Entrepreneurs are aiming at a hundred different things at once. They’re scrambling to accomplish and grow their objectives, but they’re facing a lot of headwinds. And those headwinds come in the form of things like.
How do we prioritize what matters most?
How do we think about using data to manage our business, not just gut feel?
How do we think about the right people and the right seats and make sure that we have the right processes to get those people working effectively and that they’re an excellent match to our culture?
What is our culture?
How do we think about what our long-range vision is versus what we need to do this week, let alone this quarter?
And how do we think about financials versus strategic objectives?
Will your employee go a little further when times are tough? Jen McFarland ( @jensmcfarland )talks about entrepreneurship, marketing, and living in Kazakhstan. Listen for the size 45 clown shoes. Are they European sizes, US sizes, or clown sizes?
Mentorship, empathy, marketing, and NOT being a hater! If you are an employer, this episode is for you if you are an employee, this episode is for you.
If there is one theme to hear throughout this podcast, it is this quote from Jen: “Smart Women in tech leave because of bad management.”
Brent: Welcome to talk commerce today. I have Jen McFarland coming from Oregon. Did I get that right? Jen, Oregon? Yep. Yep. Jen, go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about your day to day role and maybe one of your passions in
Jen: life. Oh, wow. Hi my name’s Jen McFarland. I am a marketing coach, even though I don’t like using the word coach.
Jen: It just seems to be what people call me. I also do a lot of hands on work. My favorite thing to do in my role as a marketing agency is I work with the city of Portland’s economic development division through their inclusive business resource network and we help people of color with their marketing so that they can build their businesses.
Jen: And that’s one of my favorite things to do. I’m also passionate about travel. hang out with my friends. It’s lovely here in Portland, because right now it’s summer and I am not originally from here. So when the rain comes, that’s not really my favorite time
Brent: and it never rains on, in, in the west coast, right in Portland.
Brent: It’s always bright and sunny, just like San Diego.
Jen: That’s what I a lot of people get it wrong. See, it only rains once in Portland, it starts in October and it ends in late may.
Brent: Oh, that’s better than starting in October and ending in September.
Jen: well, that’s true. We’ve had that happen before though. That was summer was on a Tuesday and it was pretty fun.
Brent: Yes. I was in Duluth this weekend and summer’s done already there, so no
Jen: way. I can’t okay. Checking that off the list. Not moving to Duluth.
Brent: Yeah. Duluth is very lovely in the summer. So July some parts of August depends which way the wind is blowing. Off the lake or not. How all right. The only thing I know about Portland is Portlandia.
Brent: And so I know that you probably go to one of your local restaurants and get the name of the chicken that when you’re gonna sit down to eat, is that right?
Jen: They don’t always tell us the name of the chicken, but it’s, it’s 50 50, if you get the full lineage of the chicken. So yeah. Portland idea, totally accurate.
Jen: A hundred percent.
Brent: all right. So Jen I know some of the topics we talked about in the green room were around certainly entrepreneurship, but how you went through the peace Corps and then got into entrepreneurship or how the peace Corps helped you get into it. Tell us a little bit about that.
Jen: Yeah. So I love travel. I am a unique person in that I did peace Corps with my husband. He also likes travel. So we went as more mid-career entrepreneurs. So we were both in our thirties and we, so when you go as a couple, you can’t go to as many places as a single person, they have to have a place for two people to live and all kinds of things.
Jen: So we went to Kazakhstan. It is it’s not like Borat he’s, supposedly from Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan is a country south of Russia. It’s the largest land locked country in the world. And people there are insanely nice. So nice to the point where. It would be considered kidnapping in this country.
Jen: So I was walking, we were teachers and I had a long walk back to the host family. This is when we were training and my husband was ahead of me and somebody saw, it was like, oh, the American is alone. I want my niece to talk to the American. So basically they’re like, come on in. And I’m like I have to get home.
Jen: It’s dinnertime. They bring me in and this, I was so inexperienced that I didn’t know how long this process would be and they start cooking and I’m like, oh no, I’m in deep trouble. I don’t have the phone number to get ahold of my husband, the person I’m supposed to talk to. Isn’t in the house. I don’t know any of these people, what is happening.
Jen: I think I was there for about two hours and about halfway in this woman, young woman comes in and sits down and I can understand enough Russian at that point to understand that this is the person I’m supposed to talk to you. And she speaks English. And that is how I met my best friend in Kazakhstan so we talked, it was awesome.
Jen: We left that training place and then we ended up moving back there and living there for a year and Rahan saw me and was just like, oh my gosh, it’s you? This is so great. And that’s how we met each other. But like in America, these are things that never happened. You’re not walking along the street and somebody’s Hey, come on in.
Jen: Talk to my niece. Like you would never stop. You would never do it. And so that’s how I learned that sometimes you can take these risks that just seem insane and crazy, and it turns out really good. So this was somebody who I was really close to for that time. I miss her all the time, even though I’ve been back for a long time.
Jen: And I think business is a lot like that. Sometimes you have to take that chance. You have to be like, is this for real? I don’t know if this is for real or not. And then you. Yeah, it’s cool. And you take that risk. You take the plunge and it works that way. It just works out. And that’s really what happened.
Jen: I would say then when you fast forward and I’m an executive at the city of Portland and I decide to leave, but I don’t really have a parachute really set for myself. I knew I wanted to have a business, but I hadn’t really set it up. And I was like it’s gonna work out. And it has, it’s just crazy sometimes how.
Jen: works that way. You have to have a certain degree of trust in order for it to really work out and Peace Corp was we loved peace Corp. It was super great.
Brent: Yeah, that’s good. So the peace cor in Kazakhstan. Wow. I have I’ve and you lived there for a year. Tell when was this? When did you do this?
Jen: We lived there for two years.
Jen: Two years. Okay. It was in the early two thousands and it’s cold. it’s really cold there. I would say that the weather is probably similar to Milwaukee Wisconsin, except there’s no central heating. I remember sitting next to, we had, I don’t know what you would call it. It was technically supposed to be a heater, but it was like these bare wires that would just heat up I don’t know.
Jen: It was so cold that I sat so close to it, that I set my pants on fire and I didn’t notice it for a minute and I. I was like, do you smell smoke? It was breakfast. And I was talking to my husband. He’s like something smells funny. And I looked and, but I was like, I also felt warm, so I wasn’t complaining and then I looked down and I.
Jen: oh, I just burned a hole in my pants. I like you just no, it it’s a different experience there because it’s very cold and very snowy and like the vitreous fluid in your eyes freezes, and so you’re blinking a lot and it, it’s just an interesting experience.
Jen: And then it’s like insanely hot in the summer. And I think Milwaukee’s kind of that where, Minneapolis is like that too. Except you have a lot of mosquitoes there compared to Kazakhstan. So it’s a lovely, wonderful place that nobody’s ever heard of. And it was just a wonderful experience and it was very hard and also awesome.
Jen: We only had running water, I think about. we would leave the tap opened, cuz we weren’t sure when the water was gonna come on and we would fill the bathtub and then use the water. We had a water distiller, so it would be clean and everything. So it was an interesting time, an interesting experience.
Jen: And I think that’s why, my husband and I have weathered COVID really well. I weather uncertainty a lot better. I think that’s. I think that’s why people call me a coach, even though I’m really a consultant. And I do a lot of hands on marketing for people. It’s because I have this really grounded oh, it’s gonna be okay.
Jen: And I think after you have some of these experiences, like I’ve had experiences at the enterprise level where like we melted down entire. Servers and everything came to a grinding halt, and we had to match data among like hundreds of thousands of people. And we’ve, and I’ve lived in countries where I didn’t have running water.
Jen: Like it just, everything always works out. And I think that grounded feeling I have about things is really because I’ve lived in places without any creature comforts, I’ve had all kinds of experiences and at the end of it, it’s great. Everything works out. Everything works out in the end.
Brent: So two comments, number one, I’m sad to hear that you associate Minnesota with mosquitoes, which we have a state bird. It’s not the mosquito number two. I did spend a lot of time in the eighties watching the show, Laverski and Shirliova. It’s a Kazakhstan program about two ladies in a beer bottling plant that in nevermind.
Brent: It’s a, that’s a tie back to Milwaukee Laver, Shirley and Milwaukee. Yes. I know I’ll stop. So do you please, do you think there’s a special risk factor or no, maybe not risk, but there has to be something in you or. Something you can’t quite quantify to be able to leave your job as a public employee or a city employee, and just jump off and go for it.
Brent: Do you think there’s something that most people can’t quite identify with?
Jen: I don’t know. I certainly had the golden handcuffs on if that’s what you mean, had every, I was paid I had. still have my retirement from there. Certainly if you know all of the security in the world, I don’t think I was actually gonna lose my job.
Jen: But it, I wasn’t happy. So I think that when you look at your life and you’re like, this isn’t really what I want. I, I don’t know. Some people will decide to. and be miserable. And I just, that, wasn’t what I wanted for myself. And I wanted something different. I also have the experience that when my dad was around 50, he was being worked to get to death at the state of Idaho and had a bad situation.
Jen: And he ended up having a heart attack. And I was like, I don’t wanna be like that. He didn’t want that. And so I think that as I, got into my forties, I was like, yeah, I Don. This is not the road. I know where this road can lead because I had seen it with my dad. And I was like, I don’t want that road.
Jen: And I have been so much happier since taking the risks since doing something. But certainly I would say a lot of people don’t do it because maybe they don’t have the same sense of adventure. They don’t have these experiences where they’re like, Yeah, I’m just gonna go move to Kazakhstan now, ha that’s crazy.
Jen: Most people that’s crazy. So I do think that there’s a part of me that is really adventurous and willing to take these chances and take chances on myself. And I would say certainly I’m the person who gets the LinkedIn email, the little messages and I’m like, is this real or not? And I’ll actually research things that don’t.
Jen: real. And then that’s how I ended up I had a film crew at my house earlier this year because they read one of my blog posts and they’re filming a documentary and they wanted me to be in it. And it was just a random request that came into LinkedIn, but I’m willing to take the risk that that could work out.
Jen: And it did, it was fun. It. Unique. Doesn’t happen every day that I have a film crew at my house. So I do think that we have these opportunities as entrepreneurs where we can either be like, oh God, I get so many LinkedIn requests all the time. I’m just gonna ignore all of them. I don’t even know these people.
Jen: And I’m that. Odd person. Who’s oh, is this looks neat. If this is real, then I’m gonna pursue it. And I think that we have these opportunities all the time in our lives, and we have that choice. We have the power to make the choice about how we’re going to navigate and proceed. Do
Brent: you think it gets more difficult as you get older to make that decision?
Brent: And I’ll just back that up with, I started as an entrepreneur in college, I went to college for eight years and decided. I wanna do something different. So I dropped outta college sure. After eight years and I started a business. But I really didn’t know what I was doing or getting into at a younger age.
Brent: Sometimes you can jump into those things and it just happened, whatever that I got some traction and it worked, but some people as they get a little bit older might think I’ve got a career and I don’t know if I want to, chance on not having a paycheck. Do you think it’s more difficult as you get older?
Jen: I do. And I would say that, at the time I was leaving my executive role, that all played into it as okay how much runway do I have? The truth is I had more runway because I had more savings. had more experience it. It was a different runway than if I had decided to do it right outta college.
Jen: Like you, that would’ve been a disaster for me. I know who I was and where I was at that stage that would not have worked for me. It was also not on my roadmap. Peace Corps was a hundred percent on my roadmap coming outta college, having my own business. That was something that kind of simmered later on.
Jen: And I think that you have to have that entrepreneurial mindset, that entrepreneurial spirit, and I guess I had it all along. I just didn’t identify it as that ability. Be adventurous and take the plunge. I don’t think that’s for everybody. I don’t think that everybody feels that way about life.
Jen: about what they want for themselves. Everybody’s different. So I do think that those decisions become a lot harder because we have families, we have more complicated lives than we do out of college or when we’re younger, there’s just not as much complexity. Maybe we don’t have a house. I had all of these things I had to worry about.
Jen: We have a house, we have, I have a marriage. I can’t just run off and join the circus. I could, but there’s not really a lot of circuses anymore. Size 45 clown shoes in case anyone’s curious, but I can’t do that without talking to somebody. I can’t just run. And do whatever I want anymore. So I think sometimes we get lost in that complexity and we decide it’s just not worth it because there’s too many elements to work out.
Jen: So I think that can be a hard stop for people when there might be gold there. If you did take that plunge, if you did go out there and do something new.
Brent: Yeah. I can think of so many, like be your own boss. Do your own business. There’s so many people like that are pushing franchises or something like that.
Brent: And I think there’s a distinction between taking somebody else’s dream and going with it and doing your own dream. Maybe it’s harder to do your own dream because especially as you said, as you go along, you have more entrenched things that you want to stick with. And part of it being an entrepreneur is being able to let some of those things go and embracing change.
Brent: Oh yeah. You had mentioned earlier about being an accidental entrepreneur. How do you, how would you relate to that?
Jen: I said earlier that I wasn’t gonna lose my job, but my job was very uncertain. It was a year to year deal where I had to wait for the budget to go through, there was a lot of uncertainty around that and I was really unhappy. I really, at one point thought that I would bounce around at different roles at the city.
Jen: And it became clear that this role I was in was that was where I was gonna be. And I. Like it. I created the job. I created the entire department. I had been doing a lot of projects. That’s really what I would do that was my role at the city was I would create new programs and places and policies, and I would move around a lot.
Jen: And I became clear that this is, this was it. This was the landing spot. And I was like, oh no, this is not interesting to me. as I was making this entire. role and crafting this program. I was like, wow, I wonder who’s gonna have to do this all the time. And then it turned out to be me and I was not happy. So what happened then is in life outside of my work, I had a friend who had their own business and I began to see how I could help other people in smaller roles in smaller businesses.
Jen: Where it wasn’t an enterprise large business situation. And I started to realize that some of the things that I took for granted and thought everybody knew they didn’t, about marketing, about technology, about how to get all the pieces to fit together. And so I started helping people as side hustle, is what people call it now.
Jen: And. from that experience. I was like, I could really do this. It wasn’t the intention. It was all by accident, helping somebody in need. And then it became another person and another person in the meantime, during the day, I’m in a role that I’m really unhappy with it’s budget season. Again, do I want to go through another.
Jen: Will I, or won’t I have a job, even though I think I will. The program, it’s been years now and it’s still running, so yes, I would’ve had a role. So it all happened. Like the kismet, like all of the things started happening and I was like yeah, it’s time to go. I need to go.
Jen: I wasn’t happy. There were a lot of reasons. so I took the plunge, but it wasn’t some grand master plan. I think a lot of times when people go into, should I have my own business or not, they’re looking for some sort of bright light that they run to, or all kinds of certainty and knowledge about how it’s all gonna turn out.
Jen: it’s not like that. it just doesn’t happen. I don’t think for a lot of people, maybe some people do have funding set up ahead of time, or they have banked a ton of clients. That’s certainly not what I was in when I decided this is what I’m gonna do. This is what I enjoy more. And there’s just a lot of factors that go into it.
Jen: So it was accidental. And it took a little bit of time to decide that this was what I was going to do.
Brent: If you were to think between say the employer role and the employee role you talk a lot about how you’ve helped others as an employer, do you want to encourage your employees who you recognize could be good entrepreneurs to chase their dream?
Brent: So basically you’d lose them, but they would have their dream. Is that something you think as a good entrepreneur, you should be doing?
Jen: Absolutely. My role in companies, when I go work there is to work myself out of a job. I’m not real big on the whole, have a retainer for life kind of deal. Like I like people to move on, get out of my nest and move on.
Jen: And I feel the same way about the people who work with me, who work for me. Part of what we’re doing is we’re fostering the growth of others. And in that we have to allow them to blossom and grow. And one of the reasons I feel that way is because that wasn’t something that was an option to me at several different points in my career.
Jen: So I don’t want to inhibit the growth of somebody else because I know what that feels like.
Brent: I can remember people that have helped me and people that have hindered me in the past. And certainly maybe the ones that have helped me the most are the ones that are more confident in the abilities for them to succeed in their own roles, knowing that they’ve now fostered somebody to go out and chase their own dream. Is there any advice you could give an entrepreneur to help them, maybe it’s insecurity where somebody feels as though that they wanna retain this person for the rest of their lives.
Brent: And I’m not saying that it’s bad to have an employee who’s gonna be there for the rest of their lives, because there are people that simply want to be an employee that are not interested in being an entrepreneur. Not everybody is cut out for that. No, but I do feel as though. Some employers could be a hindrance to somebody’s upward career if they were to, I don’t know, a stranglehold or something
Jen: well, I will say that I haven’t had as many mentors as other people have.
Jen: And I think that sometimes what happens is, and by mentor in this specific case, I know that you can have mentors that. Anywhere. But a work mentor, like somebody who was above me in an organization, mentor me and helped, find another role somewhere else. I work really hard. It’s one of the things that I do.
Jen: So I didn’t tend to attract mentors who wanted me to leave. So they wanted me to stay there because they knew. Whatever they needed, it was gonna get done because Jen would do it. And I can tell you, by the time I left the city, there were like four people doing what I was doing. Like I was taking on so much and I would just get it done.
Jen: That’s what I’m good at. I’m an implementer, get stuff done. I can say that just because somebody is working really hard. And I think that we’re seeing it now with the quiet quitting is what they’re calling it, where it’s basically people who have really good boundaries. And they’re saying, I’m gonna come in.
Jen: I’m gonna do exactly what you want me to do. I’m gonna leave on time. I’m gonna turn my phone off. I’m not gonna answer your. And people are really upset about it. And I’m like, why they’re finding that you’re gonna pay them the same, regardless of what they do. If they work extra or not, and they’re not interested and you’re not helping them grow because they wouldn’t be doing, if you’re doing it, if you were actually fostering a better relationship, For entrepreneurs.
