https://www.listennotes.com/e/0f703434507d4abab4a8c198a9ad12dd

Everybody, welcome, welcome, welcome. Meryl Chandler here, the Fundability Podcast. And today we have got such an amazing guest. Tracy Hazard is what has become a dear friend, a genius of a mentor. She has facilitated the growth of the Fundability Movement in ways she even produces, her team produces all of our podcast. She is a giant in my heart and a giant in business and in industry. And we're here to talk to her today in celebration for women's history and how she has navigated the shoals of gender and her full genius in this next episode. So when we come back, we'll get right to it.

In the constantly changing world of fundability, the big question is this: how are entrepreneurs and real estate investors like us, ones who want to grow our businesses and who are tired of paying for really expensive alternative lending, How do we tap into the most inexpensive money available and do it without the hassle of typical borrowing? That is the question and this podcast will give you the answers. Welcome to the Get Fundable podcast with your host, Meryl Chandler.

No joke, just like you heard, we have got Tracy Hazard here who is not just my mentor but is completely responsible for you even listening to these podcasts. her team produces my podcast. And so when I met Tracy, it was a match made in heaven or in business or whatever, however we want to frame it. So Tracy, please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about just your background and why I adore you so much.

Well, I'm not sure why you adore me, but I adore you. You know what I really love, Meryl, is I love an open mind and that's what you have. And I thrive in that situation of being able to like, take that sponge of a mind that you have and saying, here, try this and add this in and letting you absorb that and turn it into something amazing and great. That's where I feel like my gifts have been to good use. And so, you know, that mentorship model that I follow in my life and in my business is something that I missed when I started in my career. And so, you know, I started out as a designer. I went to Rhode Island School of Design and started out in the textile industry and doing design work and designing products for Herman Miller and a bunch of other really great companies. Martha Stewart Living, Costco, like all of those things. And so I was in a design world. And what you don't really realize in most of those design worlds is it's not female dominated, which surprises you and certainly surprises me.

But that's the creative side, right? The design-ish-ness would be, would at least have massive influence by feminine energy or creative energy, right?

Well, you would think, and not that I didn't have some female bosses along the way, I did have a couple, but the ones that were the most influential to me and the ones that gave me the most, I'm gonna say, direction in my business career were a few men who were just amazing to me. The very first one was an older guy. He was kind of on the sort of like heading towards retiring in the company, but he was a maverick. And I loved that that's who he was. And he could get away with stuff because he was like almost to retirement and like you could get away with it.

What are you gonna do?

You know, at 21, 22 years old, I couldn't get away with those things, right? I admired the way he did things. And he would teach me things like he would say, I did this because, and he would give me his why and share with me what he was doing. And he would frustrate the sales teams and everything because he wouldn't do anything exactly like they asked. I saw this method of that it was so successful though, his understanding of what the client wanted and then making sure he had something and we used to tease him, he'd pull stuff out of his back pocket. And he'd pull this sample out of his back pocket and it'd be absolutely what the sales people told him not to do. But what the client wanted. And so, you know, I just learned to listen from him and absorb that. So that was the first one. The second one was just an amazing man who just said, I don't want the business world and this business world specifically, because my very first job was in automotive textiles. So I would go up and there'd just be men in all the meetings at the automotive, you know, automotive industry. You could go to Ford or Chrysler or whatever, and they'd just be full of men there. And I'd be the only woman giving a presentation. And on top of it, I was 22 years old, right? You know, so like, it's just like, yeah, oh, we're young. And yeah, exactly. So there was always that. But this man said, you know what? I don't want the career path for my daughters to be like this. And so he actually did some great things. Like when I first joined the company, he had a lunch and made sure to engage us as women in the company. And I just thought that was really a great way to go about things. And it sort of set the tone for how I wanted, how I thought, wow, this is what the business world should be like. All these mentors that are wonderful. It was always how I saw my father. My father seemed like that kind of mentor. And when he retired, I met all of the women in his company and they told me of these amazing initiatives that he put through. He worked in the oil industry building pipelines like the Alaska pipeline. And he put in a project management path that women had access to. And so it was a very special program. And he did it without permission of the higher ups in the company.

What are they gonna do?

Yeah, and he apologized later, right? Exactly. I mean, his retirement dinner was just pacted with people and 80% of them were women who were just saying, I owe my entire career to your father. And I thought, oh my gosh, he did, you know, what I was able to access as well. There are other men out there doing that. I thought, that's amazing. But the women in who I worked with were horrendous. They were awful. They were competitive and backstabbing. Like, I don't know how else to say that. And I said, you know what? I don't want this and I'm not going to be this and I'm not going to play at this level. And I luckily was good at getting along with people and still getting what I needed to do, accomplish. Well, what happened?

Because I'm good at presentations, right? You're not like mortal enemies. I don't know what happened. You were so good before I knew you.

