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Tech Talk: Barclay Keith with Artis Technologies and John Wichmann with Maptician

August 9, 2020 by angishields

Atlanta Business Radio

Tech Talk: Barclay Keith with Artis Technologies and John Wichmann with Maptician

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This episode is brought to you in part by our Co-Sponsor Trevelino/Keller

Barclay Keith is the CEO and co-founder of Artis Technologies, a provider of modern lending solutions for businesses to offer affordable, low-friction financing to their customers at the point of need. Keith is responsible for the overall strategic vision, execution, and success of the company, instrumental in launching the startup and providing direction in its earliest critical stages of growth and development.

A self-taught coder with no additional training, Keith is a highly motivated individual who spent several years serving in the U.S. Army with a stent in Afghanistan – an experience that not only shaped his character but also largely influenced his business leadership style. Artis is where his technical skill converges with his desire to build a company that takes care of its people.

Before Artis, Keith was a Director at GreenSky where he was responsible for long-term forecasting, data analytics, and credit strategies research. Among other things, he rebuilt the VBA-based forecasting models, which reduced run times by more than 90 percent.

Keith also spent three years as the director of GUDHO, a company that serves the woodworking, plastics and composites industry with precision cutting tools. It’s a field he knows well, a passion of his being woodworking with traditional tools. Throughout his time at the company, he automated company operations and was given P&L responsibility.

Keith was the director for Heard Capital as well, developing risk management, investment, and trading execution strategies. As the company’s second hire, he helped build the firm to more than $30 million in capital.

After serving in the Army, Keith pursued his bachelor’s degree in finance at Kennesaw State University. He continued his studies by obtaining a Masters in Babson College’s Global Entrepreneurship programs and master’s in finance from the University of Rochester. He was also one of the original co-founders of the Atlanta Bunker Lab, a veteran entrepreneurship chapter.

He is from Atlanta and currently resides in the suburb of Roswell, with his wife and toddler son. An avid traveler, Keith lived in seven different countries and done business on three continents. In his free time, he enjoys the outdoors – anything from fishing and hunting to mountain biking and snowboarding.

Connect with Barclay on LinkedIn and follow Artis Technologies on LinkedIn and Twitter.

John Wichmann is COO and co-founder of Maptician; helping organizations accomplish the important objectives of returning to their offices in a safety-conscious, organized manner, and enabling them to plan their future, post-COVID use of office space to reduce expenses and improve employee experience.

John has spent the past 20 years focused on software and consulting services to help organizations gain new visibility, make better decisions, and unlock value. For the majority of that time, John has accomplished this through leading and growing teams that sold and delivered software, software services, and consulting services.

Most recently, John led services practices at both Teradata (TDC) and Fiserv (FISV). At Teradata, John led a $25M consulting practice responsible for selling and delivering software and consulting services to some of the largest and well-known companies in the world. At Fiserv, the practice area John led implemented and configured SaaS and installed software for hundreds of clients per year across banks, credit unions, and mortgage providers, with implementation durations ranging from less than a week to over 6 months.

Prior to Teradata, John served as President of Xpanxion, a software services company where he first worked with Maptician Co-founders Nick Eurek, and Paul Eurek. It was at Xpanxion that the team experienced, first-hand, the challenges of managing multiple offices within a growing organization. It was this, plus time spent at dozens of client offices that resulted in the launching of Maptician in 2017 and the software solutions it offers today.

John received his degree from Georgia Tech in Industrial and Systems Engineering. While there, had the opportunity to work for Lotus Development Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a co-op student. Lotus, one of the earliest and most innovative providers of business software, provided an early view into what well-designed software, paired with an energized company culture and effective leadership, could result in.

John lives in the Alpharetta area with his wife and three children, ranging in age from 10 to 18. John and the Maptician team are excited to be both founded and located in Alpharetta, Georgia; home to hundreds of technology companies and the innovations they bring to market.

Connect with John on LinkedIn.

About Your Host

Joey Kline is a Vice President at JLL, specializing in office brokerage and tenant representation. As an Atlanta native, he has a deep passion for promoting the economic growth and continued competitiveness of communities in and around Atlanta, as well as the Southeast as a whole. He has completed transactions in every major submarket of metro Atlanta, and works primarily with start-ups, advertising/marketing agencies, and publicly-traded companies. With a healthy mix of tenacious drive and analytical insights, Joey is a skilled negotiator who advises clients on a myriad of complex real estate matters.

With a strategy and business development background, Joey is first and foremost a pragmatic advisor to his clients. Most recently, he was the Director of Business Development for American Fueling Systems, an Atlanta-based alternative energy company. While at JLL, he has become a member of the Million Dollar Club, and has built a reputation as an expert on the intersection of transit-accessibility and urban real estate. With intimate involvement in site selection and planning/zoning concerns, Joey approaches real estate from the perspective of the end user, and thus possesses a unique lens through which to serve his clients.

Joey holds a Master of Business Administration from Emory University, and a Bachelor of Arts from Washington University in St. Louis. He is a founder, board member, and the treasurer of Advance Atlanta, and also sits on the Selection Committee for the Association for Corporate Growth’s Fast 40 event. In addition, he is a member of CoreNet and the Urban Land Institute. Finally, he is part of LEAD Atlanta’s Class of 2019.

Connect with Joey on LinkedIn.

Customer Experience Radio Welcomes: Jay Papasan with Papasan Properties Group

July 30, 2020 by angishields

Customer Experience Radio

Customer Experience Radio Welcomes: Jay Papasan with Papasan Properties Group

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Jay Papasan [Pap-uh-zan] is a bestselling author that serves as the vice president of learning for Keller Williams Realty International, the world’s largest real estate company.

He is also vice president of KellerINK and co-owner, alongside his wife Wendy, of Papasan Properties Group with Keller Williams Realty in Austin, Texas.

He was born and raised in Memphis, TN.

After attending the University of Memphis he spent several years working abroad in Paris before attending New York University’s graduate writing program. Upon graduating he found work at HarperCollins Publishers, where he helped piece together such bestselling books as Body-for-Life by Bill Phillips and Go for the Goal by Mia Hamm.

After moving to Austin, Jay joined Keller Williams Realty International, and in 2003 he co-authored The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, a million-copy bestseller, alongside Gary Keller and Dave Jenks.

His most recent work with Gary Keller on The ONE Thing has sold over 2 million copies worldwide and garnered more than 500 appearances on national bestseller lists, including #1 on The Wall Street Journal’s hardcover business list and has been translated into 39 different languages.

Follow Papasan Properties Group on LinkedIn and Facebook.

Transcript

Jill Heineck: [00:00:12] Welcome everyone to this very special edition of Customer Experience Radio. I’m your host, Jill Heineck. And I’m a business owner, real estate adviser, and customer experience enthusiast. Some of you may not know that I helped start the southeast region of Keller Williams Realty International back in 1999. It’s the world’s largest real estate company, by the way. It has been a wild ride ever since, which is why I’m super excited about our guests today.

Jill Heineck: [00:00:38] Jay Papasan is a best selling author that serves as the vice-president of Learning for Keller Williams Realty, as well as vice-president of Keller Inc., and is co-owner alongside his wife, Wendy, of Papasan Properties with Keller Williams Realty in Austin, Texas. In 2003, Jay co-authored The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, a million copy bestseller. And for some of us, a business Bible whether you’re with Keller Williams or not. He wrote this alongside the great Dave Jenks, who was once my coach back in the day, and Gary Keller, co-founder and current CEO of Keller Williams Realty International.

Jay Papasan: [00:01:11] Jay’s most recent work with Gary on The One Thing has sold over two million copies worldwide and garnered more than 500 appearances on national bestseller lists. The premise of the book is to give the reader tools on how to become laser focused on The One Thing that will propel your business, marriage, life, family, et cetera, forward. Perfect for today’s discussion. Welcome, Jay.

Jay Papasan: [00:01:33] Thank you, Jill. I’m really happy to be here.

Jill Heineck: [00:01:37] I’m so excited to talk to you. So one of the biggest attractions for me when I came to work with Keller Williams was that Gary’s commitment, even early on then, was to encourage agents to build their brand under the Keller WIlliams umbrella and really deemed us as agent partners. And so, for this discussion today around customer experience, we’re talking about really the internal customer from this perspective. And I kind of wanted to get an idea of if you could give us a little bit more about the leadership journey and what the discussions were around this concept.

Jay Papasan: [00:02:12] From Keller Williams Realty, we think of the agent as our customer and not the buyer or seller. Is that what you’re referring to?

Jill Heineck: [00:02:15] Right. Exactly.

Jay Papasan: [00:02:17] Absolutely. And what’s weird is our actual legal customer is the franchisee. So, there’s a little wormhole of land renting customers here. But the reality is, we’re a franchise company. So, the broker, the franchisor is our customer. But Gary understood pretty early on that success on a local level was about the reputation and quality of the local agent and the business they brought. So, he made all of his success measures if we become this the company of choice for the best agents, then everything else will follow. The franchisees will attract the best agents. They’ll have the most buyers and sellers.

Jay Papasan: [00:02:54] So, it was very much a one thing principle before The One Thing was around. But the first domino is how do we attract, how do we get in business with the highest quality, the most successful agents, and just the most of them. Because a lot of times the quality comes from the quantity as well. So, that’s where that philosophy comes from in everything. I mean, we prize people who’ve been in the real estate business. My wife runs one of the top real estate teams in the country. You know, we want people with direct experience, with the agent experience so that we’re always creating the best tools for them. It’s a deeply embedded philosophy here.

Jill Heineck: [00:03:29] That’s what has been, you know, really an eye opener for me as I talk to agents from other companies, whereas, there might be some things that are going on internally that a lot of things that can happen that fall on deaf ears. And what I’m finding is that we have had such a phenomenal – even in the last five years, the biggest changes have been the agents have spoken and leadership has responded. And so, when I talk about the customer experience, I’m talking about my experience as an agent within Keller Williams and how that’s enabling me to bring the best experience possible to my end user, the buyer and the seller.

Jill Heineck: [00:04:04] So, I’d love for you to touch a little bit more on how internally you all are working on trying to keep the franchisors, giving them the best tools they can to provide the rest of us the tools that we need for the end. You know, is there anything fine or is there are one thing that you like to share with us about what’s happening behind the scenes?

Jay Papasan: [00:04:24] So there’s a lot happening behind the scenes. I think when I first really got to know Gary – this move me back in summer of 2002 – I had worked in the company for a couple of years. I bumped into him in the bathroom and I broached the topic that “I hear you’re writing a book,” because I’d come from publishing, and that sparked a whole conversation. And the thing I remember is that day was the day he dedicated it. And back in the early 2000s, at least two days a month, he would spend all day just talking to our top agents. So, he would carve out a huge amount of time to have one- on-one conversations with our top performers.

Jay Papasan: [00:05:02] And, you know, you hang around with Gary and he’s like, “Jill, what are the big challenges that you’re facing? What’s working well for you?” Lots and lots of curiosity. So, he’s always leaned in to what are they experiencing? What do they need? So, the closer you get to the field, the people who are doing a 100 – I mean, back then 100 transactions was a lot. We had about five agents who are doing over a thousand transactions now. Right? So, you talk to those people, they have a deep sense of what’s needed. And so, it started with, I would call it entrepreneurial conversations. That was just Gary being Gary, a great entrepreneur.

Jay Papasan: [00:05:38] Now, we’ve ensconce, we call them labs. But we actually have a whole division of our company – a lot of other companies would call it focus groups. But we actually designed all of our products, whether they be education or technology, we bring the best of the best in and we say, what is it you’re looking for? And I’ve been in these rooms and they’ll literally hand out, like, 11 by 17 paper with a blank screen of computers on it or blank screens of mobile phones on it and saying, “Let’s draw the experience.” So if you opened up your phone and you were trying to host an open house on your phone, what would that look like?

Jay Papasan: [00:06:14] And granted, I mean, there’s a huge gap between what the average person thinks technology should be and the technologist. But having the technologist in the room with top performers has been a game changer for us. And it’s also allowed us to set, I think, better and better expectations with our customers because we understand what their pain point is. We can communicate it back to them clearly. We’ve heard from them what we think the solution is. And we use our expertise to translate that to actually a best practice.

Jay Papasan: [00:06:43] So, from direct conversations with your customers, now, we have very formal ones. We call them labs. I think that that is the test kitchen. The big secret behind a lot of our success is our willingness to take longer to ask the question, what do we need? And then, go all in on those solutions and really be dedicated. Our current technology platform – I mean, we’re just coming into the light. In my mind, we’re five years into this journey. I mean, that takes a huge commitment when you’re already number one to blow up your business and say let’s recreate it from the ground up. But that’s Gary Keller. That’s who we work for.

Jill Heineck: [00:07:20] And I am a beneficiary of that. And I really appreciate where that has come from. And I know that no matter what, nothing’s perfect. But we certainly have come light years from where we were, like you said, five years ago or even five years before that. But I think I’m seeing a lot of – we’re talking a lot about pivoting during this this pandemic time. We’re talking a lot about how can we continue to serve and still have these opportunities for agents to grow, even though we’re still in a learning phase, right, with labs? It’s just going to continue to evolve.

Jay Papasan: [00:07:57] I think it’s a discipline for the business. I don’t think it’s a phase. I think, I see it as an evolution to Gary. I mean, he started that practice in the early 90s of spending a few days a month with his top people and then masterminding four times a year. We’ve just taken that process and made it a business practice and ask how do we get more of our top people in the building who are designing products and courses really in tune with what’s happening in the field so that we can keep our products really, really relevant.

Jay Papasan: [00:08:27] And here’s the trick, like you said, it’s not perfect. The joke in the building is like, “Jill, if you don’t like it, you and your peers helped design it. So, how do we fix it?” And it’s part of our culture, right? It’s a we culture, not an I and they. And we’re going to do it together. And we’re going to share the blame when it doesn’t work. And we’re going to be accountable when it doesn’t work. And we’re going to fix it together.

Jay Papasan: [00:08:50] And that’s just been a fairly unique hallmark of our culture, this willingness of people that are paying to be in business with us, to roll up their sleeves and say, “I want to have a voice in this process. I want to have agency so that I can help make this experience even better for me and my customers.” It’s fairly unusual, I think, in business.

Jill Heineck: [00:09:11] I agree. And so, I’d love to dive in a little bit deeper regarding what you mentioned about franchisors ,and, you know, when someone is looking to Keller Williams as a possible option. I mean, is there one or two or top three things that you would have that person really bear in mind when they’re approaching Keller Williams about becoming a franchisor?

Jay Papasan: [00:09:37] I think it’s not for everyone. I think that it used to be we’ve never had a franchise sales department, I think early on, when Gary was selling – and this is the early ’90s when he was selling – we got in business with the wrong people. So, now it’s much more of a selection process. So, I think come from curiosity, unlike a lot of franchises, I don’t consider it a passive investment. It is, I think, a very complex business instrument our franchise. We run a big model. Our average number of agents in one of our market centers is around 170. The closest competitor is going to be about 60. So, we run a very much kind of like a Walmart, but with a lot of the perks you would think from the higher end stores.

Jay Papasan: [00:10:22] We have good margins. I think, 95 percent of our franchises are profitable in an annual basis. It goes up and down plus or minus two percent, but it’s extremely high percentage. But I don’t think it’s not something you just buy and let your third cousin run for you. You want to be actively engaged if you want to get the most out of it. And I think you really want to look hard at our culture. Is this the culture I want to be a part of? I think that’s the thing that most people who love our company love the most about it.

Jay Papasan: [00:10:52] But I also admit it’s not for everyone. We’re a team. We’re interdependent on each other versus being independent. Even though as independent franchise owners, they have a lot of independence but they choose to give some of that up. So I don’t know. It’s a quirky place. I think it’s a fabulous business to own.

Jay Papasan: [00:11:10] I own part of the franchise in my hometown of Memphis. And it’s got a fabulous rate of return and it’s gotten a lot of my family involved. My sister’s now an assistant team leader in that office, which makes me so happy to see my big sister getting into leadership in the company I’m so fond of. But it is a special place and we’re growing worldwide. I don’t know, we’re in 40 countries now. That culture has really attracted a lot of people. And I think that’s why, in terms of the number of agents who want to be in business with us, we’ve been number one for a while. And I think the culture is number one.

Jay Papasan: [00:11:44] So, it’s not a passive investment. It’s not for everyone. Just because you can write a check doesn’t mean you get one. And you should definitely check out the culture and say, “Is this something I want to be a part of?” Most people fall in love pretty quickly, then you’ll know, like, this is worth pursuing.

Jill Heineck: [00:12:00] Right. And I noticed that early on in the late ’90s that, you know, there were a lot of people throwing checks around and a lot of people got them thrown back right at them. So, it was really interesting to top players, which is not even – it wasn’t even a conversation. So, I find that to be very attractive because the selection process does make a huge difference and that does impact the culture, right?

Jay Papasan: [00:12:24] Absolutely. Well, you know that. You helped run one of the regions, right? I mean, who you’re in business with matters. That is one of our really big cultural values that we will get out of business with high performers that don’t match our culture.

