True Innovation Done The Right Way

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the land geek with your favorite niche real estate website, www.thelandgeek.com. and I'm really excited for today's guest, Scott. He's a big deal. I'm put on my anchorman voice for this one. Let's do it. Before we talk to our guests, I had to properly introduce you. Scott Todd from Scott Todd.net landmodo.com, most importantly, if not automating your Craigslist and your Facebook postings. Postingdomination.com TheLandgeek Today's podcast is sponsored by GeekPay IO, the only set it and forget it financial CRM in the world. Get your first note free at GeekPay IO. Today's guest is all about Steve is all about innovation. Steven Shapiro is an author of four books, 24 Cent of Innovation, Goal, Free Living, the Little Book of Big Innovation Ideas, Personality Poker and Best Practices are Stupid. He has spoken in to audiences in 50 different countries. He helps companies like 3M, Procter & Gamble, Marriott, Nike Marriott improve their innovation practices through customized keynote speeches, advisory engagements and other services. Steven Shapiro, how are.

You?

Awesome. How are you.

Doing? I want to be more innovative, that's how I'm doing. Good. Well, I'm intrigued. So kind of. Let's rewind the tape a bit and tell us how you got into becoming sort of this innovation expert and helping these huge companies.

Grow. I sort of stumbled on it. What happened was I was working at Accenture, I was focused on business optimization. So it wasn't innovation, it was optimization. Basically what that meant was I helped companies shrink and as a result, people were losing jobs. Literally hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs because of the work that I was doing and promoting. One day I woke up and said, this doesn't feel right. Took a leave of absence from work, decided to focus on innovation and growth, created a 20,000 person practice on the back of that vision and never looked back since. And I'm happy to say that for the past 20 years, I've never been responsible for one lost.

Job. Wow. So do you ever watch the movie Office.

Space? I.

Do. So you were, you were like the Bobs, like they would come in, they'd meet with Stephen and like they would have to like, you know, explain to you what they did, Right? Yes. And then you'd be like, okay. So yeah. And then they're like, oh no, I had to. But then you're like, I hate this. And then, you know, instead of being like the Bob's, you're like the guy that's like, let's just blow this up. 20,000 more.

People. Yeah, let's make it bigger. Yeah. I always. I was like the movie up in the air with. With George Clooney, Ryan Bingham. That's basically what he did. He drove, flew around, and fired people. That was.

Me. I mean, that's gonna be soul.

Crushing. How.

Long? Yeah, could you do.

That? I did it for several years. I mean, part of it. Look, I didn't look somebody in the eye and say, you're fired. I mean, I wasn't doing any of that. It was sort of a level removed. So I'm sort of designing the businesses and helping them implement things, and somebody else did the firing. And so it wasn't soul crushing until I actually saw the impact on the lives of people who lost their jobs. I was actually watching a TV show about a client who let 10,000 people go in the back of the work that I was working that I was doing there. And I saw one person cried the entire interview because he had a mo lawns for a living to feed the family. Another one was living off of his inheritance, and the third person committed suicide. And that was the tipping point for me, just seeing that it destroyed people's.

Lives. So, Scott Todd went through a very similar experience with his Fortune 300 company. And Scott, if your company had only gone to Stephen, you probably would have hired. You would have. Your group would have gotten larger. So I'll let Scott kind of tell you his story. But how. My next question to you, Steven, is how do you convince these big companies to innovate when it's so much easier to just say, okay, look, we're going to cut 10,000 jobs. It's all going to throw the flow to the bottom line, and then we'll figure it out. So, Scott, you want to let Stephen know, like, your.

