Eric and Jeff Take a Look Back at Our Favorite FWW Shows

Greetings everybody. Welcome to the Wednesday, September 17th, 2014 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook and I'm with WSI Internet Consulting where we work with businesses and organizations on helping them better understand and leverage the power of the internet as a strategic business tool. You can learn more about me and WSI online at www.poweredbywsi.com. With me this week is my good friend and Free Webinar Wednesday partner, Mr. Jeff Simpkins. Jeff, say hello to everybody out there in Free Webinar Wednesday world.

Greetings everyone, this is Jeff Simpkins. I'm with Community Bank Consulting, Inc., and I'm going to take a moment in my introduction this week and just mention to our bankers in the audience— I see we have several joining us this week— that we are getting lots of traction with our vendor management program that we have partnered on. So bankers in the audience, if you are looking for a vendor management solution, give me a shout. Thanks, Eric.

Excellent, way to go. So I would echo that, get a hold of Jeff. And I'm a little bit familiar with the program that you're using and the platform, and I think it's pretty impressive. And vendor management is important these days as more and more businesses— obviously it's a big requirement in the banking industry, but we can't do everything ourselves. And when we bring people in to help us do things, it's important that we have a good understanding of their capabilities and stability and experience. And all of that certainly is something we need to have a good handle on. So good stuff there. Well, We are going to do a little flashback show. We have done a couple of these as I was going back through all of the shows, and we've got pages of Free Webinar Wednesdays to go through. There are lots of shows that we've done, and so I've got some statistics to kind of set the stage of how Free Webinar Wednesdays has grown up over the years. And then we are going to jump in and talk about some of the shows that Jeff and I particularly are fond of. I know we were asked this question. A couple weeks ago, and rather than just kinda come up on the spot, we took that question and tabled it and wanted to give it a little bit of thought and thought this would make for a good show. And who knows, like anything else, it might end up turning into 2 good shows. So before we officially get started and start walking through some of these, I want to remind everybody that today's show and all shows on Free Webinar Wednesdays are recorded and made available out at freewebinarwednesdays.com. So you can check it out there, and if there's a comment or question or a little nugget of info that we share that you don't quite catch, you can always go back and get it on the webinar recording. And we encourage you to like us on our Facebook page and engage with us there. But also, more importantly, as you're attending these live, if you've got comments or questions, or maybe there's a show that you really thought was awesome, feel free to share that in the Q&A chat window, and we'd love to hear from you there too. So Without further ado, I thought maybe a good way to set the stage on this is to kind of do a little walk back in time. And for those of you that maybe don't know or are new to Free Webinar Wednesdays, Jeff and I kind of had this idea to do a webinar show kind of as inspiration from a book called Book Yourself Solid. Always have something to invite somebody to is kind of a non—

Non-sales pitch.

Threatening way of just engaging and keeping in touch with folks that may be interested in hopefully doing business with one of the two of us at some point down the road, but maybe timing just wasn't quite right. And so we came up with this idea, and it was really kind of comical that I think we, we birthed the idea, created the website, registered the domain name, and launched it all pretty much within a weekend when you visited me up here in Michigan. And it ended up— who knew we would be going 5 years and strong? But this is actually— and I pulled up a quick link. And as we were talking about favorite shows, I put my favorite shows— one of my favorite shows as being our very first one. And we launched—

Who knew that we started on April Fool's Day? I know.

I saw that. We announced it on the 21st of March, and I'm like, okay. But then I saw the show date was actually April Fool's Day. So it was like, even though we didn't intend for that to be the case, it was one of those Google-esque type jokes that maybe— what is this, Free Webinar Wednesdays? What are you talking about? But we started on April 1st, 2009, so we've been going over 5 years. And the website, was created and still is being hosted on a platform called Typepad, which is one of the blogging platforms that we talked about in our Blogging for Bankers course that you and I and B Fields offered. And Typepad has since been acquired by another entity, and luckily we've not seen a tremendous amount of change, but that seems to be a good platform for us. We started off hosting our actual videos through, and I think it was your Picasa video and photo sharing service on Google.

Right.

