 If you've chased a dream far from home or followed a dirt road to see where it goes If you've seen the sunset on the mountains alone then you know the lonely side of freedom When tomorrow is all that you trust and the road never seems to stretch far enough If you've looked out the rearview and only seen dust and you know the lonely side of freedom You can call it hope or agree to seek something better When you've got all your near and stop there's a better life for me But from the lonely side of freedom the dream far from home and left behind Everything that I've known for love I don't know yet for life There's the lonely side of freedom, lonely side of freedom Oh I gotta leave the lonely side of freedom If you've chased a dream far from home or followed a dirt road to see where it goes If you've seen the sunset on the mountains alone then you know the lonely side of freedom When tomorrow is all that you trust and the road never seems to stretch far enough If you've looked out the rearview and only seen dust and you know the lonely side of freedom You can call it hope or agree to seek something better When you've got all your near and stop there's a better life for me From the lonely side of freedom So I wanted to just take a moment to mention a couple things here about what we're doing together And really take an opportunity to make a distinguishing note about the different kinds of practices So there are lots of different types of meditation practices and mindful awareness practices And those can be formal practices and they can be informal practices Formal practices tend to be those we'll be doing some each day where we're using guided instruction and meditation and practice for mindful awareness So meditation is a very classic formal practice so you're doing something very specific for a set amount of time usually And then informal practices where we take these practices into our everyday life And we're looking for how to show up in our everyday life and find the opportunities to practice all the time So you can practice these individually but really the beauty is how they work well together When you have some formal practice that you do on a regular basis that you know how to get yourself grounded And then you carry that formal practice out into your everyday life Everyday life is what really informs us of the need for these practices And it really enriches the practice as we practice in everyday life And then the other thing I wanted to mention is primarily I am sharing practices from the Vipassana tradition And the insight meditation tradition So one of my teachers is Tara Brock and we are using a lot of the content in her book Radical Compassion She has a lot of resources and information and does lots of workshops and online training opportunities And has retreats once we can get back to retreats from the pandemic And I think there's just a rich body of information from where I'm teaching this acronym RAIN So I wanted to offer that to make sure you know those are available You can reach out to me on social media if you'd like to have a direct conversation I'm Beth A. Smith on LinkedIn and on Facebook So let's take a transition moment here So this is where we're anchoring, we were doing one thing and now we're going to shift to another thing And let's begin and practice together for a few minutes So we'll take about five minutes here to practice in a formal way So just take this opportunity if you're seated or lying down or standing up To locate your body Just see what happens when I make that suggestion Like how would you go about locating your body Coming into a direct awareness of your body And again if you're seated if you'll take a comfortable posture And that's an upright posture yet relaxed And checking in with our posture and formal and informal practices Is a really great way to take a moment to recognize where you're at Remembering that we have a body that has all kinds of sensation And can generate so much information for us Around our experience and what's going on for us And now just allow yourself to notice the body breathing And in this way you're requesting your mind to actually witness the body breathing A lot of awareness opportunity in the breath You may notice it as it expands and then contracts And the small movements that happen physically that helps the body breathe And if your mind wanders off from the practice of witnessing the body breathing That's just fine. So just with some gentleness and kindness Bring the mind back to the body breathing Breathing its natural breath You may also notice that you can follow the breath and the body breathing While you also have some mind activity The mind may be wandering a bit So you may be doing two things at once Just allow that to be as it is And then gently guide the mind back to the body Gently asking the mind to pay attention to the breath And if it's helpful just take note to any way that you're narrating your experience right now How the mind may be making an inner story about the breathing Just notice that And just for a few last seconds here Tending your focus, your attention to the breath And as you're ready you can begin to drop that practice and transition from that moment If your eyes are closed you can open them And what I'd like for you to do is just take a moment to look around the room As you come out of that inner experience And just look around the room and notice objects without really saying much about them Just sort of moving your eyes around So we'll be working this morning with the inner and outer experience that we are constantly having So with the rain acronym, recognize, allow, inquire and nourish We're starting today at the very beginning with R and recognize in the rain acronym And this recognizing is a really powerful practice Around this whole idea of waking up So I'm going to share an experience from this past Friday And I like to share from my own life just for many reasons I think it's good to have some practical application to concepts and practices And also to just share I teach as part of my own practice right And sharing the way that I wake up is one of the ways that I do that So on Friday I have a meeting every two weeks with my meditation teacher and mentor And I was sharing on Friday how much I'm struggling I have a lot going on, I have a lot of real life stress right now And I certainly have lots of tools to work with that And so sharing with my mentor, I just feel like I'm struggling And then I said, with some emotion, and here I am I'm going to go to Longmont Startup Week and talk to other people about the power of these practices And here I am struggling And as a great well-practiced teacher would say My teacher said, well, Beth, don't you think other people are struggling too That you might have an opportunity to talk to And I was like, ah, yeah, that's probably quite true So there's a lot of power and learning in this recognizing practice of how to name your experience And being able to name my experience on Friday And certainly being able to name that with another person that potentially is a practitioner or even a friend To say what's going on for you Can really shift things as we learn to practice being with what is happening in the moment to moment experience of our lives So I'm not struggling this morning, right? That was Friday and this morning I woke up early and I was so excited to have this time with you And also noticing that all of what we're experiencing is constantly moving But the trick of the mind, the tricks the mind gets up to is it wants us to believe that they're going to stay like that forever Right in those moments where we're like, oh, I'm struggling and oh my goodness, this is so hard And then in another moment it can completely fall away and we can laugh about something or cry And have that release of like the truth of what's going on for us So recognizing is about the skill of learning to name what's going on And in the naming we want to be really simplistic Because the other trick the mind gets up to is it likes to embellish everything, at least my mind does My mind likes to get really active like struggling and this and it's because of that And it just starts blowing all of it up with a lot of storyline So here in naming we're trying to get really precise and we're trying to just use one adjective to name what's going on How am I right now? And that answer is very precise And then yesterday as we practiced we asked ourselves that question, how am I right now? And we ask it three times So as you practice really waking up to what's going on for you You'll start to notice the first answer when you ask yourself how am I right now Might be very different than by the time you ask it with a little space in between How am I right now? You may be doing that right now And how am I right now? Usually by the time we've asked ourselves three times We actually get more close to what's truly happening And some of the reason for that is we've all been socialized in our culture to answer that question in a very habitual way In a very passive way pleasantries that we exchange with each other And we've learned to actually not answer that question with a lot of truth I know for me in the pandemic that was a question that I used a lot And as people ask me even now as the pandemic has been going on for 13, 15 months I actually say sometimes I don't know because that's actually the truth of that answer Someone says how are you? And I pause for a moment and I say I don't know Of course in engenders a very odd response often from the other person What do you mean you don't know? Can't you just say you're doing okay or awesome or great Or some of those ways that we culturally interact with each other But the other experience I have when I answer that question really honestly when I'm asked And it's not always appropriate to do that right? Sometimes it's appropriate to have the culturally appropriate like yeah I'm doing pretty good how about you When you're with a friend or someone that you trust that asks that and to have a practice to be able to share that Can really be an enriching moment of direct connectivity with another person To say you know I'm tired or I'm too busy right? I have a very busy life I enjoy busyness But in the last year and a half or so I've noticed that I answer that question that I'm a little too busy And so that helps me wake up to okay I can't change the busyness but I can change the way I'm in relationship to it So I can look for pauses I can look for transition moments and it really helps me keep the pace of my life rich and active Without taking myself out of my life it actually sets me right square into my life So I've been practicing for about 25 years and I wanted to share just a little bit about those early days of coming to an awareness that I needed something in my life and discovering these practices So on the external of my life 25 years ago everything really looked pretty good I had a really good job I owned a home I had great friends I was really active in my life But I started noticing that something felt just like all of that good externally in my life didn't feel like that internally It's just like I would describe it as feeling sort of hollowed out right that those things in my life that I had been able to Generate and be proud of somehow weren't creating perhaps the level of happiness that I had anticipated And so I a longer story that I can I won't share all the details but I discovered a meditation teacher that I worked with for six and a half years And pretty early in my practice I woke up to the habit I had around wishing things were different And certainly my meditation teacher was able to help me understand that that's an that's often an experience that humans have around Wishing that things were other than they are right even when things are really good we can wish they were different So I really started practicing with that idea of this wish for things to be different and how much suffering that was creating for me in my life And so the practice of recognizing is seeing when those things happen and recognizing helps us stay in direct relationship with what's really happening Rather than the story we tell ourselves about it right so wishing things are different like yesterday and I shared when I was in my talk I left my notes at home and the moment of oh my gosh I don't have my notes and then being able to stay in direct relationship with that reality And then be able to make choices as I was meeting the moment of like no notes right I always teach with notes so It starts to help us with the other practices around allow inquire and nourish But it doesn't always have to happen in a sequence right so you can you can come into any one of these four practices and specific however they show up for you But recognize can be really one of the more powerful ones of taking us out of this habit of actually not recognizing things as they are And then missing the opportunity to be in direct relationship with things as they are So in my early learning also the one thing and we're going to practice with this here in just a minute that my teacher started helping me see Is because I like to be busy I get in states of overwhelm at times and I'm hoping that you can relate to states of overwhelm And what will happen in these states of overwhelm is I feel like I don't have any space like all of my to-do list all of the pressures of life Work and personal social all feel like they're really on top of me almost smothering me And so this practice is about noticing that there's me and the reason we work with our physical body is this is me and my physical body There's space around me almost always and then there's everything else So being able to recognize how I am in direct relationship with what's going on often with some states of overwhelm then this is a great practice to help with that So we're going to take a transition moment and we're going to practice for just a couple minutes here So if you'd like you can close your eyes and it's also okay to drop your gaze if you don't like your eyes completely closed And I'm just going to practice with you if you want to watch me practicing that's fine and we're going to open and close our eyes during this practice So just be in a comfortable seated or lying down or standing position and come back to the awareness of your physical body And then with all your sense perceptors feel the air in the space that is around your body You may actually feel some coolness or tingling on your skin Again drawing your attention to the sensation of space all around your body 360 degrees space at your back space at the right and left side of you And space in front of you and now as you hold that awareness if you'd like you can open your eyes Holding the awareness of your body the space around your body And then you can move your visual cues around to just see all the things in the room Just things and then come back again to your eyes closed Remembering there's all kinds of physical things in the room There may be people or animals There may be tables and chairs Computers And now again feel the space between the objects The space around you the air around you Coming back to your physical body again We'll stay here with our physical body for a moment We'll actually engage with the breath here for just a second With three breaths So more actively than the natural breath Take a breath in Just a gentle breath in but awareness on that breath And then allow that breath to leave the body Breathing another breath in See what you notice in the body as you breathe and then allow that breath out And this time on this next breath notice that the breath can have a sense of being round Almost oval where the breath pauses at the base of your pelvis And then it has a sensation at the top of your head In moments and I'd like for those to be around where you're waiting We wait a lot in our culture At the grocery line at a red light lots of waiting So look for those moments to come back and check in with yourself how you're doing See what you recognize And then tomorrow we're going to practice on allow We're going to hang out a little bit more on what we notice So I hope you'll be able to join us again tomorrow as we take a look at the acronym RAIN again I hope you have a great day. Thanks friends A dream far from home I followed a dirt road to see you where it goes If you've seen the sunset on the mountains alone Then you know the lonely side of freedom And tomorrow is all that you trust And the road never seems to stretch far enough If you've looked out the rearview and only seen dust Then you know the lonely side of freedom You can call it hope Or agree to seek something better When you've got all your need, oh stop There's a better life for me Far from the lonely side of freedom A dream far from home And left behind Everything that I've known For a love I don't know yet For life I ain't There's the lonely side of freedom I feel sick The lonely side of freedom I gotta leave The lonely side of freedom You've chased a dream far from home I followed a dirt road to see you where it goes If you've seen the sunset on the mountains alone Then you know the lonely side of freedom And tomorrow is all that you trust And the road never seems to stretch far enough If you've looked out the rearview and only seen dust Then you know the lonely side of freedom You can call it hope Or agree to seek something better When you've got all your need There's a better life for me Far from the lonely side of freedom A dream far from home And left behind Everything that I've known For a love I don't know yet For life I ain't I know There's the lonely side of freedom The lonely side of freedom Oh, I gotta leave The lonely side of freedom You've chased a dream far from home I followed a dirt road to see you where it goes If you've seen the sunset on the mountains alone Then you know the lonely side of freedom And tomorrow is all that you trust And the road never seems to stretch far enough If you've looked out the rearview and only seen dust Then you know the lonely side of freedom You can call it hope Or agree to seek something better When you've got all your need There's a better life for me Far from the lonely side of freedom I've chased a dream far from home And left behind Everything that I've known For a love I don't know yet For life I ain't lived all I know There's the lonely side of freedom I feel safe The lonely side of freedom Oh, I gotta leave The lonely side of freedom Thank you for all and I am so excited to be here with you guys this morning We have an exciting morning of recalibrate So we are going to kick things off the panel discussion On the future of entrepreneurship in America After that we are going into accounting And the essentials of forecasting And from 11 to noon We will talk about customer acquisition and retention And curating the right sales team So we have a good lineup today And I'm excited to be here with you guys Okay, so to kick things off this morning We have the co-authors of The New Builders Seth Levine and Elizabeth McBride And we have two, they're joined By two entrepreneurship for all entrepreneurs Adriana Paola Palacios Luna And Lauren Jenkins Okay, and so... Okay, sorry about that So Seth Levine is actually a Longmont local And a venture capitalist He's been working in the venture scene For the past 30 years And he's a partner at the Foundry Group in Boulder And he has also been very involved In the launch of eForAll in Longmont So I'm going to kick things off with him I think we're waiting a couple more minutes But in the meantime I will take advantage of this to tell you A bit more about eForAll eForAll is a non-profit organization That partners with communities nationwide To develop a more inclusive entrepreneurial ecosystem We have been in Longmont Since January of 2020 And since then we have ran Four accelerator programs Worked with 42 local companies Which 74% have been women owned 66% BIPOC owned And 54% immigrant owned So eForAll is really Our mission is to turn dreams into businesses And we are really dedicated To helping everybody Make those dreams into reality So the new builders is a Great segue into the importance Of building an inclusive entrepreneurial community The new builders are And I will let Seth and Elizabeth Speak more to this from their book But they really outline The current state of entrepreneurship In America today And how in the past 10 years or so The word entrepreneurship Has really been turned into a Focus on high growth technology companies Which are very important Into the development of our economy But there's also the small businesses In all the communities across the US That are kind of the heart In the grassroots movement Of economic and social development And so I'm really excited For you guys to hear from them today And we will have an opportunity To, for people in the audience We'll have an opportunity to win a free book A free new builders book For those of you who haven't Had a chance to read it yet It's a wonderful, wonderful outline Of the current state of entrepreneurship And really focuses on how we are The need to support these entrepreneurs Okay, okay, great, okay So Lauren in Adriana If you guys want to turn your cameras on We're waiting on Seth and Elizabeth But we could go ahead And start with you guys Oh, welcome, so good to see you guys Thank you for joining us Hi Okay, so I'd love to hear Well, first of all, your first elevator pitch And yeah, introduce yourselves And tell us about your companies Lauren, you want to go first? Sure Sure, it's all good So yeah, nice to meet you guys I'm Lauren Jenkins, grew up in Longmont And I started a company called Many Money Management with my mom So she actually told me about money growing up By turning the house into an economy So I had to pay for rent and utilities and food And the big thing that I learned growing up Is that you get some money in, you save it You make sure you take care of your needs And you have fun with the rest And so we focus on teaching kids And actually adults about the basics of money Through a virtual learning platform So yeah, glad to be here Awesome, thank you Lauren Nagiana Yes, hi, good morning And my name is Adriana Paola Palacios Luna And I am the founder of Luna Cultura Art, Science, and Culture For thriving communities And well, Luna Cultura is a bilingual And intercultural space Where we provide services of training And consulting and research services In the fields of art and maker education And we do have this approach of intergenerational And collective learning We recover the tradition from our ancestors But we do a fusion learning With the new technologies and everything And we're trying to build leadership And a strong community of makers Moving forward to social and environmental justice And I'm very happy to be here, thank you Wonderful, thank you Adriana And just so everybody knows Sorry, just so everybody knows Lauren participated in our Accelerator program In our first accelerator program In Longmont And Adriana participated In our first fully Spanish Accelerator program In Longmont as well Okay, so it looks like Seth and Elizabeth are here, welcome guys Thank you for joining us How's your morning? Great so far We're a little ahead of you We're both on the east coast We've had more of a morning Sorry about the little glitch there No worries, it's all good We're happy to have you guys here So we were just presenting Lauren and Adriana And we will go back into Kind of describe the new builders And started going into that And so if you don't mind We can just go ahead and jump in And if you want to Go ahead and present yourselves first And then we can jump into questions Likeoro Fox to Okay, great so Seth's pointing at me Elizabeth McBride I am a coauthor along with Seth who's here as Well of the new builders Which is a book about It's really a book about of American entrepreneurs. And I'm happy to say that it is the rare small business book that's kind of poked its head into the national conversation. And we hope drawn some attention both generally to how tough it is to be a small business owner in the United States today and also to the fact that the new generation of entrepreneurs looks very different than the generations that have gone before. And, oh, I should say, I'm not only the co-author of The New Builders, I'm also a journalist for more than 20 years and the co-founder of Times of Entrepreneurship, which is a journalism website covering small businesses across the U.S. Wonderful. Thank you, Elisabeth. Thanks for being here. Hi, everyone. I'm Seth. Lauren, nice to see you. We met actually at the Yvral, I don't remember what we were calling it, but in Brad's bar and back when we used to get together in person more regularly. And Adriana, it's great to have you joining us. So by day, I'm a venture capitalist. I'm one of the co-founders of Foundry Group, which is, we say still based in Boulder, it's not really based anywhere anymore. We gave up our office in the pandemic and like half of us live in Longmont. So maybe I'll just call it a Longmont-based venture capital firms. I'm a big Longmont fan. And of course, along with Elisabeth, I'm the co-author of The New Builders. Also very involved with Eforall. We met David and Dash, who are the founders, founder and CEO and founder of Eforall through the writing of the book. But I've gotten much more involved now with Eforall as we brought it to Longmont and I've been working very closely with Carolyn about how to expand and how to make sure that we keep our programming as awesome as it's been. So excited to share more. I love these kind of hybrid online offline events. It's great. So, well, thank you so much, Seth and Elisabeth and Lauren and Adriana for everybody for being here today. So, this panel is called The Future of Entrepreneurship in America. And so one of the things that Elisabeth and Seth do so well, outlined so well in their book, The New Builders is first the current state of entrepreneurship in America. And so I would love to, if Seth or Elisabeth, one of you want to kind of kick things off with talking to us about the actual current state of entrepreneurship and how you speak about that in your book. Yeah, I guess I'll start and then turn it over to Seth. So what we write about, so maybe I'll tell a little bit of the backstory of The New Builders because for us, this book was a real journey of discovery and I hope it is that for readers as well. So what happened is that Seth and I decided we would write a book about entrepreneurs across the United States, not necessarily in Silicon Valley or New York, which were the worlds that we kind of knew the best from our careers as a venture capitalist and a business journalist. We decided to write the book up just about two years ago, almost exactly, I think, maybe a little over two years ago. But as we dug into the numbers, what we discovered is that entrepreneurship in America is on the decline. It's seriously on the decline. We say sometimes that it's dying in the United States because the decline has been pretty steady and pretty marked over the past 40 years and it's accelerated over the past 20. Now, we're seeing an uptick now, usually after recessions, during recessions, you do see a surge in entrepreneurship, but the long-term trend is definitely downward. When we discovered that, and I say discovered as in, this is pretty well known in academic circles and certain think tanks, but it just hadn't filtered into the consciousness of the American people and it really wasn't part of the awareness of powerful people in the United States either. I think that's because they had been lulled into thinking entrepreneurship was okay because the high-tech entrepreneurship is thriving. But when we looked at the numbers, we realized a couple of key things. One is that only about 1% of entrepreneurs take, of startups take venture capital. So that idea that entrepreneurship is thriving based on what's happening in the tech VC sector is just totally wrong, right? Because 99% of businesses face a far different reality. And we figured out a bunch of other things which I'll let Seth talk about, but what I'll say is that when we found that, we took that finding entrepreneurship is really in trouble. Small businesses are in trouble, startups are in trouble in the US. When we took that new finding of ours to our friends in the media world and the finance world, a bunch of them didn't believe us. They just flat out thought we were wrong. And we showed them the data, of course, and eventually we look at the dating, you figure out that that is indeed the truth. But that finding the fact we didn't know about it and the reaction from our peers made us think that we were telling a very important story. And so that's really what kicked the new builders into gear. And then I'll turn it over to Seth to talk about the other conclusions in the book, what we discovered as we went along and how it got even more urgent in the pandemic. And I think that the other conclusions are really important for an area like Longmont, as we think about sort of what's going on in Boulder and how we can better support entrepreneurship more broadly. So the other key trends that we uncovered as we did the research and wrote up the new builders is that the very term entrepreneur, our view of entrepreneurship has been overtaken by Silicon Valley in ways that are pernicious and really detrimental to the overall dynicism of our economy. And specifically we've narrowed our sort of terminology, if you will, around entrepreneurship to really mean just tech entrepreneurship, which is really unfortunate. And that's not what entrepreneur meant 100 years ago, right? Entrepreneur was a word that described the corner store owner, the farrier, the blacksmith, really everyone who was starting a business or operating a business on their own. And we've dangerously narrowed that definition. And if we have time, maybe we'll talk about some of the history there, which is kind of interesting. It was really Ronald Reagan who narrowed the definition, kind of used it as a diplomatic tool in the Cold War to really differentiate the United States and sort of the innovation that was happening primarily at the time in Silicon Valley, much of which was government funded as well. But in so doing, Silicon Valley sort of took it over and we think that that's problematic, right? Only about 1% of companies take money from venture capitalists, Elizabeth mentioned. And the vast majority of companies aren't high tech startups, although there are many are technology enabled, but most businesses are businesses, right? And the things, shops that you would pass on Main Street are companies that are working on community spaces like Audreana, and it's a much broader set of businesses than most people realize. And then related to that is sort of key theme number three, which is that we've somehow devalued businesses that sort of aren't scaling, that don't have this sort of massive growth potential. And we think that that relates to this sort of overtaking of entrepreneurship and the term entrepreneurship by Silicon Valley. There used to be lots of value that was ascribed to people that built small businesses because that was something, they were passionate about something and they built a business around it and they wanted to build a life for themselves. And again, as Silicon Valley has taken over our view on entrepreneurship, we've come to only value businesses that can scale, because that's sort of vernacular and the mode that they need to be in for Silicon Valley to be successful. But that's not really true across the broader economy. Silicon Valley likes to talk about unicorns. Elizabeth and I like to talk about camels, right? Little less sexy, they're actually real. So that's helpful. But the workhorses of the economy and what we really need from an economic development perspective, the economy actually needs a lot of camels, not necessarily unicorns, because there's so few and far between and the failure rate of companies in Silicon Valley is something upwards of 65, even 70%. So those are the kind of the main themes. And of course, the big thing we talk about in the book is just that the face of entrepreneurs is changing. We've got two great examples of new builders who have joined us on this call. But the truth is the people of starting businesses today are much more likely to be female. They're much, much more likely to be people of color. The fastest growing group of entrepreneurs are black women. And actually Elizabeth crunched some numbers a couple of weeks ago and put it in a Forbes article that she wrote up. But we believe that white males are actually the minority of business owners right now. And the last thing which we'll touch on which kind of wove its way through the book that we wrote is this idea of community and the deep attachment that new builders in particular but entrepreneurs in general have to place and to their community. Wonderful, thank you, Seth. So, and thank you, Elizabeth. So Lauren and Adriana, I would love to hear a bit from you guys on your entrepreneurial journey and maybe some of the barriers that you faced leading up to starting your companies and relating that back to the idea of entrepreneurship and supporting small businesses and the importance of building that community that is supportive. Yeah, and I think we'll probably touch on this a little bit later. For me, when I was getting everything started up like that's why E for All, big shout out to E for All was like such a big thing for me is because I didn't really know what to do. I mean, I know I had an idea. I knew I was like, yeah, like this is something that I think I want to explore. Like I wonder what it would be like to start a company. And like you realize like there's just an ocean of information and you like kind of don't really know where to go. Like it's overwhelming. Like if you just Google how do I start a company or like how do I start an ed tech company? Like the amount of resources and like information that's available to you is amazing. But like where do you start? Like there's not really like, hey, make sure you have this, make sure you have this. And as you start to get into it, obviously those things become clear. But I think like just the fact of like starting a company is such an abstract like idea that I mean, it's nothing honestly, probably one of the hardest things is just like getting started and knowing where to go. Not in Adriana, I mean, absolutely. Sorry, it's a, that is something we hear from a lot of the entrepreneurs that we work with as there's just where do I get, where do I start, right? And a lot of it too, I think is being able to have that push to start, right? And being able to have those people who say, hey, this is a good idea. And this is how you run with it. And that's a big reason that we are really, really supportive of mentors and with any for all and building that kind of mentorship community. And Adriana? Yeah, I think something like very important in the whole process of building a business is like, how do you move from survival tool? That is like, maybe it's this an alternative because I need to feel, I mean, I'm a single mom, mother of three. It's like, okay, I need to have incomes and things like that. How do you move from a survival mode to more like a thriving? And so that's have been like a very good experience with E for All because then it helps you not only providing you tools like how to start, like how to do like marketing and financial, all the financial support and everything, like how to even create a spreadsheet like with the whole information and things like that. But also like building a community of learning which supports you to believe in yourself and say, okay, we know that we may have some many barriers, structural barriers and many other things as they were describing like a very complex context for business and entrepreneurship right now. But when you believe in yourself and you start making all these connections and it