Situation? Well, I mean, like, I did work. I was a VP with a Fortune 300 company that decided to outsource a major, major domain that I was working. So they outsourced 85% of the. Of that department, if you will, to another company. But, you know, like, so, yeah, I got. I got. I did get, like, shown the door. And in looking back, it's been the greatest experience ever since then because, man, I would not have just kind of had the life experiences that I've had since that event's happened. But, you know, I do, like, one of the things that you said that I always. That I always think, and I'm always. I'm always like chuckling, if you will. Is that when to me, like, there's no better prop, there's no better solution to any problem that a company has than revenue, right? Like, yeah, you can, you can cut your way, you can cut expenses and you can cut those things and become optimized and all this other stuff. However, you can't cut your way to success. I mean, like, because you start cutting out all the expenses, well then the revenue is going to take a hit too, because the two of them are hand in hand. Now. It doesn't mean that you should be wasteful, but to me, man, I want to work for a company that's growing revenue wise, that's innovating, if you will. That's kind of like they don't even necessarily need to be leading edge, they just need to be kind of growing because then you've got revenue coming in, it solves all problems. You can take the employees that have been, you know, great, reeducate them, redeploy them to where they're needed today, not necessarily show them the exit door, you know, kind of keep that, that culture alive. And man, anytime I see a company like laying off people, I just kind of scratch my head. You know, typically the stock shoots up. But I'm like, to me, I see a company laying somebody off and I'm like, there is a failed management team there because they didn't innovate, they didn't grow the business and redeploy their people. They're like exiting. I mean, what do you.

Think? Yeah, it sounds like you and I are twins, separated at birth type of thing. In terms of philosophies. I remember this one time I saw Jack Welch speaking and he was talking to his GE employees and he said, for the longest time we've been squeezing lemons, we need to grow more lemons. Look, you can squeeze all the lemons you want until you have no more lemons. And what happens is so many companies go for the short term win, they go for the quick, let's slash and burn. And that will work in the short run. The question is, will you be around in the long run? And I've yet to see a company that used slash and burn as a long term strategy and is still around. So we need to innovate. I think coming back to the first question, is it a hard sell of 20 years ago? It was a harder sell because 20 years ago nobody used the word innovation. Today the problem is everybody uses the word innovation. The bigger issue is nobody knows what it means. So it Seems like most people want it, they intellectually understand the need for it, they just don't know how to go about doing it. And that's where I come in, is the businesses are struggling to stay relevant in a marketplace which is changing super.

Fast. So what is the definition of Steven Shapiro of innovation and how can we implement it in our own.

Businesses? So unlike the way a lot of people think about innovation, which is sort of about creativity and ideas, I think that innovation is an end to end process. So it is a process, an end to end process that starts with an issue, problem, challenge or opportunity and it ends with the creation of value with its ultimate goal to keep the company relevant in the long term. So that's sort of in a nutshell. It's about solving problems and exploiting opportunities. It's about creating value and it's about staying relevant. So it's adapting, evolving and changing repeatedly and rapidly to stay relevant in a.

Marketplace. So do you have an example of a company where you went in, they were stagnant and then they adopted your philosophy of innovation and then what.

Happened? Yeah, so there's a lot of them, they don't like me talking about their names, but I'll tell you, you don't say their name, you know, so, so one company, which is a great company, worked with for a long, long time, was actually a very successful company. So it's not like companies hire me when this ship is sinking, necessarily that happens. But in some cases there are what I would call enlightened companies who are doing well but believe there's a whole new level that they can take things. And I love working with companies like that because then it's not coming from a scarcity approach. So this one company, financial services company, they brought me in, I did a few speeches, that's how it started. And you know, at first like, oh, you know, we're doing great. And they were using a more traditional idea driven innovation approach. So it's sort of an electronic suggestion box, if you want to think about it that way, doing great. But I know from my past experience that those have a shelf life of about 6, 9 or at most 12 months. At that point, the quality of the ideas drop, the value diminishes, a lot of noise gets created. So I get a call from them almost like predictably at nine months saying, hey, everything you said that was going to come true came true. We have an issue, how do we solve it? And so I went in, worked with them and what we explored was how do we move from an Idea driven innovation program to a challenge centered innovation approach, which means basically instead of asking everybody for their opinions, suggestions and ideas, we ask people to solve important, pressing, differentiating questions. And so it really, it sounds like a very simple shift, but what we found was that in using this, we were able to generate a minimum of a tenfold improvement over the way they were innovating. So if in the past they were getting $10 for every dollar spent, they would get $100 or $1,000. Now for every dollar spent, massive, massive.