Right, exactly. I don't know what that is. So anyway, but I was really good at giving presentations and convincing people from the beginning. That's just a skill that I, I didn't know I had, but I did. And so, you know, it has always worked out for me to that I could convince people. that this was the right path, whether or not they wanted to support what I was into. And so that's really where getting buy-in became my thing. And that's really what worked for me. And what I started to do was realize really early on in my career that as a woman, I couldn't go out there and say, you know, I wouldn't buy that as a mom. Like, I couldn't, I, I couldn't say that in a group, and I wouldn't because it would make this view of who I was So apparent. Like, look, I mean, I know you know I'm a girl, right?

Any arguments here? Okay. But as a mom, it almost diminishes your role, even though moms are the buyers in our world today. Do you realize 65% of mortgagees are women? Not men.

That doesn't surprise me at all.

85% of 50.

Yeah. 87% or more of all consumer products in all categories are bought or influenced by women. And I used to joke on stage about this when I tell this one, and I'd say, including men's underwear. And they, and you'd hear this kind of like, like, huh? Like people are thinking about it. And I'd say, you know, with rare exceptions of, you know, certain sexual preferences, beyond that, you know, you're likely to have had your mom choosing your underwear for a very long period of time and past that, you likely wanted to have a woman see you in those underwear. And so it was influencing your decision whether or not she actually bought them for you. Right. And so that's kind of how it feels.

Guilty is charged.

Right. So anyway, when I would say that they would go, oh, yeah. Yeah, so now you understand the difference between buying and influencing, right? Making choices for you or making recommendations and suggesting things. So when I started to look at that as there are these characteristics in designing a product. So whether I was designing an office chair or designing actual products for juveniles, like it didn't really matter. I have to think about what women are choosing, what they're going through, and I have to incorporate that in the product But do I have to tell people that it's there?

That was the question. It's like the submarine versus surface warships, right? It's a stealth move. This is a stealth move that you're incorporating the truth, but sometimes we're still in an environment, even the 21st damn century, where we have to hide the influence because the status quo, I won't use any derogatory terms, the status quo, makes, diminishes the value of the suggestion because simply for who's authoring the viewpoint, right? That's not okay. Right.

And so what happens though is that now you have meetings, you might have brainstorming meetings, team meetings, and people are censoring themselves. And it's not just women, don't get me wrong. There's all kinds of censoring going on, whether it's your religious background, it might be your cultural background, or, you know, Political background, right? You're censoring yourself in that group meeting. And so what happens is, is you're not getting the best thoughts and the best minds out there and the best viewpoints. And so product development, specifically the creative realm doesn't happen in that wonderfully synergistic way it doesn't involve. So I learned to do this in a, what I call covertly feminine way. So we call it covertly feminine design. It's, I actually gave lectures on this for a decade.

It's trademarked covert feminine design. as trademarked. As long as you ascribe her, you're free to use the term. Here's her white paper from Harvard.

There actually is a white paper, I'll be honest with you. So anyway, yeah, so that's what we called it. And what we said was, is that basically, like, especially in office chair, office chairs were by default design mail. Like the standards that everybody designed to was a six foot to male, which doesn't fit the, the, the, the male, exactly.

They're aspiring to being a tall, a tall man.

Right. And, and today, when you consider that the majority of our products, especially office chairs, are made over in China, the men doing the engineering and develop work over there don't even fit in the chairs. Yeah. Right. So it's not good for anyone in any way, shape or form. And so that's just not working. So for me to come in and say, you know, we need to make the seat slightly shallower. so that someone with shorter legs, you know, I could just go, yeah, look at me, I'm only 5'2, right? You know, so, you know, I can.

Get away with saying that nicely. Yeah. How many chairs have your legs been dangling? I have team members who have to move their thing all the way, you know, move it all the way down so their desk doesn't fit their chair because they don't want their legs dangling from the seat, right? That's not okay. So that's what we did.

So we would do things that you wouldn't realize, like a gas lift. That's what that is in the chair. It's called a gas lift. And we made a gas lift with a lower low than any other chair had ever had. We actually, it dropped down and we had to actually create an ability for it to drop down lower for everyone.

I love it. We strive for lower lows.

That's right. But, you know, do you tell anyone about it? No, we would just go and we'd promote the fact that it has this range of height adjustment and that was better than any other chair on the market. So then Staples would look at that. If I was going to sell it into Staples and they go, this is amazing. And then I designed one that had pilloW that moved up and down on the back. And we designed it and we used to used to say to, you know, within our own team that we would say that, you know, what we did was we created women have more of a sway back, especially those of us women who have bad children. It's in our lower back. That's more sway men actually like it mid back. It's a little where their muscles strain when they're using their arms and when they're working on the computer. So it has a different positioning. So they like to actually have that pillow slightly up. But the other thing that it does is it takes up some of that depth, for those of us that are short, and it takes up that depth. So it has multiple purposes to it. And by allowing this height adjustment to the pillow, you can put it exactly where you want it. So women get what they need and want, but men didn't know it could be so good. Like that's the real trick to covertly feminine.

That's why the term covert is so vital because the marketplace is getting what they need without Guys, and I'm just gonna bracket right here. This is bullshit where we have to hide genius in the form so that it passes muster, right? That with, yeah, ah, okay.