Jill Heineck: [00:12:38] Right. And we’ve seen that happen on the local level here. What would you say the definition of the the customer or agent experiences for Keller Williams when we’re talking about lab [inaudible].

Jay Papasan: [00:12:51] Oh, even though you sent me that question in advance and I struggled with it. And it’s because it’s always evolving. I think that we have a philosophy that every great business has three essential components. You have a value proposition. You have a service plan to deliver on your value proposition. So, it’s not just a false promise. So, here’s what we do for you that’s special. Here’s how we do it consistently. And then, you know this, we believe in the database. The power of the database that we’re going to run a relationship business and stay in touch.

Jill Heineck: [00:13:23] So, I’ve seen our value proposition to the agents change. When I first joined the company, we were a profit sharing company. Very quickly thereafter, when we launched MAPS Coaching, which is now the largest coaching company in the industry even though they can only coach KW people. We, for many years, said that we were a coaching and training company. And on that, I mean, the profit share – let’s just toss it. We’ve given out $1.4 billion historically in terms of profit share. So that’s no false promise. We made as of last month –

Jill Heineck: [00:13:56] I can attest to that.

Jay Papasan: [00:13:56] As of last month, we’ve made 90 millionaires just from that one program. And that’s the direct benefits. We have no idea if they reinvested that money for more.

Jay Papasan: [00:14:07] As a training and coaching company, we were named number one by Training Magazine so many times. We’re now in the Training Magazine Hall of Fame. So, it was kind of like when they created the children’s hardcover book list in The New York Times because they were so tired of seeing Harry Potter taking all the spots in the fiction. So they just created a whole new list. And today we’re a technology company and it evolves.

Jay Papasan: [00:14:31] And I think if you’re going to stay relevant, it’s a particularly dangerous thing when you become number one. You think that how we got here is how we stay here. It’s very disruptive too. If you’re constantly blowing up your value proposition, but you have to ask, what is the next generation need? What is the next – here’s the really morose question, but it’s a great business question for everyone listening. What does the company that puts us out of business look like? And how do I become that tomorrow? And Gary is always asking, like, who is the biggest threat to us and how do we just become that instead of let them attack us? And we would do that within reason. We wouldn’t become something that didn’t match our values.

Jay Papasan: [00:15:17] We asked that question about five years ago. And everyone was like, “Well, look at Zillow, look at Trulia, look at Redfin, or whatever.” It’s going to be a tech company most likely in ten years that’s dominant. So like, “Great. Let’s go become one.” So, I think when you ask what is the definition of the customer experience, you have to ask that question every year. That would be my answer. I wish I could give you, “And here’s the formula.” But the formula is always be adapting so that you’re always relevant to your customers.

Jill Heineck: [00:15:48] And again, it goes back to what you’re saying, you know, what is your value prop, how are you delivering the value prop, and then how are you delivering it, like, in 2020, in 2021, in 2022? So it will evolve and change it. But as long as you are stating this and being transparent with the customer, I think that that’s where these top producing agents and franchises are doing well. And how often – I mean, do you really see a market center go away because they just lost it? They lost the culture. They’ve lost kind of momentum. I mean, how often does that really happen?

Jay Papasan: [00:16:26] You know, we have about – I don’t know – 850 franchise offices. We call them market centers, if someone’s listening and doesn’t know what that means. Maybe one a year. I mean, it’s at the very tail end and that almost always comes from – always rises and falls with leadership. That there was some massive mistake with leadership. The culture went awry and that created a situation.

Jay Papasan: [00:16:51] And a lot of times what we do is either those offices do sometimes close. Or we’ll just merge them in, say, “Look, why don’t you take a smaller portion of a better run office so you all merge.” And a lot of times what we see is the people who fled, maybe, the bad atmosphere, will then coalesce around the new opportunity and we can quickly right that situation.

Jill Heineck: [00:17:14] Right. Which I think, you know, fantastic. It’s not like just somebody just loses. They can at least, potentially, have another option.

Jay Papasan: [00:17:21] Yeah. It doesn’t always happen that way, right? But I do think that one of the people who is looking to get in business with us hired an attorney to look into our litigious backgrounds. And for a company our size – the report is out there on the web somewhere. He ended up publishing it. Like, it’s some of the least litigious places ever. And we’ve had our fair share. You know, we’ve gone through a couple of CEOs in the last five years. We’ve had our turmoil. We’ve had our moments. But we generally get it right in the end.

Jay Papasan: [00:17:50] And I think one of the values of we don’t want to have to go to court. We don’t want to have our corporate attorneys enforce these things. Find a win- win. Win-win is the first thing in our value system. Win-win or no deal. Every win is not equal. It’s not like you get 50 and I get 50. It might be you get 25 and I get 75, but you didn’t get zero. So I think that they’re always looking for how can we make this a win. Because I got to tell you, over the long run, just avoiding the litigation makes being a little bit generous in all those situations, even for people who may not completely deserve it is absolutely a great best practice.

Jill Heineck: [00:18:31] Absolutely. So pick an internal customer, what is the one thing that you would do to improve the internal customer experience at the moment?

Jay Papasan: [00:18:41] You said the magic words, the one thing. Our book is The One Thing. And every training that we’ve ever created around this, everything I’ve learned, this goes all the way back to my parents, if you want to have an amazing customer experience, everything, rides and falls, and how you set expectations. If we set expectations properly, the customer experience will go well.

Jay Papasan: [00:19:03] And it’s so funny, my wife, you know, they do a couple of hundred transactions a year. And I’m married to a realtor, so we’re always kind of on, right? She’ll get a call. We’re driving around. Like, in corona, one of the things that we do sometimes is we need to take the dog for a long walk in the afternoons or sometimes we’ll go, “We never drive our cars anymore.” You just want to drive around the neighborhood and we’ll get a call. And it’s so funny.

Jay Papasan: [00:19:30] Almost all of the challenges we have with consumers can be traced back to a poor setting of expectations. Even when things go wrong, “Hey, Jill. The reason I’m calling you today is we got bad news from the appraiser and here’s what we’re going to do to handle it.” But when we don’t communicate exactly what’s happening and what will happen and the way that our customers can hear it and actually internalize it, we’re always going to be – though we deliver, we’ll be faced with maybe a poor customer experience. So to me, it’s all about how do we set expectations? How can we do it better in the future?

Jill Heineck: [00:20:05] That’s right. And I found that each time that I don’t set the expectation with the client or if I deviate from what I normally do, like having both decision makers at the initial appointment or from the initial call, any time there’s deviation there, almost always we’ll have a hiccup or ten. And then, you’re backpedaling and trying to fix it. So, that I appreciate so much and I agree 100 percent.

Jill Heineck: [00:20:30] So, now when we’re talking about, you know, you’re on the – there’s the technology team, there is the learning team, there’s the ops team. So how are you coaching your teams internally to really deliver on the customer experience, to whomever we’re discussing whether it’s the franchisee, or the agent, et cetera?

Jay Papasan: [00:20:52] So, you know, our president is Josh Team. He comes from a software background. And he wants things to be predictable. He wants things to be measurable. I mean, he’s like a chess champion kind of smart guy. So he can do a lot of the stuff in his head. His intuition is very smart. But he really looks to data. So one of the things, without it also being like this chore, what we try to do is be really clear going into a new initiative is, what’s going to be our success measure. And I think with a lot of entrepreneurs, we know a good idea when we hear it. And because we’re entrepreneurs, we’re good at pivoting quickly and moving to it. And I think Keller Williams is incredibly agile.

Jay Papasan: [00:21:35] In the last couple of years, though, under Josh’s leadership – we have an executive leadership team that I get to be a part of – we work together. And say, “Look, we have some corporate initiatives that we know our top four or five. Does this new thing actually serve those or are we just doing something because it’s new? So, I think a little bit of it’s not can we do it. It’s should we do it. And if we do it, how will we know we’re successful? And asking that question up front forces us to build in some sort of tracking mechanism.

Jay Papasan: [00:22:08] You know, it might be – like, I know a lot of agents, you know, who do, like, a net promoter score. I mean, anything super simple. On a scale of one to ten, how likely are you to refer me to one of your friends? It’s just one question, but it gives them kind of a canary in the coal mine so they know when things are going off the rails. And they also know when they can sit back and go, “You know, this is good. And I can look at my key metric. That’s my leading indicator of success that’s working.” So, we try to do that as much as we can without it becoming burdensome.

Jay Papasan: [00:22:37] Because I’ll also say, if you have everybody on your team, you know, constantly checking things off on a Google spreadsheet, that becomes a chore that takes some of the joy out of it. So, if we can track it automatically, that’s the beauty of our tech platform. More and more of this is getting automated, but we still rely on surveys. So, I think that, one, should we be doing this? Is it truly something that we need to be getting into? And if so, what is the higher goal that it serves and how will we know we’re successful?

Jay Papasan: [00:23:05] I think if you just ask a couple of questions before you die, then that helps everybody on the team. One, they know what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and how they can be successful. If we know that the measure exists then how do we make that measure go up? That’s how Southwest Airlines, right? So much of their model came from the low cost airlines. They were very clear that one of their goals was to be the low cost airlines because they wanted people to be able to travel.

Jay Papasan: [00:23:33] And that’s why we had the cattle calls, that’s why they only serve snacks, that’s why, I mean, frankly, a lot of their airline flight attendants are practically comedians. Because they’re not going to wine and dine you, they’re just going to have to make it fun. And so, I think when everybody knows what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, it allows some innovation to bubble up to make those things happen faster, too.

Jill Heineck: [00:23:59] Absolutely. I think that during this time, this crazy time we’re in, have you seen a change in attitude in your teams regarding delivering? Or are you able to continue to pump them up from Zoom and whatever else we’re using to keep everybody engaged?

Jay Papasan: [00:24:19] Well, I’m an introvert. A lot of people don’t know that. But I am a writer, fundamentally. I like to create things. So, I like to live in my cave. I’m here in the office. I’m one of, like, two people on this whole floor and I’m happy. I close my door. I’m very effective. So pumping people up is not necessarily my style. I want to communicate that it’s a mission. Like, you know, a lot of my staff, I’ve got our video team. I’ve got our publishing team. And our, you know, instructional design team, which is the course writing. They’re crafts people. And what they want and value is to know that they made great work and they had an impact.

Jay Papasan: [00:24:58] So, for me, it’s no harder or easier through this medium of Slack and Zooms. Just remind them that, like, this is a mission moment. Like, when we went into this, I kind of gathered the troops and said, “Learning is what is going to get people through this. They’re going to have to adapt their businesses or they’re going to go out of business.” Like, it’s really life or death for a lot of small businesses right now. This is our moment. So, as hard as it is for us with our kids at home, we’re afraid for our parents and our grandparents, we’re dealing with the same things. But we get a paycheck every 15 days. They are relying on a sales commission that is not guaranteed. So we have a duty. We have a mission.

Jay Papasan: [00:25:41] And I saw a lot of people rally around the mission because we have a job to do. And now is the time that we get to write the story. My coach, Abe Shreve – I don’t know if you know him – but you had Dave Jenks as your coach, so you know what a great coach does for you. A lot of times they just ask great questions. They don’t even give you the answers.

Jay Papasan: [00:26:00] But probably two weeks into this, we were curating about 40 live courses a week because we wanted to offer it to the industry. We started up a Facebook Group that grew from zero to 77,000, like, in a-month-and-a-half. It became the second largest Facebook Group in our industry, like, overnight. And we were just sharing free education. He said to me, “What is the story you want to tell about this time when it’s done?” He goes, “Right now is the time you get to author that, so be very clear. Are you going to talk about how you got in great shape? How you cleared out all of your Netflix series that you wanted to watch?” There are a lot of people that are writing this out on the couch, and that’s okay. That might be exactly what they need to do. But he asked me, “What’s the story that you want to write?” And I asked that of my team and we said, “We want to make a difference.”

Jay Papasan: [00:26:57] So, I think that there’s a lot of challenges to working remotely. I think that, ironically, people are far more productive, but they’re also teetering on burnout much faster. Because the kind of work – like, there’s no transition time. You drop one screen, you open another. There’s no transition between your home’s workspace and your workspace. So, people are kind of at work all the time if they’re not careful. So, there’s really good things in productivity. There’s very bad things, like how do we on board new people? How do we teach them culture? There’s all these challenges.

Jay Papasan: [00:27:32] But the net is we can still do our job and we have a mission. It’s not just a job. We have a mission to fulfill. That’s what we’ve been rallying around. And I’ve seen great realtors do it, too. I mean, people have never been more aware of their homes than they are right now. They’re trapped in it, right? Wow. I never thought I would need two home offices, but now maybe I need a bigger space.

Jill Heineck: [00:27:55] That’s exactly what’s happening. And I will tell you that, again, I’m a beneficiary of the amazing training that started right when we were coming in to coronavirus. And every single morning I’m listening to you, and Gary, and these amazing agents who are sharing what they’re doing during this time. And I think that it’s made a big impact on how I’m pivoting for 2021. So, kind of 2020 is still here. So, don’t get me wrong. We’re still working here. But for 2021, we’re going to be in a prime position.

Jill Heineck: [00:28:32] So thank you because I know you guys have been working really hard behind the scenes. And as an agent customer, I appreciate that so much. And I know my office will talk once a week on what KWRI is doing for us. And who is benefiting from it and who can share what they learned. Maybe I didn’t get on all the calls they did. So kudos to you and your team. You’re doing a fantastic job.

Jay Papasan: [00:28:56] Well, kudos to you and your leadership, too. I think that we look at the market and I think we’re down overall about 30 percent. But when I talked to our top people, a lot of them are at least matching last year’s numbers or better. And when you think about a 30 percent drop in the market and you’re still doing as good as you did last year, that’s a big increase.

Jay Papasan: [00:29:13] And what we talked about – we wrote in a book called SHIFT about this – the time to grab market share is in a down market. This is the opportunity. And we usually just admonish people. It’s like it’s an equal opportunity sport, but it has unequal rewards. So, go get your unfair share of the market right. Get your unfair share. And when the last recession happened, we went into it number four and came out of it number one. So, we’ve lived this multiple times.

Jay Papasan: [00:29:41] So, I just think that if you have the right leadership and we can focus on the opportunity – like, I love what you said 2021 – the work that you’re doing in our industry, the work that you do today at best is laying a platform for income 90 days down the road, right? Sixty to 90 days. But the reality is that, when you work for tomorrow’s dollars instead of today’s dollars, you know, we talk about internet leads, only two to five percent of those convert. Only two to five percent of those convert in the first 12 months. But over a five year period, virtually 100 – I mean, people move every seven years, 80 percent of those will.

Jay Papasan: [00:30:18] If you’re playing the long hay and laying a foundation, that is the key. And that was the thing I asked Gary. I was with him, believe it or not, in the 2000s. He started this company in the early ’80s. And I was with him when he took his first million dollars out of the business. And I said, “Are you kidding me?” Because I know franchisees that have taken a billion dollars in a year out of their business. And he’s like, “Nope.” And he goes, “I was intent on laying a bigger and bigger foundation. And every time I thought I could just take the money and do something with it, I realized I could invest in another person. I can invest in another something. And that would lay just a bigger foundation for the future.”

Jay Papasan: [00:30:56] And that platform from ’96 to, I think, 2006, our company grew by 40 percent on average year over year. Like, it laid a foundation for pretty unparalleled growth. So my admonition is to do like Jill, if you’re laying a foundation for your 2021, that is our opportunity. Can we protect the best talent in our business? Can we wrap our arms around the best, most loyal customers? And know that this year is – the goals that we set in January, just chuck those out the window. We may be laying a foundation for something really great next year.

Jill Heineck: [00:31:28] I absolutely agree with that. I’ll be interested to hear what has been a recent surprise and delight story that you’ve experienced, either with a company or with a service person, anything off the top of your head.

Jay Papasan: [00:31:42] Yeah. I thought about this. Like, I always go back if you’ve ever read – there’s a book by Derek Sivers called Anything You Want. It’s a real short book. He started a company in, I think, 1999 called CD Baby. And the thing that made him famous is he’s running this little shop where he’s just got a couple of workers and they’re packaging up CDs for artists and putting them in the mail. He wrote a really exquisite thank you letter when someone made a purchase. It’s like, “Hey, you know, our team is carrying a picture of you around the office. And like, it was really funny and it was really cute.” He took what was a – you know, here’s your order number and tracking to something that was actually really fun. Laugh like wow. Laugh out loud experience. And I loved it when I find moments that should be mundane. But a great customer service advocate has said, “Can we just make this fun?”

Jay Papasan: [00:32:34] So we shop at the local co-op. So this is all set up. We have a cooperative called the Wheatsfield Co-op. It’s a really old grocery store in Austin that used to be run by hippies. It’s run just a little bit better now. But we go in for the organic food and stuff. And Wendy and I go shopping. And, you know, those little dots they put on the floor just so that you know that you’re six feet apart. I look down at the dot, right? You don’t even read it anymore. You know what it is. And it said, “Please stay six feet apart.” Approximately the width of majungasaurus or twelve breakfast tacos. And it just cracks me up. I was like, they did that little extra thing. They put a picture of a dinosaur on there and they reminded us – because Austin’s a breakfast taco town. That’s part of our image. So they took something ordinary. No one would spend any time and they gave you just a little bit of delight. So I love those moments.