Improvement. Wow, that's unbelievable. Stephen, when you go into these companies, do you meet with the CEOs, the management team, who needs to be the driver of this.

Innovation? The CEO needs to be the driver. I mean, that to me is so, I mean, a lot of companies have a Chief Innovation Officer and you know, that's fine, but I think really at the end of the day, the CEO is the Chief Innovation Officer. If they're not driving the mandate for innovation, it probably won't happen as systematically as we like. Look, we could do certain things. We can make pockets of change. It's not gonna have the huge impact. I typically get called though, by a Chief Innovation Officer, a VP of Innovation, maybe a Chief Financial officer or chief Operating officer, and in some cases even the chief information or technology officers. Because in many companies now that digital is such a huge part of a company's innovation strategy, especially in companies like financial services, they're playing a much larger role. So whoever it is typically is a C suite person, but their title could be.

Different. I see. Okay. So it's Saturday night. You can invite any three CEOs to dinner. Whom would you invite and what one question would you ask each.

CEO? Wow, that's a great question. I mean, I would have to say Elon Musk, of course. I mean, so if you talk about somebody who's doing just some really cool stuff, he's the man I would like. And I don't have specific names because there would actually be multiple people, but the CEO of a company, when they were great. So for example, Sears, what a lot of people don't realize, in the 1960s it was actually the largest company was 1% of the US Gross National Product. Clearly that's not the case now. So I would love to talk with the CEO of Sears, Pan Am, BlackBerry, the companies that were once great that are either gone or on life support. I think that would be fascinating. And a CEO, I think of a smaller business because I think a lot of times we like to look to big companies But I like to look to small companies and I look to look at the failures. And I think the question would be is what is it that you do that helps you ensure that your past success doesn't lead to future failure? And I think in the case of Elon Musk, maybe it's very early and be hard for him to answer. But if I go back to the Sears, the Pan Am's, the Howard Johnson's restaurants, the Blockbuster Videos of the world and ask them what, what would they do differently? Why is it that their success actually led to their demise? I think that'd be a fascinating.

Conversation. I mean, what do you think the answer would be? Like, why? Why did Kodak fail? They started digital way.

Before. Yeah, I mean, they had the original patent for it. I think the biggest issue is expertise is the enemy of innovation. So what happens is if you are an expert in something, the deeper your understanding of that topic, whether it's an industry or technology, that will limit your ability to think differently about it. Because our brain only has so much ability. I mean, look, there are some people who are brilliant at it, but 99.99% of the people out there, their past experiences lead to their future decisions. There's an ingrained wiring reason for this. So I think they would probably say that we became too arrogant or we became too complacent or we were too slow to change because we weren't really looking outside, we were looking inside. And these are the types of things that I see a lot of companies struggling.

With. I think, I mean, I agree with you and I think that, you know, like, you could say they have the blinders on or whatever. I think the other problem, and I think it's really, you really see it with public trade companies is the fact that sometimes when you're going down a new avenue and trying to expand that business model or trying to prepare for the future, you have to lose money sometimes, especially when you've got these startups that, you know, they're scrappy, they're young, their cost centers are so low, you know, they don't have the same infrastructure or same investment. They can, they're more nimble. And then all of a sudden you've got the, you know, you've got the giant company there who is looking to innovate. It's an investment, right? Like it's, it's, it's not necessarily something that shareholders, I mean, it depends on the profitability of the company. But shareholders may or may not want to kind of support that kind of investment. If they don't know what the return is or if they do, sometimes the C level managers think that they want to support it. But then, man, when the financials start coming out and they're missing numbers and they're like, well, we just lost $100 million this quarter over here, or we lost $10 million over here. But they're like, man, that's $10 million. We could have solved another, plugged another hole for shut it down or delay it. And then they lose any competitive advantage that they have because they let the smaller company come in and take.

