Hey, good afternoon everybody Tom Stewart here. I'm with Liz Trotter and Olu August and this is not smart business moves Good job, Tom. No, it is not smart business moves but we this will be a smart business move for anybody who's on here watching because Olu he's dying to share this AI stuff and We're like heck. Yeah, let's do it, but we also are super focused right now on foundation So we want to make sure that everybody who is thinking Should I should I be going we do have a room? open for you probably so We just want to make sure that you are not missing out on the opportunity for foundations as well Well, we'll share more about that later, but let's jump right into how do you say I to generate more sales Oh, what did you want to share with us? You're so desperate to share happy Monday? Happy Monday. What's going on guys? So, you know AI is not new it's been around since 1950 but now wait a minute 1950 seeing it on a whole different scale and 1950 AI now, yeah AI is not new AI has been around so when we talk about AI We're talking about a whole umbrella and actually I'm learning this as I'm going as I'm going along as well When I found this out, I was like pretty shocked, but when we say AI artificial intelligence a Whole umbrella of what artificial intelligence is right? It's not just going in chat GPT or You know using another AI to build some code so you can say hey now I have my own AI company, right? so Artificial intelligence itself has been around since 1950 But the way that we have access to it now is completely new to us right before it was really big companies military occasions stuff like that so Let me actually I think I'm a shimmer screwing on this. Ah says present is right there Thomas.  You should look it up because I actually don't believe it either But then when I was explained to me it made sense. So I was telling everyone that I was telling wasn't Tom earlier that my computers in Spanish and Just let I want to go present it since Spanish. All right, there it is So this is how you learn Spanish. Is that right? So you well, I'm forcing myself to Read it and see it and everything so I speak enough Spanish that I can get by the reading aspect I understand those but that's not in there. I'm sure there's a way wait, but it kind of is here nor there I just want to make a point that That the reason why you're doing that is you're trying to create an immersive Experience for yourself because you know you're going to learn Spanish better if you read it If you see it if you're living it every single day, correct for sure for sure 100% yeah, so it actually And in terms of business I was actually messaging someone a few days ago and I was saying that I need to get More entrepreneurs in the local area just because I'm in my area Yes, there's entrepreneurs and everything but I'm not as tapped in as to when I go to Foundations or as I say, I'm not as tapped in in my local community and I find that I'm even struggling But when I come to these events when I go to these things I feel like I'm more empowered because I'm around people were sharing ideas everything's going fast So I get kind of fueled up. Am I sharing my screen? I click share Bang now you are bang. Okay. Now I am there's a thousand means so I'm just gonna I'm There we go on here Can everybody still see me while I share? Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can't see my handsome face. Yeah, I got you So this is Google has been messing around with their AI a lot and really rolling out some things Some of the things that they put on early on really wasn't working as well, but now it's actually Google's making it easier so that you're Essentially gonna be able to phase out that middleman Calling an agency or dealing with an agency and asking them to set up your Google ads and Paying them on a monthly basis because this is just so Incredible so I wanted to share this with you guys. So if you're running Google ads, I want to share this I'm not gonna go through and teach you step by step how to create a Google ad campaign and all of that But this portion right here is called performance max So you would actually just go through click new campaign go through the prompts But this portion here asset generation is Big and I'm gonna tell you why it's big. So there's something called quality scores on Google and quality score is In summary, it's basically looking at what's the quality of the content that the Prospect is finding so that whoever's searching you on Google. What's the quality of the content? That they're finding on your website and how does it relate to what they're actually searching and Google Give a 1 to 10 score on that. So basically if somebody was searching house cleaning and Or deep house cleaning and they went to your website and that link was for Regular maintenance house cleaning you'd be ranked a little bit lower Whereas if they went to your site and it was showing deep house cleaning you'd be ranked a little bit higher in that quality score now That's that's a really basic summary of quality score But basically what the person's looking at how relative is it to what they're getting on your website? Well This in my opinion does away with that I don't even know how they're if they're even gonna need quality scores with this because what it does is the asset Generation when you create a new campaign on Google you set up your bidding strategy campaign settings Which includes location things like that like I said, I'm gonna get into that you go into your asset Generation and you can actually put so I have my website here. I'm gonna take this portion Website go back here, and I'm gonna put it into here and What it's doing it's literally crawling my website for photos for content for Keywords that are relative now if you guys are using open AI you already know that the quality or How precise you can be with the questions is gonna influence everything now. I'm no AI expert I don't want to make it seem like this is 1950 come on now you should have that down by now. I know, right? So No, I'm no AI expert But I I know this much is that the quality of which when you're working with like the chat GPT's The quality of the questions you ask is gonna Better output so With this the asset generation the more specific you can be about your product So it pulled all of this from my website now. This is only a few sentences So 268 words and you notice that you can go up to 3000 so if you can go more in depth about your service the AI is gonna have more things to work with so right now You see how it's clean services residential cleaning janitorial products and services now The website that I just the link that I just use is for a top-to-bottom cleaning which is our in-depth cleaning service For residential so I want to remove this because it's neither janitorial and we're not offering a product Right we're offering services, but I want to remove this So I can put things like deep cleaning not deep clean if And You can go on with different keywords as you can see you have up to 20 keywords that you can put in there So you go into the keywords you go into Exactly what you're offering and you want to click over here. You see it. Can you see my thing in Spanish? Yeah, we can see it in Spanish I'm afraid to click anything You translate over say again, could you translate that for us? Oh Sure stream yard is Comparatendo un patela. No, it's a streamer. It is showing my screen panthea They generate as a I'm probably saying it wrong. It's funny because When I read try to read Spanish, I sound horrible Pero hablo en un bien, you know, I can speak it and not have too much of an accent Yeah, that sounded actually pretty good. I was like, oh, all right So right now what it's doing is basically generating all the assets it's pulling photos. It's getting everything and it's From my website and trying to use it to create the best ad So you go in here It has apartment cleaning company top raider apartment cleaning So it's gonna be using these inputs to create headlines if I wanted to go through I can change them and Add different headlines as well again the better Quality you add like the more things you add the better the output is gonna be on here We have our long headlines Obviously didn't pull anything from my website probably because it's not that much things on this page Yes, I'm any paragraphs.  So if you have a page that has more More work verbiage. Yeah more content in general. It's gonna be better for this What exactly are we building here we're building an ad is that right or we're just building Yeah, so we're actually building a whole campaign not just one ad Okay, say good. Are we just building what I was wondering if we're building an ad or if we're just building an asset But it sounds like what you're building is the campaign Yeah, this this whole portion is for the campaign, but I'm right here in the asset portion so we once a performance max performance max is Basically the AI Campaigns so so let's back up a little bit. What's a campaign? So a campaign is so it's basically what you would use to promote your work your company Okay, and in a short term so you go to Google ads How's that different than an ad? Perfect. So an ad is just what product the service you're offering it could be alright So this is like for example, we're using deep cleaning deep house clean and talk to bottom deluxe That's the service that we're offering Whereas the campaign is going to have different things from the hours that it's going to operate It's going to have my bidding strategy and what's a big strategy? Basically, I can say that I don't want to pay more than $50 for a conversion Or maybe I don't want to pay more than $25 for a conversion So you would do that on the campaign level, but the ad itself would be something different Can a campaign has been can a campaign have multiple ads? 100% Multiple ads, which is great because you if you had to go and create a Pain for every single ad it'd be ridiculous. So you can have your campaign structure set up So I have this campaign that runs Monday through Friday and it's going to run from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m And I wanted to not charge more than $50 per conversion Then you can set up all those ads for different services that you have from deep cleaning to One-time cleaning I wouldn't say commercial although I've done it in the past I like for commercial to be in its own campaign itself because I almost feel like it's a whole different ball game Yeah, you can have multiple ads