Jacob Lapera, Author at Business RadioX ® Page

Jeff Anderson With Kaizen Analytix

June 30, 2022 by Jacob Lapera

Atlanta Business Radio

Jeff Anderson With Kaizen Analytix

00:00 /

Jeff Anderson, Chief Growth Officer at Kaizen Analytix

Jeff Anderson leads Kaizen Sales & Marketing across all Kaizengo-to-market models. He also serves as a Client Partner for key Kaizen clients. Jeff has worked closely with some of the biggest brands across a wide range of industries to help them shape, launch, deliver, measure, and continuously improve their analytics initiatives.

Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

How Kaizen Analytix approaches data in new, deeper ways
Smarter data analytics
Small and wide data
The Kaizen Insights Anomaly Detection Engine

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio brought to you by on pay Atlanta’s new standard in payroll. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:24] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. Today on the show, we have Jeff Anderson with Kaizen Analytics. Welcome, Jeff.

Jeff Anderson: [00:00:35] Thank you very much. Lee, how are you doing today?

Lee Kantor: [00:00:37] I am doing well. I’m so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about your firm. How you serving folks?

Jeff Anderson: [00:00:44] Absolutely. Kaizen Analytics was founded back in 2016 here in Atlanta. Our first office was actually in a shared office space over on Pilot Street near a city market. It got cramped over there pretty quickly. And now we have relocated out to Ravinia over near Perimeter Mall. We also have offices in New York, Dallas, in Chicago. We’ve had remarkably consistent growth because what we do is help companies make better, faster and more profitable business decisions with data and analytics. The mission that we created back over on Pilot Street six years ago is true today. And what that mission is, is to make data and analytics actionable and accessible.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:31] So now a lot of firms, you know, you hear about big data and data is everywhere. And now you can keep track of data in places you couldn’t even imagine, you know, five, ten, 15 years ago. How do you help your clients kind of discern what is data that matters? What is data that maybe you can ignore? Or is all data data the matter somewhat and you just got to kind of prioritize it, like how do you help your clients wrap their arms around what seems to be a never ending supply of data?

Jeff Anderson: [00:02:03] Yeah. That’s a that’s an excellent way of asking that question there, Lee. For for Kaizen, it’s all about finding your unique story behind your unique data, quickly understanding what happened, why it happened, how to learn from the outcomes that you’re getting, and then moving on to predicting, optimizing and continuously improving your business performance. Now our name Kaizen, which is Japanese for continuous improvement. It’s core to everything that we do, not just the name of our company, because using Kaizen principles, we rapidly deliver an initial solution for a client in a period of weeks, and then we continuously improve that iteratively based on client feedback. So it’s an ongoing. That’s why I said your question was beautifully worded and that it’s a never ending continual journey that you’re on as companies continue to leverage advanced data and analytics.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:05] So how do they even know where to begin if it’s this giant pool of data that’s constantly being created and some parts that are super important, some parts that are maybe less important. But how do you even begin to know which where should I pay attention? Which is the area that I should focus on, where there’s a lot of opportunity? Where is an area that’s telling me there’s danger around the corner? What? It just seems overwhelming if I don’t have good systems and processes in place.

Jeff Anderson: [00:03:37] Yeah, that that’s a great point in itself. The way we would attack that with our clients is that we start small but we think big. We a lot of times will follow the money, so to speak. So we’ll look for the largest revenue streams, the largest cost buckets, and then attack those with the Kaizen approach of continual improvement.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:03] So that’s where you begin. So that’s a logical place to begin. Then you kind of dig in there because that the places that have the most revenue or the place that have the most cost, therefore you can have the greatest impact.

Jeff Anderson: [00:04:16] That’s typically what we see where the biggest opportunities are. Also, the more complex the business is, the more opportunity that you have. Because with complexity, things like revenue leakage, customer churn happens, fraud, those types of things. And what we can do is apply advanced analytics such as anomaly detection capabilities to find those situations and do that so that you and your team are not having to hunt through and sift through all the data and the spreadsheets and everything else that you use to run the business.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:57] Now, who is the kind of the ideal client for you? Are these these enterprise level, Fortune 100 sized companies that have the resources and have the data that can be attacked in this manner? Or is it relevant to small and mid-sized firms as well?

Jeff Anderson: [00:05:13] That’s the beauty of what we’ve got going here. It ties in. We have created an ability to support both larger Fortune 5500, 1000, even 2000 companies, and basically being able to provide capabilities for them that are to get them to actionable results. And that’s really that actionable part of the mission statement that I mentioned earlier. So for them, it’s all about making data and analytics actionable, finding real value within their data, leveraging analytics. But we also serve much, much smaller companies and we do that through the accessible part of our mission there. We have a suite of products that effectively allow much smaller organizations to take advantage of those same capabilities that the big clients such as, say, a Home Depot here locally or a Delta Airlines that have been investing in these capabilities for for many, many years with lots of data scientists and lots of IT professionals who do great things. But what we’ve set up here with our product offerings is, in a way for the smaller players to actually take advantage of these capabilities and deliver real business value.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:36] So what’s an area where a smaller company could lean on some of your tools to, you know, create more value for themselves? Is it around pricing? Because I think in smaller firms, pricing is kind of a let’s make a deal world and there’s not a lot of analytics behind it other than a gut feeling or what’s the temperature of the of the marketplace.

Jeff Anderson: [00:07:01] You took the words right out of my mouth with that gut feel. That’s that’s typically what we see. In some cases. It’s almost an afterthought. It’s like we got the new business, but then what are we going to price it at? So we have a specific offering. Kaizen Price Think of this as first of all, as an application, which you can consult from any smart device, but think of this as your pricing brain. It forecasts your demand, calculates your customers sensitivity to price optimizes the price, but then also factors in external data which sometimes has huge impacts, you know, things like weather, macroeconomic data. And we’ve created an ability with Kaizen price to essentially democratize the ability to price like much larger companies and do that for a very affordable price.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:52] So is this industry agnostic or does it work better in certain industries.

Jeff Anderson: [00:07:59] In terms of the I guess I’ll speak to that initially more broadly from a data and analytics perspective. I guess the two things that are driving the industry industry adoption overall is basically two things ever expanded data where companies continue to capture more and more data. And then also the pace of change in technology, which allows folks like us to apply new techniques to expand and push the envelope. But specifically speaking, I would say that you look at a couple of different industry groups, consumer centric industries that have extremely high volumes of transactions. You think retail, financial services, travel related industries. These industries are some of the earliest embraces of data and analytics, but honestly, they’re probably due for a facelift. Then you have industries using advanced machinery that have sensors now that capture literally subsequent data activity. Things are. Excuse me, something like chemical energy, industrial manufacturing. These are huge opportunities to leverage data and analytics. Then you’ve got industries such as that have kind of known throughout to be very inefficient from an operating standpoint. Health care comes to mind if you imagine how leveraging data analytics, how much more effective in terms of patient outcomes and more efficient these health care providers could be if they knew exactly who needs to come in to the or the optimal staff to provide the care, optimizing the treatments and really increasing the throughput to care for more folks in the in the operation. And then don’t forget about services industries, specifically where I’m speaking here of law firms. We’ve actually began recently working with law firms to use these same data and analytics capabilities. My lawyer buddies will say that lawyers are people too, and I would extend that to say they also have data too, and they can leverage that data and analytics for huge value within their law operation.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:10] So how does the data analytics work when it’s kind of a creative field or a subjective field where the value is kind of in the eye of the beholder? Like the art world say, like, how could you price a piece of artwork? You know, with any type of certainty or predictability when it’s so subjective. And, you know, you can put one thing up for auction, it could be worth millions and another thing be worth next to nothing.

Jeff Anderson: [00:10:43] With the in the world, like the art world, where there is some subjectivity, a test and learn approach would be really a failed self fail safe approach to that where we establish a price based on what we’ve seen in the past using as much history as we can in some of these cases, going with small and wide data instead of the big data is is a great approach. But what we would do there is establish a price, watch that to see the reaction and then adjust accordingly. So we call it test and learn and we would apply that type of approach in a in an environment such as when you’re selling it like a very unique art pieces.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:33] But that would come into play like say you’re a small producer on Etsy or one of these marketplaces. You know, you’re you produce something, a T-shirt, and you, you know, you kind of can guesstimate, okay, this is how much t shirts sell for. But how do I know if this is something that’s going to be have wild demand or no demand? So it’s this kind of test and iterate approach you think is kind of fundamental to any type of new or creative endeavor.

Jeff Anderson: [00:12:04] Yes, that’s exactly right. So you don’t like if you’re just starting a business and, you know, taking a test and learn approach, just really making sure that you are in fact, looking at it closely and frequently to see based on that price, how how fast or slow is your merchandise moving and then learning from that and then adjusting again. Going back to our our approach to how we deliver for clients, the continuous improvement also falls very much in line with that.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:37] So these are just the fundamentals of how you do what you do.

Jeff Anderson: [00:12:42] That is exactly right. You could probably almost every client engagement will be some element of a test and learn. So whether you’re brand new business getting off the ground and you want to use that approach or we’ve used it especially in the in the last two and a quarter years when we’ve all been impacted by COVID. A lot of those forecasting models for a lot of our clients really went out the window for that period of time. And using approaches like test and learn is small and wide data allow clients to nimbly shift when dramatic things like like a pandemic happens.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:24] But is that a practice that you feel that businesses should be incorporating at all times? Because change is always happening? It may not be to the degree of a pandemic or, you know, just tremendous inflation, but there is incremental change. So you should always be testing and always be optimizing.

Jeff Anderson: [00:13:42] Yes. That’s what we would recommend. If you think about the concept of a decision support optimization solution and there what you’re constantly simulating, what is going on and what you believe is going to happen in your business, taking those different scenarios and probabilistically figuring out which of those are likely to happen. But then preparing for the edge cases and just being being ready to kind of go with the market or go with the direction that the your business is going. But having the the machinery and the horsepower to have done all of those scenarios in advance and be prepared for any number is really that is a best practice that we see out in the market.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:36] Now is that it feels like it’s going against human nature a little bit and in terms of humans want things to be the same and they have this kind of security mindset or stability mindset and and it changes always. They understand intellectually, changes always happening. But you need to have mechanisms that are triggering alarms, right. That are telling you, hey, there’s danger around the corner or hey, pay attention to this, this might be occurring. So you have to kind of have your hand on the the lever in case you need to pull it. And you need to always know where you stand in the data analytics. Part of this is trying to help you if you’re open to it.

Jeff Anderson: [00:15:22] Exactly right, Lee. A lot of times what we will do is put in place, even if we’re not necessarily truly optimizing a solution, if the client is not quite ready for the true optimization business rule based alerts and establishing guardrails that once once these alerts are triggered or we’re seeing a situation outside of what we’re guarding against, then being able to trigger different operations, different processes, different decisions to really keep you more focused on and avoid catastrophic situations where you’re getting to real trouble.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:05] Now, you mentioned that I think that one of your tools is an anomaly detection engine. Can you talk about in a world where anomalies seem to be happening with more frequency or maybe we’re just aware of it more? How did this come about and how can your clients benefit from it?

Jeff Anderson: [00:16:24] Yeah. Our anomaly detection solution, probably one of our most exciting developments, very candidly, but it’s our newest offering in our Kaizen Insights Suite. What our anomaly detection solution does is it automates the delivery of very powerful, but at the same time hidden insights in your data. Importantly, without your team having to scour through and sift through all these different the data that you have, different structured, unstructured data, sources, reports, etc. What the solution does is it systematically looks through and finds patterns looking at all aspects of your data. It establishes what we call the business as usual baseline on key metrics like fraud, customer churn, revenue growth, even revenue leakage. But it’s looking for those metrics which ultimately can potentially drain company profits, and then it finds those outliers against that baseline. Great example of this is for a cable company. We use this solution to identify outliers that resulted in reducing their customer churn by 5 to 10%. So we found pockets of their customer segment combinations where churn was happening that looking at it in an aggregate, they couldn’t really see it, nor could they really act on it. But when you bring it down from your your base of 10 million customers down to a household group of, say, 4500, then you can take action and you can really move the needle. So but you are right in that there’s a lot of anomalies out there and really trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, what’s real and what’s not. That is the key to the whole thing. And that’s what we’ve got set up with this anomaly detection solution.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:21] So what do you need more of? How can we help?

Jeff Anderson: [00:18:25] Well, you know, when you I guess one thing that I wanted to say is that with our presence here in Atlanta, Atlanta’s been an outstanding location to build our business. I would say that without a doubt, we would not have been nearly as successful starting anywhere else but Atlanta. We’ve got great clients here, amazing talent, access to to great institutions, and just a talent pool that is really second to none in this space and also a local community. I almost see them and feel them as champions fans, supporters, mentors like the Atlanta CEO Council. Great, great council that we’ve leveraged a lot. Great airport. Can’t forget about Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson. That allows us to move really quick and deliver for our clients, too. So it’s really about figuring out ways that your companies can use data and analytics starting small, we think big, but we start small. Really trying to understand that story behind your data, figuring out what happened, why, and then enhancing from there. And I guess just. You know, in summary here, just asking yourself the question, what’s your data really telling you? Where are those opportunities to to really have a huge impact in your business with data and analytics?

Lee Kantor: [00:19:57] Well, if somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on the team, what’s a website?

Jeff Anderson: [00:20:03] Website is Kaizen analytics dot com I’ll spell it real quick. A Z in an ally t i x dot com. But we we would love to help and carry the data analytics torch forward in your organization. Lee, I appreciate the time this afternoon. It’s been it’s been great speaking with you.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:30] All right. Well, Jeff, I appreciate you coming on and sharing your story. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Jeff Anderson: [00:20:36] You bet. Thanks. Have a great day.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:38] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We will see you all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.

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Renee Dierdorff & Amy Guest With Kid Biz And Kristy Chadwick With Prime Leadership

June 30, 2022 by Jacob Lapera

Cherokee Business Radio

Renee Dierdorff & Amy Guest With Kid Biz And Kristy Chadwick With Prime Leadership

00:00 /

This Episode was brought to you by

Renee Dierdorff & Amy Guest are co-founders of Empowered Youth Entrepreneurs, a 501(c)3 organization. Our goal is to empower kids with resources & education to grow their entrepreneurial spirit.

Follow Empowered Youth Entrepreneurs on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Kristy Byess Chadwick, Founder at Prime Leadership

Kristy began her career in the banking industry as Assistant Branch Manager of Security State Bank where she gained the knowledge to help in her next adventure of starting a new bank. In 1999, Kristy joined the elite 13 team members to start Community Bank of Pickens County. In this role as Banking/ Mortgage Officer, she set all policies and procedures for both the Consumer Loan Department and Mortgage Department.

Maintaining her relationship at the bank, she founded Cherokee Elite Mortgage, Inc where she successfully closed over $100 million in mortgage loans. After selling Cherokee Elite Mortgage in 2008, she moved into the fin-tech industry where she held the position of Chief Operations Officer for General Financial, Inc. until 2018. She managed the daily operations for the Company and was responsible for implementing and developing a positive, engaging, and encouraging workplace culture. =

By overseeing Human Resources, Accounting, Compliance, Collections, and Customer Service, she developed best practices and procedures to ensure compliance with State and Federal regulations and laws. During her tenure at General Financial, she increased the loan portfolio to over 40%, maintained a default rate of less than 8%, and a retention rate of 97%. Since 2018, Kristy has been developing leaders while providing interim leadership solutions to small to medium businesses.

Connect with Kristy on Facebook and LinkedIn.

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:07] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Woodstock, Georgia. It’s time for Cherokee Business Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Stone Payton: [00:00:23] Welcome to another exciting and informative edition of Cherokee Business Radio Stone Payton here with you this morning. And today’s episode is brought to you in part by Alma Coffee, sustainably grown, veteran owned and direct trade, which of course means from seed to cup, there are no middlemen. Please go check them out at my Alma coffee and go visit their Roastery Cafe at 34 or 48 Holly Springs Parkway and Canton. As for Harry or the brains of the outfit, Letitia, and please tell them that Stone sent you. First up on Cherokee Business Radio this morning, it is my distinct pleasure to welcome to the broadcast with Kid Biz Empowering Youth Entrepreneurs. Ms.. Renee Deardorff Good morning.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:01:11] Good morning. Thanks for having us.

Stone Payton: [00:01:13] Oh, it’s a delight to have you and your your your corporate structure here. Yes. In the studio, we had a chance to touch base at a million cups event, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and I felt like you were. So both of you, you and Amy, both so articulate, so passionate about what you’re doing. But let’s talk about as we start here, mission, purpose. Why are you doing this, Renee?

Renee Dierdorff: [00:01:43] Well, our overall mission and goal is to empower youth entrepreneurs and their entrepreneurial spirit through entrepreneurship. So the things that they learn through that journey, those lessons they learn, they’re invaluable. So whether or not they go on to run their own business or not, it’s the journey and the lessons learned along the way that we are trying to create a space for for that.

Stone Payton: [00:02:10] So I suspect you’ve learned a couple of things along the way, too, right? Absolutely.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:02:15] I just we’re leading by example.

Stone Payton: [00:02:18] So what was the genesis? A noble pursuit I think we can all identify with that is nobody says, oh, we don’t want to do that in this community. Right? Yes. But none of the rest of us did it. So what was the genesis? What was the catalyst?

Renee Dierdorff: [00:02:30] Well, I mean I mean, Amy can probably speak to this, but her youngest or her middle kiddo, Avery, wanted to sell cotton candy and started there. I don’t want to.

Amy Guest: [00:02:43] I mean, yeah. So about two years ago, one summer, Avery decided that she was going to rule the world by selling cotton candy.

Stone Payton: [00:02:51] All right, way to go, Avery.

Amy Guest: [00:02:53] She had her toy machine, and she wanted to be different, so she started figuring out ways to do flavors. I was all aboard. Like, I was like, this is amazing. I’m going to, you know, support you full wholeheartedly. Her sisters became her employees, and we started making cotton candy and going to farmers markets at least once a week as like a summer project. It kept him busy, which was great. And then our sisters were like, Wait a minute, we want to be a business owner. We don’t want to be an employee. So then we had to decide individually because she has two of them which who was going to do what and what was going to be their businesses. So now I’ve got three kids with businesses, oh my. Go into farmers markets. And then that kind of trickled because my oldest, best friend is Renee’s oldest daughter, Lila. So so then Lila was like, well, my best friend’s making money. So here we are in a trickle down effect with five girls, with businesses going to farmers markets around the county, just letting them explore what they could do and how they could run their own little companies. Everybody did something different, but we did start to notice that the community loved the ideas of having these kids out there, and we predominantly were the only kids out there in these markets. You know, most markets are even artist markets. Vendor markets in general are mostly adults. So it was a unique to have these kids out there. And so everybody was very supportive. But it kind of came down to, well, this is really cute, but if there’s an adult across the way making something a little bit better or it really wasn’t the right venue at the same time, so we’re like, we need a more even.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:04:43] Kid oriented.

Amy Guest: [00:04:44] Kid oriented, even playing field because there’s probably more kids out there. It’s not just our five kids that want to do this. So we kind of ran with that at the time. We’re like, Wait a minute, let’s see what we could do with this. And we.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:04:58] Actually, about a year ago now.

Amy Guest: [00:05:00] Right, was our very first time that we did it. So last August, we kind of just put it out there like, Hey, is do any other parents have kids? With an entrepreneurial spirit to have a small business, don’t know where to take them, don’t know what to do, want them to have a place to showcase what they’ve got. And we created the first kid Biz Expo and we had 28 kids. Wow, the very first time. And all we did was put make a post on Facebook and we had 28 kids right away. We hosted it at Sutley Baptist Church up on Highway 20, and we had so without anything residual, like no other events happening, no other things going on in that general area because it’s kind of out there on 20. Just with our promotion alone, we probably had at least 300 people from the community just come out solely to support these kids. Yeah, the the feel in the air, you could just everybody was stoked. Like it was very exciting. The kids you could just see going from like, we’re not sure about this to like, oh my God, I’m killing this by the end of the day. Like, their confidence levels. It was amazing. And everybody was very interactive, very generous. And, you know, they stop by each booth and they would talk to the kids like, how did you do this? What’s going on? Kind of things. And the community support was amazing, so we kind of took it from there.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:06:23] Yeah, they were like, Are you going to do this again? Not just the kids that were participating, the parents are participating, but the community like are. There’s going to be more of these and stuff. And so we packed up that day and we’re like and we’re tired. We’ll just we’ll revisit this revisit this in a few days. And just the very next day, we’re like, Let’s do this again. We couldn’t help it, you know. So then we did another one in November.

Stone Payton: [00:06:44] So I bet some of the businesses were interesting. What kind of businesses were the kids in and what kind of things?

Amy Guest: [00:06:49] We’ve had broad ranges, so our daughter’s alone. So Layla makes dip, dry dip mixes, Austin does epoxy resin. At the time, Avery did cotton candy. We have since rebranded to Popcorn. Ha Harper has done hot chocolate, but I think she’s doing muffins this time. But we’ve had like baked goods, lots of jewelry, some artwork in general. We had.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:07:14] Magic.

Amy Guest: [00:07:15] Kits, magic kit. Some of the boys get really creative trying to go in different directions. So we had five PVC marshmallow shooters walking sticks. We have slime.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:07:27] Melted.

Amy Guest: [00:07:28] Crayons, melted crayons, turning them into different shapes. The creativity out there was was quite amazing. It was a full gamut of options all bit.

Stone Payton: [00:07:37] And now this thing has grown beyond just the expo, right? There’s several pillars, aspects to the to the whole thing. Yes, I’ll speak to that a little bit.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:07:45] Yeah. So we have I guess if you consider the expo is a program, it’s the main overall goal that we’re trying to get kids ready for and let them showcase themselves to the community. But under that, we have the Kid Biz Workshop and that’s where a business professional in the community comes out and talks to the kids and teaches them a certain subject. It’s usually business related but can be mindset, just general life skills. And then we have Kid Biz Coach where it is a kid and a adult can, in a group setting mentor each other. And we’ll do that a couple of times a year. And then we have Kid Biz Connect, where it’s peer to peer networking so that they can be among other kids that are in the same mindset is them and going through the same life experience and learn from and bounce.

