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BRX Pro Tip: How Good Are You?

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BRX Pro Tips
BRX Pro Tip: How Good Are You?
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BRX Pro Tip: How Good Are You?

Stone Payton: [00:00:00] And we are back with Business RadioX Pro Tips. Stone Payton and Lee Kantor here with you. Lee, those of us who are practicing a craft and trying to deliver value, it’s important that we’re good at it. But maybe an important self-awareness gut check, reality check should be asking ourselves, man, how good are you?

Lee Kantor: [00:00:24] Yeah. You might have been great back in the day, but today’s a new day. How good are you today? If you want to grow bigger and faster, you better be great at something. That’s a given. You have to have a superpower that separates you from everybody else. That’s a given. But have you been investing the time and energy to just keep honing in on your skills?

Lee Kantor: [00:00:46] You know, once you determine what your superpower is, you constantly have to be investing more and more to make yourself better and better. The better you are at this one thing, then the further you’re going to separate yourself from everybody else. The deeper your knowledge, the depth of your knowledge, kind of more wisdom you have about more and more of your niche, that makes you the go-to resource for that service.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:11] It makes it difficult for anybody to compete with you because you are the person that knows the most about this niche. So, that positioning is critical. That’s the place you want to be. You want to become that go-to resource for something. So, if you’re not the go-to resource for something, you’re missing an opportunity.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:31] So, whatever your superpower is, go deeper, be better, and just continue to learn, and be at the kind of bleeding edge of your niche, because that’s going to continue to separate yourself. And if you’re just kind of resting on your laurels, you’re just leaving the door open for your competitors to take over your spot.

Brent Barbee With Conquer

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Atlanta Business Radio
Atlanta Business Radio
Brent Barbee With Conquer
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After 17 years in advertising/media industry, as President and Co-founder, Brent Barbee launched Conquer in the summer of 2015. The media agency is a response to a growing media marketplace, largely fragmented across TV, digital and social platforms.

The vision for the company is to provide principally driven planning that leads to intelligent buying solutions across all media. Conquer serves clients across the country from offices in Atlanta, St Simons Island, Indianapolis, and across Michigan. Client categories include but are not limited to: consumer packaged goods, non-profit, and entertainment brands. Brent lives in St Simons Island, GA with his wife, Tonya, and three children.

Connect with Brent on LinkedIn.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • About Conquer
  • Media strategy and macro-media categories
  • Media budgeting and spending
  • Media attribution – Marketing Science

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: [00:00:25] Lee Kantor are 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 Brant Barbee with Conquer. Welcome, Brant.

Brent Barbee: [00:00:43] Thank you, Lee. Great to be here.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:45] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about Conquer. How are you serving folks?

Brent Barbee: [00:00:50] Yeah, So conquer is a media agency. Specifically, we like to say a paid media agency because we deal with the strategy of placing ads and the execution of getting that done for our clients.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:02] So what was the evolution of the idea? Have you always been involved in this line of work?

Brent Barbee: [00:01:08] You know, really, I have most of my career. I’ve been in some sort of media work or advertising work. I started in ad sales, TV ad sales way back in late nineties, early 2000s, and then went agency side with a full service agency. And out of that we actually birthed Conquer in 2015. That’s right here in Atlanta.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:28] So from a standpoint from a client standpoint, are they coming to you to just solve this specific problem or better? What would be the problem they’re coming to you to solve?

Brent Barbee: [00:01:38] Normally we like to sort of partner at least over a year’s time with them go on the journey of kind of executing, you know, the media aspect of their marketing plan or, you know, maybe more involved just overall would their marketing plan. But the relationships really like a partnership, I like to say. I mean, we have a seat at that table, talk through their various challenges, maybe with what they’re trying to accomplish with marketing and then, like I say, like to try to mediate ties, those business goals and to things that we can put out into the marketplace.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:08] Now, isn’t media part of every marketing strategy? I mean, you have to get your message into the hands of your possible consumers in some means, and media usually is that path.

Brent Barbee: [00:02:20] Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, it depends on you’re right there’s some there’s some lever there whether it be I think some lean into the PR side of getting their message out and others have a a very methodical budgeted media budget and they fully expect to spend money to to get the word out and and they want to measure that return on investment. So we’re really on that side of the the budget. We’ll advise on what the budget should be, you know, based on what they’re trying to accomplish. But oftentimes the client will have a budget, a specified budget, which will then begin to divvy up and we get the media exposure they need with that budget.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:02] Now, is there a niche you serve? Are you do you have a sweet spot in terms of industry or types of clients you like to work with?

Brent Barbee: [00:03:09] Yeah, I think we’re sort of all over the map portfolio wise, which is great because we can kind of weather any type of like weird industry trends and things that could arise if we were more so a specialty agency. But we I would characterize our client base is sort of an emerging brand, a challenger brand type situation most of the time where we’re taking on a much larger ed in the space. But we deal with national brands and we deal with those national media brands to get those. Those media plans taken care of?

Lee Kantor: [00:03:44] Are they mostly B2C or do you do some B2B?

Brent Barbee: [00:03:48] Mostly to see. Yeah, we have a wide range. We work with consumer product know we’ve got CPG brands like Farm Rich and CPAC that are fun kind of frozen food snack brands. And then we have some more sort of interesting things like Arkane, which is a which is an attraction in northern Kentucky, you know, south of Cincinnati. That’s a literal place you can visit and see how big that you know. Noah’s Ark actually was. And it’s a it’s just amazing. You know, we work with faith based, we work with CPG, we work with a lot of different types of clients. That’s a lot of fun.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:32] Now, when you’re having those initial conversations, are they coming to you because they’ve had a media partner and it’s not working out or they’re coming to you maybe for the first time to do an extensive media buy or media expansion?

Brent Barbee: [00:04:49] Yeah, I think it’s both. I mean, we definitely have some that are unhappy with maybe who they’re they expected to do this for them and they’re looking to to make a change. And then we have others that are sort of living the you know, 50% of this must be wasted. I just don’t know which 50%. So can I get a better idea by hiring someone like us to come in? We do some auditing services that are just that, you know, we look at what they’re currently, you know, what they currently have on their media plan and active and, you know, are there things that they could be doing better from our perspective. And so a lot of the times that’s how our relationships start. It’s just trying to scratch the surface of the problem and then and then dig deeper once we all have done that due diligence.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:37] So the first step in an onboarding situation is to kind of audit where they’ve been. And then my maybe kind of understand, hey, was the problem in the last thing that you did a function of the content quality or creative versus where it was and the frequency was shown in that environment?

Brent Barbee: [00:06:01] Exactly. You know, all things are considered certainly, but media, when you measure it, it gives you a great idea, especially in the digital space. Now you can see what messages were responded to, had more engagement, which ones really didn’t gain the traction that you want and and how to maybe introduce some new strategies based on other client work we’ve done that could help them because there’s some similarity there.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:26] So how does one kind of track the effectiveness of any given media outlet when it comes to a purchase, especially in consumer products? Like if I pick up that frozen food at Publix, how do you know I did it? Because I saw the ad on, you know, on the Kelly Clarkson Show versus the ad that I listened to on, you know, some radio show I was listening to on the way to the Publix.

Brent Barbee: [00:06:57] Sure. Yeah. You know. There are definitely very there’s there’s a lot of definitive ways you can measure And we we always caution though, to not. To not be over so concerned with measurement that the message doesn’t cut through. So, for example, you’re making it harder on the can for by punching in a code or doing some certain things just so you’ll know that it worked. But today’s media market has gotten way more tricky in that way. You can promo codes have become more prevalent, you know, scanning QR codes. There’s things that we can do that the consumer can appreciate that. We can also get a good indication that that media program is working. And, you know, in the instance also with retail, many of our retailers also have their own retailer specific media now that really connects those dots more effectively for us. So we like to incorporate those tactics to not only does it reward the, say, Kroger customer, but it also gives us a good indication or precise indicator that that works.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:12] So now in your work, you refer to what you do as marketing science. Like what percent is science and what percent is art? And when it comes to creating advertising that sells.

Brent Barbee: [00:08:28] Sure. I think a lot of the science part, whether it be doing audience research or testing audiences in the digital space to see if they’re responsive, that can be scientific. We try to take information to and from our past plans and see if it’s helping us predict maybe tactics and media add weight that would be effective for this. Our next wave of media. So it’s we’re it’s an information loop, if you will, that we’re educating ourselves on and becoming better as we as we move forward each time. The art part, that’s really, you know, can we measure some of the message? Are we doing AB testing between images that we can see which one the consumers seem to respond to better than the other? And then sometimes, yeah, there’s just kind of a persuasive magic that a great creative director applies to a message that it’s hard to measure. But that’s everyone knows that it was sort of the artistic approach that that helped it stand out. So there’s a little bit of everything going on and working together to to make an effective ad plan.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:43] Is there any advice you can share for entrepreneurs or business owners listening right now? Is there any low hanging fruit that they can take advantage of themselves?

Brent Barbee: [00:09:53] Sure. I think, you know, the interesting part about today’s media market is that many things are becoming, you know. Many things are are able to be managed by an independent entrepreneur. Maybe it’s somebody on their staff, but those platforms are set up so that it doesn’t require necessarily a specialist to do it in its simplest kind of basic starting form. Getting started form Facebook advertising, for example, or Instagram. All these paid social vehicles and LinkedIn to are fairly turnkey and really built to help. Those that really don’t have a tremendous amount of expertise in this space. You know, they they’re training you up. They want you to be able to use it and to empower it for your business.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:46] So do you treat when it comes to media like do you treat a Facebook or LinkedIn ad campaign in a similar manner you would as a television and or like a more traditional media? Or are they.

Brent Barbee: [00:11:02] You know, sort of I think the you know, with LinkedIn, for example, you know, it’s it’s a platform that allows you to reach out to individuals. I think, you know, there’s a flooding of LinkedIn right now that is probably becoming a little annoying to some people. And some of the ways that you can be sort of solicited on that platform. But it is a very sophisticated social media platform. And if you if you embrace some of the things that they’ve built to help you reach out, say, be to be you can really be precise with it. And yeah, I mean I think you have to think about about it sort of like a TV spot, but it can be even more personalized because of the platform.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:45] Is there a story you can share, maybe a success story in terms of working with a client and maybe share, you know, it’s the name of the client, but share the problem that they had when they came to you and how you were able to help them get to a new level.

Brent Barbee: [00:12:00] Sure. I think where we really see some tangibility oftentimes is when we’re trying to capture leads for a client that can then be handed off directly to their sales force or, you know, whomever they wish. And we’ve got numerous stories, really, of where we’ve built subscription bases and a very flywheel snowball kind of build month over month. And it’s very measurable and it’s just really rewarding to see, I think, for our media planners and buyers and also the client can see that there’s a tangible. Affect to their advertising, whether they had somebody opt in to give their their number or email or whatever to engage further. We’ve had several like that that have been trial subscription base that have worked out really well through the power of media.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:55] Now when you’re working with somebody sales funnel, how do you kind of maybe score the value of a lead that comes in that’s at the top of the funnel that maybe agrees to join a list and then they work their way through the funnel to the final part where they buy something. Do you kind of give. That person or different score as they work their way down, or is there more value to being, you know, at different parts of the funnel in terms of what the client expectation is?

Brent Barbee: [00:13:33] Sure. I think, you know, as media planners and buyers, we think about the funnel a little differently and that each stage of the funnel requires almost a different tactic, paid media tactics. So, for example, at the top of the funnel, you would have more broad awareness that maybe our TV tactics and broadcast or what have you that are a little harder to measure, but we know they’re getting through. And then as the individual often opts in and we get more information on them and they say they’d like to know more about the product or what have you, then we switch tactics to nurture that lead. But we also have things going on at the stage of the funnel, even if they haven’t opted in that are a little closer to home, whether it be, again, as I mentioned, maybe on a social page, you’re reaching out to them in a more personalized way or that’s the way it feels. And then even down to the bottom of more conversion where this person is literally maybe typing their information into an ad unit and it’s very transactional and it’s the completion of the funnel until the the salesperson, if you will, would get in contact with them or they make the purchase themselves on an Adidas type site.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:47] So if you had that kind of equation, so you have an awareness, you have a nurture, you have a conversion, you have a purchase, like is an awareness, like, you know, a value of one say, because that’s the beginning. And then a purchase is a valuable value of 100. Like, how do you how would you kind of measure that or would you use different way to measure that, that kind of journey?

Brent Barbee: [00:15:15] Yeah I think, you know, with we talk funnel, you know, we want to be as efficient as we can On the broader reaching topic or tactics, You know, we look at things like cost per thousand, cost per thousand impressions or what’s that going to cost us? That’s kind of a common metric we use when we’re buying media. And then as we may be willing to pay a little higher CPM as we get to tactics that are a little more precise and have a higher likelihood of conversion down the funnel, maybe that CPM for that tactic can be higher than maybe the 7 to $10 we were willing to pay for the broader reaching, if that makes sense.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:59] So you always use kind of a cost per thousand as the guide.

Brent Barbee: [00:16:05] Sure. Yeah, that’s certainly a buying a buying metric we look at. And to keep ourselves accountable, you know, we don’t want to overpay and something that’s going to be less targeted.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:16] But also you want to at some point somebody has to buy something. So having lots of impressions of people who never buy anything, even if it’s cheap, isn’t a good value in the long run.

Brent Barbee: [00:16:27] Exactly. Right.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:29] Now, how much of your work is spent kind of managing the expectations of your client? Because I would imagine, you know, a lot of people think that, you know, if I do this, I should get a return at the end, even though, you know, you’d like to get a return. But there’s no obvious guarantees on anything. Yeah.

Brent Barbee: [00:16:46] Yeah. I think we’re really trying to set expectations. You know, you ask, you know, how much time is spent managing those expectations? Well, a lot. You know, we have an entire vertical on our team, you know, account strategy that, you know, deals with primarily deals with client interface and keeping us accountable to the business objective we were setting out to accomplish. And but we answer it with a lot of communication. We answer it with a lot of on the on the front end, setting a a metric or expectation that we can all sort of rally around as as a reasonable expectation to reach or if it’s a stretch goal. We all agree this is a stretch goal. We’re going to test this a little bit, you know, and then we communicate via like dashboard visualizations frequently. And that may mean weekly with some and maybe a little less or a little more with others. But communication is really the key. And it is it’s a lot of our time. But but, you know, we’re meant to be a partner and a good steward of their dollars. So we definitely open the doorway to communication. And like I said, we provide them a dashboard and everything that they can even log in on their own oftentimes to check up on things.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:05] So what do you need more of? How can we help you?

Brent Barbee: [00:18:10] Well, I think, you know, we’re we’re on a we’ve got very ambitious growth goals every year. We’ve had a tremendous trajectory since 2015, and 2023 was our biggest year. I’m sorry, 2022 was our biggest year yet. So we just really want to keep the momentum rolling and more introductions to to to partners we could work with. It’ll be great. I hope you know this. We definitely want to grow in Atlanta. We want to we’re we’re HQ here, but we’re working with brands all over the country, so. Yeah.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:43] But yeah, a good a good client for you is the actual brand or is it do you work with marketing agencies that don’t specialize in media as as in-depth as you like? Who is that good client for you?

Brent Barbee: [00:18:59] Yeah, that’s a great question. I appreciate it. We work directly with brands and then yes, we work with other agencies, several here in Atlanta and other areas of the country where they that’s one of the things one of the things that isn’t under their roof and that’s paid media. So we many times will come in as that paid media partner to complete sort of their account management team. And and those those have been really fruitful as well. And we’ve had relationships like that for years. So yeah, I encourage other agencies love to network with them and find out how we can help them, even if it just means coming in and again giving them kind of a consultancy of of approach. We have we’ve worked with some brand strategy agencies that just want to know could media solve this problem? And those are fun meetings and fun relationships as well.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:54] And then the paid media, you’re not just you’re not excluding social media, right? So paid media could include the social media platforms as well, right?

Brent Barbee: [00:20:05] Yep. Every social every social platform has paid ads there. Some are better than others, but they certainly monetize their platforms that way. And so we just feel like, you know. We want to be a good partner to those platforms, even by by doing those ads well for clients. But as I mentioned, you know, a lot of those you can kind of go direct to and test it, but it sooner or later it becomes a full time job when it when it begins to work for you.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:38] So if somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on the team, what’s the website.

Brent Barbee: [00:20:44] Sure it’s conquer WW dot com so conquer worldwide or conquer WW.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:52] Well Brant thank you so much for sharing your story today you’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Brent Barbee: [00:20:56] I appreciate it.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:58] Thank you. All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you next time on Atlanta Business Radio.

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Voice Over Artist Sharon Cline, Wendy Cone with Lingerfelt and Associates and Stormy Curtis with Paulding County Uncensored

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Charitable Georgia
Voice Over Artist Sharon Cline, Wendy Cone with Lingerfelt and Associates and Stormy Curtis with Paulding County Uncensored
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Sharon-Cline-bwSharon Cline is a professional voice over artist and narrator in Atlanta. She’s recorded voice overs for podcasts, authors, internal company videos, doctor’s offices and automated voice recordings.

You can hear Sharon on YouTube and educational videos. She’s recorded 16 audiobooks so far, and loves working with authors and businesses alike.

Connect with Sharon on LinkedIn.

Wendy-Cone-bwWendy Cone is the Marketing Closer for Lingerfelt and Associates. She has been a Closing Secretary for Real Estate Attorneys since 1999.

At Lingerfelt and Associates, Wendy specializes in finding solutions for all of your Real Estate Closing Needs. Last year alone she closed over 30 million dollars worth of Real Estate.

But what’s even more amazing than that is that is in 2022 Lingerfelt and Associates supported through donations, fundraisers and charity events OVER 15 foundations, including; DOMINIC’S MISSION, ACES YOUTH HOME, EXPERIENCES FOUNDATION, THINK PINK, BREAST CANCER AWARENESS, ALZHEIMER’S FOUNDATION, PAPA’S PANTRY, NEVER ALONE FOOD PANTRY, EVERY LINK MATTERS, ANGEL HOUSE, MALON D. MIMMS BOYS & GIRLS CLUB, ANNA CRAWFORD’S CHILDREN CENTER, TOYS FOR TOTS, HOMELESS VETERANS, HABITAT FOR HUMANITY AND FOUR CORNER’S GROUP, INC.

Wendy is humbled and honored to be able to be a part of such an amazing law firm. Lingerfelt and Associates is a family-owned and has been in business for 16 years. They believe in family, community and the success of the industry as a whole.

On a personal level, Wendy is the mother of two children Alex & Ian and wife to her soulmate, Michael. Wendy and her family reside in Acworth, Georgia and have resided in the state for over 30 years.

Connect with Wendy on LinkedIn.

Stormy-Curtis-bwStormy Curtis is the owner of Paulding County Uncensored (community publisher, event coordinator, and marketing/advertising consultant), and Buy Georgia Realty (a team under Atlanta Communities).

Whether you’re looking to buy, sell, lease with an option to purchase, or invest, Stormy can help you on your journey. She understands that you’re not just buying property, but you’re buying a home that needs to mold perfectly into your lifestyle, and it’s her goal to make sure it’s just right for you. Stormy also has a background in advertising/marketing.

Stormy’s passion for real estate continuously motivates her to always do her best, so she can build a lasting relationship with her clients. She truly enjoys seeing and sharing the process from beginning to end with you by removing the worry that may come along during such a big decision. She’ll keep you informed every step of the way; listening to you, and making your best interests her top priority.

Connect with Stormy on LinkedIn.

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:07] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta. It’s time for Charitable Georgia, brought to you by B’s Charitable Pursuits and Resources. We put the fun in fundraising. For more information, go to B’s Charitable Pursuits dot com. That’s B’s Charitable Pursuits dot com. Now here’s your host, Brian Prewitt. Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta. It’s time for Charitable Georgia, brought to you by B’s Charitable Pursuits and Resources. We put the fun in fundraising. For more information, go to B’s Charitable Pursuits dot com. That’s B’s Charitable Pursuits dot com. Now here’s your host, Brian Pruett.

Brian Pruett: [00:01:32] Good, fabulous. Friday morning, everybody. It’s another fabulous Friday with three more fabulous guests. I wish you guys could see me right now because I’m in a studio full of ladies. It’s really cool. Stone, I know your wife’s had a procedure. I hope everything goes well, but you’re missing out this morning. It’s a ray of sunshine outside and a ray of sunshine inside, as well as a perfect storm. So it’s awesome. So we’re going to start this morning with my first guest, who’s also my producer this morning Ms. Sharon Cline. So, Sharon, thank you for for being here in double duty.

Sharon Cline: [00:02:06] You’re welcome. Thank you for having me.

Brian Pruett: [00:02:07] So you’re no stranger to the people listening, I’m sure. So you have a show on here called Fabulous or Fearless? Fearless, Fearless formula.

Sharon Cline: [00:02:17] That’s right.