Jay Papasan: [00:33:28] I love it when I hear that our realtors do that. And they find ways to make a closing, which is a big moment. Right? But what about the first time you meet someone, can you make that a special moment? That first email you get, how do we make those kind of throwaway moments special? Because no one else is focused on it. No one else put that effort into that dot. And that’s what made that experience stand out and be worthy of talking about. If you only focus on the milestones that everybody else does, you’re competing with them. So, you know, in baseball, they say hit them where they ain’t. That’s how you get a baseball hit.

Jay Papasan: [00:34:02] So our top agents often do this with lead generation too. If everybody is stopping with postcards, they amp up their postcards. We saw that in the last shift. Nobody could afford them. So our top agent said, “Hey, I’m not just going to send postcards. I’m going to spend eight by eleven-and-a-half like glossies. I’m going to stand out.” So look for ways that not just that you can provide an interesting service, but provide an interesting service that’s worthy of conversation.

Jill Heineck: [00:34:31] I love it. I love it. I mean, I think that’s where we close out our conversation because I don’t even know how you could top that, honestly.

Jay Papasan: [00:34:41] Okay. It’s the breakfast tacos, right? It’s the breakfast tacos.

Jill Heineck: [00:34:43] Well, first of all, I’m starving now. But that is, I think, an excellent piece of advice for our listeners. Jay, you’ve been absolutely incredible. I really appreciate your time and your leadership. And, you know, all the sharing that you have done on your podcast is great. So I’m a big Jay fan. I appreciate it.

Jill Heineck: [00:35:07] And I want to thank everyone out there for listening. I’m proud to share with you these stories. Prioritize the customer experience as a legit business strategy. Reminding us that no matter what business you are in, whether it be real estate, consulting, marketing, writing, the customer experience should always be the heart of the business.

About Your Host

Jill Heineck is a leading authority on corporate relocations, and is highly sought after for her real estate industry acumen and business insights. As a published author, frequent panelist and keynote speaker, Jill shares her experience and perceptions with people from around the globe.

Jill is a founding partner of Keller Williams Southeast, established in 1999, and the founder and managing partner of Heineck & Co. Her real estate practice specializes in corporate relocations, individual relocations, luxury residential, and commercial properties. Jill’s analytical approach to problem-solving, along with her expert negotiation skills and sophisticated marketing, deliver superior results to her clients. Her winning strategies and tenacious client advocacy have earned her a reputation for excellence among Atlanta’s top producers.

While Jill has received many accolades throughout her career, she is most gratified by the personal testimonials and referrals she receives from her clients. Jill’s unwavering commitment to the customer experience, and her focus on the unique needs of each client, serve as the foundation of her success.

Follow Jill Heineck on LinkedIn.

Decision Vision Episode 74: How Can I Improve My Business Decision Making Skills? – An Interview with Tyler Ludlow, Decision Skills Institute

July 16, 2020 by John Ray

Decision Vision

Decision Vision Episode 74: How Can I Improve My Business Decision Making Skills? - An Interview with Tyler Ludlow, Decision Skills Institute

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Decision Vision Episode 74: How Can I Improve My Business Decision Making Skills? – An Interview with Tyler Ludlow, Decision Skills Institute

Decision making skills are vital for any successful business owner. In this edition of “Decision Vision,” decision scientist Tyler Ludlow joins host Mike Blake to discuss the process for making good decisions and much more. “Decision Vision” is presented by Brady Ware & Company.

Decision Skills Institute

The Institute helps people that might otherwise might be overwhelmed by complexity, stress, or worry, to overcome them and take action. We took 50 years of cutting-edge research, applied for decades at the world’s most successful companies, and created a framework that empowers individuals to consistently make better decisions, leading to better results, faster. We are the Robin Hoods of Decision Science!

Tyler Ludlow, Founder and Chief Decision Scientist, Decision Skills Institute

As a decision scientist, Tyler Ludlow helps people everywhere turn decision burdens into opportunities for growth.

He began his Decision Science career at Unilever, part of the team that won the 2008 DAS Practice Award for embedding DA into organizational decision making. Two years later Chevron won the same award prior to receiving the first Raiffa-Howard Award for Organizational Decision Quality in 2014. Meanwhile, Tyler joined Lilly in 2012 and was a part of the team that received the Raiffa-Howard Award in 2016.

At Lilly he facilitated large, complex, and strategic decisions, such as a $750M clinical trial investment and corporate change initiatives that structurally changed the business. Tyler has trained over a thousand business leaders and managers in basic and advanced decision science applications, always with a practice-oriented, how-can-I-actually-use-this-stuff mindset. He is now the owner at Decision Science Advisory, a company focused on establishing and strengthening decision expertise groups in the pharmaceutical industry.

After a decade of helping senior leaders and organizations make large, complex, and strategic decisions, he turned his focus to individual and personal contexts. He established and led Lilly’s efforts to support and enable better decision making between patients and their healthcare providers, including creating the Shared Decision Making Summit, an event that brings together stakeholders from across healthcare (patients, caregivers, advocates, providers, researchers, pharma companies, regulators, etc) to identify practical ways to collectively change and improve healthcare decision making. He founded the Decision Skills Institute to make cutting-edge decision science accessible to everyone. It’s mission is to make the world more deciderate by impacting 10 million decisions in 10 years.

At home, he with his wife try to apply decision science in one of the most difficult contexts – in parenting their ten children.

Michael Blake, Brady Ware & Company

**Mike Blake, Host of the “Decision Vision” podcast series**

Michael Blake is Host of the “Decision Vision” podcast series and a Director of Brady Ware & Company. Mike specializes in the valuation of intellectual property-driven firms, such as software firms, aerospace firms and professional services firms, most frequently in the capacity as a transaction advisor, helping clients obtain great outcomes from complex transaction opportunities. He is also a specialist in the appraisal of intellectual properties as stand-alone assets, such as software, trade secrets, and patents.

Mike has been a full-time business appraiser for 13 years with public accounting firms, boutique business appraisal firms, and an owner of his own firm. Prior to that, he spent 8 years in venture capital and investment banking, including transactions in the U.S., Israel, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.

Brady Ware & Company

Brady Ware & Company is a regional full-service accounting and advisory firm which helps businesses and entrepreneurs make visions a reality. Brady Ware services clients nationally from its offices in Alpharetta, GA; Columbus and Dayton, OH; and Richmond, IN. The firm is growth minded, committed to the regions in which they operate, and most importantly, they make significant investments in their people and service offerings to meet the changing financial needs of those they are privileged to serve. The firm is dedicated to providing results that make a difference for its clients.

Decision Vision Podcast Series

“Decision Vision” is a podcast covering topics and issues facing small business owners and connecting them with solutions from leading experts. This series is presented by Brady Ware & Company. If you are a decision maker for a small business, we’d love to hear from you. Contact us at decisionvision@bradyware.com and make sure to listen to every Thursday to the “Decision Vision” podcast.

Past episodes of “Decision Vision” can be found at decisionvisionpodcast.com. “Decision Vision” is produced and broadcast by the North Fulton studio of Business RadioX®.

Visit Brady Ware & Company on social media:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/brady-ware/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bradywareCPAs/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/BradyWare

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bradywarecompany/

Show Transcript

Intro: [00:00:01] Welcome to Decision Vision, a podcast series focusing on critical business decisions. Brought to you by Brady Ware & Company. Brady Ware is a regional full-service accounting and advisory firm that helps businesses and entrepreneurs make visions a reality.

Mike Blake: [00:00:21] And welcome to Decision Vision, a podcast giving you, the listener, clear vision to make great decisions. In each episode, we discuss the process of decision making on a different topic from the business owner’s or executive’s perspective. We aren’t necessarily telling you what to do, but we can put you in a position to make an informed decision on your own and understand when you might need help along the way.

Mike Blake: [00:00:41] My name is Mike Blake and I’m your host for today’s program. I’m a director at Brady Ware & Company, a full-service accounting firm based in Dayton, Ohio, with offices in Dayton, Columbus, Ohio, Richmond, Indiana, and Alpharetta, Georgia. Brady Ware is sponsoring this podcast, which is being recorded in Atlanta for social distancing protocols. If you like this podcast, please subscribe on your favorite podcast aggregator. And please consider leaving a review of the podcast as well.

Mike Blake: [00:01:09] So today’s topic is a little bit of a meta topic. And by meta, what I mean is that, this podcast is called Decision Vision. And for the most part, the topics have involved exploring the process of making a decision on a particular topic. We’ve gotten more granular and topical from time to time because events warranted it, or I just thought it was interesting, or, quite frankly, because the conversation needed to be more tactical, particularly during the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. But today we’re going to kind of go out in a different direction and explore the process of making good decisions.

Mike Blake: [00:01:58] And I think we’re going to do a series of these over time that explore different facets of making a good decision generally. And how to develop a good decision-making skill set. And I was kind of inspired by this, of all things a MasterClass video. And if you spend any time on YouTube, for some reason, your MasterClass will throw up a commercial on YouTube. And by the way, those things are fantastic. I watch the commercials – just the commercials. They are so good.

Mike Blake: [00:02:36] But anyway, they had this thing by Garry Kasparov, who is a world chess champion and a dominant player for a very long time. And he has a MasterClass on chess playing. And I used to play chess competitively. I don’t anymore. I’m too old and I do other things now. But one of the things that he said about the value of the game of chess, I thought it was so insightful. And for all the games I played and all that I’ve studied about the game, I never really understood this. It’s that the game of chess makes you a better decision maker. Because the game of chess is about making decisions. It is a process of making decisions and thinking ahead. And not just thinking ahead, but also having to decide, you know, “Do I move this piece here? This piece there? Do I capture this piece? Don’t I not capture this piece?” And every move is a decision. And I thought, “Wow. That’s really neat and profound.” I didn’t waste all that time in college and high school playing chess.

Mike Blake: [00:03:42] And so, a few weeks ago, I ran into this fellow – rather he was introduced to me by Brian Falony, who’s our marketing director here at Brady Ware. And he’s a specialist on making decisions. And a specialist on making a decision in one particular facet that I find excruciatingly interesting. And I know that’s a strange turn of phrase. But it really is that. And that is, the use of data in making decisions. And, you know, data is all now. It really has been for about ten years or so. Everybody is listening to this podcast or at least 98 percent of you, I’m sure, have heard the term big data. Most of you probably has a pretty good idea as to what it means, has a handle on it.

Mike Blake: [00:04:42] But what do you do with that? Right? And is big data for me? I happen to be a numbers geek. I do numbers for a living. So, I have some training in data analytics. But a lot of people don’t. And data analytics was really not taught in business school any meaningful way until about 10, 15 years ago, with the exception of some very specialized programs, for example, at Georgia Tech.

Mike Blake: [00:05:10] And on top of that – and this will probably be another topic that I’d do at some point – but for those who know me or listen to the podcast, you know, I do a lot of work with startups. And I can’t tell you how many times somebody pitches me a deal and they say, “Our business model is data. And we’re going to sell that data to folks that want to use that data.” But then you sort of get into it, “Well, how do you do that?” Or, “What’s the data worth?” Or, “What’s the business that even sell data?” And very quickly that conversation goes from smooth sailing to running a ground in about 19 icebergs and a rocky shore. Because data is so – oddly enough, data for something that is designed to be very specific. Once you really sort of get down to brass tacks, you try to convert the — into useful, actionable business strategy. It’s not all that easy to do.

Mike Blake: [00:06:10] And so, helping us with that is my new friend, Tyler Ludlow, who is Founder and Chief Decision Scientist of Decision Skills Institute. After earning a Degree in Applied Mathematics and an MBA, Tyler studied Decision Science at Stanford University. He then mastered its application at Global 500 companies leading decisions for $750 million investment, a global product launch, and more. Tyler has worked with top universities such as Stanford, Yale, and Dartmouth, as well as 18 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies.

Mike Blake: [00:06:45] After a decade in those contexts, Tyler decided to pull a Robin Hood at decision science and founded the Decisions Skills Institute to bring it to people everywhere. He helps people like you turn your decision burdens into opportunities for growth. Tyler’s best decisions were marrying his wife and having their ten children. That’s not a typo. I may have to go into that as well. Talk about a recidivist. Together they enjoy the outdoors. I’ll bet you do this. No space for anybody. Hiking, backpacking, rafting, ice climbing, etc. Tyler, thanks so much for coming on the program and welcome.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:07:21] Hey, thank you. I’m glad to be here.

Mike Blake: [00:07:24] Ten children?

Tyler Ludlow: [00:07:27] Yes. And actually, I had to recently update that description. A couple months ago, it used to be nine but we have a little two-month-old.

Mike Blake: [00:07:34] Well, congratulations. Are you guys like The Partridge Family and you just drive around in an old school bus or what?

Tyler Ludlow: [00:07:42] We haven’t owned a regular vehicle in a long time, that’s for sure. Yeah. No. But we love it. We love it. They’re great kids. They’re awesome. It’s a lot of fun. It’s a party.

Mike Blake: [00:07:54] I mean, do all ten still live at home? I mean, some must be out of the house by now.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:07:59] Our oldest is 21 and he has an interesting life that kid. His senior year of high school, he did a computer full-time programming bootcamp, three=month program thing. So, he’s had a full=time professional career job as a developer at Geico for two years now. And is looking to buy his first house shortly. So, he’ll be moving out. And then our 19-year-old will be moving out shortly. But we go down every two years or so down to – well, down to our newest. So, we still have a full house at the moment.

Mike Blake: [00:08:39] Well, that’s neat. And you now hold the official Decision Vision podcast record for most children. The previous record holder was Tom Brooks, who came on, I think, somewhere in the thirties for this show. And he has eight. And I thought that record was a stand, frankly, for a lot longer than it did. So, congratulations. I know that this acknowledgement makes the whole thing worthwhile, I’m sure.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:09:05] Absolutely. Absolutely.

Mike Blake: [00:09:08] Wow. Okay. Well, that could be a separate podcast. But I did promise our audience we would talk about big data decisions, so we will transfer back to that. So, Tyler, let’s start off. What makes for a good decision? How do you know if a decision that you made is a good decision?

Tyler Ludlow: [00:09:33] That’s a great question. You know, actually, that exact question many times when I speak at an event or do a workshop, I will start with that question prompt. And use a Q&A response and then I can record everyone’s ideas. And what I find when most people answer that question, the most common theme is that I got what I wanted. They got good results. It’s something about the outcomes.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:10:02] I think it’s interesting in the corporate settings where a lot of decisions are made by committee or by group. The number two thing that I see come up is, everyone agrees on it. Everyone’s on board or something like that, which I think most of us could envision we can make a good decision. And sometimes the best decision, everyone doesn’t agree with. And as well as you can make a good decision and have bad results and have a bad outcome.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:10:33] I can also talk about kids and what not. I mean, I can’t remember the number of times where I didn’t study for a test. Which I think normally will be considered a bad decision. And still ended up getting a good or decent grade on. so that’s a good outcome. So, the key to me in answering this question is, first, being able to decouple or detangle decisions and their results or their outcomes. And to realize that we’re talking about what makes a good decision. It’s, we want to focus in on making good decisions regardless of the outcomes. Recognizing that better outcomes happen more frequently when we make good decisions.

Mike Blake: [00:11:18] And I want to spend a little bit of time on that point, because you can, in fact, have a good outcome from a bad decision, can’t you?

Tyler Ludlow: [00:11:30] Oh, yeah, yeah.

Mike Blake: [00:11:30] Right. Well, let’s-

Tyler Ludlow: [00:11:30] People notice all the time.

Mike Blake: [00:11:33] Well, they do. But take an extreme example. Let say that, a person decided that for whatever reason, they would start using drugs. And in the course of using drugs, they met another user that led to a fantastic professional opportunity. And it made them very wealthy. It made them very successful. And maybe that even led to a scenario in which they went into rehab and got off the drugs. But you’d never tell somebody to go start using drugs because that’s the path to success.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:12:12] Right. Right.

Mike Blake: [00:12:12] And I think one of the things that makes the – one of the things that makes a decision good versus bad is separating kind of process from luck. When you make a decision, the goal, I think, is to control as much of the outcome as possible. Because you control how much you just sort of stacked the deck in your favor as opposed to whether or not there is actually a good outcome.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:12:42] Yeah. There’s a lot about – I love the way you kind of separate out process. There’s the process that you use to make the decision. And then there’s sort of the moment that you decide. And then there’s all the other implementations, so to speak, putting it into action that happens down the road. And we can do all sorts of things to influence the outcome or mitigate certain risks or whatnot that help better results to show it more frequently. Usually we can’t guarantee it. That’s what makes life so interesting and exciting and fun. I mean, that’s what makes it all that variety. It also is what brings us all the stress and the worry so much about these things in the future.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:13:21] But, yeah, we do what we can at the moment that we make the decision. Then, we do our best, again, to stick to it, implement, adjust all those things afterwards. But it’s not the actual outcome itself that should be our measuring stick for whether we made a good choice or not.