in there. So campaign is similar to strategy is what I'm hearing It's a much bigger thing. It's not just an ad It's how we're going to have the ad who it's going to be targeted at when it's going to when it's going how we're going to track the conversions Yeah, everything. What are we going to be tracking as conversion? Is it phone calls? Is it forms that are submitted? Is it every time somebody hits my chat bot on my website? Which I'm removing that as a conversion. I said that's it. It's bothering me But um, yeah, you can have a whole bunch of different things in there But um, yeah, you can have a whole bunch of different things in that. So that's your strategy That's a great way to put it Liz. This is my strategy So and what what what all my budget to be right, so And so how AI is helping if I'm getting this right Oh, and I is helping is you're putting you're giving AI your website basically saying hey check out my website and Help me come up with my strategy based on what you can find on my website what I do well and what you know about me And so instead of you having to come up with everything on your own AI is going to give you a little bit of an assist. Is that right? Exactly exactly and I wish I didn't jump ahead and start this before we got on this call because The image portion which is actually really cool for some reason. It's making me skip it I might have to start all over again with that In Spanish no less a coal tar That didn't sound good Hold on because I had already generated massive for this campaign. Yeah Yeah All right, so one thing that you said in the beginning while you're doing this if you don't mind if you can do Things at the same time listen to hand work. Um, yeah, go ahead. You you said that Um Google is now making it easier for us so that we won't have to have you know We'll be able to cut out that middleman be able to get rid of Doing, you know, um google google ad words and all of that. What's the benefit to google and that's why We'll we already see this if anybody's running campaigns One thing that you're gonna see Is that google will always have their google account strategies? Call you or account managers, whatever they call them, right?  So when they tell you hey, I'm with google I want to show you what's going right and what's going wrong in your account You're more likely going to answer that call Right and then you're going to get on with your ads guy. Say again, you're going to listen Exactly and you're going to get on with the ads guy You're going to say hey google said you're doing x y and z wrong. Let's change this now the benefit to google is The biggest thing is if you cut out that middleman if somebody's charging 500 You're the thousand two thousand some people charge a base and a percentage of whatever your ad spend is right So if a company is charging you seven percent of your ad spend Now all that money if you can cut them out can be funneled back into your marketing And what happens google makes more money So they can eliminate that middleman and you go right to the source You feel like you're winning because now i don't have to pay somebody a thousand two thousand three thousand dollars a month And google is winning because that thousand two thousand three thousand dollars a month is going back to them if you choose to spend it that way Okay, that makes really good sense to me There's a fancy word for that. It's dis intermediation And i're eliminating the middleman and here's an example where artificial intelligence is You know reducing jobs Right, so not everybody this intermediation Yes Nice But that's good news. That's good news if you're running a house cleaning business Yeah For sure 100% all right, so this is the image portion here and what it's doing is it'll pull images First google is going to suggest images is going to suggest stock images is going to suggest Things based on the keywords that's on your website But you also have the option here to go in and add your own images So if you go into your asset library, you'll have You add it onto there so you can see here This is my team. There's some stock photos here But we really try to focus on having our team having different things on there And uh, most of these images actually just pulled from my Uh, google google business google change the name all the day i know google my business Google my business. Yeah, that's where it's pulled from by the way if you haven't done this This is so inexpensive every single one of these photos guys Every single one of them was taken with an iphone and whether your iphone android. I don't care. I don't want to get into that argument But you can go through and have your team we've scheduled the day and we did pizza and we Paid everyone else two hours minimum. They came to the house. This is my house. They came to my house I had my phone. We had a whole bunch of lamps and different things for lighting and we took photos Right, you don't need to set up this professional shoot And if you do have the budget to set up a professional shoot great Personally, I think my photos came out Well for my iphone now it might not be top tier professional I'm sure videographer or photographer can look at this and pick it apart But it cost me I I want to say it cost me under $300 to do everything people in my house pizza Pay them two hours minimum take photos The stop using stock photos if you don't have to if you have the people on your team I understand that when you do have the people when you are just starting out Or you don't have as many people You probably want to use stock photos if you're trying to give this image of being bigger whatever it is But as soon as you have the ability go ahead You want photos I guess is what you're saying and if all you can do is stock photos That's better than nothing but get your phone out and grab a couple of texts and A couple hours you can knock this out Absolutely And one of the things that I know we always say Specifically we say this when we're all together our foundations But we do say this individually as well is done is better than perfect, right? So get in there get your phone take the pictures get them on there and bam You're done move on to the next thing and then later when you have a bigger budget you have more time you have When this becomes more of an issue in a different way And you can funnel more money into it, but for right now you probably just need to get pictures up there Absolutely and videos are even better that saying if uh if a picture is worth a thousand words and uh videos worth a thousand pictures Uh, you know that really really hits home. So if you can you have videos or even a lot of words You know, I don't I don't math very well. Tom. How many words is that? I don't know I am So this this force is a lot of words. So this portion right here is uh Generating the images so you can it says it's When I tell you step by step guys just follow the step by step so you can actually do this Describe the kind of image and I'm actually I will I'm going to find a Video step by step that google has and I'll uh share it And the link for this video that we're doing the live stream that we're doing that way you guys can go and just follow that as well uh So include describe the kind of images you want so you can put the images you want the color you want How you want it to look uh, I'm gonna put Just because I'm not that creative But again the more output you put the more input you put in the more output and the better quality output you're gonna get And all this is being supported by AI I guess is kind of the point if you were trying to do this Yourself a couple of years ago. This would be a lot more involved. Oh my gosh. Oh, absolutely absolutely from doing research to To the headlines because headlines are really It's probably the number one thing with ad So headlines that convert the keyword research is being done To use on your headline all of that But finding the images putting the images up again If you don't have your own images as you can see google's already putting images for me I just put house cleaning blue. I didn't put anything work But someone cleaning a house and this is 19 words and you have And uh, 1500 words that you can use All right, so you can generate more different outputs You can upload your own images and you can use the free stock photos that they have on here All right, so what about these videos olu that you see um, sometimes people will just take a whole bunch of um images And just play them one after the other and turn them into a video. Are those good? Are they good in comparison to having no video or Is the question that so yeah, that's going to be better than no video Okay, uh all day is going to be better. You'll stand out a little bit, but just understand that There's so much noise There's so much noise everyone's competing for our attention and our our attention span is is brief right and I even find um I even find myself I went through my instagram and started changing the content last year So i'm only seeing things that are related to traveling things that are related to business and aviation And then I get on these things that i'm not even going through the whole video I'm like how much information can I cram in the short period of time so I can get on to the next video By the time your next video five you're ready to get so Yeah, the video is better than nothing But the real thing is how can you make it so that when somebody gets to number five?  Okay Right, so that that's really what comes down to how can I stand out a little bit more? Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely And I know it's beyond scope of what we're doing here But there's some really cool ai tools that we can look at during foundations that can can help make some pretty awesome videos too Absolutely Yeah videos and your likeness Yeah Yeah, wow and are better than our real likeness too or it can It can take like an hour long video and do a mash up for you that means a lot. I mean the tools are incredible So we're doing so So one of the things about foundations is that it's different every year for those of you That have never been to foundations. You don't know that you're probably thinking it's the same program that's always been But it's not it's different every single year. So when I ask this question That i'm gonna ask right now. It's not because I am just feeding the stream It's because I really don't know so my question Although is will we be doing any of this kind of work at foundations this year? What what will we be building anything with ai as one of our workshops or Can tell us anything about absolutely So, you know, it's funny one of the classes that I taught last year which ended up being a It was a one hour class and a one hour workshop or no It was a one hour class and we spent the rest of the day with this workshop because we are reaching out to our customers and everything Uh, I'm embarrassed to say that that class can be done in five minutes And i'm talking about the workshop. Yeah, the workshop portion can be done by The attendees at the mansion in five minutes and save them a whole bunch of time Right, so it's really how do we utilize these tools? And I think Darren it was Darren Hardy who had said this in the future It's gonna in 10 years there's gonna be two kind of businesses those that are utilizing ai and those that are out of business right, so yeah, how do we how do we Use this as a force multiplier And that's really what it is. It's a force multiplier How do we leverage it in our companies and regardless how you feel about it? Whether you you know skynet's coming or whatever it is. I mean progress is coming so learn it and Really try to utilize it in your company. There's no reason not to every single person in my office is using one or two ai tools Uh at any given time because it's it's exactly that it's a force multiplier, right? So Uh, highly highly recommend it. I mean my company where we have About three people in the office full-time and it's my kid Yeah, so I speak to my kids So That actually is a really one of the points that I wanted to make that I'm really happy that you brought up because A lot of times when people are resistant to something like ai, right? And they're just It's too hard. I don't know how it's just I don't know how to do it the right way You know all of just so much resistance That's also one of the things that I love about foundations is That we have a workshop for every class that we teach so you actually That thing which makes it so much easier now. It's there's nothing to be afraid of now You've learned how to do it. You can just do a little bit more of it. It makes it so much easier So i'm glad that we are going to be working with ai in some of your classes And I actually That what we spent all that time on last year this year is five minutes That's amazing. That's kind of Yeah If you remember this discussion three years ago, we'd be saying hire an agency. This is just too much You really don't want to spend your time on it But the world's changing, you know Ai's driving a lot of it And to that point um 100% that because we I think we spoke a little bit about this the other day, you know, I think that If you're and I know this is there's different levels 100% is different levels and I'll speak to uh a company that Is maybe at a half a million dollars and really looking to break that gap in terms of setting up your Internal marketing department. Yeah, it has never been easier to Really build your own team And set up the people in place so that they can audit the work of the people that are doing the stuff Right and you don't have to be that person You don't have to be 100% text that savvy There there certain things that you need to be able to look at and there's certain things that you need to be able to Ask in order to help make the right decision But once you have that in that framework in place you have that That uh foundation in place I didn't mean to do it on purpose that foundation in place For building your internal marketing department It's going to be able to just run itself and stay on autopilot and you don't have to hire a 50 60 70 80 thousand dollars a year Marketing manager because that's the thing with our industry We're working with such low margins that it's very costly to make those six figure hires, right? Other companies that can go in and spend 100 to 250 thousand dollars on a marketing manager, but in our industry We have to really learn how can we be frugal but not frugal to the point where we're stopping progress There's there's frugal to the point where like hey, I don't want to spend on anything And we're just going to do word of mouth because we've always done it And that that doesn't it only works for so long. We have to invest In this and You can build your own internal marketing team that you can give your playbook your business playbook to And have them work to scale your company And have them give you reports, right?  And that's cutting out the middle man. You're not going through This agency to do this this is that and you're saying to people that's not necessarily like two full-time people Where that's all they do No, yeah So The thing is, you know at a smaller scale, it's only so much you can do right For example, sio once you get it set up the first 90 days is really the brunt of the work And then it's really just kind of going on a weekly basis So you're not gonna have somebody there 40 hours sitting there, you know, like a new keyword i've discovered, right?  She wants to know how to get this info info when you're not going to foundations so you know How you get information is always the same you got to look for it unless you find it all in one place Right, you're going to have to look for it. You're going to have to find a way to bring it on. Do you have any hints or tips of where people can go to Find this learn this But I do want to say one thing real quick So one of the struggles that I see a lot of the time with the people in my circles is they do one of two things they either want to hire this big fancy company or They want to jump in and they want to learn everything And so if you can talk a little bit to right I know Not this and also not this can you talk a little bit to what they could What they could what what they could be doing so not not those extremes of hire this company Yeah Yeah, so and we're talking Well then your your internal marketing department, right? Yeah. Yeah specific in that sense. I was okay, so Yeah, so as far as what you just said Liz. Oh my goodness. You're so spot-on and You know, I'm one of the people that ended up like oh, I gotta learn all the stuff But I I enjoyed that aspect of it. So it wasn't taken away from my day But I do see it where people are jumping in they're trying to learn everything Meanwhile, they still haven't figured out how to get somebody else to answer their phones for them, right? So That's a little challenging When you're trying to do that So as far as where can you learn it like there's uh in terms of building your own market This is First of all, I'm gonna make it seem like it's like oh the secret society stuff It is more in-depth what I'm going to be teaching. So it's not a 30 minute conversation That hey, you know go on some freelancing website and hire people That's also the other part is go on some freelancing website and hire people But the question the thing is you have to know how to screen those people You have to be able to ask the right questions And how do you get yourself to proficiency level enough that you know? Hey, these are the questions. You know the set of questions that I need to ask for the SEO guy This is the set of question. I need to ask for the google guy the branding guy the you know, so you need to understand It's really easy to hire the wrong people something you can do right now It's way too easy to hire them all in front of you Yeah Yes, absolutely When he's here to hire the wrong people I have a lot of friends and we all know this right so even even With the strategies that I'm going to be giving it's not like hey 100 once you do this and you post the ad this way and you ask the questions this way It's not going to be a hundred percent good hire. How many times have we sat across from someone? We're like man, this person's going to work out. I know they're going to work out. They're done, right? So Uh, it is you do have that element involved and I'm hoping that we can Mitigate that risk and lower it as much as possible And one of the things that I use to mitigate risk is uh, whenever I'm working with someone, let's say for example I'm hiring someone. Let's say I needed a va, right? I need a va to just handle emails Something as simple as that. I want somebody who uh has at least 95 completion rate Right if you go to Upwork, for example, they have completion rate I want to know that they're completing their tasks at least 95 of the time now Say a hundred percent, but I'm good with that 95 grace period Um, uh 95 rating the other thing is depending on the work that I'm looking for I want to make sure that person has earned a lot of money Why because if people are hiring them consistently that they might be halfway decent, right? And I don't want the guy that comes up and he says, hey I'm gonna check your emails for three dollars per hour and you look and he's only made a hundred dollars Right. I'm like, no, I'll go to the guy. That's a little bit more Sometimes it's a little bit better to pay a little bit more than pay a little less and get much less You know, so find somebody who's earned a little bit more Money. So what's that threshold? It really depends on What you're looking for again, right? So if you're looking for a va I might say you're you're screening emails. I'm good with somebody who's earned $10,000 If you're looking for somebody to write copy, maybe I'm looking 15 to 20,000, right? So the threshold changes based on the service that you're looking for So, uh Back to our AI a thing here What do you think about um going and finding a bunch of people? Um at Whatever wherever whatever platform I'm looking at Grab a bunch of their information and can I pull off it into my? um Maybe not open AI, you know, but maybe a more sophisticated um AI tool and can I pull up those people in there along with You know the the who I am who my company is and say who's my best hire? Give me some make some recommendations I've put people's resume on uh chat gbtv for yeah, so I haven't gone in depth as you know putting a whole bunch of people in pools but I'm I put a resume in before and it's work. So That's something that you can definitely do. I don't see why not I have not What what did you put you put the resume in and what did you ask for? So I actually cheated. I didn't feel like reading the whole resume in the cover letter. So I said give me the summary I was just looking for the summary I whenever somebody sent me something long form.  