Jen: Yes. It’s hard to have somebody leave. I get it. You don’t wanna have to train a new person. It means that you have to take on more for a while you find a new person, train them and get them to that next place. I will say though, that in the long run, you have to think about all of these things in the long game.
Jen: If you foster somebody and send them on their way, and you have a really good relationship with them, meaning they don’t quiet, quit. There’s not a big argument. And they leave . That is a partner that you have in the future. That you can be working with. This is somebody that you can join forces with maybe at a later date, but you are building a community of people who are going to sing your praises, their potential contractors later on down the road.
Jen: You don’t know where that’s gonna lead, but you do know where it’s gonna lead. If you burn somebody out and don’t help them grow, that never ends well. Never.
Brent: It leads to resentment and things that aren’t happy. So on the on the flip side of that is the employee relationship.
Brent: We talked about the entrepreneur, the employee how as an employee, do you see ways that you can encourage your employer, maybe to have this fostering role rather than working you to death. And I do agree that now today’s new world that they want to have that time to themselves.
Brent: And the motivation to just work for the sake of work is not there anymore.
Jen: That’s true. I think a lot of it is that the new younger generations. Relate to work differently. And I think that they get just as much done as anybody else. , it’s just how they do it looks differently. I have, I’m still seeking a mentor from, generation Z.
Jen: I wanna know exactly how people feel and very curious, because it’s not my generation, but I will tell you. . If you come into an organization, you have to understand that you are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you. So that’s the first thing, right? You don’t go. You ask questions, you go in and you ask a lot of questions.
Jen: So you can be really clear about the role. You can be really clear about what the environment is like. You talk to other people who work there. That’s the starting point. If they pass over. Hurdle then the next hurdle is then you make it clear about your future goals. Like where is it that you see yourself going and you need to start having like conversations with the person you work for to help build those skills so that you can make it to the next place.
Jen: And I think that you will find people who are very open to that. You will also find a lot of people who are very, not open to that. And I think that. It really is about having those conversations early. It’s about meeting with your boss and talking through problems and solutions and what that career ladder can look like for you.
Jen: It does mean being brave and a little bit bold and. These things don’t happen overnight. and I know that we all want it. I remember when I was younger, I thought I knew everything. I thought that I should have this, and I should have that. Sometimes these things take time, not as long as your boss wants it to your the entrepreneur wants you around as long as possible.
Jen: So it. There is a little tension in that conversation, but I think it’s worthwhile for both parties to start really having these mentor mentee conversations, help building skills, because they’ll be a better employee up until they leave. Anyway, if you just open the doors and sometimes people will go, oh, there’s a lot.
Jen: I don’t know. And you might end up having them longer. The more, you open the curtain so they can see the mess of everybody’s business. Cause none of our businesses are perfect. You might actually find somebody who can help you in ways that you don’t know. If you start to give somebody more responsibility and teach them as much as possible.
Jen: And then as the employee you’ll wanna stay longer because you’ll see more and you’ll learn more than if you go elsewhere or if you go and embark on having your own business.
Brent: I think. What you said earlier about burning bridges that applies even greater for the employee, because if you can leave on good terms yes.
Brent: And you can provide value to your previous boss. Now that boss becomes a conduit for you for your next job or your next role or whatever you’d like to do. What advice would you give to a a younger employee who’s trying to navigate learning how their boss is gonna react to, Hey my timeframe is 24 months and I’m gonna be leaving.
Brent: Right. some bosses are gonna say they’re gonna say to themselves, that’s great. I’m gonna look for a new person already, cuz I know in 24 months they’re gonna be gone or the boss may just come out and say, that’s not gonna work for me. There’s a certain amount of rapport that has to be there in the beginning.
Brent: But then there has to be. almost there has to be some not psychology, but there has to be some way to learn and feel out where each person lies without necessarily giving out your entire hand.
Jen: Absolutely. This is about relationship building and a lot of what I believe in is honesty and transparency.
Jen: building those relationships over time. Now, as you begin to get to know your employer, , you might realize that they’re not interested in what it is that you want, and you may not be able to be all the way to look, I have a 24 month window here. Like you might not be able to share that part that might be too much for that person to handle.
Jen: So you need to. Feel it out. This takes time. You don’t know the person as well, as you think, particularly in the beginning when everybody’s on their best behavior, like things change and evolve over time. So certainly you have to be careful and strategic about it, but being honest, it, it really does pay off.
Jen: So you’re not just shocking somebody because that can be part of burning the bridge too, is if you’re just like, whoa, piece out and it’s over, you have to give, you have to have open communication. And that’s part of it is if Y and part of it can be covered in the interview process. If you’re getting a sense of, they don’t, they’re not really interested in having any sort of.
Jen: Mentorship type of relationship with you. If you are not getting the sense that this is a growth opportunity, that’s gonna be very telling and you have to be strategic about how you ask about those things as well. But it is something that I think you can feel out early on, and hopefully you can talk to other people who work there.
Jen: You can also look at things like Glassdoor and stuff to see what former employees say. It depends on how big an organization is. All of which to say, it’s not an overnight thing, no matter what, no matter how open somebody is, but you also have to take care of yourself. You can’t just stay somewhere because somebody needs you.
Brent: Do you think it’s a red flag as an employee that, if your boss clearly doesn’t care at all about you or your personal life, is that a red flag for you? You as an that’s a rhetorical question, isn’t it? I don’t even know why I asked it. I can say that as an employer, I’ve gotten much more aware of the fact that I need to know about my employees and there is a world outside of their job.
Brent: And simply asking some of those questions and being interested in what they’re doing helps you as an employer to build a better relationship with your employee. And it just does go vice versa. Is there anything that you can say to extract some of these things out of an employer as an employee?
Brent: I don’t think you can ever teach anybody to. I think somebody has to make that revelation themselves, as an entrepreneur, as an employer, if you’re narcissistic and you only see anything other than the end of your fingers, then you’re never gonna move past that point.
Brent: But there has to be some growth on both sides and as an employee, It is a delicate art to try to coax that out of people.
Jen: Absolutely. And I’m laughing because I worked for somebody who absolutely didn’t think anybody should be friends with people from work. And I will tell you that it wears on you after a while they’re talking about themselves and they have no care about what’s going on in your life.
Jen: I’ve worked for people like that. And I can. . I said, I worked hard and I do work hard, but after a while, you don’t wanna run into the fire with that person. If they don’t care about you, you will not run into the fire for that person. As the employee, you will go to a certain point and then you’ll be like, I’m done.
Jen: I’m out. This is hard. And because when it gets hard, you want to have somebody that is with you. and if you don’t care about anybody but yourself, and everybody’s just there to support you, but you don’t care if they like to go hiking or if they have a boyfriend or not like that’s, it’s gonna be game over sooner rather than later, because we all have lives.
Jen: We all have things outside of the business, outside of whatever it is that you’re expecting somebody else to do for you.
Brent: Yeah, that’s a really good perspective. I make a point of in my day job, I make a point of interviewing or at least talking to everybody every quarter.
Brent: And I think it’s about 65 people that I do my best to talk to every quarter. Yeah. And I’ve gotten to the point of saying, are you happy? At least, I’m trying to build a relationship and I’m trying to learn more about. But I think that’s a good question. Do you think that I would go with you into the fire to take something out?
Brent: That’s a hard question to ask cuz they may not answer it truthfully and you don’t wanna say, would you come with me? Cuz of course they’re gonna, yeah, of course they’ll come with you. But that’s not the real answer either. You wanna somehow build that? As the employer, you wanna support your employee. You don’t wanna force their support on you. You would like them to support you because they enjoy their job. And they would like to continue on and build this momentum that you have as a relationship. And as an employee, employer, you don’t wanna say you have to run in there with this, into the fire regardless.
Brent: You would like it to be voluntary. .
Jen: Yeah, okay. So this is an eCommerce podcast. We haven’t talked about that this is marketing people don’t buy from you unless there’s no and trust they’re buying in to what it is that you are selling. So as a leader, why isn’t it the same thing?
Jen: Why is it that we expect people to just do it? Because I’m paying you, they’ll go with you because you’re paying them. I’m talking about will they go a little bit further when times are tough? When things go sideways, are you nice mistakes happen? It, there are all of these opportunities that you have to really build that relationship so that your employees know can trust you.
Jen: And when things go bad, cuz they always go bad. Nothing’s perfect that they will say, yep, I’m here for you. I’ll stay late. I’ll do what it takes. Let’s make this happen. Let’s make the magic, let’s turn this around. And that’s really what it comes down to. It. It is that you have to build those relationships in the same way that you would with a customer who’s paying you.
Jen: It’s a two way street. And I think oftentimes as employers, it can be forgotten because we have so many things to do, but it’s really important to surround yourself with the people who are. going to support you, who are gonna help you and who are going to help you bring the people in that you need to keep the thing going.
Jen: And you have to look at that holistically. And if you can’t do that and people are leaving, sometimes that’s a you problem. It’s not always that everybody there’s that nobody wants to work. It’s that’s not always the answer. It’s that? You’re not providing a safe community for people to work in.
Brent: I’m just gonna write that down safe community to work in.
Brent: That’s a good one. You, I would like to talk about let’s I would like to talk about your podcast. So women conquer business. Yeah, can we, and we were gonna talk about marketing too, but now we’re already at, we’re already at 38 minutes. I know. Do you want to take a little bit of time and talk
Jen: about that?
Jen: Sure. So yesterday we recorded our hundred and 50th episode. I’ve been a podcaster since 2018. I will say that I’ve had probably four or five shows in that time. I used to do. interviews don’t do interviews anymore. I used to talk about all different types of things. Now we just talk about marketing it’s I think that over four years you change a lot as an entrepreneur.
Jen: What you talk about changes. and certainly the show is a reflection of that. So now what we’re doing are marketing howtos. So I help people understand concepts that can be somewhat challenging and drill into the essentials. I think yesterday we talked about course platforms and how to find a good course platform if you’re just getting started with online courses.
Jen: So a lot of my bread and butter. would be, if a CMO was, somebody came and said, we wanna do this thing. And you’re like, I don’t really know what that is. I can talk people through what something is and help them. And that’s really what the podcast is about is if you wanna do X here’s, how you get started or, and it can be at different levels of complexity.
Jen: So that’s really the bread and butter, and that is. And one of the opportunities. So when I was talking about opportunities, one of the opportunities I had really early with my podcast, I was approached by an organization I’d never heard of. And they said, we really like what you’re doing. Can we repurpose your show and pay you?
Jen: I was like okay, is this for real? I don’t even never even heard of you. So a lot of early solo shows have been repurposed and sold on another platform. I retained the rights and. that is how my new business epiphany courses was born. Like I have a lot, even though I don’t work at enterprise all the time, a lot of my content that I create and share is sold to enterprise companies as part of an eLearning platform.
Jen: And that is the baseline for epiphany courses because we know that all of that information and that content has been vetted. And is very popular among you. Fortune 500 fortune, 100 companies that are consuming it on this other learning platform. So we’ve started making a learning platform for small business owners where they can also learn in this container and get that information and then supply a community for people to talk through it.
Jen: So that’s really the essence of what I do around the podcast. They’re really these lessons. That then get repurposed elsewhere that then we turn around and make courses around. It’s an interesting concept. I never thought that what I do would evolve in this way. I think that when I started my business, if somebody had said you’re really gonna be into creating content.
Jen: I would’ve been like, I don’t even know what that. I didn’t, it was never on my radar, but as you can tell, I like to talk. So it seems to be working out for me.
Brent: Yeah. I think that’s such a great way to look at marketing as well is repurposing content. And I now, there’s this content driven eCommerce and everything is around.
Brent: eCommerce and even no UX eCommerce, where it is all about a conversation. You’re gonna talk to somebody in WhatsApp and they’re gonna place the order for you or whatever. I think that you’ve taken the opportunity. You’ve taken that risk and that challenge and. Stepped up on it.
Brent: So one of the things that I’m on the entrepreneurs organization board here in Minneapolis, and I’m on the DEI diversity committee. Yeah. And we in Minneapolis, we’re not incredibly diverse. And in, even in the entrepreneur C. I think we’re 15% women and 85% men.
Brent: So if the math is right, is there a particular struggle that women, this is a rhetorical, I’m sorry, I don’t know how to phrase this, but , I know that there’s struggle in, in people that aren’t white, bald males to break into the entrepreneurial community.
Brent: Through all kinds of factors. . Do you talk about that, those struggles in your podcast?
Jen: I did. I talked about that a lot early on as a woman in tech at a large organization, meaning the city of Portland. I experienced a lot. I had a lot of days where I felt like I should just walk in with a helmet on, I had people.
Jen: Call me, Jenny, like as a way, a very pejorative way of little girl I’m gonna pat you on the head and stuff. So it was . I dealt with a lot, and I have a bank of content that really talks through some of those struggles and how to get through it. And all of that.
Jen: I think that a lot. what I have learned is, if you go to my website, I there’s nowhere on here where I’m saying I’m gonna empower you because empowerment comes from within. If you even look at like the definition of it. So the truth is we can talk about it a lot, and I’m glad to talk to people about the struggles of women in entrepreneurship.
Jen: Certainly, I would invite that and also. we just have to put on our helmet and go in and do it. Anyway. I was at a networking event once they brought me in to speak. It was a small group. I was my friend who invited me and I were the only women. There was a man sitting next to me. I handed out my business card and I saw him playing with it the whole time.
Jen: He, I hate to say it, he was a bald white guy. So no offense to bald white guys. I. Including you, Brent. He was playing with it and all kinds of stuff, and we got to the end and he was like, I just, I gotta tell you, I’m never gonna send anybody to you because of your business name, women conquer business.
Jen: And I was like, okay. And I was really taken aback. And in the moment, I didn’t know what to say. I was like, really, I had just spoken. as you can tell, I’m fairly friendly. There’s not a lot here to really be angry about, I didn’t think. And I got home and I was like, you know what?
Jen: That’s really good marketing, cuz I didn’t really like that guy either. So if he doesn’t wanna work with me, like that’s an example of good marketing. And I think that women have to find those corners where we fit and people are willing to help us because there certainly are corners where people.
Jen: Aren’t. And I think though, that’s also the case with men. I think that’s the case in the transgender community. I think that this is fairly universal. It’s just that for women, there are a lot more corners where we don’t fit. And I think that really stunts the growth a lot is that, and so when we talk about, we’ve talked a lot about mentorship.
Jen: I do think that sometimes as women, we. men to be our mentors. They need to come and they need to say look this, Jen’s really cool. Like she knows what she’s talking about. Let’s how can we support you? I think that’s part of it. I think also as women, we need to say, you know what, a lot of people don’t like us, they’re gonna hurt her feelings.
Jen: Oh when we just have to keep going. So I think that it’s really hard and it’s difficult and. Over time. I have really strengthened my own helmet, to where I just don’t care as much. about, I don’t focus on the people who don’t like me anymore, because I have a hater every time I put something on YouTube, there’s one person that dislikes it.
Jen: I’m like. What it’s just, and I think it’s the same thing. Like they just, maybe I said something one time and I’m like, I could focus on that one person, but then I’m ignoring all the people who I could be helping. And I’m ignoring all the people who like me, if I just focus on the one hater.
Jen: And I think that as women, it’s a lot easier sometimes for us to absorb that criticism and focus on that when the truth is we have to focus on. all of the other people who are helped by us who want to help us. And I think there’s a lot more of that than the other.
Brent: Yeah. I think a good lesson for every, a male, whether they have hair or not is empathy.
Brent: Because if as an example, that person that made that judgment based specifically on a name that maybe they lack some empathy, but if you have empathy and you put your, if you could put yourself in somebody else’s shoes and I run for a team called mile in my shoes where you’re running with people in homeless and people coming out of prison, that if you could put yourself in their shoes for a mile.
Brent: You can empathize with them. And I think there’s a tieback as being a good employer to have empathy for your employees because they’re going through their own struggles and you can’t thrust upon them your own. Like I can’t thrust upon. Anybody my own things without having some buy in from the other side.
Brent: So I’m trying to navigate the whole subject. And I believe that talking about it is better than not talking about it. I agree.
Jen: And I think that there has to be some realities out there and, may speak to the male listeners for just a minute.
Jen: It’s easy to say we’ve made so much progress. That’s not really a problem anymore. The gendered issues, the differences in pay, so many things that are going on. And yet I can tell you that I’ll go out on Quora. And there are like executives from Google who are like women don’t like tech, so they don’t need to have jobs in tech cuz they don’t like it.
Jen: The truth is we leave smart women in tech leave because of bad management. because we’re smart. we don’t wanna put up with it. So we are interested. We’re interested in everything. We are smart. We’re capable. We can do all of those things. We’re not there yet. We still need. empathy and we need compassion.
Jen: And just like you do, I think men need it too. I think that those are the things that we need to realize is yes, we’ve made so much incredible progress and things are looking so much better for women and people of color. And we don’t have equity yet. We’re not there yet. So we just need to have that compassion for each other and build those relationships and we’ll go a long.
Brent: Yeah. So I, we are running up against the clock and I feel like we need to have a follow up conversation about marketing specifically. We’ve talked about a lot of great topics and I thank you. I know we talked earlier about my free joke project and I don’t want to, I this is a terrible segue, but let’s just talk about the fact that. My free jokes land very poorly. And you had a much better joke with the size 47 or 45 clown shoes. cuz I said 17 and I was just thinking American sizes, but you said 45? Yeah. And you weren’t thinking European, you were thinking clown sizes. That’s even better.
Brent: I appreciate that. And you caught me off guard so I’m gonna tell you a joke. And the goal from the joke is just to know if I can charge for it or if it should remain free. okay. All right.
Brent: What did the tectonic plate say when it bumped into another, sorry. My fault.
Jen: I do like that.
Brent: I have one more.
Brent: My doctor says I’ve developed a German sausage phobia. I fear the wurst. Oh. I know that was just a, that was a free one. That’s a free one. The first one, I think the first one should it be chargeable or not? Yes, it should be. Wow.