Which unfortunately, I clicked on this Podcasting 101 that we did with Roger to just go back and listen to it, and for some reason it looks like it's just pulling up a JPEG. I can't get the actual podcast or webinar to load. But we've used Picasa. We had since migrated over into Vimeo because at the time Vimeo was one of the only video sites that you could load longer than 15-minute videos. And since these all go 60 minutes, YouTube back in the day was not an option for us. So we went with Vimeo. We do have a couple of presentations that had been posted and shared through SlideShare. And we also have, I think, at least one presentation, and he was a guest on the MyBrainShark platform. But now we've got all of our videos being actually hosted directly up into YouTube. And, you know, I think that's working well for us. And they have since eliminated their time requirement or restriction, and we don't really see any changes In the foreseeable future, so YouTube is where all the recordings are actually going now. And then lastly, looking at I think it was you and me and Roger and maybe my mom attended the first webinar that we did. Maybe a couple of bankers that we knew that were curious to see what the two of us ex-bankers were going to talk about. But we've since grown this list to 1,663. Individuals that are part of our Constant Contact mailing list that goes out every week. And so, you know, some of those folks attended for maybe 1 or 2 sessions, and they're on the updates, maybe don't join us live, but they do come back periodically. And we know we get some good viewership of the videos after they've been posted up as an archive. So, you know, to grow it over to 1,600 people and the audience that we've created, we typically get anywhere between 20 and 40 people that will attend our sessions live, which is great. And we love it when we got lots of people out there asking questions and providing feedback. And I didn't count how many guests we've had, but we've had a good number of guests and launched some new services, talked about some services that are no longer available that were awesome that I wish they were, such as Tungle.me. And a few others.

That was an awesome service.

Yeah, our friends at BlackBerry bought them and then proceeded to deep-six them. So darn you, BlackBerry. So that's— yeah.

BlackBerry has become a curse word.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. So that maybe gives everybody a little bit of background on Free Webinar Wednesdays, how it started, you know, and kind of the evolution. Like anything technology, I I go back and I look at some of the posts as I was navigating through all the pages. And yeah, it certainly has been a lot of different technologies we've talked about and some of the things that we chat about, you know, where trends were going. I think we hit the mark on some. We were a little off on others. But yeah, it was pretty cool. So looks like we have our first question. What's your opinion on—

We do.

What's that?

Go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah, I was going to read it.

So the question— yeah, the question is, what's your opinion on live versus recorded or canned webinars? I think— well, I think Jeff and I probably are bigger fans of the live webinars, although when you do a live webinar, I think it's important that you record it so you can can it so that other people can enjoy it later on. But I think a lot of that really depends on, at least from my perspective, what you're trying to accomplish. And I know with Free Webinar Wednesdays, what we really want to try to do for the audience as well as for the presenters that we invite on here is to be able to get real-time feedback and communication. And that's something that you can't get with a recorded webinar. You can have people go out to YouTube and they can post comments and you can talk about it after the fact, but there's really nothing quite like going through a session And, well, actually, one of my favorites was a session we did with Don Crosby where we opened up the mic and we invited an attendee from the audience to actually be introduced to himself through Don's personality assessment tool. And that was one of the more powerful sessions because I've been exposed to Don's assessment tool before and have got a little bit of background from a psychology perspective. And that was a really powerful session because it really demonstrated his expertise, validated some things for the guest that was actually on the show with us, and, and that was pretty cool. So the follow-up to that is magnitude of effort and complexity. But before I answer that—

We don't want to use a whole hour on that one.

Yeah, any thoughts on your preference with regards to live versus recorded or canned? Or are you kind of on the same page as I am there?

I would say I'm on precisely the same page. I prefer live webinars because of the interaction. The shows are always so much more valuable and probably interesting when we have lots of audience participation.

Do you want to maybe take first stab at effort and magnitude?

I was going to say as a follow-up, based on the type of participation, you remember the show that we had the guy that was sort of like a heckler spamming trying to get us to promote his service live on the show?

Yeah, yeah. We've had some pretty interesting characters. Those of you that are joining live or even on the recording don't ever get to see the chat window that Jeff and I have access to. But during one of our shows, I don't know, somebody, one of the 1,663 people must have stumbled upon Free Webinar Wednesdays and been under the impression— had a very foreign name. I guess we'll leave it at that. It certainly wasn't an Americanized— it wasn't John Smith. So that kind of hopefully answers a little bit there. Yeah. Was under the impression that this Free Webinar Wednesdays was an opportunity for him to present information to people about his services, which were not services that we would be interested in promoting on Free Webinar Wednesdays, and kept bouncing messages to us wanting to know, you know, who was on the line and how can he get more information and would people be interested. And we finally ended up having to dismiss him from the show. So I haven't seen him come back. But yeah, no, I don't think he came back after he got dismissed.

As a matter of fact, I think GoToWebinar blocked him.

Yeah, yeah. So I guess the magnitude and effort and complexity, you know, some of the shows— and maybe you guys can kind of pick up on this already— some of the shows are ones where Jeff and I just decide on, and we've got a loose agenda, but I think Much to the credit of Jeff and his personality style and our chemistry, we're able to carry some conversation that it seems has been something that people have been interested in. So I guess the complexity in that is really more in scheduling, just to make sure we block every Wednesday at 1:00 PM Eastern off on our calendars. And travel and conferences and vacations sometimes make that a little bit more difficult than others. So some of the shows are very uncomplex. Some of the shows, when we're coordinating with a presenter or even multiple presenters and trying to get people reserved and coordinating their schedules, can get a little bit more complex. But technically speaking, I think we're in a good place where I think GoToMeeting provides the recording well. We've got a process in place to upload to YouTube. You know, everything I think runs pretty smoothly, and if given time Barring any bandwidth concerns and problems, we can usually get the show turned around and archived and back up online within a day or so in between other work responsibilities.