Amy Guest: [00:08:37] Just ideas.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:08:38] Yeah, brainstorm, but also just get just have someone relate to them.

Stone Payton: [00:08:42] Fantastic. All right. Let’s hear from some entrepreneurs, okay? Leila.

Leila: [00:08:48] Hi.

Stone Payton: [00:08:48] Hello, Leila, tell us tell us about about this business that you’re in now.

Leila: [00:08:54] My business is dip it good. It’s like dry dip mixes. They come in like there’s nine flavors. Yeah. And you can have samples at the market and you put them in sour cream. I have one sweet flavor. That’s cream cheese and they make dips.

Stone Payton: [00:09:13] It sounds marvelous. Just last night, I made, like, these chicken patty things, so I’m wondering if I couldn’t have mixed it in with that. Like, yes, I did some chicken and did some eggs and some breadcrumbs, but I could have put some of this in there.

Leila: [00:09:25] Fiesta is really good with.

Stone Payton: [00:09:27] Well, there you go. See, she’s taking me right to the. Yeah, she’s closing. She’s very good.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:09:32] She knows what pairs well with things.

Leila: [00:09:34] Now you can also put like the some of the flavors on the sandwiches. Some are good with like desserts, apples, carrots.

Stone Payton: [00:09:44] All right. So it’s cool now, but you had to get started. And entrepreneurs of any age, I think sometimes they can think it all through, sometimes maybe even overthink it through, but it’s getting it going. What was the the the the thing that you enjoyed the most about about launching it and getting it going? And what did you find the most difficult? The most challenging?

Leila: [00:10:07] The most challenging part was. Is. There wasn’t anything challenging, but. There was a part where like you have to figure out what flavors and which, like what’s better and what’s not. Because when my flavors, it was good, but it wasn’t like fantastic. So I had to tweak the recipe a little bit and that’s a really good seller.

Stone Payton: [00:10:31] Were there any flavors that sounded good on paper or when you were talking but or thinking about it and then you’re trying like, Nah, that’s not going to play.

Leila: [00:10:39] Actually, all of them have kind of worked out.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:10:42] Are you wanting to maybe change things up a little?

Leila: [00:10:44] Yeah. Feel like seasonal flavors would be cool. Like pumpkin, something for fall, like fun fruit, things for spring and summer.

Stone Payton: [00:10:54] That’d be cool. All right. So the the primary application of this that, you know, works is you mix it in with sour cream and then what do you do with the sour cream? There must be a gazillion things you can do with it once you’ve got your your flavored sour cream made.

Leila: [00:11:08] Yeah, you can put it sandwiches. Just with chips, with pretzels, with carrots. It’s really good.

Stone Payton: [00:11:15] Okay. All right. So you.

Leila: [00:11:16] Say.

Stone Payton: [00:11:17] Baby bagels. Oh, that sounds all right. So you go to the expo or. Or maybe someone finds you somehow, some way they know that you’re selling this. What does that conversation look like? Because they probably ask some of the same questions, but mainly they just they want to go home with something in the right thing. So what is that conversation like?

Leila: [00:11:36] I like, hi, I have samples. So that draws them in like, hey, free food and then they just try them all. Some people try. One is like, yes. And then like, I don’t try this one, I try that one. And then once they kind of have their mind set on a few, I have a deal where it’s like more for cheaper and then, you.

Stone Payton: [00:11:57] Know, whose idea was that to do like these deals? So it’s good to have a mentor or have some input, right?

Leila: [00:12:03] Yeah, they can order online. I talk about that and then sometimes people will ask like, how did you do this? What made you get into this? Where do you see going? So sometimes I would really long conversations about that.

Stone Payton: [00:12:16] Fantastic. All right. So did Harper switch with me or do I still have Harper on the other end here? Who’s at the mic right here.

Amy Guest: [00:12:23] In.

Stone Payton: [00:12:24] Austin? Okay. I think when I looked down at Austin, snuck in there. Austin, tell us a little bit about your business.

Amy Guest: [00:12:30] I sell a epoxy crafts, which include tumblers, keychains, trays, pens, all sorts of little things. Really. If it has a silicone mold, I could figure out how to make it so. So there’s a lot of those things and they can do all kinds of colors and glitters and any sort of design on the object itself.

Stone Payton: [00:12:51] So we have Austin tumblers in the room. I know you guys can see that out in radio land, but we have Austin tumblers.

Amy Guest: [00:12:56] I have made a cup for each of these.

Stone Payton: [00:12:59] They’re very good fun, and I’m operating under the impression we could have a Business RadioX tumbler.

Amy Guest: [00:13:07] Absolutely. Yes, definitely.

Stone Payton: [00:13:09] Cool. I think we should do that. And maybe like raffle it off or like a prize for a sponsor or part of a sponsor. Oh, great. That could be fun. So why that? Did you think about other businesses? And then you said then you kind of migrated to that well.

Amy Guest: [00:13:23] So like she said earlier, my sister had sort of cotton candy. And about a year or so later, my mom was scrolling on Facebook and she saw an ad for resin coasters and she was like, Oh, that’d be really cool to do. And so we went and bought the molds and watched a couple of YouTube videos and figured out how to do it. And once we did figure out how to do it, we realized there were so many other things you could do with resin. And so it started with a couple of coasters and then we went on from there. And then a little while later I started going to farmers markets with Avery. And so that’s kind of how that became a thing.

Stone Payton: [00:13:59] All right. Went and bought the mold. Let’s talk about that a little bit, because sometimes entrepreneurs have to make an investment early on before they’re getting a return. Did you get your capital? Did you get your money from another source? Did you save it up? Did you borrow to talk us through?

Amy Guest: [00:14:14] That was your primary investor.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:14:16] We’ve got some generous investors.

Amy Guest: [00:14:19] We’re quite generous investor. That helps me purchase some of my things.

Stone Payton: [00:14:25] So you got some of that? Do you do you pay it back?

Amy Guest: [00:14:27] Yes. After the Expos, I give her whatever amount spent on that specific expo, I give her back.

Stone Payton: [00:14:33] What does she get that a little bit more? Does she get an interest or like a return?

Amy Guest: [00:14:39] I get my products for free.

Stone Payton: [00:14:40] Oh, okay. There’s perks that’ll work. All right, so it sounds like it’s been fun. It sounds like it’s been rewarding. You clearly enjoy it and you’re a human. And sometimes things may not go well all the time. What are some of the challenges in running this business in particular? In business in.

Amy Guest: [00:14:57] General? Well, was this one specifically when you have to mix resin like perfectly or it will not harden correctly? And I’ve made a bunch of cups where it does not work and the resin still sticky. So you can’t use the cup or some of the other things that are bendy or just don’t look good. So that’s one of the things that. To work, and then sometimes any of the designs or stickers won’t stay. And so then it looks weird when you put the resin over it. So it’s become a science. It’s become a science that you have to.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:15:28] Perfect.

Amy Guest: [00:15:29] To make it work.

Stone Payton: [00:15:31] So what have you learned about the marketplace and what people want and maybe they don’t want or what they like more or how they like to go by or what have you learned from interacting with the customers?

Amy Guest: [00:15:47] Most of them, when they come up to my tent, they’ll start looking at the tumblers because there’s a ton of different designs that you can do. Or they’ll ask me like, How did this start? Or Why did you do this? Or What not? There’s a bunch of keychains that usually get bought that people will look at.

Stone Payton: [00:16:05] Keychains? Yes. You don’t have one that floats, do you? I just lost my hat. Did you do a hat? Didn’t I thought hats would float and I was. That was at the river. So anyway, just if you put a little floaty thing on one. But keychains are popular.

Amy Guest: [00:16:22] Yes. Jewelry, jewelry, necklaces, keychains and tumblers are probably the main three that get sold to.

Leila: [00:16:30] I have one of your necklaces I like.

Stone Payton: [00:16:33] Oh, you guys do business with each other, so you team up. And do you ever give her food?

Leila: [00:16:37] She gives me necklaces.

Stone Payton: [00:16:38] Yeah. And if someone buys one of your dips, you can all you can always say, oh, you might really enjoy a keychain or a tumbler. You can help each other out.

Amy Guest: [00:16:46] I’ve done that a couple of times and sent them over to her table.

Leila: [00:16:48] We have. For other children?

Stone Payton: [00:16:50] Yes.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:16:52] Is it everyone?

Stone Payton: [00:16:52] Well, no, that’s handy and it’s important again, no matter what age you are, you know, in my world, it’s it’s important that I work with other people, with other media platforms, and we try to collaborate other people in other lines of business. Or if I have a client who’s a professional services person, they might be a CPA, but maybe they tell her, you know, a business attorney, hey, maybe you ought to talk to the or at least come on the show. If not if not, become a. All right. So let’s talk about the where. So it’s nice when you have the expo and the people come to you. If you found other places like, I don’t know, like a website or a Facebook page or something like that.

Amy Guest: [00:17:29] Yeah. And we’ve also been to a couple different farmers markets. One was that River Church on Sixes Road. One of them was in battleground on that green.

Stone Payton: [00:17:40] Yeah.

Amy Guest: [00:17:41] And social media do sell a couple of things there, whichever Facebook page.

Leila: [00:17:48] So people can order my stuff on the Facebook.

Stone Payton: [00:17:50] Page. Oh, nice. All right. So you’ve got an e-commerce situation going there. Yes.

Leila: [00:17:56] So professional.

Stone Payton: [00:17:58] No, that’s fair. That’s fantastic. All right. So, moms, we have an event or some events coming up.

Amy Guest: [00:18:06] Absolutely. We have. Our next expo is July 24th. We’ll be here in Woodstock on the the green.

Stone Payton: [00:18:18] Like right behind reformation. Reformation is my beacon and then everything is in reference to reformation.

Amy Guest: [00:18:25] So that makes sense. We will be directly across from reformation in the arts green green event area switch. And that is, like I said, July 24th from 1 to 6. All right. We have right now 46 children signed up to be mine.

Stone Payton: [00:18:45] Yes. All right. Well, color me there. You know I’m going to be there. Yes. We would love to have you there. Absolutely. All right. So do you pay an admission to to get in the venue itself or not?

Renee Dierdorff: [00:18:55] No, it’s free to the public.

Amy Guest: [00:18:56] Yeah. The venue itself is just a fun, free community event. The vendors set up and do their thing. We’ll have face painters and ice cream trucks and all the fun things that make it a good, worthwhile event. But the vendors do their thing, so it is for them to do.

Stone Payton: [00:19:14] Very nice. So bring your wallet. Yes, right.

Amy Guest: [00:19:17] Absolutely. Come to shop and.

Stone Payton: [00:19:19] Be ready to shop and talk with these young, young entrepreneurs.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:19:23] Do want them we do want the public to talk to them because there’s a lot that can be they can learn a lot from the questions that they.

Stone Payton: [00:19:29] Ask.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:19:30] Yeah, but the public learns a lot from them, too.

Amy Guest: [00:19:34] Absolutely.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:19:34] It’s really, really cool.

Stone Payton: [00:19:36] All right. So let’s hear from a couple of other entrepreneurs. I have Harper and Austin. Avery and Avery, man, we have a studio full here. Yes. Yes. All right, Harper, talk to me. Tell me about your business. So you know what? You know what I’m going to do, Harper? I’m going to turn your microphone on, and that’s going to make the whole thing sound better. I turned it down when you guys were switching around. So I’m getting better at this, you know? Look, you know, we’re all we’re all practicing. Let’s try it again. Now that I turned your microphone.

Leila: [00:20:05] On so I make kind of, like, circle cakes, and I’m going to.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:20:16] Book called Cake Bites, right?

Leila: [00:20:18] Yeah. My business name is Cake and Glaze.

Stone Payton: [00:20:22] Cute chicken glaze. All right. So a lot of different flavors. Yeah. Yeah. Like different tastes, different people. Like different ones.

Leila: [00:20:30] Yeah.

Stone Payton: [00:20:31] What’s your favorite?

Leila: [00:20:34] Well.

Stone Payton: [00:20:36] I think I could like Oreo. Well, you have Oreo at this next event that they’re talking about. Will you bring Oreo?

Leila: [00:20:40] Yeah.

Stone Payton: [00:20:41] Yeah. How about jalapeno? No.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:20:45] What other flavors do you think you’re going to do? What do we get?

Leila: [00:20:48] Cinnamon crunch.

Stone Payton: [00:20:50] Oh, baby. Lemon.

Leila: [00:20:52] Lemon.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:20:53] Chocolate and funfetti.

Stone Payton: [00:20:55] Yeah. All right, so. So one thing that I don’t think the general public always acknowledges and maybe even newer entrepreneurs may not realize there’s there’s the where you’re at the booth and you’re at the event or it’s available online. But sometimes they don’t see all the activity, all of the work that goes into getting ready to be able to actually hand someone the Oreo cake and get to it. Tell me a little bit about all the work behind the scenes that has to happen, for example, to get ready for this event. There’s a lot of there’s a lot that goes into it, isn’t there?

Leila: [00:21:29] It’s really simple to me, to be honest with you. It’s you just it’s supposed to be like whenever I get the box is supposed to be a cake. So I make the batter and then I can there’s like this little mini oven, you know, and it has like nine spheres in it.

Stone Payton: [00:21:48] Yeah.

Leila: [00:21:50] And then.

Stone Payton: [00:21:53] So you figured out the process. But while you’re in there doing that work and I think it sounds like you enjoy the work.

Leila: [00:21:59] Yeah, it’s really fun.

Stone Payton: [00:22:00] Some of the other kids are out playing, right. And maybe you’re playing, too, which is part of why that’s entrepreneurs. We enjoy what we’re doing, but there’s a lot to it. Okay, so you’ve got to make up the batter, then you got to make them pretty right and package them so that it looks like something I might want to buy.

Leila: [00:22:17] Yeah, it’s going to be where someone buys it, and then they can eat it while they’re walking around the kitchen.

Stone Payton: [00:22:23] And then they’ll buy another one before they leave. That’s right. That’s a good idea. Encourage them to eat it right down and tell them to come back, buy on their way out. Right.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:22:31] You’re going to have samples, too, aren’t you?

Leila: [00:22:32] Yeah, it’s just going to be free samples.

Stone Payton: [00:22:34] All right. Fantastic. All right. Again, I’m all mixed up with the names. Austin.

Amy Guest: [00:22:40] Avery.

Stone Payton: [00:22:40] Avery. All right, Avery, lay it on me now. You started this whole thing.

Amy Guest: [00:22:46] The whole.

Stone Payton: [00:22:46] Thing. All right. So talk about that very first idea with the cotton candy. You personally like cotton candy? Was that part of it? Yeah. All right. So tell us more about where in the world did you think at what point did you say, hey, I want to do this, I want to make this a business?

Leila: [00:23:05] So I got a cotton candy machine for Christmas and I wanted to do something fun. So we started to get like logos and started to go to farmers markets at River Church.

Amy Guest: [00:23:24] And then how did you come up with your flavors? Because that’s where it was very creative.

Stone Payton: [00:23:32] Oh. Did you ask anybody what they might like? Or you went with your favorites at first.

Leila: [00:23:43] I mean, I went with my favorites and in some of the best sellers that I would take to.

Stone Payton: [00:23:53] There you go. Well, that’s what I did. I started out doing the shows that I wanted to do, talking to. And then I found out that clients and listeners and people, they had ideas for other shows, kind of conversations that they would want to have. And then, yes, I also gravitated to the best sellers. Right. That’s just good, solid business right there. All right. So this has not been that long. I mean, it might seem longer to you than it does to me because I have gray hair, but it’s only been like this whole thing is like a year a year old. A lot has happened in a year. Yes. I’m going to ask you both, but I’ll start with you, Avery. Where do you see this thing going like a year from now? Will it be bigger and all of that or what do you think we’d be selling more stuff?

Leila: [00:24:43] Yeah, I think it will definitely be bigger. And I’ll have more ideas.

Stone Payton: [00:24:48] In.

Leila: [00:24:49] Better flavors or. Any other ideas?

Stone Payton: [00:24:57] Yeah. How about you, Miss Harper?

Leila: [00:25:01] I’ll probably start game. I’ll probably start and make, like, other kinds of cake. Yeah. Yeah. Then I’ll just grow from there.

Stone Payton: [00:25:11] Yeah. So. And I’ll start with you, Harper, but I want I want to ask you both about this question. If we had and we probably do, a seasoned business person, a mentor who has been through a lot, probably made some mistakes, probably had a great many successes. If you could ask them a question that you think would would help you or something you’ve been curious about that might help you in your business, is there a is there a question or something you’ve been wondering about, something that you would want to have a conversation about?

Leila: [00:25:42] Not really.

Stone Payton: [00:25:43] You got to figure it out, huh? I do know you got to you don’t need a bunch of outsiders. You just but you do pay attention to your customers. That’s the customers are good mentors, right? Because they’re going to they will speak to you. If they don’t tell you directly, they’ll tell you by what they bought right at the last expo. You can you can learn. You can learn from them. Avery, how about you? Would you have a question that you would want to know, like anything from managing the money to how to sell more or you got this thing figured out to.

Leila: [00:26:13] I think I got it figured.

Stone Payton: [00:26:14] I love it.

Leila: [00:26:15] It’s true.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:26:16] They’ve been coming to our workshops.

Stone Payton: [00:26:19] You have been going to the workshops? Yeah. So what kind of things do they talk about at the workshops?

Leila: [00:26:24] Just like I to like time management.

Stone Payton: [00:26:26] Oh, okay. Yeah, well, I need to go to that workshop.

Leila: [00:26:29] It was very. That’s the only one I’ve been to.

Stone Payton: [00:26:32] Yeah. Yeah.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:26:33] Usually the older ones are the ones that. That can hold the tension long enough.

Stone Payton: [00:26:39] Yeah.

Leila: [00:26:39] Yeah, well, I can barely hold it.

Stone Payton: [00:26:42] That might be true. I think those of us that there’s some of us, regardless of age, that that remains a challenge. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, I feel that. All right. So I’ll ask you to the same question, and I’ll start with you, Amy. Where do you see this thing going?

Amy Guest: [00:26:58] Well, our world wide world know our plans and our dreams and hopes and aspirations for Kid Expo in general. As our like as an organization grows, we would love a stable, a solid facility in the community. Okay. To kind of become that staple of where you send your kids to enhance their entrepreneurial spirit, to learn more about business, to learn life skills, to practice these these things, we could have more pop up shops. We could do like classes and camp longer classes in camps than just the occasional workshops. We could offer more to these kids that want to absorb it, just the things that they may not be getting in a traditional school setting because the curriculum doesn’t have the time for it or the focus for it, just based on different schooling systems, but just having an an outside resource that these kids can go to and learn these skills at a young age and kind of just prepare them for not only business, but just a lot of life skills.

Stone Payton: [00:28:00] Well, it certainly seems like there’s plenty of opportunity. I’m sure there are plenty of kids and parents who would love to to be a part of this. So it may be close to infinite as far as the number of people you could you could serve in that way.

Amy Guest: [00:28:15] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we would love to make it something where we could have chapters across the state. So like we’re the Cherokee County version, we can have a COB version if we solidify how it works and duplicate it and offer the more children can benefit from it.

Stone Payton: [00:28:33] Well, you know, you bring up a good point, because so much of what you’ve learned, you’re going to want to get this and maybe you’re already working on this. You’re going to want to get the I call it the playbook, but you’re going to want to get it bottled right and documented so that you have repeatable processes and transferable.

Amy Guest: [00:28:49] Tools in that process. We have a board of directors, so we are working on all the the done our I’s and crossing our T’s, getting everything organized.

Stone Payton: [00:28:59] That’s fantastic. So, Renee, what can the community do to help? How can the community at large, how can businesses, how can media, how can we help?

Renee Dierdorff: [00:29:13] Well, at the grassroots level, people coming out and supporting the kids at the Expos, sharing our workshops and getting the word out. And when you hear this, just getting the word out and getting letting people know who we are on a business level, we need donations because Amy and I operate at you know, we don’t take a salary from this. This is our own time. We don’t.

Stone Payton: [00:29:37] There hasn’t been a wealth building exercise, so it has been.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:29:39] A self-funded.

Stone Payton: [00:29:40] Exercise.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:29:42] But we’ve talked several times when it’s just me and her and it’s like, this feels important, so it’s 100% worth it.

Stone Payton: [00:29:50] Yeah.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:29:51] And it doesn’t really matter how long it takes to kind of build things where we can. Make this our full time thing, because overall it’s just more important than anything else. So but yeah, we we are a 501 three organization, so all the business donations are tax deductible. And they would go toward the donations would go towards our general operating funds that we can work on all of the programs and all of those lead up to the expose that we do three times a year.

Stone Payton: [00:30:25] Yeah. So that’s a nonprofit designation. So Cherokee Business RadioX was a nonprofit in February.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:30:33] Oh, congratulations.

Stone Payton: [00:30:34] No, no, no. Just in February. Oh, okay. Now we’re back in the black. Oh, okay. Gotcha. Under designation. Oh, yes, I understand. So. All right, so let’s talk about businesses. Is there is there a way maybe to get some returns? There’s there’s the donation side of things, and that’s great. But could we could someone like a Business RadioX or a law firm or whatever, could we be a sponsor? Yes. Like like at this upcoming event, what might that look like or probably get pretty creative with it, right?

Renee Dierdorff: [00:31:06] Yeah. So we have a, you know, event sponsorship for the Expos where it’s, you know, your traditional levels of donating. And then we also have annual giving that a business may able to do is to be an annual sponsor. Yeah. And then another way a business can give back to the organization is to lead workshops.

Stone Payton: [00:31:30] Ah.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:31:31] So we in return would. Advertise your business and then you can come and get in front of these kiddos and really make an impact. So, yeah, donate your time.

Stone Payton: [00:31:44] No, the time is precious.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:31:45] It is. And we appreciate we’ve had so many people already do this and participate in the workshops. So those have been great.