Brian Pruett: [00:02:18] That’s right. You got it. And you’re also a professional voiceover artist. So I just like for you to share your story, because you obviously have a passion for helping local business owners with your show, but share your your passion for that and how you got into what you’re doing.

Sharon Cline: [00:02:33] Wow, that’s such a nice intro. I do really appreciate being able to highlight businesses. I met Stone Payton, who is owns the studio here and at a networking meeting and really wanted to take. I just find it inspiring people’s stories very inspiring. And in meeting networking people and their own businesses, there’s so much to know beyond someone’s just business name. And so I really tried to think of what would be a great angle to kind of focus on as I’m introducing different businesses and people. And I think fear is such a universal emotion that can really impact your life in ways that maybe you’re not realizing in the moment. And so calling it fearless formula was the goal is really to focus on what people deal with when they have a setback or they are feeling unsure about how to proceed or just the natural ups and downs of what it’s like to be a business owner. And it’s just been really fun to get to know some of the commonalities that we all have. Specifically how important it is to surround yourself with really good people. And that’s something that’s a universal with everybody I’ve ever spoken to. And I really appreciate that because it’s not like you’re on an island by yourself trying to figure out how to make an LLC or a DBA or, you know, you’ve got resources not just on the Internet, but if you have some people that are kind of supportive of you, that can really take you far. And so I’ve just had a blast. It’s been it’s like my happiest part of my week besides this moment. Brian just let you know. But yeah, I’m lucky to be able to do it.

Brian Pruett: [00:04:11] So I’ve listened to your show. It’s a great show, by the way. And you, you kind of like this show where this is meant to put out more positive and inspiration stories and get people to think about that instead of all the negative that mainstream media puts out there. You get some of these business owners to open up as well. I mean, they tell their stories, right? So it’s cool to hear stories about people sharing their struggles and overcoming people who’ve been in jail, people who’ve struggled from just all kinds of different things. But it’s really cool that they’re able to to be open about that because just like being vulnerable and we’ll share with these other two being able to share their stories. You never know who’s listening, who’s reading on social media, who’s watching, but you can be an inspiration for somebody like that. And I think you having your platform is just going above and beyond being able to do that for other folks. So I appreciate that. So tell me more about how you go about getting business owners to come on here. What’s the goal? I mean, obviously you just shared a little bit about, but what’s the goal about getting the businesses and sharing their stories?

Sharon Cline: [00:05:18] Well, thank you. That was very nice what you said. I think the goal for me is, is that there are so many things that make us more like than different. And I mean everyone across the board. There are so many commonalities between all of us, personality wise and just kind of our hopes and dreams and wanting to be valued as a human. And so here we all have businesses that have names and just being able to ask someone, why do you do what you do? And what are some of the surprises that you came upon and how did you manage those things? And like even just man, the pandemic can offer just a plethora of information of how people manage to negotiate around that. Some businesses failed and some changed. And how did you feel about that? So I like that if someone says I would like to go to the pie bar or some other business here in Cherokee County or a coffee place and be able to say, I heard your story. I identify with sort of what your goals and dreams are and what motivates you. Every day it becomes more not just a name, but a personality, a place and a way to see yourself in what they’re doing. And it’s it’s kind of fascinating. I was just saying before the show, everybody that I’ve interviewed, I’ve just really loved the energy we have and. Then when we strangers come in here, you know, and then when we leave, everyone is like. Like we’re friends. We are truly happy to have just shared some time together. And I think it’s really important to be able to give someone not just here’s my business, but like a platform to be able to say, Here’s how I want my contribution to the world to look.

Sharon Cline: [00:06:52] And this is this is my. Just giving them a moment to have a story, their story because everyone has won. So I just that’s very motivating for me. I used to do a radio show when I was at Kennesaw State University and it was a very similar platform. And so just having another one here has been just a blessing. And as far as asking people, this is going to sound kind of basic, but like I really just like ask like I will find someone and say, you know, like last week I had this snuggly blanket company. This woman had never done a show before or anything like that. But I, I just messaged her and I said, you know, this is a great story that you have just from your bio. You know, would you be interested in highlighting some of the things that you like and that you’ve learned about your business? What a fascinating story because, you know, it started out kind of one way and is expanded and grown and she didn’t know anything about business. I’m like, you’re exactly who I like to talk to because my mind is my own worst enemy sometimes. So to be able to have someone come on and talk about how they’ve, like, worked around their unknown’s and basic fears, I think is very inspiring for anybody. So yeah, I’ve been really blessed, I think, or lucky to be able to, I don’t know, have the energy that seems to make sense to people that they’d be willing to come on and and like you said, be vulnerable.

Brian Pruett: [00:08:05] I knew there was another reason I liked you because I’m also a case. You graduate.

Sharon Cline: [00:08:08] So are you really go owls, man. That’s funny.

Brian Pruett: [00:08:12] So it’s it’s also cool because I as I shared the last couple of times on the show, everybody that I’ve had on my show so far, I’ve met in networking. And that’s a power of networking. And then you do one to ones and establish the relationship and that’s where you hear the stories. It’s true, right? Some people may be vulnerable and share when you get up in front of people, but when you establish those relationships and hear their stories, that’s what’s amazing. And so to have the platform to be able to get these stories out there and be inspiring and be positive, it’s incredible. So thank Stone for that, first of all. So so tell me a little more about your voiceover. How did you get into that?

Sharon Cline: [00:08:47] So I used to be in my car all the time when I was traveling downtown every day, and I got really good at listening to audiobooks, which I love still. And then one day I was like, Man, I wonder how you get started on that. And truly, I googled. How do you get started being like an audiobook narrator and slowly figured out the process and what I needed equipment wise, and then started recording audiobooks pretty steadily. I’ve done, I think, 16, and then voiceovers are like the mini baby version of the effort and time that it takes. So I went to school for that actually online, right as the pandemic started. And yeah, since then I’ve been just kind of steadily doing work here and there, but it’s very satisfying and I love that I’ve got a little booth in my garage and it’s just super fun, very fun to be creative that way. And yeah, it’s been really great.

Brian Pruett: [00:09:36] Are there particular kind of books that you enjoy doing more than others?

Sharon Cline: [00:09:38] Yes.

Brian Pruett: [00:09:39] Yeah. You want to share those?

Sharon Cline: [00:09:44] Well, so I don’t read the entire book Usually before I agree to do it, I’ll just read a snippet and sometimes they’re a little racier than what I thought. And I’m just like, Disassociate, Just do it. Just say it. Just get it over with, you know? Because it’s like, what? But at the same time, I really enjoy historical fiction and even, you know, I guess kind of the ones that kind of are helpful to people, you know, like almost narrating a little story. I like those. It’s just very interesting. It’s there’s work everywhere in voiceover. So it’s something that I’m continuing to pursue this year in particular just to see what will happen. But this has been part of it too. You know, it’s like a great way to get to know people and business owners and say, Do you do you need someone to do your voice mail or do you need an explainer video or, you know, I like to help people communicate the way that they want.

Brian Pruett: [00:10:27] So they might like your voice better than mine. So I might have to talk to you about some stuff.

Wendy Cone: [00:10:32] Her voice is very soothing.

Sharon Cline: [00:10:34] Oh.

Brian Pruett: [00:10:35] Don’t fall asleep yet. Sorry.

Sharon Cline: [00:10:38] Thank you for asking me those questions, O’Brian.

Brian Pruett: [00:10:40] So normally I ask. Well, I’ll ask that question in a second, but if somebody wants to get a hold of you for either talking about being on your show or your voice of work, how can I get a hold of you?

Sharon Cline: [00:10:52] You can go to Sharon Cline. That’s my website. And there’s my phone number is there? So you can text me or you can fill out a form that’s on the website and I’ll be happy to get back with you.

Brian Pruett: [00:11:03] Thank you. Awesome. So normally, again, I ask this question, but I know the answer. But do you mind sticking around because I can’t run the board so you have to stick around anyway. But listening to these next next stories.

Sharon Cline: [00:11:12] I’d be happy to.

Brian Pruett: [00:11:12] All right. So now we’re going on to Wendy Cone from Lingfield and Associates. So, Wendy, thanks for being here this morning.

Wendy Cone: [00:11:18] Thank you.

Brian Pruett: [00:11:18] So just knowing you have a giving heart, you you help sponsor a golf tournament that I helped with back in September. But, you know, I’ve gotten to know each other in the last several months. And you have quite an interesting. Story for an upbringing and led to your giving heart. So just the parts that I know and I’m going to let you talk more about what you feel comfortable with, but you your your biological father was a Hells Angel.

Wendy Cone: [00:11:41] I knew you were going to go there. Yes. He was biological father, was a Hells Angel, for sure.

Brian Pruett: [00:11:47] And then you told me your mother then married into with a drug lord?

Wendy Cone: [00:11:52] Yes, Yes. We lived on a sailboat. 54 foot sailboat. Sailed down the Mississippi. It was 1985. I was eight. So, yes, I’m 46 and proud of it.

Brian Pruett: [00:12:00] So go ahead and share your story. I mean, because this leads into why you have such giving heart.

Wendy Cone: [00:12:04] I know I’m turning bright red.

Brian Pruett: [00:12:06] Now when I can see you. You. It’s a perfect.

Sharon Cline: [00:12:08] You’re good. Looks good.

Wendy Cone: [00:12:09] It’s okay. It’s okay. And I speak about learning to be vulnerable all of a sudden. Happens real fast, doesn’t it? Thanks, Brian. No, I mean, I’m blessed to work for. Felton Associates. He took a chance on me to. Over two years ago for maybe in the marketing closer. And the reason I segue into that is because I’m a I’ve always been a closing secretary since 1999, but I’m able to help support foundations and stuff like that. But the reason I am that way is, you know, as a child, I know, you know, I know what it feels like to be not seen, to be, you know, hungry to witness the abuse. And so, you know, I don’t know. It just kind of developed me into who I am now, where I like to make people feel seen. You know, to feel heard, to be a part of something. Everybody just wants to be included in things. So.

Brian Pruett: [00:13:00] So you guys with Linear Associates told me last year you guys was over 15 for non profits that you guys helped share a little bit about what you do.

Wendy Cone: [00:13:11] We sure did. So we do a lot of events, as you know, golf tournaments, I think I did for last year, including yours. And then every link matters as well as the Board of Realtors one and I know our I always do the 18th hole and it’s always Caddyshack themed so you’re going to get jello shots or adult fruit cups when you come by there. But it’s just, you know, just I don’t know, just to make people feel happy. You know, life is stressful for all of us. And the one thing I’ve noticed about the people that we’ve met through networking is we all are very passionate. You know, we all have struggled something in our lives. And I feel like we navigate towards each other.

Brian Pruett: [00:13:46] What you mentioned the thing. Next time I think you should have the go for.

Wendy Cone: [00:13:50] I have it. Have you not seen it? No. Every single time I have one of it. Yeah. He dances too, for sure. I’ve had several people try to take him and I will hurt it. But now he does. He dances and everything. I put him in a little linger felt shirt.

Brian Pruett: [00:14:03] Next time let me dance with him because I can turn the Scooby Shuffle.

Wendy Cone: [00:14:06] I will.

Brian Pruett: [00:14:07] He does that. So share a little bit about your fellow associates. What do you all do?

Wendy Cone: [00:14:10] We are real estate closing attorneys in Woodstock. We also travel 40 mile radius. So we’re everywhere. But it’s a family owned firm. We’ve been he sound his farm for 15 years, so he just. He hired me because he doesn’t drink and socialize. As you know, that’s a big part of the real estate world. So luckily, they were able to pull the foundations into that. And, you know, you can get a lot of realtors to come around if it’s for a good cause.

Brian Pruett: [00:14:34] So a lot of people have myth about attorneys. You know, they don’t like attorneys. So I’m sure closing attorneys are a little differently, you know, different than that. But share something that can kind of give somebody a little bit of peace about coming to you guys.

Wendy Cone: [00:14:47] Well, the one thing that, you know, our our tagline is where closings feel like home and we truly care about the individuals. Jason is I call him Salt of the Earth. He’s in Hawaii right now. So he hopefully he’s not listening to this, but he is the best boss I have ever had, the best attorney people, often even Johnny that does our pitchers or whatever. She said the other day she met him and she was like, he’s not like most attorneys. He cares about you, he cares about your family. You know, he just you don’t feel like a number. You feel like somebody has seen you and wants you to be in your, you know, your home and wants to take care of the closing and all of the details.

Brian Pruett: [00:15:24] So So you you’re all over Facebook. You love doing the social media stuff.

Wendy Cone: [00:15:30] It’s not that I loved it. Well, okay. So I do love it a little bit. The funny thing is only half of what I do is even on Facebook, because by the time you get done with your day, I don’t even have time to post everything. But, you know, I’ve only started networking late July. I may not have to tell you it works. I mean, you just it’s exhausting. It can be exhausting, but it’s also very rewarding. I mean, I love the people that it’s truly is like a family, You know, sometimes it’s a little dysfunctional. Sometimes it’s, you know, not always people that, you know, like being around. I can say that that’s true. But but now I feel like we are a big family. I feel like we all work together for the same thing. And that is to succeed. And honestly, it’s very healing. Networking is very healing. It’s forced me to be vulnerable, you know, which is something I used to think was weak. And it is so not to be vulnerable and to be dealing with things like we all are and to be out in front of everybody. It’s fun sometimes.

Brian Pruett: [00:16:24] Can you give us a story of something, testimonial, of networking, of what benefit has benefited you and vice versa? How have you benefited somebody through networking?

Wendy Cone: [00:16:31] I feel like honestly, it’s, you know, just be present and be seen. I mean, when I came in here, Sharon asked how Storm and I met each other, and it was at a Governor’s gun club, Mardi Gras Expo over two years ago.

Brian Pruett: [00:16:45] That’s trouble right there. I know.

Wendy Cone: [00:16:47] Well, I mean, and you see us where Everywhere we support each other. We support each other’s families. And we do that selflessly, you know, And we also we have wounds that we heal with each other, you know? And then, you know, Brian, you and I met I think it was at Woodstock Business Club. Yeah. And I know I felt I felt so bad because it was like a super busy time. So I wanted to help you. I immediately came over and I was like, I’ll do the golf tournaments. But it was a certain busy season, but I just feel like we all just support each other. I mean, I could be at one networking event and immediately thinking of how I could help the people in that room at a different networking event. So they’re all good stories. Honestly, just follow your heart. Follow. You know, Ron Green said to me one day, you know, you’ve got to tell the difference between noise and a signal. And yesterday you had introduced me to somebody and it’s like a zing. When you meet somebody that is going to be beneficial not only for your soul, but for your business. You just have to follow that. I let God lead you.

Brian Pruett: [00:17:43] Yeah, that’s for sure. And we talked about the Facebook thing, and the reason I mentioned that is you had a post yesterday about what we talked about earlier, about, you know, who’s watching and being, you know, being inspired and sharing that and having those people be inspired by your story. So I appreciate your vulnerability. Thank you for being able to share your passion. And so if somebody wanted to get a hold of you guys looking for associates, how can they do that?

Wendy Cone: [00:18:08] Best way is my direct cell. Always text me because I’m I am in different meetings all the time, but it doesn’t mean you’re not important. So. 4705604509 again it’s 4705604509 Email’s also really good. Wendy. Wendy Whyalla closings.

Brian Pruett: [00:18:24] So awesome. Well don’t go anywhere because I’m not actually done with you yet, but.

Wendy Cone: [00:18:27] Oh, I knew that was coming. He’s like, that’s the good version, you know, we’ll get to the gritty.

Brian Pruett: [00:18:32] So we are moving over to Ms Stormy Curtis from by Georgia Realty. So thank you, Stormy, for being here. She’s just like grinning and smiling. And that’s all I have to ask, though, because it’s a really cool name. The only other person I’ve known with Stormy is a DJ on satellite radio. So how did you get the name Stormy?

Stormy Curtis: [00:18:48] I was born in Illinois and I was always told by my grandmother that I was born during a blizzard and that my mom said, If we make it through, this is a stormy. But my mom’s, I guess it was a friend of my mom’s had a daughter named Stormy that was older than me and that inspired her to call me Stormy.

Brian Pruett: [00:19:03] Awesome. That’s why I like The Perfect Storm, because.

Wendy Cone: [00:19:06] We’re actually team tsunami. Right here is what we say.

Brian Pruett: [00:19:09] Stormy Yeah, right. So as I mentioned, you’re with by Georgia Reality. You have a passion for educating people on the process of real estate and buying a house. Selling a house. You always preach about interviewing agents. Don’t go with even as if somebody’s your friend, you need to interview them. Share that process. Why do you educate that?

Stormy Curtis: [00:19:30] The reason I do is because you got to understand there’s been real estate agents that have been in the industry for 20, 30 years, and they brag on the fact that they’ve been industry 20 or 30 years. And in all honesty, daily, our market shifts. There’s things that change all the time with rules and regulations. And so just because they’ve been in here for 20 or 30 years doesn’t mean that they sell more than two houses a year. So someone like me, who’s been in industry for six years selling 30 houses a year, that’s a huge factor. So you’re looking at two times 20, that’s 40. And me with 36, 180. I mean, that’s a huge difference. The experience is in the time that you spent within the past six months in the year. So interviewing these people, I mean, this is the hugest investment of your life and you want to make sure that somebody knows what they’re doing, that they’re comfortable working across the table with another agent, that they’re capable to have discussions and really fight for you, but not really be horrible to the person across room because you all have the same end game. So in all honesty, when you have an agent, you want to interview them. You want to make sure that they’ve been working full time for the past six months to a year. How many houses have they sold either on the buying side versus the selling side? You want someone that’s about equal on both sides, especially if you are selling, because you’re having to work with these buyers. Usually when first time or first time buyers or excuse me, agents come to the market, they become first time home buyer agents.

Stormy Curtis: [00:20:56] And so you want to make sure that you’re able to have that personality with them and be able to work with them. So if you are a buyer’s agent and a sellers agent, then you have that capability and then you also know the offers that are going to be brought to the table so you can sort of inform your seller before you list what they’re going to be expecting. And right now, with the way that the market shifted from last year versus this year, it’s a different type of purchase price, a different type of offer that you’re getting. And so a lot of these sellers are expecting them to get the world well in the past two months. They’re not getting that right now. So they have to understand that you may be giving some seller’s contributions and things like that. So interview these agents because you don’t want somebody to bluff you and then you’re screwed out a bunch of money or you have hardship or you’re on the market way longer than you have to. You also need somebody that has the marketing and advertising background. So somebody who knows that pictures are very important. They don’t need to be going in there with your cell phone. They don’t need to be doing it themselves. There’s a lot of agents out there that are photographers. They need to stay in their lane. Professionalism is professionalism. And I also feel that words are important. So if you have somebody who has a marketing and advertising background, they’re telling a story to bring somebody into that house and into that neighborhood and into that community, and they have to emphasize that.

Brian Pruett: [00:22:12] So you have that advertising marketing background because you actually have a little agency, correct?

Stormy Curtis: [00:22:16] I do. I have a publishing company called Paulding County Uncensored. I actually started at about 12 years ago. What happened is that I have a child with special needs. He was actually born a couple of months early. Based on the fact that my brother committed suicide. I had severe stress. I was bedridden for so long. So he came. We were able to help him grow by giving steroids to me, and he was developing his lungs and organs. But a week and a half later, we were in a horrific car accident that almost killed him. So I had to make sure that I could save his life. And the police came. They wanted to arrest me because they didn’t know about the accident. But he was life flighted to Children’s. And for a whole year between five and 2 to 5 minutes, I had to stimulate. Him to breathe. I had to make sure that he would live and talking about no sleep. And that’s why I always say I’m tired. I still haven’t caught up. And so I decided to create Paulding County uncensored, to have some socialization going on within the community because there really wasn’t any. And then I realized that there was no events. So I used to work with rare hospitality, and I helped with some of the events that they did.

Stormy Curtis: [00:23:23] And so I started to create these events that brought 3000 people, 5000 people, but it wasn’t really about making money. It was benefiting the small businesses. So they had somewhere to go. It was about giving back to the community, so they had somewhere to go. If you look at Paulding County, a lot of people can’t afford anything. So I should have been a nonprofit, but at the same time it wasn’t important to me what the paperwork was. It’s what I was doing at the time. And so right now, if you look at my books, for instance, you’d be like, Dang, you’re poor. That’s why I’m a real estate agent now, you guys. Hello. So I just I took one entity and formed it, and it’s very, very popular. But then I have grown by Georgia Ability. And when I got into by Georgia Realty, I said, you know, I’m going to treat this godly whatever God gives me, I’m going to use it. And I have I put a lot into the community and I’m going to continue doing that. People use me great. If they don’t, it’s God’s way of saying, Hey, move on, do something else, Grow outside the box. I mean, set yourself apart.

Brian Pruett: [00:24:24] We’re going to circle back around to some of the things you just mentioned. So but one of the things that I think is really cool too, is you do go above and beyond for your for your clients and the fact you’ve you’ve authored a book about real estate share about that.

