Category: Featured

Frank Goldblatt Of SYSCOMGLOBAL SOLUTIONS On How To Use Digital Transformation To Take Your Company…

Frank Goldblatt Of SYSCOMGLOBAL SOLUTIONS On How To Use Digital Transformation To Take Your Company To The Next Level

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

With most of the companies we work with, we suggest starting out by optimizing your customer’s experience. Your customers make your business a business and should be a priority in this process.

As a part of our series about “How To Use Digital Transformation To Take Your Company To The Next Level”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Frank Goldblatt.

Frank Goldblatt is currently a Business Solutions Specialist in the NY Office at SYSCOMGLOBAL SOLUTIONS. He has been in the IT game for some time — over 25 years, in fact. His career predates modern tech giants and stretches back to the halcyon pre-dotcom crash days of the late 90s. When he started out, the average internet connection download speed for the biggest corporate clients was 1.5MBPS (today, that connection would be 1GBPS).

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

Thank you for having me. The start of my career actually predates modern tech giants beginning in the dot-com days. When I started out, the average internet connection was 1.5MBPS T-1, while today that connection on average would be over 1GBPS! When we started recommending Firewalls many companies didn’t think they needed them! Helping business owners understand the “why” something was needed allowed me to move from providing internet connectivity services to IT Consulting and Management, where I designed and implemented corporate IT Systems and Networks. I hold many IT certifications including Security Architecture, but for the most part, my job is still helping bridge the gap between business and IT; understanding business goals, and ensuring IT solutions meet business objectives. That is why I’m excited to work with our team here providing Digital Transformation Services that, when done properly, can have such a positive impact on a company.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?

When I first started in IT I was working on an office relocation; overseeing the build of their new network infrastructure including, something brand new at the time, Wireless Access Points! I had my piece covered… And the IT Director had everything planned out from the timing of the server breakdown, to how to pack the mouse and keyboard. He even thought about how to pack the truck (servers in last so they can be removed first). You get the idea. On the day of the move, we arrived at the new IT room and found we couldn’t plug anything in! The IT Director never coordinated with the architects or electricians to ensure he had the right power for his equipment. Everything was sorted out with many extension cords and the electrician returned in a few days to replace the receptacles, but the lesson I learned is that it is not enough to understand our own component in a project; we need to think about the whole picture! This is what Digital Transformation means to a business… Looking at the operations with a view of how everything works together and how to make these pieces work together more efficiently. Needless to say, moving forward, with every office move I was involved with, I checked in with the electricians.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

There are so many people I would need to thank or who have had a big impact on me (I’m impressionable) however my wife not only supported my career by providing a stable home life but she is also the reason I am in IT, to begin with. I saw an ad in the New York Times (back when it was actually made of paper) for a salesperson at a new ISP but they wanted someone with experience. She insisted I apply for the job which I did and got! I think the lesson there is don’t hold yourself back. If you want something go out and get it. And I think that’s our philosophy with Digital Transformation as well. Don’t let existing business processes hold you back. Talk to experts, learn and grow personally, and the business will benefit as well.

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

Good to Great by Jim C. Collins discusses what it takes to take your business to the next level. He explains that businesses must overcome the “status quo” to stay competitive and succeed. For example, how a company uses and adapts technologies sets them apart from its competition; however it’s also not enough to have the latest and greatest. Technology needs to be deployed intelligently and only incorporated into your business plan when it will clearly benefit employees and customers. This is where our philosophy around Digital Transformation begins. What we strive for is to understand our client’s business processes and then give their employees the tools to get their jobs done efficiently and effectively; what will help them succeed, not create more work.

Extensive research suggests that “purpose-driven businesses” are more successful in many areas. When your company started, what was its vision, what was its purpose?

When our CEO, Seishi Sato, founded SYSCOM GLOBAL SOLUTIONS in the Spring of 1990, he saw a need for a trusted partner to guide firms through the exponential changes that technology would soon be undergoing. We were established before the tech boom of the 2000s when most companies might not even have a computer at every desk, but there were still new IT tools available that called for an advisory hand to help clients steer the ship. We started with that goal — being a reliable, guiding partner — and have stayed true to that purpose ever since.

Are you working on any new, exciting projects now? How do you think that might help people?

Our team just launched a brand-new offering for small- to medium-sized businesses called Business Central Standard Pack, an offering from Microsoft Dynamics 365. Business Central was developed with the speed, resources, and growth potential of Small- to Medium-Sized Businesses (SMBs) in mind while connecting them with the family of Microsoft business tools and functions. It integrates with Office, updates over the cloud, and boasts robust security. Based on SYSCOMS’ experience as a trusted advisor for more than a thousand companies over thirty years, we’ve built out a customized selection of options and settings based on the most common feedback we’ve heard. — The result is a cloud-based solution that will help SMBs improve business efficiency with limited resources and minimal downtime, and we’re happy to be one of the first companies to provide this total solution.

Thank you for all that. Let’s now turn to the main focus of our discussion about Digital Transformation. For the benefit of our readers, can you help explain what exactly Digital Transformation means? On a practical level what does it look like to engage in a Digital Transformation?

Like any business endeavor, it’s important to think of digital transformation in terms of its results: reducing time spent, creating more efficient workflows, and empowering AI to find the insights and opportunities we may otherwise miss. Practically, it comes down to four steps: digitizing your data, automating your data collection, visualizing data trends, and using it to make predictions. There has been a recent explosion in the number of tools and methods that can be used to achieve that four-step process, but that’s what’s at the heart of it.

Which companies can most benefit from a Digital Transformation?

Digital transformation in a company means using digital technology to not only improve workflow and create new business models; but also, to break away from legacy systems and change the corporate culture. For example, by digitally transforming operations that were previously performed manually and depended on individuals, it is possible to organize data that had been black-boxed. As a result, overall costs can be reduced, time can be saved, and human labor can be redirected to higher-value work. With that said, firms with many vendors, customers, and inventories, with manufacturing processes, would probably see more direct benefits more quickly. One of the digital transformation’s key benefits is finding more efficient ways to get more done. We have helped many companies with their digital transformation, from infrastructure to operational parts, so if you are not sure where to start with your digital transformation, please contact us.

We’d love to hear about your experiences helping others with Digital Transformation. In your experience, how has Digital Transformation helped improve operations, processes and customer experiences? We’d love to hear some stories if possible.

One of my clients that had been manually managing everything from marketing to sales, accounting, inventory management, and customer service using Excel, etc., decided to implement Dynamics 365 because they wanted to optimize their operations.. We had discussions with the client about their business operations, confirmed what Dynamics 365 could do, and spent time with them to develop ways to improve their business operations. We started with minimal functionalities but connected all the data for the major activities from marketing, sales, logistics, and customer services in one platform. With that, the client could visualize and manage customer data across the entire company beyond each department. As the next step, we plan to implement additional Portal and BI/Data analysis functions of the Dynamics 365 series.

Has integrating Digital Transformation been a challenging process for some companies? What are the challenges? How do you help resolve them?

We often speak with customers who have been managing data manually with Excel and are now trying to improve operations. Still, end users are uncomfortable with implementing a new system and changing the way data is entered. The Dynamics 365 applications we provide are Microsoft products, so they are highly compatible with Office/Microsoft 365 (Excel, Word, Teams, Outlook), which many companies use on a daily basis. We can configure the solutions to allow you to modify data in Excel and post it to the system (one click), and the information will be reflected in the system. Also, Dynamics 365 applications are user-friendly/familiar interfaces so that users can use the applications intuitively. After introducing all the benefits of Dynamics 365, the end user, who had been reluctant to participate in the project, began cooperating with us.

Also, we usually give application demos and training in our projects to support users to feel comfortable moving on to the new system. Digital transformation gives the impression of drastically changing business operations, and many people are afraid of the change. Still, with Dynamics 365, you can gradually get used to the system and the flow of business improvement. Based on our more than 30 years of experience in helping customers with digital transformation in one form or another, we offer Dynamics 365 as a solution that is familiar to all the people involved in the company’s operation.

Ok. Thank you. Here is the primary question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are “Five Ways a Company Can Use Digital Transformation To Take It To The Next Level”? Please share a story or an example for each.

Scaling one’s business is a matter of finding the right time and market, a unique challenge that’s complicated enough on its own. In a world that now requires constant connection and data analysis, digital transformation can make that process easier. The idea is to utilize technology to manage and automate processes that allow your staff to engage with clients.

1) The first thing we’d suggest is to sit down with a trusted partner (like SYSCOM) to answer the question — why are you looking to do this for your company (business goals/objectives)? Why do you want to achieve these goals? It’s not the what, it’s the why. That will then help lead us to find the right IT solutions to bring your business to the next level.

2) With most of the companies we work with, we suggest starting out by optimizing your customer’s experience. Your customers make your business a business and should be a priority in this process.

3) Next is to automate internal manual processes and to integrate what could be existing disparate solutions (like the CRM and Accounting software currently in use) into a single platform.

4) Once we’ve mapped out the above, we’d suggest an integrated plan to help your workers adjust to the transformation and understand the new tools we have provided. Getting your employees on board while implementing a new digital process is essential to its success.

5) Lastly, we’d recommend re-evaluating the IT solution every 6 months to ensure that it’s continuing to help bring your company to the next level.

In your opinion, how can companies best create a “culture of innovation” in order to create new competitive advantages?

In business and even digital transformation, a company wins and loses based on its people. At SYSCOM, we encourage all of our employees to reach out to anyone in the company, from their peers to their managers and all the way up to the CEO, with any questions or ideas for doing things better. We’ve found over and over again that this creates opportunities for innovation — some of our best ideas, like the Business Central Standard Pack, come from this openness — and it’s also an excellent way to attract and retain top talent.

How can our readers further follow your work?

We’re constantly evolving with business needs in an ever-shifting tech environment, so to keep up with everything we’re doing you can connect with me and SYSCOM Global Solutions via Linkedin at https://www.linkedin.com/company/syscom-global-solutions-inc/ or visit syscomgs.com to continue to learn more about what we offer. Also, feel free to contact me directly at [email protected]. Looking forward to connecting with you!

Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!

Frank Goldblatt Of SYSCOMGLOBAL SOLUTIONS On How To Use Digital Transformation To Take Your Company… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Meet The Disruptors: Taavi Kotka of Koos On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

A prophet is never respected in his hometown. If you do something really influential, you will get loads of criticism, especially from narrow minded people. Accept useful feedback and ignore the rest.

As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Taavi Kotka, CEO and Co-Founder of Koos.

Taavi is a serial entrepreneur and was named one of the Brightest Business Minds in Northern Europe in 2016. He was the first CIO for the Government of Estonia, was an angel investor in Wise and was a special advisor to the European Commission VP Andrus Ansip on the European Digital Single Market. He started Koos, which received $4,5m in funding in April this year, to disrupt the equity model.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?

I started my career as a programmer, rising up to be the Managing Director of the largest software development company in the Baltics, WebMedia — now known as Nortal. As an engineer, I then moved on and drove forward a number of initiatives, which included working with the Estonian government as their first CIO, to oversee the country’s development as the most advanced digital nation. While there, I co-founded the country’s national e-residency programme, which was the first of its kind globally and also worked on things like data embassies, country-as-a-service (CAAS), the no-legacy policy, VAT fraud detection and so forth.

Since then, I’ve moved back into the private sector, helping startups develop and consulting large enterprises and governments on digital transformation.

I also worked as a special advisor to the European Commission’s Vice President Andrus Ansip on the European Single Digital Market.

Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?

We think that communities are not properly used in modern capitalism. Every company has a community of fans, helpers, friends, customers etc, but only few are able to properly use their energy and effort. The industry standard at the moment is to ask free-lunches — for example emails asking for feedback, but instead of bothering your customer-base, unleash the energy by offering micro equity-stakes in your company.

Giving equity-stakes has been difficult and that is why it has not been used widely. We at Koos.io have solved that problem.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

When developing Estonia’s eResidency programme, we made an interesting mistake in that we developed it for people outside of the EU so they could easily run their company and do business wherever they lived. It turned out that 70% of Estonian eResidents are from the EU and this strategy didn’t make any sense. Looking back, it makes sense now — entrepreneurs in Germany and other EU countries deal with a lot of bureaucracy. I guess a learning from that is, in the beginning, you never know where the sweet spot is for your business.

We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors?

In the early years when I was starting out my career as a programmer, I was lucky to be mentored by some of the best programmers in Estonia. The stuff we built together was amazing, even though I was likely more of a distraction than an asset!

Can you share a story about how they made an impact?

In software engineering, it is very important to find a balance between the business needs and the product’s capabilities. You need to understand that companies grow and their business changes, but there is no point in building a rocket at the beginning! You need to design and plan your outcome carefully and you need to be willing to throw it away sometimes and completely rewrite it, which can be frustrating. Legacy can kill innovation.

In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?

Disrupting an industry is positive when the end user benefits from the new model. The benefits can vary from convenience, personalisation, cost or efficiency, for example. A fairly simple example would be online banking — for years, customers used bricks and mortar bank branches, which were more effort on the customer’s part and today, a customer can simply access any banking services on their mobile phone, wherever they are in the world.

On the other hand, a negative disruption is one that doesn’t pose much additional benefit to the end user. Most of the time, I believe this stems from a disconnect between the idea and the real world. It may be that the idea is great but the product is more difficult to use or integrate with other products, or that it’s expensive and not accessible to most of the end-users, for example. It’s why testing a product with its key users and getting ongoing feedback is key.

Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.

It is not important what you dream, it is important what you actually do or execute!
There is no point being a know it all about lots of different things — become a specialist in what you know.
If you see something that is wrong or missing and you can do something, go for it.
A prophet is never respected in his hometown. If you do something really influential, you will get loads of criticism, especially from narrow minded people. Accept useful feedback and ignore the rest.
Never expect any glory.

We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?

For now, I’m focusing on Koos, specifically, working with early adopters to show all the different types of use cases for our platform. Social capitalism is the future. Watch this space.

Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?

It wasn’t a book, but at the age of 19 I had Hodgkin’s disease, a form of cancer. I spent a year in the hospital and had loads of time to think. It was 1999–2000 and what genuinely bothered me the most was the waterfall development model in software engineering and I kept thinking about how bad it was. Endless time was spent writing documents before coding. I also wasn’t sure how much time left I would have in this world, so I decided to start looking for an opportunity to do software in a new way, focusing on prototyping and early releasing. Today, this kind of approach is totally normal, but 22 years ago it was not used. My high-school desk-mate started a new company which gave me an opportunity to try this out and after 4 years, we were the biggest software engineering company in Estonia.

Can you please give us your favourite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

Focus on execution, not ideas!

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂

My wife and I started a girls-only technology school in 2018. It is fully funded by our family, with locations all over Estonia and we have 2 200 girls studying, with a long wait list. We wanted to prove to the politicians and government officers that girls want to study technology and “lack of teachers or funds” cannot be an excuse. So I guess, back to my previous point — ideas are nothing, execution is everything!

How can our readers follow you online?

Visit https://prior.koos.io/platform or follow us on LinkedIn

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us.

Meet The Disruptors: Taavi Kotka of Koos On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Meet The Disruptors: Betsalel J Medioni Of WeVisu On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your…

Meet The Disruptors: Betsalel J Medioni Of WeVisu On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Persistence- Some days feel easier than others and some days feel impossible. We learned we have to keep fighting even on the days it feels impossible but you just have to show up everyday. That’s what has gotten us this far.

As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Betsalel J Medioni.

Betsalel J Medioni was born and raised in Israel, eventually emigrating to the United States in 2013, where he landed a job as a runner for a construction company in San Francisco, California. However, Medioni’s thorough experience in construction couldn’t satisfy his thirst for turning original ideas into innovative business solutions. So he founded WeVisu as the first platform that gives customers, contractors, designers, and vendors access to custom digital showrooms, where they can see finished materials, products, and pricing in real time.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?

Like every other licensed contractor, Betsalel J Medioni would spend weekend after weekend visiting physical showrooms to find the right layout and materials for a space, gather samples, and later pay for 3D renders to visualize it for his clients. With a newfound perspective and background in startup solutions, Medioni realized this chasm in the preparatory stage was costing contractors, designers, and homeowners far too much time, money, and aggravation. He began constructing a blueprint to streamline the process and eventually partnered with his cousin and global sales leader, Jeremy Medioni, in 2020. A year later, he founded WeVisu as the first all-in-one home improvement platform that gives customers, contractors, designers, and vendors access to custom digital showrooms, where they can see finished materials, products, and pricing in real time.

Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?

We are taking an archaic style of home remodel/design and bringing it into the digital age with direct-to-consumer pricing on finished materials. This allows a win — win — win situation for contractors, homeowners and manufacturers.

Changes: instead of contractors/clients driving around to multiple physical showrooms, or shopping across multiple websites for the different materials →

WEVISU = one stop shop for Bathroom, Kitchen, Bedroom, Hallway, etc… FROM THE COMFORT OF YOUR OWN HOME, 24/7, on your schedule.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

We had many of our vendors send us large amounts of samples to our small office. At one point we had to refuse a few shipments. We learned that we need to make sure the whole point of what we do is to avoid showrooms.

We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?

Dr. Gerard Medioni. He encouraged us to build tenets and an unshakable mission statement. That has helped us stay on track to support the customer and contractor in every improvement we make to the platform. If we have a brilliant idea or new functionality, and it does not accomplish a better use scenario for customers, move in from it and refocus on your customers’ needs.

Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.

Persistence- Some days feel easier than others and some days feel impossible. We learned we have to keep fighting even on the days it feels impossible but you just have to show up everyday. That’s what has gotten us this far.

Teamwork- Communicate and rely on your team for the most success. In a startup you wear many hats. It’s important to know when you can lean on your team or when you have to do it on your own.

Belief- Without it, you don’t stand a chance.

Sleepless-The wheels never stop, and you never know when something might click, could be 3 in the morning.

Hope- Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. Your next big break could be right around the corner so don’t give up.

We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?

Developing 2 new algorithms to better match customers with the products they need for a complete job, and matching contractors with the best customer profiles for their skill-set.

Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?

I had a conversation with my uncle and I said to him we have so many ideas and so many things we want to do.. He said it is important to stay on track and focus on what you are trying to solve. You will always have many new ideas but don’t get off track from what your main goal is.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

‘I never lose because I never quit’

A movement to be consistent and be a believer.

Every idea and any project can be done. Be consistent and be a believer. If you don’t have that, nothing can be done. With money or without money you can always start anything you want. Just start.

How can our readers follow you online?

Follow me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/betsalel-medioni-1a8623194/

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!

Meet The Disruptors: Betsalel J Medioni Of WeVisu On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Alexandre Berard Of Portable North Pole (PNP) On 5 Ways To Create a Wow! Customer Experience

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Feedback: Survey your audience, and give them space to express feedback. For ten years we’ve run a thorough annual survey after each Christmas season and benchmarked the current responses with those from previous years. We’ve also implemented a live mini survey to get instant feedback during the season and analyze this data with our BI specialist.

As part of my series about the five things a business should do to create a Wow! customer experience, I had the pleasure of interviewing Alexandre Bérard.

The founder and CEO (Chief Elf Officer) of PNP-Portable North Pole, Alexandre Bérard, was born and raised in Quebec, Canada. Alexandre’s idea for creating PNP-Portable North Pole came from an idea of upgrading the tradition of sending letters to Santa. Alexandre and his wife wanted to make celebrating the magic of Christmas more visual and engaging for all, so in 2008, this family-run business was established and began connecting the children of the world with Santa using the PNP website and mobile apps.

Thank you so much for joining us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

The whole idea was to ‘’update’’ the tradition of writing letters to Santa. First, because young children are usually much more visual and a lot of them still don’t know how to read and write at this age! Or, as we like to say, a group of inventor elves contacted us to help create a console so that Santa could be in contact with all the children of the world, straight from his village. And, the Portable North Pole (PNP) was born!

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?

Believing we were going to be quieter during the off-season! People are always joking that we are off half of the year. They don’t understand how busy we are all year long to be ready for the next holiday season. Video filming for the next season starts at the end of January (pre-production in October through December), and we are in post-production up to the launch of the new season on October 1 and even after. The new features, innovations, and updates on the coding part of all platforms (web, iOS, Android, and Amazon) have a never-ending list of ‘ ‘to dos’’ or stories to work on.

Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

I have to say, my wife, because she had the idea of PNP first. She was my girlfriend at that time, so considering the success of the platform, I had to marry her. We’ve been together for almost 20 years, and we have three marvelous elves. I am also grateful for my business group of entrepreneurs. For nearly ten years, I was a member of a group of entrepreneurs who met every six weeks for half a day to help each other with our challenges. It’s very practical to share with colleagues that can understand clearly what you live in the business but also in your personal life. I would recommend this to all new entrepreneurs.

In your words, can you share a few reasons why great customer service and a great customer experience is essential for success in business?

Customer service and a positive customer experience are critical for business success, especially for an online B2C business, with all of the various ratings, comments, and platforms available to customers, such as the Apple App Store or Google Play. If they are unhappy or having difficulty using/understanding your product (especially in the first few seconds of downloading your app), they will not have the patience, and you may be judged very quickly. We are proud to have kept our mobile apps rating at 4.8 and 4.7 stars after all these years.

Moreover, for the last two years, we have been investing in our AI chatbot. Online users are more willing to ping a bot now, but you need to be sure he is answering the right thing. We also run an annual survey after every season to thousands of customers, we receive loads of answers, especially in open text recommendations, and we read them all and try to implement the most frequent requests.

We have all had times either in a store, or online, when we’ve had a very poor experience as a customer or user. If the importance of a good customer experience is so intuitive, and apparent, where is the disconnect? How is it that so many companies do not make this a priority?

Not every company is a ‘’product-driven’’ company. I believe it’s strongly related to the interest/passion of the founder(s). The easiest/known example is Apple and Steve Jobs. They have been devoted to producing amazing products technologically with superb innovations on top. This mix of these 2 key ingredients are at the basis of their success. People don’t realize how tough it is to get there, especially for a digital B2C product. Technology and user behaviors evolve so rapidly that you have to adjust/update constantly. To have success in this special world, you need to be passionate about it upfront, because you will need to put loads of recurring efforts to get there.

Do you think that more competition helps force companies to improve the customer experience they offer? Are there other external pressures that can force a company to improve the customer experience?

Of course! Competition is at the heart of almost all business. I believe it is also healthy for an economy, as it drives everyone to work harder and innovate, including the customer experience. Again, I would say with all the multiple ways a customer can express themselves on social media and give feedback on their experience with a product, this gives a recurring ‘’temperature’’ of your product with your customers, rapidly you get what needs to improve on customer experience. To some extent, just think how important the introductions years ago of these five small stars ratings on Amazon for any product sold on this platform.

Can you share with us a story from your experience about a customer who was “Wowed” by the experience you provided?

We are very lucky to develop an application and content on such a magical theme: Christmas and Santa Claus. It is such a passionate and strong emotional moment, especially for families with young children. Because of this, we get thousands of great comments from our users across multiple platforms, including parents/grandparents, writing us that they have cried (of overwhelmed positive emotion) when they see our Santa messages, considering their children’s reaction to our personalized messages but also about themselves and their own memories of Santa Claus and their holidays when they were a child. Not sure how you can get more than this with a customer reaction!

Did that Wow! experience have any long-term ripple effects? Can you share the story?

Amazing customer feedback is usually shared by our customer support lead and myself to the rest of the team. I think it brings us all back on ‘’why’’ we do this and how lucky we are to create such a positive reaction. Not a lot of companies have this connection/privilege with customers, and clearly, it gives a ripple effect on the team first. It’s very important because it’s extremely demanding for all the team considering the very short period of time we have to deliver on many different things.

Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things a business leader should know in order to create a Wow! Customer Experience. Please share a story or an example for each.

Feedback: Survey your audience, and give them space to express feedback. For ten years we’ve run a thorough annual survey after each Christmas season and benchmarked the current responses with those from previous years. We’ve also implemented a live mini survey to get instant feedback during the season and analyze this data with our BI specialist.
It may sound obvious, but the leadership team needs to find quiet time and play with your application regularly. Use it like a user (not with your role in the company in mind). Take all the steps a customer would, check all details, words used, colors, tone, etc. on all your platforms.
Talk and most importantly LISTEN to your ‘neighbors’ that use your application, and ask them what they think, what they understand, challenges, etc. Live feedback like this gives you the opportunity to capture emotions/reality that are not captured in a written survey. For example, during COVID we recognized that children around the world might need additional support during this time. We created a free Santa message to ‘Be Strong’ to help our little ones understand that Santa knows times are strange right now, that they miss people who are far away from them but to be strong and that their loved ones are always connected to them through love.
Look at what other players are doing, including other industries. As a customer yourself, we also have a great experience, see how you can apply this to your own product. For example, we are an entertainment app, but the platform still has complex functionalities to use, with two main different sections with different objectives (Parents vs Kids), which is not common for an app. I like to see how Airbnb is doing in their own app because it’s a complex app with two main different sections, one for hosts to manage their guests and another for renters to book a place to stay.
Realize it’s a ‘’never ending job’’ and take nothing for granted. Be sure this part (increasing customer experience) is included in your top-of-the-list yearly deliverables. To progress, first, you need to find ways to measure this aspect correctly and secondly, have SMART goals. For example, we are not only measuring our global stars rating on Apple/Google Play, but the score we get on a weekly basis to see if we are above or under our aggregate scores.

Are there a few things that can be done so that when a customer or client has a Wow! experience, they inspire others to reach out to you as well?

Invest as much as possible in creating an amazing product (content), sound obvious…? But not easy to do. You need to survey/exchange with your customers and understand their feedback, emotions, etc. about your product. Keep a close eye on what is new out there, not only in your industry but across social media, what is the trend? Then you need to maximize the halo effect (sharing online content for us), again sound obvious, but to do it the right way, for all type of platforms and type of content, it’s not a one size fits all solution and you need to keep in mind the full flow of the customers, from their first contact with your product to the new customer you are trying to inboard. Going through all the tiny steps and think!

If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?

Definitely, it will be about nature/environment, because we all live on the same planet and more and more humans will be challenged by climate change in the future. It’s quite easy to see this coming slowly but surely with all the science study we have done. We really need to push our government to take drastic measures now. It’s their role to lead the way on this to have a ‘’structured’’ way to change our behavior as a consumer, society, and business.

How can our readers follow you on social media?

Discover the magic by visiting portablenorthpole.com, downloading our free app on your iOS or Android and Amazon device, or following along on social media via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube. And please, share your experience and let us know your feedback!

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!

Thank you from the heart! I really enjoyed contributing, inspiring, and being inspired!

Alexandre Berard Of Portable North Pole (PNP) On 5 Ways To Create a Wow! Customer Experience was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Meet The Disruptors: Chaz Perera Of Roots Automation On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your…

Meet The Disruptors: Chaz Perera Of Roots Automation On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

“Be Inquisitive” — What better way to learn quickly than asking people to talk about themselves or the things that interest them most. It’s afforded me an unusual collection of connections and perspectives that have helped me immensely throughout my leadership journey.

As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Chaz Perera.

Chaz is the co-founder and CEO of Roots Automation. In his 20-year career, Chaz has launched new products, grown global businesses, and helped companies save money by leveraging data science, robotics, and AI. He’s led teams with thousands of employees, at one point leading a team of 7,000 people across 50 countries. Before founding Roots Automation, Chaz was AIG, Inc.’s Chief Transformation Officer and also its Head of Global Business Services.

I grew up in different parts of the world, but I’ve called New York City home for the better part of my life. New York City exposed me to a variety of innovative people and companies who ultimately were able to make big leaps because they had the support of an insurance company acting as their backstop as they took big risks. It made me appreciate the power of the insurance product and led me to start my career there. I spent 14 years at AIG in a variety of roles, including having global responsibility for parts of claims, operations, and strategy — each of which allowed me the space to be “entrepreneurial” and learn in a supportive environment. I also wanted to venture out and start something from scratch, and AIG afforded me the space to figure out what that was and to meet the people who I would be able to do that with.

Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?

We combine machine intelligence and human ingenuity to create intelligent Digital Coworkers, providing organizations with AI-powered, digitized employees that can think, read and intuit like people.

Digital Coworkers dramatically improve efficiency and increase capacity within stretched insurance companies by providing business leaders a turn-key, experienced worker in digital form to support their daily operations.

It’s critically important because talent is increasingly harder to hire and retain, and companies are turning to automation/AI as a solution, but those efforts typically fall short, are expensive, and intended value can be elusive. We’ve figured out how to help insurance companies overcome this burden and see ROI and improved EX on day-one with a Digital Coworker.

We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?

Some of the best advice I got from a senior insurance leader and mentor was to focus on experiences and skills as opposed to role and salary. Her advice was that seniority and remuneration will come from learning how to take and mitigate risk on behalf of a company and showing that you could be an innovative yet safe pair of hands at the wheel. The only way to get that exposure was to focus on core skills and experiences, some of which could be a step down on the career ladder or a lateral move. It’s definitely something I live and appreciate.

Disruption or transformation simply to do things differently makes no sense. A company’s decision to change itself has to be founded in aiming to improve three things (in my opinion): (1) What Customer Experience (CX) are they aiming to create; (2) How do they want to be perceived in the broader market; and (3) What revenue or cost improvement does accomplishing the first two things do for the company. Importantly, the market has to be ready or near-ready for the change.

From an internal perspective, many embark on expensive transformational projects without first considering the bigger picture — the ultimate vision for the change connected to my previous point — which is why we see anywhere from 50% — 70% of large-scale digital transformation programs fail.

Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.

“Be Inquisitive” — What better way to learn quickly than asking people to talk about themselves or the things that interest them most. It’s afforded me an unusual collection of connections and perspectives that have helped me immensely throughout my leadership journey.

“Demonstrate Respect” — There’s an old adage that being respected has little to do with your station in life. It’s earned by being reverent to others and patient throughout. I continue to practice being this as it’s easy to let slip.

“Extend Trust” — Assuming positive intent in people’s words, actions, and behaviors is something I try to follow everyday. It’s difficult, but you have to give people the space to learn and extending trust enables that.

We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?

We’ve more than tripled the usage of Roxanne, our Claims Assistant Digital Coworker, and yet we’re only processing a tiny fraction of US-based claims activity. We aim to further expand Roxanne’s ability to read, understand, and process unstructured insurance documents and use insurance software without prior training or scripting. If she works at CNA today, she should be able to work at Travelers tomorrow without any extensive training/rework.

We are striving to liberate Claims Adjusting personnel to engage and focus on their end-customer when that customer needs them most. This is why people buy insurance, and it’s where the insurance product is made real to its customers.

Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?

As a leader in an AI company, I’ll share a book that I recommend people read to get a base understanding of a technology that people need to understand and appreciate as its becomes more and more pervasive in our lives (whether they realize it or not): You Look Like a Thing and I Love You by Janelle Shane.

It might be due to how politics and points of view manifests itself on social media but I notice we assume the worst in people or at least don’t offer the benefit of doubt. So, without being cynical about it, were I able to wave a magic wand, I’d want us all to assume positive intent in the words, behaviors, and actions of the people around us. It will allow us to listen better and to hear more. And if we can get there, then we can find shared problems, shared achievements, and shared satisfaction.

How can our readers follow you online?

Chaz Perera:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chazperera/

Email: [email protected]

Roots Automation:

Website: www.rootsautomation.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rootsautomation/

Twitter: @RootsAutomation

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!

Meet The Disruptors: Chaz Perera Of Roots Automation On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Making Something From Nothing: Arthur Revechkis Of Zakuska Vodka On How To Go From Idea To Launch

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Budget as accurately as possible. Vague estimates can do more harm than good.

As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Arthur Revechkis.

Born in Moscow, Arthur Revechkis immigrated to the United States when he was seven years old and moved to Washington Heights in NYC then northern New Jersey where he lived until he left for college. He has fond childhood memories associated with the Russian style of drinking — his parents would host frequent dinners and parties with tons of toasts. People would write funny things to say and sometimes, depending on the occasion, they would be heartfelt and emotional. But it was always with a shot glass in hand. The night would often end with someone sitting at the piano and everyone singing some old Russian song. Now as an adult, he continues to make similar memories — times spent catching up with friends over a drink and holiday parties that bring the whole family together.

Since Revechkis was so young when he and his family left Russia, most of his memories of Russian culture come from his father, mother, and friends. Through their memories and the way they kept traditions alive once in the United States, he is now able to share the same culture and traditions with his friends.

Having sold his business the year before COVID-19 shut much of the world down, during the lockdown, Revechkis found himself with plenty of free time. He had wanted to be part of creating something that had meaning to him so he began toying with the idea of creating a shooting vodka. He was able to explore his interests in various kinds of alcohol and how they’re made, and little by little he was able to speak with people willing to share their expertise to slowly get to a point where it became achievable. Loving the challenge of developing a new brand with a unique application to this country, the various aspects of marketing, design, distribution, and growing the brand, all of those things, present fascinating puzzles to solve and successfully execute.

When he’s not kicking back and sipping his chilled vodka with his friends and family, you can find Revechkis writing and recording music and playing live shows.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?

First, I really appreciate you asking me to do this. I immigrated to the United States with my family in 1988 from Russia. My parents had been trying to come to the United States for a while, but at that time, it was very difficult to leave. Both of my parents were in the arts; my mother was a classically-trained pianist and my dad was involved in theater and played music. They both lost their jobs and were viewed as deserters; it was a tough time for them. We left when I was seven and my brother was one year old. We immigrated through Austria and Italy and finally ended up living in NYC in an apartment that my mother’s parents got for us. A couple of years later we moved to northern New Jersey and we lived there until I went to college. My parents have always loved entertaining, so my childhood was filled with many people at the dinner table telling jokes, having drinks, playing piano, and singing old songs.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

I’ve always been partial to Oscar Wilde’s, “Everything in moderation, including moderation.” It’s nice to remember that while even-keeled approaches to things are valuable, on occasion, it’s nice to indulge.

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

One of my favorite movies is Adaptation. In that movie there are twin brothers; Charlie is very introverted, isolated, and lacking in confidence, while Donald is outgoing and popular, essentially the opposite. At some point, Charlie asks Donald how he can be so confident and happy and Donald says something to the effect of, “We are who we love, not who loves us.” I’ve always loved that line, it’s so empowering. I’m not sure there’s a particular moment that stands out for me, but in general, it’s a line I think about often. In all sorts of situations, it helps to keep in mind that my value and my emotions come from inside and can’t be superimposed on me. Whether it’s someone’s road rage, unrequited love, a job I didn’t get, or dropping a delicious slice of cake on the floor by accident, it helps me frame these moments from the inside out and really helps keep perspective.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. There is no shortage of good ideas out there. Many people have good ideas all the time. But people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. Can you share a few ideas from your experience about how to overcome this challenge?

There’s a great Paul Simon lyric, “You want to be a writer? Don’t know how or when? Find a quiet place, use a humble pen.” If I’m starting from scratch, I think step one is to learn all you can and be humble. I started this business without any experience in this industry. I’ve never been a waiter or a bartender or worked as a distributor or retailer, my only experience has been as an enthusiastic consumer. So I went out and spent about a year just talking to anyone and everyone I could and learning as much as I could. People have been unbelievably kind with sharing their knowledge and experience, even complete strangers.

One person I spoke to had started his own spirit business, and his piece of advice was, “If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t.” It’s not always going to be good news and positive reinforcement. If your resolve isn’t tested, something is very wrong I think. Even if you’re in an industry in which you have experience, be open and approach every conversation as a valuable learning opportunity.

The next thing I did was to try and think of reasons why I couldn’t do this. I thought about all the hurdles, the funding, the licensing; the list goes on and on. But little by little, with more and more research, the hurdles became shorter until I didn’t have any excuses left. Then, I would say the most important and hardest step is doing the first thing. For me, it was starting the LLC. It made everything real for me. I had documents, a tax ID number, and a legal entity with the name I wanted, not to mention I had to spend some money. Small achievable goals really helped. Open an LLC, call five distilleries, and get samples, for example. Things that can move the narrative forward.

Often when people think of a new idea, they dismiss it saying someone else must have thought of it before. How would you recommend that someone go about researching whether or not their idea has already been created?

The vast majority of products that are on the market were not the first. Products have all sorts of unique aspects like their story, specific uses, price points, accessibility, ease of use, general improvements on existing products, and so on. I wouldn’t get bogged down about being the first. For me, that falls into the category of an easy excuse to stop.

For the benefit of our readers, can you outline the steps one has to go through, from when they think of the idea, until it finally lands in a customer’s hands?

In particular, we’d love to hear about how to file a patent, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer to distribute it.

Specifically in the world of spirits, it’s been a lengthy process to get the product to consumers. I haven’t had to file any patents, but I did have to do a trademark. Sourcing a distillery was just a lot of legwork. I made a list of 50 or so distilleries across the United States then reached out to all of them and requested samples of their vodka. Then spent the better half of quarantine blind taste-testing all those vodkas. I settled on one that had a great product, locally sourced wheat, and great people running it. Distribution was more complicated because of all the legal restrictions on alcohol, but I ended up going with a company called Libdib which was recommended by several people in the industry.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why?

Everything takes longer than you think it will.

There will be days when you question why you’re doing what you’re doing. Imposter syndrome is very real. Figure out ways for you to deal with it in your own way. I tend to try and concentrate on an aspect of my project that I’m excited about to bring me out of the funk. Sometimes you have to let yourself be down for a day, then dust yourself off the next day and get back to work.

2. Budget as accurately as possible. Vague estimates can do more harm than good.

Spend more time than you think on understanding your brand and being able to tell your story in 30 seconds, 5 mins, 30 mins. When you start to do promotions, interviews, and podcasts, various mediums have different lengths. You need to be able to tell your story in print, orally, and visually, and it needs to be consistent.

3. Spending money is easy, you can always pay someone to do something. But make sure it’s necessary for your business. I had a tendency early on to find someone more seasoned in a field and pay them for their time, before allowing myself to really understand what I needed. Now I make sure I can give clear goals and direction and have metrics that can measure the value added.

Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?

Make a list of people you know in and around the industry that’s relevant to your idea. Call those people and ask them a bunch of questions. Some of them will be helpful and some won’t. Some will be encouraging, some won’t. Some might even refer you to other people. Use social media to follow a bunch of people in that world. Reach out to some and ask if they do any sort of consulting work. All of them will have useful information. Once you’ve done that, the first steps should be much more apparent to you. Also, speak to a couple of lawyers that specialize in your area to get a sense of what legal hurdles you need to jump. Then, figure out how you’ll fund this project and try and get a sense of how much it will cost. That will help chart your next steps.

There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?

I think there’s value in striking out on your own first. Understand your industry a bit, make some mistakes, and gain some perspective. Then when you speak to a consultant, you can at least have a frame of reference. It’s very easy to spend money and think you’re moving the needle and there’s no shortage of people who are trying to convince you of that.

What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?

For me, venture capital is great when you’ve brought your business and idea as far as it can go. If you have the bootstrap option, I would always take that route first. Once you’ve reached that inflection point where your idea goes from small business to medium business, that’s when venture capital could be very useful. For me, it is/was important to run my business long enough to understand what I would even do with venture capital.

Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

I responded to every question before returning to this one. I have no idea if I’ve made the world a better place. I hope I’ve made my household a better place. I hope I’ve shared the success I’ve had with the people who’ve helped me achieve it. I hope I show kindness to the strangers I meet in the course of my days.

You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

To me, nothing brings more good than freedom of education. Access to learning about the world, science, language, etc. Jump-starting children’s imaginations, motivating them to pursue being poets, walking on distant planets, teaching literature, building cars, or whatever their interest may be.

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.

I just watched The Rehearsal on HBO and would love to talk to Nathan Fielder about it. It was one of the most interesting and unique things I’ve seen on TV in a long time.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.

Making Something From Nothing: Arthur Revechkis Of Zakuska Vodka On How To Go From Idea To Launch was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Making Something From Nothing: Jennifer Nolley Of Tiny Easel On How To Go From Idea To Launch

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Don’t be afraid to ask questions. I wish I found a mentor to guide me. Sometimes it’s very hard to do it on my own. But I have found when I get stuck, I am happy to hire outside help.

As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Jennifer Tufaro Nolley.

Tiny Easel was developed by Jennifer Nolley, a mom of three with a master’s in interior design with a love for painting on her own and with her kids, looking for approachable art supplies and art activities for her kids. Why Tiny Easel? The name takes on several meanings…creating small, less-intimidating art, for kids of all skill levels, while achieving a small masterpiece with the hope of developing a love and appreciation for art and design!

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?

Art has always been a part of my life. I grew up with dyslexia, school was always a challenge; my art classes and being creative were always such a comfort and a source of happiness. One of my earliest memories of painting with watercolors was with my mom and sisters, painting by the water on vacation. We would get up early to paint together. For me, art was such an important part of growing up.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

My favorite “Life Lesson Quote” would be from Oprah “Be still and the answers will come…” I think about this often when I struggle making decisions. In a household with three kids and two working parents, we’re in a state of constant motion, it’s loud, it’s chaotic and when faced with challenges, it isn’t intuitive to create a moment of inner calmness to make a decision. I have recently started to embrace this more.

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

Movies are a big part of our home. My husband and I both worked in the film industry and met on a movie. Wes Anderson films are my favorite. As for Wes’ style, although they are so design-heavy, there’s such a handmade and even child-like quality to the world in which they exist. You get the feeling that every detail is somehow sourced from something in his childhood. In film school, I visited Cinecitta, the famous Italian film studio. I had the opportunity to visit the Art Department for The Life Aquatic and meet the designer. This was a very important moment for me as it not only reinforced my love of film design and art direction, but it showed me that there is a world where one can be creative professionally.

I spent a good couple of years stirring up various creative ideas with the hope of finding something that would bring me joy and fulfillment. It wasn’t until I had my 3rd kid, George, when a light bulb went off. As a mom who always enjoyed arts and crafts with my kids, it quickly became stressful leaving my kids to create independently while being with my newborn. Like a lot of popular products, mine was born out of my own genuine need for something that didn’t exist: a quality art experience with affordable supplies that are safe and re-usable; one that doesn’t require arms-length supervision. I immediately saw an opportunity to develop something fun and inspiring for my kids while always keeping parents in mind… leading to specialty art kits with original activities, washable, toxic-free supplies, a splat mat and spill-proof water cup.

I knew what I was looking for and couldn’t find it available… so I need to make it myself. My kids are the best resources, along with all of the local museums, parks and children’s activities in Baltimore which inspired me to create the drawings for the watercolor books. We tested several supplies to find the perfect ones making sure that they could be fun for kids starting at the age of 3 and be stimulating enough for kids up to age 12. Using bright, vibrant watercolors, a variety of tools and simple techniques, using crayon resist, watercolor crayons, watercolor pencils, masking tape and more, kids can enjoy the process, at any skill level.

For the benefit of our readers, can you outline the steps one has to go through, from when they think of the idea, until it finally lands in a customer’s hands? In particular, we’d love to hear about how to file a patent, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer to distribute it.

To keep my budget as low as possible, I tried to do everything myself until I couldn’t. One of the things I am very proud of is I got a registered Trademark for my name, Tiny Easel… without a lawyer! I did it myself, and you can too. I will say, my brother-in-law did encourage me to do that, and gave me a few pointers which gave me the confidence to go ahead on my own.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why?

Go with your gut. Sometimes I find myself making decisions when I feel rushed, or someone suggests something I should make that doesn’t feel right… those items usually don’t sell well.
Always get a sample. Again, when I try to rush something and don’t pay attention to every detail, usually something isn’t quite right.
To help with communication, always provide examples in writing and visuals/ sketches. I communicate with my manufacturers in China via email very early in the morning and very late at night, which can be tough when making design decisions. It always helps when I provide descriptions in writing and with an image or sketch to be on the same page.
Research the right platform to use. I chose one that was user-friendly and easy for me to update. But I don’t think it is as good for customers… and doesn’t provide as many selling options. Because it’s hard to transition from platform to platform, make sure you research the ease of use for you as the founder, but also the ease of use for your customers.
Don’t be afraid to ask questions. I wish I found a mentor to guide me. Sometimes it’s very hard to do it on my own. But I have found when I get stuck, I am happy to hire outside help.

Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?

Figure out your brand and mission first. Then, write down your mission and keep coming back to it every day. Every time you are faced with a company decision, ask yourself “Does this choice align with my mission?” If the answer is “No” then you’re at risk of compromising your brand and short selling your followers. My mission is to make art fun for kids and easy for parents.

There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?

With any creative idea, I personally think it is best to write down your idea, develop it as far as you can go until you can’t. Then, I think it’s good to hire the necessary help.

What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?

I wish I knew the answer to this one. I have continued to work within my budget without any outside funding. That is what works for me, but to grow, I do believe at some point I will need to look for outside resources. And when that time comes, I will make sure to find partners who align with the goals of Tiny Easel.

Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

My hope is to provide an accessible art experience for kids, of all skill levels, so that they can enjoy creating without the pressure of a final product. I want kids to find joy and satisfaction in the process. I think creative kids will make the world a better place.

I really find it very helpful as a busy mom to find a creative space, whether it is to create a business or just to have some time to reflect. I also think within the mom community, it’s important to lift each other up. What I have loved about starting a small business is how supportive this mom and creative community has been in giving me the courage to keep going. My movement would be to create something and go for it. You will learn along the way.

As a longtime fan of Shark Tank, I would be lying if I didn’t say it sparked something in me to create a product. I would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with Lori Greiner. As a successful woman entrepreneur, who started with one idea and turned it into a multi-million-dollar brand, I would love to get her thoughts on how to scale my business.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.

Making Something From Nothing: Jennifer Nolley Of Tiny Easel On How To Go From Idea To Launch was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Mattie Mead Of Hempitecture On Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Startup

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Teamwork, vision, grit, a willingness to learn from your mistakes, and the do-it-yourself bootstrapping attitude.

Startups have such a glamorous reputation. Companies like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Uber, and Airbnb once started as scrappy startups with huge dreams and huge obstacles. Yet we of course know that most startups don’t end up as success stories. What does a founder or a founding team need to know to create a highly successful startup? In this series, called “Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Startup” we are talking to experienced and successful founders and business leaders who can share stories from their experiences about what it takes to create a highly successful startup. As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Matthew Mead.

Matthew (Mattie) Mead is the founder and CEO of Hempitecture, a nonwoven materials manufacturer that uses biobased, carbon-capturing inputs to create healthier, high-performing products for a more sustainable planet. An Idaho-based, adventure-seeking entrepreneur, Mattie has a passion for re-envisioning the materials traditionally used in construction and beyond. On a mission to discover tangible solutions to the climate crisis, Mattie founded the Hempitecture concept in 2012 during his studies of architecture, environmental sciences, and entrepreneurship at Hobart College in Geneva, New York.

In 2016, Mattie had the honor of speaking at TEDx on the topic of “Building a Better World,” and just two years later, Hempitecture was formally founded alongside Co-Founder Tommy Gibbons, as a Public Benefit Corporation. Mattie’s work with the sustainability-driven brand also awarded him a spot on the Forbes “30 under 30” list in 2020. Previously, Mattie served on the Board of Directors of Idaho BaseCamp, a non-profit organization that connects underserved communities to the outdoors, for three years. In his home of Ketchum, Idaho, he was the Vice-Chair of the Planning and Zoning Commission for five years and the Chairperson of the Historical Preservation Commission for one year as a founding member.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

My interest in sustainability and architecture began as a student at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. Thanks in part to the liberal arts curriculum at the school, I was able to gain exposure to varying subject areas. By my senior year at Hobart, I decided to launch a thesis research project that explored the nexus of our built environment, architecture, and the impacts of the built environment on our natural world. This thesis study, titled “The Contemporary Relevance of Earth Architecture,” served as the foundation for the Hempitecture concept.

What was the “Aha Moment” that led to the idea for your current company? Can you share that story with us?

My a-ha moment was when I realized that buildings in their operations are responsible for nearly 40% of our domestic carbon footprint, which makes up the largest portion of our domestic carbon emissions, more so than transportation, industry, and manufacturing. If building operations make up the most significant portion of our carbon footprint, it could also be a great opportunity to enact solutions to change that statistic. Through my thesis study and with an understanding of this problem within the built environment, I began to research bio-based solutions, utilizing materials that are adept at capturing carbon dioxide. In essence, the Hempitecture concept was born.

Was there somebody in your life who inspired or helped you to start your journey with your business? Can you share a story with us?

Personally, I have had many mentors along the way, and as a business, we have had fantastic advisers and members on our Board of Directors who have helped chart the future of Hempitecture. Early on, I relied heavily on my college’s entrepreneurship department to help shape the earliest patches of Hempitecture. In 2013, I presented at my college’s pitch competition as a finalist with a grand prize of $10,000 in seed funding to launch the start-up. This was five years before industrial hemp was federally legal. The judges laughed at me — they couldn’t believe that I was proposing to build houses and buildings using materials derived from a schedule one substance (industrial hemp). I did not win the contest, which was extremely disheartening at the time. I graduated college, and I did not know what was next. Soon after, I began working for a sustainable development in Saint John in the U.S. Virgin Islands designing and building eco-cottages at Concordia Eco Resort that are solar-powered and rainwater harvesting. One day my phone rang and it was a gentleman from Idaho. He asked if I wanted to come to Idaho and build a hemp home for his nonprofit organization. I was unaware of where Idaho was even located on a map, having never traveled there. He found Hempitecture through a news article that was shared on Facebook. Through the power of social media, Hempitecture had its first opportunity to build a proof-of-concept project in the mountains of Idaho.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

Hempitecture is unique because we are one of the first companies in the United States to build multiple homes across the country using hemp and lime as a material. When combined, this material is often referred to as HempCrete. It is an insulating thermal envelope material that is cast around a structural frame. In the years of working to bring this material to scale we realize that while HempCrete presents great opportunities as a carbon-negative building material, there are also significant challenges. Some of these challenges include a workforce not knowing how to work with HempCrete and a misalignment of building codes that don’t understand or accept HempCrete in the United States. Additionally, due to the subcontracted nature of buildings in the United States, every subcontractor, including design professionals, must understand how to work with a design for a HempCrete envelope. This led us to our pivot. In 2018, our cofounder, Tommy Gibbons, a high school classmate of mine, joined the team, and we re-incorporated Hempitecture as a public benefit corporation with a mission to scale bio-based, carbon-negative, and sustainable building material solutions in a way that could be integrated into conventional building assemblies. That led us to bring our flagship product, HempWool insulation, to market.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

As a public benefit corporation, doing good for people and the planet is at the core of our business model. We sell, manufacture, and distribute building materials that are carbon negative and healthy. We believe that our materials and solutions create healthier homes and habitats while also sequestering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. And in doing so, we believe that we are bringing goodness to both people and the planet.

Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

Tenacity, vision, and grit have been at the core of Hempitecture‘s journey to success. Hempitecture as a concept was founded in 2013, but it is not until today in 2022, that we fully realize this vision by bringing our building materials, particularly HempWool to scale in the United States. Over the years, there have been multiple instances where people have not taken our building materials seriously, due to the common misconceptions surrounding industrial hemp. Today, this is very different because industrial hemp is legal in all states and is federally legal. It is no longer a schedule one substance, as it is now recognized distinctly from cannabis that produces THC and has recreational or medicinal value. Despite being told no by many clients, architects, and even investors who looked at our business, we have fundraised nearly $5 million to build our flagship facility. This flagship facility is proof of our concept at an industrial scale that we can grow materials that support rural communities to create high-performing sustainable building materials

Often leaders are asked to share the best advice they received. But let’s reverse the question. Can you share a story about advice you’ve received that you now wish you never followed?

As an entrepreneur, you are often given lots of advice — this advice is like a mosaic. You need to decide where and when this advice is applicable and fits into place. One piece of advice that we were given was that we should move away from industrial hemp entirely and focus on other plant-based resources due to the schedule-one substance nature of industrial hemp. I am glad we did not do away with industrial hemp because it is the core ingredient that enables our building materials to be carbon-negative, long-lasting, insulating, and high performing.

Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey?

There have been many difficult times starting a business in the United States and essentially uncharted territories. Initially, as a business, we were traveling from job site to job site, helping construct HempCrete homes using hemp and lime. Oftentimes there would be obstacles in between projects that hindered our cash flow. There have been multiple points where we thought we would have to close the doors of Hempitecture and move on. Thanks in part to two committed co-founders who have self-funded the business and bootstrapped it to success today, we have been able to stay in business to ultimately realize our vision of mass-producing sustainable products such as HempWool thermal insulation.

Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard? What strategies or techniques did you use to help overcome those challenges?

The drive to continue pushing Hempitecture forward came from the core belief that what we are doing is needed in the world and that it truly has the potential to help decarbonize the built environment. Decarbonizing the built environment and making our homes and buildings more sustainable requires a comprehensive approach, strategy, awareness, and education. Education has been the cornerstone of our success: we educate architects, builders, homeowners, and even distributors who are interested in looking at our products. Statistics in the information of our product speak for themselves. Once you learn the benefits of our products compared to what is conventionally available on the market, It shows that we have truly unique offerings that are able to impact the built environment and our natural world positively.

Can you share a few ideas or stories from your experience about how to successfully ride the emotional highs & lows of being a founder?

As a founder, there are many highs and lows. One thing that is essential is that you must celebrate the wins, even small ones, and keep in perspective where you have come from and where you are going. Without celebrating and recognizing the small milestones, you can lose sight of the greater vision and all of the traction you have made to date.

Let’s imagine that a young founder comes to you and asks for your advice about whether venture capital or bootstrapping is best for them? What would you advise them? Can you kindly share a few things a founder should look at to determine if fundraising or bootstrapping is the right choice?

I would advise every entrepreneur to always bootstrap for as long as possible before responding. Sometimes this can be difficult; however, if you can successfully bootstrap your company to the point of being able to raise fundraising, you will give away less of your company in exchange for an equity investment. Also, if you are considering raising funding to launch your products or grow your business, structuring your fundraising round through a safe agreement is a great way to delay your valuation and allow you to gain proof of concept. We fundraise through a unique means; we utilized community funding on a platform called WeFunder. We have over 1,800 investors who have contributed to our goal of raising nearly $5 million, which has been deployed to build our manufacturing facility.

Many startups are not successful, and some are very successful. From your experience or perspective, what are the main factors that distinguish successful startups from unsuccessful ones? What are your “Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Startup”? If you can, please share a story or an example for each.

Building a cohesive team is essential to having success as a start-up business. It is critical that your founders are committed and determined and can recruit talent that is equally committed and determined to see the success of the company grow. As a public benefit corporation, all of our team members are aligned around the understanding and realization that buildings need to be improved, and that building materials are a pathway to doing that. In our hiring process, we often ask prospective employees about their perspectives on sustainability. If they do not share the same vision that we have, then we know they will not be a great fit for our business because we are a mission-based business, and having alignment around that vision is essential. Five things that are essential to creating a highly successful start-up are as follows: teamwork, vision, grit, a willingness to learn from your mistakes, and the do-it-yourself bootstrapping attitude. Early on when we had the opportunity to build our first proof of concept project in Idaho, we faced many roadblocks. One of which was that industrial hemp was not yet available in the United States at the time. Because we had to import the raw materials to build this home, which ultimately became the first public-use HempCrete building in the United States for a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, we fundraised through Kickstarter to support the purchase and import of the raw materials for the building project. Our Kickstarter rate is $27,000 and that $27,000 went largely to realizing the proof of concept project, not for our own internal operations, marketing, or anything else other than the building. That first building gave us the momentum we needed to show that building with hemp in the United States is indeed possible, and further highlighted the need to bring an industrial hemp supply chain to the country.

What are the most common mistakes you have seen CEOs & founders make when they start a business? What can be done to avoid those errors?

When launching a new company, CEOs and founders often think they need large amounts of money to get their product, service, or concept to market. This is not the case; there are plenty of strategies to raise funding through non-dilutive sources including Kickstarter and community rounds on platforms such as WeFunder. A founder dedicated to seeing their company succeed should do everything they can to bootstrap their company before soliciting outside investment. If you solicit outside investment at an early stage in your business, you’re likely to give up large amounts of equity and therefore you begin to give up control of your business before it even starts.

Startup founders often work extremely long hours and it’s easy to burn the candle at both ends. What would you recommend to founders about how to best take care of their physical and mental wellness when starting a company?

Starting a new business or any start-up requires dedication, determination, and a clear vision to align yourself and your team around. This can lead to burnout and discouragement when you’re not getting the traction you hope to get. Our company is based in Sun Valley, Idaho, and while we have a mostly remote team across the United States, we encourage our employees to get outside, go hiking, ski, snowboard, and do anything that helps them connect with nature. We also allow our employees to take mental health days with no questions asked. If they have something going on in their personal lives or just need a day off to recalibrate and recuperate, we allow that because it gives them the opportunity to recharge their batteries and return to working towards our collective vision and goals with more energy and enthusiasm.

If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?

Our flagship product HempWool thermal insulation — it’s a scalable one-to-one replacement for conventional insulation products. We believe the scalable nature of this product, which can be used in lieu of things such as fiberglass and mineral wool, allows us to reach more homes and buildings across the United States because it is so easy to implement. We believe the movement of decarbonization within the built environment, and subsequent federal tailwinds, such as the Inflation Reduction Act are bringing the importance of sustainable building materials and carbon-negative building materials to the forefront of thought within the architectural and design communities. We believe that more architects and builders need the education to understand why sustainable building materials like HempWool are ideal for decarbonizing the built environment and creating healthier homes and habitats. This movement is growing, and organizations like Architecture 2030 and Builders for Climate Action are bringing this awareness and knowledge to the forefront of the architecture and building communities.

We are blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why?

Today, many business moguls have reached billionaire status and are contributing their funds to sustainable and environmentally friendly causes. Take for instance breakthrough energy ventures ABC Firm which are investing in the future of sustainable innovations. There are also climate funds set up by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and even entrepreneurs like Elon Musk that are lending their exorbitant profits towards sustainable causes. It’s hard to say that there would be one person I would want to sit down with, but rather, I would like to have the opportunity to speak to a consortium of these individuals to highlight the need to develop and build with more sustainable materials. Anyone who is a VP focused on sustainability and building materials has an open spot on my calendar. I would love to tell them about how Hempitecture is just part of the solution to solving some of the biggest challenges that face the built environment and our globe today.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.

Mattie Mead Of Hempitecture On Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Startup was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Making Something From Nothing: Ethan Haber Of Happy Habitats On How To Go From Idea To Launch

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Don’t compare yourself to others.

With social media these days, it’s so easy to compare yourself to others. All my peers are always posting on Instagram and TikTok either about how great their lives are, how much fun they’re having, or how successful they’ve been. That’s all fine and good, but make sure you don’t start comparing yourself to them. The only person you need to measure up against is yourself. If you’re satisfied with how you’re doing that’s all that matters.

As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Ethan Haber.

Ethan Haber is the CEO/Founder of Happy Habitats (https://www.happyhabitats.net). An aspiring entrepreneur, and avid animal lover, Ethan identified the small pet space as the perfect place to make his mark. Join him on his journey of small pet enrichment, one hamster at a time.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?

I grew up in Roslyn on Long Island and had a pretty normal childhood. People who knew me growing up would tell you three things: I was always creating stuff, I loved animals, and I don’t take no for an answer.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

I really love the quote by Woody Allen, “80% of success is showing up.” Simply put, the people that try are the ones that succeed. I’ve found that most people don’t risk trying for fear of failure. They talk about their dreams but never go after them. If you actually give it a shot you’ll be surprised how far you go. Anyone can have an idea, but it’s the execution that matters.

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

My favorite show is It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. I’ve watched the whole thing start to finish at least a dozen times. The main cast makes for quite the interesting group of role-models. They always have some scheme or adventure they’re in the process of. The characters themselves are terrible people and they rarely succeed. But, the creativity and tenacity they exhibit are things I’ll often think about. I guess it just goes to show, you can learn from anything-haha.

I have three examples I can share:

Growing up I loved stuffed animals. There were always ones I wanted that I couldn’t buy, characters from video games and comics I wanted to see in the real world. When I was 12, I started learning how to sew. For the past 11 years I’ve been hand sewing stuffed animals from scratch. I’ve used this skill to leverage myself many times. Most notably, in college I became a hired contractor for the video game studio, Squanch Games. One semester I drove 96 miles to their office in Raleigh every Friday. I must’ve made them over 100 custom stuffed animals throughout my relationship with them.
I’ve been writing a comic in my free time, and it’s a long arduous process. My neighbor liked my illustrations and asked me to write a children’s book with him. He had this great idea about whales he shared with me. I said to him “if you write the thing, I’ll illustrate it.” Nothing has happened since then.
My startup, Happy Habitats began because there was something I wanted for my hamster that didn’t exist. I saw the opportunity to create something new in a niche market with a high barrier to entry. My father and I partnered with the design firm P9 design and haven’t looked back. After a lot of time and work we’ve created a unique product that’s one of a kind. One problem we’ve been having trouble with recently has been finding a sales rep. Most reps only take on businesses with a whole catalog of products. Every sales rep so far has told us they love our product, but they can’t give us the time we deserve. Due to this, I’ve become a one man sales army. Over the next two weeks I’ve managed to set up several meetings with major buyers. My dad and I are actually flying to Florida for one meeting. He jokingly said, “who needs a sales rep when you have Ethan.”

In each of these examples there’s a common theme. I didn’t just talk about doing something, I actually did it. My friend Ryan Gomez is a fellow budding entrepreneur. He makes amazing music and goes by the artist name Rygo. He always loves to say, “how do you eat an elephant?” The answer, one bite at a time. Start doing something today and you’ll be closer to your goal tomorrow.