Stone Payton: [00:31:54] So probably an off air conversation, but I want to plan a couple of seats with you before we wrap this segment and move to to our other. Yes. What if business radio sponsored an upcoming event and maybe got some presence in the value of that? I don’t know. In the literature there’s a banner or something like that. But what if periodically we had some of the kids come and talk about their business, either here in the studio or another idea that might be worth exploring? It might even help us get a third party sponsor they could help fund is at events like this. One of the areas was kid biz radio or that kind of wonderful and and really and let them kind of run the thing and maybe interview the board members. Yes that that’s what the.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:32:43] Explosions that sounds incredible because we’ve been trying to think of we thought about having like a booth there or something where we could interview people that are there, like to get kind of like testimonials, but just really hear back from the community what they got out of it. And then also the kids, what they’re getting out of it because because like we talked about, the kids learn what to make based off of the sales. We want to make sure that we’re serving the community the way that they want to be served. So we need that feedback and live and in person at that event is the best way to do that.

Stone Payton: [00:33:17] All right. So we got a thumbs up from Renee and Amy. But Harper, you down for something like that? You like that idea of having radio at the event? Yeah. Yeah. So would you be on the show and or would you be on the show but asking some questions. What do you think about that idea?

Leila: [00:33:34] That’s fine with that.

Stone Payton: [00:33:35] You’re cool with that? You got that? Yeah.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:33:36] You’ve done this.

Leila: [00:33:37] Expert.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:33:38] Now.

Stone Payton: [00:33:39] How about you, Avery? Is that something you could get into? Yes. Yeah.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:33:43] All right. Well, the kids interviewing kids would be. Really?

Stone Payton: [00:33:46] I think so.

Leila: [00:33:47] That’d be awesome.

Stone Payton: [00:33:48] Okay. We went from I think so to awesome. I think we’re making it. All right. So let’s before we wrap, let’s make sure that our listeners have an easy way to reach out to these to these businesses. And so I want to make sure that and let’s make sure we get the info and we’ll publish that when we publish. But for now, let’s make sure that they have an easy way to reach out and have a conversation with you or learn more about you and Amy, either one or both, whatever you think is appropriate, whether it’s a LinkedIn or Facebook email, whatever.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:34:22] So we’re on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok at Kid Biz Expo. So you can just search for us there and you’ll find it. And then you can go to Kid Biz Expo dot com for our website and everything’s there and you can message us on Facebook and we’re very responsive and we’ll be happy to talk to anybody that wants to connect.

Stone Payton: [00:34:40] Well, it has been a real delight having you and your entrepreneurs here in the studio. Sounds like we’re going to get a chance to do to work and play together. That sounds some more. But thank you so much. Keep up the good work. What you guys are doing is so important and we really do appreciate you and the community and Business RadioX Cherokee specifically. We’re going to we’re going to see what we can do to help. All right.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:35:03] Appreciate it.

Stone Payton: [00:35:04] Hey, how about hanging out with this gang while we visit with our next guest? We might learn something cool that. Yeah. You’re willing to stay with us, Harper?

Leila: [00:35:11] Yeah.

Stone Payton: [00:35:12] All right. All right. Next up on Cherokee Business Radio, please join me in welcoming to the broadcast with prime leadership Christy Chadwick. How are you?

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:35:24] Great. Thank you for having me.

Stone Payton: [00:35:25] Oh, it’s a delight to have you here. So what’d you learn in that last segment?

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:35:30] Well, maybe they made their way smarter than.

Stone Payton: [00:35:33] I am, that’s for sure. You picked up on that quick, huh?

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:35:37] I did.

Stone Payton: [00:35:38] I did know. It was a lot of fun visiting with them. So we are going to get more involved. Okay. Let’s talk about prime leadership, mission purpose. What are you out there trying to do for folks?

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:35:49] I’m well, I’m at the next step that these kids would take in their career. So I like to focus on the middle management where someone is just wanting to get into management, learning those life skills, learning the leadership, the culture, what it really means to build a great team, a great foundation, and what it is to really lead with culture.

Stone Payton: [00:36:14] So I got to ask, and I’ve been wanting to ask this question in the minute that I saw you were going to be on the show. So I’m going to ask her this question. I’ve asked a lot of people this question over the over the years, leadership. Is it an art? Is it a science? How would you characterize that, that word, that thing?

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:36:31] I wrote about this in my book. So it’s part science. Part art. Okay. So part art is something that you’re going to learn by experience, by grace under fire, I guess by just doing it and learning, you know, what works when you’re managing someone, everyone is managed differently. Just like when you have kids, each kid is parented differently.

Stone Payton: [00:36:56] And if they burn the cakes, you got to handle that otherwise. That’s right. That’s right.

Leila: [00:37:00] Yeah.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:37:01] But the science part is the things that you can learn, meaning that, you know, you build your foundation with goals and core values at my, you know, at heart. And as long as you lead with your heart and with those core values, then that’s where the where the art comes in.

Stone Payton: [00:37:18] So if you do lead with your heart and your people see you kind of living into these core values that you’re espousing, do you? It’s my theory. So I will tell you, I my answer is yes, but I’m interested in your in your answer. Do you feel like people will give you a little leeway, give you a little space because they recognize your human too, and that if they see you living into that, they don’t just automatically turn off. Turn off. Is that been your.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:37:44] Well, I mean, leadership is loyalty and trust. That’s a lot of it. Yeah. So you want your people to trust you and you want them to be loyal to you. I learned that from being in a corporate world and now shifting my career to to helping others. But we the. Court. The court leadership and leading by heart is by, you know, leading by example.

Stone Payton: [00:38:11] So so the when you’re thinking through establishing, reestablishing, communicating, re communicating values, are there some, I don’t know, do’s and don’ts or some some things to try to keep in mind as you’re establishing them or communicating them? What’s your take on that?

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:38:33] Setting expectations early. Yeah. So letting everybody know what the expectation is, what your expectation. If you was to interview 100 people who’s worked under me in the past, they would say that I’m hard but fair.

Stone Payton: [00:38:46] Hmm.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:38:46] And that’s because I’ve set a very clear expectation, and I it’s very high. But, you know, I give them the resources and communicate with them, let them know what I’m expecting, make sure that they’re successful. Because if they’re not successful, I’m not successful. And that’s the way I lead. And that’s that’s the workshops that I’m doing to lead other middle management to be top, top executives.

Stone Payton: [00:39:12] And when you set the expectation and it’s not met, it doesn’t mean you got to terminate someone. Right? But you can’t just ignore that or it’s no longer an expectation. Is that accurate?

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:39:25] That is absolutely accurate. So you just have to coach.

Stone Payton: [00:39:29] Yeah.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:39:30] So you’re I mean, you’re when you when they’re doing something that you don’t like, you know, you’re having a meeting of the minds and you are, you know, maybe, maybe they see something that you don’t see. So you have to listen as a leader as well. You just can’t. It’s not your way or the highway per se, but you’re kind of meeting in the middle because sometimes they’re going to have better ideas than you. So sometimes that’s a hard pill to swallow. However, that’s how that’s how lead. That’s how leaders grow.

Stone Payton: [00:39:57] So talk about this workshop. So walk us through some of the things we might expect if we participate in one of your workshops.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:40:04] Yeah. So right now we have the ten day later, the ten day leadership challenge going on. So it’s just ten days. It’s virtual right now where you, you know, you get an activity, you send in the activity and then we talk about it at the end of the week in a zoom. So we do one of those a month right now. So it’s just now started. We just started in February. So it’s brand new and off the ground, but it’s so, so, so far so good.

Stone Payton: [00:40:31] Okay. So in the virtual environment, we have the conversation, we set the context, and then there’s there’s an activity or a set of actions, and then we’re supposed to go back to the ranch in our own environment and apply that activity.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:40:45] Correct. And then you come back with real world, real world experiences, feedback. So you’re in an a group environment with mentors. You know, we have other people that come in and help because obviously I don’t I don’t know at all. So I want to bring people in who know more than I do. Right. That can help help people who are in the workshop to engage and that kind of thing.

Stone Payton: [00:41:08] I would think that that would be an incredibly powerful method of of learning far more powerful than just sitting and listening to you, no matter how eloquent or articulate or how right you might be about all these, to just write it down in my notebook. I mean, there’s value in that. But compared to actually, okay, now go back to to the office and do that and then come back with the results which aren’t always pristine, I’m guessing.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:41:35] Correct. That’s part that’s half science, half art. So with them having engaged engagement, that’s your art part. So you’re learning to actually implement what your what your are your learning to implement, what your what we’re teaching.

Stone Payton: [00:41:50] So how does the whole sales and marketing thing work for a for a practice like yours? I’m anticipating that it might not be terribly easy to just pick up the phone and say, Hey, would you like to participate in my workshops? How does the whole sales and marketing thing work for a thing like your?

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:42:08] Fortunately, I started by warm leads by just my network. I was at a position in November. I decided to part ways at the beginning.

Stone Payton: [00:42:20] Of this past November.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:42:22] Oh wow. And decided to go to do my own thing from some encouragement from some past coworkers of mine. Oh, good. So they had called me up and said, Hey, I’m wanting to teach your method to my coworkers, to my team. Will you will you come in? And I was like, maybe not. So I sit on it for a little bit, kind of like with me coming onto the show, right? So it took me it took me a minute to to say yes, but eventually I did. And I’m glad I did because it’s been it’s been real rewarding.

Stone Payton: [00:42:54] Yeah. All right. So the the early part of a conversation, if do you work with individuals as well or right now it’s.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:43:01] Individuals and businesses.

Stone Payton: [00:43:02] All right. So so if if it’s an individual. Or a business, I guess. Talk me through the early part of engagement. I recognize that part of what the execution might be a workshop or some individual coaching or any number of things, but that that first conversation, that early in the engagement, what is that like? Are you are you asking a lot of questions about my world? Like, what’s a what’s that first exchange?

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:43:29] Like, I want to see what their mindset is. So I want to see what they I mean, this leadership or my style of leadership is half half science, half art. And I need to make sure that they don’t want to operate totally on science because they will not be successful. So I want to make sure that the partnership is successful. Kind of like when you’re hiring somebody new, you’re hiring for culture, not for not for their ability, because their ability most times, most times you can train somebody to do a certain task, right? You never can hire for culture. You can’t once somebody is who they are, that’s who they are.

Stone Payton: [00:44:08] Okay, so lesson learned.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:44:09] Yeah. So once, you know, you have to define that culture, your company culture, same thing. When I’m working with people, I want to make sure that it’s a fit and I’m not wasting their time. They’re not wasting my time. So I want to make sure that they’re 100%, you know, that I’ve set them up for success.

Stone Payton: [00:44:22] So what do you do now that you’ve gone out on your own, you’re doing this work, what are you finding the most rewarding? What are you enjoying the most.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:44:30] Help business owners, you know, redefine their operations. Yeah, putting people in the right seat, recruiting for them. So we started doing a little bit recruiting. So where we have people that come through our leadership training, we’ve now partnerships with companies, so we’re actually onboarding them. So we went into the company and we have we know how their operations work. So now we’re training those people. So now instead of that six, sometimes 12 week training period, that has been reduced because we’re training them as we’re onboarding them.

Stone Payton: [00:45:07] So the hiring and the onboarding, I intellectually, I know just how critical that is and practically I haven’t proven to be great at either. I at least self identified. I have a tendency to hire in my own image. Right? I mean, I’m probably not the only one, right? No. Is that a common pattern?

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:45:30] Yeah, I would say more than 70% of people do that.

Stone Payton: [00:45:33] Wow. And I if someone tells me they can do something, I just I want to believe them. I want to give them that shot. So it’s a I’m not a I’m not a tough job interview.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:45:47] I don’t my interviews are not tough either. I like it to be very I want them to be very comfortable because I want to see how they are in their natural self versus their adaptive self.

Stone Payton: [00:46:01] Oh, yeah, talk.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:46:02] More about that. So that gets a little bit into the behavioral analysis. So you want to make sure that, you know, when somebody said adapt and have an adaptive personality, then that means that they’re they’re adaptive to being who you think they are. So it’s more natural in a pressure situation. That’s who they’re going to be is their natural self. So, you know, if the building is on fire and they panic, they’re not going to get your team out. They’re going to get themselves out. So, you know, in in an executive or a management role, you want to make sure that your your team comes out on top. So you’re only as weak as you’re you’re only as strong as your weakest link. And if you you know, that’s part of being big and culture, making sure that you’re making the natural self more than the adaptive self.

Stone Payton: [00:46:50] So in our earlier segment, we touched on the idea of mentorship a little bit. Have you had the gift of someone mentoring you in your earlier career or as you start this?

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:47:03] I did. I did. She may kill me for mentioning her name on radio, but Geraldine Moody was my mentor. So I say she raised me in the bank. She was one of the founders of Community Bank of Pickens County, brought me under her wing, taught me everything that she knew. And I’ve been lucky enough to house that friendship over all these years. But yes, she would be my mentor.

Stone Payton: [00:47:28] So some insights, lessons learned on either side of that table as a mentor or mentee is. That’s right. Yeah. Like, well, let’s take it from the mentee. Let’s say that I have decided, you know what, I need and want to be mentored. Are there some things I could do or maybe should not do to get the most out of that relationship? The ways I can approach those conversations or any insights you might have on that?

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:47:58] Nope. Just be honest to yourself. Have the right mindset.

Stone Payton: [00:48:02] Yeah.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:48:03] You know, always learn. From other people. So, yeah, you never want to be the smartest person in the room, that’s for sure.

Stone Payton: [00:48:10] Not been a problem for me. I got I got I got some challenges in this business that has not been one of them. So, like everyone in this room, your your enthusiasm for the business, your passion comes through, certainly here in person, I’m sure, over the airwaves. And I mean, you got to run out of gas sometimes. Where do you go? And I don’t necessarily mean a physical place. How do you. Recharge the batteries and find your inspiration to keep going.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:48:44] My family, for sure. So I come from a huge family. I have. There’s five of me.

Stone Payton: [00:48:50] So am I.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:48:50] I have a brother and four sisters and two daughters, two teenage daughters. Both of them are very active. One of them does rodeo, so.

Stone Payton: [00:48:59] Oh, cool. I love these conversations, guys. And I’ve said this before on the air. If you want to really get to know someone and learn some interesting stuff about them, get yourself a radio show because there’s just so much. It’s that tip of the iceberg thing. There’s just so much. So do you have a family member in rodeo?

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:49:17] My daughter. My youngest.

Stone Payton: [00:49:19] Oh, wow. How fun is that? I raised two. Well, Holly raised two wonderful young ladies, but I got to hang out during the process. And my youngest was a gymnast, and I was so proud of her. I thoroughly enjoyed watching the the bars and the floor exercise. I could not watch the balance beam thing. Right. Do you ever feel that way on it? Yes.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:49:45] My my oldest daughter was a catcher.

Stone Payton: [00:49:48] In softball.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:49:49] So I’ve spent most of my life since I’ve had kids and they’ve been old enough to be active, closing my eyes for at least 30 seconds during each event.

Stone Payton: [00:49:59] Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that is fun stuff. All right. So where do you think you’re going to take this thing? Do you want to at some point certify your methodology and have other people teach it as that or. Yeah.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:50:16] I don’t know that I would go certification, but, you know, I have some other people that work with me that I’m training to kind of teach the same thing, right? So, you know, more workshops more more people like myself that teach different things, you know, like social media or marketing technology.

Stone Payton: [00:50:35] So like maybe team up with other people who are best in class in that domain and bring them to the so. Well, that’s a neat idea.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:50:42] Yeah. I’m bringing bring like a group and then have, you know, maybe have a membership to that group where you meet once or twice a month and then you’re meeting the best, have a speaker. And then I like the engagement piece where you know you’re having activities and it’s just not a lot of lecture. And then you mix that up with some real world experience. That way you can test it out and then come back and say, okay, this worked, this didn’t work, why didn’t this work? Let’s go back and try it again.

Stone Payton: [00:51:11] Yeah. All right. Let’s let’s if we can leave our listeners, including the listeners in the room. So I’m going to ask you to approach it. You’re going to be covering some a lot of real estate here, but let’s leave them with some counsel, either from lessons learned, good or bad, some things that you have found. You know, these these couple of things I’m doing have really led to the progress so far. Boy, if I had it to do again or knew what I know now, I probably would not have invested as much time and energy in this. Anything along those lines that’ll help anybody in this room, including me?

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:51:47] That’s a hard question. So if I could go back and do anything again, it would be get a coach early. So, okay. So I had a mentor, but not really a coach. So, you know, I’ve I learned the hard way. You know, I spent all these all this money on softball lessons and riding lessons. But we don’t we don’t do those lessons in your career and in your business. So, you know, as you’re growing businesses, you want to learn as much as you can. And a lot of this, they don’t teach at school, but some but you’re learning real world. So you can have you know, you want to do social media, find you a coach. Somebody knows how to do it better than you.

Stone Payton: [00:52:25] I think that’s marvelous advice. All right. Before we wrap, let’s make sure that that we leave our listeners with a way to reach out to you, learn more about your coaching programs, or if they’d like, have a conversation with you or someone on your your team.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:52:42] Yeah. So you can find me on LinkedIn. We have prom leadership, LinkedIn and Facebook, and we have a website so you can find us up from leadership dot com.

Stone Payton: [00:52:50] Fan Oh, I meant to ask why? Why did you call it prime? Why prime.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:52:53] The leadership it was I come up with a couple of names, sent it to my family. My husband’s like, This is it.

Stone Payton: [00:53:00] I said, okay, it sounds like your family and particularly your spouse, very supportive of this move.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:53:10] They are. Yeah.

Stone Payton: [00:53:11] So so yeah. I got to ask, though, what was that conversation like when you went home saying, you know, I got this great job, hubby, you know, and this is all good, but I’m not going to do that. I’m going to go out on my own. It was was that a five minute conversation or was that a weekend?

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:53:25] He said, it’s about time.

Stone Payton: [00:53:27] Oh, good for you hubby. Shout out for the hubby.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:53:31] Yeah, he said it’s about time.

Stone Payton: [00:53:33] All right, one more time. Coordinates. Best way to reach out to you.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:53:36] You can find us on website WW. Leadership or on I’m sorry on website WW leadership dot com or on Facebook at Prime Leadership or on LinkedIn at Prime Leadership dot com.

Stone Payton: [00:53:48] Marvelous. Well, thanks for coming down and visiting with us. Something you might entertain if you’re up for it. I think it might be an interesting segment. If you have a local client sometime that you’ve worked with, have them come on, maybe talk about their business so we can give them that opportunity as well. But maybe also talk about the relationship and what they got out of the coaching and the workshop and that guy. If you’re up for that, yeah, yeah. Reach out and we’ll have like a special episode. A special segment on that.

Kristy Byess Chadwick: [00:54:16] Absolutely. And I would love to mentor these kids. So great pairing.

Stone Payton: [00:54:18] Very nice. I have no idea who’s sitting at number four, but it’s one of our young entrepreneurs.

Leila: [00:54:25] Layla.

Stone Payton: [00:54:26] Layla, I’m horrible with the names. Layla, what do you think about that idea? You like that? Thanks. Yes. All right. So we got a lot of we got a lot done here and we have a lot of future plans. All right. This is Stone Payton for our guest today and everyone here at the Business RadioX family saying we’ll see you next time on Cherokee Business Radio.

Jake Schuster with Gemini Sports Analytics

June 30, 2022 by Jacob Lapera

Startup Showdown Podcast

Jake Schuster with Gemini Sports Analytics

00:00 /

Jake George Schuster, Founder of Gemini Sports Analytics, was born and raised in the Boston area.

He lived in 6 different countries through 20s to get MSc + PhD and work in pro sports before burning out and moving to Miami to be closer to family and launch first business.

Follow Gemini Sports Analytics on LinkedIn and Twitter.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

Making data science accessible
Demystifying AI/ML
Why data ownership matters
How operational maturity and systems design can improve in pro sports
The pre-seed journey as a first time founder
Making sense of the minefield that is raising venture capital

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:04] We’ll come back to the Startup Showdown podcast, where we discuss pitching, funding and scaling startups. Join us as we interview winners, mentors and judges of the monthly $120,000 pitch competition powered by Panoramic Ventures. We also discuss the latest updates in software web3, health care, tech, fintech and more. Now sit tight as we interview this week’s guest and their journey through entrepreneurship.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:38] Lee Kantor here another episode of Startup Showdown, and this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, Panoramic Ventures. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Startup Showdown, we have Jake Schuster with Gemini Sports Analytics. Welcome, Jake.

Jake Schuster: [00:00:57] Thank you for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:58] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about Gemini sports. How you serving folks?

Jake Schuster: [00:01:03] Yeah, we we are a data science as a service company. So we are making predictive analytics accessible. And what we mean by that is, you know, most people have seen the film Moneyball that took place 20 years ago when the Oakland Athletics used mathematics to get an advantage on their opponents and won more games with 20 years ago, they were collecting about 50,000 data points per athlete per year. Now that number is between two and 3 million. And sports teams are hiring lots of data scientists. So we encourage that, which is just hiring more and more would be like asking Henry Ford for a faster horse. Someone’s got to build a car. There are automated machine learning platforms which allow non-technical people to do data science without having to write computer code, but they’re generic to industry and sports. People won’t use them. Sports executives won’t go pay for those platforms and use them because they’re not quite user friendly enough for their needs and the technical level. And they don’t contain APIs or data ingestion pieces for the sports data that’s being collected by these teams. So there’s too many steps for them to really harness that technology. We’re just bringing that kind of vertical SAS approach into sports.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:11] So what is the type of data that is important to these teams?

Jake Schuster: [00:02:17] Anything that will help them better make better decisions in how they acquire, develop and manage their athletes? So if you’re a professional baseball team in North America, you’re going to want to figure out which players to draft and which players to sign. You’re going to have long term development plans for those athletes that you need to optimize. And you’re going to want to keep those those athletes injury free and performing their best. And finally, you want to know which tactics to play against different opponents and to optimize processes. And so any data that’s going to help improve that process.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:47] And then where what kind of universe of data do you pull from to get that kind of information? You need to assess that. Okay. Let’s start Bill today and then Bob tomorrow.