Over. Yeah, I think that's brilliant. In fact, I did a non scientific comparison of publicly traded companies versus privately held companies. And what's fascinating, if you listen to the CEOs and the owners of large privately held companies that are ridiculously successful, they have, they're on record saying that they probably could not have done what they did if they were the CEO of a publicly traded company. And so what happens is the measures that are used are going to drive the results. And in most companies it's quarterly earnings. So I'm totally with you there. That would certainly be part of it. And so I think there's. It's actually not, unfortunately in most situations, it's not a single answer. It's actually a lot of different things that are going on. I think we have the wisdom. I mean, Sears was really one of the first companies to bring the Internet to the market. They did that in 1984, yet they were one of the last companies to put their catalog online because their catalog business was successful. So I think it's a combination of all these different things. It's fascinating from a psychological perspective to look at what has companies go down the.

Tubes. So I mean, psychologically, Stephen, how do we, like, I'm guilty of this. I see this all the time when things are going well, even with my own, like, son, like he's getting an A in a class and all of a sudden he'll start procrastinating on his study. It seems like it's human nature. And I always think of the book Andy Grove, only the paranoid survive. Like, how do I keep the paranoia? And every single day to survive? Like, how do you do that when you know you got a company with a billion dollar EBITDA and things are going great? How do they keep that hunger, that passion, the paranoia, if you will, that they don't become like.

Sears? Yeah. I mean, we used to have an expression years ago called the burning platform, which is basically, you're on a platform and it's on fire, we take charge. But how do you get people to change when there is no fire? I mean, it's a great question and I think that's why I like to work with the companies like the financial services company that I mentioned. They are fantastic, they are successful. But they had a visionary CEO who basically said good enough isn't good enough, we need to be better. We can constantly be pushing the envelope and I'm not going to be putting up with any level of complacency in those situations. I think it's interesting in a company that is not successful, the CEO is less important in the innovation efforts because people have that burning understanding. But it's those enlightened leaders that I love to work with because they see that it's not just about solving a pain, but it's actually about a gain. And that's always the toughest thing. People are attracted to solving problems, dealing with their issues, eliminating pains much more than they are about gaining something.

Big. I love.

It. Scott Todd, I mean, I think that even for our listeners, Mark, typically like a small business or someone starting out is it all starts with you, right? Like kind of what Stephen said is that and kind of tying into what you're saying too, Mark, is that as a CEO of your own personal finance or your household or your business, man, when you're having success and you take your foot off the gas pedal, that's the wrong thing to do. You're living on your laurels. You're just, hey, it's going to continue. You know, like this is going to continue. It doesn't need me to keep pushing on. And then you look at someone like a Jeff Bezos, man, the guy's like, hey, we are in like phase one of our company, you know, like we're still new. I mean, it's a 20 year old company, but they're still innovating. Like they're new, right? They're still there. And he's kind of set this long term hot time horizon that says we're not dealing with today, we're dealing with 500 years from now. We're not done. We haven't even began. And here's a guy that's having success, yet he's not taking his foot off the accelerator. He's continuing to innovate, he's continuing to drive performance and he's continuing to kind of grow. And I think that he has kind of like that right mindset, especially for a publicly traded company that says, man, we're going to make an investment. If we make a profit, great. If not, we're good. We're going to be good for a long.

Time. Well, and I think what's interesting is if you take the Teslas of the world and the Amazons of the world, in some respects, even though they're publicly traded, they operate like they're privately held. I would say in Amazon's mindset is Jeff Bezos is the owner of the company. I mean, he is the guy who makes the decisions. And you know, when you buy stock in Amazon, you're buying into his vision. It's not like you're buying GM stock where you're really just buying into the vision, the philosophy of the company. So I think it's, and here's the challenge is it's easy for us to, I mean it's called Survivor bias or the under sampling of failure. It's very easy for us to look at the apples and the Googles and the Facebooks and you know, these big companies that are ridiculously successful but replicating what they do isn't necessarily what's right for most companies because there are companies that have done exactly what they did and failed. So we need to be looking at what it is that makes us successful. I loved what you said about not taking your foot off the accelerator, but the path you drive down, the highway you're going to go down or the country road you drive down will be different for each and every person, each and every company. And we need to have the courage to, to not just follow what other people have done, but to actually create our own trail. And I think that's really the key, is not looking to the Amazons and the apples of the world, but looking to.