Here’s Rygo’s Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/72dpTEbWGlJHimIgXvcz6r?si=eouZmwPzSam0UhdaDyveAA

There’s no such thing as a new idea. The world is so big and people are so creative, odds are if you’ve thought of something, someone else has too. Don’t let that discourage you, it should actually encourage you. If your idea is that good, other people are bound to think of it as well. The question is, will they act on it? Will you act on it? Someone’s gotta do it, why shouldn’t it be you? For an idea to have value, it needs to be executed. And if someone else is already doing it, who’s to say you can’t do it better. Before the 7 minute ab routine there was the 10 minute ab routine.

First you have to identify a problem. There’s two types of problems, headache problems and migraine problems. Headache problems are things that are minor annoyances that may not need a solution, while migraine problems are issues people will pay any amount of money to solve. Generally speaking, you’ll know you’ve found something when you identify a migraine problem.

Now that you’ve found your problem you need to discover a solution. A perfect example is what Sara Blakely did with Spanx. She needed an undergarment for her outfit that the market didn’t offer. She discovered that by cutting the feet off of a pair of pantyhose she was able to solve her garment issue. Sara asked around and found that many women experienced the same issue she did.

With a problem addressed and a solution to solve that problem, you need to take action. It’s not enough to just solve your issue. You need to create something people can buy and see what the market says. You don’t need some grand operation to test your product. For example, if you have a cool new pet product you think people would buy, you may offer to stock a few in a local store near you for free and see if people buy them. That’s a very low cost to see how your product does on shelves.

If you’ve made it this far and you really have something you’ll want to file a patent. There’s two types of patents you can apply for, design patents and utility patents, depending on your idea you may need one or both. I went to avvo.com and searched for an attorney that fit my needs. After connecting with Eddie M Holder, Happy Habitats was able to file patents for the Halo. I’ve attached his link below if you’d like to connect with him. Eddie is a great attorney who cares about his clients and charges fairly.

https://www.avvo.com/attorneys/27105-nc-eddie-holder-4559312.html.

With your idea protected you can now look for a manufacturer. It’s important to leverage any and all connections you may have. Happy Habitats connected with our manufacturer, BRH2, through a friend’s connection. If you’re a student, you can ask your faculty and university for help too. The student card is a huge asset so make sure to use it liberally.

Lastly, when it comes to retail, never underestimate the power of cold calls. We’ve all gotten them, a call from some strange number talking about something. You may brush them aside, but cold calls really do work. Thanks to cold calls Happy Habitats has talked with plenty of stores, from Mom and Pop Shops all the way to Big Retailers. Persistence is key here. Don’t give up after reaching someone’s voicemail once. I’ve been told it takes seven interactions with someone to gain their trust. Happy Habitats follows a 15 step sales sequence that includes: emails, linkedin messaging, and phone calls.

P.S. It never hurts to find a mentor. Identify someone in your field who has a wealth of knowledge and ask them to mentor you. You’ll be surprised how receptive they can be, but believe it or not, they were once in your shoes. I’ve been receiving mentorship from the founder of Petsmart, Jim Dougherty, all because I reached out to him on Linkedin.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why?

Everything takes longer than you think it will.

Happy Habitats was founded in 2019 before the Covid pandemic. Everything you can imagine took longer than it was supposed to. There was scarcity of raw materials, then our molds were stuck on a ship because of the whole shipping fiasco, and now there’s cardboard shortages. Be prepared for things to take longer than you planned.

2. Don’t compare yourself to others.

With social media these days, it’s so easy to compare yourself to others. All my peers are always posting on Instagram and TikTok either about how great their lives are, how much fun they’re having, or how successful they’ve been. That’s all fine and good, but make sure you don’t start comparing yourself to them. The only person you need to measure up against is yourself. If you’re satisfied with how you’re doing that’s all that matters.

3. Prepare to be surprised.

This one skews both ways. Prepare to be pleasantly surprised and unpleasantly surprised. I was not prepared at all for when Jim Dougherty gave me a call, I was actually preoccupied with something else. But, once he said who he was I stopped what I was doing and we spoke for over an hour. That was a pleasant surprise. On the other hand, after waiting 8 weeks for our retail box to be manufactured the box that arrived is not what we approved. It’s flimsy and not fit for shelves. Because of this we had to reorder our retail boxes and be extra anal about the gauge of the cardboard. That was certainly an unpleasant surprise.

4. It’s Never Over Till It’s Over.

Remember, it’s never over till it’s over. One of our first retail partners placed an order for 16 units and my father and I were ecstatic. Then however, it took two weeks for him to send over the payment. Until the deal is signed in ink everything’s up in the air. Another customer placed an order and never got back to me on payment. A verbal agreement is far from the final thing. Make sure not to count your chickens before they hatch.

5. It’s important to dream in the short term too.

Everyone fantasizes about what they want and where they want to be. Unfortunately, we often dream of the end result without thinking of all the steps it takes to get there. It’s important to dream in the short term too. Set up daily/weekly goals and do your best to hit them. Every time I cross something off in my planner I feel good about myself. Creating visual signifiers to remind you of what you’ve done and how far you’ve come is a great way to prevent burning out.

Here’s a linked video where I talk about the 5 things listed above:

Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?

It depends on what type of product they want to create. Is it a software, a hard good, or a service? Depending on the idea the direction one needs to follow will change. Broadly speaking, first you need to make sure the problem you want to solve is real. Interview no less than 100 people to see what they have to say. An interview doesn’t have to be in person. You can create a survey and have people fill it out. I did this for Happy Habitats way back before we put a single dollar into the company. Just make sure not to ask guided questions. Instead of asking “would you pay x for this?” Ask, “how much would you pay for this product/service?” Let the consumer tell you their thoughts, rather than leading them to what you want to hear.

There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?

Happy Habitats would not exist were it not for our partnership with P9 Design. They are a top of the line design firm that innovates from soup to nuts. Other than Happy Habitats, they create products for major consumer brands: Honeywell, OXO, Swell. Though I had an idea, I didn’t have all the tools in my kit to make it a reality. If you have a great idea I encourage you to see how far you can get on your own. But, if there’s things your idea needs that you can’t provide then find a partner. Just make sure they’re a good partner who’s equally invested in your idea. A bad partner can kill a great idea.

What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?

A penny saved is a penny earned. Bootstrapping is a must for any aspiring entrepreneur. Capital is finite and hard to come by. It’s important to try and stretch your dollar as far as you can. Venture capital is great but you likely are not going to reach that opportunity if you don’t bootstrap first.

Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

That’s something I’m still working on. The most recent example I can think of is with TTPM: Toys, Tots, Pets, and More. They’re a great company that reviewed the Halo. When I visited their office I saw the sheer volume of toys they had, either extras they were sent for review (they only need one) or products they already reviewed. Every year my father and I do a toy drive to help provide gifts for children of impoverished families on Long Island (where we’re from). I mentioned it to TTPM and they donated over a carload of toys! I personally loaded the car and drove the toys to Hempstead. As your rolodex expands so does your ability to impact your community.

For my bar mitzvah project I raised funds for a water well in Sudan. Even though that was 10 years ago, somewhere today people are still benefiting from that well. It’s a crazy thing to think about. Everyone deserves access to food, shelter, and most importantly water. In the future I’d like to help more areas develop access to clean drinking water.

Either Justin Roiland or the Creators of Always Sunny (Charlie Day, Rob McElhenney, and/or Glenn Howerton). While we’re in different industries I draw a lot of inspiration from their creativity. If you look at their respective creative journeys and what it took for them to get where they are, both are entrepreneurs in their own right. I almost got to meet Justin Roiland once a few years ago because I’ve made so many stuffed animals for his company, but it didn’t pan out. If any of y’all see this, know that lunch is on me!

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.

Making Something From Nothing: Ethan Haber Of Happy Habitats On How To Go From Idea To Launch was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Meet The Disruptors: Daniel Shaddock Of Liquid Instruments On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up…

Meet The Disruptors: Daniel Shaddock Of Liquid Instruments On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

When it comes to your career, you have to make time for the big stuff, and not worry if some of the little things fall off your plate along the way. It’s just the way it is, and you have to be OK with it. Cut yourself a break. You’re not going to be able to do everything for everyone all the time. It’s up to us all individually to prioritize the things that are going to matter in five years. And don’t be afraid to try something new. The people who keep trying new things throughout their careers, no matter how senior they get — those are the ones who really go a long way.

As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Daniel Shaddock.

Daniel Shaddock is CEO of Liquid Instruments and professor of physics at The Australian National University. He also served as a Director’s Fellow at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a Fellow at the American Physical Society, where his publications have been cited over 20,000 times. His research focuses on precision measurements using advanced digital signal processing. At Liquid Instruments, Daniel is pioneering the move from a physical, hard-wired approach to test and measurement towards a computer-based system that uses intelligent software.

I’ve always enjoyed the aspect of problem solving within science and figuring things out for the first time. My mentality is if you’re going to solve problems, they might as well be useful. I’m attracted to the enduring impact you can have in science, and the immortality of discoveries. Initially, I was fascinated by exploring big topics, such as understanding the universe and gravitational wave detection. Over time, I became more interested in the practical applications of technology and how it can help people in daily life, which is what led to the creation of Liquid Instruments.

Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?

The test and measurement industry goes back to at least the 1930s, when Hewlett-Packard began making oscillators. Over the last few decades, there hasn’t been much innovation in this space, which is surprising given how many high-tech sectors it serves. When I was an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, we developed a laser interferometer to measure between spacecraft, a sort of extreme LiDAR. This interferometer was at the heart of the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO) mission to map the world’s water reserves from space with unprecedented accuracy. The super-flexible, FPGA-based instrumentation developed for GRACE-FO became the technology that launched Liquid Instruments. As a longtime user of conventional test equipment — bulky, expensive, fixed-function pieces of hardware — it was obvious that there was an opportunity to modernize and disrupt this space by making it more software-centric, while also making it more affordable. This is why we created Moku:Lab, Moku:Go, and Moku:Pro — to bring engineers and scientists versatile, high-performance test instrumentation that’s easy to use. Our software-defined instrumentation can be reconfigured on the fly and allows test engineers to upgrade equipment with over-the-air updates to add more functionality as their needs evolve. Our technology is turning heads — we recently raised a $30 million round of funding to expand what we’re doing into additional industries.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

We did have a challenge in coming up with the name “Moku.” We were a bunch of physicists 100% focused on building the technology and bringing a real product to life. We had our first big trade show — a physics conference. We got to the point where we had to print out banners with the name of the product on them. But we still didn’t have a name. There were lots of spreadsheets of potential names and many people making suggestions. Some of us were in California, and others were in Australia. As we were listing names, we thought about the geographical midpoint between us, which is somewhere near the Hawaiian Islands. That led us to think about the question, “If you could only take one piece of test equipment to a deserted island, what would it be?” Of course, the answer was our device. At that point, we downloaded a Hawaiian dictionary and settled on Moku, which is inspired by the Hawaiian word for “island.” What’s really mattered over time is the meaning that we’ve given to the name, rather than the name itself.

We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?

One weird thing about me is even though I’m a professor of physics, I wasn’t interested in science or engineering as a kid. I was much more interested in playing sports and computer games, or going to the beach. In high school, I had a really funny and engaging physics teacher. He lit a spark in me, and it was at this point that I decided to study physics. It’s true that one teacher can make such a huge difference in the lives of many students. There was a whole group of us from my class who all went on to have careers in physics. That’s because our teacher showed us that there are so many cool things to do in that area of science.

Disruption for the sake of disruption isn’t something I would recommend. There are situations where something is perfectly fine as is, and doesn’t need to be changed. This type of disruption could lead to more issues than the original problem someone was trying to solve. At NASA, I saw firsthand that there was a major opportunity to make things better for engineers and scientists by modernizing and democratizing test equipment. At the time, there were huge advances being made in areas like connectivity and cloud services, and user interface design, and it seemed like a no-brainer to apply these concepts to test and measurement. I like to think of test equipment as the technology behind technology. If test equipment is outdated and difficult to use, how can you expect it to help deliver great breakthroughs? Our flexible, software-defined approach is making a positive impact and accelerating engineering progress.

Can you share some of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.

When it comes to your career, you have to make time for the big stuff, and not worry if some of the little things fall off your plate along the way. It’s just the way it is, and you have to be OK with it. Cut yourself a break. You’re not going to be able to do everything for everyone all the time. It’s up to us all individually to prioritize the things that are going to matter in five years. And don’t be afraid to try something new. The people who keep trying new things throughout their careers, no matter how senior they get — those are the ones who really go a long way.

We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?

Over the past few years, our team has been busy expanding Moku software-defined instrumentation, which is now available on three hardware devices: Moku:Go, Moku:Lab, and Moku:Pro. After initially focusing on the optics and photonics, academic and government research, and education markets, we now have users in aerospace, defense, semiconductor, LiDAR, quantum, and other industries.

Following our recent round of funding, we’ve accelerated our growth plans and look forward to introducing new offerings that connect lab measurements to more cloud services to improve workflows. This will enable more use cases and allow our customers to increase insight and efficiency exponentially, so they can do what they do better and more quickly. We’re excited to see the benefits this will bring to our customers and the work they’re doing.

The interest in our products is exploding. We’re on track to add more new users this year than the previous six years combined. We know this is just the beginning of what we can do. We want to bring Liquid Instruments to more people around the world, and we see a lot of opportunity to do so in the industrial and educational sectors. We’re already doing a lot of work in aerospace and defense, and we will continue to expand our capabilities there. Overall, the next 12 to 18 months will be critical for our growth. We look forward to executing on our ambitious vision for the company.

Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?

I’m a technology fan in general and have become particularly interested in how it intersects with and improves people’s lives. I was in graduate school when Steve Jobs came back to Apple and launched the iMac. I would set my alarm at like 3 a.m. in Australia so I could stream Jobs’ keynotes live from California. After this, my daily routine became opening up a bunch of tabs on my browser and checking out the latest Apple rumors. It was an incredibly interesting time, because the things Apple was doing and how the company was accomplishing them felt so next-level. I think that Tesla’s focus on its product has a similar feel of building something transformational in many dimensions simultaneously. Just like with Apple, Tesla has taken its time rising to the top. I believe that if you build a product that your users genuinely love, and keep your company growing the right way, then greatness awaits.

How can our readers follow you online?

We encourage you to stay connected with us! Follow us on LinkedIn, subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out our latest company news, events, product updates, and more at liquidinstruments.com.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!

Meet The Disruptors: Daniel Shaddock Of Liquid Instruments On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Karl Chan Of Laserfiche On How To Use Digital Transformation To Take Your Company To The Next Level

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Today, data are gold and invaluable for business decisions. One way that organizations can use digital transformation to “take it to the next level” is to use data to inform your business model. Take jet engines: They are now sold based on the miles they have the capacity to fly. Usage data are collected to predict engine lifespans and maintenance schedules. Those data are used by human experts who can provide better pricing models, better business strategies and better overall service. In the end, they’re providing a better experience to employees, customers and the pilots and passengers of the jets.

As part of our series about “How To Use Digital Transformation To Take Your Company To The Next Level”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Karl Chan.

As a business leader and technologist, Chan sets Laserfiche’s strategic vision for innovation and growth. With over 30 years of experience in the technology industry, he has played a significant role in the development of Laserfiche business process automation and forms, as well as the company’s focus on Laserfiche Cloud. Chan is passionate about providing solutions that address business challenges and enrich the world. He has a master’s degree in computer science and bachelor’s degree in engineering. In 2015, Chan received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Business Journal.

I really got into technology through computer games when I was a kid. I could never beat my brother, so I hacked into the games’ software and found loopholes, which became a new interest for me entirely.

I ended up following this passion to Harvey Mudd College, where I got my B.S. in engineering before getting my M.S. in computer science from California State University, Long Beach. I’ve worked in a variety of technology focused roles, but I think I’ve always held onto that notion that technology has great potential to make things easier for us. It used to help me beat my brother at computer games, but today at Laserfiche, we’re solving some of our customers’ biggest problems — whether that’s helping their workforce be more productive or bringing more value to their employees’ everyday lives by eliminating boring, repetitive tasks.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?

I’ve been at Laserfiche for more than 30 years now, but when I first started at the company I was working as a programmer. Back then, when everyone would go out to lunch, I would stay in the office since I brought mine to work. I’d be the only technical person in the office and ended up doing tech support during lunch. It was at this time I clearly was made aware of the difference between how we intended the software to be used and how it was actually used in the field. These were the real-world problems that we were solving, and our users were pushing the boundaries of our software’s capabilities. It gave me a better understanding of the impact that Laserfiche had on the world.

Extensive research suggests that “purpose-driven businesses” are more successful in many areas. When your company started, what was its vision, what was its purpose?

Laserfiche founder Nien-Ling Wacker started the company as a consulting firm. She identified a need to help organizations work smarter — at the time, every business ran on paper, which created issues with storing, finding and managing information. She transitioned the company to focus on developing software, and Laserfiche technology has evolved from there. We’re now a cloud-first technology company that focuses heavily on process automation rather than simply helping businesses go paperless. But our purpose remains the same: Empower people everywhere to work smarter, so that together, we can create innovative solutions that enrich our world.

Are you working on any new, exciting projects now? How do you think that might help people?

Laserfiche recently introduced the Laserfiche Solution Marketplace, an initiative that I’m very excited about because it really embodies our business purpose and has the potential to have a huge impact on organizations’ digital transformations. The Solution Marketplace is a collection of solution templates to help jumpstart process automation and digital initiatives such as integrations — we’re aiming to help organizations address digital transformation needs and accelerate innovation enterprise-wide by taking a low-code approach to solution development.

Users can build and deploy their own automated workflows or connect Laserfiche to other applications faster using pre-built solutions, which are vetted by experts and follow industry best practices. There are hundreds of solutions available in the Solution Marketplace today, which represent common business processes as well as individual industry or organization needs, from new hire onboarding and accounts payable to public records requests and patient information authorization for healthcare organizations.

We are constantly adding solutions to the marketplace, and I’m excited about being able to provide these innovative templates to our customers so that they don’t have to automate or integrate from scratch.

Digital transformation is the use of technology to fundamentally change an organization’s operations to deliver more value. Digital transformation is also the cultural change necessary to adopt new technology and processes, and constantly try new things to solve problems or challenge the status quo. On a practical level, this means breaking down existing processes and asking how you can change them to better serve your customers. Once you begin answering that question and envisioning different outcomes, you can apply solutions that have the potential to be transformative. Many organizations will take on initiatives like creating a new website, updating a legacy ERP or CRM system or simply moving digital assets to the cloud and call them “digital transformation.” This is digital optimization — it may be an improvement, but if you are not transforming the human experience, it’s not transformation.

Which companies can most benefit from a Digital Transformation?

I believe all companies can benefit from digital transformation, particularly because digital transformation is never “complete.” Organizations’ needs are constantly fluctuating; employee and customer expectations change — and the technology evolves. There’s no finish line. There’s always room for innovation.

Digital transformation has the potential to reinvent the way things have always been done. I’ve seen startups build faster, more innovative ways of working using digital transformation, but I’ve also seen 100-year-old institutions reimagine core parts of their business to increase revenue. One story that recently stood out to me: Bergen Community College is a Laserfiche customer that start out wanting to replace a legacy document management system that was approaching end-of-life. They embraced digital transformation, however, when they assessed the student experience at their student center. They made the choice to digitize and automate many routine student services, only requiring students to come into the student center for high-touch student support services, such as advising and counseling. The result was reducing about 50% of the foot traffic to the student center, making the center more responsive to student needs and enabling staff to focus time on providing quality service. The college’s team estimates that the time and resources saved from their ongoing transformation are approaching $1 million.

Has integrating Digital Transformation been a challenging process for some companies? What are the challenges? How do you help resolve them?

Digital transformation isn’t a product you can buy and install — for that reason one of the biggest challenges I see when organizations are attempting to digitally transform is that they forget about the people part of the equation. How are your employees going to react to change? What can you do to accelerate adoption? What is the real impact on your customers? There are a lot of questions that organizations need to address before undertaking digital transformation, and many of them have to do with people, company culture, and employee and customer experience. Any digital transformation that does not keep people at the center of the initiative is bound to fail.

Ok. Thank you. Here is the primary question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are “Five Ways a Company Can Use Digital Transformation To Take It To The Next Level”?

There are countless ways that digital transformation can produce extraordinary results for organizations:

Today, data are gold and invaluable for business decisions. One way that organizations can use digital transformation to “take it to the next level” is to use data to inform your business model. Take jet engines: They are now sold based on the miles they have the capacity to fly. Usage data are collected to predict engine lifespans and maintenance schedules. Those data are used by human experts who can provide better pricing models, better business strategies and better overall service. In the end, they’re providing a better experience to employees, customers and the pilots and passengers of the jets.
For some companies, ensuring that the correct people have access to information and insights at their fingertips can be transformative. One Laserfiche customer rethought the way that parents of children on the autism spectrum communicated with the organization’s behavioral therapists by creating online forms that enabled a more collaborative approach to care. Enabling real-time updates also accelerated the administrative tasks associated with care, and at times even sped up the progress families were able to see with their children.
In today’s hiring climate, many companies go to great lengths to bring on and retain top talent. As identified by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), however, 50% of hourly workers leave new jobs in the first four months, and half of senior outside hires within 18 months, citing poor onboarding processes as a key contributor. Gallup also found that just 12% of employees report receiving a good onboarding experience. This is where digital transformation can have a positive impact: Automating processes like new hire onboarding can help to get employees onboarded seamlessly, and get them engaged with their teams and projects as quickly and efficiently as possible. By creating a streamlined experience, you’re making a great first impression on your new employee, and more likely to retain them.
Digital transformation can also help remove friction from government processes, which are historically known for being frustrating and marred in bureaucratic red tape. Many local governments are now implementing technology to automate processes like applications for financial assistance, giving citizens more visibility into the process. One local government in North Carolina even integrated a chatbot with their online form for financial assistance, which helped guide citizens through the application. Initiatives like these are transformative not only because they help governments to provide better service to citizens, but they ultimately help to build trust in the institutions — something that is severely needed today.
Finally, I’ve seen organizations use technology in transformative ways by empowering even their non-technical employees to build digital solutions. This can be done using low-code or no-code solutions with drag-and-drop interfaces — tools that are easy to use and don’t require any technical heavy lifting. This democratization of IT helps to build a culture of problem solving and innovation. One Laserfiche user who was not in the IT department used Laserfiche to build a Secret Santa form and process, for their office’s holiday festivities. This isn’t something they would want to ask IT to do for them, but because the platform was so easy to use, they were able to do it themselves.

In your opinion, how can companies best create a “culture of innovation” in order to create new competitive advantages?

As I mentioned previously, give your people the tools they need to innovate, whether that is a low-code/no-code automation platform or access to a digital repository from which they can pull insights and make better business decisions. Additionally, business leaders need to set clear visions for their organizations — ensure that every single employee knows your company purpose and values. Innovation without purpose isn’t innovation at all.

How can our readers further follow your work?

I am on Linkedin, and Laserfiche is on all social channels.

Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!

Karl Chan Of Laserfiche On How To Use Digital Transformation To Take Your Company To The Next Level was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Future Is Now: Trevor Dowswell Of Hotel Internet Services On How Their Technological Innovation…

The Future Is Now: Trevor Dowswell Of Hotel Internet Services On How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake Up The Tech Scene

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

If you’re still alive, it means that you’ve been more right than wrong. If something feels off or doesn’t seem like the right decision, it’s likely you’re right and it probably is off and it probably isn’t the right decision. Don’t place implicit trust in another just because they’ve been doing something longer than you have. Tenure doesn’t always equal competence, so you have to find a balance between trusting others and trusting yourself.

As a part of our series about cutting-edge technological breakthroughs, I had the pleasure of interviewing Trevor Dowswell.

For the past seven years, Trevor Dowswell has been the Chief Technology Officer at Hotel Internet Services, a multi-national enterprise networking and software development company. He directly oversees all product architecture and technology adoption and implementation for the company.

Trevor is a specialist in the architecture and configuration of converged, large-enterprise wired and wireless networks. He is a Cisco certified engineer who has personally directed the installation of hundreds of public access WiFi networks, as well as large-scale video-on-demand and IPTV systems.

Additionally, he is a specialist in public access and hospitality authentication systems and network security, a web designer and Ruby developer, and has years of experience in top tier support, troubleshooting obscure issues with advanced and complex networks.

On top of his technical experience, Trevor is a published writer and editor, and previous to his involvement in the tech industry, worked extensively in marketing, live audio/visual, and the motion picture industry. He uses this textured background to provide fresh insight and vision into product design and rollout across Hotel Internet Services’ many verticals and brands, enabling the company to set new industry trends.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

I had been managing a post-production audio studio for movies and TV in Burbank, California for a few years, and it was, in general, rewarding, creative and interesting. I had the opportunity to work on some great projects with all manner of intriguing people, from Jim Cameron to Carmen Electra. However, I had started to feel like I was hitting a ceiling in both my career and financially, so I was on the lookout for something new.

I struck up a conversation on social media with an old friend from high school, and she just happened to be hiring for someone to coordinate their web development and installations. I had only scratched the surface of web development at USC years prior and knew virtually nothing about enterprise computer networking. However, I love a challenge, so I thought “perfect” and jumped in head-first. I somehow managed to convince them that I could do the job, started a couple weeks later…and quickly went back to college on the evenings and weekends.

I happen to be a quick learner, so within six months, I surpassed our most experienced engineers and moved from a coordination role to Director of Installations, project managing all network projects and performing all advanced configuration, as well as bringing in-house our web development for all guest-facing properties.

Funnily, it wasn’t until I became the Director of Installations that I realized I had inadvertently followed in my father’s footsteps. For years, he worked as an Electrical Engineer for Motorola, overseeing the installation of the first wireless computer systems in police cars around the globe.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

This is perhaps the wrong sort of interesting, but it’s what popped to mind. I got a call from one of my install technicians, who I had sent to Brooklyn for a hotel Wi-Fi installation. He was standing outside of the property and was concerned that he wasn’t at the right location. It didn’t look like a hotel, there was no front desk, just a locked door and a tinted, bullet-proof window next to it with a little slot at the bottom. We double-checked the paperwork, verified the address with the account manager, and he was indeed at the correct location.

I told the technician to just to go and see if he can get in, scope it out, meet with the client, and find out what the deal is. He called me back a bit later. He had managed to get into the building and walk the site, and he was positive this wasn’t a hotel. When I asked him why, he said, “The door to every room was open and there were only mattresses on the floor and TVs playing pornographic content.”

This client had hired us to install a pay-for-use Wi-Fi system, so we spoke to him, trying to understand why he wanted Wi-Fi. Was it even going to be used? He told us a story about how they recently acquired the property and were going to upgrade and change things. So we went ahead and installed his network, assuming they were converting to a proper hotel.

We were not shocked when they later requested that we start charging for the Wi-Fi by the hour. We uninstalled that network pretty quick.

Can you tell us about the cutting-edge technological breakthroughs that you are working on? How do you think that will help people?

As a networking company, we’ve been working quite hard to create a seamless environment for apartments, student housing, senior living and hotels that ties together all of the disparate and disjointed internet-enabled technologies that exist in the market and makes them simple to use. We want a regular person to be able to walk into their apartment on move-in day, start our setup wizard, and within five minutes have their personal Wi-Fi network up and running, TV live and have a simple interface moving forward to manage any future devices they wish to onboard, including smart lights, cameras and appliances. Additionally, that private network they just created is instantly available no matter where they are on the property, not just in their apartment, with the same speeds and all the same features.

We are doing away with having to wait days, if not weeks, for underwhelming, overpriced internet to be activated, and which only provides the most basic services.

Our Wi-Fi is properly designed for full coverage in all areas, both living spaces and common areas, with enough bandwidth to satisfy the heaviest consumers, and it even provides features for more advanced internet users who need things such as static public IPs or who want to host LAN parties.

How do you think this might change the world?

I am a strong believer that technology should be used to augment and enhance the human experience, not supplant it. Thus, day-to-day technology should blend into the background, often forgotten and infrequently noticed. Therefore, the changes we expect might often feel intangible, such as less stress, more quality time, increased productivity, better focus on the things that matter.

The other factor is simply providing better internet to more people. We are becoming more and more reliant on the internet for both work and play, so one’s quality of life can be largely dependent on the quality of internet you have readily at your disposal.

Keeping “Black Mirror” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks of this technology that people should think more deeply about?

I feel that every conversation about connecting all things to the internet warrants reflection on security. Every pathway out is theoretically a doorway in. Do I think you might stumble out to the kitchen one morning and have your toaster try to kill you? No, not likely. Could I envision someone hacking a surveillance account to determine when someone isn’t home so they could be robbed? Yes.

Security is everyone’s responsibility — the service providers, developers, hosting services, users. So everyone managing their piece of the pie correctly is critical in surviving the world of the Internet of (every)Thing.

Was there a “tipping point” that led you to this breakthrough? Can you tell us that story?

For some time, we have been able to create the networking environment to support a fully-managed, secure, simplistic internet experience, but the industry as a whole has just not been there. So there have been a few of us championing for the correct advancements and adoption of technology to make all of this possible, and that has been a slow climb for the past ten years. The final tipping-point was when a partner of ours was able to fully crack internet-delivery of bulk TV service. That was the final piece in the puzzle for creating the end-to-end solution that we felt was truly complete.

What do you need to lead this technology to widespread adoption?

FCC 22–12 (an FCC ruling from earlier this year to further promote competition in multi-tenant environments and to do away with internet and TV service provider exclusivity contracts that have stifled innovation) helps clear the way for opportunity. I feel like better managed internet and TV is an inevitability at this point. There are too many players demanding its existence, and it is the most logical path moving forward for building developers, owners, and managers.

What have you been doing to publicize this idea? Have you been using any innovative marketing strategies?

Our company is very keen on surveys. We like to know what people are actually thinking and doing out there, and we also love sharing that data with everyone. So we have put a lot of time in collecting information and opinions from thousands of real users, owners and managers regarding Wi-Fi, entertainment, and IoT, and our marketing team continually puts that data out using every channel they possibly can.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

I would say that I would not be doing what I’m doing today without Rafael van den Berg, who built up the tech side of Hotel Internet Services during its infancy, is currently our Director of R&D, and was my first networking mentor. When I came in to interview all those years ago, I was only armed with random, disjointed pieces of data about networking that I had gleaned from Google searches over the previous two days. Rafael was the one who accessed my technical knowledge during the hiring process. Looking back, I truly knew nothing; my answers were an absolute joke. Rafael knew that I knew absolutely nothing, but he was willing to take a leap of faith, and I’m sure glad he did.

Since that time, we’ve built most of Hotel Internet Services’ products together. We are each other’s sounding boards, and I think having two people who can balance each other out and challenge each other is invaluable.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

In presentations, speeches, articles, conversations with clients, prospects, vendors, and competitors, I have always preached unity. Let’s all work together and build great things. There is already too much divisiveness in our world. We don’t need people throwing blame around; blame never solved a problem. What the world needs is simply good people, doing good things, making good products, and having a good time.

So I’ve tried to lead by example, as well as worked to actively inspire goodness. My wife and I flow a lot of energy towards people and groups who are helping others, helping the planet, and in general those striving to make big, positive impacts around the world.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?

Wow, this is a tough one. I’ll give it my best shot:

Everyone is Pretending

It’s not just you. A lot of people are still waiting for that ethereal moment when they suddenly become a grown up. Because I felt like I was pretending to be an adult, it took me a little while to realize that I knew more about my fields of expertise than any client or other vendor I spoke with. The moment I realized I was the authority of my field and that everyone else also felt like they were pretending, I fully owned every phone call and meeting. I was confident, decisive, and I could get things done.

Trust Your Instincts

If you’re still alive, it means that you’ve been more right than wrong. If something feels off or doesn’t seem like the right decision, it’s likely you’re right and it probably is off and it probably isn’t the right decision. Don’t place implicit trust in another just because they’ve been doing something longer than you have. Tenure doesn’t always equal competence, so you have to find a balance between trusting others and trusting yourself.

Following is Way Easier Than Creating

Creating the future, creating the vision and writing out the plans, getting agreement and cooperation, and pushing new projects from implementation through to completion is way, way harder than following a path that has already been paved. When you become an executive, or if you start your own company, you have to be willing to become your own power source. It takes a lot of mental fortitude, and it burns though so much mental energy.

Find a Really Good Rubber Duck

In software development, there is a practice called “rubberducking” where you debug your code by describing each function in normal language to a rubber duck (or your object of choice). This practice is just as effective in business as it is in programming. I don’t have an actual rubber duck on my desk, but I do have a person who will listen to whatever I have to say without judgement and who can often give me a unique perspective and sage advice. And sometimes you just need to get out of your head. Describing a problem to someone else often makes the solution spring to mind — sometimes just opening your mouth to start talking is enough to make the answer materialize.

Be Willing to be Wrong to be Right

It’s really hard to get anywhere substantial without being willing to just throw yourself out there and suffer the consequences, both good and bad. You have to be just as willing to be wrong as you are to be right, because if you’re never doing something because you might be wrong, then you are simply never doing anything. Sounds like 1st Grade logic. It probably is. But it’s true, so who cares.

Ha! That is a rather generous description of me, but I’ll roll with it.

I would say, be responsible. Whenever you’re at a crossroads where you can either take less responsibility or more, go with more. You can take baby steps. It doesn’t have to be huge every time. But if everyone gradually took just a little bit more responsibility for their health, for their emotions, for their child’s education, for their partner, for the quality of their products, for their company, for the effects of their actions on others and their environment, for making at least one person happier today, for that guy that no one else is letting into traffic, then we would collectively, eventually solve all world problems.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

One I’ve used over and over is, “There are no such things as problems, only conversations.” And this is one I actually don’t just preach.

I did an experiment with this when I was working in building maintenance in my late teens. At the time, it seemed like every few days someone was mad at someone, and often, it was directed at me. I decided to see if I could resolve every upset simply with communication. For example, if a bathroom was out of service, could I not fix it and then make everyone happy and able to move on just by talking to them? It worked 100% of the time.

However, you have to do it right. You have to actually fully communicate, meaning truly listen, understand and acknowledge the other side, and the intent of your communication needs to be to make them right, not wrong. I completely shocked a partner of a company I was working for a number of years ago with how powerful this is. He asked me to have a call with a client that was threatening legal action and had been quite nasty in their emails and letters. I got on the call, I listened, I told the client that they were right, we hadn’t delivered what was in the contract nor could we, that the contract was wrong, and laid out what we were actually able to do, and that was it. Afterward, the partner got with me and was just completely baffled. He said, “I don’t understand, no one yelled at you. They didn’t even seem upset. I don’t get it.”

It wasn’t a problem, it was simply a conversation.

Some very well-known VCs read this column. If you had 60 seconds to make a pitch to a VC, what would you say? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂

Managed Wi-Fi, TV, and smart home is a market with significant growth. There are a number of players in the residential arena (Google, Samsung, Control4, etc.) with products well suited for single-family dwellings, but these products can start to fall apart in a multi-tenant environment. At the same time, property developers, owners and managers are fleeing from the behemoth service providers that have dominated this market for decades. Therefore, the market is primed for disruption and a significant “land grab” with a solution that integrates all of the strongest residential technology players together and provides a centralized interface to manage them from a property level, as well as a tenant level, and that’s what we’re offering with our product.

How can our readers follow you on social media?

https://www.linkedin.com/company/hotel-internet-services

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.

The Future Is Now: Trevor Dowswell Of Hotel Internet Services On How Their Technological Innovation… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Jamal English Of EDM Network On How to Effectively Leverage The Power of Digital Marketing, PPC, &…

Jamal English Of EDM Network On How to Effectively Leverage The Power of Digital Marketing, PPC, & Email to Dramatically Increase Sales

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Education — invest time into resources or money into accelerated knowledge.

Marketing a product or service today is easier than ever before in history. Using platforms like Facebook ads or Google ads, a company can market their product directly to people who perfectly fit the ideal client demographic, at a very low cost. Digital Marketing tools, Pay per Click ads, and email marketing can help a company dramatically increase sales. At the same time, many companies that just start exploring with digital marketing tools often see disappointing results.

In this interview series called “How to Effectively Leverage The Power of Digital Marketing, PPC, & Email to Dramatically Increase Sales”, we are talking to marketers, advertisers, brand consultants, & digital marketing gurus who can share practical ideas from their experience about how to effectively leverage the power of digital marketing, PPC, & email.

As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Jamal English.

Jamal English is the CEO and Founder of EDM Network, a dominant lead generation and marketing company revolutionizing strategic marketing, technology, and distribution innovation. English is an entrepreneur and investor with deep expertise in the needs of the insurance, financial services, and home services industries. They develop unique marketing campaigns that attract quality leads and produce fast results for their clients. The core of their service is lead generation, and their goal is to help businesses achieve continuous profitable and scalable growth.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

My unifying goal is centered around aligning synergies where they exist. I founded a marketing company to serve the need of the insurance, financial services, and home services industries as a whole, providing lead generation to many large distribution partners. I also co-founded many life and health insurance agencies, and established EA International Holdings as the investment arm of our portfolio, investing in multifamily developments, insurance agencies, and technology.

Can you share a story about the funniest marketing mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘takeaways’ you learned from that?

I’ll start by telling the story of my first time advertising. Growing up, my father was a partner in a nightclub in which I spent my time cooking in the kitchen. One summer, I asked my father and his partner if I could host a one-night Sunday event when the bar was closed for kids.

They agreed, and I spent $250 on creating fliers for the event and advertising it on Twitter. On the night of the first event, we had a total of 8 people show up. The next week I told myself I would post about it every day and do everything I could to spread the word. That Sunday, 6 people showed up. It crushed my ego, and I almost threw in the towel. After checking my Twitter to see if anyone was looking to come, I saw these two guys that went to my rival school that announced a party, and EVERYONE showed up. I DM’d the guy driving everyone to the party, who was also a DJ, and asked him to come to the club to see me the following week. To my surprise, he showed up in awe of the fact that I was so young working at a 21+ club. I asked him to DJ the party, and I gave him $100 for doing so. Then I told his friends that everyone that brought their flier to the club would receive $2 per person that came. That next Sunday, we had a packed house of over 600 people. I was blown away; each of those people paid $25 to come to the party. I learned the most valuable lesson about advertising that day: you can not do everything alone. It takes a network to make the dream work.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

There was an event held in Dallas where I met my business partner Reda. We were both building insurance agencies in the final expense vertical. He was a prolific salesman with a keen awareness on how to communicate with people. He was writing a lot of business and spending a lot on leads for himself and his agency. He was writing more business than me, but I was making more money than him because I understood the fundamentals of cost per acquisition. We teamed up and grew our agency to $500,000 per month within 90 days.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

The people of EDM make our business unique. We feel a responsibility to serve the consumers we engage with each and every day. When I was five years old, my father died, leaving my mother with four kids on her own and no real pathway to prosperity. I think about the men and women who are unsure about their future, and we strive to serve those consumers with the tough conversation many try to avoid.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

Foresight
Perseverance
Self-Awareness

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

Data Authentication Blockchain Technology
DNC Suppression Software
Retail Lead Marketplace

Ok super. Now let’s jump to the main questions of our interview. As we mentioned in the beginning, sometimes companies that just start exploring with digital marketing tools like PPC campaigns often see disappointing results. In your opinion, what are a few of the biggest mistakes companies make when they first start out with digital marketing? If you can, please share an example for each.

Thats the problem; they are doing pay-per-click. They should consider Pay Per Call.

If you’re doing e-commerce, the pay-per-click models can be profitable, however, the vast majority of commerce done worldwide is solidified over the phone through multiple touchpoints. Understanding this is where you can provide a lot more value to companies.

Currently, our marketing company generates north of 30,000 calls per day, making us one of the largest distributors of live transfers and inbound calls in the country. Most entrepreneurs want to start with crazy goals, which are often unattainable. I break my goals down on a daily basis, and scale budgets as allocation and demand grow. Our initial goal for the company when we first started was to sell 80 calls per day. Then the 80 turned into 800, then 8,000, and continues to grow, but that only happens if you are profitable from the start and you understand your margins from the beginning.

If you could break down a very successful digital marketing campaign into a “blueprint”, what would that blueprint look like? Please share some stories or examples of your ideas.

The blueprint would include a combination of good images, solid copy, and focused targeting.

For example, good images would include things that pop and are distinguishing. Vibrant colors stand out when people are scrolling, but think about abnormal things that people don’t see every day. So that always captures attention.

When it comes down to copy, less is more. Try to get your point across in the shortest way possible and make it relevant to your audience’s challenges. A good example is opening up with a common question relevant to your partnership. Ask yourself, would they want to learn more about this from one question?

For targeting, it is crucial to ensure you’re reaching out to the right audience. You must be able to segment by social factors, which will usually be higher triggers for the target market you’re trying to speak to.

Let’s talk about Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC) for a bit. In your opinion which PPC platform produces the best results to increase sales?

While there are several strong PPC platforms, the reason why pay-per-call is so important is that it’s the only way that you can really start to figure out the math and mechanics of your business.

For example, if you only had to pay when you actually spoke to a customer, versus them just visiting a website where they can’t directly interact with you, which one would you rather pay for? This becomes the ultimate conversation. Most business owners would rather pay for a call with someone producing high leverage to convert that customer, especially if you sell anything high ticket versus e-commerce products. If you’re selling ecommerce products, you will want to pay for clicks, but for 90% of the world that still operates brick-and-mortar for intangible products or services (even in a digital format), this is a deciding factor.

For example, doing anything telesales. It makes more sense for them to pay for calls versus clicks, where the cost leverage becomes so much greater. Also, you can keep those people productive and busy on the phones all day. Would you rather have someone that’s able to talk to people six hours a day, or two hours a day? Which one is going to be more productive? That will be the biggest difference between pay-per-call and pay-per-click.

Can you please share 3 things that you need to know to run a highly successful PPC campaign?

Synergistic opportunities. I don’t think there’s anything that trumps that. If you’re gonna run a pay-per-click campaign, you have to have a synergistic interest as that person or a synergistic audience. So if you think in terms of social brands, their value is super high because their click-through conversion rate is going to be high. The people that follow them are loyal, versus somebody who’s just trying to run traffic and spend the money. They need to have the established audiences that you retarget with your unique product or service that comes at a lower cost per click, where there’s a leverage point. This only works where there is a synergy.
Appealing offers
Solid funnel process

Let’s now talk about email marketing for a bit. In your opinion, what are the 3 things that you need to know to run a highly successful email marketing campaign that increases sales?

The biggest concern with email marketing is spam. I do not recommend email marketing as the strongest campaign. Spamming is a very big issue right now, and buying email lists is not a viable method for starting an email campaign. Building email lists can be valuable, especially if you have engaged people, but buying them is not very authentic. Many of those emails will get flagged and sent right to junk.

Email can be used for promotional campaigns, though. Promotional emails are viable, but trying to get customers to purchase products from an email campaign won’t be as successful since the ROI is very small. If you want to inform people about new offers or events, sure, but the ROI will likely not be outstanding.

What are the other digital marketing tools that you are passionate about? If you can, can you share with our readers what they are and how to best leverage them?

Let’s go through some of the re-engagement tools:

There is automated software that can pretty much completely facilitate the re-engagement process with all of the prospects and consumers that you already have. This type of technology is where the future of AI is going to start taking over, because some of that human interaction is no longer going to be required. I do think CSR positions are going to become automated through completely comprehensive workflows eventually, and automated, pre-recorded messages can even be more responsive than a human being. This will be one of the most impactful changes. There are sequences now that run email, SMS, and phone calls. Automation is innovation, and there are various technologies for re-engagement that help improve efficiency.

Can you please tell us the 5 things you need to create a highly successful career as a digital marketer or as a manager?

Attention to detail.
Patience.
Trust but verify: mistakes can be costly.
The belief that if one can, all can.
Education — invest time into resources or money into accelerated knowledge.

Can you please share a story or example for each?

One example of the belief that one can, all can, is ‘bad’ employees. If one employee is struggling or underperforming compared to the rest of the team, there are ways to support them and lean on strategies that worked in the past before deeming them unfit for the role. Taking the time to understand why they are struggling will help managers and marketers assist and support them to get where they need to be.

What books, podcasts, videos or other resources do you use to sharpen your marketing skills?

Emotional Intelligence.
Built to last.
Measure what matters.
Principles.
Bluefishing: The art of making things happen.
Building a story/brand.
Influence: the psychology of persuasion.

Thank you for all of that. We are nearly done. Here is our final ‘meaty’ question. You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂

As a lifelong student, I want to encourage continuous unconventional learning.

How can our readers further follow your work?

Follow me on LinkedIn.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this!

Jamal English Of EDM Network On How to Effectively Leverage The Power of Digital Marketing, PPC, &… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Meet The Disruptors: Mark Lawrence Of SpotHero On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your…

Meet The Disruptors: Mark Lawrence Of SpotHero On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

What you say no to matters.

It’s very common for people to focus on saying “yes” to everything and everyone, especially at startups. I’ve found that what you say “no” to is just as powerful. By saying “no” to expansion beyond Chicago in our first 3 years, we were able to create a smooth playbook for scaling to additional cities in the future.

As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Mark Lawrence.

Mark Lawrence is Co-Founder and CEO of SpotHero, the digital parking leader and only independent off-street parking marketplace in North America. Millions of drivers use SpotHero’s mobile apps and website to find, book and access off-street parking in over 8,000 locations across 300 cities in the U.S. and Canada.

As CEO, Mark drives the overall vision and strategic direction for SpotHero, recognized by TIME magazine as one of 50 Genius Companies inventing the future. Before founding SpotHero, Mark was a Financial Analyst at Bank of America, and graduated with a B.S. in Finance from Bradley University.

I didn’t necessarily follow a particular career path per say, but more so set out to solve a personal problem. Funny enough, the idea for SpotHero started because I was getting a lot of parking tickets. At the time, I believe I had racked up about $5,000 dollars in parking tickets. I loved to drive, but parking was beyond frustrating, and I knew there had to be a better way.

The more research I did, the more I realized that the problem wasn’t a lack of parking but rather no efficient way to use parking that was already widely available. SpotHero started with one parking space by Wrigley Field in 2011. This year we became the official parking partner of the Chicago Cubs — a true full circle moment for the SpotHero team.

Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?

Almost everyone has to worry about parking. When creating SpotHero, we figured, why not make something that we’re forced to do even easier? With SpotHero, you can find your parking spot and know how much you’re going to pay, all before you leave your house. Our app is disruptive in the best way; it gives back the one thing customers value the most — time.

Think of the many moments that are often interrupted when you’re stuck, searching for parking — showing up late to an interview, missing the beginning of a show or worse, your flight. The list goes on and on.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

The first year I started SpotHero, I trekked through Chicago’s snowy streets, going door to door, asking if people wanted to list their parking spots with us. Mistake number one was thinking people would want to open their doors in that horrible weather!

The true mistake here was thinking that we needed to bring parking to the market. In reality, there was plenty of existing parking to work with — it just wasn’t easy for drivers to access. With my initial approach, it took a year for us to get 50 parking spots in Chicago on SpotHero. In year two, I had lunch with a parking company and left the restaurant with 1,000 new spots to add to SpotHero.

There are two takeaways here: You don’t always have to build from scratch, and there are ways to scale your business without involving snow boots.

We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?

Sam Yagan is a member of the SpotHero board, and he’s been my top mentor ever since we started SpotHero in 2011. When the business first started, we were growing fast and facing challenges none of us had experienced before. One of those challenges being that we started SpotHero with only $6,000.

Sam was on the board at the time and suggested raising money. Back then, I didn’t understand venture capital, let alone that there were people out there willing to help fund us.

Since then, Sam has continued to be a resource for the company and me. He also happens to be THE top user of the SpotHero app and is always providing feedback and helping us create more efficient, user-friendly experiences for the customer.

I’ve always found disruption in an industry to be a positive thing, especially if it adds significant value to the user experience. Often a disruption occurs, and you can’t imagine what life was like before it because of how much value it brings to the table.

With that being said, if it simply extracts value — meaning it doesn’t better the customer experience or add to it in any way — then what’s the point? Since the beginning, SpotHero has made it a point to only introduce features that add value. Otherwise, it’s not worth it. For instance, look at our new partnership with Lyft — we’ve integrated ridesharing and parking, two different parts of the transit industry, as we continue to seek ways to transform the parking and mobility space by adapting to shifting user preferences and thus, adding value.

Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey?

1. Ignore the Echo Chamber Du Jour.

People often conflate current topics or trends to be indicative of the past or future. It’s important to be able to cut through the noise and determine what matters. Business problems can feel like the weather. When there’s a hurricane, you may forget there will be sunny days. But don’t lose sight of the complete forecast. There will be snow, sunshine and everything in-between; all temporary and always changing.

2. Do what’s right and the rest will follow.

I created SpotHero to make life easier for drivers. Doing right by our drivers has always been my top priority, even when that’s created challenges. For example, we refunded all reservations in March of 2020, including millions of dollars in reservations for future events that were “postponed” during the initial COVID shutdown. Not all businesses made this choice, but we knew that this was the SpotHero way of doing things, to put our drivers first. Decisions like this have kept people coming back to SpotHero. Drivers know we’re dependable and looking out for them.

3. Solve problems instead of finding problems.

This empowering advice allows us to take control of the issues that bog us down. For me, starting SpotHero wasn’t about becoming a founder or entrepreneur; it stemmed from racking up thousands of dollars in parking tickets and wanting to make parking easier. The desire to solve this problem still drives our decision-making today. When you encounter a problem, there’s an opportunity for innovation — challenge yourself to work through potential solutions.

4. What you say no to matters.

It’s very common for people to focus on saying “yes” to everything and everyone, especially at startups. I’ve found that what you say “no” to is just as powerful. By saying “no” to expansion beyond Chicago in our first 3 years, we were able to create a smooth playbook for scaling to additional cities in the future.

5. How you spend your time matters.

This may seem obvious, but I’ve found that we often default to autopilot when it comes to scheduled meetings or ways of working. It’s so important to be thoughtful with how you spend your days. I block out hours each week for focused flow work and honor that the same way I would a meeting.

We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?

Even though SpotHero is number one in the mobile parking app space, digital parking is still a fairly low percent of the overall market — 30 to 50% of parking is still paid for in cash.

Think of how many places you park that still require you to physically walk up to a machine and manually pay for your parking spot. Moving forward, our main focus is to continue to bring more and more parking online and build better experiences for our drivers and parking operator partners.

Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?

Without a doubt I would say the book, “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” by Ben Horowtiz. This book resonated with me, because simply put, building a company is really hard. Sometimes, the public perception is that it’s easy to raise a bunch of money and start a company overnight. This book offers a great perspective on resilience, an honest account of the hardships involved when building a company and overall, great lessons and takeaways. Personally, I still go back to this advice, “No matter how difficult things get, it’s going to be ok.”

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

It’s difficult to choose just one, but I would say my favorite quote is, “Life is too important to be taken seriously.” So often, life is taken very seriously, including things that shouldn’t be. Little things in life always seem to feel like a big deal when you’re in the moment, so I find it helpful to take a step back, evaluate the situation and decide how easily (or not) we can find a solution.

A few others I’ve always really liked are:

O “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.” Henry Ford

O “The word impossible is not in my dictionary.” Napoleon

How can our readers follow you online?

You can learn more about SpotHero by visiting our website at spothero.com or check out our social channels — find us @spothero on Instagram, @SpotHero on Twitter, or @SpotHero on Facebook.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!

Meet The Disruptors: Mark Lawrence Of SpotHero On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Author Chris Smith On The 5 Things You Need To Be A Highly Effective Public Speaker

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Start with dessert — Do not introduce yourself to start. Someone probably just did as you took the stage. My approach is to JOLT the audience with a powerful stat or statement as my first words rather than the traditional small talk start.

At some point in our lives, many of us will have to give a talk to a large group of people. What does it take to be a highly effective public speaker? How can you improve your public speaking skills? How can you overcome a fear of speaking in public? What does it take to give a very interesting and engaging public talk? In this interview series called “5 Things You Need To Be A Highly Effective Public Speaker” we are talking to successful and effective public speakers to share insights and stories from their experience. As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Chris Smith.

Chris Smith is the cofounder of Curaytor (an Inc. 500 fastest-growing business) and he is one of the four best marketers under 40, according to the American Marketing Association. His book, The Conversion Code, is taught at colleges like Johns Hopkins University and he has been a guest lecturer at NYU.

Chris used the blueprint in his book to quickly grow his own company to eight figures in annual recurring revenue, without raising any venture capital. His work has been featured in Adweek, Forbes, Fortune, and many other publications.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to get to know you a bit better. Can you tell us the story of how you grew up?

I grew up in a small town around orange groves, chicken farms, and cow pastures. It’s called Polk County and so people joke that Polk stands for People Of Little Knowledge. I spent every other weekend with my mom in various trailer parks.

Can you share a story with us about what brought you to this specific career path?

My dad used to say that if I could get paid to talk I would be rich. He was right. My start presenting was doing inside sales. Then I moved to outside sales. Then to training. Then to trade show panels. Then I finally started speaking on my own.

Can you tell us the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

One speaker story that comes to mind was when I was visiting Calgary for a keynote and the other keynote was Mr. Wonderful. As I was going through customs they were grilling me and nothing I could say would appease them. They eventually asked me to prove I was a professional speaker by showing them the event website.

When I pulled it up it was me and Mr. Wonderful. They got super excited and were immediately like, “oh you know Mr. Wonderful come on in. That is the day I learned he was a Canadian.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

Well I’ve almost peed myself on stage because when I first started I never drank any water before the talk so my voice would get raspy by the end. So, I over corrected and drank WAY too much water one time and ran off the stage out a side door to find the nearest urinal the second my speech was over.

One thing I’ve learned about family, mentors and role models is that you actually benefit as much or more from the terrible ones than you do from the good ones. You learn what not to be. They teach you how not to act. They show you what not to do.

Those are more valuable lessons in my opinion.

You have been blessed with great success in a career path that can be challenging and intimidating. Do you have any words of advice for others who may want to embark on this career path, but seem daunted by the prospect of failure?

Failure is a required ingredient of success. You can’t become a business legend without some.

What drives you to get up everyday and give your talks? What is the main empowering message that you aim to share with the world?

Stop chasing leads and start attracting clients. Marketing and salespeople are annoying and consumers are tired of it. The byproduct of my teaching people how to be better at marketing and sales is that it benefits all who their marketing reaches. Not just them.

You have such impressive work. What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now? Where do you see yourself heading from here?

I’ve got a mobile app for kids called Slumber and a collectibles company called Business Legendz coming soon. Both are passion projects with massive upside.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

Ignore the noise. There is a lot of it. If you aren’t positive in sales you don’t eat. Enthusiasm is a major key to success.

Ok, thank you for all that. Here is the main question of our interview. What are your “5 Things You Need To Be A Highly Effective Public Speaker?” Please share a story or example for each.

Start with dessert — Do not introduce yourself to start. Someone probably just did as you took the stage. My approach is to JOLT the audience with a powerful stat or statement as my first words rather than the traditional small talk start.

Nail the first minute — I don’t practice my talks but I do think deeply and specifically about the first minute. My goal is to get an interaction and a laugh. After that, I’m golden.

Perform — It’s a stage and you are giving a performance. You are a verbal artist. An orator. The audience wants to be moved and inspired and fired up when they leave. That requires tons of energy on your end and embracing that while up there you shouldn’t be yourself you should be the two notches higher version of yourself.

Make them laugh and make them cry — Being funny is my security blanket. I know what gets a laugh and when I need to get back on track I reach for a joke I know will slay. Even though I am funny throughout I added poignant moments too. Because I don’t take that route often it makes it even more powerful when I do.

Close — Your talk is not over unless you have clearly outlined the next steps in working with you or keeping in touch. Tell them to follow you right now. Put your email or phone number up and say message me right now. Getting good at closing from the stage can be the difference between a career as a speaker or it being a hobby.

As you know, many people are terrified of speaking in public. Can you give some of your advice about how to overcome this fear?

The only way is to tackle it head on and get up there. In most cases AFTERWARDS it wasn’t as bad as it was in your head. You will always get butterflies your goal is to get them to fly in a line.

You are a person of huge influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?

Equal opportunity for entrepreneurship. There are so many people who have amazing ideas and are willing to do the work but they don’t get a chance.

Is there a person in the world whom you would love to have lunch with, and why? Maybe we can tag them and see what happens!

I would be okay with Seth Godin joining me for lunch. I’m his heir apparent he just doesn’t know that yet.

Are you on social media? How can our readers follow you online?

Instagram.com/chris_smth

Twitter.com/chris_smth

https://www.theconversioncode.com/contact

http://curaytor.com

http://theconversioncode.com

This was so informative, thank you so much! We wish you continued success!

Author Chris Smith On The 5 Things You Need To Be A Highly Effective Public Speaker was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Chris Gerlach Of Synergy Life Science On Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Startup

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

You can’t solve big problems alone. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of connecting with the right people both within your team and outside your organization. Diverse perspectives and areas of expertise are vital for startups. Broaden your network and prioritize connection and collaboration across backgrounds and industries.

Chris has worked successfully in the creation, distribution and supply of high-purity, quality ingredients for the last 25 years. Chris served in the US Army for 10 years prior to co-founding Essential Ingredients, Inc. (EI), where he held various positions for the accomplished personal care/cosmetic company, including President and Director of Business Development, before also managing Essential Innovations®: a unique product line exclusively offered through EI and its intellectual property portfolio, which consists of patented raw materials and Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs), including Curoxyl®, Meristant®, Curcylic®, and Vitacon®. Most recently, Chris’ attention has turned to breakthrough technology in the rapidly emerging hemp CBD market as the CEO of Synergy Life Sciences, Inc., which offers high-purity formulations, extraction and the manufacturing of ingredients while keeping a laser focus on safety and efficacy.

After serving in the United States Army, my career has been focused on making commonly-used ingredients better. I spent 25 years developing and commercializing innovative, new ingredients for the personal care and pharmaceutical markets, and I now focus on the cannabis/hemp industry. Currently, I am the CEO of Synergy Life Science. We create safe, effective cannabinoid ingredients to supercharge our clients’ products.

What was the “Aha Moment” that led to the idea for your current company? Can you share that story with us?

I first became interested in the cannabis/hemp space when I saw an urgent need for innovation and safety standards. This industry is just beginning to take shape, and the potential to help people is vast. I saw an opportunity to improve upon outdated, inefficient technologies by developing breakthrough specialty cannabinoid ingredients for various conditions and applications.

Was there somebody in your life who inspired or helped you to start your journey with your business? Can you share a story with us?

In 2011 my wife developed an acute, airborne, anaphylactic allergy to cinnamon. After many exposures, emergency calls, 14 ICU stays and a year in a wheelchair, I became her first responder, carrying her anaphylaxis kit (backpack) with us everywhere we went. Life changed drastically for our family, as every place we went needed to be contacted in advance to check for potential cinnamon exposure risk. I recall a time when we were house-hunting in a remote location when a cinnamon candle triggered a severe reaction. We immediately headed home, hoping that we could keep the reaction under control, but as her throat closed and her ability to breathe stopped, we fortunately found a small gas station with an ice machine out front. We quickly unplugged the ice machine and plugged in her nebulizer and were finally able to get her breathing again.

After all that time and so many exposures, she had become “EpiPen resistant,” meaning an injection of epinephrine would only keep her airways open for two to three minutes max. Today, my wife is completely recovered, and Synergy Life Science is thrilled to announce the launch of the patent-pending Nebi™️ device, which is the first pen-sized, acute respiratory nebulizer. Her struggles directly influenced the creation of this product, as the need for a portable, battery-operated nebulizing device became clear.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

When I worked in the personal care industry, I was inspired to take action with my sphere of influence. Over 2 billion people don’t have access to soap and water to wash their hands at home. It’s humbling to realize that even the most basic personal care products I worked with every day in my career are inaccessible to a staggering proportion of the global population. I was honored to make a positive impact when I worked with a nonprofit organization that shipped tons of soap to countries worldwide.

Often leaders are asked to share the best advice they received. But let’s reverse the question. Can you share a story about advice you’ve received that you now wish you never followed?

“Never take risks” is awful advice. Risks have always been fundamental to my professional success, especially in a new industry like cannabis. Avoiding risks would stifle the bold innovation we need to set ourselves apart from the crowd.

Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey?

When I started my regulated market journey, I quickly realized that short-term sacrifices were necessary for long-term success. A clear vision is critical. However, I also learned to stay flexible and adaptable while maintaining solid personal relationships. When new evidence comes to the forefront, a focused and flexible decision-making framework allows us to pivot and see challenges as opportunities.

Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard? What strategies or techniques did you use to help overcome those challenges?

Defining and leaning into a niche is key to overcoming challenges. If you’ve created a product or service that solves a problem or meets a demand for a specific group of people, you can become the top in your area. Continue to dominate your niche while growing slowly outward to diversify products and services. That strategy has helped me overcome unexpected challenges and use them as opportunities to pivot.

The journey of an entrepreneur is never easy and is filled with challenges, failures, setbacks, as well as joys, thrills and celebrations. Can you share a few ideas or stories from your experience about how to successfully ride the emotional highs & lows of being a founder”?

A key strategy for me has been to grow in phases. That allows testing at each stage to determine how well each venture performs. It also gives time to determine if there is potential for long-term success and to allocate resources. Phased growth as a strategy helps put risks and opportunities into perspective for decision-making.

Let’s imagine that a young founder comes to you and asks for your advice about whether venture capital or bootstrapping is best for them? What would you advise them? Can you kindly share a few things a founder should look at to determine if fundraising or bootstrapping is the right choice?