Jake Schuster: [00:03:01] Yeah, great question. So you’d be surprised how few or how common these sources are the most teams are collecting. Every sport has a scouting database, every sport has an endgame statistics database. And then every sport will use, let’s say, about a half dozen of the same, you might call them biometric or performance and medical technologies. So jump tests that they do daily GPS and accelerometer metrics of how much an athlete’s running and game or running in practice, and therefore how hard they’re working your heart rate. Similarly, sleep is measured often, and lots of nutrition and psychological metrics are taken these days. And then each league has some specific stats, like something called second spectrum in basketball, and it looks at indoor movement tracking and other technologies that you see in different sports.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:49] So then the teams for existing players, they have access to certain data and then there’s probably just public information, right, that you’re you know, they’re these people are being filmed, you know, playing the game. So there’s data there. How do you kind of help them? Kind of first of all, take that public information and marry it to the private information that you might have and then and use that to make an informed decision whether, hey, maybe this guy’s hurt and he’s not telling us. But because I’m getting data that suggests that something’s a little off, but like like how is it used practically on a day to day basis?

Jake Schuster: [00:04:33] Well, our platform on a day to day basis, it’s important to understand that this is a tool in a user’s hands existing. I don’t like to use the word competitor because no one’s done what we’re doing before, but existing technologies out there are often third party or consulting style where they have to send you the data and then someone’s going to play with it and get back to you with insights. We are entirely, entirely putting capabilities in the stakeholders hands, so we do a lot of backend work that we automate and scale in terms of data preparation, making it easy to join databases and those different data sets that you mentioned. For example, our first piece of traction was publishing in an academic journal publicly available data on MBA injuries. Over the last ten seasons. It was the most accurate data model ever published to date in that space, and that was just to show that what we do is objective and academic, that it’s not a black box, it’s not a secret sauce. We are just using open source data models and wrangling them into a space that it’s easy for someone to use without writing computer code.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:30] But then it’s on the team to now take that data and then use it specifically to help. Them in some manner?

Jake Schuster: [00:05:37] Absolutely. I mean, we believe this is not meant to be man versus machine. It’s man and machine. And a lot of times you will see something where the computers are saying one thing and the executives are saying something else. And then this war takes place between departments. And that’s not how it should be. It should be that the machines are giving you some some information and you’re making human decisions based on that, not because of that or dictated by that.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:02] So what’s an example that the machine might help you make a better decision because it’s giving you pertinent information?

Jake Schuster: [00:06:10] Sure. So our first pilot project we did with an NBA team where they wanted to know how to manage their busy schedule. The MBA schedule is famously hectic and challenging and causes a lot of injuries. And so you want to find where you can get a day off any place you can are algorithms show the the wind probability of every game across the season based on travel, based on time zones, density, things like that, amount of rest and so forth. And within them it was very obvious how much better their star player was getting when he had a certain amount of rest. So we looked across the schedule and identified about 20 different times that they could give the player a pre pre-planned day off based on our metrics, and they got to pick the five that they wanted.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:54] So like I use a Woohp fitness product and then so it tells me like, hey, you have good recovery today, you have bad recovery today. Is that something that you can take that data then and then integrate it into your data so that you know that if I’m having a bad recovery day and it’s kind of near the time for this person to have a day off, maybe we should make today. That day.

Jake Schuster: [00:07:18] Absolutely. And a number of teams are using MOVE. It’s a little bit more consumer grade technology, but they’re using similar things that are a bit more precise. And that’s exactly how it works, where many people you might see tweeting or posting online, observing that their sleep metrics are very poor after they have alcohol the prior night in a similar situation with an athlete or with a consumer, the technology isn’t saying don’t drink. It might not even be that smart, but it’s going to show you what happens when you drink and then you or your coach or someone involved has to help you make the decision to not drink.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:53] Now, is this primarily geared to professional sports leagues, or does this trickle down to college and high school?

Jake Schuster: [00:07:59] Yeah, we’re already we’re about to be able to announce a partnership with a Power five college that we’ll be working with. I think high school doesn’t quite collect enough enough technology yet, although we’ll probably work with some AA groups. College is absolutely a market that we’re working in.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:14] And then so when you had the idea to do this, how did you kind of create the company behind it to help and roll it out? Like what? Like did you do this kind of on your own as bootstrapping? Hey, I got this idea. Let me just play this out. Or were you like, right away? I’m going to I’m going to scale this thing and I’m going to build the team.

Jake Schuster: [00:08:36] This bootstrapped for a long, long time. You know, self belief and traction have a funny parallel journey together. And I had this idea back in 2019, and I’ve been talking about it with my partner, Jose Fernandez, who’s the head of sports science at the Houston Astros, when they won a World Series with the biggest analytics department in sports. And he saw this problem and he saw that they needed software on top of all those developers. And we went around, we publish this paper, we did a pilot project. I went full time last August. We raised a small, small round of angel investment, put that into product design, and then went around with that product design and pitch venture capital and recently raised $1,000,000 combined from lead sports known a group, which is the combination of the grandchildren of the founder of Adidas with the honor of a Premier League team and Florida funders who are the most active venture capital firm in Southeast.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:29] Now, was it always kind of just aimed at the professional team or is it going to eventually trickle down to, you know, gambling and fantasy football and things like that?

Jake Schuster: [00:09:40] It’s funny how often we get that question, and I don’t have a great answer. My sense is that someday we’ll build a parallel product in that space. Everyone wants to know if the numbers can can give more accurate betting odds and things like that. I think the market is plenty big just to help out elite sports teams around the world, but I’m sure some investor will convince me otherwise at some point.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:03] Well, because if you’re capturing this data and like you say, it’s self serve, and if I’m able to take what exists, that’s in the public domain and then get an edge. I mean, that’s what all of these, you know, games of chance, that’s what it’s about, right? You want an edge?

Jake Schuster: [00:10:19] Without question. Without question. I think the important thing to understand why I’m a little bit defensive about that notion is that trust is everything and data security is paramount. And we’ve built out redundancy after feature after redundancy in our platform to ensure the security of athlete data and proprietary team data, which obviously we know is important because we’ve been in those positions working for those teams. There will come a point in time where the value proposition becomes what my original idea for it was, which is this big snowball of combined data that teams want to plug into because 30 to 32 teams worth of data is a lot more useful than one team worth of data, and the betting companies will be thinking exactly the same at that point.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:00] Right. But even if the yours is just the proprietary individual team data combined with the public domain data and if the consumer is just the public domain data, I mean, for a lot of people, that would be enough for them to, I would think, have a subscription. Now, what’s been kind of the funnest part of being a founder and what’s been the most challenging part?

Jake Schuster: [00:11:24] The most fun part is easy. That’s working with incredible people. And I know it’s a cliche, but being the least intelligent person in the room every single day is really fun. And this incredible caliber of advisors and investors and employees that I work with just blows my mind every single day. So that is just caused me to level up enormously as a person. The least fun part is how I’ve come to accept this, but it’s still not fun. People like you when you’re winning and people don’t want to have as much to do with you until you’re winning. And and traction is everything. And it’s it’s very interesting seeing who gives you the time of day at certain points and who doesn’t. And I think you just learn that that’s one of the few ways that the world works, and you’ve got to run with it.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:11] Now, for you as a founder, what’s kind of your superpower that makes you the right person to lead this adventure?

Jake Schuster: [00:12:22] I know how to, and I’m able to get the right people in the room at the right time.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:28] And then as part of the fundraising process, which has his own job, obviously. But how did you kind of stumble upon Startup Showdown and Panoramic Ventures? Was that just part of your due diligence of looking out for, you know, opportunities to tell your story and to, you know, see who’s out there doing what?

Jake Schuster: [00:12:48] You know what? I was trying to remember the name of who did it. I apologize that I can’t. But someone put it into the Miami Tech Life Telegram chat run by Ryan Wray and Damien DiMeo. Some information about this event and encouraging people to apply. So I applied and then frankly, I forgot about it because I applied to a lot of stuff for that period of time. And then I got an email that I was, I think at that time a semifinalist and went through the rounds and then it happened. And you know, the support along the way from the likes of Stephanie and Tammy was, was amazing. And that that’s what helped the group stand out.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:22] And then so what specifically were they doing? Were you’re like, hey, this is a good use of my time. I’m glad I participated in this.

Jake Schuster: [00:13:30] Well, if I remember it right, if it was the semifinal kind of round where you had, it was almost like a speed dating pitch. You gave your pitch, I think, five times in a couple of hour period to a bunch of different investors. And they gave great feedback each of them. They gave great criticism and great advice, and all of it was useful.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:50] And do you have a mentor or is there somebody that’s kind of your person that you’re aiming at? If this is the type of leader that I want to be or this is the type of leader that I can learn from.

Jake Schuster: [00:14:02] I have a lot of mentors. I would say, you know, it takes a village. My my advisory group is incredible. So whether that’s my my CFO, Johan von Leek, telling me about how to financially model and how we can move forward with this business really economically, or where some of our angel investors and advisors like Chris Haskell and Flynn and Joshua Tony, who have all run multiple companies, all work in and around professional sports, and all gone and done exactly what I’m trying to do. I just observe how these people live their lives and run their businesses. And that helps me do. Do mine.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:34] And any advice for other startup founders out there?

Jake Schuster: [00:14:38] Just keep going.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:41] But just keep moving.

Jake Schuster: [00:14:43] Be relentless. Be persistent. Persevere. If I had to give a big cliche, it would be that whatever you’re working towards is just on the other side of whatever you’re you’re working through right now. Like, I really think pain tolerance is one of the most important qualities.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:59] Yeah, that resilience. They don’t teach you that in school?

Jake Schuster: [00:15:03] No.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:05] So what do you need more of? How can we help?

Jake Schuster: [00:15:08] I really appreciate you asking. I think being on this podcast is perfect because I think marketing is is a luxury, not a necessity at such an early stage. And we’re really fortunate that our first 25 customers are all going to come from direct relationships that we have right now. But what happens next? Right. So general exposure and general awareness of people about Gemini Sports Analytics is always appreciated. So I think being right here is great.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:39] And if somebody wants to learn more, get a hold of you or somebody on the team. What’s a website?

Jake Schuster: [00:15:44] Yeah. Gemini Sports Dot I and I’m at Jake Gemini Sports dot II.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:50] Well, Jake, thank you so much for sharing your story, doing important work. And we appreciate you.

Jake Schuster: [00:15:55] Thank you, buddy.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:56] All right. This Lee Kantor will show next time on Startup Showdown.

Intro: [00:16:01] As always, thanks for joining us. And don’t forget to follow and subscribe to the Startup Showdown podcast. So you get the latest episode as it drops wherever you listen to podcasts to learn more and apply to our next startup showdown pitch competition visit showdown vs that’s showdown dot DC. All right. That’s all for this week. Goodbye for now.

Andy Hasselwander With MarketBridge

June 29, 2022 by Jacob Lapera

Richmond Business Radio

Andy Hasselwander With MarketBridge

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As Chief Analytics Officer, Andy Hasselwander leads the marketing data and analytics functions at MarketBridge, joining the firm (for the second time) in 2018. Andy brings 20+ years of marketing strategy, data science, and software development experience to the firm.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

The measurement paradox
How marketers can best prove marketing effectiveness to the C-Suite
The history of marketing measurement
The current standings of marketing measurement and what data is available to marketers

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:03] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Richmond, Virginia. It’s time for Richmond Business Radio. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:14] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Richmond Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. Today on the show we have Andy Hasselwander and he is with Market Bridge. Welcome.

Andy Hasselwander: [00:00:25] Thank you very much. It’s good to be here.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:27] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about Mark Bridge. How are you serving folks?

Andy Hasselwander: [00:00:32] So Market Bridge is a marketing analytics consultancy. We’re based in Bethesda, Maryland. So just an hour, hour and a half, North Richmond. We work with Fortune 500 companies in the US and internationally to help them understand how effective or ineffective marketing and promotions are to their acquisition efforts. They’re just in customer efforts. Taking a look at that buy channel, for example, how upper funnel advertising is contributing versus demand generation or digital marketing type type things. And we do we do that in a very scientific way. We’re open codes, so our clients get all the code that we that we write to analyze their data. And we’re we’re extremely scientific. So basically everything we’re doing is is provable and reproducible. That’s that’s sort of what we do in a nutshell.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:29] Well, how do you help the clients that are maybe overwhelmed by the amount of data that, first of all, that exists and how to prioritize that just because something can be measured? Is it worth measuring? How do you help them kind of navigate those waters to identify the priorities in terms of the metrics that matter?

Andy Hasselwander: [00:01:51] Yeah, well, I think for the last 20 years, marketers have been there’s there’s certainly been an imperative to measure effectiveness marketing. I think before maybe 2000 got a bit of a pass in terms of measurement. The, the accounting functions of financial functions might not have been as is worried about what marketing specifically was doing. And then I think in the last 20 years as direct marketing and digital data just got bigger and, and more, more easy to, to gather, you know, it became really important for CMO’s chief marketing officers to say, hey, this is what we’re driving. The unintended consequence of that has been for channels that don’t have as much data or for channels that take longer to work, like upper funnel television advertising or now over the top video advertising. Those channels might get short shrift because it’s just easier to say, Hey, we have these digital channels, these direct channels where I can actually measure a click and I can say, Hey, that click cost me $30 or $40, whereas advertising might might not be. So what we try to do is we try to help clients put some of those tougher to measure channels on an equal footing because they actually do work differently. And it’s really important to understand the value that that they drive. That’s I think that’s one of the most important things that we help with, if that makes any sense.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:21] Now, what about kind of the the saying that maybe there’s some art and science when it comes to these creative arts and, you know, like just because you want to measure or you can measure something like it’s difficult to measure creativity or or that. Why is that one ad outperforming this other ad? Can you scientifically tell me the 14 reasons why this ad is a successful ad and an ad that looks it looks similar to me or it sounds similar, but it is underperforming.

Andy Hasselwander: [00:03:57] So Daniel Kahneman is a very famous economist and psychologist. He wrote a book Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow. And in that book, he posited that the human brain kind of works in two ways. The first way is it thinks slowly and through rational decisions, which he called system to thinking. And then and then the system one the quick decision making is more primitive. What’s interesting about the system one thinking that we find that is the more emotional thinking. That’s really what advertising good creative advertising does. It’s memorable. It activates emotions. It’s not necessarily pushing the viewer or the the clicker to sort of do math in their head. You’re really trying to build an attitude and that good, creative, good upper funnel, creative or creative that’s designed to change minds over time does a really good job on that system, one mechanism and aspects of that. I mean, there’s all kinds of ways I. Advertising can be effective. I mean, it can be memorable. Memorability is really important. You know, this is why, you know, for years and years and years, jingles have been so important. Visual and visual cues are really important. Mnemonics are really important.

Andy Hasselwander: [00:05:26] The reason celebrities or spokes animals like you’re seeing a lot of in property and casualty insurance, whether those be geckos or emus or whatever, those sort of create those those memorable pieces. So, yeah, there’s ways to to sort of scientifically understand how that mechanisms working, but you’re never going to be able to take away just sort of scientifically create perfect advertising. You know, there’s always going to be the role for that for creatives. And what you can do is you can certainly say some of these upper funnel ads are more memorable. They do a better job activating the system one side. And we can see that that mechanism work against measured attitudes over the course of months or years. And you see brands that understand this do it very effectively. Consumer packaged good companies like Coca Cola have been doing this for four decades. I think property and casualty insurance companies that I mentioned earlier have figured this out now for a couple of decades. Retail banks, I think, are doing a good job. And you’re seeing those scientific pieces, I think, come through in some of the creative that you see up for funnel.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:40] But does that? I don’t know. I think luckily if you take a Coca-Cola, they don’t really create brands. They buy existing brands that are out there. There’s a million brands going out there, doing what they do, taking shots, being crazy. Coca-cola waits for some of them to be successful, then buys a stake in them and then eventually takes them over. And then in a lot of cases, they fail once they’ve got in the hands. I mean, that’s their R&D program.

Andy Hasselwander: [00:07:13] Coke is I mean, that’s their certainly their line extension strategy. I’m more talking about the core brand, right. Which is which is the brands that are successful and how you make sure that when you walk into a when a consumer walks into a grocery store or walks into a convenience store, that they they don’t think about it. They just they just choose. And that is that is a huge piece of what they’re doing. And so when they’re running their media mix modeling, they’re very intentional on making sure that their share of voice and their core attitudes are doing what they need to do to drive all the way down to retail. I think for the line extension piece, you’re right. I mean, they’re definitely buying brands and not all those brands are going to succeed and they’re only going to invest marketing against those brands where they think they have a decent shot of, you know, of getting shelf space and of activating the shopper marketing side.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:08] But are they are they succeeding because of their marketing or are they succeeding because of their distribution?

Andy Hasselwander: [00:08:13] Well, both. I mean, distribution is a part of marketing. I mean, upper funnel advertising is probably the beginning of the funnel and distribution is the end. You know, you have to have ultimately, if if a consumer has an attitude, that attitude is only going to be activated. If when they get to all the points of distribution they can activate, that’s going to be there. So, I mean, if you had if you had to say to a coach, you know, what’s more important, shopper marketing, distribution or advertising, they would just say both because they’re both absolutely critical, you know, but one one sort of top of funnel and the other’s bottom of funnel. But the key is understanding how those are valued ultimately now.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:55] But can any of those things that these mega enterprises can can use, can they trickle down to a small to midsize firm that doesn’t have the resources or the distribution?

Andy Hasselwander: [00:09:09] I think I think what you’re seeing with right now with with on the consumer side, if we’re talking about consumers and there’s all these other industries as well, because I think it’s become much easier for upstart to to enter. And that’s for two reasons. Going back to marketing and distribution, from a marketing perspective, it’s much easier to put together long tail marketing strategies. I think Instagram and a lot of digital media, a lot of digital video has made that far more easy to do and actually has made it actually more difficult for large, large firms to compete. Because you can no longer just buy huge pieces of viewership on broadcast. You have to actually play a little bit of small ball, which can be hard for for larger firms. So that’s made it easier. And then I think the other thing from a distribution perspective obviously is, you know, e-commerce has made things much, much easier, but that gets back to for small firms, you know, they need they need to think the same way big firms do about segmentation, targeting and positioning. And the four P’s, just like marketing 101. And segmentation is if I’m going to compete and I’m going to win as a small firm, I need to pick a very specific segment. I need to be able to target them very effectively, which I can now do with digital media. And then I need to position myself in a way that is really differentiated from the larger firms that are out there. And then maybe going back to your previous point, maybe Coca-Cola will pick me up, right? Maybe they’ll maybe their business development team will go out and sort of put an offer out there. But I mean, it’s much easier, I think, now for small firms to compete because those barriers to entry on the upper funnel side, on the advertising side and on the distribution side have come down so much, but they still have to do it right.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:01] So so the fundamentals are still the same.

Andy Hasselwander: [00:11:04] Oh, yeah. And the models are still the same.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:07] So nothing has changed from that standpoint. Now you can measure better and more effectively. So you can invest your dollars wiser.

Andy Hasselwander: [00:11:15] Yeah, absolutely. And I think. Marketing has become marketing and distribution generally has become a much more scientific discipline because it can be instrumented. I mean, all the money that’s gone to marketing technology. If you just look at all the multiples of software as a service, martech firms, Salesforce was kind of the pioneer there before that was was Siebel. But all the money that’s gone in there, the reason that’s going there is it’s for everything from a small 50 person firm or a 25 person firm to do content marketing all the way up to a gigantic firm trying to create digital CRM, sort of customer management pathways that are really measurable and delight customers. So and you know, and that’s hard to do, but, but the technology now makes it certainly much, much more measurable than it ever was.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:07] Now, what about kind of the ever there’s always friction between sales and marketing. Has that has this influx of data helped hurt made it grayer?

Andy Hasselwander: [00:12:22] Well, you know, my my marketing professor a long time ago used to say that marketing was was. You defined it simply as the entirety of all of the customer facing or outside facing functions of the firm. And I’ve always I’ve always believed that. And I think sales was simply the most the highest cost per transaction, most personalized piece of that. And I think that holds together logically. But but obviously, that being said, sales has a very the sales function generally is a very, very different culture than than marketing sit in person sales selling is in COVID accelerated this with digital transformation is becoming harder. And what you’re seeing we used to actually say telesales was different or inside sales was different than field sales. Now it’s it’s really not I mean, most if you look, for example, at Medicare Medicare selling Medicare Advantage, most of these agents now are a lot of these agents are selling digitally over the phone, whereas even three years ago they would have been across the kitchen table. So it’s in a way it’s made selling more digital, more measurable, more data driven. I think sales is always going to be the toughest thing to measure because it ultimately depends on an individual keying in an activity or an individual keying in a disposition.

Andy Hasselwander: [00:13:46] And that’s hard to do. I mean, this is if you talk to anyone who has Salesforce, a Salesforce.com, and they say what’s what’s the base challenge, the challenge is data cleanliness. And it’s just getting people, for example, to pick the right thing out of a pick list or enter the date a call happened. I don’t know if that’s going to get better. Honestly, I, I think I think it might, but, you know, that that’s been a that’s been a tough one for a long time. The tension used to be the tension between sales and marketing. You know, the ultimately what sales wants for marketing is they weren’t really high quality leads and what marketing wants for from sales is they want good data and that tension is always going to be there. And I think in organizations that have integrated sales and marketing organizations, those tend to those tensions tend to to work at work themselves out. But where you have executives running each department who are very different and sort of run them in silos that can be that can be tough.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:46] So now what is your ideal client look like?

Andy Hasselwander: [00:14:51] Well, for Market Bridge, you know, we we as I mentioned, we’re primarily focused on Fortune 500 space. We typically put together we work over multiple years with clients building out data science and data infrastructures with them and delivering and delivering long run solutions. Eventually, our goal is to is to leave, right? Our bench our goal is to teach clients how to build these systems and operate these systems so we don’t have to be there anymore. I would say our our ideal client inside of of that kind of company is a company who wants to take a scientific approach towards sales and marketing, who wants to have reproducible data stack and reproducible technology stack. In other words, one that we know exactly why things happen and one that wants to have their data science team and their data engineering team bring bring these things in-house. We’re not a software reseller, so we work with all the MarTech stack, but we’re not we sort of intentionally don’t choose one or the other or partner with one or the other. We’re very agnostic in that respect. So I think we can fit into, you know, whether somebody has an Adobe stack or a Salesforce stack or Oracle or whatever we can we can fit in. It’s more the ethos of the executives and making sure that they really want to be very scientific in how they do marketing and sales.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:19] Now, what are some symptoms that they’ve got a problem like? What are some of the things going on? What are some of the things that they’re dealing with where they’re like, Hey, maybe we should be calling these Market Ridge folks?