So what ends up happening, right? Yeah, so what ends up happening in this process of like putting these things in is that I learned new languages to describe things and the benefits of things. But what I really realized was the important that gender neutral is actually BS. Like gender neutral is bad. And I don't mean that from like, you should remove like all pronouns and stuff. I'm not talking about it like that.

We're talking about the human body in the vast majority, 99.9% have some female form regardless of what you identify as or a male form regardless of how you identify. You got to sit in the damn chair regardless of your sexual preference or your gender identity preference. Right?

Right. And so, I totally get this.

I'm connecting these dots. Yeah.

But by neutralizing, what it is, is you give nobody what they want. No one gets what they need or want in that process. And so, neutralization is just that. It's nothing at the end of the day.

It's neutered is what it is.

Exactly. So, we don't want to say that.

We're neutering the human condition. Right.

But we also don't want to say, this is a girl chair. Because if this is a girl chair, then no shorter man is ever going to walk up to it and go, gosh, I could really use that. And this is so much better. and I can use my computer and like all of this is better. And so that's why we removed the language from what we did, but it's there in the design. Now, lucky for me, my husband is my partner and he's amazing at just letting me be me. So for the first 20 years of my life, my dad, as I mentioned before, encouraged me to speak my mind, be who I was, and that that was wonderful. You were going to come up to resistance. My dad's famous for being the devil's advocate and anything and waiting for me to take the bait and argue with them, right? And it was in honing those arguments that I learned how to communicate better, right? So that, but I was supported and loved. And that's really important there is that I could be, I could find myself in that process and then come out to being in business and married and having, you know, wonderful partner and relationship. I'm allowed to be me too. And we can argue together and we argue about design all the time and features and I'll say things and I can drop one of these things like, yeah, women don't like that. And I can say that to him and he's not gonna take offense by it or he's not gonna be like, look at me, funny. He's gonna instead go, I hadn't thought about that before. And so when somebody can sit back and take what you're saying as not an insult, not an affront to his manhood, right? He can take it and say, wow, I hadn't thought about it from that perspective, Pavor, I can now design with that in mind, he could make better products. And so together we were a force of design that really changed everything. And whether we design physical products, we're designing our services and our business, these are things that we're always thinking about. We're thinking right now we're working really hard on the culture of Pottetize, the culture of the business for our investors, for our clients, and for our internal staff members, what does that culture look like and how inclusive and encouraging can it be for voices of dissent and voices of opposition? Is dissent.

Are we safe?

It's difficult. Yeah. Right. And so what we've been working on is actually the communication of empathy. And by that I don't mean like, oh, I feel for you. That's so great. Like, because that's not actually me. If anyone who knows me, like, I'm not that emotional. And so, you know, that's probably more Tom than it is me. Like that's the funny part.

Between you, there's balance of the masculine feminine energies. The creative strategic are all balanced, right?

Right, right, exactly. And so it all works out great. And I would admit that I probably have a lot more the masculine than most women do or most, most executives do. I just do. And that's okay. I'm fine with it. Like this is cool. I'm good with this. What's really, you know, interesting about looking at empathy is that what I need to get is to a cognitive empathy empathetic way in which I can look at you and say, okay, I can see your viewpoint. I hear you. I'm listening to that. I'm going to absorb that. I need to reconcile it against what I've learned and then see how I can absorb that into a new world view or a new- if there's a.

Collaboration between the views, right?

Yeah. If I can remove the emotional reaction from that empathy and sit there and say, I'm willing to hear what you have to say. I'm interested in hearing what you have to say. It's going to make me a better person and us a better team. So I'm in the place of openness, then that's great. And that goes back to what I said is I love an open mind, right? Right. Because that is what makes the world move forward. Progress happens when.

All right. So I want, thank you for sharing your, the kind of your evolution through this process. Right. Well, as most of my tribe know, many, if not most, have been through the boot camp and they know that we talk in the first two hours of the entire weekend, we talk about what we call your full genius, the complete genius that we bring, we want to bring our complete genius to this, which is basically some percentage creative and some percentage strategic. Right? Now, you've shared that there's more strategy. Some people relate to the masculine, the feminine and the masculine, right? Creative and the strategic. I tried to pull out the genders out of it because I want us, I want everybody to be able to have a sense that they belong in some percentage. I'm 30 creative and I'm 70, I was gonna say 80, you know, like 110. I'm 70% strategic, right? Everybody has a mix of this creative strategist. What would you say is your mix right now of creative strategy and not creative as in being able to design something, but the intuitive, Empathic, right? Because what you're talking about, you're building a culture. The reason why this is up for me is you're building a culture in your organization of how to collaborate. That's a creative quality, right? That's a cohesive and conjoining the receptivity, openness. Those are all feminine creative traits, right? The cut and dry checkbox listing, that's the masculine, that's the masculine and strategic. way, right? So how do you marry those?

That's a great question, Meryl, and I love the way you frame that. We do something slightly different. It's a little more nuanced than two sides to it. It's four. And so it's like four quadrants. And it's the Herman Brain Dominance model. And so we do that. We work with corporate culture development, Bill Sturley. I think you know Bill, probably you've met him before. And we work with him and our entire team trains with him. Tom trained to do sales languaging with him and read people better. And what you do when you study it, there are four quadrants and because we want to remove that masculine, feminine.