I think the most important thing for young founders is to consider what they truly need from investors. Common mistakes include asking for too much money or wanting too much control over its use. Make sure you understand all the factors so you have realistic expectations. Become comfortable with communicating articulately and concisely what you need from investors and what you will do with the investment.

Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. Many startups are not successful, and some are very successful. From your experience or perspective, what are the main factors that distinguish successful startups from unsuccessful ones? What are your “Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Startup”?

Develop a niche product or service that solves a specific problem.

At Synergy Life Sciences, it was immediately apparent that there was a huge need for better tools for product formulators. We set out to develop effective, functional ingredients that they could use to create the next generation of cannabis products. CannaSorb CB Active is our flagship product and the ingredient foundation for a handful of specialty ingredients that give formulators the tools they need to develop advanced products that can modernize this industry and truly unlock the potential of this amazing plant!

Grow in phases toward your long-term vision.

Focus on solving big problems you see in the world, but plan your growth in phases. That will help you collect real-world validation of your ideas and be able to pivot when situations change while continuing steadily toward your long-term vision.

Don’t be afraid to experiment.

In my 25-year career in the regulated consumer product space, my job was to minimize risk. However, innovation requires some amount of experimentation. Learn how to experiment in phases and apply the information you gain to the subsequent stages of your business.

Constantly inspect and adapt.

In a future-focused industry like cannabinoid technology, we adapt to rapid change constantly. Look for ways to improve your offering and make changes as needed.

Build long-term relationships.

You can’t solve big problems alone. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of connecting with the right people both within your team and outside your organization. Diverse perspectives and areas of expertise are vital for startups. Broaden your network and prioritize connection and collaboration across backgrounds and industries.

What are the most common mistakes you have seen CEOs & founders make when they start a business? What can be done to avoid those errors?

Especially in science and technology innovation, inflexibility is a serious pitfall. In the rapidly evolving cannabis space, CEOs and founders must adapt daily to the market and regulatory changes in an industry in its infancy. Always encourage your team to think creatively to develop new ideas and solutions.

I can’t think of a single day-to-day priority that is more important than health. I’m in the ingredient innovation business because I want to contribute substantially to people’s wellness, so it would be contradictory not to prioritize my own health. Think of health as an investment. It can be tempting to neglect my physical and mental self-care to save time in the short term. Still, entrepreneurs must recognize the long-term importance of investing in the wellness of themselves and their team.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

You can connect with me on LinkedIn and sign up for the Synergy Life Science email list.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this. We wish you continued success and good health!

Chris Gerlach Of Synergy Life Science On Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Startup was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Author Ron Brock On Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Startup

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

…It would return to a system of teaching what was once right about our country in the old-fashioned way. Reading, writing, and arithmetic being taught in such a format that students can understand it. Conceptually that would imply teaching be done differently by demographic considerations. This would replace a more one-size-fits-all system of applying the same standards of measurement on all schools in a city. Standardization of teaching may be more efficient from a system standpoint, but the school dropout rate in areas where students are likely not to last due to inability to perform isn’t served by standardization. The result is the student is lost without having been given the opportunity to succeed. This would not impinge on students capable of performing at higher levels. Their score would have different standards, consequently, would be taught differently. This movement is envisioned to be one small step toward correcting what appears to be a current source of disaffection among economic strata.

Ron Brock’s career included a role as a Senior Product Manager at Frito Lay where he was responsible for the highly successful launch of Nacho Cheese flavored Doritos brand tortilla chips. Following the conclusion of the introductory marketing campaign he relocated to Phoenix, Arizona, later transitioning into commercial real estate sales. Serendipity struck a few years later when, seeing the potential of Tim Berners-Lee’s newly announced World Wide Web, he discovered an ability to revolutionize commercial real estate. He created the first up-to-the-minute, searchable, accessible database of multifamily properties, then included, and patented, an independent system of classifying real estate property improvements and location. His memoir The Thicket’s Prodigy: The Extraordinary Life of an Improbable Genius, details his life story, including time spent in Los Alamos, New Mexico where his father worked as part of a team redesigning the Manhattan Project’s atomic bomb. Ron, also the author of Gamebreaker: Guide to World Class Selling, resides in Scottsdale, Arizona. Learn more at www.galtmirrin.com.

Following graduation from Arizona State University I held several positions in corporate sales and marketing during the 10-year period. I have enjoyed my time with corporate life, but had an itch to try things on my own.

Serendipity struck when I met Ron Button, a former General Electric computer engineer who had been recently forced into finding another occupation when General Electric Corporation closed its computer division. The partnership we struck focused on the sale of commercial apartments.

It was a time when the commercial real estate industry was still relatively primitive. Property inventories were carried on 3 x 5 cards and investment analysis relied on hand-held calculators; the results illustrated on 14 column spreadsheets. Information concerning market conditions was by word-of-mouth opinions stated by appraisers or commercial real estate brokers.

Fast-forward 20 years. The 3 x 5 card catalog was replaced by a computerized database, and investment analysis was calculated and displayed on computers. But there were limitations.

Database storage of apartment inventories was a nice improvement but did not allow for manipulation of inventory, or market data. Things were still being done the old way. Not by choice, but because there was no other option. Then conditions changed.

What was the “Aha Moment” that led to the idea for your current company? Can you share that story with us?

Share one of my life’s most exciting moments? Absolutely! But first, let’s back up.

One day in 1995 serendipity struck once again. “We need to do this!” My daughter Kim was waving a flyer advertising a seminar to be conducted at Phoenix’s Biltmore Hotel conference center. My first reaction was disinterest; I had plenty to occupy my time. But her enthusiasm was insistent: “we need to see what this is about!” Okay let’s see what they’ve got.

We were less than 15 minutes into the seminar when the “AHA!” moment struck: here was the answer. The one we had been searching for!

For several years we had been investigating the prospect of data manipulation, and even data standardization, with no promising solution. Data standardization, the concept of making objective apples-to-apples comparison of one real estate property with another, was a frequent industry topic of discussion, but no one had devised an answer. The problem was if they had developed that capability there was no vehicle currently to make it available.

Now here it was! Everything and more! Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web had capabilities beyond any expectations we had had. Until now.

Was there somebody in your life who inspired or helped you to start your journey with your business? Can you share a story with us?

It was over lunch with one of our brokerage customers, Fred Unger. After hearing my explanation concerning what we were doing to improve our firm’s capabilities Fred casually mentioned, “what’s to stop you from extending the new service beyond Phoenix?”

Why hadn’t I thought of that? There was a business here!

Pierce-Eislen, our start-up’s conceptualization, was born that day.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

We developed both software and content for the apartment industry. Our system for categorizing properties allowed a more accurate comparison of rental rates among like for like properties rather than the prior way of simply counting every property as being the same whether a rundown tenement or luxury high-rise. We received patents on our rating systems for both property improvements and location.

Our operations focused on the quality of data gathered and summarized. Pierce-Eislen remains unique in the commercial real estate industry, but has assumed a new name — “Yardi” — the company that acquired our organization in 2013.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

A question that is profound requires a profound answer. Pierce-Eislen’s success has little to speak to the question other than the company has continued to be managed with integrity. As to personal activity I have had the discretionary opportunity to support social causes that might otherwise be missed. For example, See International, a humanitarian organization dedicated to prevention of blindness throughout the world.

I mention See International as the sort of organization I find most attractive to support. My contribution to these alternative organizations in need in comparison with major donors is not impressive by comparison, but I am happy that I am enabled to be able to participate.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

Among the questions you have asked this may be the most subjective. Also, most controversial.

My personal history has centered on determination, call it grit. The World Wide Web is the most current example. What began as a simple implementation of a new concept became a constant series of seeming roadblocks. Each had the potential to end the project before we could even test the premise of whether we had a workable product.

My second most useful characteristic has been a reasonably capable persuasiveness. I was able to convince people to continue supporting me when odds seemed against us. That particular trait was most useful in raising capital and maintaining investor confidence during difficult periods.

There were several of those, beginning with the September 11, 2001, collapse of the World Trade Center towers. Pierce-Eislen had begun offering a product to the apartment market on February 1, of that year and additional capital funds were required to continue operations.

Dependability is a third trait that works well for me.. There had to be reasonable confidence on the part of others that when circumstances get rowdy, I will find a way to overcome them. Any business, particularly one that’s new, and still mostly untried, requires that shareholders and key employees maintain feelings of confidence that regardless of difficulties encountered things are in reasonably good hands.

Often leaders are asked to share the best advice they received. But let’s reverse the question. Can you share a story about advice you’ve received that you now wish you never followed?

While raising capital through an angel round virtually everyone engaged in the same activity was giving advice — “speak in terms of eyeballs to the site.” The premise was that the old way of showing a pathway to profit was obsolete. The dot-coms were in full strength, and strenuously proclaimed, “how you are going to make money from the process can be determined later.”

We were one of a very few startups of the time, the only one that I was aware of, that was raising capital funds based on a schedule — how we were going to achieve profitability and timing for doing that event.

The recommendation to focus on eyeballs to the site was ultimately one of the more important recommendations we were able to avoid. When the late 1990s smoke cleared an estimated 90% of dot-coms were bankrupt. By then we had funded our angel round and planned the next financing round.

Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey?

Where do I begin? It seemed Pierce-Eislen’s existence was in constant harm’s way from the start.

The Web was acknowledged immediately as the greatest innovation in communications since Gutenberg and his Bible. And we, along with nearly everyone else, were inspired by the new discovery. But there was a hitch. A very big hitch.

To make use of the web required conversion of existing software, in our case Microsoft’s Visual Basic, to a new program called SQL, short for Sequential Query Language. And almost no one with software development experience, in other words just about every programmer in Phoenix, knew anything about SQL. Added to that was an impossibly long list of new product ideas that sprang up overnight with the name attaching the dot-com designation. All needed software development.

A suddenly overwhelming demand for programmers capable of dealing with SQL drove the cost of software development to $185 an hour. Worse, the price included predominantly programmers who claimed SQL competence despite having a near clueless lack of capability. It was apparent there was no way we were going to accomplish what we had intended under those circumstances. Without a solution providing a radically different approach it was game over.

After some brainstorming our thoughts turned to a starving-student type from Arizona State University. We were fortunate to find that individual relatively quickly. A very bright electrical engineering student, he had a great deal of enthusiasm about computer programming and was relatively fluent in ColdFusion, another software language with considerable similarity to SQL.

We offered to buy the SQL manuals and pay him $15 an hour ($26.50 per hour equivalent today) to learn how to program in SQL. It was assumed he then would continue to work for us at the $15 an hour wage to program our needs.

We had solved one problem, only to confront another.

We had to simultaneously fund our startup and at the same time build an organization. It was a catch 22.

The competition for competent personnel was ferocious, and the battle for capital source attention wasn’t any better. Worse, one was dependent on the other. Private investors wanted to know that an organization was in place. But capable people were in short supply and wanted to know they would be riding a winning horse if they decided to join us.

Secondary issues — a company name, website, marketing materials, recruiting a Board of Directors –at the same time seemed inconsequential in comparison with the other two.

Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard? What strategies or techniques did you use to help overcome those challenges?

My father’s influence. I had the good fortune of an unusually positive role model. One who never seemed to see things as being little more than inconveniences when they were in the way of what he wanted to accomplish.

He overcame extraordinarily difficult circumstances to become educated, then became part of a team that redesigned the Manhattan Project’s atomic bomb. My book, The Thicket’s Prodigy, elaborates on how he at one time lived homeless, and still managed to earn a degree in mathematics from Texas Technological College

The story didn’t end with his work in Los Alamos. He later became an expert in high powered computer applications, then received a congressional appointment as Director of computation and analysis over NASA’s computer operations for manned spaceflight. Ultimately, they landed Neil Armstrong on the moon.

His positive influence carried forward to my own attitude about not letting anything stand in the way of completing whatever I set out to do.

The successful entrepreneur is aware that emotional highs need to be tempered. Just around the corner is a surprise problem waiting to ambush what seems like stable circumstances.

We thought the perfect solution to what we had been looking for as a vehicle to create a more robust database experience was there for the taking when we first viewed the World Wide Web. When we began to act on it a series of seemingly insurmountable setbacks gave us one new problem after another to work with.

But maybe that’s what makes an entrepreneur. The challenge of overcoming what sometimes seems insurmountable conditions to reach the finish line — a product that possibly no one has thought of before, and now you have a working model. And it’s time to do some heavy lifting: forming a company, and raising the capital needed to put the company and the product out there to see if a success can be made of it.

It’s a journey that isn’t for everyone. But for the right individual, a visionary who enjoys the entrepreneurial process in the manner a professional athlete enjoys his sport, there is no substitute.

And sometimes, things just don’t work out. In that event, you look forward and move on to the next idea.

My first question: “describe your temperament?” Dealing with capital sources requires considerable preparation. A venture capital firm had a nuance, an elevator pitch. Almost a requirement. When we were raising Pierce-Eislen capital, during the dot-com era a reasonable probability was that brash young types who had already made serious money on other investments. And now, being full of themselves, were frequently known to face questions, stated in the imperative, “why the (bleep) should we invest with you?”

Bootstrapping is typically more likely to involve raising capital funds from individual investors who might enable initial operations and further agree to provide additional capital as needed to supplement negative operating income until cash flow is positive.

Between the two options my feeling was bootstrapping was our best option. We resorted to a creative solution. In funding Pierce-Eislen’s angel round, and subsequent rounds, we killed two birds with one: major investors were required to serve as board members. The format gave comfort to sophisticated investors, and we ended up with a board that was the envy of every startup around. Pierce-Eislen’s capital was raised as needed rather than as a large capital raise at the beginning. And I would recommend this manner of funding to most young entrepreneurs.

I have known others who have had what seemed unnecessarily negative experiences with venture capitalists from the Silicon Valley area. When things didn’t go as planned, and that condition is nearly inevitable, the VC, not dealing with patient money, pulled the plug on the company, closing it down.

One exaggerated example was with a founder who had what seemed an excellent concept for an online real estate auction firm selling single-family houses. The founder went to a Silicon Valley VC, requesting $18 million. The VC countered with insisting a $36 million investment was to their liking. Things didn’t work out. In less than nine months the experiment ended with the auction company’s closure. There was no discussion relating to “how can we make this thing work?”

Successful companies generally share a few, common-to-all, characteristics: a unique business proposition, reliable capital source, capable management, a well-conceived business plan, and most important of all, an energetic individual of high integrity serving as founder.

In contrast, unsuccessful attempts usually begin with several handicaps: little product differentiation, undercapitalized, incompetent management, an idea with no plan, a sometimes-questionable individual as the founder.

Now we get to: Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Startup:

First, a useful product. The definition of an extraordinarily successful startup must be that the product to be the basis for forming a company possesses a high probability of success and longevity, once established.

Business Plan. A clear definition of how business functions are expected to be developed. Organizational format, use of funds, potential contingencies, revenue forecasts and a clear definition of an exit strategy.

Founder’s grit. A no nonsense attitude, chutzpah. There will be times of considerable stress when things aren’t going so well, even to the extent that there is the appearance the project may hit the sort of roadblock leading most to abandon the project. Such moments are when the founder exhibits why his shareholders placed their faith in his ability to “make things happen” when the going gets tough.

Access to Patient Capital. Startups are generally expected to have a manner of returning investor capital that can be spelled out in terms of timing or specific events which are required to have been realized. But either may take longer than expected, or additional capital is needed during the development process.

A clearly spelled out agreement between the founder and individual investors is essential. And just as essential, investors should be selected just as carefully as they would be while engaged in selecting the investment being offered.

Tales of disagreeable investors making it difficult for management to operate the company are considerably more frequent than would be necessary with appropriate selection of investors by the founder.

Investor/ Organizational Communication. Problems are inevitable and frequent as you navigate through the process of developing the myriad elements included in the startup’s key functional components. Maintaining communication with shareholders, and key organizational members, explaining an assessment of problems encountered, and the founder’s solution is essential. Taking the time to calm concerns before they take on the larger-than-life perspective is considerably more valuable in trying to work through the problems before they become an issue.

What are the most common mistakes you have seen CEOs & founders make when they start a business? What can be done to avoid those errors?

Insufficient capitalization tops the list. Stories of companies who were close to achieving positive operations, but who had to close their doors due to lack of sufficient funds needed to continue, are near universal.

Nearly as important, and very likely to closely relate to the first problem, is weak management, particularly in the marketing and sales functions. This goes back to the dot-com era. We experienced hiring many individuals who had been involved with failed companies, only to find they were just as ineffective in selling our products as they had been with their prior company. Without a competent sales organization there is no capability for a company to function.

Avoidance of these company killers is the same for each: don’t underestimate the potential of either going sideways. What will be done to mitigate that potential has to be addressed at the time an introductory business plan is written.

Have a workout program established, one that’s habitual and can be done either before the beginning of the workday or at the end. Never in the middle of the day.

If you do your best thinking in the early morning, schedule your workout before the start of the productive part of your day.

A workout doesn’t have to be scheduled for every day to be effective, but it does have to be routine. I’m not aware of a substitute to relieve stress associated with business development demands that often extend into late evenings. It’s that potential that favors the advantage of an early morning workout before the start of business.

It’s tempting to work weekends, holidays, and what would be vacation time. But the result can be crushing to the ability to keep up a productive schedule. The brain needs downtime, and downtime sometimes means taking a weekend off and going somewhere without taking work along.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂

It would return to a system of teaching what was once right about our country in the old-fashioned way. Reading, writing, and arithmetic being taught in such a format that students can understand it. Conceptually that would imply teaching be done differently by demographic considerations. This would replace a more one-size-fits-all system of applying the same standards of measurement on all schools in a city.

Standardization of teaching may be more efficient from a system standpoint, but the school dropout rate in areas where students are likely not to last due to inability to perform isn’t served by standardization. The result is the student is lost without having been given the opportunity to succeed.

This would not impinge on students capable of performing at higher levels. Their score would have different standards, consequently, would be taught differently.

This movement is envisioned to be one small step toward correcting what appears to be a current source of disaffection among economic strata.

Several individuals fit the description of someone I would love to have breakfast or lunch with, but most definitely the first would be Warren Buffett.

Mr. Buffett has shown an unwavering ability to hold onto an investment and make the formula work in his favor. I have known one other individual who had a similar approach to investments — that is he never sold, he only accumulated.

Angelo Sangiacomo owned apartment communities, principally in the City of San Francisco. He achieved notoriety for having single-handedly caused rent control in the city by once raising rents on all of his apartment communities by $100 per month on the same day.

That wasn’t my reason for being interested in speaking with Angelo. He was one of the more interesting people in the real estate world, acting totally independently from any outside influences. His first purchase when he began his accumulation of real estate properties was a rundown single-family home that he subdivided and rented out portions for $75 per month. His final development, 60 years later, was a high-rise apartment building in San Francisco, funded entirely by his own money. And he still held that first house that he had purchased and subdivided to be rented out.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Readers can follow my work via my website, Galtmirrin Publishing.com; and they can purchase a copy of my book, The Thicket’s Prodigy: Reflections of an Improbable Life, on Amazon, also at Barnes & Noble and some independent bookstores.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this. We wish you continued success and good health!

Author Ron Brock On Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Startup was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Making Something From Nothing: Terry Ouzounelli Of Greek Entrepreneurs On How To Go From Idea To…

Making Something From Nothing: Terry Ouzounelli Of Greek Entrepreneurs On How To Go From Idea To Launch

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

You can’t have all the answers beforehand. Take action and you’ll figure everything out along the way. Just get started!

As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Terry Ouzounelli.

Terry Ouzounelli is an ex-military officer, entrepreneur and author from Greece. She graduated from the Hellenic Military Academy and served in the Greek Army as an officer for eleven years.

She had an interest in philosophy and spirituality from a young age and through her own entrepreneurial and self-growth journey has achieved semi-retirement and financial freedom.

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Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?

Thank you so much for the opportunity to share my story!

Well, I am not responsible for my childhood, so I am not talking about that, but I’m happy to share my mistakes, failures, choices, and decisions I’ve made during the adult life that led me to the person I am today.

I studied at the Hellenic Military Academy Evelpidon for four years and I served in the Greek army as an officer for eleven years. Although I loved my job as a military leader, I was often doing a second job to be able to afford a more comfortable life. You would find me managing hotel reservations, delivering food, doing short commercials, dropping a few lines as a background actress, serving drinks at local bars, and even dancing! But what is certain, is that I was extremely hard-working. The type of job didn’t matter to me. I didn’t want to put myself in a position of struggling financially. Nevertheless, as you can easily understand, after a few years I was exhausted. I needed to find another way to make money.

In the beginning, I started a bunch of side hustles and types of online businesses and most of them failed. That didn’t bother me at all. I learned, acted, and failed. Again and again.

Starting a business and becoming an entrepreneur had never crossed my mind.

I started Greek Entrepreneurs as a side hustle, like with everything that I had done so far. I am not a person who takes things seriously and this wasn’t an exception.

However, after a while, things got serious. And when I say serious, I mean that Greek Entrepreneurs had exponential growth and everybody in Greece and Cyprus was talking about it. Within two years, I had helped over 2,500 people start investing, trading in the Stock Market, and making passive income. The most interesting thing is that until now, I have spent zero dollars on marketing. This is because my clients saw tremendous results in their lives and suggested my products and services to other people! This is when I understood that things got serious. I was officially an entrepreneur.

You don’t choose to become an entrepreneur. People decide that for you.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

It may sound pessimistic at first, but the more you dive into that realization, the better your chances of succeeding are. The most valuable lesson that I’ve learned is that “you are on your own. No one is coming for you.” Don’t expect any support from anyone to start working on your dreams, success, ideas, business, whatever that might be, even yourself! Stop waiting and procrastinating and act now! Let me give you an example.

As a Greek, I may be biased, but if you want to study philosophy, you have to start with ancient Greek philosophy. All other types of philosophies throughout the world are influenced by ancient Greek philosophy (I explain more about that in my book Catharsis: the reason why you are here). The ancient Greeks imagined opportunity as a head that had hair only on the front side, while the back side was bald. According to them, if an opportunity was presented to you, you would have to grab it by the hair because if you didn’t do so, it would be too late to grab it after it passed by you since you would be looking at the back side which was bald, thus you wouldn’t be able to grab it.

That’s what you should do every time. Grab each opportunity the time it shows up. Act quickly.

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

Oh my God, where to start with? As an author and a bookworm myself, I have read a lot of books that have helped me tremendously in many areas of my life. I usually read books from the self-help and business genre. I strongly believe that you can’t succeed in anything unless you work on yourself first. And of course, everyone should be constantly working on themselves because no one is perfect and nobody can claim that they know it all. You may be the best version of yourself right now, but there’s always room for growth and more knowledge. That’s why I focus on reading self-help books frequently.

Two of the best self-help books that I have read are Letting go by David R. Hawkins and Breaking the habit of being yourself by Dr. Joe Dispenza.

One of the best entrepreneurial books I have read is Unscripted by M.J. DeMarco, which helped me grow my business massively.

Of course, my own books, Catharsis: The reason why you are here, The Silence of the Sheep, and Mastering Wealth: The Escape from Modern Slavery, have also helped me during my self-growth journey because you grow a lot by writing too. I remember that I ended some chapters in tears. I was happy, proud, and relieved.

Ok, I’m going to disappoint many people again. That’s not my intention. However, sometimes, uncomfortable facts and the truth are way more beneficial than inspiring quotes and sweet talk.

There are no ideas.

Or let me rephrase that so it’s more easily understood. There are no unique ideas. We all have the same ideas because we are all one, as the ancient Greek philosophers believed. Stop thinking that you’re better than everyone else, smarter, more talented, more knowledgeable, or whatever. Stop thinking that your “unique ideas” will make you successful. In other words, stop dreaming and start working.

That’s the ugly truth. Nothing but work can guarantee results.

Of course at least one person or in reality, many people have had the same idea before! Even if you don’t believe in what the ancient Greek philosophers believed, that we are all one, take the rational approach. It is mathematically and statistically impossible that your idea is unique.

But what can you do about it?

It doesn’t matter! Even if there are a lot of people or entrepreneurs that have implemented that idea and have turned it into a business, this doesn’t prevent you from starting your own business, based on the same idea. Again, what will make your work, business or project stand out is your personality, the way you present your work and how you can help or improve other people’s lives. As long as the value is provided, as long as you see the smiles on people’s faces, as long as you see them thriving using your products or services, you don’t have to worry about any competition. Besides, in entrepreneurship, you can’t have all the answers beforehand. You start, implement, improve, adjust, change, fail, succeed, adjust again, change again, and so on.

Don’t worry or get stuck in the details. There is only one purpose for your business: to serve people. Never think about profit, money, numbers, logistics, or anything else, at least in the beginning, before you get started. I’m not saying that they are not important, but what is more important is the customer. I can’t stretch this enough. As long as you care about your customer and you do your best to solve their problem or add value to their life, the rest are not even issues. You will figure them out.

Let me share with you my personal (and embarrassing) experience regarding this. When I first got started providing financial services and education, my website sucked! It was the worst website you can imagine. As I was on a tight budget in the beginning, I did everything myself, including building the website and linking all my products and services. It was terrible. It was a mess. And I wasn’t smart enough to see what was going on and adjust, or maybe I wasn’t skilled enough as an entrepreneur to adjust.

I had that embarrassing website for two years, having a few thousand people visiting and logging into my website every month. Sometimes the servers crashed and the website wasn’t functional at all!

But again, my stupid and stubborn personality didn’t let me see that something was wrong.

I started seeing the problem when I listened to the feedback, which I encourage you to do, as it will provide you with extremely useful information about your work that no other tool can.

People were consistently saying that my products and services are excellent and have transformed their lives, but some people also mentioned that the website sucked.

I remember one email from a client that had purchased a lot of my investing and trading courses saying: “Guys you can’t have the best courses in Europe and such a crappy website, it’s really annoying”.

Although I got a bit defensive in the beginning, I now appreciate that email deeply because it helped me understand what I needed to do to scale my business. It helped me see what I refused to see.

For the next four days, I worked non-stop and didn’t even eat or sleep properly. I wanted to get it done as soon as possible. After four days, I had a new, professional website that was easy to use.

My students noticed it immediately and they thanked me for improving the website saying that it’s much better than the previous version! Why didn’t they say anything sooner? Why didn’t they tell me they were struggling with navigation? I wondered. Wait, what? Did I start listening? Suddenly, I realized that I needed feedback. No more ego from now on. Only happy customers.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why?

The 5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company are:

No one is coming for you. Don’t expect support from anyone. You want to belong to the 1% of the population, right? Then why would you listen to the 99%?
Don’t think that you’re smarter than anyone else. Always work on yourself, learn, adjust and improve.
Success won’t happen overnight. It takes time and patience.
Self-growth and entrepreneurship go hand in hand. Be the person you want to become and then success will manifest in your life.
You can’t have all the answers beforehand. Take action and you’ll figure everything out along the way. Just get started!

Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?

Again, just do it. Stop thinking for a while and do it. Start today. Not tomorrow. Whatever that might be, don’t get caught up in the details and worries. You will figure it all out along the way. Starting something new, something that you’ve never done before, like a business, might seem challenging in the beginning. If you combine it with the voice in your head that will do anything to prevent you from taking action, you will never get started and that idea will remain just that, an idea.

There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?

Although hiring a coach or consultant is extremely beneficial for a beginner, as you will get a ton of knowledge and learn from their experience (that you don’t have yet) and speed up the process at the same time, it is not easy for anyone, especially if they are on a tight budget. Many people start a business out of desperation, they may have nothing, they can’t even afford to pay their monthly bills, so hiring an expert is impossible for them. I don’t want to discourage those people. There are many successful entrepreneurs that started from scratch, alone, with zero money and resources and they succeeded because they believed in themselves, they were committed, disciplined, and hard-working. It is possible for anyone.

In conclusion, if you can afford it, hiring a consultant will help you achieve your goals faster. If you can’t afford it, you can still start working on your own, but keep in mind that it will require more effort and time.

What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?

This decision depends on a few factors, like the available capital that the entrepreneur has, the profit margin of their company, future growth potential, and which phase of the Business Cycle we are in. For instance, right now that the Markets are running out of liquidity and interest rates are increasing, VCs are tighter about deploying their capital.

Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

Success came as a result of my caring for other people and not the opposite. My priority is and has always been helping other people, inspiring them, adding value to their lives and seeing the smile on their faces.

Thank you. What I would really like to become a worldwide movement is catharsis. Trying to reach enlightenment and wisdom, as the ancient Greek philosophers did, can bring happiness and freedom to your life. Catharsis applies to everyone and it’s the doorway to happiness and freedom. With catharsis, anyone can live a life beyond their wildest dreams. I describe the catharsis process in detail in my book Catharsis: the reason why you are here.

I really admire Suze Orman. She’s an extremely talented, successful and inspiring woman! Even if I had just five minutes to spend with her, I would listen carefully to what she’d have to say and keep notes.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.

Thank you so much! The time flew by so fast and I enjoyed this interview a lot!

Making Something From Nothing: Terry Ouzounelli Of Greek Entrepreneurs On How To Go From Idea To… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Makers of The Metaverse: Aneesh Kulkarni Of Strivr On The Future Of The VR, AR & Mixed Reality…

Makers of The Metaverse: Aneesh Kulkarni Of Strivr On The Future Of The VR, AR & Mixed Reality Industries

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Be bold — VR presents an opportunity for trailblazers to introduce concepts, use cases, and technology that the world has never seen before. Being creative and ambitious is key to maintaining momentum in this industry, new technology always brings challenges but also untapped potential for those brave enough to explore it.

The Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality & Mixed Reality Industries are so exciting. What is coming around the corner? How will these improve our lives? What are the concerns we should keep an eye out for? Aside from entertainment, how can VR or AR help work or other parts of life? To address this, we had the pleasure of interviewing Aneesh Kulkarni.

Aneesh Kulkarni is the Chief Technology Officer at Strivr, the leading platform for enterprise VR. He brings a wealth of experience in technical leadership, developing consumer and enterprise platforms for mobile web, and data applications. As the CTO of Strivr, Aneesh has been instrumental in developing Strivr’s platform, building and mentoring high-performance teams to realize Strivr’s product vision. Prior to Strivr, Aneesh served as VP of Engineering at Dremio and AppDynamics, and Director of Engineering at NetSuite.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit. Can you tell us a bit about your backstory and how you grew up?

I grew up in India, on the West Coast in a city called Mumbai. It’s very much like New York, being the financial capital of the country. I have a B.S in Computer Science from a university in India. I came to the United States to pursue an M.S in Computer Science. After graduate school, I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to work at a startup. I’ve been here ever since, and have worked in multiple companies, all startups before Strivr.

Is there a particular book, film, or podcast that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

The book that has made the most impact on me is Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, by Angela Duckworth. It resonates with my journey here in this industry as a software engineer now transitioning into a leadership role. As an engineer and a leader, one of the primary characteristics I’ve had to foster was grit. I don’t think I was necessarily born with all the talent — but I’ve worked hard to get where I am today, and this book has had a significant influence on me. If I had to pick a couple of other books that I really liked they would be Open: An Autobiography, by Andre Agassi, and Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson.

Is there a particular story that inspired you to pursue a career in the Virtual Reality industry? We’d love to hear it.

I’d been building enterprise software platforms for a while. The companies I’ve worked for previously developed platforms that were used by other organizations and benefited categories of use cases (i.e. business intelligence, file sharing and collaboration, application performance management, and self-service analytics for cloud data lake houses.) There was a connection between my work and its impact on people in the world, but it wasn’t a very direct connection.

In 2019, I wanted to do something very different from what I’d done before, and find a role where I could have more of a direct connection with the end-user. I was looking at a few different categories such as healthcare, fintech, and EDtech. I wanted to make a difference in industries that could benefit a lot more from technology. During that time, someone pitched me to take a look at Strivr.

I’m a big sports fan, and I was very interested in what Strivr had done for sports. The fact that VR can help someone train through “mental reps” repeatedly, reliably, and safely, was what ultimately compelled me. At Strivr, I’ve been able to draw a more direct connection between the work that I do and how it impacts people — for example, I know that what I do every day will influence thousands of employees at Walmart, Bank of America, MGM, and more in getting better at their jobs, in learning new skills, and doing it in a revolutionary new and more effective way!

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began this fascinating career?

As I mentioned earlier, what initially drew me to Strivr was its connection to sports, but I found out they were making a hard pivot into the enterprise space as I joined. Making a pivot this drastic can be risky. But it made sense and it felt like a big and audacious goal. I was still very drawn to the technology and the fact that Strivr was a category-creation company. It’s very exciting to be a part of a pioneering story of bringing VR to the mainstream. In fact, we are now working with four of the top five Fortune 100 companies, and it’s been exciting as CTO, leading research, technology, and development through this growth.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

When I first started my career as an engineer, I sort of stumbled into engineering management, by accident. In my earlier years, the people who I worked with were my peers who I’d go out to dinner with and see movies with regularly. And then, all of a sudden — I was their manager.

This was a really hard transition. My first foray as a manager was not a success, for that one reason and many others! But having been given a second chance, I learned how to dissociate personal relationships and friendships from work relationships, which has helped me to succeed.

It’s difficult to answer this question because there isn’t just one person who comes to mind. It’s more of an aggregate of experiences and people that I’ve learned from over the years, starting with my parents and the work ethic they instilled when raising me and my siblings in their pursuit of excellence in their professional careers. My mother was a stay-at-home mom until me and my siblings started going to school. Once she got the time back, she went back to university to pursue a bachelor’s as well as a master’s in education before re-entering the workforce. She showed me that, with the right motivation and interest, you can really change the course of your career.

I’ve also been very inspired by my wife of twenty years. She has a very successful and high-level career too and we’ve found a great balance between her career and mine. This has taught me that a couple’s career is not a zero-sum game — it doesn’t have to be just one or the other that gets to succeed, and I’m very grateful for her help in finding that balance.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

We recently launched our Strivr Partner Program with the goal to accelerate the at-scale adoption of VR in the enterprise. Our ecosystem joins leading providers in immersive content, software & technology, and professional services that we’ve partnered with over the last few years, such as Accenture, DDI, Pico, VMware, and many others. Through this new program, our content partners have greater access to deliver VR experiences to the enterprise workforce without having to integrate into organizations’ enterprise IT and systems. Our platform provides a Software Developer Kit (SDK) which we also launched earlier this year. The SDK will be a doorway to opportunities not only for content partners but also for developers to create and publish VR content on the Strivr platform and work directly with large enterprise customers to make a lasting impact on the global workforce.

Ok super. Thank you for all that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. The VR, AR and MR industries seem so exciting right now. What are the 3 things in particular that most excite you about the industry? Can you explain or give an example?

Creating an impact on people through technology — I’m very excited to make a difference in the world through technology. As I mentioned earlier, being able to trace my work directly to the tangible benefits it produces (i.e. in engagement, skill-building, and knowledge retention) for end users and organizations, lets me know that the work that I do has a substantial impact.
Bringing new technology to the masses: I’ve really enjoyed the opportunity to bring a new type of technology to a large number of employees and users. Typically, knowledge workers are the ones who get to experiment with all the new fancy tech first (i.e. new mobile applications, new computers, and hardware), while frontline workers are the last people considered. I think one of the best things that Strivr has done is to introduce VR to the masses through the enterprise, given that the frontline employee population in the Fortune 1000 is much bigger than the knowledge-worker population.
The rise of the Metaverse — I’m excited to see the emergence of the Metaverse, and its potential to transform the enterprise with an immersive world to learn, train, and engage with other people. At Strivr, we believe we are serving as the bridge to the Metaverse for enterprises. I foresee the Metaverse as being an augmentation of the physical world, where we take a physical space that’s too expensive or too difficult to replicate and recreate that experience virtually for the user. Ultimately, we know that when learners train in an environment as close to the real world as possible, they have the highest chances of engagement and retention.

What are the 3 things that concern you about the VR, AR, and MR industries? Can you explain? What can be done to address those concerns?

Delivering safe user experiences — A very important consideration at Strivr, is ensuring that people can experience this technology safely. With virtual experiences, we have to ensure any physical movement users do in the real world is equally matched in the virtual world, or else the end user may experience dizziness and nausea.

At Strivr, we care about the entire user experience and put a great amount of thought into where the training is going to take place. Oftentimes the companies we work with don’t have the large spaces that are required for six degrees of freedom (6DoF) experiences (i.e. experiences where users can physically move forward or backward, left or right, and up or down as they can in physical reality). We consider questions such as “Is this a 4×4 or 6×6 room?” or “Is this space better for supporting 6DoF experiences, or is it better for three degrees of freedom (3DoF) when you’re sitting in a chair or a desk so that you’re not standing up without space to move around?” Soon, pass-through and AR technology that shows the user’s real-world surroundings while in the headset should be arriving on the market to provide added visibility and safety measures.

2. Change Management — Another challenge is ensuring that organizations take the time to roll out the technology in a way that offers the best possible experience for their employees. When putting on a headset, many users are experiencing VR for the very first time. It’s a considerably different modality than they are used to compared to a phone or a tablet. This requires attention to change management practices in order to ensure that the learners understand the technology and how to get the most from the experience.

3. Content — Hardware, form factor and design, software are critical areas that are undergoing significant evolutions to deliver the most compelling, high-quality immersive experiences for users. As we get there, the quality and volume of content and applications will be critical to drive usage and mass adoption of the technology. I look towards tech like Generative AI and graphics computing platforms to accelerate the world of content development. They can help with automation content generation, improving content quality, and increasing content variety.

I think the entertainment aspects of VR, AR and MR are apparent. Can you share with our readers how these industries can help us at work?

VR is playing a significant role in critical areas such as training, upskilling, and increasing knowledge retention and engagement. Because VR provides an immersive experience for employees to practice and make mistakes without real risk, it’s a phenomenal tool for both frontline and knowledge-based workers. For example, VR training has been deployed to frontline store associates and customer service representatives by companies such as Walmart, Verizon, and Sprouts to practice using new equipment and procedures or practice enacting safety protocols for scenarios such as in-store robberies, in a safe space.

VR has also been transforming the knowledge-worker sector as well, by helping companies better provide more engaging experiences for employees during the hiring process, during onboarding, and for L&D. For example Accenture created the “Nth floor virtual office” to provide a centralized place to impart its culture and values, exchange ideas, and foster collaboration in real-time. Companies are also experimenting with VR to provide potential hires with a look at what their day-to-day roles would look like before they accept the job; and help learners improve soft skills critical for success in our virtual-first workplace, such as navigating conflict and delivering feedback with empathy.

Are there other ways that VR, AR and MR can improve our lives? Can you explain?

While very nascent in stages, VR in healthcare has seen recent spikes in startup activity and VC investment. The Great Ormond Street Hospital is a prime example of a health provider that leveraged VR to train staff on operational procedures months ahead of surgery, so that they could practice performing the task, without the risk of harming the patient.

The potential that this technology has to transform our lives is only beginning to be discovered. While each industry will ultimately use VR for different tasks, the ultimate results are the same across the board: giving learners visual, auditory, and kinesthetic cues in a fully immersive environment to bring significant improvements in performance and knowledge retention — oftentimes at a faster rate than traditional learning.

What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about working in your industry? Can you explain what you mean?

One of the greatest misconceptions we’ve had to break is that VR is primarily a great medium for games. While VR has been historically linked to the gaming world, it has proven itself to be an impactful L&D solution for Fortune 1000 companies and is backed by decades of research. I anticipate that what we are seeing emerge through the Metaverse, will ultimately change the perception of VR as a technology and medium both for work and for play.

What are your “5 Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Career In The VR, AR or MR Industries?”

Think outside the box — VR is still a relatively nascent technology despite its long history, having gone through multiple attempts mostly focused on gaming, which wasn’t overly successful. Now, there is a new wave of interest with the kickstart of the Metaverse, which has few precedents and is accompanied by more sophisticated technology. With no precedence, being successful involves thinking out of the box and having a vision of where the technology is headed.
Be bold — VR presents an opportunity for trailblazers to introduce concepts, use cases, and technology that the world has never seen before. Being creative and ambitious is key to maintaining momentum in this industry, new technology always brings challenges but also untapped potential for those brave enough to explore it.
Be innovative — VR isn’t always all about the “cool stuff,” but rather the most impactful application, and how you can find that. At Strivr, we’ve found this through learning and training. Companies spend on average approximately $1,270 per worker on L&D and still find that many existing training methods today aren’t effective or are not measurable.
Find applications of VR that drive adoption at scale — VR is a highly innovative new way of learning and training that amplifies engagement and cognitive retention. This is a great example of an area where organizations are willing to invest in innovative approaches to learning that will help drive retention, engagement, and upskilling. Driving that change by bringing something completely new and different, yet proven, is an example of a good application. And when deployed at scale, it can have a significant impact.
Have patience & understand that success doesn’t happen overnight: I think many newcomers have an expectation that VR is going to be successful overnight. They don’t consider the arc of time it takes for new technologies to become ubiquitous. Consider mobile technologies in general and mobile phones specifically. It’s actually taken a long time for it to evolve into what it is today. The development and evolution of the hardware, firmware, software, and applications were over the span of 20+ years. I do not think it would be the same length of time for VR since it has been able to take advantage of the advancements made in hardware and design over the past 20+ years.

I think of education as a great leveler — a mechanism that allows people at large, and especially those from the poorest circumstances to succeed. But there are significant headwinds and challenges for people from these backgrounds in pursuing education. Education is expensive, and people from these backgrounds have to make choices between earning a living and pursuing an education. If I could inspire a movement, it would be one that would change education from being a commodity that is easily accessible for people with means — those with wealth, those with homes in school districts with high property prices, into being a resource that is truly and equally accessible to everybody.

We are very blessed that very prominent leaders read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂

From the general world, unrelated to technology I would like to meet Barack Obama. Transcending politics, I think he has the right balance in being empathetic, inclusive, and wanting to do good for the population, without being dogmatic.

In the world of tech, there are a few influential visionaries I’d love to spend time with. If Steve Jobs were still alive, it would be Steve Jobs, it would be Mark Zuckerberg, it would be Elon Musk. Even if I don’t agree with everything they’ve said or done, I think of these people as those that have taken insane risks the average person would never take to build products and platforms that have changed or are changing the world.

Continuing with the world of tech, I have massive respect for founders. The founders that I have worked with have a singular passion and belief in solving a hard problem and making a positive impact. I have the privilege of being able to spend time with Derek Belch, the CEO and founder at Strivr every week, and I had the privilege of doing the same with Jyoti Bansal when I was at AppDynamics.

And last but not the least, I would love to have lunch with Trevor Noah. He is my favorite comedian and his background, life story, and achievement is very inspiring.

Thank you so much for these excellent stories and insights. We wish you continued success in your great work!

Makers of The Metaverse: Aneesh Kulkarni Of Strivr On The Future Of The VR, AR & Mixed Reality… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Michele Zilocchi On The 5 Things You Need To Understand In Order To Successfully Invest In…

Michele Zilocchi On The 5 Things You Need To Understand In Order To Successfully Invest In Cryptocurrency

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Bitcoin is considered a risk-on store-of-value, and that is why in some market conditions it happens to have a anti-correlation when compared to Gold. This pattern was clearly visible in March 2022 where the destiny of the Russian-Ukraine war was not already clearly defined. Under that circumstances, Bitcoin price started to decrease and Gold price started to increase because it was considered as the correct safe-asset for institutions like Investment Funds, Commercial Banks and Investment Banks (and many retails that bought Gold through such institutions).

Over the past few years, the Cryptocurrency industry has been making headlines nearly every week. Many people have gotten very wealthy investing or leading the cryptocurrency industry. At the same time, many people have lost a lot investing in the industry. In addition, more people have been scrutinizing the ecological impact of crypto mining, as well as its potential facilitation of illegal activity. What is being done and what can be done to address these concerns?

In this interview series called “5 Things You Need To Understand In Order To Successfully Invest In Cryptocurrency” we are talking to leaders in the cryptocurrency industry, as well as successful investors, who share insights from their experience about how to successfully invest in Cryptocurrency.

As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Michele Zilocchi aka Mike Zillo.

Mike first heard of cryptocurrencies back in 2012, when he was still graduating at the M.Eng of Chemical and Process Engineering among Netherlands and Italy. He thought that cryptocurrencies were “stupid stuffs” and the guy from whom he heard talking about Bitcoin, should have focused more on getting a degree instead of doing such things. Now that guy is the CEO of one of the most important crypto-investment fund and I received my most important lesson here: being humble is free but it can cost a lot not being it.

He started his journey into the cryptocurrency space back in 2017, before the first big wave of Bitcoin, where he started trading and gaining experience into the crypto-mining field. Anyway, the mere speculation on cryptocurrencies was not satisfactory for him and that is why in 2018 he started studying and practicing to become a proficient Cryptocurrency advisor, with a focus on Companies willing to deploy their business in the cryptocurrency/Web3 space.

As a Cryptocurrency Advisor I understood that Cryptocurrency companies has the same (and even more) needs of a traditional company and that is why I decided to go deeper, increasing my expertise into Tokenomics, Product Design and Business Strategy. I have already experienced with a lot of projects the needs, the struggles and how to overcome certain difficulties. I see the term Strategy Advisory quite overwhelmed in its use today, but in my conception, covering this role is like an art: helping each team with different features, tasks and working paths, with a personal and human approach.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit. Can you tell us a little about your backstory and how you grew up?

I am an only child and I have always been very shy, so when I was a child, I refuged myself into studying, attending different courses to improve my academic skills and lately creating soft skills quite different and unique if compared to young people from my age.

I then graduated with good grades in Chemical and Process Engineering, with a nice Experimental thesis carried out in the Netherlands. At 24 years old, before graduating, I co-founded my first start-up in the field of microalgae for nutritional purposes. I loved the microalgae field and I loved Chemical Engineering too. By the time I simply realized that it could result quite static in the mid-term and that is why while working as an engineer I successfully started free-time working for a Direct Selling company. The income from this free-time job almost overcame my Engineer salary and that is when I decided to resign from my working place, to start investing time to develop proficiency into some Business Fields.
My dream was working into a young and dynamic environment with the chance of being involved with different projects and different task. My aspiration was to become a catalyst of several evolution/transformational processes into companies, but for doing that, a lot of experience had to be achieved since motivation and theory were just a nice (and useful) starting point. And then, the cryptocurrency opportunity landed in my head and hands, and since 2017 I am grinding in the field.

Is there a particular book, film, or podcast that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

The two movies that inspired me the most throughout the years have been “Karate Kid” and “V for Vendetta”. From Karate Kid, that I watched several times when I was a kid, I learnt that the repetition of specific tasks can lead to proficiency over time because hard work always beats talent if talent does not work hard. Besides, this movie is still inspirational to me, thanks the humbleness that Daniel-san had to prove to increase his Karate skills.
V for Vendetta, inspired me a lot when it comes to the power of dreams, the power of rebellion and the self-confidence necessary to pursue my ambitions, even if everyone and everything seems against me. Besides, from this latest, I also appreciate a lot the idea of the totalitarianism-rebellion that is something people should have always clear in mind. Totalitarianism only works until people believe in it.

Is there a particular story that inspired you to pursue your particular career path? We’d love to hear it.

The story that, over time, inspired me the most has been the one from Colonel Harland Sanders, well-known for being the Founder of KFC. He started a ferry-boat company, then he acquired a motel with his owned restaurant that were burnt to the ground. He then started the attempts to sell the fried chicken recipes but he got rejected 1009 times and later, at the age of 62, he opened the first franchise of KFC. The ability to reinvent himself plus the perseverance to face all the rejections is something that I really admire.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

The funniest mistake I made, started from my very first start-up and lasted some years until I better understood it. When starting a business together with other people, they will likely take care of you until they have a common interest AND the value of the relationship can usually be measured by their share of the amount of money at stake.
I know, probably you all thought of something funnier, but once you realize this thing, everything becomes funnier because you become more able to focus yourself on the business (and being less a dreamer) and see the real purpose that drives people having an interest towards you.

In my path, I encountered different people, that taught me different things. Anyway, when it comes to gratitude, my parents are the two most important, that have always offered help during my struggles, they allowed me to attend several different experiences and taught me the most important values about how to be an integer person, giving values to human values, ethics and so on.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

I am currently working on different projects, all of them aimed to improve existing ecosystems or to give tools to people to exploit market conditions. I think that at the moment of writing, the most exciting projects I am currently working are two, quite different among each other. The first one is called Decentra — Accademia dei Registri Distribuiti, an Italian association conveying deep knowledge about cryptocurrencies. Thanks to the growing network and the wide technical and managerial expertise, with such structure, every crypto-project can see its birth and the development. The second project that can really impact people’s life is a fully-decentralized platform for education purposes, where content creators and Learners will be rewarded based on the quality of the participation (and the content) they will bring to the platform. Its name is Skillsbite and it is co-founded from a Polish team, where I am figuring as a Strategic Advisor for the development of the business and the integration of the Tokenomics.
If you feel you want to connect with me, make sure to get in touch through my Linkedin Profile.

Ok super. Thank you for all that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. The cryptocurrency industry seems extremely dynamic right now. What are the 3 things in particular that most excite you about the industry? If you can, please share a story or example for each.

The first one are the words: “Decentralized” and “Permissionless”: what I really enjoyed from the very beginning was this idea of the removal of central entities, changing them with democratic organizations. That is why Wallets are the real deal of cryptocurrencies and not price fluctuations!

The second is the “Tokenization of Everything”, meaning that a lot of different categories of assets can be represented with tokens, with different purposes, application and limitations.

The third one is that Bitcoin has a limited supply, making it scarcer and scarcer as the mining keeps going. More than 19 millions of bitcoin have already been minted and less than two millions are left to be minted.

What are the 3 things that concern you about the industry? Can you explain? What can be done to address those concerns?

The first one is Greed. Cryptocurrency users are greedy and they get dazzled by huge APYs without taking into consideration all the potential risks involved behind such numbers.

The second one is again Greed because people are willing to sell their soul just to get some “passive income” with cryptocurrencies without keeping in mind about the relevance of decentralization (like in ETH staking, among the other examples where now just 5 validators are controlling more than half of the voting power). To help these two kinds of greedy people, education and evidences of platforms promising miraculous results blowing up are necessary to create awareness. Promoting decentralization is more difficult since evidences come up too late, like the FTX, BlockFi, Celsius examples.

The third one is connected to regulators that can feel cryptocurrencies as a too risky asset while they were given birth to create monetary independence for people using them.

What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about cryptocurrency? Can you explain what you mean?

There are some myths I always explain to people, especially when talking to newcomers. The first myth I usually debunk is about Money Laundering, that if compared to Messari’s report data from 2019, every 800$ traditional dollars, only 1$ in cryptocurrencies is implicated into illicit traffics. So cryptocurrencies are actually used for illicit traffic but 800 times less than Dollar.
The second myth is about Bitcoin Volatility: VanEck recently issued a report stating that 22% of the companies listed in the S&P500 are more volatile than Bitcoin. For what concerns volatility you may all probably remember what happened when the Swiss Franc unpegged from the EUR in January 2015: a 50% price variation in a single day.
The third myth to be debunked is about Pollution and Carbon Dioxide emissions: from FAO’s data can be easily understood that disposed food has 10 times more CO2 emissions than Bitcoin and that Bitcoin network has an energy demand that is less than half of the banking system. Another myth is that people lose money with cryptocurrencies, while it’s just a matter of when they buy and sell their cryptocurrencies. Actually, this really depends on the time-span they are willing to look at for their purchase of cryptocurrencies and what coins (or s**t coins) they bought. I wrote a comprehensive Medium article on this topic and you can find it here.

How do you think cryptocurrency has the potential to help society in the future?

At first, I am totally sure that cryptocurrencies can help the society, and they are already doing it. At first, to disintermediate payments, bypassing potential restrictions of banks to work with third-world countries or other nations that are on grey/black OFAC list. But these can be just preconceptions, because there may be a lot of importers and exporters in such countries that are just willing to create an international business but they have to struggle with unnecessary bank restrictions.
Other applications are for the traceability of goods and services thanks to public blockchains that can store and notarize data.
Another advantage is the Tokenization of Everything that can create liquidity in non-liquid markets thanks to Secondary Markets, Digitization and Fractionalization. This can be really useful as a new frontier of the crowdfunding, with a potential exchange in the secondary market among Security Tokens.

Recently, more people have been scrutinizing the ecological impact of crypto mining. From your perspective, can you explain to our readers why the cryptocurrency industry is creating an environmental challenge?

Thanks for such question: it’s great to talk about it here. There are two ideas about pollution: the first one is the real pollution (hydrocarbons, heavy metals, polluting gases) and then there is Carbon Dioxide production/emissions. Cryptocurrency mining cannot pollute directly since it’s just a form of electricity consumption, so the trigger is moved to the source of energy production. Before accusing cryptocurrency-mining we should face the reality on how much sustainable is the electricity production nowadays. Anyway, recent stats from Coinshares state that about 30% of the electricity used for cryptocurrency mining comes from renewable resources. And that’s not so bad, if compared to the usual renewable energy shares for countries. For example, Italy (my birth-country) has the same share of renewable energy on the total energy produced of Cryptocurrency mining while USA are down to 12.4% according to EIA.gov .
Bitcoin yearly energy demand is less then half of the Banking ecosystem and 5% of the USA conditioned air consumption just for private uses. What is the priority? Setting the room temperature at 22°C during summer or empowering this ecosystem of distributed and democratic money?
One last thing: estimated yearly Carbon Dioxide emissions for Bitcoin mining are 95 Mega-tonnes per year while according to Mbow et al., 2019, p. 200, up to 10% of the total Greenhouse gases are created by wasted food. WASTED FOOD. I am not triggering the battle for Intensive Farming (that produces 7100Mega-tonnes/year of CO2). I am simply talking about Wasted Food. And that is huge. If we assume that 10% of products coming from Intensive farming are disposed, we are talking of 710Mega-tonnes/year of Carbon Dioxide to produce food that is then disposed. Just the “Wasted-Food-Industry” has carbon dioxide emissions 7 times higher than Bitcoin’s. Are we sure that we need to focus on Bitcoin’s emissions when there are millions of people starving around the world?

From your perspective what can be done to address or correct these concerns?

As usual, the first thing is to spread the correct information. Anyway, information should not be shared in a maximalist way. It’s ok being a Bitcoin maximalist but when it comes to information, we should try to understand the point of view of the other person that has probably some preconceptions in its mind and therefore we cannot start attacking it where if feels safe and confident. We must try to share with those people the correct information in the correct form with the correct attitude.

Recently, more people have been scrutinizing cryptocurrency’s impact on illegal activity. From your perspective, can you explain to our readers why cryptocurrency, more than fiat currency, is seen as an attractive choice for criminals?

This is another preconception that when I hold public speeches about cryptocurrency topic. Cryptocurrencies are used for illicit traffic, like any other currency is.

In 2019 Messari.io published a stats where they showed how cryptocurrency are losing the competition for illicit traffic application 800 to 1 if compared to traditional Dollar. That means that every dollar in cryptocurrencies used for illicit purposes, other 800 dollars are used.

Recent statistics from Europol made this ratio to decrease, but still in the range of 1:83–1:217. So again, cryptocurrency can be used for illicit traffics, but they are still losing the competition with traditional currencies by order of magnitudes.

From your perspective what can be done to address or correct these concerns?

I think that awareness is again the key. In order to increase it, mass medias should pay more attention to positive and constructive examples of cryptocurrencies and blockchain use cases. As of now, their main focus is on negative events, frauds and other events that contribute to dismantle the faith that people may have on these technologies because that’s what can significantly impact the size of their audience. Anyway, this is not entirely mass media’s fault. Big responsibilities are also on the shoulders of “cryptocurrency-professionals” or journalists that surf such hype waves to get some attention for themselves. To balance the polarity of these yellers, we need people that are here to BUILD and not to act just as megaphones and shouters but rather we need BUILDERS, PROJECT MANAGERS, INVENTORS. For the moment, unfortunately, some falling trees are making far more noise than a growing forest.

Ok, fantastic. Here is the main question of our interview. What are “The 5 Things You Need To Understand In Order To Successfully Invest In Cryptocurrency?”

1 — For people considering cryptocurrencies as an investment, keep in mind that cryptocurrencies are a relatively new asset, meaning that they are still considered a high risk asset. My first purchase of cryptocurrencies, back in 2017 was 100$ because the asset was new and, to be honest, I was almost completely ignorant of what I was purchasing. So I thought to spend just 100$ because I wanted to purchase some bitcoin and to start understanding how this system works. 100$ at that time was a correct amount that was not compromising my pockets and I could “forget” about.

2 — Cryptocurrencies are a lot, much different one from the others and before following the hype, I always evaluate the project, the team, the advancement stage behind. It happened to me when I bought Algorand back at the beginning of 2020. I studied the team, the validation method, and the technology behind and that is what led me to buying Algorand and even becoming and Algorand Ambassador.

3 — Cryptocurrencies are the tip of the iceberg. Blockchain and token applications are the whole iceberg. Cryptocurrencies have been the tool to apply the Theory of Games to Blockchain validation, stimulating people with an economic incentive to validate the chain in good faith and reject malicious transactions.
I had the chance to explain these features to a webinar I held for an Italian engineering association and they got quite astonished when I mentioned all the applications for tokens, from Security Tokens to NFTs and for blockchain for the notarization of data. People usually focus on the news from the mass medias and unfortunately they do not get the full picture of the whole evolution brought here.

4 — Bitcoin is considered a risk-on store-of-value, and that is why in some market conditions it happens to have a anti-correlation when compared to Gold. This pattern was clearly visible in March 2022 where the destiny of the Russian-Ukraine war was not already clearly defined. Under that circumstances, Bitcoin price started to decrease and Gold price started to increase because it was considered as the correct safe-asset for institutions like Investment Funds, Commercial Banks and Investment Banks (and many retails that bought Gold through such institutions).

5 — Not your keys not your money. Money not used for active trading should be kept in decentralized Wallets, to HODL the cryptocurrencies in a safe place. We have all seen what happened in 2022 to FTX, BlockFi, Hodlnaut, Celsius and some more. If you are really serious on buying cryptocurrencies to create your accumulation plan and hold them for some time, you should definitely understand how Native Wallets work, what types of wallet do exist and why they are such safe for cryptocurrencies. Leaving cryptocurrencies into Exchanges is like leaving the money into the bank: it’s safe until the bank is safe. And if you do not trade such funds, use the Wallets!

What are the most common mistakes you have seen people make when they enter the industry? What can be done to avoid that?

The biggest one, is about believing in absurdly high APY and joining cryptocurrencies spread by Multi-level Marketing. High APYs are hardly sustainable and they are often carried out with a depreciation of the token (higher earnings meaning higher selling pressure). The Multi-level Marketing approach to Cryptocurrencies is quite dangerous because the buying pressure will come mainly from recruiters recruiting “ignorant” people that at the first occasion will sell their tokens. As soon as the first drop of the price or the first negative rumor will happen, a chained bearish reaction will be potentially triggered, making the price going to zero in a few hours or few days at the most.
To avoid these situation, always make your Due Diligence and evaluate what is the project or the real underlying assets of this token. Furthermore, when you are proposed a token sold by MLM, your first attitude should be skeptical. Then DYOR (Do Your Own Researches).
Another huge mistake I see people doing is panic selling when the prices drop. Bitcoin has proven that has to be treated as a long-term deal and you can see information about this into dcabtc.com .

Do you have a particular type of cryptocurrency that you are excited about? We’d love to hear why.

I am very passionate of Algorand, which I have already spent some nice words about. Algorand introduced an innovative Proof of Stake, called pure Proof of Stake, pPos. The difference from the original PoS is that with the pPoS also the small stakers can get randomly “called” to validate blocks. So, the validation committee is different every block like in the traditional PoS but with the pPoS the distribution of probability to be inserted in the validating committee has a variable that randomly choose an Algorand wallet, with no weight correlated to the number of Algorand contained into it. So in the pPoS a part of the validating committee is based on the heavy wallets, while another part is chosen in a complete casual way.
Algorand Blockchain is fast and block validation takes about three seconds and the fee for the transaction is flat to 0.001ALGO. While I am writing, Algorand is in the range of 0.30$, meaning that the commission for transacting on the Algorand Blockchain is 0.3thousanth of dollar (0.0003$). That is why Algorand Blockchain is often used for traceability purposes and I used it as well for the supply chain tracking I have done since late-2020.

What I also like a lot from Algorand Ecosystem is the team, mainly Italian (like me, lol) and its leader, Silvio Micali, who is a Professor at the MIT of Boston and he has won a Nobel prize for cryptography.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the greatest amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂

I am very passionate about environment and environmentally friendly technologies. Anyway, since there is already a lot in that direction I would love to create a “pat on the shoulder” movement by smiling and greeting people we encounter on the road. We are often immersed in thoughts, often worried about what is going on in our life and I think that walking here and there, smiling and greeting each other would have two different results: more positive energy spread around and second, by greeting people we recognize that someone is passing by and we are not alone on the route: we acknowledge that other people do exist and we greet them like saying “I know you are there, I notice you, I feel you”. I have already had this experience in the College where I lived when I attended the University (away from my birthplace), and it made me feeling really good! A smile can always change people’s day.

I have to choose only one and my choice is upon Lebron James. I am a passionate basketball player and I also admire him a lot. Starting from his troubled childhood, having the guts to attend the College and then being continuously under the spotlight, having now the chance to become the All-time top scorer. I would love to talk with him to understand his mindset, how he trains himself to stay focused towards his targets without being distracted from his same targets.

Thank you so much for these excellent stories and insights. We wish you continued success and good health!