Andy Hasselwander: [00:16:28] Yeah, you know, I mean, basically anyone who says, you know, I’m pretty sure that my marketing is half my marketing is working, but I’m not sure which half that would be a classic one.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:39] People are still saying that because they were saying that 50 years ago.

Andy Hasselwander: [00:16:42] Yeah, they’re saying it probably more. And but I think going back to the most classic one we get is I know upper funnel or brand is is important, but I can’t prove it. And you know, or somebody that might say something like, geez, I really we’re spending all this money on promotion, on promotional paid search, and my CPAs look good. But I think I think I’m overspending because I think I might be just doing demand capture that would be happening anyway. Those would be the kinds of questions we would get most often from CMO’s. Another one might be, Hey, we’re sort of launching a new we’re in a we’re in new product launch mode and I don’t. I don’t know how much of my new product launch is is being driven by marketing and how much would have happened anyway. Those kind of hypotheticals tend to get asked. Another one on the data side would be would be, hey, I, I, I don’t really have a good sense of my marketing pal. So really, what the p now being what I’m getting and what I’m spending for it, I don’t, I don’t have a good data stack getting from my source, my source data systems up to that sort of almost accounting or financial reporting view of marketing’s effectiveness. Those would be some of the things.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:13] Can you share a story? Don’t name the name of the client, but maybe the problem that they were having, that you came in and were able to take their business to a new level, maybe get a result that maybe they didn’t even dream possible.

Andy Hasselwander: [00:18:24] Yeah, sure. So one of one that’s that’s fairly recent, I’d say is we had a client who, you know, had a good business. The business was, was from a market share perspective, stagnant or declining, direct response marketing looked effective. In other words, the cost per acquisition was was lower than the customer lifetime value. And yet they were declining and they had a strong slowly but but still they had a strong hypothesis that, that, that they weren’t spending enough upper funnel and that they were losing mindshare. And what we were able to do for them is we were able to build a two stage model where we proved that advertising was driving affinity and comprehension and awareness of the products where those system one. Attitudes. I mentioned earlier, we and we showed mathematically what that relationship looked like. And then secondly, we showed that those those attitudes, those core attitudes were over the course of months and even even a year plus were driving customer acquisition at rates that they were basically refilling the top of the funnel. And we were able to instrument all that, put that together, and then they were able to change their advertising strategy and sort of turn that decline around. And I’m not saying it’s not like we’re talking about you go from -10% to plus ten, it’s more like minus two to plus two. But that understanding that and understanding that relative market share is, you know, the mechanistic link of that to share voice or the basically the percent of messaging, upper funnel marketing. And that we’re doing and proving that mathematically, I think is really important in this case, help the client a ton. I mean, this was a major impact on their ability to sort of tell a compelling story to investors. So that would be a pretty good one.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:33] Well, if somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on your team, what’s a website?

Andy Hasselwander: [00:20:39] Yeah, it’s w-w-what market dashboard edgecomb. We have a dash in the middle. Apologize for that. That’s just somebody sat on the URL when we bought it but WW web slash dash market bridge dot com and hit contact us and we’d be happy to to reach out and have a conversation.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:56] Well, Andy, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work. We appreciate you.

Andy Hasselwander: [00:21:01] Thanks, Lee. Appreciate it.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:02] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Richmond Business Radio.

Porter L. “Buddy” Ozanne, III With Probity Advisors, Inc.

June 29, 2022 by Jacob Lapera

Dallas Business Radio

Porter L. “Buddy” Ozanne, III With Probity Advisors, Inc.

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Porter L. “Buddy” Ozanne, III AEP^®, ChFC, founder of Probity Advisors, Inc., a Dallas-based registered investment advisory firm(RIA), is celebrating his 50th work anniversary in the financial industry. Over the past five decades, Ozanne, III has helped innumerable Dallas families and individuals create and conserve wealth.

The native Texan entered the financial industry in1971 when he joined his father, Porter L. Ozanne, Jr.’s, insurance agency, Ozanne and Associates, and later acquired the business in 1976. As a forward-thinker, Ozanne, III, wanted to provide Dallas area residents with holistic wealth management solutions and foundedProbity Advisors, Inc. in 2002. By adding investment, retirement portfolio and asset management services, the firm has been able to better accommodate its clients’ financial and estate planning goals. Probity Advisors, Inc. is now focused on helping multi-generational families build and grow wealth.

Asa Southern MethodistUniversity (SMU) alumnus, Ozanne, III has dedicated his professional life serving SMU by holding various board positions and mentoring business students and student-athletes. He also donates his time and resources to serve local Dallas nonprofits and organizations.

Not one to sit at home, Ozanne, III and his wife, Linda attend SMU sports games, primarily football and basketball. He also enjoys golf, fly fishing, travel, and flying. An avid flyer, he had to land planes in two in-flight emergency situations. After his first emergency landing, his first thought was how relieved he had just bought additional life insurance for his family.

Ozanne, III believes that integrity is the most important aspect of running a business. That’s why he named the firm Probity Advisors, Inc.

Connect with Porter on LinkedIn and follow Probity Advisors on Facebook and Twitter.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

The secret to your success
The transition from insurance to wealth management
The most important (obstacle) Americans will be facing financially in the future

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:05] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Dallas, Texas. It’s time for Dallas Business Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:17] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Dallas Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. Today on the show, we have Buddy Ozanne with Probity Advisors. Welcome, Buddy.

Porter L. “Buddy” Ozanne, III: [00:00:28] Oh, thank you, Liddy. It’s good to be here.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:30] Well, before we get too far into things, tell us about probity advisors. How are you serving folks?

Porter L. “Buddy” Ozanne, III: [00:00:36] Okay. So property advisors, we help people create and conserve wealth. We’re an independent registered investment advisory firm registered with the SEC and independent. We offer our clients financial planning, estate planning, business succession planning, retirement planning services, and we follow that up with excellent asset management services to fill the clients needs on a fee only basis, by the way.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:15] Now, I think in today’s world, especially with the turbulent times that we’re dealing with right now, to have somebody like you on the team is a must have. It’s not a nice to have. I think that when things are going well, then everybody is kind of quote unquote system is working great. But when things are kind of going through a rough patch, this is where you need a steady hand of an advisor. How do you help your clients, you know, through this kind of what are some of the conversations you’re having with the clients now as opposed to if I was there on my own and I’m seeing headlines and woe is me stories left and right, and I’m just going to have to sort through this on my own without any help. Like, I think that what you’re doing is critically important.

Porter L. “Buddy” Ozanne, III: [00:02:03] You know, that’s a great question. First of all, you know, I’ve been in this business now for over 50 years, 50, 52nd year. And the entire my entire career, I have focused on helping people plan, plan for retirement, plan their estates. You know, we do a lot of estate settlement work. We help people, you know, take people to attorneys that do a great job of of setting up trusts and so on and so forth and so and, you know, my dad actually started our business back in in the 1950s. And and so we’re serving in a few cases, fourth generation clients of our family, of our business family. But it’s all been focused on on planning. And so when times get tough, we’re able to take our clients back to the plan and show them where. Yes, you know, we’ve planned for downtimes. You know, we we expect during your retirement, we expect, you know, after someone’s passed away and we’re and we’re managing money for, you know, widows and orphans, we expect we expect these times and we show them where we’ve we’ve gone through the process of planning and and, you know, so. We expected these times. This is what we’re doing about it. And and, you know, according to the plan, you’re still on track.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:48] Now, how do you help people with the mindset? Because as people age, it’s one thing like you’re going through your working years and you and you have a plan and you’re like, I’m going to invest. And so when there’s a downturn, you’re like, Good, I’m buying things on sale because I know I feel good about all this and everything’s, you know, going to be better down the road and you keep investing in a downturn. And then it goes, you know, the market goes up and then you’re investing and maybe you’re not getting as many shares, but you still feel good about the system because you’re betting on some better future. But what if you had to retire? You know, last year and you were going through the downturn at the time where you’re no longer accumulating wealth, you’re accumulating and spending down your nest egg. How do you help people through that time? Because that’s a mental shift. You know, it’s one thing when you know that I’m always refilling that bucket. But now when I’ve stopped filling the bucket and I’ve got to live with what’s in the bucket, that’s a different kind of mentality.

Porter L. “Buddy” Ozanne, III: [00:04:52] You’re absolutely right. And and I will say this, that my observation has been over almost 52 years in this business, that our happiest clients are clients that can afford to live on dividends, primarily those clients when they retire. Honestly, it just doesn’t matter. As long as we have them broadly diversified, we have, you know, some in fixed income. But but on the equity side, focused on dividends. That’s that’s not where the problem is. The problem is where people haven’t been. Doing their financial planning long enough to to have a portfolio that’s focused primarily on generating income from dividends and interest. And so they they kind of have to create we have to create dividends for them in in the form of, you know, capital gains, selling off some capital gains. And you’re right, you know, somebody if they begin this process just as they retire and and their assets are invested. You know as well as we can along, according to modern portfolio theory, which is is the system that we use in determining what kind of asset allocation that we provide for clients. If we’re having to depend on that, then then the client has to go through we have to take them through a planning process that shows them what’s going to happen if if indeed they wind up retiring and the market goes through a downturn like we’re experiencing. Once again, we want to make sure that that plan stands up and it becomes a spending policy issue. We help our clients figure out what their spending policy should be. Planning for a potential downturn. You know, once they once they hit retirement, it’s not it’s it’s it’s more comforting than just saying, well, this happens. But it’s, you know, it’s problematical for people. But what we find is if we’re doing the planning right, the the the the asset allocation will hold and, and our clients portfolio survives.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:47] Yeah. And I think it goes back to again, you have to have somebody on the team doing the work that you’re doing to play out scenarios and what ifs. And, and could you live with this kind of a budget or what would be the most you would need? What would be the least you would need? What are you willing to, you know, sacrifice? What are you not willing to sacrifice? You know, when it comes to lifestyle or choices or vacations or future, you know, giving grandkids stuff like all of these questions should be asked and answered well before you’re retired.

Porter L. “Buddy” Ozanne, III: [00:08:21] Oh, absolutely. And you mentioned someone has to be able to help people figure that out. And one of the things that we’re really blessed with here at Probity Advisors is although I’m in my seventies, we have five experts who do a great job on the planning side, and we have three wonderful analysts, two of whom are CFOs who who do the portfolio construction to meet the goals that are that our planners set. And, you know, one of my policies has been ever since we you know, created probity advisors was to hire. People that are smarter, smarter than I am. And so that makes life pretty easy for me right now. I mean, you know, we’ve we have our own analysts that are, you know, that are paying attention on every day to what’s going on in the economy and and doing, you know, company specific research, portfolio construction. And once again, to meet the goals that the our CFP, our planners set with our clients, it’s a great marriage. And we, like I say, we’ve just been blessed with wonderfully. Smart people and wonderful clients that have a tendency to stick to us. Stick with us, and. But. Does that answer your question? Yeah.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:00] And where do you fit when you have a portfolio or you’re managing someone’s portfolio or any of your clients portfolios where is you know, obviously a portfolio is investing a lot of times in other businesses and other organizations. How much of a portfolio should you invest in yourself, in your own entrepreneurial venture? Is there a place for that in a in your clients portfolios?

Porter L. “Buddy” Ozanne, III: [00:10:28] Oh, absolutely. We have a lot of entrepreneurial clients. And honestly, the best thing in the world for people to do if if they have a good business idea, is to invest in themselves. But once that once that business begins to make money and it’s throwing off. You know profits that that are not. Immediately needed. That that business needs to be looked at. We do actually, we manage for entrepreneurs a number of portfolios for businesses we refer to as sinking funds. But but they’re just portfolios of investable cash that the business has. You know, we counsel people on setting up retirement plans for tax efficiency and ways to save for their employees and themselves. And so, yeah, we really encourage people to to invest in themselves if they have a good business idea. Once that business idea starts bearing fruit, then we encourage those entrepreneurs to begin to diversify and and move. So much so that so that they’re not wiped out if if their particular industry gets hit by a recession or or something worse.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:10] Now, it sounds like your firm is kind of holistic in the sense that you’re trying to watch your clients back from a variety of places, whether it’s from wealth management. It sounds like there’s some insurance in there as well, and a variety of ways to really be that trusted advisor that a person needs if they really want to have that kind of good retirement they dream about.

Porter L. “Buddy” Ozanne, III: [00:12:38] Yeah. That’s a that’s a great point. My father started our business or the incubation of our business back in the 1950s when he went into the life insurance business. And he opened a an agency for the Guardian Life Insurance Company in Dallas in 1960. I went to work for him January the second of 1971. Guardian created the very first insurance. To my knowledge, the insurance company owned mutual fund, which I think is still there. And when I went to work for my dad, the first thing he had me doing was killing people on paper, filling out the estate tax return for small business owners as if the owner died as the spouse died. And back then, the estate tax rate was 70% the top. A state tax bracket back then was 70%. There was no unlimited marital deduction back then. So in a community property state like Texas, if the business owner or spouse died or if the business owner died, half the value of the business was exposed to a state tax with a $30,000 exemption. And like I say, up to a 70% tax. Well, we we we would run these numbers or I would run these numbers and we would have the business owner, you know, show.

Porter L. “Buddy” Ozanne, III: [00:14:26] Show them what what the cost was going to be of of the business owner dying, the spouse dying. And then we would try to help figure out, okay, so how do you reduce the cost? How do you and one of the ways of doing that, of course, is to get life insurance out of the estate and available for the family to use either to pay estate tax or to live on. And, you know, that evolved into financial planning, which evolved into providing financial solutions for retirement planning and other other areas of financial planning. And then that evolved into a fee only basis of serving clients. We still hold we still actually own the insurance agency, but that’s not really a part of probity advisors. And so, you know, we we make available to our clients the ability to acquire life insurance to solve that part of the financial plan and estate plan. And we fully disclose what the costs of doing that are and what and what individuals that are in that agency get paid. But but probity advisors is a fee only institution and totally separate from that agency.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:59] Now do you think that the role of Financial Advisor, obviously some of the job requirements have changed over the years and what they may do in a day to day basis. But at the heart of what they’re doing is helping people navigate a successful retirement and have more, I guess, predictable income as they age. As has that part change? Is it still a relationship business where you really have to care about people? It can’t. It seems like a lot of folks are moving to this robo advisor world where they think they can just put in, you know, pay a fee every month that just comes out of your account. You don’t have to talk to a human. And it all just happens like magic.

Porter L. “Buddy” Ozanne, III: [00:16:41] Yeah, that’s a good point. You know, in some people, we’re going to do just fine with robo advisor. But but, but they’re going to have to if they want financial planning, they’re going to have to do that themselves, too. If they want a state planning, they’re going to have to either do that themselves or go find, you know, somebody that’ll do the estate plan for them, an attorney CPA, a CFP. We find that our clients are very comforted with the holistic approach that we take. We we provide the planning and then we find the solutions for them. And. And of course, you know, we provide some of those solutions. But, you know, not every client is going to. You know, you’re absolutely right in our business model. Care for the client? Integrity. Really, really good people. Providing service is really the key to success.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:54] Well, I think that, as you mentioned earlier, you have clients that span multiple generations, which I think is pretty unusual in your in your industry, that most financial advisors, their kids don’t don’t take up the same financial advisor they are. They’re kind of go their own way. So if you’ve been able to crack the code to have multiple generations still under your umbrella, you must be doing something right.

Porter L. “Buddy” Ozanne, III: [00:18:22] Yeah, that’s exactly right. As a matter of fact, honestly, then this big key to my success is honestly has been prayer. You know, I’ve prayed for guidance. I pray every day for the ability to help somebody. And and a long time ago, when I first went to work for my dad, that that estate planning focus that that that we began with and we still continue with his actually, that’s the key to the code. The the fact is if we do the estate planning, we get a really good estate planning attorney involved to draft the documents when mom or dad passes away. The family seeks out our help. In doing the estate settlement work. And during that process, we get to we get to kind of shine in front of the family. Okay. Well, so we do. This is the next step. This is the next step. We get a tax ID number for the trust. Whatever it is that we know that we’re doing, we we allocate assets between trusts. We help hold their hands through that, that making that decision process. We then do financial planning for the beneficiaries to figure out how much income they need. And what happens is when someone dies, instead of the kids taking assets to their relationships more frequently, we wind up with additional assets because they see the competency of the work that we’ve done for their parents.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:12] Well, I think it’s super wise to invest in the next generation. Like, why try to find brand new clients when you have a pile of them just sitting there with your existing clients?

Porter L. “Buddy” Ozanne, III: [00:20:23] Right. That’s exactly right. In the estate planning and estate settlement process is is key to to to hang on to those clients.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:34] But most, at least in my work, I’ve seen a lot of financial advisors don’t want to invest in the children because they don’t have the assets yet. And, you know, if you wait till the last second, you know, they’ve already they might already make a decision. So at least show them some value prior so that they think of you when the moment comes.

Porter L. “Buddy” Ozanne, III: [00:20:58] That’s exactly right. And as a matter of fact, you know, to to that end, we’re not snobs. You know, a lot of our competitors will say, you know, we don’t want to deal with you unless you have $1,000,000,000 portfolio or a half million dollar portfolio. There’s TV advertisements. I won’t mention the name. You know, if you have a half million dollars or more, come to us. We’re not snobs like that. We we have actually created, you know, a small account service for kids and grandkids, you know, where, you know, grandparents, parents, you know, they want to set up a five9 account for the. You know, for their kids or grandkids. We’re going to help them do that. And. And so, you know, we do invest in. You know, generations to come. But we also in the estate planning process, we get our clients to bring their families in before anyone dies to to help the family, the kids understand what their responsibilities are in the estate plan. You know what? The way their parents have set up their estate, you know what their ultimate goal is for their family and what the kids responsibilities are with regards to, you know, what if what do we do if dad passes away and mom, you know, needs mental care assistance, for example? You know, we have those frank discussions with the family. We get to know the family. We get to know the kids. And the kids have needs. We’re going to figure out a way to fill those needs, too.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:55] Yeah. And what better way to teach them the the proper way to save and to get, you know, the power of compounding working in their favor early, earlier, the better.

Porter L. “Buddy” Ozanne, III: [00:23:06] Absolutely. Absolutely.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:09] So what do you need more of now? How can we help? Do you need more advisors? You need more clients. What do you. What do you need?

Porter L. “Buddy” Ozanne, III: [00:23:18] Well, of course, you know, we need good, experienced advisors, actually. We have, like I mentioned, three analysts. We have a a an SME football player is interning with us this summer. But our newest our most recent employee, HA, has been with us eight years. He’s a young CFP. We have five scopes and they’re all, of course, younger than I am. And, you know, we have great tenure. The youngest, like I say, employee, has been with us eight years. And it goes all the way to two of our CFOs have been with us 20 years. You know, we would love to find an advisor that likes the kind of of client centric. The only client loving, planning focused service. You know, if that appeals to people, the idea of being independent of of of the big company, you know, we’re looking for those advisors and of course, you know, we we would love to add clients. We we, you know, work solely by referral. You know, we don’t none of our people do code calls and such. So we’re sure we’re we’re still looking to grow.

Lee Kantor: [00:25:00] So if somebody wants to learn more about property advisors, what’s the website?

Porter L. “Buddy” Ozanne, III: [00:25:06] W w w probity advisors dot com.

Lee Kantor: [00:25:10] Well, buddy, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Porter L. “Buddy” Ozanne, III: [00:25:16] Lee. Thank you for having me. This is this has been a fun experience.

Lee Kantor: [00:25:20] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you next time on Dallas Business Radio.

Kyle Knapp With Saxonburg Area Business Association

June 29, 2022 by Jacob Lapera

Association Leadership Radio

Kyle Knapp With Saxonburg Area Business Association

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Kyle C. Knapp is the founder and CEO of Viterium LLC, an IT Managed Services Provider in Saxonburg, PA. He is responsible for all functions of the company and works with organizations and individuals in the Greater Pittsburgh area to keep their information systems running efficiently and securely.

Mr. Knapp also serves the community through his activities as President of the Board of Directors for the Saxonburg Area Business Association, Governance Committee Chair on the Board of Life’sWork of Western PA, and Board member of Downtown Kittanning Inc.

SABA was formed in June 1990 for the purpose of organizing, planning, and implementing functions to benefit our community by enhancing the economic prosperity of members, encouraging economic development of the area, and promoting free enterprise, growth, and quality of life in southeast Butler County, PA, especially in the greater Saxonburg region.

Connect with Kyle on LinkedIn and follow SABA on Facebook.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

The role of Business Associations
Networking opportunities for business owners
Resources for small businesses
Marketing your business on a budget
Getting started in business

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:02] Broadcasting live from the business radio studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Association Leadership Radio. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:17] Lee Kantor here another episode of Association Leadership Radio, and this is going to be a good one. Today on the show, we have Kyle Knapp and he is with the Saxon Berg Area Business Association. Welcome, Kyle.

Kyle Knapp: [00:00:30] Thank you, Lee. Great to be here.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:31] Well, before we get too far into things, tell us about the Saxon Burg Area Business Association. How are you serving, folks?

Kyle Knapp: [00:00:39] Well, we started about 30 years ago, and we are focused on local governments, working with local governments to enhance the business environment for our members, as well as bringing consumers into the area through events and promotions for our members.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:00] Now, what was kind of what did something spur this 30 years ago that said, hey, you know what, maybe all the business folks should get together here and work together to for the greater good.

Kyle Knapp: [00:01:11] There was just a couple of folks that had stores and just really wanted to work together with the other people in the in the area to promote their businesses and to promote our town. We have a long, rich history, so we like to bring people in so they can see all the historical sites and visit our locations.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:34] That was that not being kind of those services, not being delivered by a Chamber of Commerce or other type of associations that typically form.

Kyle Knapp: [00:01:43] Yeah, we do have a Chamber of commerce and actually a tourism group also in our county. However, there’s a lot of history in our area. So yeah, we felt that we were a small piece of a larger pie. We really wanted to kind of take the bull by the horns and really promote our town on our own, in addition to the support provided by the Chamber and the Tourism Bureau.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:10] Now, how do you kind of see the the differences between a business association and a chamber?