So for example, I uh Tom and I had a whole conversation about building Uh a cleaning company to the hundreds of millions residential cleaning companies hundreds of millions a few months back And one of the things that I had done before I had spoken to Tom was I put in depth My entire company from the people that I had to the customer to employ your ratio that I needed Uh in order to meet this and what my management team looked like right now Conversion and asked it to spill out. How can I scale this company to 300 million dollars with this format? Right, so it did come out with some things some things were useful some things were like Ah, you already know this is junk, but what what I realized about Open AI specifically is that it it gives you a framework And you got the bones and it's your job to go out there and put some meat on the bones and get the muscle stronger, right? A lot of stuff that it gives you is really really good But it's still far from giving you the the answer. It's still far from that right now But there's a lot of People working on AI hiring tools you google it. I mean there's a lot of stuff out that you can license today But they're they're collecting performance data And they're using that and kind of layering over You know, what are the attributes that you're looking for in some way that you're hiring? There's all kinds of legal stuff associated with this because a lot of these AI tools are Not normalized. There's like bias and so forth. So you got to be a little bit careful with some of that, but There's third parties What you're describing was a day's coming and it's probably not that far away that Benai is going to be telling you out of these 200 candidates who want this job here the top three that you should be talking to Now I haven't been on indeed in months, but Is that Maybe it's not their AI maybe it's not but they have like you can put a questionnaire portion and it matches It'll tell you the candidate how the percentage of How good of a match they are so that's I mean that's something that probably will be developed more Indeed's kind of conflicted in a way. They don't want to make it too easy And they don't want you to be too good at it. They're okay. Yeah, make it out higher because you're going to be back and doing it again For sure for sure I wish they had a portion for cleaning companies that says hey, we just need to consistently be hiring keep it open Just keep it open and like only charge me when I need somebody One thing on AI for anybody on commercial space looking at this Someone had just put me on to this and I I haven't gone in and really died then so But you can check it out yourself It's it's called Apollo and it's an AI that basically does all the data mining for you It puts in the the customers Not a name, you know the point of contact that you want to reach their email their numbers and all that stuff And the dashboard it allows you to keep accurate notes So if you're doing cold calling and I know when I used to work for this company called clean net USA Back when I was like 19 years old we did cold calling for cleaning companies, right? so this This dashboard just has a whole bunch of information and it's all AI driven and it keeps giving you a list so If you have a commercial cleaning company and you're looking for leads Apollo is in name. I believe it is. I haven't checked it out myself. But that was the first time I heard about that Okay, awesome. I haven't heard of that one. I can't wait So I did want to speak to real quick. Um tc your question, you know, how can we get more of this information? Um, keep in mind what olu was sharing in the very beginning is go into google start there You know, you you don't need more than that to get started go into google And what was the name of the place that you're supposed to go? I can't remember what you said Yeah, so new campaigns performance max and here's the thing about google as well google has like they publish so many different articles how-tos tutorials and The truth of the matter is it's just boring. That's why everyone doesn't read through every single piece of it and do it to the google standard That's really a class of certification programs. Yeah, you want to go deep you can yeah, you don't have to pay for the course, right? The first time I started doing google google ads It was a course that I had purchased before I knew google had all this information Yeah, so for free. I paid a good amount for that course so Well, we are about 10 12 minutes, I guess from the top of the hour Do we want to take a minute and just talk about? What we're going to be doing here in a week or so and how all of this Kind of ties together and I don't know about you guys I'm going to be on the beach working on my tan because last year I didn't even get to touch the sand Me either but this year I'm absolutely going gonna gonna hit the beach a little bit It is harder as one of the instructors right because we've got this agenda that we're trying to But yes, absolutely and I didn't realize how intense it was with diving into everyone's company and making sure like going into their Accounts and everything to add accounts making sure the structure is good But um this year tom tom is getting uh Tom and I are getting matching foundations 13 speedos. So Oh, okay. So what you're saying is that's the number one reason why people should go to foundations I don't remember talking about that I have we just decided right now One cheek is going to say after the other one 13 Um, not not everybody's excited Don you That's just I'm never want to speedo. I'm just joking. I'm just joking. That's not really happening. Oh my gosh. Yeah, that was that was good like Oh, well, I don't know we got everyone just exited Yeah All right, so seriously though One of the things I really wanted to bring up we're talking about foundations is a lot of times people are saying I've talked to so many people this year especially that have said, you know, I'm just I'm I think I'm going to do it next year but I hate that because every single time Somebody says I'm going to do it next year or next year or next year and then when they finally do it 100 of the time what I hear is I don't know why I waited I would have been already a year ahead if I would have done it last year They think they always say I wish I would have done it last year.  I'm not sure or you know, it's so expensive or I can't afford or all of those arguments I just Yeah, I just want yeah dawn. I know for you dawn says best training she ever attended I've worked there a lot so and you know a year is a long time especially in 20 a year A lot happens in a year and you're basically If you think about what we just talked about here with with ai and how that completely changed What would we be sharing regarding, you know, paid digital marketing? you know giving up a year without You know taking advantage of that information and all the other things that you'd be doing you're you know The compounding effect and scaling your business and everything else. I mean a year is a long time to wait And too many things change in a year. You can get behind so fast Just and now you're you're one of the people that's doing everything by paper When are you going to come out of that right? You got to get into the new the new The new I don't know what to call it the new sphere We run our businesses differently now than we did five years ago is the long and the short of it two years ago One year ago. All right picture of the mansion So uh for those of you that haven't seen it don't know anything about it. There are 12 rooms and Once they're gone, they're gone. But what ends up happening is people end up sharing rooms because get down to the wire What happens right now is people are getting to the point where they're like I'll do anything so that I can go y'all. I know this is for you all of you One week left, right? Yeah, yeah, that's it a week in four days right until week in four days Yeah, this is it this so for those of you that I haven't really quite understood the what the mansion looks like. This is the pool and see see how little you just walk down those stairs and there's The big pool, right? That's where the the beach is it's just right downstairs, so Uh, it I don't know. It's a beautiful Time it's a beautiful place. We have another picture of just the beach. I think on there I don't know about anybody else, but like just having a visual of the ocean motivates me So like having that visual while i'm working forget about it because you're there And you look to the left and the oceans right there like for me that energizes me And so when we're doing like the classroom stuff you're sitting in this really huge room with nothing but Glass you can see the ocean you take a break. You can go stretch your legs and actually walk out to the beach Eight five minutes and you're back and ready to go again And a lot of people do that right they just take a quick And even just going out onto the back balcony Right and just breathing in that fresh air. It's like so invigorating. Yeah, so much food food more food So much food that's foundations. It's ridiculous. Oh, yeah You will have a great time meeting the different people and And just chatting with everybody sharing ideas. It's a different type of environment. Oh Lifetime lifelong friendships are created on some of these people That's actually these people hardly even look the same nowadays. I should have a throwback This should be like a throwback picture here all three of them look the same anymore. They all look so different now This is the classroom. You can't see the windows, but on the left hand side Of this the entire wall is windows. So that's what you're looking at with the ocean This is this what it's like y'all you really do have this time to go out on the beach and kind of repair A lot of us especially in this industry work So hard day in day day out Many of the people that are going to foundations are really they're beat down by their businesses. They're exhausted They have been working so many hours so hard for so long And yes, we're gonna work you harder. They're stuck. They're stuck. It is stuck these you're on that path So uh quick agenda This is the the first day we have initial one-on-one consultations. So you meet with us on that first day and we help design Your schedule every person that goes through foundations Every year we'll have a different agenda that you're going to follow. There are some times when you'll be Meeting with Olu or myself or in this case, we'll have Aja here this year. So you might be meeting with Aja and The rest