Michele Zilocchi On The 5 Things You Need To Understand In Order To Successfully Invest In… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Remote Career Development: Brendan Griffith On How To Advance and Enhance Your Career When You Are…

Remote Career Development: Brendan Griffith On How To Advance and Enhance Your Career When You Are Working Remotely

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

FOMO — Not everyone can travel out of town or out of state to meet-up with colleagues. Instead, identify a group of professionals you’re connected with locally and schedule recurring happy hours or lunches each month.

Career development is the ongoing process of choosing, improving, developing, and advancing your career. This involves learning, making decisions, collaboration with others and knowing yourself well enough to be able to continually assess your strengths and weaknesses. This can be challenging enough when you work in an office, but what if you work remotely? How does remote work affect your career development? How do you nurture and advance your career when you are working from home and away from other colleagues? How can you help your employees do this? To address these questions, we started an interview series called “How To Advance and Enhance Your Career When You Are Working Remotely”. As a part of this interview series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Brendan Griffith.

For nearly 12 years, Brendan has helped to create and execute integrated communications programs across a broad range of local, national and international clients. He has worked in diverse industries including professional and financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, real estate and retail, among others. While specializing in strategic media outreach and executive positioning initiatives, Brendan’s experience also includes managing corporate crises/issues, fostering improved employee communications, developing and implementing social media strategies, and providing financial communications and investor relations.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would love to get to know you a bit better. What is your “backstory”?

I am currently a Senior Vice President at Reputation Partners, a national strategic communications and public relations firm based in the Midwest, but my backstory starts much earlier. I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago before heading to Illinois State University to study public relations. After graduation, I moved back home for a year and worked at Fishman Public Relations, where I focused primarily on delivering media placements and results for national and global franchise brands. After a year and a half, I joined Reputation Partners in 2011 and ‘the rest was history.’ I initially worked in our downtown Chicago office for about six years before moving to Wisconsin and working from our Milwaukee office. Today, Milwaukee is home where I live with my wife and two-year-old daughter (and soon to be another little one joining our crew).

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?

Although ‘interesting’ isn’t necessarily the right or best word to describe it, the pandemic has been one of the more impactful things to happen to my career. My wife and I were moving in March 2020 on the weekend prior to the country shutting down. I can remember leaving work not knowing I wouldn’t return to the office. Overnight, everyone was suddenly in the same situation of navigating uncertainty and figuring out how to best manage (and make things work in) this new work style/environment. The resulting hybrid model that I now experience (and so does the rest of our team at Reputation Partners) ultimately had a positive impact on my career and life, as it gives me more time with my growing family, as well as allows me to be more intentional/collaborative with my teams — whether in the office or virtual.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

My first job out of college was working at one of the leading PR agencies that specializes in supporting national and global franchise concepts. Every Friday, a small group of us would go out to lunch together and we would brainstorm which restaurant to go to by circulating a group email earlier in the morning. If I was the one kicking-off the email thread, I would typically have some fun with it — include a meme or GIF, link to a funny video, add some sarcasm, etc. One Friday, I drafted my humorous email (the meme I chose that day was the crying James Van Der Beek from Dawnson’s Creek), quickly auto populated the email addresses of everyone in the group and hit send. The only problem with auto-populating the email is one guy in our group had the same first name as the owner/CEO of one of my clients. I was mortified when I realized the mistake, but luckily for me, the CEO had a sense of humor and simply replied with, “Thanks for the invite! Really wish I could join, but I’m out of state. Have fun!” The lesson: Everyone makes mistakes, but ALWAYS double (and even triple) check the recipient(s) and content of an email before sending.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

One of my favorites is an Aristotle quote that says, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” I feel people confuse this with seeking perfection. That is not the case. No one is perfect and that especially applies to me. Rather, I view it as setting a bar — or a standard — for yourself that you try to repeatedly meet or exceed as often as possible. How you repeatedly act or operate — whether that is your work or how you treat people — defines you. It isn’t a one-time thing.

What advice would you give to other business leaders to help their employees thrive and avoid burnout?

Advice is never a one-size-fits-all, but, for me, so much stems from creating a supportive and open culture and environment. Like many aspects of a company culture, it is easy for leaders to say they are advocates of these cultural characteristics, but whether they put them in to practice is another story. By creating a supportive environment, employees feel comfortable to ask curious questions, try new things and make mistakes without fear of feeling dumb or letting someone down. This allows space for employees to grow their career and ultimately thrive.

Additionally, establishing an environment where open communication and feedback is not only encouraged, but expected, empowers employees to share issues they may be facing — including factors leading to burnout. The sentiment I always convey to the teammates I manage at work is that if I don’t know something is wrong, I can’t help find a solution. Without a culture that promotes open communication, issues — big or small — aren’t raised.

Ok, let’s jump to the core of our interview. Working remotely can be very different than working with a team that is in front of you. This provides great opportunities, but it can also create unique challenges. To begin, can you articulate for our readers a few of the main benefits and opportunities of working remotely?

You can work anywhere — When all you need is a laptop, anywhere (literally, anywhere) can be your office for the day. There is an extraordinary level of freedom that comes with this. While many individuals choose between working from their home or dropping into a coffee shop or co-working space for the day, being able to work from anywhere even extends to different cities and states. Planning a long weekend trip away? Work from your AirBnB so you’re ready to kick-start the trip sooner. The possibilities are endless.
Better work-life balance — There is an increased level of flexibility in working from home and/or remotely that helps create a better work-life balance. Simple things (and in some cases, simple pleasures) such as a coffee meet-up with friends; taking a break for an early afternoon walk or at-home workout; or even knocking domestic ‘chores’ off your list such as doing a load of laundry or quickly mowing the lawn are all things remote workers can accomplish on any given day. And while some might think this is cutting into typical working hours, always remember that remote workers are just reallocating the time they previously spent commuting to and from work.
Increased productivity — The ability to create and work in an environment that best suits your preferences and makes you feel comfortable can drastically increase productivity. For some, this means setting up shop at a co-working space for the day, while others may prefer to put on headphones and listen to their favorite music from the comfort of their living room couch. Whatever the preference, being able to cut out distractions (and yes, this even includes colleagues randomly dropping by your office/desk just to chat — which can be nice some of the times!) and focus on your work can allow you to accomplish more in a shorter period of time, which also helps with work-life balance.

Can you articulate for our readers what the five main challenges are regarding working remotely?

Everyone is different (personality, preferences, etc.) and how one person navigates working remotely will differ from someone else. While not the only five challenges, the hurdles that come to mind especially apply to individuals who exclusively work remotely and aren’t able to take advantage of a hybrid work environment (or one where employees are able to come together on a recurring basis to meet, collaborate and socialize — as is the case with Reputation Partners).

Isolation — Working by yourself all day every day can be isolating, especially on days where you might not leave the house due to a hectic schedule or inclement weather.
FOMO — If you are a remote worker for a company that has a core group of employees in one or more central locations, missing out on happy hours, team lunches, etc., could give you a lingering feeling of FOMO.
Zoom/Teams Fatigue — While even in-person employees have Zoom/Teams meetings throughout the day (both with internal teammates and clients/customers), if virtual meetings are the only option, fatigue will certainly settle in after looking at a video screen for several hours per day.
Professional Development — Unless a company makes it a priority and is committed to the growth of its employees (or even provides financial resources to pursue professional development opportunities — that’s what Reputation Partners does), professional development can become difficult for remote employees as they may miss out on opportunities their in-person colleagues.
Access — When you’re remote, more coordination and scheduling is often required to interact and meet with members of your team. This can stifle impromptu interactions and ‘access’ to colleagues, potential mentors and leaders at your organization.

Based on your experience, what can one do to address or redress each of those challenges? Can you give a story or example for each?

Isolation — Make it a priority to get out of the house (or wherever you’re working) at least once per day, and aim to grab coffee with a friend, new connection or someone in your local community a few times per month. An added bonus: By grabbing coffee or meeting up with connections, it also helps to expand your personal and professional network.
FOMO — Not everyone can travel out of town or out of state to meet-up with colleagues. Instead, identify a group of professionals you’re connected with locally and schedule recurring happy hours or lunches each month.
Zoom/Teams Fatigue — Sometimes it feels as if taking calls via phone (or off camera) is now frowned upon, as if meetings have always been conducted via Zoom/Teams (insert sarcasm and an eye roll). Unless the expectation has been explicitly set by a manager, consider taking some calls (if/when appropriate) via phone or off-camera and go for a walk while you talk. This is a perfect way to be productive while also grabbing a 30 minute break outside.
Professional Development & Access — Whether it is one of your main managers/supervisors at work or someone you’ve identified as a mentor, make it a priority to schedule recurring meetings so you can connect with the people that are most important to you and your development. While the cadence of these meetings is up to you, aim for weekly or every other week. Also, don’t be afraid to connect with any and all individuals at your company where you might have limited interactions — it’s always better to be able to put a face to a name when working together.

Let’s talk about Career Development. Can you share a few ideas about how you can nurture and advance your career when you are working from home and away from other colleagues?

Proactively Check-In — You never want to find yourself in an “out of sight, out of mind” position by working remote. While it might seem simple, proactively touching base with your account/team leads or primary manager can do wonders for your development. Specifically, it shows your teams and managers that you’re someone who is on top of things, eager to drive work/projects forward and is always ready to take on a new task/opportunity, schedule permitting. Ultimately, it shows your team that you’re dependable and trustworthy (they never wonder about the status of your work), and those are two qualities needed for a teammate to be given proper growth and development opportunities.
Align Yourself with an Advocate — We all have different types of working relationships, ranging from mentors to the teammates you might go out to lunch with or vent to if you’re having a tough day (or they’re the first person you go to with a positive ‘win’). These are all advantageous, but it is just as important to identify and meaningfully connect with someone within your company who will serve as an advocate for your development and growth. Oftentimes, this is a more senior member of the team who can ensure you are given level appropriate development opportunities to try out new skills. Similarly, it might be someone who is responsible for your performance reviews and can work with you to identify your strengths and address areas of improvement — and ultimately advocates for your promotions. For some, the person they align with fits both descriptions — that’s the sweet spot.
Advocate for Yourself — This is something all employees should do, but for anyone working remote, it is especially important to be your own advocate. You (and the team that supports you or works with you) will have various ‘wins’ — don’t be afraid to share those with key decisions makers within your company so it doesn’t go unnoticed. Similarly, if you’re participating in a professional development course/event/etc. that will benefit you and the work you’re able to deliver for your company, share that great news. While you should always be mindful not to overly boast, there is nothing wrong with making your teams and managers aware of the positive contributions you’re making from afar.

Can you share a few ideas about how employers or managers can help their teams with career development?

I am a firm believer in not overcomplicating things, and this applies to career development. While simple, my guidance to managers is to have every interaction with your people be meaningful and make it about them. Our days are busy and schedules can be hectic, so making the most of your time with your team is critical. Whether a scheduled regroup or an impromptu conversation, find ways to see how the individual is doing personally, check-in on how their work is going, and try to find way to share some guidance/direction surrounding something they’re dealing with professionally. This creates personal touch points (and builds camaraderie) and learning opportunities for your team. Additionally, make career development about them. Yes, an employee that continues to learn, grow and develop naturally benefits the company, but the focus needs to be on the individual — what do they want to focus on, where do they want to improve, how can you help them meet their 1/3/5-year goals? It is a false (and unrealistic) expectation that employees will be with you forever, but while they are, it should be your goal as a manager and leader to do everything possible to help someone grow.

I would not be surprised if the idea that floats around in my head exists in some capacity. Nevertheless, I would love to see a more broadly organized and impactful program that exposes disenfranchised or impoverished youth (especially at an early age such as grade school and middle school) to various career opportunities they can strive for when they get older.

Here’s a quick back story that will lend itself to this idea. When I first moved to Milwaukee, I joined Big Brothers Big Sisters and was a Big Brother for three years to two boys (8 years old and 11 years old) who lived in very low socioeconomic conditions. One day when I picked up the boys, the youngest was extremely excited because his class traveled downtown for the day to visit a local bank — he got to talk to a banker, go inside the vault, etc. Both visiting a bank and even going to downtown Milwaukee were things he had never done before. He had never had this sort of exposure, and that is common for young kids growing up in impoverished areas and environments. My wish would be to find a way to fix this. Not through a typical job/career fair, but rather through a movement that brings together youth organizations that historically reach these kids (i.e., Boys & Girls Clubs, Big Brothers Big Sisters, etc.), as well as local companies and their employees across all industries and professions (both professional and trade/skilled), to create an immersive experience that exposes young kids to all the different opportunities they can aspire to when they grow up. Sometimes opening someone’s eyes to what could be is a powerful force that instills hope and a realization that there is something more than the environment one might find themselves in.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Anyone interest in learning more can check out Reputation Partner’s website at www.reputationpartners.com or my LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/brendanjgriffith/.

Thank you so much for the time you spent doing this interview. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success.

My pleasure. Thanks for allowing me to share!

Remote Career Development: Brendan Griffith On How To Advance and Enhance Your Career When You Are… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Orville Wright Of Oh Yeah Beats On 5 Ways To Create a Wow! Customer Experience

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Every thriving business leader knows how to display transparency through the process so customers can enjoy the ride. Unexpected bumps that customers aren’t aware of only create instability in communication and reduce trust.

As part of our series about the five things a business should do to create a Wow! customer experience, I had the pleasure of interviewing Orville “OH YEAH” Wright.

Orville is trailblazing with amazing music that moves the hearts, minds, and souls of audiences. He is creating “Wow” moments after each of his products and services to the public. His well-known pride and joy is spotlighted in “THEME SONGS”.

<a href="https://medium.com/media/9357840fa974458c70708e7fd967af90/href">https://medium.com/media/9357840fa974458c70708e7fd967af90/href</a>

Thank you so much for joining us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

Absolutely! My story involves the desire to connect with everyone around me with talents I can truly hone continuously. As I was growing up, I observed the connections and bonds created through common interests. I was considered an outcast being one of the few children of color in my community but I stood up for kids who were bullied (my parents always told me to stand up for others), connected with other outcasts, and always helped to represent others who had struggles in society. After realizing my “calling” in music, I discovered a way to really connect with everyone that I made music for. I created a theme song for a few friends in television and film. The purpose was to highlight and showcase their contributions to communities. The purpose of these songs was merely to let them know that their good deeds were indeed seen. Often I am told to keep it going, words relayed to me in amazement. From this perspective, I determined that I wanted a defined method of having individuals seen, heard, and felt (understood) and with this model “OH YEAH” is able to provide consistency every time.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?

A funny mistake with my theme songs is when I created a theme song “100 K”. This song was highlighting a brother and friend who was just beginning to gather an audience of 10,000 followers. He is doing incredible things that move a lot of diverse communities and I knew that he would easily surpass that number. The chorus of the song includes my vocals saying “One Hundred K” but some audience members recall hearing “Honey Cakes”. The irony was that many audiences have a huge amount of admiration for this person but to hear OH YEAH say Honey Cakes would have made sense. I learned that the way I played the song back was the reason for the misperception. I had streamed the song in a low service reception area so the distortion was the reason for misguiding my articulation. I knew from that moment on the best way to have music heard when streaming was with great Wi-Fi. I think to this day, some close to the man known as “100 K” hear honey cakes.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

I am extremely thankful for my good friend Rose Rosen, C.S.A. Rose is an incredible Casting Director who cast for “Edward Scissorhands”, the world famous 1990 film. She has also been one of the first listeners for several theme songs that I make for her audiences and songs that I create for public figures. Halloween just passed and her group asked for a theme song appropriate for the occasion. Once fully listened to, she responded back with “Another one hit out of the park!” This made me so excited that even for small projects I am still doing exceptional work. She helps me realize that my storytelling ability is extremely creative and captivating. Plus, Rose has the greatest content on YouTube, “Casting Notes”. I believe that from the first song that I created for Rose, I have been trying to level up. I mean her Theme Song “Beauty In The Art” makes me dance every time! I know that reflecting on my past works, I always want to exceed the expectations and results. To thrive for others to yell “Oh Yeah”, I will continue working hard with every theme song.

Thank you for that. Let’s now pivot to the main focus of our interview. This might be intuitive, but I think it’s helpful to specifically articulate it. In your words, can you share a few reasons why great customer service and a great customer experience is essential for success in business?

Definitely! Exceptional customer service and experience is necessary in business because it is a reflection of the owner and an owner’s core values. A few reasons I feel it is vital to reveal to the world is because it is how I connect with more like-minded individuals and brands. Demonstrating great customer value and appreciation drives an incredible supply and demand. It also creates transparency for true business practices that customers everywhere will resonate with. So often we all are familiar with a bad review and experience at an establishment. Bad reviews themselves can be traumatic to a point that potential “future” customers will not want to welcome the business. Oh Yeah Beats doesn’t worry about this because this brand is all about the customers and clients. I feel the obligation to provide service will also bringing education into the equation so each client feels empowered after our encounter (business or not). I understand their perspective as I was once a customer looking for music. Every time, I felt like just that… a customer. The business got my money and gave me just what I paid for. I wanted to give back “then some” to everyone who had any inquiry with my brand so that they would be able to empower themselves with an “OH YEAH!” I always want to enable others to exceed their own expectations also. Businesses will not be as impactful unless they provide memorable and liberating customer service to make customers happy they made the decision to take the most important step for a business.

Ironic but great segway… It is reoccurring but tragic that businesses don’t truly consider the customer beyond the customer’s money. What I mean is that companies focus on statistics of how many instead of what quality. The disconnect occurs when the customers still have questions and concerns but the businesses will not indulge in providing information to fill those voids. This is a disservice and abandonment to customers. I do believe there is a misperception of education being the gateway to the end of business interaction. Yes, it does enable others to learn how to put pieces together but it doesn’t eliminate the energy and effort along with experience required to successfully recreate. It does also create room for potential competition which is why many will choose not to empower others with customer service beyond a completed sale. What this illustrates to me is the fear of failure to stay on top when providing the same level of education to others. I find it very disappointing that businesses and individuals would rather keep others in the dark rather than shedding light on matters for true inclusion and equality. This is a definite reason real customer service is not a definite priority. Companies everywhere should do better.

100 percent do I know that more competition creates space and opportunity for more excellence from a company through customer service. Outside sources that force for better customer service include feedback reviews, audits, and also statistic reviews of personnel morale. I am certain that all of these tools can help companies determine their impact on customers whether new or returning. Audits can unveil conflicts regarding returns and refunds that can help narrate the satisfactory levels from customers. Typically, they majorly drive businesses to do better at least momentarily if not indefinitely, moving forward. Feedback reviews are excellent for drawing in larger numbers or deterring an entire crowd. Most customers are willing to pick up a pen or log on to stress their complete satisfaction or absolute disappointment. With this information, businesses will gain an understanding to improve slightly or drastically.

Can you share with us a story from your experience about a customer who was “Wowed” by the experience you provided?

Honestly, when it comes to all of my Theme Songs, I receive “Wow” every time. Every business interaction is certainly an experience that I want to be memorable and also a true collaboration. As soon as Theme Songs are delivered to clients, the amount of gratitude in an email or voicemail is so beautifully articulated, I smile and drop tears. Another song that I wrote and produced is entitled “Heart Felt”, a collaboration with a voice-over artist Giovanna Inverso-Kawaash. This song is for an Italian Filmmaker friend of mine in Hollywood. When this producer finally heard the song for the first time, I received a call and on the other end was happy crying. I feel that I accomplished covering every aspect that I wanted to highlight and also reaching the heart as a “bullseye target”. “I freaking love it” was some words shared that made me feel that I gave justice to songwriting and producing “Theme Songs”. I was destined to create music that elevates others around me.

Did that Wow! experience have any long-term ripple effects? Can you share the story?

The Oh Yeah experiences always leave long-term ripple effects with how business is conducted and how others learn to get to know people in and around their industries. A great demonstration and example is opportunity for exposure. Let’s look at the collaboration that I mentioned before with a voice-over artist. I know that this helps both of us “artists” gain more exposure across industries as much as it helps others learn how to work outside of the box. I have not seen any artists do such a thing like this form of production with individuals outside of the field. The two fields are similar though in a few instances of necessary takes to get recordings done as desired. What this also does from a money standpoint is bring the other contributors up to the table as they should be to reap the benefits of doing such a collaboration with OH YEAH. Again, I put complete intention behind informing and educating others about how they can succeed. I have seen others doing similar productions with cross-pollenating on podcasts. When the two artists I have worked with started with me, they did not know that they could be entitled to a portion of royalties. I just want everyone to win. This indeed was a “Wow!” Moment to realize they could work with me AND get a small profit out of the deal. Royalties last the lifetime of a song so talk about long-term…

Ok, here is the main question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things a business leader should know in order to create a Wow! Customer Experience. Please share a story or an example for each.

1. Great business leaders know their customers beyond the business aspect.

2. Good leadership in business also knows how to exercise active listening and provide feedback during the process. There is appreciation and deeper understanding that takes place.

3. Impactful business leadership knows how to demonstrate patience. Customers get just as anxious as the business providers in hopes to receive great service, particularly when they are about to pay a decent amount of money.

4. Every thriving business leader knows how to display transparency through the process so customers can enjoy the ride. Unexpected bumps that customers aren’t aware of only create instability in communication and reduce trust.

5. Memorable business leaders know to exceed requests with a “double down”. Invest in your customer and they invest right back “ten fold”.

Are there a few things that can be done so that when a customer or client has a Wow! experience, they inspire others to reach out to you as well?

There are a million and one things that can be done when a customer has that WOW or OH YEAH! Consistently I have returning clients that pass along my name and contact email or website so that others can have the exact same experience and success. Quite often are my social media inboxes flooded with new inquiries for music. I am very appreciative for this. Another way that they pay it forward after their “Oh Yeah” moment is simply playing and paying for my music across platforms so they can always enjoy more of my gifts to the world. A great friend of mine and Superman as they like to say often shares my music on instagram stories. That is certainly gratifying in my opinion. When your work surpasses expectations and the competition, others will gladly speak out about your business. Occasionally I also have some clients plug in my info on their platforms during livestreams on Instagram and YouTube. New people are always discovering “Oh Yeah Beats”.

Thank you for that compliment! I firmly believe in the power of two and exercise this daily. I hope that it sparks the mind of the next person in a day. It is simply the “pay it forward” practice but times two. Either doing two great things for one stranger or one great thing for two strangers. We never know who will cross our paths and lives so it matters most to be kind to everyone. Humility goes the longer mile and helps motivate the next person who may only need a few more steps in their particular races. I want to continue motivating everyone to help out and step up with the power of two. You will feel better afterwards, even if you are having a bad day, trust me!

How can our readers follow you on social media?

I am always releasing new content on Instagram, @Ohyeahbeats

Its fun to find new ways to produce content of my next projects on instagram.

You can also find me on Twitter, @Ohyeahbeats

There is a lot of random music antidotes that I drop and I always engage with people on there. I will see you all soon!

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!

Thank you from the heart! I really enjoyed contributing, inspiring, and being inspired!

Orville Wright Of Oh Yeah Beats On 5 Ways To Create a Wow! Customer Experience was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Makers of The Metaverse: Maxx Berkowitz On The Future Of The VR, AR & Mixed Reality In

Makers of The Metaverse: Maxx Berkowitz Of NOWHERE io On The Future Of The VR, AR & Mixed Reality Industries

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Learn new tools and know when to use them. This industry is by definition cutting edge, as a result, tools are constantly evolving and changing. Every project can bring the need for a very different skill set. I have often accepted projects that relied on software that I had never used before. It is important to be able to have a broad base of knowledge and an openness for exploration to be able to adapt and figure things out on the fly.

Maxx Berkowitz is the co-founder and head of product and design at NOWHERE.io, a video-on metaverse gathering and events platform. Maxx is a multidisciplinary designer and technologist with a passion for crafting digital products and experiences that improve people’s lives through intuitive elegant products and experiences. Maxx has been creating digital products and immersive XR experiences for start-ups, brands, agencies and entertainment since 2011. His work has been featured at Sundance, SXSW, Panorama Festival, and has won an Emmy for Outstanding Interactive Media.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit. Can you tell us a bit about your backstory and how you grew up?

I had a childhood that was different from most that prepared me for a lifelong love of learning and approaching the world differently, which I wouldn’t trade for anything. I was homeschooled until college, we considered ourselves “unschoolers”, meaning we did not follow a curriculum or use textbooks. We led a free-flowing life with the opportunity and encouragement to experiment, build, explore and learn from the world around us. For example, I became an animal tracker and wilderness survivalist, built my own kayak and stereo speakers, made skate videos, played music and spent time with and learned from people of all age groups. I was fortunate to have had a breadth of experiences that were shared with a diverse mix of people in my community. This upbringing taught me to be an autodidact, a lifelong learner, to think about things from different angles and to forge my own unique path. I went to college at Syracuse University where I earned degrees in Graphic Design and Information Management and Technology, which have positioned me well for my career.

My first job out of school was at Showtime’s print advertising department where I created key art, bus wraps and billboards posted in New York City’s Times Square. I absolutely loved this job but I felt a need to explore the world of digital. After a few months at Showtime I took a job at a digital production company called Bajibot, which really let me cut my teeth by trying out many creative mediums, from motion graphics to action script banner ads to online mini-games. I left Bajibot to strike out on my own as a freelancer with the goal of developing a fuller understanding of how production houses and top ad agencies operate while getting to work on diverse projects. After five years in the ad world, I took a position as Design Director for the early stage start-up Outernets, creating a networked system of interactive storefront windows using machine learning and computer vision. After that I went back to freelancing, now working on a mix of product design for start-ups, motion graphics, live shows, projection and interactive installations. From these experiences I realized that I wanted to focus on creating digital products and immersive experiences.

Is there a particular book, film, or podcast that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

I read Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” when I was a teenager and loved the poetic tales of adventure and fantastical stories of mythic cities and cultures. It was a book I couldn’t put down. It sparked my imagination and led me to think about distant lands, the human connection, and possibilities for the future. I reread it after starting NOWHERE and, once again, I found it to be inspiring and applicable in thinking about an interconnected metaverse.

Is there a particular story that inspired you to pursue a career in the X Reality industry? We’d love to hear it.

In 2013 I was hired to take over creative directing for the Macy’s NYC holiday windows, which gave me the experience of overseeing a high-production project. I learned what it takes to craft and direct a complex multi-faceted display that included animatronics, scenic design, animation and interactive displays. I knew after this experience that simple websites and advertising was not the direction for me, and instead I was inspired to dive into immersive experiences and emerging technology. I developed a passion for creating moments of wonder for people and rethinking how humans and machines interact. I am very grateful to have had the Macy’s opportunity as it guided me to a new and exciting direction.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began this fascinating career?

A writer & creative director I was working with recommended that I go to a Burning Man fundraiser party in Brooklyn to meet Jon Morris and Ana Constantino from a company called The Windmill Factory (in what would become a fortuitous meeting, as they would become my NOWHERE co-founders). I showed up at this backlot party in an industrial part of Bushwick and after going through the entrance gate, I passed a painted bus with industrial art mixed with LED art and crowds of people. I found Jon and Ana, introduced myself and, after talking for a while and learning more about their company, I really wanted an opportunity to work with them. I assumed that my online advertising background would not be of much interest to them as most of their work consisted of live and interactive installation projects, but a few months later I followed up with Jon and in a moment of kismet they had just gotten an inquiry to create a pitch for a company called HEED who were looking for help creating an app with an automated After Effects pipeline to make sports content mixed with data. After helping them to create the pitch that won the bid, they hired me and I was able to work on many exciting projects, from Pixel Vortex (wireless LED mapped balloons spinning in a surround sound colorful dance experience inside or a 40’ dome) to The Infinite Hotel (a live film shoot, interactive, music and theater show) to giant screen content for AWS Berlin. Meeting Jon and Ana and getting to work with The Windmill Factory changed my life and was the break that let me transition most of my work to interactive and move away from standard websites.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

In 2016/17 I built an interactive, dance and live music show called “birds sing a pretty song.” along with my partner, choreographer and dancer Rebecca Margolick (who later became my wife). It was the first big live interactive piece I had worked on and while we pulled off a great show I definitely tried to do too many things at once. I was playing guitar on stage and I had a stage manager running the interactive and video queues, instead of managing the queues myself or bringing a tech with us (which we later did). At one of the first shows in Vancouver, Canada, at a point in the show that’s very projection intensive, the show computer crashed and instead of the intended content, projected on the ground was the snow covered mountains of the default Mac desktop image. I noticed it immediately, but, being on stage, I couldn’t do anything about it. I just stood there trying not to look at the stage filled with mountains. After what felt like forever, we got the show back on track, most people did not notice that the snow image was a mistake (in fact I got a comment from one audience member after the show pontificating about the meaning behind the mountains, during which I just smiled and nodded). The big lessons learned from this were, 1. Make sure you have a backup plan, 2. simplicity and minimalism coupled with good execution will make your life significantly easier, and 3. If you are presenting live it is good to make your desktop background solid black and hide your desktop icons.

Priscilla Gomez, who was one of the first Art Directors I worked for while I was at Bajibot and I see her as a mentor and friend. I was very fortunate to have had the opportunity to work for her, she is one of the best and most thoughtful designers I know. Her leadership style, career choices and design skills have greatly influenced my own. Priscilla would trust me to take on big projects, let me make mistakes and then give me feedback that pushed me to become a better designer, all while making me feel that I owned my work (even when she would strongly guide me in a better design direction). She also inspired me to think more holistically about a project, which gave me a glimpse into UX and how design impacts usability. She also opened my eyes to a multi-faceted and immersive learning career path. I am incredibly grateful for the time we worked together and all of the advice and feedback she has given me in the years since.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

Nowhere is all encompassing, but I’m very fortunate to have one of the best teams I’ve ever worked with building this project with us. We have an exciting new partnership with Disguise that has the potential to unlock amazing immersive and hybrid experiences. In addition to the next level of user experiences that this integration can bring, I am very interested in exploring more meaningful ways to bridge the gap between people in virtual and physical spaces, in how they can better influence each other’s experiences in meaningful ways, how they can communicate, trigger excitement, and give the feeling of presence across contexts. I think we have only scratched the surface of how dynamic and immersive the metaverse can be, and I am excited to be a part of creating the experiences of the future.

I believe AR is about to explode. The power of devices is getting to a sweet spot with mass adoption, and wearable tech is getting close to being a viable and integrated option in our lives. I am super excited to see and explore new ways that will allow the seamless interaction of the digital and physical world around us.
I’m very interested in exploring avenues of hybrid experiences that bridge the gap between a virtual and in-person audience, and how these two types of audiences will meet and feel like they’re sharing a singular experience. How well will they influence things happening in each other’s spaces? What will make a fun and interesting experience? How can the interaction be used to inspire creativity and innovation?
The possibilities of where virtual art is heading is interesting to me. I look forward to seeing growth in this area that further develops the artistic experience around viewing a collection that is for sale or instead of a picture of a 3d model for an NFT’s actually get immersed in a minted world.

What are the 3 things that concern you about the VR, AR and MR industries? Can you explain? What can be done to address those concerns?

I’m nervous about web2.0 models of data mining, privacy, and targeted ads and how that can get even more subconsciously invasive in immersive experiences. I think companies need to be thinking about how they can use new, more innovative models to support their products, whether it’s web3 or memberships to avoid the deep advertising reliance and greed.
As an avid outdoorsman, I am concerned that people are losing touch with the world around them and how this technology could drive us to spend even more time in virtual spaces. But I also see the potential for AR and MR to bring connection and awareness back to the physical world, whereas the current ecosystem of computers and phone screens are all encompassing and force you to look at a small screen, I have hope that more seamless technology like AR glasses may let us look up and actually be in the world while still interacting with technology. Time will tell what direction this will go and how society will shape around it, but I have hope that the people leading the charge in these industries will think more about the health and happiness of their users and community rather than solely the bottom line.
From the exploration that I have done of other metaverse products since beginning NOWHERE, I have come to see bullying and bad actor behavior in many of these spaces, especially now that we’re getting more immersive, and the spaces are feeling more like real life. It is critical that we think about how we can create healthier digital public spaces that discourage this kind of negative behavior and instead encourage compassion, support and having fun. NOWHERE’s belief is anonymity will be reduced by showing people’s actual video presence and this will encourage people to use their real names which will help reduce bad actors.

I think the entertainment aspects of VR, AR and MR are apparent. Can you share with our readers how these industries can help us at work?

There’s no question that AR/VR has already proved its usefulness for training purposes (pilot training, specialized construction, military, etc.), but it has not yet shown all it can do for the day to day work experience. XR has huge potential to make remote work a much more collaborative, present, and compelling experience. Instead of the ways that we have now, like taking a meeting in a flat Zoom grid, imagine having the feeling of being at your office with your colleagues working in the same room, mixing up into different breakout groups you can interact with, while overhearing someone at another desk who needs help. Think about a project manager having several groups of people working separately in one space as they drop in on each group and interact as needed without the need for calling separate meetings. AR/VR has the potential to make work so much more fun and engaging while improving efficiency, productivity, and interpersonal connection.

Are there other ways that VR, AR and MR can improve our lives? Can you explain?

Two aspects of events going virtual or hybrid that stand out to me is access for remote audiences and the environmental benefits of reducing travel needs. Big city happenings, events, galleries, experiences etc. can now involve people in small towns and all over the world (in addition to giving remote creators an international outlet). From an environmental standpoint, we can reduce the need for air travel, one of the biggest contributors of an individual’s carbon footprint, by making spaces where compelling virtual or hybrid events are a viable alternative to in-person meetings and conferences.

What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about working in your industry? Can you explain what you mean?

A great deal of this technology seems complex and unapproachable at first. I have always been excited about more immersive technologies, but I was intimidated and unsure of the skills that I needed to break into this space. When I eventually started getting opportunities to work on these types of projects, I found that the transition from design into immersive technology was actually smoother and more accessible than I thought it would be. Having good design and motion sense will get you really far, plus working on collaborative projects generates supportive guidance. With the industry being so young, there is tremendous room for innovation and people who are not experts have an opportunity to make meaningful work.

What are your “5 Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Career In The VR, AR or MR Industries?”

Learn new tools and know when to use them. This industry is by definition cutting edge, as a result, tools are constantly evolving and changing. Every project can bring the need for a very different skill set. I have often accepted projects that relied on software that I had never used before. It is important to be able to have a broad base of knowledge and an openness for exploration to be able to adapt and figure things out on the fly.
Be comfortable with the unknown. In this field the client will often request for end results that are far from mainstream with a lot of openness or interpretation. Choose the best tools, think on your feet, and dive into the deep end of an experiment that you think will turn out cool. You have to be creative and you must thrive on coming up with new ideas to create things that have never been done before.
Embrace communicating and collaborating across silos (Design, motion, 3D, developers, management, fabricators etc.). Most projects in these fields require a strong mix of different creative and technology to bring a project to reality. Depending on the project, there is a good chance you will be bringing in people from a diverse set of industries that you must collaborate and communicate with, and it can be quite challenging to keep everyone on the same page, while keeping focused on a shared vision. No matter your role, it is important to do your homework so you understand the project you are working on and the fields you’re working with. A good sense of design and a reasonable understanding of development and technology is important to be able to communicate with the whole team and to express your vision and expectations in a way that will make the entire team inspired and productive.
Have confidence to interpret direction and feedback in a way that excites you and/or makes the project the best it can be. Many times the people who commission work in these fields do not fully understand what is possible, what is cheesy, or what gives a great experience to the end user. Obviously you have to understand boundaries to make a client happy, but that being said, don’t be afraid to think outside the box and be prepared to stick to your guns with a good reason when you see that you can make something great. Sometimes you have to get it made and show the client before they can see your vision come to reality.
Maintain a strong network. As with many fields, your network is critical. This part of the industry is still in its nascent stages and tends to be a tight community. Word of mouth and connecting with contacts of contacts has brought my most interesting projects and collaborations. Being around people who you respect and who are living the life you want for yourself tends to rub off and inspires you to reach for greater things, and being around other creative people breeds creativity.

With my passion for the outdoors and desire to make the world a better place, I have been feeling a drive to find ways to address climate change and bring people together at the same time. How can we use emerging technology to create ways for people to gather across the world in less carbon intensive ways? How can we create events, activities and communities in virtual and mixed spaces that are inspiring and engaging enough to bring awareness, drive fundraising, push for political action and make a difference in the future of our planet? How can we use our platform to bring together climate activists from around the world to strengthen their networks, their voice and their impact?

I’ve found John Palmer’s writing and musings on spatial interfaces and other technology to be eye-opening and inspiring. I would love to brainstorm with him about the future of the metaverse and new ways to interact with the world and devices around us.

Thank you so much for these excellent stories and insights. We wish you continued success in your great work!

Makers of The Metaverse: Maxx Berkowitz On The Future Of The VR, AR & Mixed Reality In was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Making Something From Nothing: Sarah Kallile Of Lunnie On How To Go From Idea To Launch

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Be scrappy. You don’t need a polished prototype to start testing. Hack materials that are readily available to create a mockup. Share this with customers. Don’t be shy if it’s not perfect. I lovingly call the first Lunnie bra prototype a “Frankenstein bra” because it was a mashup of all sorts of materials but it enabled moms to see my vision.

As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Sarah Kallile.

Sarah Kallile, founder of Lunnie, is a mom of three who went through postpartum and was frustrated by the frumpy, impractical nursing bras that all moms deal with post pregnancy. With the help from other moms who are now a part of Lunnie Hive, the first-ever community led brand for postpartum moms, they tested and created the perfect postpartum nursing bras for a pretty and powerful postpartum. Sarah’s leakproof, patent-pending nursing bra sold-out at first launch and is now back and restocked!

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?

I was born and raised in the suburbs of San Francisco with my parents and older sister. As a kid, my favorite activity was playing “Sarah’s Stores”. I created an elaborate pretend franchise in my family room that consisted of a grocery store, bookstore, video rental, etc. My favorite part was making ClipArt graphics and receipts on my family’s computer (nerd alert!).

In high school, I loved English, history, and theater classes. In college, I took my love of storytelling and majored in broadcast journalism. But I discovered I didn’t want to just tell the story. I wanted to be part of the story. My first job out of college was a marketing position at an early-stage health-tech startup in San Francisco that grew from 30 to 300 employees. I loved the speed and intensity of startup life, and ended up working for several other VC-backed, health-tech startups.

I met my now-husband in San Francisco and we got married a couple years later. His job moved us to Seattle in 2013 and then to Dayton, OH in 2017. A California girl living in the middle of Ohio — believe me, I never would have guessed that for myself! I gave birth to my three beautiful daughters here (ages 4, 2, and 5 months). It was through my own experience becoming a mom that inspired me to start Lunnie in 2021.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“There will never be a perfect time. Just start where you are” When I had my idea to create Lunnie’s leakproof nursing bra in January 2021, the timing couldn’t have been more challenging. The pandemic was wearing on and I was a stay at home mom to a 2.5-year-old and 5-month-old with no outside help. I was in the throes of postpartum emotions myself and the pandemic compounded the feeling of isolation.

But those circumstances gave me the idea to form Lunnie as a community-led brand because I was craving meaningful interactions with other moms more than anything else. I spent my nights and weekends cranking away at my idea because I was so passionate about it.

In October 2021, I found out the surprising and happy news that I was pregnant with my third daughter! However, this pregnancy was my absolute hardest physically and I was drained everyday caring for my older two daughters and growing my business.

I continued to push, launched my business, won a major pitch competition and $50k grant, filed for two patents, and had a baby — all within four months.

There’s no denying that motherhood and being an entrepreneur is exhausting. But for me, motherhood is my superpower as an entrepreneur. My three daughters keep me motivated and put things in perspective. I’ve become a master at ruthless prioritization, being efficient, and committing to decisions. My girls are my world and I love sharing this entrepreneurship journey with them.

If you have an idea you’re passionate about, my advice is go for it. Life will always be messy and complicated. Just take the first step and see where it leads you. Then take a couple more. It will be better and more rewarding then you could have imagined.

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

NPR’s “How I Built This” podcast has had the biggest impact on my mindset as an entrepreneur. Host Guy Raz does an amazing job interviewing diverse entrepreneurs and uncovering all the twists and turns in their journeys. Building a business is never a straight line and there’s no one way to do it.

I’ve listened to hundreds of episodes, some favorites being from Sara Blakely of Spanx and Whitney Wolfe Herd of Bumble. The common thread amongst entrepreneurs is everyone is figuring it out as they go. You don’t need (nor should have) a full-fledged 5-year-business plan to start a company. You just need the confidence to take the first step, the curiosity to learn, and the passion to keep moving forward.

Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. There is no shortage of good ideas out there. Many people have good ideas all the time. But people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. Can you share a few ideas from your experience about how to overcome this challenge?

My idea for a leakproof nursing bra came from my own experience as a breastfeeding mom. I was frustrated with my leaky, frumpy, beige nursing bra and the lack of innovative yet fashionable options available in the market. I wanted a solution that was chic yet functional. I asked friends and searched online, but I couldn’t find what I was looking for. That’s when I put on my tech marketer hat and decided to gather more data points around this problem.

I sent a survey to a diverse cohort of postpartum moms to gather their insights on nursing bras. Within two days, I received over 300 responses! 84% of moms are dissatisfied with their nursing bra and want something better. This was my lightbulb moment to build what was clearly missing in the market.

Because these survey respondents were so passionate, I knew they would be valuable in my product development process. I formed a group called the “Lunnie Hive” and invited surveyed moms to join. I recruited my own mom to help sew the very first leakproof nursing bra prototype. It was scrappy but it gave moms an idea for my vision.

I then messaged local moms and asked if they would be willing to test the bra, share photos, and provide honest critical feedback. I would drop a little pink bag containing the Lunnie bra prototype on a neighbor’s doorstep for a new mom to test. At first, it felt very odd asking neighbors for such an intimate favor. But I was blown away by how willing — and excited — moms were to be a part of the process.

A couple months into working on my idea, I was selected as a finalist in The Female Founder Collective Big Pitcher competition. I pitched my idea to some of the biggest female CEOs in the country, including Rebecca Minkoff, and won the grand prize $10k grant. Receiving this outside validation early on was the motivation I needed to keep going.

The grant money enabled me to partner with a small-batch manufacturer in Columbus, OH. Over the course of a year, I iterated and tested six prototypes before nailing the final design. By the time I launched my nursing bra in March 2022, I created an organic, loyal following of moms. This enabled me to sell out my first production run with $0 marketing spend.

In April 2022, I achieved another major business milestone by winning the University of Dayton Flyer Pitch competition and a $50k grant. This pitch competition was the culmination of 7 months, 3 rounds, and a final 30-minute presentation in front of judges (at 30 weeks pregnant, whew). This opened up more opportunities for my business to continue forward.

My Lunnie bras were completely out-of-stock over the summer which wasn’t ideal after building up so much momentum. However, it allowed for a perfectly-timed maternity leave as I gave birth to my third daughter in June. (If you want to call it that, solo entrepreneurs never really stop working!).

I restocked the Lunnie bras in October and I’m so excited for more mamas to experience the magic of a leakproof and beautiful nursing bra!

When I first had an idea for a leakproof nursing bra, I did heavy research. I discovered two leakproof bras already on the market, but their designs were very different from my own. I searched the USPTO website to see if there were any existing patents that contained my idea. I consulted a patent attorney to make sure I truly had a unique product idea before moving forward.

Once I was confident I had a unique design, I created a compelling brand and built an authentic community. Lunnie is named after my daughters and is the first brand for postpartum mothers. There’s so much emphasis on maternity and the first nine months, but there are no brands focused solely on the unique and challenging postpartum experience. Combining a unique product and one-of-a-kind brand is Lunnie’s super power.

Absolutely! I did not have a design, intimates, or manufacturing background prior to starting Lunnie. It was very daunting trying to figure out how to go from point A to point B. But I took it one step at a time and asked others for advice when I didn’t know what to do. I asked people in my network and cold reached out to other female founders who had similar products/brands.

As mentioned, I created the first prototype with the help of my mom and a couple months into working on my idea, I won the pitch competition and $10k grant. I used this money to partner with a local, small-batch manufacturer to take my prototype to a real product. It took a couple months to source the right manufacturer as most turned me away because bras are incredibly complex to make.

A year and six prototypes later, we nailed the final design. I decided to use the same small-batch manufacturer to produce my first and second production runs. Producing small-batch means the cost per unit is higher, but you’re not on the hook for producing large quantities as you are with a larger manufacturer. From a risk analysis standpoint, I decided I’d rather break even and test my product-market fit rather than invest in a huge amount of inventory upfront.

I launched my nursing bra in March 2022 and sold out with $0 marketing spend. I did this by cultivating my Lunnie Hive community over the course of a year and building up an organic following on social media. Due to the nature of breastfeeding, many of my followers no longer needed a nursing bra. However, they bought nursing bras and gift cards for friends who were expecting. Sales continued to snowball until I completely sold out of inventory.

I worked behind the scenes with a local patent lawyer to file for both utility and design patents. I received grant funding through Dayton’s Entrepreneurs’ Center to cover my legal fees. It was a very lengthy process and I ended up filing in June 2022 the same week my third daughter was born! I surprised my mom by listing both of our names on the patents as inventors. Her help creating the initial prototype was critical.

I currently sell exclusively DTC but am looking to expand to wholesale in 2023. I’m also in the process of working with a larger manufacturer to produce my third production at the same high quality but better margins. In addition, I’m working on exciting new products to add next year too!

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why?

These are perhaps 5 things I would advise others considering entrepreneurship to think about.

1. Ask for advice. If you don’t have people in your network who can advise you, cold reach out to other founders of aligned products/brands. Do your research. Have a specific ask. You’ll be blown away by the generosity of this community. Lunnie would not exist if it weren’t for the kindness of others sharing their advice, particularly female founders.

2. Don’t create your product in a silo.Even if you’re the consumer of your own product, you must talk to other customers. Have them test the product, give feedback on the brand, ask what could be improved. Truly LISTEN. I created the Lunnie Hive for this exact reason.

3. Be scrappy. You don’t need a polished prototype to start testing. Hack materials that are readily available to create a mockup. Share this with customers. Don’t be shy if it’s not perfect. I lovingly call the first Lunnie bra prototype a “Frankenstein bra” because it was a mashup of all sorts of materials but it enabled moms to see my vision.

4. Seek out grant opportunities. Apply for local business grant funding and enter pitch competitions. Even if you don’t win, it’s an invaluable experience to present your company and get better. Thanks to winning two major pitch competitions and funding through local entrepreneur organizations, I’ve received $100k in grants and in-kind services. These opportunities didn’t just appear — I sought them out and worked very hard to earn them.

5. Be a cheerleader for other entrepreneurs. One of the best things about being an entrepreneur is meeting other passionate entrepreneurs. I love supporting fellow small businesses and startups, whether it’s being a consumer, sharing with my networks, helping make a business connection, etc. We’re all in this together.

Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?

Talk to potential customers: Send surveys, have 1:1 open-ended phone interviews, understand how your product can fill a void in the market.
Create a prototype: It can be super scrappy but put it out for feedback to validate or invalidate your assumptions.
Implement feedback quickly: Move quickly, make mistakes, keep testing and iterating until your product is ready for launch.

There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?

No, I would recommend an entrepreneur to keep the idea to themselves and try a scrappy approach. It’s tempting to have an “expert” come in, but it is costly and no one understands the product as much as the entrepreneur.

Instead of looking for development consultants, consider seeking trusted business advisors instead. My advisor Anusha Mohan, an e-commerce/apparel expert and former high school classmate of mine, has been integral to Lunnie’s success. She’s helped navigate the early stages of building the company and been my biggest cheerleader. Through my relationship with my local Dayton Entrepreneurs’ Center, I gained another amazing advisor in Katie Hill. A successful startup founder x2 herself, she has advised the infrastructure of my company and seeks grant funding. Having a solid sounding board has been crucial for my decision making and success.

What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?

I’ve been able to fund my company through grant money and bootstrapping. I’ve been approached by venture capitalists but am self-funding for as long as possible. Having outside capital can be a huge distraction and puts pressure on fast growth and achieving other “sexy metrics” while overlooking the fundamentals of running a sustainable business. As a founder and mother, I want to run my company — not the other way around.

It can be daunting as a founder on how much it costs to start a business. Product development, legal, branding, running a website, the list goes on. I’ve been super scrappy in finding grant opportunities and working hard to secure funding. It’s taken a ton of effort, but it allows me to retain control of my company.

Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

Lunnie is reclaiming postpartum as pretty + powerful, starting with the nursing bra. There is nothing more beautiful and strong than a mother and she deserves to feel that way inside and out.

My goal for Lunnie is to provide postpartum moms with better support through thoughtfully made products with a supportive community so she doesn’t feel alone. Much of the postpartum experience comes as a surprise for new moms and it doesn’t need to be that way. Talking about postpartum — the good and the bad — needs to be normalized. I strive for Lunnie to be an authentic and supportive voice for moms.

As a mom of three, it always bothered me how much attention is given to pregnancy yet after a mom gives birth she often is forgotten. Postpartum is a very challenging time physically, mentally, and emotionally. Moms are the real MVPs of society but they’re not treated that way. We see it play out in many facets: A one-time 6 week appointment covered by insurance post-birth, postpartum depression on the rise, a failed paid maternity leave bill, etc.

Lunnie is not only making products. We’re launching a movement to support moms who have been underserved. The stigma around postpartum and breastfeeding is stifling innovation. This leaves moms in the shadows and unprepared. The time for change is now.

I’ve always admired Sara Blakely and how she built Spanx from the ground up. She calls herself “half Einstein, half Lucille Ball” and I love that she leads her company as herself, not a stuffy corporate CEO. She is a huge inspiration to so many female founders like myself who are building solutions for women, by women. It would be a dream come true to meet her!

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.

Making Something From Nothing: Sarah Kallile Of Lunnie On How To Go From Idea To Launch was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Rachel S Ruby Of Divorce To Bliss On 5 Things You Need To Know To Survive And Thrive After A…

Rachel S. Ruby Of Divorce To Bliss On 5 Things You Need To Know To Survive And Thrive After A Divorce

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Surround yourself with people who truly support the new you and vision of your future. It is so important to have the right people in your life — those who truly love and support you. I let a few people go from my life and allowed new friends to enter who are full of life and love and provide unconditional support, and it feels amazing.

As part of our series about the “5 Things You Need To Know To Survive And Thrive After A Divorce Or Breakup” I had the pleasure of interviewing Rachel S. Ruby.

Rachel S. Ruby is an attorney, former certified divorce mediator and entrepreneur. Rachel’s life was turned upside-down when she divorced in midlife after almost 30 years of marriage. She has authored several books, and Divorce to Bliss is her most heartfelt book to date. It took a big journey through the dark tunnel of divorce for Ms. Ruby to find true happiness and live her best life. It is her passion and her mission to share this pathway to happiness after divorce, so that others can live their truth and find ultimate bliss.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to ‘get to know you’. Can you tell us a bit about how you grew up?

Hi! I grew up in a suburb of Los Angeles, in a warm loving family with a large extended family. My parents adopted me and my younger brother at birth and were very open, loving and caring. I had an exceptionally “normal” and happy childhood. They taught me many valuable life lessons; from my brilliant father I learned the importance of education and hard work, and from my sweet mother I learned how to connect with people, really listen and figure out what they need.

I did well in school and went on to college and law school, practiced law for a short time then married and started a family. I owned a real estate brokerage and for years taught many agents about the legalities of purchase contracts through corporate education, podcasts, live events and blogs. Writing has always been my passion and I have written several other books, magazine and newspaper articles, and many short stories. I always knew I would end up as a writer full time. My divorce provided not only that opportunity, but the catalyst for me to find my passion helping others by showing them they can live incredibly happy lives despite the trauma associated with it.

Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

I wrote Divorce to Bliss as the result of my own divorce after 27 years of marriage. I had to go through a very dark tunnel to get to the beautiful light at the end, and it was absolutely worth it to get there! Prior to and during my divorce I did a LOT of deep inner work and went through a major spiritual awakening as a result. It was the most incredible thing I have ever experienced, and all the work I did on myself led to some earth-shattering truths. I started a blog at one point and came to realize that I needed to write a book to help others learn how to find the kind of happiness I had found, because divorce is a trauma and many people do not know how to start healing. It has since become my life’s purpose to help those who are stuck in victim consciousness and/or negativity as the result of divorce, so they can heal and find their happiness. I was meant to do this work and I am excited every single day to be of service to those who need me.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started this career?

I think it is a combination of stories that is most interesting. Since I started writing the book, I have had so many people approach me, many who have said they are drawn to my energy and want to learn how to mirror it in their own lives. I have counseled many people — which is my biggest pleasure — and I love it when they tell me my story and words help them listen to their hearts.

Several women have conveyed that they were able to take my advice and make subtle changes in their lives which led to feeling more grounded and confident. They were excited to implement more tools from the book in order to see further improvements.

Sometimes all it takes is someone to listen and help guide you on starting a path toward healing and happiness. It takes hard work and courage, but it IS possible. Those who choose to stick with it are rewarded immensely, and to me those are the BEST stories.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

It is not really a funny mistake, but like most everyone does I listened a lot to what those around me had to say — at least for a short while until I figured out that doing so was not serving me! A few friends told me I should stay married because it was “tough out there” to be single. An extreme example was a neighbor who told me that if I left my marriage God would strike me with debilitating illness. I responded that my God wants me to be happy, because it is only when we are truly happy that we can serve our purpose here — which is to serve humanity, other life forms and our planet. I shook it off and decided to politely tell others that if I wanted their advice on what to do, I would ask. Trusting my own instincts and my heart were the only way to come to the right decision for the rest of my life. A big part of that involves letting go of fear, because it can put a choke hold on making the right choices with divorce and life in general.

Do you have a favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life or your work?

There are so many life lesson quotes I love, but here are a few that resonate at this time in my life:

I love this quote from Eckhart Tolle: “The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life.” This is truth — we are the ones in control of our lives, and that means we decide whether our lives will be blissful or not, whether we will be successful (however one defines that) or not, and whether we will make a difference by acting through love in our hearts, OR conversely by letting negativity and/or fear dictate our thoughts and actions. It is all up to us to be mindful in order to steer ourselves in the right direction.

I also love this one from Carl Jung: “Who looks outside dreams. Who looks inside awakens.” This is beyond powerful, and also deep truth. Change cannot come from looking out; each of us needs to look deep within to make changes, fully loving ourselves and trusting in our intuition to guide our choices, and that is the only way to live a blissful life. This was the biggest lesson I learned going through divorce and doing deep healing work.

Another favorite is this quote from Oprah Winfrey: “What I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we have.” Wow, does this resonate! For the last few years of my marriage, I was extremely unhappy, and I stopped speaking my truth — to both myself and my spouse. I know now why I did it, but the effect was that I was miserable, and that is no way to live! It brought physical pain to my body and kept me in a negative lifecycle, which is so obvious in hindsight when I look back at photos and videos of me! Life is short and everything is temporary, so we need to make the right choices to be happy — we simply MUST stand in and speak our truth in order to do so.

Last, this is a quote from my book. It sums up the importance of healing after divorce, and how to live one’s best life: “If we are to achieve bliss in this lifetime there is no time to deny ourselves that which makes us whole…we simply cannot remain stuck in mediocrity.”

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

I am currently working on my personal coaching program to help people heal from divorce so that they can lead blissful lives. I also will be doing live events down the road with this same goal in mind. There is some very exciting stuff coming soon!

Ok. Thank you for that. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. Can you tell us a bit about your experience going through a divorce, or helping someone who was going through a divorce? What did you learn about yourself during and after the experience? Do you feel comfortable sharing a story?

As I mentioned above, divorce was a huge personal journey for me. Going from the “we” to the me is not easy; whether divorce is challenging or amicable there are always so many feelings involved. I went through the gamut like everyone, and there was a lot of fear in the unknown life I was jumping into — would I be able to support myself alone? Where would I live? What would happen if I became ill or needed help in some way and had no partner? Would I ever find love again or would I spend the rest of my life alone? Once I realized that fear was guiding all those questions, and once I made the choice to LET GO of that fear, I was able to step off the proverbial cliff knowing that I would be ok. But to get to that point I had to do a lot of diving into who “me” was, what she wanted, and how she wanted life to play out for her (knowing of course that some things are out of my control). I had to get in touch with my inner child — who had been in hiding for a long time — in order to not be so serious and find lightness and laughter. These are just a few of the things I learned but they were paramount to moving forward to a beautiful life.

During this process of self-discovery, forgiveness, learning to love myself, treating my body as a temple, speaking my truth, putting me first and letting go (to name a few!), I discovered a “me” I didn’t know existed (or perhaps I did know her, but she had been buried for such a long time). She now shines a radiant light and basks in the essence of the beauty all around. She is not afraid of what may happen, because she knows in her heart that her life is blessed and that she will not only survive, but will live life to the fullest. She wants to surround herself with people who also know these things, and wants to look back at the end and know she has no regrets.

In your opinion, what are the most common mistakes people make after they go through a divorce? What can be done to avoid that?

Oooh this is a loaded question! First of all, most people fall into a well of negativity, anger, hurt and other negative emotions that can lead them to dark places — it is important to feel all the feelings but guidance is needed here to move forward. Many will turn to food, alcohol, other substances and/or sex to try and dull the pain. It is of utmost importance to know how to start the healing process so that the caterpillar within each of us can emerge as a butterfly. That starts with learning how to rewire the mind, body and spirit.

Dating immediately after divorce is another mistake people need to understand — most importantly you cannot love another until you truly love yourself. Many people THINK they love themselves, but until they go through the healing process dating needs to be put on hold, because they will not attract the right partners. You need to learn who you are first and what you want out of the rest of your life — in other words, you need to truly embody self-love — before you can attract partners who will support the new you.

There are so many mistakes that can be made if people do not take the time to go through the process of rewiring, healing and discovery.

People generally label “divorce” as being “negative”. And yes, while there are downsides, there can also be a lot of positive that comes out of it as well. What would you say that they are? Can you share an example or share a story?

Yes, divorce can be very positive if you heal properly. In my book I talk about rewiring oneself — mind, body and spirit — in order to become whole again. This allows you to find your true happiness and live a life that is focused on that bliss. The positive result of this is that you are born again so to speak — you learn who you are as a human being and what you want from life. You learn how to trust yourself and be authentic and put YOU first, and the importance of standing in your truth and forgiving yourself, your ex-spouse and others; you learn to stop blaming and focusing on who messed up, you accept that it simply IS and that your most important job is to move on and make life incredible. You learn how blessed you are and see things from a different perspective, and you are grateful for all of it. You learn to recognize unhealthy patterns and change them, to stop being a victim and to listen to your intuition, and much more! Once I learned all of the new “tools” for a beautiful life my life started to change immensely, and I experienced the most mind-blowing awakening. I felt high, so alive, beautiful, magical, open in so many ways to life — ways in which I was previously blocked. I was full of positivity and only saw the good in everything and everyone. I started meditating daily and taking even better care of my body. I truly became a butterfly,

Some people are scared to ‘get back out there’ and date again after being with their former spouse for many years and hearing dating horror stories. What would you say to motivate someone to get back out there and start a new beginning?

Dating after divorce can be scary, but only if you do it before you are ready. Society and many of those who love us tell us to “get back out there,” but in my opinion that is the worst advice to give someone who just went through a divorce and has not truly healed the body, mind and spirit. Dating is magical once you have discovered who you truly are and what you want for the rest of your life — but until you have done the work and know these things dating will only bring the wrong partners to you. You cannot attract the right person into your life until you are secure in who you are NOW — the new version of yourself that is birthed after going through the trauma of divorce. There is no quick way to get there, and dating will only set you back if you have not blossomed into your best self-version.

I am very mindful of whom I date, and I am not afraid to say no to someone who doesn’t feel right to me or could compromise my self-worth, nor to someone who has a lot of red flags. I can see those red flags because I am confident and secure in myself, love myself and know my goals and desires. There are a few qualities that must exist for me to date someone, and the rest I leave to my intuition and trust my heart.

What is the one thing people going through a divorce should be open to changing?

It’s hard to pick one thing — I feel it is a trifecta of rewiring the mind, body and spirit to align with one’s highest self. But if you twist my arm here, I will have to pick learning to truly love oneself, as that has many sub-parts and opens one to intuition and forgiveness, authenticity, truth and gratitude.

Ok, here is the main question of our discussion. If you had a close friend come to you for advice after a divorce, what are 5 things you would advise in order to survive and thrive after the divorce? Can you please give a story or example for each?

1. Learn to love yourself! This is the most important thing when entering the healing process. It does not happen overnight, and it takes a lot of work — even if you think you DO love yourself already. After going through the trauma of divorce you need to learn who ME is, separate from the WE of partnership. There are many tools to use to get there, and the first step is commitment to yourself and your happiness. Once I truly knew I loved myself, after much healing and a huge spiritual awakening post-divorce, I started attracting the things into my life that I wanted and needed. I met new people who see me for who I am, my career picked up and I enjoyed it more than I had in many years, my financial situation improved, I manifested and obtained my beautiful home in the exact neighborhood I wanted, and I started writing again — which led to the birth of my book and discovering my life purpose!

2. Forgive yourself and your ex-spouse. Many people go through divorce and build up negative and even hateful feelings toward their ex-spouse. Blaming, anger, hurt, resentment and other negative feelings can lead to mental and physical ailments, as our bodies take the brunt of our suffering. This can lead to unhealthy habits like isolation, overeating, alcohol or drug consumption, and more. Learning to forgive — not only the ex-spouse but also yourself — is so cathartic, and focusing on TODAY and your future goals, instead of your past, will turn your mental and physical health around and free you from the bondage of your suffering. This is a hard lesson to learn, but I did it and only wish my ex well — just because he and I divorced does not mean he does not deserve happiness, as I cherish the beauty we shared for many years.