actually helps you to build a community. I think entrepreneurship can be kind of like a lonely path but also it has to be a community path because you have to support each other and things like that. So I think that's a very, very good thing that I got from E for All, like getting to know a lot of people, all the mentorship and all the other business that I'm working with. My cohort was like only Latinx women, very powerful and that's like a very, very good experience for me. Wonderful. And Elizabeth and Seth, and I know you've worked with a lot of, if we'll throw out your book you interview different new builders and I'd love to hear about your experience, working with them and kind of maybe outline some of the ways that we can further support new builders like Lorne and Adriana. Beth, you wanna start on that one? Sorry, just getting over to my mute button. Yeah, so I mean, we talk a lot about this in the book, right? I mean, I think much of the book is just, the book is sort of split, right? We spent a lot of time telling, talking about the research and sort of explaining the state of affairs and then we spend also quite a bit of time just telling stories of new builders because we want people, it's why we are excited to be on panels where we're really featuring new builders because we want people to really understand kind of what the landscape actually looks like. What are people interested in building? What companies do new builders undertake? But there's lots of ways that we need to change our systems of support for new builders starting with finance, but also extending through mentorship, right? And I think we've already heard this a little bit in the stories that Lauren and Adriana have told about the power of being in community. And so it's probably the better place to start just given that we're on a panel that's featuring E for All, but one of the reasons that E for All, we're such big proponents of E for All and why it's been such a successful program is it's really important to have community and mentorship and access to advice and in some cases, just examples of other people who have gone before you. The tech world has done that actually quite well, right? And we sort of joke in the book that there's a lot of ideas that Silicon Valley has kind of usurped or kind of pretended like they came up with that really they got from somewhere else and they've kind of taken credit for. But one of the things that Silicon Valley didn't invent, of course, but really did perfect in a way that I think some of the broader economy could benefit from copying is this notion of mentorship and working together on these broad problems. And platforms like E for All, we talk about a handful of others in the book are just really critical to addressing needs beyond just finance. But that said, Elizabeth, maybe you wanna talk about kind of the finance side of things because finance is important, right? It's the lubricant that helps businesses both start but then also grow. Yeah, we talk about this. There's one really interesting example toward the end of the book where Catherine Finney, who was the founder of Digital Undivided, which was a support organization for women of color. Early in the pandemic, she took $5,000 she had been saving for her family's vacation and put it into a fund for and just started giving it out in I think $50 or $100 increments to women. And all they had to do, all these women founders had to do to get it was to show they had a website or a bank account, very minimal kind of proof of a business. So this money just went flying out of the door and then the response back was incredible where all the women business owners, it created an online community on Instagram. And they all started sharing about that tiny vote of confidence had meant to them. And I tell that story because it's kind of the transition between this idea of emotional support for entrepreneurs and finance. And those two things are just kind of inextricably tied because it's when someone writes a check, whether it's an investment or a loan or a grant, when someone writes a check, it's a really an emotional affirmation, right? And the idea then that that can be, that you have an ongoing relationship with that entity or that they will introduce you to a larger network of other people who have money and can support you both emotionally and financially. That's the incredible support system that exists for entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and that is starting to be built piecemeal across the country for other kinds of entrepreneurs. And E for All is an example of that. But it's an uphill battle right now for small businesses who are in the broader economy because our system of finance for them has really collapsed in the past couple of decades. There used to be 14,000 banks in the country and now there are 5,000. And most of that decline has been in the world of community banks which are so critical to small businesses the banks that are capable of creating that ongoing relationship that entrepreneurs and small businesses need. In fact, when we were working on the book, this was what we call in like academia an emergent finding, right? We figured out as we went along that pretty much every new builder we interviewed eventually had made their way to a community bank or a CDFI, a community development finance institution. And they were just playing this critical role that most people hadn't even realized. And in fact, in Washington, right? They're writing rules that are forcing community banks to shut down. So it's like this huge disconnect between what entrepreneurs of today need and what's actually happening in the economy. Yeah, so I'll end there. Obviously Seth and I can talk and talk and talk about things. No, it's questions. It's so important. And so, it's so interesting. I wonder in Lauren and Adriana, if you feel comfortable talking about any of your financial barriers, I'd love to hear your comments on that. And if not, maybe discuss another big challenge that you've had to overcome and launching and growing your businesses. Oh, Lauren, I think you're on mute. Oh, yeah, sorry. So yeah, in terms of like finance issue, I'm like trying to think of one off the top of my head. I mean, outside of the fact that like you're a startup and you don't have any money. Like other than that, like general, like the definition of a startup, I think. And again, like it's one of those things. Like if you don't come from the business world and you don't have a big business background and your family wasn't like in business, like you would have no idea what the investment world was like. And I mean, like I probably spent the first six months of starting a company just listening to podcasts and listening about like how people invest and like watching shows and how people invest. Like there was never a crash course for me to figure out what an investment was. There's not really a crash course out there. For especially for early stage people about like, you know, what you would need to look for if you were looking for an angel, if you were looking for a VC, if you were looking for a bank loan. And so I think like the beautiful and also the tough part about being an entrepreneur is that it's just so wide open. And so like those funding sources are available. You just have to either know the right people or know where to look. And those are two things that aren't readily available to most people. Cause if not, you're just like kind of shooting fish in a barrel and you can apply to all of the money and the startups and the accelerators, but pretty much all of the financial traction I've had is just because of like based on like people that you know, but I was lucky enough to grow up in Longmont, which is where I was out of Boulder, which is like a tech hub. So even being a black male in this space, I was kind of given a leg up cause I grew up close to people with money. Whereas, I mean, I've got friends and I've got people who are starting different accelerator or like different like companies and different accelerators and they haven't had nearly as much access to capitals as I have just based on where they live. And so, I mean, this is like, it's a problem and I've gotten lucky enough that I live out this way, but I got lucky, like I'm the exception, you know? Yeah. Adriana? Well, yes, all the financial aspect, I think it has been also, well, it has been for me a challenge. And also, I agree with Learn about the networking. It's like how important it is in this case. Like Luna Cultura is a for-profit business, but my model is like business to business to consumers. So actually my final consumer won't have to pay for the classes or for the trainings and anything. So because what I'm trying to do is like close the gap of accessing art and make your education for all the communities that I work with. So what I try to do is to connect with these sources that sometimes I get like, I write to get a grant and things like that. And then it has been like an alternative for me on the having funding. So that's in that supports what I'm doing directly with the community because then I'm able to provide like all the materials and everything. So actually the people that participate in the trainings because that sometimes for them is a big barrier like to have to pay for a art class or something. So I'm trying to search for a different ways of funding my activities in order to provide these services. Yeah, and I think that speaks a lot about you as an entrepreneur, you know, as you're finding other sources to fund those operations. And so, okay, so let's see. Elizabeth and Seth, do you guys have any final notes on the new builders before we go into Q and A? Notes, not well, I don't know. I think it has been really great to see the momentum building around the book and to see that we are at a moment in history that people that this combination of the pandemic and all of the inequality in our society that became more apparent. Like we just hit the timing of the new builders and it was very good to shed light on the people who are really the backbone of the economy. And so I'm just really happy that we've been able to do that and to push that narrative forward onto the national stage. So I feel really great about that. And also just wanna say, you know, it was hugely fun and like inspiring to meet people like Lorne and Adriana, you know, who are building these amazing companies despite all the extra barriers or maybe not at extra barriers always, right? Like Lorne was saying, sometimes it's an advantage, right? But navigating a complicated landscape. So that's been incredibly fun and interacting with small business people. I think everybody missed it during the pandemic. So I hope that emotional awareness translates into more support for new builders. That's what I wanna say. Steph probably wants to say a couple of things too. Well, I just, I would encourage people to go get the book and read it. I mean, you know, I, you know, we wrote the book because we care about and are passionate about the future of entrepreneurship and specifically this sort of broader vision that is the reality of entrepreneurship in America. And I think it's been, Elizabeth opened with this but the reaction we've had to it, you know, it's unusual for a book on small business to be successful. Certainly as successful as this one has been. And I think it's because people can relate to new builders. They walk up and down main streets and, you know, they have friends who started businesses. Like they, you know, everyone knows lots of new builders. And I think that, you know, really being able to dig into the statistics around them but also in a way that's very accessible and hopefully well-written, I don't know, but at least we're told it's an easy read in the sense that it's a delightful read and a storytelling way of writing about it. So I hope people will take the time to read it or listen to it now that the audio books out because it's such an important message and, you know, something that we're trying to share with a broader audience. Yeah, I will second that. I just, I honestly had so much fun reading it personally. So I definitely encourage everyone to do it. Everyone to grab a copy and listen to the audio book. And it's, you really get to hear those new inspiring stories and just like Lauren's story and Adriana's story. And yeah, it's, I'm very, very thankful to be here with you guys today. And yeah. So let's see. Going into Q and A. Sorry, I'm not positive how to do this. So one second. So just open it. Okay. Sorry. While I'm pulling this up, Lauren and Adriana, do either of you have questions for Seth and Elizabeth? Or we can go the other way, but Lauren's talking your mute, your, yeah. I just said shoot because I didn't have any questions right. I mean, I'm a journalist, so I always have questions. So I can ask you, you also have questions. But Adriana, do you have questions before I jump in? Well, considering that you have researched all these like all the context and specifics, like everything, like what would be your advice on like, in order to actually make more successful business? Yeah. Well, I can tell you that what, I can tell you what entrepreneurs have and small business people have told me over and over again over the years, that the key turning point comes, but this is farther along, I think than either of you, but the key turning point is when you can turn over kind of the day to day stuff to somebody that you've hired. And that's when your business really starts to scale because you can devote time to thinking more strategically about it. And then in the early years, I mean, small businesses over the years just, they have told me, I'm of course, a small business owner myself and I totally don't follow this advice. So, but what generally the advice is that as much as you can, you've got to connect with other people. That's what we said before, right? But not only for the emotional support, I think it's looking for partnerships that might not be obvious in the beginning, but partnerships that can really propel two businesses forward at once. So maybe that I've heard that definitely from small business owners over the years. Okay, great. So we have a question here for the panelists. How has the pandemic impacted entrepreneurship? Want to go, Seth? Sure, Elizabeth alluded to this, but you know, and this is not uncommon. I mean, often in times of crisis, people turn to themselves, right, to entrepreneurship to make their way. And so we've seen a drastic uptick in new, at least as measured by the applications for new business licenses since the pandemic started. Not uncommon, we see these sometimes when there is a shock or disruption to the system. Unclear how, what businesses people are starting and it's unclear what, whether that's a sustained trend. We hope it is, right? I mean, we think that would be a positive outcome to what has otherwise been a really challenging time. One of the other things we noted, there was a great upshot article in the New York Times, maybe a month or two ago, essentially asking the question of whether these stimulus checks that people got, turned them into entrepreneurs, right? And it turned out that people were taking that money, even though it was on a business scale perspective, wasn't a lot of money. We're talking kind of $1,000 checks here and used it to start businesses. And of course, Elizabeth and I thought it was such a rhetorical question. And of course they were. And so, you know, it really, to us begs the question of if people become incredibly entrepreneurial because you hand out $1,000 checks, what happens when you turn them into entrepreneurs, when you direct that money a little bit more specifically to people with business ideas and make the checks $10,000, right? Or $100,000. And so, you know, that is what we think the opportunity is. By the way, there were also some federal programs, the Idle Program in particular, to some extent the PPP program, although that was more of a loan forgiveness program than it was sort of a true small business loan program. But so many businesses took money under the Idle Program. And I hope have provided maybe a little bit of a roadmap for how we can do a better job of financing our entrepreneurial economy. We only, Elizabeth mentioned about 1% of businesses take money from bank or from venture capitalists, only about 17% of businesses take money from banks. And that really is the gap that we need to solve for 82% of businesses are left on their own. And they raise money from friends and family. They take money out of their home, home equity lines or they start their businesses essentially without any capital. And so closing that gap, finding innovative ways to fund those businesses, not necessarily big amounts, right? I mean, to my story about $1,000 stimulus jacks, you know, 10,000, 25,000 goes a long way when you're starting a small business. Perhaps the Idle Program will be a bit of a roadmap for how to do that. You know, I think that there's some silver linings here to the pandemic. Absolutely, and that's something we, with eForAll we do provide small amounts of seed funding to entrepreneurs as they go through the accelerator program. And it's always great to see, you know, what type of, what type of ask, excuse me, what type of ask these entrepreneurs are making, right? It's, you know, if it's a, it could be something for a piece of equipment. It could be funding to design and launch their website. Kind of those things that are in the beginning very, very necessary, but do have those costs and have to be able to cover those. And so, yeah, I absolutely agree on being able to build and discover other ways of providing finance, financing to these companies. Okay, and let's see, we have one more question here. What are the three qualities every entrepreneur should have? Beth, I'm curious for your thoughts, and then I have some too, but you go first. I'd love to hear also, Adriana and Lauren, maybe answer that question first, and then more in the French. I'll say the first thing is you gotta be able to take a punch. I always tell people like, you gotta be tough as nails to do this because you're gonna have people tell you it's a bad idea. You're gonna have to tell people like, I wouldn't do it this way. And I think like, if you can just kind of weather those storms, you could be an entrepreneur. Two, you gotta care about it because you can't weather those storms if you're just in it for the money. Well, you can, but you gotta really, really be in it for the money. So you either gotta really be in it for the money or you gotta really care about what you do. And then three, you kind of gotta be a little crazy. And like, I think that was always my favorite because you kind of have to be a little crazy to just say, like, you know what? I think I could do this better and just take the leap. So yeah, those would be my three. I think also, I think you have to love what you're doing because you actually gonna sleep with it. So, and also like being aware of taking care of yourself because it requires like a lot of energy and time that something you say like, well, I have to do it and because you're starting, you're almost by yourself and you have to be aware of taking care of yourself. So I need to that awareness. And yeah, I agree, a little bit crazy, maybe. Those are great. I think those are, I think it's so interesting to think about how those would differ if we were talking to tech founders or more of the more traditional like white male business people of 20 years ago because I think that what you need now is a little bit different. I do think it takes more courage to start now. So I think you need courage. And I think you need the ability to network. I think that ability to connect with people is more crucial than it has been because if you're starting out with not a lot of money, you have to be able to do the other piece of that, the networking piece. And then I would just say persistence because as both of you said, right, you're gonna get knocked down a lot, gonna get back up. And that's what we love about new builders and about entrepreneurs, right? Is that optimism? Is that persistence? It's that like a little bit of crazy. We talk a lot about, we described it as grit in the book but we talked a lot about the importance of grit, the importance of persistence. And I don't think we went in thinking about the importance of optimism but we certainly came out of it feeling very optimistic despite the fact that we truly wrote the book in COVID. We did the research ahead of COVID but then we started writing essentially right after COVID hit. And one of the reasons we wrote so quickly was because we realized that COVID was affecting new builder businesses more than the average business. And I think we were a little worried as we checked in with all of the companies that we had highlighted in the book at the end of the pandemic, right as we were going to press, which for us was sort of February of this year. So the book is very current, right? And we really truly finished writing it. Like as they were printing pages, we were like finalizing it. But it turned out that people were, despite some many hardships and people having to close their businesses and having to lay people off and sort of make things work, they were incredibly optimistic. And I think that optimism rubbed off on us certainly as we describe it in the epilogue to the book which is the last thing we wrote, which was February. We really felt I think more optimistic, frankly, than either Elizabeth and I sort of had felt during the pandemic because new builders are so optimistic it really rubbed off on us. Awesome. Well, thank you guys so much. And thank you for those answers. Absolutely agree. And working with entrepreneurs is a crazy time. It's a wild ride. And I absolutely love it. So thank you guys again for being here. And don't forget to get your copy of the new builders. And that's it for the day. Thank you so much. And we, next up we have, we have a 10 minute break and then we have a panel on accounting and forecasting. So thank you guys so much. Thanks everyone. Next time in person. Yeah. Thank you. Very nice to meet you. You've heard the saying, dance like no one's watching. It's easy to blend in and go unnoticed. But what if you let go? What if you march to your own beat? It takes guts. It's uncomfortable at first. But for those who have done it, they'll tell you it's freeing and it can take you to places you've never been before. Isn't that why you do what you do in the first place? The time has come. To dance like no one's watching. To lead, not follow. To ignore the status quo. The time has come to go boldly. Little sun, you keep me warm. You get a little cold sometimes to leave before the storm. I ain't ever built a life for. But I found a place I can't go on. Love it is, love it is, little life it is. Makes me feel smaller, makes me feel alive. Mountains in the west, there's a big old jet plane in the sky. I can't keep my eyes on the road. I'm driving down I-25, but I'm glad I found a place I feel alive. Moon don't you ever let me walk? They told me once, when I was young, you don't know the places you could go. I ain't ever built a life for all of my own. But I'm glad I found a place I can't call home. Yeah, I'm glad I found a place I can't call home. But I found a place I can call home. Little sun, you keep me warm. You get a little cold sometimes to leave before the storm. I ain't ever built a life for. Love it is, love it is, little life it is. Makes me feel smaller, makes me feel alive. Mountains in the west, there's a big old jet plane in the sky. I can't keep my eyes on the road. I'm driving down I-25, but I'm glad I found a place I feel alive. Moon don't you ever let me walk? They told me once, when I was young, you don't know the places you could go. I ain't ever built a life for all of my own. But I'm glad I found a place I can't call home. Yeah, I'm glad I found a place I can't call home. But I found a place I can call home. You get a little cold sometimes to leave before the storm. I ain't ever built a life for. Love it is, love it is, little life it is. Makes me feel smaller, makes me feel alive. Mountains in the west, there's a big old jet plane in the sky. I can't keep my eyes on the road. I'm driving down I-25, but I'm glad I found a place I feel alive. We are excited to present you to Brian Ormsby, who will be discussing the essentials of forecasting and accounting. Brian is, sorry, Brian, sorry, Brian. Brian is the founder and the CEO of Pantheon Solutions. Pantheon specializes in providing compliance accounting and contract management for businesses that work in the government space. Pantheon is a partner with the Boulder Small Business Development Center to assist all small businesses with issues with accounting and finance. So Brian, we will kick it over to you. Yeah, thanks Caroline. So yeah, let me get started. Let me share some slides here. I can find the slide deck and we will get going. So we'll put that in presentation mode. Okay, should be good. All right, so before I start, I wanted to let you know, I am a lead consultant with the Boulder SBDC as well. And I wanted to kind of give an advance to the Boulder SBDC. We'll be offering leading edge entrepreneurship series beginning Tuesday, September 14th. So if you're interested in this 10 session series, please go to the Boulder SBDC website and sign up. It helps assist participants with building business plans and start and growing their businesses. So with that out of the way, announcement requirements, let's talk about accounting and essentials of forecasting. So first what I wanna do is talk about the whole financial concept, which is personal finances, business finances, how these things run together. I also want to talk a little bit about credit score, borrowing power, and then we'll talk about cash flow. And then finally, we will talk about forecasting. So one of the things that's really important in a small business is understanding that your business doesn't stand alone. Your small business and your personal finances are symbiotic. So if your businesses has in trouble financially, you're having trouble financially and vice versa. So we need to make sure that we understand our business finances, long-term goals, your exit strategy in your business. And when we talk about exit strategy, this is kind of an interesting thing because most people when they start a business don't think about how they're gonna leave their business. It seems counterintuitive, but it actually is very important with what kind of business are you going to run? What are your goals? How long do you wanna be in business? What are you gonna do when you're not in business anymore? Do you want to build your business up to a sellable entity? Do you want to run your business until you don't wanna run it anymore? And then when you're done, you close the doors and it's over. So exit strategy is very important. And it's extremely important because it sets the tone for your long-term goals. Personal finances, how they affect your business. So remember when you go out and you see that shiny new truck or the new boat that that may or may not put a strain on your personal finances that your business is going to have to handle. So consider these things together. What is your retirement strategy? Is your business playing into that strategy for you? And is your, I wanna talk about this term lifestyle, which is on the slide. It means two different things. So on a personal financial level, lifestyle is how you are accustomed to living. So you wanna make sure that your business finances are set up to be able to allow you to keep up that lifestyle. The other lifestyle I talk about is the kind of business. So I think about a business in terms of, is this something that we are going to build and grow and become perpetual, maybe at some point sell. Maybe I turn it over to another principal partner. Maybe I sell it to my employees at some point. That is a business acumen that is different than what I call a lifestyle business. A lifestyle business for me is the kind of business that you want to keep very simple and you want to run it as long as you can do it. And then when you're done, when it's no longer suits you, you stop doing it and potentially you just close the doors. That is a lifestyle business. So we talk about your lifestyle in terms of finances. We're talking about the way you're accustomed to living. When we talk about a lifestyle business, we're talking about a business that will exist and then not exist when you're no longer doing it because it is based on you and you alone. So those things are important in kind of setting up that whole financial concept. How we want to look at this as we go forward. So the whole financial concept is also very interesting because we have to think about things looking forward, trying to stay ahead of the game. We don't want to get trapped. And when I say get trapped, I'm talking about these first two major bullets which are credit score and borrowing power. So if you're going to make in your business what you consider a business decision that may have risk, you want to make sure that your borrowing power is at its fullest prior to making a risky decision. If you need to pull a line of credit, if you need to make a loan, if you need to do anything, maybe on your personal side, your car is 15 years old, it's got 300,000 miles on it, you know you need a new car. These are the things you need to consider before making a risky business decision. The reason is because once you make a risky business decision, your borrowing power has dropped. So when you go to a bank or a lending institution, if everything's roses, it's easy to get money. When you go to a bank and things look a little risky, it's really hard to get money. So consider these things in advance. You've got to stay ahead of the game. Think about your credit score. What will doing certain things do to your credit score? On a business side, you're done in Bradstreet. Do you need a done in Bradstreet? That's a whole different conversation, but if you're in the government space, yes you do. Now, a done in Bradstreet number is required in the government space and because it is required by the government, the done in Bradstreet number is free. You just have to tell them when you apply for the done in Bradstreet number that you're in the government space. So, but a done in Bradstreet number may or may not even be necessary for you as a business owner, but it is a credit score for your business. Most small businesses, when you're dealing with sole proprietorships, LLCs, which are the most common businesses, your personal FICA score is going to make the difference because you're gonna be personally guaranteeing everything you do along the way. So, consider the decisions you make and what is that going to do to your score. The higher your score, the cheaper money is to get. Now, doesn't mean that if you have an 800 credit score and you've just made a crazy risky business decision that you're gonna get a loan, but it does mean that if you get a loan, an 800 credit score may save you a quarter to a half percent in interest. So, these are things that are very important when considering your whole financial concept and how does this work for your business? So, when we start, we talk about looking forward, a key to this is cash flow. Cash flow is vital to is your business, is your personal finances, is this symbiotic relationship going to work out? Because if you're tracking cash flow and you're hitting, you could have money in the bank. You know, a lot of people, they manage your business by, well, I've got money in the bank, I must be good. Well, if every month, the amount you have in the bank becomes a lower number, then you have a negative cash flow. And eventually, that's going to prove out to be a bad thing. So, I mean, this is common sense, but remember, when we're tracking cash flow, we need to know is a negative cash flow situation going on in my business right now, is that something that is going to continue? So, we'll talk a little bit about that when we get to forecasting, but what we need to understand before we do this is these relationships of when are you going to do what? How are you going to make your decisions? How are you going to stay ahead of the game and try not to go after funds when they're the hardest to attain? So, after you've made a business decision that you have decided is risky, and then all of a sudden you say, oh my gosh, I need money. You should have said, oh my gosh, I need money in the front. Get a line of credit. If you don't use it, it doesn't cost you anything. Make sure that you've got that set up before you make risky business decisions, because once you make that business decision, getting the money is going to be very difficult to attain. So, consider these moves before you need to make them. So, now let's talk about forecasting because forecasting is the key to how we are going to figure out all of the things that I just talked about. So, when we look at forecasting, we need to predict our revenues. We need to predict our expenses. The difference between revenue expenses is cash flow in the end. So, I mean, if your revenues are $100,000 and your expenses are $80,000, then you've got a $20,000 plus on your cash flow. Now, that may or may not be a good story for you depending on what you have to do with that $20,000 on a personal level, but it does tell you something. So, what we want to do with forecasting is we want to look forward and try to figure out what is going to happen in the future. So, I tell people all the time, forecasting is the hardest thing you will do in your accounting world. So, when we start looking at forecasting, we need to first look at the next 12 months. Once we can figure out what the next 12 months look like, then we need to look at months 13 through 24 and we need to keep that going, which means that we don't create a forecast every fall. We don't create a forecast every spring. We create a forecast and we maintain a forecast every month. So, it's a very difficult thing. If you're a pre-revenue company, then forecasting is extraordinarily hard. It's a lot like when you create your business plan for the first time and they say, so what's your five-year revenue look like? And you're like, I have no earthly idea. So, when we start looking at forecasting, the idea here is to ground yourself and then start looking forward. The further you look forward in your forecast and the more data you collect on a monthly basis, trying to kind of bring that forecast to fruition, then the better off you're going to be and every month your forecast is going to look a little better. So, let's talk about revenue predictions first. Revenue predictions are, sometimes they're easy because you have things lined up and you can see them and you know exactly what they're going to be. Sometimes it is a total crazy guess and you're trying to figure those things out. And I say, well, what we want to do is we want to reduce the wag wild guess out of the revenue prediction forecasting. So, how do we do that? So, we try to come up with actuaries. So, if you're a pre-revenue company and you don't know how things are going to go, let's figure out what's an actuary that if I put so much effort into the game, how much should I expect back? So, this is part about research. This is part about learning your business environment, learning your competitors, your customers, the whole gambit, right? So, we'll get down to how you used to work for a simulation firm and I'll use this as an example. We would submit proposals to the government every quarter when the announcements came out. And our history told us with every number of proposals that we submitted, we would win a certain percentage of those proposals. So, that is a good way to predict revenue. So, if I know I'm gonna win one in five and I submit five proposals every quarter, then I can expect four wins a year. And