Well, we've learned to do some things that no longer make it necessary to edit the show. I think originally when we were recording the show, we just Did what we thought was right, and you ended up having to edit and recompile the show every week. And when we learned the little secret of getting around that, that helped a lot.

Yeah.

I think another thing relative to magnitude of effort and complexity, in the beginning our claim to fame was we went for a year or 2 years, or I don't know how long it was, and we never canceled a show. Because I think at one point we thought we would probably monetize this in some way. And we've talked about that over the years. And I think we both, both reached the point that we just said, eh, it's not really worth it. There are too many hoops to jump through, disclosures and things like that. And we'd rather just have fun with it. And within the last year or so, we reached a point we said, well, when we can't do it, we're just going to have to start canceling it. And I think When we took the approach, we're going to have fun with it and we're going to have the show when we've got something to have the show about, it became a lot less complex than when we were in the routine of we're going to do it every week come hell or high water.

Yeah. There were actually some conferences that I would schedule flights around so I would arrive either really, really early in the morning or later in the evening so I could do Free Webinar Wednesdays from the airport or even arrive a day earlier or leave a day later. And when you've got other responsibilities and maybe that impacts cost, especially since Jeff and I aren't monetizing this, this is something we just enjoy and I think provides value, but hopefully keeps some folks in touch with us. It got a little hairy there. So I agree. Now the one thing that I would say, I would like to see us maybe get closer to is exploring the Google+ and the Hangouts functionality. And we sometimes, although knock on wood, GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar has been pretty stable lately. That's another platform that we've talked a lot about Google+ and maybe some value in that. And I guess one of the things from a lessons perspective, if you are thinking about implementing some sort of a webinar strategy for your business, you may not necessarily need or want to do it on a weekly basis. But I've been giving serious thought to offering just for my own business monthly office hours and, and treating it much like you would with a college professor. And between this time and this time every week on this, or every month on this day, you can just show up and ask questions, talk about what's new in the world of digital marketing. Facebook made a change, what does that mean for my business? You know, how is SEO evolving? And just having an open chat forum that can be even more unstructured and just giving people the opportunity to talk back and forth and maybe even bring joint customers together and have them ask questions and share information. And, and the communication and I guess positioning yourself as a connector and an educator is becoming more and more important these days as people are really seeing through any attempt to try to outright sell products and services. And so that's an area that may be coming on the horizon for us, and it may be implemented within Free Webinar Wednesdays, or it might be something that I do separately through WSI. But, you know, as I kind of look in my crystal ball, that, that, that may be on the horizon for me. So anything else on your end with regards to that, Jeff, or do you want to jump in and kind of walk through some of these, some of the past shows?

Let's jump in and walk through some of the past shows and I will disclose to you and our audience, I just got in to do the update on my iPhone. So yes, I'm multitasking.

Yeah, and we'll come back to the whole i-whatever reference here shortly because I know we've got one of our favorites that made our top list. But one of the ones that you rattled off early on was this one, and I'm flattered because I think I had something to do with this. You said this one aired on June 25th. This was my opportunity to get over to our European conference. Rather than me ramble on, Jeff, what was it that you liked that I said?

You had lots of interesting ideas. You and so many of the folks that participated Free Webinar Wednesdays from the WSI world. And Free Webinar Wednesdays is a forum in which many of you, I think, have an opportunity to share ideas at a high level. And for me, that's enough because I need to understand enough about what you're saying that if I have a client or a contact that needs more information, I can get them to the right person and step out of the picture because I'm not a subject matter expert. Matter expert on so many of the things that you and the other folks at WSI are. So with this overview that you did, I thought you did a really good job. And I really enjoyed hearing lots of the things that are going on relative to marketing on the internet, is what I'm going to use as my simple terms. And the things that you're talking about I just thought it was a good overview of what's going on now and what— I started to say what's coming up in the future. I'm going to rephrase that because the future is always— it's much less like a crystal ball than we think. What may be available in the future so we have an idea of things that may stick around and may not.