Stormy Curtis: [00:24:37] So I created six years ago the The Home Hunters Playbook. If you look at wedding books, they’re very interactive baby books. They’re very interactive. Women love to draw and write and think outside the box and these little books and create pictures and times and memories. And buying a house should be like that. You should be buying a house excited. You should have this book that you open up. Not only does it educate you, but it also can educate the next person that buys your home. So at the back of the book, it even has it where you can put down all the claims that you’ve had in the past, any of the passwords to your house. Like you can really make this an informative book that you can pass on if you decide to sell the house later. And it’s very, very informative. But when you’re buying the house, it teaches you about the different types of insurance a lot of people don’t understand just because it’s cheap, it’s not going to really take care of your house. They also have to understand there is a difference between an inspector and an appraiser. They have to understand the cost of an appraisal is having to be paid for by the lender. You’re paying that cost. So all this stuff is written in the book. But then when you start interviewing these agents, when you’re interviewing your homeowner’s insurance and everything, it has that right there where you can actually fill it out and have it down on paper. So it’s not scattered all over your desk. You have one book that does everything.

Brian Pruett: [00:25:54] So Stormy talked about these events that she’s done. And again, it’s about her passion for community and businesses because she doesn’t charge anybody anything. She doesn’t charge the vendors, the. Spooktacular that I helped with last year. It was the first one I’ve been to, but I know you’ve done it for several years. Last year it was. It’s on a Saturday, so I go to church Saturday. So sundown. I went out to help her when I could after sundown and I get there and she said Go on direct traffic. Let me just tell you, when you’re dressed in dark. Right. And almost getting run over. No, but it was awesome because you had 5000 people come to that.

Stormy Curtis: [00:26:31] About 5000 over 5000.

Brian Pruett: [00:26:32] You know, And you had 900 the year before, right?

Stormy Curtis: [00:26:36] The year before we had about 22,500. And we were in a smaller location. We probably would have had more if we had more parking. And so thankfully, I was able to. This year I have it over at the Chattahoochee Technical College. So one college, I ended up having the entire event which took up everything. And then the next college right next to it, which is the same college, it was all parking. It got so full they had to park at Oasis Church. It was so amazing. But that’s the point is a lot of kids and a lot of parents can’t afford to do a lot anymore. And you have schools, nickel and diming and fundraising for everything. And they’re forgetting the fact that we all are all struggling right now. And it’s sometimes good just to pause and realize there are people outside of our own bubble that we need to be able to help. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be financially. Some of these vendors came in there just providing activities because they couldn’t afford to give out thousands of pieces of candy. But at the same time, just giving that activity brought so many smiles to these kids and that’s what matters. And so as someone who didn’t really make anything and invested a lot into it, I mean, the point was, is to make my heart good, knowing that I helped all these kids. I helped the small businesses get in front of these families and stuff to be able to answer other people’s questions that they had with We had a plumbing company there, we had HVAC, we had the attorney’s office, we had I mean, churches there, Whatever we have there, people can ask questions. And that was a great location for everybody.

Wendy Cone: [00:28:07] I think if they gave her the Mercedes Benz Stadium, she would fill it up literally. I truly do, which is good.

Brian Pruett: [00:28:12] I wouldn’t have to drag traffic then they should do that.

Wendy Cone: [00:28:14] And I think my husband might have almost run over here. I’m so sorry.

Brian Pruett: [00:28:20] Yeah. If I could start the Brian Pruett fun on would. Because you said we’re all fundraising for ourselves too. But you shared a little bit already. But, you know, we’ve got stories of passion, We’ve got stories of giving hearts, we’ve got stories of inspiration and an overcoming and perseverance. You have all of those. You’ve dealt with things you shared. Your brother committed suicide. Your your son was. What’s the word I’m looking for?

Stormy Curtis: [00:28:48] He’s special needs, special needs.

Brian Pruett: [00:28:49] But he was. He was born before he was supposed to be born.

Wendy Cone: [00:28:51] Premature.

Brian Pruett: [00:28:51] Premature. Thank you.

Wendy Cone: [00:28:52] Sorry.

Stormy Curtis: [00:28:53] He was premature. And then he was in a horrific car accident with us that almost killed him. Honestly, in the past, I have been molested. There’s watching your mom be beat up, living with no plumbing, where you have to take the water out of the toilet to flush like a bad background. But at the same time, I was like, That’s never going to be me. I’m not going to let that define me. I do suffer from anxiety and depression, severe anxiety. Honestly, I’m truly an introvert and I fake it. I’m as wild and smiley as possible in front of everybody. But I get home and I start shaking. It’s because I just I’m becoming deaf. I’m almost 42 years old, so being in a room with a lot of loud noise and having to hear people, I feel anxiety because I’m not able to answer some of their questions. And sometimes you just.

Sharon Cline: [00:29:41] Smile and nod.

Stormy Curtis: [00:29:42] And so that brings on it. But the depression is all the stuff from my past and me trying to ignore it and not having to take medication because my my brother wasn’t on the right medication and therefore he went above and beyond to make sure that he he wouldn’t be here anymore. And so I keep myself mentally busy. I feel like God is leading me to do great things for great people. And if I pause for a minute, a minute, then I’m I reflect on the past and I need to look towards the future. Now, as I told my kids yesterday, because I was talking to you and they could hear our conversation, I said, I’m not going to be that person that kills myself. I’m not not right now. And let me explain. This is we cannot control our chemical imbalance. But right now I feel like I can now, in the future, can I promise that? No, we can’t promise anything. But right now, I promise. I love my kids more than I love anything in this world. I love my husband beyond anything. I love Wendy. I love you guys. I have to be here. I feel like I have a purpose. If I didn’t have a purpose, I would not be here.

Wendy Cone: [00:30:42] She never ceases to amaze me. By the way, I.

Brian Pruett: [00:30:44] Told her yesterday, you know, when she shared first shared with me that she struggles with anxiety and depression, you would not know that. And you are, like I said, told you yesterday, you are inspiration. You inspire a lot of people, whether you want to believe it or not. You do. You know, the other thing that you deal with is you have a heart condition as well. And you’re doing all this.

Stormy Curtis: [00:31:01] I’ve had two heart surgeries. It’s it’s super ventricular tachycardia, so they call it SVT. And so sometimes it can get to where like normally it’s about 120 where you guys are about 6070, but it can get heart attack range. And so I’ve had two heart ablations where they go in and they burn your heart and stuff. I’ve been able to control that over the years. This year I found out I have severe IBS. I’m like, Oh God, what’s next? Because I’m going to take everything with a grain of salt. And I mean, I always have. I feel like there’s a reason behind it maybe that God needs me to slow down a little bit. I don’t know what his plans are for me, but I feel like sitting there and trying to figure out is not something I want to do. So I’m going to keep going forward. I’m going to look at diets that are more efficient for me and then I’m going to keep meeting great people and hopefully that it will impact my life and my kids and my husband and everybody around me.

Wendy Cone: [00:31:52] Being still is hard when you’re a child of abuse. It’s, you know, being still is when all of the anxiety, you know, comes in.

Sharon Cline: [00:31:59] But I really appreciate just taking a moment to acknowledge what it’s like to have a template in front of you that is not one you want to repeat and make normal and how hard it can be to make a new normal for yourself and and promise yourself that you will not do to others and make them feel how you were treated and how you felt. And it can be a daily struggle. But I always admire people who almost save themselves that way. You know, they’re making a new future, but in helping other people, it can. At least when I do things, it kind of soothes my soul and kind of helps me to want, I don’t know, to continue that energy. And so I admire that about both of you. I mean, everybody’s got their their background, but not everybody turns it into something beautiful. So thank you.

Stormy Curtis: [00:32:49] I can tell you, I was honestly very nervous about coming on here and not answering questions because I you, Brian and Wendy knows me. I’m very straightforward. I don’t sugarcoat anything. I tell people not to sugarcoat because you don’t want to give false impressions. However, I do not talk about my past.

Wendy Cone: [00:33:04] Yeah, I don’t either.

Stormy Curtis: [00:33:06] I don’t want people to look at that as a weakness. I don’t want people to just be a little common from me. I want them to be who they are. I want them to utilize me and know that I’m going to fight for them. And they have to understand with depression, just because I have it doesn’t mean I’m weak. It doesn’t mean that I’m going to be a little bit slower or more aggressive as far as towards the other person across the table. It means I’m going to give 120% more because I want the best in my heart by providing something for you. And so I’ve never told really much of anybody my issues is because I don’t want it held against me. So yeah, you don’t want that.

Wendy Cone: [00:33:41] To be you don’t want to be identified.

Sharon Cline: [00:33:43] Yeah. That’s not your brand.

Wendy Cone: [00:33:45] In the other part is like I’m cautious to say things because those that live through some of the abuse with me, I don’t want to hurt them. I couldn’t protect them as a child, as eight years old child, you know, trying to protect a mother from abuse and, you know, and turn around getting my nose broke from the stepdad, I couldn’t protect them then. So I’m trying to protect them now. And as far as kids and depression parents, listen to your kids. Our son is we have a 28 year old daughter and an 18 year old son. And he came to us four years ago when COVID or when COVID was full blast and said he was having self-harming thoughts and he was cutting himself and he was wanting to commit suicide. And we were humbled and honored that he came to us, you know, immediately, got him in therapy. He was failing classes, everything. He graduated 3.5, two dogs later, you know, and he’s in Kennesaw with criminal justice. So still learning to drive because I didn’t want to give him keys to a car when he was having suicidal thoughts. But just listen to your kids. Pay attention, you know, So.

Stormy Curtis: [00:34:41] I would say pay attention. Listening is a little bit differently. I can say this is when I finally came out and said something and I said it at an appropriate time, honestly, I said it to other kids and my mom and my family found out I had another person tell me that if what I had said was true, that they were going to take me away from my my mom and my brothers. So, I mean, we weren’t we were live in poverty. And the fact that somebody was doing things to me that right there, they wanted to pull us. I didn’t want to lose my mom. My mom struggled. My dad was an informer to the police in Illinois. She took us from them to bring us here. And so I had to live saying I lied, knowing that it was happening. And it was the worst struggle that your your family, your mom, your dad needs to take time and actually look at you.

Wendy Cone: [00:35:30] Pay attention.

Stormy Curtis: [00:35:31] Don’t really pay attention to the word sometime. Look at the body and stuff like that because that I wish she would have. And again, that’s probably why I never bring up things, because I don’t want it to be held against her either, because she had no idea I lied. I said I lied to protect her, to keep us with her.

Wendy Cone: [00:35:48] So and people will wonder, like, how do these parents not see things? And a lot of times it’s because they’re dealing with their own. I mean, that’s something I had to learn. Older is sometimes all parents can do is survive. Sometimes that’s all that they can do. So, you know, anyways.

Brian Pruett: [00:36:03] I have never met two more stronger women than these two right here. I would agree. And I don’t think of it as it’s a little different because, yes, you don’t want to share too much because it’s not your identity. I understand that. But you also have to understand the strength you guys bring to other people and inspiration, as I shared with both of you, that I don’t know who’s listening right now, but somebody listening right now. I needed to hear what you guys just said. And I shared what I think I’ve shared with you, too. But I had I’ve had two brothers commit suicide and it’s not an easy thing. Right? So, again, just and don’t be afraid to ask for help. That’s the other thing I would say. Ask for that help. Don’t be afraid. It’s not. It’s not it’s not a weakness that you have some whatever’s going on and it’s a strength to ask for help. So I appreciate you guys being vulnerable. Now we’re going to lighten up the mood just a get here, but.

Wendy Cone: [00:36:57] We’re going back to the Hells Angels, aren’t we?

Brian Pruett: [00:36:59] You know, I want to talk about you guys are actually starting your own podcast together, which, first of all, if the FCC gets a hold of this, I don’t know, we may be sharing something else, but share your what you guys are going to be doing and the idea behind your your podcast.

Wendy Cone: [00:37:14] Yeah, go for it.

Stormy Curtis: [00:37:16] So we are doing a podcast called Wanderlust Living. And the reason we decided that is because we’re moms, we’re pet moms, we’re wives, we have entrepreneurship, we’re.

Wendy Cone: [00:37:28] Survivors, we’re.

Stormy Curtis: [00:37:29] Survivors, we have kids that are in the school. I mean, everything that I just named is a full time job, to be honest with you. And our plates are probably overwhelmed. And I feel like we could be a strength to somebody or a lesson to somebody. They could either laughing at us or agreeing with us. But I feel like we’re able to be true to who we are and hopefully answer questions. We as entrepreneurs network a lot as well, so we want to also be informed and informative, not only in the real estate industry helping people, but those that are brand new small businesses. How grassroot marketing can really set your business apart from everybody else, how grassroot marketing really works. If you take the initiative to utilize it and how to use it properly, it’s never about me, me, me, me. It really is. How can I help you?

Brian Pruett: [00:38:20] Selfless is.

Stormy Curtis: [00:38:22] Selfless. Yeah. Gaining that relationship and knowing that person and then having them know you. Because am I really going to refer to somebody that I’ve never used that I really don’t know? No. So you have to build that relationship.

Wendy Cone: [00:38:37] Know like and trust. You have to know like and trust somebody to be able to do business with them. And the way to build that is the consistency. Show up, show up, show up. And that’s what. We do for each other all the time. You think as much as we talk, we wouldn’t have any more material, but we were so wrong.

Stormy Curtis: [00:38:51] We’d be like, okay, it’s been 30 minutes. We’ll do this next week.

Brian Pruett: [00:38:55] When do you guys have you launched it yet or when are you going to launch it?

Stormy Curtis: [00:38:58] We have not launched it. So I spoke to one of our people that are helping us and I think we’re going to launch it the week of Valentine’s, so we’ll go ahead and put that out today. I’m going to put out your video and stuff so people get to learn a little bit more about us. But the week of Valentine’s, I think that’s when we’re going to start it. And once a week for 30 minutes, we’re going to be speaking to everybody.

Wendy Cone: [00:39:19] We won’t say any names.

Stormy Curtis: [00:39:21] We’ll try not to. We’re going to.

Wendy Cone: [00:39:22] Try not to say it. Maybe somebody can bleep over them. I’m not certain, but it’s one or less living because we have a lust for not only life, but living it to its fullest and moving forward. Yeah, I mean, we love our journey, good and bad.

Brian Pruett: [00:39:34] How can people listen to it when you do lunch?

Stormy Curtis: [00:39:36] We are on something, I don’t know, podcasts I’m trying to teach myself. I think it’s called Lysosome or I don’t know, but it’s going to be on like Apple and Google and all this other stuff. And of course I’m going to utilize some pictures and put it on YouTube. So social media, but I’ll start branding it right when it comes time. Right now it’s just trying to understand myself how to do it and then go ahead. Because to me it’s like even if we put out crap, which we’re not, at least I’m putting it out there and then we will train ourselves along the way. Because being an entrepreneur, that’s what it’s about. It’s really just taking that jump and not stopping. And when you fail, get up and do it again. And that’s what we’re going to do.

Wendy Cone: [00:40:16] Yeah. And I think because I mean, I’m learning about associates is not mine, it’s my bosses. But I you know, my husband had a very successful business for years. So I have that small business, you know, mine state where I feel like it’s my own right. So, you know, you give all to.

Sharon Cline: [00:40:30] Everything.

Wendy Cone: [00:40:30] What you do. That’s right.

Brian Pruett: [00:40:32] So I asked them, but I didn’t ask you this. If somebody wants to can only talk about some real estate, how can they do that?

Stormy Curtis: [00:40:37] They can call me at 7702628575. I work for Atlanta communities. I’m one of their team leads. My team is by Georgia Realty. So honestly yesterday I was just messing around on Google and I put in my name Dang, I’m everywhere. Google Stormi Curtis. You will find my phone number, my email. I got.

Brian Pruett: [00:40:56] You. It’s because there’s no other Stormi’s already told you that.

Stormy Curtis: [00:40:58] Oh, they’re.

Brian Pruett: [00:41:00] Not the ones you.

Wendy Cone: [00:41:01] Want to be. She reads the books about her. No.

Sharon Cline: [00:41:05] I’d be happy.

Brian Pruett: [00:41:06] To. That’s another show. Yeah. So what I like to do before we wrap up is I’ve been doing this and I’m going to do it all year long. As I like to ask everybody who’s been on my show, you guys have shared some great advice already, but share some nugget, a quote, a phrase or something for people can go forward with 2023, just that they can do this year and beyond. So you’ve already shared one on one show, but I want you to share another one. So you start please sharing.

Sharon Cline: [00:41:31] Oh, my. Not on the spot. Let me think. I think just having compassion for people. I mean, everybody has their their struggles and no one is, you know, what you see on the Internet or what you see on social media is just highlights of someone’s life. And so if you have compassion for where people come from and kind of what their journeys are, I think it’s just there’s like a feeling of understanding between you. So think if you lead with compassion, you really don’t go wrong.

Brian Pruett: [00:42:00] I think.

Wendy Cone: [00:42:01] Wendy and that was almost verbatim what I was going to say, but mine is just my mom taught me this years ago, is you never know what people are going through, whether it be the person at the grocery store, somebody you see at the gas station, just flip and smile. It’s not that hard. We all know it’s harder to frown. Actually, I believe it’s more muscles to frown. Just, you know, say hello. You don’t have to get in a detailed conversation with him. But so many people are so lonely and so depressed. And I mean, all of us deal with it honestly, whether it be a spouse or ourselves or family members is just say hello and mean it. You know what I mean? Don’t do it to get something out of it or whatever. Just say, Hi, how are you? Because you would not believe how many people do not ask that You would not believe how many people do. Not even they’re not even present in a conversation. So just take the time, say hello and walk away and pray for them. If they’re ugly to you, pray for them even more honestly.

Brian Pruett: [00:42:51] Stormy.

Stormy Curtis: [00:42:53] This is something I learned last year and I’m taking in 2020, 2030 is to love yourself, take care of yourself, because in all honesty, you can’t take care of anybody else. And when you are a giver, like majority of us are, you do get burnt out. But the reason you’re getting burnt out is not because of all that you’re doing, is because you’re not giving yourself time and reflection and loving on yourself. You have to do that and then just take in the fact that you’re doing so much that you have to give grace to those who are taking advantage of you. So having that time to yourself and loving on yourself, you get that understanding to where you can go back and do more. So again, love yourself. Take care of yourself as a mom, as an entrepreneur, in all honesty, then you’ll be able to do more for others.

Wendy Cone: [00:43:39] We’re way better at telling people to do that, by the way, than we are actually doing it. Yeah, So I’m just going to throw.

Brian Pruett: [00:43:43] That out there.

Stormy Curtis: [00:43:45] Absolutely. But I’m going to tell you.

Sharon Cline: [00:43:46] Right.

Brian Pruett: [00:43:47] I say this all the time or I shared a couple of weeks ago. You know, I may have had a long week, a busy week, but come Friday morning, May and I get I get inspired, I get exhilarated just because I know I’ve got these amazing stories coming on this this show. So, again, the three of you, thank you for for much, very much for coming on, being vulnerable to share and everybody listening. Let’s remember to be positive and be charitable.

 

Building Culture Through Human Connection E29

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Phoenix Business Radio
Building Culture Through Human Connection E29
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Building Culture Through Human Connection E29

Do you ever feel like you are moving through the motions at work and not really connecting with the people there? You want to know them more and truly connect but you aren’t. Do you ever feel this same way when you are at a networking event? As if it is a competition for how many names and business cards you can share?

This is because you are not finding the real connection with people.

True human connection and communication is what really builds culture and relationships. True connection with others helps good leaders to become the best leaders. We discussed this with Craig Forman with CultureAmp and Bobi Seredich with Southwest Institute for Emotional Intelligence on this episode of the Culture Crush Business Podcast.

When we reflect on this podcast, we have so many topics that were discussed.

Self awareness
Military culture and influence
Emotional intelligence for the workplace
Ways to inspire people through culture
Having the courage to be vulnerable
The fitbit affect with culture
Leveraging data to grow culture
Stop, Breath, Ask

If you are curious about these topics then you will have to listen to the podcast to hear more from Bobi and Craig about them.

In the meantime, we do have a few other quick takeaways from the podcast about shifting your attitude and actions.

Intent versus impact: We all have good intentions but others judge us by our actions. When you are forming a relationship or bond with someone, be curious instead of judgemental. Love human beings, not human doings. Let’s try to be more intentional.

Transformational versus transactional: Let’s try to be less transactional and more transformational. When it comes to connections and relationships, it does not need to be a tit for tat game. If we come at relationships with the want and need to help support and transform, then the relationship has the opportunity to build in a more unique way.

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Culture Amp is a culture-first software company that is building a survey and analytics platform for people and culture.

The Culture Amp team combines deep knowledge in psychology, statistics, user experience and engineering into a platform that is transforming organizations worldwide.