those four wins a year, depending on the proposal I'm writing and the value of the contract I'm proposing to, can give me a revenue prediction. So, think about that in terms of how do you do this? So, everyone is different in your space. Now, I think in almost immediately, consider the government space when I'm thinking about predicted revenue and stuff because that's where my experience base is. But, if you are a clothier or you are a brewery or a restaurant, how do you predict revenue? How many customers are gonna come through your door? What's the average ticket? How many days are you open? How many hours a day are you open? These kinds of things are predictive of revenue. I do caution you when you start putting these things together to really pour the revenue model through. So, I'll give you an example. Years ago, I used to be in the indoor tanning business. So, my wife and I decided to buy a tanning salon and we looked at buying new tanning beds and the tanning bed company sent us a revenue predictor saying that there were 20 minute sessions and if we had three people per hour per session and we were open 10 hours a day that then we would see 30 people and our revenue would be this. Now, that was a horrible revenue model and the reason is because you can't put three people per hour in a 20 minute session because they have to go in, they have to get ready, they have to put the, when they get out, some people are putting on lotion, they're doing, so there's all kinds of reasons why you can't turn people in this cattle call the way their revenue predictor had said it would be. So, their revenue prediction was completely off base. In fact, it was very difficult, we found, to turn two people an hour just because of the prep time for someone when they got into a tanning bed to get into that mode of tanning, to get back out of that mode, get themselves ready to meet the world again. So, when we think about revenue predictors, think about the common sense, actually walk through the process yourself and see can this happen? For example, if you are a restaurant and you say, okay, well, we have got capacity for 100 patrons and if we can meet a 75% capacity and we can turn those clients every 30 minutes, what would our revenue be if the average ticket for four people were $60? So, when we look at that model, think about is it reasonable that we could reach 75% capacity all day long? It may not be, there may be hours of the day in the month where 75% capacity is completely unattainable and there may be hours of the day of the month where 75% capacity is way under what's going on. So, we want to come up with this rhythm of maybe three o'clock in the afternoon, your capacity is 10% but six o'clock in the afternoon, your capacity is 95. Can we turn people in 30 minutes? Is that reasonable or should it be 45 minutes or should it be an hour? So, when we think about revenue predictors, we have to think about the rhythm of your business, whether it's my indoor tanning example or a restaurant example, it doesn't make a difference, it's your rhythm and your business. So, that's what you have to look at. For example, another good one is a brewery. What's a healthy number of beers for someone to consume? If someone stays in there for two hours, you don't want to count them for 10 beers, that would be a really bad model for you and your business in general anyway. So, we have to consider what makes sense in terms of revenue and revenue prediction. Okay, so I think I've kind of beaten that one pretty hard here. But again, think about your business, every business is different. How is this revenue gonna come in and what makes sense? Now, when we're building the forecast, every month we have data allows you to create a more finite process. So, as a month goes by, we can look at that revenue prediction, we can decide is that a good number or are we going to grow? Or did we have an incredible month because it was our grand opening and now we expect things to kind of settle back to normal or like in and out burger, is there gonna be a line around the corner every day? So, let's think about those things when we talk about revenue predictions. Now, let's talk about expenses tied to revenue. So, for every sale, there is a cost of sale. Now, you may or may not in your accounting system have cost of sales or cost of goods sold depending on what kind of business you are, but it doesn't make a difference. There are certain expenses that are directly proportional to your revenue. So, as your revenue goes up, those expenses will go up. As your revenue goes down, those expenses will go down because they're symbiotic. So, we need to look at those expenses, try to figure out if you're a restaurateur, you understand this because you have what they call labor costs and food costs and beverage costs and those things. And those are calculated as a percentage of your revenue and those are the numbers you're supposed to hit because if you hit those numbers, then you know you'll be profitable. So, when we think about these revenue predictors for businesses, we also have to think about the expense predictors against that revenue. So, that part sometimes is easy, but again, as we forecast and we get further and further down the road, we will get a percentage that we can count on, that we know that this is how business is done. But we can use the model. I think about, I think it was Taco Bell, but I may be wrong, stopped handing out straws except on request. And then they found out corporate-wide across all Taco Bells in the world that saved them over a million dollars just by not handing out straws until someone asked for it. But how many times you still go to a fast food restaurant, go to the driveout, and they throw a fist of ketchup or a fist of hot sauce into your bag. Think about how much revenue that's costing the company because they haven't defined that process. So, when you're running your business, you have to think about everything. Think about all of the little things and how does it save you money to maybe just don't serve it unless they ask? When you go to some restaurants, every time you sit down, they put down a glass of water in front of any person. Well, now maybe that water, you don't think causes you any expense, but those glasses have to be washed. There is an ice machine. There is maybe a straw. There is the water that comes out of the tap that hits on your bill. If you think about what that costs, as opposed to putting a sign that says water available upon request, these are things that are cost to your business and it's good for the environment. So everybody wins. So think about these things and revenues tied to expense because just because it's tied to your expenses or tied to that revenue doesn't mean it has to exist. So there are some reasons and some ways to streamline that process that can save you money. Now, fixed expenses are the next thing. Fixed expenses are things that do not change until you change the nature of the expense itself. So we think about rent. Think about a company car, things that no matter what you do, the rent is always going to be the same or will be the same with some level of escalation year to year to year. So fixed expenses are a little bit easier to predict, but they also create a level of risk because they're not tied to your revenue. If your revenue goes down the percentage of fixed expense to what's total going on in your business is much higher. So we have to kind of look at these fixed expenses, although they're fairly easy to predict, they can be very difficult in terms of profitability. So, and they also become the biggest risk when we start talking about decision making. Do I go to a bigger space? Do I, you know, want to get a car for one of my executives? Things like that really can hit your bottom line and it all sounds rosy at the time when your revenue is great and then something happens, your revenue dips and all of a sudden the fixed expenses are eating you alive. So in your forecasting, fixed expenses, although they're the easiest to forecast, they can be the riskiest when it comes to is your business profitable? So we talked about, I mean, I've done this kind of understanding the relationships and I've hoped that I've kind of talked about that as we go through and I want to kind of go into this revenue model. Now I have a revenue model that I am glad to share and I will give to the presenters of this meeting so that people can request it and we'll hand out for free. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about my revenue model and you won't see it, but when we do, if you do request it, it'll make sense. Now, if you use my revenue model, which is very basic or any other revenue model, honestly, it doesn't change the concepts of, and I say revenue, it's really forecasting. The concepts of forecasting are the same. So we'll have a tab in there that talks about revenue predictions, which we've talked ad nauseam about. We'll have a tab in there that talks about expenses tied to revenue. We'll have a tab in there that talks about fixed expenses. There'll be another tab in there about major purchases so you can sit down and say, well, we're gonna buy a new grill or we're going to need a vacuum seal machine or we need some kind of vacuum former or we need a heater or there's so many different fixed assets that you could buy, depending on what kind of business you have that you need to make sure that you account for when you're going to buy that and when you expect to buy it. And there's two ways that we have to look at this when we go forward. So obviously, how you buy a fixed piece of equipment, whether you are going to pay for it and in full when you get it, whether you're going to finance it, either lease or some kind of purchase arraignment, either one of them is going to have some type of expense of interest tied to it and payments going forward. And then how is that going to depreciate? Because one affects cash flow of how much money is actually coming out of your account when and then the other affects depreciation which affects your taxes, which in the end will affect cash flow again. So we have to look at fixed assets and look at both ways that they're accounted for in your system. So and we talk about forecasting, let's talk a little bit about your accounting system. So how you account for things in your system is what makes sense to you. And I like to talk about this a little bit just because I see small businesses will look at bigger businesses and their accounting system and then they will try to duplicate or emulate that system. And that's not necessarily a good move. You should keep your accounting system as simple as you possibly can, but with enough detail that makes sense to you. So if you, for example, you could have a line on your accounting system that says utilities. Utilities could be gas, water, electric, phone. It could be a whole number of things and it could be gas for the car for all that matters. It really depends when you're tracking utilities, does it make sense to know how much your gas bill is, vice your electric bill, vice your water bill, vice the gas that you put in your company car, so on and so forth. Only put that level of detail into your accounting system if it makes sense to you. Because you're gonna forecast the same way. So you forecast a level of detail that makes sense. If these bills are not generally important to break out, then don't do it. Now, bigger firms break out lots of things. They have accounting staffs, they can do this and whether or not they use it or not really doesn't make any difference. It doesn't cost them any extra money to do that because they already have five accountants on staff. Well, small businesses don't have that luxury. So let's think about your accounting system and keep it simple. And in that, it will also keep your forecasting simple. Okay, so I'm gonna see what my next slide is. So my next slide is a wrap up and it seems awfully early. So let's go back and let's talk a little bit through this wrap up about some of the things that we talked about. So let's talk about this whole financial concept. The whole financial concept, what's important in your personal finances, what's important in your business finances are symbiotic. So we have to know that in my personal finances, anything that I do, anything that I buy, I want a new house, a car, so on and so forth, potentially put a burden on the business if the business is how that I get paid. So in your business finances, if your business is profitable, not profitable, so on and so forth, are those things going to affect your personal finances? So unless you're independently wealthy, which I don't know very many people who are, these things we have to look at together. Talk about our credit, our credit worthiness and when is it important to get money and funds? So money and funds are extremely important to every business and it's always a good idea to line these things up way in advance and make sure that we have plenty of funds on hand to use when something happens and not make a risky decision and then try to go find money. So that borrowing power aspect we have to look at when is the most important part of that? And then cash flow and forecasting and we'll go into a little bit more about this. So as we're doing our forecast, as we're predicting our revenue, every month we go through, we predict revenue. So I always say start with the next 12 months. So if we're gonna start a revenue calculation right now, we would look from August to next July. We would take all of the data that we have from zero to maybe you've been in business for five years and we can go back and look at five years worth of data. But the nature of this being startup week, I would say that there's probably no one listening to me that's got five years of data. So we wanna take all the information that we have. If we have no information, then we need to do research. We need to look at like businesses in our space and figure out what can be predicted from that and try to create a revenue model. So if you're pre-revenue, this is extremely difficult, but keep at it, you'll figure it out because once we do this August to July forecast, then we will get August done and then we will have a September through August forecast and we'll have some data. And then September will happen and we'll have an October through September forecast and we'll have more data. And as the data streams in, the numbers will get smarter. So that's rule one, 12 months forecast. Rule two is 13 through 24 months forecast. We need to make sure that we are not just looking at the next 12 months, but we're also looking at the 12 months after that. Now the information is gonna be fuzzier, right? We won't have as much data to go by and it will probably be more about futuristic planning than actual numbers. But every month, update our forecast, we continue to slide those months out to the right. So the next 12 months represents a little further down the road when we're thinking about today. And then the 13 through 24 months should get clearer and clearer and clearer. So it allows you to then make business decisions because now I've got a plan that says, what do I think it's going to look like 18 months from now? How am I going to get to that point? And I don't know, throughout my entire life, everyone always told me, have short range, long range plans. And most of the time, I would just kind of go, yeah, whatever. And, you know, because yeah, short range plans, yeah, I know what I wanna do tomorrow and next week and that's really not short range plans. Short range plans are what are we gonna do for the next 12 months? And long range plans are what are we gonna do from the 13th month to the 60 months or retirement? So how are we going to get there? And this forecasting, if we only do one year of forecasting, then the long range plans are never considered. So going back to making sure our forecast goes out at least two years, it would be okay if it was three or four or five because a business plan should go out five years. And then looking at our personal finances, well, how do we get to retirement? How am I going to put my feet in the water in the beach on the golf shores? Maybe that's my retirement dream. How am I gonna be drinking my ties in Cancun? Maybe that's my retirement dream. So we have to figure out how we're going to get there. And, you know, if you're my age, I don't have a whole lot of long-term plan on that anymore because I'm a lot closer than I ever thought I would be. Now with that said, had I done planning 10 years ago or 20 years ago, I'd be in a much better place than I am now. So this is the importance of this planning and forecasting not only for personal life, but for business life. So now what I want to do, even though we're in this wrap up, I kind of want to go through a few scenarios with the different styles of businesses and talk about how that would roll through forecasting. Maybe those examples with the kind of business you're in will ring true, hopefully. And if not, you can hit me at the questions phase and then we will discuss your particular situation. So let's go back to the first business I ever owned, which was a tanning salon. And I'll give you a little history on that. I was extremely bored. My wife was extremely bored. Both of us had just left the military and we were looking for challenges. And so I had a friend that had a tanning salon that was getting ready to relocate and was trying to sell it. And my wife and I just had a wild hair and we bought the salon. And so from that, that tanning salon business, when we bought it, we sat down with our friend and we looked at how many customers they had. We looked at how many hours they were open. We looked at how many beds they had. We tried to do a predictive model of how much money we would make and we were so wrong. So this, in terms of when I talk about getting a new business, is how is this forecasting gonna work for you? Well, in a new business, it's tough. Because we, even though it was a friend of mine, I mean, I think he was trying to put rose-colored glasses on us because he really wanted to sell. So we found out that just because you had 500 customers in your customer log and you were open 12 hours a day, didn't mean that you were going to have any revenue. And quite frankly, when you get in the middle of November, a week before Thanksgiving, you can sit in a tanning salon all day long and no one's gonna show up. So we found out the hard way that our revenue predictive skills were quite lacking. So what we decided to do was to kind of create a predictive model. And so we did, like I'm talking about now, is tried to come up with initially a one-year plan of what revenue was gonna look like. And we talked to manufacturers of tanning equipment and looked at their revenue predictive models, which I gave an example of earlier, of one that was given to us that was just, totally optimistic and not attainable. We looked at our actual numbers. Unfortunately, one of the things in being a new business owner is we didn't get a lot of revenue data from the person we bought it from, which was a huge mistake on our part. You should be getting that kind of information by the person that you buy from, making sure that you have some real numbers to go by. Like when you buy a house, you should be asking them, hey, what's your average utility bills? Can you send me your last 12 months of bills? Same kind of thing when you buy a business is find out what kind of revenue did they achieve in the last 12 months before they sold it to you. If you can get two or three years of revenue, even better, because now you can find out whether that business is growing or declining. And maybe declining is the reason that they're selling it. So in the case of trying to create a revenue model for this business, of course, my wife and I were crazy go-getters. We're trying to figure out how to generate more revenue. So what did we do is we branched out into more things that even cost us more money. So you look at these models and you think in desperation, because we didn't know what we were doing, we decided that we would develop our own tanning lotion brand. So we contacted a chemist in Chicago who made us three different lotions. We contacted a graphics artist and created a design for a logo and got with a bottling company and got bottles and bought an apparatus where we could fill the bottles ourselves. So now my kitchen was a manufacturing lotion facility and we continued to lose money hand over fist because we had no idea what we were doing in that business. We had no revenue predictive model. We had no idea how we were gonna take it to market. And it was a wholesale disaster. So when I look at these things and I look back in my experiences, I guess that's why I'm standing here is because I can relay some of these personal, they weren't tragedies, they were very trying times. And the fact that my wife and I are still married after all that is probably the most trying. So considering how this works through, we have to come up with this revenue predictive model. So think about your business, think about where you're going and how that's going to work. Now, I am going to wrap up and go for time for questions because I think I've hit my moment. All right, thank you so much, Brian. That was so interesting and so great to hear your personal stories as well. It's wonderful to be able to learn from others. And so first question here, we have an anonymous attendee asking, how do you handle revenue forecasting when your historical data from last year is significantly skewed from the pandemic? Yeah, and that's the same thing. It's almost like pre-revenue where you have to try to do a predictive model based on what you think it should be. Remembering that the pandemic is a great lesson for us to learn because no one thought it could get this bad. So no one predicted this in their revenue. So consider, when I have a company that actually does three revenue forecasts, they do an optimistic, a baseline, which is what they really think is going to happen, and they do a pessimistic. And the pandemic has changed their pessimistic forecasting dynamic entirely. So it's really hard because the pandemic gave us many, many things that we didn't see coming. But that's something that you need to look at. Should we put together a revenue based on what we think would happen without the pandemic? And should we also put together a forecast if the pandemic were to continue? Because we've got new Delta variants and things like that. Maybe this goes on for a lot longer than we think. What does that look like in our revenue predictions? Okay, and this, well, this second question is when conducting revenue forecast, do you do a low, a higher just average? So if you want to. Yeah, no, I mean, again, what I'm saying is I think it's probably a good idea to create a baseline revenue model, how we think this is going to happen, the most realistic possible case forward. And then now you've got a spreadsheet that's fully populated, so you can make more copies of that. You can do an optimistic predictive version of that, a pessimistic predictive version of that. You could come up with what if our revenue was 10% more? What if our revenue was 20% more? So you could make as many models as you want. They could all be linked together. So when you change one, all the rest of them change and then you have all the data to look at. All right. And thank you for offering your revenue model. I will definitely be asking for that. And so just building upon that, apart from Excel, are there any other tools that you recommend for new small businesses or entrepreneurs? Well, I mean, I think a spreadsheet-based revenue predictive version makes the most sense. And because you don't have to go out and spend money, I think everyone has a version of some spreadsheet, whether it's Google Sheets or Excel. So that makes sense to me, so you're not spending money. I mean, there are many, many companies out there that do forecast models for a fee. You know, if you've got the cash, there are some fantastic systems out there. But realistically, no one knows your revenue like you do. So you sitting down and working through your forecast, and I keep saying revenue in terms of forecast, but no one knows your business like you do. So doing your own forecast makes the most sense. Paying someone else to do it, while that may be fantastic, and they may have a fantastic tool, they don't know your business like you do. So are you gonna get what you're looking for? And quite frankly, most of them are pretty expensive. Okay, thank you. And what is the most frequent mistake that you see small businesses make in regards to forecasting? So we use a term from Winnie the Pooh. So Winnie the Pooh has two famous characters, Rabbit, who's very optimistic, everything is gonna turn up daisies. And we have Eeyore, who is just the world is coming, the sky is falling, Eeyore is oh gosh, it's going to be horrible. Don't be a rabbit, don't be an Eeyore. So if you are that kind of person, then be both. So what I'm trying to say is we want to find this middle. So if you create an optimistic rabbit style forecast, and then an Eeyore style forecast, reality is somewhere in the middle. So the biggest mistake I see is people either bring their pessimism or their optimism. Most people who are small business startups are optimistic. So don't be overly optimistic, try to be realistic. Okay, and well, sorry, there's a question here about getting a copy of the revenue model and getting the slides. So we will send those out afterwards, correct? Yes, I'll provide that to the group here and then you can get that from them. If for whatever reason that system falls through, my email is right here, you can contact me and I'll send it to you directly. Okay, great. Okay, and then we have a question here about credit score and how can I better build my borrowing power? Well, I mean, borrowing power is based on two things. Credit score is part of that equation, but the other part, and I say this, and it's a pessimistic thing to say or maybe cynical, is that if you need money, go to the bank, you'll never get it. If you don't need money and go to the bank, they'll give you a loan tomorrow. And that's why I use this in my presentation and I stress it so much is don't go looking for money when you need it, look for money before you need it. But the whole credit score is based on how long have you had credit, how much credit do you have? What is the percentage of debt to credit and have you missed any payments? So you have to really kind of live a good life in the credit world. Okay. Okay, and so on the one more question here coming in, we have, so you said to build your forecast 12 months out and to do monthly check-ins. Is this something that you are typically also checking on a daily basis? No, don't overthink it. If you do it too much, it'll drive you crazy. It's kind of like watching the stock market, right? So if you watch it every day, it will drive you crazy and your forecast is the same way. What you want to do is you want to keep a good set of accounting records. You want to close your books every month and then you want to update your forecast based on your last month's close. All right. Okay, well, thank you so much, Brian. I think that is the rest of our questions. So thank you everybody and we will, any follow-up for the revenue model, we will get that to you and up next, we will take a 10 minute break and up next we have a discussion on customer acquisition and retention and curating the right sales team. Thank you again, Brian. You're welcome. Downtown Longmont boasts innovative craft breweries, cideries and distilleries, nationally recognized restaurants and one-of-a-kind shops and boutiques. All comprising a Colorado-certified creative district and a national historic district. Downtown Longmont is your destination for small-town charm and moderate urban bias. With unique small businesses, tangible history and Colorado's best craft culture, Downtown Longmont has something for everyone. So come explore downtown, take a stroll, make a memory and discover what's waiting for you just around the corner or just inside the door. Well, it takes a little time to heal, I know it now. Hard times come and they go like all the rattle rain. So I'm leaving tonight with a poem to prove only dust in the rearview mirror I choose to ride under a sky full of stars tonight. Leave it all open wide, it's a cup of teas, you know, it takes a cup of broken wheat past the pain to a life built to fall apart. Well, it takes a little time to heal, I know it now. Hard times come and they go like all the rattle rain. So I'm leaving tonight with a poem to prove only dust in the rearview mirror I choose to ride under a sky full of stars tonight. Leave it all open wide, it's a cup of broken wheat past the pain to a life built to fall apart. Well, it takes a little time to heal, I know it now. Hard times come and they go like all the rattle rain. So I'm leaving tonight with a poem to prove only dust in the rearview mirror I choose to ride under a sky full of stars tonight. Leave it all open wide, it's a cup of broken wheat past the pain to a life built to fall apart. Leave it all open wide, it's a cup of dust in the rearview mirror I choose to ride under a sky full of stars tonight. A cup of teas, you know, it takes a cup of broken wheat past the pain to a life built to fall apart. Downtown Longmont boasts innovative craft breweries, cideries, and distilleries, nationally recognized restaurants, and one-of-a-kind shops and boutiques, all comprising a Colorado certified... Welcome back, everyone. We are so excited to present the next round of speakers. This session will be on customer acquisition and retention and curating the right sales team. We have two presenters with us for this session and first up is Eric Hostine from SMP Alignment. He's the founder and CEO. SMP Alignment helps business leaders achieve revenue goals by using simple and effective tools to align the company's sales, marketing, and product functions to a market-centered purpose, vision, mission, or strategy. All right, Eric. I'll kick it off to you. Hello. I had some instructions. This is a... You haven't seen yet. This is a very formal studio. And I need to first share my screen on Zoom, right? Shoot. PC. Where'd that go? It's awesome. It burns time. All right. Looks awesome. All right. So thanks for tuning in today. Title of the talk is Customer Acquisition and Customer Attention, Theory versus Practical Reality. So we're going to sort of build up sort of the theoretical way things work and then talk about real life examples about where things go. And notice that the retention here is called out in the title and that is because retaining customers is far less expensive than acquiring customers. So it's important to focus there. So going in reverse order, of course, the goal here is to retain customers. Question is, which customers and why? Prior to retaining customers, they have to, of course, make the decision to buy the very first time. And this is often where we think about sickening the sales team on them. And then before that, we have to go through the consideration phase. And this consideration phase usually takes longer and involves more people, the more expensive the product is and the more risky the decision might be. And before that, there needs to be awareness, not just only of awareness of your particular product, but awareness of the problem that it is they're solving. So we typically flip this upside down. This is the first round of marketing jargon and we call this the, typically we call this sort of thing, the funnel. And it moves from awareness through consideration, decision, and then retention. Some people like to see this left to right and that will often show up that way and let's say a CRM system. But I have a particular client that's trained me that we need to draw the funnels vertically because gravity helps. And we need every little bit of help we can when it comes time to moving people through. So it also noticed that the shape of the funnel is like a funnel, not horizontal or rather vertical because otherwise we'd be calling this the tunnel. And what happens is there's leaks in the funnel. So you think about this process much like maybe like a manufacturing process and along the way we're going to have yield or losses that move along that happen along the way. And then the way that people actually go through this funnel is what we usually call something called the buyer's journey. And unfortunately it's never really linear and straight like the arrows suggest. So we have to get those out of the image and what happens in fact is it's usually a very messy process where customers will become aware of the problem that they're having and aware of the solution that you offer and sort of bounce around their hem and haw for a bit. They might move to the consideration phase where they're thinking about changing but then might ghost on you for a little while and disappear. And this whole thing is really sort of messy. And many times business owners or startup founders find this to be pretty frustrating because she's why my product is so amazing why can't people just flow through. And I consider ask you to think about a corporate buying decision that you may have been involved with in the past and think about how many times it's moved smoothly through the system or a major significant purchase in your own world. How many times you've thought you were close to buying said product but then going back and doing more research or talking to more friends or deciding that you want to try out some other things before you go through. So all of this is really quite frustrating. And that's just sort of the way it goes but there are things that we can do as founders and commercial teams to set our companies up for success. But just to drive this point home I want to share a story that demonstrates how difficult our jobs are as company leaders to move people through our funnels. So some more jargon, right? So many times in the startup world we talk about things like the total available market sometimes called the TAM or SAM or some cool sounding acronym like that. And we think boy if I could just be in front of my customers when they have a triggering event and boy if this triggering event were so serious like oh let's say my life is in jeopardy and oh let's say I have a product that will is pretty sure to be significant in helping save said life. Oh it wouldn't be great if the price was right oh maybe free. Maybe it would be awesome if the inventory was in place. We didn't have any supply chain issues and so much so that that product is already available and literally right between your legs. Boy wouldn't it be just so easy to be able to sell this product. So here's a clue. Flight 1549 which was the famous Captain Sully flight that took off from LaGuardia Airport in January of 2009 had 150 passengers on it as the total available market. All of them had just gotten a product presentation about the the life vest you know blow here pull on the straps we've seen it all before. And all of them took off remember that both engines went out and it was known by all the people on the plane that the airplane was not going to make it back to the to the runway and in fact was going to have to live in the land in the Hudson River and no one knew that Sully the famous Captain was going to save the day and and therefore we're not sure if their arms and legs were going to be able to work and they'd actually be able to swim in the eventual water evacuation. How many passengers of the 150 took this took this life vest with them off the plane? The answer is 33. So nearly eight out of 10 people had this amazing product at their fingertips that they had just seen a presentation blah blah blah blah blah and didn't take it with them. So this is the this is where the theory and the practical reality come crashing together and we have to deal with these