Right. Because not everything sticks to the wall when you throw it, and we've unfortunately seen that again. Yeah, Tungle Me is one that I wish was nailed to the wall with a little construction adhesive and stuck around because I love that scheduling platform. But that's one that dropped off the wall. So yeah, so the bullet points and just the overview of what we talked about, really social selling primarily in the influencing area of LinkedIn and how cold calling is pretty much dead and you have to be understanding of the ways that businesses are making decisions these days and doing that through a social environment and all of the tips and skills to do that. And then talked about paid search and how that kind of dispels the 50% of my advertising doesn't work. I don't know which 50% that is. This gives you the way to cut through that. We had an awesome email marketing presentation. From the folks at Constant Contact. And then, you know, SEO seems to be a recurring topic that we've discussed a lot, and we announced our adaptive SEO process, which really just takes SEO to the next level. So yeah, I really enjoyed the conference, and I'd never been to Barcelona before, and so it was a great opportunity to meet some consultants that maybe we see through Free Webinar Wednesdays because they hop on a webinar, but never had the opportunity to actually meet them face-to-face and shake their hand and share a beverage. And that was pretty cool because I think it's one of the neatest parts of being part of the WSI family is the global footprint that we have around the world, almost 80 countries. So it's a pretty unique experience.

You know, we need to get the folks from Constant Contact back because I understand from you there's some really awesome enhancements to that platform.

I'm trying. Yeah, I'm trying, believe me. They're a little busy, but yeah, I've got one guy in particular that was actually in Barcelona that I'm hounding, so hopefully we'll get an opportunity to chat with him. So stay tuned, little teaser there.

You know, one of the statistics you didn't share with the audience is The guest the farthest distance away that's ever been on the show, or the speaker guest. Any ideas on—

I would probably say Francois Lescott from South Africa. I would say Francois joining us from South Africa. We've had Rob Thomas from the UK and Tracy Spence from the UK. We've also had Ian Clary from From Ireland. But I would think South Africa would probably be the furthest away that we've actually had a presenter.

I would guess that as well. I know we've had one or more presenters and a number of people in the audience that have literally gotten up in the middle of the night to participate in the show live.

Yeah, yeah. So that's been pretty cool. Anytime you can get somebody to set an alarm for you, you know you're doing good. Well, the next one that was on your list, and I wouldn't disagree, would be one of the sessions from Tony Rubleski.

I'm checking off Mind Capture, Leadership Lessons from 10 Trailblazers Who Beat the Odds and Influenced Millions. So hasn't Tony been on twice?

I think at least twice, maybe even 3 times. And I've seen him as a banker, and we've actually co-presented at the same conference after, after I left banking and became a consultant. So he's a West Michigan guy, and he's got a couple of books, a couple, 3 books out that are pretty, pretty good books talking about, you know, thinking things differently and not doing things the way that we've always done them. And he's always got a good message and he's got some good energy. So any, anything in particular on, on that that jumped out at you or Well, I like the approach that he took in developing that book.

And I think we actually were one of the— book had not been released yet. We were one of his early promo interview sessions. And he essentially was following a pattern sort of like Napoleon Hill did in Think and Grow Rich, where he spent some time with people that had been extremely successful and Documented some of the things that they've done in order to achieve that success.

Yep. So here's just a quick little recap. Seth Godin. Yeah, so here's the, here's the folks. And I think we also asked him some pretty interesting questions. Which, which individual gave the most surprising answer? Which individual was the most pleasant? We resisted the urge to ask the opposite. But I think that was— I agree that was a good conversation. So put that away.

Who's the guy that told us, that talked about— I think it's Malcolm Gladwell, works from New York City and absolutely doesn't have an audience or doesn't have an office, can be found In coffee shops all over New York City. I think he's the guy who shared that.

Could have been, yeah. So the next ones that we talked about are really instead of individual shows, collections of shows. And I'm going to reveal, if you don't know how to do this quite yet, there's a way that you can modify a Google search to actually search just within a particular URL. One of our guests, and this is where we're going to throw the whole Apple reference back on the table, is our conversations with Gregg McPherson. Gregg and I went to high school together. He's a realtor here where I grew up, but he's also very well connected and a gadget guy like us. If you go to Google and you put site: and then www.freewebinarwednesdays.com and then put McPherson, that's going to force our friends at Google to just look under FreeWebinarWednesdays.com for the word McPherson. And this is going to give you a listing of any of the blog posts that we've got out on Free Webinar Wednesdays that reference Gregg. And so you can see we've got a few of them that are found here. So he's been— I don't know if him or Tom Petty hold the distinct honor of being the most frequent Free Webinar Wednesday guest. I think he's probably Probably got Tom beat by a little bit, but Greg has exposed us to a lot of really cool things. The Livescribe pen, the body fat sensing scale, the whole concept of wearable technology and understanding kind of your individual performance. Of course, everything that there is to do with Apple and gadgets and kind of where that's going. But the thing that I like about Greg is it's not just about Apple. When he makes a comment, it's not just Apple doing it because Apple's doing it because it's cool. Apple may be doing something that then causes the rest of the industry to react because it's a bigger issue than just Steve Jobs deciding that he wanted to do this. It's kind of more of an effort to react to society and What are your thoughts on these shows?

