High Velocity Radio Show with Guests: Scott Burkett and Michael Blake

High Velocity Radio Show

www.highvelocityblog.com

with

Stone Payton and Todd Schnick

Guests:  Scott Burkett and Michael Blake

11/22/09

STONE PAYTON: Welcome to the High Velocity Radio Show.  This is your host, Stone Payton and joining me in the studio this morning is our producer, Lee Kantor and my good buddy,Todd Schnick.  What’s happening Todd?

TODD SCHNICK: Not much, Stone.  How are you this morning?

STONE PAYTON: I am doing well. What do we have going this week?

TODD SCHNICK: Well, this is Turkey week.

STONE PAYTON: Do you have your Thanksgiving ribs yet?

TODD SCHNICK: No, I don’t have my Thanksgiving ribs. I know you do.

STONE PAYTON: Yeah, we are doing ribs on Thursday.

TODD SCHNICK: And yours are gluten-free ribs, right?

STONE PAYTON: Oh yeah, you can count on it.

TODD SCHNICK: Our fan base, they appreciate the gluten-free-ness of our food.

STONE PAYTON: So are we taking off after this or are we going to do some work this week?  What’s in front of us for the High Velocity Boys?

TODD SCHNICK: We don’t do any work at the High Velocity organization.

STONE PAYTON: No, I know that.

TODD SCHNICK: No, I think we probably should take about our next little venture. Our little speed school.

STONE PAYTON: Let’s use the free advertising now, go for it!

TODD SCHNICK: All I did was do video work yesterday, recording the video briefings as part of this thing.  So, that is how I spent my Sunday.

STONE PAYTON: I’m tickled to death because our plan was we were going to launch speed school at the first of the year. And it looks like we are going to be able to launch at least by December 7^th and our internal deadline actually is December 1.  This is going to be a lot of fun.

For those of you who don’t know, the focus of our consulting practice is to solve the sales problem for consultants.  One of the challenges that we consistently run into is that some of the folks that could really use our help the most, they can’t afford us.   So our solution is this web based curriculum, where not just Todd and I, but experts in a variety of specialties are providing instruction through video, audio, and of course there are job aides and additional resources, in a 52 lap, 52 week curriculum. I am tickled to death that we are going to have an opportunity to release this in just a couple of weeks.

TODD SCHNICK: Yeah, it’s going to be real exciting. I’m having a lot of fun.  I’m already getting some good interest in it.  I think there is a market that needs that and I think it is going to be a great tool to serve that community.

STONE PAYTON: We are going to have a ball with it!  But, that’s not what today’s about. Today we have a really different kind of show set up.   It is more  of a round table format. I am delighted to introduce to you this morning a couple of gentlemen.  The first is a gentleman by the name of Michael Blake. He is Director of Evaluation Services for a firm I can’t pronounce! But we’ll learn more about that later.  We also have Mr. Scott Burkett, who in some ways works directly with Michael. I get the sense that he also does some things on his own on well.

TODD SCHNICK: I don’t we have a clue what Scott really does. He is one of those entrepreneurial guys. We’ll let him tell us.

STONE PAYTON: Welcome to the show Mike and Scott.

SCOTT BURKETT: Thanks for having us, guys.

MICHAEL BLAKE: Thanks.

STONE PAYTON: We are delighted to have you. Let’s start with you, Mike. Tell us a little bit about what in the world Evaluation Services really entails. And maybe we ought to also start with the name of this firm I can’t pronounce.

MICHAEL BLAKE: The correct pronunciation is Habith, Arogeti & Wynne. We are the largest independent accounting firm in the southeast United States. I run the valuation practice, which basically means I am a business appraiser.  My job is to appraise businesses and business assets like patents and other intellectual property or stocks, securities in privately held companies and I tell you what I think they’re worth.

STONE PAYTON: Do you ever  find when you go in and evaluate a business that what they are really worth, because you have some science and structures and discipline and rigor around all this, what the business is really worth is sometimes a slightly different number from what the business owners think the business is worth?

MICHAEL BLAKE: No, I sometimes find that it is really different. Almost delusionally so!  Part of it is that my report doesn’t buy the business. A lot of people will say, in terms of value, that a value of a business is worth whatever somebody else is willing to pay for it.  And that’s true to an extent except it doesn’t really factor in the ‘knuckle head’ factor.  (laughing) And just because some knuckle head pays something for a business…if I sell you this bottle of water for $10, that doesn’t mean I can turn around and find some other knuckle head to sell this thing to for $10.  So even though somebody bought it at that price, that’s not the value of the asset, that is just what somebody paid for it. That’s probably the most difficult concept to get across to clients. They will say, “My buddy sold this business for three times sales or five times EBIDA.” Well, good for them,  and I’ll say, “Go see if that guy will buy your business too.”

STONE PAYTON: Now do you specialize in a specific type of industry?

MICHAEL BLAKE: Not so much industries, but I do a lot of intellectual property evaluation. I do a lot of patents to a lot of early stage stuff to a lot of venture stuff.  Probably just because my background is a recovering investment banker and they were  forming venture capitalist. So I have spent my entire life with emerging companies.

TODD SCHNICK: Michael, what does a down economy do to that sector, is that an increased amount of sales and business or is it decreased or the same?

MICHAEL BLAKE: Due to which sector?

TODD SCHNICK: The amount of businesses  that are sold.

MICHAEL BLAKE: You know what happened…what the correction about 15 months ago did is that it took all the motor oil out of the engine. It just seized up almost instantly. What happens is you get sort of a buy-sell or bid-ask spread.  Whenever you have a correction like that the buyers are saying, “Yippie! I can buy stuff on the cheap now!” and the sellers are saying, “No, not so fast, I was going to get $10 million bucks for this business”; it takes awhile for that reality to set in. You have willing buyers and willing sellers but they can’t close the gap on the price.   You throw in the additional monkey wrench, the banks are not lending you money to buy a business anymore. So, all of a sudden you have to come up with the cash, you have to convince the seller to provide a note or finance that business for you. That makes it a lot more difficult. There is a lot of liquidity that has been taking out of the market to actually go out and buy those businesses, even if you can agree on the price.

It is really a liquidity issue from both those sides that is preventing or hindering of buying and selling of businesses. I will tell you, at sort of the sub-Wall Street Journal level, not a lot of deals happening at the $500 million level and up.  There is a lot of stuff going on in the $10 million and under.

STONE PAYTON: Is that right?

MICHAEL BLAKE: Yep. I think it is because the sellers can be flexible in terms of their financing.  More people can plausibly pay cash on the barrel for a $10 million business. But, you want to go pay $500 million, not many people can write that check.

STONE PAYTON: So Scott, how do you fit into this equation?

SCOTT BURKETT: I am basically the guy that Mike follows around with a fire extinguisher and just tries to keep me in check. (laughing) I am basically a serial entrepreneur. Born and raised in Georgia. Right now my day job, I know we are not here to talk about that but I’m going to pimp it anyway…

LEE KANTOR: Pimp away! That’s a lovely fur coat you are wearing. (laughing)

SCOTT BURKETT: You’ve heard of the Cheetah?  Well, no…that’s not actually my business. Actually I am the Chief Operating Officer of a company called StarPound Technologies.  We are an Atlanta based software company that focuses on helping companies automate their business process and make them on demand.  It’s a pretty fun thing. That’s my story. That’s it and I’m sticking to it.

STONE PAYTON: I tried to do my homework a little bit, on you particularly Mike. Last week before we got to the show, I noted that in reading one of the articles that you have published you talk about the seller reducing the perceived risk. Talk a little bit more about that and maybe share with our listeners some of the things that you can do when you’re preparing to sell your business to reduce that perceived risk for the buyer.

MICHAEL BLAKE: It is all about reducing risk whenever you sell anything.  It could be a car, tires look a little worn so you put new tires on the car.  You put a new coat of paint on. Same thing with a business. You make it easier to buy, easier to look at and you are going to get more people that are interested. The same goes on the venture side when you are raising capital. Scott and I have the connections through StartupLounge and the thing that we do most as we are advising people in the StartupLounge community when they are selling their businesses or selling stock in their businesses that they’ve got to reduce the perceived risk. They have to make it as easy as possible for somebody to learn about them, investigate the business, get comfortable with the entrepreneur and buy the thing.

STONE PAYTON: I don’t know if Scott was blowing smoke up my skirt or not out here in the lounge, but he said you guys have something like 17-18,000 community members around this StartupLounge.

TODD SCHNICK: Let’s step back for a minute and tell us a story of StartupLounge. I think you said it’s just about three years old.

SCOTT BURKETT: Yeah, Mike reminded me a couple of days ago, three years ago a couple of days ago.

MICHAEL BLAKE: We’ve lasted as long as Star Trek.

SCOTT BURKETT: That’s amazing.

MICHAEL BLAKE: You think they will have people dressed like you at Dragon*Con?

SCOTT BURKETT: I doubt that. Actually, they do have people dressed like me at Dragon*Con but it has nothing to do with the fact that they know who I am. (laughing) A couple of years ago I sold a small software company, I guess it was ’04 or ’05 and Mike and I got to know each other at that time. I sort of came up for air and looked around in the Atlanta startup community and I really just wasn’t excited about what I saw.  Mike and I started talking about it and drinking and talking about it and drinking some more (laughing) and we just said, “Let’s do something about it.”  Not necessarily try to solve the problem but let’s try to promote a healthy dialogue, as it were. We basically made a list of all the things that we thought that Atlanta could be better at in terms of startups. When I say ‘startups’, let me also delineate between a small business and what we call a fast growth startup, something that is a venture back-able play.  That is really where our focus is. That typically involves software, technology, clean tech, biotech, those kinds of things.  We just pulled up two microphones and said, “Hey, let’s do this thing called a podcast.” We did and we were our own first guests.  It went over like a hand grenade in the small crowded marketplace.

STONE PAYTON: Your typical pilot program.

SCOTT BURKETT: We just went out in our network and we started bringing on really great guests, like you guys. Bringing on Chris Klaus and Mitch Free and just people who had been there and done that. We had a real conversation with them. We didn’t talk about “Tell us your story”, “Tell us how great it is to be rich now”, they are more than happy to do that, people love to talk about that; but we just started talking about Atlanta and what can we do as a community to be better. It just took off from there.

STONE PAYTON: Where can we get to StartupLounge? Where is it?

SCOTT BURKETT: StartupLounge is in an alley way down in Midtown! (laughing) No, you just go to www.startuplounge.com and we have all of our podcasts on there, 40+, 42.  We have all of the information about our various events and podcasts and things like that on there.

TODD SCHNICK: You have been around for three years. Three years ago in the new modern world of marketing is almost a generation ago.  Has the technology of podcasting changed? Is the world accepting them?

SCOTT BURKETT: I don’t think the technology has necessarily changed, though certainly it is improved.  I think the adoption is certainly there. We had a certain challenge too when we started ours. You guys remember this and I guess to some extent it is still that way. People love bite-sized podcasts. You are sitting on the train, you are on the plane and you want to listen to a 10-15 minute deal.  Our first podcast was like 1 ½ hours long. We said, “Nobody is going to listen to this thing. This is ridiculous, just two monkeys sitting up at a microphone talking for a 1 ½ hours.”  Our podcasts will typically go about 1-1 ½ hours, it depends.  We just said we wanted the person that listens to that podcast to listen to it for the right reasons. If you don’t want to listen to it because it is 1 ½ hours long, you are not the person that we want to help. We found for some bizarre reason that that works.  It may not work for everybody that is in to podcasting, but it certainly works here.

We were also able to take advantage, and Mike you would agree, of the pent up energy that was here in Atlanta. People would listen to it for 1 ½ hours long because they wanted to hear what that venture capitalist thought about that particular sector.

MICHAEL BLAKE: Without question. Most venture capitalists, up until about two years ago, ran around town like they were in the Pope-mobile.  (laughing) You couldn’t get within 500 yards of them. The way this town operated was that the only way you meet millionaires was to yourself be a millionaire. That’s great, but you are not the one looking for the angel investment.  Maybe a guy like a Charlie Papparelli will get on a panel or something or he will give a talk, or a Steven Fleming, or one of the other noted VCs.

STONE PAYTON: Or Stone Payton or someone like that?

MICHAEL BLAKE: Sure.

STONE PAYTON: We’re not easy to get to!

MICHAEL BLAKE: No. They have their people, they have their handlers.

TODD SCHNICK: They have the PR flack, you know!

MICHAEL BLAKE: Because they were targets in the marketplace, frankly for people like me because I’m a service provider, it is my job to sell people stuff like accounting and tax and junk, they do their thing, they get up on their panel and then they just duck out the back door.

SCOTT BURKETT: They run!

MICHAEL BLAKE: Like Elton John after a second encore. In the limo, boom, gone!  The reason the podcast works with the length is that here is the opportunity to listen in on a long in-depth sit down with guys that are generally inaccessible to most entrepreneurs in the market. You should listen to the whole thing. That’s where all your information is going to come from. We ask a few soft ball questions, we ask them the tough questions that the entrepreneurs need to understand.

STONE PAYTON: What’s the secret to getting to them? How do you get all these great guests?

MICHAEL BLAKE: Tax returns! (laughing)

SCOTT BURKETT: Exactly, he works at a tax and accounting firm. Need I say more?  One of the things that I think we were very fortunate to stumble over was that a lot of the successful folks in the community wanted the same things we wanted. They wanted Atlanta to be better. Once we provided a vehicle for them, we really didn’t have a problem finding people and going out into our network and bringing those folks on. They were very excited about it. “Yeah, I’d love to do that. I’d love to not do a soft ball – tell how great it is interview – but really get down to the brass tacks.  Tell us the five things that you really struggled with in building that billion dollar company.”

MICHAEL BLAKE: The other thing that helped, Scott’s being modest, it was his network.  The first eight guests were all personal friends of his and they are important people in town.

SCOTT BURKETT: The only eight friends I have.

MICHAEL BLAKE: Yeah, but they’re a good eight friends.

SCOTT BURKETT: They are not friends any more. (laughing)

MICHAEL BLAKE: He would say, “Let’s get Chris Klaus on the podcast.”  Well, great but how do we do that?  “Well, I’ll call him and let’s gets Steven Fleming on too.”  Well, how do we do that?  “Well, I’ll call him.”  I’m thinking great! This podcast is great.  But once we got that caliber of person on and we didn’t 16 minutes them. We decided early on you could be Mike Wallace with a guy like that once. After that you are never going to get…we don’t want to play amateur investigative journalist, but at the same time once people figured out that we could get the kind of people that were hard to access by themselves in the marketplace it started almost to develop a viral quality to it. I think our guests genuinely enjoyed being on the program as long as they could get by the profanity.

SCOTT BURKETT: Exactly, And the nudity. (laughing)

MICHAEL BLAKE: Yeah, there was that unfortunate exposure incident.

TODD SCHNICK: I saw the website, that was awful!

SCOTT BURKETT: You have to take one for the team when you come into the lounge.

TODD SCHNICK: They say 2010 is the year of the video, but in your case…WOW…

LEE KANTOR: it is the year of the arrest!

SCOTT BURKETT: Isn’t that the Chinese calendar? The year 2010 is the Year of the Indictment?

TODD SCHNICK: The Year of the Orange Jumpsuit!

STONE PAYTON: I want to hit you guys with the same question Todd and I get all the time.  I am really interested in how you answer this…How does all this translate to making money?

SCOTT BURKETT: That’s a very good question. Mike is going to jump in here in a minute, I know. But one of the questions we got asked probably for the first 1 ½-2 years of doing StartupLounge was, “I don’t get it. You guys are a nonprofit and you are doing this podcast, you are not charging anybody and you do these events that you do where we put entrepreneurs and investors together and we don’t charge anybody. What’s your angle, how are you getting paid?” We basically said, “We’re not.” It is a nonprofit organization.

A lot of people thought for awhile that there is something there with those guys. They are doing something. They are getting a piece of this or a taste of that or a percentage point of that…it really wasn’t about that. We founded it because we wanted to make a difference. I think that’s the thing that people in the community are finally coming to terms with.   The reason I think that’s important is that we’ve established a level of trust, both with the investment community as well as the entrepreneurs. The goal is to make money but it is not for us to make money, it is for those entrepreneurs to make money.

STONE PAYTON: Wow, that was a really good answer. Now I want to get the truth.

TODD SCHNICK: Now let’s get the real answer.

MICHAEL BLAKE: You know, we’re Communists. (laughing) Which is ironic because Scott gave 2-3 years of his life defending us against Communism, on the Czech/German border, protecting us from errant snowballs from the Communists…

SCOTT BURKETT: And stale Gummy Bears, exactly!

MICHAEL BLAKE: The whole idea is…Mark Twain once wrote that everybody complains about the weather, nobody does anything about it. Everybody was complaining about the weather in Atlanta for start ups. Why don’t we do something about it.  Look, we have a nonprofit and we are involved in trying to help people become millionaires and realize their dreams. That’s not a noble goal like building houses or curing cancer…we get it. But on the other hand, speaking for myself, I have no skills to feed, clothe, shelter or heal anybody. I am a danger to myself and others when I try.  Do not accept a house that I worked on Habitat with. You are just asking for trouble.  (laughing) But, the one thing I do know something about is how to cultivate early stage businesses in the venture capital area.  So, why not?

For me on the back end getting your name out there and being associated with the StartupLounge brand is helpful.  I don’t ask for any business for H, A & W through  my StartupLounge persona, I don’t need to. When people are ready and they need a valuation and they need that kind of advice and it is appropriate for them to get that then they know the person to call.

SCOTT BURKETT: Let’s also credit your firm Mike, H, A & W who has an amazing spirit of community about them. They are one of our sponsors and they have done an amazing job of helping us in any way they can, whether it is freeing up your time or giving us space to work out of or helping us with the events and things like that. Kudos to your firm.

MICHAEL BLAKE: They were a sponsor before I joined so this is not like total kiss-ass thing! (laughing)

SCOTT BURKETT: That’s true.

MICHAEL BLAKE: They sponsored and then I joined the firm, not the other way around.

STONE PAYTON: There really is some path to some of these guests, they get to know you, they trust you, they are getting genuine value from the experience at the StartupLounge. They know what kind of business you do. And in many cases they are perspective clients for you. You don’t have to hammer them over the head with, “Buy my stuff, buy my stuff!”. But when they are ready for the kind of services you provide, you are certainly one of the people they are genuinely going to consider talking to.

MICHAEL BLAKE: There are clients and referral sources. I don’t think a guest has ever been a client.  But, listeners certainly have been. Through that I have actually gotten engagements over Twitter. You can do business over Twitter.

TODD SCHNICK: I thought you said you got engaged over Twitter! Does your wife know about this? What is that about?

MICHAEL BLAKE: Well, one of them does! (laughing) There is that element and there is the personal branding.  I think I get a lot more out of StartupLounge than I give to it.  One of the reasons for that is being one of the StartupLounge guys is a very comfortable persona to have in the marketplace as opposed to being H, A  & W, here I am to sell you professional services - NO. There are a lot of places I don’t even hand out an H, A & W business card, because when I say I am one of the StartupLounge guys I am here to help and I want to learn about your business and try to help you, it immediately puts people at ease. That is a much better persona than sort of a guy who is just another accountant.

TODD SCHNICK: People think a certain way about Stone, but when he hosts a radio show then he suddenly becomes cool. We get that, we understand that.  (laughing)

MICHAEL BLAKE: It is good to be part of the media, isn’t it?

STONE PAYTON: In reading that article that I read, all that great homework that I did, it occurred to me all of the advice that you are giving people to follow in preparation for selling their business, you ought to do this stuff even if you are not going to sell your business.  Say more about some of the key disciplines that you ask these people to exercise and how and why that plays into selling the business effectively or just continuing to run a business effectively.

MICHAEL BLAKE: There are lots of things that are best practices in businesses that people don’t necessarily execute on a day to day basis. If you look in the neighborhood, which are the best maintained houses in your neighborhood?  They are the ones that are about to go up for sale. A new coat of paint, they just repaved the drive…unless it’s a foreclosure house.