I've got my quadrants up, go.

Because when we start to put feminine, masculine, we start to put that language into things, it starts to get people's shackles up, right? Like they start to be like, that's not me. I don't want to be known as that. And so same thing when you were like, you know, you study disc or anything like that, I was like, well, I don't want to be that. And so you're preventing yourself. So this aligns you with, we call them colors so that they never we never had this association with any names or labels. We're removing the labels except for color. So, I mean, I guess if you really hated yellow, you'd be in trouble. But the reality is that. So we'll say Meryl's a yellow. Like, this is like, well, you know, and usually what that means is you're a Visionary. You have a lot of creative in your process, and we're looking towards that. And then he's also got a lot of red. And red means you've got a lot of human. You need human interaction. You're really. with people, you're empathetic in that way, you crave that human touch. And so you might prefer a phone call versus an email. Like that might be its embodiment for you. So we look at those yellow red on that, what you would consider to be that feminine side and that creative side. And then the blue and green are all about like checkboxes, to-do lists, analysis and dominance.

Right?

Yeah. The interesting part is in my team, there's a lot more blue-green dominant women. in my company who are all about the systems, the check boxes, the- oh.

You mean, hold it, hold it, stop everything, stop the presses. You mean they imprint from the mistress of the business?

Well, no, so this is the interesting part. There's actually a whole study, you answer all these questions and you figure out where you are. And most people are two zone, two zones at once, right? You know, they're a majority of them, they might be a little heavier, like I said, I can read you, I know you're yellow red, but you've got a lot of analysis in there. and you've got a lot of that.

The entire fundability system between the creativity and the analytics, right?

So you're probably more of a three zoner and that's actually really common, but I guarantee you your team back there is going, yeah, but there's no to-do list in Merrill. We've got to make them do stuff, right? We got to get them to show up. And that's okay, you've got this one thing that's just not you. For me, I'm actually dead center and that's a very unusual place that most people where I can speak and flip between all four color languages. And that's what we call them languages, because I'm gonna talk analyst right now, or I'm gonna talk, and you know, I've done that. If anyone goes back and watches the episode, I mean, today was really red. Like, we're really human, right? Really, really emotional and human. But we've talked like, you know, about gender discrimination and AI, like that's all analysis, right?

That's all analysis. You know, I can- A blockchain implementation of, yeah, fundability model.

And you and I have sat down and we talked about the implementation and the the processes and the team set up and all the different aspects of our business and how we built it. And that's got a huge systems and to-do list to look at that. Right. So, like, I can split between all those areas really fluidly. It's, it's my gift. And I'm so lucky to be there. And, you know, there are people in the world who do this really well. Steve Jobs was known for this because, and he would call it going macro and micro. So he would think of his Visionary side and his people side and being able to give presentations and do all and all of that is his macro view of the world and his micro What is that view of the world was like, what is that system? What is that process? What is that code? Yeah, let's get this done and get this launched, right? And if he could flip and keep both in his mind or go, you know, zoom in, zoom out, then he could be better at what he did to run a company. So it's a CEO thing. But what I want to get everyone is to say, okay, we need people with these different skill sets, but they need to be able to talk to each other and not upset each other, right? I need, you know, my team that is involved in the systems and processes. So we can't have someone who is not detail oriented, checklist oriented, following a standard operating procedure to make sure that all of our clients blogs are perfect and everything is done right. I can't have someone who just only, you know, who just wants to talk on the phone all day and communicate with people and get to know our guys.

That's a really good, I really like this person. That's a great message.

Yeah, I'm distracted by listening to their instead of blogging it, right? You know, we can't have that, that there's a skill set involved in the job, right? But we also do need them to be able to say, this is my job and I'm having trouble with it. I think it could be more efficient. I don't have the vision for being able to make that change. I know something has to change. How do I communicate with the higher ups in my company, with my team leader, with the management in it and tell them that I'm suffering, I'm in need, And how do I express that when it's not my default mode?

And how do you express it to somebody whose default mode is just say, it's your job, do it.

Right. And sometimes we have to say that. Look, as a boss, right?

Right. That's the green. A green is the checkboxer, right?

Yeah.

Literally, it's like, I don't understand what you're saying because I told you that's your job.

So, yeah. Well, you know, and here's the thing is, like, if I were to say, here's a vision of where we go, Meryl, I guarantee you've done this before because I know you well enough. Like, here's the vision of where we're going to be in two years. And my COO, who you know well, Alexandra, would be like glazing over, stressing out because she knows that that to-do list is a mile, mile long.

To make that happen is her job. She identifies with its implementation and is now overwhelmed. Just from you. Hey, you know what? I had a thought. I think this is where we want to go. And all of a sudden it just laden them down with pressure. I totally, that has never happened to me or my son.