Ourselves. So Stephen, is there a book that you gift to CEOs or clients more than any other book? Or if I want to start with one of your books, which one would you.

Recommend? Well, of my books, I'd say Best Practices are Stupid, partly because it's the newest book, partly it's all about innovation and everything you need to do in order to stay successful as an organization. My favorite books, and it really depends on what it is I think is the challenge for the organization. But the books that I gift most frequently are actually. Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman, which is about Nobel Prize, is written by Nobel prize winning physicists and Richard Feynman who was just, I think, one of the coolest people on the planet. And that book is just some stories of creative things he did. I think it is the best book on creativity. It is also one of the funniest books I think ever written. On a more somber side, there's Man's Search for Meaning, which by Viktor Frankl, which is if your company is looking for more purpose, if you want more purpose. Man's Search for Meaning is an extremely powerful, powerful book. I'll add a third one which is Orbiting the Giant hairball by Gordon McKenzie. He worked for Hallmark. A creative guy inside of a company that you'd think would be creative, but it was anything but. And he talks about what is it like to be a creative individual inside of a massive hairball, a massive corporation. So those are my three picks for non business books that I think are the best tools for helping us think.

Differently. I love it. I love it. Is there something that you know, you think is normal or innovative or really like just a truism that other people think is.

Crazy? I have a few. One is in there. Well, two of them are very closely related. One is asking for ideas is a bad idea. Let's face it was Dirty Harry who said opinions are like buts. He didn't say buts, but opinions are like buts. Everyone has one and in my opinion, most of them stink. So look, we don't want more opinions, suggestions and ideas. We want well framed questions. Which leads to the other one, which is everybody says think outside the box. My mantra is don't think outside the box. Find a better box. The issue is not the expansiveness of your thinking. The issue is we're looking in the wrong place. And we've taken some very simple changes in a problem statement and just by changing one word or shifting it slightly, we got a completely different range of solutions which unleashed massive amounts of.

Value. I love.

That.

Scott. Todd, you know, there's a famous quote. The quality of your life is usually dictated by the quality of questions that you ask yourself. I think I'm paraphrasing this, but are there certain questions, Scott, that you'd like to ask that sort of help expand your.

Thinking? Well, one of the things that I always try to do is I try to understand like what someone's trying to solve, right? Like where they're trying to come from. So, you know, it's easy to try to throw a solution together for something, but then, you know when you just stop them and say, well, what problem are you trying to solve here? A lot of times they don't even, they don't know what problem they're trying to solve, right? Like they just, I got this problem And I, you know, Mark, you've seen it. Like, hey, what do you think about this idea? Okay, well, it's an idea, right? Like, you know, whatever it is. What do you think about this? Well, it depends. Right? Like, it depends. What problem are you trying to solve? Oh, well, I'm just trying to, like, automate this thing. Okay, well, why are you trying to automate it? Because I don't want to do it anymore. Okay, well, what's wrong with the way that you're doing it? Can you give it to somebody else? Why are you going to invest time to try to try to automate something? And, you know, at the end of the day, they're kind of confused as to why they even want to do it. They're just hitting a buzzword or they're just trying to, like, do something. To do something, but they don't know what they're trying to achieve at the end. So how do they judge success? So I always like to go back and kind of reframe.

It. Like.

What. What problem are you trying to solve? Why do you want to do this? And then when you kind of have that right frame of mind, well, now you can go back and kind of hit the topics that they want to hit on. Right. Like, I'm doing this because I'm trying to solve this problem. Well, yeah, then what you're trying to do makes sense. Or no, there's a better way of doing. There's a better way of doing.

It. Steven Shapiro, your.