Craig-Forman-Culture-CrushCraig Forman is a Lead People Scientist at Culture Amp, an employee experience platform used by over 6000 organizations worldwide. He both supports organizations in building effective people and culture strategies along with building the world’s largest community of people focused on building a better world of work. Behind all of his work is a mission to help the world work better by improving the places we work.

He holds a Masters degree in Industrial / Organizational Psychology, and is a proud veteran of the US Air Force.

Connect with Craig on LinkedIn.

SWIEI_LogoMark_HORZ_Orange

The vision at the Southwest Institute for Emotional Intelligence is to enhance life and leadership through Emotional Intelligence (EI) mastery. They have a proven approach to teaching EI skills that are immediately applied to business growth.

They teach influencers and leaders to connect confidently with each other in more meaningful and productive ways – to better collaborate, communicate, express empathy, perform under stress, adapt to change, and drive results.

The Southwest Institute for Emotional Intelligence offers keynotes, workshops, online courses, coaching, and consulting.

Bobi-Seredich-Culture-CrushBobi Seredich is the Co-Founder & President of The Southwest Institute for Emotional Intelligence. She is a certified coach and trainer in Emotional Intelligence from the Institute for Health and Human Potential. She is a recognized speaker, author, trainer, and successful entrepreneur specializing in leadership development.

Her passion is to guide individuals and organizations to a higher performance level through her own business knowledge, inspirational stories and leadership emotional intelligence training. She has spent over 25 years of her career dedicated to creating, directing, writing and presenting leadership programs for top companies in the U.S. and around the world.

In 2001 she founded Equanimity, Inc. also known as EQ Speakers, a speakers bureau, and leadership training company. It fast became a top speaker bureau that booked hundreds of speakers with large Fortune 500 clients. EQ Speakers was sold in 2012 and continues to be a leader in the industry.

Her book, Courage Does Not Always Roar Ordinary Women with Extraordinary Courage, was published by Simple Truths in the spring of 2010. The book is a collection of her experiences and stories of women who have had the courage to overcome very difficult life events. She is a mother of twins, Alex and Gia.

Follow Southwest Institute for Emotional Intelligence on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

About Culture Crush

Culture is not just a tag word to be thrown around. It is not something you throw in job descriptions to draw people to applying for jobs within a company.

According to Marcus Buckingham and Ashely Goodall in their book Nine Lies About Work, “Culture is the tenants of how we behave. It’s like a family creed. This is how we operate and treat each other in the family.”CultaureCrushKindraBanner2

As a growing company- Culture Crush Business Podcast is THE culture improvement resource that supports companies and leaders.  Our Mission is to improve company cultures so people WANT to go to work. Employees and leaders should like where they work and we think this is possible.

Within the company: Culture Crush has Vetted Resources and Partnerships with the right people and resources that can help improve your company culture.

On this podcast:  We focus on everything surrounding businesses with good company culture. We will talk with company leaders to learn about real-life experiences, tips, and best practices for creating a healthy work environment where employees are finding joy and satisfaction in their work while also striving and growing within the company.  We also find the companies that offer resources to help improve company culture and showcase them on the show to share their tips and tricks for growing culture.

About the Host

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Kindra Maples  is spartan racer, past animal trainer, previous magician’s assistant, and has a weakness for Oreo cookie shakes. Her journey working with people actually started working with animals as a teenager (don’t worry we won’t go that far back for her bio).

She worked for over 15 years in the zoo industry working with animals and the public. Her passion of working with animals shifted into working with people in education, operations and leadership roles. From there her passion of leadership and helping people develop has continued to grow.

Then came the opportunity for leading  the Culture Crush Business Podcast and she jumped on it. Leadership, growth, and strong company cultures are all areas that Kindra is interested in diving into further.

Shout Outs

We want to thank a few people for their behind the scenes effort in helping this relaunch to come to life. James Johnson with Tailored Penguin Media Company LLC.– It is a small, but powerful video production company with a goal to deliver the very best by articulating the vision of your brand in a visually creative way. Gordon Murray with Flash PhotoVideo, LLC. -Flash Gordon has been photographing since high school and evolving since then with new products that will equip, encourage, engage, and enable. Renee Blundon with Renee Blundon Design – She is not only one of the best free divers (that’s not how she helped with the podcast) but she is great with graphics design and taking the direction for the vision that you have while also adding creative ideas to bring to your vision to life.

These are just a few of the folks that supported the relaunch of the podcast. If you would like to be part of the Culture Crush team or would like to support underwriting the show- please reach out: info@culturecrushbusiness.com

Mission Critical: Closing the Cybersecurity Workforce Gap E34

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AZ TechCast
Mission Critical: Closing the Cybersecurity Workforce Gap E34
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Mission Critical: Closing the Cybersecurity Workforce Gap E34

Did you know that the global cybersecurity workforce gap is roughly 3.4 million people? This means that the supply of skilled cybersecurity workers needed to protect businesses from cyber threats has struggled to keep up with growing demand.

The January 2023 episode of the Arizona Technology Council’s AZTechCast podcast featured experts including Dara Gibson, AZ president of WiCyS Phoenix and senior manager at Optiv; Susan Morris, co-owner of ABL Cyber Academy and Cogent Cyber Range; and Andrew Roberts, chief cybersecurity strategist at cStor, A MicroAge Company. These leaders joined Steve Zylstra, president and CEO of the Arizona Technology Council, and Bianca Buliga, the Council’s director of marketing and communications, in discussing how Arizona can more effectively close the gap and connect with skilled cybersecurity talent.

Throughout this hour-long episode, the panel of three experts discussed how they became interested in cybersecurity careers, the current global state of cybersecurity, the top cyber threats to watch out for and how businesses are more closely integrating cybersecurity within their business operations to protect themselves, their employees and their clients. On multiple occasions, the experts emphasized the growing disparity between open cybersecurity positions and the pool of skilled talent, and highlighted that people don’t need to be cybersecurity experts to land careers in the growing field. wicys-logo

The mission of WiCyS (pronounced We Sis) is to help build a strong gender-diverse cybersecurity workforce by facilitating recruitment, retention and advancement for women in the field.

WiCyS is a global community of women, allies and advocates, that are dedicated to bringing talented women together to celebrate and foster their passion and drive for cybersecurity.

The organization unites local communities of aspiring and thriving women cybersecurity professionals across the world to collaborate, share their knowledge, network and mentor.

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Optiv is the cyber advisory and solutions leader in the United States. It is critical for any organization to achieve its full potential, cyber risk must be understood and overcome. Optiv cybersecurity experts will work alongside clients to manage cyber risk and equip them with perspectives and programs to accelerate business progress.

Real-world experience, deep vertical expertise and diverse teams enables the subject matter experts to face any challenge with confidence. Optiv will put the organizations at the center of our unmatched ecosystem of people, products, partners and programs to design and implement agile solutions. The adaptive approach continually assesses risk in the context of cyber and broader objectives to secure today’s business and fortify it for the future.

Optiv professionals manage cyber risk so all businesses can secure the full potential.

Dara-Gibson-AZ-TechCastDara Gibson has developed and managed cybersecurity services for 5 years. By blending cutting-edge technologies, unique skill sets, and proven cyber strategies, she can create lasting partnerships with clients to protect shareholder value and corporate reputations.

As a nationally recognized information security leader, Mrs. Gibson is responsible for designing cybersecurity awareness programs to foster expertise in relationship management with industry leading cyber insurance and legal providers for proactive and reactive cybersecurity capabilities.

Connect with Dara on LinkedIn.

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cStor helps organizations strategize, design and implement cybersecurity, modern infrastructure, and digital transformation solutions and services that address the evolving needs of today’s enterprise. cStor’s proven capabilities with best-in-class technologies provide peace of mind and put organizations on a path to success.

cStor serves clients throughout the Southwest with a focused, collaborative approach and superior results.

Andrew-Roberts-AZ-TechCastAs the Chief Cybersecurity Strategist for cStor, Andrew Roberts partners with clients to help them achieve great accomplishments in their cybersecurity, governance, risk and compliance programs.

He is building a successful cybersecurity practice by focusing on client success, sales enablement and partner alignment.

Andrew brings a wealth of experience in audit, advisory and cybersecurity leadership and freely shares that knowledge to help put clients on the path to success.

Connect with Andrew on LinkedIn.

ABL has been a workforce effectiveness provider for 24 years. Clients include the US Navy, Department of Energy, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and numerous Fortune 1000 organizations including Allstate, Esurance, eBay, Microfocus, Avnet, Haliburton, and PepsiCo.

ABL takes a hands-on approach to learning and development and has followed the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE) Cyber Range Project Team’s recommendation for the use of cyber ranges to improve individual and team cyber security knowledge and capabilities.

In response to the significant threats facing every organization today, ABL includes hands on skills development for all students through ABL’s Cyber Range, for ensuring higher levels of cyber skills competencies in identifying vulnerabilities and threats to mitigate and thwart.

ABL’s mission is to develop and validate cyber security skills for incumbent individuals, teams and the incoming workforce.

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ABL’s newest range, the Cogent OT Cyber Education and Skills Range launched in October 2022. A “cogent” approach to large scale education and skills development has never been more crucial. Through cloud range access, training resources for organizations, educational institutions and individuals are available from anywhere, at any time, ensuring individuals have the knowledge and practical skills to identify poorly designed code, legacy and vulnerable device configuration issues, critical to protecting any organization.

It is ABL’s mission to build and continue to initiate alliances and partnerships for real change with private organizations and government agencies who are leaders in the field for OT workforce development, to attenuate the global OT/IT cyber vulnerabilities. A few of our current partnerships include, but are not limited to, the Arizona Cyber Threat Response Alliance (ACTRA) and ACTRA’s initiative, the North American Cyber Range Alliance, NACRA.

Susan-Morris-AZ-TechCastSusan Morris’ areas of expertise include business consulting, research, design, development, and implementation of workforce effectiveness solutions and corporate change initiatives that produce bottom-line results for ABL’s clients, including the Fortune 1000 and the Federal Government.

Ms. Morris amended ABL’s mission in 2015 to include a focus on the critical threat to both private and public sectors – the shortage of cyber OT and IT workforce talent. In her role, Ms. Morris researches and utilizes the most current learning strategies, methodologies, education processes and resources in workforce development for ABL’s clients and partners.

As part of establishing ABL’s strategic direction and vision, she ensures ABL has alliances and partnerships with private organizations and government agencies who are leaders in the field for real change and attenuation of the global OT/IT cyber vulnerabilities. She continually diversifies ABL’s portfolio and worked to secure ABL as a cyber certification training provider to the US Army, US Navy, and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

From over 30 years’ experience in workforce effectiveness, she understands reducing human error-caused data breaches requires more than building employee knowledge, skills, and abilities.

Susan holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Marymount College in New York.

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Alan Vey with Aventus

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Daring to
Alan Vey with Aventus
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Alan-Vey-AventusAlan Vey is Founder & CEO at Aventus. Following receiving his Master’s in Artificial Intelligence at Imperial College London, he completed a stint as a quantitative developer at macro hedge fund Brevan Howard, giving him exposure to the world of traditional finance.

Marrying these skillsets and his hunger to innovate, Alan founded Aventus in 2016 – an enterprise-grade blockchain with the aim of making the benefits of blockchain available to businesses. After raising over $20m in an ICO in 2017 and surviving the pandemic, we have since continued to grow and expand into new sectors (including NFTs, loyalty, ticketing, gaming and supply chain to name a few).

Alan was named a Forbes 30 Under 30 winner in 2021 for his work at Aventus, and he continues to look for ways to remain at the bleeding edge of the space.

In addition to his work at Aventus, building further blockchain businesses and supporting others with their tokenomics models, Alan focuses on extending discipline to all areas of his personal life.

Connect with Alan on LinkedIn.

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:02] Welcome to Daring to a podcast that finds out how CEOs and entrepreneurs navigate today’s business world. The conventions they’re breaking. The challenges they faced and the decisions that they’ve made.And lastly, just what makes them different.

Rita Trehan: [00:00:19] Well, what a way for us to kick off 2023. Joining me today is Alan Vey, a serial entrepreneur, Forbes 30 under 30. He’s just traveled from the UK back to Dubai. He’s only just landed, but he’s looks as fresh as a daisy and he’s raring to go to share his knowledge, his expertise about a subject that I think is like on everybody’s radar right now. There’s like a ton of news about technology. Yeah, we know technology’s been around a long time, but you’re kind of like a really interesting character. So I’ve got some what I call wicked questions for you today that we’re going to cover. We’re going to cover. Does it make a difference? Is an entrepreneur successful because of the diverse experiences that they bring to the table? Why do I ask that question? Well, Alan was born in South Africa, but apparently he’s lived around many countries. Let’s explore. Does that make a difference to being a really successful entrepreneur? I wonder? We’ll get his thoughts on that. If you’ve heard of blockchain, I will share with you my own experience of blockchain. Very briefly, back in about 2016, 2018, I was on the board of a publicly listed company in Australia.

Rita Trehan: [00:01:31] Sitting on the board. The board were talking about black blockchain. I came out of the meeting and said, Is anybody got blockchain for dummies? Because I like, I really need to understand this and my mind is blown. But Alan is going to help us understand that in a way that’s really important. One Web two, Web three. I know. Do you know what they are? If you don’t know what Web three is, you better listen in because it’s something that we may all really want to benefit from. So, you know, I’m honored to have you on the show, Alan. I mean, you know, you are you’ve created not only successful businesses, raised $300 Million and more, but you’re continuing to be an advocate for a tech industry but making tech accessible. So let’s start. Tell me, what does gold and blockchain have in common? I ask that question because it seems like golf is quite important in your early days. And I play golf, but I can’t say I’ve connected. It’s blockchain. So tell us a little bit about yourself, please.

Alan Vey: [00:02:29] I read that. Thanks for having me up for a chat today. So maybe just starting off on that first point, right? I think I played a lot of being South African Culturally, it’s quite typical to play a lot of sports is very sort of outdoorsy lifestyle, right? Everything from water sports to different team sports. Golf and rowing were the ones that kind of resonated best with me. And I continued on playing the most, I think in any team sport, especially as you’re growing up as a kid, it’s just great and learning the discipline of training, right? A competitive nature and figuring out how to at times do it with, well, what you’re going to golf the world of etiquette or just in a competitive but not too far in the realm of that being a little bit unpleasant to others. I think a lot of those sort of good fundamental building blocks and how to deal with people in a competitive environment and work together come from the world of sports.

Rita Trehan: [00:03:24] And so what was it? I mean, like you trained like I mean, you played at a national level, but then you decided to pursue computer science. What was it about computer science that interested you? I mean, that’s not necessarily outdoors, is it? But but clearly, there was a passion, a hidden passion that you’ve had, which you’ve actually brought to, in all seriousness, to to play in a very important space right now. So tell us a little bit about that. What was the intrigue around I computer science and your time at Imperial College? Because that’s kind of where you got your like you really kind of made it come alive. Tell us a little bit about that.

Alan Vey: [00:04:05] Exactly. So I started I moved to the UK. I was living in Germany and when I was 16 my parents moved us to the UK and that’s really when I’ve been playing kind of at a national level in Germany and then the moving country that age at 16 as well, and was starting to become an adult, or at least the early phases of that. I went through, shall we say, a less motivated phase with respect to my goal of right after the move. So I was a little bit lost all over the place looking for kind of a direction like what’s next, right? And I started to become better and better at maths in school. It just seemed to be something that came to me naturally, but I like to apply it to the real world. So the applications are kind of physics or more recently computer science. And that’s where in my last year I took a gap year after I did A-levels in the UK to really figure out what I was doing. I worked. Deloitte, an entrepreneurial business, which was my first kind of commercial world experience in that seeing sort of small and medium sized enterprises and what that meant from the sort of financial professional services and consulting side. Being at Deloitte and during that year then applied to do computer science because I just thought it was a nice application of maths. Imperial was a great school. I was really, really happy when I got accepted there and I thought spending some time in London, you’ll meet amazing people there and kind of see where that takes you, right? So my undergrad was done in computer science and as I learned more and more about the space and artificial intelligence really resonated with me.

Alan Vey: [00:05:40] We did various different assignments. I remember one of them was predicting people’s emotions, so you would get sort of readings of whatever facial expressions and the like 45 action units or something on the face, an eyebrow up or down or something like that. And we’d predict to 93% accuracy what the emotion was. The person’s face was kind of showing, which is as accurate as humans can predicted. And these kind of little tests I just thought were so powerful when you extrapolate where this technology might go one day and then we had to do a sort of industrial placement. So I spent six or nine months working at macro hedge fund Brennan Howard, looking at machine learning strategies with them. So I went to my professor, also South African guy William Newton, both he had just launched the cryptocurrency Center at Imperial in 2015. This is also the Ethereum blockchain. That sort of second biggest blockchain today was launched and I went to Will and said, I’m going to predict the price of Bitcoin based on sentiment laws, machine learning, sort of techniques I learned better than anybody has so far. And he was very unenthused, as I gathered. That’s that’s, that’s old news. And why don’t you do something really interesting and look at what Ethereum has done to Bitcoin. And Ethereum obviously introduced the notion of smart contracts programable money, if you like, and that innovation really learning about that is what kind of set me off on this path.

Rita Trehan: [00:07:07] So I talk about the companies that you have, like you are a serial entrepreneur, your companies have as you progressed, they’ve actually really sort of open the field of transparency around contracts and changes and actually addressed a really critical problem, something that I’m very passionate about and which is inclusion. So in the sense of inclusion being that everybody gets the opportunity to be able to access, have ownership and get to decide where and what they do and how they how they play in a marketplace. But you just use the word I’m not sure even I’m going to say it right. Etherium Right. Which is like people like, quick, let me Google that. What does it mean? But actually it’s a really important concept. So can you talk about some of the the businesses that you’ve actually created and and how actually it’s making technology not only available, but but actually really transparent and actually inclusive, INC making it inclusive versus these big technology companies, which we loved. So let’s not get us right. We love them. We love them for what they are. But also, you know, they’ve had their share of the game, haven’t they? And it’s time now to maybe open it up a little bit. So talk a bit about that. You are a massive advocate for that, the businesses that you’ve created. I’ll let you talk about them and have done that both from a ticketing perspective, just opening up this concept of tokens and exchange. I mean, it’s a whole new world, but it’s so fascinating. So they share some of that.

Alan Vey: [00:08:45] Yeah, for sure. Let’s start with. A sort of high level overview of what was innovative about this technology, right? Because then we can understand the problems that we tried to apply it to to solve them. So there’s a lot of complicated terminology around blockchain, and it’s the nature of the technical industry. People like to be very precise, but at the end of the day, the thing we couldn’t previously do, which blockchain enables is create scarcity without a trusted intermediary. It’s pretty much that simple, right? With scarcity, you can’t actually have any genuine representation of value without scarcity. If something isn’t scarce, it has no value, right? It’s infinitely available. So that ability to represent value and to move that around is what Bitcoin really enables. No intermediaries, like you say, transparent and immutable so that nobody could tamper with it kind of creates that beautiful audit trail. And then the second generation of blockchain is what Ethereum kind of created, which is coin smart contracts. And what you layer on top of that is the ability to create rules around this value. How is this value created? What conditions have to hold for this value to be transferred? You can think of these. The reason they call it smart contracts is almost like contractual clauses. Right at the end of the month you will pay me X if you did your job properly or whatever it is. So that’s what Ethereum brought to the space in the kind of second generation of smart contracts. And when you look at the industries we got involved in, so I had done my master’s thesis with Will at Imperial at on film rights distribution and in exploring the film industry, it became clear quite quickly that music typically adopts new technology first and then formed us.

Alan Vey: [00:10:45] So we thought, okay, let’s start with the music industry and then music. There’s two major subcategories, right? There’s recorded, which is your Spotify, and you’re kind of playing it on your phone and there’s live where people attend events and whatnot and revenues and growth in recorded is decreasing because of their business models there, but in life is massively increasing. So we thought, okay, growth market in a sector where this is very applicable, we think there might be some problems there and in doing our analysis, really noticed in the ticketing market how there were certain inefficiencies in the secondary market. Now it was a bit naive at first. Our approach being very technical and background and coming into this industry and thinking, Oh, it’s just a tech problem. There are various political reasons and and sort of monopolistic behavior in the market, which is why it is the way it is. But the tech can help support that. And specifically the point you’re mentioning around transparency, right? This technology that now does not require intermediaries means essentially from an economic perspective, you can move away from this notion of economies of scale, Right. Where something needs to scale to be really big for it to be efficient With blockchain, the technology so efficient that the base layer, we can do much more sort of decentralized and put the power back in the sort of masses and individuals and just as efficiently come together as in that sort of economies of scale.