Never. Exactly. But you know, this is the thing. So my father taught me when I was growing up that whenever you give a meeting or you set that at the end of a meeting, whatever you do, you only give them three things. This is what he taught me. I didn't know why. I didn't understand it, but I was like, you give them three things. The other tip he really gave me was that you never pack more than you can carry yourself, which was Great advice as a woman, right? Like, if you don't wanna look like you're struggling with your luggage, that certainly sets you in a different world. And if you have to negotiate a massive settlement, ply them with coffee and do not let them use the restroom.

Take no break. And I'm like, that's my dad's negotiation. Those three things will set you up for success.

There's an entire book there. There's an entire book on those three strategies, right? It totally is, yeah, exactly. But the three things, I started to like, I use it all the time, but I talked to someone about it once and he ran international organizations and expansion for Denny's and on the food companies and all those things into other parts of the world. And he said, what happens is, is that when you're at that project management or higher level and you set three things, it goes down each level with 10 to 10 things. So if you're a very layered organization and you've got all of these different things that have to get accomplished, you could end up with 3000 things that have to be done at the bottom level.

3 to 10 things as this be for us to hit our one thing.

Think. Yeah.

We've got to do these 10 things.

Right.

All right. For us to hit these 10 things, we need to do these 50 things.

Right. And so it Cascades and compounds for all the people at the. And so this is why your organization doesn't move is because you gave them too much. So those three things need to be tight, specific, accomplishable in a certain time period. Then they. And they, as they head down, yes, they get broken down, but each level below it shouldn't have more than three major things that they're accomplishing at each level, even though all the way at the bottom. Yes, if you looked at the whole chain of it, you might have 300 things. That's what I said.

That's a multi-level organization, right? Yeah, you got up at the top, at the pyramid down here, but it's manageable for every person because they only have three things.

Right. And then what I discovered is in an entrepreneurial enterprise or a startup that really you can only have one thing because everybody wears three hats or, you know, like that's kind of very common. And so until you have a large enough organization, it's got to be one thing that you do at a time or, It just really overwhelms everybody.

You guys see why I adore this woman? Because I'm sitting here taking notes. All right, so we're gonna do the quadrants and then we need to look at the three things and how am I, how well am I performing on the three things? If you're not taking notes, you are missing the whole point here.

There'll be a transcript in your blog.

You're gonna list every one of these things out.

That's right. There you Here you go. But here's the thing, Meryl, is like you've said before, and the other thing about having two instead of four quadrants, the way that we look at it is that when you have two, you have, you have to look at things that as balance, right? You're looking for balance going on. And in my experience, balance is absolute BS. Like it can't happen. And if you think about like a yoga pose and you're standing and balance, you cannot hold that forever. It's not possible. So what we strive for is harmony with the four quadrants. That way it's okay that you never love the red side of you. Like you're just, you wanna live in your spreadsheets and it's okay that you never love that as long as you can empathize with that red and cooperate with them and be in harmony with them and understand and recognize that the sales team, which is typically red, right? The sales team has to have their needs met too in order for the company to work.

And so when you can get to.

That harmony, now everybody's working.

I really like this framework. And by the way, HVA, the home investors group, we have the hundreds of mutual clients with their franchisees and they use this blue, red, green, yellow framework. So, and they, they literally have it when we're at a, when we're at an event.

They have it on their tags.

They have the two to three buttons, whatever is, I think it's 30 or more you get a button for.

Right.

So that, you know, when you're walking up, they actually did a training for the vendors so that when somebody walked up and they had a red and a yellow, you knew how to talk to them as a vendor. It was amazing. So I Bill Sterling does this interaction.

Exercise and he gets everyone to stand in the four corners of a room. So it's like really nice and interactive, especially if you've got a big ballroom. And he's like, he's like, so you know, you have all these cards that are describing it. You put them in your ranked order and he sends you to the corner with whichever one you feel is at the top. And so you, you might, you know, the, you might have your over in the yellow corner and your spouse or your partner in business is in the opposite corner diagonally from you.

Yeah.

And then he talks about you want to know why you have conflict. This is why you have conflict. This is why separate languages.

This is fascinating because this very process is they have roles in the franchise. Who's your buyer? Who's the, who's the Outreach? you hire for a green, red, yellow or blue. You actually hire the role that you want and then I'm assuming, because I'm not a franchisee, I'm assuming that they have, how do you have collaboration meetings where everybody feels heard, everybody feels seen and yet everything's moving forward, right? This is brilliant. I just want, if anybody missed it, if anybody missed it, I just want you guys to know that Tracy and I affirm this, balances BS. That's your take-home message.

That will be the meme that is going out now.

It balances BS. The editor is gonna put it center bold when you read the blog. I love it. They're listening going, okay, apparently I'm supposed to center bold that.

You know, think about, like, I think about, like, harmony is, to me, like the ultimate music. You know, I'm gonna say I'm an Eagles fan because they're amazing, but their harmonies are amazing. But here's the thing. thing. They've got. Well, they had their issues of getting along because all. All. All those big egos do. Right. Yeah. But they created beautiful music together because they learned how to let each one shine at different times. So sometimes the. There's the need for me to take a break and let the drum solo go. And, you know, that's okay. And then I'm ready to come back and be that lead singer and, you know, like, whatever that might be, this is how it works, right? No one has to be in the driver's seat in harmony, right? Especially allowed to flow into whoever it needs to be at any given time.