of the time we're going to help you design The classes that you need to go to and the workshops that you need to be in to create The different things that you need to be creating in your business So initially it's just that um initial one-on-one consultation kind of get clear Kind of get your head in the game figure out the mindset that you need to get started and You know what you're going to be focusing in on you're there for a purpose And if you're stuck if there's something that you're trying to accomplish in your business This is kind of where we lay it out a lot of times You don't even know until you have the discussion and there's a whole lot of data that we get prior to this So we're kind of able this assessments and numbers and There's a lot of material that we have to help us through this day one Go to that next agenda page tom. I think it's monday. Yeah monday. You'll see. Oh, it's kind of hard to see on here But you can yeah, if you can it shows that Some of your pre-work that you'll have to have your pre-work for Class number four you'll have some pre-work that needs to be done for the different time frames Oh, yeah You will have a decision-making tool That you'll need for Three, um, you'll everybody will take a disc assessment. So we'll be talking in depth about Disc who on different behavioral styles We start we start the week off with who you are and what you really want from your business Um to make you happy if we don't know what you want. We can't get you there So not no no two businesses are are having the same experience Lucky we're starting at eight o'clock in the morning I know let me interrupt right there with with what you just said Liz with uh, what you want you know Many times we don't take that time to actually do that exercise And for those of you watching that are kind of really on the fence like hey, I don't know if I can go I don't if I want to go right now. I want to wait till next year Take at least do that exercise Yeah, take a blank sheet of paper And start with the end in mind like why are you doing any of it? Right. Why is why is this any of it important? So initially for me when I started my cleaning company I was getting out of the military and I wanted to make sure I could provide for my family and my Newborns my wife all that right so really start with that and ask yourself All right, what has changed since I started my company has was 2023 similar to 2022 to 2021 Right as our things changing and trending to where you want it to be and if it is Ask yourself what happens if I do nothing will I be in the same position next year? Now what happens if you change everything you've been doing and try a winning strategy Where are you going to be next year where you got to be in 2025 where you're going to be four or five ten years from now, right? I've only been in business since 2015 and I I I'm very happy with the level of success that I've been able to achieve And the things that I've been able to accomplish in that short period of time And I would say the bulk of it came in the past four to five years past five years so What can life look like for you? Can you hit your why in five years? Can you change it? Three of your family and in five years, right? So in five years five years is going to pass you want to be better because of the five years passing Or do you want to be in the same position starting late saying I wish and one year Can make that change one year many times It's you got to get that big shift that Big shift that gets you on the right path because right now the path you're on if it's working Awesome, excellent, but if it's not working you need a new path. You got to get there. You got to get on that new path You say big shift, but sometimes it's not Huge it's just getting clarity as to what it is and it makes a big difference So true I can think of many many people that all they needed to really learn was their numbers, right tom And once they understood Oh Oh, I can make decisions about my whole company based on these numbers Oh, I get it Somebody will cry somebody will cry when they get to that point always. Yeah And and same thing we've had where people are like I can't I can't manage people I can't manage people and just one class is like Oh I get it Now I understand how to manage people so wherever that breakthrough is but a lot of times it is just That's my favorite class too. By the way in that exercise that you did with me That was solid I don't remember when when I had to when I had to stay mad at you and as you try to work through and give me And I guess I messed up. I didn't do something I was supposed to do as an employee And I was supposed to remain upset and you had to work through that barrier. Yeah And literally I was trying to stay upset Yeah, it's so hard So we're working all the way up to about eight o'clock. So it's a 12 hour day. So that sounds like boy That's a lot of work, but when you're learning and having fun it doesn't I mean You're tired at the end of the week. That's true But it's it's totally different kind of tired and throughout the day you're moving you're not just sitting in a chair And that's it.  It was kind of the the the same thing, right? Same You can see the different classes You see that after every class we have a workshop. Sometimes we have um an individual workshop We're going to work on something specific to your individual business or we'll have a A group workshop. We're all going to kind of work together to create something um Yeah, linda. She's that's I would say linda's exactly right. Oops. Sorry. I think somebody shared a lot of Lot of numbers and operations and kpi stuff here on wednesday Yeah, I didn't share all of the days, but um, there's just because it's the Follows somewhat similar format for each day saturday tell us about saturday So saturday, I think is um a really really important day. It's he's really short agenda. It's a short day But what we do on this day is you build your plan So this is 2024 annual planning You will build all the way through the end of this year. Maybe even a little bit into next year of What are you going to be doing month by month to be able to Build out your entire plan We've made a few changes like we do with everything To make this easier to implement because what can happen is you can get a little overwhelmed and you can end up feeling like Whoa, there's so much. I don't know how I'm gonna do So we've changed the process just a little to make it a little easier to implement Um over the course of the year, but this is a this is a big day So everything that you work on for the entire week. This is where we tie it together into an action plan. Yeah And we set up with your accountability partners. I know dawn's on here and I'm pretty sure she is still They're their accountability group is still running strong a year later So just keep it. So yeah, uh the founding Stations isn't okay. Actually, I was gonna ask you about go ahead There's all kinds of stuff going on here. What is all this? So these are just the add-ons this these are this is not the program This is not what you're going to get at the program. This is not your your new training manual This is not your safety manual. This is none of that. This is on top of foundations You're also going to get six months of strategic strategic circle membership I've probably heard people talking about the circles and you're going to get six months This is where we're going to help you get on track and do the things that you plan on doing the things you said You're going to do the next thing is you get access to circle specials. So As a circle member you have access to certain specials that nobody else has This is listed as five to five hundred dollars But really when I added up everything afterwards, I came up with closer to 15 thousand dollars In potential value that you could get out of just being a member of the circles Um, you also get eight hours of one-on-one coaching. So on top of your circle membership Eight hours of one-on-one coaching to help make sure that you personally stand track with your Your objectives the next is you get the 2024 profit maximizer. This tool is amazing This tool is basically traction all in one tool So if you've heard of traction, this is the entire traction program In one tool that you can take and you can implement in your business instead of paying $6,000 an hour For someone else to come in and teach you how to use it You get a market analysis workbook find out what's going on actually in your actual market And fill out this workbook and you'll know exactly what's where you should be in your market You get the foundations live success series that tom and I do twice a month for this You get a year's worth of that foundations Or that success series 2025 goal-setting workshop that will be happening in Dallas this year in october with tom and megan likes and myself And you have access to that you have access to membership in the listening cells crispy community Um, this is a private group just for sales Dig into your sales and increase your sales margins every single month As part of this membership And reach for the stars employee engagement program you want to have a program where your people feel more engaged because They are reaching for their own goals Here's a program to help you with that and you get a your own personalized disc assessment And debrief that we do for every single person. So over 15 000 dollars in add-ons not not the program Wow, so If I want to know more if I only add something there. He's like what what you got although No, go go back to that slide real quick The one before access to circles specials. Okay, so This one, okay, so I was looking at the 5500 value versus 3000 value And I'm like, how is that less than the the circle membership? So guys for circles, by the way I feel like Liz knows it so she didn't explain it as well. So let me tell you what it is Imagine every every single week. You got a group of business owners that are facing the same challenges as you That understand what you're going through Right, you sit with them you meet with them and you guys can help each other problem solve Not only that you get a specific day where it's your turn.  