difficult realities. So what do we do with do about it? Let's go down and we're just going to quickly break down the funnel into the into the four pieces and talk briefly about some of the key elements. So this first part is is awareness and this is what the cool marketing people usually called the top of the funnel and will abbreviate it as tofu and it has nothing to do with your favorite soy product. And this is where we have to really start thinking about who our ideal customers are and we do this by building out specific personas and also by building out a market segmentation schema that identify exactly who those customers are. And once we've got that figured out we have to start doing some marketing. We talk about sometimes doing inbound versus outbound marketing and this is always sometimes confusing. So here's a fun little story that will help you figure this out. So let's imagine you're single for a moment. Maybe this is real. Maybe this is a figment of your of your past life and you're trying to figure out who you're or you're trying to go out and find your ideal mate. And let's say for example you also are only like two kinds of music both country and western and jazz rock and those sorts of things just aren't all that interesting to you and you're deciding that you know if you want to find a bear you need to look in the woods. So I'm going to get myself ready and go out on a Friday or Saturday night to my favorite country and western bar to listen to some music and find a suitable partner. So the pre-work all has to it's all the same no matter whether you're doing the inbound or outbound work. You know you have to think about who it is that you're trying to attract. You have to think about what your unique value propositions are. Make sure you take a shower put your best foot forward and head out onto the town. So inbound marketing would be as if you were to get yourself all ready and go sit at the bar and hope for your ideal mate to come and start a conversation with you. But you know that might be risky because this person might be a little bit crazy. On the other hand outbound marketing would be going through those same activities and deciding that you are going to find someone out in the in the crowd and go start a conversation with them. That would be like the outbound email but in this case you buy extra pap spool ribbon and you bring it over to the person that you'd like to start a conversation with and you get go and you start that dialogue. Now here you run into a similar risk one the person still may be nutty or this person may not find you attractive at all and may not want to have a conversation. But the point is is that there's all of this the odds of finding the person that you might want to get to know more the odds always go up when you leave home and go do something about it. The next stage of the funnel is the consideration phase and this is where what happens here? Oh this is where change has to happen this is where people have to start contemplating whether or not they're going to the problem that they're aware of and the solution that you're offering that they're going to have to go through this sort of internal dialogue and change analysis to figure out whether or not this is something that they might want to do. And this is always difficult I like to pick on my good favorite physicist Sir Isaac Newton who his first real law is that an object at rest stays at rest unless acted upon by an outside object outside force but in the world of business I've changed this to say a business that rest stays at rest unless acted upon by a crisis and the if you've been through any sort of therapy sessions before you may have heard of this these six stages of change and this first one is pre-contemplation which is where people are not at all ready to make a change they get into the contemplation stage or they start thinking you know maybe this is something I ought to do and then they go through the preparation stage of things where they really start making the to prepare to make these changes and they actually take action and then at the end they go through this maintenance phase where they're actually maintaining that change now we know in reality that people will flop up and down through this through these stages of change much like they will in a sales funnel but it maps pretty closely to this idea of first awareness then consideration and then ultimately ending in retention where that change is locked in and then they are staying with you for the long haul next phase of the funnel is decision the decision-making phase and I want to warn the audience to avoid this sort of false character of the mythical decision maker and that is you know many times sales teams are marketing so we just need to get to the decision maker but I would argue that it's insulting to people in the decision-making process because all of us are in fact decision makers I chose to wear this shirt today you chose to come and watch this session you might be regretting that but nevertheless there were decisions that were being made I also have a story of a CEO that I worked for in a company several years ago I was sitting at his table at the holiday party and he was saying you know I always wanted to be the boss I want to always be the CEO so I could make decisions and then here I am CEO of this publicly traded company and I've got 12 bosses and this number 12 happened to coincide with the number of people on the board of directors of which he had to convince most of them that his decisions were the right ones I also had a scenario in my own practice where I had a CEO tell me you know we're going to start working together and we're going to start next week you know next week rolls around I'm like okay I'm going to show up what's going on what are we going to do and it comes to find out that he changed his mind and upon reflection on my sort of post postmortem of what happened I remember him saying during the discovery phase that there was one particular member of the board who had it out for him and I needed to you know I took that as my own responsibility and one of those hard life lessons that just because you're working with the CEO who you might think is the decision maker title and the title and who actually are the bigger influences on the decision making process there they're not necessarily not necessarily connected and then finally we get into the retention phase and this is again where you know customer success or customer service depending on the industry you're in are incredibly important because you've gone through all of this time and energy and effort and expense to get people through the funnel to be customers and this is where a lot of companies screw up because they don't have the operations in place to make sure that people are having an enjoyable experience once they've come and certainly we know that when we do have bad experiences we tend to tell our friends more about that than the good ones so it's incredibly important to have strong customer success delivery operations in place in order to make sure that this funnel has as few leaks as possible so some summary points remember that we are dealing with a funnel it is not a tunnel so we're going to have yield and loss yield that losses along the way this one is really really powerful is that recognize that marketing and sales activities are probabilistic functions and not mechanistic functions meaning you can do all of the things right and smart and you're not going to necessarily get the one specific blue M&M that you're looking for and the vending machine to drop even though you put in the right money and turn the crank the right way the buyer's journey is often chaotic very few people move through very few people or companies move through the journey in a linear smooth way it's our role as a commercial organization to help facilitate that process think of it as being like a deal Sherpa just like people that are climbing up the top of Mount Everest the Sherpa doesn't actually carry them but does make things easier for them along the way but ultimately it is on the buyer to move themselves through this particular journey and given all the things that are completely outside of your control in this process it's incredibly important to identify those things that are within your power and focus on those things and with that I would say thank you for listening and if there are questions I'd be happy to address them all right thank you so much Eric and we are going to do Q&A after our next speaker and so thank you thank you a lot Eric that was super interesting and I think I have never heard as many analogies on the funnel and I loved it so thank you again okay so up next we have Lori Raymond Lori is the regional market manager for specialty appliance Inc Lori manages the Fort Collins and Louisville showrooms and leads the charge for their sales team having spent most of her career in the appliance and building industries Lori is passionate about the design community she works with she currently serves on the executive boards for the American Society of Interior Designers and the Home Builders Association of Northern Colorado and Lori with that I will kick it to you all right thank you so much one second here some technical difficulties as well here we go sorry you think I would know how to do all this after all these zoom calls we've had over the last year and a half but again thank you so much for having me my name is Lori Raymond I am with specialty appliance what a fun platform to be able to talk about just you know the business and kind of the culture that we're living in here and just excited to be here on behalf of specialty appliance as Caroline said I am the the North Market Manager for specialty appliance I do lead two sales teams both in our Louisville and Fort Collins showrooms and this was a job a position that I kind of was promoted into last fall so kind of during a COVID environment and a lot of times you know today I will be talking about curating developing and what kind of curating means and how to develop a sales team but I was just thinking about listening to Eric's conversation sometimes we have various personalities we work with and it's our up to us as far as managers to be able to curate those personalities that are on our team and develop those sales teams so they work most effectively so let's go ahead and jump into that here basically what I wanted to start with is talking about what curate means as probably most of you hopefully listened yesterday to Maggie Sivak's presentation from Arc thrift stores we were talking about some marketing buzzwords and what curate means and it basically is to take charge or organize so when I'm trying to curate a sales team or curate a right person for a sales team I need to pull together and kind of select various personalities and so forth to have the right individual but in business to curate is the act of examining a number of items and selecting what you consider to be the best of the bunch so again you're going to have various personalities in a sales team and it's to look at those attributes of those individuals so kind of simply put we're going to talk about today as curating means to identify the key attributes and traits of what most important to your business culture because what might be as far as individual that I'm looking at as far as potential sales person may not be the same in your business so let's kind of talk about a little bit what that means today and how we can go about finding that right individual to continue to build your sales team all right so it's kind of from where you could start for example is look internally especially appliance kind of just the back story we've been around for 20 years now it is a locally business here in Colorado our founders the two gentlemen that actually worked for big box stores back in the day and wanted to kind of branch out and start a business of their own as far as on the installation side and then from there we have these showrooms both in the down in the tech center and then now in in Lewisville and Fort Collins and we well as have various warehouse locations all over the front range area but we have a lot of internal candidates that we have looked at over the years and been able to promote from within so you really as far as looking at a sales team maybe have people that you worked with in the past or have folks that have helped you as far as on the admin sign admin sign of your business that want to possibly move into sales and so forth so you can look internally I know we have a great sales gal now out of our Greenwood Village showroom down in the tech center that started out in the in the accounting side in the admin side of our business and three years later now she is a really successful sales person and doing great working with builders and designers and clients in our showroom so she's a great success story I actually have a new sales person starting in our Lewisville location next week that he's been one of our installers been in the field and been in on job sites for the last several years and he wanted to change and kind of want to develop within his career and he's coming over to us next week in a sales role so really excited to have that again we'll talk a bit a little more about it as far as culture and so forth but these individuals know the culture and they're moving into different roles within the company so it's really exciting next thing as far as employee referrals you could have friends and so forth we actually do have some family members and some friends of friends that have worked in various industries good candidates are out there especially now I know that there's a huge workforce as far as GAAP right now but looking for as far as changing careers a lot of times your current employees might have great referrals and we do as far as especially do have a referral bonus program so you may want to talk about possibly doing that within your company it's a great way to get good people and to retain and develop those people as well within the company and again big thing that we do we work a lot with manufacturers so we network with our suppliers customers colleagues and other social contacts so really you never know as far as people moving in and out of the metro area it may have come from the same industry in a different part of the country or have worked for a very supplier I know personally I have been in and out of the appliance and construction business for years but I actually got back into appliances with specialty over three years ago used to work with my boss now currently used to work with him years ago for a different company so you never know who you might come across it might be a great benefit to your team down the way so something to always think about and network with you know industries you may be involved with professional trade associations as Carolyn had mentioned I'm very involved with kitchen and bath association we work closely with them in our business as well as home building associations and so they have great great referral bases as well to get good employees maybe a folk that's been in the field maybe want to go and more of a sales route and so forth so you always can network with those trade associations and we have had we've hired and had very successful salespeople that have come from being a designer in the past or used to work for a builder so it's all kind of interconnected and really we'll talk about it a little bit as far as sales development it's really a relationship business so you can really get great great candidates by people that you may work with day in and day out that may be interested in a job change and again we can always look to as far as online we do a lot of LinkedIn a post and so forth I know that indeed is a big source as far as advertising job posting so forth but again there's a lot out there so I would actually look at the ones we talked about earlier as far as looking internally and looking at various employee referrals and so forth but advertising is always a good option and then lastly the sales force that's coming out of our local universities and colleges is a great avenue to get some good hungry recently graduated employees that want to start out in the business I know that they've got some great skillset we actually recently just brought in a new marketing who came from a new marketing assistant who came in from a local university just graduated not too long ago so someone who's new and like kind of hungry and looking to start the career and join a great team that's something we want to look at as well and then you can even talk to you know kind of go back to the employee referrals you may have friends or co-workers that have kids that are recently graduated from university or college but definitely it's a great avenue to look at for potential sales sales sales people so kind of to dive in a little bit as far as the key attributes and traits you may want to look at again this is not a tell-all but just some things that I have felt that in my experience you really want to look at as far as a team member and as far as getting the right salesperson and bringing them onto your team is their their experience of course you hire someone out of college I almost kind of think then you can groom them to where you want them to to be when your organization how to mold them but as far as past work experience they come from a different industry you want to look at that you want to look at their background and any sort of other industry experience they may have a big thing that I really like not only experience because I think sometimes you may have a candidate that doesn't really have a personality and they have some great experience but they're not going to be the best fit within your organization so I think a personality traits really looking at those is a big thing again you want to look overall at your team I know that my Lewisville team for example is a little different from my Fort Collins team and I know kind of the mix that maybe certain individuals couldn't work in either location but they do work well together and when I'm looking at new new hires I want to make sure they're going to fit into the the team dynamics like it's good to have a balance for example of introvert versus extrovert I know for example I'm very much an extrovert but my counterpart that covers the south region with our company he's more of an introvert so we balance each other out we also kind of battle it out sometimes but in the end we have the company's purpose and the goal in mind so it's really important to think about that in your team too you want to have a mix of extroverts and introverts but of course in a sales environment how to pick a good candidate in sales being an extrovert being able to talk to people folks that are coming into our showroom for example or meeting our clientele we want to have that outgoing personality but there is you can have a mix as well in that so a big thing too you know you don't we'll talk about it a little bit here as far as interest but what I really try to get to the kind of a nut of an individual the core of the individual of what kind of keeps them motivated in a sales role if you are hiring for a sales person I really think it's important to have a motivated individual you know a big thing is you know we want our sales people to make the most money they possibly can I'm here to support them in my role but we need to kind of find out those things that are going to trigger them as far as motivation whether it be income as far as income potential or teamwork and sometimes you know we have a lot of sales people that just need to have a that-a-boy or that-a-girl throughout the day or throughout the week or throughout the month to kind of keep them encouraged and so forth so I really try to find out kind of what their interests are what motivates them and kind of help that also keep them moving forward and developing in the sales process and kind of a big thing I wanted to talk about I'm going to talk about this a little later as well but when I'm looking at candidates as far as on my team I want to see how they're going to be a part of our culture and the culture what I mean by that is both my team as far as in my Louisville location or Fort Collins location but also overall company culture we're a very family oriented company have like I said have gone from very few employees 20 years ago to over we've actually just acquired two locations up in the mountains so we're over I believe like 150 employees now so we have quite a success story but you really have to look at the overall culture very family oriented very work hard play hard culture and I really like that because I feel like it's a good balance we don't have that corporate culture but it's still a very well driven well developed team and so forth in company culture so you really have to think about that overall how that individual is going to fit within that culture and sometimes and you know I've and I've learned over the over experience here over the years that sometimes a person is not going to fit in the culture and that's okay they'll fit maybe someplace else so kind of I gotta know your company culture and know that individual to see if they'll they'll fit in with your company so as far as the team goes you know we're talking about the individuals that you're looking at as far as to hire and kind of some key attributes and so forth but what I also like to think about as I mentioned before is to talk about how they're going to balance out or work well with the team like I said my Lewisville team is a little different my Fort Collins team and yeah could they work at both locations and do they absolutely but I definitely can see day and in doubt that those two teams are different and that's okay that's kind of what keeps each each location kind of moving forward and yeah do we have perfect days right now in this industry it's crazy you know with with COVID and everything our business is going to gangbusters but definitely it's a balance as far as far as to find that personality and to get that team all balanced together so again you know it's important to have being introvert and as far as the sales role but you don't want I'm sorry it's important to be an extrovert in the sales role but you don't want all extroverts it's a good balance to have some people that are a little more subdued you have to have that good personality mix as I mentioned here and you want to be able to you know when one person's having a bad day the other person can pick them up and so forth and so on so you got to have that that mix that really keeps the team motivated and keep each other going because as kind of a sales manager a market manager per se I can't be at both locations at all times they need to be self motivated and managed themselves and like a lot of times we have customers or clients they may call in and I want to speak to a manager well I've empowered my sales people to be able to answer the question and take it upon themselves if I'm not available to to address that customer with a concern and so forth so it is definitely finding that mix that that person that can take charge but also the person that can call me or the person down and so forth so a big thing is I also as far as a team member when I am bringing in new sales people I can make sure to get the team's input I make sure I introduce that candidate bringing in someone to the whole entire team to kind of get their their field as far as their personality and make them involved in the process because again I'm not there all the time and in one particular location that individual is going to be have to be working with the whole team day in and day out so you want to make sure you get the buy-in and the support from your team members because they're going to be working with them every day so it's important to have like a team effort even in the admin side I just recently brought in a new admin gallon or Lewisville location and I made sure that we had some sales team members that were part of that interview it's important because they're supporting that individual is supporting the team day in and day out and they have to be able to work well together so that's a really important to have input and make sure that you have buy-in from all team members and again I wanted to reiterate the culture sometimes you just know you know when you meet an individual as far as the team they're just not going to be part of the culture and you have to have that location or that team in mind as far as how they're going to work well together as well as the overall company culture and you'll pretty I mean if you ask the right questions as far as an interview you can you can know that pretty quickly so make sure that you're you are aware of the kind of the culture you're you know talk with your team beforehand and kind of know what individual you're looking for and how they can best move forward with that so as far as team development again this is something that's I take a lot of pride in but again it's a work in progress no one's perfect I like I said I took on this role and this new role in the company last fall kind of in the in the middle of COVID per se so we were we were mostly in our showrooms but we all work so also we're working remote so it's important as far as to have that communication but I think a big thing as far as team development once you get the right candidates you want to make sure you know your people both in and out of the office I'm not saying you have to be best friends with somebody because there can be conflicts of interest there as far as you know knowing all personal aspects of the individual but I really believe in having fun at work and also like taking the team out outside of the work the stress environment and getting that everyone together to kind of create that team morale and see everyone outside the environment that we're in all day so I really strive to kind of know some of my sales sales teams they're they're families they're kids you know many of the sales teams that have had growing families had new new babies and you just want to make sure that you're supporting that of course you know if they have a healthy home life and personally they're happy then they're gonna they're gonna come to work and be really happy about that too so you want to make sure to know them on a personal basis and be able to encourage them because that's that's one really important thing as far as I think that COVID has taught us is really the relationships as far as in business and in the team aspect is getting to know your your team so they're there to support the company and support you as a manager as well so and that gives you a lot of I believe that once you have a good team they know that you have their back and you know that they have your back and vice versa so again I think it's important to give them some earned autonomy I don't believe in micromanaging I know that's hard sometimes because I like to kind of get things done and take charge but we really and that's a big thing within our company we really instill as far as our sales people to manage their business they work a lot with builders large production builders kitchen designers that have all sorts of projects and so forth so we really instill them to manage the sales process from the start to the end you know when they first come in our showroom or they first start their project with building their house all the way to the delivery installation and even follow-up service so really I empower them to manage their sales people or their customers and involve me as needed as far as support them but it's really important that they feel like they have gotten they get the empowerment and be able to manage them things themselves without me you know controlling everything they do so I feel that they have my support and I I believe if listen everyone makes mistakes but I know that if they need support I'm always there to help them so I always try to also encourage collaboration not competition but I think in sales it's kind of it's normal and it's kind of a part of the sales process as far as competition we do have our top sales people but also again to kind of create and encourage collaboration within the team that's why I think that kind of going back it's good to have both you know in and out of the office activities and kind of team building events to actually encourage that because competition is good but we want to make sure that we're including everybody in that and everyone's part of I'm part of that and rally around performance you know we've had a lot of success you know have we been perfect over the years absolutely not do we stumble from time to time absolutely but we do strive day in and day out for great customer service for a great customer experience and I think that's important as far as to to really encourage the good performance and you know congratulate salespeople as they perform well or have a good we have good you know a good reporter a good review we regularly do have reviews that we do look at on Yelp or on Google and we make sure if we do have a positive review we make sure to reward our salespeople with a small gift card and just say hey thanks for the good review because as you guys know reviews go a long way and so it's all about encouraging that and then you know one salesperson sees that oh they're getting a great review and they've got a little you know gift card oh I want to do a good review so it encourages that collaboration that you know positive performance and again and you know as far as sales it does all come down to clear communication and metrics we do have sales goals you want to make sure you're regularly meeting with your sales team and talking about those goals and so forth you want to make sure that they know what's well know what's expected of them and be able to um kind of follow up with them and on a regular basis that's really important and again a communication that goes back to expectations and following up with them you know I believe and kind of on a side note if there is you know something as far as a negative experience that comes out I believe in you know positively approaching them and then talking about the negative aspect or negative review and then ending it in a positive so it's that positive negative positive feedback that I believe that people really do react with kind of again going on as far as some extra things find coachable people I think it's important to find people that are want to be a part of your team that want to grow that want to have that income potential but also that want to learn I mean no one's perfect everyone is you know makes mistakes day in and day out I know I do and I want someone to be able to tell me hey Laurie maybe think about doing it this way next time and I want sales people on my team to think about that as well it's not always their way so again a big thing too kind of moving forward here lead by example I believe I don't have a per se desk or an office at my showrooms I do sit with my team in our Lewisville show and we've got a sales bullpen and then our showroom is where we meet with clients and so forth it is more of a destination showroom but I actually sit in the back with my sales team I really feel like that's the way I can kind of get to you know kind of hear what's going on day to day and be a part of it and kind of give my guidance and also they can hear kind of what I you know what I go through in a day to day and in day out basis but I think that it's if you lead by example they're going to say oh Lori you know she is not going to sit back in her her office as a manager she's going to be with the team here in the bullpen so I definitely feel like leading by example is a huge thing and it's been successful with us sales partnering I highly recommend like talking about the introvert and extrovert having sales partners and maybe team up you know I've got about 10 people or so in one showroom and seven or eight people kind of pair them up knowing that they have different personalities they can learn from each other I think it's a great way to develop a team and again kind of going back higher for culture cultural first that's a big thing you got to know your culture both in within your team and maybe different from showroom to showroom by location to location but overall the company culture and again relationships sales and building the sales team is really about relationships you know you want to get to know the individual personally but you want to be able to relate to your team members and develop them so you make sure you have a great culture a great team overall so and that goes for both internally within your company as far as a team but also your customers that you deal with day in and day out you want to make sure you're building those relationships and getting to know that person because that's a big thing with me I want to you know you never know who you're going to meet in this world or in this industry that may know someone and know someone and so forth and may need appliances those remodeling their kitchen or building the house and it's really all about relationships that's really important as far as developing your team and kind of moving that forward so again kind of just to summarize here I really believe that kind of teamwork makes the dream work strong teams are built on encouraging autonomy and I've always said throughout the presentation here our culture is a big thing both within your team and also in your organization so know that culture be able to hire an individual based upon that culture get to know that individual before bringing them on a little plug here for specialty appliance as I mentioned before we are here in business for 20 years it's really exciting we have three kind of destination showrooms around the the Colorado front-range area we do actually have a warehouse down in Colorado Springs as well and warehouses in Denver we've actually moved up to like I said the mountains we do have a location moving over to the specialty appliance family in Avon and Basalt but as well as I cover the Lewisville and Fort Collins so if you have any questions my information is on here a little fun little another plug is we do have a mobile showroom this is actually kind of like a big thing these days here in Colorado the food trucks we don't consider this a food truck but it's actually a mobile showroom we have a live appliances on it for example if you're around in Lewisville this summer on Friday nights we're at the Lewisville street fair we've got this trailer there we've got our barbecue going we've got all of our appliances so come and see us at the Lewisville street fair but it's a lot of fun and again it's just it's showing that appliances are more than just appliances it's an experience and hope you'll feel that when working with us and so forth so I hope that was informative today talking about finding the right salesperson and developing the team but I also wanted to end here if you all listened yesterday to my girlfriend Maggie who I mentioned before with Arc thrift stores I want to see I don't know if you have any out there if that you guys can mention she had put it out to this presentation today if anyone is responded to the hey girl hey challenge a Maggie oh there's Maggie yeah and we also have Lloyd oh okay awesome hey girl hey sweet well so with that we're going to continue this on this week here at Lionmont startup week so if you join us tomorrow afternoon when Laurie Jones moderates the afternoon sessions from noon to three if you type in hey girl hey in your responses you will get not only a $20 arc gift car but also a $50 gift card from specialty appliance so please join us we're kind of talking about how word of mouth is very impactful in business and so definitely join us tomorrow for the presentations and say hey girl hey in your chat and you'll be able to win those gift cards so I just wanted to throw that out there but thanks so much awesome