STONE PAYTON: Well, that and the one retired guy at the end of the cul de sac. I do not like this guy! (laughing)

TODD SCHNICK: The Homeowner’s president, invariably. “Your trash cans are visible from the street!” (laughing)

MICHAEL BLAKE: When you get ready to sell something, all of a sudden that fresh coat of paint matters.

SCOTT BURKETT: Yeah, the books gets balanced all of a sudden.

TODD SCHNICK: Books?

SCOTT BURKETT: Yeah, the hastily scrawled books.

MICHAEL BLAKE: The thing is that, yeah, there are things that the margin help your business on a day to day basis. But, there are people who’ve owned their businesses for 30 years and they’ve never kept accounting records. They have an external accountant who does their tax return and they’ve done fine.  Operationally that works. It is just when you try to bring in a stranger to understand the business you have to sort of meet them half way. You have to professionalize it. You have to put in processes and procedures that weren’t all that important when you were just operating the business. But as you position it for sale, that fresh coat of paint all of a sudden becomes more important.

STONE PAYTON: So how fresh is the paint on StarPound?

SCOTT BURKETT: StarPound, we’ve been around for around five years.  Noro-Moesely, venture partners here in town is a significant investor in our fund. We were actually founded by Michael McChesney, who is one of the co-founders of S1. The paint looks good, although it is 4-5 years old. We say we are a startup even though we are 4-5 years into it. I would caution a lot of companies, as you are growing, to try to do everything you can to retain  that culture of startup-ness, you know that fast, fluid, you never know what the next is going to bring. But, you are there because you want to wear ten hats every day.  We are a mature startup, how about that?

TODD SCHNICK: There is a different attitude. You are little bit more courageous. You are willing to try some things. It is funny you say that because I have seen a lot of other thought leadership out there talking about that same thing.

SCOTT BURKETT: Culture is important. In a startup world in particular, where you are wearing so many hats.  In fact, we were talking about Jason Jones just outside here today. There is a great podcast called “Battlefield of Business”. I was on his podcast and we were talking about lessons from the military and how they applied to start ups. One of the things that I liken a startup to is a small squad or a small unit in the military. Small unit tactics apply. I was a tank gunner in the army. If the tank gets disabled, guess what?  You are instant infantrymen.  Guess what? If you can’t shoot a rifle or carry a pack or do all the things that you were trained to do secondarily to your primary job you are going to fail. In a small team of four or five people, if one person goes down in a military unit that causes problems. Very much the same way in a startup.  There is a lot more risk and the risk is applied at almost miniscule task based  levels sometimes. You don’t have that in big companies.   Trying to retain your culture through all that chaos is almost impossible sometimes.

TODD SCHNICK: We are two weeks past Veterans Day. Thank you for your service.

SCOTT BURKETT: Thank you. Thank you very much.

STONE PAYTON: I thought you were going to say we were two weeks past chaos at High Velocity!

TODD SCHNICK: We’re always two weeks past chaos at High Velocity! (laughing)

SCOTT BURKETT: You guys have nice digs here. I think I may have to come up here and start doing our things here. This is nice. This is a lot nicer than your office!

MICHAEL BLAKE: You’ve got the sound panels here, the sound absorbing panels. Nice.

TODD SCHNICK: I don’t think you said earlier, but you told us before the show. You have a pretty respectable audience listening in to that podcast.

SCOTT BURKETT: We do. It is very strange. We started with about 100 people pulling in our feed. That is kind of cool, there is actually 100 people in the world with nothing better to do but listen to the two of us yap on.

LEE KANTOR: It shows you can sell 100 of anything!

SCOTT BURKETT: We get an entrepreneur that says, “Nobody is buying my product.”  We are like, “I don’t want to hear that”. If we can do it.  That became 1000, which became 5,000. All of a sudden, last count a few months ago it was 17-18,000 people. It is just bizarre.

TODD SCHNICK: Did you do anything to push that or did it just happen?

SCOTT BURKETT: Not at all. Just word of mouth.

TODD SCHNICK: Just good content and people were sharing it.

SCOTT BURKETT: This is one of the things that I think…I guess this will be my third  New Year’s resolution in a row, Mike, where we sit down and say, “This year I am really going to make an effort to try to promote our stuff.” Yeah, right! We have day jobs.  In fact, you were asking me before the show, “Do you do it once a month?”  We used to. Now it is like, “Yeah, we should probably do that again. We should probably do another podcast.”  It is a lot of time, as you guys know, to do the research for a show and to edit and all those kinds of things.

TODD SCHNICK: Yeah, it is a lot of work for Stone.

SCOTT BURKETT: He was saying he does carry an unbalanced load of the work around here.  I read it on the internet, so it must be true! (laughing)

STONE PAYTON: Listening to you guys talk about the podcast. You really seem to talk a lot about Atlanta and the community here and the players in the Atlanta VC market.  But three years hence and 17-18,000 subscribers, are you getting an audience from outside of Atlanta?

MICHAEL BLAKE: Oh yeah. We’ve been asked to go to Berlin and Philippines.

SCOTT BURKETT: I’m like, “I’m not going back to Berlin! I did my time there. I’m sorry.”

MICHAEL BLAKE: Apparently there is an MBA professor in Toronto that makes our podcast required listening as part of the curriculum.

SCOTT BURKETT: Now that’s some scary stuff right there!

MICHAEL BLAKE: Don’t do business with Canada, that’s a lesson right there! (laughing)

SCOTT BURKETT: The Philippines and just bizarre places. They ask, “Can you come do your ‘Capital Lounge’ event here?”  We are like, “No.” I think one of the things that we want to do and we are trying to do is sort of open source our methodology, our philosophy. Here is how we do things…if you want to take it in your neck of the woods and go off and…have at it. That’s fine.  We have no desire to gallivant around the globe.

STONE PAYTON: So are you staying true and talking strictly about the Atlanta community when you are on?

SCOTT BURKETT: We talk a lot about the Atlanta community, I would say the Southeast. But, it sort of gravitates towards Atlanta. But I’ll tell you the thing we noticed about a year into it, as we started getting emails from people and just bizarre requests – and we’d get some strange ones. But we found out that basically anybody outside of Silicon Valley has a similar set of problems to Atlanta. I think there’s that sort of universal appeal of StartupLounge. We talk about Atlanta personalities sometimes times, we’ll talk about certain companies here in Atlanta and that really does kind of pertain to Atlanta specifically. But when we start talking about the under-served capital market here and what entrepreneurs have to do to think out of the box to get that first customer or to meet the investor half way, and we start talking about the cultural aspects of Atlanta, we found that they actually apply, more times than not, around the world. It is almost universal.

TODD SCHNICK: Are all your guests in the studio with you? Do you have anybody phone in?

SCOTT BURKETT: We do both.

MICHAEL BLAKE: We phone it in each and every time! (laughing)

SCOTT BURKETT: Exactly, we’ve done a few over the phone and those are fun. But to us it is a lot more fun if the guest is there because you can actually see the reaction on their face when you take your clothes off, things like that…(laughing)

STONE PAYTON: Mike, you touched on Twitter a little while ago. This whole social media thing, are you guys trying to capitalize on that and if so what kind of results are you getting from it?

MICHALE BLAKE: It is not a concerted effort. Scott and I didn’t say one day, “We have to capitalize on social media.” But, the podcast is itself social media. Everything I’ve learned about social media I’ve learned through this podcast and it is really more an issue that if you want to be a player in the tech community in Atlanta, you have to be on social media. That is where everybody is spending their time.  A lot of the big players…guys frankly of an older generation that you wouldn’t think are big on Twitter and Linked In and Facebook are on it all the time. Very accessible.

SCOTT BURKETT: Actually, one of the things that we’ve seen is that three years ago when we started StartupLounge we had some very specific things that we wanted to accomplish and three y ears later this is a different Atlanta, in terms of high tech startups, fast growth startups.  We asked the question the other day when we were doing an interview and Gene Creech said, “What do you attribute the changes in the Atlanta startup ecosystem to over the past couple of years?” and our answer was social media.  Without social media the community didn’t have a voice. We didn’t have that voice through Twitter and blogs and podcasts and things like that. Now we do. Now there is a real dialogue happening with investors and startup entrepreneurs and angels out there and it is happening over Twitter and it is happening over blogs. It is awesome.

TODD SCHNICK: One of the points you made earlier was that it was hard to find and to get to some of these people. What I’ve found in the time I’ve been on social media is that some of these big players out in the world are very accessible on things like Twitter.

MICHAEL BLAKE: In fact, they prefer it. It is spot, they can do it very quickly and you are not sucking an hour of their lunchtime down. They would rather reserve that for that power lunch with Mr. Blake, you know.

MICHAEL BLAKE: It lets them be more selective. It gives them more control over how much time they invest in that exercise.

SCOTT BURKETT: They realize too that a lot of these folks had a fundamental branding and messaging or marketing issue. Especially the investors here. Atlanta is perceived and still is by some to be a very closed looped community as it pertains to investors. We are opening that up. Not StartupLounge, but we the community are opening that up now. Investors are participating. It is almost like they always wanted to but they just didn’t know how.  It is very cool.  It is very cool to see.  In fact, we see more VCs now coming into Atlanta looking for deals.

STONE PAYTON: So they are from another town and they will come to Atlanta because now they feel like this is a community that they can tap.

MICHAEL BLAKE: There are a lot of North Carolina VCs that regularly come down here.

SCOTT BURKETT: Yeah, Boston, Chicago…

MICHAEL BLAKE: And a couple with a permanent representative now.

SCOTT BURKETT: Once a quarter we throw about 200-300 entrepreneurs and investors in a room and we shut the door and we feed them and sort of let nature take its course. We are seeing now that we have about 4:1 ratio of entrepreneurs to investors. That is pretty remarkable. There are a lot of people who didn’t think that there were that many investors in Atlanta.  But a lot of them are coming from out of the state. It is great. That’s good stuff.

STONE PAYTON: I want to hear more about these live events that you do. Can you describe what happens at these things?

MICHAEL BLAKE: The event which is called ‘StartupLounge’, renamed recently. It used to be called ‘Capital Lounge’, now it is ‘StartupLounge’. It is basically 3 ½ hours of chaos. What we do is we rent a facility that is owned by a good friend of mine that actually fronted a lot of the money for the first event, or at least in terms of free food did. It is invitation only. In contrast to most of the other events in town where anybody can show up as long as you pay a fee.  We don’t charge a fee to anybody but you have to be on the list.  You have to be an entrepreneur who is serious about building a fast growth startup.  We really define that as a startup that could sell for $50 million in 5-7 years. So it is not going to be a flower shop, it is not going to be a life coach, it is not going to be a chiropractor. That’s not who we serve.   You have to be an investor and be able to point to a track record that says you actually write checks, not just some guy who says he is in an investor, “Yeah, I’m an investor. I’m a lawyer too, but I’m an investor.”

We’ll invite people from academia and nonprofit, and education, and government sectors as observers. What we do is exclude the service providers with the exception of those who sponsor the event. That’s been a major issue with events in the Atlanta area. Yogi Berra once said, “It is so crowded, nobody goes there anymore.”  That’s what has happened to a lot of the events that you are supposed to meet a lot of these entrepreneurs and investors.  They are so over run with people like me, stuffing business cards in their pocket, “Can I have five minutes of your time?”, that they just stop going. So you go to these events and they are basically hungry service providers who are just desperately seeking some sort of business.

SCOTT BURKETT: Imagine a room full of Mike Blakes, just coming at you all once! (laughing) That’s a Left for Dead game, just a bunch of zombies coming at you.

LEE KANTOR: That’s Orwellian, right there!

MICHEAL BLAKE: Right.  What it does is it creates a great energy in the room.  We also don’t really have a speaker component. There is a component where Scott and I get up and we crack a couple of jokes and make some community announcements and we thank our sponsors. But it is not one of these deals where we have anybody really get up and make a speech because that is taking away from the networking time. We hope that that time is being used, and it has been used, by people to start conversations about making a deal. We’ve had nine investments confirmed over the last three years, really two years, that arose as a result of connections that were made at that event.

SCOTT BURKETT: And we’ve had entrepreneurs meet other entrepreneurs and ended up merging their companies and their ideas together because they realized they had one half the puzzle. We’ve had entrepreneurs find their first customer at our event.  That community spirit, it is a great cocktail party, if you walk in there you can feel the energy in that thing. It is just amazing. I can tell you we are spent after we do it.

MICHAEL BLAKE: We’re dead!

SCOTT BURKETT: It is a lot of fun.

TODD SCHNICK: You can just feel the capitalizing oozing over the event.

SCOTT BURKETT: You can. What is really cool is you see people helping each other. That is awesome. When you see an entrepreneur saying, “Hey you know what, that’s really cool what you’re doing. I know a guy that may want to look at that deal.  It’s not a good fit for me but let me introduce you to him. Give me your card.” There is a lot of that and it happens thousands of times at that event. We do it once a quarter. It is just so amazing when we see those kinds of things happening.

MICHAEL BLAKE: And there is the hope and the tension on the way in.  Entrepreneurs are going to be put in front of an investor for the first time in their lives.  The tension, “I hope I don’t screw this up.” Some are overcome with it and they sort of rock in the corner like Leo Mizzoni working off tension.     Most of them, after a drink or two at the cash bar, will loosen up and they will wade in and they will start getting those conversations going.

Scott and I are pulled around like pinballs, “Can you introduce me to this guy?”  We do send out a list of the entrepreneurs to the investors beforehand so they target 5-6 people that they make sure they want to talk to. So Scott and I and a couple of other folks will try to make sure that those connections happen.

STONE PAYTON: Do you find some of these entrepreneurs are a lot more effective at articulating what they do and what they want than others? If so, do you help directly or do you put them in touch with people who can help them articulate that?

MICHAEL BLAKE: Yes, as a matter of fact at our first event it was funny. It really wound up being like an 8^th grade dance! (laughing) We thought we were helping everybody. We were going to put investors and entrepreneurs in the same room and they are going to get together and have a great old time. What happened was they separated into two distinct groups, the investors on one half of the room and the entrepreneurs in the other half of the room. It was like the Berlin Wall was in between them.

SCOTT BURKETT: I felt right at home!

MICHAEL BLAKE: Exactly. They just wouldn’t cross. What we realized is that the entrepreneurs were utterly unprepared for that conversation.

SCOTT BURKETT: Ill equipped. Absolutely ill equipped.

MICHAEL BLAKE: What we decided is that we had to equip them. So we set up a free seminar that we do periodically called ‘Pitch Camp’.  Pitch Camp is a seminar that is, again free, and it is really a workshop and we take about a dozen entrepreneurs or so and we lock them in a windowless conference room for 3 ½ hours and using Guantanamo style indoctrination tactics we do nothing but teach them about the elevator pitch.  One of the cool things is that we get investors, check writers from the community to help with that education process.  Don’t believe me and Scott, because we are not writing checks, we bounce them all day long. (laughing) But we get the guys in…

SCOTT BURKETT: We write plenty of them!

MICHAEL BLAKE: Don’t run to cash it though!   (laughing) The investors, the guys who actually write the checks are in there and say, “Hey, look if you want to get somebody like me interested when you meet them at a cocktail party here is how you have to do it…”

SCOTT BURKETT: What’s awesome is we have each of the entrepreneurs give their elevator pitch when they come in and 3-4 hours later when they go back through and everybody does their new pitch after they go through the workshop, it is night and day. Night and day! We have had  150-160 CEOs, startup CEOs go through that in the past couple of years. Investors will tell us at the event that they can tell who has gone through the motions of Pitch Camp because they are more confident, they are very precise with their pitch. I don’t care who you are as an entrepreneur, you cannot pitch your deal without surrounding yourself with people that are like-minded that can beat you senseless over the head.  You cannot do it by yourself, you are too close to it.  You have to have people with fresh eyes to say, “Are you an idiot? Don’t say that.”  You have to have that.

MICHAEL BLAKE: It’s fascinating that that is a big part of what that does. We talked about Speed School at the lead of the show and the first lap we are talking about is how to tell who you are and what you do. Most people can’t do it!

SCOTT BURKETT: It is not rocket science, unless you are close to it. If you are that close to it your elevator pitch becomes eight  minutes long and the guy wants to stick a pin in his eye the whole time, “I just want to kill myself”.   Pitch Camp is fun, it is always a lot of fun.

STONE PAYTON: I just have to know, because you guys see the load I’m carrying, it is all on me!  We have several things that are going on in our world but you guys have Pitch Camp, you have the StartupLounge, you’ve got your business, you’ve got the valuation stuff…How do you keep it all organized? How do you stay on top of it?

SCOTT BURKETT: We don’t.

MICHAEL BLAKE: Well, you assume we keep it organized.

SCOTT BURKETT: We don’t. We are very fortunate that we can make calls to the community and get help from people to help us with various things. I tell you that this is probably the one thing in my life that I’ve been the most passionate about, except for my family.  I think Mike is the same way. We genuinely love to help people.

There is something almost romantic or exciting very American-ish about a kid or a guy who is swinging for the fences and he is putting it all on the line. Mike says it best that this is one of the few countries in the world where the entrepreneur is a folk hero.  Mike has spent some time and I have spent some time behind the Iron Curtain in Russia or at least what was left of the Iron  Curtain at that time…it is different. “You are an entrepreneur, what’s wrong with you?”.  But, here you read a success story about someone who put their mortgage on the line or their kids college fund and they bet the farm and they went through all this adversity and they made it. Everybody has a soft spot for that. When you see that kid or that guy who got riffed at Bell South or AT&T, whatever they are calling it these days, and he is going to be a first time entrepreneur at 50, Man, you have to respect that and you have to help. You have to help because that guy may end up hiring you three years from now when you don’t have a job! (laughing)

There is a sense of business karma, I think it does come back. We are trying to doeverything we can to get people to espouse that as well.

MICHAEL BLAKE: There are a lot of people who serve on boards and they organize their own charities. Quite frankly if it is a choice between watching ‘So you Think You Can Dance’ or doing some work on StartupLounge and helping an entrepreneur, it is a pretty easy choice!

TODD SCHNICK: It’s like Gary Vaynerchuk, who you are probably familiar with, he says, “If you watch ‘Lost’ on TV then you are not going to be a success in this modern world.”

MICHAEL BLAKE: But if you watch it and understand ‘Lost’, you have a shot. Because, I have to tell you, I watched that show one time and thought, “My god, this is like…I don’t even know what’s going on.” (laughing)

STONE PAYTON: There goes our sponsor! ABC is out now!  Whatever the network is.

MICHAEL BLAKE: ABC, NBC, whatever it is. There’s a consulting opportunity there for your guys.  A little branding issue there…story writing at least!

STONE PAYTON: We could hang out with you guys all day, but it is just about time to wrap up the show. Before we let you go…there are a couple of things we want to do. Number one, we want to make sure that our listeners know how to get in touch with you guys and are able to access StartupLounge, your firm Mike, and of course your firm Scott.  Why don’t we do that first. Then we have a question we’d like to ask you as we wrap.

MICHAEL BLAKE: My firm is Habith, Arogeti & Wynne. The website is www.HAWCPA.com My email is mike@startuplounge.com My Twitter handle is @unblakeable   My blog site is Unblakeable

SCOTT BURKETT: Of course you can go to StartupLounge at www.startuplounge.com I’m scott@startuplounge.com If you have nothing else to do with your spare time and you like to see what I do for my day job you can go to www.starpound.net

STONE PAYTON: Well, we do have a little tradition on the High Velocity Radio Show. We’d like to ask each guest if they would to share a mistake that they’ve made at some point in their career and really  more importantly what they feel like they learned from it. Can we get you guys to do that?

SCOTT BURKETT: Wow, I make mistakes every day,  it is hard to single out just one. Gosh, Mike, I don’t know…there have been so many, where do I start?

I think the mistake that I made early on in my career after I got out of the military…I am from Columbus, Georgia and in Columbus, Georgia if you are in the technology business, certainly at that time you basically went to work for TSys or Synovus or Aflac or you moved to Atlanta. That was sort of the path. I think very early on I was in denial about who I was, upstairs.  I made a lot of mistakes because I kept trying to force fit myself into a big company culture. I should have known better because the entire time I grew up I was the kid with the great grades that no one could seem to reign in and calm down in the classroom.  That caused me a lot of grief early on. That was a world that I understood but I just didn’t fit into it, as you can well imagine. So, it took  me about 6-7 years to sort of trickle my way down to belonging in startups.  There were a lot of mistakes as a result of that that I ended up paying for.  They have all expunged now.