Brent: All right. Yeah, I’ll
Jen: give that an a plus. They’re both great, but I love dad jokes,
Brent: all right, good. Jen at the end of every podcast, I give my guests an opportunity to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like, what would you like to plug.
Jen: I would like to talk about epiphany courses. This is our new project.
Jen: It’s at epiphany courses.com. It’s a course platform and a community where we talk about marketing and we’re focusing on service based businesses in particular people who are coaches, consultants, all types. I have acupuncturists, I have intuitive coaches in there. all different types of people who are building all types of service based businesses.
Jen: And we talk. marketing and how to build your marketing platform. How to we answer questions. We have some mini courses, our bread and butter are courses that are under an hour. Hence epiphany. We wanna give people in as brief amount of time as possible, all the information that they need so they can make a decision about whether or not it’s even a viable marketing tactic for their business.
Jen: And that’s all at epiphany courses.
Brent: All right. And I will put those I’ll put the links in the show notes and and what’s the best way to get in touch
with
Jen: you. Oh, I’m all over social media, but yeah, you can find me at LinkedIn on LinkedIn, Jen McFarland on LinkedIn. And then also through my
Brent: websites.
Brent: All right. Thank you, Jen. Thanks so much. And I’ve enjoyed this conversation.
Kalen Jordan introduces the concept of a new podcast called “That was a Joke,” sponsored by Cricket Protein Bars.
So far, we do not have the sponsor or the podcast, but this is our first attempt at accomplishing this task. You will learn about surfing in Costa Rica, swimming in Minnesota, and electric skateboards. As a bonus, I have left in our conversation on Employee Happiness.
Kalen tells us about his week-long surfing lesson in Costa Rica from Witches Rock
Cricket Protein
Kalen: How are you doing? I’m hanging in there, man. You’re look-in fit is a fiddle. Thanks, dude. suns out guns out. Do you know what I’m saying?
Brent: Wow. I could tell those are some good size guns. You got the, and you’re in Texas. Those are the rules.
Brent: I don’t make the rules. You move from California to Texas because of your arms. So you could be legal in Minnesota. We don’t have li it. Yeah.
Kalen: Yeah. Those are street legal. Those are street-legal in Minnesota, but yeah, I might run into some run into some snags. How are you doing, man?
Kalen: What’s heck where are you? Hawaii. Min, Minnesota. I’m in
Brent: Minneapolis.
Kalen: Minneapolis.
Brent: Okay. Yeah, as they say, as the credit board, a plane somewhere.
Kalen: I don’t get, I
Brent: don’t get, I don’t never mind. It’s a joke. Just ignore me for a while,
Kalen: dude. If we ever do our own podcast, never mind. It’s a joke.
Kalen: That’s the whole podcast. Oh yeah, there you go. How good is
Brent: that? Yes. Sponsored by. Somebody funny,
Kalen: we’ll figure it out. Cricket, protein bars. I, there you go. My whole goal in life is to have a podcast with a cricket protein bar as a
Kalen: sponsor.
Brent: Yeah. And those are, I don’t know why. And those are actual crickets, right?
Brent: That use the protein from actually grinding up the cricket powder. Yeah. Yeah. That’s good. It’s gluten free
Kalen: is it? Yeah, that makes sense.
Brent: There’s no gluten in crickets, right? Unless they’ve just eaten some fresh grain.
Kalen: True. I’m actually, by the way, I’m using a gluten-free microphone right now. I don’t know.
Kalen: I can tell looks
Brent: great. Yeah, no it’s yeah. Mine is a paleo microphone. Okay.
Kalen: It’s non GMO
Brent: as well. It is non GMO. My microphone was built or was grown in fields in North Dakota that had GMO products next to it. They blew the extra mic. Bits of microphone blew into the field and contaminated it.
Brent: And that’s why I have my stand, which is blue and my microphone, which is I believe a zoom. Is that
Kalen: a GMO adjacent microphone? Because I can’t do this. I know. Sorry about that. I can’t have you on this esteemed podcast with that kind of a setup. That’s absurd.
Brent: It is. And I agree with you a hundred percent.
Brent: It’s can we talk about disgusting?
Kalen: Let’s talk about the elephant in the room, which is the gigantic BigCommerce partner award behind you.
Brent: It’s okay. It’s actually not an award. It’s just that we’re a partner with BigCommerce now because I’m on all kinds of BigCommerce calls and they got sick of seeing the Magento stuff in background did that’s in fact, sums out.
Brent: We did get an award in in. 21 for, from BigCommerce, but it was during the pandemic and they never shipped him out. Oh, I’m gonna call him out right now on this podcast that never got our award. That’s rough, the old that they did send me that in place.
Kalen: That’s the old partner award trick.
Kalen: Oo, that’s the oldest trick in the partner book.
Brent: We’re gonna go heavily branding here.
Kalen: I like, what is that? What is that hat that you got on there? I should have one of those here. It’s
Brent: called Hoooooooofa
Kalen: dang it. If I would’ve had that in
Brent: your video I gotta take off. Cause I click a little kid with a hat on.
Kalen: Yeah. That’s the problem with hats. They can tend to do that,
Brent: unfortunately. All right. What we’re talking about, some fun stuff today, man. You had some really topics, all
Kalen: sorts of topics, all sorts of fun stuff. We’re gonna go all over the map.
Brent: What is the end of your podcast this week? Or is it a video
Kalen: series?
Kalen: We’re figuring it out as we go. We’re figuring it out as we go. And it will be reveal at the proper time,
Brent: but I’m gonna, we are in the, we were, we are gonna remix and it is also gonna be a bonus episode on talk commerce. Perfect. Fantastic. Fantastic. So we’re, we’ll see, it’ll be competing and we should release it together.
Brent: Same week, same apple podcast stream.
Kalen: You’re gonna compete with my own podcast. All I can
Brent: do is try to keep, I can try to keep up with
Kalen: that non GMO microphone.
Brent: Yes. But I do feel like on my stream, I’m gonna put a bunch of beeps in. Just to cover up your swearing. Oh, okay.
Kalen: Son of a bur yep.
Kalen: Burp. Yeah I do swear a lot these days. just not on podcasts. You’re
Brent: You’re in Texas. You have to,
Kalen: it’s a lot, it’s a lot to swear about including. Employee culture and happiness, which is one of my favorite topics. Really. Okay. It really is. I’m big on call employee culture and happiness.
Kalen: I’m surprised that you’re surprised you sounded like you were surprised by that, which I don’t I’m particularly
Brent: appreciate. I, because I’m not surprised.
Kalen: That’s my whole, that’s my whole life.
Brent: That’s your whole shtick.
Kalen: I have a handbook. Have you read my handbook on employee culture and happiness?
Brent: No. No, we should read it right now.
Brent: yeah, no, I don’t have a, it could be like an audio book.
Kalen: yeah, one of these days it’ll be an audio book. No, but that was something you wanted to talk about was employee culture and happiness.
Brent: So yeah, I think in today’s age, when while we’re here in Minnesota, the unemployment rate is 2% or something like that.
Brent: Oh, crazy. Like crazy low. Yeah. As an employer, you have to go the extra mile to retain your employees.
Kalen: you have no choice. So is this just a pragmatic, is this just a pragmatic thing? Listen, if the if the unemployment rate were higher, we wouldn’t care about this at all, but because it’s so low.
Kalen: We gotta bite the bullet and be nice to people.
Brent: yeah. That is a great, that is a great way to look at it. I will answer that in full transparency that that you should not take an employment rate into account. And the reason is what does it cost to rehire the next person?
Brent: The 2% is a hard. Wall for an employer to get over. Because there’s simply not anybody you can hire, right? Yeah. Let’s just say it’s 10%. You get really sloppy and you’re hiring. You’re like, oh, we’ll hire people and blah, blah, blah. And if they leave, who cares? Just because we can hire more people.
Brent: Yeah. But does that mean because you’ve hired somebody new that person is gonna just hit the ground running. like even in the programming world, developers could be the only, one of the, they developers theoretically could be the fastest onboarding person you could have because hopefully your projects is detailed well, and they can come in and they just look at the requirements they’re already qualified.
Brent: They could start working right away. There’s still gonna be a week or two of rampup
Kalen: Point them at some tasks and have ’em like jump right in, in theory.
Brent: Yeah. Theoretically, they’re gonna have to learn a little bit, but let’s just say have two weeks or a month to get them up and running. Okay.
Brent: Let’s just say in the US developers make whatever we’ll use a round number, a hundred grand a year. What does that then cost you that one that’s $8,000 that you have to pay that one month of trying to get everybody up and running, onboarding all those other things.
Brent: Yeah, so it’s a lot of money. I think that, that 2% unemployment rate is a wake up call to employers who haven’t been big on employee culture and should be working on that.
Kalen: Yeah. Yeah. Totally. No, and yeah, I was just kidding. It’s easy for me to beat, to joke about these things.
Kalen: Cause I don’t have any employees and. And then I give you a heart. You actually have responsibilities over there. So I’m busting your chops. but
Brent: it is a I appreciate that question and I believe that is a completely fair question to ask any employer. I
Brent: think it’s a factor for sure.
Kalen: It doesn’t change, like what’s the right thing to do, but it is a factor. But what are, so you’ve been in the. Working world for a long time. Since the Dawn, but so what are some things that are top of mind for you as far as like employee culture,
Brent: keep people happy.
Brent: think that Time off is certainly a big one. Having well planned and thought out like for a developer, right? want a developer wants to have a project manager that is going to help them be better developers they’re they don’t want help technically, but they need help org or
Kalen: they things to be organized.
Kalen: They just want like requirements not to change things to be straight forward, tell me what I need to do. I can do it. It’s not gonna change 16 times and then I can get it
Brent: done. Yeah. They want them to run interference.
Brent: They don’t want the client talking to them directly. Yeah. They, hopefully the project manager can handle all that. So yeah, from a, from an employee stand happiness standpoint, we want to encourage that and support that. Yeah. All those pieces as you come down the whole pipeline of getting work done.
Kalen: That’s really good, actually, because there’s so many different, you could talk about benefits and perks and but I really think the core of what a developer cares about is exactly that make the work itself. Clean to whatever extent, in the real world, things are gonna change.
Kalen: Things are gonna be requirements are gonna be fuzzy and stuff like that, but as much as possible make, the process of getting work, done the project management structure, like straightforward, I think also probably you wanna work on challenging stuff. Interesting stuff too. That’s also obviously gonna be a big component.
Kalen: But like the work itself, make the work, improve the work itself, as opposed to all the things around it that are important. Are. Nice to haves, but they’re not really the core of what your job is about.
Brent: Yeah. This actually, this whole discussion would be better for a panel.
Brent: If we had say four or five employers, that’d like to just talk about what is it that they, or even employees like are just a regular. Developers. No developers are regular, they’re all extraordinary. Find four extraordinary developers, which are every developer and ask them what makes them happy.
Brent: You’re probably gonna get four different answers, right? Some of them want to get paid. Some of them would like lots of time off. Some of them like flexibility in their schedule, as a edge agile, is all kinds of things. It’s, it is gonna be varied. It’s a complicated, it is a complicated task.
Brent: But that culture that any company embodies would have people that have been there for a long amount of time and they would be the ones driving this culture, the ones that like the culture. So maybe it is about time off or flexibility. Those are the ones that are gonna stick around.
Brent: And if somebody doesn’t care about some of those other things, then all they wanna do is make the biggest money. Then that’s where you see developers jumping from jumping around the agency. And again, I don’t wanna make it sound too general. Like not it just because somebody goes from one agency to the other because they make more money.
Brent: Doesn’t mean they’re jumping because of the money. There’s all kinds reasons. I don’t want to generalize it, but it’s just an example of the different parts of that. That encompass that whole idea of employee happiness.
Kalen: I think of the dev teams that seem felt to me, the strongest are where there’s this combination of you enjoy working with your peers, you respect them. They help you and also challenge you. So if you have a problem, you can get feedback, get help, get support. The work is interesting. You have a high level of autonomy or ownership of what you’re doing.
Kalen: There’s not a lot of red tape and, nonsense. And and then you get paid well, that’s that never
Brent: all those
Kalen: things, right? Yeah. But you’re an employee, right? Are you technically an employee? Yes, I am. Are you ha are you happy? Are you,
Brent: That’s good. Yeah. I think part of that is autonomy.
Brent: You want to give people a degree of autonomy to to be able, you wanna give them space to make some of their own decisions. Yeah. So that’s huge. Yeah. I think one thing that’s always important is knowing what is that space? And then what is, how does creativity go into that space?
Brent: As an employer, you want to recognize that people need some of that space, right? They, and they, and if you’re demanding so much time out of it what is an acceptable, modest time to for either create creative growth or personal growth or educational growth?
Kalen: Yeah, because like I I remember this one dev team I was on and we were working on a new project. It was interesting. It was fun. It was exciting. And then certain people were building certain components of it. And. When you talk about like creativity and stuff, like they were taking some very creative approaches to the architecture of how to build this thing.
Kalen: And we would talk about it and be like, oh yeah, it’s gonna, it’s gonna work like this. And it’s gonna be super extensible. And it’ll, the code’s gonna be so clean. It’s gonna be. You could tell they were super excited about it from like a creativity standpoint and it sounded cool.
Kalen: It sounded great. But then, a day turns into a week, turns into two weeks and it’s like the thing isn’t getting done, and it’s oh yeah. And they show, show you all the stuff. And then they have a good explanation for why it’s not done.
Kalen: It’s oh I gotta do this. And then I got da, and I gotta refactor it. And they’re all good reasons. And then sometimes people just get caught in like a loop of things can be complicated. And so that’s the flip side of it, is if you’re too creative, like you gotta get stuff done.
Kalen: Like you gotta get, things out the door.
Brent: Yeah, there’s a in the development world, there’s always a push and pull be between the developer who is a perfectionist. And the developer, who’s just a get stuff done. Developer. In a past life I liked, I did development work.
Brent: I would never say I was a developer, a very good one anyways, and I was a get stuff, done, person because especially if you’re a. Single contractor, or, you are the only person accountable to that customer. And so you’re just trying to get as much steps down as you possibly can.
Brent: I think another good role for a project manager is to be that person who can say this task actually takes this long and to do it right. It’s gonna take that long. And the only way to get around doing it right, is doing it wrong.
Kalen: Say the only way
Brent: to get a, if you, the only way that’s not do it right.
Brent: Is to not do it. You can say it in so many words, but if you want it done faster, you’re gonna have to take some shortcuts and chances are, it’s not gonna be right. Like you’re not gonna write your unit tests or you’re not gonna do QA on it, or you’re gonna skip over a bunch of functions that, or whatever it is, there’s just things you can do to cut corners.
Kalen: Yeah. Yeah. And yeah. And that’s. Yeah. And then that’s the problem. Like I’m a get stuff. I’m a get stuff done developer and I can move pretty quickly, but I’m not like the perfectionist. And then the downside to that of course, is that, down the road, you realize there’s technical debt.
Kalen: There’s. There’s limitations to what you built that really can start to compound over time. And I really should. , I really should have taken a little extra time and done it, done it. The fir, but there’s really no such thing as doing it. You want to do it as.
Kalen: As best as you can and then improve on that. And that, and this is why somebody that’s been coding for 10 years is so much more efficient. Somebody’s been doing it for a year because they’ve gone through enough of those cycles that they can see, the problems ahead of them and then fix them, from the get go.
Kalen: Yeah
Brent: yeah. What, so you had some other topics you wanted to go? I did have some topics I had let’s jump into ’em. Let’s
Kalen: talk about exercise, man. Cuz you’re a big exercise guy. And what have you been doing to. Exercise. What’s your what’s. What do you do, man? You do a lot of stuff. You do cross country skiing.
Kalen: You do all sorts of stuff. What’s. what’s your latest deal?
Brent: My goal is not to do cross country scheme cuz I’m very tired of the cold weather. Although I do enjoy it when I do it. Yeah. And it is super fun. Yeah. But it’s also cold enough to. Walk on a lake yeah.
Brent: And in order for the ice to be thick enough for you to walk on, it has to be cold for a sustained amount of time. Wait, just the opposite of being a hundred degrees for 13 days in Austin is the opposite of that is to be below freezing for right a month. So the lake is a foot thick anyways.
Brent: Yeah. Yeah. So I, right now I’m running and I’m biking and I’m swimming. , I’m doing a little yoga. oh, nice. When did you start the yoga? I had a pretty significant injury back in February that sidelined me. Oh no. Am I running? And, I think stretching is one of those things that I just have to do.
Brent: And so yoga has been a good thing. I was doing it every day, but I’ve cut it down a couple times a day. Just flexibility as a runner. Yeah. You’re you become very inflexible. Yeah. Oh, do you in the same from running thing all the time. So your hips are super tight and oh,
Kalen: interesting. Yeah. How did you injure yourself?
Brent: Running on the ice. If you can think about and I’m writing an article about it right now I wanted to detail my injury. There’s Icelandic horse that, that has very tiny little steps, lots of tiny steps, right? Lots of cadence you call it. When we run in Minnesota, because we’re running on snow and ice.
Brent: you change the way you run and that then changes like smaller steps a thing. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s not a bad thing, but if you go from, running in a warm place, , I’m not embarrassed to say that I spent most of my November and December in Hawaii, which was warm. Nice.
Brent: And I came back at Christmas and went immediately to Fargo. And it was like going from 80 degrees to minus 10 and go running. And I was in a running streak. So I had to run every day and I hate running on a treadmill.
Kalen: Why didn’t you stay out there longer? Why didn’t you stay on Hawaii, longer
Brent: Christmas?
Brent: We have family, like we celebrate some of these holidays and the family that liked whatever reason they like to have us around. I don’t know. Yeah, so just repeated
Kalen: stress, just a repeated stress thing of running in a little bit of a funny.
Brent: Yeah. And then, I think my body reacts better to cold weather, like the cardiovascular part.