Alan Vey: [00:12:15] So when you apply that problem to you apply that those properties to these kind of problem areas and ticketing, for example, what we found is you don’t want to touch the transaction, you don’t want to be dealing with the money of the sale of the ticket because of how the industry is structured. That’s a very hard way to break in. But if you restructure what you think has as the access, right, it was originally a piece of paper moved to barcodes, Now it’s moving to these what you call NFT tickets or should we say blockchain based tickets where you can essentially lock the tickets to an identity and you can very transparently track how that ticket moves between various different identities. So maybe the identity is the identity of a phone. So you buy a phone, maybe it’s an actual individual’s identity. There’s various ways of thinking about identity and how you validate that when somebody shows up at the venue. But this infrastructure gives you the ability to much more efficiently manage this shed light on some of what’s happening in the secondary market, which ultimately allows the artist to deliver the experience to the fan as they intended, with maximum effect alongside the promoters and managers and whatnot who are involved in that value chain. So yeah.

Rita Trehan: [00:13:33] That was available when George Michael was having those debates around like who owns the music rights for his music Boy, would it maybe have created a very different place for his passion for music. And who should who should benefit from that, right? I mean, you can kind of play that back. And say actually, that you’re solving a problem that many musicians and and artists, whether it’s in the film or music industry, were saying, like, actually let the people have access to the music and exchange that in a fair, fair way. Right. So it’s kind of really addressing a very real problem that existed. I’m sure if he’s listening above is going carry on, Alan, because that’s the way forward. If you’re a George Michael fan. I am. So we’ll leave it at that. But it’s a really interesting concept. So, you know, you’ve created several businesses from this. And one thing that I because I like to kind of find that interesting facts is you say experience is not everything. I find that a really interesting and insightful comment from an entrepreneur because a lot of people that listen to this show particularly are wannabe entrepreneurs. They want to hear inspirational stories. Now, you may have this brilliant idea. They may be right now thinking, I’ve got this idea around how Web3 might play out for me or some of the technology and some of the space that you’re playing in could be a real collaboration, but I don’t know that I’ve got the experience to do it. You said earlier we came at it from a tech perspective, but actually there’s a whole lot more. Tell me why that comment experience is not everything and was so important to you? Our couple that with one with other things which is influence comes from the people that you know you talked about your professor and how you learn. I kind of put those two together and go like experience is not everything. Influence is about people like who you know and who you work with and who you trust kind of thing. Tell us a little bit about that journey for you.

Alan Vey: [00:15:34] Yeah. So. On the experience front, right? There’s there’s various different ways of looking at it. Base kind of as an individual for trying to achieve something. You kind of look at your base talent or shall we say the things you were born with. You then have your skills, the things you really worked hard on creating for yourself, and you spend the time and then experience as you kind of use your talent and skills over the years, which helps sort of further refine that. That’s the way I kind of look at the sort of base skillsets of an entrepreneur, right experience. It’s difficult sometimes when you look back on your life and you’ve done different things to say, Oh, the reason I had this success was because of this property, that property, that property. Because if you changed any one of them, you don’t know which one actually created that sort of causal link to the result that you were trying to achieve. So sometimes people who are amazing people in business have worked in business for 40 years, had great successes. They don’t necessarily know which of their characteristics are the ones that led to those successes. They know all of them together potentially lead to that result. But to say just this one thing or that one thing from my experience is so important, it’s difficult to dissect them objectively, sort of quantify. So that’s one thing. But that’s not to say experience doesn’t matter, right? Like, it’s very important to surround yourself with people who know what they’re doing.

Alan Vey: [00:16:59] And better yet, the more independent sources you can draw on. Mentors is a very important part of being an entrepreneur. Finding people that you respect who see something in you, maybe something of themselves, and they want to help sort of foster that learning from their experience and listening to everybody, always having an open mind. I think it was Continental. Somebody said strong opinions loosely held. You have your strong opinions form your point of view. Of course, be willing and ready to change that as and when you are given evidence of concrete. Right. So if you have four or five mentors or completely independent, diverse backgrounds all telling you the same thing, there’s probably something to it. They all have a different opinion on it, then maybe the experience is not so relevant to that particular element. So all of this kind of plays a role in trying to build and then ultimately everything comes down to relationships, right? The fundraising, which enabled building the products, hiring the team that was able to take these ideas to the next level and further develop the ideas come with their own ideas and ultimately sign with the clients. Every one of those aspects is about relationships with people, and if you don’t work on that and actively see that as one of the most important elements of your job as an entrepreneur, I truly think you’ll struggle to get to get anywhere.

Rita Trehan: [00:18:20] You have been very active in sort of being a voice for technology, in technology. And let’s talk about Web3 because it’s technology Web3 the new wave of of the Internet. Internet for good, as some people refer to it. And you know, you’re an advocate for that. But mentorship around that as well. So why is for all those budding entrepreneurs and actually all of those corporations that are listening to because we do get some high level CEOs, they say they don’t listen, but we know they do. We know who you are. And they are interested, too, in budding entrepreneurs. Why is Web3 so important and how can you explain it to the average person like me? Okay, but I liken it to Brexit. It’s a complex subject, but you can make it simplistic in a way that can help people. It is really important, right? It’s the internet for good. Can the internet be good? Is it a liberator or is it really an enslaver? Tell us your views on Web3.

Alan Vey: [00:19:25] Yeah. So. Let’s start with some definitions and then we’ll get to the conclusion of how people choose to use it. So. Web3. Let’s do Web one. Web two. Right. The Internet itself, obviously is just a bunch of computers that are connected and talk to each other. Web one was all about reading content. You had these big service companies that would create informational websites or whatever, and you would sit at home and you would pull this information and you would kind of read it to consume it. What went to then did this is really where social media started to explode, is read and write. So rather than pulling information from these websites like Facebook, you would start with user generated content posting YouTube videos, Facebook pictures, all of this kind of stuff, creating more of a dynamic Internet environment of reading and writing. What Web three adds to this equation is owning as well. You can actually have digital ownership and everything that comes along with that the scarcity notion that I mentioned before. So Web3 is really all about the ability. The Internet itself was not set up very well for payments for sort of value exchange. Any of that stuff is still a lot of manual processes, right Today, if you transfer banks for money between international banks, you’re waiting days in a world where we can lend each other a text in just than a second.

Rita Trehan: [00:20:52] Seconds.

Alan Vey: [00:20:52] Right there. So it’s a basic building block that’s going to help a lot of that. And the reason it’s so in the forefront of people’s minds is because of crypto, Right? It was an interesting market, like the stock market, like what Robinhood did with sort of shares and that kind of way of making investing easy for people in the stock market. Crypto is very easy and unregulated and that’s why that’s one application of blockchain that web3 technology itself will fade more and more into the background of. I think people will start using it without even knowing that they’re using it because they’re getting value from these properties. That’s more and more where they’ll go. And of course crypto and trading in the markets and financial side will stay interesting for those that are interesting and playing in that domain. But the core technology now is really starting to get used underneath things and like any technology. It’s not inherently good or evil. It’s how many? I mean, even the defense industry, you could argue some people use it for defending rather than attacking, and that’s questionable. But most technology is how people end up applying it.

Rita Trehan: [00:22:00] Right.

Alan Vey: [00:22:00] So let’s have an example in the ticketing world from when I spoke before, you could use this technology to ensure that what’s promised with the artist, let’s say Ed Sheeran, he’s big on sort of making sure he does right by his fans. Right. He could make sure that none of his tickets ever sell for above whatever price and everything is enforced properly all the way through. It’s called the supply chain of a ticket from sale to redemption when you enter the venue. Or his manager could use it to ensure that they still market works exactly the same as it currently does, but they get their fair share of all of the revenue within that market. Or somebody downstream can use it to ensure that they control that downstream. Right. So there’s various ways more right or wrong, depending on where you kind of draw the line with respect to what you’re trying to optimize towards where it could be good or bad. But ultimately, it does give us the ability to empower individual communities and move away from these models, like the tech companies storing all data and benefiting from it. Right? You can now build systems where you are paid for your data if it’s used in advertising. So I think more and more use cases is going to act like a nuclear deterrent. Big businesses in the financial world and big tech across many industries are going to be forced to innovate their business models in a more fair direction because of the pressure of competitors using this technology for good. So ultimately it is going to improve the scenario for the kind of individual every man from this technology.

Rita Trehan: [00:23:43] To what is your vision taking you? You know, you’ve raised all this money, you’ve created these platforms where whether it’s ticketing, whether it’s payment opportunities, whether it’s about opening up sources for token exchange on different aspects around payments, an opportunity for people to kind of like collectively create their own, if you like, exchange platforms. Where’s your big vision going? Where do you see not only have you done that, I should also say like you’ve done it in an ecologically sound way, right? We’re we’re in this week is Davos. There’s a lot of there’s a lot of talk is going out there at the moment but maybe they need to hear from practitioners, the people that are really making it happen about where the vision is. So where’s your vision, Alan?

Alan Vey: [00:24:34] So. I just want to for our companies, what we are trying to achieve is being a part of on building on building the world to Web3 right. The real definition, the goal is to continue to improve The infrastructure will be a part of improving the infrastructure that we have to kind of drive advancement across society. So we’re a minor part of that today. But more and more, this technology really has the ability to drastically transform ecosystems. And we’ve seen a lot of interesting stuff already happening. People are moving towards more sustainable infrastructures with the impact this has had in developing nations. Their example of of crypto games that were basically exclusively axie infinity, as an example that blew up and this is a game on Ethereum and blew up in the Philippines and such a large amount of people started playing the game because they were able to earn triple what the sort of average salary earning was that they otherwise had access to. So the ability to create fairer economic systems, people send money back to developing economies now without 20, 30, 40% fees, you can do it for a few cents. There’s so many ways that this can help better connect the world and improve our infrastructure as a whole. So might not be the sexiest kind of vision, but being a.

Rita Trehan: [00:25:57] Part, I think it’s a pretty sexy vision, right? I mean, just thinking about the UN have 21 sustainable goals that they’re trying to achieve, you know, that are empowering and saying to companies, governments, institutions, hey, we can’t do this alone with three potentially offers, opens up that platform to make some of these massive challenges and they are global challenges. We can’t move away from them anymore and say it’s a government challenge or a corporation challenge or an institution challenge. It is a collaboration and it’s making technology like at the core of how it can be a good thing. Like technology is not bad. It’s not. I’m a big believer technology is not destroying jobs, it’s creating jobs. Technology is creating interesting work. It’s actually solving societal problems, as you say, it depends on how it gets used. Right. And ultimately, that that’s the that’s the foundation that you’re proving with the companies that you have invested in and or have serially created to prove out that point. You’ve said that actually you’ve been quoted, and I wholeheartedly agree with you, that the downturn in the Bitcoin and crypto currency was probably a good thing, right? It kind of sifted out those bad players in the market or people that were perhaps more focused on like, let’s go with the hype rather than actually doing what you’re talking about, which is like, let’s invest in a sustainable infrastructure that actually works and capture on those ideas wherever they may come.

Rita Trehan: [00:27:32] So I have to come into a little bit about knowing a bit more, digging deeper. You know, I don’t have the facial tech AI that tells me like what you’re thinking right now, but I am intrigued by that. We may talk about that later on another on another webcast. But let’s let’s delve a little bit more into Alan. Right. You know, here you are, 30 under 30. Having created this, you talk about the need to be tough and ruthless, right? Like hard work, determination, but this kind of ruthless quality I like ruthless like you look like a ruthless kind of guy, But I don’t think you mean ruthless in the sense of like just in it. For me. I think you are ruthless. Is a different kind of take on that word. Tell me if I’m right or wrong and what you mean by that.

Alan Vey: [00:28:20] Yeah, I think the most important thing is to try and be objective, right? As much as possible, keeping an even temperament, not being too happy with any of the apps. So people agreeing with you, not being too depressed with any of the downs or people disagreeing with you as much as possible. Trying to be objective, trying to be rational. And people at times can say that comes across a bit cold. And those things that I’ve had to work on over the years is especially with staff internally and telling people, Yeah, great job, but they’ve done a great job or now we need to improve this or that. Because most of the time we all work really hard. We get it done and then we move on to the next thing. So I think, yeah, ruthless is not intended to mean. China doesn’t matter. The other people don’t matter. Let’s just optimize towards ourselves. I think ruthless in pursuit of the objective without distractions. Right. That’s that’s the really important part. Objective focused and not getting taken off path by things that don’t really matter to the core objective of what we are all waking up for.

Rita Trehan: [00:29:33] So I think that’s a great payback moment. I always have like there’s always an aha moment happens on my podcast, me personally, and that was my aha moment. And this is the one where I say, go back and relisten, rewind listeners and just listen to that sentence again because it was all about have the focus, don’t get distracted, stay true to what you’re trying to to achieve and be really disciplined about it. I guess that’s where maybe some of that goal came in to it, but I really like that. Ruthless In your pursuit of what your goal is, I think is a very powerful message for businesses in general to stay the course and not get sidetracked and be true to following that that path. I go back and listen to that. There’s plenty of nuggets all around. But but that one, I think, just kind of hits. So I’ve got to ask as well. Right. We’ve got to like it’s really current. It’s been in the news this week. I’ve been on I’ve tried to chat TB to right. People may not know what it is, but I’ve been quite intrigued with it and it’s I it’s in the space where you have, you know, you are an expert in there’s lots in the media about Microsoft’s $10 Billion potential investment in this in this new thing where you kind of go in, you ask it a question. It’s the kind of the taking the web to to potentially a web3. It’s kind of letting you ask questions and get information back. Is A.I. designing A.I., As some people have said, this could be What’s Google doing about this? Because suddenly they’re in the space of like, hang on a minute, isn’t that what, like, I’m just going to Google this dead? And is this now playing in this space? Our favorite saying, What’s your take? What do you say to the people that are debating this right now? Because it’s a big thing into Web3, I think, is it not, or am I wrong?

Alan Vey: [00:31:27] I think it’s really exciting to see how far I has come. We had Siri and Alexa and all of these tools for a while, but that’s its really fancy way of selecting from a menu with GPP when you kind of interact with this bot. It feels very different than the kind of intelligence it shows. I mean, I don’t know to what degree you’ve played with it, but one thing I like to do is I would do these kind of meetings. Right. And I have a tool that transcribes the conversation, and then I’ll put that into chat and say, please give me the action points and the kind of summary and everything. And it’s amazing how accurately it even does that. So processing new data, drawing on other data. Once this thing gets properly let go, right now I think we have beta version three, version fours coming, which is sort of a whole nother level. So I think it’s very exciting what the best technology can do. I’ve heard I think I saw Google’s got kind of red alerts around.

Rita Trehan: [00:32:26] They say they’re now fast tracking their version of it. So.

Alan Vey: [00:32:31] Exactly. And then Microsoft, one interesting thing that I saw from the deal structure with Microsoft and Chat Group, I believe in the early years, they from any profits, they recoup their investment. But over time, it shifts to a 5050 split. And in the long term, the profits stay with church. And so despite this investment, it’s really them looking at it as whatever the timeline is, 5 to 10 years of first to market and being able to use this and ultimately giving up the revenues in the future for that advantage. So it’s not even your traditional kind of investment, which is very interesting to see sort of strategic thinking that might be happening at Microsoft that that suggests.

Rita Trehan: [00:33:14] That’s nice thing. Yeah. They all said some interesting things in the space without a doubt. Yeah. And you obviously see it as a play for all of the things and where you’ve invested and kind of what you are trying to to bring forward. I mean this is this is continuing to open up the avenues, is it not? Is it not heightening the the sort of the awareness of just the capability of what technology can do and how blockchain can play a part in this?

Alan Vey: [00:33:44] Yeah. So between sort of blockchain and especially the payments infrastructure that we’re seeing really starting to change on the financial markets, these sort of intelligent AI tools that will ultimately be able to join anything that is digital and concepts around sort of metaverse, where obviously Facebook announced this a couple of years ago now and people are more and more kind of building out those elements, but you’re starting to see a world come together of I don’t know if you’re familiar with Steven Spielberg’s ready. Player one but.

Rita Trehan: [00:34:15] Now, yeah.

Alan Vey: [00:34:16] It’s kind of live in this virtual world. You transact there and every now and then the real world is kind of not so interesting and you just get a sense of your core substance that you’ve won by playing this game in in this kind of fake world and you’re playing against real people and computer intelligence. So it’s very advanced. It’s pushing forward things significantly. And I’m really excited to see what happens with GPT. I mean, it’s really good times for the AI industry and something. I finished my master’s in AI in 2016 and couldn’t even dream of something like this when you know, you kind of reach the edge of where certain elements of research are in the world and to see what’s happened in what, five, six years. Yeah, it’s very exciting to see what might happen in the next ten. We’ve just got to be careful with how it plays out from us.

Rita Trehan: [00:35:03] Yeah, well, I hate to see you writing about it and talking about it, because I do think it does need visionaries like yourself to actually be contributing to the chat on these new technologies as they come out. So I hope to hope to be reading back your opinions on this in the future. I’m going to come back with one question that is particularly, I guess, important in my kind of my heart, I guess, which is do you think that your diverse experience, having lived and worked in different cultures and and what you’re trying to what you have shown with what you’ve done with blockchain, is it truly opening up the opportunities for inclusion? There are many people, as you’ve said, like whether it’s payments that people, you know, trying to send payments to across countries in underserved populations and underrepresented founders and massively continues to be an issue, does blockchain and web3, does it open up that And do you think your own personal experience of having that diversity is actually core to the potential success of entrepreneurs? I’m curious.

Alan Vey: [00:36:16] So to the first half of that question, is blockchain opening things up more? Yes, to a degree, especially because of the lack of regulation. Right? There was the ability for everyone and anybody to kind of get involved in this market early on. And that led to a lot of problems because, of course, the easiest way of making money is to kind of cheat. And if you have a scenario where that’s possible and not enforced, that’s why we have some of the negative sentiment from the 2017 ICO bubble and various other crypto winters we’ve had since then. But the flip side of that coin is that everybody has access, including. Various underrepresented people. People who don’t quite have the advantages, or shall we say, the access to capital, the democratization of capital is a very important one in solving this problem. Right? If you look at the sort of founders, there’s a demographic profile that emerges as a significant majority, despite merit wise, you wouldn’t necessarily expect it to be the case. So that democratization of access to capital, to debt, to financial markets that operate more efficiently, less relationship based, more merit based, because you just have the transparency of the KPIs that you can enforce on the blockchain, right? It shows transparency. So you can see how many transactions are occurring, how many users there are these kinds of things. I believe that there is the ability, if people so choose and the regulators leave room for it, for this technology to to create a big difference in sort of inclusion when it comes to experience the second half of what you’re asking there.

Alan Vey: [00:37:59] I’ve noticed it in our businesses that the best teams are those with diversity of thought. So often having different backgrounds leads to diversity of thought. If you’ve lived in various different countries, I remember when I moved to Germany, I didn’t speak German and I went into a German school, not an international school. And certain things that you just think are like universal truths in the world. As a kid, I’m just not because people laugh at you for it, or it’s just completely different cultures. And those kind of learnings. But the moving around is not the only way of getting those right, going through difficulties and overcoming difficulties, really taking challenges head on. That’s what ultimately builds sort of diversity of thought, diversity of experience and from what I’ve seen, so the better. And does that impact performance? What I’ve seen with teams is the more diversity of thought that exists people from different backgrounds, ethnicities, genders. Sexual preferences, whatever all the arbitrary classifications that we create around people, the more diverse peoples are, often the more, shall we say, friction there is between the team, the good friction, because people have different viewpoints, they don’t just agree. And that ultimately if you have the right management structure and a very emotionally intelligent manager to make sure that you keep this productive, that’s where you get the best ideas from them. So, yes, I think it I think it’s important to evaluate myself is difficult. I believe it’s helped me, but who knows?

Rita Trehan: [00:39:43] Yeah, well, you sound to me like you have a mindset that says I don’t need to be the smartest person in the room. I need to, like, have that diversity of thought around me to help me ask the questions. Why? Why not? What if? What could be? So that’s the sense I get from who you are. And certainly you’ve been an inspiration to many, many people. If anybody looks you up, they can just see how much of a thought leader you have been for the tech industry and to individuals, which is the kind of leader I call them, leaders of difference. You are the leader of difference that hopefully is going to continue to make that make that traction going forward. We need more of them. We need we need the advocates and you certainly in the businesses that you’ve done are taking them there. So I think well, I’m certainly much more educated on on web3 and blockchain, so I no longer feel like I need to refer to Blockchain for dummies, which I felt I did need back in probably 2017. I think it was when my head was hurting and I thought like, I’m never going to get this. And I would encourage people to kind of like really read about it. It is important and certainly we’re going to get on to how they can find out a bit more from you. But as much as I’d like to to chat more, I’m conscious that we are running out of time. So I do have one last question which I ask everybody, which is they’re daring to moment. So it could be something that you’re daring to do. It’s you’re daring to moment, it’s what you did or it’s a daring to just believe what you’re daring to moment that you want to share with the listeners.