STONE PAYTON: That’s material for a whole other broadcast!

TODD SCHNICK: Thanks for the Statute of Limitations.

SCOTT BURKETT: Yep, the Statue of Limitations, absolutely!

MICHAEL BLAKE: The biggest mistake I made early in my career was thinking to myself as not a sales guy. It limited my career early on immensely and although I take pride in the technical element of what I do the fact of the matter is there are a lot of people who can do what I do from a technical standpoint. There are a very few people in professional services that are good at selling. I am not saying I am good at selling. I work very hard to be average.  But, making sales a key element of my career was a major turning point. I probably handle most of our sponsorship relations now as well as sort of the sponsorship management and recruiting.

SCOTT BURKETT: That’s because most of them don’t want to deal with my anymore! (laughing)

MICHAEL BLAKE: (laughing) By default!  I think back, even five years ago, having sales be a big part of what I do for a living seemed incomprehensible. Now, not only is it a big part of what I do for a living, it is a big part of what I do for my night job or my hobby.  That was the biggest epiphany of my life. I had to figure out how to be a revenue generator. If you are a revenue generator you are never going to go hungry.

TODD SCHNICK: That’s true.

STONE PAYTON: You are indispensible.

MICHAEL BLAKE: Absolutely. I can find accountants all over the place, but you have somebody who is bringing in the dollars, that is a very tough resource to let go.

SONE PAYTON : Well, I think the biggest mistake you and I have made, Todd, is waiting this long to have these two guys in the studio. Huh?

TODD SCHNICK: I’m telling you what…it is amazing that people pay us to live this kind of life.

SCOTT BURKETT: The funny thing Mike, is that the next show they are going to say their biggest mistake was having those two guys one! (laughing) They keep looking at the clock on the wall, I don’t know if that’s a bad thing.

STONE PAYTON: Well, we have had a terrific time. It’s been an absolute delight. Thank you both so much for coming on. I hope you’ll come back and visit with us again sometime.

MICHAEL BLAKE: We’d love to. Thanks for having us.

SCOTT BURKETT: Thanks so much.

STONE PAYTON: Until next time, this is Tone…

TODD SCHNICK: You don’t even know your name,  man. Come on…(laughing)

MICHAEL BLAKE: He needs Pitch Camp!

TODD SCHNICK: Yeah, you do need Pitch Camp!

STONE PAYTON: When is your next Pitch Camp? (laughing)

Until next time, this is Stone Payton, Todd Schnick, our producer Lee Kantor and our guests Scott Burkett and Mike Blake and the entire RadioX family saying, “We’ll see you in the fast lane!”

END

Dr. Fitness and The Fat Guy with Guest Dr. David Kessler

Here is one of our most popular interviews we have had in some time. Dr David Kessler, former Commissioner of the FDA was on Dr Fitness and the Fat Guy discussing his controversial new book "The End of Overeating"

 

Dr. Fitness & The Fat Guy

Hosts:  Dr. Adam Shafran & Lee Kantor

Guest:  Dr. David Kessler

September 21, 2009

Dr. Adam Shafran: Right now I want to bring on our next guest.  I am very excited to bring on Dr. David Kessler. He is the former FDA Commissioner. He wrote a book recently, a fantastic book. Lee cracks up about this because it is one of the only books that I have ever read cover to cover.

Lee Kantor: And not only that, Dr. Kessler, he bought the book!

Dr. Adam Shafran: I actually bought it! Instead of getting it, I actually purchased it.

Dr. David Kessler: Thanks.

Lee Kantor: He couldn’t wait.

Dr. Adam Shafran: I couldn’t wait!  The name of the book is The End of Overeating, Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite.  I really must say it is very enlightening. The creation of these hyperpalatable foods that we have never seen…

Lee Kantor: He is using words like “hyperpalatable”. He has never used those words before.

Dr. Adam Shafran: It is very difficult to say.  Dr. Kessler, welcome to the show.

Dr. David Kessler: It is a pleasure to be with both of you.

Dr. Adam Shafran: Take us on the journey on how you decided to write this book. Was it based out of a personal experience, where you wanted to figure out…?

Lee Kantor: How much do you weight? That’s what he wants to know!

Dr. David Kessler: I have suits in every size. Does that answer your question.

Dr. Adam Shafran: So you were a customer as well.

Dr. David Kessler: I am very much a customer. I didn’t understand why does that chocolate chip cookie have such power over me.  Why am I sitting there with a box of pizza and there is one slice left in the box and I’m thinking about who is going to get that last slice.  That was the question.  It is never quite linear.

I was Dean at Yale Medical School, I was sitting there with residents and fellows and we were around the table and I started off by asking the question, “If you want to stay alive, what are the things that you can do? What is the real evidence-based medicine that suggests what the things are you can do to prevent the major causes of death – cardiovascular disease, stroke and cancer?”

I went to the library and worked with the librarian and collected all the medical literature and she was helping me pull the articles. I noticed along the way, over three months as she was pulling the articles that she lost 30 lbs.

Dr. Adam Shafran: Was it from the exercise of pulling the articles or actually reading them?

Dr. David Kessler: It was because she was reading these articles.  We all know that excess weight is not good for us. But, when you are sitting there every day looking and reading the effects of this. It had a real effect on her.

If it were diet and exercise we’d all do it, if it were that simple. But there was something about it. What was it that was so hard for so many of us to do. I am watching Oprah one night and there was a woman on the show, very well educated, very well spoken and she said, “I eat when my husband goes off to work in the morning, I eat before he comes home at night, I eat when I am happy, I eat when I’m sad, I eat when I’m hungry, I eat when I’m not hungry. And, I don’t like myself.”  I wanted to understand what was driving this woman to do what she didn’t want to be doing. She knew what she shouldn’t be doing but she was doing it anyway. I could relate.  That was the journey for the book.

Lee Kantor: Was that the fat Oprah or the skinny Oprah (Optifast)?

Dr. David Kessler: Let me give you three characteristics. Some people when they hear this will say, “That’s not me”, others will say, “You are describing me”.  Let me give you three characteristics…it is not just people who are obese or overweight or have these characteristics; some people who are at healthy weights also have these characteristics.

1. A hard time resisting your favorite foods.  A loss of control in the face of highly very good tasting food.
2. A hard time stopping eating.  A lack of satiation, not feeling full, just keeping on eating.
3. A preoccupation of thinking about food, between meals or sometimes as you are eating and your food is still in front of you and you are thinking about what you will be eating next.

Those three characteristics:  Loss of control, Lack of satiation, Preoccupation with food; those three characteristics we found in 50% of obese people, 30% of overweight people, 20% of healthy weight people. They all scored very high on those three characteristics.

It is not just a question of whether you are fat or not fat. I wanted to know what was driving that behavior.

Dr. Adam Shafran: It seems what you talk about in the book, a lot of this drive seems to be this creation of a new food group that popped up in the universe that hadn’t existed before, called hyperpalatable foods, where the right combination of sugar, the right combination of salt and the right combination of fat will change the chemistry of your brain.

Dr. David Kessler: That’s exactly right.  There are a lot of things that can capture that circuitry.  But certainly foods that are high in fat and sugar, high in fat and salt…fat, sugar and salt stimulate us to eat more. Understand how this works…let me give you four experiments, I’ll keep the science simple…A vanilla milkshake – what do you think it is about the vanilla milkshake that drives intake? Do you think it is the sugar? Do you think it is the fat? Do you think it is flavor? Which one?

Dr. Adam Shafran: Well, The Fat Guy likes to bathe sometimes in the milkshake, so it might be the actual texture.

Lee Kantor: It is the smell.

Dr. David Kessler: You think it is the texture?

Lee Kantor: You read the book, that not fair!

Dr. Adam Shafran: No, it has to do with a bunch of things. Some people respond differently to certain stimuli.

Lee Kantor: Vanilla would do nothing for me.  If it was chocolate, I’d be diving in!

Dr. David Kessler: You know what the main driver is? It is sugar. When you add fat to it it is synergistic.  It is not just any one ingredient, but you put that fat and sugar together…I asked my colleague, Gaetano Di Chiara, he is one of the great pharmacologists in Italy. Gaetano studies the affects of usually amphetamine, cocaine on the brain, he studies a brain chemical called ‘Dopamine’. What does Dopamine do? It is not pleasure, Dopamine is the chemical that locks your attention, it focuses your attention on a stimulus. We certainly see that with amphetamines and cocaine you get these big rises in Dopamine levels.

Food was always thought to give you a little bump, but then the 2^nd, 3^rd time you had the food there was no rise. Drugs on the one hand gave you a rise in Dopamine, food gave you a little bump but then it habituated (there was no rise).  I said, “Gaetano, let’s just not take any one food, let’s take fat and sugar together and see what happens to brain Dopamine?”  Sure enough, brain Dopamine increases. So there you see those combinations. Fat and sugar can give you this elevation in brain Dopamine.

I was very interested in the group of people who have this loss of control, lack of satiation and this preoccupation, it is some 70 million people who score high on those characteristics.  We did brain scans. We did it in two phases. The first phase we didn’t even give them the food.  The power of food comes not just from the taste, but it is from the anticipation of thinking about food.  We scanned their brains in the people who had this conditioned type of reading of a hard time of resisting their favorite foods.   Their brain reward pathways lit up just from the sight and smell of food.

Dr. Adam Shafran: Right.

Dr. David Kessler: Then what was interesting was when they started eating the food those pathways still remained elevated much more than in control groups of people who didn’t have this.  The brain pathways didn’t shut off until all the food is gone. There is a biological reason why it is so hard to resist.

Lee Kantor: Now is this something that a person should switch from food to amphetamines because they are less calories (laughing)?

Dr. Adam Shafran: (laughing)

Dr. David Kessler: The answer is an unequivocal “NO”. But in fact, what drugs work?  Very few drugs work for weight loss. What were the drugs that work but they had a lot of problems associated with them?

Dr. Adam Shafran: The Fen-Phen was the…Phentermine…

Lee Kantor: You don’t see many fat cocaine addicts.

Dr. David Kessler: It is an amphetamine-like compound. So if your brain is racing, you are not thinking about food, sure it will work.  But, that is really important, will we ever really get a drug for weight, that magic bullet?  You can do it but you are going to have to interfere with the brain’s learning, motivational, habit and memory circuits.  Maybe we get a drug that works but you are going to have give me a couple of IQ points back!

Dr. Adam Shafran: One of the things I really liked about your book is that you talk about the science of why we are the way we are and a lot of the studies and stuff that goes on in the food industry. But, you didn’t give this one cookie-cutter, blanket approach to fixing this.

Lee Kantor: How do you combat this?

Dr. Adam Shafran: Some people respond differently to certain stimuli.  You kind of talked about many things you have to kind of put in your gun as bullets to shoot at this problem.

Dr. David Kessler: This is not a disease.  There is not a quick fix. The fact is that we are all wired, our brains are wired to focus on the most salient stimuli in our environment.  What do I mean by that? If a bear walked into the studio right now, I would assure you that you are going to focus on that bear and you are going to stop interviewing me.

Lee Kantor: I don’t know, you are pretty compelling!

Dr. Adam Shafran: Don’t sell yourself short, Dr. Kessler!

Dr. David Kessler: For some of us the most salient stimuli, what can capture those brain circuits?  If you are thinking about your kids, for some people it could be alcohol, it could be gambling, it could be sex, it could be tobacco. For most of us, what is on every corner, what is available 24/7, what is socially acceptable to do?  It is eating.  What’s at the core of those stimuli that are the most salient?  Fat, Sugar and Salt.

Lee Kantor: Should you switch from one thing?  If your drug of choice is food, is the solution to switch to some other drug of choice that is better than food?

Dr. David Kessler: It is interesting, you come out on the West Coast and you watch television at 2 a.m. and there are these ads that say, “If you just had bariatric surgery and you have a resumption of alcohol or gambling, some see us at the rehab centers.” You are right, there is this crossover between different kinds of behavior and different kinds of stimuli.  We are more vulnerable than we think. No, you want to be able to substitute something that is more healthy than something that is less healthy. That is the real trick.  You don’t want to go to something that is less healthy, that is the wrong direction.

Lee Kantor: Are you really solving this problem by moving from overeating donuts to overeating grapes? Is that a win, just because grapes are healthier?

Dr. Adam Shafran: It is also the combination. It is like you are creating the perfect storm. If you do A, B and C you are going to get the same result.

Dr. David Kessler: How did we get here?  What is the business plan of the modern American food company?

Lee Kantor: To sell food, as much of it as possible.

Dr. David Kessler: So what did they do? When I was growing up we ate meals, we had structure. We didn’t eat between meals. What has been the business plan? Take fat, sugar and salt put it on every corner, make it available 24/7, make it socially acceptable to eat any time day or night, make it into entertainment. Walk into a food court, it is like we are in a food carnival. What did we expect to happen if we did that?

Dr. Adam Shafran: It is like pornography with food!  It is like a candy store where you have everything accessible any time.

Dr. David Kessler: Understand how that works…we are constantly being bombarded. Based on past experience, past learning we get cued.  What is a cue? The cue can be the sight, it can be the smell. I am walking down Powell Street and I start thinking about chocolate covered pretzels. Why? Because I had been on that street six months earlier and I got that. I forgot entirely about that but just with learning…Every time I land at San Francisco airport I start thinking about Chinese dumplings. As the plane hits the taxi-way!  The plane is the cue. What does a cue do? It activates arousal, it focuses my attention, there are thoughts of wanting. I eat for a minute and it gives me pleasure, it sort of locks out all other stresses, it distracts me. What happens the next time I get cued again?

Dr. Adam Shafran: Lee, is a smart guy.  This is a very bright doctor who is aware of it and these are the things that are happening to him on a personal level.

Lee Kantor: Pavlov would be proud.

Dr. David Kessler: Well, Pavlov would be proud. But it is not just conditioning. Pavlov got it right in part, but it is conditioned and driven behavior. It is not just learned, it is learned and motivated. If you try to break this cycle, once you’re cued…you know that inner dialogue, “Boy, that looks good. No, I shouldn’t have that. Maybe just a little, not now.” That is the stuff of obsessions and cravings so that the behavior becomes conditioned and driven. That is why we really need food rehab.

Lee Kantor: But there is always after, if you are a habitual food user.  There is the shame element too, after you have eaten that where you feel bad that you did.

Dr. David Kessler: We have to get rid of the shame. The shame is because we can’t control our behaviors. No one explained to us…we are constantly being bombarded with this cue activation reward/relief cycle.  Do we ever get any real satisfaction. I thought I was eating for nutrition. I thought I was eating for nourishment to fill me up. I didn’t realize I was eating for stimulation. But, that is what fat, sugar is all about.

Lee Kantor: But food is more than just fuel. Food is part of your culture, part of celebrations, part of lots of things that go beyond fuel.

Dr. David Kessler: That’s fine, but does it need to be layered and loaded with fat, sugar and salt?  What happened is that in the 1950s and 60s, in order to feed a hungry nation and to be able to do that economically the food industry became highly processed.  That was good, it was primarily safe, it was cheap.  What did they learn along the way? To dial in fat, sugar and salt.  Then we put the nutrition facts label, that little box. You know when you pick up M&Ms and you see it is 40% of your daily fats and you put it back, that’s my fault. At the FDA we put that on. We didn’t do that on restaurants.  Somebody said to  me, “In the food industry, Kessler, this whole obesity epidemic was your fault.”  I said, “What are you talking about?”  He said, “You didn’t put the nutrition facts information on restaurant menus.”   So you see the real explosion.

Lee Kantor: Look at cigarettes, they have a warning that says this is going to kill you and that doesn’t impact sales.

Dr. David Kessler: What is worse than tobacco? What has been the real success?

Dr. Adam Shafran: The drug that they have put into cigarettes…

Dr. David Kessler: What has really shifted? What is important? Is wasn’t laws. It wasn’t warnings. What was it?  Back 30-40 years…

Lee Kantor: It was cool to smoke.

Dr. David Kessler: What changed?

Lee Kantor: It wasn’t cool to smoke anymore.

Dr. David Kessler: Right. So we changed what scientists call the valence of stimuli. It used to be positive valent, not it is negatively valent.  If a reinforcing substance is positively valent, what are you going to do? You are going to approach it. If it is negatively valent, what are you going to do? You are going to stay away from it.  We changed how the country views tobacco. Tobacco is easy, you can live without tobacco.  You are right, food has to be enjoyable.

Lee Kantor: Yeah, but look at the media. You are bombarded with images of fat people, they are not positive.

Dr. David Kessler: We have it wrong! Let’s stay away from people and criticizing. This is not about obesity. There are people who want to be thin but they want to eat the food and any food that they want. This is about the food.  If you want to lose weight but you want the food, it is not going to happen.

Dr. Adam Shafran: Right. We have created foods that weren’t created before. This is the evolution of man and we’ve created food that will alter the chemistry of the brain to now make us eat, whether we are full or not full; we will just keep eating until we are stuffed pigs!

Dr. David Kessler: And what’s happened?

Dr. Adam Shafran: And we’re fat and we’re not happy.

Lee Kantor: As soon as we start changing the gravitational pull on Earth based on the increase in weight…then we’ll change!

Dr. Adam Shafran: I think the main thing, doctor, that you bring up in the book which is amazing to me…as humans we’ve had this change that first of all we didn’t  know was happening.  You looked at obesity rates, you looked at a lot of data and you said, “Wait, what’s happened in the 70s and 80s where all of a sudden we’ve had obesity rates that have gone through the roof? They haven’t existed before.”  How did food change and the availability of it and you create the perfect storm for obesity. I really love the idea and the concept that you don’t give this one approach, “The reason why you are fat is because you have too many starches, you have too much carbohydrates…or your protein”, where people like to focus on some external thing. Or… “If you place the food…or don’t have it in the house, you are not going to be obese.” It is not a one fix for all. There are lots of things that you need to do.

You talk about some of them. One of them is to set rules, this resonated with me. I think it is a great concept in terms of trying to change the way that you view food.

Dr. David Kessler: Yeah, but they have to be rules you want to follow. If you set rules and the rules make you feel deprived, it is not going to work. Deprivation only increases the reward value of food. That is why diets don’t work.  Sure you can 30 days, 60 days, 90 days white knuckle and with just sheer force try to resist, but that only increases the reward value. If you haven’t laid down new learning on top of that old learning, if you haven’t laid down new neural circuitry on top of that old neural circuitry you go back into your environment and you continue to get cued and bombarded with cues and all the highly palatable foods are right in front of you and all the cues.  What do you think is going to happen? Your brain is going to get activated again and you are going to gain back the weight.

Dr. Adam Shafran: Right, you are going to go right back to the same behavior and do the same thing.  It goes back to how mindful you have to be when you are going to eat. You just can’t shut off.

Dr. David Kessler: The problem, the catch, you say “be mindful”, then I am mindful and I am paying attention to it, but I want it.  That starts obsessions and cravings. In some ways, you say “be mindful” and you’re right, because a lot of this behavior is habit and it is out of consciousness but I bring it into consciousness and I then start thinking about it and ruminating about it.  “I want it”, “I don’t want it”!

Dr. Adam Shafran: It sounds like a Woody Allen movie that is going on in my head right now!

Lee Kantor: A lobotomy, I think is the way to go!

Dr. Adam Shafran: Yeah, you have to cut out a part of your brain!  Doctor…?

Dr. David Kessler: I wasn’t going to respond to that, I was just going to let that one go (laughing).  I thought I would let that one just go by.  I wasn’t going there!

Dr. Adam Shafran: It is a wonderful, wonderful book. I think it is probably one of the most powerful books about eating, overeating, about controlling behavior; especially if you are trying to lose weight. I think it is a phenomenal book.  The End of Overeating, Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite. Great book!  I really appreciate you taking the time…

Lee Kantor: If you want Dr. Fitness to blurb the paperback of this saying that he actually bought it with his own money…it might be worth it!