Greg's always interesting to have on. He's got a lot of depth, and like you said, he's a big advocate of Apple products. As a matter of fact, I think he's probably the reason both you and I now use the Apple platforms primarily. He's not the only technology that he looks at.

Yep.

What do you think? You think Greg will be our first person that can come on the show and give the real-world review of the Apple Watch?

Yeah, I've been curious. I've not heard if he's going to be one of the first Apple Watch users. I don't know if he's sold on that. Even some of the Apple Fans out there aren't convinced that a watch is necessarily the gadget to have. So yeah, that's one of many questions that I'd like to ask Greg. I'm also curious to know if he's going to jump on the iPhone 6 Plus and get the phablet larger platform device, or go with just the regular 6, or if he's going to stick with what he's got. Because the phablet larger certainly is not something that's new. The Galaxy Note has been doing that under the Samsung banner now for I think 3 generations. And there are some other larger form factor phones out there. So it will be curious to see if that's really something that he thinks is going to catch on and how that's going to impact maybe phone devices from some of the other carriers and networks. So that will be a fun show. The next one, and I alluded to his name already, and again, I always say this with a little caveat, Tom Petty, not the rock star, but Tom Petty the digital marketing consultant out of California. Although I do call him the SEO or the digital marketing rock star, but he's not. Tom Petty is in— He's in the band. and the Heartbreakers, different Tom Petty. Different kind of heartbreakers. Yeah, but he's been on our show quite a bit. Again, using the same mentality, you can use the site: with Tom Petty in there. And Tom's kind of been our go-to guy when we start chatting about some SEO stuff. I think one of the first shows he did was SEO is Dead, or There's No Such Thing as Page 1. anymore and really kind of pulled that curtain back as to what's going on from an SEO perspective. But we've also had a lot of good conversations with him about Google+ and the evolution of that network and local places and reviews and the importance of claiming your, your spot and how Google changes things. And sometimes it doesn't even make sense for Google. But I think Tom's been another good one that maybe has been more on the Google side of things. So I know this was one of the guys that I had teed up as well, and I couldn't pick any one of his episodes to do, so I was glad that you had suggested we just put Greg and Tom in here as just people as opposed to shows individually.

Tom is one of those guys that very quickly gets over my head, and so on those shows I learn a lot and really get a lot of depth out of it and very quickly reach a point with Tom that it's like, well, if I have somebody that needs this information, I got to get them to Tom through Eric.

Yeah, he does good. I see the picture or the site that I pulled up here You can't buy Tom Petty tickets to go see our Tom Petty. I'll say our, the WSI Tom Petty. You could, but I don't know if it would be nearly as engaging of a show as, you know, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. So I didn't catch that, but it's kind of funny. Google Ads has decided to throw an advertisement here thinking that that's who we're looking for. So kind of interesting. So yeah, Tom would be another one that's not on the list. The next one that you had mentioned that was actually top of my list is the conversation we had with Adam Broadway back in May on social commerce and his effort, which I thought was awesome because we got a lot of really good comment feedback. And I probably got more after-the-fact email on this show than most of the others. But he presented the whole concept of peer-to-peer commerce, and I have something that I want to sell or rent or lease or monetize, and Jeff lives in my neighborhood, or Jeff has a similar interest, and using technology to put the two of us together and how that's being done already to a certain extent in some industries. But, you know, he's now part of an effort that's doing this, you know, on a much larger scale to try to go ahead. You can see the Near platform that he's working with Adam and I had the opportunity to meet one another when he was one of the co-founders of a content management platform that we used that Adobe purchased called Business Catalyst. And we've had him on the show talking about that program as well. So he's a pretty smart guy and really in touch with a lot of what digital trends are. And I thought this was a really, really good show. Jeff had this on his list as well. Anything in particular that stood out for you in this show with Adam?

I was really fascinated by the Near Me platform. The Near Me platform essentially is the basis for many services that would work such as the services that allow you to rent out your home for vacation rentals or your vacation home or things like that. I think he said they were working on a customization of the platform that was an office share type service. Those are the types of things that I found fascinating about what Adam was sharing with us.

What was very apparent is this is not something that could have been done 10 years ago or maybe even 5 years ago. Technology continues to evolve, and and based on the evolution of technology, it's inventing opportunities for businesses to to serve people in ways that you wouldn't have thought you would even need service five or ten years ago. And so that was what was really exciting, and it's one of those chicken and the egg is is the thought and the idea around this driving technology to make it happen, or is technology evolving to the point? Where it can do so many more things that it's causing people to think of ways that they can use it in different ways. Or what I suspect is the case is a little bit of both, and you're meeting somewhere in the middle. But it's, it's pretty cool how people are putting different things together. And I think you talk about Airbnb and Vacation Rentals by Owner and some of these, even going back to as early as Craigslist, of Taking somebody that wants to sell something and making it easy for them to connect with somebody that wants to buy something. So yeah, definitely on the list as well. So my next recommendation is going to be the conversation we had with Kathy Roach Wallace back in August of 2011.