Alan Vey: [00:41:23] The biggest one that sticks out to me is a personal risk I took when when starting all of this, I had just finished uni and you don’t have much money as a as a recent graduate got your uni debts to kind of deal with and I just raised my first angel round for a business. So this was late 2016. I raised £80,000 and now I wanted to spend every dollar as little as I could to get as much as I could out of it. And from a personal perspective, that meant cutting at many costs in my personal life as possible, right? Dedicating ridiculous amount of time to work. So I had maybe £1,000 in savings or something like that, and I decided to invest all of it into cryptocurrency ether. Etherium So I think it was about $10 at the time when I made the purchase and. Then when it got to about $50, my investors told me an amazing return five times in, whatever, six months or something. You should cash that out and sit on that. And I was like, No, guys, I believe in this. And anyway, I needed to go out and I’m going to be able to pay for my my noodles and whatever. And so I just left it in and it ended up going to so I ended up at 5000 at one point as it went through those phases, I was selling it off and actually paying for just my food and my eating and my whatever in London was just trying to build this business and draw any money on the company, spend that purely on marketing or third parties and whatnot to scale as much as possible. So there were a few times where I sat thinking. Am I really stupid for doing this and kind of doubting it? But looking back on it, it was for me, a big risk putting all of my money into something that was unproven. And everyone told me, What do you know about financial markets in the world? But it paid off, fortunately, and it helped me build the companies and and get to that next level.

Rita Trehan: [00:43:23] So I come back to your core experience is not everything. Believe a vision and real hard work and being ruthless in the pursuit of an idea and a passion. What counts? It sounds like that was your daring too. And boy, I mean, it’s showing its its fruit, if you like, in just how it’s helping in many, many sectors. So, Alan, it’s been a privilege to talk to you. If people do want to know more about you, about your company, about how they might even work with you and or your mentorship as well, and what’s the best way to get hold of you? What’s your website? Do you have LinkedIn, Twitter? What would they be?

Alan Vey: [00:44:07] So the best the one that I’m personally the most active on is LinkedIn. That’s just my name, Alan. But otherwise you have the companies Aventis, Aventis, today, AT&T, US Dollar, and then all of the socials are sort of at Aventis Network as well. I’m on Twitter as well at own pace. Yeah.

Rita Trehan: [00:44:26] Okay, That’s great. Okay. Well, thank you so much for being on kicking off 2023 with such a brilliant podcast on a topic that is really, really hot at the moment. So this podcast is going out ASAP because there’s lots of people that need to learn about this as fast as they can. And if anybody wants to hear and learn a bit more about and worldwide and what we’re doing, you can get us on our website. Ww Wine.com If you like this podcast, please like it, please share it. And please recognize the importance of technology in 2023. It is really important and it is a way to change the world. We’re big believers. Don’t wait for the world to change. Change the world you’re in. So do that. You can get me. And you’re here where you can get in contact with us. If you’re interested in learning more about what we do as well. So thank you very much. Alan. It’s been great having you.

Alan Vey: [00:45:18] Thanks for having me. Retranslated chatting to you.

Intro: [00:45:20] Thanks for listening. Enjoy the conversation. Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss out on future episodes of Daring To. Also, check out our website AOL White dot com for some great resources around business in general leadership and how to bring about change. See you next time.

 

Daniel A. Scola, Jr. With Hoffman & Baron

by

High Velocity Radio
High Velocity Radio
Daniel A. Scola, Jr. With Hoffman & Baron
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Daniel A. Scola, Jr. is the managing partner of Hoffmann & Baron, LLP, and also manages the chemical, pharmaceutical/biochemical, and medical device practice group in the New Jersey office. He has extensive experience in polymers, pharmaceuticals, and medical devices. He specializes in building IP portfolios and designing strategies to protect and enhance company value.

Previously, he was Counsel, patents, and trademarks as well as Assistant Corporate Secretary at The Warner-Lambert Co. and Intellectual Property Attorney at Loctite Corporation.

Prior to earning his law degree, Scola was an adhesive and composite materials engineer at the Pratt & Whitney Division of United Technologies.

Connect with Daniel on LinkedIn.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • Intellectual property
  • Importance of intellectual property to any business or entity
  • Protecting assets for start-up companies
  • IP to be implemented at the same time funding is received
  • Venture capitalist to work with an IP law firm

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 High Velocity Radio.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:15] Lee Kantor here another episode of High Velocity Radio and this is going to be a good one. Today on the show we have Daniel Scola with Hoffman and Baron. Welcome, Dan.

Daniel Scola: [00:00:26] Thanks, Lee. Thanks for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:28] I am so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about Hoffman and Baron and how you serve in folks.

Daniel Scola: [00:00:33] Yeah, so we’re an intellectual property law firm, and that means we’re exclusively devoted to procuring, protecting and enforcing protection of ideas, creations and expressions of those ideas into intellectual property.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:50] Now, in today’s world, intellectual property seems to be an area there’s a lot of gray area in terms of what is my intellectual property, what is kind of the public’s intellectual property, how is it defined, number one? And number two, how can you possibly protect it?

Daniel Scola: [00:01:08] Well, there are very good vehicles for protecting it. And they go back to the constitutional mandate that if you exchange your ideas and teach the public how to do certain things, the government will in return give you a limited monopoly or monopoly for a short period of time. So, for example, there’s different vehicles that protect things like patents, protect inventions, for example, and you get 20 years of protection and then you’ve got the creation of expressions and ideas that go into brands and that’s covered by trademarks. And then you’ve got copyrights, which is protection of things that are reduced to a tangible form like like books, movies, dance steps and so forth and so on. And what actually happens is these rights become property rights just so just like real property, like you can sell real property. It’s an asset. You can, you could license it, you could, you could rent your, your, your land, for example. Same thing goes on with assets that are formed from these intangible ideas. You reduce them to a tangible form and they become property rights that you can license, you can sell, and they’re quite valuable.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:21] Now, the area where for me it gets gray and I was in Chicago the other day with my son and we were walking and there was a truck that was selling like a roofer or something. It was some manual labor vehicle. And on it they had pictures of all kinds of superheroes that are well known. And then my son made a comment about, Wow, how did they do that? And I’m like, something tells me they didn’t ask for permission to do that, that they just did that. And so how like is Marvel going to search these people out to try to tell them to stop doing this? Like it just seems like that in today’s world where there’s so much content just constantly being thrown around, it’s hard to defend your trademarks or your your marks in terms of everywhere that somebody is misusing it.

Daniel Scola: [00:03:16] Well, that’s a very good question, but there also is a very good answer to it. You know, normally what they would what most companies do who have like certainly the famous brands, for example, like the Marvel Comics, you know, all those action figures there, they have a a daily, weekly and a monthly program where they police their their marks and the use of their marks. So they hire people. Sometimes it’s outside law firms like ourselves. And we look to see, you know, on a constant ongoing basis, monitoring basis who is using something that is similar or identical because it’s not just using identical, it’s something that’s confusingly similar to the public. And so what happens then is they’ll get they’ll get a letter saying, you know, you either have to stop doing this or you have to have some discussions with us to allow us to develop maybe a license situation. And, you know, it’s just a way of policing it. So you really do have to to you know, one of the big advantages of having IP is that when you do get a copy copycat, you do have rights to to stop them from doing it. And I know that there’s a lot of content out there, but it’s also a lot easier to find the content these days so you can search and find lots of things it used to be, and they still do it to some extent.

Daniel Scola: [00:04:45] Used to be in the old days before social media became so prevalent, you could hear in a restaurant, for example, you could hear various songs that, you know, well known music being played in the background. Well, all those commercial establishments have licenses to play that music and they play they they they go through a a single source. Usually it’s it’s ASKAP. And they’re responsible for giving royalties to all of the performers and the people who have copyrights in the music. And they pay a limited amount for certain amount of plays that they’re you know, it’s sort of an average. And they go back and it’s a little bit on the honor system, but they do audit audited it. So all those restaurants that are playing commercially available music are paying license fees on those. So you can imagine how many restaurants out there and how many royalties are getting paid just for that, and that’s restaurants. It applies to any commercial situation. And yeah, you’re right. You’ve got to monitor it and police it and then you’ve got to get someone to to write the letter or actually follow up on on something like a lawsuit.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:03] And if you don’t follow up, are you at risk of losing your marks?

Daniel Scola: [00:06:09] Well, you do have some risks if you don’t follow up. So, for example, in the trademark situation, if you allow someone to exist so long, it becomes more difficult to to make the argument that the coexistence is creating an issue for you, even though there’s infringement. I mean, you can still get them off. But it’s always almost like, for example, in patents, the patent area, if you have an invention and you have a patent on it and you know there’s infringement and you don’t follow up on that for a period of time, usually it’s a six year period of time. There’s a doctrine called latches, which means you basically sat on your rights, you didn’t enforce them, and now you can’t enforce them. So, yeah, you have to pay if you’re going to have an asset. It’s very much like if I have a house sitting empty on a lot and I do nothing with it and I just let whoever wants to go live there, you know, I’m sitting on my rights. I have the right to charge them rent, but I’m not not a good thing to do in any field.

Daniel Scola: [00:07:15] And also the IP field is the same way. Can’t do it. So you really should pay attention. Look, it’s an asset. You know, these are valuable, valuable assets. They’re property. They can be licensed, they can be sold. They they increase the value of your company. And and by the way, whenever you’re looking for money for an investment, IP is is right at the forefront. They’ll say, okay, what is your product or what are your services? And then is it protected by IP because IP represents a barrier to the public getting in. So normally you would be you would say, I have IP and here’s here’s what it is. And they would do an evaluation. They say, oh, well, you know, the people shouldn’t be able to get to where you are easily. They have to redesign something and that’s going to cost them money and that’s going to take time. So you’ll be out there for a while first in the market will invest in you. And that’s sort of the thought process.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:17] Now is the recommendation for a, you know, maybe a startup or a new firm, even a professional service or consulting firm to develop some IP that is uniquely theirs. Will that help them in the long run, maybe get more value down the road if and when they sell?

Daniel Scola: [00:08:37] Absolutely. You know, IP always increases the value. Sometimes it’s exponential. I can tell you many examples of situations where startup companies have come to me and to my firm and we’ve worked with them to develop an IP portfolio. So it becomes a thicket of of little think of them as little land masses where people have to figure out how to walk in between these land masses so they don’t step on your IP because they don’t want to infringe. And and nobody wants infringement, right. But you know that you can enforce it if you if someone does. So it’s a real barrier and they have to redesign spend the money and sometimes they just go it’s it’s too expensive, it’s too difficult. I will just take a license from them and I’ll just compete with them. But I’ll I’ll make mine a different name. So I’ll call it a different brand and I’ll work on my brand and just try to develop that as opposed to the product and the patent behind it. But but no, you know, almost all investors look very heavily at the market and how they can prevent others from getting into the market if they invest in this in this particular asset. So if a company has a good portfolio of of IP assets or a dominant position in that technology area in terms of patents and a dominant position in terms of trademark, which is the awareness, the goodwill associated with the name and everybody knows it’s that company that sells that name, you know, then, you know, they really feel much more comfortable and they do a lot of due diligence before they put, you know, hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in in investments.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:32] Now, if somebody is thinking about protecting their IP, when you’re working with an IP attorney, is their job just kind of just kind of going through the process of protecting it and defending it or is a good relationship with an IP attorney, one in which maybe your brainstorming together and you’re saying, you know what the IP attorney maybe is making recommendations of, hey, you should think about protecting this, or if you did this a little differently than that might be protectable. Like, is it is it kind of more of a partnership or is it more of a kind of person that’s executing some tasks?

Daniel Scola: [00:11:10] You’ve you’ve hit on a very important point. It’s actually the latter. It’s a person who is in a partnership with the client and has added value in terms of creativity, where to step, where not to step, how to take an idea which might be somewhat narrow and say, listen, we can develop this into a little broader concept and still not be within the scope of other people’s property. And you know, you do you do searches, you do patent searches, you hire specialized patent search firms, you do an analysis. You say, you know what, there’s a range of competitors or we’re doing something similar, it’s yours is distinguishable, but it’s going to narrow the scope of your protection. Do you still want to go forward with this? Or we can redesign this to actually broaden it out in another aspect which goes away from those competitors? What do you think? It really is a partnership and and a good IP attorney who is thinking ahead also has to add creativity to it to really be. And so what does that mean? It means a lot of times you have to know or learn something about the technology because, I mean, we do everything from complex immunology to, you know, in engineering, industrial engineering, chemistry, I.T. computer business methods is a whole array of technology. So, you know, you have a lot of specialists. So you hire people who have you know, the attorneys have electrical backgrounds or they have I.T. backgrounds, or they might be a biological guy or a chemical guy. And it’s sometimes you get a team and the same thing goes when you’re enforcing it. You know, you have that whole litigation aspect to it, which is more more than just protecting it. It’s defending it. So, yeah, it’s an excellent question. It’s really a partnership.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:05] And when you’re in your firm, when you’re working with clients as your client, maybe the business owner, or sometimes are you working with like private equity firms or venture capitalists who might have a portfolio of clients that it might be more efficient to work with one IP attorney firm in order to help my whole portfolio of clients rather than, you know, one at a time.

Daniel Scola: [00:13:30] Well, you know, it’s it’s the the the portfolio management like with with investors, what we’re looking to do is work with investor groups who need an evaluation of all their IP, because we have we have different departments which can handle that. But the idea is you want a consistent source of, of judgment in the evaluating of the IP. So we we work with we do diligent diligence for investment companies, but we also do a lot of work for eight universities, large companies, small companies, startups. I love startups because and I love the due diligence, which comes when investors are looking to put money into startups because that’s where I feel I can be particularly creative and add value. And and I have a lot of experience judging when something is going to be too close to for comfort and that you need to change something so you don’t get into a situation which is uncomfortable, you know, maybe a litigation or maybe someone saying the product isn’t differential enough. And, you know, but we work with all kinds of and all levels of people, including some individuals and professors and inside guys, the business guys are fun to work with. Sometimes it’s a small company and the top business guy will come and, you know, if they’re a really sharp entrepreneur, it’s a pleasure to work with them because they understand what it means to take prudent risks. They also they also know when they see creativity, they they latch on to it. So it’s it’s really it’s a fun area to practice. And I have to say, and you have to be able to to trust experts. And so this is our expertise. But when we talk to inventors, for example, or marketing people, you know, they’re experts at what they do. So it’s a nice integration of expertise coming together. When you when you work together, like in a partnership like that.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:42] Now, can you share a story? Don’t name the name, but explain maybe the challenge they had or where the opportunity was. Were you able to add value, maybe make a recommendation that that took their business or their idea to a new level?

Daniel Scola: [00:15:56] Sure. Actually, I won’t name the name, but it’s a it’s a company that was a one person startup and now it’s a public company and it is a leader in its field and it’s in the pharmaceutical area. They came to me with an idea of how to make a particular dosage form for a drug. And the idea was it came from watching the way California pulp manufacturers dried dried fruit. And they said, Gosh, that’s a cool process. I wonder if I can take certain pieces of that and adapt it into a new process and make something that will be useful to deliver drugs, which no one has done before. So in evaluating that, I found that there was an awful it was just a terrible amount of a huge amount of prior art. But in other words, patents and and disclosures in different publications which talked about, you know, this particular delivery system that this this client wanted to make, but they never described how they went about to make it. They would describe what we have a product and here’s what the product is made of X, Y and Z. But the process of getting there was never described. So what I had suggested to them is focus on that process piece, because if you can dominate a process of making it, nobody else has that. And then they all have to go through your patent to do it. And that’s exactly what happened. We got coverage on the particular and it had to do with the uniformity of content. So when you go to make a dosage form, the FDA wants to make sure the public is getting whatever the label says. If it says ten milligrams of a certain drug, you want to make sure that there’s ten milligrams in there with a small variation one way or the other, plus or minus.

Daniel Scola: [00:18:02] But when you’re doing that particular dosage form happened to be a film, like a small film, I mean, years ago. Give you an idea of what a small film is. It’s like a one inch by one inch very thin film you put on your tongue and that’s how you got your dosage form. They were making Listerine pocket parts. If you remember, Listerine used to sell a little thin strip. You could pull out and put it in your mouth. If you saw some years ago. Yeah, well, it was similar to that. Only they had to have uniformity of content. So the drug in each one of those strips had to be the same amount of drug that it’s that they said it was in it and each one of the strips had to have that. Now when you go to make they’re not making individual one by one strips. They’re making hundreds of thousands of yards of film and then cutting it. So how do you make sure that every every one by one inch film cut has the right drug in it, the right amount that you’re saying it does? So that was their invention. So when I saw that, I said, don’t worry about the compositional nature of it. Go and try to get the best coverage we can get. And sure enough, they have several hundred patents on it. They’re a public company. We still represent them. And that’s that’s an idea. I’ll give you another quick one, very quick, if you like, on Super Glue. That’s that was a patent one I just gave you. This will be a trademark example. So you’re familiar with the trademark super glue?

Lee Kantor: [00:19:33] Sure.

Daniel Scola: [00:19:34] Yeah. Most people, they know Super Glue. Well, when I was a fledgling attorney with, you know, I had maybe a couple of months experience, I was on the ground floor when the guy who came up with the name Super Glue came in to me and of course I was assigned to him. So he came in and he was a big marketing guy and he was he was herald to be this this real marketing genius. So I was a little intimidated by the guy at the time because I was just brand new and he was asking me all these questions. But the one question that he asked me was, What do you think of the name Super Glue as a trademark? And I knew this much. I said, I think it’s great from a marketing perspective, but I don’t think it’s protectable. And he said, Why not? He said, I said, Well, you know, to be protectable, it has to be something that doesn’t it can’t be generic, right? Because no one can own the rights to a generic name like glue. Glue is a generic name, and it has to be something that’s fanciful that doesn’t describe the product. That’s what most people get confused. Trademarks should not describe the product.

Daniel Scola: [00:20:45] They’re really adjectives, but they don’t describe the product per se. And Super Glue Super was just saying, Well, it’s kind of a laudatory thing, saying it’s pretty good glue and you know, you would not get that that trademark through. So I said to him, I don’t think you’re it’s very protectable. He goes, Well, I don’t care. I’m putting $10 Million into this program. And we’ll just beat them on the market side. So, you know, we’ll do our best from the legal side, but I think it’s going to be difficult. So he didn’t listen to me. But he did listen to me. And the reason I said he didn’t, because he launched the product was very, very successful. The reason I said he did listen to me is because very shortly after that, he left the company and he started his own company called the Superglue Corporation. And and we sued him. And we we basically lost because it’s a terrible trademark. Trademarks. Look at look at the word tide. That’s a pretty famous trademark, right? It doesn’t describe what the product is. It’s a great mark. It’s very fanciful. It’s like, well, you know, it gives you the connotation of suds.

Daniel Scola: [00:22:03] You know, like when you see the ocean waves come in. They look like, you know, the tides come in. It gives you that sort of foamy action. And so they named their detergent that way. And everyone knows Procter and Gamble makes Tide. And you’ve got to enforce it. And going back to your other question real quickly there, you know, Velcro is a very well known mark, and it was almost in, you know, going generic because of misuse. People would refer to say, give me a I’d like to buy some Velcro. It really it’s it’s a hook and loop structure and the brand is Velcro. So people were identifying it like Velcro is a noun. And if you said Velcro brand, fine. Ibm went through this when with I’m sorry, I’m sorry Xerox went through this with photocopying. Everyone would say, make a Xerox copy of this. Well, you know, there’s a lot of different copying machines out there. So Xerox put a whole marketing program together saying don’t misuse our trademark. If you misuse the trademark and you let people do it long enough, you will use it. Lose it. So. So did you know that escalator was a trademark that went generic?

Lee Kantor: [00:23:18] I didn’t I didn’t know escalator. I imagine Kleenex was one Kleenex.

Daniel Scola: [00:23:23] Right. Kleenex. I’m not sure if Kleenex still. Kleenex still may be. I’m not sure it’s generic. I’ll tell you what really is surprising. It was surprising to me when I learned it. Adrenaline was a trademark. In fact, it was it was a trademark of a company I once worked for, which was the Warner-Lambert Company. Adrenaline was the trademark for epinephrine. So and everyone uses adrenaline now to get your adrenaline going. Well, you know, drink some, drink some coffee, and you’ll get your adrenaline going.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:54] So they created their own word. That’s now just that’s.

Daniel Scola: [00:24:01] That’s amazing. In that’s what trademarks are great on you be be creative. You know, you can come up with some great names and I’m guessing that adrenaline came from the adrenal glands, right? Right. But they called it for it was for a shot that contained epinephrine. And that’s that’s what they named it. So, you know, it’s these these trademarks can be extremely valuable. I mean, you know, and sold. I remember when when Johnson and Johnson bought the Mylanta name, they bought it. In fact, I was involved in the sale and. My lanta was a it’s. It had a distinct color on the bottle. It has a distinct name and so forth. And they even the color of the bottle in combination with the name was a protectable thing under trade dress. It’s part of the trademark genre of protection. So IP can really be a fun place to be if you’re if you create. And the one thing that entrepreneurs don’t do usually early enough is get their IP, because once they disclose their idea, if that’s not under a non disclosure, it’s gone. You can’t protect it anywhere. I mean, you get it, you get a little time in the States, they give you a little grace period. But you know, you always have to file first if you’re going to get the best out of your IP because you never know if you’re going to misstep. Otherwise, it’s just very much safer. So what do you do if you don’t have the money? You have to have the money early enough. You’ve got to get some money to get some IP early enough or you will you will really be sorry later. And there are many stories I could tell you where people come and there’s not a lot you can do with the early stage stuff they had now, which was excellent but now can be copied. So it’s just a lesson, you know, for entrepreneurs.