Dr. Adam Shafran: And read it! I read the whole thing cover to cover!

Dr. David Kessler: What’s the price (laughing)?

Dr. Adam Shafran: Listen, how about a hot pastrami sandwich at Ben’s Deli with some coleslaw and some half sour pickles? That’s my poison.

Dr. David Kessler: Any time, sir.

Dr. Adam Shafran: We really appreciate you coming on the show and look forward to talking in the new future.

Dr. David Kessler: Thanks a lot.

Dr. Adam Shafran: Where can we get the book?

Dr. David Kessler: Amazon has it.

Dr. Adam Shafran: Any websites?

Dr. David Kessler: www.theendofovereatingbook.com Amazon and local bookstores have it. Thanks for having me on the show.

Dr. Adam Shafran: It is always a pleasure, thank you so much for coming on the show, Dr. Kessler.

That is The End of Overeating, Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite. Great book, Lee. I’m sorry that you never read it. You really should read this.

Lee Kantor: Does it have pictures?

Dr. Adam Shafran: No, lots of words.

Lee Kantor: Sorry!

Dr. Adam Shafran: When you are checking out the book The End of Overeating, Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite at www.theendofovereatingbook.com make sure you check out Dr. Fitness & The Fat Guy at www.drfitnessandthefatguy.com, check out our blog, check out our book You Can't Lose Weight Alone. The Partner Power Weight Loss Program now available free online.

END

High Velocity Radio Show with guests Dr. Steve Bistritz and David Eckoff

On this recent High Velocity Radio show Stone Payton and Todd Schnick had such a content rich show that I had to have Karen Galambos with Right Type Pro transcribe it. First Dr Steve Bistritz shared some amazing information from his new book Selling to the C-Suite. then web entrepreneur David Eckoff shared some insights on customer experience. David's newest venture is called Spitter, which is sports on Twitter.

 

High Velocity Radio Show

www.highvelocityblog.com

with

Stone Payton and Todd Schnick

Guests:  Dr. Steve Bistritz and David Eckoff

August 17, 2009

Stone Payton: Welcome to the High Velocity Radio Show.   This is Stone Peyton with my personal commitment to you that as soon as the voice over guy gets out of rehab we're going to have him back in the studio, have him cut a new intro because there's a lot going on.  A lot has changed.  My partner and now co-host, Todd Schnick, is in the studio with us each Monday morning.  What's happening Todd?

Todd Schnick: Having a great day.  You know my contract stipulated a new voice over on Day 1 and it's been about a month now.  (laughter)

Stone Payton: When we get him cleaned up we'll get him in here and we'll get that handled for you, okay?

Todd Schnick: I appreciate that.

Stone Peyton: So what's going on this week?   A lot happened over the last few days.  Get us caught up.

Todd Schnick: Well gosh, I think the two biggest pieces of news is that the High Velocity Radio Show now has a flagship sponsor, PSI, the digital media experts.  We're really excited about that.  You can find out more about them on their website which can be found at highvelocityblog.com.  This is the very beginning of this relationship with PSI.  We have some big things planned down the road but we're excited to have them as a part of this family.

I think the other exciting news, Stone, and we've got Lee with us here in the studio, our producer.  Radio X had our first awards last week and Amy Otto, the host of the Atlanta Business Radio, was our first winner.

Stone Payton: Yeah, big surprise there, huh?  We were gunning for her.

Todd Schnick: Well that was our target in the campaign but she did a great job and has a great show and a big following.  I spent the weekend, Stone, counting up all of the money we raised for the Furniture Bank and the Furniture Bank was the true winner of the campaign.

Stone Payton: How did we do after you took your cut? (laughter)

Todd Schnick: We had like $5 left after I took my cut, but the great news is that we're going to be able to provide beds to children in two families.  And so the dramatic impact on those lives is very special to all of us and I appreciate everybody who participated in that event and donated that money.  Next time we'll do more to steal more votes.

Stone Payton: That's right.  We'll be back in the fall, won't we?

Todd Schnick: Yes we will.  Yes we will.

Stone Payton: Well thanks for getting us updated.  We have a marvelous show for you this morning.  I'm delighted to let you know that at the top of the show we're going to introduce Dr. Steve Bistritz who has a new book coming out in just a few weeks, I believe.  Very anxious to share some news with you about that and really dive into the mind of this gentlemen and find out what we can about how and why some people are meeting and serving senior level executives far better and far more effectively than others.  And then after we visit with Dr. Steve Bistritz, we're going to have technology entrepreneur David Eckoff on.  I don't have a clue what we're going to talk to him about, but we'll unleash Todd on him and see what we can learn from David Eckoff.

Todd Schnick: Yeah, we'll figure that out.

Stone Payton: But first up on the High Velocity Radio Show this morning is Steve Bistritz.  Welcome to the show Steve.

Dr. Steve Bistritz: Good morning.  It's great to be with you this morning, Stone.

Stone Peyton: We are delighted are to have you on the show.  So tell us why did you choose to write a book about selling to executives?

Dr. Steve Bistritz: Well Stone, there's a lot of literature out there on selling to executives, but most of it was written by salespeople from an anecdotal perspective.  Selling to the C-Suite highlights the research we did with CXO level executives where we asked about their relationships with professional salespeople.  So from that perspective we think it makes a significant contribution to the sales profession because it speaks from what the executive was really looking for in their relationships with salesmen.

Stone Payton: So what did you ask them?

Dr. Steve Bistritz: Well we asked them a lot of key questions.  For example, we asked them when and why they got involved in the sales process or the decision making process.  We also asked them what has to happen with sales people for them to think it was an effective meeting.  When they had a meeting with a salesperson, what did the salesperson do so that it was an effective meeting from the executive's perspective.  And lastly we asked them questions about what do salespeople have to do to gain credibility with them.

Stone Payton: So what was your favorite part about conducting these interviews?  Did you learn anything particularly new or something that surprised you?

Dr. Steve Bistritz: Well, you know we did, because when we talked to executives, and we asked them those questions, we got some interesting answers, but more interesting was the perspective we got from those executives.  For example, in one of the interviews I had with a CXO level executive that's a senior executive in the client organization, I asked him why would you ever meet with professional salespeople.  And I’ll never forgot his answer.  He told me that "I meet with professional salespeople because often they can offer me advice on issues related to my company that even my own people can't come up with.  So I want the benefit of their experience and knowledge because they've seen it in other organizations and I want to hear about their experience, what they've done, how they've solved some of those problems."

Stone Payton: So you've hit the big time, you're on the High Velocity Radio Show, you've got this new book that is being published by a little upstart in the New England area called, what is it, McGraw-Hill or something like that?

Steve Bistritz: Right, right.

Stone Payton: So…

Steve Bistritz: Go ahead, I'm sorry.

Stone Payton: Well I'm just interested to know, how does a person get to this point?  You know a lot of our listeners, Steve, are aspiring authors.  They are and want to continue to be thought leaders, they want to get published, how does one get to this point?

Steve Bistritz: Well that's a great question and let me tell you exactly how it happened because it was really easy, but then again I think we hit the right point without the book.  And that's the key.  I think you've got to have a book that the publisher thinks is going to appeal to some audience out there.  And that's what happened with us because I'll tell you exactly what happened.  In September of last year, in 2008, we sent proposals, blind proposals to four different book publishers and we didn't have a contact within those publishing organizations.  We didn't know exactly who to get to.  We sent it to four publishers and two of those publishers, McGraw-Hill and John Wiley came back to us and said "We have some interest.  Tell us more about the book."

And then the other thing we did is we had the book almost finished, sent it to about 40 or 50 people out there who have some interest in the sales profession who are recognized sales professionals and they came back to us with comments and we included those comments in the book proposal.

So it's really about Number 1, getting the right kind of book.  Number 2, just getting your proposal in front of some publishers and then 3, having some people that are recognized professionals out there give you some input on what they thought about the book.

Todd Schnick: Steve, what I'm looking forward to most about this book is this concept of this relevant executive, the relevant client executive.  Can you shed some more light on that?

Steve Bistritz: That's a great question Todd.  We define what we call the relevant executive as the executive who stands to gain the most, or lose the most, as a result of the application or project associated with the sales opportunity.  You know that is so key, but it's so simple and most salespeople neglect it.  They overlook it.  They're talking to some contact in the client organization who's telling them that they're doing great, they've got a great proposal in front of them and there is some executive in the client organization sitting out there talking to some of their competitors and you've got to find out who that relevant executive is.  And again, it's who stands to gain the most or lose the most as a result of the application or project associated with your sales opportunity.  Find that person and that person can really make the buying decision.

Todd Schnick: So it might not necessarily by the CEO.  It could be a different C level executive in that organization and the trick is identifying who that relevant executive is.

Steve Bistritz: You're exactly right because when I worked for IBM and I spent 28 years with IBM in sales, sales management and sales executive positions, the mantra with IBM was Sell at the Top.  Always get to that CEO.  You don't always have to find that CEO.  You have to find that relevant executive who is really on the line for the application or project that's associated with your sales opportunity.

Stone Payton: And I get the idea that the target reader for your book is the business to business sales executive.  Have I got that right?

Steve Bistritz: The business to business salesperson, sales manager, sales executive, anybody who is in the area of business to business selling is the top candidate for this book.  Now I think other sales professionals can get some insight from the book, but it's really aimed at the business to business salesperson or sales organization.

Todd Schnick: Steve do you think, you and I pre-show were discussing the power of the internet and where we still think that the internet and what it means is still in its infancy.  The internet, as we know it, is only 15 years old, do you think there's a role to play using social media in this space?

Steve Bistritz: Absolutely, because one of the things in the book is that internet marketing is really playing a key role today and it's going to play more of a role as we move forward.  That's Number 1.  Number 2, client executives out there, they're using the internet to find out information about the different organizations that are selling to them.  So when a salesperson makes contact with an executive in the client organization, that individual has already done some homework on you.  More importantly, the salesperson has to do a lot of homework on the client executive.  And one of the ways to find out more about the client executive him or herself is to use things like LinkedIn and other social media, LinkedIn I guess is more of a business example, but social media will play more and more of a role.  Facebook and some of those other social media will be more important as we move forward.

Todd Schnick: I'm thinking that those tools could be helpful in pinpointing that relevant executive.

Steve Bistritz: Absolutely, the thing about identifying the relevant executive is you can't do that in one call.  You can't do that with one observation of the client organization.  You've got to do a lot of work to identify that relevant executive and then start triangulating your information so that you get to that right person who can help you win the deal.

Stone Payton: Well, my advance copy of the book got lost in the mail, Steve.  But as I understand it, you did release some advance copy to a few people in the sales arena that are well respected and some of us might recognize.  One name that I saw that maybe a few people might recognize is a gentleman by the name of Neil Rackham and I wanted to read a quote, because you didn't just get Neil Rackham to blurb your book.  I mean this guy invested the time and energy to write the forward for this book.  I want to read this quote and it's just one small snippet from a really well written, well thought out forward.  Here's the quote.  "This is a refreshing realism about the author's advice.  No gimmicks, no tricks, no smoke and mirrors.  Selling a C level is hard, thoughtful and strategic and the book offers none of the usual unrealistic silver bullets."  I mean that is…what an endorsement.  How do you go about even getting a Neil Rackham to even crack your book open?  Give us a little history on that whole thing.

Steve Bistritz: Well, one of the things we had to do in kind of researching how we were going to publicize this book was finding out some of those sales professionals out there who we thought had credibility with publishers.  And obviously Neil Rackham is one of them.  When we had the forward written by Neil, I sent it to my kids and none of them have ever heard of Neil Rackham so I tried to explain to them that Neil Rackham was to sales, or is to sales, like Tiger Woods is to golf.  So getting Neil Rackham to endorse a book on selling is kind of like Tiger Woods endorsing a book on how to play golf.  But what happened was we sent the book to him, the pre-release copy early version of the book, and it wasn’t totally completed and he saw it and the first thing he did was he sent back a note and he said "You know I get so many of these requests.  I review about 10 or 15% of the books that are ever sent to me so I'm not sure I'm ever going to be able to get an endorsement to you."  And about two weeks later we got an email from Neil and he said "I really loved the book and here's my quote."  And he sent it to us and a little bit later we said "Hey Neil, would you be willing to write the forward for the book?"  So just by asking him to do something, he did it for us.  He wrote the forward for us, he was very generous in doing that.  But that also played a role in getting the book published because when McGraw-Hill obviously saw that quote from Neil, they had published his book on spin selling, they thought quite a bit of Neil Rackham and they said "Hey, we've got to get on this."  And they did and the rest is history, as they say.

Todd Schnick: Tell us about some of the other initial reviews you've gotten.

Steve Bistritz: Well we got reviews from people like Chip Brubaker who is a key executive of CA, Computer Associates.  We got reviews from other sales executives who probably wouldn't be as recognizable as Neil Rackham but they are significant sales executives at organizations around the world, some in the United States, some in Europe, some in Asia, some in Australia.  So the book has a global perspective and global executives have seen it and endorsed it and have really liked it.  They said that it's something out there that's going to give salespeople some insight into how to do a better job of selling at the executive level and that's what the book is all about.  Selling to the C-Suite.

Stone Payton: Selling to the C-Suite is the title of the book.

Steve Bistritz: Yes.

Stone Payton: And where can people get access to it, buy it, read about it?

Steve Bistritz: Well right now you can go to my website www.sellxl.com and you'll see on the homepage, just click on the book and there's more information about it.  You can preorder it today at any of the online bookstores and you can preorder from my website so I look forward to people reading the book, and not only reading the book, but getting value from it so that they can go out there and close some of those key deals that they're working on.

Stone Payton: Well Steve, it's been an absolute delight having you on the show this morning.  Hope you got a heads up on this, but before we let you go, we do have a little tradition here on the High Velocity Radio Show.  We like to ask each guest if they would like to share a mistake at some point that they've made in their career, and more importantly, what they've learned from it.  Can we con you into doing that for us?

Steve Bistritz: When I was a young IBM salesperson and new to sales, I didn't always focus on executives in the client organization who had the most influence or power.  I had no idea that politics was in play in client organizations.  I was very naïve.  My focus was on the contact person that I had already gotten, the person that I was comfortable calling on.  And that person may not have had any influence or power on the sales opportunity I was pursuing there.  My mistake was in not spending enough time identifying what I now call the ‘relevant executive’.  What I learned is that by identifying the relevant executive and aligning with that person, that is the single most important thing you can accomplish as you pursue sales opportunities because those people can help you navigate the complex structures of the organization and can help influence the decision process in your favor.  That's the one thing I tell salespeople today, in the business to business environment, go out there and find that executive that I'm talking about.  That ‘relevant executive’.  You'll reduce the time it takes to close the deal.  Very simple.

Stone Payton: I can't wait to get the book.  I'm sure my advanced copy will find it's way through the mail in the next day or so, but I'm so interested and enamored with this idea of identifying the relevant executive and then exercising some of the strategies that you learned from doing real work research as opposed to some guy just thinking through theory around all this.  So thank you so much for being on our show Steve.  Can you hang out with us while we interview our next guest?

Steve Bistritz: Absolutely.  I'll be right here.

Stone Payton: Alright.  Well next up on the High Velocity Radio Show - I am delighted to introduce to you technology entrepreneur, David Eckoff.  I met this jean-clad, t-shirt wearing entrepreneur some weeks ago.

Todd Schnick: He's our kind of guy.

Stone Payton: Yeah, he's got the backpack and the whole bit and we talked about all kinds of things that really interest me and, candidly, sometimes befuddle me.  I just have to admit up front you're going to find out very quickly, this guy has got several IQ points on you and me.   I can't wait to dive in and find out what he's up to and learn what we can about where this world and where the business environment is headed with respect to technology.  So with all that said, please join me in welcoming David Eckoff.

David Eckoff: Hey Stone, it's great to be here today and hear you remarking about my t-shirt and jeans-clad entrepreneur dress.  I really enjoyed hearing Steve and your start of the segment today.  I got my start at IBM also, and after too many years wearing white shirts and red ties, it's great to be an entrepreneur and I spend a lot of time in the Silicon Valley and the Bay Area and it's I think standard dress for the black t-shirt and jeans.

Stone Payton: Well we all have an IBM connection.  That's how my mortgage gets paid.  My wife has a real job with IBM as a consultant, so thank you IBM, our second sponsor. (laughter) I think mostly what we want to talk to you about this morning is innovation in customer experience.  Can you expand on that?  Tell us what that means to you.

David Eckoff: People ask me all the time, "So David Eckoff, you're a technology entrepreneur, why are you so interested in customer experience and why is it so important?"  Well, a decade ago there was a big gap in product quality between the Number 1 and the Number 2 and the Number 3 players.  And today that gap has closed.  So the key question that we need to ask ourselves as business people is how are you going to differentiate your product or service?  I believe a great opportunity is to differentiate based on customer experience.  Jeff Bezos who is the founder and CEO of amazon.com, he makes the distinction between customer experience and customer service.  He says "Customer experience at Amazon includes having the lowest price, the fastest delivery and being reliable enough so that you don't have to contact anyone."  That's their customer experience.  And he says "You save customer service for the truly unusual situations when things go wrong with the customer experience.  This is when you as a customer interact with Amazon employees."  And he views this, and his company executes on this, as it's the exception not the rule.  So customer service is a subset of the overall customer experience.  And Bezos said something that really got my attention.  This is so important, what I'm about to tell you.  “Fixing customer problems builds loyalty with people.”  Think about that.  It's so important I'll say it again.  Fixing customer problems builds loyalty with people.

Todd Schnick: That's my favorite thing about social media, David, is that my clients say, "Oh, I don't want to get involved in the social media space because I'll rope myself up to getting criticized on line."  I say, "That's the best opportunity you have to build a long term loyal customer, when you can publicly fix and solve that problem.  You're more likely to build a loyal customer long term than if they came in and had an average experience that you never really knew about."  So a lot of people talk about customer experience and there's a lot of ways to impact that.  How does technology play a role in there?

David Eckoff: So technology can play a role in multiple ways.  A couple of examples, and I've been paying a lot of attention to customer experience just as myself, as a customer, so I'll talk about things from my own personal experience.  I'm interested in hearing from your experience too, what you've seen.  So technology, a couple of examples…I just ordered an item on amazon.com recently and before it had even arrived, the price had declined.  I got in contact with Amazon and on the technology side, they've got something on their website where they make it easy to get in touch with them.  They don't just publish their phone number, but all you have to do is enter your phone number and click and bang, they call you right back.

Stone Payton: Oh that's cool.  I didn't realize that.

David Eckoff: But it gets better, Stone.  It gets better because at this point you can imagine as a customer I'm not too happy that the price went down.  I didn't even have the item yet.  So I asked them "Could you issue me a refund for the difference."  And I didn't really think they would but I figured it was worth talking to them anyway since they made it so easy to get in touch.  And you know, they did.  They said "Hold on.  This particular item is with one of our divisions.  We want to connect you to somebody from that division."  And of course what happened when the person connected me, they disconnected me.  (laughter) So technology can have its ups and its downs but here's where it gets really so much better is within a few seconds I got an email automatically kicked off to me from Amazon saying "We noticed you just had a customer service call with Amazon.  Did this call resolve your problem?  Click here for Yes.  Click here for No."  So of course I clicked here for No.  And then an amazing thing happened.  They gave me the opportunity to call them back on line or they called me back and I was connected automatically.  Because I clicked "No, the problem wasn't resolved" I wasn't just connected to a first line customer service rep.  I was connected with a specialist who handled customer service problems that had not yet been resolved and she, on the spot fixed it.

Stone Payton: Nice.

David Eckoff: How impressive is that with technology to have that happen so quickly?  And Amazon is clearly a company that's thinking through that customer experience and how to win people over when things go wrong.

Todd Schnick: What do you think about Amazon buying Zappos?