It's easy when it's just you and you're in charge of you to not do the things and it's different when you're sitting in front of Everybody and like, oh, I didn't do it, right? So that aspect Tom Tom told me this uh month ago and I realized that it's so true. Tom said professional management is boring And and it's true And when you look at the people that are really achieve a high level of financial success in their industry Is because it did the same boring stuff day in day out without losing that stream that steam So when you start losing that steam sometimes you need somebody to push you. So that's why I think there's A lot of value in the circles right there like that alone this should just be by itself and Give half of foundations and that and that's the value right there in my opinion. So that's why I was like, wait You didn't explain that well Yeah, sorry. Sorry. Sorry. We're right. I've been doing it for a few years now and I No, I'm used to it. I do it every I'm working in circles every single day So, yeah, I get it. Yeah so if somebody wants to Get more information or sign up I guess we're going to be starting on the 16th. So we're what a week and a half out one week four days 12 hours 36 Minutes and 45 seconds. That was when I put this together. Maybe a couple hours ago. So less time than this Cleaning foundations.com. Is that the magic url? That's magic url. I'm gonna drop that in chat. All right cleaning foundations.com um good good Don't don't wait and for those of you that are going to be attending for the Yeah, for those that are gonna be attending that are thinking about attending and you guys heard me talk about the marketing aspect building your own marketing team Like I said, we're gonna be trying to get at least the framework really Completed in foundations so that you already have ads running while you're there in the workshop.  But for those that are like, hey, I need this completed After foundations if you want to sit with me one on one once you attend I'll give you guys one hour and we'll go through the candidates together. So everybody that attends one hour with me going through those To really help sift them out awesome Yeah, uh, I don't I don't know about y'all But when I have somebody that's sitting with me one on one Man, I get so clear and I can just make it happen. Just need somebody to sometimes feel right Makes it makes a huge difference All right, let this be your year. Don't don't wait another year Don't be looking back on a year and be thinking darn I really wish I would have done something because here I am, you know, this much ahead instead of this much ahead Too much information and too much Is out there right now that You can utilize to scale you shouldn't be in the same position you are and right now You know, I say this and I think I said last time we we spoke with the information that I have now I could scale the company using the same same resources I had before in terms of finances Zero to three to a million in three years depending on the market depending on the market I want to make sure that's clear because some markets can't bear that But the information is there if you're in a great market and you know, your competitor is doing a million Your friend is doing this person is doing a million I met somebody who was in uh in dallas, you know, in houston Emma has wife both had competing companies and they were both over a million They're competing with each other if you're in these markets There's no reason why you shouldn't go out there the fruits hanging.  There is a low. What's it called? Um, low country boil. Yes. Yeah, there's a low country boil this year done. Yeah Want to share here we're a little past the top of the hour I have a beach date. So i'm gonna bail on you guys soon. We're gonna go watch the sunset Seriously, if um, you've ever thought about doing foundations now is You know, when was the best time to plan a tree 20 years ago? When's the second best time today? Today I'm looking forward to it. I hope to see some of you all there Thanks for joining us on facebook too for those of you that are my facebook friends Like a lot of you and you can reach reach me DM me on facebook and I'll I'll talk to you real quick Okay Oh, it'll be great. See y'all later. Bye. Bye


Lakeland Currents, your public affairs program for North Central Minnesota, produced by Lakeland PBS, with host Ray Gildow. Production funding for Lakeland Currents is made possible by Bemidji Regional Airport, serving the region with daily flights to Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport, for information available at BemidjiAirport.org. Closed captioning for Lakeland Currents is sponsored by Niswa Tax Service, tax preparation for businesses and individuals online at NiswaTax.com. Hello again everyone and welcome to Lakeland Currents. Where tonight we get to talk about our great state of Minnesota. And I think anybody who lives here would agree this is a wonderful place to live, except sometimes in January and February, gets a little bit hairy. But we're going to talk tonight about Explore Minnesota, which is actually an organization that's been in business for quite some time. And we're going to find out about all things Minnesota as we go through the program this evening. My guest is the regional manager for Explore Minnesota, Nicole Alum, and she is hails from right now New York Mills. I do. And welcome to the show. Thank you very much Ray, I appreciate it. And let's just talk a little bit about you first, because you're pretty new to this job. But you're not new to the job of public relations and promotional things. Tell us what you've done. Right, yes. So I started just in May with Explore Minnesota. Prior to that, I was the chamber director at Park Rapids, for their Chamber of Commerce and Convention and Visitors Bureau. Before that, I worked at a resort in Otter Tail, Minnesota, Thumper Pond. Oh sure. Resort as well. We're the rough cave-in. It did, but it's all better now. I heard that. All better now. And yeah, so I've been in the tourism industry for a while, but now I'm working at the state agency Explore Minnesota. And as the regional manager, what are your general duties? So our region that we cover northwest and central is basically everything from Lake of the Woods down to Hutchinson and then Fargo Moorhead over to Hill City. And so we work with industry partners, accommodations, attractions, dining, and other tourism destination marketing organizations to promote this particular region. And then also, I am the coordinator for the governor's fishing opener, David Bergman, who's in the northwest region. He coordinates the deer hunting opener. Our southern regional manager coordinates the pheasant opener. Those are all media press events that we do on an annual basis. So how many regions are there technically? There are five. Five regions? There's northwest and central that David Bergman and I work in in the southern. There is the Metro Minneapolis-St. Paul region and then the northeast region, which goes up the North Shore. Do you have any idea what tourism is worth to the economy of Minnesota? Tourism in Minnesota is a $14 billion industry. Wow. It is a 17% of our sales tax revenues. We're an agency that's funded through the legislature, through sales tax and the general fund. Wow. That's a lot of money, $17 billion. And I'm sure you've got one of the, I would say, one of the real nice areas because of all the lakes. It would probably be a little more challenging to get people to go to some other parts of the area. Maybe where there's just more agriculture, not as many things to see and do on the outdoors as we have in this region. We're definitely covering Cabin country here, the lakes country for sure. With malax, all the way up Leech, all the way up to Lake of the Woods. There's so much to see and do here. And I am just starting to scratch the surface of everything that there is. And I've grown up in Ottertail County, but realizing how little I know. So when you say your job is to promote your region, that's your primary focus in addition to doing the governor's fishing over, which is a huge task in itself. I've been involved in a number of those over the years. It takes a lot of planning, a lot of coordination. I would guess you're working on it now. We are. 2018 will be in the Wilmer Lakes area. And so we're going to be on Green Lake outside of Spicer. Looking forward to exploring New London and Wilmer. The fishing openers, all of the openers, they're really a media event. So we invite media who will promote that particular area. So what we're looking for in a host community is for them to have a committed committee of people who just really want to shine a spotlight on everything they have to offer. Not just fishing or deer hunting, but really what does the community have to offer any kind of visitor at any time of year. So you're working with Wilmer, but I would guess that means some of the Spicer and some of the little communities around will also be involved. Oh, certainly. It's the Wilmer Lakes area. So we have committee members on the executive committee from all of those communities are represented, represented as well as the DNR is represented. And we're just doing our best to really shine a spotlight on the whole area. So getting back to your region that you're working in, which is, do you call it the central region? Is that the central region? Primarily, yes. I work in the central region. Does that involve you're working with other states? Do you do things out of Minnesota to get people attracted to Minnesota? How does that work? So as an agency, we have some partnerships, both with brand USA on a country level to promote the United States of America to other countries. Oh, really? Also with the Great Lakes Association to promote kind of, I want to say it's like a nine or 10 state area to the rest of the country. And so we work in partnership with those. We also do our own international marketing. China is a really good growth market for us. Really? We're also looking at the Scandinavian countries, obviously with our heritage here. We tend to be a good draw that way. France is another country that we do a lot of work in. So we're doing things that you'll see to explore Minnesota. And we can talk about some of those. But there's things that we'll never see here in marketing programs in China. So are these television promotions? Are they print promotions? What are they? Some of them are. You go to China, for example. Some of them are publications. And some of them are industry-facing, where we work with travel operators and group tour planners to package Minnesota and spend 10 days in the land of 10,000 lakes. Technically 12,000 lakes. But yeah, so we work with them. We also have in-country representation in some of those markets as well. So when you have