Thoughts? Oh, spot on. In separated birth, I've always believed that the questions we ask, the most important part of the innovation process, and I got a fortune cookie once, and it said, you always have the answers. They just sometimes solve the wrong problems. And I think that's what we tend to do inside of organizations. We spend a lot of time running around solving problems that aren't important, or we haven't taken the time to really reframe the question, because in the question, you could change one word and get a very different result. And so I think it is the cornerstone. And there's so much more that we could talk about in terms of how we leverage that then to drive this tenfold improvement in.

Innovation. We'll have to have you back for sure.

Mark. I mean, like, yeah, I'm sorry. You know, you. You kind of. I know you get asked this question all the time, like, hey, Mark, what do you think about this? Or, like, what do you think about this process that I created? Right. Like, what do you think about, you know, like, this, this for an ad. And the answer is always, like, it doesn't matter to me. Right. Like, I can't give you feedback. The paper looks great. But until you get to the end user, until you get to somebody that can, like, really give you feedback, you're asking the wrong people, too. So it's not just asking the right questions. It's sometimes about asking the right people.

Too.

Yeah. I mean, I think the two of you should go for lunch.

And you're in there, too, man. We're all gonna.

Go. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a bunch of doppelgangers here. So, Stephen, one more question before we get to the tip of the week, and I'd just be curious, what is some of the worst advice you see or hear given in.

Innovation? The worst. There's a lot. I think that the worst advice given by CEOs is when they tell their employees to go innovate, because it means nothing. I mean, you know, coming back to what Scott was saying, it's a solution, looking for a problem. So why? What are we looking to do? In terms of what most people say, I think the thing which concerns me the most these days is everybody seems to think that failure is a good thing. I mean, I hear companies say, we're proud of failing. This is good. You know, if we're not breaking eggs, we're not innovating. And I think that's the wrong mind. I think you're sending the wrong message. I don't think that failure is what you want. What you want to do is construct scalable experiments. And the point of an experiment is not to prove.

Yourself.

Right. It's actually to prove or disprove a hypothesis in the correct way. And there's a whole bunch of reasons why we tend to either not do experiments or conduct faulty experiments. But I think a quote that, to me, is probably the best quote when it comes to innovation. Scott Cook from Intuit said, for each of our failures, we had spreadsheets that looked awesome. And I think this really gets at the heart of what I see a lot of companies doing, is they're running around, they're passionate about their new innovations, they're passionate about their ideas, they're implementing a lot of crap, and they're failing. We shouldn't have a 70% failure rate, which is the number that's often quoted. That, to me, makes no.

Sense. I love it. Well, Stephen, your mentorship. This podcast has been amazing, but we're going to extract one more piece of wisdom from you. We're going to ask you for your tip of the week. A website, a resource, a book. You already gave us three books. Something else, actionable, where the art of passive income listeners can go right now, improve their businesses, improve their lives. What else have you.

Got? I'll give you the simplest thing that costs nothing. If you go to personalitypokergergergergame.com personalitypokergergame.com is a. It looks like a Las Vegas slot machine. You're gonna see wheels with poker cards. And you spin the wheels and you hold the cards where the words on those poker cards best describes your personality. And when you're done, you basically say, give me my results. And it will give you a printout of, you know, what your strong suit is, what your. You know, what your. Where you need to focus on partnering with people that you might not partner with. It's. It's a tool for teamwork. And we have a physical version, actual decks of personality poker cards. But that's just a free game that people can play around with. To get at least a quick snapshot takes about 30.

Seconds. Oh, that's awesome. That's awesome. So the cards I've got right now are considerate, bossy, anal retentive, gregarious, loyal, and then I just hold the cards that describe.

Me. You hold the cards, you keep. You hold the cards that describe you, and you keep hitting spin. And then once you have five cards that you held that you like, you, you basically say, show me my results, and it'll give you the results page. And then what you'll also do, you give an email address, and we'll send you a bunch of videos about yourself and how you actually leverage what it is that you took in this all.

Free. This is.

Awesome. Okay.

Mark.

Okay. Have you helped.

Yet? Not.