That's fascinating view because so tell me then, as we kind of move this to our conclusion, give me an idea for people who, first of all, name it again so that they can quadrant things so they can go to the website or subscribe or otherwise. What's the who's the author of it? The inventor I love it.

Yeah, so it's called Herman with two N's at the end, Herman Brain Dominance Institute, H-B-D-I.

Okay, yeah.

But if you really want to get some, I mean, he writes about it all the time and he talks about it as Bill Sterling, and it's S-T-I-E-R-L-E, billsterling.com, and he writes about and talks about communication languages and politics, communication languages and companies. Like, you know, he's done things where where, you know, the Flint, Michigan water issue. Right. And, I mean, there were like, the city of Flint did not do a good job of communicating with the community. And they were getting, they were getting death threats, which, because people were so angry. And he brought into, he was brought in to help mediate. But that's not what he did. He taught them how to empathize and communicate back and forth so that they could change the languaging. And so he actually does that down in San Diego and some other water boards and other places like that. But this is where we all can benefit from that when we can sit back and say, okay, that was a tragic use of language. You're obviously angry about this.

Let's, let's, let's. Tragic use of language.

We sometimes say it like you just dropped, you know, the bomb right there. Right? You just, you just pulled the pin, you know, you pulled the pin out and you just dropped that thing, that grenade right there. Yeah. And so a word grenade. And that can be the case. And so we want to watch those things, but when we see them, if we see them and we recognize them for what they Then we can move into a place where we don't have to be using them. We can say, speak to the pain, speak to the need. And so this is where you can be really great at sales if you know this, right? Because you can start to understand what they're really saying. You can also understand what their default mode of communication is. And so if they're looking at podcasting in my particular case, right? And they're looking at podcasting as an authority, an ego boost, and, you know, they want it for all of those reasons. The last thing I want to do is give them the checklist of all the things they're going to have to do. Right. chances are that it's going to shut them down and I'll lose the sale. It doesn't mean that I don't have that, but that's why they're coming to me because I have this checklist for them. Right. Not because they want to know what it is.

Implement it for them.

Right, exactly. You know that better than anyone because there's too many things on the list. But what I think is really beautiful, Meryl, and this is one of the reasons I love your system and I love the, because I can see the layers of thought that you put into it and all the analysis and all the systems and thinking and everything like that is that as I I use it and I do it. And, you know, just to give everyone a frame of reference on my funding entity, just this year alone, we, we got sixty seven thousand dollars on a funding entity that really hardly has any money, had any money in it to begin with. Right. Like, because we really just, you know, don't use it as a normal entity. So anyway, so, yeah. And so that, you know, that, that occurs. The whole process is we do follow your rules, we follow what you're doing, but we also Incorporated it into our process of, of our system, of what we were doing and how we go about how I pay bills every month and how things happen. And, and so, like, there is this part of it that you have to incorporate, and that's where collaboration happens when I want to incorporate something that I know. And then sometimes I want to deviate from it. And so, you know, that's where I come to you, and I'll say, hey, Meryl, what about doing this? What do you think? Would this help? Would this make it better? Would this make it worse? And now you Know that I've done it right. I did what I was supposed to do. I'm not asking you or saying this to you because I'm too lazy to do it. I'm asking you because I'm thinking there might be a new hack we haven't thought of yet. There might be new something new. And now we can collaborate together instead of feeling in opposition, right?

Like I'm not, I'm not willing to do it your way. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like this is BS, right? Yeah. Balance is BS, not fundability optimization.

No, definitely not.

But you know, when something's not working, then get creative instead of, okay, what are they? what do they say that when you learn the piano, yes, there are people who can play by ear, but if you learn the mechanics of playing the piano, and this is how I teach my team, when you learn the mechanics of playing the piano, then you can let go of the mechanics and express yourself freely. So it's not just the mechanical, this is a quarter note and a half note and a full note, and you got to keep it there. You can now start to express yourself freely because you've got the basis of how the The piece is played. Then you can riff, right? And that's kind of what you're talking about. You get to collaborate on riffing now that we know the fundamentals.

Right. Now that we've got this down, but we also can then bring up, this is where you can have that conversation I was talking about that's so hard about this isn't working for me because this system is difficult to implement or this is why I'm having trouble keeping up on my schedule or meeting my to-do list or doing these things because this is hard for me. how you hear that and you go, there might be an app, a reminder system. What if we did this? What if we, you know, what if when we, you know, like some of the banks don't have automatic transfers. So like, I mean, I've got, and I do, I have a stack of checks here that I have to go.

To the bank, right? I love you.

I have to go to the bank, right? But I got to set a reminder for myself to do that. Like, you know, this is a way that all of a sudden, systems, ideas, innovations, Come into play when you are not so rigid that my system is the only thing that works. And the other side feels comfortable coming to you and saying, Hey, I need some improvement here. This is getting harder and harder to keep up with. And I don't want to quit it because I see that it's working. What could we do together to make this change?