all of these things you're working on, it's just you're an office of two people here, aren't you? I am. But the agency is in St. Paul. The headquarters are in St. Paul. Division that's dedicated to international and group tour travel. There's a division that's dedicated to marketing the state with other partners as well as doing the media campaigns. I know years ago I used to do some work with the Minnesota Resort Association and I know that's a real big partner of yours. Yes. I was just at their annual meeting for the Resort and Campground Association. It was just up at Breezy Point, so it was a nice quick drive for me coming from the Brainerd area. But there is also the Community of Minnesota Resorts, which is another statewide organization. There's a Bed and Breakfast Association. We work in partnership with all of them to assist in marketing the products that their members have to offer to visitors as well. You said you won't see what's happening in some of these foreign countries, but you'll see what's happening here. Here's some examples of things that Minnesotans in the central region might see in the next year. Well, one of the things, we have this little event coming up in February down in the metro called the Super Bowl. And one of the things that we've done is we've partnered with Minneapolis St. Paul to produce a series of videos called My North. And they are putting out a video a week, so it's 52 videos between last year's Super Bowl and this year's Super Bowl. And where are they going to be shown? You can search for them right online. You can just search My North series and you'll find them. Otherwise, you can go to explore Minnesota and find them. So are these going to be shown in other states too, or just Minnesota? They've been shown, well, so they're digital, so they're on social media, so they're being shared all over the place. All over the world. Yes, certainly. One of my favorites that they've done so far is they're interviewing Minnesotans. So they've done famous Minnesotans that are Steve's on and some others. But one of my favorites is Amy Thielen from the Park Rapids Lakes area. She's a food network, she had a food network show and she's a chef. Oh, okay. And they're interviewing famous Minnesotans really about what it means to them to be from Minnesota and what Minnesota means to them when they come back, that sort of thing. And it's just the My North series has been really, really good at telling that Minnesota story. How is it that you folks are evaluated to see if what you're doing is working? How does that happen? There is a slew of research that is done, both with consumers, with travelers and tourists, as well as research just on the leisure hospitality industry within the state. We work with Deed. We have our own research analysis analyst that works on that. So you're in charge of the fishing opener this next May. And that involves working with Chambers of Commerce and all kinds of organizations in those areas. And I know that there's been different levels of success in fishing openers and probably with pheasant openers too, depending on the commitment from the community, wouldn't you say that would be a huge portion of how successful these events will be because it takes a huge number of volunteers to make this really successful, doesn't it? It does take a large number of volunteers. It also takes a lot of planning. And so when I think from what I can see when communities really communicate about what it is and what's going on, it just lends itself to that much more successful of an event. When you have a small committee that does an event and they don't really let the community in on it, it might not be as successful for them. So you have your initiatives, and we can talk about those in a minute, but if there's a community, let's just say theoretically, Pequot Lakes or Pine River, if they want to do something unique with Explore Minnesota, is that an option they have or are you limited by your resources for what you can do outside of your normal agenda? We have a lot of different programs that companies and organizations in the tourism industry can take advantage of. We have a partnerships program. I mentioned the My North series is one example of that. The Sound of the North where they brought the Vikings out throughout the state, that was another Explore Minnesota partnership. What was the point of that? What were they doing there? They Sound the North tour went to different communities and they sounded the horn. And it was just building some excitement over the Super Bowl and the event that's coming up. They're talking about a potential million people in the metro area for the Super Bowl. There's going to be a huge spotlight on Minnesota. I was reading some of the places close to the US Bank Stadium are actually renting out their places for $5,000 to $10,000 a night. That's a pretty good Explore opportunity for Minnesotans, isn't it? There's an opportunity for those metro people to get out too. I know I've heard similar to when I lived in Duluth and everyone would leave town for the Grandma's Marathon so that there wasn't so much traffic around. I know that Otter Tail, the Otter Tail Lakes area is planning a large party on the ice on Otter Tail Lake. For the Super Bowl? On that weekend with concerts and all kinds of events and things. So it isn't all things right by the US Bank Stadium? No. It's things all over Minnesota. Well, in the Brainerd fishing extravaganza is that weekend as well. Oh. There's all kinds of things going on in Minnesota. So do you have a, obviously you have a website, but on your website do you list all things Minnesotans can go to see across the state? We have a very comprehensive events listing. Everything from arts and cultural events to town festivals and fairs to, you know, workshops and things you can go to learn to make bread or what have you. Events listings on explore minnesota.com are, that's one of our most popular pages and databases that get searched. So you do the fishing opener, which I would guess probably takes the most person power to manage, but what are some of the other initiatives? I know you do the pheasant opener and the deer hunting opener too, right? We do. Are those the three kind of outdoor openers that are covered by explore Minnesota? Those are our major like mass media familiarization events that we do, but there is an opportunity if we have an outdoor writer who perhaps freelances for the Wall Street Journal that will take that writer and take them around the state so that they can see different things and experience Minnesota and go back and write a really good article about it. We do it on a small scale as well with different media partners. There was a case of about two years ago and I'm sure you saw this where the gentleman wrote some negative things. I think it was over by Red Lake Falls. It was Red Lake County, right? Yeah, Red Lake County. He lives there now. And now he's moved his family and found out Minnesota is a pretty nice place to live over there. That's really sort of ironic, isn't it? That's quite a story. So besides those three openers then and the pheasant obviously is probably not as big as a fishing opener, I would guess for, is that an accurate statement for the numbers? Well, it hasn't been around as long. No. It's about what, three or four years? I think plenty started it. Maybe about seven. The fishing opener has been around 71 years. Has it really? This will be the 71st, yeah. Wow. And then the deer hunting is even newer, isn't it? It's around the same, I think. About the same? Yeah, as the pheasant. So those are some things that communities can get involved in but we also have different campaigns that they can get involved in as well. Like what are some examples? So we do a thing called a marketing grant program where marketing organizations can access grant funds through Explore Minnesota in order to market their particular community. So rather than being a part of the overall overarching campaign, they have an opportunity to do their own marketing with their own targets really to invite people to come and experience what they have to offer. So someone like Crosby who's got the bike trails could tie into that and probably already have as far as I know. And then they can promote just that segment that they're doing. Exactly, exactly. So that's one program we also have. And how are those judged? How are they determined? How are they given out? Is that a committee that looks at that? Those are basically, there's a deadline for application. And we try to grant to the full, this year it's $7,000. We have a pool of money and depending on how many requests we get and how much money they request because some request the full amount and some don't. We just try to give away all the money so that the marketing is being done. We also have a new program this year, an events program. So communities throughout the state that are really looking at starting a new event or soliciting to have an event happen in their community can possibly apply and access some funding to help them operate that and produce an event. Because really people when they visit or travel it's what can I see and what can I eat. And so we've started an events program that's been really very successful in bringing some things, you know, Minnesota we've had the Ryder Cup and we've had the X Games and now we have the Super Bowl coming so Final Four is on its way. There's really big events coming to Minnesota but there's other things that people are executing as well in order to inspire travel. It's just amazing to me all the things that are going on and the diversity that's in our state. I mean I don't know that people think about the differences between New Olm and that area to the Iron Range and to the western Minnesota. I mean really I think all of us could say there's a lot of Minnesota that we haven't seen. Oh, certainly. I mean a lot of the business that could explore Minnesota could come from Minnesotans because I know I'm guilty of that. There's a lot of places I've heard about or read about I think that would be neat to go to. Years ago Jason Davis had this on the road again on Channel 5 and I thought that was one of the things they did so well is they covered interesting people in Minnesota in so many places. It really is the stories, the little things that you never knew that makes places so unique. There's Dorset for example. Even after it burned down it's risen above the ashes. It has, it's like a phoenix, right? We did an