Mike Blake: [00:13:37] Now, could the definition be modified, maybe if you have a process that’s leading to lots of good outcomes? Maybe that’s a way to kind of think about it, is if you have a good decision process, over time you should have better outcomes than the person that has the poorer decision process. And then that gets into basic statistical analysis that, over time as your sample size gets greater, your expected outcomes should start to match your actual outcomes from your sample size.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:14:15] Yes. Absolutely. On the nose. I tend to use the phrasing of better outcomes more frequently. You’re never guaranteed on one to be better off. But you’re right, as you make more overtime, you should be better off. Yes, absolutely.

Mike Blake: [00:14:28] So, you’re approaching decision making from a data perspective, which I love. I wish people that did what I do for a living would approach things from a more rigorous data perspective as well. But again, that’s another podcast. You know, everything is about big data and artificial intelligence now. And we sort of have this healthy sprinkling of block chain as well somewhere in there. Why aren’t we just turning everything over to robots, some websites, at this point to make our decisions?

Tyler Ludlow: [00:15:05] That’s a good question, because we probably should be turning more – we’re learning that we can be turning more and more over. So, why do we not just turn it all over? I think there’s a few reasons. One, for example, just last week, I attended a virtual conference. And it was on decision making. And at that conference, there was a session on the merging or the integration of data science and decision science.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:15:34] And one of the presenters was this gentleman who was a data scientist. And he had sort of a framework, a model, slides, some pictures, graphics that he was showing. And it was really intriguing because he showed how, from a data science perspective, one of the features that big data provides is identifying problems or opportunities. I mean, it’s seeing the patterns that we, as humans, don’t. Our brains can’t handle all that.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:16:07] And those are, I think, potential opportunities. Because I think the key – we talked about decision making process in general. I think the place that most of us go wrong is that most folks will see decision making as, “I go collect some data. I analyze it. And make a decision.” And where that cynically can go wrong is that you get the right answer to the wrong problem. That you’re not really tackling. That you’re not framing. Taking some time to sort of frame that decision. You know, what is this? What’s my main objective? What’s most important to me? Just kind of early insight and all that kind of stuff.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:16:43] And I think that is one of the opportunities to blend data – what you call it data science or big data or whatever. But data with decision making is, one, identifying the opportunities. Sometimes we don’t see those. I think big machine learning AI can bring up opportunities. So, I think that’s one way that it can help in that mix to make classic definition of being able to decide.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:17:11] Even the root of the word to decide comes from decision. You can hear it in sort of the root of the word scissors. I think they both come from the same root in Greek or Latin. And so, it’s about cutting off all options except one that then you move forward with. And that’s what a decision is. To select that best alternative, the measuring stick is what we care about. It’s the value criteria that are important to us. And AI can’t tell us that. We have to get clear on what we want. And that’s part of – I mean, AI can do it. Machinery can do a lot to learn how to find that in the data and get better at spotting a cat in the picture or other more important things. But to be clear about what’s important in the beginning and what we’re driving after, let alone to take these opportunities and then say, “Yes. This is one that we want to move after and frame that decision.” I think that’s where the humans are needed.

Mike Blake: [00:18:16] Now, I think there’s a misconception that all of a sudden data matters as if nobody used any data before to rely on making important decisions. Right?

Tyler Ludlow: [00:18:27] Right.

Mike Blake: [00:18:27] And so, it’s a misconception to say that data hasn’t been around or hasn’t been driving decisions for a long time. But what’s different now? What has changed where data is now sort of a top of mind, very much kind of vote set, if you will, a decision tool that’s available.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:18:54] Well, I think it’s just the last word that you used, availability. Something being available. I think that’s one of the biggest keys. I mean, you could layer onto that computing power, right? The ability to be able to do something with it, to make sense of it, especially to be able to make sense of it in a timely fashion. Often we don’t control the time bounds of the decisions in which we need to – that we need to make. I can think, you know, we’ve done a lot over the years with stochastic simulation or Monte Carlo simulation, being able to use a computer to do that. The theory and the thought of how that would be valuable existed before the computing power. And even in the early days, it could be done on big behemoth processors.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:19:37] But to be able to put that at people’s fingertips, I mean, I’ve worked on projects where it was, you know, all of that rocket science, so to speak, gets embedded under the hood. And the decision makers, they’re not even going to an expert anymore to work with it. It’s just happening at their fingertips. They’re getting almost instantaneous looks at distributions of potential future outcomes and then being able to make their decision about whether to go forward or not

Tyler Ludlow: [00:20:01] So, I think the availability of the data, like as you asked your question, I was thinking how a company that I used to work at, a pharma company. Every drug that we had, every molecule that we had for every potential disease that it might be efficacious in, we would do an assessment of the likelihood of it being able to clear each of its clinical study hurdles on its way to potentially being approved. And so, it’s an assessment about the future.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:20:33] And historical data in the past might be informative, but there’s a lot of subjective information about current science, regulatory stuff, and all sorts of things that we’re looking towards the future. One reason why we relied so much on subjective assessment in that process is because there wasn’t available data to be able to aggregate. That’s happening. That’s changing in more and more places where you get the data available. And then you have the computational power to make sense of it in a timeframe that’s useful for the decision maker. I think those are some of the big keys.

Mike Blake: [00:21:09] You know the Monte Carlo tools are now so powerful. And I found out with my clients to be so eye opening. I’m fortunate, I kind of made a commitment to learn that kind of modeling a long time ago. And in addition to having it sort of generate referrals for my competitors who aren’t really very comfortable doing that. When you are able to show a client not a static outcome, like a forecast, for example, or three or four forecasts based on best case scenario, worst case, middle case, scenario. That stuff drives me crazy. But instead, with Monte Carlo, you’re able to show people a full range of potential outcomes. And literally show an image that paints a picture of the distribution to show kind of the relative trade=off between likelihood of outcome and extreme amount of outcome, basically.

Mike Blake: [00:22:12] And at first my client thought it was witchcraft. But once I sort of explained to them that, “No. It’s not witchcraft. But it is different.” There’s just so much there. And I don’t think Monte Carlo simulation and the tools that enable it, they don’t get enough credit in terms of how much that can and is starting to revolutionize decision making.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:22:36] Yeah. Yeah. Dead on. And as you were talking, I was just thinking, “This is just timely.” Just last night three of my boys were playing Risk together, 19-year-old, my 14-year-old, and my nine year old. And a week or so – it may have been during this conference that I mentioned that was attending. You know, we were looking all this at remodeling stuff. And I had this idea that I should teach my kids just the concepts of Monte Carlo simulation. And I thought, it’s been a little while since we played a game of Risk. I’ll teach them to use it in Risk. And I’ll show, “Hey, you can look at these different strategies. Should I attack one country to the other? There’s a best case. There’s the worst case. There’s an average.” But it’s really the distribution of potential outcomes that you want to make your strategy based off of.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:23:23] And so, it just so happened they started their own game last night. And so, they’re partway through when I walked in. And I said, “Hey, guys. I’m going to interrupt your game a little bit. I’m going to teach you this thing called Monte Carlo simulation.” We homeschool our kids so they’re okay with a little bit of mom and dad interrupting life to do some teaching. So, we did that. And we talked, like, 15, 20 minutes. I just gave them the concepts. I showed them the loop sheets engine. That was a very light Monte Carlo engine. And they all got it. In fact, my nine-year-old was the most excited about it because he usually gets pounced on by his older brothers when he plays. But he was like, “I can have this little magic crystal ball type spreadsheet that can give me an idea of how successful I might be. That’s really cool, dad.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:24:11] So, it went better than I thought it would. But it made me think kind of like your last comments, you know, as we keep moving forward and people become more fluent in these sorts of techniques and data and in the use of it, even if they’re not a data scientist, just the usage of it, I think it will dramatically inform and increase the quality of our decision making.

Mike Blake: [00:24:35] So, what is it that makes data big? How did data go from being data to big data?

Tyler Ludlow: [00:24:42] Good question. Well, certainly back to maybe a little bit of this availability piece and the ubiquitousness of that availability. A lot of it having to do with databases becoming more proliferated in all different areas of our business. Things being more trackable so that they leave behind a database trail. And then the ability to share that data between systems. I mean, even just the analysis that we’re talking about doing, even if that analysis was possible processor-wise, and the data existed to do it with, you still have to then get the data into the system that’s going to do the analysis.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:25:27] And whether that’s an engine like Excel or add-ons into it or it’s a bespoke piece of software, the interoperability – so the availability, the ubiquitousness of that, and the interoperability of that, sharing of that data – to get it to the points where it’s gets closer to that point in time where the decision is being made or being looked into. To me, those are some of the key things that had it go from data to big data.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:25:58] I think one of the big challenges is how do you make big sense from big data? Now, we’re swimming in it. We’re swimming in this stuff. And how do you then use that in a timely fashion to actually make sense of it where it’s not a block box. Where you understand the story that’s being told. And you could communicate to somebody else this is why we’re doing it this way. As opposed to just, “Hey, this machine told me I don’t know that type things.

Mike Blake: [00:26:27] Can every business benefit from using data to drive decisions or maybe using it more than they already do?

Tyler Ludlow: [00:26:39] So, I think the answer is yes. But that’s kind of the answer that most people would expect. But then I think the cynics are rightly so in thinking, “Really? Like, everyone? All of us? Even some of these small entrepreneurs, small business folks?” Which, I think, that sort of pushback is good. So, I think the answer is yes in the right way.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:27:04] One of the biggest challenges, I think, we have in smaller organizations down to our personal lives – I think that’s the smallest organization, me and my individual life. One of the biggest challenges, I think, we have is learning how to press the pause button and reflect a little bit before we make a decision. And not just be in the flow of everything else that’s going on. And creating an opportunity like almost creating that fork in the road. And then saying, “Hey, I’m going to do something about it.” Sometimes in the moment when we’re going down the river, we don’t have the ability to necessarily make – take much time and make a decision about which fork in the river we’re going to go down just because of how fast the current is.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:27:54] So, in the moment, I think, there’s one answer about when is it appropriate to use big data and when do you just not have the time or the resources to make it makes sense. But the frequency with which it is useful goes up if we learn how to press the pause button. If we learn to sort of pre-think some of our decisions in a more strategic fashion. Rather than being so reactionary when they actually come up. And so I think in times like this, we get have a little bit of time to reflective. It provides more of an opportunity to go out and get your hands on and do something with that big data. And then once you’ve kind of pre-made that strategic decision, it might pop up here there, here there as you’re running down the river, so to speak.

Mike Blake: [00:28:38] You know, I think that last point is really smart. And I know we didn’t bring you on here to talk about the psychology of decision making. And I’m going to make a topic out of that at some point. But that pressing the pause button before you make a decision, I think I found to be so helpful. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned over my career that has made me a better decision maker, is to push pause and realize that most decisions I need to make in business are not snap decisions. Nobody expects me to make a snap decision. And there is something to taking a morning, or an afternoon, or sleeping on something, or even a weekend to make a decision that just leads to much better – just better outcomes.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:29:26] Yeah. I remember I was approached to help develop a training for, like, 3,000 thousand employees at large companies to work at. And the whole point of that training, it wasn’t around how do you make really big strategic decisions. Which was the normal place that my day job was. It was within the organization. It was about how to help employees think about just taking 15 or 20 minutes to stop and just jot down a few notes. Think through or a little bit of reflection before making that next sort of day to day – thoughtful day to day decision. So you’re absolutely right, learning to be able to do that is one of the biggest challenges. Having a great decision process is fantastic. But if you never take the time to actually deploy it, you’re missing out on it’s value.

Mike Blake: [00:30:19] Yeah. I mean, it’s rare in business that you really have to make wady snap decisions like that. We’re not in the military, so we don’t have to start moving troops around, otherwise people die. It’s like, “Okay. Well, this problem is going to be here.” As long as not using it to avoid the problem, right? There’s something to be said for sort of taking your time and perspective and adding some intellectual capital.

Mike Blake: [00:30:46] One of the things I hear about data and I hear people offer a lot of misgivings – I’m somewhat sympathetic to this argument – is that complete data is almost never reality. And can you fall into a trap of striving to collect that last bit of information that you just never actually make a decision? And then what’s that inflection point? Can you talk through what that inflection point kind of looks like or even feels like? Or you just need to say, “Okay. I’ve got enough. I’m never going to get a sure thing.” But in terms of kind of cost benefit, this is as much as I’m going to get. How do you figure that out?

Tyler Ludlow: [00:31:35] So, yeah. Great question. And I think my answer to it all come from, essentially, just building on the previous little discussion point that we had about pressing the pause button. Or the language that we use is to declare a decision. So, when you declare that decision, there’s some time that you take to say, “What’s my overall objective here? What am I trying to achieve? What are the alternatives I have on the table?” One of the biggest mistakes that people make is that they’ll frame up decisions as being, “Do I do this? Yes or no. Should I do X or Y?” Rather than being able to go sort of a step above that and say, “You know what? How do I frame these questions so I can look at a myriad of alternatives?

Tyler Ludlow: [00:32:24] One of the other mistakes that folks make is that there’s sort of some descriptive titles here. People tend to be alternative focused in their decision making rather than value focused. And what that means is, if you’re going to buy a car or something, you show up at the lot and you start looking at the alternatives, the vehicles that are available to you. And you start looking at the differences between them, horsepower, miles per gallon, leathers, whatever, the trim packages, whatever they have.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:32:56] Rather than being clear about what it is that you’re looking for, what’s important to you. Going in and only starting to look at the value focused side of it. And only going in and saying, “Okay. This is what we’re looking for. How do the options compare?” Even to the point where you’re saying, “I only want to look at options that meet these criteria.”

Tyler Ludlow: [00:33:17] So, when it comes to the data, I think the connection there is that – I’ll give an example aside from car buying. One is apropos. We work with all these kids. We’ve got a bunch of teenagers. And we were looking at another vehicle for the kids, primarily, to drive. So, I’m looking at getting a used vehicle. And I’m trying to think, “Well, what is it that we’re looking at?” If I open the Auto Trader app, there’s a couple hundred thousand vehicles. So, I specify and it needs to be under 150,000 miles. It needs to be $7,000 or less. It needs to have four or five criteria. And from that, we ended up with 14 cars that were nearby. And so, that was really easy then to start sifting through.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:33:58] And I’m not distracted by all of the other pieces of information about this vehicle. I’ve been thoughtful and say, for us, it’s the kids driving. So, it’s miles per gallon because we want them to get to good places. We might use it on long tripe, so we’re looking for leather seats for comfort. And I didn’t want it to break. I wanted it to be cheaper, but not start breaking down the next month, so some limit on the number of miles. And everything else beyond that was not all that important.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:34:28] So, I think that the first key to not being overwhelmed with data and decision making and the wrong one and getting too much is being really clear about what’s important to us. What are the criteria that we’re going to use to make the decision? And those are the only things I needed to go and gather data about or the unknowns that affect that data. I might go, can do some market research to forecast my revenue, which is going to impact my profit. And that’s what I’m basing my decision on or something.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:35:00] So, I think one is gaining clarity of those value criteria ahead of time. So, people that market stuff, like back to the car buying example, the sales guy on the lot is going to want to tell me up and down about these cars. I really only care about the information that matters to me helping to distinguish between my preferred alternative. I don’t really need all the other information. I just need my stuff. So, I think the biggest key is to be clear about our value criteria ahead of time, so that we don’t get distracted with all of the possible data that’s out there. We zero in on what’s really important to us.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:35:40] And then we get clear about saying, “Hey, is the cost of going out and getting that extra data, is that worth the additional insight that it might provide?” And the answer is not always yes. We tend to sometimes take comfort in saying, “Oh, I’ll just go get more data and more data and more data.” Even if it is data that informs my value criteria. It might not be worth it in the time or the cost that it takes to get it relative to the benefit of the additional insight that it might provide.

Mike Blake: [00:36:09] So, on the flip side of this question, I want to ask, is there value to even having a relatively small amount of data? Let’s say that you’re – I don’t know – a food truck. And you may have a very limited amount of data. Perhaps no more than simply your receipts in your inventory. And maybe you have a little bit more. But can good decisions be made on a small amount of data? Or maybe better put, on a fairly incomplete data set.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:36:46] Yes. Yes, they can. And as you’ve kind of alluded to, sometimes that’s all you have. There are some times that that’s all you could reasonably get your hands on or might be affordable to get your hands on, so to speak. And I think this is where coming back to, again, sort of framing up that decision. One of the next pieces of that is saying, “Well, what are the key unknowns that could really drive my outcome scenarios to be really good or really bad?” Like, we talked about this Monte Carlo simulations that range with its potential outcomes. So, what are the factors that really are key to that?