And what about? Absolutely. I love and and that is some of our best intel comes from our clients who are like, Hey, Meryl, this is a thing. And we're like, well, let's validate, let's do a stress test and see if it's true for you or true for a significant number of people. And then the solve is there's always a solve. We just have to be open to it. And that is one of the things that is most important to me about my framework is openness, receptivity, flexibility. Because I'm the guy that nobody's done this before us. The fundability. Speaking of fundability. Now, nobody's done this before us. There's no way to benchmark it against some other successful company as well. The only place that I can get input from are from my clients, from the lenders. Hey, they're saying, yeah, we don't do this anymore, but have you tried this? I'm like, down to try that, right?

So- and we're always willing to experiment, right? Like that's something that I think that, you know, us yellows are really willing to experiment and try some things. But you and I have that sort of analyst side that says it must be repeatable. And so when we are balancing our vision with that repeatable, what we don't do, and this is not my policy at all, we don't build something and then say, we'll sell it, then we'll build it. No, we will build it first and test it out. If we find that it's working, we'll let some of you come along for the ride on the beta as we systematize it. But we will not, but we will not let, we will not guinea pig you. That's not a thing because we can't tell if you did all the steps right, if you've gotten this going. And so, you know, you, I know you have your own funding entities. You're always doing it on your own.

I have a podcast. You have your own, you have several, right? I have eight.

Yeah, I just started my eighth one. Well, it's just about to launch. It'll be any day now when we make it live. I have to wait. So we decided to do a private podcast for our Republic Crowdfund Investors.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

We're doing the Equity Crowdfund and it's.

Investor updates on the weekly.

Right, exactly. And so it's private within that portal and we had to develop some systems and processes because we didn't want to have have to pay for it or have to deal with excessive logins or other things. So we had to find a way to make the feed private, but still allow them to access it as an investor. So yeah, so we've come up with some new methods. It got us thinking about how people might want to make private podcasts. We've experimented, we've got it done. And now I've got a high level of trust communication level that I'm building with those investors by doing this this way. Like, you know, these are the things.

That we can just check in.

We can try in. And now it's a case study to say, I've done this. This is how I did it. This is the regular best practice. Now let's partner up and figure out a way for you to use this to your advantage, you know, corporation A or whatever it is, right? And so that's fun.

I adore you. You are so smart and so sensitive and so flexible and you're your own crash test dummy, right?

That's right.

You gotta be. I have, it's not been once that I have been battered and beaten after trying a particular strategy before I, I'll never subject, like you said, I'm never gonna subject my clients to an idea. It's gotta be A proven model, right?

And so- I just fired my fifth digital marketing advertising company. Like just fired my fifth one. And I had really high hopes that it was going to work. And it just, I still can't get it. We still can't get it right.

I'm waiting for you to find them.

I know. And when I find them, I will tell everyone about them.

What is that all about? So final for all of, especially our, this has been beneficial of course to all of our viewers and listeners. But what would you say? Because we're doing this to celebrate women's history month I wanted to bring my mentors, my coaches, the women that are so influential in my life who have helped me build my business. You introduced me to the Board of Advisors, which then introduced me to Multiple Club, which is now flourishing for helping me scale my business. You have been instrumental in so many aspects of my life, including establishing myself as an authority in this space. We have 165 episodes now. And so what's the message that you would tell women who struggle with having it all?

Well, first off, do you want it all? I think is a question you should ask yourself. Number one, do you want it all?

Meryl's full of shit. Do you actually want it all?

I don't think my full genius is doing it all. Let's just say that. Like that, my full genius is very different definition than somebody else's. So like, you gotta keep that in mind there. But I think my biggest advice is that when I look at, you know, the things that are going on. And we, you know, in podcasting, only 22 of podcast hosts are women in the industry. And I think, wow, that's a lot of unheard voices out there who aren't.

For half of the damn population.

Yeah. What's happening there? Why isn't that now we're closer to four. We're closer to double that. We're over 40 in our company. So we're making inroads. And so if we can give ourselves all to make progress and that keep making progress and stop saying, this isn't worth it. We're still not at, you know, at salary parity or whatever that is. Like, no, we have to make the changes that we need to make. And I look at my dad and what he did within his company, and he changed every one of those women's lives. Did he change companies outside of that? Did he go on the road and lectured about what he did? He didn't. It wasn't his thing. But what he did within that company changed people's lives, changed women's lives and their families and changed the way everything was viewed. So I look at that as, as that it is a combination of us making progress where we are. Today, my company has 15 different segment teams of, you know, areas that we work on audio, video, graphics, like all of these different things that they do. And 11 of those 15 teams are run by women.

Yeah.