thank you Laurie that was wonderful and okay we have a couple questions from the audience here or Eric and Laurie the first question is would you please describe your best suggestions for motivating someone who may be less than enthusiastic and a sales position well that's a thing I actually have a personal experience with right now because motivation I mean I'm always kind of a positive and on the go person but I would kind of say maybe sit them down and kind of talk about as far as being motivated maybe you know sit down with them and talk about what does motivate them there are always maybe different things and maybe there's something going on in the individual's life that you're not aware of and maybe this position for example as far as the sales role isn't the right fit you know talking about culture and really trying to understand what their background is versus you know the direction of your team and where you want this individual to go but I would really recommend sitting down with individual and kind of seeing what what motivates them and what gets them going and see if that aligns with your goals and if not then maybe we need to you know readjust and examine their position within the company all right and Eric do you want do you have anything to add to that or oh I'm sure I'll add to it you know I say somewhat tongue-in-cheek that I'm not a people person and what that means is that you know my where where I focus is a lot on what I call the structural elements of an organization and sometimes from my own experience when I'm when my goals aren't clear for me or when what's being said and what's being done or in conflict those things tend to make me sort of retract and move away from tapping into my own intrinsic motivations so think about think about what's going on in the other parts of the organization that might be contributing to someone's sort of poor attitude yep that's a great point would you say that you are an inbound marketing in your analogy then I do both you do both yeah you do both this is this is outbound this is outbound exactly okay and so we have a question here in terms of the funnel top of the funnel where do you do the handoff from marketing from a marketing team to a sales team start with the buyer's journey for your particular market first figure out what as I mentioned there's a there's a natural progression that your customers are going to want to go through from awareness through decision and depending on the organization or the type of product that you're in that transition point is going to be different as a general rule marketing owns the top of the funnel and as a general rule the sales team owns the bottom of the funnel but there are significant overlaps depending on industry okay great and Laurie do you do you agree do you feel how does that absolutely I mean I I work really closely with our marketing we've got a marketing team as well it's smaller team you know we don't have like you know just a local a local company here in Colorado but we do a lot of marketing events as far as business development but I feel like it's kind of in our world we market and so forth and then that brings our client tell into our showrooms that's when the sales process starts so absolutely I believe that marketing is huge you know we do a lot of advertising and TV and so forth but also like you know the mobile showroom is a marketing opportunity and a lot of times we'll have it actually at our showroom so they can come in and and visit our showroom and so forth so I definitely believe that you know marketing kind of starts the sales process and then it's you know my sales team I want to make sure to develop to you know get that sale and keep things moving forward great wonderful okay and what advice do you have on client retention last question sorry yeah I'll you know so again when we start with personas we recognize what's important to a particular particular customer and when we have a retention team whether that be customer success or customer support whatever words fit for your industry recognizing what those metrics are for your customers and having those tied into the variable comp on what your customer success and customer success customer support and success teams have that will help tie that together pretty nicely okay great all right Laurie anything else no I don't don't think so okay wonderful well thank you guys so much that was a a great team presentation there and I really appreciate your your time so with that we are going to close the morning session up next we I'm excited we have a couple wonderful more sessions this afternoon including one on how far will DIY get you in a hardware development another panel on authentic operational plans for DEI and then we will close up the day with an introduction to employee ownership and then don't forget this afternoon and every every afternoon this week we have our in-person events tonight's events will be from 4 to 7 p.m there's one at the Gross and Bart Brewery and one at the Roost and there's special discounts and yeah different different offerings for for startup weeks so I hope to see you there and lastly a big shout out to our wonderful sponsors Arc Thrift Stores Avisa Communications or Elect Electric Company Longmont Economic Development Partnership Biz West Left Hand Brewery Docket Lee Downtown Longmont High Plains Bank and Handprint Inc Circle Graphics Sticker Giant and Chop 5 Thank you guys so much again for being here today and we will see you next time I started Left Hand Brewing Company at 1265 Boston Avenue in Longmont, Colorado in 1993 I handed it to our team to create this incredible beer we named it 1265 Pilsner after our home We hand crafted this recipe for a light lager elevated by a balance of fresh baked bread and zesty citrus aromas creates the perfect easy drinking Pilsner We designed the 1265 can artwork by hand months ago and are so excited to have it on shelves around the country While this beer is packaging I hand pull a can off the line every 10 minutes test it for quality that way every six pack is perfect I pull our left hand tap handles to perfectly pour you a beer each time you come visit me here at 1265 or you could be like my friend Bubba who likes to chug a beer from his local liquor store Our employee owners lent their collective hands to make this incredible new beer though we all play different roles when we work together we are one hand left hand from our hand cheers cheers When I died it hanged my soul from the star in that old Nebraska sky buried my heart in the soil that kept me alive When I died it hanged my soul from the star in that old Nebraska star I'd open road and won't stop river like a marching band soft face to land Plains like an open hand they can give and they can take bury my heart in the soil that kept me alive Take my soul from the star in that old Nebraska sky I can hear a train cross mark in the time I look about in that old Nebraska sky Take my soul from the star in that old Nebraska sky buried my heart in the soil that kept me alive When I died it hanged my soul from the star in that old Nebraska star I'd open road and won't stop river like a marching band soft face to land Plains like an open hand they can take with the sky bury my heart in the soil that kept me alive My soul from the star in that old Nebraska sky The thunder is rolling in on a summer night the train cry the things built up I started left hand brewing company at 1265 Boston Avenue in Longmont, Colorado in 1993 I handed it to our team to create this incredible beer We named it 1265 Pilsner after our home We hand crafted this recipe for a light lager elevated by a balance of fresh baked bread and zesty citrus aromas creates the perfect easy drinking Pilsner We designed the 1265 can artwork by hand months ago and are so excited to have it on shelves around the country While this beer is packaging I hand pull a can off the line every 10 minutes and test it for quality That way every six pack is perfect Pull our left hand tap handles to perfectly pour you a beer each time you come visit me here at 1265 Or you could be like my friend Bubba who likes to chug a beer from his local liquor store Our employee owners lent their collective hands to make this incredible new beer Though we all play different roles when we work together we are one hand left hand from our hand Cheers Cheers Welcome to our session on how far will DIY get you in hardware development My name is Jenny Loper and I'm the Director of Operations at Zebulon Solutions We primarily work with startup companies and young companies that are looking to develop their product or their concepts and take them into production My particular background is in operations and I have worked in supply chain management and new product introduction manufacturing transition resolving quality issues and manufacturing process development I'm joined with two panelists today One of them is Allison Hughes and we also have Lauren Halford off camera Lauren go ahead and turn your camera on Welcome Hey can you see me Yes we can Good to see you So Lauren as a mechanical engineer she uses data-driven science to drive decision making and systems understanding She's an alumna of the E21 hotels and Fulbright Fellowship Programs She holds a bachelor's degree in material science and engineering from the Oland College of Engineering Her experience ranges from structural sheet metal design on a large-scale solar day lighting product to human-centered design on water quality program in rural India And then Allison for the last two decades has specialized in designing technology that empowers creativity and self-expression Her software has supported audio hardware and many Apple products including Macs, iPhones, iPad and the Apple Cinema Display Currently she's the founder of NCEO Beatrice Forms where they reimagine the apparel design process to fit real bodies I'm so glad you ladies are able to join us today Thanks for having us Yeah thank you So as we get into our discussion we have four topics and I would like to take a break after each section to take questions So the first thing we're going to do is just to find some terms around product development I find that many people don't use the same words in the same way so I'd like to try and just level set that for our discussion today Then we'll talk about why would you do why would DIY your hardware development How far can DIY get you and when do you need to hire an expert So as I said I will take a break after each section just to take questions and get some engagement So we're looking forward to if you have questions go ahead and answer them All right Our background I guess I want to say this from a level set everyone Our backgrounds are all in developing technology based products and we'll be primarily speaking to the inventor types who have a hardware product and want to understand how to get it into the marketplace But that said many of our concepts are applicable to nearly any kind of business So to start off with let's talk about some of the assumptions and myths about product development With that if you want to go ahead and put our slide up in the questions So would you go ahead in the chat answer the questions about have you developed a product before either your own or for someone else When do you think what do you think about I'm sorry one more time When you think about developing a hardware product what do you think you can do for your on your own and where do you think you will need help to develop that product So while the audience answers those questions I'm going to share a little slide that might be helpful to many starting for people who are starting to develop a hardware product I can make this available to anyone who wants it if you want to email me at the end All right do you want to go ahead and put that up So many entrepreneurs I speak with have a very simplistic view about how hardware product is developed they have an idea and they get it patented and get a concept built and then want to go straight to production They overlook the many intentional erasions that are needed to refine the product and ready it for production Regardless if these steps if you do these steps yourself or employ an expert there is a need to think carefully and specifically about how a product is developed and the testing completed to ensure it is a robust reliable and ready for general consumer use So with that let's see what kind of engagement we got and I'm trying I'm looking at I don't see if I see any questions in here but that's okay We will just keep going All right So let's talk about why why would we try and develop a hardware product on our own and I mean this probably needs the least amount of discussion because of the most obvious answer lack of funding you can't pay someone else to do it but what are some reasons why people would choose to do things for themselves instead of hiring an expert Would you like me to answer? I'm sorry it's either to you either to you or Lauren to get along I'm gonna start here sorry it's a little bit of a delay so I'm gonna go ahead and talk without the headset There's a lot of reasons why you might be interested in building your own prototype and I'm you know I'm using the word prototype I'm not talking about later iterations but getting started it might make sense if not just to save money but to explore the component features one at a time and that's really easy in the many cases to do yourself when you are trying to figure out the kind of business that you want to start what is the product and who are your customers because in the end you're trying to build a business that will be sustainable and viable and a lot of times you have to do some exploration to even know whether it's worth it to start at all so I wouldn't jump straight into hiring expensive experts just to explore some of these basic questions like is this really a problem that my customer segment has and I think that it's a lot easier to explore these things with physical objects and watching people's behavior than it is to just ask questions because a lot of times when you're just speaking with people you can only get limited information it might be kind of biased so I find it easier to watch people interact maybe with just a small piece of your product idea or it might you know just to kind of break it down into pieces you can only get so far with that but I think that that is a worthwhile pursuit I agree with that and I would add you can also be learning about the landscape that your product is in or maybe the tech that might be that your product might be fitting in amongst and then one bad reason to DIYs that you don't know how to find an expert which is a you know a real thing but it's not a reason to keep going DIY if it's the only reason it's because you can't find somebody or don't know how to find somebody and that's a really great point about how do you connect into the ecosystem and find people that can help you in your area you know one I think Alison touched on this about some of the long-term objectives to the business and so like if your long-term objective is to run a business or sell a business or even just sell the idea how does those business objectives influence the DIY Alison, do you want to take this one? Well I think that when you are I think that the first thing unfortunately I wish it wasn't the case but the first thing that you have to think about are finances and to do that you know that will take some internal exploration but like Jenny said your objectives with the business can be very different like for instance the business that I'm running which is custom dress forms from iPhone scans we knew that we wanted we were able to bootstrap and we were not interested in securing VC or any external investment and in terms of selling the business that was pretty far off so we actually had a longer time horizon we knew that we were going to go slowly but moving forward so for us we had time to prototype ourselves and DIY it we also happened to have the technical background so it made that decision really easy but you know if you have an idea that has to scale very quickly to even test whether it's viable or not so you're going to be taking external investment or raising capital some way you may need to move a lot more quickly so the DIY question kind of you know you don't have endless time to teach yourself some kind of programming language or how to set up some kind of embedded system if you're doing IoT or something like that so I think that plays a huge role so Allison when you set your business up were you giving thought to what your exit strategy would be or were you focused on just getting to being revenue positive we were definitely more focused on just being revenue positive so we wanted to get a product into the marketplace fairly quickly but again I hesitate to use our example for everyone out there because we you know I had you know nine years at Apple and hardware engineering and my partner had seven at Apple in software and is a mechanical engineer by trade so for our product which was half software half physical product it was a no brainer we could get that up and running pretty quickly to get an MVP out there that's a minimal viable product to start selling because to me that's the ultimate validation of your idea and if you are doing a self-funded bootstrapped business you have to get to making money real quick so for us it made a lot of sense to do it that way yeah thanks for going into that when you when I'm thinking about like how has DIY been beneficial to your business you've touched on a little bit about the skill set you brought into the business but could you span a little bit more about how you've been able to do it yourself and your benefit your business has benefited from it um let's see how has our business benefited by doing it ourselves well we have a lot of control and we're able to to pivot very quickly as we learn things and honestly if you come from a technical background of any type or you're a maker like this is like your dream come true right you're like this is my opportunity to build and as a curious maker engineering type we you know this is like the whole reason we started the business I mean honestly the problem needs to come first so I actually have a background in home sewing and sewing clothing for myself so I had a personal passion for the industry and the customers and so that you know all that together with my background it made a lot of sense for us to to DIY it what are other advantages that's a great question and I think that we're able to feedback information really quickly into our iterative process in development so one of the things that if you are to outsource these things the schedule of like turning around changes that you're learning from your audience from your customers or whoever you're testing with takes longer to feedback into it so we had a very very tight feedback loop so if you're a if you're a follower of like the lean startup I feel like we were able to follow that model very well and have very tight iteration cycles so it helped us to develop a lot faster and be in tune with our users again like I'm you know I'm an engineer but something that's missing a lot in engineering is contact with customers and a real empathy for customer experience because you can try to imagine all day long what your users need or want or how they work but you're going to get it wrong because your imagination is never as good as watching people and learning from people actually using the product now Lauren she's an expert over here at testing and this is the a lot of the mindset that in expertise that she's bringing to the table but um you know you as a if you're a a solo founder or just you know someone getting started you may not have that expertise so you you got to really lean on your audience and your clients to to really learn that so I think that that is one of the advantages and just having a deep understanding of how the product works but that only gets you so far as Jenny knows and Lauren knows um when you get to manufacturing then it's a whole different ball game I want to add to that really quick because I I completely support everything you said about listening to your customers and get the product into their hands and I want to emphasize part of that so you build your prototype you get it out in the real world you get it out with a customer and then they test it and the critical part is you got to listen to them like you got to hear what they're saying and take it in and if you feel that defensive monster if somebody reveals something that's not great about your product you feel that defensive monster inside you take a breath that's the critical feedback you got to take in so true yeah it's a great point to bring up thank you Lauren you know I I like Allison that you said that you almost perfectly positioned because you had a passion for the this new industry you were going into because it came out of kind of a hobby in an interest that you had but then you also had the technical and the engineering a skill set to really do it that I think that a lot of entrepreneurs are not as necessarily perfectly positioned as you've been and you've mentioned that so yeah so all right is there any questions from the audience relative to why would we do something ourselves instead of hiring an expert I'm going to give that a couple seconds here and see if anything comes up if not our next topic is to how far do we take DIY and I'll give you a second to think about the next question is that what needs to be done to refine an idea and and related to that or what kind of professionals are you going to need so I think if you want to go ahead and start one of those questions that would be great you want to go first Allison uh sure let's see to refine an idea well I'm going to go to you know like engineers or software people we like to start with zero so that would to me the refine the idea is one zero is should I be doing this at all and so I I think that the were you talking about the first first time you spend money or we're still in not yet this is still what needs to be done to really refine that idea and the general process as a whole okay so I still would start with step zero and talk I want to just just really drive home that that user validation piece and just under make sure you understand the problem that you're solving very intimately and then and then the the the refinement I think I touched on this a little bit before but it is about so we were talking about building your first is a proof of concept so you're going to be putting together a piece of hardware that just shows that you can actually make it right and do that feature like can can you build the feature that you're that you're exploring or thinking about because if you can't build it it's difficult to test or to put it in front of people although there are exceptions to this and I I want to take the opportunity to point this out right now there's a method called concierge and even with a hardware product you can test certain parts of the of the idea without actually building anything that's technical if you're a non-technical founder so an example of this is we did some consulting with a company called track pacer and what their idea was is it was a string of LED lights that go around a track like a 400 meter track and this would different color lights would go at a different pace so you could follow these lights and pace your running and one way you could prototype that and do one iteration without building anything is to have somebody wear a red t-shirt and another person wear a blue t-shirt and they run the paces on the inside of the track and people follow it and I know that sounds really sounds maybe amateurish but it actually is not you could learn a lot about like well what kind of how would people use it how do they respond to it is it like something that's even needed at all or are there going to be issues with having the different paces I don't know what the issues are but I'm just saying you can concierge so that may be the step zero that I was talking about but then so the next step is okay can I build this at all like a feature and then is MVP and MVP is a step farther in that it has to be a working piece of hardware that the flaws don't get in the way of testing the product right it has to be that's what they mean by minimum viable at least that's what I take it to be and you can actually you know use it as a full product maybe it doesn't have every single feature in it but it has enough to to get started and get some and when I say feedback I don't mean like sometimes clients give or customers give feedback like you need to fix X and it's valuable but most of the time it's not like that most of the time it's about like feelings and you observing people because you're not they don't have the fix they just know how they feel and how it's quote working for them and so you have to you need to listen deeply and not be defensive but you also have to listen for the high level take homes and then you're the innovator so you're the one that's going to figure out the fix because they're going to have a million features for you they're going to be like oh yeah you got to add this and you got to add that and you got to add this other thing and you know you can't do all that so you have to understand the essence of the product and sometimes that feedback might even be it should be less than it is so that's what the refinement process is about and you want that loop to be as tight as possible and I think yeah I think that's awesome and then after the MVP after you've been through all of that and then you've made got the essence you've figured out how to innovate to solve that essence and you've added that back into the product you might call that alpha or maybe not quite yet but once you get to that point then you're going to be testing it you're going to take it out in the real world you're going to drop it on the concrete or you're going to you know put it in a hot car or you're going to do all these other things that are going to stress test your product and then you'll have to fix all the problems that that reveals and then that might put you somewhere at like beta if you remember Jenny's original graphic so I think that's great that you guys have really touched on already some of the steps involved but then also everything you've talked about you can do yourself you don't have to hire an expert necessarily to do this but breaking it down into base elements and figuring out what needs to be understood and tested in part of the design I know that one thing that we've done has been to at the end of like kind of the MVP or in the middle of the MVP is have something that maybe functionally what you want but it doesn't look like the final product and then also have something that looks like the final product but it doesn't have any function to it and so that you're able to kind of break apart the electrical from the mechanical aspects of the design and then get some feedback on it and that is good that people have that electrical or and mechanical background right if you don't have that then you're going to have to find somebody with it okay all right this one other thing is that we ought to talk about what what kind of professionals are needed through the design process or even through building a business I'll jump in here unfortunately I know that I feel like I'm the deliverer of bad news today no don't get discouraged don't get discouraged it's just you know you got to bring out your grit and and get in there one of the first professionals I really think that I mean this is my personal opinion but I think you should hire a lawyer and the reason why is we're getting into the world of patents and just protecting your IP and depending on your strategy if you're looking to do an exit or get investment it's very important that you consider this very very early on because if you have a disclosure too early it could jeopardize the potential for those IP protectors the patents trademark how trade secrets whatever you're doing so you want to kind of iron that out very early on it's worth every penny do not skip that step and then when it comes to technical profession if it's an engineer or a product designer or even product testing mechanical electrical whatever that is I would actually recommend that you hire one expert that has a hardware background that can advise you on what to do next so instead of this person doing technical work for you at first they're more of like an advisor on how to approach this because some of this stuff you might be able to do yourself with some expert guidance and you are a lot cheaper than that expert that you're going to hire so to kind of maximize this now not all people experts technical experts are going to be wanting to work this way but they are out there that's when I was doing consulting with little barn industries our consulting company we actually did offer that service so that helped and then you can they can help you do your hiring right because how would you verify or validate that you're hiring the right professional and they have the expertise that you need right you don't even know you're totally brand new to this area how would you hire somebody so you can hire this initial person on a very short-term basis right because it doesn't take a lot of time in terms of hours to give you this advice right because you can pull on their network and they can make recommendations and then perhaps help you to interview so that would be my piece of advice especially if the budget is tight and if you have time because what we're talking about is the mentor or expert comes and has a big picture of you of the landscape of this technology and they can give you some really good advice and then you have to do the legwork to reach these milestones that they've sort of set out for you so but it's a it's a very cost-effective but time-consuming way to go Yeah I think that's a good point to bring up Lauren that it's that you do have to fully develop the idea or at least get it down the road more so I guess related to that how do you see inventors not developing an idea far enough before they either hire an expert or try to rush into production or taking it to market I guess one of the things Yeah I think the people that I've worked with who fall into that category it was a case of they don't know what they don't know so they weren't aware that how much work there is between the MVP and the production how much development has to happen how much how advanced the CAD needs to be or the electronics design needs to be meaning you've built you've tested you've iterated I think yeah I don't know what would you have to add to that Alison um um I think that that's you know I to be perfectly honest like I've kind of been on two ends of the spectrum in terms of the process so my specialty is more very very early stage prototyping to MVP and then working at Apple I was at the very end like having more mature manufacturing processes and hardware in place with a very structured way of doing things so I feel like I'm not as much of the expert here in between I think maybe Jenny might have something to add here yeah should answer my own question I'm sorry it's a good idea I would say in my experience that a lot of entrepreneurs come in or inventors come in with a pretty developed idea sometimes they have spent some extra time getting it through a pretty robust prototype but I think if you remember the slide that I put up at the beginning it's not been refined and narrowed down to being really something that you can take to a contract manufacturer to have quoted out I've seen that repeatedly where you might have the CAD done you may have even the electrical CAD done but there's no drawings that go with it there's no assembly instructions there's it's missing a lot of this documentation that is going to tell someone how to do this I actually have talked to one entrepreneur who said that their best approach was going to be just to take videos and send videos to the production line the reality is is that the operators on the production line are not going to sit in a conference room and watch a video about how to assemble something that video is going to have to get converted into work instructions whether they're electronic work instructions with images on a screen with a few words associated or if it's going to be a document but either way there's going to be some additional hardware that needs to be done the other thing and Lauren we've talked about this a lot is it has to be a lot of testing because if you don't test your product your customers are going to test your product and so you want to find out what's wrong with your product ahead of time you want to make sure that it lasts in the environment that you're planning it to be used in that it if someone drops it it doesn't break the first time that if you're going to be working in an outside very hot environment or a very wet environment that is not going to have issues related to environmental exposure I thought one thing that we've done quite a bit has been with ingress testing and making sure that the electronics are staying dry when an item is going to be used outside or even in a humid environment and so I think it's these types of things that well the concept may be ready to go it's really has to be hardening it before you take it into the field because you don't want your customers to doing this life testing for you or you're going to ruin your brand and you really only have about one shot at getting something into the market and getting a brand recognition out there because you don't want your brand to be killed because of quality issues Can I jump in on the testing piece everything in my career this this idea has been reinforced you do not want your customers testing your product and this is where you know we're by the time you're getting to manufacturing we're talking a very large investment we're not talking about those early stages like ten thousand dollars fifty thousand we're talking a million dollars you're trying to set up tooling this is huge investment and so when you get to this point you have budget you've already raised capital whatever you need to get this off the ground spend some of that capital on professional QA do not skimp on this this is not to me that is not a DIY activity when you are that close starting manufacturing you can't do not take that risk quality assurance is not like this little last minute thing that you do at the very end this is something that you're doing you start yourself but you need to bring on professionals because there are tried and true methodologies for doing this and just like Lauren said you don't know what you don't know and trust me there's so much that we don't know like as an engineer I cannot tell you how many times QA save my butts on something very high profile very expensive once you're in manufacturing oh my gosh line down I don't care if you're doing a very small operation it's expensive and you have to retool something change the layout on something holy moly you will totally regret not doing the QA properly so hire professionals for that absolutely you know I and Lauren I'm going to jump in really quick and then I'll let you answer but one thing that I see related to that is that there's a common statement about hardware is hard and I think that you've touched on the primary reason for that is that you're not testing product and you're having to go back and reiterate at very expensive rate Lauren I cut you off I'm sorry so I was just agreeing I mean we're talking about these molds that you know could be $5,000 could be $40,000 and you're talking about cutting into hardened tool steel that is not something you want to say oops we got to move this we got to change that that's not the time to do that absolutely we do have a question from Luke I'm going to go ahead and just read this and then you guys and engage with it so is it easier to research existing solutions and getting