Brent: So I feel like I can run a lot harder and I do. It just makes it worse because your muscles are super tight because of the cold weather. Anyways, I ended up with a very bad glued injury. I had a running streak going, I had 683 days of running straight before I stopped. What? Wow. And so you really, why did keep that streak going?
Brent: I really wanted to, and I was on a treadmill and I was holding myself up with my arms. Oh, just trying to let my legs dangle. Oh. Until that one mile I thing clicked around and I’m like, this is so stupid. I’m not really running a mile. I’m barely touching the treadmill. I might as well just call it quits and oh no, I got, so I, I had to heal.
Brent: Yeah. So took a while. I did a lot of stretching, lot of trips to the PT. Oh wow. And yeah, it felt, I started feeling better and then immediately, because of all the different pieces, I’ve had IT Band problems and, tight tightness and my IT Band and I’m about 99% now. Oh, that’s
Kalen: great.
Kalen: How how long did you have to stop running.
Brent: I stopped for about six weeks. Oh, okay.
Kalen: Oh, wow. Yeah. That’s frustrating when you’re doing something and then you have to stop cuz that becomes your whole routine and you start to depend on it and stuff and and then if you have to stop, it just sucks.
Brent: Yeah. So now I’ve started doing open water swimming and believe it or not. Our open water swim club starts. June 14th. okay. Cause that’s June 14th. That’s when the, what lakes are, that’s pretty much warm enough to swim in. The water was still 69 degrees on June 14th, right? Yeah.
Brent: That’s chilling by August. They’re gonna be 80 because it’s so hot here in the summer. Do you ever do
Kalen: ice baths
Brent: or cold? I’ve done his best. Yeah.
Kalen: Yeah. Okay. I’ve been wanting to get, I keep hearing about the benefits of I do sauna and stuff, but I keep hearing about the benefits of ice baths. So I wanna do that, but I gotta buy a bag of ice or something like that and just put it in a bathtub tub
Brent: or something.
Brent: I think Philip does ice baths does into a very, really long run.
Kalen: Oh, okay. Yeah, a lot of the people I follow on social media related to Jim and workout stuff. Talk about ’em and I gotta get that going. Yeah. I, what were you gonna say?
Brent: Yeah, I was gonna tell you my last thing that you asked me what I’m doing.
Brent: I have one more thing that I’m doing. Yeah, what I’m biking. Okay. So I swim, I bike and I run. That’s what I pretty much do on yoga. Nice and yoga. I did my first triathlon last weekend and no,
Kalen: way’s it. Your first tri your first tri. Cause before it was, you were just more pure running and then now you for this year.
Brent: Okay. I did lunch last year too. Anyways, that’s it first. Oh, what are you doing? Tell me what you’re doing. No. For this year. Cause it’s so cold here.
Kalen: Okay. You don’t your first triathlon this year, but you’ve done triathlons in the past. right? Yes. Okay. You’ve done a ton of
Brent: them. No, I wouldn’t say a ton, but I’ve done.
Brent: You’ve done a handful. I’ve done solid. Yep. And I’m a terrible swimmer. yeah. You look
Kalen: like a terrible swimmer.
Brent: Yes. That’s what everybody says too.
Kalen: do here’s do you when it comes to exercise, do you do the things because they’re beneficial for you or do you just do the stuff be like, have you gotten to the point where you just do it because you enjoy doing it?
Kalen: Like you do the running cuz you enjoy running. You don’t do it because. It helps you to be healthier or is it a mix of the two?
Brent: Yeah, I think I am doing it because I absolutely enjoy it. I am trying to enjoy swimming more. , that
Kalen: swimming is so boring. I’ve tried to do the swimming thing, but I can’t do it.
Kalen: I just lose my mind. I get too
Brent: bored doing it. They have headphones you can wear while you’re swimming. But oh, I do mainly open water swimming. So the, in Minnesota here it’s supported. So there’s buoys and they have peak lifeguards on paddleboards.
Brent: Oh, that’s cool. I swim with the swim buoy. So I feel pretty safe. And you have a goal, you go. 400 yards come back, four yards. That’s pretty cool. Too big circle or
Kalen: whatever it is. That’s kinda of an epic dude when I’m in Costa Rica like surfing. you’ll first of all, like just being on a surfboard and paddling is so tiring and you’ll just like, just going from A to B you’ll be exhausted.
Kalen: But then of course you just lay on the surfboard, and chill out and you’ll see dudes open water swimming in the ocean. And. You will just see a guy just go out like as far as you can see, like he’s practically out past the horizon. Just swimming. No, support. nothing. Not even sometimes they don’t even have a boo or anything like that.
Kalen: I don’t know what these people are thinking. It’s insane.
Brent: But yeah, there’s people that swim miles and mile. I was talking to a guy last night who is in a swim club and he met a lady that is, he, she, there’s a swim you can do across the English channel, which is like 26 or 30 miles or whatever.
Brent: You get out, you stamp your passport and you swim back. That’s funny. So it’s like a 50 mile or 60 mile swim. That’s funny. That’s not gonna be me. I’m not gonna
Kalen: do that. You’re not gonna do all that. Let me grab another water real quick. Hold I’ll be right back.
Brent: This episode of Kalen talks is sponsored by. Protein cricket bars, protein, cricket bars, bring you crickets and protein in a nice condensed package. Dude,
Kalen: let’s start a protein cricket bar brand. How cool would that be?
Brent: There’s probably one that exist. We could be the
Kalen: spokesperson. That’s true, by the way. I need to install an AC in the garage but which is on my to-do list.
Kalen: So if you wonder why I’m sweating like a madman that’s the reason why I’m just,
Brent: and we don’t have our AC right on our ACS, not on right now, but it was on last week and it was like, 90, it was 96 here. and it was 64 degrees in my basement, cuz all the, oh, that’s not bad. All the AC drops, that’s not bad.
Kalen: Yeah. But yeah, I like, I feel like on a, like I, I recently got an electric skateboard because I just, I think it’s a lot of fun and I feel like I’ve been on a path of doing, like doing exercise, cuz you, you have to, you wanna get in better shape, you wanna get healthier and then gradually you start to find the things you really love to do.
Kalen: And then eventually you just do the stuff cuz you like, that’s ultimately where you want to get to where you just do the stuff that you love to do. And it’s not, you would do it even if it didn’t make it’s not about the getting healthier is like the byproduct.
Brent: You know what I mean? Yeah. I is that I totally get a high from running. There’s nothing more fun than getting up, as the sun is rising and having. Whatever amount of miles in front of you and just having this little adventure of running around. And seeing things like when I travel, I always try to do some kind of extended long run or I’d stay on a Saturday to do my long run.
Brent: I think we were gonna get together last spring. I was gonna come to Austin for some event and I had planned on staying an extra day and that’s when I got injured. So I had to cut that one short, but I had a 20 mile run planned in Austin and I have a route planned out and I was super excited to kinda, ah, that’s a bummer.
Brent: Go see the it’s fun to see that I’ve done the The murals, there’s all kinds of paintings and there’s a walking tour. I did eight miles of just running around, looking at all the great paintings on the side of buildings in it’s a great way to see a city. Yeah.
Brent: I think it’s EXPECIALLY fun. Did I say that, right? It, especially cuz I said, some
Kalen: people say, EXPECIALLY,
Brent: I feel like that’s a, and that is pronunciation That the one thing I love to say to my wife is I love to say, Hey, would you like to get an EXPRESSO? Yeah. If she said, do you mean Espresso And I said, oh, she
Kalen: Expresso She corrects you. No, that’s not cool. Yeah. EXPRESSO that’s valid. Yeah. Hundred percent. valid No. I’m jealous of people that are into running, cuz it seems like a really cool way to, like you said, see a city and I’ve tried to get into it, but I’ve just never, and like my joints drive me crazy, but I’ve tried.
Kalen: But that’s how I feel about the skateboard now is I want is it’s a fun way to like I’ve been exploring different parts of the city where I live in that I hadn’t seen before. And it’s a neat way to get around. Yeah, it’s funny how, when you’re just driving you, you just go through the same route that wherever you’re going and you never really stop to smell the roses,
Brent: or and did you get a one, one wheel, one of those one wheel skateboards or no.
Brent: So
Kalen: I got a it’s called an evolve. It’s like an actual skateboard with four wheels. Huh? I did try the one wheel and I rented it and I have a buddy here nearby. Who’s super into ’em, but I couldn’t quite get it. Have you ridden a one wheel before?
Brent: No, but I have a friend who has one.
Brent: Okay.
Kalen: They seem really cool, but the problem is that you can also, you can fall on them a lot. And they do this nose dive thing.
Brent: Where that’s exactly what he just broke his collarbone. Are you for real? Yep. He was going 20 miles an hour and it just there’s something with the battery happened.
Brent: The
Kalen: battery dies it’s oh my gosh,
Brent: you’re supposed to get a warning. Yeah. He put little wheels on the front, on the back now. So if it does a nose dive, it can but I still think if you’re gonna nose dive and you’re gonna dig in, you’re just gonna, it’s gonna, yeah. You’re not gonna recover
Kalen: from it.
Kalen: Yeah. It’s scary. I watched a ton of videos on that and I was really nervous about it and stuff like that. Apparently you learn how to feel when that’s happening and then you can avoid it. And those things that you, the wheels are called fangs, the wheels that you put on the front, and then they make it so that if it does nose dive it, doesn’t like hard dive.
Kalen: It gives you a little bit more space or whatever, but yeah, I was just like, nah, and just riding it. It was just weird. I just more comfortable on the skateboard, but I’m still, I’m super nervous about falling just off the skateboard. Because they go, 15, 20 miles an hour and stuff like that.
Kalen: And,
Brent: And do you have a remote that you hold because I’ve seen those electric skateboards and I’ve seen people holding it remote and they’re just yeah. Cruising.
Kalen: Yeah. It’s nuts. Yeah. Okay. There. There’s a little remote and actually right after this, I’m gonna go to this meetup and we’re gonna, I’m gonna cruise around with some people
Brent: electric skateboard meetup.
Brent: Yeah.
Kalen: Actually it’s a one little bikers too or not, oh, it’s a, I think any electronic per a transportation device, whatever they’re called, but but yeah, it’s a one wheel group and then there’s some people with skateboards too, but I’m gonna be like the one I’m gonna be like the weird one, cause everybody else is gonna have a one wheel.
Brent: Susan and I went out and joined a new bike group on on Wednesday night and nice. There was an, a and B in biking. And so we, and there’s a 40 mile and a 25 mile. So we joined the slow 25 mile group. And I haven’t actually ridden that far this year. And it was an, a group for us anyways, but I was so tired.
Brent: that’s a long
Kalen: ride. Yeah. That’s a 25 miles. That’s a ride for me at least. If I ride 10 miles, I’m tired.
Brent: Yeah but you’re going like 10 miles an hour. So that’s pretty fast.
Kalen: I get
Brent: I know you don’t even know how
Kalen: fast you’re going. I don’t know how fast away hours making fun of me, but I don’t exactly know why. So
Brent: did you take, let’s go. I wanna come back to surfing cuz I took surfing lessons last year. Did you take lessons in Costa Rica?
Kalen: Yeah, I went to a surf camp for a week.
Kalen: Took lessons, whoa. A week. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And then shout out to witches rock and then and then I stayed it by myself for the rest of that month. And then we’ve gone back. This is gonna be like our fourth time going there. We were there for three and a half months last year, total. And part yeah, so we loved it.
Kalen: But that’s kind of thing with the skateboard is that I loved surfing so much and I was like, we need to move here. I was talking to my wife about it. Didn’t you know, then you realize it’s a little more complicated than that when you have three kids and stuff, even though we homeschool. kids have dance, they have music, they have their friends.
Kalen: You can’t you gotta stay put, so
Brent: yeah. I’m just gonna put out a little shout out for Hawaii because the one thing that a lot of people don’t realize about Hawaii is that it is a US state and getting a house there is far easier and than like Mexico or Costa Rica. And getting the other thing is what?
Brent: Go ahead.
Kalen: Getting a house there is easier. Is that what you said? Yeah. Cuz
Brent: it’s a US state. You can get a mortgage. I know you wouldn’t need a mortgage, but people that would need one,
Kalen: I would need a mortgage but it’s expensive there. It’s crazy.
Brent: It’s crazy expensive. It is expensive, if you go there as a tourist and go out to eat every day, but if you’re making your own food and.
Brent: you live in a local, it’s not as bad, much more expensive. They have a Costco. So that’s all you
Kalen: need the houses. The houses are expensive.
Brent: The houses are expensive, but they’re smaller. You pay the same amount for a house, but it’s not gonna be like, it’s not gonna be, what do you have?
Brent: Like 12 or 15,000 square feet in Austin. It’s you’re gonna, you’re probably gonna have to. For the size of the house you have, you’re gonna have to, yeah. If you settle for 2,500 square
Kalen: feet. Yeah, no. Yeah. If it’s just the two of you and you’re getting a small house, it’s probably super doable.
Brent: A big house in Kona is 1500 square feet oh, okay.
Brent: Yeah. And a big house for millions is gonna be anything over three or 4,000.
Kalen: So did you do some, so you did some surfing out, you did some surfing out there. In Hawaii.
Brent: Yeah. I only did one day of surf lessons. Which now have hearing that you said a week, that’s probably a really good idea.
Brent: The mistake I made and I went with my son was he said paddle back as soon as you can. And so we would go out, do our little run and then we were just both Gavin and I are just whipping it to get back to the start. And it’s man, you guys have never had anybody get back as fast as you guys get back.
Brent: But what happened I wasn’t used to that motion and I ended up bruising, one of my ribs between the waves bouncing and me paddling so hard. It’s bruised a rib. Dude
Kalen: it’s. Yeah. And it’s so painful.
Brent: I don’t know if you’ve heard of persuasive kids. I have a very, I have a very persuasive son.
Brent: He’s dad, we’ve gotta go by. Let’s just go to Costco right now. I know they had surfboards he’s like he, he talked me into going to Costco. We bought two surfboards. So you bought, and then every single day, he’s we gotta get out there. We gotta get, which only makes your ribs hurt more.
Kalen: So you kept going out.
Kalen: I
Brent: did.
Kalen: Yep. Okay. So how how many times did you go out total? Did you get the hang of it?
Brent: My son definitely got the hang of it. I would say because I was in such pain that I never got, I was never relaxed enough that time that we were just back in May and susan. And I went out and just paddled around and it was so much easier once you’re comfortable and not in pain.
Kalen: To, yeah, totally. I feel like that first week for me was like, the there’s just balancing on the board was super hard, like laying down balancing and paddling for me was like, I was just like, I was a wreck. I was like all over the place. And then the rib pain and stuff like that. And then your arms are so sore.
Kalen: It’s yeah, after that week I feel like I started to get the hang of it, but
Brent: the first, so I’m not the only one that gets rib pain. That’s good to know. Oh, I’m glad that I’m glad that you had all kinds of rib pain.
Kalen: Yeah, I had so much. And then it’s weird how the pain just starts to go away. Like I think you’re you’re at your, whatever your ribs get conditioned to it.
Kalen: And then, I don’t know, you probably figure out your technique a little better too, whatever, but.
Brent: It’s fine. You’re from California originally. So was that part of your culture? Did you, were you a surf kid?
Kalen: No. I didn’t grow up near the beach at all, but I was always into skating and rollerblading and stuff like that.
Kalen: And then snowboarding. So I picked it up relatively quickly, but yeah, it was a new, that was a new thing, but it’s pretty fun. Pretty fun, man. Are we with our time here? We’re almost at our time,
Kalen: there was a couple other things on the list, but I don’t know. I feel like we had a solid sesh, solid yeah. Podcast sesh.
Brent: So can I’ve got a good I’ve got a one of my favorite poets. Yes. It’s called love poems for married people. Oh, wow. This is great. Can I read a poem? Oh my gosh.
Brent: As we close it out, please. All right. Yeah. And I got this book for Susan. So this is gonna be a joke you’re setting. No, they’re real. It’s love poems by it’s John
Kalen: Kenny world in which you’re gonna read a real poem right
Brent: now. Poems
Kalen: look at it says poem, you found a poem. That’s gonna somehow be an, a joke one way or another, but we’ll see..
Brent: We’ll find out after I read it right. We’ll find out real soon. Okay. Title the Mo title. Ready? Here we go. Are you in the mood? I am. Let’s put the kids down, let’s have a light dinner shower, maybe not drink too much and do that thing I would rather do with you than anyone else lie in bed together and look at our iPhones.
Brent: that’s so dumb. It’s a real. It’s a real poem.
Kalen: Yep. Yeah. That’s
Brent: wow. I find all of his poems completely hilarious. And are they all,
Kalen: they’re all funny.
Brent: Are they all if you think that’s funny. I think it’s hilarious.
Kalen: but they’re not like sincere love poems. So it
Brent: was a sincere love poems.
Brent: I’m this guy has to be Irish because the humor that comes out of it is very Irish. Yeah.
Kalen: I like it. I like it. I’m gonna flip. I’ve been thinking about actually trying to read some more poetry. I’ve been trying to read fiction. I can’t read fiction though. It’s so hard for me to it just goes in one ear and out the other.
Kalen: versus mostly I’ve just read like non-fiction books and
Brent: all I’m reading a fiction book. It’s by comb McDonald, and it’s the dead man sins. And we’ll have to put it in the show notes. It’s completely hilarious. He’s got all these anyways. Nice. I am reading a fiction book.
Kalen: Sorry. You cut out just a tiny bit. What was the, what was that book?
Brent: It is it’s called dead man sins. It’s by Cole. It’s C a I M H I know it’s Irish. And I should know how to say it cuz they often say it, but Cole McDonald. Okay. On Amazon C a I M
Kalen: H. And
Brent: what’s it about? It’s a sort of a it’s a detective novel, let’s say, but nice.
Brent: Quite a bit of Irish humor in it.
Kalen: Nice. I’m reading the Hobbit with my daughter. Oh, that’s a good one, which is fun. Yeah. It’s yeah, it’s pretty. It’s pretty cool. She reads it to me and she understands it much better than I do. Good. She’ll actually test me. She’ll be like, she’ll test my comprehension. She’ll be like, did you understand that part dad.