Kyle Knapp: [00:02:16] The chamber is usually a larger geographic area, and they work with kind of county governments and maybe even the state governments in some sense. Whereas I think the business association is operate more on a local level. We can really get to know our members and work with our local government as far as the regulations and things that they can do to help our businesses prosper. And we also help to promote building owners to fill any open spots because it’s. Tourists, I think, like to see a bustling town and area and have a lot of things to do rather than see, you know, half of the the shops boarded up because no one’s operating out of it.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:07] So when you say that and it seems like you’re very collaborative, that everybody is kind of working together in this way. What drew you to this leadership role? I mean, what’s your day job?

Kyle Knapp: [00:03:20] My day job is running a company for offering I.T. support, computer support to small businesses. I started my company about four years ago, and the Saxon Burg Area Business Association was the first group that I joined. I thought that it made the most sense that they’re a local group. I already knew a lot of the people that were within that, and so I joined. I enjoyed the networking opportunities and within about a year and a half, I was elected as president of the organization. So I got to make a good impact on our town.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:56] So what’s kind of your dream like? What? What do you want more out of the like what kind of outcome do you desire from being the leader of this organization?

Kyle Knapp: [00:04:07] The outcome I desire is to see a robust economy in our local area with a lot of events that people can participate in that bring in outside consumers. Because our town is kind of in the middle of a triangle of major highways. So there’s really people don’t just come through. Saxon burg you don’t there’s just no three ways through. So we have to really have something, a destination, a reason for them to come visit. So I’d like to see all of our local businesses having events working together in just promoting our area.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:51] Now, for the business folks that join or should join, what are some of the reasons, the compelling reasons why, if you’re a business owner in the Saxon burg area, that this should be a must join group.

Kyle Knapp: [00:05:10] You know, one of the main benefits that we provide is promotion advertising. So we have a website. We list all of our members, all of our members information. We have a Facebook group where we promote our members. We’ll do spotlights periodically, where we talk about a business in our area, a little bit of their history, what they’re currently doing, what they’re offering. And then we actually do some paid ads or boosts on social media to yeah. To get the word out. The the networking opportunities are great with our our business is really work together a lot and try to patronize each other’s businesses rather than going outside, if possible. A lot of my clients have have come from joining the group and just being able to talk about what I do and in offering that service to the local businesses.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:07] Now, when you’re in the kind of the town environment that you’re in, a lot of folks are like, Well, why should I join the Business Association? Everybody knows who I am. It’s a small town. Everybody knows everybody. So is there is it worth the dues or the, you know, the time commitment to to actually be part of an association? I think that for most people, that that’s some consideration for people who are members of associations. And like you have leaned into this leadership role, it becomes a this is just kind of being a good corporate citizen. This is something you should be doing and you should be supporting everybody here because we’re all in this together. And and if we start failing individually, then as a collective, we’re all going to fail. So how do you kind of help make that case for your other business people that haven’t yet joined it?

Kyle Knapp: [00:07:01] Right. So, I mean, we really try to keep our our dues low just for that reason. I mean, it just make it an easy, easy entry for our new members and current members to remain. But one of the biggest things we do is we we leverage the group power to expand our influence further than we could as individuals. So we do some advertising through billboards, magazines, things that a an individual business on their own probably couldn’t afford. So this allows us to not just market to our local people who, like you say, a lot. A lot of the people in the local town know everybody knows everyone. But this expands our sphere of influence by. Standing together in using the power of of the group.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:58] Now, are you finding that you’re getting a lot of folks that are first time business people, like maybe they had a corporate job or a more worked for a larger enterprise and then they’re kind of going out on their own nowadays.

Kyle Knapp: [00:08:13] Yeah, we do have some of that. We have some some folks who have opened up stores. Maybe they retired from their their day job and this is just something to do in their golden years. But we also do have people who are currently even working in a another job, but they’re moonlighting and kind of testing the waters to see if their business idea can can take root and can become a full time venture for them.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:45] So is that something where the association can help them kind of learn the ropes of getting started in business?

Kyle Knapp: [00:08:52] Yeah, definitely. We have a lot of small business owners who have started on the business on their own. We can definitely provide feedback and advice, and particularly with resource other resources that businesses can use that they may not have known even existed before joining in getting the first hand knowledge. There’s just there’s so much information available on the on the Internet. It’s hard to filter through what’s really worth it or not. So I think having the advice of someone who’s been through that and who’s tried out different resources on what work best for them is really invaluable to a new business owner.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:36] Now, any advice for the people in a similar situation that you’re in kind of a smallish town? It’s super important the work that you’re doing, but it’s just you’ve got to kind of struggle to get the word out every day. You know, you’ve got to, you know, be present. You have to create events. There’s a lot of energy. You have to invest into this group that maybe isn’t appreciated by everybody, but it’s kind of like that unsung hero in the community that’s doing important work that maybe it isn’t at the forefront of other people’s minds.

Kyle Knapp: [00:10:09] Yeah, there can be some of that. But I mean, really keeping an eye on the on the bigger picture, what the reason or the purpose that you’re in that organization. And I also find that partnering with or at least making connections with other. Business associations and even even the chambers to to to work together in the when you find other people who are doing similar work and they have the enthusiasm enthusiasm it it compounds everyone’s enthusiasm kind of builds. And even if your organization does not have a lot of active members, just being involved with other people can share their, their, their passion for what they do. And there will come a time there will be people that ebbs and flows of people within the group that are organizing events, but keeping a steady hand on it will get you through the dips until you get some periods of high activity.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:14] So what’s been the most rewarding part of the job for you thus far? Has there been a moment where you’re like, Wow, this is really paying off? I can really see the impact I’m making, I think.

Kyle Knapp: [00:11:27] After COVID. I mean, during COVID, we all of our events, which were all in person where we did not have any that first year, the second year was very, very light. But this this past year, going into this year, we have basically revived and added new events. We so we’re we’re going stronger now than we were before COVID. So I think that that just shows the resiliency of everyone. And we also going into COVID had several storefronts that were empty, businesses had closed or moved, and we were able to get to 100% occupancy after COVID. And I think that’s just a great sign of the of how our our local community is thriving.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:16] Well, congratulations on that. That is a big achievement. And you can see that the impact is real. I mean, it takes that whole team in order to keep that going. That wouldn’t have happened by itself.

Kyle Knapp: [00:12:30] Absolutely. It’s nothing. Nothing happens very little. It happens by accident. I mean, you do have to put in some effort, but it is very rewarding to see the outcome when when it happens.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:46] Yeah. And you can see that people are really hungry for that sense of community and the working together and getting back to that some sense of normalcy of everybody’s in person, you know, looking each other in the eyes, shaking their hands.

Kyle Knapp: [00:12:59] Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:01] So what do you need more of? How can we help you at Saxon burg and also in your day job? Business vegetarian?

Kyle Knapp: [00:13:09] Well, I mean, any any opportunity to promote our town and say, hey, we’ve got a great little community here. We have a lot of shops, a lot of great restaurants to visit. So if you if you’re in the area where in the greater Pittsburgh area, just northeast of Pittsburgh. So if you happen to be in Pittsburgh and you have a data that you want to take a look at, some some great American history, we have that to offer. And for my my day job, I work in cybersecurity for for all businesses. And it really doesn’t matter where they are. A lot of my work is remote, so if anyone is having difficulty finding a provider or just wants some feedback, some maybe a second opinion on what they can do to secure their local networks, I’m happy to have a conversation.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:01] All right. Well, if somebody wants to learn more about Saxon Burg Business Association, what’s the website?

Kyle Knapp: [00:14:07] The website is WW dot Saxon business dot org.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:13] Good stuff. Well, Kyle, thank you so much for sharing your story. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Kyle Knapp: [00:14:19] Thank you, Lee. I appreciate it. And. Thanks for having me on the show.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:23] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Association Leadership Radio.

Voice Over Artist and Audiobook Narrator Sharon Cline

June 29, 2022 by Jacob Lapera

Cherokee Business Radio

Voice Over Artist and Audiobook Narrator Sharon Cline

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This Episode was brought to you by

Sharon Cline is a professional voice-over artist and audiobook narrator in Atlanta, and she has recorded voiceovers for podcasts, authors, internal company videos, doctor’s offices, automated voice recordings, and you can hear her on YouTube and educational videos. She has recorded 16 audiobooks so far, and love working with authors and businesses alike.

Connect with Sharon on LinkedIn.

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:07] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Woodstock, Georgia. It’s time for Cherokee Business Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Stone Payton: [00:00:23] Welcome to Cherokee Business Radio Stone Payton here with you this morning. And today’s episode is brought to you in part by Alma Coffee, sustainably grown, veteran owned and direct trade, which of course means from seed to cup, there are no middlemen. Please go check them out at my Alma coffee and go visit their Roastery Cafe at 34 or 48 Holly Springs Parkway in Canton. As for Harry or the brains of the outfit Leticia and please tell them that Stone sent you. You guys are in for a real treat this morning and please join me in welcoming to the broadcast voiceover artist and audiobook narrator Miss Sharon Cline. Good morning.

Sharon Cline: [00:01:07] Good morning. Thank you for having me.

Stone Payton: [00:01:08] Oh, what a delight to have you in the studio. So, voiceover artists, audiobook. Narrator Why, when, how, what compelled you to get into this line of work?

Sharon Cline: [00:01:20] Well, I used to do a lot of driving down to Atlanta every day, and I would listen to a lot of audiobooks, which is the most fun for me, because I’d be excited to get back in my car to kind of hear what was happening with the rest of the story. And so I really just thought, well, I wonder if I could do any of these kind of characters or I think I just got so used to hearing what it sounded like. I wondered if I could sound the same. So I did some I did some research online and I found a website called Ask.com, and it teaches you kind of how to become an audiobook narrator and what you need and how to be successful. And so I started to audition for different books and got a few books, and that just started sort of my, my audio journey and then voiceover work a couple of years later, I thought, gosh, you know, it’d be nice to, to do something similar, but, but a shorter amount of time because books can be, you know, months of recording, you know, in my spare time outside of my my regular everyday job. So but the goal would be to be able to make this kind of work, my everyday job. So it’s part of why I’m here with you. So I really appreciate the time.

Stone Payton: [00:02:27] Yeah. So I hadn’t thought about the character aspect so, so much. So do you have an acting background or like did you do community theater? Did you were you always in the high school play kind of thing?

Sharon Cline: [00:02:38] It was, you know, my story is like you’re following me. Yeah, no, I really was. I did a lot of theater in high school and, you know, like musicals and just kind of loved getting into characters. And so I think one of one of the most fun parts about doing the audiobooks and recording is kind of, you know, becoming a different person. And I’m trying to identify with the energy of who that person is to make it easy for the person listening to automatically know this character speaking. You know, it’s different from when you’re just reading a book and you’re hearing voices in your head as opposed to hearing it. You know, you don’t want someone to question who’s speaking and get confused.

Intro: [00:03:13] So.

Stone Payton: [00:03:14] Well, I can’t imagine that challenge because it’s one thing to see an actor on stage and they’re in costume and they have different movements. And maybe, maybe now that I’m a little more informed, I’ll look and listen for different voice, too. But you’ve got to do it all with the voice, right?

Sharon Cline: [00:03:30] So the main, if it’s a woman speaking, usually I get a book where the main character is is a woman. So I have like a certain tone for her. And then her friends will come along and they’ll either have a higher pitch or a lower pitch or an accent. And and then, of course, men will be speaking. So I try to speak in a bit of like a lower tone, not not exactly like that. But I try to make it sound more distinctive so that when you’re listening, they don’t always say he said. She said it’s more just a natural flow of conversation.

Stone Payton: [00:03:58] So of course, I’m a huge admirer of Frank Caliendo. The me and my nephew candidly does a pretty darn good Christopher Walken and Donald Trump. No kidding. So he’s like entertainment at the family dinner, right? And I enjoy the heck out of it, but I wouldn’t even know where to begin. So you just you’ve had to train yourself. You’ve gone to help get people to help you. How does that.

Sharon Cline: [00:04:23] Work? Well, I really kind of I look up YouTube videos a lot on different accents. Like there was one book that I did where a character was from Jamaica. Yeah, I think. And I was like, I don’t.

Intro: [00:04:36] Know, I sound like an idiot.

Sharon Cline: [00:04:38] I sound like an idiot. And people are going to hate this book and write the author. And so I just did a lot of like listening over and over to just the tone. And I checked with the author and it’s like, Here’s how I sound. Are you happy with this? Because my goal as sure is to make the author just so happy and feel like, Oh, yes, this is exactly what I was looking for. That’s the way I want to be. With anyone I’m interacting with in this industry is to just hope that they’re extremely happy with everything that I’ve done and that that they feel like, okay, yes, this this is brought to life, my product. This has brought to life these characters. And it’s very special. When an author feels that way, it’s like very satisfying for me.

Stone Payton: [00:05:16] Well, no, that’s that’s the beginning, too, to the answer, I’m sure. But a question I wanted to ask you is, why do you. You feel that that that this kind of work is so important to business, to businesses and authors?

Sharon Cline: [00:05:28] And that’s a good question. It is a good question, I think, in terms of business or product. When I read a statistic and I wish I could give you the exact source, so I hope you believe me. But there’s about 8 seconds that we have when we’re listening to something for for an ad to catch our attention, because I do the same thing. If I’m not really into it, I switch over to something else. So having a voice set the tone of of what your product is or your business is or your services is really important. It gives an energy. It gives almost a call to action. Listen. Listen to what I have to say. This is important. You know, it brings to life your product. And it and it explains in a really super concise, non confusing way. Usually this is the problem that people have. This is an answer. You know, it could be us and this is why we’re different and this and so it’s it makes it’s this the product or service that you have or even book. It sounds very professional and serious and not just someone off the street speaking. And I think a voiceover artist kind of knows the audience as well, knows what audiences want, because that’s kind of what they’re thinking about all the time. What what would someone want to hear and how how how can you make it sound even more appealing than than just someone on the street speaking? So I think that’s why it feels really important is is to have that professional sound be taken seriously, set the tone, explain in a concise way why your product is wonderful or different or important. You know what your values are.

Stone Payton: [00:07:01] So, so, so let’s walk that through a little bit. What are some of the applications? One that comes immediately to mind, of course, is the we interview a lot of business authors here throughout the Business RadioX network. A long, long time ago, when I had black hair, I self-published a book. Right. Good for you. But there are a lot of people out there in the business world. So that’s one application is to is to have their book have an audio version of their book. But there must be a ton of other applications for this.

Sharon Cline: [00:07:33] I agree the voiceover industry is so huge and I’m just still what, two years into it? So I’m not as definitely not an expert yet. I hope to be some day. But just from the experience that I’ve had in kind of dabbling in this industry and I did go to school for it. So got some really good insight into different ways that I can market myself. And one of the big genres is, is like computer games and video games and it’s it’s huge. I would love to get involved in that way some way and be a character on one of these kinds of games. And it can go on and on and on. And that’s the goal kind of for me is steady work. But also if you you’ve got obviously radio and commercials and you’ve got oh my goodness, I’m trying to think there’s like so many different aspects. It’s kind of crazy because when you really pay attention, you can hear how voices are involved in so many different parts of our lives. And I watch TV, obviously, and have hear a commercial come on and I wonder, what would I sound like if I had tried to done that? But but also there’s voice over announcing people like if you’re having an event and you need someone to speak and kind of announce people’s names, right? What’s happening? There are different videos that you can do as you’re walking around town, like there are media companies that need a voice for an explanation of what their projects are. There are real estate offices that would like to hire people to kind of explain this model home is coming and put that on YouTube. And I’ve done medical explainer videos like software that’s that’s brand new for a medical office and they want to have like their whole team learn how to use it. I’ve done the the voice for the explaining how that works. Gosh, I can’t even think it’s so funny. I’m like, race, my mind is racing. So I sound great and articulate. I’m sure I sound great.

Intro: [00:09:27] No, you don’t.

Stone Payton: [00:09:28] And I know our listeners can feel it too, and I can certainly feel it in this room. Your your passion for this work. I mean, this really I mean, I think this is what you’re meant to do.

Sharon Cline: [00:09:36] That’s so sweet. It’s very fun. And I find a lot of joy in it, which is to me, that’s kind of the key if you’re really finding some joy in what you’re doing. You know, it’s not really just about me making tons of money. It’s it’s it’s providing a service that you’re happy with. And we both win. You know, that’s the best is when there’s a win win, you know, you’re happy. I’m happy. You know, let’s hope. Let’s hope everyone walks away with a good feeling.

Stone Payton: [00:09:58] Sure. Okay. So how does the and I’m sure the answer to this is evolving, but how does the whole sales and marketing thing work for a small business like this? How do you get on people’s radar? How do you get those first conversations to talk to somebody about, Hey, maybe I could voice over your training videos or something?

Sharon Cline: [00:10:15] It’s a great question. There are lots of different ways that I could be marketing more, and it’s kind of my goal this year is. Actually to build this business. And and this actually is is part of it. I started to go to some local business meetings once a week like.

Stone Payton: [00:10:31] Like Woodstock Business Club or why or. Those are my those are my two. You know.

Sharon Cline: [00:10:35] I go to FAO and that’s how I met you. And it’s really great in that I feel like I’m not just a name or just even a voice that you hear somewhere. It’s getting to know people because ultimately that’s what business is. It’s it’s meeting with people and interacting with people. And I wanted to build my own brand in that way, not just be a business card or a mailer. I wanted to be a person. And I think just having met all the so many different, really wonderful and innovative and smart people that work here in Woodstock, it’s really been fun to say, you know, do you have an an interest? Like there’s the Reeves house, which has it’s an art center, but it’s also coffee.

Stone Payton: [00:11:18] Right. Right.

Sharon Cline: [00:11:18] To go and get a drink.

Stone Payton: [00:11:19] Beer and wine and some great waffles and before. What a waste. They promoted Zack, and now he’s running more stuff. But, Zack, if you guys have ever met Zack, he makes these sirups out of beer and it poured over. No, I love. I love everything about the retail.

Sharon Cline: [00:11:35] I’ve never had. That sounds amazing, but that’s what I mean. So if, like, let’s imagine that they had a little video that they wanted to explain their new I don’t know, sirup, you know, like, and put it on YouTube or put it on their website. Perfect. Exactly. Something like that. So I try to speak to different people. You know, there are mortgage lenders that are there. You know, do you have any need for a communication that you’d like to explain to people? Or is it do you need some direction on something? I mean, I would love to be able to help people to get whatever their message is out into the world in a way that they’re really happy with.

Stone Payton: [00:12:08] So let’s talk about process and again, probably evolving, but let’s walk. Let’s say that you do get a chance to have a meaningful, substantive conversation with Darren Hunter over there, over there at Mortgage. Mortgage. What is the name of his outfit that isn’t that awful? Anyway, Darren is a great he’s the mortgage hunter, you know. All right. So you talked to Darren. You meet him at Woodstock Business Club or around town or something, and he says, okay, yeah, tell me more. What what’s the process particularly like early in the Engage, you sit down and kind of think through goals and stuff.

Sharon Cline: [00:12:39] Yes, that’s exactly right. So what are some of the needs that you have? So for example, if he’s saying, well, we’ve got a new kind of mortgage that we would like to promote to people, well, I would ask him to come up with some of the highlights and a script of of how he would like it to sound. What are some of your what would you like the audience to know the most about and what would you like them to do about it? And how are you different? Those are some of the the highlights that I think are important. So I have a studio in my basement. It’s a it’s a booth. It’s not a studio. This is a.

Stone Payton: [00:13:10] Studio. But you can well, I mean, it’s a different application. This is an application of some of this kind of work. But you can go in your booth and you can create really high quality stuff.

Sharon Cline: [00:13:19] That’s it.

Stone Payton: [00:13:20] You edit it, all that stuff.

Sharon Cline: [00:13:21] That’s right. And it’s really important to have the correct equipment. The sound is obviously it’s everything. So having the right software and microphone and being able to edit out certain sounds that just letters that are difficult to nail because they just pop too hard, you know. So anyway, there’s there are a lot of really great ways to make yourself sound so professional, so that it’s it’s very low, low noise floor so you can’t hear anything in the background. It’s just the message is as clear and concise as possible. So I can do that and turn that audio around and, you know, 12 hours. And it’s great because there are different ways to process the files. And if anything is like a real immediate of course, let me help you right now. So yeah, so I would be able to send them an audio file and have them, I don’t know, even if they wanted something on their their voice, like as an answering service. You know, I have one one of the companies I do is, you know, thank you for calling Stone Payton.

Intro: [00:14:20] Yeah.

Sharon Cline: [00:14:21] For this press one for, you know. So those are really important as well.

Stone Payton: [00:14:24] You know, you just just occurred to me, if anybody should have a really good, solid professional sounding voicemail, it’s Business RadioX people.

Sharon Cline: [00:14:32] Well, you know.

Stone Payton: [00:14:33] All of us do.

Sharon Cline: [00:14:33] Right? It’s true. But whoever did your intro, I was like, Who is this lady? She sounds great. She sounds great. You don’t need me at all.

Stone Payton: [00:14:40] I don’t know. Well, we’ll find out. But that’s another application, right? Exactly. And podcasting is so prolific. Not a lot of folks I don’t think are doing what we do with the in-studio and all the comforts. Right. But there’s a I don’t know, maybe they are. But there’s I mean, a lot of people are doing the podcasting. And so to reach out and have you do.

Sharon Cline: [00:14:57] Those, it’s true in the pandemic. That’s kind of when I started to do I had been going to school a couple of months doing voiceover, and that’s when the pandemic hit. And so I had no idea but was able to kind of watch as my business and kind of as I was learning it really did change. There’s so many people talked about, I’m home, I’m home, I can’t go to a studio, I can’t do anything. And so actually, I lost some. Opportunities to buy equipment because they were being sold so fast, because people were doing things from home, which is great and it’s actually a wonderful business to be part of, to not have to go to a big studio or live near a big city. I’m obviously able to just be in my B in my booth, used to be my closet. Now I have a booth and just, you know, record and feel like I’ve got opportunities to affect the whole world in a really small way. I’ve done podcast intros before. I’ve done questions for podcasts. It’s like it really does set a really nice tone of these people have invested time in making sure they sound polished and professional and it just gives, like, a nice feeling to to a consumer.