David Eckoff: I'm a big fan of Zappos.  Tony Shea, the CEO of Zappos, he spoke at South by Southwest this year and I've been studying what he does and a couple of things that… we'll talk about Zappos in a minute but how do I feel about it?  I'm a passionate fan of Zappos.  Zappos for those of you who don't know, they're an online ecommerce site, they're primarily known for selling shoes but they've branched off in other things like clothing, accessories like sunglasses, etc.  My own experience with Zappos, I went to buy a pair of sunglasses.  They're really cool sunglasses.  I couldn't wait to get them.  Being the cheap SOB that I am, and as an entrepreneur, I did not put the most expensive shipping.  I opted for the slowest shipping.  And guess what?  Zappos, one of the things they do for the customer experience, they want to wow people and they surprise upgraded me to overnight shipping.  How cool was that?

It's things like that that win customer loyalty.  So it's not just when things go wrong that you can win loyalty, but also it's when things happen unexpectedly, positive surprises.  So just in this room, how many of you like surprises?

Stone Payton: I do.

Todd Schnick: I do.

Stone Payton: Right.

David Eckoff: So Zappos is all about good surprises.  At South by Southwest, so if you really want to understand how to do customer experience, you really want to study zappos.com.  There are some great videos online from South by Southwest that you can watch.  One thing I learned at South by Southwest from Tony Shea, the CEO of Zappos, is he talks about how Zappos doesn't just sell shoes.  They don't think that they just sell shoes.  Zappos sells happiness in a box.  Put yourself in the position of the person who is ordering those shoes.  Of course they want the shoes, but at the end of the day, what do they really want?  They want to be happy.  They want to feel happy.  So Zappos makes sure that they sell happiness in a box.

Compare that to other businesses.  Cold Stone Creamery, have you ever been there?  It's ice cream.

Todd Schnick: Yes.

David Eckoff: Do they sell ice cream?  Of course they sell ice cream.  As a customer do I go there and get ice cream?  Sure.  But at the end of the day what do they really sell.

Todd Schnick: Happiness in a cone. (laughter)

David Eckoff: Happiness in a cone or a cup.  You got it.  I spent some time this past week talking with the president of Cold Stone Creamery, Dan Beem, who's a great guy and who has a great vision for their customer service and customer experience and he talked about how their goal is to WOW you at Cold Stone and to make sure… We talked about that with Zappos.  He thought that was so cool.  He was like "Happiness in a cone.  Yeah.  That's it."

Stone Payton: So you're finding rock stars in this arena that are doing it well and that what?  You're going out to your client base and helping them replicate that success in helping them develop some of these strategies?

David Eckoff: Well Stone, I divide my time between a couple of things.  One of them is that as a tech entrepreneur I'm developing and launching my own technology business.  In fact today the open beta for my newest startup Spitter.com is launching.

Todd Schnick: That's what I want to talk about.

David Eckoff: We'll get to that in a minute.  I figure less people are interested in Spitter unless they're sports fans but spitter.com, think of it as a great place for sports fans to be able to get all the news and all the fan discussion.  There's so much of it and it's so spread out over the web, we aggregate that into one easy to scan page stream.  So think of it a little bit like sports, maybe a little bit like Twitter, that's Spitter.  That's open data starting today at spitter.com.  Great place for sports fans.

Stone Payton: I thought it was just solely dedicated to baseball when he said Spitter.  I didn't know. (laughter)

David Eckoff: The other part of what I do, I divide my time between that and I work with select high technology start ups, in particular high potential start-ups.  I've worked with companies like Zazzle, Kleiner Perkins company in the Bay Area, youstream.tv which is kind of like youtube except it's all about live streaming video.  Great group of people over at youstream. And Chris Klaus here in Atlanta.  Great local entrepreneur with 3D Virtual World Kaneva.  I'm really impressed with what Kaneva is doing and Chris is an outstanding entrepreneur.

But I also work with them in some ways with customer experience but my focus on customer experience is really about learning best practices and going out and putting them into play in my own businesses.  You mentioned social media before.  Social media, you also mentioned Zappos.  Tony Shea, the CEO of Zappos, he's on Twitter ALOT! More than anyone I know, he's a Twitter rock star.  So you guys are all on Twitter, right?

Todd Schnick: Yes.

Stone Payton: Yeah, I think so.

David Eckoff: And out there in radio land, if you're not on Twitter really check it out.  It sounds like the dumbest thing.  I thought it was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard of when I heard about it.  Like "Why would you want to Tweet about what you're doing?"  But it turns out it's an ultra powerful way to connect with people.  Jack Welch, the CEO of former CEO of General Electric, even he's on Twitter and he said something "Twitter makes me smarter."  Well, I've got a lot of respect for Jack Welch and when Jack Welch says "Twitter makes me smarter." I think there's something there.

Todd Schnick: The cool thing about Twitter is that people like you and I can connect with Tony Shea.

David Eckoff: Yeah.

Todd Schnick: He's active.  He's very engaged in Twitter.

David Eckoff: And not only can you connect with him, but Tony Shea, how cool is this in terms of customer experience?  He goes out there on Twitter and he says, this is like last year sometime, and he says "Hey, if you're a Zappos fan and you're going to be in Las Vegas anytime over this weekend" that's where their company is headquartered "We're having our company picnic on Sunday and we'd love for you to come by to our company picnic."  Now how amazing is this.

Stone Peyton: That rocks.

David Eckoff: If you're a fan of the company and the CEO says if you're going to be here come to our company picnic, I mean this is just like unprecedented.

Todd Schnick: It might be the coolest office working environment I've ever experienced or ever seen.  If you ever get a chance to get online and see digital pictures of the Zappos headquarters in Las Vegas, it's a pretty amazing place.  Talk about building happiness, it's a fun place to be.

David Eckoff: Not only can you see it online, but Tony makes this promise.  If you come out to Las Vegas and you're out there, get in touch with them and they'll take you on a tour.  They'll even pick you up at your hotel and bring you there.  This is a company that's dedicated to building great relationships with their customers and I read that Jeff Bezos said he was so impressed with Zappos and how they do things and that's one of the things that he liked a lot.

So what do I think about the purchase from Amazon, I think it was about 800 million roughly, I think that's a great combination of companies.  I'm a big fan of both companies.

Stone Payton: Okay so how does the guy with the little 3 million dollar consulting firm that really buys into that whole approach, what kinds of things does he do to replicate or she do to replicate that same type of practice that you see with the Amazons and the Zappos.

David Eckoff: I think it's looking at each point of interaction that you have with your customers and looking at it from the customer experience.  I'll give you an example.  Cold Stone Creamery, this is how I end up talking with Dan Beem, the president of Cold Stone last week… as I see things go right "I'm interested in understanding that and replicated it."  As I see things go wrong "I’m interested in understanding what things led to those things going wrong so we can learn from that and maybe avoid them."  So it was my birthday a couple of weeks ago and there's this one ice cream from Cold Stone that I just love.  It's a creation called Mud Pie Mojo and I'll tell you what, I just love this Mud Pie Mojo.

Stone Payton: Sounds good.  Sounds so good for you too. (laughter)

David Eckoff: I'm sure it is.  Those folks on the air that know me know that I eat a lot of organic salads and I pretty healthy, but I've got a weakness for this Cold Stone Mud Pie Mojo.  So all day long, on my birthday no less, I'm thinking of what?  That Mud Pie Mojo and I'm just like "I can't wait to get in there."  I looked up online at coldstonecreamery.com to see the little store near me what time are they open till. They're open till 10:00 at least according to the website.  I show up at 9:30 and the door to the store is locked.  I reach out and pull the handle.  I tried a couple of times.  I tried it again a couple of times.  And it's still locked.  Can you imagine the look on my face?  And of course the people at Cold Stone Creamery employees are in there closing up and they're like "We don't want to open the doors."

So, this is part of the customer experience.  It's not just when you're in the store, not just when you're getting ice cream in this case.  It's really the whole end to end customer experience.  If you look at that WOW factor from Zappos that they're trying to have, or from Amazon, you really don't want to be disappointed customers like that, particularly not on their birthdays.  On your birthday, you can spend your birthday anywhere.  So out of the infinite number of places I could have spent my birthday, I decided to spend it with Cold Stone Creamery to get my Mud Pie Mojo.

I had a good conversation with Dan Beem about this and some lessons learned from this is Dan Beem, president of Cold Stone nationally, he has a vision for the customer experience that's dramatically different than that.  I think what we see there is one of the things that can go wrong it is the classic example of the executive and the executive team that has a vision for things being one way, but then the execution of that plan either being a lot different or a wide variation.  It goes to show that it's important, it's critically important, to have the communication channels open so that you understand when things go wrong so you can make them right.

In this case I thought "I'm going on this radio show with Stone talking about customer experience.  Let's try this out.  Let's see if it happens like Amazon or not, just as an experiment. And what can I learn from this that I can go back and apply to my own businesses?"  And here's what I found...So Dan said that I have three lines of defenses or three pillars.  The first thing is the person who's at the front line.  The person who's the staff person making ice cream.  They should be able to solve any problem and make things right on the spot.  If that doesn't happen then the store manager or the franchise owner should be able to handle things and turn things around on the spot.  They want you to have a WOW experience, not a what happened experience.  And the third line of defense is they have a national 800 number and you can call into and they should be able to solve things and turn things around on the spot.

My experience in this case is none of those three worked.  All three of them failed.  So again further disconnect between their vision and the actual execution.  But having spent a lot of time with the folks from Cold Stone over the past week at an executive level to talk with them more about this and seek to understand how things are going with that, I have no doubt in my mind that they are absolutely committed to changing the execution of their plan.  That's impressive and I have a lot of good things to say about the folks from Cold Stone at the executive level and the focus they're having.

So what can we do as entrepreneurs?  I think it's put yourself in the shoes of the customer.  What does the customer really want?  They're looking for that happiness in a box, the happiness in an ice cream cone.  I read this recently.  I thought this was great…I wrote this down and highlighted it in yellow.  I recommend that you write this down and highlight it in yellow yourself.  Put it somewhere that you can see it.

Stone Payton: We're going to record it. (laughter)

David Eckoff: Outstanding!  "People don't always remember what you say to them but they almost always remember how you made them feel."  So again people don't always remember what you say to them, they don't always remember what you do, but they almost always remember how they feel.  So how do you want your customers to feel before, during and after their interactions with you?

I'd say start with that and then design everything in your execution to make that happen.  Have some methods in place so you can know if that's on target or not on target.  A few ways that you can know if it's on target or not on target is there's something called Net Promoter Score.  I don't know if you're familiar with this.  This is a customer satisfaction measure.  When I was at IBM, Steve you're from IBM also, we put a lot of focus on customer satisfaction and measuring it.  We measured it quarterly, we looked at the scores.  We put a lot of focus on that.  Well a funny thing, some smart consultants at Bain, Bain Consulting, studied us extensively.  Statistically they found that customer satisfaction does not necessarily statistically correlate with profitable growth.  That's interesting.

What else might you want to focus on as a metric to measure?  How about customer loyalty or intent to purchase?  Well it turns out, none of these things statistically correlate to profitable growth.  But the folks at Bain, these smart rocket science kind of guys, they did discover one metric.  There is one metric that they found that consistently statistically correlated to profitable growth for the company.  When I heard this and heard that GE is focused on this and I heard great companies like Intuit focused on this, I thought "Maybe I should learn about this and focus on this."  This metric is one thing.  "Would you recommend this product or service to a colleague, family member or friend."  When you measure that, all you have to do is ask that one question and the follow up question was "Why do you feel that way?"  If you can understand that you'll know pretty much everything you needed to know.

Now a quantitative person like myself, MBA, so not just mega bad attitude but also the degree. (laughter) I put a lot of focus on measuring.  I'm kind of a detail oriented person and so when I thought "You can only ask one question to find out everything you need to learn?", that's pretty amazing.  I like the simplicity of that.  It's simple.  It's powerful.  You can have that as an operating metric for your business.

But what does this mean for your business?  The score is from ten to zero, ten being:  Absolutely, you'd recommend to friends, zero being:  not at all.  How does this work?  You take the percentage of people who said ten or nine, those are called promoters.  Those are people that are out promoting your brand.  You want these promoters.  Then the people that are eight and sevens, these are neutral.  Throw those numbers out.  It's not that they're unimportant customers but they're not promoters and nor are they the next step which is six, five, four, three, two, one, zeros.  These are people who are detractors.  These are people who are out, they're so unhappy with you.

Stone Payton: We've got to hush them up.  We've got to quiet them, right? (laughter)

David Eckoff: Well it's not so much that you have to quiet them, we want to listen to what they have to say.  There's that great commercial from Direct TV, I think, where they're poking fun at saying "Those customers who are trouble makers, we need to quiet them down" or something like that.  Well it's not so much we need to quiet them down, we need to learn from them.  But we want to turn them from detractors into promoters, so turn things around.

But to use the metric you take the percentage who are promoters, minus the percentage who are detractors, that's your net promoter score.  A perfect growth engine for a company would be having what percentage promoters?  One hundred percent.  For every customer you bring in, they're out recommending to friends and bringing more people in to your business.  That's a perfect growth engine.  What would be a perfectly bad growth engine?  What percentage being net promoters?

Todd Schnick: Zero.

David Eckoff: Zero.  Correct.  So Steve, a surprise to you? (laughter)

Stone Payton: Can you tell who in the audience is educated?  I mean I'm really enamored with this concept.  I'm really glad we decided to record the algebra.  But we love the idea.

Todd Schnick: Yeah, we're not into the math thing.  That was a problem. (laughter)

David Eckoff: Do you know any companies that have perfectly bad growth engines with like 0% promoters?  Or even like negative net promoter score meaning they're creating more detractors than promoters on a daily basis.  I know some companies, I know some entire industries like that.

Stone Payton: Huge government agencies maybe.

David Eckoff: Yeah, maybe industries like airlines.  Maybe certain cable companies that should remain nameless at the moment.  I think in all our experience we see this.  What does that mean for business?  It means you're always having to spend a lot of money on marketing and you're having to work really hard and spend a lot of money with marketing to attract new customers all the time because you have a leaky bucket that's constantly losing customers.  Why would you want to do that?  Wouldn't you prefer to have a bucket that's constantly filled up with customers who are going out getting more customers.

So this is something that I've experimented with since I was at Real Networks in Seattle, implemented at Turner Broadcasting when I was VP for new product development at Turner.  All my clients I work with use the net promoter score.  Chris Klaus, a great entrepreneur here in Atlanta with keneva.com.  When I explained that net promoter score to him, he's a brilliant guy, he instantly saw the potential for this.  As a consultant, one of the things that just makes your heart - you just feel really great, is when you make a recommendation and the client company actually goes out and does it and they do it in a big way.  So they've put a lot of focus on the net promoter score.  They're learning.  It becomes a metric, it's a benchmark.  And no matter what your score is, good, bad or indifferent, no matter what the score is, every quarter you try to increase it.  So wherever you are, and just like in life, no matter where you are in life, keep improving.  If you can improve just 1% everyday in anything you do, by the end of the year, just do the math on that, you'll make tremendous gains.  Same thing with net promoter score.

Todd Schnick: I love this concept.  Let me tell you, David, an example of how one of my clients puts it in action.  I do marketing for a local restaurant and we solicit customer feedback.  We have cards on the tables and they are invited to fill those out and put them in the confidential box.  It's my job to go through those and measure and quantify the data.  Every now and then someone has an experience that's not up to their satisfaction.  We naturally take steps to address that and solve that problem.  But fortunately for us, more often than not people say "This was a wonderful experience and we're going to tell all our friends about it."  Well we take steps to encourage that.  We then just don't say "Thanks."  We send them Buy One Get One Free cards and we thank them and we take other steps.  We don't just want to reward people who are complaining.  We want to reward people and say "We're going to take the next step and help facilitate them to be promoters."  So it's a phenomenal concept.  So I thank you for sharing that with us.

David Eckoff: I really like that and as we were talking about you put a lot of focus on listening to your customers, there are two companies I wanted to call out as great examples that I've seen during the past year.  I've worked with them as customers myself.   They provide a great example I think we all can model.  They're both on Twitter.  One of them is Dell, Dell Computers and the other is Comcast.  So I've got to say my experience with both of those companies with their standard customer service channel has been abysmal.  Michael Dell are you listening?

Comcast, I already know you're not really listening but…

Stone Payton: They'd listen on Twitter though, right?

David Eckoff: But standard customer service channels are so abysmal.  Everyone I talked with in preparation for this radio show asking about companies that do it right and companies that don't, I mean there are certain companies that happen pretty often to come up in conversation, but those two, their standard customer service needs a lot of work.  But they've got some folks who are pioneers doing some great things.  So at Dell, Richard Bernier, who's on Twitter at rich_@_dell.  Rich, though I had some issues that weren't being resolved and I said "You know what?  I bet Dell has got some folks in social media.  I'll get in touch with them and see if they can help?"  Rich is just out there on Twitter all day long and what's he doing?  He's looking for people who have problems with Dell computers and their Dell experience and he's like, along with the rest of his team, he's helping people one at time to solve their problems.

Stone Payton: How cool is that?

Todd Schnick: That's great.

David Eckoff: So when I had problem with my laptop and standard channels weren't helping, in fact it was a miserable experience, he said "You know what?  I'm going to help you get this done and here's how we're going to do it."  And I thought that was tremendous.

And Comcast, a company that I just gotta wonder with their standard customer service, they've got somebody who is like that.  I think everyone of our companies needs someone like this.  At Comcast, they're on Twitter at comcastcares.  His name is Frank Eliason and he is Director of Digital Ecare.  If you just say anything about Comcast like "I'm having a problem with Comcast."  So last night, the season premier of Mad Men was on, so one of the people on Twitter who I follow was having some problems with his Comcast service and he's upset because he's not going to be able to see Mad Men.  He put something into Twitter of course saying "You know, problems with Comcast."  What happens next is something that completely surprised him.  Comcastcares on Twitter gets back in touch with him, just out of the blue, they're monitoring what's going on Twitter with the conversations looking for opportunities to help customers and they said "How can we help."

Stone Payton: That is awesome.  David we're about to run out of time but before we let you go, a couple of things.  One, how can people get in touch with you to learn more about your work, about innovation in customer experience and maybe apply some of these ideas and strategies to their own work.  What's the best way for them to get in touch with you?

David Eckoff: You can get in touch with me via email at davideckoff@gmail.com.  That's D-A-V-I-D-E-C-K-O-F-F @gmail.com or my blog davideckoff.com or you can check me out on Twitter.  On Twitter I'm davideckoff.

Stone Peyton: Or just howl at the moon and you'll be there, right? (laughter)

David Eckoff: Something like that and I do monitor Twitter for people talking about me and I've got alerts on Google if you mention my name out on line, I'll see it and I'll be in touch.  I like to be real accessible and would love to hear from folks and talk business.

So I'll leave with this closing thought.  Another area where companies seem to go wrong is with, and I see this, is how they treat their employees.  Think about this.  How you treat your employees, your employees will never treat your customers any better than you treat your employees.

Stone Payton: Wow.  You're so right.

David Eckoff: So raise the bar on how you treat your employees.  Zappos does a great job with that.  Amazon does a great job with that, and many other companies.  If you're looking to have those WOW experiences for your customers, think about how you treat your employees and that can make a big difference.

Stone Payton: Well said.  Hey one last thing.  We'd love to put you on the hot seat for a moment if we can.  Of course you heard us as we were asking Steve Bistritz to share a mistake that he's made at some point in his career and what he learned from it.  Could we get you to do that?  A personal mistake that you've made in your career and what you've learned from it.

David Eckoff: Yeah.  Since we're talking customer experience, do I have 60 seconds to tell the story?

Stone Payton: You're good.  Go ahead.

David Eckoff: Okay.  So I just told someone about this the other day.  It's kind of funny I think for customer experience.  So I used to publish a sports magazine called Inside Carolina, covered University of North Carolina basketball and football.  A great way to go to a lot of games and a great fun business to have.  It actually put me in an entirely different path in my career that I never could have anticipated.  But I owned the domain name northcarolina.com, a pretty sweet domain name to have.

Stone Payton: Yeah, really.