them to modify them versus building it from scratch and what do you see are the advantages I'm a shameless poacher of other people's ideas they're yeah there's so many people that are thinking really clever thoughts and putting things together and if you can just cherry pick out of that hodge fudging something new I think you save yourself a lot of time and you you're really standing on the shoulders of of giants the other thing is you should always be surveying the existing landscape in whatever technology or industry you're in by looking at comparable solutions and things that you can just purchase off the shelf you're basically doing a survey of what's out there pretty much I doubt that most of you out there are starting like trying to come up with a new algorithm or a new like something that no one's ever thought of before what you're probably doing is putting together a few existing pieces of technology to solve a really novel solution right a niche for a certain group of people and doing it in a unique way it's usually not the technology itself the pieces that you're inventing from scratch so it like I I almost think like always do that there's very few cases I mean I guess there's some geniuses out there they they're going to you know come up with a new algorithm new math for something but usually there's a piece of software that's out there the other thing is I always try to delay as an engineer you're always like I want to just make everything because that's like the thing that gets you excited but really you should make nothing you should make the least amount of stuff as possible and just start testing your idea like fast and cheap that's what you want to be in the beginning and then later put the money behind it when you're more sure of the business concept and you have some proof then you go full force then you that's when I'm talking about dropping the real money on like testing properly QA like hiring the professionals to do your life like get the professionals to lay things out like I know how to lay out a board but you know even my I had like a personal project I paid and a hard a you know a silicon person to lay my stuff out like I can I can hack it but I'm going to make mistakes so anyway sorry to to beat that horse to death but I think it's good because like if you can get like let's take a physical thing an off-the-shelf widget that does half of your product that widget is already cut in hardened tool feeling it's already at you know scale what's it called when it's cheap because there's a lot of it I forget the word economies of scale yeah it's already at a con it's already had a ton of QA like it's a solid little piece and if you can just do your piece on the side of it then you a lot of money thank you for answering that I think you look for the question let's go ahead and go into our next section around when do you need to hire an expert so we've touched on this before we don't know what we don't know but when you know that you don't know what you don't know what do you do at that point I think that you can I would recommend and it's just personal my personal way because I'm pretty cheap as a rule so I would do it myself as far as I could hit a wall think oh I can't get any farther myself and then the next thing I would look for as a mentor so that's sort of like the next level up and maybe it's free maybe it's through like a startup community maybe it's someone you pay for on a limited engagement like Allison was talking about with her company and then you see if you can get farther with that so that person is telling you all right go that direction then you run that direction you do the legwork you get as far as you can if you run out of time if you if it's way beyond your skill set then go out in the marketplace and engage a consulting firm in whatever discipline you're stuck in and I think that that's you know the sort of stepped approach totally agree with that all right good well covered Lauren all right then we've already talked about like the first professional we would hire is a lawyer what is one professional beyond the lawyer that you would always hire well I think it depends on what you're building when I guess is this conversation just limited to hardware because if you're a lot of times hardware involves other things so if you did a hardware product these days there's probably software involved somewhere maybe and then maybe product design so you may have industrial design you have your enclosure you may have mechanical that kind of goes with the with the industrial so you it it it can be it really depends on the product like Lauren was saying it's kind of like when you hit that wall and you know the you've already done a lot of legwork already so you have an idea of where you're headed to and you know that like so one of the things I learned at Apple and mostly you know this but it's good to just be reminded focus on one thing and do it really really well don't make it so complicated where you need every single one of these professionals what's your number one you know feature the number one first of all what's the problem you're solving and what's the number one thing that you are solving focus on that thing because then if it's just if it's if it's just one aspect like maybe you don't need you know that fancy ID whatever like or you don't need that extra button or those extra two sensors or whatever like the the more you can get rid of and get it down to its essential parts it's just going to be easier then maybe you can get away with hiring one person maybe you only need electrical you know like maybe if it's an electronic device you could just hire an electrical engineer like just to lay out your board and make sure you're you know using these these components properly and pick out the best components to get started like I don't know I just think reduce the complexity get to the essence of your product and that will tell you which expert you need to hire first agreed and in that example if if it's if you can boil it down to you just need an electronic engineer to lay out the board then and let's say you don't have any other skills which obviously you do but let's pretend you don't you can get an off-the-shelf enclosure they have like waterproof not waterproof they have vented whatever you need and just like kind of Lego it into place with all the off-the-shelf parts you can and you could get to a minimum viable product or maybe even alpha yeah we've talked a little bit about testing already but let's talk a little bit more about how do you identify all the corner cases that we need to be tested so that your customers aren't going to be doing the testing for you yes I think that's I think the way you phrase it is perfect because the hard part here is not doing the test the hard part here is identifying what tests you should be doing and for that the question you're answering is like how do we expect this product to fail in the real world and the answer to that is you really need that expertise so hopefully this is core to your product which means it's core to your expertise which means you will have some of that expertise you'll know that it's going to be splashed by water you'll know it's going to be stomped on by a horse whatever it is but if you don't have that expertise you better go find it either a mentor or pay somebody or whatever but knowing what to expect out in the real world and how you need to be testing that is a matter of just yeah having sort of seen things fail yeah and if you've got a firmware component then it's like a whole another set of things that you that you may not be aware of and that is an experience-based exercise I learned so much by being like I didn't learn this from school I learned from being working in a company and seeing things fall over in the way people organize their tests so those edges are not going to be clear to you as a lay person or if you're not familiar I really think this is where you want to get a mentor if you happen to have someone in your network I know I was kind of pushing to pay someone but like let's say there's no budget for that I love the idea of starting to go to meetups and build up your network because that's kind of what I did to start my first project my first project didn't turn into a company because I figured out it wasn't a good business idea but even with my background in industry I benefited greatly from just networking in the local area one of the best resources that we found is go to your local maker space so we use tinker mill here in Longmont and I actually found our electrical engineer there amazing resource you have people doing fabrication there and all sorts of disciplines so you know really take advantage of those resources that you have I mean I don't know if our audience extends beyond Longmont but these these maker spaces are all over the country take advantage wow you can find a lot there absolutely and as soon as you get that mentor to say okay you got to test this at five degrees C and 55 degrees C you've got to test it at 55 degrees C with humidity you know you can mock up all those tests you can you know like I've done we were talking about the rice cooker you just I just put a little Tupperware in the rice cooker turned it on key form and that got to about you know 55 degrees C 95 percent humidity it was a cheap way to do that test that initial test but knowing what to test is the hard part and then you can figure out how to like mock it up ratchet strap yeah big crushing thing we had to we had to get 200 pounds on a product so I stood on it and then my partner went piggyback on me and we like added all that weight and we stood on the thing and that we got 200 pounds on or you know it's more than 200 pounds but you know what I mean you can mock it up it's fun Yeah we do have a lot of fun in the testing area don't we yes it is fun we've got a few minutes left so I'm going to ask our audience if there's any questions that you'd like us to answer in the last part of the session while the questions come in I'll have you guys think about when did you try to do something on your own but either found you needed an expert or really wish you'd hired one I have a quick answer I'll never touch anything legal me too that's something it's there's consequences for screwing that up absolutely yeah I am so with you Lauren that's why I keep talking about lawyers because you really I've seen some bad things happen and even myself I had we had some slip ups and you can't take it back there's no going back like once you do something in the world you know but that question I've messed up lots of times and needed help in fact I used to mess up in my job where I was being paid I worked at Apple and there are plenty of things I didn't know how to do and I needed help and I needed to reach out and that just so you know when you have an idea and you're an inventor or you're a maker you get really emotionally and personally tied to those ideas like this is your identity and so you have to learn like this the quote smart person is actually the one that knows that they don't know and that's a great quality to have and so think of it more as like you're you're just being curious and asking questions like you want to be a pro question asker to for your client your customers these people that these experts you're going to work with so you got that's your job be curious ask great questions can I add one more group to that because that's awesome so your customers what was the other one you said the experts you're gonna the experts hire yes and suppliers all of your suppliers anyone who's machining something for you any boardhouse that's doing board for you whatever feedback they give you listen to it all right one last question on our last 30 seconds here what are the what are new skills you've picked up either to run your business or develop a product should I jump in oh my gosh where do you start oh my god you've only got 30 seconds I'll go 30 seconds oh the pressure's on marketing I know the best one is customer research so had to learn that quickly like how do you do an interview without leading people and biasing them how do you set up experiments to watch people's behavior fascinating stuff loved that learning about that nice awesome I yeah I we don't have time let's go so much so many new skills all right well ladies thank you so much for joining us in this discussion today I appreciated looking at what things we can do ourselves when we really need to hire experts and and how we learn a lot in this in process we're developing a product so I think with that we'll go ahead and talk about what the next session that's coming up it's building an authentic and operational plan for DEI so DEI for those who don't know is diversity equity and inclusion it's a it's a subject whose time has come our panel of distinguished thought leaders and innovators include Betty Artees of Casa Alvarez Ricardo Cabrera of the Latino Chamber Professor Sonia Stovall and Fred Davis the director of culture and diversity for a Washington financial service company they will discuss the dangers of implicit bias the importance of alignment within your company culture best practices for hiring and the roadblocks that may stand in your way if you don't know about the happy hours this afternoon there's two of them between four and seven pm one at the roost and the other at the gross and bart brewery so one of the best things that I enjoy about Longmont Startup Week is getting out and meeting the people and we're glad that we can be back and able to do that again this year since last year was completely virtual so I will be at one of them I'm not sure which one I'm probably the roost but if you have some questions I'd love to connect with you and I can certainly put you in touch with both Allison and Lauren as well if you've got questions for them so I think with that we should thank our sponsors so the platinum sponsors we have this year are the Arc Thrift Stores Avicet Communications Ward Electric Company the Longmont Economic Development Partnership so if you have time and aren't familiar with those companies take a minute and just google them and see how your business may benefit from them with that thank you so much again thanks Jenny thanks going back to where I came from until the harvest comes till of my furrosaurus spread my brothers round I'll be a happy bean in the cool ground going back to where I came from going away this season's long going back to where I came from until the harvest comes the storms and swellings toward the sun and miles to you and we'll be humming with the birds this time next year but if I'm lost and can't be found so my memories in the ground going back to where I came from going away the corn grows tall going back to where I came from as I can never left at all to where I came from going back where I belong going back to where I came from until the harvest went to found her end I'm just a springtime seed tumbling in the wind tumbling in the wind the sun rising through the trees went to found her end I'm just a springtime seed tumbling in the wind going back to where I came from going back where I belong going back to where I came from until the harvest comes till of my fertilizer spread my brothers round I'll be a happy bean in the cool ground going back to where I came from going away this season's long going back to where I came from until the harvest comes I'm just a springtime seed spread the sun next to you and we'll be humming with the birds this time next year but if I'm lost and can't be found so my memories in the ground going back to where I came from going away the corn grows tall going back to where I came from I can never left at all Welcome to our next session of Building an Authentic Operational Plan for DEI and Supporting Diversity in the Entrepreneurial Workforce I'm joined with four panelists today Betty Artez, Sonia Stovall, Ricardo Cabrera and Fred Davis I'm Jenny Loper I'll be your moderator today I'm the Director of Operations at Zebulon Solutions My background is in operational consulting and helping companies take their products really from that final stage of development into manufacturing Zebulon is an end-to-end product development firm and we help with a lot of companies small startups, large corporations take their ideas from concept all the way through into manufacturing I would like to introduce our panelists today I'll start with Betty, Betty Artez She's an immigrant who was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and raised and educated in New York City She has been a bilingual educator, government worker, mother, real estate agent, restaurateur and food entrepreneur The longest and most fulfilling role aside from motherhood was the ownership and management of Casa Alvarez Restaurant in Boulder One of the largest and longest running Mexican restaurants but after 20 years the restaurant closed and a new company emerged Casa Alvarez Foods that produces and sells the restaurant's award-winning chili sauces and to retail and wholesale outlets This last venture is a work in progress with some of the same ruling principles as all the other ventures Know your why, have fun and give back We also have Sonia Stovall She's a professor that loves educating people on how embracing diversity creates space for authenticity and innovation for everyone From parents to educators, entrepreneurs to businesses looking to interconnect DEI principles in their mission Sonia earned her diversity, equity and inclusion in their workspace certificate from the University of South Florida's Mooma College of Business She earned her law degree from Creighton University and took her constitutional law seminar with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas with whom she respectfully disagreed with about her homework Having taught diversity for nearly 10 years Sonia encourages others to embrace the cultural adventures found in everyday life One of her own diversity adventures involved taking line dancing class in Korean Ricardo Cabrera is a business professional and real estate agent He focuses on helping with wealth building matters from assisting people in buying or disposing of their home their most important asset to assisting on business matters to the Latino Chamber of Commerce and coaching on NAPRO 10 disciplines on wealth creation Ricardo believes in working hard living on less than what you make and investing the difference with the goal of attaining wealth Frederick Davis is an accomplished diversity equity and inclusion professor with experience as a senior leader He acquired his bachelor's degree at Colorado State University where he was a three-year letter-minute football and received his master's degree from San Francisco State University Before starting his current role as the director of cultural and diversity for a Washington financial services company he worked as a senior leader for a tech startup for three Fortune 500 companies as part of their talent acquisition and global diversity and inclusion human resources areas Fred's strong reputation has been built on his educational background work experience drive passion and leadership skills I'm really looking forward to this panel today with this diversity topic and look forward to where we're going to go with us today So we will have four topics in our conversation one briefly looking at the definition of DEI some roadblocks to having a culture of DEI in your organization educating your organization and then how do you hire a DEI community I will take a break for a couple minutes between each of the topics to give you a chance to ask questions So let's go ahead and get into our first topic the definition of DEI For those of you who are watching we'd love to have some engagement from you today So why don't you go ahead and in either in the chat window or in the questions how would you define DEI have you even ever heard of the acronym and then how does this focus on DEI affect you personally if you would mind sharing with us that would be great while you're answering that I'm going to go ahead and ask the panelist who can give us a working definition of DEI today I'm going to go ahead and ask the panelist I'll start off in your chat title by no means do I claim to be the sole personal best for this panel but to me what I truly enjoy about the work around the diversity work is that it's inclusive in this definition I've often said I actually had to just share this with some leaders where I'm at now is that if I do my job right no one's excluded from the work so it's more than just gender and race we're talking about bed status, ability, economic level all these aspects of it and that's the diversity part of it to me and that's to me I have found that to be useful even with those that aren't you can confirm the Kool-Aid if that makes sense Hi I'm Sonia Stovall for me I think in the workspace area the E is almost the most important in this particular acronym I'm it looks like my panelists co-panelists agree with me when it comes to the E in the EDI the workspace equity so that everyone gets those opportunities everyone has that chance to be seen I think is the most important in this acronym on this particular panel they're all very important but when it comes to work equity so that everyone gets that same opportunity is very important I think may I please go ahead and to that point there's an image that I've seen over and over of three young children trying to watch a game on the other side of the fence and one is tall one is medium-sized and one is short and they both they all have access but not equal access so the next image is a box where the shortest one can have the same view and then another box where the medium-sized one can have the same view so as an employer to to provide those boxes so that all of your employees your community have equal access to the same thing you can say yeah everybody's got it but they don't have equal access that's great imagery well I I'll chime in and I'll have to say I cheated because I went on the internet and look up the definition of DEI which by the way is diversity equity and inclusion and what the internet says is that DEI is it's defined as a set of programs that encourage representation participation of diverse groups and diverse groups are include genders, races, ethnicities abilities disabilities religious differences cultures, ages, sexual orientations, diverse background skills and expertise and I think overall access is the most important word to use here so thank you for that Betty because access is you know is limited by many things and including technology financial access technology access physical access maybe I just can't get to a building and all of those things are are our our community's task to elevate the DEI environment thank you for going on the internet and looking at the definition I think that that helped to put the words to the image that Betty gave us so thank you for that what are some of the goals of DEI well as an employer I think the the most important thing is to create a space in your work area or in your company that will attract and retain people of diverse backgrounds in a way that they want to be there that they are enjoying the environment and they can be the best that they can be as productive and that is community building that is incumbent on the employer to build within the organization and in the surrounding community by encouraging volunteer not you know paying your employees to go out and volunteer if that's what you have to do but really encouraging that engagement within the organization and the community and then diverse workers and professionals they'll want to work for that organization and want to elevate it to the best that that could be as well so I think that's a big goal for businesses they're not just not just to be a silo within their own organization but to make an impact on the community that's what they're serving yes I would in addition to that to what was shared I have found especially with the places that I've worked it's kind of a healthy balance between ROI and social justice all right especially now over the last year you know if if as an employer especially for the entrepreneurs that are listening in you know if if if if it would be inauthentic if you just said I want to do this because it's the right thing to do it's our mission but without realizing that there's an ROI to it for example if you're I guess I know the questions are one of the sections about recruiting for recruiting we want to do it we want to cast a wider net to get the best talent you know that's why that's why you want to make sure that we're doing DEI work right for example in regards to products and services and designing innovation that's we can all kind of speak to that a spectrum there but I think once again for the for the audience here be honest you're doing it because you want to have an excellent business you want to be seen as one of the four at the forefront what you're doing you got to have a an authentic holistic comprehensive DEI program you can't do you can't do DEI inauthentically and have ROI on it and have it pay back for you so the question was what are some of the goals for DEI I think working with the Latino chamber and seeing the community development for me is an important goal for DEI whether it's personal economic development that's either an individual or a business I think the ultimate goal for this DEI programs is to elevate community development to be inclusive as the word says inclusive equitable and diverse and you have to be genuine I give you that to be able to do this you can't fake it well I think everyone here has talked about authenticity in some fashion but I think that has to start with you the entrepreneur and the people who are making that mission statement and a lot of that comes from who are you and where are you at in your DEI journey have you faced your own implicit bias do you understand what that is do you have those tools are you discussing that with your co-workers your partners whoever you're either starting up with or in business with where is that coming from it can't just be oh this looks good and this is trendy right now it needs to be this is how we're going to get the best people and then we're going to come up with a plan on how we're going to keep them and we're going to make that part of our operations it's not just going to be on paper and it's just not going to be culture talk it's going to be something that we can follow through with I think you've already started talking a little bit about a potential roadblock that is very hard to be authentic if you haven't done that work yourself and so we have a question coming in actually for you Sonia and I'll go ahead and just read this to you you bring up a great point about working and keeping people realistically we are all dealing with COVID the COVID overhaul is there anything that is free out there that we can do now with employees or people to start a conversation and see if we are all on the same page oh well thank you for the question I certainly appreciate that one of the things I've done for a long time now is teach diversity and criminal justice and that's not just about black and brown people being in in jail which a lot of classes are so to that question one of the first things I do with my class is we do the implicit association test from Harvard that's free you can go online right now and look that up it's called projectimplicit.com I believe or you can just google Harvard implicit bias and that's something that you can do today you can start a conversation with whomever you're with today and I had a police officer in class and he actually talked about how he did this because I made them but you know but it's it's great the students actually really really enjoy it I hope they all do it and those who feel comfortable share and he discovered that he had an implicit association of bias against people who were overweight he was very surprised by that so you'll learn something about yourself and so that's there's a freebie from me to you thanks for that freebie all right let's go ahead and start I'm ready to add that can I just add that there are a lot of free things that you could do by taking the initiative yourself in connecting with people who don't look like you and starting groups like we started a group sharing stories that matter and basically spread the word and scheduled some Zoom calls and people shared stories people of all racism colors and nationalities and it was fascinating to get to know people that didn't look like us and it just opened up so many doors to additional learning and I think that's the piece that we need to understand is that we're always learning that we don't we're evolving and now the doors are so open the floodgates are open and DEI is a buzzword and acronym and all this but it's always been there but now it's at the forefront take advantage and create your own groups that will help you identify how you see people and how you maybe you should be seeing people thank you thank you well let's talk a little bit about roadblocks and get into our next topic so what are the some of the roadblocks that you've encountered or have observed that have hindered DEI I'll start again take it Frank you know it's just been you know it's been a hell of a political four years right four or five plus years and I think the inability for people of different size different perspectives to communicate effectively and to come to a solution has been key right and as I alluded to before now everyone's drinking from the Kool-Aid which is fine but especially if they as they perceive DEI work but I think some of the roadblocks have been some of the things that we've all probably historically but there are some people who just they're cautious about doing it and they want to take it slow they want to pick and choose which aspect of diversity they want to do let's just deal with this for now right because that whole prayer during the day thing that whole LGBTQ that's too much right let's just deal with race and gender and that's it's all or enough to me it's all or nothing right and there's an effective way to do it you can build pillars and then try to build other pillars and each year each fiscal quarter whatever you want to do but to just say I'm never you know we're not going to get to that issue it's just I think it's an effective way to do it and it's going to come back to bite you at some point so those are my roadblocks it's be focused on one area and not constrain the whole yeah and that's me from a kind of infrastructure kind of corporate kind of thing that it's it's embedded and it's tough to break that wall because there's so many people who are holding up that wall you know what I mean yeah I mean from my perspective there is you know fear fear of trying something new maybe one one of the assumptions or that's not an assumption but the point that I want to make is that assumptions are always create roadblocks and the assumption are those things that we don't know we don't know so somebody may have all the intentions to create a inclusive a diverse environment in their business but because of their assumptions they're going to create a gap unintentionally maybe by trying to do good so you know I'm not trying to give you an answer to how to solve it there's always different ways to try to solve that but he always starts with the person right you have to be open to to understand that you don't know everything and sometimes you may learn more than when you think just by trying something get over a fear and just start a conversation start an action and and be prepared for for the reaction because this you know talking about DEI and I can't remember how I was telling earlier is let's see what comes out of this because it's like talking about religion or politics it's very personal it's very subjective and but it's a beautiful thing in the thing in the end I think the fact that we're talking about it here is it's already a step in the right direction briefly just building on what you said about fear and what you were saying earlier well all of you actually so one of the things I have my students do is to overcome their fear and also to have some fun is food food is a great way for you to step out of your comfort zone and meet people who don't look like you who don't come from the same part of the world as you and so I would have kind of a quiz and you'd have to go to a place where you've never been before and I would know because at the beginning of class I would say what are you comfortable with and then I would make you do the exact opposite the whole time but I'm doing that because I'm going to do that myself you know when I took that line dance class and everyone was speaking Korean I did not expect them to suddenly speak English just because I was there or because I was invited they invited me there into their space and so it was for me to be there for me to learn and so you've got to do you've got to do both so if you're looking for an easy way to step out of your comfort zone I say go to your local market food place you've never been you're a little curious about talk to those people they would love to share their story with you roadblock I think it's seceding power I think many people in power are afraid and so that fear like Ricardo said shows up and they will allow up to a certain point but then no more because that will encroach on their power so as a CEO of a company or a startup or you have to look at your own sense of am I willing to share my power and then of course as a as a citizen of the of the world you also have to consider you know am I the majority and if I am I've got so many privileges and then I don't want to give them up so what do I do to hold on to my privileges so I think that like like we've all been saying it starts with the person you need to do that work and see how much you're willing to give up to you have a more inclusive and and diverse company so so Betty I have a surprise question for you it's not on the list okay this so you would you would you consider that this is a two-way street because if you're the majority or the minority DEI works both ways and works in both directions so just like the majority feels some an impart but they have certain things privileges privileges you know the minority you know being you know cultural differences or you know religion whatever the difference is we do live in the majority world and you know even though I'm not discounting fairness and propriety we should somehow learn to ourselves to fit into the the majority world well then you're talking about fitting into the the majority world as you're saying is the the white privileged world is the where most companies operate from you know the boards of directors that the rules and everything else is based on that majority but is that does that work for everybody it works for the people in power how decisions are made you know it's majority rules well does that work for everybody so that's the that's those are the the kind of ethical questions really that we are looking at something you bring up an interesting point is that within business that it is you know there are people who set the rules but then people who are wanting to have changed wanting to have actual effective change within the organization what are a couple ways businesses can address the the roadblocks that have been identified by people who are interested in making actual changes in the organization well one of the ways and correct me if I'm can you just repeat that sure what are a couple ways businesses can address the source of the roadblocks or the roadblocks themselves either way either questions so I think for business as I said early on I think that operationalizing equity is a is a big one and I mean I'm happy to talk more about that later but also one of the things I wanted to bring up and that we spoke about before when we were meeting one another is there's legislation out there that businesses need to be aware of and a simple