Tyler Ludlow: [00:37:25] So, I’ll give you an example. Years ago, I used to work for a company that did a lot of home, personal care, and food products. And so, some of those would be manufactured in big warehouses. So, we might have a huge product launch. I mean, we’re working on a product launch of a new laundry crystal. So, it was something. It wasn’t sort of a laundry powder nor was it the liquid. It was these crystal things. They were new. They were looking onto this. And it required a new manufacturing line. So, that huge capital expenditure was in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And as you looked at the overall revenue for the project, that was impactful. But it actually had a very – because that was very controlled, we knew a lot about it, it had a very small range of uncertainty around it. Whereas, the range of uncertainty around our market share was much more uncertain.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:38:17] And so, for us to go out and get that data was even a small bit would be super helpful. Whereas, the data on the CAPEX side didn’t provide sort of the benefit or as much benefit. So, having a clear idea of what are the key factors that could really swing my outcomes in one direction or the other. Again, that’s important to know beforehand. And then if you have one of those key factors that you have, even just a little insight on, a little data can go a long way. I mean, if you know nothing about something happening or not, you essentially have a 50-50 chance. But if you just get a little data that helps you to know, hey, it’s more 60-40 than 50-50. The relative value of that uncertainty, you’ve just shrunk that uncertainty by 20 percent. So, that relative value of that little piece of information can be super valuable.

Mike Blake: [00:39:18] So, one of the things I’m sure our listeners are concerned about and I’ve asked before is, “Look, this sounds great. But I don’t have Tyler’s massive education and data analytics. I don’t even have Blake’s sort of back of the envelope iPhone calculator level of data analytics.” Do you need to be a statistician or have one on your staff sort of full time in order to use big data?

Tyler Ludlow: [00:39:49] No. No – I mean, yes. This goes back to the question of should every company use it, right? If you can pick and deploy, there will be times where you want to invest more heavily in it. And times, where you invest less, I believe. And this goes back a little bit to being able to press the pause button and insert, maybe, some strategic decisions. When the time is right, you might buy into it a little bit more than not. But the basic process of being able to be recognizing how to plug data in, how it can create value, give you insight, in particular about unknowns into the future, that sort of process and principle can always be applied.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:40:30] One of the things that we teach in our workshops is how to use something that we call decision archetypes, which is a way to say there’s these simple patterns that show up over and over again in decision making that hinge on these uncertainties. And if you can just start to get a read on the ballpark, sometimes all you really need to know to make the decision is which side of the fence you’re on. You don’t necessarily know how far away from the fence you are to an exact team. At times, it’s nice to know that exact distance from the fence. But as long as I know which side of the fence I’m sitting on, then I know how to decide and how to move forward.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:41:11] And so, sometimes, just like you’re talking just a little bit of data or a little bit of – if you’re going back to your question was about, “Hey, do I need all of the analytical chops?” No. Having a process that allows you to do a little bit quickly could take and just – you know, got to take a little bit of learning. But it’s not overly complex, no.

Mike Blake: [00:41:31] We’re talking with Tyler Ludlow of Decision Skills Institute. And we’re sort of running out of time here. But a couple of questions I want to make sure we get to. One is, if I’m a small company, you know, I have limited resources. What are some tips to, maybe, at least amp up my data access or collecting game? Are there some easy things maybe a lot of companies could be doing that are not in order just to, maybe, capture more data they already have or access data, maybe, they don’t know exists? It doesn’t completely upend their entire cost structure.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:42:11] That’s a good question. I’m going to answer it in a slightly – I hope it isn’t in a field to dodging the question to your listeners. I want to say, first, I think the key is to be thoughtful about the decisions that you currently make. The bigger ones, the ones that you’re already taking some time and thought for. And to take the time to say what bits of data or information, if we knew better, might really impact our ability to make that decision in a more quality manner.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:42:48] This goes back to maybe sort of the alternative focus versus value focus bit. Before you start just collecting data, because that’s the style and the fad, I think having clarity about what data would be most meaningful is probably the first thing. And then you can set some very simple strategies to start with of being able to either collect or get your hands on that specific data at the right time. Especially if you’re a small business, and we think about collecting data off of your own processes, that can be an expensive sort of thing to put in a program, a collection program like that. Let alone in the moment. Sometimes it takes longer to do a process in a way that it’s completely trackable afterwards. So, those are investments that you’re making.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:43:39] You want to make sure you’re not doing those just because of fad. And because, “Hey, I know that if we start collecting this data, it will give us insight about this unknown.” And that can really drive our insight into potential outcomes in the future in which way we might go or things going forward. So, that would be my sort of – it’s a bit dodging the answer, but I would start with the bits of information that would be most useful.

Mike Blake: [00:44:03] I don’t think it dodges the answer. I mean, at the end of the day, kind of restating the answer back to you, I think, the answer is you may have to spend some money. Make an investment to extract the data that you already have. But it doesn’t sound like it’s a binary discussion where you either spend no money on it or you spend millions and millions of dollars on it. You can sort of snipe this and decide what data is the most important. And it could be, for some companies – you tell me if I’m wrong – some companies, just one data point or one data set makes all the difference.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:44:41] Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Blake: [00:44:42] Right? And that’s the leverage part you talked about.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:44:44] Absolutely. Absolutely. And I would say that – maybe building onto this – one of the most common themes that I tried to drive home to people when we do teaching and training and workshops and whatnot is that, we know more typically than we think we know about how things might be in the future. So, often, whether it’s scientists or whoever, I start working with someone to help make a decision, it will be clear that it kind of hinges on this one unknown. I’ll start asking about it and the response is, “Well, we don’t know, it could be anything.” Well, that’s true. What would be the height of the next person to walk through the door? Well, it could be anywhere.

Tyler Ludlow: [00:45:19] But you know what? I know it’s probably less than seven feet tall and more than four feet tall. And I could probably still go in narrower and narrower down there. And we tend to know more than we allow ourselves in first pass to think we know about something. And oftentimes just starting to put some reasonable boundaries on things, we realize we can get it into a space where we can then start deriving some insights about what we do. Rather than just saying, “Well, it could be anything. We don’t know until we bought some market research,” or whatever it might be. So, a lot of times you’ve got some of that insight just in our minds – in our heads because of our expertise and our experience.

Mike Blake: [00:45:56] Tyler, we are running out of time. And I have to let you go and do your many things. But I’m sure there are questions that our listeners have out of this discussion where they like to, maybe, ask you and get some expertise on it. Would you be willing to share your contact information if anybody wants to ask your question?

Tyler Ludlow: [00:46:13] Absolutely. If you want to follow up with me directly, my email is just Tyler@decisionskillsinstitute.com.

Mike Blake: [00:46:24] Well, great. That’s going to wrap it up for today’s program. I like to thank Tyler Ludlow, Decision Skills Institute, so much for joining us and sharing his expertise with us. We’ll be exploring a new topic each week, so please tune into so that when you’re faced with your next decision, you have clear vision when making it. If you enjoy this podcast, please consider leaving a review with your favorite podcast aggregator. It helps people find us, so that we can help them. Once again, this is Mike Blake. Our sponsor is Brady Ware & Company. And this has been the Decision Vision Podcast.

Robert Pastor with ADAPTURE and Anju Mathew with OncoLens

July 9, 2020 by angishields

Atlanta Business Radio

Robert Pastor with ADAPTURE and Anju Mathew with OncoLens

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Robert Pastor is a seasoned IT Executive with over 30 years of experience managing top-level accounts and high-performing sales, professional services, and technology leasing teams.

ADAPTURE strives to cultivate visionary, comprehensive enterprise technology solutions by implementing world-class platforms that scale with both business growth and technological innovation to keep clients at the forefront of emerging business technologies.

As business productivity solutions move to the cloud, demand on the network increases exponentially, all while threats to data security grow more sophisticated. It’s more important than ever to proactively prioritize innovation; and ADAPTURE is the partner to help manage it all.

Follow ADAPTURE on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Anju Mathew is CEO and co-founder of OncoLens. Most recently, she was the head of technology and innovation at McKesson’s Medical Surgical business unit where she led the development and launch of several successful tools and business partnerships positioned to take costs out of our healthcare system.

Prior to her role at McKesson Medical Surgical, Anju was part of McKesson’s corporate strategy group. She was also co-founder and executive at LumaMed, a medical device company focused on cancer imaging. Prior to LumaMed, she worked with Thomson-Reuters, A. T. Kearney, IBM and i2 Technologies.

Anju has an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and Bachelor’s in Industrial Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology. She is a member of the Atlanta Technology Angels group and a member of the board of directors for Illuma Care Connections, headquartered in Atlanta.

In her free time, Anju enjoys spending time with her husband, son, daughter and dog, Lexi. She enjoys going on long walks, watching movies and traveling around the world.

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July 9, 2020 by angishields

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Decision Vision Episode 70: How Do I Build My Personal Brand? – An Interview with Jared Kleinert, Meeting of the Minds

June 18, 2020 by John Ray

Decision Vision

Decision Vision Episode 70: How Do I Build My Personal Brand? - An Interview with Jared Kleinert, Meeting of the Minds

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Decision Vision Episode 70: How Do I Build My Personal Brand? – An Interview with Jared Kleinert, Meeting of the Minds

“How do I build my personal brand?” is a question many are struggling with right now. If you’ve been successful at building relationships face to face, how do you pivot in an environment where relationships must be developed digitally? USA Today‘s “Most Connected Millennial,” Jared Kleinert of Meeting of the Minds, joins “Decision Vision” to discuss this issue with host Mike Blake. “Decision Vision” is presented by Brady Ware & Company.

Jared Kleinert, Meeting of the Minds

Jared Kleinert is the founder of Meeting of the Minds, as well as a TED speaker, 2x award-winning author, and USA Today‘s “Most Connected Millennial”.

His invite-only mastermind community, Meeting of the Minds, curates top entrepreneurs, CEOs, and business owners for quarterly summits in places like Napa Valley, Atlanta, Los Angeles, New York, and Bermuda. Members of this network, typically operating 7-figure businesses with no outside investors) enjoy more predictable revenue, increased profitability, and sustainable growth for their companies in addition to new life-long friendships and long-term business partnerships.

In the last two years, Jared has invited over 100 diverse “super-connectors” and subject matter experts into Meeting of the Minds, including CEOs of 7, 8, and 9-figure businesses, creators of globally-recognized brands and social movements, New York Times bestselling authors, founders of pre-IPO tech unicorns, former Fortune 500 c-suite execs, and others.

Jared’s career began at 15 years old when he started his first company, and took off at 16 while working as the first intern, and then one of the first 10 employees, for an enterprise SaaS company called 15Five, which today has raised over $40M and has almost 2000 forward-thinking companies as monthly recurring clients. 15Five is the market leader for software powering continuous employee feedback, high-performing cultures, objectives (OKR) tracking, etc.

Later, Jared would become a delegate to President Obama’s 2013 Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Malaysia, write multiple books including the #1 Entrepreneurship Book of 2015, 2 Billion Under 20: How Millennials are Breaking Down Age Barriers and Changing The World, and speak at TED@IBM the day before he turned 20.

As a highly-sought after keynote speaker and consultant on engaging Millennials in the workplace, Jared’s clients range from organizations like Facebook, Samsung, Bacardi, Estee Lauder, IBM, Cornell, Berkeley, AdAge, and the National Speakers Association. His insights on entrepreneurship and networking have been featured in major media such as Forbes, TIME, Harvard Business Review, Fortune, NPR, Entrepreneur, Mashable, Fox Business and more.

Join Jared’s private email newsletter group at motm.co/newsletter.

Michael Blake, Brady Ware & Company

Mike Blake, Host of the “Decision Vision” podcast series

Brady Ware & Company

Decision Vision Podcast Series

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Show Transcript

Intro: [00:00:02] Welcome to Decision Vision, a podcast series focusing on critical business decisions. Brought to you by Brady Ware & Company. Brady Ware is a regional, full-service accounting and advisory firm that helps businesses and entrepreneurs make visions a reality.

Mike Blake: [00:00:22] And welcome to Decision Vision, a podcast giving you, the listener, clear vision to make great decisions. In each episode, we discuss the process of decision making on a different topic for the business owner’s or executive’s perspective. We aren’t necessarily telling you what to do, but we can put you in a position to make informed decision on your own and understand we might need help along the way.

Mike Blake: [00:00:40] My name is Mike Blake, and I’m your host for today’s program. I’m a Director at Brady Ware & Company, a full=service accounting firm based in Dayton, Ohio, with offices in Dayton; Columbus, Ohio; Richmond, Indiana; and Alpharetta, Georgia. Brady Ware is sponsoring this podcast, which is being recorded in Atlanta per social distancing protocols. If you like this podcast, please subscribe on your favorite podcast aggregator, and please consider leaving a review of the podcast as well.

Mike Blake: [00:01:06] Today, we’re going to discuss the topic, do I need to go all in on building a personal brand? And ever since this coronavirus thing really hit home, and we’ve all been sent scattering to our homes and hastily building work-from-home workstations, complexes, turning dining room tables into corporate headquarters and so forth, I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic because I’m in very much an old-industry firm. Well, let’s face it. I think that some of our firms and us included are actively thinking about how to best adopt and adapt to modern business techniques, practices, methodologies.

Mike Blake: [00:02:00] But the fact of the matter is the world is and has changed. And I don’t think that it’s at all a guarantee that it’s going to go back to the way it was, say, February 1st of January 15th. And as I think about that, I think about my business partners, I think about my colleagues, I think about my clients, I think about people that are in my ecosystem whom I care about, and I wonder what is to become of them if their primary method for building a brand or buildings, not even a brand, but just sort of a circle of people that are helpful to them. I don’t know what the word for that would be, so I’m going to just use that very awkward terminology. But what’s going to become of them, right? What what becomes of you if your primary vehicle for initiating and developing relationships is networking, and exchanging physical business cards and shaking hands with people, or God forbid, hugging them? It’s just what becomes of you if that’s your world? And frankly, that’s how you have been successful for the last 35 years of your career.

Mike Blake: [00:03:23] And the honest, no-sugar-coating answer as I try to do on this podcast is an asteroid has hit. Now, it’s hit on the other side of the planet. So, the shockwave hasn’t really hit. It’s hit in Mexico, but we’re in Eastern Europe. And so, the shockwave hasn’t hit. The fragments of molten lava or volcanic rock haven’t rained down on us yet. So, there’s a little bit of time. But the fact of the matter is an asteroid has hit. And these conferences, these seminars, these professional meetings, trade associations, happy hours and so forth, at a minimum, I don’t know anybody that thinks they’re going to come back tomorrow. And I’m of the camp that I’m not sure they’re going to come back maybe ever, certainly not in the medium term.

Mike Blake: [00:04:21] And so, what do you do? As a company, I don’t care how many costs you cut, there’s not a single company out there that is viable long term if you don’t generate revenue. And I don’t care what ever sort of other things you do in terms of building infrastructure and trying to be else helpful to your company that you work for or that your own. And I’m on record of saying this, if you’re not a profit center, you are expendable. And as I’m recording this on May 8th, 2020, the most recent unemployment figure shows 14.5% unemployment, which is better than I thought it would be. I think we’ll see 20%. And you do not want to be in a position where somebody looks at you as a cost, and you’ve got to be a profit center. A profit center is somebody who, generally, there are exceptions to this, but somebody who is going to bring in revenue.

Mike Blake: [00:05:22] And because the world we’re in now, because that’s sort of active ping that we’re used to is just off the table, what do you do? And I think the answer is about building a personal brand where you don’t have to meet people directly. And I think I’ll say with as much modesty as I can muster, I’ve had some success doing that. And Exhibit A is that I have never met over half of my clients in person. And I think that’s a help. Showing them my face is not going to close deals, I promise. But the fact that my clients really don’t care if they ever meet me in person I think shows that there’s a personal brand out there that’s had some effectiveness. And it’s not because I’m great at it. It’s just because of something that I chose to do.

Mike Blake: [00:06:15] And so, I’m picking this topic and I’m picking this topic now because I think it’s something that everybody out there has to be thinking about, even if you’re not an executive. I received a LinkedIn message from a friend of mine yesterday who has a son that wants a business internship. I know very few people are handing out internships right now. They’re trying to figure out how to keep their 30-year or 20-year employees busy and paid. So, where’s that internship going to come from? And my answer was, if you want to stand out, start building that personal brand. I only came to this party 15 years ago. I wish I would have had the opportunity and the foresight at age 20 to start doing this. I’d be miles ahead. And that’s the way I think you’re going to stand out, even as somebody who’s looking for an internship, have a personal brand, have a reason for people to know you, to remember you, to identify you as a special individual that’s bringing something that’s unique and special to the table.

Mike Blake: [00:07:22] And happily, my thinking on this topic coincides with something that, for me, has been very fortunate. About a year ago, I made a new friend name named Jared Kleinert. And to be candid, I had never heard of him before, but he reached out to me and was introduced to me because at the time, he was planning to move to the ATL, which he has since done and we’re delighted for that, but it turns out that even in his teens, he has understood organically about the importance about building a personal brand. Literally, it’s not hyperbole to say that he’s a genius and a prodigy of doing that. And when I read off his bio, you’re going to see why.

Mike Blake: [00:08:12] He’s a guy that sort of has this in his DNA. And I’m delighted that he’s agreed to come on to talk about this because I cannot think of anybody better. You can have your Gary Vaynerchuks, you can have your Tim Ferris’s, and they’re all great. You can give me Jerry Kleinert every day of the week. So, I want to introduce Jared, whose current deal is he’s founder of Meeting of the Minds, as well as a TED speaker, as a multi-award winning author, and has been named as USA Today’s Most Connected Millennial. Okay. So, maybe maybe you’re kind of getting this now.