David Eckoff: By owning the domain name northcarolina.com, surprising things happen.  You get people who are thinking about going to the Outer Banks on vacation.  They email you, just email into info@northcarolina.com "Can you tell me about the Outer Banks."  Or little Timmy in Jr. High is doing a book report and he emails info@northcarolina.com saying "Can you tell me the state bird of North Carolina." (laughter) People say "I'm moving to North Carolina, can you tell me more about housing?"  And I'm thinking can't they see on the website that it's a sports website.  It's about basketball and football.  They don't see this?  So then I put down frequently asked questions, I actually put answers to "What is the state bird?" "What is the state capital?" "What's the population?" "Tell me how to get in touch with people about travel and tourism, etc."

Stone Payton: (laughter) That's funny.

David Eckoff: Everyday these would come in, everyday for like seven years.  By the end of seven years this was starting to be kind of comical.  Except I really didn't have a lot of time to be dealing with all these questions.  I did my best to point them in the right direction.  Well one day I got an email from someone and it was like the straw that broke the camel's back.  I must have been real busy and aggravated that day and who knows what and she asked me a question about the Andy Griffith show which is set in North Carolina.  I thought "It's a sport site.  She's asking me a question about the Andy Griffith show?  Are you kidding me?" And against all the best judgment I hit reply and I wrote a scathing email back and hit send.  Of course you never want to do that but after seven cumulative years of entering little Timmy's book report questions and…

Stone Payton: They wore you down, huh?

David Eckoff: Two minutes later I got an email back from this person who is probably like a senior citizen and it's probably like her first time getting on the internet or doing email and she said "You don't sound like a very nice person." (laughter) I felt so badly and I wrote back to her and made that right afterwards.  The lesson learned from that is everyone has a reason why they do things.  Some times the reasons don't make sense to us but there's always a reason and I think having empathy for other people and treating other people as you'd want them to treat you, no matter what the situation, is the way to go.  It's something we all know and sometimes I think the lesson learned is that even when you're in the most stressful situations, take a deep breath, think about how you respond because there is a real person on the other end of that even in the impersonal communication channels that happen online.  I think I come across pretty sociable most of the time but it really showed that every interaction that we have with people, everyone one of them, is a real human being on the other side of that no matter what the experience is.  I think we want to have our actions consistent with how we'd want our own personal brand known.  My own personal brand I'm really looking for people to have those WOW experiences and for people to say "That was spectacular."  So your execution has to be consistent with your vision.  I'll throw that out there as a time something didn't go right, but I've hopefully turned that around.

Stone Payton: Well for what its worth, David, having you on the show today has definitely been a WOW experience.  We have thoroughly enjoyed it and I hope you'll come back sometime.

Todd, anything else to add?  What did you think about this show?

Todd Schnick: Oh, it was a good one.  It was a good one.  I look forward to listening to it again.  Two wonderful bright guests.

Stone Payton: Well we have to go back and listen to the Algebra anyway, right?

Todd Schnick: That's just not worth my time. (laughter)

Stone Payton: Until next time this is Stone Payton, Todd Schnick and the entire Radio X family saying we'll see you in the fast lane.

END

Georgia Business Coaches Show Transcript of Mariette Edwards and Kim Gay Interview

A few weeks ago BevAnn Bonds interviewed Mariette Edwards with StarMaker Coaching and Kim Gay with Match Healthcare on her Georgia Business Coaches show. This show gives you a lot of insight into the coach client relationship. Once again, a big thank you to Karen Galambos with Right Type Pro for this transcription.

 

 

 

GEORGIA BUSINESS COACHES SHOW

ON BUSINESS RADIOX

with

BevAnn Bonds

and

Lee Kantor

Guests

Mariette Edwards  - Star Maker Coaching

Kim Gay - MATCH Healthcare

June 9, 2009

BevAnn Bonds:  Good Morning. Welcome to the Georgia Business Coaches Show. I am

BevAnn Bonds and I am joined in the studio with my co-host, Lee Kantor.  Good Morning, Lee.

Lee Kantor:  Good Morning, BevAnn. How’re you doing?

BevAnn Bonds:  I am doing great!  It is a glorious day out today and we have two fantastic guests. I am really excited about this.

Lee Kantor:  I know, this is going to be a good show.

BevAnn Bonds:  It is. We are joined in the studio today with Mariette Edwards of Star Maker Enterprises and Star Maker Coaching and with Kim Gay of MATCH Healthcare consulting.  Good morning, ladies.

Mariette Edwards:  Good Morning.

Kim Gay:  Good Morning.

BevAnn Bonds:  We are really excited to jump into everything but we have to do a couple of things before we really get into it.  Each week on the Georgia Business Coaches Show we feature top businesses which provide our listeners with the opportunity to learn more about coaching, how it can help their business and the tools that coaches may use.   Today, we will be finding out about Mariette and how she works with clients and a little bit about what Kim’s business is and how her relationship has been with Mariette.  That’s going to be great.  Before we do that, we have to thank our sponsors.

Lee Kantor:  Today’s show is brought to you by Business Support Solutions, the virtual assistant organization providing administrative bookkeeping and marketing support to small business and, of course, Business RadioX, the radio marketing weapon.

BevAnn Bonds: Thanks again to our sponsors, Business RadioX and Business Support Solutions.

Mariette, you have a very dynamic background. You work as an executive coach, you have a real insider’s perspective on how businesses can really make decisions involving people.  Part of that ties to your background, so can you tell us a little bit more about yourself?

Mariette Edwards:  I originally am from New York.  I spent 20 years in human resources management, in executive roles here and in New York City. I left that corporate world back in 1989 and since then I have done a variety of things.  I was president of a radar test and threat simulation business, I worked in a variety of different industries while I was trying to find out what I wanted to do next in my career.  I landed in coaching quite by accident, actually, in 1996 and that is when I started my coaching practice.

BevAnn Bonds:  That is definitely at some of the forefront for coaches - changes.  I know that you’ve seen a lot over the past years.

Mariette Edwards:  Absolutely. There were only three coaches in Georgia when I launched my coaching practice.

BevAnn Bonds: You are one of the founding members of the Coach Federation?

Mariette Edwards:  The Georgia Chapter of the International Coach Federation.  I co-founded it with my coach at the time. I am not involved with the organization any longer, but I was right at the very beginning.

BevAnn Bonds: That’s great. You have a lot to give your clients, between the changes that you’ve seen in industry and during these times that is going to be really great and very helpful for them.

Lee Kantor:  Mariette, how do you see coaching changing over the years from when you started to the people who are getting into coaching now?

Mariette Edwards:  It is interesting because coaching is ranked as one of the hot careers to choose. When I started there was very little in the way of training opportunities. I worked with a Master Certified coach when I made the decision to go into this kind of business. At that time the only opportunity for learning was Coach University which had been started by Thomas Leonard, who has now passed on.  Now you can learn coaching in universities, they have programs for it. You can become certified in special certification programs that are offered by different colleges and universities. There are also full academic programs that prepare you for that. I think it is more in terms of corporate coaching, which is not where I focus my particular practice.  It has changed quite a bit and it has become much more organized, more formal than when coaching first started.

BevAnn Bonds:  Mariette, can you tell us a little bit about your coaching practice and what your specialties are?

Mariette Edwards:  I specialize in three practice areas. The first is Career Packaging. The second is Executive Evolution and the third is Communication Coaching which includes pitching, presentation and all types of communication in high stakes situations.

Clients hire me, for example, in Career Packaging when they are in the job market or want to move up in their organization. We work on strategies to help them stand out.  Executive Evolutionary clients are like Kim, who is with us today. Clients who want to achieve more in their business, perhaps move into a different kind of business, change careers altogether. Finally, in Communication Coaching what I focus on with those clients are pitch strategies primarily.  Those pitch strategies might be anything from selling a new piece of business to changing the way the company sees the role that you play within that organization.

BevAnn Bonds:  Where do clients, for these three areas, come from?

Mariette Edwards:  Generally, my clients come from two places. One is from referrals, from other clients. Of course it takes a while to build up a practice where you get client referrals. Secondly, when people hear me speak…I get a lot of business that way.

BevAnn Bonds:  Is there a typical way that they engage with you when someone is working with you?

Mariette Edwards: First of all, what surprises a lot of people is that I don’t actually meet with my clients. Most of my coaching clients are clients who are in Atlanta, New York, they are in LA or sometimes in Europe or Australia.  It is all done over the phone. I generally have  never met the person that I work with, but that is really not relevant to producing the results that we co-create.

Lee Kantor:  Can you walk us through what one of those sessions looks like?

Mariette Edwards:  For example, I just had a new client contact me two weeks ago. He works for one of the big entertainment companies in New York City. He had made a mistake, an error in judgment; he went to his boss last year and said, “You know, I’d really like to do more. I am not happy with what I am doing now. Please help me.”  What ended up happening is that his boss thought about that and felt that if he wasn’t happy, he didn’t want him there.   That isn’t what his goal was. Honestly, if we had been working together he would have handled that completely differently. He is on a very short string right now, he is going to be out of a job on July 1^st.

He hired me to help him position himself better within the organization to find a job for himself. He had an opportunity, this speaks to your question Lee, he had an opportunity for one of the departments in his company to create a job for him.  He couldn’t convince the guy that he was somebody that should have a job created for him.  So, I said, “You know, we need to pitch it. We need to pitch him on what that job might be and what you could do for him.”  We created a whole pitch around five clients that he could bring in as a sales organization.  Five clients that they had never approached or been successful in bringing in before using all the tools available to them in this very high profile entertainment company.  Absolutely, blew the guy away. It was an amazing experience. He came out of that meeting and couldn’t believe it. Everything that we had intended to do is exactly what had happened.

We did it all on the phone, reviewing his Power Point which he sent me. We practiced. We tweaked the pitch.  We had a lot of follow up on strategies for what to do at the end of the meeting and so forth.

Lee Kantor:  How do you immerse yourself in his business so you really understand to help him achieve his goals?

Mariette Edwards:  That interesting, it doesn’t matter what business you’re in.  I understand how business works, especially in entertainment; but, it is really the same.  Entertainment is particularly relationship driven.  But, I have been in almost every business that you can imagine.

Lee Kantor:  And the same rules apply?

Mariette Edwards:   The same rules apply. It’s all rules around people.  It all has to do with what people want and how to appeal to their interest versus their intellect.

BevAnn Bonds:  That is really great, because you can see where someone thought they were out of a job and that they are providing extra value which is incredibly pertinent at this day and time with the economic state the way that it is.

I do have some more questions for you, Mariette, but before we get too far into everything I would like to take the time to introduce Kim Gay who is a healthcare industry expert.  She has more than 20 years experience as a successful entrepreneur, business owner and supplier to the healthcare community.  Can you tell us a little bit about your background, Kim?

Kim Gay:  My background has been primarily with a manufacturer of specialty equipment for wounds.  I worked in that company for seven years and then started my own company where I bought  from the manufacturer that I worked with and just developed a company that hit a market in long term care and we really didn’t have a lot of competition.  After growing that company, after 14 years, I sold it to a national company that did the same thing that APS, my former company, did and  I worked with them for several months.  Then I started something entirely different. That’s where I engaged Mariette to help me in the development of my new company, MATCH Healthcare Consulting. It has been very interesting.  I am doing something totally different now and it is a lot of fun, but I am learning a lot too.

Lee Kantor:  What’s different about what you are doing now?

Kim Gay:  Well, my former company, APS, had a tangible product. We provided equipment and devices for people who had wounds, we rented that. Now, with MATCH we are in the facilities and in the corporate offices of my former clients and we are training them.

Lee Kantor:  Training them to do what?

Kim Gay:  Training them in business development.  There are a lot of changes going on right now in the healthcare market.  We are trying to develop them to help them change, especially with people… their people involved.  In long term care there has been a lack of development as far as leadership training and change management, that is the niche we are trying to develop with them.

BevAnn Bonds:  With having a successful business before and being able to sell it, which is a great thing, why would you bring on someone like Mariette? Did you not think you had enough of your own experience to develop the business?

Kim Gay:  Initially, I hired Mariette because I am writing a book. I met her through a friend of mine and we started talking about my book.  As we got into the development of my book I realized that Mariette has so much expertise in the areas that I was going in to with my consulting that she could be able to help me with the development of my new business.

I was used to running a company that had employees and we were delivering product, we were selling a tangible product out to a customer to help heal a patient. Now, we are selling consulting. It was totally different and I needed Mariette to just guide me through the process.

Lee Kantor:  Had you had a coach before?

Kim Gay: I had not.

Lee Kantor: She is your first coach?

Kim Gay:  She is my first.

Lee Kantor: So, how is it going?

Kim Gay:  It is great! She is wonderful!  She always has the answer.

Lee Kantor: That’s always good. (laughing)

Kim Gay:  (laughing) She does!

BevAnn Bonds: What are some of the challenges that you face from selling a business to creating a new one?

Kim Gay:  Selling a business that I started and ran for 14 years and developed, it was my baby. So, when I sold the business it was very traumatic.  It took me a little while to wrap my head around that I didn’t have that company anymore.  It took another company for me to get excited about something else.  I needed that to help my grieving process of getting through my other company.

Lee Kantor:  When you had your company and you sold it, was it something you were looking to sell or did they approach you and say, “I’d like to buy it.”?

Kim Gay: They approached me.

Lee Kantor:  That’s a different mindset.

Kim Gay:  Yes, totally.  Years earlier someone approached me and we went through the whole due diligence process and it didn’t happen. So, after that I kind of put it out of my head and never thought about it again.  Then this company approached me in 2007 and it happened pretty quickly.

BevAnn Bonds: That’s fantastic. Mariette, I have a question for you…I know that you started working with Kim because she was writing a book. How has your relationship evolved? It sounds like it is different now.

Mariette Edwards: It is very different now. Let me give you a little plug for what Kim is working on…She is working on a book on Ethics and it is quite interesting. We started with outlining what the book was going to be about and then getting her interviews with high profile individuals who had taken an ethical nosedive. That, in itself, was a difficult process because these people aren’t necessarily going to talk to everyone.  We were very successful in getting these individuals to meet with Kim so that she could interview them.  In fact, she is creating a program right now about that which goes beyond the book.

So, working together, there is a lot of strategy involved and there was a lot of communication involved.  Things would come up during the coaching process about the book that would tap in to some of the other background that I have. Little by little, Kim came to ask me more, “Well, I have this idea for a business. What do you think about this…?”  and we would talk about that and how we were going to structure the business and what was that business going to look like.  We’ve done a lot of brainstorming sessions and then strategies about positioning the business and so forth. It has just grown and grown and grown. I am involved with all of the pitches that Kim makes now.  Everything about how she talks about the business  has evolved.

We started in one direction and it has grown into a new direction. We started initially just for training and now MATCH really focuses on change management training and project management. But, what we are really in and what we are really excited about is that MATCH is really in the profitability business. We are in the business of helping our clients become more profitable in what they do, through how they manage their people.

BevAnn Bonds:  One of the things I want to tie back to is that you were mentioning helping her with pitches. I know one of  the things that you talk to other groups about is pitching for buy-in.  People typically think of a salesperson making a pitch, but you say it is way  more than that.

Mariette Edwards: Oh, Yeah! You don’t want to be somebody that sells, you want to be someone that people buy from.  All of the coaching and programs I do on pitching have to do with being attractive to opportunity and putting yourself in a secondary position when you are talking about whatever it is that you are pitching.  When I talk about ‘pitch’ and I talk about “Life’s A Pitch”, that’s just about everything is an opportunity for you to meet someone else at their map of the road. When you are willing to do that then you become more attractive to that individual and you become more visible to them. I think that is what really happened with Kim.  I am really interested in seeing her be successful, I am not interested in promoting my services with her. I could have said, “Hey, I can do this…then I could that for you…”, I don’t do that.  I’m really just motivated by wanting to see her successful; as I am for all my clients.

Everything I know is spilling out when I am talking to her and other people that I work with.   Some people kind of naturally go, “Oh, maybe that is somebody I’d like to work with.” That is the same way I coach my clients, because it is much more important that you be attractive to opportunity by paying attention to the people you are dealing with.

Again, getting back to pitching, it is really a multitude of situations, it is not just going in and selling a proposal. It could be that you want to get buy-in for an idea, or in the case of that client who was pitching an idea about re-creating a whole new department for himself and changing the whole direction the way a multi-billion dollar corporation does business, we created a pitch that actually landed that for her and had nothing to do with selling a service.

Lee Kantor:  So you are presenting an opportunity where your client is part of the solution?

Mariette Edwards: The client is part of the solution, yes. But the solution is tied to what that client’s interest is.

Lee Kantor: Right, the ultimate…whatever the opportunity is.

Mariette Edwards:  I want to take this a step further,  I gave you the example earlier about the fellow in New York who called me and has until July 1^st, one of the ways we did this and one of the things I always do with a client is to tell me about who you are pitching to, who is this guy we are trying to enroll in this idea of creating a job. He profiled him. He is a sales guy, he has always been in sales. I asked him a few questions about how he sees the world. I said, “You know what, this guy’s a star. When you go into that pitch, he is the star you are just in the background. So everything we are going to be talking about in that pitch has to be around how what you are proposing is going to make him a bigger deal in his company because that is what is driving him.”  I am always looking for the driver, what that need is and what that opportunity is for my client to stand out.

BevAnn Bonds:  How would you work with someone, and this may be the case for you Kim, that doesn’t exactly say, “I have this sales manager that I am presenting to or that I’m pitching to a group of people and I think these are the demographics.”

Mariette Edwards:  That is interesting because there are generally four ways that people see the world.  If we include those four ways in the pitch then we will have hit everybody in the room.  So there will be somebody in there that is a detail person and there is going to be a top end just give me the facts person. That is Kim’s style, she is a sensor style, she doesn’t want a lot of stuff she just needs to know what she needs to know to make a decision. There are also going to be people in there that are people people and there are going to be high creativity people with big ideas. So, when you are dealing with a group like that you want to go in and hit the sensor style first which is to give them a summary so that the sensor can walk out of the room when they’ve heard enough, they don’t have to stay for the whole pitch. You have to have enough  data and detail. I always recommend to bring a lot of books and bring a lot of paper, never refer to it…it just looks good.

Lee Kantor:  Like a prop?

Mariette Edwards:  I tried this a couple of times and it was very successful because people think that there is a profound amount of knowledge behind whatever it is that you are saying, it is all perception.

You need enough detail for those analytics and then you make sure that you are personable so that the feelers in the room are dealt with. Then you do a lot of “what if-ing' and blue sky stuff for the intuitive.

BevAnn Bonds: It is a lot like when you are writing an article or doing anything else, you tell people what you are going to say, you say it, then you summarize again for anyone that came back into the room that might be a sensor.

Mariette Edwards:  Yeah, but you want to make sure that you get the big deal decision maker in the room, you want to hit that person hard with whatever it is that you want to say.  Then, everything else is for all the other people in the room. As long as you know who the decision maker is in the room you can tailor your pitch for that.

Lee Kantor:  The knowledge that you are imparting now, is that stuff that you learned from your HR background?

Mariette Edwards: That’s a very good question, because I can’t point to anything that taught me any of this. I just kind of came in wired this way. I came in wired to be a coach. Coaching is what I do. Coaching is who I am. As far as communication goes, I just know. I had the experience in the corporate world, I understand it. I have been in all kinds of interesting situations, which we don’t have time to talk about but believe me they are pretty amazing. I also have a highly developed intuitive side and I just know when we are on and when we are off.

When I am dealing with a client I am listening so hard to what that person’s telling me and in my mind the wheels are turning, “We have to go this way… we have to that way…okay, this is the word we have to use…we have to hit this…we have to go this way…”

It was interesting because my client came out of that meeting and he called me and he said, “That’s exactly what you said was going to happen. It was exactly like that.” I can’t tell you that you can go to X University and learn how to do this or read Y book and learn how to do it. Some people are really just good at that. That’s what I’m good at.

Lee Kantor: Kim, as part of your evolution from having a business with employees to now being kind of ‘eat what you kill’, you are on your own and dealing with people individually; how has that changed from your personality standpoint? Are you enjoying that as much?

Kim Gay:  I am enjoying it. I’m a lifelong leaner. I am in something that is totally different and I had to take it from Kindergarten all the way up. I think I’m in  high school  now! (laughing) I want to get my PhD some day.

Lee Kantor: Have you started getting clients in this new venture?