Kalen: And I’ll be like she’ll have to explain this to
Brent: me. That’s good that you have to read the line, the witch in the wardrobe. Yeah,
Kalen: I think they’ve read that one. Yeah. Yeah. They were
Brent: contemporaries. CS Lewis and JRR Tolkin.
Kalen: Yeah. I think there’s some science fiction from CS Lewis.
Kalen: I’ve read a bunch of when I was in college, I read a bunch of CS Lewis’s books on Christianity and stuff like
Brent: that. Yeah. My favorite book is called the Great Divorce. Yeah.
Kalen: I think I read that
Brent: one. Yeah. It’s a good one. It’s not about divorce. Yeah.
Kalen: But anyways, he has some interesting science fiction too.
Kalen: Yeah, absolutely. Brent Peterson, thanks so much. This has been a lot of fun. Where can people find all your content and links and web links?
Brent: If we’re gonna put this up, mine will be on talk hyphen commerce.com. Fantastic. And I don’t know, we’re gonna name this episode. We’ll
Kalen: figure something out for that’s for darn.
Kalen: Sure. All right. Thanks everybody for tuning in. See you next time.
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Nestled in sunny South Florida, The Bulk Candy Store sees its staff as family and its customers as close friends. Bulk Candy Store has been helping celebrate memorable events with sweets and snacks since 1992. Every day is a celebration, and sharing those moments with the people we cherish is priceless. Whether you are ringing in the New Year or just gathering to make merry, the Bulk Candy Store has all of the sweet treats you need to make the special occasions of your life exceptional.
Do you want to have an impact on the world and do something to better it? Reynaldo Santana helps us understand the complicated maze of the Non-Profit Google Adword program and how he helps non-profits to better themselves through these online tools.
Reynaldo is a former tech executive with 10+ years of experience working from corporate to small-medium businesses, to non-profits and start-ups. Managing a budget of 30MM and teams worldwide. Reynaldo is a serial entrepreneur, investor, speaker, philanthropist, and author on a mission to impact 1 Billion lives by using what he has learned along his journey.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/reynaldoasantana/
https://www.impactannex.org/
Transcript
Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce today I have for Reynaldo Santana. He is an entrepreneur and the founder of Impact Annex. Reynaldo, go ahead. Introduce yourself. Tell us what you do in your day-to-day life and maybe one of your passions.
Thank you so much, Brent, for having me here today and everyone for listening today.
Happy to so who is Reynaldo Santana? I am still one who was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts I’m a serial entrepreneur. Investor, I’m an author. I’m a motivational speaker for young people. I am second generation here in the U S my parents came from the Dominican Republic.
So are we going to that I do is new and the first one in my family is pretty cool. It’s like a journey or an adventure on everything that I do in life. So it’s pretty awesome. But aside from that my background 12 years working in the tech fields I used to live in Mexico, San Francisco, California.
I did some time in Florida and Columbia, Venezuela. So I’ve been everywhere as well. One thing that I also like to do and to share with everyone is that I’ve been playing the trumpet since the age of seven. So I’m a musician as a hobby and also. So I do love music a lot, and I love to travel, like to eat food.
You can consider me as a chubby guy. And you see me in the street, not that big, I’m a chubby guy, but if you read, come to Massachusetts, hit me up, happy to grab some sort of food or
drink. All right. Yeah. Trumpet. I played trumpet in junior high and I still have my trumpet.
I was thinking about putting up on the wall behind me and I’ve played piano all my life. So two things had common already. The Minnesota twins have a large following in the Dominican Republic for their baseball players. And I think we have what towns for the wolves that is from there.
His family’s from Dominican Republic anyways. So true. I’ve been there a couple times. Done some work there anyways. So let’s get talking about Impact Annex. What is it, what do you do?
Within these past 12 years, I’ve had the opportunity to be a business owner myself and work for a few startups started my owner startup as well, worked for corporate small medium businesses.
So had a chance to really understand the different types of pain points that a different size or organization can have and understand how sales and marketing works as well. And actually wrote a book on 2016, it’s on Amazon, on catching up to millennials because technology doesn’t wait for anyone.
It keeps evolving over and over. And we have to keep adapting as business owners. That’s not easy, especially if you’re a different generation. So things are moving very rapidly. So in that book, I it’s explaining. The history of marketing sales and how that’s changed into this thing called inbound marketing which, people today are now creating a lot more content to be found and to build that trustworthiness with the consumers, because we can agree that consumers have also changed the way that they buy today.
There’s a lot of due diligence in the process now of buying a product or service beforehand. And people like to now go onto, Google or Yahoo or something to look up the person’s name or the company’s name, and look at reviews that there’s different types of checklists that we all do now naturally, before you buy something.
The idea of Impact Annex came about. It’s time that we normally understand that this is where things are going, but it’s also a shift in mindset. I went to business school, I’ve been a business owner. I worked in different businesses and it’s really the same thing where it’s pitch your product, pitch, your idea pitch sell push.
And then it becomes a knowing at some points and people would like to be pushed. And so I’m on a mission to impact 1 billion people out there. And with the message of you should give before you receive. And I’m sure some of us have heard that before from, our grandfather or grandmother or charger committee members overall.
And it’s true. If you get. First before you receive great things, come out of that. And that’s what impact is all about. It’s about giving free receiving, and I showed that mindset shift and I use different tools to help people thrive and be a thought leader and stand out. So going straight to the point, what is Impact Annex?
Is basically we in an organization. That helps organizations create a philanthropic arm to their business or to the organization. Now, does that mean basically let’s take a for-profit organization, for example. I would come speak to the owner and be like, Hey, what do you care about? What kind of causes that you really that’s close to you?
It can be the red cross. It can be, saving animals, saving children, you name it. What’s that special thing that’s close to your heart. And typically they’ll tell me what that is. And if they don’t know what that is, I can tell them, what have you ever thought about giving back to community by just teaching people?
or what you do for your for-profit. So rather than pitching and selling your service and products, why not teach people about your products and services and how you help people and what are the pain points that you’re trying to solve and become look and be like, huh? That’s a different angle.
What is, and so once we come down to, all right, so this is what we’re going to do. This is the cause that you’re going to focus on. I file and register a nonprofit. On their behalf, it can be in the U S or it can be in Canada. And once we have a nonprofit set up and once we have the. Targeted or, all set with agreed upon.
I tend to focus on a particular grant that many people don’t know about Brent, and that is that there’s the Google nonprofit program grant and Google provides nonprofits with $120,000 with Google ads. Every single year for a lifetime, which is remarkable. Number two, I found out that Google only works with one partner.
In this to validate nonprofits and their contexts when they’re a global organization. And if you don’t do that application well or correctly, you can get denied and you can no longer apply to Google which is unfortunate. And then number three is Google does, is they don’t provide good support on this.
I Their website is nice and shiny with testimonials and everything else. They tell the steps on how to do this, but it’s harder than you think it is. And all they have to offer is heavy documentation. I don’t know why, but that’s what it is. And we all know that this many people have lost many people out there who are not technical to understand these documentations.
So that’s where we come in as well. You can do it yourself or you can have us help you do this whole process. We have a hybrid model, which is a done for you. And you do it yourself as well. So we teach you there’s a video series and you can submit information to us. We can take a look at it and we’ll give it back to you to submit.
And you have weekly support from us and support is live on Facebook. And also we give you best practices that do’s and don’ts so they won’t interrupt your grants. And also how to scale up and optimize your ads. It can be found on Google and on the front page. Now for a for-profit you may be asking, oh, thanks.
So how does that benefit me? I By doing that, okay. I have a nonprofit now, what we’re going to as grants. The several things you can do you can test ads. $10,000 per month to test ads is enough money to make you dangerous. What does that mean, basically? You can test different markets, different age groups, races languages.
countries, nationwide different states. You name it. You can test different things out and whatever works. Take that and optimize and skill up right now. How do you make those, both those non-profit for-profit work together, right? I’m sure that’s one of the things you guys are thinking about right now, it’s basically when you have your nonprofit.
So for profit, for example, is Joe’s plumbing, right? We create this academy called Joe’s academy for plumbers and what Joe’s gonna do. On his nonprofit, he’s going to create courses. It can be webinars presentations, just teaching people about plumbing, overall plumbing.
One-on-one. And what’s great about it is that when people find you online on a nonprofit, they’re going to one have access to your content to learn for free. And in exchange, you’re going to have a. Some sort of contact form or some sort of a form that says, give me your first name, last name, email, and we’ll give you access to our content.
Great. As you grow that mailing list you can follow up and be like, Hey Brent. So I saw that you downloaded my my workshop on plumbing 1 0 1. I hope you loved it. If you need any information, let me know. Or if you’re interested in a partnership or a addition to help, here’s my website, Joe plumbing.com.
Happy to support. Great right. Ciao. And what happens is, I We go on YouTube. We go to school, you name it wherever we get educated naturally would tend to have a respect for that person. That’s teaching us something. We see them as my meastro, or professor or someone that’s just of high authority.
That’s teaching us and we’re learning from them. And somehow like to partner up with them where we trust them. And that’s what’s happening in the backend is that you’re building your brands. You’re building your trustworthiness. You’re doing good will you’re doing great for your community. You becoming a thought leader in your space, you stick out from your competitor
and people naturally want to work with you because you have that. Non-profit where you giving first. So that’s really the strategy behind it. Is your for-profit does this, your nonprofit does this and they both support each other. Now that’s just for profit, for nonprofits that are existing, you’re already halfway.
Which is we just help you apply for the grants and help you understand Google ads and how to optimize it so you can promote your mission, help fundraising and basically get out there worldwide. So that’s what we do at Impact Annex.
I’m part of entrepreneurs organization. It’s a global network of entrepreneurs. There’s chapters in every city. There’s one in Boston. There’s one here in Minneapolis. We are using this grant. It is a non, it is five, I don’t know, five or something. Whatever’s and as a pure non-profit, there is no there’s no for-profit arm of EO.
It is effective on getting our goal is to get membership in our own local chapter. So I think what I hear you saying is that you provide the help for somebody that’s either already registered. Backing up, you would provide help. If somebody wants to create a nonprofit to helping them navigate some of those waters and creating it as that correct?
Yeah, we do all the fun administration on your behalf, in the U S or in Canada. Okay.
Get you all set up and running. Perfect. I think the exciting part is, and a lot of people don’t know about this Google grant, this nonprofit grant for ads is that once you become that, that nonprofit you are eligible to apply for the grant and start.
Using the Google ad network for that. And I can say here we rarely ever even use up our $10,000 a month. It’s a lot of ads to run for for entrepreneurs for trying to get people to join an entrepreneurs organization. But I think you’re also right. It does give them an opportunity for people to test some of these things.
Even as a nonprofit to learn to navigate how Google works. I did do that Joe’s plumbing thing. And I went through all those, and then my wife said, no, just I’m hiring a plumber because there was water everywhere. I never, it never worked for me, but I know a lot of people are going to be able to do the DIY plumbing thing.
So maybe walk us through how you would take an existing nonprofit and help them with the Google part of it, or just getting them on to the ad network.
Basically I actually had a workshop that we conducted three weeks ago for no 40 non-profits. It was great because I got to really understand what are the common pain points for these 40 nonprofits and a large majority of it was technical skills.
They were, non-profits already up and running and again, they also didn’t know about this Google nonprofit program even existed. Not only that, we walked through the steps and how to get this Google grant. And like I mentioned earlier, one of the things that’s getting through tech soup and once you get to tech soup, they give you this token that allows you to apply for this for the Google grant.
Now what some people could also miss out. Tech soup, they partner up with a lot of other large organizations, similar to Google, like Microsoft as well. And I’m on a tech suit website. They actually have a page for partners where you can look up all the partners that they work with, including Google.
And with this token that they give you only for 60 days to apply, you can use this token, to not only apply for Google, but all these other organizations, somebody give you free computers, they give you discounts and support and all sort of supplies that can be helpful for your nonprofit organization. We were short showcasing them that page of partners.
So they take advantage of that opportunities as well to support them. And then number two, it was understanding how Google non-profit program works overall because you’d be surprised how many people get the grant. And then two months later their account gets suspended or canceled because they didn’t know how to use it properly.
Like I mentioned, Google, they provide heavy documentation, but then to give you all the answers, they don’t give you a best practices and do’s, and don’ts that much. So we teach them not to enter a debit or credit card on the backend because that will interrupt the. We also show them the website policy that Google expects before they give you the grants.
Google has their expectations, making sure that it’s mobile friendly, making sure there’s no commercial activity or language on the website and a few other points there. That one has to go along that line. So we teach them to make, to make sure you go through that policy very well. And also we start teaching about.
Google ads can be very complicated for some folks, if you’re not really tech savvy. So we, create these videos to show them step-by-step how to use it. What each certain things mean, buttons, wordings what are keywords, so help them with the, define their keywords and also how to.
Use pixels to to track everything. Because if you know how to use a pixels and conversions, stuff like that, you’re able to cut track on all on your other social media platforms, how things work and attract the right people. Not just only on. So we do share best practices, so they don’t have to go through the headaches and they can get fast results less than 90 days and how to optimize their their ads.
Number four, we like to set up automation. We tend to use Zapier to do a automation things to make things easier for people. It can mean, Lee comes in, goes to your CRM and then it sets up a booking on Calendly. So all these automation things to make them much more efficient because sometimes if we don’t know about automation, we tend to hire more people and they can do those sort of roles.
Now there’s software that can allow us to scale up and do these sort of things. So we’d have to. Fund raise more money to find an additional marketing person. We like to save people money safe. People’s in terms of. And help them scale up and get to their goals a lot faster.
So that’s what we do for an existing nonprofit.
I know that one thing in your bio, you said that you help serve underserved communities. You help with underserved communities. Maybe tell us about how you’re helping in that. And maybe why those underserved communities don’t have the kind of access that.
You’re a fortune 500 company that wants to do a non-profit would have,
yeah. Happy to do that. So actually have a nonprofit here in the U S and a it’s called E S G housing Inc. Stands for environmental social governance. And our mission is pretty simple as to provide access to affordable housing
for low-income families and seniors. Now why is that important to me? Because I grew up in the projects. You could say, that’s the word we use it’s projects and I’m in Lawrence, Massachusetts. And I remember not having a lot of access to resources or education. I it was just me my family I, all I did was just, live there play game with the kids, really nothing else. I didn’t see any sort of, a lot of programs. Maybe I was too young. I don’t know. But what I do remember is, as I grown all these years and, diving into real estate and I’m still around these communities. And I have friends who live in these communities and they still give me their feedback and how things work.
People feel like they are, that the government is not working for them. And they show me around, so I created this this nonprofit, not because I’m also. But I’ve been in their shoes. I have friends who are in these projects. I have people who can’t find apartments I have on people who yes, they can find apartments, but also the too expensive.
And within my experience I’ve learned a lot about technology. I learned a lot about robotics 3d printing. And what I’m hoping to do with this nonprofit is to build a lot of affordable homes with a lot of green technologies and materials. That includes plastics instead of concrete and, create homes
under three months under six months, these are, that are very it’s going to change the game. I call it, the future of technology or future of construction. But it’s basically being able to build homes in a faster pace. Building homes that are safe building homes that have resources that needs access to education, access to programs nationwide.
So I’m gonna pause it, creating different partnerships to make that possible. So I’m serving those communities that are distressed and underserved, just how I grew up. Cause I know how it feels and I think today in America, there’s still a lot of opportunities, a lot of fems, other need, and a lot of communities that are still distressed.
And for those folks that are not in real estate these are called are call qualified opportunity zones, which are zones that need to be developed that the town or city they incentivize you to build schools shopping places, affordable homes, et cetera. And it also incentivizes the investors as well.
So overall that’s how I’m serving, serve communities. I grew up in and in other states is by creating affordable housing with these green technologies.
That’s great. Yeah. And I think if anybody has traveled to other parts of the world and I’ll point out Venezuela as particular, that there are areas in south America where there’s different levels of economy and emergence.
I traveled to Bolivia quite a bit, and I know that their economy is completely different than Mexico or even Dominican Republic. So the closer you get to the U S things get a little bit better, but I think we as Americans we get notified or you don’t understand what the rest of the world lives and how they live and how lucky we are.
And then how many resources we have to help our fellow brothers and sisters to lift up and and move up. So I applaud you in that.
Thank you Brent, that’s one thing that I am very appreciative of is I’ve been able to live in the Dominican Republic, live in Mexico, travel often to Columbia been in Venezuela.
And I’ve learned that there’s more to life than what we think and the different perspective that I’ve been through. And I seen, and I understand what hard work is. And I’m thankful that I grew up in, in my environment with my family, pretty humble. My wife is from Colombia from a third world and I’m humbled and blessed that I’ve had these experiences because it has made me who I am today.
Using Google Yahoo, just promoting things online. Practicing inbound marketing as well. So I think that a lot of potential to do good and to impact many people out there in many businesses.
Kept me humble for sure. And blessed to have what I have today and being, raised here as an American, but it has opened up my perspective on the opportunities and where the need is and where we can provide help. ESG Housing Inc and Impact Annex. It’s just the beginning. I’m planting my seeds here in America to boot case studies to create some sort of long-term game here.
But my long-term goal is to expand to these countries that I visited, because I’ve seen that, they’re still countries out there that still do business face to face. They use radio ads, newspaper ads, they do WhatsApp promotions right on his communication apps. And. They’re all transforming into the digital world as well.
So they’re all beginning to, create online websites that creating inbound marketing techniques offers, right? They’re transforming this digital age and all this it’s going to be helpful for them, especially the Impact Annex $10,000 here for us is about 30, 40 million pesos in Colombia
and that can make a big impact for any business down there to be found on Google. Just think about, back when we got internet and we started having AOL and Google, anyone who knew the. Dot com era and was able to be on a first page of anything or just have a page. I You’re a thriving, I you’re ahead of the curve.