Mike Blake: [00:08:53] His invite-only mastermind community, Meeting of the Minds, curates top entrepreneurs, chief executive officers and business owners for quarterly summits. Members of this network, typically, operating seven-figure businesses with no outside investors enjoy more predictable revenue, increased profitability, and sustainable growth for their companies, in addition to new lifelong friendships and long term business partnerships. And we talked a little bit about this topic with Marc Borrelli in a previous episode, where he talked about professional and business peer groups such as Vistage and talked about the value of those sorts of things. What Jared does is the same thing, but I think it’s more exclusive and a little bit more amped up on steroids.

Mike Blake: [00:09:36] Jared’s career began at 15 years old when he started his first company and took off at 16 while working as the first intern, and then one of the first employees for an enterprise SaaS company called 15Five. And we had one of their founders, Shane Metcalf, come on to talk about how to be an effective remote worker. And I hope you enjoyed that podcast because it was terrific, and I’m still begging him to introduce me to Simon Sinek who, as everybody knows, I have a disturbingly high man crush on. And today, 15Five has raised over $40 million and has almost 2000 forward thinking companies as monthly recurring clients.

Mike Blake: [00:10:13] Jared is the author of multiple books, including the number one entrepreneurship book of 2015, 2 Billion Under 20, which I have read, How Millennials Are Breaking Down Age Barriers and Changing the World. And he spoke at TED at IBM the day he turned before 20. Jared, thank you so much for for coming on.

Jared Kleinert: [00:10:34] Yeah, thanks for having me. And I appreciate the flattery. I’m going to have to take the quote of, “You can have your Gary Vaynerchucks, you can have your Tim Ferris, but I’ll take Jared any day.” I appreciate that.

Mike Blake: [00:10:48] Well, it’s open source. I mean, I’ve already gotten the podcasts. I have no incentive to suck up to you. What you’ve accomplished is remarkable. And you’ve done so in a way where I presume it’s basically self-taught, where there are people my age with gray hair and arthritic ankles and all that we would love to accomplish that in a lifetime. And now, you realize, boy, we really need to accomplish stuff like that in a lifetime. So, having you with your talents and your story here, it’s really, I think, a terrific resource for our listeners. And frankly, I’m going to nag all the partners in my firm to listen to this.

Jared Kleinert: [00:11:33] Yeah. And none of us are completely self-taught. I mean, I’ve benefited from meeting hundreds of the world’s smartest and most talented millennials, and consulting for people who have New York Times bestselling books, and who are Rhodes scholars, and who are really world class of what they do. So, I’ve been very fortunate over time to download as much as I can from the people around me, but I think that’s part of why we’re talking about this topic today is that you are know the average of the people you meet and how high of a quality time you spend with them.

Mike Blake: [00:12:11] So, let’s start at the very beginning. Who needs a personal brand? Why do you need one?

Jared Kleinert: [00:12:18] Yeah. I mean, I think everyone. I started my first business at 15 and didn’t know anyone and didn’t know anything. I really began my career with a series of cold e-mails that I was doing to individuals on the West Coast of the United States when I was living in South Florida where I was born and raised. And so, in a way, I’ve been practicing some of the reach-out methods to influential people in the hustle and the relationship-building efforts that we can all apply during this time of social distancing. And so, started my first business at 15, failed miserably. I didn’t know anything about the industry I was playing in. I didn’t know anything about my competitors. I didn’t have enough capital.

Jared Kleinert: [00:13:10] Biggest mistake I made was poor mentor selection. And I was spending six months hanging out with a guy who I later found out had served time in prison for securities fraud on Wall Street, which is definitely not who you want to associate with if you want a long, prosperous career as an entrepreneur.

Mike Blake: [00:13:29] Yeah, nowhere to go but up.

Jared Kleinert: [00:13:30] Yeah. So, at 16, I had negative connections and negative experience, but I realized that I needed to do a 180 and surround myself with not just high integrity individuals because I think you have to be around great people first and foremost, but also people that were real subject matter experts at what they’re working on. I think that part is really important as well. And so, that’s when I sent a cold email to David Hassell, the CEO and founder of 15Five, Shane’s co-founder. And I reached out because I read about him. He was called the most connected man you don’t know in Silicon Valley, according to Forbes. And when I was thinking about reaching out, I had to think about what I could offer him, why would he give me his time of day. He was a serial entrepreneur, he had a successful business going, and he had a great network and a great brand, or another word we could use for brand is maybe reputation in this conversation. And I was just a 16-year-old kid in Florida who had spent six months learning under a former white collar convict and had a failed startup.

Jared Kleinert: [00:14:45] So, nevertheless, I sent him an email, basically offered to work for free in exchange for his mentorship. And that led to an internship in his company, which led to me being one of the first 10 employees at his company. And from there, that single super connector in David snowballed into a whole network of people that I’m still in touch with today, Advisors of 15Five, some of their clients. In fact, one of their former clients is now speaking at a camp or at an event I’m hosting in about a week at time of recording. And you also build the skillset of reaching out to more people like David.

Jared Kleinert: [00:15:30] You also pick up social proof along the way. Like I reached out to David. I’ve now established some experience in working for 15Five. I can leverage that in a tasteful manner, of course, but I can leverage the fact that he took a chance on me. I can leverage the trust that he’s built with other people in his network when I’m starting to build a relationship with those people off of his introduction or recommendation. When I called and emailed other people, I can leverage the work that I did at 15Five and anything else that I accomplished in the two years I was there, which I’ve done a TEDx talk, I got a book deal for my first book when I was 17.

Jared Kleinert: [00:16:12] And so, I replicated this model. I reached out to Keith Ferrazzi, who’s the author of Never Eat Alone, when I was 18. I sent another cold email. This time, I was able to better leverage some social proof I’d built up, which I think opened the conversation much more easily, but I still was looking to provide value to him as the first matter of business. And that effort turned into him becoming my first ever client of a marketing consulting firm that I ran. Again, I got to meet a ton of new people through him and with that case study.

Jared Kleinert: [00:16:46] So, I think what I’ve been able to do, which is definitely needed now more than ever, is find ways to meet influential people, build deep, meaningful relationships, and do so without relying necessarily on an in-person interaction at first; although, of course, that’s an important part of deepening relationships whenever you can do that. And I think at some point, we’ll go back to normal and we’ll have events. In my company, Meeting the Minds, it is driven by these three-day in-person experiences; although we’re figuring out how we do things virtual in the time being. So, I hope we go back to normal at some point. Yeah, even just the origin story of who I am and who I’ve been able to learn from and work with, it was all through a connections made virtually.

Mike Blake: [00:17:37] So, I want to ask you about the cold emails because I think that’s fascinating. Many people are reluctant to send cold e-mails. And I’m not sure why. The worst that could happen realistically is they’re just not going to respond. Unless you just say something completely just bad, they’re not going to bother to denigrate you with a response and they’ll just say … you might get an autoresponder, whatever it is. But what got you to start sending out cold e-mails because you’re too young to be scared of doing that, or did somebody advise you to doing out, or how did you get to that?

Jared Kleinert: [00:18:22] I think part of it was the pain that I had in having a really terrible mentor at first. So, I hope that you don’t need to have pain before you start cold e-mailing or sending more cold e-mails. And of course, the best cold e-mail is not having to send one at all. It’s to have a mutual connection where there is trust between you and that mutual connection, and then that mutual connection and whoever you’re trying to reach out to, be it a potential client, or mentor, or joint venture partner, vendor, et cetera, potential podcast guests. But if you are resorting to sending a cold e-mail, then how do we do that in the best fashion possible? Because even if you send the perfect cold e-mail, you may not get a response, as you were saying. It may take two, three follow-ups. Maybe they just are awful at e-mail or, perhaps, other things are going on like global pandemics that they have to deal with.

Mike Blake: [00:19:20] Oh, yeah, that.

Jared Kleinert: [00:19:21] Yeah. So, if you are going to send a cold e-mail, I think it’s a great strategy for potentially meeting some new people. And I don’t think there’s a huge barrier to doing it. It’s finding their e-mail address and sending a worthy message. And so, for me, I always start with the social proof that I have to offer. So, nowadays, it’s easy. I met Ted and TEDx speaker, award-winning author. I got this USA Today’s Most Connected Millennial thing. I have a lot of social proof that I can leverage. And then, specifically, for certain industries or individuals I’m reaching out to, I can reference a mutual friend in my subject line or I can reference something that we have in common.

Jared Kleinert: [00:20:07] But if you’re just starting out, then think about in the subject line of an email … before we even write the email, we’re just talking about the subject line. Think about social proof that you can offer, whether it’s awards that your company has won, or that you’ve won, or it’s a mutual connection that you see on LinkedIn. And if you can’t find some social proof, then, at least, try and spark intrigue, so that the other person opens your email. And you could do that by having something mysterious. Like one of my favorite subject lines is, “Quick question …” Or you can find a way to offer your value in the subject line of your email. “Hey, Mike, I have three podcast recommendations for you or three guests that I’d like to introduce you to.” You’re probably going to open up that email even if you had no idea who I was because it’s personal and it’s related to how I might be able to offer you value.

Jared Kleinert: [00:21:04] And so, then in the subject line or in the body of the email, quickly introduce yourself, but do it in a sentence or two. “Hi, I’m Jerry Kleinert,” and insert that social proof that you have or insert what you do. Then, the bulk of that e-mail should really be how you can help someone. And so, to send a proper cold email, you should be doing your research in advance. And that’s where the power of the internet comes into play and where you could actually start better initial conversations potentially than if you met someone randomly at a conference because you have the luxury of stepping back, doing a lot of research on what that person may want or need, what they care about.

Jared Kleinert: [00:21:50] And then, you can craft the perfect pitch or the perfect email to them to show them how you can be valuable, how you can be valuable right now, and what the next step should be, which is, “Hey, let’s …” You should end your email with a call to action like, “Let’s get on a call,” or “When are you available?” or “Let’s hop on Zoom,” something like that. So, I do think the cold email or the art of reaching out to new people digitally does pose some benefits from being able to think about what you can offer as valuable, what the other party is going to find as a trustworthy source of credibility, your social proof, and then the value you can offer them, which is why they’re going to pay attention to you and your message right now when there may be other competing priorities or other people reaching out, other salespeople trying to get money from them, et cetera.

Mike Blake: [00:22:51] So, you’ve built, obviously, a personal brand. I think, for good or ill, I hope this is accurate, but I do think of your personal brand as the millennial who really gets it and has figured out a lot of the secret sauce, secret formula to digital media, to digital relationship building, and so forth. And my question is this, is that at what point did you go from trying to find a mentor that was better than the train wreck that you initially had to becoming a cohesive plan around building a personal brand where you going to be known for X? How did that evolve?

Jared Kleinert: [00:23:39] Yeah. I think the biggest strength of my brand, as you call it, is the quality of my network. And I’ve certainly taken steps to not just build a great network, but then to amass social proof, to let it be known to the world that I am a quality person to connect with. And so, in terms of thinking about that social proof curation process, as we can call it, I would start with what your ideal customers, or what your ideal friends, or mentors would find to be trustworthy. So, things like Ted and TEDx are trustworthy.

Jared Kleinert: [00:24:20] I’m really clear about saying I’m an award-winning author as opposed to a bestselling author because I know that there is a lot of people that can write a book post on Amazon and be a bestselling author with three book buys and an esoteric category in an hour from their friends for 99 cents. I’m really salty about that. So, I say award-winning because it’s a lot harder to win awards. And if I was a New York Times bestselling author, I’d put on I’m a New York Times bestselling author, but I’m not. So, I’ve found different ways to leverage the assets I have and to go acquire those as quickly as possible.

Jared Kleinert: [00:24:57] If you’re part of my business as I’m a keynote speaker and I’m a consultant for major companies occasionally. And so, you have a potential speaking client is looking at me and my body of work, what are going to be the other companies that they’re gonna look at and sort of deem trustworthy? What are the news sources they’re going to look at and deemed trustworthy, the podcasts they’re going to look at, et cetera. So, I even if it’s working for free or taking a reduced fee, I went and tried to get Facebook, Samsung, Bacardi, Estée Lauder, IBM, you know, National Speakers Association, you could you can go to associations as well, those are all groups that I worked with because, in part, I wanted to shine a light on the quality of my work for other people who were interested in connecting with me.

Jared Kleinert: [00:25:48] So, there’s that aspect to it in terms of building my network because I think the quality of my network and the diversity of my network is where my brand and reputation really shine and why people connect with me. I think, again, there was a snowball effect at first with building my network. So, being a good person, looking to provide value up front, and then focusing my efforts on connecting with one super connector in David or in Keith Ferrazzi a couple years later.

Jared Kleinert: [00:26:21] And then, from there, it’s leveraging that connection to connect with more super connectors. And the dirty secret is someone like Keith Ferrazzi or someone like David has dozens, if not hundreds, of friends who are also very well connected, very well regarded in their fields. And so, I, in turn, can meet those people. And when I’m connecting with those individuals, we’re starting at a much deeper level of our relationship because we’re both leveraging the trust of David or whoever that connector is in that situation.

Jared Kleinert: [00:26:56] And so, it’s important to keep your quality of work high. And when I say be a good person, it’s not just Mother Teresa type doing good deeds, but it’s also having high quality products and services, and showing up on time, and working hard, and some of those basic statements. But as long as you’re continually a good person, and you’re continually looking to provide value, then your network is going to grow exponentially when you focus on these super connectors. And you can focus on super connectors in your industry. I’ve made it a particular point of interest to focus on super connectors from diverse industries and fields because that is my leverage in the marketplace as I have perspective across hundreds of industries and access to hundreds of other communities if and when I need it.

Jared Kleinert: [00:27:48] So, hopefully, that’s answering your question, but I think it’s being mindful about who you’re connecting with. And then, it’s also thinking about what’s it going to take for that other person to trust me. And so, that’s going to be a mutual connection. Or if you don’t have the luxury of a mutual connection and/or you want to bolster that mutual connection’s introduction, then you can go and amass social proof in the form of press, and podcast interviews, and all this stuff that you might say is your brand online. And then, make sure you put it in places where people are going to see it, your LinkedIn bio, your email signature, going on different shows that have a decent audience. So, I’ve been interviewed by Larry King and and New York Times bestselling authors like Neil Strauss with a big following in the entrepreneurial community, or have been referenced on James Altucher Show, even though I haven’t done a full interview with him. So, then it’s thinking about from a distribution standpoint, like where are my ideal clients, partners, friends going to hear about me in a one to many fashion, if it’s not through a mutual intro or it’s not through a cold email.

Mike Blake: [00:29:02] So, let me ask you this. So, you’ve done, I mean, the TED talks. And I realize I gotta go back and actually watch. I’m embarrassed I’ve not, but I will. Did did those come before you are in the process of building a personal brand, or did you look back to say, “Hey, I did these TED talks and I wrote this book. That’s pretty cool. I, now, have a personal brand that’s kind of evolving, and I’ve got to figure out a way to be a good steward of it or be a good caretaker”? What was the order of operations there?

Jared Kleinert: [00:29:41] For me, I think it was pretty the personal brand building exercises were centric around book launches and around sort of getting a certain mission out into the world. I think it’s cyclical too. I’m now thinking about how we grow Meeting of the Minds and what are the new assets in my brand that I need to build to better reach more of our ideal clients. And so, I can look back at what I’ve done, and comb through what I have, and maybe pick some of the top interviews, or pick some of the top places I’ve spoken at, or individuals that I’ve worked with, and then reference those.

Jared Kleinert: [00:30:29] I would recommend, if you’re listening to this and you don’t have a lot of social proof built up, I would build that as quickly as possible, so that you can go back to revenue-generating activities and some of the other stuff. I think that the main thing here is you want to spend as much time as possible leveraging your social proof and building your network and your business instead of what some of my peers do, and they spend a lot of time chasing press opportunities and chasing “fame,” for lack of a better word. I’m not really interested in doing too many paid or doing too many speaking gigs right now unless they’re paid. I don’t need more social proof in terms of stages I’ve been on. But at the beginning, when I was looking to build out part of my business or leverage stages I’ve spoken on for Meeting of the Minds or for book launches, it was very important for me to get as many high quality speaking gigs as possible, and get as many names or logos I could reference on my speaking pager or wherever.

Jared Kleinert: [00:31:33] So, it depends on where you’re at. If you’re starting out with a new business, or new industry, or you’re earlier in your career, then I would build that social proof as quickly as possible, so you could spend more time leveraging it. But it also makes sense to view it or look back at it cyclically and make sure that the assets that you’ve had reflects how you can be helpful in the marketplace right now because, a lot of times, even today, I get a lot of references to my books. And while it’s great that people are reading, I want more people to know more about Meeting of the Minds. And so, I need to adjust for that. I need to make sure that what I’m putting out in the world accurately reflects how it would help our ideal member there. So, that’s a good way to think about it.

Mike Blake: [00:32:24] So, I’m going to tear up the script up a little bit here. And I want to focus on-

Jared Kleinert: [00:32:30] Oh no!