Stone Payton: [00:16:03] All right. So let’s go on the other side of the table. Someone who is pretty sure or at least they’re interested in exploring the idea of of capitalizing on talents like yours. I don’t even in fact, I know for sure I don’t know what to ask, what to look for when I begin. I mean, I do now. I just I just I’ll just reach out to Sharon. But but right. But but you and I haven’t gotten to know each other a little bit. And maybe even looking at doing some projects together, I wouldn’t know how to go about shopping for what kind of questions, what am I looking for? What should I be asking?

Sharon Cline: [00:16:35] You know, it’s interesting. There are a lot of people who if they’re looking for a voiceover artist or even an audiobook narrator, they have an idea of what they want the sound to be, but they don’t know it till they hear it, which sounds kind of odd, but it is very subjective. My voice is not for everyone, which is totally fine. I want to be whatever anyone really feels and identifies with. That’s what I want the most. But I would say that where I have a lot of my work I get from voices dot com. So if you’re interested in hiring a voiceover artist for a book or anything else, that’s one of the websites that I’m listed on and really appreciate. And if you Google like voice artists, you’ll find so many different ones and it’s nice they have samples of how people sound. So it’s not just what someone looks like or, you know, what other work that they’ve done, their list, their resume, it’s how do you sound and do you do you have an emotional connection at all to any of the products that I that I want? So I do a lot of auditioning stuff.

Stone Payton: [00:17:36] So there’s these demo kind of reel and some voiceover artists might even be willing to do like a little brief auditioning.

Sharon Cline: [00:17:44] Kind of thing. I do. I audition all the time. It’s just. Yeah, and the more the better. Yes. And I obviously don’t always get jobs, but I feel like every time I audition and I’m trying to identify with the energy and the and the emotion of whatever spot this is, I get better and better.

Stone Payton: [00:18:01] Okay. So let’s let’s say that I do this or I don’t call you because I really need a male voice for this or whatever, or young or kid or something. And I like this, but but what else should I be? I should be asking how they work, I guess. And there’s other stuff I should get. That’s right. Lined up, right?

Sharon Cline: [00:18:17] Yes. A lot of people want to know what’s the equipment that you have? What is your turnaround time?

Stone Payton: [00:18:22] Well, turnaround time, yeah.

Sharon Cline: [00:18:23] Okay. Do you do edits or, you know, revisions if I’m not happy and some people are not as detectable as others. So if you were like, you know, I really like the way this sounded, but can you say it just a little bit faster or a little bit slower? Put an emphasis on this word. You know, I tried.

Stone Payton: [00:18:39] To.

Sharon Cline: [00:18:40] I really like the I’m very direct. I don’t know what’s the.

Intro: [00:18:44] Word you can direct for me. You can direct me, right?

Sharon Cline: [00:18:48] Yeah. And I think it’s just important because, again, I’m such a pleaser regarding this job. I really the industry itself, I’m just like, why do I want you to be so happy? What do you want? You know, I’ll do it. And so definitely being able to have someone kind of listen and take direction and adjust themselves to to kind of match what your vision is. And even if you’re just starting, if you have no idea what you want something to sound like, here’s the script, here’s what I’ve got. Do you like how this is? It’s a starting point. And I think that’s kind of fun to with books because a lot of times the authors that I’ve worked with have not done an audio book before. And when they hear their characters come to life, it’s like so special. And I don’t know, it’s like a really I feel like, so honored, you know? It’s like a little sacred thing that I get to do is to be part of what their little vision is, you know? So I really appreciate the opportunities for sure, and I’m grateful for them.

Stone Payton: [00:19:36] Well, I can tell that you are. What are you enjoying the most? What are you finding the most rewarding about this pursuit? Whoa.

Sharon Cline: [00:19:42] Okay, I love these questions. I’m taking them for myself. So when I have an interview show someday.

Stone Payton: [00:19:47] Oh, you’re going to have a show. We’re going to talk about that after this.

Intro: [00:19:50] Oh.

Stone Payton: [00:19:50] You’re going to have a show.

Intro: [00:19:52] Well.

Sharon Cline: [00:19:53] I can’t wait. This is so fun. So I think the most rewarding is when I feel like I’ve really been able to identify with what an author or a business or producer is looking for, like the energy of what they want, the tone of what they want. And I feel like I’ve been able to match it, understand it and match it. I don’t know. There’s just like I just get a little thrill about it myself. I’m like, Yeah, I did what I did it. You know, I some the way that I was put together in the way I. Sound naturally somehow really makes someone else really happy.

Stone Payton: [00:20:25] With, yeah.

Sharon Cline: [00:20:26] Whatever I can do for them. So there’s just like a really personal, deep satisfaction. I get out of that and it’s just like a little party I have. Any time I get hired to do anything, I already have one for sure, but I’m still just so honored, so honored and just want to, you know, prove them right for choosing me. I guess so. Yeah, it’s really it’s really fun. I mean, and an author being super happy is. Yeah, it’s oh, it’s the best. Yeah. I feel like they’re my, they’re my people. I don’t know. They’re my family now.

Stone Payton: [00:20:55] All right. So let’s shift gears here for a moment. Talk about being an entrepreneur, the decision, because that can be a daunting prospect for some people. Was there like this catalytic moment? Was it just a slow roll and you eased into it, accidentally tripped over it? Because I’ve heard all of those things over the years. Yeah, let’s let’s let’s talk about that a little bit. What was what was that?

Sharon Cline: [00:21:18] So when I started to do audiobooks, being paid was, was part of the process. Like, how do I what what is going to happen now? So I had to create, you know, a little business for myself so that I had a tax ID number. And really I stumble through everything. I kind of the first thing I did when I decided to do audiobooks is I put like a little sample of what I sound like. And I auditioned for a couple of different ones. And when I got hired, I actually had like a total meltdown. Like, what.

Intro: [00:21:40] Do you mean? Oh, no, I got.

Sharon Cline: [00:21:41] To do this for real. I’m like, What does this mean? I don’t even have this or that. Like, I kind of like through the through the phishing hook out there. And it someone caught it and I was like, Oh, no. So then I had to kind of go backwards. Well, what do I need to actually make this work? And in in figuring all of that out, it’s a lot of resources on the Internet, obviously, of how to create your own business. You have to make a name and apply and pay certain fees or actually I don’t even remember. I just kind of did. Everything was like, please, please make this work. I hope I did this right. But yeah. So in the beginning it was really just doing audiobooks and kind of everything I did was just online and very slow and I wanted it to be so good. And just as time’s gone on and I think I’ve done maybe like 16 or 17 audiobooks. Wow. Yeah. So I realized, well, I really kind of need to understand how to market myself as Yeah. And with voiceover work enormously competitive and very subjective, I can only sound how I sound.

Stone Payton: [00:22:37] And you are doing a great job and it’s just this is like an audition for a movie, you know, I need somebody five, eight and you’re five five, right?

Sharon Cline: [00:22:44] Exactly right. It’s just very it’s very interesting because it can I just I just booked one for Harley-Davidson, which I actually do ride a motorcycle. And I think that’s why I got this job, is because I can understand, I guess, the energy behind the spot. But I never would have thought they would have chosen me over anybody else that auditioned. I’m like, why me? Why question it? Just be happy, you know, but at the same time just be great, which I am. But it is just so almost random and serendipity and who knows the right person at the right time. So I just keep trying to put myself out there, I guess, and hope someone likes it. But as far as building the business, this next part, being a voiceover artist and and and trying to understand the different markets and what they want and how the how to best help them. I through school actually, I had gone to a studio called Such a Voice and they helped me to understand that there’s just the first part of of trying to become a really effective voiceover artist.

Sharon Cline: [00:23:41] But the other part is letting people know who you are. And I have not embraced that as much as as I would like. So again, that’s why I kind of this year has been my don’t hide, you know, be brave. Go out there and try to help yourself to to learn, not just, I guess, kind of to avoid hiding. Because for me, I’m like, oh, I’m in my closet or I’m in my studio and you know, no one kind of knows where I am or what I’m doing. But that’s not going to to grow kind of my business, which is ultimately, yeah, I would love for this to be every day, my full time, every day. And getting to know people is, is a huge part of it. Not, not just I’m sharing voiceover artist. I’m sharing this kind of what I’m all about and what I what drives me. And, you know, I like getting to know you and your story, too. It was really fun. We met for coffee at the Reeves house, and it was really it was really.

Intro: [00:24:29] Fun to.

Sharon Cline: [00:24:29] Just sit and chat and kind of, you know, what are the ways that you kind of move through the world and is there a way that I can help you and do that as well? So yeah, I don’t that was very random. All the different things I know. I think it’s I answer your question.

Stone Payton: [00:24:41] I think it’s a marvelous piece of counsel for all of the entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs out there. Don’t hide.

Intro: [00:24:48] No, no, that’s perfect.

Sharon Cline: [00:24:50] It’s it’s it’s a challenge. I naturally don’t want to, you know, be brave. I tend to want to just, like, comfort. And so, yeah, it’s forcing myself to to to say, what’s the worst that can happen? They just say no and can I take a no? Heck yeah, I can take a no. So. Right, yeah. That’s the best thing I can think. I can think at this moment, maybe I’ll have better words in like five years.

Stone Payton: [00:25:11] So you get four or five no’s in a row or things don’t go well or you’re buried or you run out of gas and all that kind of stuff. Where do you go? And I don’t necessarily mean if. Physical place, although the answer might be motorcycle. Where do you go to get recharged to get kind of inspiration rejuvenated? What’s your path for that?

Sharon Cline: [00:25:31] Oh, my goodness. So I go through phases of being enormously, enormously busy. And then I think you’re right. Like, I will run out of gas a little bit where I’m just. Oh, I got to I got to not worry about this. I can’t be in that in my booth all, all day. So, yeah, I definitely try to balance out my life a little bit, but. I read a lot of blogs. I’m on different Facebook pages that are associated with voiceovers. And so when I read what other people are working on it, it’s very inspiring for me. Yeah, yeah. In different questions. They have also problems that they come up with that I haven’t experienced yet. Well, I think it’s wonderful that people are willing to share kind of their experiences and what are things to look out for. So I try to keep my my mind focused on those. It’s kind of nice with social media, but I also look at my audition pages and what different jobs are out there. And some are super inspiring for me and some I’m like, Oh no, I wouldn’t do that one. I know a lot of people I’ve been asked to like. Are there things that you won’t do? And there are some people don’t want to do a political ads. I tend to stay away from those as well. But anything that can kind of like make a little spark, oh, I know what this is like. I know. You know, if it’s about a Prius because I drive a Prius, well, I’d be happy to.

Intro: [00:26:44] Do it.

Sharon Cline: [00:26:45] Because I know what that feels like. So if there’s something I can identify with personally, it really helps to make the audition or the spot sound, I guess, identifiable, you know? And that’s the goal is to really have a moment when you’re auditioning or or is, is to get someone to feel the emotion behind the spot. It’s not just this is a great glass of water, you know, but it’s like, why is this a great glass of water? So you kind of go back to how can you get someone to understand the passion behind why this water is so great, you know? So it really is. It’s just acting. A lot of acting, not just acting, but it’s a lot of acting. But yeah, so I think I just try to keep my mind focused in that way. I can definitely balance myself out easy by doing other things. But yeah, I think it’s trying to find that balance is really important because I can get burnt out pretty quick.

Stone Payton: [00:27:32] This is turning out to be the Sharon Klein Masterclass on Entrepreneurship.

Intro: [00:27:36] No, it’s not.

Stone Payton: [00:27:37] No, you don’t hide. You decide where you draw your lines. You look for the balance. You look for the inspiration. You look for the connection. This is perfect.

Intro: [00:27:44] I love you.

Sharon Cline: [00:27:46] I’m so glad you’re not disappointed.

Stone Payton: [00:27:47] No, no, I’m learning. Okay, so where’s this thing headed? You touched on it early in the conversation, but it sounds to me like you’ve got a pretty, pretty clear vision of where you want to take this thing.

Sharon Cline: [00:27:58] Yeah, I do. So when I was going to college, I was. I worked at a radio station at Kennesaw State University. Go Owls. Anyway, I loved it. I loved it. And it was just so much fun. I had a couple of different radio shows and I would interview different people on campus and I just thought, This is like joy for me. I have the highest joy. And because I really do, I like people so much and just kind of understanding people, I like to identify with them in some way. So I think that would be my ultimate goal, is to be able to still somehow do radio and and get to know people and not just have I mean, I’d love to I’d love to do it all. Like, I love to have books and I love voiceovers, but also, yeah, just chat with people and kind of. I don’t know. See what they’re all about. And is there is there a way that anything that I can do can help? Because I do think that we’re all here to kind of help each other, I think.

Stone Payton: [00:28:46] Amen. I agree.

Intro: [00:28:48] Yeah.

Stone Payton: [00:28:49] All right. So if our listeners want to get in touch with you and have a conversation with you on any of these topics, let’s leave them with some coordinates, whatever you think is appropriate, whether it’s LinkedIn, email, website, but I want to make sure they can connect with you.

Sharon Cline: [00:29:01] That’s so sweet. So my my website is Sharon Klein C, Klein E and I have my phone number there and I have like a little form that you can fill out and those samples of how I sound. So if it sounds like something that could work for you. All right, but feel free. Feel free to let me know. I’d love to help.

Stone Payton: [00:29:20] Well, it has been an absolute delight having you in the studio this morning. Thanks for coming and hanging out with us.

Sharon Cline: [00:29:26] Thank you for having me. You’re so sweet.

Stone Payton: [00:29:27] Yeah. We’re going to do some more of this if things go my way.

Sharon Cline: [00:29:30] Oh, okay. I’m on board.

Stone Payton: [00:29:32] All right. This is Stone Payton for our guest today, Sharon Klein, voiceover artist and audiobook narrator and everyone here at the Business RadioX family saying, we’ll see you next time on Cherokee Business Radio.

Katherine Saez With Truist

June 28, 2022 by Jacob Lapera

Atlanta Business Radio

Katherine Saez With Truist

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Katie Saez is Executive Vice President and Georgia Regional President for Truist Financial Corporation. In this role, Ms. Saez serves as the senior leader in the Georgia Market, responsible for direction and integrating client management business development efforts with privately-held companies operating in business banking, commercial, middle market and commercial real estate, as well as nonprofit and governmental entities.

Ms. Saez leads our Truist Atlanta Advisory Council and has direct oversight of the Truist Foundation and Trusteed Foundation Local Advisory Councils.

A 22-year veteran of the financial services industry, Ms. Saez joined Truist (formerly SunTrust) in 2000. Prior to her current role, Ms. Saez was Head of Sales for the Corporate & Institutional Group, Wealth, and Specialty Treasury groups within wholesale payments.

During her career at Truist, she has managed sales and marketing functions in multiple Lines of Business, developing successful programs to drive revenue, increase teammate effectiveness, and improve the client experience. She is a graduate of the SunTrust Commercial Banking Training Program.

Through her service on Truist’s Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion council and company-wide business resource groups, Ms. Saez seeks to promote a more purpose-, mission-, and values- centered working environment at Truist. She is committed to investing in the next generation at Truist by mentoring and sponsoring junior talent to help propel them forward in their careers.

Ms. Saez earned an MBA in Finance from Georgia State University and a BSBA in Finance from the University of Florida. She serves as Executive Partner of Georgia Allies, is a member of the Association of Financial Professionals and holds the Certified Treasury Professional accreditation. Ms. Saez is a native of Jacksonville, Florida.

Connect with Katie on LinkedIn.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

About Truist
The biggest opportunity for Truist in Georgia
How Truist able to bring a high-level of personalization to its clientele
How has Truist continued to enhance its offerings to provide a better financial experience for its clients

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Lee Kantor: [00:00:24] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor on pay. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Atlanta Business Radio, we have Katie Sayers with Truist. Welcome, Katie.

Katie Saez: [00:00:41] Good morning. I’m glad to be here.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:43] Well, as the Georgia regional president, you’ve got quite a task ahead of you. Can you tell us a little bit about kind of your vision for Truist?

Katie Saez: [00:00:55] Yeah. I’ll, I’ll be glad to. And I’m glad to be on this morning. In May of this year, I stepped into the Georgia regional president role for Truist. And and a little bit of a way with a little bit of a homecoming for me. I spent the first half of my career in commercial banking here at Truist, started out in SunTrust Bank and the old commercial banking training program straight out of college and spent about 14 years here in a different commercial banking roles and then spent the last nine years of my career on the wholesale payment side. So the Treasury and payment side and a few months ago was asked to step into this role. And while there is a lot of new faces and some new ways of doing things, I’m glad to see that the foundations that I learned back in that training program over 20 years ago were still are our guide star here. So while banking is is not quite a commodity, it’s still very much a people business where relationships matter and truth is invested heavily in technology and creating those innovative products that our clients are demanding. But it’s still a people business and Truist is still very much committed to the communities that we serve. So let me go back to this role as regional president here for Truist. My role here is to help bring the Truist purpose to life. Our purpose is to inspire and build better lives and communities. And it’s my job as regional president to make sure that we’re delivering on this across Georgia. So I’ll be making sure that we’re bringing our best thinking and expertise to clients and gathering and sharing insights from across the region. So specifically, I lead our commercial banking team and we deliver comprehensive financial solutions to business clients here in Georgia. So I work with my teammates on direct client management and on business development activities. All of that will integrate to our truist lines of business for the benefits of our clients and the communities that we serve.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:55] Now, when you’re saying commercial on business, how are you defining that? Is a business that one solopreneur or or is it only kind of these mega enterprises?

Katie Saez: [00:03:08] Well, you know, we want to help and advise businesses at all stages of their life cycle, whether it’s in capital formation or cash management, risk management, employee benefits or personal financial management. And we do that across the entire spectrum. So we we bank and meet with businesses from inception all the way up to those big mega businesses that you just mentioned. Our core commercial banking team, of which I have responsibility, really focuses in on this privately held businesses and enterprises that, you know, are have revenues, you know, all the way from the low end of the spectrum to the top. And we work with them on working capital optimization, on capital expenditures, and we work in concert with our partners in the retail bank who typically work with some of the smaller organizations that you’ll find here in Atlanta, as well as our corporate and investment bank who are working primarily with with public companies.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:18] So when you’re dealing with a kind of micro business versus a mega business, they have different needs and different levels of service in order to help them each be successful. Are you saying that kind of in the branch level is where that kind of the micro business can get kind of the most relationship advice and relationship building happening in that in that scenario as opposed to these enterprise level or are dealing mainly with kind of a truist at the corporate level.

Katie Saez: [00:04:54] Well, we talk here at Truist about being an advisor to businesses throughout their entire life cycle. So whether we’re talking about a small, perhaps newly started or perhaps even a more tenured but smaller organization that might be handled out of the branch or someone that’s more established and more mature within their life cycle, we might handle them, might be a better fit here within our commercial community bank, regardless of where their needs are met, whether it’s in the branch or here in my part of the organization or within Truist securities, where they perhaps have gone public. We still take that same advisory approach here with our clients. So our relationship teams, we want to support the business owner through commercial financial services, capital formation and leverage the expertise of our organization, whether it’s on our premier or a private banking side, our mortgage partners, our treasury and payment partners, where I came from, or our insurance partners and as they grow, as they expand, become more mature within their life cycle. The way that we deliver to the bank might change a little bit and the breadth of the offering that we bring. But what you’re going to see is more specialized solutions that we bring to them. So at Truist, we utilize a pretty unique, I think, community banking model, and that combines a decentralized regional structure, which I lead here with industry expertise and banking expertise. So what this does is allows us to use our regional teams, local market knowledge of the businesses that we work with and then customize the solutions based upon their individual client needs. So we work together as a team. We I work directly my team here were directly with a group of industry consultants and they have what I call extraordinary expertise and experience of some of the fastest growing and most complex industries here in Georgia.

Katie Saez: [00:07:12] So some of them are food and agribusiness, logistics and supply chains, beverage education, health care, etc.. So let me let me maybe perhaps bring this to life with an example. Let’s take higher education. We have local relationship managers on my team that sit here with me and Truist Plaza, downtown Atlanta that work with some higher education clients, but they partner with industry experts that also sit here in this building with me. And these experts help us speak and understand the financial language of that industry. We understand the lagging and the leading indicators that help drive that business or this organization. Our industry focus helps help us take conversations deeper and faster by having that specialist in the room. So again, back on higher education, we can advise on campus planning to keep pace with academic and technological advances. Strategic Endowment and Investment guide us to make sure that their portfolio design meets their objectives and risk tolerance and operational needs, and then helping them manage stakeholder payments and cash flow to preserve liquidity. So we will work alongside schools to help develop a very highly customized capital solution that supports the school strategic initiatives. So, you know, I think that’s an example that regardless of the size of the organization or if you’re a public or private, you’re not for profit. We have a team of people here at Truist that can meet the needs of the unique needs of that organization, regardless of where they are in their life cycle. We’ll work very closely internally to make sure that we’re really delivering the entire breadth of capabilities and solutions that we have to offer.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:00] So how do you recommend your clients interact with Truist? What should this be? A regularly scheduled meeting where you’re updating each other of where there’s opportunities or where you’re having challenges? What how does that relationship kind of look in real life when you’re working with? Because I would imagine that you would recommend that your banker be one of your trusted advisors that is involved in your business. So how does that look in real life?

Katie Saez: [00:09:31] Sure. Well, look, I’ll focus in on my team and commercial banking here. Each of our relationships manager, relationship managers here have a portfolio of clients, and they are the primary point of contact for that client with Truist. And that relationship is going to look a little bit different based upon the unique needs that client. But what’s what’s similar is the way that we engage and our commitment to that client. So typically what that means, we have a team of people that’s working with the client. The relationship manager takes the lead and ensuring that we are regularly engaged and connected with that client. We typically sit down at least on an annual basis and do a full relationship review, and then oftentimes based upon the specific strategies and complexities of that business, we’re meeting on a much more frequent basis. And oftentimes we’re coming out and we’re delivering a Treasury management review where we’re talking through strategies on how to optimize that. Companies working capital. You know, we try to bring clear insights and guidance and advice from what we’re learning from our other clients, what we’re learning in the industry and here on the banking side, and bring those insights to that particular relationship. So we’ll sit down and do a working capital review. And other times we are bringing out other partners within the organization, perhaps from the insurance side or from the wealth management side.