3. Speak your truth and trust your intuition. Learning to speak your truth will drastically change your life, as will trusting your intuition. Once you have learned to love yourself and listen to your needs and desires, intuition should start to assert itself, but there are many ways to tap into it. When I was going through my divorce and doing deep work, I realized that I had stopped speaking my truth and had not done so for a while within the relationship. It always seemed to lead to confrontations and fighting, and I was so tired of it so I simply kept things to myself. Obviously, that was not the right thing to do, and it created other issues within the broken relationship dynamic. This is why I say every divorce is the fault of both parties (except in very few cases, such as with abuse situations where the victim is controlled and terrified to leave). Part of the healing process is to recognize your own contributions to the breakdown, and oftentimes it will become clear that one did not speak their truth nor listen to intuition.

4. Let go of people, situations and circumstances that hold you back. We are conditioned from childhood to accept certain ideas, beliefs and convictions as truth, such as the idea that marriage is forever and “quitting” is a failure. These come from society, religion, and family. But we need to rewire ourselves to recognize that we do not have to live by these “rules” if they do not make us happy. This applies to people as well — if there are those in your life who bring you down and constantly infuse your life with negativity, it may be time to let them go. In order to heal from divorce and find true happiness one usually needs to do a lot of letting go.

5. Surround yourself with people who truly support the new you and vision of your future. It is so important to have the right people in your life — those who truly love and support you. I let a few people go from my life and allowed new friends to enter who are full of life and love and provide unconditional support, and it feels amazing.

The stress of a divorce can take a toll on both one’s mental and emotional health. In your opinion or experience, what are a few things people going through a divorce can do to alleviate this pain and anguish?

I think all the steps I mentioned above will help people get through the mental and emotional strains of divorce, especially having a good support network and diving into your soul to find what makes you happy. There are great online resources as well, like divorce support groups (just make sure you don’t join one where all they do is complain and share negative thoughts). Many people also seek professional help, and it is important to find the right person. It also helps to get out in nature, exercise daily, and find fun things to do (art, music, volunteering, taking classes, etc.) to meet new people, which will all help with moods and mindset as well.

Do you have any favorite books, podcasts, or resources related to this topic that you would recommend to our readers?

I have a lot of transformative books to recommend — here is a short list: Letting Go by David R. Hawkins, Creative Visualization by Shakti Gawain, The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, Think Like a Monk by Jay Shetty, Breath by James Nestor, and Energy Medicine by Donna Eden. There are many more, but this is a great starting place for a healing journey. The first 3 mentions are “bibles” to healing, incredible life guides, and should be on every bookshelf, in my opinion.

Because of the position that you are in, you are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂

I would inspire people to do the work I have outlined for healing from divorce and apply it to ALL areas of their lives, so that people can learn to be happier, healthier and trust their hearts. This would enable people to live their true purpose(s) and serve others, which is the reason we are all here. We need to love ourselves so we can love others — we do not need negativity and jealousy and hatred…the world is so beautiful and if more people realized this the possibilities of what we could accomplish as a whole are mind-altering.

We are very blessed that very prominent leaders read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂

I have to pick Vishen Lakhiani, the founder of Mindvalley. I am so inspired by the incredulous project he has birthed, and it just keeps getting better. The idea of changing the way people are educated is brilliant, and so integral to healing humanity. I am a Mindvalley member and love the quests offered. I would be honored to sit down with Vishen and learn more about his journey and what inspires him. He is a person who has figured out how to live his life by so many of the same principles I utilize in my own life. The idea of helping millions of people through education — body, mind and spirit — is invaluable — just think of the effect on humankind!

Thank you for these great insights and for the time you spent with this interview. We wish you only continued success!

Thank you so much for this opportunity! I am deeply grateful.

Rachel S Ruby Of Divorce To Bliss On 5 Things You Need To Know To Survive And Thrive After A… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Let’s Expand Co-Ops: Vernon Oakes’s Big Idea That Might Change The World

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

…When you look at how coops have the ability to change the world, I would first look at that fifth principle of cooperation, which is: Education, Training and Information. This Principle is what first attracted me to co-ops. Co-ops teach its members how to run a business, how to make collective decisions, how to resolve conflict, how to read financial statements, how to save for the future, the importance of voting, etc. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character — that is the goal of true education.”

As a part of my series about “Big Ideas That Might Change The World In The Next Few Years” I had the pleasure of interviewing Vernon Oakes.

Vernon Oakes hosts the leading weekly national radio program for the U.S. cooperative community. He is General Partner in Everything.Coop Communications, LLC, a media company that promotes cooperative business models by providing education and resources specifically for under-resourced Americans and their communities.

Vernon has significant national and international experience in various business activities including finance, marketing, sales, sales forecasting, distribution and service, and systems design. He became familiar with cooperative business models as a residential property management company owner and has more than 40 years of experience in property and asset management.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit. What brought you to this specific career path?

I was living in Washington, D.C. and working full time in my property management business which I began in 1994. I believed it would be easy to secure contracts, because as I was an African-American living in Chocolate City with an MBA from Stanford University. I had management experience at the corporate level, but my competition had over forty year’ s of experience in property management. Even though I bid on five large properties in my first year, I didn’t win one bid.

I was introduced to limited equity housing co-ops, and I was able to secure management contracts with several smaller projects, as they were less attractive to larger management companies because of the low revenues generated. I was amazed at the level of competency displayed by the resident co-op members who were mostly African-American women. Their ability to make sound decisions, engage in fruitful deliberation, operate with integrity and supervise the vendors was impressive. They made extremely good decisions, and most of them had at best had a high school education.

I’ve come to understand that training is the foundation of co-ops. The fifth principle of cooperation is Education, Training and Information which is extremely important in creating successful cooperatives. I started looking at the cooperative model and got involved with the Potomac Association of Housing Cooperatives which covers DC, Maryland and Virginia. I became a member of the National Association of Housing Cooperative (NAHC) and joined the Development and Preservation Committee with two long-term cooperators, Roger Wilcox and Herb Fisher. Roger passed away a couple years ago at 97 years of age, and Herb is no longer practicing law in Chicago, but is in his 90s.

Through Roger and Herb, I learned about housing cooperatives. They continually said that if developers built housing co-ops, then people would buy them. From a marketing standpoint I understood and told them that there’s no demand for co-ops because people don’t understand them. If people knew about the benefits of co-ops, they would demand them, and developers would build them.

As the President of NAHC, I started promoting housing co-ops which led me to The Thornton’s Business Hour radio show in June of 2013. Immediately following my appearance on the show, I was offered my own show. Originally it was scheduled to run for the month of October, in recognition of National Co-op Month. That one month turned into nine years. Today we have over 300 shows on our Everything Coop webpage , on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.

How do co-ops make an impact?

To understand the impact of cooperatives we must first define what a co-op is. A co-op is a business that is owned and controlled by and for its members. In the limited equity housing co-op, the members are the residents. The residents have an equal say in the running of the cooperative, and they all receive an equal share in the profits.

The biggest impact for me is what happens at the individual level. A guest on my radio show, Dame Pauline Green, who at the time was the President of the International Cooperative Alliance, put it quite eloquently when she said, “Co-ops help people to come out of poverty with dignity”. This is because when members have a voice, control, ownership, and income, their self-worth increases.

All too often I have seen individuals — family members, friends, colleagues, students — with little to no self-worth, (particularly in the African-American and the Native American communities), because they lacked power. When communities gain power over their existence it impacts the entire planet.

In the book, Cities Building Community Wealth, by the Democracy Collaborative, there is an example of what happens when individuals are empowered. Christina, a Mexican American earned $7.00 an hour prior to joining a worker co-op. At that wage, when she worked a 40 hour week her gross pay was $280 a week. After joining the co-op, her hourly wage increased to $20.00, and she only needed to work 14 hours a week to make the same $280.00.

This additional income and hours empowered her as a single mom. She could work fewer hours, spend more time with her children. The added time with her children allowed the family to grow stronger which not only helped them but also impacted their community positively, and the planet. The Cooperative model allows everyone to benefit together. No one is pushed down because another is up.

Another example that I helped to found is Common Good Management Services, which also illustrates Dame Green’s point nicely. Millions of people live in mobile home parks in the U.S. Most parks are owned by investor-owners and the parks are regularly bought and sold, driving up the cost of living for the residents. With the help of a national network led by ROC USA , hundreds of mobile home parks have been purchased by co-ops where the residents are the member owners. Extracting mobile home parks from the investor-owned marketplace puts an immediate stop to the exploitive relationship with the investor owner. Residents are empowered to govern their community for the common good of its residents. Common Good Management Services is a community-based property management co-op designed to manage the property in a manner that serves the residents. Both the mobile home park movement and the potential of Common Good are inspiring and based on exactly what Dame Green described as the impact of cooperatives.

Which principles or philosophies are the cornerstones of cooperatives?

We will start with the cooperative values, which are: self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, quality, equity, and solidarity. I noticed that in the housing co-op meetings, decisions were made on what was best for the group. If the decision is best for the group, then each member in the group prospers together, in solidarity. Decisions are not made on what is best for one individual, because this normally means that this decision would be at the expense of somebody else. Cooperatives also believe in the ethical values of honesty, openness, social responsibility and caring for others, which I see as the Golden Rule.

Cooperative organizations are governed by their values and principles, where the principles are guidelines by which the values are put into practice. The principles are:

1. Voluntary and Open Membership: Personal demographics don’t make any difference.

2. Democratic Member Control: One member, one vote.

3. Member Economic Participation: Must pay money to become a member and share in profit.

4. Autonomy and Independence: The co-op members must own and control the business.

5. Education, Training, and Information: continual education.

6. Cooperation among Cooperatives: Co-ops work together for the good of the members and the community

7. Concern for Community: Govern in a way to improve the community

There’s an eighth principle that different credit unions in the US have started using and that’s DEI: diversity, equity and inclusion. Some argue that you don’t need this eight principle, because the first principle states that membership is “open to all persons able to use their services and willing to accept the responsibilities of membership, without gender, social, racial, political or religious discrimination.”

Unfortunately, if you take a co-op and put it into a racist society like the US, then those co-ops would probably be racist with leadership being white, particularly white men. So, having an emphasis on including everybody makes it better than just the first principle. It’s open to everybody and make sure diversity, inclusion and equity are included.

Let’s go to the father of capitalism, Adam Smith, who believed that man has natural tendency to look after self-interest, and as social creatures man has sympathy for others that have less.

Smith saw humans as creatures driven by passions and at the same time self-regulated by their ability to reason and by their capacity for sympathy.

Narcissistic individuals by definition don’t have the ability to empathize. It also seems that those persons who inherited their wealth don’t have the capacity for sympathy, as described by the French economist Thomas Piketty’s book Capitalism in the 21st Century.

How do Cooperatives have the ability to change the world?

When you look at how coops have the ability to change the world, I would first look at that fifth principle of cooperation, which is: Education, Training and Information. This Principle is what first attracted me to co-ops. Co-ops teach its members how to run a business, how to make collective decisions, how to resolve conflict, how to read financial statements, how to save for the future, the importance of voting, etc. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character — that is the goal of true education.” The character of the cooperative and its members is found in the values and principles expressed earlier.

I would turn to principle 6 and the different co-op sectors. Principle six is Cooperation Among Co-ops. There are four types of co-ops that look for ways of working together that will benefit the members and the world. The sector’s names are based on who owns and controls the business or the function of the business. The four sectors are defined below:

a) It is a Worker Co-op if the business is owned and controlled by the employees (could be any business)

b) It is a Consumer Co-op if the business is owned and controlled by the persons who use the products or services (housing co-ops, credit unions, rural electric co-ops, food co-ops, REI, a health clinic in Madison WI, and Blue Hawk Distributor are examples of consumer co-ops).

c) It is a Purchasing Co-op if the function of the business created is to Purchase products and services to afford it’s member better quality at lower prices (such as farmers, artist, and the Consumer Purchasing Alliance in DC). In the 1960s when black farmers were getting out to vote, the white stores wouldn’t sell them gas. So, these black farmers pitched in their dollars and purchased a truck, went across state lines and brought gas. To get what they needed, they formed a purchasing co-op. And all these coops formed the Federation of Southern Co-ops in 1967.

d) It is a Marketing/Producer Co-op if the function of the business created is to market and add value to the products or services of the members to get access to more markets at a better price (farmers started Cabot Creamery, Land O’Lakes, Ocean Spray and artists started Ujamaa in Pittsburgh, Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico). I was in a store in San Diego and bought some eggs from a co-op. The eggs came from Wisconsin. The farmer in Wisconsin wouldn’t have been able to get the eggs to the marketplace in San Diego on his own.

Was there a “tipping point” or some holes in the way the average business is structured that are leading more businesses toward a cooperative model?

Absolutely. I got my MBA from Stanford. In every class that I was in, decisions were made on “what’s the greatest return on investment (ROI) for the shareholder?” The focus of the company is what’s the best return; money, financial profit for the shareholder; it was not what was best for the employee. Matter of fact, there’s this antagonistic relationship between management and the employee and between the board and the employee. In a worker co-op, the focus is also on what is best for the shareholder, but the shareholder is the employee.

Look at the principles of cooperation, the first concern is for the people, the members. What’s best for the planet is second, and third is profit. Profit is important but in a capitalistic model, it is king, it is all important. Managers in the capitalistic business make decisions based on what’s best for the shareholder first, then what is best for the manager. In the capitalistic business, the top managers may make 200 times more than the average bottom salaries. Whereas in a co-op, often there are rules that the top person may not make more than 10 times of what the lowest paid workers make. This rule allows more money to be spread throughout to the employees. In the cooperative the money stays in the community, but in the capitalist business the money goes to the shareholder, who may not live in that community.

The tipping point is the capitalistic model focuses on profits. Almost totally, to the exception of everything else. And we have things like climate change. And if it keeps going that way with short term decisions based on profit, we will see continued destruction for our planet. Whereas the co-op model is for our world, for our children, and for our grandchildren.

The capitalist model has totally missed the priorities of cooperatives. That we must take care of the planet, community and the people. The capitalistic model focuses on profit for the shareholder and management. That’s the tipping point.

What is needed to lead this idea to widespread adoption?

Awareness is needed to lead to widespread adoption. We’ve been producing the Everything Co-op radio show for 9 years. It got started because the United Nations declared 2012 the year of co-op and about 300 cooperators from around the world went to the UN in November of 2011. In that gathering, it was stated multiple times that Co-ops are “the best kept secret.” In 2013, we started the radio show to let people know about co-ops. Co-ops do an extremely good job of helping their members, an excellent job providing great products and services, and an awesome job at solving community problems. However, co-ops do a terrible job at promoting the co-operative brand.

I firmly believe that we have to let people know about the cooperative brand, and if we tell them about the benefits, the impact, and the things you asked in the aforementioned questions, they will then look for co-ops to do business with. They will start co-ops and convert capitalistic businesses to worker owned co-ops. This is especially true with the baby boomers, because the baby boomers own a large percentage of the normal, capitalist businesses. As they are beginning to retire you can convert their businesses to employee ownership, then the business and profits will stay in the community.

Can you share with our readers why it is important to support cooperatives?

If you look at 100 cooperative businesses that started 5 years ago, then 80–90 percent of them are still in business today. The reasons for this are:

The training that took place for one to four years before the business started,
The connection with the community
The excellent products and services co-op provides the community and
The community problem that the cooperative solved.

If you look at 100 capitalistic businesses that started 5 years ago, about 10–20 percent of them are still in business. They ultimately fail because they don’t get the education nor the solidarity with the community. And so most fail.

If you want excellent products and services, then buy from co-ops. This helps the employees, the community, and the planet. If you’re a nurse or a home health care worker, or plumber or taxi cab driver, or lawyer, etc., you might want to connect with 4 or 5 of your co-workers and start your own cooperative. You can reach out to the cooperative community to get the training, technical support and funding needed to be successful.

What are a few cooperatives that you would encourage our readers to learn about?

Well, credit unions are co-ops. In 2012 about 150 cooperators went to talk to President Obama’s head administrators about cooperatives. There was a cooperator in the front of the room who would ask each administrator if they knew what a co-op is. Most answered “no”, then he would ask them “Do you belong to a credit union?” Most said “yes”. One person, I’m not going to say who he was or his title because he was extremely high in the administration, said that he and his family belonged to 3 different credit unions. They belonged to 3 co-ops and didn’t know they belonged to co-ops. They did understand that if they wanted to apply for a car loan or any kind of a loan then they would get a better deal at a cooperative.

The products are created by the members for the members. The credit union has to make enough money to pay for the overhead, and may want to make enough money for growth, and may make money to donate to solve community problems. Most credit unions don’t give dividends to their members but that would be another reason for cooperatives to make a profit so they can give dividends to their members.

I like the worker co-op, Equal Exchange with about 120 members/owners. They have great products including coffee, teas, bananas, and chocolates. Equal Exchange pays its farmers a fair price for the products they buy. They buy from small farmers in Africa, Asia and South America.

You can go on the US Federation of Worker Co-ops’ web page, and find worker co-ops sorted by the type of co-op in each state. You can also find a food co-op by just going to google and putting in food co-op near you. You can find different housing coops by going to the “National Association of Housing Cooperatives” at NAHC.coop. As I travel around the US in my RV, I’ve found that google is a great way for locating co-ops in the area that you are in. The National Cooperative Business Association (NCBA.coop) has been working on a software app where you can find co-ops in your area. I’m hoping they will be able to get the application out in the market soon.

How can our readers find out more and follow you on social media?

We post every week on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter; we encourage readers to follow us to stay up tp date onwho is coming on the show We also offer an option to subscribe on our website at www.everything.coop.

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.

Let’s Expand Co-Ops: Vernon Oakes’s Big Idea That Might Change The World was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Meet The Disruptors: L Renee Blount Of WndrHaus On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Indust

Meet The Disruptors: L. Renee Blount Of WndrHaus On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Be Bold. That was told directly to me once at a lecture. It’s something I take with me.

As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewingL. Renee Blount.

L. Renee Blount is a professional adventurer, athlete and creative. She’s dedicated to her work as an athlete with a camera who is making the outdoors way more inviting, fun and filled with flavor. A proud alumni of Harvard University School of Design, she is known for her infectious smile and joyous work in the outdoor space as director & photographer. She has graced the cover of Outside Magazine, featured in Gear Patrol, Nat Geo, Athleta, North Face, Patagonia and more. WndrHaus.com

I got my start by inviting myself when I was never invited. This has been my career path. The dozens of coffees scheduled between SF, NYC and Boston until I could land my creative and strategy jobs in innovation & design despite having two graduate degrees. I quickly recognized fancy school names may not overcome my own name, so I had to show up and prove myself. The conferences where I humbly showed up to be the notetaker but relentlessly networked. And when I shortened my name to “L.”, calls began to be returned despite applying previously. Yes — that is very real.

The same is true for the outdoors. I don’t come from money in any way. I never felt fully invited when I picked up a camera out of desire to tell stories like my own. A lot of my work sat on hard drives until tragedy. However, I always believed in my creativity, voice, ability to learn and physical capabilities. I believed in our stories and style long before it became popular.

I am an advocate for women to take big creative risks that bring joy — a calculated bet on yourself because you deserve the chance to see what can happen. We all deserve to take a risk — a big one. And the most successful individuals, take the biggest leaps. It’s something I didn’t see women in my family have the ability to do. That very ability to take a risk is often shorter for minorities and economically who may not have the same options for a fall back.

I’ve always been a creative hustler to make sure I had scholarships, so no one knew my family’s economic situation. When I graduated from Harvard, I thought I’d made it. Turns out, I had not at all. It took me 50 coffees, grit and faith to pivot from architecture to land my first big job working in NYC doing creative strategy. I was asking to be a notetaker at conferences so I could introduce myself to VPs.

At the firms, I was inspired by the CEOs I’d come across — they were gay-identifying and black working companies ideate the most out-of-this-world — NBA to J.Crew to IBM. That power of the visual led me to think, Why not me? And what happens if I can become more aligned and follow my passion projects? Rethinking the outdoor space with more joy, more flavor, more diverse faces.

I decided to take a leap of faith with a career change. I saved up a freedom fund and decided to pursue alignment. I changed coasts and followed my side hustle with the encouragement from Alain Sylvain, a CEO I looked up to and worked for. For a while, I’d take red eyes to do my creative outdoor assignments and still keep my consulting work. And then I decided to go for it. I’ve been training in climbing for the last 10 years. And in my first year photography, I’d already worked with The North Face, Arc’Teryx and Patagonia all while working full-time.

The biggest encouragement was from the black women in my family who hadn’t been allowed to take chances. It was with their cheerleading that I decided to embrace being uncomfortable due to their history of never feeling like they could for it.

When I followed my calling, within just a few months, I made magazine covers, was added to the Nat Geo Adventure Team as the only black woman ever and only the third black person ever; partnered with elite outdoor companies on campaigns and so much more.

Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?

Showing joy and visuals through creative directing & working directly with brands to tell new stories in a space that is not typically diverse.

Here’s are some snapshot examples:

+ Decided to remake the covers of popular outdoor publications to feature my work of adventurers and athletes of color as a provocation. The outdoor world took notice. An exercise in strategy and creativity.

+ Landed the September/October cover of Outside Magazine after my work was widely seen.

+ Hosted & produced a new video series! Pitched and co-produced a series that celebrates my loves — adventure, innovation and curiosity. The series will feature Cake (the Tesla of electric bikes), OneWheel and more. This was my first time doing any video, and I’ve gone on to do more since.

+ I’m the only black woman contributor to the Nat Geo Adventure Team and as an athlete & explorer, I’ve been pushing into expeditions. Here’s my latest crazy trip that just released with Sony!

+ Since 2020, I’ve worked with Sony and a host of brands to give cameras away to elevate talent in the outdoor space. I deeply know what it is like to have the talent and not have the best equipment. With a host of brands, I’ve been able to do $30k+ in funding for portfolio projects and give over 10 professional camera setups away with gear by spearheading the Elevation & Peak Design grants for underrepresented creatives.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

I hired my little brother to be an assistant on my first big shoot while he was early in college. Total fail. LOL. I also hadn’t been on a set before. I’d come from just doing projects on my own & didn’t know all the ins and outs. He complained the whole time and I haven’t done that since. He’s super generous, smart and bright — and he works at Meta now so it’s all good.

We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?

Many, many people have had an impact on my journey. Even some who may never know it.

Susan at Ideo — “Just get in the door.” She gave me 10 minutes on a call but it was so valuable.

Toyo Ito — the Pulitzer Prize-winning architect really encouraged me not to be traditional when I spent 3 months in Tokyo while taking his architecture studio. When I got back to Harvard, I super embraced the pivot.

Caitlin Kalinowski — She’s an amazing friend and confidant. And a big deal in the tech world. Since I pivoted at Harvard into innovation & storytelling, she’s known me. We talk often and always share insights. Super brilliant and makes me feel like I’m making the right decisions creatively.

Alain Sylvain — He encouraged me that I could go out on my own. He’s another business savant and I worked for his firm in NYC. I was surprised by his revelation and confidence.

Chris Burkhard — I’m so thankful to him. Just having someone I admire like my work was a huge confidence boost. When I went to Iceland with him, I asked so many business questions. He was so open and honest.

And many more. I like highlighting these individuals because they are also very astute at business. That’s super integral for me. I took entrepreneurship business classes twice at Harvard — one at the Harvard Kennedy School and one at Harvard Business School. And thinking about opportunity costs and ROI are super important.

It’s a positive disruption when the status quo only exists to serve or elevate the few. For example, Patagonia reached out to me early on. I, like many, deeply very much respect their environmentalism. They are a leader and pioneer. However, I rarely, rarely ever saw myself in their materials. So, when they approached me, I told them I wasn’t privileged enough to work with them and kindly explained every reason why. The email was circulated amongst their team.

They desired more diverse content but their process only allowed for the privileged few to go out and do it. Essentially, it was built for photographers to go out on trips. And then they’ll just archive your images for weeks or years until they have a need. No one gets paid until then.

If you have less access to equipment, the trips, the people that can afford to go, etc., then how can you get supported by them? How will it not only go to the most insular circles who’ve long been able to afford it or have those connections?

They called back. Hopefully, that email opened eyes not only for me but for anyone who’s been an outsider.

It’s negative when I think it’s done without thought or intention. Or the ramifications will be ignored. Just look at FTX.

Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.

Be Bold. That was told directly to me once at a lecture. It’s something I take with me.

We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?

Out of my triumphs, the world gets to see the most incredible places illuminated with joy outside. And changing the narrative of who exists and who’s doing the most badass things makes me smile like no other.

There’s a couple endeavors — I’m building up my creative studio, WndrHaus. Beyond creative directing, concepting & photographing for amazing brands, I want to continually push as an athlete.

Up next is continuing to push that and making sure I’m on expeditions. It’s still rare to see women with cameras on expeditions teams. And women of color are even rarer.

Highlighting my creative directing, design and consulting efforts. I’ve been behind the scenes working on incredible things. Next year, I hope to amplify those efforts and talk about them.

And most importantly, there’s also altruism initiatives for outdoor inclusivity. I’m bringing back completely free experiences (such as gym takeovers) that give underserved communities the ability to try.

Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?

I love the Jen Sincero Badass books. They came in heavy at the right time when I knew I needed to pursue something new but felt nervous to dive in. I had started saving up to make it happen. But reading those, I felt that it was possible. They’re books of hope & affirmation that I really love and re-read passages.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“You can’t climb a mountain if it’s smooth. You have to go over the rough spots.” -S. Adams

I love this visual. And it’s helpful for the continual climb.

“Once you know better, you can do better” is something my grandmother always repeats. And I constantly say it to myself. There’s so much that I’ve had to figure out — how to get in the door, how to get to make it when I have less resources, how to maneuver when others put me in a box, how to be first when someone like me doesn’t exist, etc. I tell myself I deserve the chance to take risk, to fail. To allow my pathway to be a gate opener so others can walk in.

I think I can be precious and perfectionist at times. But I’m here to fail forward. If I stumble, it’s okay as long as I can really learn and continually improve.

Like many, I feel like there’s still so much to learn and know. But I’m not here to be a flash in the pan. I’m endlessly curious and love being experimental. So, if I make a mistake, I can improve. And I can share that knowledge & hopefully, inspire.

Reclaim & reclaim with joy. You deserve to be there especially if you haven’t been historically invited.

Making sure that you’re giving more than taking. What are you doing to replenish & nourish? Not only yourself but the community or society. When you visit a place, you can give to it by sharing that experience with others who haven’t been able to go, by volunteering, by donating to a local area. Your presence is powerful. Remember to not just take.

How can our readers follow you online?

IG: @urbanclimbr

Website: www.wndrhaus.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lrblount/

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!

Meet The Disruptors: L Renee Blount Of WndrHaus On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Indust was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Adam Castleton Of Startle On 5 Ways To Create a Wow! Customer Experience

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

People remember the ending too. How an interaction ends is equally memorable and should be designed accordingly. For example, hotel staff greeting a customer by name, or reducing the perceived wait time in retail with an “Occupied Wait”. Together with memorable peaks, these moments are known as the “Peak End Rule”.

As a part of our series about the five things a business should do to create a Wow! customer experience, I had the pleasure of interviewing Adam Castleton.

Adam co-founded Startle in 2012 after identifying an opportunity to haul dated background music technology into the modern, highly connected era. Previously Head of Strategy at digital agency, Rawnet, Adam has extensive technical and operational experience, working with media companies such as Discovery and ITV to deliver exceptional digital experiences for their customers.

Thank you so much for joining us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I started my first business at the age of six, charging my family to park on their own driveway! I soon realised that the parking sector wasn’t my passion, so since my first “proper job” in the leisure industry, my career has revolved around my passion for technology and experiences.

I’m anti “tech for tech’s sake”, so you’ll find me as far away from virtual reality as the metaverse will allow me to run! I’ve found that retail, hospitality and leisure environments provide the perfect real-life playground for using technology with intent.

There are so many opportunities to improve the atmosphere, gain efficiency and enhance the experience using technology in these spaces. And it’s exciting to think that our technology is shaping the customer experience of thousands of people each day, as they go about their lives. That’s what gets me up in the morning.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?

I’m a self-taught software developer. And while knowledge of how things work is valuable in running Startle Music today, I’ve learnt to keep my hands off the code.

In the early days of Startle, I remember attending an awards ceremony in Manchester, and corrupting an important database from my phone. We didn’t win the award, and I spent the early hours in my room restoring backups over a patchy 3G connection!

There is a valuable lesson in every mistake, and that’s my biggest ‘take away’ — to learn from every one of them, as they will arm you well in the future.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

From a young age, I’ve been fortunate to work alongside leaders of successful young businesses. It’s now that I value the learnings I gained from these people, whether it was how I saw them manage people, any guidance or advice they gave me, or just what I learnt from overhearing conversations about their business in the office.

With the rise of remote work, I think it’s easy to underestimate the value that can be gained from time spent in the office, with the leadership of the company that you work within. I’d say I have all my old bosses to thank for helping me get to where I am today, and I hope that I’m passing on some wisdom in the same way to the Startle team today.

In my opinion, an exceptional customer experience is as important as the product or service being sold. I intentionally use the term “exceptional” as everybody can offer a great experience if they try. It takes an exceptional experience to really stand out, and standing out is important. Here’s why:

Getting any customer to buy from you takes investment, whether that’s investing in marketing, a physical storefront or long-term building of a brand.

The customers you attract will either be ones you never see again, or loyal ones that repeat purchase from you and recommend you to others. These people will also pay more for your product, allowing you to hold your margins.

Loyal customers, referrals and higher margins become a natural byproduct if you’re consistently delivering an exceptional customer experience. Consistently delivering an exceptional customer experience is also significantly cheaper to achieve than continuously investing in ways to find new people to sell to all the time.

A transactional relationship where a product is simply purchased in exchange for money is easily forgotten. A stand-out customer experience is not.

Expectancy Theory teaches us that the way people perceive something is influenced by how they expect the experience to be. By delivering an exceptional customer experience you are influencing not only how the product you’re selling is received, but also how they will expect future interactions with your brand to be.

Not only does this earn loyalty with your customers now, it affords you some helpful forgiveness if, in the future, you do ever miss the bar.

Like an exceptional experience, bad customer experiences can be remembered too. Anyone delivering consistently poor experiences are at risk of creating an army of detractors which can be difficult to bounce back from.

I think most people would agree that the vast majority of customer experiences are pretty average. I think we naturally put too much focus on what is being sold at what price, rather than the context of how it is being sold.

This is short term thinking. This unbalanced focus may deliver earlier revenues, but as I explained, these experiences are purely transactional in nature and easily forgotten. This means that your customers are back on the market for your competitors to acquire next time around.

This cycle leads to a tendency to buy customer loyalty through loyalty schemes. But in reality, loyalty is an outcome and not something that can be bought through discounting.

Typical loyalty schemes (and discounting in general) assume that price is the main reason that customers buy from you, when in reality, we know there are other more influential soft-factors at play.

Discount schemes also create a sense of entitlement. It’s not difficult to think of an example company where you would only ever buy from with a discount code (think pizza chains), or where there has been outrage when the terms of their loyalty scheme changed (think supermarkets).

True loyalty is more forgiving, and a result of a genuine connection made between a brand and its customer. And it is something that can only be earned by consistently delivering an exceptional customer experience alongside your great, properly priced, product.

Absolutely. Pressure drives a change in behaviour, whether that pressure comes from competition, inflation, supply chain issues or a staffing crisis.

Typically I see businesses take one of two directions. The first is a short term view again, minimising costs at the expense of customer experience as an attempt of survival. The second is to invest themselves out of the situation.

Brands that take the short term view are simply extending their runway, but often, and predictably, go out of business eventually. Brands such as Toys R Us, Mothercare, Blockbuster and Debenhams are all good examples of this.

On the other hand, brands that knuckle down and invest in a great customer experience typically see more longer term success than their competition. Not only do they survive the tough times, they come out stronger on the other side.

I’m a big believer that there is opportunity in adversity, and that’s because usually the whole market is facing the same challenges as you are. You just have to navigate the adversity better than others to end up in a better position. That takes a cool head, calculated risk taking, unequivocal belief, and above all dogged persistence. That’s certainly the approach I’ve taken at Startle.

Can you share with us a story from your experience about a customer who was “Wowed” by the experience you provided?

A big part of our customer experience comes from the relentless support we provide our customers. We could certainly cut costs, scale back our support operation, and still exceed the market expectations. But our support is so impactful that we see it as an investment rather than an operational cost.

An example would be a customer calling to cancel their contract with us as they were retiring. Although this was a shame for business, we believed the human connection was much more important, so we sent them a retirement gift in the post.

Did that Wow! experience have any long-term ripple effects? Can you share the story?

This genuine act of kindness eventually became good for business when the person retiring referred us to another mutlisite operator. And from there we were able to build our reputation and client list further within the industry. It’s an example of an above-and-beyond approach to business paying off in the long term.

People remember the peaks. Peaks are stand-out and unexpected moments in the customer journey. Consider your customer journey as a whole, and identify areas that you can introduce intentional peaks. Think, a random “on the house” coffee from Pret, or how Costa helps customers who have their hands full with small children by helping them carry their item to the table. These virtually free moments will create a long lasting memorable impression on your customers.
People remember the ending too. How an interaction ends is equally memorable and should be designed accordingly. For example, hotel staff greeting a customer by name, or reducing the perceived wait time in retail with an “Occupied Wait”. Together with memorable peaks, these moments are known as the “Peak End Rule”.
Look outside of the industry for inspiration. It’s easy to be blinkered which can lead to lost opportunities and unintentional mimicry. I think it’s best to intentionally look outside of your industry for inspiration when designing your customer experience. For example, we have an office space client using a sports fashion retailer as inspiration for their background music. Being distinctive in a sea of sameness will not only make your brand stand out, you’ll be more memorable too. This is known as the “Von Restorff Effect”.
Consider the environment as a whole. A lot of thought is put into the visual merchandising of physical locations, but often the wider atmosphere is often considered in isolation (or not at all). Impactful experiences are ones where the look and feel of a space works in harmony with the sound, lighting and everything else that contributes to an atmosphere.
Underpin your thinking with the principles of behavioural science. Humans are unpredictable creatures, and can often behave seemingly illogically. I’ve mentioned some behavioural principles that we use at Startle, these are established heuristics within the field of behavioural science. Instead of guess-work and wishful thinking, these heuristics can be used to design an environment and customer experience with real intent.

Are there a few things that can be done so that when a customer or client has a Wow! experience, they inspire others to reach out to you as well?

There is nothing more powerful than word-of-mouth and referrals within the industry we operate in. So we approach our customer experience in the same way that we teach our clients to, by using the principles of behavioural science to make our business and proposition stand out. This is reflected in our marketing, how we sell and how we manage client relationships.

Amazon is going to exert pressure on all of retail for the foreseeable future. New Direct-To-Consumer companies based in China are emerging that offer prices that are much cheaper than US and European brands. What would you advise retail companies and eCommerce companies, for them to be successful in the face of such strong competition?

Price alone isn’t a USP, nor does it drive genuine customer loyalty. D2C brands are opening on the high street because they realise they need to make more emotional connections with customers that isn’t possible purely in an online transactional environment. Allbirds and Gymshark are two examples of this.
If anything this proves that there is opportunity on the high street.
With Amazon, they’re investing/testing tech (like “just walk out”) which is so expensive that retailers would never create it themselves. Let them haemorrhage cash while learning the mistakes and refine the technology. Amazon’s play is to ultimately sell the technology to retailers, not to own every shop on the high street — and that’s a long, long road which doesn’t replace excellent customer experience.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?

Over the last decade our lives have become increasingly digital. The Coronavirus pandemic made many of us realise the value of in-person interactions, whether that’s in our personal relationships, visiting a restaurant with friends, meeting in person instead of over Zoom, browsing the shops on a Sunday afternoon, or even re-realising the convenience of in-store click and collect.

I love tech, and there’s definitely a place for it in retail, but I’d love to see a movement that promotes real life, in-person experiences over making our lives increasingly digital. I’d like to see less time invested in projects like the metaverse, and more investment in real human connections.

How can our readers follow you on social media?

In that vein, I’d rather meet you for a coffee than follow me on social media, but in the meantime you can follow Startle on…

Website: https://startlemusic.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/startleint
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/StartleInt
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Startle_Music

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!

Adam Castleton Of Startle On 5 Ways To Create a Wow! Customer Experience was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Future Is Now: Robert Messer Of IPTECHVIEW On How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake Up…

The Future Is Now: Robert Messer Of IPTECHVIEW On How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake Up The Tech Scene

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Do not take yourself too seriously.
Don’t believe your own press releases, and always listen to people that care.. There is always a nugget of truth in most suggestions.

As a part of our series about cutting-edge technological breakthroughs, I had the pleasure of interviewing Robert Messer.

Robert Messer is the President & CEO of Dallas-based IPTECHVIEW, a 6-year-old software as a service business (VSaaS). The company is a spinoff from ABP Technology, a specialty distributor of IP technology he founded 21 years ago. Today IPTECHVIEW develops and operates a global cloud video surveillance platform. The company’s mission is to protect people, places and assets by providing visibility, smart alerts and controls.

Before these two companies in the USA, he founded and ran several technology companies in Barcelona, Spain. He immigrated to the US in 1993 and became EVP of AJ Weller Corp, Shreveport, Louisiana, a business focused on composite materials and technology improvements in heavy industry. This gave him much insight into the operations, maintenance and security of manufacturing plants and industrial facilities.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

After college in Germany, I lived in Spain, where I started a business reselling computers. At that time, you could only sell a computer if you created a tailor-made software solution to the customer’s needs. That got me into software development. Later I started importing computer systems, and our reseller business morphed into a distribution business. I helped other resellers with the solutions we had made. I guess I am still kind of doing the same thing today.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

Even as a tiny business, I discovered I could sell exciting, innovative products competing with huge companies. I started ABP marketing SIP phone technology, our product was a new IP phone made by a snom a small German company. At that time, ABP was only one salesperson and one office manager, and within six months, we were selling to IBM and HP, winning business against Cisco Phones. The lesson here is David can beat Goliath. We passed a million dollars at the end of our first real business year.

Can you tell us about the cutting-edge technological breakthroughs you are working on? How do you think that will help people?

A few years back, we started selling business security cameras. We soon realized the systems and processes people used to sell and install were too complicated and costly, and the systems needed to give users more of what they wanted.

Today’s solutions give customers solutions based on expensive servers, large disc drives units that often fail, and come with software that is hard to use. Accessing video from outside is inconvenient and insecure, installation and configuration take days, and the cost to set up and maintain is high. Many users that need surveillance are not able to buy professional solutions because they are too expensive and then end-up with cheap but ineffective consumer-grade solutions.

We wanted to make a system where customers could just buy as many cameras as they needed for their place. Pick the proper camera type for their application, have them installed and then provide access to people in these companies to start using them without needing to learn much. Intuitive software with a few built-in videos to learn the rest.

We also felt our system should be multi-site so businesses could manage all their locations, and everything should work on users existing devices, smartphones, laptops or bigger multi-screen workstations. We made all that happen and now are securing facilities and provisioning video management of security cameras in about 20 countries.

How do you think this might change the world?

We believe smart security solutions can make the world a safer place and provide extra value by enabling workflow and process improvements and quality control, plus providing videos as training tools, situational awareness, and more. Adoption always grows when the prices come down.

At IPTECHVIEW, we reduced the cost of deployment to a fraction by eliminating the need for local servers and hard discs by putting ting in the cloud. We made a system that needed just cameras or pre-configured edge-device & cloud. Without servers and software, we lowered the deployment cost. Now many things like Security cameras, video intercoms for doors, access control card readers, and more would work as soon as mounted and wired to their network.

Last we also made Video Access so easy with our cloud software that everyone within the organization can use it. Now not only the security manager or loss prevention can access the video. It is now possible to provide access to HR, the warehouse manager, and the CEO.

Keeping “Black Mirror” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks of this technology that people should think more deeply about?

We believe there is a potential to democratize video so many stakeholders at the company can use surveillance cameras to see the space they manage or cohabit at work. Particularly in our new hybrid and WFH world, this is valuable.

A warehouse manager can “oversee” his warehouse on a day he needs to work from home. The production manager can check on process flow and more.

The concept that people are allowed to see the same workspace they can see when they are at work makes sense. In a hybrid world with few people, sometimes no one else is there on certain days. If many in the company use surveillance cameras in their day to day workflow and can see the space users move in, that would make the lonely worker feel safer. But there are always risks and downsides that need to be weighed and balanced.

How do we define privacy, and what are the lines that such open video solutions should not cross? Like always, when new technology emerges, there will be pros and cons and as a society, we will need to adapt, evaluate and regulate our new future.

Was there a “tipping point” that led you to this breakthrough? Can you tell us that story?

We have become a leading supplier to service providers and shipped millions of IP Phones. We could see how the reseller business for PBXs shrunk as the centralized cloud PBXs grew. The same fate could befall our camera resellers and integrators, but it dawned on us that that was a bit different since cameras and door stations need more physical installation. We realized we could help the security installers if we provided them with their own partner-centric cloud platform for cameras to sell. We also offer to preconfigure the cameras and devices to give them the same advantages a dedicated cloud service provider would have to help them cut installation time and lower their costs.

What do you need to lead this technology to widespread adoption?

The challenges are for our partners to change their habits and business model to get ready for the future. They must learn to start selling a yearly subscription instead of on-premise hardware. They need to educate their team that it is better to sell a service contract as a recurring service plan than do “Break Fix”.

The gross margin of service delivered as remote work is way better than service done locally. Especially considering the lost time and cost of transportation to and from sites. Technology partners can handle customers in a much larger geography, can do more projects with the same amount of people, and customers get much faster service at a flat service fee.

What have you been doing to publicize this idea? Have you been using any innovative marketing strategies?

Today we spend a lot of time educating everyone in the market, from end-users, and enterprise companies to resellers and integrators. We are also teaching businesses how they can integrate their alarm systems with our video surveillance by simply installing a few AlarmReady cameras from IPTECHVIEW.

The list of people that helped us is long. I am incredibly lucky and will be forever thankful to have had a passionate team that worked on making the vision of a more partner-centric cloud video surveillance solution real.

We also were lucky to have some sizeable early adopter customers and integration partners that bet on us that reaffirmed our beliefs and commitment to the vision.

Also, friends in the world of PR, Editors in the Technology space all helped us initially with promotion when we could not afford a lot of marketing.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

It’s a bit early for us, but we are looking forward to a time when we can do more of that.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?

There is more to life than the company.
It is very hard as a CEO to keep a work-life balance. You should reign in your passion by telling yourself you will be better if you recharge with other activities.
The truth is that these activities become inspirational for your work.
Do not take yourself too seriously.
Don’t believe your own press releases, and always listen to people that care.. There is always a nugget of truth in most suggestions.
If people dont work out in their jobs fire them soon.
Many times I tried to be nice and find a way to make things work for people that did not fit. It ended up making life worse for both of us.
Everything takes twice as long, costs twice as much, and will be half as unique, special, or cool as you thought it would be. Plan to be over budget. If things only add marginal value consider not doing them.
Enjoy the simple things and have fun every day. Do not plan on ignoring life to have all the fun at the end. The end may come sooner than you thought.

This is as much about your life as it is about the lives of all that are working for you.

Always be on the lookout for adding value and improving things around you. Be it to the environment, towards people you work with, your customers or the economic situation of yourself and those around you.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

When I started my first business, I read a book that had a phrase like “If you do enough good things for others, good things will happen to you too.” We always acted that toward employees and customers, and vendors. Our principles helped us stay focused on helping our customers grow their businesses, and our success and longevity are a testimonial that the principle works. Of course, this only works for those that let themselves be helped.

Some very well-known VCs read this column. If you had 60 seconds to make a pitch to a VC, what would you say? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂

We are too far down the road for VCs, but I would not mind finding the right strategic investors. Our business model has incredible potential, and now that we have overcome most of the technological hurdles, we are entering a phase that is process and execution centric. This may require more investment than we can bootstrap. It could be helpful to work with a partner where we could leverage certain aspects of their strength.

How can our readers follow you on social media?

The best two are:

https://www.linkedin.com/company/iptechview

https://twitter.com/iptechview

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.

The Future Is Now: Robert Messer Of IPTECHVIEW On How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake Up… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Meet The Disruptors: Max Curnin Of Remaster On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

People are emotional beings and tend to tune out exposition. I love to get into the nitty-gritty of the tech and the implications of how that tech can solve real problems. However, if I don’t shape the story to the person I’m speaking with, they have no chance of being brought along for the ride.

As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Max Curnin.

Max Curnin is Co-Founder and CEO of Remaster, a blockchain-based legal tech startup. An avid NFT collector, angel investor, tech advisor and art enthusiast, Max has dedicated the last eight years to finding opportunities at the nexus of technology and creativity. Max has a B.S. in Applied Physics from the University of Miami.

In the midst of the pandemic, my close friends and I discussed some of the issues that museums were facing due to a lack of admissions. We thought we could use the power of NFTs to help these institutions monetize their collections without having to de-access their works. We quickly realized that copyright ownership and artwork ownership were completely decoupled from one another. Fast forward to the NFT craze, we realized this issue was a small subset of a much larger problem facing the blockchain industry.

Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?

The Web3 and blockchain space is an interesting area. By and large, the whole concept of the blockchain is to disrupt centralized power structures. The industry is so new that people focus on disruption before solving real-world problems. Remaster is disrupting commerce for high-touch asset classes where transactions are dependent on many different intermediaries such as lawyers and banks. We are not removing these institutions from the process but fundamentally upgrading their ability to function in this new environment.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

The funniest mistake I made involved our first pitch. As a legal and Web3 company, we spoke with a ‘lawyer’ that specializes in NFTs. We were pitching our concept of decentralizing the Terms & Conditions associated with an NFT digital asset.

I was so caught up talking about the technical implications of our product that the investor asked me, “Who cares?” I got so flustered that I didn’t really know how to respond. Suffice to say, they did not invest, but I learned a valuable lesson. Don’t forget to answer the simplest questions. We often gloss over them, but they are the most important.

We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?

I don’t have a mentor per se, but I am certainly in the market for one. However, there have been a number of books that I have found profound and have helped me on my path. These include:

Complexity by M. Mitchell Waldrop
Something Deeply Hidden by Sean Carroll
7 Powers by Hamilton Helmer
Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

This is actually a great question and something I think about quite a lot. Disruption has many connotations but in tech, we’ve associated disruption with throwing away the old to make way for the new. In general, this is a very typical human conceit that associates new with better. I believe that it is crucial for us as a society to not remain sedentary and continually question the status quo. But this idea is fundamentally different than challenging for the sake of challenging.

I think disruption is a good thing when the existing power structures have become complacent and have ceased to continue to justify their very existence. Technology evolves exponentially faster than the businesses that utilize it. Capitalism is about the survival of the fittest. It’s in our DNA to challenge existing power structures. If we don’t also learn from them, then we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes.

Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.

Communication is everything

When communication is 92% behavioral, we need to recognize that information can get lost in the cloud. Recognizing behavioral cues in yourself and the person you are speaking with is the best way to see if the message is coming across.

Tell stories

People are emotional beings and tend to tune out exposition. I love to get into the nitty-gritty of the tech and the implications of how that tech can solve real problems. However, if I don’t shape the story to the person I’m speaking with, they have no chance of being brought along for the ride.

Tune out the noise

Knowing when to learn what competitors are up to can get very distracting when you’re trying to focus on your own solutions. This is a delicate balance that I have to actively work at every day.

Ambition doesn’t equate to resilience

As entrepreneurs with early-stage companies, we love to talk about how we are going to change the world. This level of exuberance is necessary but at the end of the day, we need to solve real problems for our clients. The best advice I got was to break this down into four key areas.

Make a client money
Save a client money
Keep them from getting sued
Enable competitive advantage
Take a breath

For so much of the day, we are in the thick of things and it seems like the weight of the company and everyone at it is on our shoulders. Taking a step back to gain some much-needed perspective can often be the key to getting past what can seem to be an insurmountable obstacle.

We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?

Remaster has built a blockchain legal protocol and various enforceability and management tools for assets in this new Web3 environment. We are currently working on some new commercialization features that can only be accomplished through this legal architecture. We are initially focusing on the ability to list and monetize IP on the blockchain.

Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?

There’s a Bankless podcast with Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon where they discuss the parallels of the dotcom boom and bust cycle to this new internet, Web3 and the corresponding boom and bust cycle. They break down some core concepts in relation to capitalism, property and property rights.

What resonated with me is that when we are in the thick of new technologies, we sometimes forget to draw crucial parallels between the old and the new. So much of the technological revolution is grounded in the core concepts that humans have experienced for millennia. We still care about the same inalienable rights that we’ve always cared about. It’s important to showcase new technologies within this context.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

A quote that resonates with me is from philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, “People only see what they are prepared to see.” This is something that I personally have to contend with every day. Sometimes I get so attached to a problem and a solution, that when I try to express my solution to others, it is lost. If I have not adequately communicated the steps necessary for others to see the problem, then they will not be able to see the impact of the solution.

I encourage people to remember the third law of thermodynamics, energy of a system will eventually reach equilibrium. Too much energy on one side of a system is not sustainable. This is as true for politics, decentralization and the universe. You can’t fight with physics. The scientific method is everything. That and nuclear fusion. Let’s please devote as many resources to fusion technologies.

I would also like to encourage brands, creators and communities to embrace the next era of the internet. Web3 and the entire world of NFTs is still largely misunderstood but there is immense potential to accelerate commerce through legal infrastructure and unlock new potential.

How can our readers follow you online?

Twitter: @maxcurnin or our company page @remaster_io

Website: www.remaster.io

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!

Meet The Disruptors: Max Curnin Of Remaster On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Agile Businesses: Edward Wilson-Smythe Of AlixPartners On How Businesses Pivot and Stay Relevant In…

Agile Businesses: Edward Wilson-Smythe Of AlixPartners On How Businesses Pivot and Stay Relevant In The Face of Disruptive Technologies

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Acknowledge and internalize that what got you here will not get you there. We need to rethink our mission, our business objectives, our customers, our partnerships and how we create value. This was a key learning from a large airport client of mine, that had historically been led by construction and government leaders, with a focus on capital projects and funding arrangements. Not surprisingly, they were the worst rated airport in their region in 2003, with the distinct ignominy of running out of deicing fluid towards the end of a northern winter. Their technology relationships were also based on turn-of-the-century models of technology being the back office. New executive leadership team that included outsiders from a range of consumer-focused industries reimagined the airport’s purpose as a preferred destination for passengers, a hub of commerce, a community for workers and a catalyst for regional growth. They worked closely with technology companies to define and implement innovations in airport operations, customer experience and transport connectivity. The airport was the best rated airport in North America in 2016–2019 as a result of these innovations.

As part of my series about the “How Businesses Pivot and Stay Relevant In The Face of Disruptive Technologies”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Edward Wilson-Smythe.

Edward is a Director in the Digital Innovation practice at AlixPartners, a global management consulting firm. In this role, they help clients to harness the power of innovation to drive sustained competitiveness, superior business results and improved social outcomes by means of the definition and execution of digital innovation strategies, integrated solutions, and innovation partnerships. In their more than 20 years of experience, Edward has worked at with leading management consulting firms such as PwC and Kearney and has led digital consulting practices at Gartner, Avasant and NTT DATA. They are a prolific author and speaker on harnessing ethical innovation for the common good, Head of Research at TechPACT, an organization committed to driving equity in technology, and co-author of the Amazon bestseller Digital Singularity: A Case for Humanity.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I spent several years after earning my MBA not knowing what I wanted to do or what I was passionate about. While many of my contemporaries were pursuing impressive careers in consulting or finance, I was trying my hand at stand-up comedy and club promotion in Amsterdam and Toronto, while dabbling part-time in working with start-ups on strategy and funding pitches. As a result, my career was anything but planned in its infancy.

My initial work as a management consultant was in the area operations strategy and improvement, which became increasingly intertwined with technology as technology became more and more integral to business strategy and operations. This created a growing interest in technology and its impact on business, leading increasingly from the peripheries of technology decision-making to working with disruption and innovation as the core of my work in the last decade or so.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what

Did you hear about the time an MBA, a stand-up comic and a club promoter walked into a data center? No, seriously, the worst gaffe to date was at a meeting with an ecommerce startup that had hired me to prepare a prospectus to raise capital for an ecommerce transaction processing service based in the Caribbean. Part of the document contained diagrams of the physical location, architecture and connectivity of the systems, in the days when external connectivity was shown as lightning bolts. I still remember looking at one of the diagrams and exclaiming, “oh, that is great, we are showing that our data centers are waterproof because of all the hurricanes!”. Everyone stopped and looked at me, and the founder started laughing only to be joined in laughter by the others. That is how much of a newbie I was to the technology world slightly more than 20 years ago!

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

There have been many exceptional companies and professionals that I have had the good fortune of working with, but the work at Avasant with CEO Kevin Parikh was perhaps the most meaningful and impactful on my journey. We did great work consulting on technology innovation and digital transformation, and purposefully ensured that social and environmental impacts were integrated into the core of what we did. Kevin gave me a wide berth to experiment, break things and put new things together, and protected me when people threatened by change, both inside the firm and some very senior people in three very large technology companies, pressured him to remove me from my role.

The realization that it is possible to drive broader social benefits through consulting, to put people first in all decisions, and to push back against much larger incumbents based on values and principles, was an eye-opener for me. This experience has driven me to push the boundaries in reconciling growth with equality, people with profits, and economics with environment, at work and in my personal life.

Extensive research suggests that “purpose driven businesses” are more successful in many areas. When your company started, what was its vision, what was its purpose?

AlixPartners has worked with clients around the world for more than forty years, helping businesses respond to challenges when everything is on the line — from urgent performance improvement to complex restructuring, from risk mitigation to accelerated transformation. Our purpose is to enable decisive, informed, and often urgent action, when it really matters.

We measure our success in real terms — by the results we deliver, not just the advice we give. We work shoulder to shoulder with our clients to ensure the work we do is completely integrated with their vision, culture and formula for success. We don’t make recommendations and walk away — we stick around until the job is done, and are accountable for a practical, sustainable outcome designed not just to help our clients succeed today, but to leave them ready to build on that success in the future.

Which technological innovation has encroached or disrupted your industry? Can you explain why this has been disruptive?

Rather than a single technology, it has been a consistent and ever-accelerating parade of innovations. The common theme across these innovations, going back to the early-1990s, is that technology has moved from the periphery of the business to being critical to competitiveness and sustained profitable growth. As a result, the focus has shifted from optimizing technology costs and managing reliable services, to harnessing technology innovation to create new business models, develop better products, understand customers better and improve how customers experience our brands. An equally important trend is the need for collaboration between various technologies and between different companies in different industries to provide superior capabilities to our customers.

Being able to apply innovation to new business models and new ways of engaging customers, while at the same time creating collaborative ecosystems that can effectively mobilize these new capabilities, is what is driving disruption and determining which businesses stay relevant.

What did you do to pivot as a result of this disruption?

This is where my previous meandering and taking things as they come was turned on its head. In mid-2012, I made a deliberate decision to focus my career on defining new ways for companies and governments to understand and harness technology disruption. At that time, I was part of the Sourcing practice at Gartner, which focused on traditional IT outsourcing and offshoring strategy, contracting and execution. I worked with my team, especially a trusted colleague Rehan Qureshi (who has since gone on to leadership roles at AWS, Google and Confluent), to shift the focus on our work away from traditional sourcing topics, and into helping clients define strategies to transform their business based on new technologies.

At the start, it was something as simple as building in infrastructure and application modernization into the overall services strategy, which sounds quaint today but was radical ten years go. That evolved to working with clients to reimagine their business operations and identifying new business and technology capabilities, along with the services relationships, that would deliver the desired business outcomes. In two years, by the time I left Gartner, the vast majority of our work was related to what we now call digital transformation strategy and enablement. The rest of my career since then has continued this journey to embed technology innovation at the core of business strategy.

Was there a specific “Aha moment” that gave you the idea to start this new path? If yes, we’d love to hear the story.

There is a very distinct 2-hour period that marked the inflection point in my journey. I was invited by Nikhil Zaveri, who was responsible for Wipro’s Analyst Relations with Gartner, to deliver a keynote and judge a competition at the Sales leadership meeting of Wipro in March 2012. This visit also included meetings with a few of their executives and their growth strategies and a meet and greet with their CEO TK Kurien. It turns out that TK and I are alumni of the same college in Delhi and had similar runs-in with authority figures as undergraduates. What was supposed to be a cursory 15-minute meeting turned into a 2-hour free flowing discussion.

At some point, still being stuck in my traditional IT services mindset, I asked, “so Wipro plans on succeeding by standardizing and automating the 70% of business processes that it can”, and TK looked at me and said matter-of-factly, “no, I am interested in differentiating on the 30% that cannot be standardized”. That led to a us scribbling down on napkins what it meant to ‘differentiate on the 30%’, including how business value is created, how technology companies can make high-margin revenues, how revenue models need to move from people to products, and how effective innovation requires a collaborative partnership with each partner having strategic and financial incentives aligned to the same set of business metrics. I walked out of that meeting as if I had a spiritual experience, with an almost missionary zeal to manifest the ideas we had discussed and scribbled down.

So, how are things going with this new direction?

In the truest meaning of the Chinese proverb, I have lived in interesting times! At one level, the progress over the last decade in driving technology innovation has been faster and more impactful than I could have imagined. Some of the concepts discussed at the meeting with TK have been formalized and even trademarked, and applied to large clients to help with complex strategy and transformation initiatives. The biggest progress has been in moving from technology being applied as an enabler of business processes to technology being seen as the driver of new business models and new ways of doing business.

The best part of the last decade has been the ability to work both in management consulting firms and a very large technology company, and advise both creators and users of technology innovation on their growth and transformation journeys. Of course, this progress has been as much because of supporting environments as despite pushback and challenges; addressing the latter has been equal parts exhilarating and exhausting.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started this pivot?

Finally, we can talk about the very senior people from very large technology companies who wanted to get me out of the way! Each of these was related to me advising clients on growth strategy based on leveraging technology innovation, and large technology companies and some of their leaders being unable or unwilling to change time-worn ways of doing business that had led to success in the last two to three decades. One leader went to the trouble of writing a letter to the CEO of my client outlining not only that they were not going to compete for the business but that the partnership was so poorly structured that no technology company would do business with the company. The second leader complained to a Partner in my firm that I was giving clients bad advice that was contrary to consulting templates (developed in 2008!), which I found out about after I was inadvertently copied on an email escalation to the CEO (note to anyone driving disruptive change: legacy managers love escalations!). The third leader accused me and my firm of colluding with a competitor to disadvantage his firm, as the competitor was about to enter the partnership with my client.

The lesson from these experiences is that despite the pace of change, there are enough people in the technology industry who are reluctant to change and focused on perpetuating old ways of doing things that they are comfortable with. The heavy-handed tactics come not from a position of strength, but rather fear, since they know that their knowledge and skill set no longer are in demand outside their current firm. With this realization, I have learned to be less worried and carry on, focusing on defining tangible business value and aligning with leaders who are committed to change.

What would you say is the most critical role of a leader during a disruptive period?

Articulating a vision of the desired future state, defining the principles that will guide the journey to that future state, identifying the key strategic or operational pivots that will be necessary, and giving people a clear view into how this journey impacts and benefits them. Ok, that is four roles, but in the spirit of complex run on sentences that work better on the other side of the Atlantic, can we agree to call this one concept?

When the future seems so uncertain, what is the best way to boost morale? What can a leader do to inspire, motivate and engage their team?

Leaders need to go beyond clear articulation of the vision, tangible steps and benefits mentioned earlier, to purposefully create opportunities for people, and provide people with the resources and an environment where they can benefit from these opportunities. People who benefit from this process early will become the champions of change and infuse the rest the organization with enthusiasm for change.

At the same time, there will be people who are impacted negatively by change, who have trouble adapting new business models, operating models, processes, technologies or culture. It is critical to treat these people with respect and ensure that they are provided opportunities for learning new skills or taking on new roles.

Leaders also need to be cognizant of the fact that every disruptive change will have its naysayers, who will try and slow down or stop the change. Now, this may sound controversial, but sometimes the best way to address this dynamic is a deliberate, planned and well-explained separation, especially for executives or other senior leaders who are visibly impeding process. This should not be taken lightly, but I have never seen a company go through disruptive change without at least one executive parting ways for this reason.

Is there a “number one principle” that can help guide a company through the ups and downs of turbulent times?

Focus on the north star of the desired future state, what the business looks like when this future state is achieved, and what benefits that provides for all stakeholders.

Can you share 3 or 4 of the most common mistakes you have seen other businesses make when faced with a disruptive technology? What should one keep in mind to avoid that?

The most common mistake made by businesses and leaders, including the three instances of leaders trying to stop change mentioned above, is believing that they have the ability to stop or slow down the impacts of technology innovation on their business. A related mistake is assuming that if they slow things down for long enough, the innovation will pass them by, thus taking a “this too shall pass” approach. The reality is that pace of technology change, the permeation of technology trends into the public consciousness, the impact of technology on business capabilities, and increasing competitive pressure from both traditional competitors and new business models, make this approach untenable and a recipe for failure.