Mike Blake: [00:32:32] Such as the script is, but I want to drill down into building social proof, right?

Jared Kleinert: [00:32:37] Sure.

Mike Blake: [00:32:37] That’s dominated this conversation so far. And I get it, it’s important. I’m [indiscernible], but, now, I’m somebody that I know I need to become intentional about building this personal brand, and digital is going to be likely a big part of that. What are the things I should be thinking about now if I feel like I don’t really have a lot of social proof? What can I do that’s intentional to try to build credible social proof relatively quickly?

Jared Kleinert: [00:33:09] Yes. So, for you, we can use you as the guinea pig, you’re-

Mike Blake: [00:33:14] Good.

Jared Kleinert: [00:33:15] You’re at Brady Ware, and you have to think about how to generate new clients, especially now more than ever. But in general, part of your work is is revenue generation. It’s upselling clients that the lifetime value of those clients is higher and higher. And that once you have clients, they need to trust you to do work with them. And then, they should also be excited about referring you and so on and so forth. So, for you, it’s looking at who is your ideal clients, and then thinking about where do those people get their ongoing education. What industry news sources would they regularly read; and therefore, they may trust those sources. It’s thinking about associations that your ideal client might be part of. It can be credentials. I never went to college, so I don’t have the college credential that many people use. But I found other credentials in terms of things I’ve done that showcase. That is hard to do that; and therefore, I had to get skills, and connections, and whatnot. But it’s thinking about your ideal client and all the different things around that person that are important to know.

Jared Kleinert: [00:34:46] And so, you can probably write this down if you took half an hour or an hour to think about it. You can also ask your ideal clients and be like, “Hey, where do you go to get your ongoing education?” or “What podcast you listen to other than mine?” or “Where are you hanging out virtually right now because you can’t go to conferences.” And so, then, it’s how do you … that gives you some of the information that you’re gonna need. And yes, social proof could be being featured in Forbes, New York Times. Those are sort of the wide ranging ones. But then, it’s also getting really specific as to what are the exact places that your ideal audience needs to to hear you and see you in order to trust you and know that you’re like the perfect person for them. If you’re focusing on some sort of book launch or product launch, then you could go even crazier with this and try and book 20-30 podcast episodes. And then, wherever your ideal client is turning, they’re hearing, and seeing you, and you’re sort of a surround sound influencer for them, I think that’s a great strategy as well for a launch of sorts.

Jared Kleinert: [00:34:46] And then, you become just a trusted source. And so, when you finally do reach out with a cold email or get that mutual or get that introduction, you’re going to start your relationship on a much better footing. And then, it’s also reference material. So, it’s when you are reaching out, someone’s gonna Google you, or look on LinkedIn, or see the email signature that you have. And at first, they’re going to be like, “Who the heck is this?” And then, they’re gonna be like, “Oh, they’re actually pretty cool,” or “I could really use their product or services,” or “They’re worth chatting with,” at minimum. So, there’s benefits there from a reference standpoint, but also sort of a marketing standpoint. And I would start with, you know, who you’re trying to influence, which is probably your ideal clients as one of the main buckets of people. And then, thinking what matters to them, where are they going to get their education, and try and be in those places.

Mike Blake: [00:37:02] So interesting. So, to sum up with your advice is to get connected with wherever your target audience gets their education, gets their information because that’s all they’ll be looking and you’ll happen to be there. Interestingly, you did not say go out and write a book. You did not say go out and become a TED speaker. And you didn’t say go get an award from a national publication. So, I’m curious why that is.

Jared Kleinert: [00:37:43] I think those could be indicators of social proof, and they could also be ways that you can offer value to people. But I think the best bang for your buck is is starting with any sort of blog posts, or guest blog posts, or being interviewed on a podcast, or getting featured in some press because those are also quick and easy. And that’s more of a marketing and positioning challenge or exercise; whereas, writing a book is two years minimum of absolute torture before you get something out into the world. And most books are not good. And I think you could use that two years in other ways. So, by all means, go write a book if you are going to dedicate the time and resources to it to make it fantastic and to really serve the needs of your ideal listener. By all means, start a podcast if you think you can put the necessary investment of time, and money, and effort into it, and you’re gonna be able to get interesting guests on a regular basis that are going to serve your ideal listeners’ needs.

Jared Kleinert: [00:38:55] But you also have a business to run for most people listening to this, or you’re running a business within a business, and sort of you’re an intrapreneur. And so, again, I think if this is a conversation about networking, then it’s how do I acquire the social group as quickly as possible, so that I can go on with my life and leverage that social proof. Most of my time is not spent talking to the Ted organization, or it’s not spent talking to Forbes where I used to have a column. It’s talking to potential clients. It’s serving their needs. It’s networking with other peers, and learning from them, and discovering how I’m going to pivot my primarily in-person events business to a virtual format for the next six to nine months and how I can do my pivot in a way that maybe integrates with our long-term strategies that we can do a virtual part of our Meeting of the Minds and also an in-person part.

Jared Kleinert: [00:39:59] I think there’s a lot going on, and your network is is one big part of that, and your social proof for how you find other people in your network should become an increasingly smaller part of that. The ultimate goal is when you reach out to people, they listen. When you get introduced from someone, you immediately get a response. So, over time, you should need less and less social proof or need less to get that connection going and get to the fun stuff.

Mike Blake: [00:40:33] So, anybody who sits down on Google’s personal branding online influencer is going to run into the term “authenticity” early and often. Can you explain to our audience what authenticity means, and why is it important, and how do you project or make sure that your brand does come from a place of authenticity?

Jared Kleinert: [00:41:01] I can share what it means to me. So, it goes back to that being a good person aspect. It’s doing the work required to both have good intentions, and then to reflect that in your work. So, it always starts with the quality of your product, the quality of your service. Being authentic also means if I’m going to then start marketing or broadcasting who I am and what I do, I’m doing it in a way that reflects my values. And sure, occasionally, you may say something that is risque, or unique, or different, but it’s not to put anyone else down. It’s only to reflect who you are and what you’re working on. It’s apologizing when you mess up and providing even more value to deepen that relationship or mend that relationship.

Jared Kleinert: [00:42:04] So, for me, it starts with the work that you’re doing before you ever talk to anyone, and building great products, services, and then getting that out into the world. When you talk about networking, or marketing, or sales, I fully believe that if you have the best solution in the marketplace, then it’s a disservice if your ideal clients aren’t using your or your product or service. But if you’re selling snake oil, and then you’re trying to run a bunch of ads or leverage these social proof tactics that we’ve been talking about, I don’t think that’s authentic. I think that’s when you risk influencing people in a way that’s not in their best needs. Can you really sleep with yourself a night selling a low-quality or detrimental product or service to someone?

Jared Kleinert: [00:43:03] So, I think that’s where authenticity comes in. And I’ve never personally been too afraid of wearing what I want when I’m speaking or talking how I’d like to talk. I mean, those parts can be authentic too if you’re in a more corporate environment, being able to just be you. There’s no difference, really, in how I am sharing with you now versus how I am at home. I’m an open book. So, I guess there’s a version of authenticity there that could be debated or could be implemented or not. I mean, I respect privacy as well. I do have parts of my life that are private, but I’m pretty much the same person 9:00 to 5:00 that I am 6:00 to 9:00 or whenever.

Mike Blake: [00:43:52] So, one thing you’ve done now or you’re doing now as well, I would consider, the advanced classes that you’re evolving from Jared kind of the personal brand of the network building wonder kid into building now online communities. And so, why is that desirable to you? And how do you go about doing that?

Jared Kleinert: [00:44:21] Yes. As I was building what some have called a world-class network in record time, you have a limited amount of time. And so, you have to think about how to help as many influential people as possible with the limited time that you have. You also have to think about how you can offer value to people. And many times, I’ve found that one of the best ways to offer value to other people is by connecting them to other great people. And so, pretty early on, maybe 17 or so, I was actively creating Facebook groups and creating spaces where I was curating, which I think is a really important word and exercise. I was curating great groups of people and giving them an opportunity to meet each other and provide value to one another. And then, that becomes one-to-many networking.

Jared Kleinert: [00:45:20] And you’re also creating an environment where it’s sort of like a neural network of a brain. When two people in your online community connect with each other, they’re going to sort of think back to you as the person who connected them, even if you did nothing other than create the setting for them to connect and maybe put some guardrails in place for who’s in there, how they’re supposed to interact with one another and things like that. So, I’ve been building, I guess, online communities since 17. Nothing massive, like not tens of thousands of people, but hundreds of the perfect people.

Jared Kleinert: [00:45:55] When we were writing Two Billion Under 20 and Three Billion Under 30, we were building online communities of some of the world’s smartest and most talented millennials, so that the same people that were contributing to our book could meet each other. And that was one of the ways that we convinced these book contributors to partake as we said, “Hey, we’re asking you to contribute three to five pages of your formative life experiences to our book. And we’re going to give you access to this entire community of other world-class millennials. And then, of course, we’re going to give you exposure via the book sales and people reading your story. And I, personally, will connect you to as many people as possible or be your cheerleader. However, I can help you, I’m there. And that’s how you convince, like the founder of WordPress, or the co-founder of Duolingo, or champion athletes, or social media influencers to all partake in that work of yours.

Jared Kleinert: [00:46:51] And so, there’s all my communities. I saw it in different lenses when I was, I guess, 22 or so. So, after a few years of writing these books, building a readership, getting to speak at some great places, also building that consulting firm, which started with that connection with Keith Ferrazzi. And then, I had a marketing consulting firm where I worked with other top thought leaders. There’s only so far. You can only scale a consulting business to such capacity. And while the work I was doing with my clients I thought was very valuable, I realized that the most valuable thing I could offer was to take my clients, and to take my book contributors and readers, and bring them together, so they could meet each other because, then, they’re working with me and they’re also working with each other to grow their businesses.

Jared Kleinert: [00:47:43] And so, that’s where we started Meeting of the Minds. I do truly believe in the power of online or the power of in-person connections, even though most this conversation has been about virtual connections. So, the Meeting of the Minds, our core businesses running three-day summits where these people are flying from all over the country, sometimes, even internationally, to hang out in Napa for three days, or Bermuda for three days, or Upstate New York, or Atlanta, and they’re building deep, meaningful relationships with one another where they’re not talking about work. They’re talking about personal hobbies and things that they’re doing to better themselves. Then, they’re talking about pressing problems in their business, or exciting opportunities and projects, and helping one another, and masterminding. But that can be done digitally as well. And we’re doing that now as a way to sort of deal with the pandemic.

Jared Kleinert: [00:48:41] But ultimately, that is one of the best ways I can offer people value is by creating these spaces where someone can get a connection with me and value from me, and they can also meet all these other people that I’ve deemed trustworthy and awesome. And so, I’m now taking the social proof that I’ve built over time and extending it to my clients and extending it to my friends, and creating the space where two new strangers who I’ve curated can leverage my social proof and my relationship with each of them individually, and start a relationship with each other, and do all the things that we’ve talked about, whether it’s work together, partner, support each other, mastermind, things like that.

Jared Kleinert: [00:49:26] So, if you’re listening to this, I think you have to start with how you can best influence your ideal clients or your ideal boss if you’re looking for a dream job. Start with that like first set of connections. Then, you might think about what are all these diverse advisors, mentors, peers I’m going to need to educate me along the way and hold me accountable, make sure I don’t go off the beaten path. And then, after you’ve accomplished that, and you’ve built a great network for yourself, then it’s how do I offer this network and how do I offer what I know to others in a way that will allow my network to grow exponentially but it’ll also provide exponential value. And so, that’s where the online communities come into play. That’s where the in-person event series come into play. And anything where it’s a one-to-many communication channel. Even a podcast, I have an email newsletter that I’ve been pouring a lot of effort and energy into. That’s where the groups come into play and could be extremely valuable.

Mike Blake: [00:50:37] So, you touched upon one issue I want to make sure that we cover. I think a lot of people, even people who are experienced, frankly, can be easily discouraged because you go on YouTube, you see something that’s got 250,000 followers. If somebody’s got a LinkedIn, and they’ve got thousands of followers and so forth. You know what I’m talking about. I’m starting up, I turn on my laptop, I’ve got eight followers. And so, the question is, am I so far behind that I just can’t catch up. Is number of followers even the right metric to be looking at your opinion in most cases?

Jared Kleinert: [00:51:23] I don’t think so, no. I also struggle with the same feelings sometimes. I think it’s all about your goals. I mean, for me, I would rather have a network and a following of very influential people. So, if I have a thousand email list subscribers but they’re all serial entrepreneurs, they’re all community leaders, podcasters, authors and can influence millions of people collectively or tens of millions of people, to me, that’s success. And that’s what I was trying to accomplish with our book series. And we had 75 book contributors to both books. And so, I had a network or a community of 150 of the world’s smartest, most talented millennials. And through them, if I had something that was very compelling and worthy of the masses, we could reach 50 million plus social media followers and we could reach half a million to a million people on their various email lists.

Jared Kleinert: [00:52:21] Such as my personal goal is to be an influencer of influencers in the humblest way possible, I want to work with the the entrepreneurs, business owners, the CEOs who have a vision for how the world should work or how their industry should evolve. And I want to help them get that vision out into the world, grow their company, reach more people. Some other people have business models that are predicated on total amount of viewers or total amount of listeners. And so, then, it should be your goal to get as many people as possible to listen to your stuff. So, it’s all depending on your goals, but I’ve personally focused on the quality of my connections.

Jared Kleinert: [00:53:05] It’s also a lot of people that will take in content that may not sort of raise their hand and tell you that they’re raised or listening to the content. You may have 1000 or 5000 regular podcast listeners, and maybe five of them have told you that your show’s awesome in a review or maybe they’ve reached out on social media, but they’re still influenced by you, and they’re still coming to you every single week. And so, I’ve had countless stories of friends who have seen a Facebook post that I had about like my weight loss journey; and yet, they never liked it, they never commented, they never told me about him. Then, six months later, they’re like, “Oh, yeah. By the way, you made a post on Facebook about how you lost 20 pounds, and I started doing that. And now, I’ve lost 20 pounds.”

Jared Kleinert: [00:53:55] And so, I think it’s important to keep in mind who’s absorbing your content and information, who’s watching you from afar, and just how you’re building your career, and how you’re working who will never raise their hand and tell you that they’re doing that. And that, I guess, is truly your reputation. It precedes you before you ever meet someone. It will allow you to start new conversations with sales prospects much more easily or more difficultly depending on how you’ve built your reputation. So, I wouldn’t be fooled by subscriber counts or lack thereof. I’d really focus on just the quality of your work and the quality of the people taking in your work as you define who is an ideal customer, listener, friend for you.

Mike Blake: [00:54:51] Jared, you were very generous with your time. And I know you’ve got to go because you have a packed schedule today. I want to scratch the surface of what I had hoped to ask. How can people contact you for more information about this? If they have something we haven’t gotten to today, can they reach out to you?

Jared Kleinert: [00:55:08] Yeah.

Mike Blake: [00:55:09] How do they do that?

Jared Kleinert: [00:55:09] Jaredkleinert@gmail.com. You can find me on on social media. I have a private e-mail newsletter that I keep, which for the last 18 months I have not had an opt-in page for, and I’ve added everyone one by one because I want to keep in touch. But now, you can go to MOTM.co/newsletter and join that. I’m not going to tempt you with a free e-book or anything like that but you can see some of the past newsletter updates I’ve sent out before you subscribe. So, that’s that’s the place I’d love people to go to, reach out to me just directly through email. And seriously, I’d love to chat with you. I’ve been on a ton of podcasts, and you’d be surprised even the shows like 250,000, there’ll be two people that would reach out. So, don’t be afraid to reach out to me. You could send me a cold email, “Quick Question …” or “Mike’s podcast,” and let’s start a conversation.

Mike Blake: [00:56:12] So, I actually talked over you. Can you repeat the email address, please?

Jared Kleinert: [00:56:16] Yes. Jaredkleinert@gmail.com. So, just my name.

Mike Blake: [00:56:20] So, K-L-E-I-N-E-R-T.

Jared Kleinert: [00:56:20] Yes, sir.

Mike Blake: [00:56:24] Good. Well, Jared, thanks so much for joining us. I learned a lot, and I know our listeners have too. That’s going to wrap it up for today’s program. I’d like to thank Jared Kleinert of Meeting of the Minds so much for joining us and sharing his expertise with us today. We’ll be exploring a new topic each week, so please tune in, so that when you’re facing your next executive decision, you have clear vision when making it. If you enjoy this podcast, please consider leaving a review with your favorite podcast aggregator. It helps people find us, so that we can help them. Once again, this is Mike Blake. Our sponsor is Brady Ware & Company. And this has been the Decision Vision Podcast.

Leo Falkenstein with Consume Media, Steve Barha with Instant Financial and Eyal Benishti with IRONSCALES

June 16, 2020 by angishields

Atlanta Business Radio

Leo Falkenstein with Consume Media, Steve Barha with Instant Financial and Eyal Benishti with IRONSCALES

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Leo Falkenstein is a brand strategist, video producer, and co-founder of Consume Media. Leo has been working in video marketing for eight years and has worked with a wide variety of clients in fields including technology, consumer goods, municipalities, and healthcare.