So that opportunity still occurs for other countries. And we’re about to provide that opportunity with this Google ad grants. So the hopes in the long-term goal is to expand to other countries and create more JV opportunities. And on the ESG housing, Don’t get me wrong. I already have people in Peru who want have 500 single homes to be built with these 3d printer machines.
So there’s the demand is growing there’s education. That’s still happening evolving. But I’d love to see how we can do more international work as we get. I’m trying to get my feet wet here in the us first, but the vision, the long-term goal, the feature, it’s going to be a beautiful thing. We’re gonna help a lot of people.
And I think achieving a goal of impacting 1 billion lives is a reality, and I can’t do it alone. I can only do it with everyone who has similar vision, who feels that energy through this podcast. And hopefully that we can connect at, in this podcast to make that dream into reality.
And that’s great. So we have a couple of minutes left, so maybe tell, help people understand how they could get ahold of you.
What are the right people that that you’d like to talk to. And and
yeah. Happy, thanks so much, Brent. For those listening, if you have an interest to learn more about Impact Annex if anyone has to look you up on Google, then you’re a great fit for us because this grant is for anyone that’s a, that can be found on Google.
So that can be a for-profit or non-profit, we’re happy to help you out. Just visit our website at www.ImpactAnnex.org that’s spelled ANNEX and browse around and any contact form you, you find there will lead up to me. We’ll have a half hour conversation. Just learn more about your current situation and and for those folks that are interested in learning more about ESG housing, Inc.
We have a website www dot ESG, housing.org, and we’re looking to, of course, any donners like the fund lights donate, happy to have you part of the family. And in terms of partners we’re looking for partnerships for developers, landlords former mayors or governors anyone that’s involved in QLZ which has qualified opportunity zones and any volunteers or potential community members like to join our team.
That’ll be phenomenal because then we can scale up very rapidly. We’d love to have people in different states because your, your town and city of situation more than I do. And we’re looking to scale up that way, where you can be an ambassador for ESG house Inc for your committee.
And you tell us, what’s happening what’s needs and let’s start building and helping your community and friends and family. Cause that’s what really it comes down to is making a win-win for everyone. Keep growing together. So that’s my my message to everyone today. And I, again, I appreciate Brent and everyone for listening today and let’s build up America together.
I’ll put all the, I’ll put the links in the show notes so people can find those grade Reynoldo at the end of every podcast, I give you an opportunity to do a shameless plug go ahead and plug whatever you’d like to.
Sure. I thank you so much, Brent, for the opportunity.
I guess my plug is Come to support ESG housing, Inc. I think that’s a big priority right now for many people is to find affordable homes. We’re all seeing prices are jacking up everywhere and it’s hurting. I had a friend last night, came over saying my budget is only $1,600. I can’t find a place I have to move up at the 14th, and it really hurts me that I really.
If I had, a few buildings, but dude, I’ll plug into this unit. Don’t worry about it. I’ll cover the first two months. Give yourself, on your feet, happy to help you out, bro. No worry about And that’s the organization that, or the community I’m trying to build here is.
Let us be your plan B or your plan A regardless we have your back. Which one thing I forgot to mention Brent, is we’re looking to within this model is to create an emergency fund so that every building that we create for families they’re all going to work interconnected. So all that cash.
Goes among all these buildings. So that let’s say the epidemic will happen again. Basically, and he can’t pay rent. We’ll take money from that fund to pay your rents until you’re back on your feet. That also includes providing little to free internet in terms of it can be a low cost or it can be free internet, but we’re looking to pay people’s bills when it comes to internet, because we want might not be the issue here.
We want you to have access to these resources and There is
right.
So it’s I think people make it over complicated. I think many people sometimes it can be ego. It can be just about money, but I’m trying to take away all those roadblocks and just really help people leave. Both all the way and start doing start executing.
Because I think we have a power to do great things here if we put our minds to it. And if you work together, so that’s my plug a little bit long, but basically supporting us at ESG housing. There you
go. No, that’s fantastic. Thank you so much for being here. And again, I’ll put all the links in the show notes.
Reynoldo Santana the. Yeah, Gusto. Great. Have a great afternoon.
Business owners and entrepreneurs are known for their energy. They focus on their ideas but frequently, that energy is sedentary. Brent interviewed Taren Gesell or better known as Triathlon Taren. Taren went from an Ironman and Youtube sensation to a tech startup with an exciting and disruptive app called MoTTIV. This virtual coaching app helps athletes focus on what they need to focus on while still giving them the flexibility to live their busy lives. Taren is through the beta version and is into his first round of funding. There is a lot to learn and much to unpack in their episode.
Brent: Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. This is the activity edition, and I have Taren Gesell Taren go ahead. Introduce yourself. Tell us what you do in your day-to-day life and maybe one of your passions.
Taren: Thanks for having me here, Brent. Thing that people would best know me for. If they look me up online would be this YouTube channel that I started about seven years ago called triathlon Taren.
Taren: And I started a YouTube channel while I was an investment advisor as my day job, because I just wanted something on the side that was fulfilling and creative. And I thought that if I really knocked it out of the park, maybe I could get some free energy bars at some point in my life. It ended up growing to being now the second largest triathlon YouTube channel in the world, the largest triathlon podcast in the world, we’ve published four books.
Taren: We have expanded into the main thing that we focus on now where I’m the CEO of a. Called the motive training app that helps regular people get to their endurance races. So whether they want to train for triathlons or running races or cycling events, or do Athlons, we have an app that now is hopefully as good as a one-on-one coach, but as cheap as doing it yourself, which has never existed in this world.
Taren: And we want to make getting to those exciting finish lines that endurance sports really are. A little bit more accessible in the world.
Brent: That’s great. Thank you. And I will admit that I found you because I’m a triathlete. I’m a a very poor triathlete I’m free, very poor swimmer. I’m an avid runner.
Brent: And I’m an okay. Biker. I think I saw one of your videos. we did our first to half Ironman last year as a family, my daughter, my wife and I. It was one of the best experiences I had absolutely so much fun and I’ve run a lot of marathons. It took me longer, believe it, or not than a marathon.
Brent: But I had so much fun in the race and even the swim part, I had such a great time. That’s how we found each other. One of the things that, that really stuck out was the fact that you’ve pivoted from. This role of being a coach or what you were doing with your YouTube channel into this app that you’ve built.
Brent: Maybe tell us a little bit about that. Yeah. So
Taren: I recognized that life on YouTube is a little fleeting. You get about 15 minutes of fame and there comes a point where your channel maybe just starts to feel a little stale. Maybe in my case, I’ve said a lot of the same things for seven years. I’m also getting older and a lot of YouTubers find that.
Taren: Their channel lifespan is finite. So I recognize that was happening about four years ago, just in general in the YouTube space. And I didn’t want to go back to having a real job. I wanted to still stay in this industry and think about what could I do that would be lasting as a career, as a business and what was needed in the world.
Taren: And I saw one of the things that people need the most help with is coaching and advice to get to their finish lines. But what I saw was the two options that are out there for people that want to get advice on how to train for an endurance event is either a $200 a month one-on-one coach or a free template training plan.
Taren: Both options suck for most people because the average person doesn’t want to spend two to $3,000 a year or more on a hobby just for coaching, let alone all the biking equipment and the wetsuit, and it just gets to be too expensive. So most people don’t use one-on-one coaching and then template training plans are not motivating.
Taren: They’re not relevant to the user. They’re not customizable. And what happens if you have two races in a row and you’ve got a marathon and a triathlon and the training overlaps, what do you do with those template training plans? And nobody’s ever looked at solving this problem. So we launched a Kickstarter, but three and a half years ago to see if people were interested in something like this app.
Taren: And I sold the Kickstarter campaign, literally just off of a Google spreadsheet that I mocked up to prototype my way into showing what an app could possibly do. And now three and a half years later, we’re finally scaling up. We’re raising our first significant round of investment. And I think that we can build something that
Taren: is comparable to what Duolingo did for language learning. That’s what we want to do for endurance training. We want to make it something that isn’t a real niche sport. We want to make it something that everyone can access because it’s easier to get solid training and more cost-effective to get solid training, which it hasn’t ever been.
Taren: So that’s what we’re working on right now. That’s the future of the business of my YouTube channel. And I’m really just trying to make sure that I prove my mother wrong and continue to play for a living. And the app was the way that, that I could continue to do that while having a good effect in the endurance community.
Brent: I love that story. I know myself personally, I do have a running coach who helps me and holds me accountable. And I do see though that where you can get stuck in a rut, even with a coach. What are some of the pain points that your app has been able to overcome in bridging the gap between a training peaks, 80/20 plan and a one-on-one coach.
Brent: And I’ll say to, mine’s just a running coach and I know that there’s a lot more involved than a triathlon coach.
Taren: That is actually a perfect example of one of the biggest problems. Most users of our app. And frankly, most endurance athletes are like you, they want to bounce between marathons or half marathons and triathlons.
Taren: And the fact of the matter is that most one-on-one coaches are single sport coaches they’re run coaches or triathlon coaches or cycling coaches, and they don’t go across all disciplines. So that’s an issue that we have to solve with our. We partnered with some of the best run cycling, triathlon duathlon, swim, run coaches in the world and created algorithms to make the plans that each of those great coaches put together coordinate with each other.
Taren: So that was one problem that we had to solve a second one is that there are a lot of really great one-on-one coaches out there, but there’s also a lot of really terrible one-on-one coaches out there who charge $200 a month and essentially make a template training plan. And the story that a lot of people resonate with is they might go to their one-on-one coach, wake up in the morning and go, Hey, Carl, I feel really bad.
Taren: What should I do today? And Carl, the coach goes this is part of training, continue on. And he’d go I really feel bad. There are going to be low moments in training, continue on, and really what’s happening is the coach doesn’t know what’s going on in your body. And the coach doesn’t want to go through readjusting your plan every single time you have a ache or a nigle or feel a little bit tired, what we can do with technology.
Taren: And now the data that is being collected by things like the Whoop band and the Aura Ring. We can adjust training every single day. If users drink a bottle of wine, we can make their workout the very next morning, easier for them. If they’re trending down and not keeping up with the train and feeling sore, we can detect that and actually get training that is better than a lot of one-on-one coaches and doing the things that really good one-on-one coaches do.
Taren: The ones that will charge three, five, $1,500, but we’re doing it in a way that we can charge 14 to 20 bucks a month. So there were a couple of major problems that we had to solve. And those two are the primary ones that weren’t really being serviced, even by most one-on-one coaches with the current service model.
Brent: I just I’m pretty sure my wife now is signed up for your app because she does drink a bottle of wine with me every night. And that’s probably why she’s getting up in the morning, thinking that she can take it easy and I’m joking. Cause she’s probably going to listen to this. I think from experience, I can say I did go through the coaching training last year with RRCA, the Roadrunners club of America.
Brent: And that was one of the warnings that they give coaches. I know also that coaches either haven’t been through that training can fall into that rut of not listening and especially right now with online and not even actually seeing anybody in person, you end up with somebody that’s in a different city that doesn’t connect with you or never has connected with you.
Brent: From what I’m hearing is that there’s some technology behind that says listening to your body and is there a certain amount of technology that the user has to have to be able to. W like you’d have to have I have a stride pod and I have a power pedals. I’ve all the dumb things that somebody with enough money can buy that doesn’t ever use all that data.
Brent: But what I’m hearing you saying is that some of those things are of value and they add that value and then you can get back and like my Garmin account is a great example. I can go and see what my power was or my FTP was in my bike ride. I have no idea how to use any of that stuff I should because I’m a coach.
Brent: But I don’t know how to use that for myself. So not to get into a bunch of technical details on an e-commerce podcast, but it’s very interesting on how it’s almost like in AI, like in artificial intelligence, helping the users to know, and then the system is learning as it goes for each one.
Taren: That’s a big issue that you’re talking about with the entire industry that we’re collecting heart rate data, we’re collecting power data. We’re collecting HRV data now, resting heart rate data, all of these things and the Garmins, the Whoop, the auras of the world. They all basically just collect the data and then tell you all here’s what it is, but nobody really is interpreting it and saying, here’s what you should be doing. Whoop is a great example. I liked the whoop band, but they say here’s your readiness score. And if your readiness score is in the tank. Great. Okay. What are you doing? Does that mean that you change your workout?
Taren: When does it mean? Like how in the tank does it need to be to change your workout? So that’s what we’re able to do is pair a lot of that data with what you actually should be doing as an endurance athlete on the day. And that’s a big piece that’s been.
Brent: I want to pivot a little bit of just, the, maybe our listeners our business owners who are sitting in there at their desk.
Brent: Maybe talk about you. If you’re not already really into doing some fitness things. The importance of doing something other than just typing on your computer. Do you ever ever get stuck in not going and doing some exercise? Are you a type of person who has to get out and do something in addition to doing your day to day business work?
Brent: No.
Taren: I came from a very unfit upbringing and a very, even add a few more varies, unfit early twenties in my life. Lot of drinking, I was quite overweight, about 215 pounds. And I got rid of a little bit of weight in my mid twenties by going into the gym and throwing some weights around and eating chicken breast and bland rice, the things that young kids do when they think that they’re bodybuilders.
Taren: But there were a couple of things about it that were never quite right. And I think are very meaningful to the average person, whether they’re a business owner or really just anyone who wants a little bit more from life, that feeling that you talked about when you stepped up to a start line of a triathlon being different than stepping up to the start of a race, I think
Taren: running races, really fulfilling that feeling of little bit of fear of not knowing if you’re going to be able to accomplish the task ahead of you being a triathlon or a long running race or a marathon swim or something like that. (A), it gives you a lot of structure and motivation to be healthy. And (B) it gives you a lot of fulfillment.
Taren: When you complete that task, it’s like selling a business or achieving a huge milestone in the business. It’s going through a process of seeing what you are capable of doing. And being able to do it and astounding yourself. And in my case, it made me more confident. It allowed me to start this business.
Taren: It allowed me to have the confidence to put myself out there on YouTube and put my thoughts out there in the world. So it’s less to me about, alright. Do you age? Because so many people talk about that, but I think the unsung hero in endurance sports. Is the confidence and fulfillment and structure that you get from that little bit of fear of knowing that you have to step up to the start line of a race and not know if you’re going to be able to finish it.
Taren: And frankly, the things that are going on inside your head at the start of the race, are am I going to come out of this alive? Yes, the answer is for sure, you will but it’s exciting. And we don’t really get that excitement in this day and age anywhere we can get it in endurance sports.
Brent: Yeah. And maybe not so much excitement from a marathon.
Brent: Although if you’re in a the excitement going into a triathlon because you, even if like I’m from Minnesota, so Northern Minnesota, there’s some races and in the summer, those lakes. Dark sometimes and it’s gets, it gets imposing when you’re going across a white cap to lake and you’d have to go out a mile and come back or something.
Brent: So the structure that you said is what I really want to key in on, because I think most entrepreneurs or business owners have to have some kind of structure or they just wing it. And the ones that wing it are unbelievably lucky to make it. And when they do make it, they have to put some structure into it.
Brent: So I think that by doing some of these things to get fit, and let’s just say, all you want to do as a couch to 5k. That structure you’re putting into place. And that goal you’re setting to get there is going to be (a) fulfilling and then the fulfilling the next piece of that fulfillment is that most likely you’re going to be a little bit more fit at the end of that goal.
Taren: And you’re going to change how you feel about yourself. I use the example that I’ve just recently come across, while we’re doing fundraising as opposed to going the traditional venture capital route. We are going to individuals. And we could talk about another time about why we’re doing that, but I’m looking for individuals who are endurance athletes and could write a decent sized check. And I started thinking, how do I actually go about finding these people? I say, can I just search for them? So in quotes, I have triathlete in quotes and then LinkedIn, and then president in quotes. And sure enough, the amount of people that have triathlete or ultra runner or ultra marathoner in their LinkedIn bio is enormous.
Taren: That doesn’t happen with golf. Maybe with CrossFit, but there are very few things in this world that become a part of who you are and that people want to celebrate and display to the world in the same way that endurance sports gets displayed an advertised. And I think that’s because it is such an impactful thing in people’s lives.
Taren: So yes, again, all of the good health is great, but the confidence, the fulfillment, the structure of having a reason to be healthy it’s all so powerful. And I want more people to be able to experience that sort of power of changing and improving one’s life.
Brent: I think that fear part is another one that’s always a fear in a good way. The fear of trying something new and the fear of failing and even the acceptance of, Hey I’m going to go out and do this swim, let’s just say, you’re going to sign up for a 5k swim. And if I don’t make it, there’s going to be a boat there to pick me up.
Brent: If the weather gets big and I know there’s a swim, like the Point to LaPoint is one I want to do it’s from Madeleine island to to wherever across Lake Superior, two miles, and last year they had three foot waves. So a lot of people had to dropout, but just the idea of doing it and stepping in and making that extra effort to put yourself out of what your comfort zone is.
Brent: I think makes you a better entrepreneur because in your entrepreneurial life, in order to grow, you can’t be stagnant and always doing the same thing. And I believe there’s such a tie-in from being active in your physical life to being active in your mental life, to being active in your business life.
Brent: They all tie together and I think you’re right. And I’m going to say something that would probably get a lot of people upset. I don’t like CrossFit. I don’t see the big point in CrossFit. You’re standing in a place. And then you might do a hundred yard run. I run past a CrossFit gym and I see them sprint out and they come back and they sprint back and maybe I’ll run five miles down the trail and come back and they’re still sprinting out and whatever.
Brent: But the the idea of that identity and then the idea of of being able to put yourself into somewhere that you’re uncomfortable. And maybe the, one of the differences too, from the gym to an ultra race is that you’re putting yourself into somewhere uncomfortable for a really long time.
Brent: So your half Ironman is more like three hours. Mine is more like six, but that’s, you’re still out on the course a long time.