question could be if I were to come and apply with you right now with my hair the way that it is in a protective style is that seen as professional in the majority heteronormative type world and a lot of people would say no that they wouldn't consider it they would you know they want it to be straight they want it to look as a similar you know they want it to assimilate with the white standard of beauty that the United States has been I don't want to say shoving down our throats for years but it's tough it's tough when that's not when you know everybody doesn't look like Jennifer Aniston and that's okay I think that's great so that's something I think businesses need to ask themselves the first roadblock is obviously you as we've discussed so if I come in and I look like this are you looking at this or do you want to look at my resume that says that I have a law degree do you want to look at my resume that says that I've I've had classes with these you know Supreme Court justices that sort of thing or are you concerned that I'm going to be in front of place and what are your customers going to think so to me that's that's a major roadblock and there is legislation the Crown Act is that anything to that I would I mean to to add to that I would just say collaboration I think sometimes one of the things that that hinders roadblocks is not having that that voice at the table as so as you plan things as you plan to advance to seek to talk to a funding source right for example right for entrepreneur as you seek to bring on new talent someone needs to be at that table say hey did you ever think of this do you ever think of doing it this way did you ever think about reaching out to that source so I think just having that that eclectic set of voices at the table is also beneficial now but you got to listen to it too right there's difference and I always say listen I always say the difference having worked with gang members in Richmond, California I say there's difference between listening and hearing right you hear a gunshot you that but you listen to some you listen to a person and you agree or disagree respectfully right from there and it's a great point that you bring up because we've heard a lot about that you've got to have a seat at the table you've got to have a voice at the table that simply being seated at the table does not mean that you're being heard and so I mean I think that there has to be a willingness not only to have that have you sitting there but also to have you have your voice be heard and contributing in a way that it is making sure so you don't want to have a token person at the table basically is is you want to like you said earlier you know spread a wide net and invite I always I like to use this this kind of image also is not just send invitations to the party once you've already planned the party send invitations out to help plan the party and then you will have engaged planners who will want to stay for the party and invite their friends so it's a very intentional act I think we all have to be very intentional about this authentic and intentional 23.9 and I would say because nothing nothing sucks more than being a DEI person and not having your voice heard right do you really want me here you know you have sometimes you got to say you know for those that are looking to hire somebody or a diversity recruiter or whatever these things that and entrepreneurs do just like are you are you sure right because it's going to entail all these things we talked over before it's not just race and gender it's all these things it's going to take effort and resources and a commitment to do it absolutely hard work is involved in making a change absolutely we do have a question I'll go ahead and read this to you what are practical ways to diversify my personal network everyone I know is like me so I don't know how to attract diversity hires well I think there's friends probably you are doing a lot of hiring I would say starting with some of that language in your you know in the in the ads you know what's that language look like and who was it targeted for if you're getting the same people over and over it's because whether you realize it or not you're angling for a certain kind of person and so there's there's an easy place to start plan the party and invite people to help you plan that don't look like you and you can join groups there are so many ways of you know line dance with Koreans and all you know but there there's so many ways you just have to open up your your doors associations join groups start your own group and really be intentional about it that's really the most important thing well and if I might say the question is asking for some practical correct like things they can maybe do right now some tangible takeaways so perhaps reach out to the black chamber of converse the latin is it like let's you know you know look for groups of asian south asian and ask them you know what does this look like to you give it to them you know can you help me so that way you have other people at the table that you're listening to that are contributing who are helping you create that outline this is my passion for here on the on the getting talent because I think it's I think it's I think it's I think I don't know if we can cut here or not but I think it's crap once people say they can't they can't find diverse talent I think you're not trying hard enough you know we've talked about that before so you know that and linked in there's groups there's 30 something diverse groups and linked in for example right this is what's going to be an expert on stuff we're all trying to do stuff there's also specific platforms based on I use the term community group that you want to reach to so you can actually start posting position descriptions that's what I'm saying because it's been targeted areas once again you're kind of cast a wider net to get the best talent and that's what you know that's the sourcing part of talent right sometimes you're looking on linked in you got to pick up that call you got to find that company you got to say hey you're you're you're you're an ex-person because it's tough to find some of these tech positions right so to post and pray and think that just by putting on your website linked in maybe built in Denver and think it's going to happen it's not going to you're going to have to you're going to have to either be very assertive very aggressive and cold call as well as look at some of these specific platforms and get out there and do so but it's very possible to say it isn't is is you're not trying hard enough would you mind listing a couple platforms because maybe there are people who are watching don't already originally with the platforms yeah I if you give me I'll I'll jot some down and then okay add them to the to the chat but there's I think the things that we just talked about there's the chambers there's other things and then if you want to cast that international national net they're there as well that'd be great yeah yeah so business networks you know you have all sorts of chambers you know I have Latino black LGBTQ this is all Boulder County you have Asian you have you know they're various there's social groups I mean Facebook has a a million groups that's to drop names but you can find somebody there there's another place called meet up and then those are the ones that I know I'm dating myself because there's probably a hundred more that are designed for for younger you know individuals so you know go play soccer if you want to meet brown people or you know whatnot and uh you know so so I love the keyword that you use there that is that you have to be intentional it's just like anything else if you if you want to do it you can make it happen the you know the internet is ubiquitous is ginormous and all you have to do is pick up your phone and speak what you want and you're gonna have a hundred options come up to you on your screen okay great thank you for that I think we're gonna move on to our next topic I think we've covered your blocks the next one is and we started this a bit about how to increase awareness within your organization so before we get into that let's start out with kind of the legal requirements and Sony already talked about this about the legislation that we should be aware is there any other legislation that we should be aware about there that either helps or directly hinders DEI well uh focus on the crown act and so for people who aren't familiar the crown act is creating a respectful an open world for natural hair and the reason this is necessary because maybe people will say oh my god now they're legislating their hair the reason this is necessary is because I myself as a professional woman have had my hair grabbed at work children as young as seven years old are being suspended from school because they have locks or they have twists or their mothers braided their hair or they have some sort of protective style that's been associated with gangs or you know I mean I don't think most seven year old children in school uniforms as this little girl was are probably in gangs so this is something that is important for you as a business owner or an entrepreneur because if I come in and I'm I'm great for front of house you like my style you like the way I'm talking you like my skill set you're not quite sure about my hair and it's not going to look like this next week or the week after that or the week after that then you have to ask yourself like I said previously about professionalism and also know that this legislation is in place so it's not enough just to teach about the microaggressions you know just coming up behind me and grabbing a swath of hair and walking away that's not okay I don't know if anyone told you but you should not touch other people's children my grandmother always said um so the crown act is one of those pieces I think that is it's an easy one and it was passed here in Colorado Governor Polis wore a crown on his head while he signed it and partially for the children that were there because this is this is who we're also doing this for these upcoming generations who hopefully won't live in a world where they're on the playground being licked to find out if they taste like chocolate I'm not saying that happened to me personally oh my goodness does that answer that answers yes question okay and then and with the crown act that's something that you can put together when you're talking about operations does that make sense so if you create operations and let's say that one of your workforce imperatives is let people be themselves then you've got the crown act backing you up and uh you can marry those two things together and create a policy so that it's not just talk it's not just part of your mission statement it's actually part of your operations policy so that there are consequences let's talk about some really practical things I think that he just probably applies to you but what are some actions that you've taken to change the culture within your organization to be more diverse equitable and inclusive wow put you on the spot there's other people yeah no no no yeah that's that's a good one um well I've had several different kinds of businesses I want to say the the restaurant which was the one that tested us the most and um what was what was the question again what's the what are some what what have you done what what have we done what have you done to create this culture within your organization well I think really because I mean I'm an immigrant so um and I grew up in New York city which is like the place where there's people of every every language and color and race and ethnicity so it was not hard for me because as a as kind of like seeing feeling comfortable around different people so really in the hiring practices and that business was in Boulder Boulder is not the most diverse city so I know it's a surprise but we really encouraged the use of different languages we created really an environment where people felt welcome from every walk of life also one I was I was actually thinking about this today and one big mistake I made one time hiring mistake was I mean we had a a Mexican restaurant and this woman applied and she was a little older they had a lot of experience and I was like well you know again you can't you know age is another you know implicit bias but it was you know but she had a lot of experience in and presented herself well and spoke well and all of that so I said okay you know let's you know we always had a little trial period and she was good so about a couple of months into her employment I had a customer complain to me because they told me that she said that she didn't know what a jalapeno was and that just like it was like this bell of wow we are I made an assumption that because this was a Mexican restaurant she would know what this was and you know the training was pretty simple so but it was like a kind of a reverse discrimination kind of thing you know because I didn't I didn't push the envelope further as far as her cultural capability so at that point I realized we need to have all of our staff be totally culturally competent so and so we we sponsored softball team and we also sponsored a soccer team we really created that synergy within the organization so that people felt comfortable and I think that's really that's what you have to do it has come from you you have to work on yourself and then you create that space where people from all walks of life can contribute to your business and contribute positively because they love being there our customers used to say I love walking in here because everybody's smiling and they love they love what they're doing it was like yeah we do so creating that space the space yeah thank you for sharing that any other thoughts on that around how to either what you've done to build awareness or create that culture or change the culture in your place of employment well I'm not an expert in all of that I mean I'm more of an experiential guy right I live in and and that's that's a keyword for me that's one of those KPIs and DEI cultural awareness is an experiential learned thing I can't go tell you to be equitable and understand my culture unless you believe it so you know and I like to think of okay so the assumption here is that we're in the United States talking about you know the majority being the Anglo population then we're the minority here but what if a white guy goes to Brazil you know it's all the same thing but in reverse he's going to learn a lot and come back and be a different individual when he's back and then he'll really understand all of this that we're talking about so you know being intentional in education you know there are professionals out there this question came up a couple of times there are people that do this for a living that can teach us all in different ways how to be understand cultural differences cultural communications you know the word the word the spoken word is also an assumption you know loophole if you want to call it that and you know and and if you're afraid of it go hire somebody they'll be happy to help you out in education and you can you're a minor you know you may be a small business you know I mean it's nice if we have a a large company that can afford this but where are you for a company at five small restaurant of seven employees you know come to one of the chambers and we'll be happy to do something like this for you and and and help you get started at least so you know be intentional and go ask for help you don't have you know we don't know everything and we don't have to know everything thank you for sharing that we do have a question coming in related to this would anyone be able to provide a good example of a workplace imperative using equity I am in the construction business that brings in many cultures I'm not the our Howard Smith our asker so it's what's the first one can anyone provide a good example of a workplace imperative using equity okay well I I will try Howard to jump in here I think so if you look at places that have great cultures for example it's controversial sometimes but Google supposedly has great workplace culture and one of their workplace imperatives is let people be themselves magnify people's strengths so that's something that you can use perhaps as one of your workplace imperatives and then as far as being equitable are you giving everyone the same opportunity to magnify their strengths if someone's got a strength that you read that resonates with you just on an individual level I think sometimes we tend to magnify that person maybe promote them maybe look at them more when you might have someone else who has a strength in an area where you're weak and you need to magnify their strength as well and maybe that's something that doesn't resonate with you because culturally it's different from you but that's just something for you to take a look at so that could be a workplace imperative magnify your people's strengths and recognizing that things that are culturally different from you may be a huge asset to your business I have to say something now um I think you know what I what I I I really like what you're saying because it's it's about maintaining this culture right that's part of the the work I get to do now and one of the things I'm a big fan of from a practical sense is there's a company out there called Corn Fairy and they have these competencies right and there's 36, 38 or something like that and so as you hire people you can bring those competent you can pick which competencies you want to keep because that's the culture you want to have in your company you also talk about performance you know annual conversations or quarterly conversations with your staff on those same competencies right especially depending on the function area you want them to do and then you want them to develop right so some that I'm going to be a hot and a one out of 10 with all these competencies but you may want to be able to coach them up appropriately because then now you're having quality conversations and and that and I think that's something looking for in construction if someone's hourly and they've got to get in and out that's going to be tough to do but if you can find a way to to spend that time with them especially if you if there's some of that you want to develop into a manager or some more supervisor people that's it's it's well worth it because finding a good manager because more times than not we all probably seen it people get bumped up into managers because the heart is working per person and more knowledgeable in that area that doesn't necessarily mean they should be managing people right that's true good performances not necessarily mean they should be promoted sometimes they're best suited just for the job that they have but all right well in our last section we've got just a few minutes here to talk about how to build a DEI community within the organization let me look over the questions here for a quick second I think probably the best way to do this is from a again asking what we've done from our experience what are some of the actions that you've taken to build bridges across different groups within an organization yes Betty well one of the organizations that is is pretty prominent in Boulder is intercambio and they've created talk about building bridges they've built bridges and really getting involved with them in their fundraising they are a non-profit and in their events helping sponsor events that was a huge thing for us they it not only it brought us together with this other community through that bridge building and I think that's what would be worthwhile for any organization to find a group non-profit that they could help sponsor events or really get integrated in that community I think it really would be helpful so building bridges that's one of our vision statements of the Latino Chamber but I'm going to look at my notes here because I wrote some answer a part of an answer for that so I would say that you know again you have to be intentional you have to want it hard enough that you're going to make take actions on it I would say that you know the importance of community engagement you already said that and and ask yourself your business reflect your local community proportionally because older count is going to be different than somewhere in California or somewhere in Minnesota right so you know if if you can just look around and say okay my business looks like my community that's a good starting point because it'll it'll start all the conversations and all the issues that we've mentioned here today is you know being diverse you have to start right being diverse and if you don't know you know if your assumptions are are there so you don't know what you don't know then at least if you have the diverse group then you can start inviting people to plan the party and I you know one of the things I I was jotting as I was getting to hear the team members here we could talk about is you know I talked like bias training ERGs I also had you know thinking about when with with startup folks there's the incubator and the accelerator which allows you to network right if you would hopefully if for those you'd get accepted into one of those is really top tier ones is accelerator or incubators you know should you may want to check their diversity right you want to what their what their missions they're going to help you get started there might be some funding involved but if if you really want to make sure your work as it represents the diverse client base that you want as well as maybe a staff you may want to check that out but I think you know sometimes we'll hang in through we see a lot of job descriptions now that talk about bias training and ERGs without really taking the time to the other things that folks have talked about here so there's no easy way to do this stuff you you commit and you got to make it part of your business but your your overall business plan absolutely we've got about 30 seconds left from our 15 seconds left and I'm going to ask a question that is there any final thought that any of you just that we didn't cover all of the questions we laid out there so is there any topic you're passionate about that you want to try and share and about 30 seconds I want to say be okay with being uncomfortable I think that's the most important thing if you are in your comfort zone all the time then you're not doing the work that needs to be done to get where you want to go especially when it comes to EDI I'd like to just offer a question for you guys and uh and it's is this what does DEI Utopia look like to you and once we don't have time to talk about this but once you can answer that questions for yourself it'll give you a good path forward on and what to do next I think that's a great way to wrap it up and I think we've talked a lot about if we want to have DEI we have to start internally first and we need to be genuine and then I think great way to think about is that okay what does it look like when we when we get there what does the end result look like so thank you all for being on the panel because I think it's been a good discussion thank you thank you thank you can I get those resources I'll get them to the organizers yes and then wherever you guys should share it look uh just yeah we'll get we'll put up in chat the question about some resources and so we'll we'll get those up in chat looking at the next session that we have coming up here is an introduction to employee ownership we're going to be looking at what is what is it and why would you why would you choose to do it for your business Ashley Ortiz of the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center will teach us a little bit about how to learn about the different types of EO models as well as the benefits they have for owners and employees and then how you can start down the path of ownership towards that shared ownership you're in your own business I will mention that there are a couple happy hours this afternoon and so one of the great things about Longmont Startup Week is being able to connect with other people and so the happy hours are from four to seven p.m. at the Roost and Gross and Bart Brewery so hopefully we'll be able to see you all there and I don't know if any of the panelists are able to join us but you might be able to connect with them as well with that thank you all for for for us today Thank you Chopped Salads taste better? Chopped Five uses fresh from the farm ingredients and chops them into our salads to enhance their natural flavor add our delicious roast to chicken press and house-made dressings bursting with flavor makes everything together and taste why Chopped Salads are simply better come into Chopped Five and enjoy our watermelon chopper only $8.99 order online at chopped5.com and find out how Chopped Five is chopping up fresh flavor and eat with no regrets What if the end is the beginning What if flowers never bloomed What if the cure to all this heartache is inside of you We are all so full of questions Where are we going to go in this life then What if every moment matters If this is all pretend What if we're not supposed to know What the future holds Sunshine above and roots below What if we're just here to grow It's just one thing we're looking for In a world so big with hearts so small What if we loved like we were children Not afraid to fall We don't know where we're going We just don't want to go alone What if the road is all that matters And we never find a home What if we're not supposed to know What the future holds Sunshine above and roots below What if we're just here to grow What if the end is the beginning What if flowers never bloomed What if the cure to all this heartache is inside of you We are all so full of questions Where are we going to go in this life then What if every moment matters If this is all pretend What if the end is the beginning What if flowers never bloomed What if the cure to all this heartache is inside of you We are all so full of questions Where are we going to go in this life then What if every moment matters If this is all pretend What if we're not supposed to know What the future holds Sunshine above and roots below What if we're just here to grow Just one thing we're looking for In a world so big with hearts so small Of like we were children Not afraid to fall We just don't want to go All that matters And we never find a home What if we're not supposed to know What the future holds Sunshine above and roots below What if we're just here to post a note What the future holds Sunshine above and roots below I was wading through the snow What if we're just here to grow What if the end is the beginning What if flowers never bloom What if the cure to all this heartache is inside of you We are all so full of questions Where are we going to go in this life then What if every moment matters If this is all pretend What if we're not supposed to know What the future holds Sunshine above and roots below What if we're just here to grow Just one thing we're looking for In a world so big with hearts so small So, and welcome to this session on Introduction to Employee Ownership My name is Jenny Loper and I'll be your moderator today I am the Director of Operations at Zebulon Solutions We are an end-to-end product development firm that work with small and medium-sized companies and helping them take their ideas from concept all the way through manufacturing. My specific experience is related to operational consulting and supplier quality as well as helping customers find that contract manufacturer for their product. I'm joined with Ashley Ortiz She is an entrepreneurial business specialist with more than 15 years of experience. She has a passion for equitable economy and is the Technical Assistant Specialist at the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center Previously worked for the Bay areas at the Mendee Association. So Ashley, welcome and thank you for joining us today. As we get into this, I think I'll hand this over to you and let you talk through the first couple slides and then I'll interrupt you again. So yes, great to be here. Thanks everyone for joining us today. Before I do dive in, I just wanted to ask a question to anyone out there who's listening to see if you might be willing to put into the chat box any information about whether you're here today because you're thinking about starting up an employee owned business as a startup it'd be really helpful to know if anyone here today is here looking for that information. So I will dive into a little bit of information and Jenny will compile that information and we'll report a little bit. So a little bit about the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center where I work our main mission is to build a more just and sustainable economy through employee ownership and we do that by supporting businesses through technical assistance helping businesses convert to employee ownership or support them through startup of these types of models. We also provide education on employee ownership on different models of benefits of those businesses and best practices and then we also work to create connections between employee owned businesses to help strengthen the whole sector. And a little bit about me, Jenny gave a great background just a little bit more I started focusing on worker owned cooperatives a specific kind of employee owned business in grad school and ended up focusing my thesis on supporting worker owned businesses in Los Angeles and then ended up working for the Arizmendi Association of Cooperatives in the Bay Area which is a network of nine worker owned businesses and I did support work behind the scenes so to speak for all of those businesses was also a working owner of one of the bakeries of that network and then moved to work with the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center last year. So really quick I'll just pause for a second and see if we got any feedback. I don't think we have any feedback but if you are online and able to engage with this go ahead and click on that Q&A button. I think you have to ask the question but you can just put in your answers in there not as real questions and that's fine. The question that I guess I will ask if you want to go ahead and try and answer this in the Q&A is what interest brought you here to listen to an intro about employee ownership. So I think with that let's see if anyone answers on that. Great and I'll keep going. So I just wanted to start with a really quick overview. What is employee ownership? At its simplest level it's a proven business concept which has really been around back to the mid-1800s and it just means that a broad base of the staff members who work in a specific business own a financial share in the company where they work. And I wanted to place today's talk a little bit in the current crisis that I know all of us in the business world are going through. Not only with the pandemic but also you might have heard of a movement within the business community now that a lot of people are calling the Silver Tsunami which is that many many baby boomers are retiring and lots of those businesses are at risk of closure because they're not finding buyers and there's no one to transfer those businesses to and as we know when that happens local jobs are lost overall right now in our economy many working people are not economically secure. As I mentioned the pandemic made that worse. There's long-term unemployment happening at really high levels. Many companies are switching roles to contract positions because of crunches and finances and BIPOC businesses workers and communities have been disproportionately affected by these challenges. So within this we feel like there's a great potential of employee ownership and we've seen this historically happen in several iterations most recently after the 2008 crash the number of worker co-ops which is one type of employee ownership actually doubled in the U.S. and that's because oftentimes you know in times of crises and in challenges people look to come together often to find something new and to explore all the options they need before they shut down a business or decide whether or not to start one. And one of the great potentials to employee ownership is that you do get to share the benefits and good times but also the burdens and hard times but at least you're doing that collectively with more people. So I'll stop for one more second and check in. Sure we did get one question from Dan or comment from Dan about he's interested in EO business in the tech space and is curious about anyone doing this because he hasn't come across anybody in the tech space doing an EO so there's that. One thing that I will say to our audience that like I said we will pause kind of at the end of each section so if you do have questions go ahead and type them in and I will interrupt Ashley and ask her. I want to talk about the tech space or your next comments. Great thanks. Yeah there is a lot happening and I'm looking is called platform cooperatives for tech startups. It's a way that the cooperative model and the employee ownership concept is being manifested in a digital way and across large platforms. One resource you could also look to is called start.coop start.coop is actually an incubator for cooperative businesses that is being modeled very closely after a lot of the venture startups around tech so just a little note about that we can definitely talk more about that at the end. So one great thing in the context of the challenging climate that we're in for business is that you can make a difference simply by becoming employee owned. It allows you to become more resilient in times of economic downturn. There's solutions within these models that have been time tested over multiple generations of businesses and the different waves that have gone through the economies and it's a really great way to help revitalize not only the local economy where the business is but also the larger economy that the workers and the owners are contributing to. So some benefits of EO for your company. These six I'm going to dive into in more detail here as we go along. So creating a stronger, more resilient company. As you can imagine if the workers who are there within a company actually own the firm the company tends to perform substantially better and here are some statistics about that did they EO companies tend to have higher profit margins faster growth per year 25% more likely to stay in business than traditional companies and worker co-ops one of the types that I mentioned earlier are way more likely to still be in business after five years compared to about 20% of 90% are still in business after about 20% of traditional companies and this is often in cases where you see that businesses are not only sharing the financial piece of the company but also engaging employees in participation in how to run that business. Also having employees as a built-in buyer if you are already in business and thinking about selling that business around 80% of business owners actually don't find a buyer when they're hoping to do that and right now we're seeing only about 15% transition within families. So selling to employees creates this natural buyer it also creates consistency between jobs, local business stability it can allow you to preserve your legacy again if you're already in business and something that helps you tap into tax benefits for not only the company and the owners but also the employees once they become owners as well. So taking care of your employees this you can do from the start as a startup you can do this by converting ownership and obviously this has implications that are positive throughout many iterations of being in business. EO companies tend to be able to pay higher wages, have better benefits and employee owners in lots of cases have opportunities to participate in decision making which can really sort of ripple out into all types of community spaces people learning about democracy within their