Lee Kantor: [00:26:08] So now who is the ideal client for you and your firm? What is that, that perfect fit client for you?

Daniel Scola: [00:26:16] Well, I think, you know, between companies where they’re they’re really technology driven and that’s really independent of the size and they really have a lot that they want to do in the IP side. That’s the kind of client because that’s where you can you can have the most room for being creative. I love the due diligence aspects. I love evaluating IP and creating it. So investment firms like large companies that that large investment companies that that are looking to buy and companies that are looking to get new IP, it could be there could be small firms, it could be medium sized firms, they could do large firms. And we have all of those small investors, big investors. You know, a lot of times people think, well, patent patent firms, they really just, you know, deal with single inventors who come in, who have got a better way to slice bread. That’s not really the bulk of the work that we do. We certainly do some of that because there are investors. I mean, it takes a little bit of money to get some patents going. So, you know, you can’t think you’re going to get have a patent with that’s going to cover anything for a small amount of money. This doesn’t happen. You have to know you’re in for it for the long haul. You’re getting a monopoly. So you’ve got to pay for a monopoly. Monopoly? It’s not it’s not a free thing.

Lee Kantor: [00:27:49] Right. So but these larger entities, like a VC firm, private equity firm, a university where they they have a lot of intellectual property or potentially could have a lot that’s a good fit for you to have conversations with.

Daniel Scola: [00:28:02] Absolutely. Yeah.

Lee Kantor: [00:28:04] Now, if somebody wants to connect with you or your firm, is there a website?

Daniel Scola: [00:28:08] There is. You know, it’s it’s the Hoffman and Barron website. W. W w h. B ip locked. Or you could put in Hoffman and Baron, and you’ll see it come up on any of the search engines. And the firm number is is, is on there as well. So.

Lee Kantor: [00:28:32] And you’re open. If they go to the website they can find information to connect with you, maybe learn some things.

Daniel Scola: [00:28:39] Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. You know, you can go and do some there’s a blog page where you might be able to there’s there’s I know that we have some basics on why should I get a pad and what should I do, you know, when is it a good time? And then if they just want to give a call or an email, I can answer them. Or we can get people, other attorneys who might specialize in that particular question.

Lee Kantor: [00:29:06] Well, Dan, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Daniel Scola: [00:29:12] Well, thank you, Lee. It was a pleasure to be on.

Lee Kantor: [00:29:14] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you next time on High Velocity Radio.

Charitable Georgia Trivia Night: Khristie Staines with Footprints On The Heart

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Charitable Georgia
Charitable Georgia Trivia Night: Khristie Staines with Footprints On The Heart
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CGA-Trivia-Night-Banner-Khristie-StainesKhristie Staines is a native of Bartow County (Georgia), a graduate of Cass High School as well as Shorter University. She has been married to her husband Michael for 15 years and is the mother to Trevor, stepmother to Allison, and grandmother to Maddox and Natalie (in Heaven).

She is the co-founder of Footprints on the Heart. Natalie was delivered stillborn in 2011 and God laid on her heart that night to create a resource for bereaved families. After discussing this with her cousin, Lori Dowdy (who had suffered a miscarriage 5 years prior), Footprints on the Heart was created.

They offer free in-person services (Remembrance Photography • Memory Making • H.OP.E. Boxes • Assistance with Funeral Planning • Ongoing Peer Support) to families facing pregnancy and infant loss (up to age 2) in Bartow County (GA) and its surrounding counties.

They also host/participate in various Community Outreach/Events throughout the year. Footprints on the Heart is a registered 501(c)3 non-profit organization and they can be reached at info@footprintsontheheart.org. Find them online at footprintsontheheart.org or www.Facebook.com/footprintsontheheart.ga

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:07] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta. It’s time for Charitable Georgia, brought to you by B’s Charitable Pursuits and Resources. We put the fun in fundraising. For more information, go to B’s Charitable Pursuits dot com. That’s b e. S charitable pursuits dot com. Now here’s your host, Brian Prewitt.

Stone Payton: [00:00:45] All right. We’re going to do a little bit of a head fake because I am not Brian Pruett. This is Stone Payton with Business RadioX. Welcome to this very special edition of Charitable Georgia. We are actually on site at one of those fund raising events. Stone Payton here again with you and I am with Khristie Staines with Footprints on the Heart. Welcome back to the business radio microphone. What a delight to have you. What brings you here tonight?

Khristie Staines: [00:01:12] First of all, thanks so much, Stone, for being here and broadcasting live with us. We’re super excited for this first charity trivia giveback. Not that Brian and his team have put together. We’re so grateful for all of the sponsors for making tonight happen. It’s already a little busy out there. The buffet looks great. I’m not sure I’m going to know the trivia answers, but I’m definitely going to eat. Good.

Stone Payton: [00:01:36] Hey, it’s crazy out there. I’m surprised I was able to pull you away from the buffet line. I’m going to hear it here in a little bit. Tell me a little bit about your expectations, what you’re hoping to achieve by being here and hanging out with. What I can only characterize, I guess, is like minded people. These are these are folks who genuinely want to serve and are very serious and committed to these various causes that we’re trying to help out.

Khristie Staines: [00:02:00] Yes. I’m so thankful once again to all the sponsors, very thankful to the Carnival Business Club. I go each week and network with those and and they’ve really turned out and supported this event just like they did back with our Christmas project for the nurses. And honestly, every event doesn’t matter if it raises a dollar or $1,000. It’s just raising awareness, raising education to remind people that infant loss does occur. It’s occurring in all of our communities. It’s just such a taboo topic that people don’t discuss it, and we just want to let people know who we are and what we offer the communities we serve.

Stone Payton: [00:02:37] Yeah, so say a little bit more about the work, but before you do, I’ll share something with you that I did not share with you when you were in our studio. My wife Holly and I, about 32 years ago, had a baby boy that lived for about a day. And so although I chose not to share during that particular episode, I was more my role was more producer. I do have a little bit of a feeling for what people go through and just God bless you and your work.

Khristie Staines: [00:03:08] Thank you. And and I don’t know what memories you might have had that were made. And what was your son’s name? Jesse. Jesse, I don’t know. 32 years ago, people didn’t do probably what we do today. And so, you know, you and your wife may have had lots of memories, tangible memories with your baby boy. You might have had none, you know, depending on what gestation you were, what gestation. So full term.

Stone Payton: [00:03:31] Full term. And that was very early in the technology of the echo machine. It did not do the trick. And, you know, we told ourselves that he was in a better place. And we were told not long after that that a that an experience like that often will either break a couple apart or really bring them together. And we’re so blessed and so fortunate. I really do think it made us stronger and brought us closer together. And that’s not to suggest for one moment that it wasn’t difficult. One of the challenges that we experienced and then we’ll quit talking about me, we processed and I suppose we still would our grief very differently, and learning to navigate that.

Khristie Staines: [00:04:14] Was definitely processed differently. And going back to like finding out his age because that determines what tangible memories might have been made. So you might have got hand or footprints or ink prints. And then again, 32 years ago, you know, it’s not been that long ago. Mamas didn’t even get to see their babies. Oftentimes when a loss occurred or if you go back a little bit further, the dads would take care of all the arrangements before mom ever left the hospital. And mom didn’t even get to go to the funeral a lot of times. So for us, we just try to slow that process down, help them get past the fear of the unknown, because the outside world is, I refer to. It may think everything we do is crazy, but when you’re in that moment and those tangible memories are what you have to last forever because you know, you’re 32 years into that journey. I’m a bereaved grandmother. 11 years into that journey, there’s things I’ll never forget and there’s things I can’t remember no matter what. From that experience. Natalie Her birthday would be coming up on February the ninth. And so, you know, I tell couples, just like you said, it’ll pull you together. You know, it’ll bring you together or tear you apart. And there is no middle ground for that, it seems, from from walking alongside families. And that’s why we encourage families to grieve together, because men and women definitely one dad explained it to me that men did not like chaos in their brain. So they want to process and get done and they’re going to throw themselves into work and being busy and those things where a woman sometimes is going to. Think about it. Talk about it and work through it in that way.

Khristie Staines: [00:05:46] So then, you know, I’m faith based, so we know the devil is going to step in and make the mom think the dad doesn’t care and make the dad think the mom is studying on it too much or, you know, grieving too long. I don’t know that too long is the right word because, you know, half your heart’s missing forever. There’s no such thing as too long. But I think the devil will use that to get in and tear those families apart. Because, you know, his. His thing is to kill still and destroy. And he stops at nothing for that sometimes. So we you know, we recently found a book that we love that talks exactly about that based on the five love languages book and theory. I’ve heard of that book, and it’s a book that specific written for families who lose a baby. And so for them to have that book, to help them navigate and see, just like you were talking about, where women and men do grieve so differently, it helps them know that what they’re experiencing and feeling may be normal because their friends and family and loved ones may mean well. But if they’ve not been in those shoes, they may not know what it’s really like. I don’t know if y’all had a close support system. Some of our families have an amazing support system. Some of our families walk the journey alone with no family friend type support system. And obviously we’re there to provide peer support. But, you know, we’ve we’ve had some heartbreaking situations that we’ve served in, and you just want to love them up and wrap them up in your family because they don’t have what you have.

Stone Payton: [00:07:14] So the work, I’m sure it must be absolutely fraught with challenges and it’s got to be emotionally draining. And at the same time, I got to believe there are aspects of it that you find very rewarding.

Khristie Staines: [00:07:27] Yeah, I tell people all the time, you know, it’s sacred ground to stand in that hospital room or, you know, maybe we didn’t find out about their loss when they were at the hospital. Maybe we’re serving in the funeral home capacity. Maybe we’re serving 32 years down the road when we meet them and talk to them on a day like today, I tell people, if you step back and look, even amidst the most tragic of situations, if you look, you might not can look on day one. But if you look back, you can see that even though God may not have answered your your prayer for a healing for Jesse or any other family, he entered in an ultimate healing way. It just might not have been the way we believe that he should have answered. But we have to believe that even despite that, there’s a lot of really good things that he may have put into place. Maybe he put the perfect nurse in your room. Maybe he put the funeral home like we are so, so blessed to have funeral homes that donate their services for our families. I think last year we served 62 families roughly in person, and I think around 40 of those families at least, and possibly more receive their funeral services for their babies at no cost to them.

Khristie Staines: [00:08:33] Wow. That’s like 25, 30,000 probably in donated services. So maybe it’s just them putting that funeral home in their community that’s willing to do that. Maybe it’s a ministry like ours. Maybe it’s their friends and loved ones. You know, we had a family we served. It’s going to be a year ago coming up that literally we helped them set up a meal train and we did it for for grass cutting and for groceries and for accepted monetary gift cards. That family, I think, did not have to worry about cooking a meal for almost a month straight. They didn’t have to worry about what was for breakfast, lunch or dinner because somebody signed up to make sure that every couple of days they were taken care of and they didn’t know that dad didn’t have to cut his grass, all the whole grass cutting season almost, because his friends stepped in because, you know, with with men it’s different. And I tell people, don’t be afraid to let others love on you because they don’t know how to fix it and make it better. So let them just be like your mama and let them love on you, because really that community is what gets you through.

Stone Payton: [00:09:36] So how are you funded and what can we and by we, I mean the community and Bartow, Cherokee, Cobb County, surrounding communities and the business community. What can we do to help?

Khristie Staines: [00:09:49] So right now, our ministry, you know, just being real and honest, we’re probably 95% funded by Facebook donations, those five and $10 donations. Wow. $20 donations really make a huge impact. We’ve been blessed in the past to receive the Cartersville service Lake Grant, which is local to Bartow County. They are a nonprofit that fundraises all year long and then turns around and give gives that money back to the Bartow County community nonprofits. We’ve been blessed for that. Last year we were blessed to be the recipient of a grounds for hope, grant opportunity, and hopefully we’ll get to apply for that again this year as well. So, you know, we don’t get government funding, we don’t get county funding, we don’t get hospital funding. Truly, it’s the families we served, our friends, our loved ones, strangers. You know, on Facebook, we had someone from London that found us in little old Kingston, Cartersville, Georgia. Yeah. And did a fundraiser. So a lot of times it’s people that really don’t even know who we are and what we do other than what they see shared on social media, which really isn’t even a drop in the bucket of what we do because we are very private in a lot of that. The families know what we do, the nurses know, but the outside world, because you know, it is their most sacred. You’ve been there. It’s a very intimate time. And so we try to make sure to respect that. Yes, we have to share who we are and what we do. And it’s a hard balance for sharing images of what we do and and protecting the family’s privacy. Some families, we have permission to share anything picture wise we may have taken. But even still, that doesn’t mean that we’re just out there sharing it away either. Because, you know, I know being a grandmother, how sacred those images that are in that true, raw moment of grief can be.

Stone Payton: [00:11:37] Oh, yeah. So you mentioned a moment ago the Cartersville Business Club. I’ve heard such wonderful things about this group. Can you speak to that a little bit before we wrap?

Khristie Staines: [00:11:47] Yes, We meet each week on Wednesday here in Cartersville, Georgia, and it really is a great time of networking with one another. I just can’t say enough. It’s definitely not my wheelhouse because I’m a little nervous. Each week, Brian tells me, you know, I’m like, Dory, just keep on swimming. I think it is. Dorie Maybe so I just keep coming and trying and they’ve been really great to embrace us in what we do and other businesses and nonprofits too, as well. I’ll never forget, you know, when you stand up and tell like, you know, what’s a perfect referral? And I’m like, in the beginning I was like, well, a perfect referral. Like, we only get called when there’s a trauma. So I didn’t even think about, oh, a perfect referral is a photographer that wants to lend their time. It’s a business that might want to sponsor us. It’s a person like Brian that might want to do a fundraiser. So it opened my eyes to what I needed to be thinking of instead of, in my mind, thinking, Oh, we don’t want anybody to really need us because that means a sad tragedy took place.

Stone Payton: [00:12:46] Yeah. All right. Where can people get in touch with you if they just want to learn more about this, how they might support you or if, you know, if they need the help and they find themselves in this situation or intimately connected to a similar situation, what’s the best way to to connect with you and learn more?

Khristie Staines: [00:13:05] So we have a website Footprints on the Heart dot org, but we are probably most active on our Facebook page. Messages come straight to me. We don’t have an outside group that that does all the admin stuff. It’s pretty much it comes straight to me. So if you message the page, I’m going to have that message pretty quick and try to reply back. There’s stories and different things on our Facebook. Our events are there. We have an annual candle lighting in October every year. That’s one of our most special and sacred nights of the year because we sometimes see the families for the first time after being in that sacred ground.

Stone Payton: [00:13:41] Well, Kristy, thank you so much for what you and your team are doing. Please keep up the good work. Please keep us informed and let us know what we can be doing to support you. What you’re doing is such important work, and as I shared, it means a lot to me personally. And we really appreciate you being here and sharing your story here on the network.

Khristie Staines: [00:13:59] Thank you so much. And thank you for sharing about your precious son, because no doubt today is a part of his lasting legacy of love, just like every baby we serve.

Stone Payton: [00:14:08] All right. We will be back in a few with the Giving Back trivia nights and silent auction.

 

Renee Dierdorff & Amy Guest with Austyn Guest

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Austyn-Guest
Cherokee Business Radio
Renee Dierdorff & Amy Guest with Austyn Guest
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This episode was brought to you by

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ReneeDierdorffAmyGuestRenee 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.

Austyn-Guest Austyn Guest is a young entrepreneur from the The Kid Biz Expo program.

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 Kid Biz Radio. Kid Biz Radio creates conversations about the power of entrepreneurship and the positive impact that journey can have on kids. For more information, go to Kid Biz Expo. Now, here’s your host.

Stone Payton: [00:00:29] Welcome to this very special edition of Kid Biz Radio. Stone Payton here with you this morning. And we have a studio full. We’ve got some young entrepreneurs and we have the folks who are behind the scenes running this marvelous organization, Renee Deardorff and Amy Guest. Welcome back to the studio.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:00:48] Hello.

Amy Guest: [00:00:49] Happy 2023.

Stone Payton: [00:00:50] Yeah.It’s going to be an exciting season. I’ve missed you guys. You know, I went chasing Elk in Kentucky for a couple of weeks, and so I’ve been out of pocket and I actually got back in time to go to the gala. But the only thing I harvested, no elk, was a terrible cold. I didn’t want to get anybody sick. So that’s why I didn’t go.

Stone Payton: [00:01:10] Well, I really wanted to attend. I’m looking forward to future events and I want to talk about that in a little bit. But get me up to speed on the gala. How did it go?

Renee Dierdorff: [00:01:19] It was awesome.

Amy Guest: [00:01:20] It was so much fun. Oh, my goodness. It all came together somehow.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:01:24] We had a great time. We held it at Woodstock City Church and we appreciate them letting us use that space. And we have beautiful over 100 people there.

Amy Guest: [00:01:35] And Kevin Williams from Chick fil A was a great speaker. The kids were really engaged in his his speech and conversation. He was very entertaining. So that was that was the highlight for sure. Yeah.

Stone Payton: [00:01:47] Fantastic. And we are going to talk about some upcoming events before we close, because I want to make sure that our listeners kind of have that calendar together. And can they also go to the website and see upcoming stuff and what’s the website again?

Renee Dierdorff: [00:02:00] It could be Zappos.com.

Stone Payton: [00:02:02] Well, that’s handy.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:02:03] Yeah, we might try make it easy.

Stone Payton: [00:02:05] And then as early as this Sunday afternoon, I’ve got it on my calendar and I would like to attend if I can. You’ve got a workshop and the kids are going to play a very active role in actually facilitating this workshop.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:02:18] Yeah.

Amy Guest: [00:02:18] Yes, that is correct. So this Sunday at 3:00 right here at the Innovation Spot, we will be hosting the first of the year’s workshop on brainstorming and it will be led by our older, more seasoned kid partners, one of which we have in the room, Austyn,

Austyn Guest: [00:02:36] Hello.

Stone Payton: [00:02:37] Hello, Miss Austin. So are you ready for this workshop? Have you thought about what you’re going to say or questions you might ask?

Austyn Guest: [00:02:45] I have thought about a few questions to ask. Have begun to think about how this is going to go and what me and Laila are going to talk about and help these kids brainstorm about what they’re going to do and just some new ideas in general for the for the new year.

Amy Guest: [00:03:01] It’ll be a good place for kids who want to start a business but don’t know where to start or have a couple of ideas, a way to hone in on that kind of bouncing ideas off of each other, but also kids with businesses that maybe want to plan out some new things for the year. So it’ll be a good like open forum kind of.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:03:18] So they’ll be leading it, but it will be kids talking to kids and the parents can chime in, too, of course, because I’m sure they’ll have questions, especially if it’s brand new, which is totally fine because we’ll be there as well. Yes, but it’ll be very interactive. And we’ve done something similar last year. It kind of turned into that, which made us think about it was at the end of last year. It made us think about this one being a great way to start the year where these kids were just just the ideas that they had were amazing, and it turned into a really good conversation. So we’re looking forward to this one.

Stone Payton: [00:03:47] Great. And it’s okay if an old man with broken dreams comes in and gets re-inspired.

Amy Guest: [00:03:52] Absolutely. You’re always welcome. Yes.

Stone Payton: [00:03:54] Well, I’m looking forward to it. Well, you know, I thought that maybe for this edition of Kid Biz Radio, it might be a good idea to go back and get you guys to share what I call the origin story. How did it all get started? What compelled you to do it? Some of what you learned along the way, I know our listeners would be interested in. I certainly am. So yeah, please, please share that origin story with us, if you would.

Amy Guest: [00:04:22] Sure, we can do that. Let’s see. So two years ago, maybe a little bit longer, like two and a half? I don’t know. Anyway, my middle daughter is a dreamer, and she was going to run the world of cotton candy. She was going to rule the world. She decided she wanted to sell it. And I was like, okay, let’s figure this out. So we’ll I’ll take you to farmer’s markets in the area and you can sell your cotton candy. Her sisters were her employees. We all worked together. It was very fun experience. But then, of course, her sisters decided that they didn’t want to be employees anymore. They wanted to be their own business owners. So we figured out a couple of business ideas for everybody else than we were taking. So I was taking three girls to farmers markets, which of course led when your bestie has two daughters of her own and they see what their friends are doing, they’re like, Oh.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:05:20] Neat on this.