A related mistake is businesses and leaders trying to apply traditional planning and execution approaches to disruptive change. For example, traditional technology initiatives executed by corporate IT departments are capital intensive, have long planning and budgeting cycles, focus on improving current processes, and take 24–36 months from start to end. This approach makes no sense in a world where technologies especially related to data, communications, experience and commerce have lifecycles of less than a year, where competition is using disruptive technologies to reimagine their businesses, and where customers expect new features and enhancements to be rapid and seamless. We are seeing a shift towards decentralized innovation planning, zero-cost gain-and-risk share partnership models and rapid release cycles that address these challenges. However, even today, this outdated thinking is the number one contributor to initiative failure, which experience shows us has been the historical outcome for two out of every three technology initiatives.

Another major mistake is focusing on technology innovation for the sake of innovation, without a clear definition of how any of this impacts the business. We see examples of companies investing in marketing automation or commerce portals or customer platforms or dynamic offers, with little consideration of how these will serve customers better or impact internal operations. Worse, businesses fall into the trap of following the herd and investing in the hype of purportedly breakthrough technologies, almost out of FOMO. Large companies have invested in blockchain, artificial intelligence and the metaverse, without a clear understanding of the concepts or a clear view into how these technologies can serve business needs. Worst of all, following the hype leads to companies ignoring immediate and tangible business benefits possible from more pedestrian approaches such decentralized data, real-time data operations, augmented reality and decisions at the edge. First mover advantage works only if the first move leads to an advantage.

Ok. Thank you. Here is the primary question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things a business leader should do to pivot and stay relevant in the face of disruptive technologies? Please share a story or an example for each.

I suppose that is a subtle message to me to stop talking in long sentences! Since you asked, here are five things, in a structured list:

Acknowledge and internalize that what got you here will not get you there. We need to rethink our mission, our business objectives, our customers, our partnerships and how we create value. This was a key learning from a large airport client of mine, that had historically been led by construction and government leaders, with a focus on capital projects and funding arrangements. Not surprisingly, they were the worst rated airport in their region in 2003, with the distinct ignominy of running out of deicing fluid towards the end of a northern winter. Their technology relationships were also based on turn-of-the-century models of technology being the back office. New executive leadership team that included outsiders from a range of consumer-focused industries reimagined the airport’s purpose as a preferred destination for passengers, a hub of commerce, a community for workers and a catalyst for regional growth. They worked closely with technology companies to define and implement innovations in airport operations, customer experience and transport connectivity. The airport was the best rated airport in North America in 2016–2019 as a result of these innovations.
Understand where your customers are going to be, and meet them there. Our customers are rapidly evolving in terms of priorities and desires, and we need to anticipate these changes and build organizations that are able to look 2–3 years into the future. Perhaps an example of a company that failed to evolve with their clients will illustrate this point. We were consulting a consumer goods company that is home to some of the most iconic brands but was suffering from low growth and declining margins. Their products, distribution channels and marketing were no longer in line with their customers’ needs or behaviors. Customers were moving rapidly to gaming and immersive experiences and away from physical products, purchasing online direct from the creators instead of from retailers, and relying on messaging and amplification across social media instead of traditional media. One of the responses to this was to create a television reality show on a legacy big 3 channel, with no social media plan for amplification, where people competed to create new physical products, that would be sold exclusively through a retailer, … that had already declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Talk about missing the memo!
Understand how technology changes what you produce and deliver. While companies are becoming more adept at adopting innovation to improve business operations, the reality is that every company is today a technology company. The best example of this are the large automotive, industrial equipment and industrial automation companies, that are moving from selling physical assets to selling connected and automated services, whether these avionics platforms for aerospace companies, autonomous warehouse operations, predictive maintenance as a service based on committed asset uptime, enhanced in-vehicle experience or automated building condition and environment management. Equally importantly, the commercial relationships with customers are changing from large one-time capital purchases to ongoing revenues for the use of product and platforms. These companies see themselves as software companies first, and are working to define products, offerings, go-to-market approaches, and customer engagement across the lifecycle. This pivot has impacts not only on high-margin growth and competitive differentiation, but also on the valuation of these companies.
Create an organization that is part of the broader innovation ecosystem. This was a lesson I learned relatively, as most of my work had been with large consulting firms that can tend to be insular. In the spring of 2014, I was invited to speak at a technology conference by Robert Brennan Hart, the founder of the Canadian Cloud Council recognized by the United Nations as a Top 70 Global Digital Leader. This event included leaders from government, large corporations, technology companies and civic society, and the potential for collaboration and exponential impact was almost immediately obvious. My previous firm NTT DATA is perhaps the best example in the world of mastering this ecosystem, being a provider of breakthrough technologies, investing $3.6bn a year in innovation, investing in early-stage companies through a venture fund, and working with clients in strategic partnerships to develop and commercialize disruptive solutions. Evidence of this approach can be seen in co-investment partnerships with energy companies for operations improvement and carbon reduction, applying artificial intelligence and robotics to improve medical care delivery, and collaboration with large automotive companies on autonomous, connected and electric vehicle development.
Ensure that disruption creates benefits beyond corporate results. Disruption and transformation have been associated incredible wealth and progress for a few, and lob loss, displacement and impoverishment for the many. We have seen this in repeated innovation cycles since the 1980s, including the ongoing reset in technology firms. This dynamic has led to America losing 95% of manufacturing jobs since 1970, the increasing disparity income and wealth, and record-low levels of institutional trust. At AlixPartners, we are purposefully building considerations for social impact explicitly into the planning and execution of disruptive change. This needs to go beyond traditional outplacement support and focus on quantifying the negative social impacts of disruption, defining plans to mitigate these impacts, factoring these social costs into the business case for change. I am afraid that we are at a tipping point where large sections of our society irreparably lose faith in corporate and government leaders, and no one wants to live through what follows.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

My favorite quote, which is also tattooed on my right arm, is from the Bhagwad Gita and says in Sanskrit “karmanye vadhikaraste ma faleshu kadachana”, which translates roughly to “you have a right to perform actions, but not to the fruit of those actions”. These words were uttered by Lord Krishna in the context of advising Arjuna on his duties to wage war against evil, even if that meant fighting his own family.

In my life as I drive change and disruption, I interpret these to mean that I have an obligation to do what is right, without being too vested in the results or worrying about negative personal consequences. For the last part, I also take comfort from Psalms 23:4, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me”.

How can our readers further follow your work?

I post on this topic frequently on LinkedIn, and readers can check my profile at https://www.linkedin.com/in/edwardsmythe/.

In addition to my role at AlixPartners (www.alixpartners.com), I am also the Head of Research at TechPACT, an organization founded by technology leaders with a mission to reduce the digital divide and pursue representative diversity throughout the technology community by the end of the decade. The published research can be accessed at www.techpact.org.

I also contribute regularly to C-Suite Quarterly (CSQ) magazine, and my articles can be accessed at https://csq.com/profile/edward-c-wilson-smythe.

Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!

Agile Businesses: Edward Wilson-Smythe Of AlixPartners On How Businesses Pivot and Stay Relevant In… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Makers of The Metaverse: Joseph Crossley On The Future Of The VR, AR & Mixed Reality Industries

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Mistakes in my world generally are not funny at all, they are disasters. Horror stories!

Joe’s work has been synonymous throughout the past decade with creative and technical advancements.

As the Technical Creative Director for DCentralize, Joe not only brings a dynamic creative vision needed for an event of this kind but also a plethora of technical IP, yet to be seen in the public event space. Technically, his work in the use of advanced media techniques has seen multiple accolades, including being featured as a TEDx speaker on this very subject.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit. Can you tell us a bit about your backstory and how you grew up?

I grew up in North Wales in the middle of the deep countryside, I got a scholarship to my school Rydal with music and my parents were horticulturists.

In 2004 after leaving school at 24 I set up a production company in Chamonix, France to fuel my love of surfing and snowboarding and to promote music concerts. Through this I found projection mapping and immersive experience.

I met my wife and moved to Australia where I founded Astral Projekt, a company focused on making media immersive in 2012.

This led me to discover the early stages of augmented reality either via projection of other forms, and took this in an academic route with the Universities of Sydney and NSW and the (now) worlds largest immersive media festival Vivid Sydney.

Is there a particular book, film, or podcast that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

Ahh there’s so many — Nassim Harramein at the age of 15 really changed my perception of state and reality and triggered a lifelong exploration of science and metaphysics. You can probably tell from the name of my company Astral Projekt what we were looking for in our work and effect.

I would say the most impact came from my peers in this world, initially Ben and Will from RFID really opened my mind to the possibilities of immersive media, Peter Walker (Vj Astrix.) Then the festival VIVID Sydney and Iggy Jones gave me licence to express this along with the likes of Samsung and Intel fostering new ideas through their respective creative channels.

‘The Cosmic Trigger’ by Robert Anton Wilson was a book a friend of mine, Hanna May, gave me which really set the position of understanding a holographic reality state and what that means for innovation in MetaV platforms. Many other titles included, along with writings of Nicola Tesla or Timothy Leary opened me up to visualisation. If anything this is my superpower and it was so native to me, it was like finding instructions to fly a jet, but I knew already. It’s been a long journey filled with influence.

Is there a particular story that inspired you to pursue a career in the X Reality industry? We’d love to hear it.

For me the human senses of data input into our brains are so interesting. We filter out masses just to make sense of it all. The eyes and the ears provide much of the conscious bandwidth for absorbing information. In 2008 as a DJ at a show I was playing I realised that we are only getting one half of the art that could be expressed. So I switched focus to the eyes, by far the highest bandwidth data entry tool for our minds.

There is a story I would like to share, it is one from Burning Man.

In 2017 Andrew Johnstone had found me and commissioned me to develop an artwork for.

“The Man“ at Burning Man 2018. A great honor and a whole other story of how this came about.

The Piece I designed was called “I AM AI — a declaration of benevolent co-existence.”

I created a circular projection wall inside the man base, it’s the middle that gets set on fire if you don’t know, and the idea was an AI system would show you alternative landscapes and real time 3D Engine graphics based on the people walking in there. A living AI system, augmenting the landscape of Burning Man offering a different perspective of the virtual world, the theme was I-Robot and held narratives of our future AI brothers and sisters and potentialities this created.

Inside each image, media file, audio file we implanted metadata which would be searchable by any future AI looking back for the origins of itself. It was 2018 and the first google AI systems were coming online.

The implanted metadata file states as a redacted Human rights document, the fundamental principles of humanity and their need for benevolent co-existence to exist, so culture and society can emerge.

The idea was that future AI at the point of singularity would find an event, a circle of 80k people, ceremonially burning an effigy of a man, which contained an invisible AI message to it — the AI, and it only. Humans can’t read metadata without a computer. The document states what it is to be human and the aspects of benevolent co-existence as a program file, and upload which would intern formulate the origins of itself.

Larry Harvey sadly passed away during this, and we opened the creative to burners from around the world. I AM AI was one of the last things Larry and Andrew touched at Burning Man and the rest is history.

This moment allowed me to understand that creation and visioning in innovation are the vectors for an expanded reality state. Unlimited possibilities can take place in those moments. The depth data can flow and the states your mind expands to in understanding it are unparalleled.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began this fascinating career?

Ha ha — I seem to be answering the questions before they get asked, ha ha.

I would suppose this is the most interesting question as it’s fundamental to my business.

Ok let’s get out there for a moment. My experience in Astral Projection and manifestation has led me to realise that ideas are like mail, or gifts from another place. From today I have completed 521 projects where the idea has come before the commission.

I have an idea and it’s clear and detailed, I write it down, illustrate it, make it into a 3d game, and then the phone rings or an email comes, and the person is requesting just that thing that I have been working on.

That’s the most interesting thing that still I can’t work out.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

Mistakes in my world generally are not funny at all, they are disasters. Horror stories!

I was once on an unnamed project where we were constructing a huge industrial installation, and projection mapping it for a ride, a roller coaster.

The company running the engineering had a new smart system for hosting the files, for the metalwork which in-tern the fabricators and metalworkers were using to build from.

We were animating media in LA and Sydney for this structure also as well and some very intense positional tracking for the warp and distortion of the media. Each render was 8K res so it was a big computational grind.

The new system got the plan dates wrong, and the engineers in turn got the structure wrong, the entire build was incorrect, just based on the simplest file storing system. It wasn’t our issue (thank god) but it caused us massive issues in correcting the immersive media, and when renders take days back then it was super hardcore.

I learned back then that simple is always best in critical situations, tech can and does sometimes make life harder. It certainly did on that project.

Iggy Jones — a Sydney pop star creative director took me on as a visionary, he gave me carte blanche to create and ideate and it was one of the most informative moments in my life.

He asked me to design an immersive media project for the University of Sydney, with an indigenous group from the area. This was one of the hardest things to approach in Australia as this building was built on sacred land and was a place they despised.

We created a story blessing called “Our Hands — Wingara Mura — Path to the future” blessing the building with traditional techniquest through projections.

When I saw their tears it was a really powerful moment and it made me realise what augmented media can do for perception of reality.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

It’s been a random past few months exploring the peripheries of new project ideas.

Just finished an amazing music project with a Spanish flamenco family and members of the Rolling Stones band and Tim Reice with Pino Saggliocco in New York.

It was part of the MTV VMAS in this incredible cathedral St. John the Divines. Looking at how music passes through cultures and generations. It was a huge success and the emotion was palpable, sometimes the simplest things are the most appealing.

We have been an early stage tech startup working on metaverse based tooling and aps with some amazing people, looking at human health, consumer metaverse creation, and real time AI driven media from body systems Astrl.io.

One of my favourite projects at the moment is working on how immersive media can change perception. We are heading to the great Pyramids of Giza in Egypt to enter the king’s chamber to study this.

Then there is of course Decentralize festival in the UK, and music festival operating in both real life and in the metaverse. It’s a decentralized music festival model that will redefine what it means to be part of a global music community. Dcentralize.io — This project will give ownership to the people who love live music and web3 and redefine the way festival brands approach their communities. It’s owned by the people.

What are the things that concern you about the VR, AR and MR industries? Can you explain? What can be done to address those concerns?

Detached reality in its many forms has to be a front and centre conversation. Instagram and facebook alongside others has shown how reality is generally false when passed through the ego brain. The Chinese whispers essentially create false perceptions and then AR Face aps deliver these false perceptions. Distorted sense of self and body dysmorphia are real things for millennials who have grown up with this tech.

It must be the main focus of developers to ensure people don’t get lost in alternative realities.

I think the entertainment aspects of VR, AR and MR are apparent. Can you share with our readers how these industries can help us at work?

Yes we are working with Passage3D and HQinSpace on just that. Flowstate communication systems with clearance levels for data protection allow people to work from anywhere but still be contactable via a virtual tap on the shoulder.

Working in 3D in real time is a trip, designing buildings are tools collaboratively with people around the world is amazing. We will see this becoming a main part of how we interact online either socially or at work.

Are there other ways that VR, AR and MR can improve our lives? Can you explain?

Mental health and wellbeing over AR, watch this space its coming via Astrl.io

Blockchain community voting — kind of how we use DAOS but for everyday, solving homelesses to food sharing, to social community gathering. I want to see this, kind of line the notice board for your area, it can make the people the council and decentralized power.

Many many many — Just incase I would choose

I think for manufacturing and sheer balls of ideas it would have to be Elon Musk.

For Physics and surfing it would be Nassim Harramein.

For Art it would be James Turrel in his crater in New Mexico.

For music it would be Hanz Zimmer.

For leadership and future planning it would be Tim Cooke of Apple & Tim Sweeney of Epic both together on a Burning Man Art Car deep playa.

For Design and Architecture it’s always Zaha Hadid but she is sadly no longer with us. A lunch with her team would be amazing to discuss the fusion of media art and architectural design.

Thank you so much for these excellent stories and insights. We wish you continued success in your great work!

Thank you for having me.

Makers of The Metaverse: Joseph Crossley On The Future Of The VR, AR & Mixed Reality Industries was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Future Is Now: Ben Smith Of DivideBuy On How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake Up The…

The Future Is Now: Ben Smith Of DivideBuy On How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake Up The Tech Scene

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

It’s great to have a vision, to know that down the line you want to have a big house or lots of money or a fast car. I wanted all these things too. When I started my career as a chef, I wanted to become world-famous, travel the world, make crazy amounts of money and have my face on a jar of sauce on every shelf in Sainsbury’s. But if you ask me: what do I want now? I want to take my family to Disney World next year. I want to take my daughter swimming at the weekend. Down the line, the little things in life will become very, very important — so don’t disregard them.

As a part of our series about cutting-edge technological breakthroughs, I had the pleasure of interviewing Ben Smith.

Ben is Head of Partnerships for DivideBuy, where he builds strategic partnerships that drive DivideBuy’s Instalments-as-a-Service strategy, through ethical and affordable lending for partners. Ben has 14 years’ experience in the payments sector, having previously held roles as Strategic Partnerships Director at Worldpay and Leader of Sales Engineering at Worldpay.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

It’s been a long and winding road. Throughout school, all I ever wanted was to be a chef. It was my only dream in life. So, I left school and went to work full time in the industry when I turned 18.

It was great, right up to the point where I had to do the job full time. As an 18-year-old, regularly starting my shift at the same time as my friends were coming home from work was not how I wanted to live. I realised that being a chef was not for me. I still retain my love of cooking, which my wife and daughter are delighted about.

Around that time, I was also exploring another passion of mine: computers. Growing up in the early 90s, the internet was recently established, so it was a very interesting time to be involved with the technology. When I realised this passion could also become a career, I retrained as an IT Engineer.

A few years later, I was working as an IT manager when I realised that the money wasn’t in building and maintaining the IT systems: it was in selling the computer equipment. I took a segway into sales, which led me into a network communications sales role within a company called Transaction Network Services. This company moved payments around the world, essentially connecting merchants to payment processing services and to the big global payments network.

This experience was my first foray into the world of payments. After a happy five years at Transaction Network Services, I moved to a company called YESpay, which was quickly acquired by WorldPay. I spent seven years there, helping build out the proposition for an omni-channel payment gateway, developing integration partnerships and managing a team. That leads me to where I am today: building partnerships in the fintech space and working with like-minded organisations to bring products together to create great solutions.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

Back when I worked as an IT engineer, I was employed by a firm of chartered surveyors within the insolvency sector. They sold businesses or assets of businesses that were in trouble or in administration.

On Christmas Eve, I was asked to go and value the IT infrastructure of a large business that was due to be sold. After arriving and making a list of all the IT equipment present so that I could start making valuations, I received a call from one of the company partners. They told me that the bank had decided that the business would go into administration, meaning every member of staff was being laid off — yes, on Christmas Eve. Given that none of the partners were anywhere near the office, they had to have a conversation with the whole business over the phone to let them know the sad news. I then had the difficult job of making sure that all the company’s property was left on site and things like company cars and keys were returned. It was a very difficult experience.

The experience taught me some very important things. One: that life changes very quickly, and Two: that the biggest skill you can have in your arsenal in terms of facing the world is empathy. If you can’t empathise with what’s going on in a situation, it will be very difficult for you to build partnerships or be successful in any kind of relationship management.

Even now, when I am in a difficult situation, I come back to that moment and remember that, while what I am experiencing may not be great, it could always be worse. I could be back there doing that. I will never forget the feeling of having to tell people that had worked at the company for 20 or 30 years that after Christmas, there would be no company for them to go back to.

Can you tell us about the cutting-edge technological breakthroughs that you are working on? How do you think that will help people?

At DivideBuy, there are always interesting things happening. The consumer finance industry has exploded over the last few years. It’s a fascinating area to be involved with and an exciting time for the sector. But the technology supporting this growth had been lagging behind, so the DivideBuy team took it upon themselves to bring technology solutions into the space. Having built our own platform from the ground up, we were the ideal people to do this.

DivideBuy is now in a position to evolve. We want to put responsibility and ethical behaviour at the heart of our product development. As a company that is focused on lending money to people, we know it is incredibly important that we make great decisions ourselves.

In fact, our CEO, Robert Flowers, told me a story on my first day at the company that really stuck with me. He said there are only ever really two reasons why people default on repayments when engaging with consumer finance. One: they have a life changing event that they didn’t see coming and we didn’t see coming, but which has impacted them to the point where they can’t make a repayment. Two: that we have made a poor lending decision. DivideBuy is all about building services and solutions that enable us to make good lending decisions.

In terms of the new solutions that we’re putting out into the market, the idea of Instalments as a Service, and making our platform available for others to adopt, is a relatively new proposition for the business — and one that we’re very excited about. We’re going to provide a solution that can be integrated with our partner’s platforms to provide their customers with alternative ways to pay and a seamless checkout journey. There will be more news on this over the coming weeks and months, so watch this space!

Longer term, taking our core proposition as a business and finding different routes into existing and new markets is a priority. There will be challenges, but there will be many benefits as well and we look forward to sharing more on this in due course.

How do you think this might change the world?

I wonder how many people who have set out to change the world actually accomplish it? I would argue that in comparison, those who set out to do something with less grandiose ambitions can end up changing the world because they’re able to focus better on what they do and why.

DivideBuy’s aims as a company are comparatively modest. I’ve already mentioned the importance of putting responsibility at the heart of what we do and in being ethical lenders, with regulation coming soon to help make this formalised across the industry — something which we are hugely supportive of. We also want to grow our services in the market by exploring different channels and bringing ethical behaviour to the wider consumer finance industry. Ideally, we will inspire other companies to adopt a very similar approach to ours.

That is what we focus on, and what we think will create positive change. We may not transform the world, but if we succeed, it will be a good day at the office.

Keeping “Black Mirror” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks of this technology that people should think more deeply about?

Every year, the consumer finance industry finds new ways to make credit easier to access for more people. While it should be easy to access for everyone who needs it, it’s important that it is accessed responsibly.

I believe this responsibility is shared between the lender and the consumer. You’ve heard me mention that making good lending decisions is at the heart of what DivideBuy does every day. But flipping that around, I would also always advise consumers to make informed borrowing decisions. There has to be a shared responsibility.

Was there a “tipping point” that led you to this breakthrough? Can you tell us that story?

Our operational model has always been focused on providing retailers and merchants with consumer finance solutions. Now, we’re exploring different channels and ways of taking our service out to customers. One of the reasons, I was brought into the business is because this indirect route is not only a viable solution for us, but a huge opportunity as well. My job is to find like-minded partners that we can work with to deliver this solution, but also enhance it. We want partners who can help us to add layers of value to different services and build solutions that can become something much bigger than the sum of its parts.

So, for want of a better phrase, DivideBuy’s story is an ongoing story. With a lot of change going on in the market, developing our technology and our business is a marathon rather than a sprint.

The future of this business is going to be how we evolve and stay relevant over time, while keeping our core values of responsibility and ethical behaviour at the heart of what we do and never losing sight of that.

What do you need to lead this technology to widespread adoption?

We don’t want lots of partners. We want the right partners for us and our business. We want to work with people that share our values and are on the same kind of journey as us. We’re incredibly proud of what we have built so far, so it is of great importance that we continue to work with people and companies who feel the same way about where the market needs to be.

For us, it doesn’t matter if it’s a huge high street retailer that wants to take our platform and present it as their own consumer financing solution, or a payment gateway that wants to partner to develop technological solutions together. Our philosophies and visions need to align.

What have you been doing to publicize this idea? Have you been using any innovative marketing strategies?

DivideBuy has been putting plans together to further scale the business, which we’ve started to do under the direction of our outstanding Head of Marketing, Scott Winstanley. He is honestly one of the most switched-on people I’ve ever met, and it’s fantastic to be able to work with him.

As a team, we’ve got some really exciting ideas about how we can bring our new propositions to market and grow in a sustainable way — with key events and social media activity in the pipeline as well as my ongoing focus on securing new partners for the company.

In a nutshell, watch this space.

During my time at Transaction Network Services, I worked for a man called Andy Slaughter, who now works at Mastercard. He is one of the nicest people you could ever meet and work with — apart from being an Arsenal fan, but we can forgive him for that!

Andy recruited me very early in my career when I knew very little about the payments industry. Andy has one of the best analytical minds I’ve ever come across, and he used this in his management style to question his team about the things they were doing and working on. At the beginning, as a young salesperson, I was sure that I knew everything and that there was nothing that I could be taught. So, his approach would really frustrate me, as he would continually ask me questions when I was presenting him with an opportunity: “Have you thought about this? What about the next one?”

At first, I thought he was questioning my ability to do my job well. But I soon realised that he was helping me to think differently about the things that I had done, so that I could establish for myself what has worked well and what could have been done differently. Andy got me to a point where I could analyse what I was doing, really start to think about my actions and be autonomous in my work.

To this day, my work is guided by this approach. Ultimately, what he taught me was pragmatism — which is an incredibly difficult thing to teach anybody if you’ve ever tried to do it, but he did. Andy used to refer to me as the Wayne Rooney of the sales team, as I was always running around at a million miles an hour with the danger of getting sent off. But he coached me to a point where I could channel some of that energy into productive activities.

I will always be grateful to Andy, because without him I could still be a very angry salesman with no focus or direction. He taught me a lot of very important skills that have since guided my career.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

In 2019, I joined Slimming World. And then in early 2020, the pandemic hit, and lockdown ensued across the country.

Everybody was terrified. No one really knew what was going on. And in the first lockdown, there was also a big and negative impact on food availability. Everybody was either dependent on queuing up to enter the supermarket, or ordering what they could from a delivery service. This meant that people ended up with some really eclectic ingredients.

Given my background as a chef, I saw this as an opportunity, and started to stream what I called ‘Cook-Alongs’ on our shared group channel. As a team, we looked at how to make something healthy to eat out of the ingredients that we had, so that we didn’t need to consistently return to the bag of frozen chips.

We certainly made some interesting dishes, but the biggest result was that it bought the community back together. As a group of people that used to meet in person on a weekly, if not daily, basis, it made a huge difference to be able to come together and interact as a group again.

Together, we were able to work towards adopting a healthy lifestyle, while keeping ourselves connected and morale high. On a personal note: this experience also gave me something to focus on during that difficult time. Most importantly, we got to try some new and amazing food, with some recipes that we will never mention again!

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?

Not only is it okay to fail — it’s incredibly important to fail.

When I first started out in the industry, I didn’t know anything about payments. I resigned myself to ‘fake it till I made it’. This meant I ended up in some very embarrassing situations where I pretended that I knew more than I did, and it backfired. Failing in this way teaches you that it’s okay not to know everything, which is especially important for young people in sales. I strongly believe that the best thing that can happen to you early on in your career is to fail, especially when there’s consequences attached, because you won’t do it again. Most importantly, don’t let a fear of failure inhibit what you try and do. There is an upside to failure, and as long as you can take the learning on board, it can be an incredibly beneficial gift to you.

2. People don’t buy what you do. They buy why you do it.

Using the example of Apple: sure, they make great computers, but that’s not why they do what they do. I’m sure most of us remember the “Think Different” campaign. I can think back to several situations when I have wasted time in sales pitches, talking about specific features and benefits, thinking that I will absolutely wow someone into placing an order, when in reality they rarely do. Business synergies happen when someone buys into your dream: do you believe in what they’re doing and why they’re doing it? You’ve already heard me mention responsible lending and ethical behaviour, and for me, this is why DivideBuy does what it does. We also have great consumer financing solutions for merchants, and we have indirect channels available for partners, but why we do it is the most important element of the business.

3. You don’t know what your future self wants.

At the start of my career, being a chef was all I wanted to be. But now, I wouldn’t change where I am for anything in the world. I never thought I’d be involved in the fintech and payments industry, but this wasn’t really an industry when I was growing up. However, t has since grown around me as my career has progressed. With every new generation that comes into the world of work, this development will happen again and again, so don’t be closed to it. Don’t get me wrong: it’s great to have a vision about where you want to be. My point is: don’t be blinkered to change and to new opportunities that arise, because you never know where you’ll end up.

4. The little things in life are more important than you think.

It’s great to have a vision, to know that down the line you want to have a big house or lots of money or a fast car. I wanted all these things too. When I started my career as a chef, I wanted to become world-famous, travel the world, make crazy amounts of money and have my face on a jar of sauce on every shelf in Sainsbury’s. But if you ask me: what do I want now? I want to take my family to Disney World next year. I want to take my daughter swimming at the weekend. Down the line, the little things in life will become very, very important — so don’t disregard them.

5. If you can’t change the situation, change your attitude.

We’ve all had tough times in our careers and been in situations where things don’t necessarily go the way that you want them to. In these moments, people often waste their time dreaming that they can control things that they can’t. If you can instead recognise the times when you can’t change things, you can establish exactly what actions you can take yourself to better the situation you are in. You have a responsibility to change your activities and get yourself to a point where you’re comfortable doing what you’re doing. Don’t spend time thinking that things are going to change or correct themselves — be the change you want to see in the world.

I would love to create something called the ‘Take a Breath’ movement.

From social media to the news agenda, we live in a world of immediacy, where everything encourages us to act now and think later. People rarely have the chance to take a breath anymore, to stop and think about the things happening in the world and what it means for the individual and their community.

So, the ‘Take a Breath’ movement would involve ideas like having zen gardens on every street corner, where you could walk in and sit for five minutes and be at peace with yourself. This would give everyone the chance to have those moments in life when they can think about what it is they want, and what the ramifications of those actions might be.

I genuinely believe that this attitude would make the world a better place. There are a lot of things that happen in the world that aren’t intended. Usually, people just don’t think things through to the point where they understand what the likely outcomes are of their actions. So, the ‘Take a Breath’ movement would go a long way to solve this problem. Get your t-shirts here!

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

There are several quotes that I could share, and they all come from Douglas Adams and his books, like ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ and Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. His books are an absolute goldmine of great quotes that have all been life lessons to me.

My favourite quote, which relates to the development of any kind of solution, service or partnership that you want to put into the world, is: “a common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely fool-proof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”

I couldn’t tell you the amount of meetings that I’ve joined over the years with product teams who will come up with a solution and claim that it is so simple, it will just work. Inevitably, the whole idea comes crashing down before we can even get to alpha testing, because someone has pressed a button that they shouldn’t have pressed, or because they didn’t think that that we shouldn’t do that thing that was bound to be a problem. In my experience, designing things most often goes wrong when everyone has been more fixated on the design element rather than the usability element.

Another quote from Douglas Adams that has stayed with me is: “human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.”

This quote is evidently true. You see people all the time who say, ‘I know it’s never worked out before, but I’m sure I can do it that right this time’. People too often fail to learn from past mistakes and instead tell themselves: ‘everyone’s telling me this is going to be a disaster, but I know I’m right’.

The final Douglas Adams life lesson quote that I want to share is: “he attacked everything in life with a mixture of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.”

In our dark and morbid moments, we all have a tendency to think about how we will be remembered when we’re no longer around. This quote inspires me because it is what I want to leave behind. For me, if this quote was something that people could say about me, I would know I have had a life well lived and had got some things right. It would also mean that people hadn’t realised that I was making it up as I was going along!

Some very well-known VCs read this column. If you had 60 seconds to make a pitch to a VC, what would you say? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂

We’re fine, thanks!

In all seriousness, DivideBuy has some fabulous investors on board who have allowed us to build the company and hire some really great people into the business. We’ve got a strong strategy for where we want to take the business and a team of people who are committed to making it happen.

From that perspective, we’re in a very strong position as a company. While you can never have enough investors, I believe that people will naturally become interested in us the more they see us be successful as a business.

As with all these things, however, we’re always open to conversations.

How can our readers follow you on social media?

I tend to use LinkedIn more than anything else, so please feel free to follow my page there at www.linkedin.com/in/bensmith77. You’ll hopefully see a mixture of genius and incredibly naive comments to keep you entertained throughout the day.

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.

The Future Is Now: Ben Smith Of DivideBuy On How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake Up The… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Bronwyn Smith: 5 Things You Need To Know To Survive And Thrive After A Divorce

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Allow yourself to go through the emotional stages of divorce but take care not to get stuck in any one of them. Sometimes you may have to force yourself to move to the next stage. One client was stuck in the grief stage. She had to force herself to move to the sex stage or healing stage in order to thrive. During this process be kind to yourself. Do things that make you happy, that make you feel confident, that make you feel special. Learn to be comfortable in your own skin and enjoy your own company.

As part of our series about the “5 Things You Need To Know To Survive And Thrive After A Divorce Or Breakup” I had the pleasure of interviewing Bronwyn Smith.

Bronwyn is an Author, Coach and Clinical Hypnotherapist. Before starting her new career she was a Litigation Lawyer for nearly 30 years and Family Lawyer for about 20 years, working primarily with women helping them obtain a favourable property settlement. Bronwyn now coaches women who are going through a divorce helping them not just survive but thrive.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to ‘get to know you’. Can you tell us a bit about how you grew up?

I grew up in Sydney Australia. I grew up in the 1970’s when women were fighting for equality, the rights we now enjoy. My mother was one of the women fighting for women’s rights, so it was instilled in us that we have a career and that we have choices. And we can have a career and a family we don’t have to choose.

Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

I had loved being a Lawyer and then law no longer made my heart sing. I looked for a new career and found Marisa Peer’s Rapid Transformational Therapy, a type of Hypnotherapy, it made my heart sing and I new this was my new career. Coaching was a natural fit with RTT and it was the perfect match for me.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started this career?

I know they want an interesting client story but I don’t have one. The most interesting thing that happened is the number of law colleagues who rang me and asked me if I was okay or if I was having a midlife crisis because I was leaving a lucrative legal career for a career in Coaching and Hypnotherapy. My happiness and loving what I do is the most important thing to me.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

In my first year as a hypnotherapist a woman rang me and asked me to treat her husband. She told me it was urgent and asked if I could fit him in the next 48 hours as they were going overseas. I was absolutely full and didn’t have a vacancy but she insisted. So I created an appointment for him. When he arrived he told me that he didn’t want any treatment. He didn’t believe in hypnotherapy and left. I learnt to never book an appointment from anyone other than the person being treated.

Do you have a favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life or your work?

If you can Dream It You Can Achieve It by Zig Ziglar because it reminds me that my future is always in my hands.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

I am thinking about writing another book. This one will be for women about what to expect when going through a separation and divorce and how to thrive.

I have never gone through a divorce although I have had long term relationships end. I was a Family Lawyer for about 20 years and now I am a Coach and Hypnotherapist helping people navigate divorce so that they can thrive. Between the 2 professions I’ve probably helped at least a hundred people maybe more, predominantly women, navigate their divorce. I’ve learnt that you need to be detached as well as empathetic and caring to best support and assist the person. I learnt that it was important to heal from my childhood traumas which led to me being happy in my own skin and that led to much better relationships and a happier life generally.

In your opinion, what are the most common mistakes people make after they go through a divorce? What can be done to avoid that?

There are 8 main emotional stages people go through after divorce. One of the main mistakes people make is getting “stuck” in one of those stages. Usually where they get stuck is in anger, bitterness and grief or a combination of the three. People need to understand that these emotional stages are normal and they shouldn’t be afraid to move through them. The second mistake people make is defining themselves by the Divorce or that they are Divorced. People should be aware that Divorce is just one chapter of their life and doesn’t define them. We all have many chapters in our lives, good and bad, and divorce should be seen as just another chapter. The third mistake women primarily make is not being able to say “No” to their ex. They are so used to compromising with their ex and they forget they don’t have to compromise with them anymore, they can make decisions solely based on what suits them. I teach these women that saying “No” to their ex is ok. The fourth mistake people make is being negative about their ex-partner in front of the kids. Both parents should always respect that the other parent is the child’s mother or father. When kids hear negative comments about a parent they feel bad about themselves.

One positive is women can finally put themselves first. It is an opportunity for people to heal from not only the relationship but from any past traumas they may have. It is also an opportunity for them to reinvent themselves whether that be in their career or in their personal life — as I said earlier healing is one of the main areas that I see people shy away from. But they can also do simpler things like lose weight, create a new circle of friends, take up new hobbies, or spend more time on the hobbies that they love and haven’t done because life became too hectic.

They can financially reinvent themselves — climb the corporate ladder, open a business, learn about money and investments, buy their own home. So that they are financially independent. They can also choose whether or not to be in another relationship in the future. If they decide to be in a relationship in the future, what will that relationship look like. Do they want to re marry, or just live with someone. Or do they just want to date and not commit any more than that. It is a time that they can really make decisions on their future that suits them. And they should take this opportunity to sit down and really make decisions about their future. When I work with clients I help them go through the emotional stages of divorce and not get stuck. And then work with them to decide on the future they really want and how to put that into action.

A funny story I had a client that went through her divorce and property settlement. One thing her ex husband wanted was equal time with the kids which she agreed to. On the first week that he was to have the children he texted her and said he couldn’t have the kids and could she have them. She rang me in a panic not sure what to do. I said to her not to worry that I would dictate her reply. She was so relieved. I said bring up his text and hit reply, which she did. I said now type the letter “N” and now the letter “O” and hit send. She spiralled a little bit but ultimately hit the send button. He was so shocked that she had said No that the kids went to his place as planned. I reminded her that it was ok to say No to him, She didn’t have to compromise with him and accommodate him any longer. She could and should make choices that were for her benefit.

Decide on the traits that you want in a partner and sometimes it is also appropriate to decide on the traits that you don’t want in a partner. Make sure that you are choosing the right partner for you rather than choosing any partner because you don’t want to be alone. Trust yourself and everything that you have learnt from any previous relationship mistakes. Enjoy the process of dating and don’t put any pressure on yourself. Have fun whilst dating. I know that sounds easier said than done but don’t take it too seriously. Get to know many people and take your time. Walk away when it doesn’t feel right because your gut instinct is usually right. Don’t lead with your business self, connect with your emotional self and lead with that — and that means you will be vulnerable and that’s ok.

What is the one thing people going through a divorce should be open to changing?

Themselves. I think we should always be growing and learning. It makes us more interesting people. The other thing is they way they parent as they will now be co-parenting the children. Women should be open to giving their ex more time with the kids, rather than the standard every second weekend which is typical in Australia for the father. I think children should spend a significant amount of time with both parents as it benefits the kids to have a relationship with both parents. It also benefits the parents to have time to build their new life, to get to know themselves, to heal themselves and to have a life of their own that is not defined by their kids.

Allow yourself to go through the emotional stages of divorce but take care not to get stuck in any one of them. Sometimes you may have to force yourself to move to the next stage. One client was stuck in the grief stage. She had to force herself to move to the sex stage or healing stage in order to thrive. During this process be kind to yourself. Do things that make you happy, that make you feel confident, that make you feel special. Learn to be comfortable in your own skin and enjoy your own company.
Heal from the relationship and any past trauma that you may have. People after divorce often feel that they are either Not Good Enough or Not Loveable and that is why the marriage failed. That is not true, they are good enough and they are loveable. Also if you don’t heal properly from that relationship, it is more likely than not that you will attract the same or similar partner in the future. Seek help if you need to, to deal with those feelings. During the healing stage you will change and grow, and learn a lot about yourself and that is a really good thing. That attracts change into your life and new beginnings.

Have you had a friend who introduced you to their new flame or partner and you commented “that they have a type.” That is generally not a good thing because they are attracting the same sort of partner and generally the same sort of problems or issues that they had in their marriage. And the result will also be the same. It is much better if the new partner is completely different, in a good way, than their last partner.

3. Plan your future. What exactly do you want your future to look like. What career do you want? What friendship circle do you want? What do you want in a future relationship — married, dating etc? What do you want to do in your spare time? What do you want your financial future to look like? What do you want your co-parenting to be? Sit down and make decisions in all areas of your life. Then look at how to achieve that.

It may seem daunting at the start but it is worth it. Also don’t afraid to change a plan, that’s ok too. I had one client who was working towards starting her own business. Then she got offered a plum job with a great salary and so she took the job and put the business on the backburner. That’s ok she can go back to the business in the future if she ever wants to.

4. If you can use the money from the property settlement to buy yourself (and your kids) a house. Knowing you have a roof over your head gives you security and stability. After a divorce most people say they feel like they are in a fog and have trouble making decisions. I’ve found that this is an easy decision to make and really helps clients move forward. I’ve had clients ring me up months later and thank me for steering them towards buying a property. They said having that stability had really helped them move forward.

5. Be open to your ex spending more time with the children. It is much healthier for everyone and it really is putting the kids first. One couple had an amicable divorce and the kids spent 50% of the time with each parent. The ex husband bought a house around the corner from his ex wife so the kids could easily go between the two houses. The kids didn’t have the same stress that other kids often have because they knew it was ok to have a relationship with both parents.

Definitely see it as a chapter in their life rather than being defined by their divorce. If someone sees their divorce as who they are it will take a much bigger toll on their emotional and mental health, because they see themselves as a failure. That they failed in what they see as their most important relationship. The truth is that this is just one significant relationship in their life. There will be other significant relationships in their life, even if its not a life partner eg parent, child, friend and sibling. They are more likely to get stuck in the bitterness or grief stage if they are defined by their divorce. Reframe this and remember it is one chapter in your life. Your divorce does not define you as a person, it is a chapter in your life, albeit a painful chapter, that you can recover from and you can move forward to bigger and better things. And a better you.

Put yourself first including your emotional self. Be kind to yourself and give yourself time to grieve from the wounds of the marriage. So often I see people being hard on themselves and being overly critical of themselves. This is the time to learn to give yourself a break, be kind to yourself and put your needs first. Spend time doing the things you love and being with the people you love and laugh. Laughing always makes you feel better.

Do you have any favorite books, podcasts, or resources related to this topic that you would recommend to our readers?

For anyone who has suffered from narcissistic abuse I would recommend Caroline Strawson’s podcast. Free Facebook Group called Divorce Society which I run with a girlfriend. It is a support group for women. A safe place where women can ask questions and find out if how they are feeling or what they are experiencing is “normal” and how other women in the group have faced and overcome challenges. My book Dream a Big Life. My Podcast “It Starts With A Dream”.

The Dream Movement. Teaching people that dreaming isn’t for children, its for everyone. When you let your imagination Dream, you become inspired as well as motivated. When you live your Dream Life you have purpose, happiness and a wonderful sense of self. You also inspire others to Dream too.

That’s easy, Oprah Winfrey because she has had such an amazing life where she has learnt and grown. She has embraced every opportunity that has come her way. She is so inspirational and yet seems really down to earth. I would love to ask her what her Dream was and how it changed over the years. How her mindset has changed. And how she has embraced every opportunity yet still remains so down to earth.

Thank you for these great insights and for the time you spent with this interview. We wish you only continued success!

Thank you that’s very kind.

Bronwyn Smith: 5 Things You Need To Know To Survive And Thrive After A Divorce was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Making Something From Nothing: Gary Paull Jr Of Gauss On How To Go From Idea To Launch

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Don’t be afraid to let go of something and delegate it. There’s power in delegating tasks to those on your team, even though delegation can be difficult.

As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Gary Paull, Jr.

Gary Paull, Jr. is a Marine Corps veteran and boot-strapping entrepreneur with decades of white and blue-collar work experience under his belt. He has worked as an optical alignment technician, machine operator, project manager, and business development consultant. He launched the Gauss project in 2021 due to his passion for blockchain technology and all things Web 3.

Gauss is a curated layer 1 ecosystem, with a team of more than 20 people around the world, working towards building a more ethical and sustainable internet culture.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?

I’m originally from Providence, RI but my family moved to Florida after my parents’ divorce. I lived in Florida until the end of high school.

I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit. When I was young, I went to work with my Dad regularly. He did a lot of odd labor jobs but he was more of a hard worker than a businessman.

I started mowing lawns when I was 10. I did this for the whole neighborhood before and after school as well as on weekends.

I also ran an Easter egg hunt in 3rd grade. I hid change in the eggs and charged an entry fee for the other kids. This was my first contest I suppose.

I started a dinosaur kids club after Jurassic Park came out. Basically, my friends and I pooled our money together to create a sort of toy co-op. This was likely my first membership service. I still have that stuff in a box somewhere.

I’ve always been fairly self-sufficient. I was the kid that took my lunch money and bought candy to sell on the bus to school. I started buying my own clothing at 13. I built an entertainment system at 15. My Dad showed me a lot of respect as a child. He knew he couldn’t take away things that he didn’t buy. My Dad taught me the value of hard work.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“The largest room in the world is the room for improvement.” I always believe it’s important to improve oneself and constantly learn. Learning and adapting are incredibly important.

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

The Scythe Series by Neal Shusterman. It’s an interesting exploration into a possible future with the pros and cons of extreme technological advancement and advanced general intelligence. One person’s utopia is another person’s dystopia. One person could be happy living in that world while another would be horrified by it. For anything possible, there’s a diametrically opposed view. For every hero, that hero is likely someone else’s villain. That’s just the nature of us as a species.

First, I think good ideas come from working through a lot of bad ideas. Come up with 1000 ideas. 999 might be bad. 1 might be good. Second, execution. You can have the best ideas but without the motivation to execute them, it won’t matter. You’ll likely fail at things many, many times before you succeed. I also don’t look at failures as failures per se. I see them as learning opportunities.

I think that looking at things that others have done before you is validating. It’s not something to be discouraged. Google was not the first search engine. It’s more about the timing of that idea than whether or not someone has done it before you. Don’t concern yourself with being the first. Be the best.

There’s no one founder’s guidebook. It’s not a straight line. It’s a roller coaster with many loops and turns. Do your own due diligence to see if your solution is being offered and if so, can you do it better? Then identify whether or not you can do it by yourself. If you need to bring on others with synergistic skills, then do that. But be confident with who you bring on board. Co-founder conflict is one of the number one business killers. Finally, talk to customers as part of the validation process.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why?

1. Don’t be afraid to let go of something and delegate it. There’s power in delegating tasks to those on your team, even though delegation can be difficult.

2. You should be working harder than anyone else on your team. I believe in leading from the front.

3. Celebrate small victories. I’m still working on this. I believe it’s important to celebrate wins whenever necessary.

4. Set everyone on your team up for success. Approach this goal with genuine intent.

5. Take care of yourself. I think everyone struggles to some degree with balance. It may sound cliche but self-care is hyper-important. In 2017, I was working an event, and put in 20-hour days for 14 days in a row. It’s definitely not sustainable or healthy. Make sure you’re eating and drinking water as well as getting adequate rest.

Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?

Talk to someone else who has done it or something similar. Learn from the mistakes of others before you have to make them yourself. Product and hard tech businesses can be very expensive so there needs to be some hard introspection on risk tolerance.

There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?

That depends on capital availability and where they are in their cycle. If they’re early and don’t know much but have capital, then use them as a resource. Explore all available resources at your disposal. And heavily use as many free resources as possible. Google everything exhaustively.

What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?

I think most businesses should explore bootstrapping before exploring venture capital. We’re launching our product before exploring venture capital. Try to sell the product or service to bring in money. Find customers and talk to them. If other people believe in it and are willing to give you money for it, then it should be able to attract VC money when the time is right.

Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

I don’t think those two things are mutually exclusive. That is to say, I don’t think you necessarily need success to make the world a better place. You can do small things constantly to make things better for the people around you. Success makes it easier to do things on a larger scale, but all of us have the potential to make the world a better place.

Focus on being decent to people. It’s a simple baseline. If everyone were just decent to one another, that would be a marked improvement in the world. It doesn’t take much to be a decent person and to do no harm to others. That would change the world. It’s really, really simple.

John Doerr. He’s been around for so many of the largest impacts in tech. He had an immeasurable impact on Google, Intel, and the rest of the tech world. I feel like I could learn a great deal, even over just a single meal.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.

Making Something From Nothing: Gary Paull Jr Of Gauss On How To Go From Idea To Launch was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Meet The Disruptors: Tammy Ramos Of LatinaVIDA On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your…

Meet The Disruptors: Tammy Ramos Of LatinaVIDA On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

… We can look at the C-suite of most Fortune 500 companies and observe a sea of white, males wielding power and privilege. Even two, three tiers below the C-suite, we discover a significant lack of diversity. Disrupting this status quo and requiring that we do something different to get a different result, ie more women and people of color into leadership roles can be seen as a negative or a positive, depending on who you are. Women and POC would like disruption in the workplace so that they may enjoy some power and privilege. Those who currently hold all the power and privilege might see this disruption as “causing trouble.”

As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Tammy Ramos, J.D.

Tammy Ramos, J.D. is the Executive Director of LatinaVIDA, a nonprofit who partners with organizations to support DEI goals to equip the next generation of diverse leaders to rise to the top in their careers. Tammy is also a well sought after speaker who is known for her ability to connect, engage and inspire a broad range of audiences. Her passion is to empower women of color by building community and unity while celebrating diversity.

I am a first generation Latina in my family to not only graduate from college and law school, but I’m also the first to graduate from high school. I’m also the first non-teen mom. My mother was a 16 year old girl who had run away from home and came back pregnant with me. My father was an illegal immigrant from Mexico who left her out of fear he’d be deported. I often say that I grew up on the other side of the tracks into a life of poverty, homelessness, abuse, neglect and great sadness. Today, I have the privilege to live on this side of the tracks. I’m eternally grateful for all those along the way in my journey to success who believed in me, inspired me, opened doors for me and basically — took a chance on me. I find myself in this career because my high calling has always been to make my life count for something — to do good in a broken world, and as the last sentence of my essay for law school admittance says, “… to be the voice, power and strength of the unheard, weak and helpless.”

Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?

I refuse to stand idle and not challenge those in positions of power, influence and privilege to become aware of the inequities that exist for women of color, especially Latinas. I tell them the truth. I give them the facts and the data. For example, Latinas represent 1 in 6 women in the U.S. and are projected to be 1 in 3 women by 2060. Despite Latinos being the largest ethnic demographic in the U.S., accounting for 19% of the populations, Latinos still only hold less than 4% of senior executive positions, less than 1% are held by Latinas. If the numbers don’t lie then who is lying? Wise up corporate America! Did you know that Latinos have 1.9 trillion purchasing power which will become 2.5 trillion in 2024. Latinos are the future. If you want to be competitive in your business, you need to understand the complexity and multifacetedness of the Latino community. Latinos are your future employees, customers, clients, suppliers, vendors, etc … or, maybe not for you.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

I’ve made a lot of mistakes. Most were not funny. Many had to do with my lack of business acumen. With that said, my funniest mistake was being corrected when I said, “Ahha” too much in meetings. I did it because I was trying to demonstrate my attentiveness and agreement but was told it was annoying and didn’t bode well for my executive presence.

We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?

The most important piece of advice I share often is that we need people along the way to support us in life and career. Some may be mentors, sponsors, coaches, counselors, colleagues, friends, family, professors, bosses, allies, etc. What all these people have in common is — your best interest. They want to see you happy and successful. I have been blessed to have had many lifelong believers in Tammy Ramos. One story is of my foster mom, Mary Pena. She was the leader of the Mecha Club at my high school. She saw that I had no home, no family, no hope. So, she took me in and gave me a home, family and hope. She changed the course of my life and helped me to see that there was so much more I could do and become. She inspired me and helped me apply for college where I would meet Dr. Maria Hernandezwho took a chance on me and gave me a seat in the High Potential Program at Saint Mary’s College. Dr. Hernandez has been a lifelong friend who has opened doors for me where I didn’t even know doors existed. These two women continue to build me up to continue to dream big dreams and see them come to fruition.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/disruptive

Disruptive — adjective

causing trouble and therefore stopping something from continuing as usual:
His teacher described him as a noisy, disruptive influence in class.
changing the traditional way that an industry operates, especially in a new and effective way:
disruptive technologies

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, disruptive seems to suggest that as it relates to an industry, disruption can “stop something from continuing as usual.” We can look at the C-suite of most Fortune 500 companies and observe a sea of white, males wielding power and privilege. Even two, three tiers below the C-suite, we discover a significant lack of diversity. Disrupting this status quo and requiring that we do something different to get a different result, ie more women and people of color into leadership roles can be seen as a negative or a positive, depending on who you are. Women and POC would like disruption in the workplace so that they may enjoy some power and privilege. Those who currently hold all the power and privilege might see this disruption as “causing trouble.”

Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.

Loretta McCracken — “Tammy honey, you have been a student of many things; become a student of God’s Word.” She told me this in a season of great marital abuse as I was contemplating divorce and felt so lost and afraid. Studying the Bible transformed how I saw myself — from a broken, lost and unloved woman of three little kids to a powerful, loved and treasured woman who had purpose.
Tom Brown — “Have no little dreams; little dreams have no magic. Reach for the stars.”
Mary Pena (mom) — “Everything will be ok. This too shall pass.”
Judy Middendorff — “When someone gives you a compliment, just say thank you.”
CLEO Leader (I can’t remember her name, but she was a black woman who inspired me to reapply to Notre Dame Law School.) When I received my acceptance, I asked her how I could ever pay her back. Her response was, “Just succeed. When you succeed, then I know I have done my work well.”

We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?

The older I get, now 51, the more I realize how much work still needs to be done to create equity and to close the gap for women of color. I’m only one person and I can only do so much. My goal today is to build stronger communities of women of color supporting other women of color. I am active in several organizations including How Women Lead, Women of Color in Engineering Collaborative and Notre Dame’s Hispanic Law School Association. United together — we can change the world!

Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?

Outside the Bible itself, the newest book that has had a huge impact on me is “The First, the Few, the Only: How Women of Color Can Redefine Power in Corporate America” by Deepa Purushothaman I have told Deepa personally how her book has nourished my soul because she tells the untold stories of women just like me. We are a part of a world designed and led by white men. It is like trying to put a square peg in a round hole. We don’t fit; we don’t belong. We try, but the harder we try, the more painful it becomes. We begin to saw off the corners of our square pegs, which scars and discards what makes us unique, powerful and wonderfully different. Before long, we can’t recognize our reflections. Today, women of color over 50 years old seem to be rediscovering who they really are, reclaiming their true identities and rebuilding their place in the world.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me.” Philippians 4:13 As a girl born into poverty, abuse, addiction, neglect and great trauma, I came to know the Lord in an orphanage at the age of 11 years old. Through the deepest, darkest traumatic and painful moments, I would repeat, “I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me.” Although I was helpless, I found comfort in knowing that there was someone else I could count on to give me strength.

Movement — Melinda Gates would donate a large sum of money to support the career advancement of first generation Latinas in corporate America. I recently had the opportunity to be interviewed by KTVU Fox News where I shared that Latinos are the future. We are the largest ethnic demographic, accounting for 19% of the U.S. population and the fastest growing demographic in the workforce. Today, we have a purchasing power of 1.9 trillion which will become 2.5 trillion in just two years. Latinas account for 1 in 6 women in the U.S. and will become 1 in 3 by 2060 and yet Latinas still only earn 57 cents earned by white men and hold less than 1% of senior executive roles. 21% OF THE 75M MILLENNIALS IN THE USA ARE HISPANIC. They outnumber all other ethnicities combined. All of this to say that Latinos are an organization’s future customers, clients, employees, vendors, suppliers, etc. Latinas, who are the first in their families to graduate from college and have a professional career, need to support in learning how to navigate a very white, male dominated corporate America. Latinas, coming from a traditionally very humble, hard-working, family oriented and community centric culture, generally do not have the skills or knowledge to successfully advance in their careers. They need programs like LatinaVIDA’s PODER Leadership Academy that teaches developing executive presence, creating a personal brand, developing a career playbook, attracting a sponsor and overcoming impostor syndrome.

How can our readers follow you online?

Tammy Ramos

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!

Meet The Disruptors: Tammy Ramos Of LatinaVIDA On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Remote Career Development: Robbie Gallegos Of Cyberbacker On How To Advance and Enhance Your Career…

Remote Career Development: Robbie Gallegos Of Cyberbacker On How To Advance and Enhance Your Career When You Are Working Remotely

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

I’d be happy to. To overcome the initial need for equipment, prepare ahead of time. Before even interviewing for a remote job, start saving for the tools you’ll need. In addition to a computer and headset, check company websites to see if the jobs you are pursuing mention other requirements. And don’t skimp on your equipment. It’s always best to hit the ground running with exactly what you need.

Robbie Gallegos is the Vice President of the Launch Division at Cyberbacker, the leading provider of virtual assistant services. In this role, she is responsible for all event management and improving franchise awareness. Gallegos has deep expertise in event management, sales, and helps others excel while working from home.

Fostering meaningful connections between colleagues are critical for successful teamwork in a remote workplace. When building remote teams, the focus should be on creating engaging activities where all employees can participate in real-time, using products that work where they work. Establishing team and 1:1 rituals can also be an effective way to combat feelings of isolation, such as a daily team stand-up or check-ins via Slack.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would love to get to know you a bit better. What is your “backstory”?

First, I should let you know that I live and work in the Philippines. After college, I took a job working in a call center. My goal was to work without manual labor, and at the call center, I only needed my brains and mouth. After six or seven years there, I started noticing a trend toward working from home. I jumped into this space early and worked for two companies remotely. Believe it or not, I followed that with one year as a full-time performer hosting stand-up in comedy bars, so you could say I have a broad experience base — seven years at a call center, three years working from home, and one year of performing. Then, I took a role at Cyberbacker. Here in the Philippines, we recruit, vet, and train top-notch virtual assistants who can handle any task not requiring licensing, certification, or a physical presence at a fraction of the cost of on-site assistants. I’m currently leading their launch division.

During my first interview with Cyberbacker, I mentioned I was hoping for an admin role, but I think I was profiled as someone who could speak eloquently in front of people. For that reason, they started me off as a Cyber Recruiter, where I talked with real estate agents about the advantages of joining my client’s company. After three months, I shifted into the role of Headbacker. In that position, I trained and coached new virtual assistants, or Cyberbackers. We call them “Cyberbackers” because we train them to have your back. They are hired by all kinds of professionals in the US to take on tasks like web design and SEO, social media management, graphic design, video editing, phone calls, accounts receivable and payable, transaction processing and coordinating, sales, and scheduling. During my third month, I was promoted to Headbacker for the cyber recruiting division. There, I led entire teams of Cyberbackers and helped some of these recruits promote to Headbacker themselves.

Around a year later, I spotted a post from the CEO, Craig Goodlife, looking for somebody to lead Cyberbacker’s upcoming launch division. There was an instant buzz around the new role — everyone was curious about this position. As it turned out, Craig wanted someone with event-hosting experience to organize virtual grand openings for Cyberbacker’s new franchises. At the time, I’d heard the company was starting to launch franchises, but I wasn’t involved in that aspect of the company.

At the interview, I was surprised when Craig told me I was the first to apply for the position. He joked by asking me whether I was more excited about the role or the possibility of being promoted. I laughed and told him honestly that my goal was to be promoted. I explained that I had a desire to continue growing in the company. Craig’s interviews are scheduled to last 15 minutes, but we talked for nearly half an hour. I took that as a good sign and was offered the position. I completed onboarding in November of 2021.

During my first two months, I dug in and learned everything I could. I felt like I was starting from the ground up. By January, Cyberbacker formally announced that the launch division was active. Seeing my name in a press release and being introduced in dozens of meetings as the leader of this new division was surreal. It’s been a fun challenge because I’m blazing a new path. The division is entirely new, and we’re charting our course as we go.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?

That’s a very good question. Honestly, the best experience I’ve had at Cyberbacker is cultivating the skills needed to be an effective leader. I’ve been a sales coach and led teams at previous companies. I’ve led projects and issued commands, but my roles at Cyberbacker actually make me accountable for the future of the people I lead.

With this leadership, there are challenges. Just today, I ran into some difficulties implementing a new metric. When I hit an obstacle that makes me feel like giving up, I go back to what inspired me to take on this position in the first place. I remind myself that I signed on for this command and motivate myself to push forward.

I use that same logic with the people I am responsible to train. I coach them by bringing them back to their “why.” I ask them why they joined this team and want to work for Cyberbacker. I remind them of those initial goals and then ask if their goals are the same, or if they have changed.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

My first mistake when I took on the launch division stemmed from the fact that I was feeling pretty proud of being accelerated into that role. When I became a VP at Cyberbacker, it was a big deal. The hierarchy goes: CEO, President, and then VP. There are currently only 9 VPs in the company. On top of that, I was the youngest VP because I was the first to be promoted directly from Headbacker. The other VPs went the route of director first.

One of my first projects was something we call the GPS, which stands for goals, priorities, and strategies. In this project, leaders map out their plan of action for the upcoming year. I was under the impression that I would follow Craig’s lead in this role. Since I envisioned myself running plans by Craig for his approval, I made the mistake of going into that GPS meeting without doing enough research. I brainstormed for a few hours and wrote down the first things that popped into my head. As I presented the plan to Craig, it felt like I was delivering an elementary book report in place of a graduate thesis. It was a newbie mistake.

I came away from that meeting mortified. I was sure Craig thought he’d chosen the wrong person. In fact, I could almost hear him saying, “I just hired somebody who wanted to be promoted but doesn’t have a clue what she should be doing.”

I know I’m not alone in those feelings. I recently read an article about how difficult it is to convince yourself that you have what it takes to be successful after a promotion. The story said most people feel they don’t have the skills they need for their new roles. In my experience, it was intimidating at first, but confidence came after a few months on the job.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

In response to one of your earlier questions, I discovered the importance of always returning to your “why” as I learned to lead at Cyberbacker.

The book “Find Your Why” by Simon Sinek, David Mead, and Peter Docker has a wonderful quote about this. Sinek says, “If we want to feel an undying passion for our work, if we want to feel we are contributing to something bigger than ourselves, we all need to know our WHY.”

That lesson impacts every decision I make on the job and every conversation I have with my team. If you have a bold vision, you won’t inspire people to join you with tangible incentives. You’ll inspire them by giving them a purpose and sense of belonging.

What advice would you give to other business leaders to help their employees thrive and avoid burnout?

To avoid burnout, you have to love what you do. Not everyone has the luxury of choosing their job. As I mentioned before, when I first came to Cyberbacker, I asked for a position in administration but was given a role as a recruiter. It wasn’t my goal, but I looked for ways to love that job.