She's got a cool shop.

Yeah, Kathy is a really close friend of mine. She actually is the current world record holder for the solo women's 50+ Race Across America bicycle race that goes from Oceanside, California to Annapolis, Maryland on a bicycle over 3,000 miles, and you gotta do it in, I think, under 14 days. And so she was the first woman in the 50+ solo category to ever complete that event in its, I think, 36-year history. So Kathy is a mother of 6, grandmother of 3 now, competes in endurance events. But the thing I like about her, she's not a professionally sponsored athlete. She has a regular job. She has a regular family. She trains her ass off and probably rides her bike and runs and swims more than most people, but she lives what I would think would be as close to a normal life as you can possibly lead and still compete at that level. In her presentation, she shared with us her concept of face time and how that motivates her and keeps her kind of focused on what it is that she needs to accomplish. And so, you know, I pulled up the whole face there. When you focus on what you want to accomplish, allow yourself to fail, have courage to get out of your comfort zone, and embrace the now and live in the moment. You know, those are great things to live by. And even though she presented it in an adventure racing athletic perspective, I think those messages can be really taken into business or your personal life or anything else that you want to. And in the example, you know, just using the F that she gave during the session was when she was out mountain biking, she had a rather particularly tricky part of the trail with a big rock right in the middle of it, and she kept focusing on, I'm gonna get around that rock, I'm gonna get around that rock, and she kept looking at it and she kept riding right into it and crashing. And it wasn't until she actually focused on the path that went around the rock that she was able to navigate that trail successfully. And I think a lot of times, just using that one example, a lot of us focus on, you know, I wanna lose 15 pounds, or, you know, they put what they don't want to have happen as part of their goal, which unconsciously puts that as part of the goal and it makes it more difficult instead of saying, I want to weigh X, or I want my body fat to be here, or I want to run a 5K, or I want to run a 10K. And so I think the message that was part of that presentation really was pretty cool. So she's getting ready to do a quintuple Ironman distance event in October, and she is committed to going back and doing the Race Across America again next year. And, and so it's gonna be an interesting, an interesting 12 months for Kathy coming up, but I know she's focused really, really hard on making that a reality. So, Jeff, did you have any thoughts or remembrances on this session with Kathy?

It's funny how when we talk about these former shows How certain things come up. And the story that I remember her telling, I think this is one of her— I think this was her first ultramarathon. She talked about coming up to one of the water stations and she just blew through it. She was just on a high and didn't feel like she needed to stop. And how she discovered later in the event What a mistake that was. And she tied that back to the focus on what you want to accomplish and allow yourself to fail because ultimately that caused that event to be a lot more challenging for her. And she didn't— let's say she didn't complete it within the timeframe that she would like. Yet She just got back on the horse and did it again. Thank you for adding her to the list. I actually only went back through 2014, but it's inspiring to think about her as a guest.

Yep. It was pretty cool. Another one that kind of tugged at my heartstrings and Part of Kathy's, I think, lure is she's also doing RAM to help raise awareness for neuroblastoma, which is the effort that I did my triathlon at Cedar Point about. So there's a charitable component there, but this one back in March of this year, I actually got to go down into North Carolina and reconnect with a buddy that I hadn't seen for a number of years, and he was in his 4th year of a cancer fundraising tournament, an all-in poker tournament, Texas Hold'em. To raise money in memory of his good buddy and do something to help keep his spirit alive, but also raise money for some great local cancer causes. And so I was actually on site with Steve at his office when we did this and walked through kind of a slide deck and talked about— this was the day of his event and super busy, hundreds of people were coming, and he carved out an hour with me and we walked through and talked about it and really celebrated Rob's life and how he inspired Steve and so many others. And he lost his battle, but Steve's now raised $400,000 for local charity and cancer-fighting causes. And so this is pretty cool because it just goes to show you the power that one individual has if they really set their mind to it. They get an idea, they rally the troops, they get passion behind it, And making an impact. And I think too often we get lost in the daily grind of our own lives, maybe what we think is the most important thing. And taking some time to step back and figure out a way that you can make it about somebody other than yourself, I think, is a good thing to do. So this is one that I'd certainly suggest you go back and read. And at the end, he tells a story that, you know, really I think if it doesn't give you goosebumps, you know, you're probably not a human. Because it was pretty amazing. So that was a pretty cool show. Another one that jumped out at me was when we had the opportunity to get Lewis Schiff, the author of Business Brilliant, to be on the show. And he shared some of his insights from one of his books on really what it takes to be successful and to make good money and to really capitalize on your talents. And this is one that really reinforced to me that you're better off really focusing on what you do really well instead of trying to be a jack of all trades. And I think a lot of times— I know I fall into that trap, and I know a lot of consultants that are within my WSI family that maybe are operating as individuals might fall into this as well, where you try to do a bunch of different things and then wonder why business isn't growing as much as you can or as it should. So he shares some really interesting insight based on a lot of research that he did with— you can see the slide here— the middle class, the middle class millionaire, high net worth, and then the ultra-high net worth individuals. I thought this slide really told it, that the ultra-high net worth individuals, they really don't give a rip about something they're not good at. They have somebody else do that for them and they focus exclusively on what they're the best at. And that's, I think, that's a good reminder. So this had a lot of really good business advice in it, and I was surprised at how much cool stuff there was that I had forgotten when I just scanned through the presentation again. So I would strongly suggest throwing that one on your list of things to go back and listen to. Did you remember this one? Any thought on that with Louis?