Kim Gay: Yes, I have several clients right now and people that have approached me. I am not at the level yet where I am going out and trying to create new clients or going after new clients.  The clients that I have right now have approached me, that  has been a good development.

Lee Kantor: So you are feeling confident? You are feeling this is the right path for you right now?

Kim Gay:  I do.  If I ever get off the track a little bit, I have my coach over here…

Lee Kantor:  How often do you meet with your coach? Is it monthly?

Kim Gay:  Initially it was once a week and we would talk for about an hour. Now, our relationship has developed so that if I have a question or I need help, which I am in a process right now, I need a lot of help, she is a phone call away.

Mariette Edwards: We went from weekly sessions to speed dial!

Kim Gay:  Next week is our healthcare association convention and I am doing the CU program on Ethics and it is pretty much based on the book I am writing.  This is where I really need a coach, if you haven’t done anything like that before.

BevAnn Bonds:  It is great to know that you have that resource available to you at all times.   Right now with the economy is on the top of everyone’s mind starting a new business can be a little bit scary. Can you tell us about some of the challenges or advantages or the disadvantages that you find with starting a business at this time?

Kim Gay:  Thank goodness I am in healthcare, because the economy absolutely hurts healthcare too; but, I am in a business that we are all going to need healthcare and we are going to need people that are good at what they do and hopefully I will be able to help them.  But, it has been scary. It absolutely has because one year after I sold my business is when the stock market crashed and when you think you are set, you’re not really set.

I think that people who are starting a new business right now with this economy, it may take them a little bit longer. It may take them a lot more effort to get that client and build a good base of clients. But, also there are tons of opportunities out there right now.

Lee Kantor: Do you think it is good time to invest in yourself rather than the stock market?

Kim Gay: Absolutely!  I do. I have done that. I have not let the economy make me fearful of spending a dime to go get a certification or have a coach.  If you can do anything to grow yourself through using a coach or getting a certification you are then going to be one or two steps ahead of somebody else that is out there that is afraid to spend a dime to develop themselves.

BevAnn Bonds:  I am curious, Mariette was talking about ‘pitching’ before. I know that you said you have not been actively going out and doing cold calls, but you definitely have clients. So that speaks to some of your work with Mariette. I am just wondering how she helped with some of your messaging and your pitch?

Kim Gay:  She did it.  I’m going to give her all the credit here.  I’m a salesperson, that is what I was born to do. But, I’m selling a different product now. Before I had something, a product to sell, so that was a little bit easier. Now I am selling myself and my services to help my client grow.  I absolutely needed Mariette to help me with my messaging and show me how you sell this product versus selling a different product.

Lee Kantor:  What is the time frame it takes you to get through that process? Do you get that in an hour or is it a month, six months?

Kim Gay:  It’s ongoing.

Mariette Edwards: It is ongoing.  I want to make a differentiation here because Kim moved from selling a tangible to an intangible. In my background I have worked in brokerage, finance, banking, manufacturing…you name it…hardware, software, intellectual properties - tangibles and intangibles.  An intangible sale is very different. You have to create an emotional connection with the intangible. That is what we are working on with her messaging. It is ongoing.

I think because many people see coaching as an hour a week or an hour…I have a client who is a coach and she does an hour a month with her clients. That is not how I work. Sometimes it is, but a lot of times it is the way I work with Kim, which is that I am on-call, like a 911 call.

Lee Kantor:  I don’t want to get into how you bill, but is it a retainer or is it an hourly rate?

Mariette Edwards:  For some clients it is a retainer and for some it is an hourly rate. I have an introductory package when I start with someone that is four sessions. Some coaches work with a year-long program or six month program, they have a contract. I don’t believe in that for myself. People hire me for a very specific reason. There is a very specific target they want to hit.  It is not life coaching where it may go on for a very long time. Often the client gets in and gets out. I then have other clients like Kim that go on for a years.  Those clients become retainer clients.

BevAnn Bonds: When you are talking about working with Kim having been a process and things have evolved, it is sounding like when you are talking about creating a message or pitching, it is not just making the sale…

Mariette Edwards: No, you can’t make the sale until you know what you are selling. We were basically dealing with an old phrase we used to use back in my technology days which is “Vaporware”, it doesn’t exist. It is just an idea and you have to take that vapor and turn it into something that is three dimensional.  Make it compelling for someone to want to buy. It has taken us awhile to move from the training idea, Kim is passionate about leadership and training and people, to move from simply offering a training solution to offering a profitability solution through change management, project management and training. That has been part of our messaging. It is very new, this being in the profitability business on behalf of our clients. That’s a new message that we’ve just recently created.

BevAnn Bonds:  What are some of the challenges that you and Kim have had to overcome to help her achieve her objectives?

Mariette Edwards:  One of the big challenges in achieving Kim’s objectives is that Kim is brilliant and she is passionate and she is excited about what she does. She is a life-long learner. Sometimes she will run down a path to learning that might take her mind and her eye off the prize.  So, we have to crack the whip a little bit.

Lee Kantor:  How do you keep a person compliant like that?  You know it is easy to get distracted, there are shiny objects everywhere. How do you get them back on track?  Kim, how do you get back on track?

Kim Gay:  She keeps me focused.  What she just said is so true.  I see a direction, an opportunity, and a little ADD comes in and I want to do this, want to do that. She just reels me back in and says, “Stay focused.” It’s her own messaging, I think to me. She has her own internal messaging that keeps our clients reeled back in and focused.  I don’t really know how to answer that question.

Mariette Edward: I have to say that I think that is my New Yorker…I remember interviewing for a job on once and I had to go through a whole psychology, you know a battery of psychological tests. It came back and said “Lacks tact”.  I have to be careful. But when Kim goes down one of those roads, I just say, “Whoa, Hello! We’re not going that way.  Our target is this…That’s great and you can do that later but let’s go here right now because that’s the target you are trying to hit.”

BevAnn Bonds: Kim, would you agree that when someone is starting a business at this day and time that having someone help them stay more focused is a better use of their time and resources so that they don’t get off on those tangents?  You could spend  three months researching what you think is a great idea and then finding out, “Gosh, I should have been back over here following path A.”

Kim Gay: I think everybody needs a sounding board.  It is hard to start a business on your own and be very, very productive if you don’t have somebody that is going to reel you in and keep you focused and be a sounding board.  You can’t do it on your own.

Lee Kantor:  Is that the value that you are providing for your clients? Are you helping them and coaching them in a way?

Kim Gay: Yeah, I guess I am coaching them a little bit. I think mine is more business development and I have a process that I go through.

Lee Kantor:  And you’re sharing that process?

Kim Gay: I am sharing that process.

Lee Kantor:  Don’t you have to hold them accountable and teach them?

Kim Gay: Absolutely.  A lot of that I have gotten from Mariette.

BevAnn Bonds: Mariette, if someone is doing their pitch and it goes wrong, is there anyway midstream to correct that or are they just out of luck?

Mariette Edwards: Well, if you are in the moment and you see that you are going down the wrong road there are ways to do that, but generally that has to be someone who is pretty experienced in those situations to be able to recover. We might have a strategy for that going in. If you see people, if you see you are losing them you can do this or that. But, mainly what happens is that people come out of a pitch and they are just devastated because they know they did something awful or it didn’t go the way they wanted it to.  The first thing I would tell a client who is in a situation like that is that you have to grieve the loss that you just had. You have to acknowledge…it is not like you can just get back up on the horse right away, you have to really just feel bad.  You feel really bad, eat a lot of ice cream, call a lot of your friends, go through a couple boxes of Kleenex…then we can talk about how you can recover. Often, you can recover better than if the pitch had gone right the first time.

This same fellow that I was talking about in New York, had an interview last week with another part of that organization where there is an actual job. We did a whole kind of strategy and the goal was to go into the pitch and get the second interview.  That was the whole goal. So he went in and got the second interview but he did not feel good about how he had answered a question about his vision for the organization that was interviewing him.  So what we did was we came up with a way to go back to that person and resolve that unresolved issue. It is actually going to position him much better than if he had answered the question right at the moment it was asked.  So, you have to get back on the horse but you have to allow enough time to feel bad about it.

BevAnn Bonds:  So I guess you are just telling our listeners that it is okay to feel bad. Go ahead and take the time because you are going to learn from it.

Mariette Edwards: Yeah, yeah. Look at what went wrong. If I asked you on a scale of 1-10 how did your pitch go and you tell me an eight.  I would then ask, “What would have made it a ten?”  Then you would say, “I wish I would have said…(X)?” Well if the same person says it is a two, you always know why it is. Why is it so low? “Well, I was totally unprepared…I didn’t practice…I didn’t have good intention when I walked in the room…The guy that I wanted to be there wasn’t there and I didn’t know how to cover for that.”   There are a lot of things that could go wrong in a pitch.

Lee Kantor: So it is important to do this kind of autopsy?

Mariette Edwards:  Absolutely, you have to, even if you don’t want to.

BevAnn Bonds: Kim, you’ve mentioned that working on your messaging and just staying on task or on target and writing your book…are there other ways that you are working together with Mariette?

Kim Gay:  I have one employee and she and Mariette are working great together. I think that that has helped Andrea learn and develop. Mariette has helped Andrea develop and go beyond what I thought she could do.  It has been very helpful in managing my employee.

BevAnn Bonds: Alright, that’s great to know. So if somebody wants to find a little bit more about getting the right pitch or to help manage their employees to get over the people thing, how would they go about finding out more about you or contacting you, Mariette?

Mariette Edwards: The best way to find out more about me is to visit my website at www.starmakercoaching.com.  You will find contact information for me. You can download the brochures about my three practice specialties. You can read client case studies. You can see examples of clients that I’ve worked with.  There are a number of free articles that I make available from my own archive of articles that I have written. I also have a podcast that I do for Business to Business magazine and you can listen to that.

BevAnn Bonds: Kim, I wanted to say it has been great hearing some of the changes you have had go on between selling your business and creating a new one and how well that is going and your relationship with Mariette. If somebody wanted to find out more about MATCH Healthcare Consulting, how would they go about finding out more about you?

Kim Gay: Our website is www.matchhc.com.

BevAnn Bonds: I want to thank both of you for being here. This has been great. It is great to find out about how, in today’s economy and in any economy, you need to have a pitch and not think of just selling and that you have to target your message to people. It is fantastic to find out how someone’s applying Mariette’s work and working together with her. I want to thank both of you all for being on today.

Lee, we had another great show!

Lee Kantor:  Great guests make a great show.

BevAnn Bonds: They do, every time. We’d like to thank our sponsors, Business Support Solutions and Business RadioX. Until next week, I am BevAnn Bonds and for my co-host Lee Kantor we’d like to thank you for listening to the Georgia Business Coaches Show. Be sure to tune in each week on Tuesday’s at 11:30 and to listen live. If you are not able to do that, you can go to our website www.georgiabusinesscoaches.com and listen at your convenience.

END

Launch Interview Transcript of Kristi Gorinas with Kristi G Company

A few weeks ago Jim DeBetta and Ron Reardon interviewed Kristi Gorinas from the Kristi G Company on their show Launch. Kristi created and is marketing a wonderful designer diaper bag. And on the show she took the listener through the trials and tribulations of getting her product and company off the ground. Once again, a big thank you to Karen Galambos with Right Type Pro for this transcription.

The Launch Hour

On Business RadioX

Jim DeBetta

Ron Reardon

Interview with Kristi Gorinas

Kristi G Co.

July 9, 2009

Jim DeBetta:   Welcome to Launch where we explore the world of invention and entrepreneurship.  I’m Jim DeBetta, here with my co-host Ron Reardon and our producer, Lee Kantor.  Good morning guys.

Ron Reardon:   Hello, Jim.

Lee Kantor:  Mr. Jim, how are things going?

Jim DeBetta:  Things are going.

Lee Kantor:  Big day?

Jim DeBetta:  Big day!  Great guest today too. I know I am excited. I think she is excited.  Kristi, are you there?

Kristi Gorinas:  Yes, very excited.

Jim DeBetta:  Alright. We Have Kristi Gorinas.  We have been going around here making sure we get her  last name right, I think I nailed it.

Ron Reardon:  Yes, you did.

Jim DeBetta:  Kristi is with us today to talk about her journey, about her products, her company and we are going to go through all that and hopefully she will have some good stuff for us here today for other inventors to learn from.

Let’s start it off.  I met Kristi through Lee here, she was a past guest on…who’s guest was she?

Lee Kantor:  Erik Wolf’s show, it is called Gravity Free Radio.

Jim DeBetta:  Cool. Kristi has a great line. Her company is called the Kristi G Company. Kristi, tell us a little bit about some of the products you are working on and then we will hit you with tons of questions.

Kristi Gorinas:  Thank you for having me today.  My first product that we launched is actually a handbag, or a purse, that is made to function like a diaper bag.  We designed them to look like regular everyday purses.  However, the lining is such that if you have spills in it is water resistant. Most importantly, the bags have what we call the “Easy Wipe System”, which is a stylish zipper on the back of the bag. You open the zipper and you pull out your baby wipe. It is that easy. The cool thing that I’ve learned over the last couple of months is that many women that don’t have kids or that are past the diapering days, they are buying the purses because they like the fabric, they like the style and they are actually putting antibacterial wipes in there or even tissues. It is so easy to access, you are not digging through the bag of the bottom of the stroller when you need it.  You pull it out the back of the bag and you’re done.

Jim DeBetta:  I can tell you as a father of three little ones…first of all, if you see these bags you don’t know that they are for kids or that the purpose is to carry wipes and other things in them. When you see them they look like something you’d see in a department store. That’s really cool for moms. My wife, she doesn’t want to always be known walking around with a big old diaper bag, they are usually not very fashionable. But, the fact that you have the wipes accessible through a side zipper is huge.  First of all, half the time my wife forgets the wipes. Then what to you do?  Tissues don’t work. The wipes do come in handy for other than using on the baby. Sometimes your kids have a lollipop or have ice cream…or spills in the car, that is even worse.  Having that feature, to me, is what caught my attention and I think it is a home run in terms of convenience for moms.

Ron Reardon:  Kristi, what you talked about happens a lot with inventors. You invent something for one particular use and one particular device. Then all of a sudden when it gets out there and consumers are using it, then they start using it for other things that you never even conceived.

Kristi Gorinas:  Yeah, I never thought about putting the antibacterial wipes or Kleenex in there.  We’ve got several newspapers, the travel section that are going to be featuring the bags for on-the-go and having easy access. I am learning and we are starting to pitch it differently than just a diaper bag.  They are designed not to look like diaper bags.

Jim DeBetta:  I could see my wife, us going to dinner, having that and nobody would really know, other than it just looks like a bag that is very cool looking and stylish.

Ron Reardon:  She doesn’t have to switch.

Kristi Gorinas:  That’s great. Just this morning I was walking up here for the show and one of the gals in the building said, “I love your handbag.”

Ron Reardon:  It is…but it isn’t.

Kristi Gorinas:  It looks like a handbag, it didn’t look like a diaper bag. I am carrying it and I don’t have any kids with me.

Jim DeBetta:  It is smart. I love it.  I’ve been shopping around since we met and looking, whether it is Babies R Us, Target or even some of the department stores; you do see a few fashionable diaper bags but you know they are diaper bags.  They scream “Mommy – Baby” kind of a thing. They are usually huge and very bulky.

Kristi Gorinas:  Can I comment on that? When I was doing research for the bags, I actually had my husband at Neiman-Marcus picking up several bags, designer bags, that are the $300 and $400 bags.  He brought them home, we had about $2,000 worth of bags sitting in my living room, I think there were only four bags there.  Looking at them, they were huge and heavy. I am thinking, “How do you put anything in there?”  You would have to have a nanny to carry your diaper bag. They were so big and bulky.  They were beautiful and expensive.  One of the things we wanted to do was to make sure that the bags were very light weight.  Because, once you stuff them full of things they really start wearing on your shoulder. That is why we chose to go with a fabric so that it is lightweight, even when you stuff it full it is not heavy.

Jim DeBetta:  The clutch is a great piece. I know you have different styles but that you just never would know.

Kristi Gorinas: You can fit three diapers in there.  You can fit a small bottle. You can fit little toys and snacks. It is amazing how it expands to fit what you need.

Jim DeBetta:  Ron, you look at products every day, we know the lesson. Somebody emailed me the other day about this. They said that they wanted to bring a product to market. They went to the stores, they didn’t see anything like their idea on the shelves and so they just assumed that they were free and clear. As you know, that is a dangerous road to go down.

Ron Reardon:  Yeah, just because you don’t see it in the marketplace doesn’t mean that patent applications have not been filed for or maybe even patents have been issued for it.  It is one thing to actually file a patent or get a patent and another thing to take it to the marketplace. It is a one-two punch.

Jim DeBetta:  That is a mistake that people will continue to make because they sometimes want to find their way around hiring a patent agent or an attorney to do the proper search. Doing a search is much more than just going on Google and looking for your product. If you are going to build a business around your product, you better make sure that this is the foundation of the house. If that is not right, and I have seen t his, two or three or four years down the road they get a nice big fat Cease and Desist letter in the mail and it is lights out, so to speak.

Ron Reardon:  When I was in high school we learned a poem, the punch line in the poem was, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”   Because of the pervasiveness of the Internet and the Google patent search and things like that, a lot of people think that they can do their own search and that it is comprehensive. It is just not true. One time I did a search on mousetraps and I discovered that of the 4,000 patents on mousetraps, some of them never mention the word ‘mouse’ or ‘trap’.  So if you are doing a word search, through Google or the USPTO, because they don’t have the word mousetrap in there even though it is for a mousetrap.

Jim DeBetta:  Like the ‘Rat Catcher’…

Ron Reardon:  They will call them vermin, they will call them rodents, small animals, they will call them bait stations. Here is a patent for a mousetrap that the word ‘mouse’ and ‘trap’ is nowhere in there so you would miss that one.

Jim DeBetta:  Tricky stuff.

Ron Reardon:  Yes, it is.

Jim DeBetta:  Kristi, I don’t want to say it is obvious what your inspiration was, so I am going to ask anyway. What made you come up with this idea?

Kristi Gorinas:  Well, this wasn’t the first idea that I had. I was actually working on a different product about 2 ½ years ago after my fourth child was born, she was 2-years-old and I happened to be watching a TV show and another ‘Mompreneur’ had inspired me. She had three girls at home, I have four girls, she had them doing craft day and she was the one who came up with the Jibbitz, those little jewels that go into the Crocs.    I thought, “You know I have lots of great product ideas and I have four kids at home. I can follow through with some of my ideas.”  Honestly, that day I started sketching out my first product, which has been in development for about 2 ½ years.   It is a frustrating process being in development that long. So during that process I wanted to have a coordinating, something to go with the one product I was working on.  That is when I thought that I would do a bag. I started researching bags and I then thought I wouldn’t do bags because there are a thousand diaper bags out there.  But, after thinking about it some more, I came up with pulling a baby wipe out of the bag. I tried to find a diaper bag that was like that out there, I personally couldn’t find it. That is when I decided it was something a little bit different and I’m going to start working on designing a diaper bag that is functional, but looks more like a purse and that you could pull your baby wipe out of it.  That’s the only reason I went forward with a diaper bag, because of the “Easy Wipe System”.   If it was just a plain diaper bag, I wouldn’t have done it. It had to be different. I had to do something that was not currently out on the market.

Jim DeBetta:   That is your unique selling proposition. You are right, more and more today I am seeing more fashionable things.  Companies are waking up and saying that women don’t want to always look like they are mommies all the time. They do just want to run out for lunch with their girlfriends or wherever and they don’t want to carry a 50 lb. suitcase. My wife has the same problem.  She has this one huge bag and she doesn’t take the time to switch it out and then she forgets her credit cards and all that stuff. It is a problem for her.  “Honey, you got to get it organized.”  This is really the solution for that. You could actually even keep that thing loaded, keep a couple of diapers, some wipes; all she has to do is grab her keys and just toss them in there and she’s set.