Taren: But
Brent: close, you could be. Who’s the guy that just got the world record. He did his full Ironman in less than seven hours. Yeah.
Taren: Yeah. Blumenfeld they’re in 7:21 crazy.
Brent: Only the Norwegian can do such things. Exactly so I can see the tie in, I’m a big proponent of keeping people active and my business life has been around having some balance between that. So maybe if you could bring us back to your app, then you’ve transitioned from your YouTube into this app, and now you’re trying to raise capital, that’s where you’re at in your business. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about, are you in a beta? where are you on your app now?
Taren: So we launched three years ago, a little bit over three years ago and it was in beta for about a year and a half. The beta was public, and because I was still doing the YouTube channel and have this nice big audience.
Taren: We were always able to drive a certain amount of users to it, enough users that we could start getting data and collecting user feedback on where we needed to go with the app. And then a year and a half ago, we rebrand. We rebuilt the entire app, a completely new architecture, completely new programming language so that we could scale the app because we had grabbed enough, got enough data from our users to have an actual business thesis of what would scale up, what are users looking for? Things as simple as like you mentioned AI, we started doing a lot of market testing of what do athletes think when they hear that their plans are generated by machine learning or artificial intelligence.
Taren: It’s actually a detriment. So learning things like that is important that isn’t to say that we won’t use AI. It just means that we don’t lead with it and our marketing. So learning all the things like that, about what increases engagement, what is a good price to come in at? What is a way to make people feel that the app is working and that they actually develop confidence so that by the time they get to the race,
Taren: they’re confident that they’re going to be able to get across that finish line. So we’ve been gathering all of that for three years and we bootstrapped all, but us small little friends and family round that we raised at the beginning of last year, but now it’s time to start unrolling some of the features that we think are fairly groundbreaking in the industry, and we don’t want to do those
Taren: slowly, we don’t want to do those in a bootstrap fashion and basically announced to the world what the playbook is. We want to be able to come out, grab market share, because we’ve probably got about a 24 to 36 month window before competitors catch onto what we’re doing. And we want to use that to aggressively launch the feature set that we want to create and capture market share quickly.
Taren: So that’s where we’re at right now.
Brent: Are you seeing a community as an important part of the experience from the user? And I say it from, I used to use an app called the daily mile. It was something that was super popular 10 years ago. They just really put no money into their app and it just ended up fizzling out.
Brent: But the best part of that is that it created a community. And it was more about how your posts look. And I do remember my wife complaining like, oh, you’re going to go do your post about your run, because it was a social thing. And because you had people actually cared about what you’re doing, it turned into less
Brent: Facebook, Hey, look at the marathon I did to here’s the marathon I did, or here’s my run and here’s the struggles I had, or here’s the exciting part about what I had. And it was a commonality in that community that you don’t get on Strava. Strava, you can give somebody a kudos or you say, Hey, great run but for whatever reason, there’s a piece that you miss in the social part of it. That’s between coaching and between support and it’s about your own people or your group of people that are supporting you in your activity.
Taren: So it’s interesting that you say that we launched on day one with a social media feed. And my core belief was that training for yourself and solely for yourself, wasn’t as fulfilling as training for yourself but with other people, that human element is something that is so hardwired into us, whether it is seeing success in other people and being motivated by it,
Taren: or achieving success in yourself and getting those kudos or the accolades from achieving something that you never achieved before, is really important. And I look at an app like Zwift, so people don’t know Zwift is a training app where you hook your bike up to a smart trainer. And the smart trainer communicates with the app and you cycle inside this virtual world alongside other people now had Zwift launched and you biked around this virtual world by yourself.
Taren: It would be marginally better than staring at a wall or watching Netflix while you’re on your bike. But not immensely better, but the experience that Zwift launched with was you cycle inside this virtual world. And so is everyone else. So when people pass you, you have an encouragement to go a little bit faster and you can enter a race and there’s people all around you.
Taren: You get ride ons from everyone that is riding around you. There are achievements and badges that you can go and collect. The other people get to see how far along you’ve come. And then all of a sudden it’s immensely better than just training by yourself, staring at a wall. So our competitors and where the industry of online endurance training has gone is really just creating that virtual world where people are training by themselves.
Taren: The problem that they’re all trying to solve is how do we automate training? I can tell you we’ve already solved, automated training. And it isn’t enough to change people’s habits. So our entire scale up thesis is we’ve already automated training. We’ve figured out all of that logic and that programming language to be able to make that happen.
Taren: But how do we actually make it such that all of the users have this community experience? They get some of those good things from CrossFit or from a in-person training club. That sense of community is really what keeps people around and keeps people very motivated to continue to come back. So it is the entire thesis of our business, that community aspect of it, without that we’ve just got empty training that people are doing solo and suffering by themselves.
Brent: How. So just I apologize. I should have used the app before I came to the interview. I apologize for that. How I’m not if you’ve sparked my interest. I’ll give you an example, right? So I’ve been injured and I haven’t been running for about a week. And so I’ve switched to biking.
Brent: And so my coach has a running coach. So now she’s given me some biking workouts that I actually, I find quite fun. But because I’m on and I’m on Rouvi, which is just like Zwift, but you get to play. Can I get the bike in Hawaii all the time now? So w what happens to me is. I see that person, then I’m like, I can bike as hard as that person.
Brent: And then I, my easy days, I find myself biking way harder than I should. So if I get I’ve told I bike between a hundred and 150 Watts or whatever, I’m at 200 or 250 or some stupid number that, and I’m no that, I know these are very small numbers for you, but That I’m overdoing myself. And then, I don’t get a lot of feedback after that.
Brent: So would the, would like your app would give you an opportunity to say, Hey, ease back or
Taren: yeah, our app will give people not any sort of strict guidance where people will be. Say penalized for not following the app to the letter. I think that people need enjoyment. They need to be able to have some free play time, essentially where they can go.
Taren: And if a workout says 60 minutes, but they’re feeling great and want to go for 90 cool where we will start giving people guidance is when they start going off the training plan too many times, be it in the intensity or in the duration or in what they’re actually doing in the workout. We will have indications of you might be less likely to reach your goal. So we will give that guidance of being able to do that. And it will not necessarily motivate people to only follow the plan, which I don’t really believe is reasonable. It’ll give people motivation and guidance to maybe not just fall too far outside the rails.
Taren: And have a bad race day. As long as they’re keeping a hard ride, hard, an easy ride, relatively easy most of the time, strength days are still strength. Days. Rest days are still rest days. People are going to still reach their goals. And we want to give that latitude while we’re giving the a hundred percent guidance, but give them the ability to
Taren: make smart choices make adult choices. If you want to go and turn a 60 minute easy ride into a 60 minute easy ride with 15 minutes, really hard at the end, we’ll tell you if that is becoming detrimental.
Brent: Yeah. So at the macro level, rather than trying to micromanage the individual workouts, it sounds like what you’re saying, which is, I think that’s a great approach to how you’re doing that.
Brent: And as we tied this back to business, Often entrepreneurs tend to get stuck in the details of a thing and they can’t see the bigger picture. So as we bring this full circle, tying it back into a business standpoint, or even in your app standpoint, if you were to focus on some small bits of code and you’re missing that picture of community or something like that, you’re missing the big picture.
Brent: You’re going to miss out on what your goal is going to be.
Taren: Yeah, exactly. Whether it is training or what we’re building say with our analytics dashboard. I like what you’re talking about, that we’re looking at large, big indicators of the health of an individual or the health of your business, as opposed to fussing about all of the very, very small minute details.
Taren: I think the small minute details are things that you do need to work on. We’re obsessing right now about the time that it takes people to get through our signup flow. But the reason that we started looking at that was because we started looking at larger numbers, is our churn too large for our.
Taren: For the amount of people that we’re bringing in. And if the answer is yes. Okay. Where are the leaky buckets? Yeah, as opposed to getting stuck in the weeds of every single detail, just focusing on the big picture numbers, which then led us and me in fitness and in business to starting to narrow down what weeds we look at after looking at the big picture.
Brent: Not to keep harping on it, but that idea of having those metrics in place and measuring it and remeasuring it and testing it. It’s exactly the same across both business and exercising and training for an event. If you don’t measure something you’ve done, you’re not going to know if you’ve achieved that goal.
Brent: That’s obvious in a running race, but in business sometimes. And I’ll take marketing as an example. A lot of times people just think marketing is marketing and I going to put some social media posts up and I’m going to do a post on LinkedIn and that’s my marketing and whatever happens there.
Brent: I’ll spend $5,000 on Google ads and we’ll see what happens. I don’t know. And then they don’t look and see how well they performed. So I think to tile this back even the idea of looking back at your your workouts to see how well you performed, it’s always good to to have a measurement or a commonality in that measurement.
Brent: The motivation is like the Google analytics. Could I say of of the running triathlete world and that those analytics are telling you certain things about your fitness and your training. That’s bold step.
Taren: Maybe I thought about it that way, but as you were saying, that one thing that came to mind was a big thing that we believe in with our method of endurance training is taking care of the entire body, looking at
Taren: every system, as important as all of other, the other systems that isn’t the case with most sports that people do, whether it’s CrossFit and focusing basically entirely on strength and explosive power or yoga focusing exclusively on nothing but being flexible or running and cycling, focusing on being aerobically fit, most sports tend to leave out the rest of every other system.
Taren: What we like to do is look at the digestive system, the musculoskeletal system with strength, training, the heart and the lungs, the cardiovascular system with the aerobic training. And how do we get a training app and a training philosophy to address all of those together because they all do need to work together.
Taren: If you don’t have a healthy heart and lungs, but you’re super strong. Hey, you might be able to run really fast to the end of the block, but you’re not going to be able to run any further than that. Vice versa for people who are really aerobically fit, but not very strong. I look at marketing as exactly the same thing that it’s not enough just to buy some Google ads.
Taren: You have to buy Google ads and then retarget people on Facebook. You have to not just have Google ads, but then you also have to have content. So content marketing, when people come to your website, if they don’t sign up. If people end up maybe signing up for the app, then you have to start thinking about how good is the onboarding flow that the entire system of marketing and of business has to be looked at as a whole, in the same way
Taren: that the body has to be looked at as an entire system. And if you’re just focusing on one thing, I don’t think you’re really going to get great results in fitness or business. It’s got to be looked at as this entire cohesive system.
Brent: That’s great. Yeah. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Brent: So we have a couple minutes left. At the end of the podcast, I give everybody an opportunity to do a shameless plug, but anything you’d like to plug today and go ahead and plug whatever you like.
Taren: The app would be the biggest thing. And I’m not saying that endurance sports is the key to everyone’s happiness, but if people feel a bit of a sense of unfulfillment and want to challenge themselves physically, I can’t think of a better place to do it,
Taren: but in endurance sports, because it is so fulfilling. It’s so rewarding. When you have a well-designed endurance sports training plan it does address your heart health, your lung health, your strength health, your mental health, your emotional health your digestive health. All of those things should be addressed in a really well designed training plan.
Taren: And when you cross that finish line, you’re going to be really happy that you challenged yourself. So I think we have one of the best offerings of any endurance sports app in the world right now. And it’s only getting better. This is the year that we’ve been building up towards over the last three years.
Taren: So I’m really excited for everyone that’s on the app. And if people sign up over the next couple of months, they’re going to see a lot of things that start getting rolled out with all of our features over this year.
Brent: Yeah. And I would just add on that. Now as races start opening up and the world starts getting back to normal, this is a great time to train for a race, to sign up for a race, to do a race and apps like yours, help people to track and build those habits that then turn into
Brent: something that is part of your lifestyle. And I think there’s always a joke about, how do you know if somebody is a marathon runner? They’ll tell you. How many marathons, how do you know how many they’ll tell you? So you just, like you said, in the LinkedIn example, it’s part of their persona.
Brent: I’ll have to look at my LinkedIn. I don’t know if I say I definitely my Twitter. I tell you how many marathons I’ve run. I’ve run five majors. I only have one left, which is Tokyo 2023. They’ll tell you what those are. This is a great way to get into those habits and build healthy habits.
Brent: My dad is 83. He ran until he was 75. She still tracks his miles walking. He’s his goal is 700 miles a year walking this still. It. It is well documented that being active is better than being sedative and as much as much fun at it as is sitting on the couch, watching Netflix, drinking beer, and eating Cheetos it is equally as fun and free in some people’s minds, either, biking for 56 miles or 112 miles, and then running a marathon.
Brent: And by the way, before, I’m starting that I’m going to swim for a two miles. Yeah. A little warmup. So you know that there’s an equal amount of like in both of those, for the type of people. Some of those behaviors are learned behaviors and you don’t have to do a marathon. You can do 5ks. And there’s an incredibly amount of fulfillment in doing a sprint triathlon.
Brent: And my whole family is into sprint triathlons and it’s now turned into a family thing that we do together. I’m just going to go back to having that place to track those habits is so important because you know how well you’ve done.
Taren: Then having a community of other people who are also going towards similar goals, the community is very important that without a community around you, to support you, things are going to be really hard without a community around you to celebrate your wins. Things are also going to be really hard, the community aspect of things, sharing in other people’s successes and other people sharing in yours, it makes it so much more fulfilling that’s when you start getting the people that have triathlete in their LinkedIn bio, because it becomes part of their identity.
Taren: And it’s not to say they can’t ever have beers or pizza or Cheetos or whatever it is, but you can offset that a little bit by doing something for 60 minutes in the morning, challenge yourself and feel really good for the rest of the day and really proud of what you did every single day and string a few days like that together
Taren: and you’re going to be able to step up to a start line that you never expected you to be able to do.
Brent: Terran Gesell. I thank you so much for being here today. I will put the links to your app in the show notes so people can go there and sign up. And I look forward to someday participating in a race with you, maybe the half Ironman in Kona.
Brent: Yeah, what’s ed life is
Taren: getting back to normal. We gotta start thinking about that again. This is awesome.
Youth don’t stop playing sports because they lose a game, they stop because they have a bad experience while playing. We interview Tim Williams about his journey as an entrepreneur, his company, and his approach to youth sport.
Tim is the Founder and CEO at T.WILL Sports, a dynamic sports company that delivers a variety of youth, recreational, and competitive sports services. He focuses on youth sports and takes pride in the ability to educate through sports and the experiences that come with sports.
Tim is also a motivational Speaker at T.WILL Sports with a goal to help parents and coaches to inspire greatness within youth.
T.WILL Sports focuses on youth sports and takes pride in the ability to educate through sports and the experiences that come with sports.
With so much technological disruption, it is important to stay relevant and I can think of no better way than merging, acquiring, or being acquired. However, these transactions fail because critical deal processes such as diligence and integration, are being poorly conducted without proven success techniques.
We interview Kison Patel, CEO, and Founder of M&A Science. As a former M&A advisor, he has seen these challenges first hand and set out to develop tools and techniques that address industry failings and enable M&A practitioners to drive growth and maximize value.
Transcript
All right. Welcome to this episode of talk commerce. Today we have Keyson Patel Keyson is the CEO and founder of M and a science. Keyson tells us a little bit about what you do from a day-to-day standpoint and maybe one of your passions in life. Hey, thanks, Brent pleasure. To have this conversation with.
W as CEO of MNA science, we run a business. That’s pretty much all things. I’m an a, we provide education, training, resources, frameworks, and also software products to help manage them in a process and make it smooth as you can. It tends to be complicated when you have hundreds, if not thousands of people that are going through one of the largest magnitudes of change management that can possibly happen in the business.
And trying to do that without having them get pissed off and quit their job.
Yeah. And I, in our green room, we did, we talked a little bit about, some of the, some of what I’ve gone through with selling a company and then integrating and still being on board with the leadership. So maybe we could talk about a little bit about what does it mean to merge and what does it mean to acquire, and is it really a difference anymore?
I don’t think there’s such thing. I think there was a thing and there’s some type of a financial vehicle around it. But today now, because I then have the day one management team takes control of the other management team. So it’s essentially is an acquisition one way, how you look at it or another, I feel like the merger part is more of the PR placement, trying to make it cute and friendly to the public.
But Publix wise, they know what M and a is. And I think everybody at this point has this. That it’s a change of control. Yeah. And I think if you think from an accountability standpoint there has to be somebody who is accountable and suddenly you can’t have two parties that are accountable.
You have to have at one at ultimately there has to be one at the end. So when you’re bringing on somebody or you’re talking to somebody about a mergers and acquisition or an acquisition, do you come down through a bullet point list of here. Here’s the things you should be worrying about and here’s there, here’s the things you should be upfront about.
And maybe you could walk there from a high level standpoint, walk us through that process. You can look at it from either side, the buy side or the sell side is probably one of the big dividers of this whole conversation. Then from there you can get a much better sense of what you need to focus on to make things.
I think a lot of the big things, when you think about the buy side is preparation to take a company presented for sale and actually transact on it because it starts off really simple. You need some basic high-level information, but as you go through the process, it intensifies and becomes more complex.
There’s more information that gets reviewed. That’s going to be requested back and forth, more clarification. More people involved, spending time doing their diligence, trying to understand the business what’s represented and make sure it’s accurate. The more you can prepare for that upfront, the best position you’ll be.
That’s one of the most critical things that sometimes gets overlooked and then the rest of the process will be even more taxing as it already will be. I think that’s, if you can work with them like an advisor to do some of that prep work is ideal. I think being creative about it, a lot of people just run into the local investment bank.
You could actually find folks in the industry that’s done that. Maybe there’s like a CFO person that has been involved with a couple M and A’s and the industry. And if you’re going to identify that person, bringing them in as a contract so something sort to help prepare the business, but find that advisor that could really do it.
I think the other part is when you look at how you want to sell a business, right? Do you want to play the long game or do you want to play the short game? Do you have this urgency timeframe? And if you had a really tight team timeframe, say less than six. You probably want to engage investment bank and run more of an auction process so they can go out and run through their network of folks.