I do remember that one. You've actually made me want to go back and re-listen to that presentation. I think I'm going to be putting that on my iPad.

That's what we're hoping for, right?

Listening to it when I travel in the next few days.

Yeah, absolutely. Another one that I particularly liked only because I'm kind of a gadget app guy. And some of these, it's kind of funny, I'm already using them. So as I went back through and I looked, I'm like, okay, yep, doing that, doing that, doing that. Some of these weren't as cutting edge now as they were maybe when we talked about them a year ago. But we had Ian Clary from Raiser Social join us. And I've tried to get him back on the show, but he's so darn busy. He's just unfortunately stepped away from doing webinars. So I don't think we'll ever get him to come back.

I'm sure he's busy.

But you can follow his great stuff over at RazorSocial. And you can follow him on Twitter and Google+. But he walks through some really cool tools. A lot of them are free that help you manage your time on social media more effectively, measure its effectiveness, cross-promote and build engagement. One of the tools that I heard him talk about that I'm absolutely addicted to and I use for a lot of my posting, especially when I'm using my mobile device, is Buffer. And so he shared that during his presentation, and that was a tool that I just started playing with, I believe. And so that's one that I really, really like. But if you go over to his RazorSocial site and just read any of his blogs, oh my gosh, you're going to get just a tremendous amount of information. Sign up for his newsletter, follow him, tell him Eric Cook and Jeff Simpkins sent you along and Free Webinar Wednesdays. Maybe if he gets enough subscribers that reference us, we'll get him to come back and join us on the show again. But some really, really good stuff. And a lot of it, like I said, was free and just available for the taking. So thoughts on that one, Jeffrey?

No, nothing to add.

Okay. 2 more, and these are both related. And I alluded to Don Krause already. Don is a dear friend of mine that I had the pleasure of working with back in my days of being a banker. And I just noticed we've got a typo in the actual title, Google, Google Behavior. That's the Google-ification of global behavior. Maybe I should fix that. That's too funny. I can't believe nobody actually picked up on that until right now. So yes, the rest of the world. This is done by humans. We do make mistakes. So interesting. At least it's not an offensive typo. But Don and I actually met when I was at the bank, and we brought him in to do some personality assessments of staff and to help kind of tie our team together and make sure that we were working as efficiently as possible. And anytime you get more than one person working with another person, you have the potential impact of personality conflicts. And while we like to think that we understand exactly what makes another person tick, or maybe we think we do, the reality is that there's a lot of nuances that may be going on behind the scenes that unless you're a skilled professional in this, you may not pick up on. And things might not go as smoothly or as comfortably as you would like, but you can't put your finger on why that's not happening. And so Don implements a tool called a ProScan analysis, which is very similar, although I would say much more powerful, than things like maybe Myers-Briggs or a DiSC assessment. And you answer basically 40 statements about yourself, how you feel that you are and how you feel others perceive you. And those statements are cross-matrixed to thousands of different personality characteristics. And during this show, We actually had somebody from the audience that filled out one of the assessment tools and sent it in, and then during the 1-hour show took a portion of that time and actually introduced the person to themselves. Had never met them before, didn't know who they were, didn't even know where they lived, but based on the results of that ProScan analysis, he says, let me introduce you to yourself and let me tell you what I think you like about work and life, the things that maybe frustrate you, the challenges. kind of your optimal work environment, the types of projects that you enjoy. And he was dead on. And I've had him do this for me. I had him do it for my wife. He did it for myself and a coworker and identified a point of friction that neither one of us really even knew existed that improved our working relationship tenfold, if not more. And so that was a really cool show because this is one of those— when we talk about live versus recorded and engagement. This is one of the best examples when we pulled an audience member in, we unmuted their line so they actually talked while they were on the phone with Don, and, and it was really, really powerful. So I don't know if you remember that show, Jeff, but I thought that was really, really cool. And another one out here where we kind of talk about just the concept of using personality assessments Those two together with Don, I thought, were really powerful tools.