You may not have your dream job, but you can always find something about the work that you like. Trust your instincts to discover what you enjoy about a role and then grow in those skills. For example, I was eventually profiled for the launch division because I followed my passion for entertaining and took a year to host events in comedy clubs. My advice is to find something you love about your job and lean into it.

Ok, let’s jump to the core of our interview. Working remotely can be very different than working with a team that is in front of you. This provides great opportunities but it can also create unique challenges. To begin, can you articulate for our readers a few of the main benefits and opportunities of working remotely?

I decided to transition from working in the office to working from home to avoid the daily commute. Previously, I was working in Metro Manila and lived in Cavite, a province south of Manila. I traveled for one and a half hours just to get to the office, and my trip home could be longer than two hours if I ran into rush hour. Imagine how much of their lives so many people spend sitting in their cars! When I started working remotely, I gained four hours each day to hang out with friends, spend time with family, exercise, sleep, and relax.

I also noticed a huge dip in my expenses when I started working from home. When I worked from the office, I ate lunch with coworkers and didn’t always get to choose where we ate. Sometimes, they chose restaurants I considered pricey. When you work in an office, there are extra expenses that are out of your control. Working from home, you save money on gas, food, and your wardrobe.

In spite of all that, the biggest benefit I’ve found remote work offers is more time with family. It’s a great feeling waking up each morning to join my family for breakfast after I log out from work. Not only that, but I’m home every evening for dinner with them, too.

Can you articulate for our readers what the five main challenges are regarding working remotely?

The first challenge remote workers run into is a need for equipment. Right off the bat, home offices need a reliable computer, a high-speed internet connection, and a nice headset. Those are the three basics to get things going. If you lack one of those, remote work will be nearly impossible. As a remote employee, you need to start with top-of-the-line equipment. If you come to the job with an outdated computer and slow wi-fi, your productivity is bound to suffer. Dependable equipment can amount to an expensive investment, but it will make or break your daily success.

The second challenge remote workers face is fatigue. If you didn’t get good sleep the night before, chances are you’ll hit a lull sometime during your shift. At home, you’re working within steps of your sofa, and if you’re tired, you’ll hear your bed calling your name.

The third challenge faced by so many remote workers is background noise. It’s tough to control distractions from family members and pets, and you don’t want to be the person shouting for everyone to quiet down all the time. The walls in my house are one layer of wood. They don’t prevent much sound from getting through.

The fourth challenge for me has been power outages. Here in the Philippines, we’re in the path of all the storms from Southeast Asia. You can’t control a force of nature like a typhoon or hurricane. The time between June through December is our rainy season, and we know to expect regular Category- 1 hurricanes. We’re used to it here, but it does interrupt my work.

The final challenge for remote workers is the constant distraction from our gadgets. If you’re working with your phone beside you, you will be strangled by social media unless you find a way to stay disciplined. In my experience working in a call center or corporate world, phones are banned in the operations area. When you work from home, you can have Netflix on your iPad and Instagram scrolling on your phone. You’re the only one keeping yourself accountable.

Based on your experience, what can one do to address or redress each of those challenges? Can you give a story or example for each?

Sure, I’d be happy to. To overcome the initial need for equipment, prepare ahead of time. Before even interviewing for a remote job, start saving for the tools you’ll need. In addition to a computer and headset, check company websites to see if the jobs you are pursuing mention other requirements. And don’t skimp on your equipment. It’s always best to hit the ground running with exactly what you need.

If you are feeling sleepy during work hours, find a sleep schedule that works with your shift and stick to it. I work the graveyard shift but don’t reset my sleep schedule on weekends. Instead of shifting to daytime in the Philippines, I sleep like I’m in the US. In my new role in the launch division, I host events on Saturdays and Sundays. Fortunately, I can stick to my sleeping pattern because those gigs are in the evenings. My advice is to establish a sleeping pattern that extends through the weekend.

To alleviate background noise, many people hang styrofoam egg crates along their office walls. It’s a common do-it-yourself soundproofing hack used by remote workers here in the Philippines. I’ve also set expectations with my family about the volume level I need during work hours, and they have adjusted. They even know it’s their job to quiet the dog down when I’m working.

To overcome power outages, I strongly suggest that remote workers have backups in place. An uninterruptible power supply, known as a UPS, gives you time to shut down your laptop and save your work. A UPS responds instantly to power failure but is not the same as a battery backup. The UPS battery system is designed to be a stopgap between your main power source and your backup power. It takes several minutes for your system to start drawing from your backup. The UPS responds instantly and then hands the load to your backup system when it’s ready. The battery on your UPS system can only handle a sustained load for a few minutes, so you’ll want a backup system on hand to take over. It’s best to unplug during an outage to protect your computer from power surges when electricity is restored, but we can’t always do that as remote workers, so have a surge protector ready.

Finally, if distractions from your devices are proving to be a challenge, the best advice I can offer is to turn them off during your work hours. Of course, part of your job involves communicating through email and social media, but that doesn’t mean you have to respond to every message in seconds. Establish specific times to check messages, so you’re not constantly getting off task.

Let’s talk about Career Development. Can you share a few ideas about how you can nurture and advance your career when you are working from home and away from other colleagues?

If you love what you do, you won’t accept mediocrity; you will always do your best. This mentality will cause you to be noticed whether you work on-site or remotely. When you catch management’s eye, make the most of that opportunity. If you are offered a task or a promotion, take it, whether you feel ready or not.

The secret is that nobody feels prepared to advance. What’s holding you back? If you don’t feel ready, relax. You will never feel ready. When you are promoted, you’ll know the specifics of the job through onboarding and on-the-job training. Take the leap. You’ll be ready when you’re there.

Can you share a few ideas about how employers or managers can help their team with career development?

If someone comes to me saying they feel ready to advance, I show them the steps that can make it happen. Next, we plan together to distribute those steps over a reasonable timeline. If they want to be promoted in six months, I show them what they need to accomplish by the end of each month. Throughout that time, I check in with them to see if they are staying on track.

If there are areas where my employees need to grow, I hope they recognize my criticism is meant for their benefit. People who are open and ready to grow listen to feedback and do what it takes to improve. Sometimes, looking at a list of everything they need to do to advance can seem overwhelming. My role as the leader is to check in on their progress. If they are not on track, I can readjust the timeline. I always try to ensure that they feel the goals are realistic. If they believe the goals are unrealistic, they won’t do what it takes to accomplish them.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?

I have to start by saying thank you for that wonderful question! I would love to inspire people with something I learned from a previous supervisor. He said, “Comply before you complain.” In other words, get to work before you give feedback. Whenever I doubt a task will succeed, I remind myself to take action before saying anything negative.

In terms of our jobs, we’re tasked with responsibilities every day. The expectation is that we do our work regardless of how we feel. I believe we’d all be happier in our jobs and contribute so much more to our workplace cultures if we joined a “comply before you complain” movement.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Readers can follow me and my work through my LinkedIn.

Thank you so much for the time you spent doing this interview. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success.

My pleasure. Thanks for allowing me to share!

Remote Career Development: Robbie Gallegos Of Cyberbacker On How To Advance and Enhance Your Career… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Meet The Disruptors: Robert Day Of weAudit On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

You learn from every mistake too. I tell my team I will let go of someone for lying, with no second chance, but if you own up to the mistake, we’ll work through it and see those mistakes as an opportunity to improve our process and guardrails.

As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Robert Day.

Robert Day is the co-founder and managing partner of weAudit.com. With more than 35 years in the financial services space, he brings a wealth of knowledge from working on the inside and behind the scenes of a “closed-door industry.” Robert is passionate about helping businesses save money, uncover unfair billing practices, and he has shared his expertise with The National Credit Association, The Credit Research Foundation, Credit Today, Coleman Research Group, and has previously been quoted in The Wall Street Journal, CNN Money, The Washington Business Journal, Business Week, to name a few.

I’ve tried my hand at several careers and businesses before getting my start in commercial banking. I got into banking to make my mother proud, and I got out of banking so that I wouldn’t have to tell my mother what I did day-to-day. The merchant process industry is rampant with unethical practices, and the industry had a corrosive effect on me. I felt that we were treating people like crops, and I didn’t like who I was becoming. It got to the point where I didn’t want to be anybody’s friend if my career couldn’t benefit from the relationship. If there wasn’t a buck to be made, why would I waste my time? And that’s horrible to admit.

In a moment of exasperation, a colleague and I had a conversation about the future. He floated the idea of founding a company with a mission to bring transparency to the merchant processing industry. We wanted to help people whose companies and livelihoods were being put at risk by the unethical business practices of commercial banks. That company eventually became weAudit.com.

Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?

As the industry leader in merchant processing auditing, we save our clients a profound amount of money from processor overbilling. For many merchants we work with, it’s like turning on a lightbulb. I recently completed an audit for a new client and we discovered that he’s getting overbilled $260,000 per year, and that’s before fixing their interchange issues. Prior to the inception of weAudit.com, processors had free reign to overbill merchants with zero recourse. Not anymore! Now merchants are in control and have the ability to manage their fees. If what we are doing to this industry is not disruptive, I cannot imagine what would be, as we have turned it upside down. Now it’s the way it should be.

Commercial bankers and merchant payment processors steal more than you think. They may not break into your house and take your wedding ring, but the amount they overcharge eats into margins and sometimes forces companies into bankruptcy, costing people their jobs and livelihood. The impact is more extensive than the theft of a wedding ring — it’s equivalent to taking away a spouse’s ring, the home, and the family’s future. And bankers believe that they operate with some moral standing because they work for a large, well-known corporation.

But unfortunately these large payment processors have a rap sheet longer than most criminals. They have received multiple fines of tens of millions, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars. If a fine of that staggering amount doesn’t stop a company, what’s that tell you about how large the grift is?

Helping businesses avoid overbilling fees saves jobs and families, especially at small and mid-size companies that don’t have any other resources or methods to recover overbilling. We approach the business with transparency and full disclosure, something you simply don’t see in the industry. The government fails to regulate the industry effectively, and the processors operate unchecked, so we expose that. We’re the only ones who do what we do.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

To be honest, funny is not a word that comes to mind when I think about the mistakes I’ve made or our company has made. I may be too neurotic to look at any mistake without a large degree of self-criticism. We have made plenty of mistakes by trusting salespeople and signing contracts where things were promised on the phone only to learn the applications and features that were promised were a feature to come, not ones they currently have.

However, it is what gave birth to our “Love Us or Don’t Pay Us” guarantee. We want our clients to feel comfortable hiring us without worrying about the risk that they misinterpret our services or aren’t satisfied with what we do and how we do it. I believe that by offering our services without that risk, without that stress, we are doing the right thing. Signing certain contracts with a guarantee would have saved us from making some large mistakes.

We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?

I’ve always been interested in Steve Jobs and Elon Musk as influential business leaders.

With Steve Jobs, I loved his passion for disruption. I appreciate his refusal to accept “no” as an answer and his commitment to ensure his team was staffed with the right people to get the job done. I am someone who works their team hard, and if you can’t get it done, we can cut the conversation short because you’re not the right fit for us.

That level of candor and expectation to succeed is essential when you are creating something from scratch, when many people’s instinct is to say no simply because there is no precedent or blueprint. We had to create the vast majority of everything we’ve done from scratch. It was a hard journey, and when you try to explain it to others, they question what we do. You’re trying to use a vocabulary that doesn’t necessarily connect yet to our everyday language.

Steve Jobs was the kind of guy who never did what was already being done. This caused skepticism — if somebody could’ve gone down this path, wouldn’t they have done it already? Entrepreneurs need to constantly overcome that skepticism.

Elon Musk is also passionate about creating something new. His commitment to making the world a better place, prioritizing advancement over winning, is inspirational. For example, when he committed to making Tesla’s patented technology freely available for anyone to use, he was called crazy, but he responded by asking what is the worst thing that could happen? The worst thing meant somebody would build a better car than Tesla could, and what’s wrong with making the world a better place?

Again, entrepreneurs often face skeptics who believe we’re going down the wrong path. But we have to try the impossible to change the world.

In my opinion, being disruptive is doing something new and doing it in a way that’s against what everyone gravitates towards. The status quo is the kiss of death. I always aim to innovate, operate with excellence and improve our business each year. I am constantly pushing our vendors to up their game, allowing us to improve, as well as pushing my IT team, our auditors, client services, operations. I ask them every year and even many times during the year, if we could change one thing, what would it be? I am always looking to improve. Maybe it is my DNA, but I am never happy with how things are.

We don’t get everything right this first time. But wrong is only the first step to getting it right. I don’t think anything really goes wrong if we’re learning from it and working towards getting it right. We can see the irritative nature of disruption in the music industry, where we’ve gone from 8-tracks to cassettes to CDs to the iPod. Now we watch TV on our phones. This only happened because someone knew there was a better way and they worked hard to find it, to create it! As Albert Einstein said, “Creativity is seeing what others see and thinking what no one else ever thought.” When we think of creativity we usually think of art. However, creativity is so much more and is what makes the world go around.

Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.

My dad gave me good advice at my son’s first birthday. The baker had made a mistake with our cake, and I was furious. My dad calmed me down by asking, “What will this matter in time? Who will remember this in a year, a month, or even a week?”

The saying “time heals all wounds” doesn’t just apply to romantic relationships; everything gets better in time. Bad business deals and business mistakes, soured friendships — you learn from it all with the benefit of time.

You learn from every mistake too. I tell my team I will let go of someone for lying, with no second chance, but if you own up to the mistake, we’ll work through it and see those mistakes as an opportunity to improve our process and guardrails.

I also have benefitted from the advice that nothing is ever as bad as you think.

And a practical lesson I’ve learned and try to teach is to never reply to an important email for 24–48 hours. You need time to digest things.

Best advice no one gave me, but advice I regularly give involves perfecting your pitch, research and professional networking. For example, when I take our teams to trade shows, I tell them to stop by every booth and learn more about every single vendor. Tell the vendor what we do and ask that vendor how they might be able to help us. Not a group effort, each one on their own. I ask them to write up a small report on what they found. Over the years, that has led to quite a few changes in how we do what we do.

We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?

For me, taking our message and the story of what we’re doing to the next level is about getting the word out more. I have a book coming out soon (The Great American Heist), that provides a personal account of what I’ve been through, what got us to the level of success we’ve experienced and why we’re doing what we’re doing. My hope is that the message will resonate with and have an impact on as wide an audience as possible.

Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?

I recommend “Elon Musk” by Ashlee Vance. I can relate to the struggles Musk faced in his early days of trying to get Zip2 and x.com (which became PayPal) off the ground. He wanted everything to be perfect and better than anything that was done before, which resonates with me. He was a trailblazer, but he needed to overcome a team of people who reinforced the status quo and were constantly saying what he was trying to achieve was not possible. My first five years of building weAudit.com were full of “no” and “it can’t be done.” Reading about Musk, I felt like I was in good company, and while the average person may have thought I was crazy, it was comforting to know other industry trailblazers faced the same obstacles.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

A favorite quote of mine relevant for our business is from the character Bigweld in Robots: “See a need — fill a need.”

And, oh boy, do we see a need! Even Senator Dick Durbin has said so, speaking about the banking industry: “Small businesses and large businesses alike are being overcharged across America by credit card companies and banks, without restraint.”

There is a need to address the massive overbilling — an issue that the senator and other politicians have acknowledged but not addressed — and there has been no one to fill that need to help merchants. That is, until we saw it and filled it.

I’m passionate about helping improve living conditions in Haiti. There is a lack of awareness about how dire the humanitarian issues and conditions are in Haiti, and I use my influence as much as possible to raise money for humanitarian efforts in the country and the nonprofit organization, Loving Kay Refij.

We’re in the midst of fundraising for a well, with about half of the money already raised. At the same time, we are fundraising for a mobile ultrasound to support women and prenatal health. Children often have less rights and are treated worse than we treat animals in this country. So, I do try to influence people to get involved there.

How can our readers follow you online?

Readers can follow me on LinkedIn, Twitter, and our website, weAudit.com.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!

Meet The Disruptors: Robert Day Of weAudit On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Andy Harrington of Presentation Profits On The 5 Things You Need To Be A Highly Effective Public…

Andy Harrington of Presentation Profits On The 5 Things You Need To Be A Highly Effective Public Speaker

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Your story of why you care. Most corporates will have a slide that says, this is the name of our company; this is how long we’ve been in business. This is the list of our prestigious clients. These are the awards we’ve won. And frankly, nobody really gives a shit. But what they care about, what you should replace that with is a story of where did you come from? Why do you care about this message or topic? Why do you care about delivering this service? Why do you care about the people that you serve? Where does all that come from, your origin story of why they should trust you? And then maybe after that, you can talk about where you are today and give it some context.

The UK’s answer to Tony Robbins, Andy Harrington is a world-leading expert in public speaking. A Sunday Times bestselling author with his book Passion into Profit, he has shared stages and worked with big names including Bill Clinton, Sir Richard Branson, Donald Trump and Nadja Swarovski.

He is passionate about teaching people to share their messages with the world in a way which helps their audience and increases their sales so they can build a thriving business.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to get to know you a bit better. Can you tell us the story of how you grew up?

I don’t have this big background of coming from money or anything like that. There wasn’t much money. My parents broke up when I was 13 and I had no indication it was coming. It felt like my whole world was just completely pulled from under my feet. What I thought to be true was no longer true. And so, I ended up spending a lot of time on my own, feeling lost for a long period of time.

I was quite an extrovert when I was a kid. I spent a lot of time with my dad playing sport, rough and tumble, all that kind of stuff, and then I lost it.

The introverted part of me seemed to get over developed after that, but it worked out well in the end as it meant I became a very deep thinker.

Can you share a story with us about what brought you to this specific career path?

In essence, I went to see Tony Robbins, not for me, but for the person I was in a relationship with. She had experienced a lot of trauma in her life and was involved in a couple of big court cases where she was giving evidence for the prosecution. As a result, she broke down emotionally. I couldn’t solve it and I didn’t know how to help her.

So, I went to see Tony Robbins in America and he chose her to work with at the front room in one of his live interventions. This changed her life. I thought, “Wow, this is amazing. I wonder if I could do something like this.”

That was quickly replaced in my mind with, “Andy, you can’t do this. You can’t be like him. He’s massive. Well, his teeth are bigger than you.” And so, I didn’t do anything with it.

About six months later, we did another Tony Robbins event and I ended up doing an intervention with him. Again, I got picked out in front of thousands of people. I stared into his eyes and I remember being so emotional and filled with gratitude that he had changed our lives. I thought in that moment, ‘I’m going to do it’.

So that’s how I started teaching and training people and my content evolved over the years into teaching public speaking and presenting because that’s where I thrived.

Can you tell us the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

Before I embarked on that career, I’d done a little bit of training for an insurance company, Churchill. The very first time I ever presented for them, there was a wonderful lady who was an Indian sales manager.

One day, talking about her sales training, I said to her, “You must be really busy doing that. Haven’t you got somebody else doing it?”

She said, “Are you volunteering?”

I said, “Well, no, but yes. I mean, if you give me some time, then I’m sure I could give it a go.”

About three months later, she comes to see me on my desk and says, “Hey, you remember that sales training. Do you still want to do it?” I said, “Okay.” And she replied, “Great. You’re on in five minutes.”

So, I found myself about five minutes later in a Churchill training suite with the flip chart, a pen and five people. And let me tell you this, five people was pretty daunting, 50 is much easier. Five is awful because they were just there to ask you questions and stuff.

I didn’t know what to do with my hands, so I was fiddling with the flip chart pen, taking the lid off, putting the lid back on. I even used it as a pen, once.

And then, unbeknownst to me, at some point, I’d obviously got ink over my hands. I looked in the mirror to see a massive black smudge of ink right in the middle of my forehead that had probably been there through most of my talk!

So, that was my first experience of delivering a talk. I went from that to speaking at arenas to tens of thousands of people. Anyone can do it if they stick at it!

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

When you’re first presenting, you tend to overjudge the audience and how they’re reacting to you.

I remember one guy who had this big frown on his face the entire time I was presenting and I thought, “Oh, he’s not very happy.”

I did the presentation and he came up to me afterwards. I was thinking, “Oh no, he’s going to tell me I’m no good or whatever.”

He’s still got the big frown his face and said, “That’s the best presentation I’ve ever heard anywhere.”

The big frown must have been his way of focusing, right?

But it’s funny how you read people and you can misinterpret some. So, I’ve learned not to do that. I’ve learnt to let people experience it the way they want to experience it. Frown or no frown!

As I mentioned earlier, Tony Robbins really inspired me to become who I am today. Tony Robbins once said to me, “The greatest way you can honour me is to outgrow me.”

One of the things you want to be doing as a leader is to inspire people to become better than you. The hallmark of a successful trainer, speaker or influencer is how people take on what they have been given and use it in their own unique way.

I thought it was really cool that Tony Robbins would say that. I mean, he is six foot seven, so I’m never going to outgrow him physically but I always say that to people now too.

The greatest way you can honour me is outgrow me, outshine me, out-earn me. My goal is to organically make sure that I keep improving and adapting so that my students don’t surpass me too much and that I keep on developing myself.

You can pretty much learn anything if you set your mind to it, providing you follow a successful process of doing it that’s been proven to work. You can achieve anything you want. The trouble is most of us get in our own way. If you believed that there is no failure, only feedback, then what would you be prepared to do? What would you be willing to try to do to move your life and the lives of others forward?

What drives you to get up every day and give your talks? What is the main empowering message that you aim to share with the world?

Well, I don’t get up every day to do my talks. I actually speak typically once a month for four days and that’s it. My whole business now is automated to the point that I don’t need to present every single day. But what gets me up and keeps me giving that message is the idea that if I were to die tomorrow, there might be people wanting to come. I think the hallmark of a successful person is the number of people that are touched or moved by your passing. We can talk about the Queen as an example of that and the outpouring of love and emotion her death inspired. That’s the real hallmark of how much difference you’ve made is how much your life passing affects other people. And I’d like to believe that if I was to pass, I’d have touched enough people’s lives that they would want to come and pay their respects and see my wife and kids and say, “Hey, he was a good, good person. Didn’t know him very well, but what I did know about him was great and that he made a difference. He touched lives. And I just want to say I’m grateful for that and I’m grateful that he was around.” So, it’s kind of that really, which sounds quite morbid.

I think it’s an important thing is to recognize that we’re not going to be here forever, and I want to leave behind a ripple effect for others, that means that my life had meaning beyond the now.

The empowering message is that what human beings can achieve is pretty remarkable. I teach people not to be afraid of the solution, but to be more afraid of the problem. Because most people are more afraid of the solution than they are of the problem because they live with the problem every single day. They live with their results they get every single day, which means they’re comfortable with those. But the solution for most people carries with it a fear of failure, rejection and hurt.

You have such impressive work. What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now? Where do you see yourself heading from here?

Well, one of the most exciting things that we’re doing is building our Professional Speakers Academy. It’s an incredible incubator for so-called ordinary people with an extraordinary message. And what I mean by that is most of us are fairly ordinary, but we’ve had extraordinary things happen through us or to us. And those are amazing stories. Those stories show how people have coped with that and the lessons they’ve learned. That’s wisdom that we pass on to other people.

And that’s who’s dominating the speaking market today. It isn’t the person that’s climbed Mount Everest or won a gold medal or swam across the Arctic Circle. I’m sure there’s a place still for that but people don’t want to hear the metaphor of how I climbed the mountain. They instead want to be given instructions of how they climb their specific mountain, which might be the mountain of how do I overcome grief; the mountain of how do I improve and grow my business; the mountain of how do I fix this social media problem; the mountain of how do I market myself. Whatever their mountain is, what people want is real world tangible knowledge and knowhow and steps that are actually able to be implemented.

Today, the reach all of us can have is essentially unrestricted. So-called ordinary people can reach out with their message of hope and help, and truly get to their target market. This is something they couldn’t do because the only people who could reach out were people who could get on television or radio or get a newspaper to write about you. But today, all of us have that ability to reach out to those people with our message, providing you have a real message that breaks through the noise, and isn’t another voice in just the sea of sameness.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

Yeah, I like the quote by Dr. Seuss, which is why try so hard to fit in when you’re born to stand out?

We want to fit in, of course, but that should never be at the detriment of your ability to be unique and stand out from the crowd and be an individual. Finding the balance is important. But most of us, we have such a desire to be loved, to be validated, that often we will downplay our uniqueness or we will hide our gifts, just so that we don’t rock the boat or because we want to avoid other people not liking us. And the problem is, with presenting, speaking and sharing your message and leading, you’ll always be dividing people between followers and non-followers, between fans and non-fans.

And another good quote, which I think might be a Churchill quote, is, “If you have enemies, good for you. It means you stood for something.” Which means you’ve got to have enough conviction in your own message that you don’t need other people to validate it, but you share it because you feel intrinsically it’s right, and that people who don’t agree with it, you can let them not agree with it. You don’t have to change their opinions because their opinions are just theirs. And you don’t have to change what you believe to be right.

Ok, thank you for all that. Here is the main question of our interview. What are your “5 Things You Need To Be A Highly Effective Public Speaker?” Please share a story or example for each.

Yeah. So, first thing is, you have got to have a really good beginning. So, when you are presenting, you’ve got to have a good opening that opens up the minds of your audience, because in the beginning, their minds are closed. They’ll be sceptical and not responsive or receptive, especially if you’re not already known to people. So essentially, you’ve got to presale people on your message before you share your message. You’ve got to presale people on the why it’s important to listen to that message now and begin to open them up by answering. In essence, the first part of your content should be answering those questions of why. Why should you listen to this message? Why is this message ideally for you? Why should listen to it now? And why the hell should you listen to me?

Part number two is your story of why you care. Most corporates will have a slide that says, this is the name of our company; this is how long we’ve been in business. This is the list of our prestigious clients. These are the awards we’ve won. And frankly, nobody really gives a shit. But what they care about, what you should replace that with is a story of where did you come from? Why do you care about this message or topic? Why do you care about delivering this service? Why do you care about the people that you serve? Where does all that come from, your origin story of why they should trust you? And then maybe after that, you can talk about where you are today and give it some context.

Number three is that you’ve got to have a methodology or a framework for people to implement the advice you’re giving. You can’t just give them a series of bullet points. It can’t just be stories. There has to be a tangible method or series of steps that they can follow. Otherwise, it’s just a nice message. But what the hell do I do with that? There has to be some implementation plan.

Number four is that you’ve got to be a real presence on the platform. I say platform because it might be virtual, as much it might be physical. And that means that you’ve got to perform at a level where your message is coming through you, not from you, where you’re in flow. You need a real message. It shouldn’t just be some safe, benign message that is corporately acceptable, but something that actually gets beyond that and breaks the norm and touches hearts and minds to the point that actually people might begin to pay attention and more importantly, might begin to change. Whatever your message is, essentially, that message is calling people to a higher place of making a change and it should be a change that impacts the person, other people and the world in general to make it a better place. And if you’ve got that, then you have, in essence, a message that has good ecology to it, which is good for everyone.

And finally, while you’re teaching, you’ve got to be transforming. You can’t just teach people, otherwise they’ll know what to do, but they won’t bloody do it. So, you’ve got to transform thinking, which means transforming beliefs. So, you’ve got to figure out, what does my audience actually believe right now that’s keeping them stuck in the old paradigm or an old way of thinking? And then what you got to do is develop stories and content that actually addresses those false beliefs and begins to reframe them in a way that they believe something new. And then you’ve got to reinforce that new belief with evidence to back it up. And then, if you do that, whilst you’re teaching new things at the same time, then those new messages land and people don’t get in their own way.

As you know, many people are terrified of speaking in public. Can you give some of your advice about how to overcome this fear?

The fear of speaking in public normally happens because you believe the audience might know more than you. So, one way to overcome that is to make sure that you remind yourself of how much you know and remind yourself that the audience out there essentially wants you to succeed. But in terms of actually performing at your best; all performance at the highest level happens in a zone of high performance. So, the question really becomes, how do I access my genius? How do I access my zone of high performance? But if you look at any performing art or sport; if you carefully watch, you’ll see that all high performance happens in a state of no thinking. Because the highest level of any performance, you can’t think about the dance moves, you can’t think about the words to a song, you can’t think about that ball coming at you at 90 miles per hour — if you’re playing cricket or higher than that, if you’re playing tennis. It has to be instinctual.

And to access that state of no thinking you need to put your vision in a peripheral vision. If you watch a top basketball player, they’re bouncing the ball up and down; they’re not looking at the ball. They can see it in their peripheral vision. And so, that allows them to read the game. If you’re driving a car, you’re in peripheral vision. You are reading many, many things happening simultaneously, but you’re not actually thinking about any of them directly. That’s pure genius. Pure genius comes from doing things without thinking about doing them. And the way you trick your mind into doing that is to put them into peripheral vision. And that will open the track door to your unconscious mind because peripheral vision accesses unconscious mind thinking, which is where all of your knowledge, knowhow and instinctual experiences reside.

If you try to think about your message, if you try to put your message into words and write it down before you say it, you’re going to get completely scared. That’s not the way to do it. The best way to do it is to put your message into pictures rather than words, because a picture paints a thousand words. So, in essence, all you’re ever doing is talking into images that conjure up many, many thoughts. And the final technique you use is to use rhetorical questions. And what I mean by that is, rather than go statement, statement, statement, statement, statement, in essence, you say something you want to say and you say, now what do I mean by that statement? Because they have that question in their head, what do you mean by that? So, you say what do I mean by that, and you give a greater definition.

So you make a statement, what do I mean by that? Make another statement to answer that question, and then say, why is that important? Answer that question. And then say, but how do you do it? Then answer the how question. So, you’re only ever answering your own questions and that makes it sound conversational. The key is to ask the question rhetorically that they’re actually thinking in that very moment. And that makes them go, wow, this sounds like he’s in my head.

You are a person of huge influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?

I would probably inspire more women to speak up and have a bigger voice. I think in leadership specifically, and this is what speaking really is, there’s a much greater need for women to have a voice than men. And if men are making all the decisions at the highest levels, men are primarily driven by testosterone, which makes them take risks and makes them want to win. Women are primarily driven by oxytocin, which makes them want to care, it makes them want to connect because it’s the love hormone — but you need both. Men provide a drive to win, to be better, to be ambitious. Women have that too, but women are primarily driven by connection. Those two together, if you have a masculine and a feminine energy, both have a strong voice, then you get sustained growth rather than a boom and bust.

Is there a person in the world whom you would love to have lunch with, and why? Maybe we can tag them and see what happens!

Yes, I’d love to have lunch with my dear little boy Aston, who didn’t make it, because he would be seven now. And I never got to speak to him, so it’d be good to hear him somehow. It’s a fantasy obviously, but I never got the chance to sit down alongside him. Just to know him as a seven-year-old, just to know how he feels and what he thinks about the world and his dad and whatever, it’d be good just to sit down and do that.

Are you on social media? How can our readers follow you online?

You can find me on https://presentation-profits.com/ or follow me on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JetSetSpeaker/

This was so informative, thank you so much! We wish you continued success!

Andy Harrington of Presentation Profits On The 5 Things You Need To Be A Highly Effective Public… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Future Is Now: Sukhveer Sanghera Of Earth Wallet On How Their Technological Innovation Will…

The Future Is Now: Sukhveer Sanghera Of Earth Wallet On How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake Up The Tech Scene

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Keep your focus on balance. For example, if you feel immense excitement about something, then balance it with calm thoughts. If you get lucky on an investment, then rebalance your portfolio. Extremities will bring chaos, while balance will bring peace. Trusting this can maximize your enjoyment of life over the long run.

As a part of our series about cutting-edge technological breakthroughs, I had the pleasure of interviewing Sukhveer Sanghera.

Sanghera is from Oakville, Canada, studied aerospace engineering in university, and spent his early career doing renewable energy research for minimum wage. It became very clear to Sanghera during this time that the incentives for the smartest people to work on real problems were not correct. Academics who dedicate their lives to researching and pushing humanity forward with real science and innovation, were being made to jump through hoops for government funding, while Wall Street and Silicon Valley executives were literally printing money off false advertising.

Sanghera decided to leave his master’s program to go into this world and try to understand how it works, and in the process helped build a dozen tech startups as the CTO across a range of industries. Sanghera helped build systems for TD Securities, Deloitte, NASA Langley, and was an early developer in both Bitcoin, Ethereum, and most recently Polkdadot, Avalanche and the Internet Computer Protocol. When Sanghera turned 30, he decided it was time to use all of his experience and go back to his origins in clean tech, to see how we can use decentralized finance, governance, and media, to shift the scale back in favor of the academics. With this in mind, Sanghera created Earth Wallet.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

I was always fascinated by how technology constantly evolved to challenge what we thought was possible. After finishing a degree in aerospace engineering, I started my career writing computational fluid dynamics software to help push the boundaries of renewable energy research. I worked alongside some of the smartest, most focused, and dedicated people in the world to help create a more abundant future by bringing the cost of clean energy down.

Though it seemed obvious to me that people would want to invest in this future, I was making minimum wage, and the research funding model was structured in a manner that required you to jump through hoops for limited government funding. On the other hand, you’d see Silicon Valley companies building chat apps funded by Wall Street for billions of dollars with what seemed to be an infinite river of cash. So, I decided to find out how our society got to such a place.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

One day, my friends and I decided to try for the Lunar X Prize and see if launching rockets from high altitude balloons could be a feasible low cost way to reach the moon. We decided to add a GoPro to the payload, which recorded the entire ascent up to an altitude of 150,000 ft., just to see what it looked like from up there and make some cool content. With a few hundred dollars and a couple of days of planning, we managed to capture footage of Earth from space. I think it really made us realize how deeply connected we all are.

In the world of technology entrepreneurship, this experience widened my perspective. It pushed me to create a new weather balloon monitoring system for NASA, learn how our entire global banking infrastructure runs on cobalt mainframes at a major global bank, build automated auditing software for a major financial auditing firm, and join the Wild Wild West of the blockchain industry. After helping develop open source code around new blockchain protocols like Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Ethereum, Polkdadot, Avalanche, etc., I was blessed to witness the growth of a trillion dollar industry from scratch.

Can you tell us about the cutting-edge technological breakthroughs that you are working on? How do you think that will help people?

Earth Wallet is using decentralized finance, media, and governance to create new incentives for solving climate change. The way I see it, blockchains are an open source software upgrade to the world’s financial system which is meant to allocate capital to fighting problems humanity is facing. Every individual will be affected if the planet becomes uninhabitable. We’re simply giving people the tools they need to take control of their future, rather than yelling at the sky or throwing tomato soup at expensive paintings across the world.

How do you think this might change the world?

There is a saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results, yet we have collectively been trying to solve climate change with the same financial markets and governance systems for half a century now. We need to trust in change. New technology can change the way we allocate capital to climate solutions. There’s both potential and hope in that sentiment.

Keeping “Black Mirror” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks of this technology that people should think more deeply about?

Yes, S3E1. It is inevitable that financial markets and social networks will merge, as integrating the two makes humanity more efficient at allocating capital to what we deem is important in real time. However, I see many decentralized social network designs that are well suited to the past of capitalists using media to progress their self-interests, which leads to social credit scores applied to individuals. The correct way to do this is to flip the incentives on their head to instead progress our common goals. It is also critical that we do not listen to people saying we must give up our freedoms by banning the self-custody digital assets, which will completely destroy all progress being made in the industry.

Was there a “tipping point” that led you to this breakthrough? Can you tell us that story?

In 2017, I was the CTO at a company building the first Ethereum protocol to tokenize securities onto the blockchain. Regulators back then had no idea what blockchain even was, yet they wanted us to put a backdoor in the code so that they had the power to freeze an individual’s assets. Around the same time, Cambridge Analytica was being exposed as the go-to tool to win the democratic elections, and the power of Facebook and Twitter’s centralized control of billions of people’s data became clear.

I saw this as essentially the same problem/solution. Governments want people to own their own media data, but they also want to control their financial data. In the information age, these are essentially the same thing- just bits of information. Both media and finance are required for self-custody of ‘digital assets.’ You can’t have one without the other.

What do you need to lead this technology to widespread adoption?

Once it becomes more obvious that decentralization can be used to enable humanity to come to a global consensus in near real time, we will see fewer hurdles (especially from regulators). Widespread adoption is critical for us to tackle global issues like climate change. The same is true for democratic elections, which will continue to be rigged as long as we have centralized control of data and AI algorithms incentivized to generate ad revenue for the corporations that run them.

What have you been doing to publicize this idea? Have you been using any innovative marketing strategies?

In a world of cubic zirconia being sold as diamonds, we believe in building quietly. Marketing is a tool that can be used for either good or bad. Our commitment is to bridge the gap between web2 companies and leveraging web3 technology. As such, our partners are not selected based on industry, size, or a founder’s net worth, but rather how scalable their climate solutions are.

Earth Wallet is now available on the iOS, Android, and Chrome stores, and we have launched a new initiative with trees.org to plant a tree for everyone who creates a new account and claims their NFTree seed. Early next year, we will be releasing a new protocol on Ethereum which we hope will bring all the pieces together, so be sure to claim your seed to be eligible for any early adopter rewards.

The Alexander Hamilton and Satoshi Nakamoto whitepapers, my professors in school, and my mother have had the most impact on me deciding to start Earth Wallet. All three have instilled in me the value of doing things right, instead of doing things fast. This used to be common sense in engineering 100 years ago, but for some reason today, the accepted norm is to ‘build fast and break things’… And yet we wonder why society is shattering around us.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

I think the most important thing is to make sure the next generation does not give up hope that the future will be better. When I was growing up, this was never even a thought. Now when you ask kids, a shocking number of them genuinely believe that the planet they inherit will not be better than the past. If the next generation loses hope, it is one of the worst things that can happen to a society because we quite literally will not have a future at that point. So, I will continue to fight to keep the light of hope illuminated in the world.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?

People appear to come from different places, but we all come from Earth. I’ve been blessed with the freedom to work and live from anywhere and have learned that generally every human is more similar than they are different. We all want the same things. The people who don’t understand this have more often just never left their bubble or are conditioned to believe otherwise by their upbringing.
Keep your focus on balance. For example, if you feel immense excitement about something, then balance it with calm thoughts. If you get lucky on an investment, then rebalance your portfolio. Extremities will bring chaos, while balance will bring peace. Trusting this can maximize your enjoyment of life over the long run.
In an infinite game, the only constant is change. Many people strive for perfection or a specific achievement only to finish and be left unfulfilled. This is because the universe does not play zero sum games- Only humans do.
The media is run by capitalists, not the working class. There is a fairly large dissonance between the truth and what the working class is made to believe by marketers and advertisers who understand how to sell a click and a like. Always seek truth from deeper sources of knowledge like books or elders.
Think first, then build. If you are building systems that could impact the lives of billions of people, please do not move fast and break things. The motto needs to be the complete opposite of what we’ve been doing if we wish to have a positive effect on the world.

My goal is to make it as easy as possible for everyone to be a part of solving climate change. I think it needs to be as simple as that. You can join the movement today by creating your own Earth Wallet for free.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“Fundamentally, nobody knows anything.” It’s common to feel imposter syndrome, especially when you’re starting out in your career or trying to do something great. But always remember that even the most historic humans breathed the same air you do today, and likely knew just as little as you do about our place in the Universe.

Some very well-known VCs read this column. If you had 60 seconds to make a pitch to a VC, what would you say? He or she might just see this if we tag them 😊

I work for Earth, not VCs. I suggest they start doing the same.

How can our readers follow you on social media?

Instagram: @earthwallet.io

Twitter: @EarthWallet

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.

Thank you!

The Future Is Now: Sukhveer Sanghera Of Earth Wallet On How Their Technological Innovation Will… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Making Something From Nothing: Will Russell Of Russell Marketing On How To Go From Idea To Launch

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Search for patents and get a provisional application for a “patent-pending status.” You then have one year to decide whether to formally file.

As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Will Russell.

In 2017, Will launched Russell Marketing: an innovative digital agency, specializing in e-commerce launch marketing. To-date, they have generated more than $25 million in revenue for 300+ new entrepreneurs. Will has been featured on Forbes, Business Insider, Crain’s New York, StartUp Nation, and more.

In 2021, Will launched the Russell Gives Foundation, a family foundation that offers grants and mentorship to early-stage 501(c)(3) partners committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion. In November 2022, Will’s first book, Launch in 5: Take Your Idea from Lightbulb Moment to Profitable Business in Record Time, was published by Nicholas Brealey and is available on Amazon.

Prior to product launches, Will spent his early career managing launch marketing efforts for brands and websites in the media and nonprofit space. A decade of experience in launch marketing — across an array of industries, products, and for businesses of all sizes — provided Will with a unique perspective on the attributes of successful launch campaigns.

Originally from San Francisco, followed by two decades in London, and now in Austin, TX, Will holds a dual degree in Philosophy & Sociology from the University of Leeds.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory?”

While I was born in California (and live in the US now), my parents are both English and we returned to that side of the Atlantic shortly after my birth. So, my upbringing was the stereotypical English one, culminating in graduating from the University of Leeds. Soon after graduation, I decided to return to the US and pursue my own American dream, which led me to Michigan, North Carolina, California, New York, and now, finally, Texas.

Looking back, I’m not surprised at all that I pursued the route of entrepreneurship. As a child, I was stubbornly independent and hated being told what to do. While many of my friends took the conventional path of a 9-to-5 commute in central London, I knew that was never for me. I wanted to create something for myself.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

A quote from comedian Ricky Gervais is the one that most sticks with me: ”The best advice I’ve ever received is, ‘No one else knows what they’re doing either.’”

It’s a reminder that those we look up to as “successful” aren’t special or unique. They’re just like me. They have imposter syndrome, they have doubts, and they’re simply doing the best they can with the information they have. The message I always take from that is: if they can do it, why can’t I?

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl. It’s a phenomenal book with both narrative that glues you to the page but also overarching concepts that offer a valuable perspective. If I’m feeling defeated or down, this book is my go-to.

The core message in the book is a modified version of Nietzsche’s quote: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” Ultimately, he suggests “meaning” is subjective, fluid, and can be found in many little (and big) things. There’s not just one “meaning of life,” there are many. And, if Frankl can find meaning during his time and suffering in concentration camps during WW2, I’m reminded how fortunate I am.

Launching a business is a big, intimidating thing. I’ve been there; I know what it feels like to give up the comfort of a consistent paycheck and look ahead to months of the unknown. It’s important to remember that any successful business was built by small steps, nothing is an overnight success. Look at your idea and the path to a viable business objectively. Break it up into smaller tasks and smaller timelines. Day-by-day, week-by-week, you chip away at these tasks, you meet deadlines.

Don’t look up at Mount Everest and think how impossible it seems. Just put one foot in front of the other, take it one step at a time, and one day you’ll look back astonished at how far you’ve come.

I would argue that almost no one comes up with a completely new idea. Even an idea that seems like it’s “new” has likely been thought about by dozens of people before. Ideas are worth nothing, it’s all about being able to execute the idea successfully. And so, if someone has thought about it before (or even if they’ve pursued it), who cares? Facebook wasn’t the first social network, Google wasn’t the first search engine, and Tesla wasn’t the first electric car. If you have an idea that you truly believe to be new to the market and/or better than any other idea currently in the market, I say go for it.

Validate the idea and prove there’s a need in the market for it.
Search for patents and get a provisional application for a “patent-pending status.” You then have one year to decide whether to formally file.
Create a prototype that will prove your idea can indeed function in the way you intend it to, at the price you need it to be.
Get quotes from manufacturers (if you’re launching a physical product). Before moving into any form of investment, I would recommend having numbers and some form of intent from a manufacturer that they’ll be able to produce it. These days, almost all the clients we work with will be working with manufacturers in China or India.
Acquire funding. This could be a product crowdfunding campaign (like Kickstarter or Indiegogo), an equity crowdfunding campaign (such as StartEngine or Wefunder), or a more traditional funding route (like angel investment or venture capital).
Deliver the product. With validation, prototypes, manufacturing partners and funding in place, it’s time to get your idea into the world.
Scale. It’s taken a long time to get here, but this is still only the beginning. Once you’ve gotten your first customers, the sky’s the limit. Learn from them, delight them, and add fuel to the fire.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)

I’ve described my 5 Things in this YouTube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt5eAwaS0gI

Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?

The first step is to validate that the idea is actually something people need and are willing to pay for (at the price you need to sell it to have a profitable business). Get out and put this idea in front of strangers, whether that’s online or hitting the streets and speaking to people in-person. You need to prove that there are people out there willing to buy it (that aren’t your family or friends).

If you’re pursuing an idea and you haven’t yet validated that the idea has product-market fit (aka — is something people want and will buy), stop what you’re doing. Go back. Start again and validate. Don’t waste another minute or dollar until you have data that proves the viability of your business idea.

There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?

The answer to this question depends on the scale of what you’re looking to achieve and the budget you have to achieve it. Money and experts will make things move more quickly and with less mishaps. However, some people don’t have access to this kind of money or are happy to make mishaps in the name of learning. If you’re looking to start the next Apple, you’ll want to invest in help. If you’re happy with creating a product as a simple hobby, going it alone is a perfectly fine path forward.

What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs. looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?

Like the previous answer, this often depends on what result you’re after. If you’re looking for massive growth, very quickly, you’re going to need investment to make that happen. If you’re happy for a slow and steady path to success, I can speak from personal experience how brilliant it is to fully own your business and not have to report back to investors.

Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

I used to work in the nonprofit sector and always wanted to get back there somehow. Once my business reached a level, financially, that I felt was secure, I launched the Russell Gives Foundation as a way to revisit that sector and give back. Russell Gives is a family foundation that offers grants and mentorship to early-stage 501(c)(3) organizations that focus on reducing racial inequity in the US.

I also recently published a book, Launch in 5: Take Your Idea from Lightbulb Moment to Profitable Business in Record Time (available on Amazon). So often I heard from entrepreneurs that they didn’t have the budgets to work with a launch agency like mine. My book offers up the strategies and systems to anyone looking to pursue an idea, without the high cost of hiring an agency to help with that launch.

A movement that focuses on empathy. I read once that many astronauts experience the “overview effect” when they first see the earth from space. It’s the sense of understanding the “big picture” and of feeling a connection among all humans. Yet, here on earth, there’s so much vitriol, hatred, and bitterness. I wish our schools would teach more empathy and I wish all of us were more empathetic. After all, we’re all in this together.

David Beckham. He’s not only one of England’s greatest football captains and would have some incredible stories to share about what goes on behind the scenes in professional football, but he’s also a guy that has used his work ethic and determination to get past difficult situations and flourish. In 1998, he was the scapegoat of English football and effigies of him were burned across the country. He kept his head down and kept working hard. Two years later, he was named captain. Similarly, while playing for Real Madrid, he was relegated to the youth team due to a falling out with the manager. Again, he kept his head down and worked hard. By the end of the season, he was back in the first team and played a key role in helping the team win the championship.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.

Making Something From Nothing: Will Russell Of Russell Marketing On How To Go From Idea To Launch was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Meet The Disruptors: Shannon Goggin Of Noyo On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Stay ready so you don’t have to get ready. Opportunity is everywhere. The people who win are those who are ready to seize opportunities, create openings, and can move fast when they see something in the making.

As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Shannon Goggin.

Shannon Goggin is the CEO and co-founder of Noyo. Before starting Noyo, she built product at Zenefits, where she was inspired by the powerful role technology can play in improving people’s experience with their health insurance. Shannon holds a BSBA from Georgetown University and currently lives in San Francisco, where she enjoys cooking elaborate vegetarian meals.

I am the CEO and co-founder of Noyo, an API-led benefits data platform that powers the benefits and insurance industries. We are working to make it dramatically easier to build amazing benefits experiences for people across the country.

My co-founder, Dennis Lee, and I started the company after working together at Zenefits, where we were building benefits software for small businesses. Users loved our product, but behind the scenes, it was extremely costly and difficult for us to get the right data in the right place at the right time. We started Noyo to solve the underlying data and infrastructure challenges that ultimately lead to the negative consumer experiences we’re all familiar with — expensive insurance, unexpected bills, and confusing benefits.

With Noyo, benefits data is continuously synchronized, scrubbed, unified and instantly available anywhere it’s needed. The technology unlocks new possibilities for how benefits are designed and delivered and enhancing the benefits journey for all: employees, employers, carriers, brokers, and modern benefits administration companies.

Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?

We see ourselves as “collaborative disruptors.” Often, when you think about disruption it’s about tearing down the old and creating the new from scratch. That way can be effective, but that’s not the approach I am leading at Noyo with our team. When trying to change an influential, monolithic industry like healthcare insurance, for example, which has 50-year-old systems in place and is connected to the bigger U.S. healthcare ecosystem, a collaborative approach was crucial.

There is so much change needed across healthcare and benefits. This change can be daunting, and it is critical to have a deep understanding of how it all works today — not just the technical systems and the digital workflow, but the economic incentives, all the different players, and how they effectively work together (or don’t).

Noyo is a benefits data platform. We offer tooling, like APIs, to help benefits administration software build better benefits experiences for their members, HR, and broker users. The API-powered technology platform we have created serves as the bridge between legacy infrastructure and modern software. So, we view ourselves as disruptors because we are paving a new way forward while working collaboratively with all the many important players.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

When the company was just a few months old, we secured a meeting with a large potential customer. They were in San Francisco visiting several of their existing partners, and we saw it as a great opportunity to connect. We were able to get on their schedule for dinner to share our vision for connected benefits and talk about how we might work together.

It was in the early days for the company. It was just the founding team, and I think we’d each put a few thousand dollars into the company bank account to get things off the ground. We were supposed to be hosting this big, national insurance company, but when the bill came, I fumbled when I saw the check. I think they saw my face, and they were very gracious and covered the meal. We had a good laugh. It definitely protrayed just how much of a startup we were at that point, but it all worked out — we started working with them formally a short time later.

We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?

When I was interviewing to join Zenefits, I felt an immediate connection to my soon-to-be manager, Jason, and I knew right away that I wanted to work with him and learn from him. Near the end of my interview process, Jason asked me where I saw myself in five years. I mentioned that I might like to start a business someday. At the time, I didn’t have a clear idea what the business might do, but I felt the draw. As we worked together, he would regularly nudge me on this topic — “You are going to start a business. What are you learning right now that’s going to help you do that?”

Jason was more than a mentor to me; he was a sponsor, placing me in positions to try new things and develop and round out my skill set. When he would challenge me with a new project, he always connected it back to my goals saying something like: “You’re going to work on this project with the sales team. You haven’t been exposed to that part of the business yet, and when you start your company, you will need it.”

He helped me build on my natural strengths, while challenging me in areas I was less comfortable. He held me accountable, and helped me move from a dream mindset to a goal mindset.

Three years later, when I decided to go all in on Noyo, Jason was one of the first people I called. Again, he was right there with encouragement and support, making introductions and helping us recruit crucial early hires. His vote of confidence meant more to me than he probably realized.

Disruption with clear vision is a positive. Disruption for disruption’s sake, with no solution and just to knock a system or organization down, doesn’t seem wholly positive to me.

Every day is an opportunity for growth and development — of people, systems, processes, and organizations. The world is changing and the supportive systems, strategies and approaches should change with it. But change is hard for so many. I find it energizing!

Can you share three of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.

Get many points of view, and then make your own decision. If you hear the same thing three times from people you trust, though, you probably have your answer. This advice came from another mentor of mine. It’s great to get lots of opinions so you can make a considered decision. The speed at which you make decisions matters as much as the quality of the decision.
Never show up alone for an important meeting. Bring a second person, even if they say nothing. I got this advice when we were just starting out. I laughed at the time, but it’s excellent advice. When the company you’re meeting with is big and established, showing up alone highlights just how small you are. Showing some bench strength is essential, especially for an early-stage startup.
Stay ready so you don’t have to get ready. Opportunity is everywhere. The people who win are those who are ready to seize opportunities, create openings, and can move fast when they see something in the making.

We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?

We need to make it easier and more compelling for more people with fresh perspectives to join the modern connected benefits industry. The work is vital to people and population health, and the opportunity is tremendous. I am committed to cultivating an inclusive group of leaders to build the future of benefits in a way that serves everyone.

We have all seen how the way we work and live has changed dramatically. Companies are distributed across states and countries; people have different needs and priorities. All this newness underscores the need for a fresh look at how benefits are delivered, and new technology unlocks new possibilities. This requires talent from different industries and creative energy to build the future.

I am so committed to infusing new talent into the industry that I welcome anyone interested to email me at [email protected]. I’ll help you find your next opportunity, whether at Noyo or any of the other amazing benefits tech companies out there.

Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?

Truth be told, I don’t read a lot of business books. I love reading essays. E.B. White is the writer I go back to most frequently. His writing is captivating, witty, and perceptive. He speaks plainly to the reader — no flowery language — and he draws you in with his observational style. His essay “Here Is New York” is one of my favorites, and while I haven’t lived in New York City in nearly a decade and the essay was written in 1949, it has a timeless energy and I still revisit it regularly.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

I come back to Nelson Mandela’s quote: “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” To create meaningful change, you must first believe it’s possible and then work to make it a reality. Ambitious, dedicated people have incredible power to do extraordinary things, no matter how seemingly impossible or lofty they may appear. Mistakes, failures, and missteps will happen along the way, and there will be many people who doubt if it can be done. But at the end of the day, it always seems impossible until it’s done.

I care deeply about a lot of causes but getting our planet healthy is number one right now for me. I would mobilize people to planet-saving action.

How can our readers follow you online?

Find me on Twitter at @ShannonCGoggin and @NoyoHQ and

on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/shannongoggin/

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!

Meet The Disruptors: Shannon Goggin Of Noyo On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Justis Kao Of Loop Media On 5 Things You Need To Know To Successfully Scale Your Business

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

A big vision is always important to have for the long run. But defining a hyper focus in your core business is more important to get you there. For us at Loop, our business clients are our primary focus. And their focus are their customers. We are a leading multichannel streaming video platform with one of the largest libraries that includes music videos, movie trailers, live performance and non-music entertainment content that is licensed to stream music videos directly to business venues out-of-home in the US. In addition to Loop’s 150+ expertly curated channels, Loop enables businesses to communicate promotions to their customers via a wide range of digital signage tools, and so much more. Ad-supported and at no cost to the business, Loop’s versatile, growing content platform has been built to help businesses thrive.

Startups usually start with a small cohort of close colleagues. But what happens when you add a bunch of new people into this close cohort? How do you maintain the company culture? In addition, what is needed to successfully scale a business to increase market share or to increase offerings? How can a small startup grow successfully to a midsize and then large company? To address these questions, we are talking to successful business leaders who can share stories and insights from their experiences about the “5 Things You Need To Know To Successfully Scale Your Business”. As a part of this series, we had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Justis Kao.

Justis Kao is Chief of Staff at Loop Media, Inc. He directs Loop Media’s internal communication strategies, external press efforts and oversees the staff at large for the company. A creative at heart, Kao is an entrepreneur who has carved out global success in every aspect of the traditional music industry and is conquering music tech with Loop Media.

Kao’s love of music gained him entry to the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA, where he graduated with a degree in Contemporary Writing & Production. His skills brought him to Los Angeles, CA, where he quickly found success as a live vocalist on season 1 of “The X Factor USA,” and worked with friend and songwriter Claude Kelly and artists including Rihanna, Justin Bieber and Alanis Morissette.

His network and expertise led Kao to become Creative Director at FarWest Entertainment, managing all aspects of global appearances for Quincy Jones’ first Pan-Asian girl group, BLUSH. While at FarWest, Kao eventually rose through the ranks to oversee branding, communications and operations across all global partners and offices.

Kao is based in Loop Media’s Los Angeles office in the heart of the entertainment industry, where he also runs AIM Foundation, a non-profit empowering young people to create a groundswell movement to do good, give back and affect change in their communities.

Thank you for joining us in this interview series. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’?

Thanks for having me! I was raised in Toronto, Canada in the heart of the city and began playing piano at age 6. From a very young age, music has been ingrained in my core being. At 10 years old, I had completed my formal classical piano training with an offer to study in New York and train to tour in Europe by the age of 13. Growing up in arguably, one of the most diverse and multicultural cities in the world, I was surrounded by friends from all different backgrounds, ethnicities, and cultures. My musical tastes reflected that, and I never wanted to be pigeonholed in my music career with just classical music. It was a strong foundation to start with, but I had my eyes set on Los Angeles and the music industry at large since I was very young. When I turned 17, I auditioned for Berklee College of Music which I later attended on scholarship.

You’ve had a remarkable career journey. Can you highlight a key decision in your career that helped you get to where you are today?

As a young child, even though music was such an integral part of my life, I was strangely hyper-administrative and constantly focused on detail. Essentially, half-artist, half-business, all the time. I always knew I wanted to further my musical skills and abilities and follow the artist path, but at some point, transition over to the business side of things. As a young musician going the independent route, I would write by myself and then find a producer to help me cut the records in studio. I would find a venue to do a show and promote to my local fanbase and concurrently handle ticket sales, lighting design, stage production, F&B, background singers, band — you name it, I’ve probably played that role at some point in my artist career. This really set the stage for me understanding the complexities of what it took to build and put something great together. It all starts with a vision for me, but I’ve grown to understand the micro-execution needed in going from an idea to the completion of it.

What’s the most impactful initiative you’ve led that you’re particularly proud of?

At Loop, I was one of four from our team that started with the Company from day one. Back then, we were a small and lean team. That meant every head count that we added had to be strategic and add value right from the beginning. Of course, every start-up at that phase knows it will encounter its share of ups and downs, so the culture of the company from early on is crucial. Even if it was a more senior hire vs. a new intern, we knew we wanted a company that treated everyone equally, with respect and professionalism. Our culture today at Loop promotes excellence, integrity, a sense of urgency, built on respect and collaboration. I’m proud of what we are continuing to accomplish at Loop because of that culture we’ve been able to grow and maintain.

Sometimes our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a mistake you’ve made and the lesson you took away from it?

I’ll start by saying that communication, urgency and accuracy are key traits that I’ve continued to develop for myself. Early on when your role or responsibility includes other key stakeholders, the deliverables on any given project are incumbent on everyone doing their part, on time. We all know that not everything goes as planned all the time, but we can do our best to over-communicate, follow up immediately and always triple check everything. “Preparedness is the key to victory and success.”

That said, a mistake I’ve learned from is not asking enough thorough questions. The 5 w’s are key in executing efficiently and accurately.

How has mentorship played a role in your career, whether receiving mentorship or offering it to others?

I would say this is a key part to anyone’s growth in their career, in both receiving and offering it to others. Personally, I’ve taken advantage of a great mentor and role model in our CEO, Jon Niermann, who at the age of 35 became President of Disney Asia. We have now worked together for over a decade, and I’ve actively consulted with him over the years on business strategy and decisions as well as observing how someone with his pedigree and resume continues to operate with integrity and wise judgment after an illustrious corporate career. We began Loop Media years ago with the intention of starting a company that would not only operate with excellence in our product and offering, but also create and instill a culture that would constantly challenge our employees to become better and reach new heights. I think that’s where the mentorship to those that report to you become priority: Bring the right individuals with the skills needed, potential to grow, and invest deeply in them- as people, first.

Developing your leadership style takes time and practice. Who do you model your leadership style after? What are some key character traits you try to emulate?

I’ve been led by some formidable leaders in my life in various areas whether it was personal, finance, mental or professional. Way back when, I had the opportunity to work on TheXFactorUSA when it first launched. I got to watch Simon Cowell in action on a day-to-day basis. His attention to detail was unparalleled. By day three on a set of a few hundred people, he walked down the hall on stage and said “Hi Justis.” Something I’ll never forget, and always took note of.

A common thread between most of the most influential leaders in my life is communication. The ability to communicate — first by listening, then accurately understanding a situation or person before making a judgment or decision — is key to being a great leader. Always remaining level-headed and calm in tough and challenging circumstances. It’s something I’ve learned throughout my life and career. With any growing organization, there will always be conflict and problems at some point and being a great leader means that you can address those issues and provide a solution.

Thank you for sharing that with us. Let’s talk about scaling a business from a small startup to a midsize and then large company. Based on your experience, can you share with our readers the “5 Things You Need To Know To Successfully Scale Your Business”? Please give a story or example for each.

1. Hyper Focus on Core Business

A big vision is always important to have for the long run. But defining a hyper focus in your core business is more important to get you there. For us at Loop, our business clients are our primary focus. And their focus are their customers. We are a leading multichannel streaming video platform with one of the largest libraries that includes music videos, movie trailers, live performance and non-music entertainment content that is licensed to stream music videos directly to business venues out-of-home in the US. In addition to Loop’s 150+ expertly curated channels, Loop enables businesses to communicate promotions to their customers via a wide range of digital signage tools, and so much more. Ad-supported and at no cost to the business, Loop’s versatile, growing content platform has been built to help businesses thrive.

2. Human Capital

Hiring the right team is crucial. We started strong with our CEO, Jon Niermann coming from Disney and Electronic Arts Asia and then Liam McCallum (Chief Product Officer) having come as Head of Platform for Electronic Arts, Asia. As we grew, we needed to add to the management team with experts in their field. As such, we added former execs from MTV, Viacom, and Facebook. Now, years after our launch of the company, we are continuing to hire within our teams that have strong experience and resumes and not only understand the vision of Loop, but have passion for where we are headed.

3. Establish Best Practices, Processes and Protocols, and Make Them Repeatable

Having a clear, focused core business model and the right team to support now means that you need to operate with efficiency and productivity as you grow. Where we used to be able to jump on quick calls with a only a few of us is now more difficult with everyone’s schedules. Developing productive and focused team meetings within each division is key. Constant communication is vital, whether you’re using Slack, text, phone, email, etc. With my team, I start the year with an overarching focus for the coming quarters and then review with them in more detail for goals and deliverables. With any growing company, the ability to pivot and change course is always needed. That leads us back to management and leadership being able to cast and communicate the vision and executables needed whenever that happens. When launching a new initiative, test the plan that you have with the market. Get constant feedback and adjust as needed and test again.