They know, and folks they don’t know and reach out to the whole universe of buyers via private equity, family offices, high net worth individuals and institutions corporates, and then be able to go through the funnel and to get this interest down to some options for you to consider. That’s a good way to do it, and it’s tends to lead to the highest price, but sometimes it doesn’t lead to the best buyer or suitor to take that company to the next greater place of growth that person or buyer could potentially be warned off from that whole auction process.
If you win an auction process, you’re not really sure. A lot of the smart savvy buyers, aren’t going to participate in a highly competitive auction process. So if you go back to, if you didn’t have, they’re going to see, and you’re going to play the long-term exit six or six months or greater, then that’s when you want to get to know the buyer’s universe and take your time.
You as CEO of the company and start understanding where corporates are. They have a corporate development function that’s in charge of their MNA activity. Who’s in charge of that. They have a head of corporate development. That’s your job is to be out in the market and knowing the potential acquisition targets and companies like yours.
So you should be on that person’s radar at least have the introduction meeting. So you know, of each other and there’s nothing wrong. I think it’s good to have that conversation. Some of those organisms, same organizations are likely to be really good partners for you. So think about your space, who are those likely acquirers of your business?
Make those introductions build those relationships. It’s just better terms when you have a good relationship with that company that you’re likely to get acquired by. You can know each other, know the cultures of the different organization really spend the time and the consideration on all these things that could go right.
Go wrong. When you’re in this auction process, your timeline’s compressed, especially in this market right now. It’s so crazy. They’re not even getting an exclusive. You have to just be competitive all the way until close that throws all this consideration and smart thinking out the window and you’re buying rationally that’s where I, there’s a lot of value in terms, if you want to put if you want to make sure the transition goes well, that you’re making sure the business goes to the right.
A culture that will fit well together for there to be growth for all the people that took that ride with you to create the value and get the business to where it is today. So I think one, one question I guess I’d have for you would be, I know there’s a difference between the larger deals and the smaller deals.
I’m assuming. The more information that you have not information. The more processes that you have developed in advance is going to help both buyer and seller and from a buyer standpoint how from a buyer standpoint it’s easy to see the processes from the seller standpoint. It’s not as always, it’s not always as easy to learn about the buyers processes until after the fact.
So the question is how much should you insist on as a seller, seeing some of those buyers process. You should. I think the way things are evolving, the buyers are getting more savvy to it and we’ll throw the term around reverse diligence. How do you get the company you’re acquiring to better understand your organization and what the different business look clot looks like, where they would fit in had that understanding.
So they’ll be better prepared for that transition when. That’s that’s essentially the reason you want to do it is because you’re going to work better together on the, all the post-close activities, all the integration work. And if that goes well, people are happier and they’re going to stick around and they’re going to achieve goals and create values for the business.
I think it’s part of a bigger piece of creating this process. That’s connected together. With a vision with the vision, what the end state’s gonna look like when we’re going to buy your organization and what are we planning to do? How do we see it coming together? What’s our go to market going to look like?
In fact, we should be able to sit down and outline a go to market together to get as good sense of. This is where, what it’s going to, what’s the, what the customer experience is going to look like are we are combining the sales teams together. Are they going to be selling? We’re both, I’m going to be selling one giant portfolio of products.
Are we going to let you guys run independent? And when we just sell yours this whole separate product line, what’s that go to market, gonna look like what’s that strategy. And if we can outline that, I think the other critical component is the values of each organization to understand that. Leader to leader and be able to identify that with the company culture, to understand the real people, the leadership, how they operate and manage the respective teams, because there’s things that we can acknowledge are nice commonalities and then some unique differences.
But then there could be some stark differences that we could identify some potential conflicts. If you operate on a pure top-down strategy. And we’re very much about. Managed company, that’s going to create some frictions. We can just integrate our organizations together. You, we need to think of this throughly, how it’s going to actually work, because if we don’t figure that out, then maybe this deal isn’t going to make sense to do.
I would say that. And then the other piece around that is thinking. This vision right. Of what you’re trying to achieve in the end state and building into pillars of value drivers and being able to align teams around those value drivers, is think of them as, okay. Ours they’re defined and all the tasks that need to be executed can roll up to these OKR because the big problem that you lose sight of all the potential values when people.
Lose that end state goal of what they’re trying to achieve. And they don’t know where they fit in and what they’re doing. So the better you can align that by using these OKR hours and prioritizing and creating teams around those OKR, specifically to deliver on them. That’s where that critical part of being able to execute the integration activities, because you’re not buying a company and an operating it, and it’s going to make money for.
You need to buy it with a model that lays out potential synergies. You can capture through cost, energies, cutting costs, where you can economies of scale and whatnot. And then the increasing revenue, are we going to start cross selling the products? What are we going to do to generate the additional revenue?
Is that going to bridge our technology roadmap so we can get to market faster than. So I think having those OKR is what helps keeps those teams, that big picture alignment there, because when you lose that big picture alignment, you lose, everybody loses their focus, it’s in the wrong direction.
But I think those are the big pillars to think on the expand off of having that target company understand you are the new buyer should. So I think in this, on the sellers regard, That is something that you want to know. It’s part of it. And I think the seller, a lot of times have that disadvantage because there’s not a frequent, reoccurring thing, that theme that they do most time, it’s a one-time life event.
So how do you develop that comment that’s where you get, depending on some of the advisors, but the challenge with advisors is you basically pay them to a close, so they don’t have a lot of post-close considerations. They’re not sitting there analyzing that end state and the go to market and helping to calculate the probability that going on, the cultural fit, these sort of things, all the postmark marriage activity that you’re going to have to commit to for the rest of your life.
They’re not, they’re helping you to analyze that and look at it. They think of everything for you up until that day, they get their shoes. Yeah. I That’s you bring up a really good point. So in your role as a, as an, as a advisor, would you stay on with that? So if you’re helping the buyer to navigate this.
Would you stay on with the buyer until some end point? And I think back on we, we both talked a little bit about entrepreneur’s organization or, and there’s also a thing called EOS entrepreneurs operating system, where there’s an implementer that comes in and they help implement some process for you or an entire process.
That role is usually hung onto for two years after that’s been implemented. Hey, do you do that? Or, and B, is that something that, that you see buyers that will need that post-transaction now that you brought a really good point out? This is where our business has been evolving. When we started with software with a basic software diligence management tool, and we got to understand the problem of diligence on management really well.
And the nice Nashville adjacency was integration manager. So we developed a competency around integration management, catered, iterated, a lot of the software functionality. And then we did the front end pipeline piece. Then we had this full, comprehensive lifecycle management solution. So we’ll work with corporations and digitizing that lifecycle manager.
A lot of times they’re just using Excel across the board and stuff’s pretty scattered out there using maybe a data room, like an old school data room. It’s funny. Cause it was back I think, but 15 years, 20 years ago, they would come to your office and scan all your documents and put them on servers. And that was the virtual day.
Do your own business for you? They charge a lot. They used to charge like a dollar 25, something like that per page. You got thousands of pages that need to get scanned in front of the web. They made quite a bit. What’s interesting is today they still use that same per page billing. But there was nothing being scanned or nobody going to the office or nothing.
Are we doing the office in general right now? But they still charge. They’re still charging and maybe not as much it’s in the cents per page, but I think it’s interesting because it’s still playing that model of here’s a company, a lot of data. And then next thing they’re spending a million dollars a year plus for this high security data.
That’s how inefficient this was. It’s that. And then your process flow is all done in Excel. We built around that. I think it was probably six years ago, a friend of mine and marketing was like, Hey man, you should do a podcast. We started getting into that with a mission of enabling MNA practitioners to be able to share their lessons learned.
And the idea was because that was the problem we saw. We kept working with these companies and they all had a different way of thinking and looking at them. But there’s industry itself is lacking standardization, best practices. The real science as very started this theme of MNA science to the podcast was eMoney science.
As we kept learning, we started documenting all these things that we’ve learned, and we took transcripts of these podcasts. And I think it’s the date we have over 350 published blogs. You build a community around it. We have these practitioners that show up to our events. They started an online school.
They’ll get, take horses, get badges certifications. And it’s all of this pursuit of getting good, optimizing M and a getting really good at it. Looking at our industry as this practice. And that, yeah, there’s a swarm of bankers out there, and most of them are out in their self-serve serving regards, but to be an actual practitioner and sharpening your skills in all these areas that really are what generate value in a deal.
And they’re not models. They’re not always math formulas. It’s a critical part of. But when we look at the actual doing the diligence through executing integration, that’s real people, skills, that’s real leadership skills. It’s more about managing change than anything else. So I want to put Magento out there as a Guinea pig on, on success.
And failure specifically, Magento was purchased by eBay in 2011. They had a different vision and I’m of course I’m speculating because I wasn’t part of. Their team at the time. But I was a partner with them and I’ve, I found firsthand on how they dealt, how E-bay dealt with with the users and how eBay dealt with employees and then how they dealt with partners.
So that’s my perspective on it. And I know that after two years eBay came back, did a reset and said, Hey. We actually care about our users. We care about our community and we care about our partners. Do you see that happening a lot in this space where, Hey they’ve taken a little bit of time realize that they need to make some changes and then they go ahead and make those changes.
Please don’t have a choice nowadays because things are moving pretty quick. And if they see what’s working, like when Adobe ran that Magento product, they had a much better ecosystem to support a product like. Where they can foster growth and they immediately saw the value, which is why they pay the high amount for them, for it forum.
E-bay. It’s interesting that you say that too, because just recently there was an open letter that was written by the Magento community to say to adult. You have to change something or you will lose the majority of your community open source customers. And the message, the problem was there was some transparency and messaging.
It turns out, we don’t know everything yet, but it turns out that Adobe was on the same page, but they didn’t have that messaging in place for that open source side of the community in terms of Magento or Adobe. The M the open source probably is 95% of the install base. And the CA in the commercial version is 5%.
And again, I don’t know if these numbers are accurate, but it’s a big proportion that are on open source. So there’s a lot of open source users that are skewing the sort of usability or communication channels that Adobe has that. So it Adobe then has now come back and said, Hey, we do care about you.
We are going to support you and, helping to convince the community in general or the users in general that we are behind this vision of open source software, as well as the commercial version of it. And here’s how we’re going to do it. It just took them a while to get there. Crux of managing change.
The gap year was the communication that the intentions were good and there were there. But as part of doing this acquisition, the comp plan didn’t cover that part. That there’s this suspect sus or subset of people that they didn’t get the right messaging to, to have them clarification about what was happening, why and how it was.
And in your process, do you go and help them identify those gaps or there’s a whole comm department from that corporate development, the leaders should be helping to shape that and they should continuously iterate on it throughout the project. We don’t work with companies directly on it. There’s a whole bunch of consultants that specialize in that alone, but in our academy, we’ll cover offerings.
Teach people, the basics around stuff like that. I guess some of my points here, or at least my, what I’m trying to illustrate too, is that it’s it it, no matter what size the deal is and no matter how mature the company is, it seems like there’s always going to be issues that come out of it.
And I think to your point, the sooner they can manage that. The more successful, they will be in that acquisition and then transition into whatever’s next for that particular business. That’s the hardest part. If you can get good at that’s your whole competency of M and a, if you create change for the greater good that you had this vision of how you’re going to make value from purchasing the company, they’re able to execute and deliver it.
That’s it. That’s the whole M and A’s all about that. That part is the part that makes it the most challenging is to be able to do that. If you can understand that part, it’ll allow you to make that part of your success by managing that change, knowing how to align people around priorities and have them achieve and change, achieve goals, but then not have to the big, typical problems like attrition, Cain shows back.
You’ll get frustrated. They leave. All the headhunters around are after them, after deals announced. So there’s, especially in this market, they managing that change. It’s it allows you to really bring things together in a nice way that happens quickly communicates well. So people are in the know, they don’t feel all this fear and certainty if they have a job or not, or, and it just, I think a lot of it, you just gotta be real clear and transparent because people can take the bad news.
They just can’t take notes. As you can keep communicating it saying, Hey, we are going to let some people go. That’s the whole point of this deal. Like we’re going to save some. And then we’re going to use other resources to make the company overall much better, provide better value to our customers, but we’re going to create a lot of other new jobs and these other areas, the good far outweighs the bad obviously there’s opportunities for those people that you know, are going to get affected and if they can transition to it.
But that’s the thing. If you can get really good at managing change, that’s your whole competency around invest a good M and a. Acquire businesses and have them continue to grow and be healthy. It’s really hard to do so many people screw it up. So many corporations we see just seeing them sometimes just murder some of these companies, especially these little startups start integrating them, caused them to turn in.
So it was follow every little large corporation process. That’s not what they signed up for. Yeah. And again, we’re having a little bit of a technical problems with Riverside, but okay. So I just been riffing. No, you’re doing great. And I hear you the whole time. I just I’ve tried to do that’s good.
Absolutely. All right, so just, let’s just wrap it up here with attrition. I know that I heard you say attrition and I wanted to talk about like when Adobe purchased Magento, they, everybody stayed on. I think part of it was, they just moved people into different roles. So part of that change management has to be, and I heard you say communication quite a bit.
It sounds like communication and transparency as much transparency as you can get with each of the employees is a key factor in that. Yeah. The way it’s difficult. Cause you can’t sit down with people one-on-one like, ideally. And the change is going to be hard regardless. Everybody’s gonna have challenges with it.
Plus just the projects, your scope of work. It’s just a lot of change. And if you don’t feel you’re up to speed and what’s going on, I that’s, the, what we’ve seen is the hardest part to really manage it. When we look at a lot of the clients that we work with, it’s not like the technology or stuff like that.
It’s really, they bought a company that need people to do stuff and have everybody really motivated and do it. That’s really hard. Yeah. So setting those expectations and helping everybody’s aligned with the new vision of the leadership is the key to success from the anti attrition.
They call it anti attrition is as you’re trying to bring people and keep people on. Yeah. Cause that’s the thing it’s like the gravity is the attrition. You really just naturally going to, especially like the, seen this. It’s hard to keep them when we’ve seen it happen a lot where it just does the innovation.
You have to keep people that leave. And then it’s over. We see one of the big IOT companies. All right. Let’s just back on Google for a bit, like their nest acquisition that turned off to be a big disappointment. They came out with. Great products to start the business, built it up, got acquired at a great valuation.
I remember it was two or 3 billion, but they didn’t keep cranking out products. A lot of their leadership team left and it happens a lot, assessed as I one example like that’s why it just happens a lot. It’s a big, hard thing to do. And having all that organization upfront. I think in the very beginning, you, you said having all the planning in place, especially from the buyer’s standpoint is important, but the seller having they’re having some kind of a transition plan is just as important.
It should be something that’s joint that’s working together. And then I think at the end of the day, people tend to forget about the customer for maybe both of you, both sides of the table, working together with. Things aligned around the customer’s perspective might be the way to really do it.
Yeah. I’m with you there align around the customer. Look, how are we going to do this? We’re just going to, if we create value, it’s all through customer experience. We can just bill out. Are we going to actually make customer experience better and compelling, and really think that through from the time you start working together and at that, in that journey, understand each other’s cultures, the value.
And then you’ll get a good sense. Hey, this would be good partnership that’s happening or leading in like a partnership of us working together to achieve this. And then it could be a really good net positive things. When two organizations come together for the greater good, a lot of value gets created.
We see it happen a lot by companies. If things go rive pretty quick and that’s it, a lot of value gets dot gong. I wrote down the company doesn’t grow to the next big thing that everybody wanted them to. It’s just things fall apart. And yeah, and I’m assuming, Adobe still has a vision that that they’re sharing again with everybody and they are going on to the new, great things and I’m crossing my fingers, that it will continue to be a success.
Are they doing? They’re doing pretty good. We’ve got a great confidency. I know one of our MNA science alums just joined their M and a team. What to see? I depends on their con department, how friendly they are loading people and it gets some airtime on a podcast, but we will find out soon enough. Keyson we have used a lot of time up here and unfortunately we use it up in, in technical difficulties.
So we might have to do this again in the future. We should do this again in the future. I’m going to rephrase that. So as we kind of wrap things up here I always give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like to. Go ahead and plug something today. A very, we can talk a lot about mergers and acquisitions.
If anybody’s interested in learning more about mergers and acquisitions, it’s hons of content on M a science.com. Yeah, anybody interested? We have a diversity scholarship program to promote diversity in industry to give a couple of years on the academy program. So it was a great opportunity. Expose people that have not familiar with M and A’s or career path to understand, learn about it.
It’s an interesting world that we often associate with just the bankers and we’re working in the boiler room operations, but there’s so many other roles that involve some of the things that are more important. What we’ve been talking about. And how do you align people around these goals to make things happen and manage this large magnitude of change?
That’s it? Yeah, that’s such a great point too, because people are what makes your company run and making sure those people are happy people, happy employees make happy customers. Thanks again for bearing with me today on our, on the podcast and some technical problems, but I appreciate you being here and I hope you have a wonderful.
My pleasure. You too, Brett. Thank you. Thank you.
Are your clothes made where you live? Where does the cloth come from? Shannon Lohr and I dive into some of the sustainability questions that you should ask when starting a clothing business. As the founder and CEO of Factory45, Shannon has worked with Idea-stage entrepreneurs to launch clothing companies that are ethically and sustainably made across the globe.
Shannon got her start in 2010 when she co-founded {r}evolution apparel, a sustainable clothing company for female travelers and minimalists that was featured in The New York Times, Forbes.com, and Yahoo! News.
To date, Shannon has worked with over 150 entrepreneurs in the sustainable fashion space, many of whom have launched some of the most transparent supply chains in the fashion industry. https://factory45.co/ Shannon has worked as a consultant for crowdfunding projects that have surpassed their goal amounts by as much as 300% and has worked closely with startup apparel companies from all over the world to create ethically-made products with a focus on environmentally-friendly materials and transparent supply chains. Shannon is a strong advocate for increasing supply chain transparency through sourcing, localization, and storytelling. She’s been named a thought leader for the future of fashion by Ecouterre and Triple Pundit, and she frequently writes about conscious consumerism and the intersection of fashion and environmentalism.