Amy Guest: [00:05:21] Action. Wait a minute. So then they had business ideas. So now we’re the two of us are taking. Five girls to farmers markets around the area and little tiny events that was it to like didn’t cost too much for moms to, you know, invest in their kids for this. The community was so supportive and very sweet. Everybody loved seeing kids working hard at something and, you know, doing something for themselves and running a business and trying something new. But also at the same time, we kind of felt that it wasn’t the the best avenue to showcase the kids. It almost felt.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:06:00] Like novelty, like, oh, isn’t that cute? Yeah, they were very nice about it, but it wasn’t. They were competing with.

Amy Guest: [00:06:06] Adults because adults do that for a living, you know, go to event event to support themselves. And we were just kind of like on the sidelines and we didn’t I don’t know. It just felt more like we needed our own venue. So we’re like, wait a minute.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:06:20] We could try.

Amy Guest: [00:06:20] This. We could try this. So light bulb went off and Renee and I are like, okay, let’s do a kid’s vendor event. Maybe there’s other kids in the area. I mean, we already got five. We’re halfway there, right?

Renee Dierdorff: [00:06:30] Yeah, we started by getting interest. You know, we asked the community if something they’d be interested in and people jumped all over it. So that kind of gave us a little fire there to make it happen.

Amy Guest: [00:06:39] So we hosted our very first kid Bizz Expo, just the two of us, August of 2021 at Seattle Baptist Church, and we had 27, seven kids. Wow.

Stone Payton: [00:06:52] 27 kids. That had to be encouraging.

Amy Guest: [00:06:55] It was so exciting. We had a DJ and Rene’s husband Adam is in the fire department, so he brought the fire truck and that was, of course, entertaining. We had a bounce house, food trucks and we just turned it into a fun community event. And if you know, we’re suitably is it’s it’s not close to anything. It’s not there’s no residual people come walking around. So we had at least over two 300 people that showed up solely for us based on our efforts, efforts, our marketing efforts, we were determined to make it an event for these kids. So we were very excited and exhausted.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:07:35] It was exhausting. It was so rewarding.

Amy Guest: [00:07:37] The feel, the environment of walking around and hearing the comments from the people, the spectators and the parents involved and the kids involved like you watch. These kids are like, I don’t know what’s happening at the beginning of the day. To the end of the day, like running the show, you know, and really feeling inspired and in the moment and just like proud of themselves. And then people walking around notice that and they’re engaging these kids and they’re wanting to know more and then asking us, is this we’re doing this again, right? Like, when is this happening again? And is this what you guys do for a living? And we’re like, Woo, hot. Yeah, but yet. So then we’re like, the next day, I guess we have to do this again.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:08:24] This something like.

Amy Guest: [00:08:26] People liked it. So we had a connection in Milton and we went over there to host. We did a holiday themed one in November, so just a couple of months later with how many kids did we have? Like 35, I think. Something like that, Yeah, 35 kids. And then that was even bigger because it was in a location that was like a live work play area. So people were able to walk around and they’re like, What’s happening over here? You know? And it became like an event. Yeah, we had Santa, we had face painting, ax throwing bounce houses, which was amazing. So with that, we’re like, okay, maybe we do have something.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:09:05] Then we thought about, well, we should probably make this a nonprofit organization. And then in December we applied for a51c3. We got that in March, and.

Stone Payton: [00:09:16] That seems like a very short window. I would have thought it would have taken much longer.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:09:21] Than we’re surprised.

Amy Guest: [00:09:22] But very surprised. Yeah, everybody told us it’s like, which is not I’m not minimizing it at all. It’s a lot of paperwork. But yeah, somehow we managed to push it through as quick as possible and they got it done. And that like three month window, which was great. Yeah.

Renee Dierdorff: [00:09:38] So I mean, like I say, the rest is history, but I mean that was not even a year ago that we got that. So last year we spent the year developing the foundation of the organization and we had three more expos. And you know, here we are.

Amy Guest: [00:09:52] And here.

Stone Payton: [00:09:53] We are. You have office space in this same facility that I’m in, the innovation spot. You’re over in the other building?

Speaker4: [00:09:59] Yeah, Yeah, we have an office now. We’ve been doing we had a numerous workshops last last year. We had the three big expos, one at the mill at Etowah. In April. We had our summer expo at the Woodstock Arts Green, and then we had our October expo last year alongside Crabapple Fest back at Milton, which was massive.

Speaker1: [00:10:25] So many people.

Speaker4: [00:10:26] Yes. So that was a lot of fun. So we’re, I think total between the expose of last year and workshops, we had over 150 kids involved in our program, which is amazing and super inspiring and exciting. So obviously we’re hoping for that continued encouragement. This year.

Speaker3: [00:10:47] We started the podcast.

Speaker4: [00:10:48] We started this podcast with Stone, which has been fun because what else have we done?

Speaker3: [00:10:54] The parades this.

Speaker4: [00:10:55] Summer we’ve done a couple of parades, which is just super fun for that, like exciting time, just like a low key cool thing where you get to throw candy at people. Yeah.

Speaker3: [00:11:05] We had our inaugural board of directors, so we got some amazing people that helped with that. We had ten workshops and I you mentioned the workshops. We were in round Canton magazine.

Speaker4: [00:11:13] We were the June cover of Around Canton Magazine with the beautiful cover girl next to me. She still loves me for that one.

Speaker3: [00:11:22] We presented to the community a few times with 1 Million Cups and also a Cannon business club, which was really fun.

Speaker4: [00:11:28] Yeah, it was.

Speaker3: [00:11:29] Good to try to get awareness out to the community of.

Speaker4: [00:11:32] Business leaders. Get in front of them.

Speaker3: [00:11:34] Yeah, yeah. And get in front of them. And because of that, I feel like we garnered a lot of support from the community.

Speaker4: [00:11:39] Absolutely.

Speaker2: [00:11:40] You really have gotten a tremendous amount of support from the Woodstock community, the Canton community and Cherokee County. All of these folks, they’ve really rallied, haven’t they?

Speaker4: [00:11:50] They have. It’s been I can’t even describe like to have other people believe in your passion and to support it. And it’s a it’s a great feeling.

Speaker3: [00:11:58] We attribute a lot of that momentum that we had last year to that because getting the word out and just supporting it and that helped us believe in ourselves, which helped us keep going. And it’s just this whole thing. So grateful is the best word, I think for sure how I was feeling, especially at the gala, just the accomplishments and, you know, just seeing all the kids in the room and we had them stand up and we got to applaud them and we got to thank our board. And just yeah, there’s a lot of people in that room that we were very proud to have there, and we were very grateful for their support all year.

Speaker2: [00:12:31] Yeah, and clearly the kids are learning and growing through this process. Do the two of you feel like you have been learning and growing along the way?

Speaker4: [00:12:41] Goodness, yeah.

Speaker3: [00:12:41] It’s been uncomfortable situations, but that’s where you grow. Yes. You don’t grow in your comfort zone. We’ve learned a lot.

Speaker4: [00:12:48] Yesterday has pulled me out of my comfort zone numerous times. I am not a public speaker, as I’m sure anybody who’s been in the room with me has noticed. But we have presented so many times now that it’s a learning process and it’s much less overwhelming. I’m now more capable. We’ve learned so much more about the nonprofit industry in general and the business behind it because it is still a business. And so learning those foundations has definitely been eye opening. And that’s a learning process.

Speaker3: [00:13:18] Yeah, because neither one of us had nonprofit experience in the past. It was a brand new world for us.

Speaker2: [00:13:23] So yeah.

Speaker3: [00:13:24] It was what do we do from the get go? So that’s a part of the community. I mean, the community helped us with that too.

Speaker4: [00:13:29] So yeah, our board was critical in that, helping us discover and lay that foundation.

Speaker3: [00:13:36] Yeah, doing everything right from the beginning. That was a big thing for us and making sure that it’s not just half done, you know, because we owed it to the kids in the community to make sure that this thing can build from the ground up.

Speaker2: [00:13:46] So another constituency that surely benefits tremendously from this and learns a great deal is the parents. What are some I’ll call them pro tips, but what are some things to keep in mind as your kid expresses an interest in entrepreneurship? Maybe some do’s and don’ts or some things, some resources, some things to be reading or thinking about that that let’s let’s leave them with some Pro Tips in this segment.

Speaker4: [00:14:11] Do you have any tips that you have learned that as coming from the kids point of view? Possibly.

Speaker1: [00:14:19] There have been many lessons to learn along the way of starting a new business out of just an idea you get from going from that to going to market to expanding your business as much as you can to get it out there. A good lesson is definitely interacting with customers. You definitely get better at that as you go. It is definitely a difficult start for some people. It’s kind of hard to interact some in some ways, but by the end of the day it just gets easier and easier to interact with the customers and talk to them and get them interested in your products or your service. That is definitely been a helpful learning that along the way. Also, like she was talking about earlier, public speaking has gotten much easier as well.

Speaker4: [00:15:07] Which I imagine has helped at school also.

Speaker1: [00:15:10] Yes. Yes, it has. Especially since we’re starting to do that a bit more.

Speaker2: [00:15:15] So how about in interacting with your parents? Are there some things that they’ve done apparently very well that kept you encouraged? Because I could see that same conversation happening in some household and even not on purpose, just inadvertently it gets shut down just because the parent doesn’t quite know how to handle the conversation or doesn’t want the kid to get disappointed, or.

Speaker3: [00:15:38] I’d say listen and let them kind of just have that brainstorm and open discussion because and don’t I think a lot of people get maybe shut it down because they don’t have that mindset and it’s overwhelms them or they think that it’s too much. And in before we kind of got started, there really wasn’t a place for that kid to try that stuff out. And that’s why we are doing what we’re doing, because we’ve talked to parents that are like, Well, I’m not really, you know, entrepreneurial minded and I didn’t know what to do with this kiddo that’s got all these ideas. And so it’s a place to channel that. And our workshops are a great way to kind of dabble in all of that. And we’re always we’re always available, you know, if a parent needed to talk to us individually, of course. But biggest thing is listen, because, you know, and just try something small and let them get creative. I mean, it just depends on what they’re wanting to do. But yeah, don’t shut it down. Let them try to, I think, express their thoughts on that.

Speaker4: [00:16:34] Big part of that is letting them try. Yep. Because that is probably the hardest thing, I guess as a parent, just in all aspects. Like you don’t want them to fail, you know, but they have to try, you know? And so if it starts with something as simple as a lemonade stand or whatever craft that they want to create, and even if you’re worried that it’s not going to sell, they still need to experience all the parts that go with it, the good and bad. So just letting them try something help could only help them.

Speaker3: [00:17:04] Yeah, it’s the life skills that they’re learning that go along with it. That’s the point of all of it.

Speaker2: [00:17:08] So I wonder at the other end of the continuum, is there also the trap of maybe pushing too hard, too fast, like you, you get so excited. Like, like as an entrepreneur, I would be so excited if my kid and then I’d want to do too much and maybe not place enough accountability on them. So there’s.

Speaker4: [00:17:25] That. We have seen, unfortunately, I’ve seen a couple of instances where it becomes more of what the parent wants than what the kid wants, and then the kid gets burnt out because it’s not fun anymore, you know? And so that kind of correlates, you know, in along the lines. But it’s starting that conversation that like, you know, like how you approach things, like how much effort you put in your accountability for it and then things of that nature. So letting them hold the stake in it because it is theirs and not trying to do the work, let them do the work and make them feel like if they want to do this or not, you know, but trying to take it over or run it how you want it run is takes that joy away from them.

Speaker3: [00:18:02] Yeah, they have to have ownership in it one way or the other.

Speaker2: [00:18:05] So yeah, yeah. Point So at this point, what’s the most fun? What are you guys finding the most rewarding about the work?

Speaker4: [00:18:14] Good question. Oh, man.

Speaker3: [00:18:17] I mean, we love Expo Day.

Speaker4: [00:18:19] Expo Day. I mean.

Speaker3: [00:18:21] Know, it’s stressful leading up to it. Just trying to make sure all the ducks in a row. But when it’s kind of like, okay, we’re.

Speaker4: [00:18:28] Here once it starts, then it comes together. Walking around is like just this uplifting, like, Yeah, we did this.

Speaker3: [00:18:36] But, you know, just it’s just fun to show the community and let these kids do their thing and let everybody see it all come together. And because, you know, we talk about how the workshops lead up to the expo and that supports the kids along the way and keeps the conversation going and gives resources to everybody along the way. But the Expo Day is like, This is why we do this. This is why we’re here. We’re seeing it in action, seeing the smiles on everyone’s faces and, you know, not just the community but the kids and their parents and everything. And then they feel I know they feel the same way, like this is why we did all this, especially if it’s a kid that’s brand new and hadn’t done it before. They’re getting the full circle. They’ve been working really hard, making the inventory, doing all the having the conversations, and they may not exactly see how it all clicked yet. But then they’re making money and they’re, you know, doing all the things and they’re seeing the fruits of their labor and just feeling proud of themselves and just knowing that that’s that day that that happens. That’s what we love.

Speaker2: [00:19:32] And at this point, you guys are really beginning. Maybe you’re further than even I realize, beginning to develop or maybe you already have begun to package methodology, discipline, rigor, steps to okay, here’s a a path, a roadmap for for helping your kid get into business or for the kid to get into business. Yes. You.

Speaker3: [00:19:55] Yeah. I think that and you can interrupt me any time, but when we were developing workshops for this year, we took what we learned last year, what you do right? And we’ve noticed a pattern and you’re talking about a path where there’s like a pattern leading up from now to the expo and then when the expert is over recapping, figure out, you know, reevaluate, readjust or just bringing in new kids, you know, talk about that brainstorming thing and then you’re leading up to the next one again. So, you know, the elevator pitches and all the things that were very successful last year for people just getting ready for the expo is just trying to lean into that and develop this pattern. So over time we will have more methodology, but we’re crafting that. So it’s another year of learning. You always learn. But yes, we have definitely found a pattern.

Speaker2: [00:20:41] Fantastic. Now forgive me, I get my entrepreneurs mixed up, so I don’t know if it’s Austin or Layla or who it is, but somebody in this ecosystem has got a new business that they’re launching has made quite a substantial pivot. So it is you Awesome. Are you up for describing this new business?

Speaker4: [00:21:00] Sure. Yeah, it has definitely pivoted.

Speaker2: [00:21:03] Yes.

Speaker1: [00:21:04] Big pivot. So I originally started with epoxy crafts like resin tumblers, keychains, that sort of thing. And this year I have recently pivoted to a mobile photo booth business, which has been a fun journey already. And we’ve just started. We got a small camper, a camper that.

Speaker4: [00:21:25] It’s like so cute and like little vintage.

Speaker1: [00:21:27] Vintage camper, and we have set it up to wear the outside. It has a ton of different decor and set up different scenes and all these different things that you can have different photo shoots for, photo shoots that you can bring to many different events or you can use for really any occasion. And soon we are going to open up the inside to have a photobooth machine with different backdrops and different props so that you have the outside for photos and the inside for a more photobooth feel.

Speaker4: [00:21:58] Yes.

Speaker2: [00:22:00] And so you can be present at the at the expo for this kind of thing. But it strikes me as something that you might be at some point willing to. However, the structure is rented out for an event.

Speaker1: [00:22:12] You can rent it out for an event or I can bring it to an event such as an expo or a farmer’s market or any event of that nature.

Speaker3: [00:22:20] And photographers can use it.

Speaker1: [00:22:22] Yes, photographers can rent it out and have their clients and.

Speaker4: [00:22:25] Like mini sessions.

Speaker1: [00:22:26] Yeah.

Speaker4: [00:22:27] I could do parties weddings. So we’re trying to figure out all that. It’s capable of it at.

Speaker3: [00:22:32] The moment and what you enjoy being there for and doing it for.

Speaker2: [00:22:35] Yeah, I got to believe having the experience of being in the other business has probably served you really well in getting this one off the ground. Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:22:43] Yes I have. From what I’ve learned previously with my other business has really helped carry on into this one with all the different lessons like the interacting with customers, public speaking, the money management, the time management, just everything has come together to help with this new business.

Speaker2: [00:23:01] So what’s the biggest lesson you feel like you’ve learned around money.

Speaker1: [00:23:06] Before.

Speaker4: [00:23:08] To save it? Yes.

Speaker1: [00:23:09] With my previous business it helped a lot for me to start saving more money rather than just. And they get all on something as soon as they see it. It has helped me save stuff to get new, more materials, maybe some new materials, and even maybe even pay somebody if they help me out during an expo that I have money saved up for that it has definitely helped with money saving.

Speaker2: [00:23:35] So a ton of things coming up in 2023. I know about a couple. I’m going to try to attend the upcoming workshop I plan to be at. You’ve collaborated with another organization to do something. I think at some point the The Limitless folks, you’ve got your spring gala. I’m just hitting some of the hot spots and people can go to the website. But yeah, just give us some broad strokes on some upcoming stuff.

Speaker3: [00:23:59] Well, first that’s happening or the workshop. So we are also having workshops in the Milton area too. So, you know, the brainstorming this weekend and the next weekend there’s going to be one in Milton. So it gives people an opportunity. There’ll be 20 workshops this year, so we have.

Speaker4: [00:24:11] 20.

Speaker2: [00:24:12] You know, there’s only 52 weeks.

Speaker3: [00:24:15] So double a.

Speaker4: [00:24:15] Lot. Oh, my gosh.

Speaker3: [00:24:17] But there it’s it’s brainstorming for both in January, but it just gives people more dates. So and if they loved it and they want to come again, they’re welcome to and they can provide a lot of insight to it. So we have workshops on the docket and the first expo is going to be at the mill on Etowah in April, April 23rd to Sunday from 10 to 2. Then we’ll have one on July 8th in Woodstock again. So that’s our pattern. Spring is in at the mill in Canton, and then we have summer in Woodstock, and then we’ll be at Crabapple Fest again. They asked us to come back and do that in this fall in October.

Speaker4: [00:24:52] So and as far with the Limitless organization, we’re working and coordinating with them to offer more accessible and inclusive areas of our expos to encourage their audience to be a part of our expo. So that’s very exciting. So we’ll be promoting that this year. We are working on incorporating to more of our programs the kid biz coach and Kid Biz Connect, hopefully one of which will be starting as soon as March, so there’ll be more details on that. It’s a mentorship program that we’re working on. We have a date scheduled for our golf tournament. We can announce that save the date, September 11th. It’s a monday. We will be at Bridge Mill Golf course for our golf tournament, which would be fun.

Speaker3: [00:25:42] Save the.

Speaker4: [00:25:42] Date. Save the date on that. Let’s see.

Speaker3: [00:25:44] We also have our scholarship fund that we have. We have some funds that we can use for the first expo where we want to have some kids apply for that and they will get their vendor fees paid for. So. That’s right. Yeah. And the help of the community. Yeah.

Speaker4: [00:26:00] When we were the community was very helpful in supporting that cause When we were selling ornaments and out doing some small fundraisers, all those proceeds will go and benefit some kids to pay for their vendor fees.

Speaker2: [00:26:12] We are so blessed with this community and it sounds like they’ve helped directly and probably created some marvelous opportunities to connect with area business people who want to rally behind this kind of effort. I know that this particular type of effort is very dear to to the Business RadioX family. It’s something that we really want to support. So there are going to be continue to be opportunities for local businesses to support. And I suspect you can get pretty creative in whatever’s going to serve them and support the kids, right?

Speaker3: [00:26:42] Yes, We are going to have community partner, annual community partner opportunities and the levels would be geared towards small business in the area. People want to help and we appreciate it so much. So we want to help make that possible.

Speaker2: [00:26:55] What a fantastic year this is going to be.

Speaker4: [00:26:58] It’s going to be busy. It’s going to be busy.

Speaker3: [00:27:00] So if I look like a deer in headlights, just I’m not.

Speaker4: [00:27:03] Just.

Speaker3: [00:27:04] Me.

Speaker4: [00:27:05] All the time. Just keep moving.

Speaker3: [00:27:07] I’m good. I’m fine. Just give me a high five.

Speaker2: [00:27:10] Well, we are so delighted that you guys are putting so much energy and effort into this. And we want to support you any way we can. And when I say we, I don’t just mean business Radio X, I mean the local business community. The community at large. Keep up the good work.

Speaker4: [00:27:24] Thank you.

Speaker2: [00:27:25] And keep us posted. And let’s get some of these community folks and some of these business folks in the studio and give them a chance to share their story and and talk about how and why they want to be be a part of this. I really enjoy doing this show. If you can’t tell, this is a lot of.

Speaker4: [00:27:40] Fun, but we love that you enjoy this. It’s definitely been helpful for us so much.

Speaker2: [00:27:46] It’s my pleasure. All right. Until next time, this is Stone Payton for our guests today, our roomful of youth entrepreneurs and of course, Amy Guest and Renee Deardorff and everyone here at the Business Radio X family saying we’ll see you next time on Kid Biz Radio.

 

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