I exchanged communication with Don within the last few months. I think he's got a book coming out soon. I anticipate he will be a guest on the show sometime by the end of the year or the beginning of next year.

Yep, that would be great. If you're taking notes and you've got a list of all these, you can do the same site: with Don Crosby in there and pick up the 2 webinars that he's got. I think Don's session was great. I think the one with Ian. We've got Louis Schiff. We've got the one that I did with my buddy Steve on Cancer Sucks, What Are You Doing About It? Kathy, I think, was one of the better ones as well. Good buddy Adam Broadway, and then of course we've got Tom Petty and Greg McPherson, and then Tony Rubleski. We've been on the show a couple of times, and then yours truly. So kind of fun. I, I discovered some gems in there like yourself. I'm like, I gotta go back and listen to that Louis Schiff one because that I think of the episodes that we've offered, that's probably the most powerful business and wealth creation webinar that we've done. Maybe that conversation, um, maybe has the biggest potential to, if you follow it, um, of impacting your earning potential and kind of changing the way that you do business. Um, I think honorable mention has to go, um, Has to go to Bea Fields. I know there's a lot of things that we had done with Bea that I didn't have a chance to put in here because I figured we'd be pretty close to running into the hour. Bea has been a popular one. We haven't had her on the show in a while, but as an executive coach and kind of a no-nonsense— I loved her. You know, you can't manage time. There's no such thing as time management. So, you know, if you're not getting something done, it's not time's fault. It's Your Fault, and kind of walking through some exercises with her. So those were great sessions as well. So in the last 5 minutes that we have here, Jeffrey, any other closing thoughts or observations that you'd like to share?

Well, I think we can share with our audience we are talking about trying something new that we haven't had an opportunity to do before in the next few weeks. Eric and I are both going to be together at the CSI customer conference. CSI is probably the 4th largest bank software provider in the United States, I would guess. And we're going to be together at that conference in Orlando, and we're going to see if we can't have a live show from that conference if our schedules permit. So that'll be a lot of fun.

Yep.

Something to look forward to. Yeah.

And I'm trying to think the last time you and I have actually physically been in one another's presence, and it's been a couple years, so I'm hoping I recognize you. Yeah. So, no, that'll be cool. We'll— we've talked about doing a live simulcast, and that'll be kind of interesting. So who knows, maybe we'll even fire up the webcam for that one so everybody can see us together.

So that'd be We're trying to arrange a meeting in January. I think we might have to do a Winnebagocast if we do that.

There you go. Absolutely. While we're traveling down the road, we'll get Alicia to drive and we can have the webinar from the back of the RV. So that'll be good. Well, cool. Well, that brings us to the end. I think we do also have one other announcement to make for next week. Both you and I are going to be traveling. You're going to be, I think, on-site down in the Atlanta area without the ability to join at 1:00. And I'm actually going to be in the air on my way from one conference to another. So we are going to have to cancel for next week. We will put something out there just to make sure everybody knows that as well. But we will be back the following week. And we have already secured for later in October a great session on video creation. And we are going to get Lou Bortone back to talk with us about video. He's kind of our expert resident video guy, and so we're excited to have him come back. And there's a few other people that, like you said, we're reaching out to, and so should be able to bring some really cool guests to finish out the rest of this month and kick off October. So looking forward to it.

You mentioned Lou's got a pretty cool tool that he's going to be introducing in that session, so Those of you that want an easy tool to use for doing things with video should definitely try to hit that session up live.

Yep, exactly. Bring your questions and have him answer them for you. Good. I think we are at the top of the hour. We actually picked it just right. I was fearful that we would almost have too much information here and we'd have to push it to 2 weeks out, but we got through what we got through. And I can't remember, I'm thinking it was Gunner that maybe had asked the question, what were your top favorite shows and why, a couple of weeks ago. So if it wasn't you, you're getting some cred for it. But if it was you, thank you for posing that because I think this was a good show and it caused me to go back and revisit some things that I probably would be well served to listen to again and also Hopefully we've been able to do the same for you all out there. So hope you enjoyed the show, Jeff. Thanks again for joining and being my co-host and helping keep this thing alive for the last five and a half years. And I'm really looking forward to actually being physically with you. Well, that sounded bad. Being in the same room as you. We'll edit that out after.

In the same hotel lobby as me.

Being in the same conference. With you in October. So yeah, uncomfortable silence, insert here. So, but until then, we will miss you all next week. We'll be back the following week, and keep an eye out, Free Webinar Wednesdays. We'll get this recording out there. Like us on Facebook and have a great week and a good week next. So until then. We'll see you at freewebinarwednesdays.com. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.