workplace can have a big impact on the community as a whole. I wanted to point out to just a quick note about micro-businesses some of the things we'll talk about today are about larger businesses or about converting them but these models can work really well for small or micro businesses of just a couple people or even one because businesses can come together in this way to either form new businesses to work together to support compatible products or services or there's larger cooperative networks that can be formed where people can share benefits like marketing and supplies working space all sorts of things so it's really something that's applicable to all sizes of business and then just a quick note about the tax incentives I won't go into too much detail today but no matter what path you go down there are great benefits and ESOP one kind of employee ownership that I'll talk about allows owners to avoid double taxation on corporate earnings and their percentage of ownership that's held by the ESOP and then there's a Code 1042 which applies to the worker co-ops another type of EO that has resulting favorable tax treatment so there's lots of stuff to research on this front so I'll just pause for a minute before we switch gears into the types of employee ownership and see if there's any questions yeah so please do put some questions if you have questions put them up and we'll cover them here while I'm waiting for questions to be typed in I guess one question for you is that when we're starting a business what is something that I should one more time I can't talk today goodness alright when starting a business should I start as an EO company or change that into the structure after the business has grown that's a great question really you can go down either path and we're lucky in Colorado there are tremendous resources here all the way from the state government down to nonprofit sector resources etc so really I would say look at this path no matter what direction you're going there's great startup resources whether it's in tech or you know any industry and pathways to go down towards employee ownership but also again if you have a business already this is a great model for whatever type of transition you'd like to make whether you want to leave the business whether you just want to make that change and stay a part of it and even if you don't start up as employee owned learning a little bit about it if it's something that intrigues you at the beginning could help you make some decisions on the structure the way that you set up that business that would allow you to transition into that kind of structure later down the road so you really have a lot of options how long does it take to transition into an EO business typically I realize there's probably a lot of assumptions that it's going to go into answering that question but what that timeline look like yeah it is of course super super variable but I'd say maybe on average about a year would be the first time from the first time we either talk to an owner or an employee about the idea move through that process bring in the specialty services that we need to help that transition like legal services typically CPA's those sorts of folks once we get everybody on board and help both the selling owners and the employees get on board figure out the new structure maybe on average sometimes it's a lot longer though and I definitely recommend if you do already own a business and you're thinking about it to start early and it's fine to just start the thoughts around that especially if it's a succession planning type situation sometimes we'll work with businesses 10 years before somebody's wanting to transition out and that's fantastic to have that much time and get the concepts and the workings of the business adapted to this new structure is there any specific size or type of business that is best suited to employee ownership there's not as you'll see I'm going to jump into talking about different structures in a minute they can apply to any type of business as I mentioned even micro businesses can pool together to create types of employee owned models any business that's generally three or more can become a worker co-op and then ESOPs we see up to thousands of employee businesses so there's something out there that should work there's also employee owned trusts all sorts of models great well I will switch gears here a little bit this is a quick picture and quote from Namaste Solar really inspiring worker owned cooperative in Colorado and I'm going to talk about just the kind of three main types of employee ownership really two main ones as I've already mentioned both the worker owned cooperative there's also an employee stock ownership plan which is called an ESOP and then there's some other EO models or pathways things like employee owned trusts and basic stock and profit sharing programs and just a note here a lot of companies do take gradual steps to full or broad based employee ownership so again if you're small or just starting up it's not something you have to do all at once there's lots of ways to begin to share the ownership in terms of the financial aspect possibly and then bring in more participation so lots of ways that this can happen and it does often happen in multiple iterations so just a quick overview nationwide to give you a sense of the sector there's around 600 worker cooperatives right now and you can see just kind of a recent scattering of where they're clustered and ESOPs there's around 6500 total across the country as well and see here these are different industries I don't have all the details here but to answer that question further all of these represent different industries so you can see they're really all over the country but now diving in just real quickly into these few structures a worker owned cooperative is actually a 100% employee owned business and it includes democratic values in the very structure of the business in this case the workers own the business and they share the profits and decision making within this business is democratic meaning that one worker has one vote and nobody can actually own more of the company to collectively then have a greater say than anyone else they work with and this one really is appropriate for any size company it's great for very small businesses startups with just a few people you can start from this form the state of Colorado has tremendous resources as I said earlier supporting this we have actually two different types of structures within the statute of the state which is not universal across the country right now we're lucky to have it here so you can actually start up as this type of business within that path towards starting up a new entity and this is a pretty popular option for a lot of companies because it only costs around 10 to 15,000 set up as a conversion and so I just want to point that out that would be for companies that are already in business if you're thinking of starting it up from scratch it really doesn't cost anymore to actually go down that path from the very beginning than starting any other type of company and just a quick overview of the governance to give you a view of what it looks like within the business so co-ops are governed by a board of directors like another company that's elected by and comprised of a majority of those employee owners so as I mentioned one worker has one vote they get to choose who represents them in a lot of cooperatives everybody actually serves on the board of directors so there isn't even a split between who's running the board and the business itself and management can look very traditional there can be hierarchy within a cooperative but they essentially the structures are in place so that those management teams are answerable to that employee owned board which in the case of a co-op would often be a lot of the same people so you start to see in this case people are just wearing different hats they're not only doing the work of the company they might be on the board and they might also be a shareholder of the company just a quick couple examples of co-ops in Colorado to point you in the direction of if you're interested Fly and Miata just actually was a conversion of an almost 40 year old company last year where nine or I think eight in the end worker owners ended up buying the business from the two original selling owners really great inspiring story another one in Denver is an interior design company fully woman owned and they are now an employee co-op and just one more note here back to the micro owned business structure as I mentioned the cooperative structure can be a really great fit if you are starting up it's very low cost similar to other businesses and it really has so much flexibility built into it for you to form your own entity and or then bring together other cooperatives or even other types of businesses to pool together so definitely a great thing to research if that's where you're at right now eSops are employee stock ownership plans and basically in this type of format the employees own shares of the company through a trust so as opposed to the worker owned co-op where they own the whole business in this case they're owning a portion of the company through a 401k retirement plan so basically the company is making contributions into that plan typically based on a percent of wages and typically this is better for larger companies around maybe 40 or 50 employees with larger revenues it can work for smaller companies there's always exceptions so if it's of interest at a smaller scale definitely still reach out see if it might be a fit there's great tax benefits and the startup cost the conversion costs rather for this tend to be anywhere from 50 even 75,000 or up so that's why we typically see it working best with larger companies and it is highly regulated so it's requiring an annual valuation and the cost associated with that in an ongoing form so you see really quickly just in comparison here in this case the company actually sets up a board and a trustee represents the employees at that board level and by law employee owners have the right to vote on certain decisions they can have additional voting rights in this case but it's not necessary in an ESOP like it is in a cooperative so you can have a participatory culture and management but you can also have an ESOP trust and still run the business in a very similar way to how that business was set up originally and a couple of quick examples here Stoneage is a tool manufacturing company in the Durango area and also in Arvada we have a seed company that distributes seeds and you know both really great examples and also just to show how many different industries these businesses are in and then as I mentioned there's a whole other realm of businesses that we often refer to sort of as the in between as I mentioned you can go down these paths without taking a full leap into employee ownership by doing things like an employee on trust stock sharing programs and or different types of employee stock purchase plans so there's ways to go forward if neither a worker co-op or ESOP feels exactly right but the general concept is interesting feel free to reach out to the resources I give at the end and see if something might be a good fit locally here in the area and Fort Collins and Loveland Palmer flowers you might know they're organized with a stock option plan that shares ownership and then just a quick overview here just on the Colorado scale there are right now around 50 employee owned companies including worker co-ops and ESOPs and some of these other models that I talked about and then here are some other names I think it always helps to see real examples of these when you're trying to envision who you might look to for a model or information going forward so I will stop for a minute that's the super quick overview of a few types of employee ownership there's a lot of information to speak an entire session on just that portion of it I got one question for clarification so you say one employee one vote does that apply to executive management as well it's they sort of they happen in connection with each other so you can have both of those so co-ops can have executive management and they can have a board and both are interacting it doesn't take the place of that in a cooperative all of the people that work there have an equal vote to whoever is in that executive management role and the management might be dictating certain things more traditionally like a different like in a company that's not employee owned on the day-to-day basis but when it comes to those high level governance decisions that's the real difference in a co-op is that everybody that's there who is an owner is allowed to have an equal vote at that scale are you seeing a trend towards more EO businesses and away from private or stock owner ownership yeah it is definitely growing as you can see though the sector is still small and comparative to the number of businesses in the U.S. right now it's I think one of the biggest reasons for that still is an access to capital which is kind of a whole other topic but it's something being discussed right now at the national scale like how do you help grow these types of companies and get the capital in there if it's the employees that are the ones trying to buy the companies the federal government has tried to start mandating some of these things all the way back to the main street act really putting their support behind it but so far there's still a gap around how the lending and the capital can get into the hands of the people that would like to buy the businesses so I think that's probably still one of the largest hurdles to growing the sector in a worker cooperative how are people hired or fired in a worker co-op it's fairly similar to hiring employees right you still have to go through the same process as having traditional employees of hiring and firing but the difference is oftentimes worker co-ops for the hiring side will have what's called a candidacy period which is where people will be hired on as an employee but not brought on as owners because as you can imagine you wouldn't want to hire somebody and become a co-owner with them right up front you'd probably like to have some amount of time to say do I really want to share my company with this person so co-ops have really a wide variation of candidacy periods and the business can decide that itself it could be six months, it could be five years whatever feels right and then people are typically brought through a learning process they learn about the company, they learn about how to understand its finances how it operates from that governance level and then typically there's a vote at the end of whatever it is and the current owners of that company will vote whether they want to extend ownership to that new person and the other person the worker decides if they want to buy in and there's typically some buy-in amount that's decided upon within the company and then at that point they become a co-owner and share in the votes from that point forward and in the profits of the company and then firing out in the bylaws it's not that much different than traditional companies typically it's a vote of the working owners in a similar fashion they would decide to ask that person to leave and they would be given their buy-in back typically again this can be set up differently for different companies but they might get that buy-in plus any of the profits that they have amassed as a co-worker up until that point great what specific resources are there in Colorado for EO businesses we're lucky to have lots of great resources here we're the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center we're a non-profit we work statewide so we have lots of resources that we can talk to you about and also the state office was funded recently by Governor Polis who's a big supporter of Employee Ownership and so through Oedit the Department of the State Government in Denver there's a whole Employee Ownership Office and I have links for those at the end and they have tremendous resources now just a lot there's a whole EO commission now that's working on behalf of this sector within the state that brings together incredible minds all trying to help support the sector there's also the Center for Community Wealth Building which is in Denver a non-profit especially for startups I'd recommend reaching out to them they work with worker-owned co-operative startups and have lots of resources as well great maybe we can put those resources up in the links for the session on the page great we can do that I don't have any other questions so talk a little bit about how an EO startup or transition works it's a little different so I'll just try to hit the middle here today so hopefully this will apply to whatever space you're in if you're listening today the beginning of the process obviously is the exploration phase as I mentioned earlier this can vary in the length of time that it takes within different types of companies and for different reasons that you might be pursuing employee ownership so exploring all of the types of benefits that I mentioned is a great place to start there's a lot online about that you can start as I mentioned with the Colorado Employee Ownership Office reaching out to us and then if you start looking nationwide too there's actually a US Federation there's the NCEO which is the National Center for Employee Ownership that can help with ESOPs and other types and through those what you'll probably start to find is a lot of examples of other companies and hopefully that will help start that envisioning of what this might look like so there's lots to explore to try to figure out what is the right structure whether you're just starting up or whether you're an owner or an employee within a business you can start this exploration from whatever perspective you are coming to because often I'll talk about the owner's perspective in this but oftentimes we do have employees calling who are starting to think about this and wonder if they might be able to bring the idea into the mix of the place where they work the second phase is the assessment phase and this is where we can help the other organizations I mentioned and this is where you're really starting to look at the details of your company this would be for start-ups starting to look at how these models might work from the get-go depending on your size or possibly how you might build in to the core of the structure the pathways that would make that transition even easier and less costly if you wanted to go there and how you could start bringing people in especially if it's one of those in-between type models of sharing stock or things like that all of that you can start to assess and this is where you'd really start to get into the details of what size company are we what model do we want to look at how many people are we what industry are we in and starting to look at is this viable right now might it be more viable later so at the end of this phase then you would move into the structure phase and that's where you've really made the decision you know what makes the most sense and typically this is the part where you'd want to connect with lawyers who are knowledgeable about employee ownership often CPAs because as you can imagine how the books are set up differs with different types of employee ownership so that's the phase where everything is literally put into place whether it's a corporation with bylaws those would be drafted an operating agreement if it's an LLC different types of companies can be employee owned and we do see that it can be helpful connecting with service providers that understand these models already so that you're not reinventing the wheel when you're creating those kind of documents and we're lucky in Colorado to have more and more of those people who are specializing in these specific ownership types and then we see the execute phase which is where the actual conversion would happen or if you're a startup the actual company would be set up and launched and then you start to figure out all the details of how do you run a business collectively we at RME OC can help with that transition especially with worker cooperatives as you can imagine figuring out how people can operate effectively and efficiently and compete against other companies if there's say eight people making every decision on a governance level rather than one or two it is different but there are really really great ways and structures for communication and decision making that can allow businesses to remain competitive and all the way back to those stats I talked about at the beginning we really do see when co-ops and all types of employee ownership can work on those structures and find a place to operate effectively together they can actually outperform other types of businesses and then once that transition happens hopefully those structures are coming into place and then you move into more of a support phase and that's also where groups like ours the Colorado State Office the national groups like the Federation of co-ops and CO all those groups have ongoing programs webinars conferences all types of things to support you when you're in this structure and in the sector of employee ownership so that's a really great piece of going down this path I would say too once you are a part of the sector because it is smaller there's just a nice sub sector of businesses for you to connect to and people tend to be very supportive of each other because you have this tie and this bond we're starting to see some great peer networks manifest in Colorado one specifically for ESOP another for worker co-ops and businesses are coming together for happy hours and different breakfast meetups specifically to share ideas and support each other as they move forward so it's not only support within the sector itself between businesses but there's all of us here within the state and nationally who are here then to help once you actually convert or set up as an employee owned business and then some readiness factors to think about this is mostly towards conversions again but I did put in some thoughts here for startups so I think a lot of them would apply in the way again that you might just be thinking about these things in the future so financial health profits obviously if you're going to convert the business that's pretty key that the business is on a good path for the employees to take over a committed selling owner and in this case as a startup being committed to that path can just again help define the decisions you're going to make throughout all of the startup so that you're on this path even if you don't start there committed and experienced employees in any case obviously that's very key but remember that it's often kind of the chicken and the egg by turning into an employee owned company or starting up is one you tend to engage employees in that way and they do become more committed and experienced because they engage with more within the company operations and then a proven business track record if it's in conversion that can help so some more sort of sub thoughts which I won't go fully into but specifically for startups do you have a core group of three or more that's the easiest way to start up a co-op if you are smaller than three as I mentioned there are ways to bring different types of businesses together so you could still continue that exploration and see how that might be able to manifest if you're already in business is the business growing what does that look like if the employees are going to consider taking over the business trust obviously a huge word in this whole arrangement between employees and owners and that can really start right from the beginning of working with anyone you're going to start up a business with and looking at how you're going to share information that's something you can build in at the beginning that can lead to a really healthy environment for a later conversion and then incentives tied to performance you know how is it going to look where the employee contributes to the overall success how are they going to be connected to the profits and the success of the business one quick note I wanted to throw in here specifically for startups I'm sure many of you have heard of this if you are pursuing a startup there's a thing called the business model canvas which is a way to vision for business planning and it can often take the place or be a starting point anyway for a larger business plan and I just wanted to note this specifically here as a tool that can really lend itself to working collectively because it's a very visual way to envision how a business will start up this is often a poster you can either do it digitally or literally on the wall with sticky notes and in those sorts of times it's really great if you have multiple people all want to contribute ideas as opposed to sitting down and having to write a traditional business plan check this out there's a lot online there's some books that go into it and companies of all types use this it's not specifically for employee owned businesses but I just think it's specifically a really neat tool that has this collective leaning because it's visual it's quick it's designed to be populated with lots of smaller ideas that pool together to form basically the way your business is going to make money so here's just a kind of summary of what I've been talking about in terms of the support for the whole transition to this concept whether you're just starting out and switching your mindset to this or you're literally switching a business we're here to help and there's other entities here to help doing all these things so we can help you source solutions help you explore the different models help implement it and then help get that education that I was talking about so here are a few resources Colorado Employee Ownership Office the US Federation I already mentioned the National Center on Employee Ownership there's also the Democracy at Work Institute I'd recommend looking them up they have a ton of resources they're doing a lot of advocacy for the whole sector across the country oh and also the workers the owners collaborative the website becoming employee owned they actually have a whole section of case studies which I think can be really helpful you can break it down by either the geographic region or by sector type and try to see some companies that might be in the sector that you are in and read about how they became employee owned the other ones I mentioned so they will be here as resources and that's it for my full content I'd love to switch to any questions and just thanks again for listening everyone thank you Ashley one question where can we find the vision template that you shared a few slides back the the business model the canvas yeah if you go back like two or three slides yeah that one yeah it is open source online so if you just do a web search for the business model canvas I've found PDFs that you can download as I mentioned I've even used ones where we've blown it up to a big poster size where we've wanted to do visioning for employee owned businesses from the beginning and you can put those up on the wall read a little bit about these different they call them the building blocks so there's nine building blocks and what you do is go through collectively to brainstorm everything you can think about what would your customer segment be or one of their unique pieces is called a value proposition what value are you going to bring to your customers there's actually a whole sub book about that so there's a book about the business model canvas but a whole thing that dives into value propositions and then you can see you go into everything else here where do you think the money is going to come from and they recommend brainstorming with sticky notes as I mentioned because it's meant to be a very light and quick way to envision and be able to change ideas over time so as you can see it's just a nice way if you picture a group say of six people starting up a business together to be able to do that over time you can leave it up you can change the ideas as things iterate also larger companies I think it was the iPod actually for Apple they have an example where they use this so you can use it later on just to set up ideas for new products and how the revenue is going to come in for that product and how you'll specifically tap into a segment of your customer base so it really just has lots of applicability it's a neat model but again it's nice there's tons online that's open and for you to download great Janine is asking if she could get a copy of your slide deck would you be willing to make that available sure yes in terms of setting up a new company does deciding to go in the EO direction have any impact on the type of business that is looking to be set up so like an LLC versus an S corp or are those an EO like is that another option can you talk a little bit about how those would work together yeah there's really I wouldn't call it an impact there's it will look different which is why I was recommending trying to find legal experts or CPA's that have that knowledge built in because there are aspects of the bylaws that the statutes dictate need to be there kind of like the guardrails that make it different than say starting up an LLC there will be things built into those structures if you decide to set up that way for the in-between models and ESOPs it's a little bit different because it's not built into the very core of the company but those things would get written into whatever agreements there are around profit sharing etc so again still nice if you can find someone to help you do that but lots of people could probably research that and we are finding more and more service providers who are interested in it and hearing about it and wanting to learn so even by just going down that path and asking they might be able to tap into the resources now as it's growing especially in the state of Colorado where people can adapt those pieces but it can be an LLC it can be a corporation everything can basically be applied and it just does take that shift that difference to put up those pieces that make it uniquely employee owned great this is a really great question if I have a startup what are some actual first steps I can take to start as an EO company as a startup yeah I'd say it's really starting at that first bubble that I pointed out exploring try to find examples that are similar so that you can look to those for inspiration reaching out to all the groups that I mentioned almost all of them have startup resources and more and more I just recently talked to someone at the Denver Public Library and they have a whole realm of business support there and they're starting to learn more about employee ownership so that when you go in there they can help you do research around these types of companies so in a lot of ways for a startup you would go down exactly the same path as any startup because at the end of the day a business that's employee owned has to be a business and has to be successful so these things get put into the mix along with the traditional path to employee ownership so first and foremost going down the road of making sure like using the business model canvas those types of tools knowing that the business can be successful and then looking to these resources either statewide or nationally to figure out how the specifics need to be set up for whatever type you choose or whatever type you might want to reach later down the road say if you're starting up but five to ten years out you want to switch to this you can start to find that information to build it in to the core of that business yeah I think one thing that with the startup companies funding is and having enough resources is always a challenge and so you certainly have a lot of information about this and the organization that you work for the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center how does that organization help convert a company to an EO are you guys funded by the state are you funded by the company you're doing that like what how does that work just as we're trying to plan for what type of cost might be involved in this yeah so what first I guess to answer the first part we are funded not only in partnership with some state funding but also by nonprofit funders grant funding so we can work a lot of times without having to charge clients we do a lot of introductory work and a lot of ongoing support and things if we do engage more deeply with a client to go down a worker cooperative path then we do have a small technical advising contract that typically spans about a year as I mentioned walking through the company with the company through that whole process and then yeah it is just it is the part of the startup challenge right where does that funding come from it's a challenge for EO companies or other ones for conversions I think in the slides I mentioned some ballpark planning for startups I don't think you'd have to plan for much different again if you're already decided on that path you'll be going down a very similar path so there's not much of a difference there but the conversions are where the costs come in where some planning has to happen and oftentimes there is in a conversion situation the selling owners are willing to finance some of that cost for the employees and get paid back over time for the value of the company and then we oftentimes also look to some national lenders who specifically will support employee ownership and through a merger of those two sources the employees can get enough funding to buy the business and then pay that off over time so a lot of times those costs for the conversion get lumped into that larger sale and paid off slowly great thank you so much for your time today and for sharing this information about employee ownership I know that it's not something that probably comes to the forefront of one's mind when they're starting a company but I think this is very helpful today so thank you so much for doing that this is actually wraps up our sessions for today so the end of day two looking forward into day three tomorrow the theme tomorrow is going to be reimagined and there's several panels and sessions on DEI leadership and the great resignation so that sounds like a great line up tomorrow again a reminder this afternoon also I've said this the last couple sessions one of the best things about long month start up week is meeting other people in the community and so there's two happy hours that started in about an hour at four o'clock and go until seven there's the roost and then also the gross and Bart Brewery so I think I'm going to probably head over to the roost and grab a little bit of lunch I haven't had that yet but I'll probably see you at the happy hour if you'll go there again thank you so much for attending today and I'm looking forward to your participation tomorrow as I do wrap up I do want to thank our sponsors because without our sponsors long month start up week would not be what it is so thank you to the arc thrift stores avaset communications ward electric company and the long month economic development partnership as our platinum sponsors for our gold sponsors we have biz west left hand brewery and docket lee the connected sponsors that are downtown long month and high planes bank and then also we have some in kind sponsors and if you go out to the networking events you'll see the handprint ink circle graphics sticker giant in chop five and I know that there's sticker giant has provided some really fun stickers this year that you can pick up at the networking events and happy hours so thank you so much and hopefully we'll see you in the happy hours dig in deep whenever I see to find an untamed love to push and shove with a rose and to give my respects I've come to be lost under time I hold house down my heart unmask my scars turn pain into art dig in deep whenever I see I've come to meet the stranger in me