Did I do it on purpose? No. But because of our skill set, models of looking at where they're strong and because they were willing to work on empathy across the table so that we could have a more collaborative team, that's why they have the positions that they have. That's how it's grown. So I'm making a difference here and I know that and we're making a difference to our clients, we're making a difference within our company and our staff and we make a difference in how we mentor out there. So do I only mentor women? No, obviously I mentor men too, right? I have something to to gain from doing that though. When I mentor men, I see a way to do things that hadn't occurred to me before. I consider it observational input and it's essential in the innovation and development process. So as I went to go fundraise over the last two years and figure out my model for doing it, never once have I walked into a room and felt, wow, they really didn't want to hear from me as a woman. Never self that once. Now, did our businesses not match? Like, so I didn't emotionally react to the fact that they were telling me something. I would say, wow, that's not how I want to do business. I don't think we're going to make great partners. I don't want to take capital from you. I'm going to go a different route. And so it enables you to view this in a, is this what I want to achieve my full genius or not? When we remove that emotional, emotional component from it, and when we can get there, we innovate, we are We move the industry along, we move our gender along, we move progress for everyone along. And that's my ultimate goal. So as long as we can keep making progress in some way, shape or form.

Collaborating, collaborating, collaborating. Absolutely. In fact, just so you guys know, that one of Tracy referred one of her top, I was struggling in a couple of areas to scale. and Tracy actually sent me one of her high level women who had built four teams, four teams for you.

And she set up our entire production team system, right? So this woman started with us as a transcriptionist. That was all we needed in the early days. And she said, you know, I think we need this team. What if we added this? And she actually just expanded all this. And so this is the thing that, you know, we have to to look at, especially when we're mentoring someone. I'm her mentor too. And I look at my role as the leader of a company. And when it's not, although I would have loved to have kept her and had her working with us for decades, right? But the reality is that she was ready for a new challenge. She wanted something new. And you had an opening that I knew she could excel at that was going to help her grow.

Kick her ass.

I bet she is.

And the point for bringing this up for me, you guys, is to understand that even though Tracy would love to have kept this person in her business, she also saw the investment that my project would grow her as a soul, as a human, as a woman, that there was more she could do with me than currently was able to do So she had Gels back. You had Gels back. You said, you, know what, Joe? I adore, you,'re awesome. And I think you would prosper here and she has. So once again, not just my mentor collaborating, you killed, you sent me a high value team member to help me get to where you are to scale like you are.

Right, and sometimes that's the thing we have to do is like a little tough love. as, you know, as parents, we do it, right? So it's like you need to kick the baby bird out of the nest at some point. And so this is where as a good leader of a company and a good leader of human beings and looking at them that way and not just my bottom line and my system and the way things run is I have to look at that as to say, there comes a time when they don't realize that they're not in their full genius anymore. they're bored. They're not thriving and they don't even know it maybe because they're like, they just want to keep their job and they're very concerned about the other things going on in their life. So my job is to show them opportunity. That's a growth for them that is going to actually move them into a new field. Right. And they didn't know it yet.

She is killing it over here.

So I'm so happy to hear that.

Thank you. All right. So everybody wrapping up. First of all, take home message balances BS. Harmony is, is the, is the construct. The masculine, feminine have Masculine feminine is a two-dimensional yes or no framework. And what we've learned today is that even this Herman Brain Institute model allows us to create nuances where we all can see how we show up in the world and then how we can create relationships with other not like-minded persons and be able to collaborate and speak to our intuitive, our strategic our creativity and contribute to an organization. Tracy, you're always my freaking hero. You are my Neo. And such an honor. You're my Morpheus to my Neo, right?

That's what it sounds like to me. Yeah, thank you. I'm very honored at that.

Yeah, if I am the hero of my journey, you are my Morpheus. so thank you so much for joining us on this. Celebrating Women's History Month, Women's Awesomeness Month, Women's History Month. Women's History, I'm looking for the future. I'm looking—first of all, I did want to say this a little earlier when you were telling your story. It's weird that I'm the guy, I am the white, older male. If there's a such thing as a patriarchy, it's me, right? Or at least iconically. And I'm here to tell you, we and get to show up for our partners and our, the other half of the entire universe that we know of human beings, guys. And we get to show up and support like you did from your dad and you do from your husband, Tracy, that it is not okay to leave untapped the full genius of half of the freaking population. That is not okay. And you for me, I'll even say first.

Yeah, just to kind of cap what you're saying there, Meryl, don't leave them on the sidelines. You've got some great players, right? Put them in the game. And so thank you, Meryl, for doing that because, you know, even though it, you know, it might be this month that's kind of spurred that thinking for you, that's okay. Don't feel guilty about that. That just do that and say, now I'm aware. Yeah. I could keep doing this, and I'm, I'm, you know, wow, I had four men this month. I need to mix that up a little bit, right? As a podcast host, that's what we need to think about.

Yeah, I'm excited. Thank you so much. You are a jewel and you are just a powerhouse of knowledge, implementation, your own crash test dummy, all the things that inspire me to become better at my vision and implementing it. So thank you, everybody. This is Meryl Chandler, your host of the Get Fundable podcast, the fundability podcast that is introduces you to an entire universe of opportunities that you may not have had an opportunity to explore. Thank you, Tracy Hazard, for joining me. We will see you guys on the inside.

Thank you for listening to the Get Fundable podcast. Please leave comments because Merrill would love to read about your aha moments from this episode. And be sure to visit getfundable.com to read our blog, get important links, join our community, and much, much more. like ordering Merrill's tell all book that is changing the world, the new F word. And you gotta tell your friends about this podcast because we want them to get fundable too.