4. Develop and Grow the Right Partnerships

I’ll use another personal music example here. When I was younger, as an artist, I wanted to do everything musically myself, because I could write, play, produce and perform. But that was limiting my creativity and my ability by missing the value that others would bring to table. The more that I collaborated with people that were great and better than myself, the more my music went to a different level. Great partners in business become just as crucial to move the business forward. The synergy between teams, coupled with strategic and experienced thought leadership and opportunities help drive initiatives forward, quicker and in a more productive manner.

5. Leverage the Partnership vs Transactional approach

I find that every single day brings new opportunities in business to choose between taking the Partnership approach, or the Transactional approach. I almost always opt for the Partnership path. What does this mean? Think about it in terms of meeting or not meeting, vs. exceeding or greatly exceeding expectations for the other party. The Partnership approach looks at the situation and seeks to understand all of the extra value–short and long term here–that can be delivered in the spirit of conveying to the other party just how much you care about them feeling heard, seen, understood and truly delighted. The transactional approach never feels great- it always feels like the box-checking effort that it is. Every once in a while, this might be the way to go; but I almost never lead with it, and especially never when it comes to any situation where my intention is to build a great relationship for the future. Any company or entity can do a one-off transaction, or even a few repeated transactions. The measurement for me is building a network of true partners to last a lifetime, in business and also personally.

Can you share a few of the mistakes that companies make when they try to scale a business? What would you suggest to address those errors?

1. Thinking that a huge investment in the start-up phase is all that you need. Of course, capital funding is crucial to every business at any point in time, but it’s definitely not the only important thing early on. Having a plan and a management team with experience, creativity and critical thinking are also key.

2. Thinking that structure can come later. Think through structure, organization and processes early on. The more you can define, the easier it will be when you actually scale.

3. Planning too far ahead. There’s a balance when it comes to leaders that are visionaries. You need to be able to see the big picture but also execute and deliver often within each quarter. Piloting projects and testing the market is a great way to see if there’s sustainability and success in the path you’re taking.

Scaling includes bringing new people into the organization. How can a company preserve its company culture and ethos when new people are brought in?

I think this again starts with leadership. As you grow, do you become too busy to meet new hires? Or do you make it a point to have face time right from the very beginning? Sharing your vision about how and why the company started in the first place speaks volumes to new hires, especially when it comes from the top.

In my work, I focus on helping companies to simplify the process of creating documentation of their workflow, so I am particularly passionate about this question. Many times, a key aspect of scaling your business is scaling your team’s knowledge and internal procedures. What tools or techniques have helped your teams be successful at scaling internally?

Keeping with the communication theme, we direct a lot of our attention to regular, consistent conversations with our partners, vendors- really any and all key stakeholders. Being in the loop here with them constantly allows us to effectively be strategic in our objectives. We’re able to identify targets of intersection with our partners and then execute on those initiatives in a timely and productive manner. We find that more frequent, objective-oriented check-ins with our internal and external partners is more effective than having longer intervals of dead space in between meetings.

What software or tools do you recommend to help onboard new hires?

A great, experienced HR person/team.

Because of your role, you are a person of influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most people, what would that be? You never know what your ideas can trigger.

I would tell people that you should never stop learning, no matter how much success you’ve achieved at that point in life. Always challenge yourself to grow and find peace in the uncomfortable seasons as it is part of the process and journey. Invest in yourself first so that you can invest in others. This is part of my personal ethos: “Aim to do good. Aim to be better than the last version of yourself. Aim to affect a little, and from there you affect a lot.”

This was truly meaningful! Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your expertise!

Justis Kao Of Loop Media On 5 Things You Need To Know To Successfully Scale Your Business was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Meet The Disruptors: Shay Paresh Of SHAYDE BEAUTY On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your…

Meet The Disruptors: Shay Paresh Of SHAYDE BEAUTY On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Failure always seemed unacceptable…. We grew up within an education system where failing held you back. After jumping into entrepreneurship, I quickly recognized that each wrong turn is an experiment, not the end. Learn how to fail so that failure turns into a beginning. Learn from the mistakes you identify and be better next time around.

As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Shay Paresh.

Shay Paresh is the founder of SHAYDE BEAUTY, a science backed skincare line made with melanin in mind. Shay has worked to develop formulations that address the specific dermatological needs of skin of color by reducing inflammation, which can often result in dark spots and hyperpigmentation.

I’ve struggled with hyperpigmentation and acne scarring since my early teens. Often, the products I would use would make my hyperpigmentation worse or not help at all. They were dated, antiquated, and honestly not appealing.. I always wished there was a brand that offered products that were not only efficacious and simple to use, but also catered to my melanin skin.

During my time working in Creative Marketing at some of the worlds most established beauty brands, I saw first-hand how diversity was treated as an afterthought not just in marketing, but down to the product development process. That’s when SHAYDE BEAUTY was born. All of our products are vegan and cruelty-free, backed by science, contain clinically proven actives, and are sustainably made.

Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?

At SHAYDE, we’re on a mission to change the personal care ecosystem for Fitzpatrick skin types IV-VI. Less than 3% of brands in the industry cater to Fitzpatrick skin types IV-VI. Meanwhile 40% of Americans are people with skin of color and this is estimated to grow beyond 50% by 2045. While globally 80% of all people are with skin of color, most of the clinical studies, research and products on the market are not geared towards those with skin of color.

(By definition : Fitzpatrick skin types (or phototypes) — FST (or FSP) — refer to a skin tone scale developed to classify skin coloring and response to ultraviolet (UV) radiation)

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?

My grandmother is one of the most impressive people I know. From the time I was little, I remember her unexplainable ability to command respect and attention in a room. I can recall following her around work everyday after school and witnessing her passion for helping others. She’s always able to connect with those around her in a meaningful way with open arms and she’s able to build a community around her everywhere we go. To this day, I use her strength to fuel my own.

We are in an age where ‘disruption’ has almost lost its meaning. However, I find disruption in all things to be imperative to change and innovation. Without change, imagine where we would be right this moment.

Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.

My strongest piece of advice that I have ever received is “organize or agonize”. That goes for my personal and professional life.

Another big one is that failure is ok!

Failure always seemed unacceptable…. We grew up within an education system where failing held you back. After jumping into entrepreneurship, I quickly recognized that each wrong turn is an experiment, not the end. Learn how to fail so that failure turns into a beginning. Learn from the mistakes you identify and be better next time around.

We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next? We’re really excited to launch globally in the near future and offer even more innovative products to those underserved by the beauty industry.

Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?

One of my all time favorite books is Shoe Dog (A Memoir by the Creator of Nike) because I felt connected to his struggles. It was a good reminder to trust your intuition, never give up, and using the resources around you to level up.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

Find a strong support network that inspires you to keep going. Science has shown that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. It’s vital to surround yourself with the right people, personally and professionally.

Set an intention and trust yourself. Don’t let others dim your light. Be able to adapt. Most importantly, just keep swimming.

How can our readers follow you online?

https://www.instagram.com/shayparesh

https://shaydebeauty.com/

https://www.instagram.com/shaydebeauty/

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!

Meet The Disruptors: Shay Paresh Of SHAYDE BEAUTY On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Making Something From Nothing: Scott Dancy Of Azuna Fresh On How To Go From Idea To Launch

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Don’t be afraid to evolve. Shed your skin often, and you’ll always be fresh. It doesn’t mean that you change the core of your brand but revive it often. Let your consumer know that as they evolve, you will too.

As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Scott Dancy, Founder & CEO, Azuna Fresh.

A Jersey-born, take-no-prisoners entrepreneur by nature, Scott Dancy has spent his life building big ideas into big businesses. His multiple successes have spanned the corners of industry, from oil and gas to staffing, and these days he’s defying expectations in a new arena — natural household cleaning solutions. With the launch of Azuna Fresh a few years ago, Dancy aimed to reinvent how we clean and deodorize our home, using tea tree oil as a basis to create a kid and pet friendly tea tree-based gel that quite literally cleans the surrounding area of bacteria and odors. A dedicated father, he’s rarely satisfied with the status quo, juggling both parenting and product development. In the last year alone, Dancy has now expanded Azuna into multiple products, partnering with retailers and selling direct to consumer, once again building a dream out of a single idea.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?

I was born and raised in New Jersey, and my father was always an entrepreneur. Early on in my life he owned liquor stores, but then we owned a funeral home, and we lived above that most of my childhood. I was a very good athlete, but made sure I was at least an average student, and that combination allowed me to play football at a very academic selective school — the University of Rochester. I think early on I knew that I needed a variety of skills in my life, and I didn’t want to fall back on any single talent or dream.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

Perception is reality.

I was told this by my first business partner, and it instantly made complete sense and therefore left a lifelong impression upon me. What anyone perceives about you, your brand or your product — that is their reality. It’s critical to pay attention to how your message is being received. This really made me focus on my communication skills, and I think long and hard about how the person I am trying to reach interprets my words and actions. If I am trying to motivate someone, then I have to make sure they accurately understand what we are trying to achieve together and feel good about the reasoning. This is true in both personal and professional relationships, and in how an audience sees your brand.

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

A Man in Full, by Tom Wolfe. I read it while in my early 20’s, living in Atlanta. The book was based on a businessman in Atlanta who lived with extreme wealth and luxury. At first, I was mesmerized by how the character — Charles Croker — lived. The extravagance and power, whether real or perceived, how those two things intertwined fascinated me. But by the end of the story, by the time the truth of that whirlwind life was revealed, it was a tale about how our value is in doing the right thing. Money didn’t buy happiness or fulfillment. It can make survival and life easier, but true, authentic happiness doesn’t have a price tag. That has been a baseline for me through the best and worst times of my life.

I think the greatest obstacle often is fear. I’ve had failures, sometimes back-to-back. I remember people saying things like “just keep going buddy, you’ll get there someday” and “are you seriously going to try this again?” I’ve been a founding partner in the fastest growing staffing business in the northeast. I’ve been a co-founder of a very successful oil and gas company — but when you branch out into new spaces, if you meet with early failures, the doubts and the doubters can get to you. With my current company, Azuna, I knew I had a great brand because the product is amazing, and it works and it is affordable. Yet I had many, many people ask me what the heck I was doing, because I had no experience with a direct-to-consumer product. Maybe I was crazy, because I really didn’t know anything about how to market direct to a consumer, but I did my research, I followed brands I admired, I found people I wanted to work with — and three years later, after a lot of perseverance, we are expanding far faster than I ever expected. Fear is always the devil, and I’m glad I didn’t let it drive me off course.

I think these days that is easier than ever. The most obvious start is to try finding your product online. Try every search term that could be associated with it. Search chat rooms for the problem you are trying to solve with your product and see if solutions like yours exist. If there are similarities between what you’re trying to create and something that exists, don’t give up. It doesn’t mean it isn’t a good idea, use that to push yourself to go a step further, be even more innovative. It’s critical to check on patents so you don’t infringe on anything, but don’t be afraid to compete with a product or to improve on something.

Before you do anything, you have to do your research about possible competition or similar ideas. If your idea stands up and can exceed the competition on quality and price and originality, work with a patent attorney to make sure you can hold your own in the category. The right patent attorney is critical — so call around, ask friends for those that are highly recommended and those that know your space. Then you want to find the right manufacturer — and that can be tough as well as most don’t have their own web presence. And most of all — do some focus groups, even with family or friends. Does your product have a use case? Would they buy it? What would they change? Don’t be distracted by negative feedback, use that to improve on your idea. Then create your own web presence and see if you can get some online sales traction, because no retailer is giving shelf space or time to a cold brand.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why?

Never dismiss any idea until you have tried it. If you have a good idea, give it the time and energy it deserves. Don’t let it fall by the wayside. Ideas have to be priorities in your business because that’s how you grow and expand.
Follow the competition and what they are doing. You can’t own the category if you don’t know what the competition is doing today, and what they have announced is to come. Pay attention to their evolutions. There’s a reason the “know thy enemy, and know yourself, in a hundred battles you will never be undefeated” quote stands the test of time. It’s a battle to the top.
Make sure that you are listening to your employees. They know the ins and outs of your product, your competition, and your market. That’s what you have hired them for — pay attention to what they have to say. Your great idea needs many minds to grow.
Always be on top of social and consumer trends. Do your research, and know what the consumer is seeking, how they are acting, what motivates them to spend. And know what content appeals to your direct consumer — every brand is a content creator these days, don’t ignore the fact that your audience wants you to make an effort to connect with them on a personal level.
Don’t be afraid to evolve. Shed your skin often, and you’ll always be fresh. It doesn’t mean that you change the core of your brand but revive it often. Let your consumer know that as they evolve, you will too.

Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?

First try and build a prototype — that is key. You have to understand the full cost and demand for any product before it can be viable for any market. You might have the best way to catch a llama, but that doesn’t mean there is a high demand for llama catchers.

There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?

I’m a big believer in trying it on your own to start. Take it as far as the point where you don’t have the answers anymore or can’t find them, then go ahead and hire a consultant experienced in your category to take you to the next step. By all means hire a consultant to do some competitive landscape analysis if you need to — make sure you know the ins and outs of your manufacturing process and the market demand before you go too far.

What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?

I’m a self-starter, but I’m also a big thinker. I like the freedom of bootstrapping in the beginning as you figure out your product and your market, and you get to a realistic projection of your potential. Get your product out there, find out what the demand and profit possibilities are, so you can value your company accordingly and back up those claims before you open yourself up to venture capital. If you want a business you can manage on your own, you may not need that big round of funding, but if your goal is to blow it out or to sell in a few years, then by all means go after the big funding. Ask yourself how autonomous you want to be, and decide if you’re looking for 30% of a million dollars with people to answer to, or 100% of $100,000 and no one to answer to? Social platforms have also changed how we sell direct to consumers — a single campaign can take a product viral very quickly, so you have to recognize that you might need the capital to scale quickly — is that something you can manage on your own or do you want outside funding to prepare for that?

Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

I’ve started, but I’m not where I want to be yet. The pandemic opened my eyes in a lot of ways to the things that we can change about our lives and our lifestyles, and it made me even more aware of the world my kids will live in. My company now, Azuna, is utilizing natural solutions like tea tree gel to solve a bacterial, indoor air pollution problem, and we’ve heard from a lot of people that it’s helped them with their own indoor air challenges. We made sure to approach our product with sustainability in mind — so recycling and refills are important options for us, and now we are moving into long-term glass containers. But all of that is far from where I want to be. I want to create an impact both via our product but also via our ability to fund solutions and organizations that are advancing care for our planet. I can’t ask my kids to be compassionate, global citizens if I’m not striving to be that myself.

I’d love to find a way to bring counseling services to underserved areas in a big way — meaning it would be easily accessible, paid for, encouraged and confidential. One day, when I sell and can allocate funding towards a need, it would be to create this pathway. I’ve witnessed firsthand many teenagers who live in violent neighborhoods, or who live with a lack of general resources, and I’ve seen them overcome because they have someone to talk to, and someone who is listening to them and giving them opportunities to break out of a negative cycle of thinking. Communication is so critical — it would give these kids a chance to express their stress and fears, and to get some guidance on how to become healthy-minded adults who can navigate a path to success.

I’d have to say Shaquille O’Neal. He’s someone who has worked so hard to find his own path to success, and he is obviously a legend in terms of his reputation on the court. But off the court, he’s done even more for communities who need it. His foundation reaches so many kids in underserved communities, and he reaches them with communication and by creating joy in their lives. He’s found a way to bring happiness and hope to people, at a time in his life when he could easily rest on his laurels. I find that deeply inspirational — his energy and effort after the buzzer to teach those around him how to win, too. That’s something I hold up every day, and would love his insights as to how he tapped into that calling within him and manifested it into the real legacy he’s created.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.

Making Something From Nothing: Scott Dancy Of Azuna Fresh On How To Go From Idea To Launch was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Makers of The Metaverse: Freddie Hickman Of Hyper SQ On The Future Of The VR, AR & Mixed Reality…

Makers of The Metaverse: Freddie Hickman Of Hyper SQ On The Future Of The VR, AR & Mixed Reality Industries

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Move forward with pace and intensity, but allow mental space to connect the dots. Have aggressive self-directed timelines, keep momentum high, but at the same time allow time to let things sink in. Sometimes the most pivotal ah-ha moments come from the times you least expected it, often when you’re not deep in work and in a relaxed state of mind.

Freddie Hickman [CEO & Co-Founder of Hyper SQ] spent half a decade at Expedia Group (the largest tech travel company in the world) across product, finance, and commercial roles. He noticed that the travel space in general is ripe for disruption, especially on the consumer discovery side. Prior to that Freddie worked at L’Oréal for 3 years helping to build out their ecommerce function.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit. Can you tell us a bit about your backstory and how you grew up?

Born in London, swiftly migrated to Stockholm with my mother and started life as a fully fledged Swede (with the accent, of course). 14 years later, I returned to the UK with a music scholarship, shipping straight to boarding school — I had played the piano since the age of five, and so it seemed at the time that I was firmly within the musical path. In fact, the plan was originally to study Music at university, though one week in I realised this just wasn’t for me, so I switched over to Economics, Politics, and Music as a combined degree. University was far too much fun, so I decided to stay another year and study for a masters. Fast forward almost a decade later, and I had spent several years across a bunch of product, strategy, and commercial roles at L’Oréal and Expedia Group, before finally building the overdue courage jump ship into the startup world and building something from the ground up.

Is there a particular book, film, or podcast that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

‘The Magic of Thinking Big,’ by David Schwartz. I’ve probably read this book about 4 or 5 times. The one thing most of us can get better at is simply thinking bigger. I’m obsessed with the concept of leverage. Virtually anything you think of now, can be thought of on a scale that is bigger, bolder, and more daring. I’d highly recommend getting stuck into that book for anyone looking to truly accomplish big things.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

The journey so far is littered with fragments of mistakes (some less humorous than others!). The hardest thing for me was having to unlearn the stuff you get taught at large companies, where I had spent most of my career up until now. Getting out of the ‘employee mindset. ’In the early months, I was looking for a software development company to help us get started before eventually migrating technology in-house. I set out and in hindsight, grossly over-analysed over 40 vendors in this beautifully formatted excel spreadsheet (that by the way, no one will ever read through apart from myself), with tons of criteria, score systems, and conditional formatting. Classic big company efforts — it looked pretty to be fair. This all felt great until my buddy asked a simple question — so have you chosen your vendor yet? Ah..

Rather than a single person, I’ve got a group of crazy talented friends who have without a doubt led me to where I am today. Virtually all of them started off in either consulting or banking, but swiftly veered off and got ‘red-pilled’ into the untrodden path. Most of them are now venture-backed founders, doing incredible things. Everyone challenges each other, keeps each other accountable, and helps one another think big and bold.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

Every ounce of my attention right now is focussed on building one thing: our Web3 startup, Hyper SQ.

We’re building the first true Explore2Earn experience that rewards people for getting out of their homes to explore the world. There is a lot of criticism today towards large tech giants and how they have optimised and designed their products to make us addicted to our phones, through carefully engineering addictive compulsion loops, making us hungry for hearts and likes. Rather than fight this, we’re taking the technical progress and turning this into a force for good — getting people out and exploring. Having worked at Expedia Group, one of the largest travel tech companies in the world, for over five years, I saw first-hand how much could be disrupted.

Without a doubt for me it’s the paradigm shift in how we think about incentive structures, made possible by crypto tokens. The list of use cases is endless where the incentive structure is fundamentally flipped, whereby value is accrued to the true value creators (typically end-users, early participants, creators, developers), rather than the centralised entities. Well designed incentives, as we know, are extraordinarily powerful human motivators.

The concept of interoperability is also a fascinating one, particularly in the context of metaeverses whereby they should all be connected to each other seamlessly, along with all the assets and elements within them. That there is no ‘closed-economy’ which is the case for most games available today, for instance.

Of course, the concert of decentralisation also blatantly comes to mind. And with regard to metaverses, that there is no single point of failure nor control.

What are the 3 things that concern you about the VR, AR and MR industries? Can you explain? What can be done to address those concerns?

We’re still early in the S-Curve of adoption for these relatively new technologies. General momentum is going to matter for these industries to truly breakthrough into the mainstream. Which is also why the fact that the metaverse vision and technological progress is being controlled and led by a few large companies (several public companies, at the mercy of market conditions and investors risk appetite) is a risk in itself. Much of the mainstream adoption will also be linked to the physical hardware development — building products that are convenient and affordable for consumers.

I think the entertainment aspects of VR, AR and MR are apparent. Can you share with our readers how these industries can help us at work?

For one of my advisors we strictly use Oculus to meet for our weekly catch ups. Though the kit is still burdensome, and the graphics have a long way to go, it’s fascinating how connected it makes us feel, despite being in different continents. Your typical Zoom meeting just doesn’t get anywhere close to this. Once the hardware problem is solved, and we have more practical equipment for everyday office work, VR, AR and MR will all have a huge place in solving also the remote work problem by bringing us closer.

Are there other ways that VR, AR and MR can improve our lives? Can you explain?

They will make us feel more connected than ever before, at a time when we are often geographically dispersed. A guilty pleasure of mine is a healthy dose of the multiplier game Warzone with my buddies. We joke to say we were the original adopters of the metaverse. Though this might not be too far off. I’ve had old friends who I hadn’t spoken to for over a decade, now become a part of life again (and in real life) as a result of gaming alone in these digitally created online worlds.

What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about working in your industry? Can you explain what you mean?

I noticed this all the time — the majority of people still have this idea that the metaverse/crypto/web3 industry is full of ‘degens’ (to be fair, we’re shooting ourselves in the foot here by referring ourselves to this too!). There is a sense that this is still the wild west with plenty of bad actors. The reality is some of the smartest people I know all work directly or indirectly in this space, and this pattern is becoming more apparent by the day.

What are your “5 Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Career In The VR, AR or MR Industries?”

1. Move forward with pace and intensity, but allow mental space to connect the dots. Have aggressive self-directed timelines, keep momentum high, but at the same time allow time to let things sink in. Sometimes the most pivotal ah-ha moments come from the times you least expected it, often when you’re not deep in work and in a relaxed state of mind.

2. Get to market as quickly as possible, iterate based on real feedback. Classic product 101, though often overlooked or misunderstood. What can you do today to get something to market, even if this is just a small part of your grand vision? So you can get a quick and early signal that you’re building something people actually want and will use.

3. Trust the process, and see the true potential beyond what is in front of you now. It’s just the early building blocks of what is to come. The larger the ambition the harder it will be to fight this and visualise the possibilities — the metaverse is a classic use case for this.

4. Speak to as many people as possible in this space. Everytime I speak with someone, I never regret it. Something new is learned. The ‘easier’ thing to do is to read books and continuously study. Might be slightly controversial, but I believe the most impactful and high leverage activity is just to source information directly from others. Not only will you build relationships whilst learning, but you will also often get information not publicly available.

5. Build in public. This is a hard one — the temptation is to keep things in private and wait for the big reveal. If you can get your early community of users to join you on the product development journey, you’ve already won half the battle.

This is going to be biassed based on what we’re building! We want to create (literal) movements of people for different causes through the power of our technology. Getting people out of their comfort zones, out of their homes, and exploring places en masse.

I’m torn between Elon Musk and Chris Dixon of a16z

Elon to learn how he truly operates, and to get a glimpse of how his mind works. Chris, since a huge amount of influence of what we’re building originated with his original thinking.

Thank you so much for these excellent stories and insights. We wish you continued success in your great work!

Makers of The Metaverse: Freddie Hickman Of Hyper SQ On The Future Of The VR, AR & Mixed Reality… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Srikrishnan Ganesan of Rocketlane On 5 Ways To Create a Wow! Customer Experience

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

A business leader needs to have their team anticipate everything that can go wrong with their customers’ experience and create a playbook to recover from those situations, thereby “wowing” the customer. So, being prepared is the single most important thing to do. I’ve heard how Amex deals with a lost credit card, not by simply blocking the card but also shipping a new one — immediately — wherever you may be — and letting you know which subscription services on the card should be changed.

As a part of our series about the five things a business should do to create a Wow! customer experience, I had the pleasure of interviewing Srikrishnan Ganesan.

Co-founder and CEO of Rocketlane, Srikrishnan Ganesan is a serial entrepreneur with a track record of leading teams. With Rocketlane, he’s focused on providing a purpose-built customer onboarding platform that shortens the client’s time to value and eliminates hit-or-miss experiences for their customers. The end goal is to deliver a collaborative, transparent and professional onboarding experience for every customer.

Thank you so much for joining us !Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I’m Sri, co-founder and CEO of Rocketlane. We are a 2-year-old startup helping to provide a better way to collaborate and deliver on client-facing projects that is ten times better than the competition!

I’m a computer science engineer at heart, but I also went to business school to be able to assume other product and corporate roles. I started my career in product management and previously worked at Verizon and rediff.com.

I am excited about creating something from nothing. I figured I enjoyed the “building” part of the job — building teams, building products, building the culture, etc. So, my next move was to join a very early-stage startup and create my own company with a couple of friends in a couple of years. Our B2B SaaS startup was acquired by Freshworks™, where we learned a lot about building SaaS businesses — a lot of which we now use as we build Rocketlane.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?

In our previous startup, my sales lead would focus an entire conversation with a prospective client on one feature of our product. This singular approach appeared to promote positive interest and an intent to purchase from those prospects. But in my role as a passionate founder, I would jump in and talk about the rest of our product features the prospective client absolutely must use. This tactic forced bringing in more stakeholders and complicated the sale.

I was thinking we were not doing justice to the product without selling its complete vision and capabilities. But all I was doing was increasing the risk of losing potential clients by overwhelming them with too much information. From then on, I learned to trust my salesperson’s judgment on what resonated with the customer. And to optimize that for deal momentum instead of thinking inside-out or from the perspective of what we’ve built. You can always expand to your full vision later.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

There are way too many people for me to thank who have helped me on all my start-up journeys. So, I cannot call out just one person here. I am super grateful to all the folks who gave me their time and feedback, made introductions, did reference checks, and looked out for me during hard times.

Here’s one story: Tony, a fellow entrepreneur who runs Tagalys, met a key leader from a large global retailer at an event we were at while running my previous startup. He felt we might be a good fit for the retailer, so he slipped me the leader’s business card. Eventually, one thing led to the other, and we got into an accelerator program through this leader and later landed a six-figure deal with them! This was just one of the small gestures that made a huge impact on our startup. There are so many people I am grateful to who made all kinds of contributions to our business.

In your words, can you share a few reasons why great customer service and a great customer experience is essential for success in business?

It is said that every good experience is shared with three others, and every bad experience is shared with ten others. If you have a turnaround/”wow” moment, you are more likely to share that. Investing in excellent customer service, customer experience, and building playbooks for your teams to follow is essential to delivering a consistent experience that creates happy customers!

Very few companies count customer support as an important “investment.” Most look at it as a cost center and try to focus on cost-cutting. On the other hand, companies like Amazon care deeply about customer service and consider it a worthwhile investment. The fact that they invested in features like “May Day” showcases how much they care about CS [Customer Support].

The competition requires you to build a DNA for delivering superlative customer experience as one of your key strengths. Customer expectations change over time, and perceptions around your brand are also impacted by CX [Customer Experience] and hence become a reason for you to improve.

Can you share with us a story from your experience about a customer who was “Wowed” by the experience you provided?

Sending thoughtful gifts to customers when things go wrong or when they are in a stressful situation is something that has helped us “wow” them. For example, we noticed a customer had a cat on one of our zoom calls, and at the right opportunity, we gifted her a cute accessory for the pet as a “thank you” to her. This helped our customers understand that we aren’t just a transactional company and that we pay attention to the small things.

Another “wow” experience is the gorgeous Indian art we presented to every speaker at our Propel event earlier this year. There was a very enthusiastic response from every speaker upon receiving the art.

Did that Wow! experience have any long-term ripple effects? Can you share the story?

The art we sent to the speakers made them curious about the significance of the art style and the depicted bird, a peacock, in Indian mythology. And they were posting about our gesture on social media. Anything you do that is thoughtful leaves your customer or partner “wowed” and helps them understand what it is like to work with you.

A business leader needs to have their team anticipate everything that can go wrong with their customers’ experience and create a playbook to recover from those situations, thereby “wowing” the customer. So, being prepared is the single most important thing to do. I’ve heard how Amex deals with a lost credit card, not by simply blocking the card but also shipping a new one — immediately — wherever you may be — and letting you know which subscription services on the card should be changed.

To create a “wow” CX, the team must simultaneously act with urgency and patience with the customer. For example, if you provide chat offerings for support, responding in under 30 seconds and not closing the chat on the customer if they are delayed, like how we message with friends, is a “wow” experience. For customers used to chat experiences that time out, providing an asynchronous experience is very appealing. So, business leaders need insights into consumer preferences and be aware of the technology to support those insights.

Creating “wow” experiences involves an element of surprise or going above and beyond. So, proactively planning these pleasant surprises and putting a playbook in place for implementing these little extras will consistently create “wow” experiences. It could be something as simple as putting the customers’ logo on their cappuccino (a partner did that for us once!) or sending a “get-well-soon” card or gift when you know a customer is sick.

Are there a few things that can be done so that when a customer or client has a Wow! experience, they inspire others to reach out to you as well?

Ask them! When you’ve just given a great experience to a customer, don’t be shy about asking them to share their experience. You can point them to a review site or even ask if you can get a quote from them. While they are enjoying the moment, make a simple ask!
Also, some experiences with that element of surprise or about recovering spectacularly from a negative situation automatically lend themselves to being stories that customers will share proactively with their network.

Amazon is going to exert pressure on all of retail for the foreseeable future. New Direct-To-Consumer companies based in China are emerging that offer prices that are much cheaper than US and European brands. What would you advise retail companies and eCommerce companies, for them to be successful in the face of such strong competition?

Brands need to create an emotional connection with their customers that can overcome the disadvantage of higher price points. They also need to demonstrate innovation that puts them ahead of the competition and helps consumers see the value behind the added cost. And if they can create consistent “wow” moments and positive shareable experiences/stories with their customers, they will give their brand an edge to win in the face of strong competition.

If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂

A pay-it-forward idea: Many of us have spent a lot of energy trying to reach out to someone for their help or support and have not heard back. While we can’t do this for every person vying for our time, if you recognize someone in need of help, connect and work with them for as long as it takes to help them out as much as possible. Hopefully, someone will do this for you someday when you need a hand.

How can our readers follow you on social media?

Follow me on Twitter @srikrishnang.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!

Srikrishnan Ganesan of Rocketlane On 5 Ways To Create a Wow! Customer Experience was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Brad Parks Of Morpheus Data On How To Use Digital Transformation To Take Your Company To The Next…

Brad Parks Of Morpheus Data On How To Use Digital Transformation To Take Your Company To The Next Level

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Fail faster and more often: The ability to deploy small software changes hundreds of times per day compared to once a month or once a year is what makes today’s Digital leaders great. If you can experiment, learn something, and experiment again you will inevitably deliver something that customers really value and beat the competition. This is only possible if you automate processes and break projects apart into smaller logical microservices.

As a part of our series about “How To Use Digital Transformation To Take Your Company To The Next Level”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Brad Parks.

Brad Parks is CMO at Morpheus Data. Morpheus Data is the leader in hybrid cloud application orchestration, helping hundreds of organizations in life science, pharmaceutical, financial services, and other industries unleash productivity and address IT operations skills gaps through their unified software platform. The Morpheus platform enables self-service provisioning of VMs, Containers, Clusters, and Application Stacks into any private or public cloud while staying within policy guardrails. For more information and to request a personalized platform demo, visit www.morpheusdata.com/demo

I grew up (and still live) in Denver, Colorado. Wanted to be a ski bum but after school realized job prospects were better in Tech so went into Software Engineering and IT Operations. After a decade working in IT as a practitioner I decided to move to the dark side and shape the products being built by IT technology vendors.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘takeaways’ you learned from that?

Not really a funny mistake but working in software development and IT means a fair amount of time troubleshooting problems which did lead me to develop a certain set of forensic discovery skills being able to analyse problems from different angles and iterate on potential solutions in a very organized way to identify which variable caused the problem. That has been a useful skill to apply to the art and science of product management and marketing.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

Too many to count but I am forever grateful to my parents who grew up in very modest circumstances but worked hard to get to a place where they could provide very well for my brother and I. They made sure we had a strong work ethic and an appreciation for everything we had earned.

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

I’ve been a fan of fantasy and science fiction since I was a little kid. I appreciate the escapism of going into a different world but also appreciate that it’s that kind of creative spirit that leads to innovation in the real world. What used to be science fiction from the mind of authors like Jules Verne is now very much real science.

Extensive research suggests that “purpose-driven businesses” are more successful in many areas. When your company started, what was its vision, what was its purpose?

I love our origin story and it’s one of the reasons I joined the company five years ago. We were created by a group of developers who were tasked with the digital transformation of dozens of companies within a private equity portfolio; they built a platform and set of tools to fulfil that mission. They were not thinking about how to sell something or get rich… they just wanted to get their job done. Along the way they realized large enterprises were trying to undergo the same sort of digital transformation so we turned the software platform into a company.

Are you working on any new, exciting projects now? How do you think that might help people?

The most exciting thing that we see happening right now is actually with the market rather than the platform itself. When we first launched a number of years ago we would talk to senior leaders and large enterprises and they would love our product demonstration and agree that they wanted to improve the speed of their internal software development processes but they didn’t have the right people with the right skills to take advantage of the platform. Today, we see most of those same customers creating Platform Engineering teams who are charted with solving the very problem that we address.

About a decade ago we saw a major shift in market where the power of mobile devices, high speed networks, and cloud infrastructure enabled new start-ups to come out of nowhere and challenge established competitors by out innovating them and using the power of software to meet customer needs. One of the more famous examples was Netflix who was able to completely change the nature of providing entertainment and effectively put Blockbuster out of business. ‘Digital Transformation’ is a term often applied to the change that virtually every company in every industry is now going to use internally developed software innovation to improve how they engage with customers and stay competitive.

For a long time, technology was considered a ‘back office’ function to support business operations. Digital Transformation is really a reversal of that reality where every company is in many ways a technology company using software to deliver new customer experiences. For example hotels able to track what needs their rewards members have to then simplify a customer’s travel experience from having a favourite beverage in the room to pre-setting the ideal temperature. This is all done through software development and data analytics requiring a massive amount of automation and cloud computing; the result though is revenue for the company and a best-in-class hotel stay for the customer.

Has integrating Digital Transformation been a challenging process for some companies? What are the challenges? How do you help resolve them?

True transformation is more about people and process than tools and technology. Those who try and code their way through transformation are having a challenge. You must eliminate organizational silos and change priorities plus improve the amount of trust between groups. While this is very much a people and process challenge, the right platform can unify the teams and streamline the work. Morpheus enables developers, security teams, IT, and finance all get what they need from hybrid cloud to help their organizations succeed.

Really doing Digital Transformation right is hard and it requires complete organizational alignment. It’s a fundamental shift, not a project and it cannot just be the job of a single team. With that in mind, here are 5 Ways a Company Can Take Digital Transformation To The Next Level:

Embrace uncertainly: Being agile can apply to software development but also to organizations as a whole. Companies must be able to identify a minimal set of requirements with a minimum of information and then start the iteration process despite not having all the details. A problem that many companies face is the inability to move until they have all the information. In today’s world you’ll never have all the information so you need to build resiliency and rapid response into processes so you can change quickly.
Get closer to customers: Digital Transformation is most often used as a term to describe the changes in how companies are interacting with their customers, both internal and external. If done right, internally developed software can completely transform the customer experience and often can result in new lines of business and profit centres for a company. This requires maniacal focus on customer experience from the outside in.
Eliminate boundaries: Organizational rigidity and silos are never a good thing but they are absolutely a death sentence for any Digital Transformation initiative. Use Digital Transformation projects as an opportunity to flatten organizations and facilitate more streamlined conversations across teams. This also requires empowering people do to more at lower levels in the organization. In this way you can eliminate friction from customer to company and across teams like IT operations, security, and application development.
Fail faster and more often: The ability to deploy small software changes hundreds of times per day compared to once a month or once a year is what makes today’s Digital leaders great. If you can experiment, learn something, and experiment again you will inevitably deliver something that customers really value and beat the competition. This is only possible if you automate processes and break projects apart into smaller logical microservices.
Look to the fringes: Digital Transformation rarely starts at the centre or traditional cash cow for an organization. Some of the most innovative ideas come from the most unlikely of places. For those tasked with Digital Transformation it’s important to look under every rock in the organization to find new ways to interact with customers and change what value you are able to bring to those interactions.

In your opinion, how can companies best create a “culture of innovation” in order to create new competitive advantages?

Smaller cross-functional teams
Give room to experiment
Minimize unplanned work

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

I’m a firm believer that most problems in life can probably be addressed with some sort of life lesson illustrated in the movie The Princess Bride. One of my favourites comes from the character Inigo Montoya portrayed by Mandy Patinkin. Specifically, the Spanish swordsman has done the following:

Put in the work: Inigo practiced for thousands of hours to become an expert swordsman.
Be loyal: Inigo lives to avenge his father but also to look out for his friends.
Be ambidextrous: “I know something you don’t know… I am not left-handed” — Inigo is able to fight with his left hand as well as his right.

How can our readers further follow your work?

Please feel free to connect on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/brad-parks-b190464/) Also, check out the Morpheus blog at www.morpheusdata.com/blog

Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!

Brad Parks Of Morpheus Data On How To Use Digital Transformation To Take Your Company To The Next… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Jorge Olson Of Hempacco and Green Globe International On The Five Ways To Develop More ‘Grit’

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Sports and Exercise — Testing your body and mind in sports and exercise make you practice Grit without the consequences of failing in life. If you test yourself in basketball, soccer, boxing, or martial arts, you’re putting your body and mind under pressure and desensitizing it to pain, failure and overthinking.

As a part of our series called “Grit: The Most Overlooked Ingredient of Success” I had the pleasure of interviewing Jorge Olson.

Jorge Olson is the co-founder and CMO of two publicly traded companies, Hempacco, ticker symbol HPCO, and Green Globe International, ticker GGII. Mr. Jorge Olson was born in Tijuana, Mexico, without running water or electricity, hurdling buckets of water across a block several times per day. Now, Olson is the author of business and inspirational books, as well as an authority on consumer packaged goods, beverages, and wholesale distribution. His partners are super-entrepreneur Sandro Piancone, Cheech and Chong, James Linsey, and Rick Ross.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about the events that have drawn you to this specific career path?

The business path was chosen for me out of necessity, you see, when you don’t have water or electricity and you see your mother and grandmother work all day, your brain starts thinking of solutions. At first, my solution was to go to school and be a CEO. I know, a long shot for a kid growing up in Barrio Cuatro in Tijuana, but in my brain, the way out was to be a CEO. Why a CEO? Because the poles to bring electricity to the house cost $1,000 each, and I also had to pipe water in, as well as pavement for the ugly dirt street. When the minimum wage is sixty dollars per week in Mexico, I figured a CEO could make enough money to bring utilities to the house.

Besides channeling CEO energy, I also started exploring the art and science of influence, which later fueled my love affair with marketing. After I made it to VP of marketing and later CEO of software companies, I decided to go solo and pivot form corner office executive to start-up entrepreneur. My first company was a wholesale distribution and consumer goods company in San Diego with five hundred accounts, most of them convenience stores. The best practices from software, jumping into consumer goods and twenty-five years of experience prepared me to launch two public companies with my partner Sandro Piancone. They are called Green Globe International Inc., ticker symbol GGII, and Hempacco, ticker symbol HPCO. Sandro and I rang the closing bell at Nasdaq last September.

Can you share your story about “Grit and Success”? First, can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey?

Oh wow, I’ve had some interesting experiences. From growing up in a bad part of town in Tijuana, half a dozen kidnapping attempts, commuting four hours to college, and seeing my mother studying in the middle of the night at candlelight to finish her degree. I will elaborate on a more recent story, which is a pandemic story that nearly ended our idea of disrupting tobacco’s trillion-dollar industry before we even started.

My friend and co-founder Sandro Piancone and I started a brand of hemp smokables called The Real Stuff, selling CBD-rich smokables targeted at early adopters of hemp cigarettes. I developed the entire experience myself, from the box to the branding, it’s my baby. Sandro and I incorporated it under the name Hempacco and got ready to go out and visit distributors to get sales and book investor meetings for our funding. After the very first meeting, the pandemic hit and we couldn’t get any appointments, since travel was banned. We almost closed the company before it even got started.

To survive the pandemic, we decided to start selling white-label and private label hemp cigarettes, but nobody wanted to travel to our San Diego manufacturing facility to see us and see our factory. These moments are when entrepreneurs have to think out of the box. For us, we started online video marketing, and I recorded daily videos of manufacturing and product development. My main platforms were YouTube and LinkedIn — I used YouTube because of the Google keyword and ranking, and LinkedIn because C-level decision makers are active on LinkedIn. Sandro and I also invented a Hemp Expo in San Diego, and to our surprise, we got buyers to fly in and visit us. They always told us “I wanted to meet the crazy video guys in person.” Our videos were quirky, funny, and informative. This is how we survived the pandemic.

Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard?

I don’t expect things to be hard. I always keep a positive attitude. However, the road to success is often sprinkled with obstacles of all shapes and sizes. Taking HPCO and GGII public with Sandro was no exception. Mindset is key for executives and entrepreneurs, and our mindset is always to jump, dig under, and sometimes go straight through obstacles. When Sandro and I sit down to discuss all the problems and the crazy things that happen to us, we never complain. We always laugh and make a plan to overcome them.

The drive to continue when things get hard is not natural. You need to cultivate it and change your perspective on problems, business, and life. For me, it all started in my childhood. When you have to haul buckets of water more than a hundred yards multiple times per day at ten years old, you start building grit. Tough times can take you down or they can develop a drive to succeed. I’ve always felt like an underdog, especially in business. Coming to the USA as an immigrant wasn’t easy. I had to live in a self-storage, I got deported, and I even spent the night in a classroom because I didn’t have two dollars to get back home.

So how did Grit lead to your eventual success? How did Grit turn things around?

After cultivating grit for years, my businesses were a perfect outlet to unleash it. GGII and HPCO are by far both mine and Sandro’s largest undertakings. For starters, it’s not normal to have two publicly traded companies, especially when one owns the other one, as GGII is the major shareholder of HPCO.

Grit allows me to see large problems as a personal challenge and a privileged opportunity. In other words, I use perspective when using my Grit. My new problems are overcoming the public markets, naked shorts, getting funding, and increasing sales. Before, it was surviving the pandemic while staying safe. All of these problems are wonderful, especially when my old problems were getting deported, helping my mother and grandmother get out of poverty and retire, and to bring electricity and water to our rural house in Tijuana, all while staying safe from kidnappings, narcos, and violent crimes. In my mind, my current problems are a privilege, and I can’t wait to tackle new, hard problems as an entrepreneur, and as my life long calling as a missionary. My missionary work started when my mother would take me to orphanages at five years old, and now, I would like to bring shelter, clothing, and food to all of the orphanages in my home city of Tijuana.

Based on your experience, can you share your “5 Things You Need To Know To Develop More Grit”?

Here are 5 Things You Need to Know To Develop More Grit, from Jorge Olson, co-founder and CMO of Hempacco, ticker symbol HPCO, and Green Globe, ticker symbol GGII:

Change your mind — Start by changing your mindset. Positivity has to be your modus operandum.
Read 52 books per year — this will start changing your mindset and give you more confidence in your decisions.
Sports and Exercise — Sports and exercise are some of the most important things you can do to develop grit.
Develop an Exoskeleton
Don’t Overthink, Just Overact

Here are some examples:

1. Change Your Mind — Start by changing your mindset, or the way you see yourself and your environment. Mindset is the way you perceive reality, so change your reality by changing your mind. How do you do this? You start by understanding that your mind is elastic and can change. Your brain is filled with webs of connections between brain cells, and they can change and mold your thinking and emotions. Let’s hack your brain by giving it new information. In the next point you’ll get one way of doing it, with books, and then with sports and exercise, but if you’re not convinced this is what you want, you’ll never change your mind. Change your mind in success and failure, money, relationships, and everything that makes you and others better. Start with language, remove “no” and “can’t” from your vocabulary. Instead, think and talk about what needs to happen to achieve the goal or idea.

2. Read 52 Boks per Year — This comes out to one book per week, and yes, you can read more than that. Is it possible to do this? Do you have time? Yes. Reading and studying is a priority and a must to achieve grit and bend your mind. The other grit developing points all depend on bending your mind to your will, and for that you need lots of information. Fortune 500 executives reed at least one book per week. The most successful entrepreneurs, artists, and the smartest people I know read at least one book per week, probably more. The other points in this exercise allow you to grow your mind, however if you have a bigger brain, you need to fill it, and waiting around for experience will not do it.

3. Sports and Exercise — Testing your body and mind in sports and exercise make you practice Grit without the consequences of failing in life. If you test yourself in basketball, soccer, boxing, or martial arts, you’re putting your body and mind under pressure and desensitizing it to pain, failure and overthinking.

4. Develop an Exoskeleton: When you want to scale your business you’ll fail multiple times, you’ll be rejected, and you’ll hit several walls. This is a normal process in scaling fast, and the faster you scale your business, the tougher you need to be. You need to develop thick skin, so think if it as turning into an exoskeleton. You can’t take things personally, and you can’t let your emotions lead the way to success. Your emotions have a place. They are the fuel that propels you forward, not the one that wants to fight back or give excuses.

5. Don’t overthink, just overact — Life is not perfect, and you shouldn’t try to be either. Accept your behavior and that of others and work with it; apply this to business and in life. I see a lot of paralysis by analysis in business and in other achievement goals like writing a book or changing jobs. In business, if you want to grow exponentially, get investors, or go public, you can’t overthink, you can’t control. You have to have a “good is good enough” attitude and move on to the next goal or problem. The great Steven King says he’s never published a book without mistakes; this single sentence helped me publish and edit more than fifteen books. I always tell potential authors “It’s not how many books you write, it’s how many you publish.” At the moment I have five unpublished books, and it drives me to do something about it.

You want to open or grow a business? Go ahead and do it, develop Grit with the steps above, and get the confidence you need to get investors and grow exponentially. Do you want to write a book or become an artist? What’s stopping you? I bet it’s all in your mind, so bend it!

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped you when things were tough? Can you share a story about that?

There are so many people in my life that helped me that we can chat about forever. From my mother to my wife, teachers, business partners, and friends. One of my friends would lend me money for college, another would take me home from San Diego State to Tijuana, and the list continues. However, when it comes to Grit, Christian Hoffman gave me a truckload of it in a very short amount of time. My friend and mentor Christian hired me out of Tijuana and took me to Germany, showed me work ethic, and Grit, as a matter of fact, he’s the toughest person I’ve known in my life, a larger than life six foot four German, an executive in a software company, former butcher, and business superstar. He catapulted my business career from poverty to CEO in less than a yar. How is that possible? Well, this is why he’s the man!

I met Christian in San Diego while teaching him Business in English in a language school, and we became great friends. After hanging out for a summer, he offered me a job in Germany. This was my shot, and everything else I’ve done was a result of that shot. This was not only an incredible opportunity to work, but to fulfill my lifelong dream of traveling in Europe.

“You’ll be the first one in and the last one out,” Christian told me. I did everything he asked in the business and exceeded his expectations when I came back to the USA and broke the software sales record in my first quarter. He exceeded my expectations in everything, including monetary compensation. Christian gave the shot to make my dreams come true, retire my mother and grandmother from working all day, and even allowed me to travel. To top it all off, he gave my wife and me, both working for him, brand new company cars and a company apartment in Germany, and then in Coronado and in La Jolla in San Diego.

My friend Christian died in his early fortys, a tragedy for his family. My wife and I called him one of our best friends, and sixteen years later we’re still grieving. I still get tears when thinking or talking about Christian.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

This is the best question ever! I believe entrepreneurs have an obligation to leave the world better than how we found it. This can be making a difference in your family, company, community, and yes, why not, the world. My partner and I are serial entrepreneurs, and we’re also social entrepreneurs, we take on projects that have the potential to change the world.

Sandro and I currently run several companies, two of them are publicly traded under HPCO and GGII. Hempacco (ticker HPCO) is changing the world by disrupting tobacco’s $1 trillion industry with smoking alternatives to nicotine tobacco. We want to help tobacco smokers switch to better smoke. However, this is not the only impact. Our products are biodegradable, including the filter. Cigarette filters are some of the largest contaminants to our land and oceans. We’re a green company and want to pressure the entire industry to think before they contaminate.

Our other company, Green Globe International (ticker GGII) has the mission to help people look and feel better inside and out. We manufacture nutritional supplements and beauty products with GGII.

I feel an enormous responsibility for my employees. I want to make a difference in their life and the lives of their families. I try to be a mentor and offer a great place to work.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

Yes, let me tell you about three different projects I’m working on:

Writing books
Disrupting tobacco
Feel and Look

Writing Books

Writing is my calling, and I’m publishing books that can help people in all facets of their life. This includes entrepreneurship, motivation, and inspiration. I write both fiction and non-fiction books in Spanish and English. My new book is Build Your Beverage Empire, third edition, my next books are on Wholesale Distribution, Leadership, and a couple of novels.

Disrupting Tobacco’s $1 Trillion Industry

We’re Disrupting Tobacco with smoking alternatives to tobacco nicotine, and we’re doing it by manufacturing hemp cigarettes in many cannabinoids, hemp blunts, cones and tubes. We’re also Disrupting Tobacco by using all-natural and biodegradable ingredients, including the cigarette filter, as assistant filters are some of the worse contaminants in the world. We’re doing this with our company Hempacco, Co. Inc, publicly traded under ticker symbol HPCO

Feeling and Looking Good

Our new line of nutritional supplements and beauty care products will be out this month. We’re working to develop the highest quality products with top-notch ingredients, like the products you find in the most expensive department stores, but at a fraction of the cost. For example, a moisturizer that runs $150 to $250 will be available for $15 to $30.

What advice would you give to other executives or founders to help their employees to thrive?

Be kind. This is one of the most important things you can do for your business, customers, and employees. When you hire, hire kind people, and use kindness in all of your thoughts and your actions. We’re here to make a better world, and it’s not going to happen if you don’t change your employees’ lives.

As a child I wanted to be a missionary. I still do, however, when I asked myself this question, the same question you asked, I realized I could influence more people with my writing and speaking, like we’re doing right now. The mission is to build kind and responsible leaders because I think if we can make better leaders, we can bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people. I don’t just mean political leaders. I mean leaders inside the family, in businesses, schools, and even sports. My definition of leadership must be Karma. Leadership Karma means to think of the benefit of others before your own. Simple, but we haven’t been able to do it consistently as humans.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

Change your mind. Start with changing your mindset, and the way to look at yourself.

When I was twenty my uncle Miguel sat me down for a quick five-minute chat that changed my perspective on life and catapulted me into a self-help phase that lasted fifteen years to complete the first phase. I’m now on my second phase.

My uncles and I were at their house ready to start our weekend carne asada or Mexican BBQ. “I’m picking up my best friend,” I told my uncle and went over to my old three-hundred-dollar car, and the car didn’t start. I tried my best with my lousy mechanical skills, but couldn’t get it to start. I started to come apart, and when I came back into the house my uncle gave me a glance and asked what happened. “The car didn’t start,” I said in my best non-upset voice. My stomach hurt, my temperature was raising, and I was thinking of twenty things that I should have done to prevent this, my anger increasing by the millisecond.

“You look terrible,” said my uncle, sit down and take a deep breath. Turns out I was pale and my demeaner was off. Now I know I used to internalize emotions, and my uncle immediately saw that there was something wrong. “The problem is not the car, you’re the problem,” he said. “Your reaction to a little adversity is extreme emotions, and you’re only twenty years old. If you think you have problems, you’re mistaken, you don’t have problems. If you continue with this attitude, you’re just not going to make it in life.”

I listened, I mean I really listened, carefully, to my uncle’s statement, and decided that minute I would not get angry and not let my emotions get the better of me. On the contrary, I decided I would always have the same level of happiness, in good times and in bad ones. This is how I started on my self help and self-development phase. I started with information. I knew I didn’t have the tools, so I read a book a day on self-help, communications, inspiration, and latter in business.

How can our readers follow you on social media?

I’m very active in social media. I use it to communicate with others and share my experiences in life and in business. My handle is almost always Jorge Olson, so when you type that on your TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or YouTube you’ll find me on the spot. I use all of my social media accounts professionally, so feel free to connect on any of them, ask me questions, send me videos or business ideas.

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.

You’re so welcome.

Jorge Olson Of Hempacco and Green Globe International On The Five Ways To Develop More ‘Grit’ was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Making Something From Nothing: Lauren Carroll Of The Montgomery Carroll Group On How To Go From…

Making Something From Nothing: Lauren Carroll Of The Montgomery Carroll Group On How To Go From Idea To Launch

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

You need to be leaning into your company full-time: If you really want it to be your career and a strong company you must devote your full attention to it.

As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Lauren Carroll.

Lauren Carroll, a decade and counting Senior VP and Partner of The Montgomery Carroll Group, focuses solely on residential real estate solutions. She thrives on finding her buyers the ultimate dream home and ensuring a profitable sale for her sellers. Using her refined property knowledge in a targeted area that she’s practically grown up in is one of her many strengths. Lauren exudes a strong dedication and attentiveness to all she encounters throughout the beginning to end of the home buying and selling process. With over $250 million in residential sales under her belt, she is committed to fierce negotiation and yet can easily create a level of ease to complex processes for her clientele.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?

During my childhood, we moved around a lot, but my mother found a wonderful school system where we established real roots in the Boston area and a community with an excellent K-8 school system. I learned early on that I loved to run track and became a state champion in the 100-meter hurdle.

As my mother remarried, I grew up with my stepfather who I got along with well. We enjoyed the same things, operated the same way, and our similar personalities allowed us to form a strong bond.

The hard work of my mother and stepfather taught me to put my best effort into everything I do. They showed me a lot about dedication and it inspired me to apply these qualities into my own business as an independent boss. I also was fortunate enough to have strong friendships, life long companions (some of which I have known since third grade) who helped shape me into the person I am today.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

I have never forgotten this quote from my high school yearbook. “Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth” by Archimedes

Throughout my life, having to overcome challenges, and being a strong woman to succeed for my family, that quote has remained relevant for me not only today but in every opportunity I have encountered.

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

While getting your business off the ground in the early days, this requires a lot of sacrifice, however, work-life balance has always been a priority for me. Having control over decision making and being able to support my family were my major motivaters when I started my business.

This book, Letters to a Young Entrepreneur by Ricardo Levy helped me from the start of my business development. In the early years there can be a lot of stress, and unknowns, being able to succeed and the ability to have a helpful tool such as this can give you comfort, direction, and confidence.

A lot of entrepreneurs have a saying “you don’t know what you don’t know”. This book can help gain perspective and speaking from experience, this was a guide for me from the beginning until even now.

In my industry particularly, is marketing. Taking a new idea on how to promote yourself and turning it into an executed plan. It takes a lot of trial and error, and you have to be resilient when trying one of the ideas. Take feedback, make adjustments, be patient, and have the willingness to be flexible. Keep working on it even if it doesn’t produce what you want in the timeframe you had planned.

Specifically, I think forming partnerships is a good idea, but the challenge is finding the balance between personal and professional relationships if you are going into business with someone you know. You should be aware that partnerships can form even if you do not know each other well, but lines of responsibility must be clearly defined. It is important if you want to team up or partner up with someone else to communicate upfront and establish real terms before you form that bond, since once the image goes out and is not handled properly, you may have to start again on your own if it fails.

In sales or any field for that matter, having a good completely original idea can be a challenge. You need to be creative so you can set yourself apart as a leader in your competitive field. This is where setting clear terms, boundaries, and long and short-term goals can support your idea and build confidence as a leader.

To me, research begins on the internet. Even if your idea isn’t brand new, you should research it and look around, particularly online, to see whether it’s already been used or not.

Most businesses locally (depending on the industry) are more interested in what people are doing right around me than if it has been done before. If it has been created and established for someone in a competitive position to you, there is always a way to spin it for you. This could be achieved by changing the language, design feature, or execution timing.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why?

To really understand how long it will take you until you generate income: When you start your business, do you have a plan for what happens if it takes you longer than you expected to generate income?

Investment in yourself and starting your own business requires a significant amount of personal capital upfront, as well as the energy and capability to go without being paid for an unknown period of time. Everyone needs to be prepared so that they can stay calm and focused on their real goals. It is inevitable that we will spend time and energy worrying about money, but how we approach that can help us succeed.

2. You need to be leaning into your company full-time: If you really want it to be your career and a strong company you must devote your full attention to it.

It’s often that people have a good business idea that they want to try and develop in their spare time or outside of their regular job. It’s been my own experience and those of many I know that in order to really get off the ground, your startup business needs your full attention.

3. As soon as you can, hire administrative help to make your business even more successful: Many times, we take on the role of CEO, as well as other responsibilities. This can take away from meeting clients, creating new ideas, or self-promotion.

Hiring is often lower on people’s list of things to do when they are just getting started. Eventually, we develop the habit of taking on roles and responsibilities that ultimately need to be delegated to someone on your team so you can focus solely on the more important aspects of your business, whether they are building clientele or staying on top of current market trends. There are a host of things that we need to prioritize but in the long run building a strong administrative support system for yourself is imperative.

4. To consider releasing some control: Even though your business is your baby, it is wise to get advice from other resources around you and learn from them.

This leads back to the answer for my third example, and while it’s important to hire before you think it’s necessary, it is also important to listen to your instincts about the ideas you have. It is also essential to consider the advice of those you admire and who have come before you when making strategic business decisions. Reinventing the wheel is not always necessary.

5. Fake it till you make it: There is some validity to that. Many people don’t want to work with a new company that presents itself as unknowing of what it is they are doing.

It’s difficult to feel fully confident when you don’t know what you don’t know. Or every direction your business is going to take in your early years. However, projecting to the world that you know what you’re doing will help you gain success.

Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?

Trial and error will happen so lean into that. Take your idea or your product and test your prototype in every possible manner. Review your product with peers, and survey groups where possible.

You may choose to invest in paying a marketing firm to run a focus group for you to help you consider every possible positive and negative outcome. Your product may seem to serve everyone or a certain group, but you should invest time and energy into knowing who you think your product will best serve.

There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?

Yes, if it’s within your budget and means. It wouldn’t hurt to speak with someone who has experience in executing new ideas. It doesn’t mean that you take everything they say word for word or execute the strategy exactly as how they presented it, but I think in most situations you would be fortunate enough to hire a consultant. All it can do is gain additional perspective. I believe you should also stay true to your own gut instincts for your own business — that’s what makes it unique!

What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?

I think this is very much a personal decision. There can be great benefits for either, but I would choose a bootstrapper. In most cases, venture capitalists take your company in the direction they want which gives them some level of control and decision making. Then again, what happens to your business can be beneficial, because the venture capitalists are willing to invest in you and can accelerate your business’s growth. There is nothing wrong with getting help if you need it.

However, I think there is a lot to say about pulling your own funds and having full decision making control. Although it may take longer, I personally feel that I will be more successful in the long run. If you are creating a business that is founded in something you love and truly believe in, creating it on your own will most likely feel more authentic and give you a greater sense of personal strength over the course of your life.

Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

I believe so. The examples I can share with you are I take every opportunity to foster new agents who need guidance getting their business started. Nothing really makes me feel better than helping new agents learn the ropes, answering their questions, giving them confidence, and my opinions on their next best steps. I try to support new people in my industry because I remember how scary it can be in the beginning.

I take every client and sale I have very seriously. I try to bring as much ease into my client’s life as possible for the time period we are in high contact. I want this part of their life and this major transition to be a joyful one. My goal is to leave people knowing I was helpful, so I consider making people happy to be good for the world.

I donate to causes that are important to me. I support one particular child through an amazing nonprofit that focuses on children in certain communities that need an extra hand. My own hard work and success allow me to help people in my own community every year. Everything from donating my change balance at CVS to making food for families when one parent in my community is sick or injured. I particularly try to make small deeds of service when I am having a bad day for myself. It’s the number one thing that lifts me up. Paying it forward is an amazing way to lift the spirits of others as well as your own.

Lately, I’ve been inspired by videos that I catch online of people going into grocery stores, or various shopping establishments and paying for the orders of families potentially in need. I like the concept of surprising someone you don’t know. I think it reminds us that we are all part of a larger community.

Through the work I do I am often the first introduction to a family in a new neighborhood and I wish for them to have a good experience with that. By surprising someone you don’t know with a lovely gesture, can not only make them feel good in the moment but can make their whole day. This idea can inspire people and spread love, joy, and peace in a simple, quick, and profound way.

Well, I love lunch so let’s go with that! This question struck me as thinking of what successful women in my own field of who I would like to pick their brain, so I’m going with Barbara Corcoran.

Arguably one of our country’s most successful real estate brokers, certainly the most famous. In my field, it’s not uncommon or challenging for women to be successful. There are no compensation inequalities that we need to overcome as much as there are in other professional fields comparatively. But it comes with its own challenges.

Running a corporation such as Barbara does take a lot of leadership skills in male-dominated fields. I would love to pick her brain about her success and failures in our business and I would love to hear about the challenges she has overcome to get where she is today.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.

Making Something From Nothing: Lauren Carroll Of The Montgomery Carroll Group On How To Go From… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.