Currently, Leo spearheads the Strategy and Customer Success divisions at Consume Media with the goal of crafting engaging and innovative video content. He is a graduate of the University of Georgia.

Connect with Leo on LinkedIn and follow Consume Media on Facebook and Twitter.

Steve Barha has spent the past two decades utilizing the key principles of “operating with integrity” and “acting with urgency” to develop successful technology companies. The Founding CEO and now serving as the Executive Chairman of Instant Financial, Steve brings an extensive background delivering financial technology to large enterprise customers.

Prior to Instant, Steve served as both the CIO and EVP of Mobile for TIO Networks (acquired by Paypal) leading the mobile business unit while driving the company’s engineering, IT, and product teams.

Steve was also previously the Founder & CEO of Santra Technology, the pioneer of Web Services QoS and performance monitoring, along with holding management positions at Saba Software (NASDAQ: SABA), TELUS Enterprise Solutions (TSE:T) and Emerge Online.

Connect with Steve on LinkedIn and follow Instant Financial on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

As Chief Executive Officer at IRONSCALES, Eyal Benishti pioneered the development of the world’s first self-learning anti-phishing email security solution that combines human intelligence and machine learning technologies for automatic prevention, detection and autonomous incident response to cyber-attacks in real time.

Under Eyal’s leadership, IRONSCALES has filed four patents for anti-phishing and email security solutions and secured three funding rounds from K1 and Israel’s RDSeed totaling more than $20 million. IRONSCALES has received numerous awards, including Frost & Sullivan’s AI-Powered Email Security Innovation Award and Best Enterprise Email Security Solution by the Cybersecurity Breakthrough Awards.

Eyal brings to his executive leadership role nearly 15 years of software industry experience with enterprise and startup companies. Prior to founding IRONSCALES in 2013, he was a security researcher and malware analyst at Radware and worked as technical lead for various information security solutions at Imperva. Previously, he held a variety of R&D roles with Comverse and Amdocs. A passionate cybersecurity researcher from a young age, Eyal earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science and mathematics from Bar-Ilan University in Israel.

Connect with Eyal on LinkedIn and follow IRONSCALES on Facebook and Twitter.

About Your Host

Connect with Joey on LinkedIn.

Economic Forecast for 2020 and Beyond E2

June 2, 2020 by Karen

AZ TechCast

Economic Forecast for 2020 and Beyond E2

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Economic Forecast for 2020 and Beyond E2

At the start of 2020, most investors and economic analysts expected the 11-year bull market to continue. And then the spread of COVID-19 changed everything. As a result of the pandemic, the global economy is projected to contract sharply by 3% in 2020. In addition, there is a huge amount of uncertainty about the future of the outbreak and the economic impacts associated with it. While the epidemic’s economic impact is difficult to predict, the economic forecast says we are on track for a major downturn. The question is how bad and for how long.

Economic experts Jim Rounds, George Hammond, Dennis Hoffman and Steve Zylstra join the Arizona Technology Council’s May 29th podcast to share their assessment of the damage, needed measures for economic growth and the prospects of recovery in the coming months.

Featured guests covered:

Arizona’s economic recovery
Hard-hit industries that will take the most to recover
Expected growth rates for Arizona
How 2020 compares to the crash of 2008 and the Great Depression
How can IoT and renewable energy help kickstart an economic recovery
The innovation and opportunity a downturn can spur

While the epidemic’s economic impact is difficult to predict, we are on track for a major downturn. The question is how bad and for how long.

Rounds Consulting Group advises both public and private sector entities on matters of policy and economics. The firm specializes in economic development; data collection and analysis; fiscal planning including revenue forecasting and budget development; strategic planning and marketing; impact and market studies; litigation support, and keynote speaking, and more.

Jim Rounds is president of Rounds Consulting Group, a firm specializing in economic development and tax policy analysis; education research; transportation economics; fiscal planning including revenue forecasting and budget development; strategic planning and marketing; impact and market studies; and litigation support.

He regularly provides economic advice to policymakers at the State Capitol, mayors throughout the state as well as city council members, county board members, and other public and private sector leaders in the community.

Rounds a Senior Fellow at the Goldwater Institute and serves on many boards and foundations, including the Maricopa County IDA, the Helios Education Foundation, Achieve 60 AZ, the Rodel Foundation, the Arizona Board of Regents and various state universities, among others. He serves as the lead economist for multiple rural and urban area healthcare and hospital associations and is a member of the Joint Legislative Budget Committee’s Finance Advisory Committee. He has also served on scores of committees and task force efforts at both the state and local levels.

His recent areas of study include advanced workforce analysis; minimum wage impact analysis; State Trust Land finance; public employee pension reform; utility infrastructure investment; and state and local area tourism planning. Recently, Rounds has been supporting the concept of “growing from within,” which includes efforts to better understand small business development issues, and strategic investment in education and workforce training.

Rounds began his career as a Senior Economist and Senior Budget Analyst with the Arizona Joint Legislative Budget Committee and has been engaged in policy related economics for more than two decades. He has a Bachelor of Science degree and a Master of Science degree in Economics from Arizona State University.

Follow Rounds Consulting on LinkedIn, Facebook, and connect with Jim on Twitter.

Founded in 1913, the Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Ariz. is one of the largest colleges at the University of Arizona, with over 5,400 undergraduate students and nearly 700 graduate students. Employing over 130 faculty members, the business school offers programs in accounting, economics, finance, marketing, management information systems, operations management, entrepreneurship and business administration.

Its interdisciplinary program in entrepreneurship is perennially ranked one of the world’s best. As the highest-ranking college at the University of Arizona, Eller also boasts the #1 Public Management Information Systems and ranked #7 Entrepreneurship programs nationally. The MIS program has been ranked in the Top 5 by U.S. News since the inception of the rankings, one of only three programs in the U.S. with such a distinction.

George W. Hammond directs the Economic and Business Research Center in the Eller College of Management. A specialist in econometric forecasting for more than two decades, Hammond has designed, built and used economic models to produce more than 100 forecasts for state and local economies, and completed more than 50 regional economic studies on topics including economic and workforce development, energy forecasting and the impact of higher education on human capital accumulation.

These forecasts and reports reach thousands of business leaders, policymakers and citizens each year through conferences, public presentations, publications, EBRC’s websites and social and traditional media. Hammond is a frequent contributor to local and national news services. His analysis and commentary have been featured on NBC Nightly News, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Bloomberg Businessweek and The New York Times.

In addition to directing EBRC and spearheading EBRC’s Forecasting Project, Hammond is also a research professor with academic research interests focusing on the determinants of local economic growth in the U.S., the impact of state and local policies on economic growth and the contribution of higher education to local workforce development.

Follow Eller College of Management on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

The L. William Seidman Research Institute serves as a link between the local, national and international business communities and W. P. Carey School of Business. It collects and disseminates information about local economies, benchmarks industry practices and identifies emerging business research issues.

Dennis L. Hoffman is a Professor of Economics at Arizona State University where he has published numerous academic articles and a book in the area of macroeconomics and econometrics. He has received both teaching and research awards from ASU. He received the Distinguished Faculty Research Award in 1992 and has held the title of Dean’s Council of 100 Distinguished Scholar since 1996. He served as a visiting research scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis during the summer of 1996. In 1997, Dr. Hoffman was named the Arizona Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation.

In addition to his academic appointment, Dr. Hoffman has held several administrative appointments; Associate Dean for Graduate Programs, 1998-2004, Associate Dean for Research; 2004-2008, and Director of the Seidman Research Institute, 2004-present. Dr. Hoffman is also director of ASU’s Office of the University Economist, 2005-present.

In his role in the Seidman Institute – as University Economist, Dr. Hoffman is responsible for the production of policy white papers with regional, education, fiscal, and labor market emphasis. This work is supported directly by the Office of University President Michael Crow. In addition, Seidman serves as the applied contract research arm of the W. P. Carey School averaging approximately $800,000 per annum in external research contracts meeting the needs of government, community and business clients primarily in the southwest. This activity is summarized at https://seidmaninstitute.com/. Seidman is also responsible for responding to the majority of business/economic media inquiries received by the university and has considerable connections with both local and national media outlets.

Dr. Hoffman’s sponsored project efforts include the construction and maintenance of the tax revenue forecasting model used by the Executive Budget Office of the State of Arizona each year since 1982 – serving eight different Governors. Dr. Hoffman headed groups of economists who measured the economic impact of several fiscal initiatives for the State of Arizona in 1989 and in 1990. The 1989 study was commissioned by Governor Mofford as an input to fiscal initiatives that were contained in her State of the State speech in 1989. The 1990 study was requested by the Joint Select Committee on Fiscal Reform of the Arizona Legislature. In 1996 Dr. Hoffman was appointed to the Joint Select Committee on Economic Incentives of the Arizona Legislature. He also served as technical advisor for Governor Napolitano’s citizen’s fiscal reform committee (2004). At the Governor’s request, Dr. Hoffman served on the Board of the Arizona State Retirement System (ASRS) from 2012-2017. As Director of the Seidman Research Institute,

Dr. Hoffman has closely studied the regional economy in Arizona. His extensive experience with the state and local economy positions him for his current research interests that include defining and measuring the role of research universities in regional development, quantifying the value of education investments to the economic prosperity of a region, and measuring the impact of various fiscal initiatives on regional development. These current research interests align with Dr. Hoffman’s administrative assignment, Director of the Office of the University Economist, undertaken as a strategic university initiative at the direction of Arizona State University President Michael Crow. Dr. Hoffman is the faculty director of the Center for Competitiveness and Prosperity Research where he directs the Productivity and Prosperity Project.

Connect with Dennis on LinkedIn and follow Seidman on Twitter.

About the Show

AZ TechCast is dedicated to covering innovation and technology in Arizona and beyond.

Through the art of connected conversation, AZ TechCast’s guests will share their expertise, success stories, news and analysis about the region’s leading startups, companies and emerging technologies, as well as the latest industry trends and critical issues propelling the state’s growing technology ecosystem.

About Your Hosts

Steve Zylstra serves as president and CEO of the Arizona Technology Council, a role he assumed in 2007. He is responsible for strategy, operations, finance and policy development. Zylstra is a vocal spokesman for the value technology can provide in raising social and economic standards in Arizona.

Zylstra serves on numerous councils, committees and boards, was named “Leader of the Year, Technology,” by the Arizona Capitol Times, and “Most Admired Leader” by the Phoenix Business Journal. In addition, he was awarded an honorary doctorate of science in technology from the University of Advancing Technology in Tempe, Ariz.

Zylstra earned a bachelor’s degree in automotive engineering technology from Western Michigan University.

Karen Nowicki is a successful author, speaker and the creator of Deep Impact Leadership™ and SoulMarks Coaching™. She is a two-time recipient of the prestigious national Choice Award® for her book and personal development retreat. Karen was crowned the first-ever “Mompreneur of the Year” Award in 2010 for the southwestern states. She was recognized for her leadership, business acumen, and work-life balance.

Karen has been an expert guest on regional TV and radio shows, including Fox Phoenix Morning Show, Sonoran Living, Good Morning Arizona, The Chat Room, and Mid-Day Arizona. She has been a regular contributor to many print and online magazines – publishing articles and blogs for business and education.

In addition to working with private coaching clients, Karen is also the Owner & President of Phoenix Business RadioX. The Business RadioX Network amplifies the voice of business – serving the Fortune 500,000, not just the Fortune 500. Phoenix Business RadioX helps local businesses and professional associations get the word out about the important work they’re doing to serve their market, profession, and community.

Of all the experiences Karen has had the privilege of participating in over her vast career, she shares that Phoenix Business RadioX is a pinnacle adventure!

Connect with Karen on LinkedIn and follow Phoenix Business RadioX on Facebook and Instagram.

About Our Sponsor

The Arizona Technology Council, Arizona’s only statewide organization serving the technology sector, fosters a climate of innovation to enhance technology in Arizona.

A trusted resource in strengthening Arizona’s technology industry, the Council proactively eliminates impediments that companies face, accelerates the entrepreneurial mindset in the state’s expanding innovation ecosystem, and works to create a destination for companies to be, thrive and stay.

Follow Arizona Technology Council on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.

Beau Henderson, Rich Life Advisors and Dr. Bill Lampton, Championship Communication

June 1, 2020 by Beau Henderson

North Georgia Business Radio

Beau Henderson, Rich Life Advisors and Dr. Bill Lampton, Championship Communication

00:00 / 40:51

Beau Henderson – Rich Life Advisors

Beau Henderson is the Bestselling Author of several books including The RichLife: Ten Investments for True Wealth, The Roadmap to a RichLife, The 5 Thieves That Will Steal Your RichLife, The RichLife Stewardship Principle and Masterful Communication For Success With Business and Life with Dr. Bill Lampton.

He holds a degree in Psychology from the University of Georgia as well as the designations of Retirement Income Certified Planner, National Social Security Advisor, Certified Long-Term Care, Master Certified Success Coach and Certified Master Behavioral Analyst, in addition to his role as CEO of The RichLife Advisors.

As a media contributor, Beau’s message of the RichLife has been featured in media outlets including The Huffington Post, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, CNBC, and MarketWatch.

Beau was studying at the University of Georgia to be a psychologist when his father passed away at 49 years of age from lung cancer. He felt helpless as he watched his mother, who had been married to his father since she was 18, struggle with financial decisions. He left college to return home and help her piece her life together.

Through his family’s heartbreaking experience, he found a silver lining when he realized that he could make a profound difference in someone’s life by helping them navigate important financial decisions. His interest in psychology, coupled with his fascination with financial matters, led him to a career he loves. Now over 16 years later, he has never stopped learning and growing through his work.

Dr. Bill Lampton – Championship Communication

With his comprehensive experience in teaching, writing, broadcasting, consulting, coaching, emceeing, directing seminars, and speaking to diverse audiences, Bill is available for:

PRESENTATIONS

Meetings, Conferences, Conventions
Keynote and Motivational Speeches
Commencements
Seminars and Breakout Sessions
Master Of Ceremonies for Major Events

OTHER SERVICES FOR ORGANIZATIONS

Consulting
Media Relations Advising
Narrating Audio and Video Productions
Directing Board and Staff Retreats
DISC personal style analysis
Sales Training

SERVICES FOR INDIVIDUALS
- Speech Coaching
- Editor / Author
- Marketing Strategy
- Produce brief promotional videos

Tech Talk: Barclay Keith with Artis Technologies and John Wichmann with Maptician

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About Your Host

Decision Vision Episode 74: How Can I Improve My Business Decision Making Skills? – An Interview with Tyler Ludlow, Decision Skills Institute

Decision Vision Episode 74: How Can I Improve My Business Decision Making Skills? – An Interview with Tyler Ludlow, Decision Skills Institute

Decision Skills Institute

Tyler Ludlow, Founder and Chief Decision Scientist, Decision Skills Institute

Michael Blake, Brady Ware & Company

Brady Ware & Company

Decision Vision Podcast Series

Visit Brady Ware & Company on social media:

Show Transcript

Robert Pastor with ADAPTURE and Anju Mathew with OncoLens

About Your Host

Real Relationships

Leo Falkenstein with Consume Media, Steve Barha with Instant Financial and Eyal Benishti with IRONSCALES

About Your Host

Economic Forecast for 2020 and Beyond E2

Economic Forecast for 2020 and Beyond E2

About the Show

About Your Hosts

About Our Sponsor

Beau Henderson, Rich Life Advisors and Dr. Bill Lampton, Championship Communication

Beau Henderson – Rich Life Advisors

Dr. Bill Lampton – Championship Communication

Our Mission

Sponsor a Show

Partner With Us

Connect with us

Search Results for: marketing matters

About Your Host

Transcript

About Your Host

Decision Vision Episode 74: How Can I Improve My Business Decision Making Skills? – An Interview with Tyler Ludlow, Decision Skills Institute

Decision Skills Institute

Tyler Ludlow, Founder and Chief Decision Scientist, Decision Skills Institute

Michael Blake, Brady Ware & Company

Brady Ware & Company

Decision Vision Podcast Series

Visit Brady Ware & Company on social media:

Show Transcript

About Your Host

Decision Vision Episode 70: How Do I Build My Personal Brand? – An Interview with Jared Kleinert, Meeting of the Minds

Jared Kleinert, Meeting of the Minds

Michael Blake, Brady Ware & Company

Brady Ware & Company

Decision Vision Podcast Series

Visit Brady Ware & Company on social media:

Show Transcript

About Your Host

Economic Forecast for 2020 and Beyond E2

About the Show <img decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-128339 size-full" src="https://businessradiox.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/AZTECHCASTLOGOBRX-4-23-2020-e1587904530183.jpg" alt="AZTECHCASTLOGOBRX-4-23-2020" width="200" height="125" />

About Your Hosts

About Our Sponsor

Beau Henderson – Rich Life Advisors

Dr. Bill Lampton – Championship Communication

Our Mission

Sponsor a Show

Partner With Us

Connect with us

About the Show