Ron Reardon:  One of the things you need to look for is that whenever there is a longstanding problem, like needing a baby wipe with a diaper, you can count on the fact that there has been a lot of time and energy put into finding a solution for that.  You might not know that Jamie Lee Curtis, the movie star, she is now the Activia lady, she has a patent on a diaper that has a pocket for putting a baby wipe in. The diapers already come with a baby wipe already in there.  I have never seen it commercialized…

Jim DeBetta:  How many wipes are in there?  I have never used just one wipe, sometimes it is one, two, three, four, five, six…(laughing)

Ron Reardon:  I would have to look more closely at the patent. I collect trivia as far as patents are concerned, especially when it is involving movie stars. But, she did have a diaper that had a pocket where the baby wipe would be in there. I have never seen it on the marketplace but she did get a patent for it.

Jim DeBetta: Ron Reardon, patent agent to the stars!   The other thing too is that when they have the perforated and you pull one out and seven come out.  That is something that really bothers me, not that this show is about the problem with wipes…

Kristi Gorinas:  Mine doesn’t do that!  One at a time.

Jim DeBetta:  One at a time like a good box of tissues. That is important because that happens a lot. You buy wipes enough…when having kids we always told people when they asked us, “What do you want us to get for the baby?”  We never said clothes or toys, we said, “Buy us diapers and wipes.”  You constantly are buying them. It is a money pit. I think we spend more money on that than anything. In-laws and family, they always buy clothes and all that stuff; that is easy.  But, going through wipes many times I just wanted one and then you would hold the baby down and if they go to the bathroom and are wiggling and you have to try to keep them pinned down and then you are pulling wipes and ten come out!  All of a sudden you use a whole bag of wipes in three days. They are not cheap. It is one of those things when they come out of your bag, Kristi, and they come out one at a time, it may be a little stretch in a sense but it is a money saver too. It will save you from just wasting all those extra wipes too.

Kristi Gorinas:  The next thing I’d like to do is to come up with a baby wipe that is also an antibacterial wipe that doesn’t sting. I know there is liquid out there because I have it at home that is antibacterial liquid. How can they put that on a baby wipe. That way you’ve got it both. You can use it for both the bottom and your hands and you don’t have to switch it out. I’d love to get an antibacterial wipe that is also a baby wipe. I have been searching but I haven’t found one.

Jim DeBetta:  We must know a couple of chemical engineers out there that can formulate that.

Ron Reardon:  I know that when I helped with m y son, Eric, with the grandchildren…you sit there and clean them up with the wipe and everything and you get the diaper on and then there is the container with the antibacterial and then you clean your hands. It is a two-stage process.  You are on the right track.  You look for people struggling with something or something that is not really convenient or efficient and come up with a better solution.

Jim DeBetta:  Or we could just have babies change themselves, that would be the ultimate solution. Then all these companies wouldn’t have a business, but you know it would make our life easier.

Kristi, you have this idea, you have these bags. The idea is in your mind. You say that there is nothing like this out there. You send out your husband to Neiman-Marcus, he looks like a hero in the store because he is buying all these expensive bags.  You were not returning those, you were going to keep them!  How long did it take you from the moment the light bulb went off and you said this is something that has to be solved or you had to do something about it until you really saw the first prototype and it came to life for you?

Kristi Gorinas:  It was last April2008 when I thought of the idea for pulling out the baby wipe.  I had an engineer already working in China on my chair so we sourced some handbag companies and I drew some sketches of some handbags with pulling the wipe out, a little flap that you lift up and a big old hole to pull the wipe out and that took a couple of months to get a prototype from China. I worked with China factories for 7 ½-8 months, having two guys that don’t have any kids try to help design a diaper bag; and that did not work.

Jim DeBetta:  You said something that was really important that I want everybody to hear which is that it took months…there is a big misconception in the world of manufacturing. A lot of inventors feel that, “Hey, I got an idea and within a few weeks I will have prototypes. I will have everything solved for me.”  Here you are. You’ve seen what it is like. You know that it takes time and it can be frustrating and it can be slow and sometimes you don’t get the right fit. It is good to have somebody that has experience in a particular area help you design your product.

Kristi Gorinas:  It was very frustrating and it took  much longer than I thought. Quite honestly, I am not a real patient person, because I have a lot of energy and I like to see things happen. But, I’ve learned patience in the last 2 ½ months. I learned to wait a month to hear something back about getting a sample or a prototype from China.

Ron Reardon:  It takes quite a few versions to get it right. I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of anybody that their very first prototype was what they went to market with.

Jim DeBetta:  Never.

Ron Reardon:  They go through five, six, ten, twenty different versions.  Even Edison went through thousands of possibilities for the light bulb before he came up with the little coiled carbon filament.

Jim DeBetta:  That’s a little long though, 2000 times, that’s a little much. We’ll let him slide, it is Thomas Edison…

Lee Kantor:  What was it like calling China? That must have been weird. Did you do it yourself or did you hire a company to do that?

Kristi Gorinas:  Initially I wanted to do the bags here in the United States. I was already in China trying to make the chair and being long distance like that I wanted to be more hands on, especially with the bags. It wasn’t as technically involved. I did search for while to find a handbag company in the United States. Nobody wanted to do business with me because I wasn’t big enough. They didn’t want to manage 50 bags at a time. They just couldn’t shut down a line in order to do that.  So, I ended up going online and looking to source my own handbag company over in certain parts of China where I had already the engineer over there.  I said, “I found two, go visit with them, meet with them and see if they can make this bag.”  Well, after eight months and fabric was upside down and it looked like you would pay $3 for the bag, I wasn’t working with the right factories. I know there are factories over there that can do the work. But if you are not over there physically, standing next to them, working with them it is not going to get done right. So after eight months of trying to be patient and a lot of money with prototypes I said, “That’s enough. I’m done with working with China.” I went back to looking in the United States and found a company and went out and met with the company and in three days I came back with samples that were almost perfect.

Jim DeBetta:  It is kind of like a good and a bad thing. It is a shame because the reality is that, although it would be great if we could continue to make products in the United States and support our own economy in that respect, there are a lot of people that still love the Made in America thing. You had somebody over there. You had an engineer over there and still you couldn’t get what you wanted. That just is a testament to knowing that when you have a relationship, like we were talking about last week about networking, how Ron and I know so many factory brokers.  They are your eyes, ears and your mind. They know the factories, they know the right places to go and they remove all that doubt. They do all the work for you.  The reality is that Asian factories,  and any factory overseas, are very capable of making great quality but you have the language barrier, you have the distance barrier. You can’t stand there unless you have a factory broker by your side, you are kind of shooting in the dark and that is a tough thing.

Ron Reardon:  There is really no substitute for face-to-face.  You are actually with them and they say, “What about this?” and you say, “No, turn it this way.”  From an efficiency standpoint you can get so much done in a shorter period of time if you are right there with the person working with the device.

Kristi Gorinas:  Not being a designer by trade, I didn’t know the steps and your product specifications. I should have had a 20-page product spec done for each bag on exactly the details of every piece of that bag. I didn’t know that. I lost a lot of time not being properly prepared to deal with the factory.  I was hoping that they could just take my hand sketches and they would make something up.  It didn’t work.

Lee Kantor:  Is that common, Jim? That the inventor thinks they have enough data to give the people who produce it, but the invariably don’t?

Jim DeBetta: Yeah, that is common. It is only simply because they just don’t know. They are not expected to know.

Ron Reardon:  And when you don’t know, you don’t know that you don’t know!

Kristi Gorinas: Exactly!

Jim DeBetta: But you try and you know what, I always give credit to people like you, Kristi, who went out they wanted to do it, they had an idea and they said, “You know what, I’m going to go out there and try it.” I’m sure you’ve made in your mind your own mistakes and wish you could have done things differently and quicker. But, it makes you stronger, it makes you move forward. At least now you know that you’ve been in the trenches yourself. You’ve done it and you know what you won’t do the next time. Going forward you will have a better sense of the path you have to take for this stuff.

Ron Reardon:   That’s true. It is just like when people do a sketch, they think they can engineer and manufacture it from the sketch.  No, you need engineering CAD drawings. Then when they have the engineering CAD drawings you think you can use those for the patent drawings. No, there are different requirements for formal patent drawings. There are sketches.  There are renderings and then there are engineering drawings and then there are patent drawings. When you don’t know, you don’t know.

Kristi Gorinas:  And you need money.

Jim DeBetta:  Good. See it is not us prompting that one! I am not going to ask you how much you spent, but if I asked you if you spent in the thousands, I think your answer is probably going to be “Yes”. I’m afraid to ask further how much because this is a common issue with inventors. You are going to spend money and Kristi will say that again, I’m sure if we asked, but at the end of the day it is spending your money wisely and choosing the right vendors. Time is money. So when you wait eight months along the way is that lost money in lost potential sales, is it re-designs, who knows. Along the way though, it is about being efficient.

Ron Reardon:  It does take longer than you think and it is going to take more money than you think. It is very common. What you encountered with people not wanting to do short runs is also very common. Sara Blakely, the inventor of Spanks, she went to something like 17 manufacturers and they all turned her down because it was just here, she didn’t have a company or anything like that.

Kristi Gorinas: Can I comment on Sara?  She has two of my bags. She just had a baby a week or two ago, or something or that.  I met some people that were friends with her at a networking seminar. I said, “I’ve been trying to get her some of my bags.”  They said, “We’ll get her a bag.”  I am hoping she’ll use it.  I’m hoping somebody will take a picture of her with my bag.

Jim DeBetta: Just show up at her door and introduce yourself.

Ron Reardon:  She is in town, right?

Lee Kantor: Yeah, she is here in Atlanta.

Jim DeBetta: Talk about once you had the bag in your hand, what were the challenges that happened after that?

Kristi Gorinas:  I was tired.

Jim DeBetta:   Because you thought that was it,  “I’m done now. I’ve made the bag!”

Kristi Gorinas:  I was so excited that I finally found a factory to make the bags and I got the prototypes and then all of a sudden we are in production with inventory. Then I have a thousand bags in my basement and I was like, “Now what?” It was anticlimactic a little bit for me.  It is a whole other ballgame. You get the product done and now I had to do something with it.  So, it was scary. It was overwhelming. We had the website. Just because you have a website, doesn’t mean anybody is going to go there. That is a whole other…a lot of money to take and try to market it.

Lee Kantor: These are all different mountains you have to climb along this journey.

Jim DeBetta: Ultimately, like Kristi, like most inventors, they want to make money with their invention. My dad always said, “Nothing happens until somebody sells something.”  You have all this product and now you have it and it is here in the  United States and you have a thousand bags. A lot of people, unfortunately, don’t think past the excitement. “Now I have them. They are here.”  You then take a couple of breaths and, “Oh, Oh. What do I do with them?”

Ron Reardon:  Now what do I do?

Jim DeBetta:  “What do I do with them?”  Build a website, they may not come. It is about marketing. It is about branding and it is about having those contacts and being able to reach the buyers that can buy them. These designs are great. If I saw this, if I was with my wife and we were in a department store, a high end department store, and she said, “Look honey, that bag is $300.” I would say, “Alright, it looks like that is what it should cost.”  Perception, branding, looks, style…it still means so much and where it is. If you put that bag in Odd Lot and people are going to expect to pay $10 for it. If you put it in Neiman-Marcus they will expect to pay $300.  It is interesting how having a good look, especially for women with fashionable products for babies or have kids is a tremendous asset.

How did you come up with the designs? Of all the designs in the world, how did you pick them?

Kristi Gorinas:  That was very, very difficult. I probably looked at 20, I swear this is true, probably 10,000-20,000 fabrics, thousands upon thousands of fabrics.  But, I looked at the same fabrics over and over again. I swear, 20,000-30,000 and then having to narrow that down and narrow it down and narrow it down to six. It was really hard. What I did was that I really looked at what bags were out there and what was missing. There were no purple bags out there and there are a lot of people that love purple. There were a few purple bags. It is a bag that can go with a girl or a boy. There are hardly any olive green bags. I also looked at what are the fashion trends for spring and fall, it was purple and yellow. I just tried to really find fabrics that weren’t already out on the market, that they weren’t too loud and obnoxious but were real elegant, sophisticated and smart. I asked a lot of people, they didn’t agree with me and my choices and I changed some of them. You can’t just use your own ideas.

Jim DeBetta:  That’s it, getting objective opinions. We talk about that all the time. If you friends and family weigh in they are often going to be a little slighted in your favor. But, if you ask a stranger and they say, “That’s an ugly pattern”, and you get five people that say that pattern is not a good pattern you would want to think about changing it.

Ron Reardon:  That’s right.

Kristi Gorinas:  Our soccer club has about 1200 families and I literally would take out fabric samples out to the soccer field and walk around and look for women that had babies and toddlers and I would ask them, “Would you choose your top six?”  I would go around and ask their opinion and do my own little focus group just off-handedly.  “What fabrics do you like?”

Ron Reardon:  Looking back, the initial concept was actually the easiest part of this whole journey.

Jim DeBetta:  The idea.

Ron Reardon: The idea. Because, like you said you had to make choices of fabrics and design and manufacturing…

Kristi Gorinas:  If I could also say the little plastic pouch we call the “Easy Wipe Pouch”, it looks like a pencil case, that took me eight months to get right. Eight months!  The first 5,000 I got from China were all defective. I had to throw them out. They had to send me a whole new group.

Jim DeBetta:  This is just common stuff. I am not surprised here. I am not surprised here, it happens every day.

Ron Reardon: It happens. I’ve heard this story over and over again.

Lee Kantor: Was there something that she could have done to prevent 5,000 being thrown away?

Jim DeBetta:  When you work with factories that you know, or you work with a factory broker that knows the factories that are reputable you typically don’t have those types of problems.  It is not that they can’t have a defective run of product but, when you are investing your own money and you are not a big company to get that first run and they are defective is crushing.  Sometimes if it is not a good factory they may not want to work with you to take the product back or give you a credit or redo them. They may give you a hard time and then you have to wait another couple of months.  Waiting is sometimes tougher than the actual mistake itself.

Kristi Gorinas:  They replaced them for free.

Jim DeBetta:  That’s good.

Kristi Gorinas:  It did cost $700 to ship it, though. My quality engineer, they were given five little sample bags to test and they felt they were fine.  Well, five isn’t enough out of 5,000 bags. So the testing wasn’t done correctly on my groups end. So, they paid for the shipping and the factory replaced the pouches. It was more of a time and disappointment to me.

Ron Reardon:  How much time did it cost you?

Kristi Gorinas: Probably an extra month.

Ron Reardon:  A month here, a month there…

Jim DeBetta:  She is lucky she didn’t send them to a retailer and they were defective!

Lee Kantor: That could have been Game Over.

Ron Reardon:  Good factories will have good quality control procedures. They will not test every bag but they will do random samplings, it is definitely more than 5/5000.   They will pull every other master cart and they will pull a bag and they will do very specific tests. They will not just go, “Yeah, this looks good.” They will do stress testing and drop testing and fabric spill testing, all the specific things they will do for fabrics and they will check them.  Color fastness, things like that.

Kristi Gorinas:  I’m learning this process as I go, through my mistakes.  You are right, every time I’ve said something you’ve come back with the factories in Asia are good. You are right, they are good and I plan to do future business with them because they do make good quality products. It is just that you have to learn.

Jim DeBetta: A lot of people are worried. I think one of the big fears people have with working with Asian factories is that they say, “Well, I really want to support a US effort.” But when you are in business and you’re successful by importing products, when you sell products you may hire people and you put people to work no matter what.

Lee Kantor: What’s the difference in pricing?

Jim DeBetta: It could be huge. Sometimes it is only 10-20%, but I’ve seen products 60-70-80% less expensive for the equal quality. When I ran my own companies I used to source things, I couldn’t believe how inexpensive but how well made they could be. This is what they do. These factories overseas…we support these countries in a way by all the goods we consume here.

Lee Kantor: So the lesson is to have somebody on the ground there in China that is a good quality control person that is going to make sure you are choosing the right manufacturer.

Jim DeBetta: Absolutely. I think in Kristi’s case, which is common, I think the handful of take-aways are that you have to have some money to get behind your project. If you know that you are only going to have a few bucks and then you are going to run out when it comes to sales and marketing you probably shouldn’t really jump in. You may just lose your money.  The next thing is that it takes time.  Here’s Kristi, typical example, six months, eight months, a year; it takes a long time to go through the process.  You have to try to have the best connections you can. You want to find people that know factories. You want to know people that are great with branding and patent work. When you have those you pay more up front but you will save a lot of money later. It is so typical in this business.

Now Kristi, real quick before we wrap up…I know you were interviewed by The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, that’s a huge paper for anybody that doesn’t live in Atlanta, I guess that is the New York Times equivalent of a paper down here.  It is a huge thing. So quickly, tell us about how that went and when we can expect to see the article.

Kristi Gorinas:  Actually, the article came out this morning. I haven’t seen it in print. I did see the online version about ‘Mompreneurs’. Myself and another gal in Alpharetta were featured. They actually came out to the house and took pictures of me in my own environment with the inventory in the basement and just asked about the journey a little bit and the struggles and pretty much the same thing we talked about today. Also, the benefit of being a ‘Mompreneur’, being able to work from home and go to the doctor appointments and be with the kids  and also the struggles of trying to have four kids at home and do work.

Ron Reardon: Well, now that you are published you are somebody. You are important. You’re a star.

Jim DeBetta: You’ve made it through the hard parts which is, unfortunately is not what happens to everybody. We will be posting the link for Kristi’s interview on our websites and our radio show so that everybody can take a peek and get to know Kristi a little bit better.

Kristi, we really appreciate you coming out. I’m excited. I love your products. I know you are working on others.

Lee Kantor:  What is your website, Kristi?

Kristi Gorinas: It is www.kristig.com.  They didn’t put it in the newspaper.

Ron Reardon:  What is interesting is that when I was in the AJC many years ago is that people will track you down, even though the website is not there, they will still find you.

Jim DeBetta: Yeah, they do. Five years ago it would be more difficult. They’ll just Google you and find your website. It is not as tragic as it used to be.

Ron Reardon: Kristi, thanks for coming out and sharing your journey with us. I think our listeners really picked up some great, great tips of what it is like to go from start to finish.

This has been another episode of Launch with Jim DeBetta and our producer, Lee Kantor.  I’m Ron Reardon.  Thanks very much.

END

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.

Highlights of The Week of May 3rd

Stone Payton interviewed on Carlos Quintero and Nancy Sutherland on Sales Effectiveness on his High Velocity Radio show

Erik Wolf and Stephanie Frost had a social media special with LinkedIn Guru Sean Nelson and recruiter Stephanie Lloyd on their Gravity Free Radio show

Atlanta Business Radio hosted by Amy Otto featured Sanders McConnell with MyHSARewards, Neill Gass with Sunbrook Academy and Steve Cook with Americas Discount Home Loans.

Dr Fitness and the Fat Guy hosted by Dr Adam Shafran had on Dr David Rearick and Stephen Cherniak to talk about the benefits of a corporate wellness program and Terry Kennedy from Foot Solution who talked about the health benefits of balance walking.

My son Max asked Paula Abdul her pick for the winner of American Idol on his Kid Power Radio Show

Highlights From Week of April 27, 2009 on Atlanta Business Radio X

Last week was really busy for me as I transitioned from out of town to in the studio.

Jim DeBetta and Ron Reardon began hosting Launch, a new show about getting an idea or business off the ground. So if anyone knows any inventors or aspiring inventors please send them Jim and Ron's way.

Joe Blumberg is hosting Men's Health Radio and has already had on six doctors who are leading the charge in Men's health issue.

Stone Payton interviewed on Amy Otto on an innovation in AFLAC's new Wellness program for small business and Skip Davis from Nine Sigma on his High Velocity Radio show

Erik Wolf and Stephanie Frost had a franchise special and a small business roundtable on their Gravity Free Radio show

BevAnn Bonds interviewed on Deborah Gallant with Web Power Tools on her Georgia Business Coaches Show

Atlanta Business Radio hosted by Amy Otto featured a Girl Power special with the Peace Love Mom ladies, Kai Med Spa, Women's Automotive Connection and Oxygen Financial. There was also a social media roundtable.

Dr Fitness and the Fat Guy hosted by Dr Adam Shafran had on lots of magazine Editors from Eating Well to Women's Running all the way to SobeFit