Yet. Oh.

Man. You know what? One of them is disciplined. I don't. I think I am. My wife would say. I mean, ocd. Is OCD one of the.

Cards? Well, we do have anal retentive. That is one of the cards. I think that's a close cousin to.

Ocd. Keep spinning. Keeps it. Like, I took. I took two spins, and I don't know, it looks.

Pretty. I. You know, like, I gotta keep spinning here. Hold.

On. Mark, would you say you're bossy or.

What? No. All right, I'm done. Okay. Enter my.

Name. Oh, this is really.

Cool. This is really. This is a. You know, I.

Got. I got.

Logical. I kind of want to show my.

Personality. I kind of want to keep spinning and see all the cards. But I got, like, right now I got logical, competitive, direct, rational, expert man. I got. I might have to give up some just to go see what else is.

There.

Yeah. What's interesting is based on just those few cards you gave me, I can tell a lot about you. So you've had primarily spades and clubs. That means that you are a little more left brain, thinking and just even listening to. Even though you're a creative guy, I think you're sort of like me. You got a left brain approach to things. Very analytical, logical, yet at the same time you want to make sure that you're producing results from everything that you're focused on. And so the black cards are the people who are critical when it comes to innovation at defining the problems and making sure we get results. So at least based on what I heard, I would put you in that category. I'd have to see more hands. Here's what's fun though is when you use the physical cards, not the one that you're doing on the game. When you have the physical cards, you gift cards to people. That's.

Fun. We might need to play this game like a boot camp or.

Something. I think we should. Stephen, how can we get the.

Cards? Go to personality poker.com and you will see all the information you need.

There. All right, we gotta get the cards for sure. It's done and done. Well, Stephen, this is great, but you know, we have to ask Scott Todd for his tip of the week. Scott, what's your tip of the.

Week? Well, it's definitely not like personality poker game. I mean this is like, this is like awesome. So I feel like, I don't know, I feel like weak now. But look, Mark, how many times have you like struggled to like figure out like you got to write an email marketing, marketing message. You need something kind of like, kind of get, you know, kind of that writing prompt.

Right? Every Sunday that's when I write my.

Emails. So what I like to do is I like to go to this website. Check id, comm check. Like, you know, you're writing a check, check, check. And you know, basically what it does is it shows you like all of the, I'm going to say holidays for a given day, right? So you can scroll through the week and you can see like today, you know, today is like Mean Girl Appreciation Day or it's National Techies Day. So could you now take and write an email about, you know, let's honor National Techies Day or kind of weave in National Techies Day into your, into your, you know, kind of email message your marketing message. So it's kind of like, to me, I use this as kind of a writing prompt so I can keep my marketing message kind of relevant and fresh for the. For the.

Time. This is really cool. Wow. I can spend all day on check id. Check it out. All right, well, my tip of the week is learn more about true innovation the right way and getting some some additional Steven Shapiro wisdom at the aptly titled website Steven Shapiro.com. i'll have a link to it. And, you know, this was a phenomenal podcast. Steven Shapiro, thank you so much. Are we.

Good? I feel good. Just, you know, Pete, my name is spelled with a ph, which is always confusing. S, T, E, P, H, E, N. So if you go to Stephen with a V, you're get somebody completely.

Different. All right, will do. Will do. Scott, Todd, are we.

Good? We're good.

Mark. All right, well, I want to thank the listeners and just remind them the only way, the only way we're going to get the quality of guests like a Steven Shapiro with a phone is if you do us two little favor. Three little favors. You guys subscribe. You got a rate. You got to review the podcast. Send us a screenshot of your review to support the landgeek.com we're going to send you for free the $97 passive income launch kit. Please do that. It really helps. Steven Shapiro would never come on this podcast unless he, you know, saw we had a lot of reviews that are positive. So please do that. Also, just a reminder, GeekPay IO only set it and forget it. Financial CRM. Check it out. Get your first note for free. No risk. GeekPay IO Scott, you want to lead us.

Out? No, we say, Mark, let freedom.

Ring. Thanks.