Katie Saez: [00:11:05] We know that in commercial banking, with privately held businesses, there is not always a clear line of delineation between the wealth management needs versus the business management needs. So our commercial relationship managers are highly connected with our wealth advisors and are meeting with business owners and key leadership within the organization to make sure that we’re connecting the needs and opportunities and strategies on the business side to the needs and opportunities and strategies on the personal wealth management side as well. So that engagement model might look a little different. You know, over the last two years, getting through the pandemic, we found that oftentimes we can be very effective and advisory and and relationship building virtually. But we we recognize that sometimes being in person, there is no replacement for being in person. So we’re out in the market a lot meeting with our clients. I’ll tell you, just yesterday I was, you know, on southeast Atlanta visiting one of our good clients, a steel fabricator. And I had my heels on, but I was there and and in the building watching watching them fabricate steel. And that’s the best part of the job. And what we do is seeing how our our clients are really bringing business to life here in the state of Georgia. Now we’re out. Go ahead, Lee. Sorry.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:45] Well, are you seeing any trends like for younger folks who kind of prefer the digital experience rather than in-person? Are you seeing that as a trend that maybe younger folks are more interested in a digital solution rather than a face to face solution?

Katie Saez: [00:13:02] Well, Lee, it’s not just the younger folk either. So like like a lot of industries we’re seeing our clients preferences and behaviors change as more and more of them choose to bank with us and engage with us digitally. So, of course, this was accelerated by the pandemic, by COVID 19. And so here at Truist, we’re focused on building technology solutions that will help shape the future of finance. So we’re creating solutions, one that people can trust. People need to know that their money and their their their activities and transactions are safe. But we are also trying to build digital solutions that simplify money management to help clients achieve those financial outcomes they’re looking to achieve, but also customize their experience. So we have a we have a term here at Truist called T3 and it talks about, you know, touch and technology, build trust. So technology is critical and we have to continue to deliver more advanced solutions on the technology front to meet the needs of our clients. But banking is still a people business, and especially here in the commercial bank. Our clients want a personal relationship with their bank and they want a phone number they can call. They want a banker who will be available to. Them when there are issues or challenges. And more importantly, they’re expecting their bank to be a strategic partner with them as they’re navigating this this complex world that we’re in right now.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:45] Now, Georgia has a very diverse economy. As you mentioned, a lot of the areas that probably Truist is involved in. Where do you think the biggest opportunity is for Truist in leveraging kind of the vast variety of businesses that are kind of bubbling up in the state?

Katie Saez: [00:15:08] Well, I’ll answer that in a couple of different ways. So as you know, Truist is a relatively new creative entity, about three years old with the merger of SunTrust Bank and B.A. And I’m seeing a lot of excitement right now from our teammates to go to market as one truist as you just mentioned, Georgia is a leading and competitive state for business. In fact, Georgia’s been named to many different lists that highlight it as being one of the top states for doing business. So we do have a quite a diverse economy and a very business friendly environment, but we have a large and skilled and growing talent pool. So we here at Truist, we just completed our largest conversion event in February. This was an enormous undertaking that involved transitioning nearly 7 million clients at the Truist ecosystem. So overall, that integration was successful, especially when you consider the scale and the complexity involved. I think this was the largest bank technology integration in more than 15 years, but now that we’ve successfully integrated our two heritage bank, it’s it’s really time for us to deliver against the promise of this merger. We’re now the seventh largest U.S. commercial bank, and we have a comprehensive and a very diverse business mix with very distinct capabilities and insurance and investment banking and digital solutions that we just talked about and industry expertise that we’ve talked about, too. So it’s really up to us to lead with purpose and providing leading and distinctive client experiences. But to do that and to do that well, we have to continue investing in our teammates. The people who choose to work at Truist and here at the bank as leaders were constantly looking to attract and retain top talent.

Katie Saez: [00:16:58] Georgia is rich with great talent and both those early in their career and more experienced individuals as well. But as you know, there’s been a pretty big shift over the past few years in employee engagement and what employees are expecting from their employer. They’re demanding better technology. They’re demanding hybrid work opportunity, better advancement opportunities, more progress toward diversity, equity and inclusion and belonging. And we hear a lot about the need for real mental health and wellbeing support. I saw a survey a couple of weeks ago from Illinois that said nearly half, I think was 43% of all employees say they’re likely to leave their employer in the next year. And that’s a pretty scary number. So I’m committed here as the Georgia region, region president to help us both what I call boldly differentiate ourselves to be an employer of choice here in Georgia. So I’m focused on ensuring that the individuals who are on my team have the resources that they need to be successful. And look, they’re the face of truist and they’re really good at their jobs. And it’s my responsibility to make sure that they’re equipped with the tools and information and the support that they need to take care of our clients, because there’s a lot of growth opportunity here in Georgia. And as I meet with clients and I ask how they’re feeling, I’m hearing a lot of similar things. First of all, there are challenges out there, whether that’s in workforce and having a good skilled labor or strong talent that I just mentioned. But we continue to have supply chain disruption, rising price of goods, this inflationary pressure that we’re seeing.

Katie Saez: [00:18:53] And and they’re sometimes struggling on determining how to forecast in this environment. There are, you know, the recession risk are a primary concern for many right now. And while we at Truist don’t necessarily believe that a recession is inevitable, we’re monitoring this as a risk and have very proactive conversations with our clients. And that’s where I think the value of working for our team at Truist comes into play. We sit down across the table from our clients. We listen to their risk and challenges and help them create a path forward. So I’ll end by just saying, you know, just this week, another meeting I had with one of our clients, I heard these common things. Demand continues to be robust. Businesses are growing, and many companies are coming off of record profit years, and they’re using that capital to invest in new technologies to optimize and drive efficiencies in their business. Now, some are keeping capital expenditures on hold, not necessarily because of a pending recession, but an expectation that prices might begin to stabilize over the coming months. And then others are moving forward with their spending needs because their customers are demanding it. I told you I was at a steel rebar fabricator yesterday and their business is so robust they simply could not wait to install a new share to add to their line. So seeing some good positive momentum with some concerns hanging out there as well. But a lot of continued investment here in Georgia. And I think this is a great place to live and work and bank as well.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:37] You mentioned, you know, all of the turbulence that were were kind of dealing with in the financial sector. And that’s why it’s so important to have that trusted advisor with your banker. I think that you need to have somebody who is kind of has the expertise and can look ahead a little bit and give you a glimpse of what could be and, you know, kind of so you can determine how much risk there is or isn’t. I think that’s where a partner like Truist really comes into play for companies that you have somebody watching your back in this area.

Katie Saez: [00:21:13] Yeah. Look, our teammates, they really do care for our clients and they take a lot of pride in the companies that they work for and and help. And so, you know, they they treat every client interaction like it’s a big deal because that’s what it is for our clients. It’s a big deal when they when they borrow money or, you know, obtain a new loan or they make an investment. And so you’re right. I think this approach it brings together our entire team. It helps clients meet their financial needs and goals, and it feels good. You know, truth has more than 125 year history here in Georgia. And just this week, I was able to participate in a groundbreaking ceremony for McCallie Park in the Sweet Auburn District of Atlanta. Now, this project, I don’t know if you’ve heard about it, this project will include, I think it’s 170 affordable housing units beginning and about 22 months. But we expect McCallie Park to become a blueprint here for what success can look like when we talk about addressing housing inequality. So this is a community that connects affordable housing with critical wraparound services for its residents, like health care and workforce development. But Truist was a major contributor toward this project, both in low income housing tax credits, as well as a construction loan from tourist community capital and a charitable grant from Truist Foundation. So our role in McCallie Park is part of Truist continued commitment to investing in the city of Atlanta, and it helps fulfill the truest purpose to inspire and build better lives and communities. It was really awesome to be there and to participate in that groundbreaking. I learned my lesson Don’t wear heels in Georgia red clay. But besides that, I was so proud to serve in this role as Georgia region president and represents our 8000 teammates in this company at this groundbreaking. It’s a great reminder of the importance of our contribution in this community, but also the the partnership that public and private partnership as well. We can make a real difference.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:31] Right. And I think that’s part of Georgia’s secret sauce, is that there is such a good public and private working relationship that everybody is kind of working together to lift all the boats here. And I think, you know, as a truist, you know, was birthed from SunTrust, you know, people in Georgia want to make sure that Truist is still there and doing, you know, playing the role that they have played for all those years.

Katie Saez: [00:24:01] I. That’s a good point, Lee. You know, we are bigger than the name on the Braves ballpark, right? I mean, we’re exceptionally proud of our partnership with the Atlanta Braves. But, you know, as I said, we go back 125 years in this great state, and we have 8000 teammates that live and work here in the state of Georgia. And so, you know, it’s important that the community knows that we’re here to stay. Three years ago, Truist made a commitment to double our investment in the city of Atlanta to $300 million over a three year period. And we’ve just wrapped up that three, three year period. And not only did we meet that number, we exceeded that number by a good measure, too. So it’s not just about dollar investment, but it’s also about the people, how we serve this community, how we engage in the community, how we’re connecting with our clients. That’s an important element to Truist commitment to the state as well.

Lee Kantor: [00:25:00] Well, Katie, if somebody wants to learn more about Truist, what’s a website?

Katie Saez: [00:25:06] It’s true, Ask.com. Pretty easy to read.

Lee Kantor: [00:25:08] Pretty easy to remember. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Katie Saez: [00:25:15] I appreciate the opportunity to be on.

Lee Kantor: [00:25:18] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you next time on Atlanta Business Radio.

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Beth Ziesenis With Your Nerdy Best Friend

June 28, 2022 by Jacob Lapera

Association Leadership Radio

Beth Ziesenis With Your Nerdy Best Friend

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Beth Ziesenis, Author, Speaker at Your Nerdy Best Friend

Since her first Motorola RAZR flip phone, Beth has made a verb out of the word “nerd.” She’s here to help you filter through thousands of apps, gadgets, widgets and doodads to find the perfect free and bargain technology tools for work and home. Although the only real trophy she ever won was for making perfect French fries at McDonald’s in high school, Beth Z has been featured on Best Speaker lists by several organizations who write best speaker lists. She has written a whole shelf of books on apps and has spoken to more than 100 thousand audience members just like you. And if you’re puzzling over why she goes by “Beth Z”… it’s because she only finds about three people a year who can pronounce her last name.

Connect with Beth on LinkedIn and follow Your Nerdy Best Friend on Facebook.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

Tech tools, tips, and techniques to make life easier
Nerd365: A Year of APP-ortunities to Upgrade Your Life

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:02] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Association Leadership Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:16] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Association Leadership Radio. And this is going to be a good one. Be sure to have a pencil and paper ready. You’re going to learn a lot. I am so happy to be talking to Beth Z and she is your nerdy best friend. Welcome, Beth.

Beth Ziesenis: [00:00:34] Thanks and hi to all my association friends.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:38] Well, before we get too far into things, tell us about your business, your nerdy best friend. How are you serving folks?

Beth Ziesenis: [00:00:45] I talk about tech tools. People have never heard of that do things they couldn’t imagine at prices they can’t believe are possible. And I speak at association events all the time, all over the country to share these tools, and I write books and I do consulting, that kind of stuff.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:06] So when you’re talking to an association, what are some of the specific tools that impact them that, you know, the kind of the most bang for their buck?

Beth Ziesenis: [00:01:14] Well, when I talk to association executives, gosh, I was an association executive a few years ago and I was an education director and oh, my gosh, y’all work so hard, association execs. It’s crazy. So a lot of the things I talk about have to do with personal productivity. You’re going to choose your association management software. You’re going to choose all those things with a bigger program, with a bigger situation. But what are you doing for yourself to keep yourself in line? So I talk about things like to do list, which is to do list with superpowers and it’s got a free version. It lets you create tasks straight from email, it lets you prioritize them, share them with other people, delegate and keep track of things. And then I talk about if that’s not enough, you go back to you go to project management tools like Trello and Asana.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:14] Now you recently released a book Nerd 365 A Year of App Opportunities to Upgrade Your Life. How did you kind of narrow down all the it seems like every minute there’s a new app coming. How did you possibly narrow it down to fit into a book?

Beth Ziesenis: [00:02:36] Well, it’s my job to do the homework for everybody. I So there are 400 and some odd apps and tech tools in this book. And for every one that I put in there, I probably vetted five. It takes me so long to go through them and I’m constantly looking for new ones and the ones I choose are the ones I trust, the ones that seem to be most helpful, the ones that are the most interesting, and sometimes the ones that are just the quirkiest and the funnest.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:06] So what’s an example of a quirky, fun one?

Beth Ziesenis: [00:03:10] So a quirky, fun one. I’m going to pick up the book here for those of you playing at home. Let’s see. There is a tool I’m just flipping through here for a fun one on November 15th. It’s national. Clean out your refrigerator day. And believe it or not, the USDA has a tool called Food Keeper that helps you determine food safety. And then I’m going to flip through here again. There’s the National Day of Listening on the day after Thanksgiving for you and your family to have those conversations. But I like the tool for listening called Perfect Recall, and it attends in a kind of a creepy way. Every single Zoom event, I have automatically to do a live transcript, note taking, and then it’ll do video highlights.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:01] So now how did you get into this line of work? What’s your back story?

Beth Ziesenis: [00:04:06] Oh my gosh. Well, AC is my back story. So back in 2007, I was sad and single. I had just been dumped and it was a Friday night and I was a member of the ACI listserv and I wrote to it was a listserv back then and I wrote to them and I said, Hey, you know, I’ve got all these little tech sites that I have. You know, the iPhone had just come out. And so it wasn’t apps as much as it was Web 2.0 little sites. I said, I’ve got tons of these. Does anybody else have any? And all these people started sharing theirs. At the time, they said it was one of the most interacted with threads that they had ever had. And I got like 60 of them and I put them all in the list and people started requesting the list and I started a blog around them. And then it was the California Society of Association Executives, Shelly Alcorn, who is, you know, a an amazing consultant in our field. But she worked there and she said, Beth, would you mind? Would you just come and talk about some of the tools at our conference? And it was in San Diego and I’m like, Sure, why not? Because I live there. So I went and just talked about a few of the tools that I like and I’ll never forget it. One of the association execs came up to me and he said, I’m here scouting speakers and you’re the only one I want and I want to get you before you become famous. So he said, We will fly you to Vegas and put you up in a hotel and let you come share these tools. And I’m like, What? This is a thing like people want me to talk about this, things that I would love to talk about no matter what. So I started speaking and sharing these tools because of associations.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:56] So once you started to kind of share and speak on this topic, then it just kind of organically grew from there.

Beth Ziesenis: [00:06:05] Yep, absolutely. I spoke in 2012. I spoke at the ACI annual convention and it was kind of my debut in the association world on the on the bigger stage and not the big, big stage. But I had a breakout session and the topic was so hot and the interest was so high that I ended up with five association engagements before I left the conference, and that was it. I was like, I think I can do this. And so it was all association people who started me here.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:39] And then from there. Then it’s just been a regular kind of combination between speaking and writing.

Beth Ziesenis: [00:06:47] Absolutely. Most of my business is in the speaking world, although consulting is coming up. So for example, I work with boards and I work with staff who need better tech solutions who are making a big tech change. And I will do consulting and guiding and helping and humor and consoling to get people through those changes. So nowadays I’m very much switching from just being on the stage and just sharing tips in a keynote to getting more in depth and helping association people more one on one and and group on one.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:29] So like if the organization maybe is contemplating using a certain app or software, you can come in to tell them kind of the good, the bad, the ugly, and maybe things that aren’t in the brochure.

Beth Ziesenis: [00:07:44] Well, what I again, I concentrate in the personal productivity and the internal productivity. I’m not the person you need to contact. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Review My AMS, but you know the proprietary software review my AMS is run by one of the most amazing entrepreneurs I know, Terry Carden, and she has put together a site where you can go and learn about AMS and there are other sites that have the proprietary, the bigger end, the more enterprise end, things that power in association. But I’m here to help you with just learning how to get your committees to talk to one another using technology or, you know, refire up your community. So it’s not as much the higher end enterprise consulting I do as just make this easier, for gosh sakes, for us to do our jobs.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:45] So there are some apps out there that an association can deploy to their team that they all would maybe communicate more efficiently.

Beth Ziesenis: [00:08:54] Oh, my gosh. So many different things happening in this category. So if you look at a tool called notion, another one called Mondaq.com, another one called click up. These are changing the ways groups are working together in like right now. When we go to write a document, we open up Microsoft Word or Google and we create a piece of paper, a virtual piece of paper, a digital piece of paper which we put into a digital folder and put into basically a digital file cabinet. This is the way it’s been done since the 1800s. 1700s write the piece of paper in the file cabinet and that kind of thing. Now we share them more easily, but we are going way past that now because those three companies that I mentioned are doing more things like a workspace. So instead of having pieces of paper in individual silos, a spreadsheet here or a PowerPoint there, you have a workspace where it’s all kind of out on the table, so to speak. Instead of having email by email, which are also little, they’re basically letters that go back and forth. You have a conversation and it becomes so popular that both Microsoft and Google are adding those features into their infrastructure.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:16] So now what is kind of the pain this association is having where you’re consulting or you’re speaking would be the solution? Like what are some symptoms of a problem they might be having? Maybe it’s regarding communication. Are there symptoms that communication is suffering?

Beth Ziesenis: [00:10:34] There are symptoms that communication is suffering. There have always been. You will not meet an association who says, Hey, it’s so easy working with the volunteers on my committee. Everybody knows everything and everybody is up to date. There’s there’s a program I teach and talk about called Discover Your Technology Psychology. And that’s all about the sub. I have several categories of technology psychologies that personas, that guide how we’re really making changes and how we’re really thinking about technology. And once you determine which category you fall into and the people on your team fall into, then you can see and address the challenges you’re having in making changes, getting adoption, making too many changes and making mistakes. You can better evaluate those pieces and parts if you know what you’re driving. Factor is what your subconscious approach to these things are.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:42] So now what’s it like when they hire you and you speak at an event? Is it something that everybody is like, oh, they’re just kind of taking notes like because it seems like there’s just so many apps and there’s so many things that could be useful, and then you get overwhelmed.

Beth Ziesenis: [00:12:00] You know, that little emoji, the exploding head emoji that you see everywhere, that’s pretty much what my sessions are like. They there are so many things that are mind blowing, you know, not just the fact that I give so many tips in a session, but there’s so many things that that are new and people have never heard of and they can’t believe they can use. And it’s not just a pie in the sky or something that a big company could use. So, yes, they’re taking notes like crazy. Yes, I give resources like crazy. That’s why also why I write books, because I can only give, you know, 20 different apps, 30 different apps in a keynote session. But the book, the books that I write are the sum total that I know and the sum total that I want to share. So that’s why I put it all into one package. It’s not just a book, it’s what I know. It’s Beth Z in your pocket so that you have references to different things you can try.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:06] All right, so let’s give our listeners some kind of suggestions. I know you spend some time finding good free education that’s out there.

Beth Ziesenis: [00:13:18] So free education, such as some of the tools that I like to use, are Google Primer. Google has all kinds of free education, if that’s what you’re talking about, like technology education.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:32] Yeah, there’s there are so many. I mean, everybody knows the importance of learning, but there are so many resources where you can learn without kind of paying if you know where to look.

Beth Ziesenis: [00:13:44] Google actually just opened up. It’s basically its small business education certification area to everyone for free. You as an association need to go and register your company and be approved. But I think they’re going to approve everybody and all the certifications, you know, everything from marketing, personal business skills, computer skills of different types, all the certifications that used to cost between 29 and $49 each or whatever are all free. Now, this just happened in the past month, two months. And so Google is a huge resource. And then you’ve got things like edX, X and Coursera, and they all have free versions that you can take and not for credit necessarily. With Google, you can get those certifications now for free, but with these other things, you can take these classes and get the education you need. Now we’re all struggling with time, so you’ve also got, gosh, I’m going to give you my plug. I do everything in bite size pieces, one tool at a time. I have a newsletter that goes out every week and I hope I finish it for tomorrow. It goes out every week with some of the latest stuff, but it’s only one tool or concept at a time. And so if you need just bite sized pieces, there are resources out there like that.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:13] Now, a lot of folks, you know, need LinkedIn and and should be sharing things on LinkedIn. Is there any resources for folks to maybe improve their LinkedIn profiles or just have a better presence on LinkedIn?

Beth Ziesenis: [00:15:31] I’m going to give you a person resource because this person, I’m kind of stalking him. It’s kind of creepy because I don’t actually know him. He’s a National Speakers Association member just like I am. But and he’s spoken to us several times lately. It is. His name is Richard Bliss. Go look him up on LinkedIn. He has done an analysis of the algorithms for LinkedIn that tell you exactly when to post, how to post, what to post, what not to post, how often to post all these questions that people have for both their association and themselves. And it seriously, I’ve never seen a resource that is that straightforward and that scientific as Richard Bliss, you can find him on LinkedIn, you can follow him. He doesn’t know me and I’m following him. And it is kind of creepy, but he’s got real reports of the analyzes he’s done and he gives tips all the time.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:33] Now, if somebody wants to learn more about what you’re up to, get a hold of your book or books. What is the website?

Beth Ziesenis: [00:16:41] Well, gosh, thanks for asking. It is your nerdy not dirty nerdy best friend dot com. And I have another resource that I’m very excited about. I don’t know. I know this podcast will come out this summer, which is great, and August 23rd, which is overlaps with the RSA conference I created, Find Your Inner Nerd Day and you can find that at Find Your Inner Nerd Dot Day because Google just opened up dot day as a URL. Very exciting, but find your Inner Nerd Day is something that I created to help people recognize something unusual about them, weird about them, fun about them, and share it with others.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:29] Well, Beth, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Beth Ziesenis: [00:17:35] Well, thank you. And it was great meeting you. And again, I know a lot of association folks. I hope you’re all out there and I’m waving at you virtually.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:44] Good stuff. Well, this is Lee Kantor. We will see you all next time on Association Leadership Radio.