article this year on unique places to watch movies and the communities that do movies in the park are the drive-in theaters that are still here. Are there still some drive-ins? There are, yes. There's not many. Not many but there are still drive-in theaters and it's just those things make us so special I think. Yeah and so when they go on your website they can see a lot of these places. I would guess you're just constantly adding new things, new features to the website. Currently we're in the process of switching over to the winter transition and it's long and it's cold and it can be miserable but if you get out there and check things out there's fat biking trails and snowshoeing and dog sledding and cross country skiing and kite surfing on the lakes. There's all kinds of things to do no matter what season it is. So would you folks get together, do you put together a strategy every year as a team for what you're going to do next year? Do you kind of look at what's worked in the past year and then sort of reevaluate your goals as an explorer Minnesota organization? Always, always looking at strategy and what the vision is and what are the trends, you know, the way that organizations and communities marketed to tourists in the past is not necessarily the way of the future. One of the things that we've done is build our social media presence. So we have a hashtag, hashtag only in MN. It has over a half a million uses already. So if anybody's on the internet and looking for inspiration just do a search on hashtag only in MN and you will find little nooks and crannies of different state parks and different communities that you never thought of before. How about the micro breweries? Are you starting to see a pattern there? I mean, there's these breweries are popping up all over that never existed five years ago. Exactly. It is an industry on the grow and it's definitely something that we cover on our site. We had a partnership actually with Growler magazine and we mapped breweries and distilleries, wineries in Minnesota and mapped them all out for you so you can make a trail and a tour. All over, aren't they? They're just still popping up all over. They are and we're doing our own thing. It's Minnesota, you know, cold weather, cold hearty fruits and grapes for wineries to make spirits and panther distillery comes to mind. There's a couple other things that they're just embracing Minnesota and telling the story in a whole new way. In that era from the Great Recession, and I know you weren't with Explore Minnesota then, but from 2008 to about 2012, I'm a fishing guide and I know we really saw a huge drop in the businesses that we had in central Minnesota and I think things are really rebounding pretty well, aren't they? It seems to be coming back, doesn't it? It seems that people not only are traveling more with their families but businesses are doing things more. There are more outfitters and more rental places, more bike shops. I just think that people are starting to value their leisure time as well and really starting to... You know, they say that you plan more for vacation. People plan for their vacations and their travel more than they plan for their retirement. Really? Wow. That's pretty scary. It can be that. But at the same time, making those kinds of memories and making those connections with different communities and with your family and your friends, it's really important to do that. I have friends who are campers and we always have talked about how hard it is to get places to stay in Florida in the wintertime just even for a couple of weeks because everything is booked. They're telling me that these state parks in Minnesota are booked so far in advance you have to really, you know, get ahead of that or you're not going to have a place to stay. And one of the things that's developing is Air BNB and some of these rental things. Do you have any link to those kinds of things? If people are looking for places to stay, let's say there's someone here watching us from North Dakota and they want to stay, do you have a place where on your website people can find places to stay? So at exploreminnesota.com you have some places to stay and you can search for bed and breakfast, you can search for camp grounds, you can search for classic Minnesota resorts or that full service luxury type of accommodation. It's there. Yes. It's all there. It is. And it's just called exploreminnesota.com. It is. Wow, that's an easy one to remember. We hope so. Yeah. What else would you like us to know? Is there anything else that we haven't talked about?  See what there is. Around the corner there's something, even 10 miles down the road, something you never knew. There's the Veterans Museum in their own words and per Minnesota I never knew even existed. I didn't know that. Really? What's it about? So in their own words it is an interactive museum where you can hear veterans tell their stories. Really? Yes. The World War II of Vietnam. All of the conflicts. Even the more recent conflicts. Wow. And where's that located? Right in downtown? It's in Perm. It's just on the main street as you're heading on the west side of town. I didn't even know it was there. Wow. There's things everywhere. Yeah. Wow, that's amazing. Well, we're about out of time, but we've got about a minute left. If you were to give people a heads up about two or three of the most exciting things you see coming down a road besides a Super Bowl, what might that be? What are some of the things in your region that you're seeing coming up this summer or this winter that you think people should know about? Well, there's eel pout. I see that staying in Walker. It is staying in Walker. Yes, they weren't sure, but it's going to be in Walker this year. That's one great wintertime event. About 10,000 people come to that. Just a few. Yeah. There's some in your friends, yeah? There's all kinds of trails being built and developed, which is super exciting with fat bike trails and mountain biking, hiking trails.  And there's a lot of youth mentoring programs too, as well as teaching kids how to enjoy nature. Cool. Yeah. Well, thank you, Nicole, for jumping on to our show. It's great to hear how the good things happening with Explorer Minnesota. It's a wonderful place to be and get out there and look at it. Thank you. You've been watching Lakeland Curves. I'm Ray Gildow. So long until next time.


The Archbishop of the Lutheran Church of Christ in Nigeria, Dr. Mosa Panti-Philipus has appealed to the government, and religiously, just to embark on mass evangelization to discourage young people from embarking on illegal migration and trafficking. He was speaking at a three-day psychosocial training for clergymen in Yola, a Dhamma State. Dr. Philipus solicited for the institutionalization of a support system for deported migrants to enable them to reintegrate into the society. As far as human trafficking and irregular migration is concerned, the church plays a critical role in not only educating the public, but also calling on the government at all levels to pay close attention to the survivors of trafficking and irregular migration. I've been equipped to help those who migrated illegally through the abnormal way as a combat, and I've been exposed to advise those who are thinking and are trying to migrate illegally. We understand that as Africans, as Nigerians, we are religious people, and if the religious leaders and faith-based workers understand the dangers involved in human trafficking and irregular migration, it will go a long way in sensitizing the general public, in educating the people on what happens in all of this. So we brought them together so that we will educate them, we will train them, and they will step it down and go over to train others.


Hi everybody, it's Sandy. Welcome to my YouTube channel where today we're going to be painting perfect trees and perfect is of course in the eye of the beholder but I've got some stamp sets that are really going to help to make really beautiful trees super easy. These are stamp sets that are generally meant to be stamped in ink colors and layered over top of each other but if you do them in distressed inks and add water they turn into watercolor trees. This one on the left could be used for any time of year. They're meant for fall trees right now but you could use them for spring trees as well. I'll talk about that later and pine trees can be used any time of year as well. They don't need to just be for winter but here are my Christmas and fall cards that we're going to be making today. Yes, four cards, one video. Now I've laid out all the ink colors and all of my stamps. I have them on individual blocks. If you wanted to mass produce a whole bunch of these it would be really easy to do. On your craft desk you would probably put your inks right next to each of the blocks but since I'm trying to make this pretty for YouTube I tried to line everything up so I had all my inks lined up square and then every time I put something down it all went kittywomp as so. If it drives you nuts I'm sorry because it's driving me nuts just while I'm watching the video doing this voiceover. Oh the things we go through to craft on YouTube. But anyway I've got all of my stamps inked and then it's going to make it really quick to just stamp them onto my paper and I'll put the top of the tree and kind of the top two-thirds or so of my watercolor paper. This is Kansan XL watercolor cardstock. I'll zoom in here so you can watch the development of the tree and you can see easily that all of these different reds and orangey colors would be really great in other colors too. If you stamped everything in greens and then added that big blobby one in a flower color you could make a spring tree very easily with the same stamp set so if you get this one don't put it away when fall is over because you can use it any time of year. You could also put less of them and make it just a bare winter tree as well and put some snow on it and a bird in the tree wouldn't that be pretty? So I'm going to grab my water brush. This is a zig water brush and it's a detailer so it's really tiny. It's got a super fine point and I'm going to squeeze it here and drop some water onto the tree and then just start spreading it. I'm not rubbing at the paper very much. I don't want to push the color too much. I want the water to move the color so I'm just pushing the water around over the surface of the paper so that the water is what pulls the color around across the the entirety of the stamping. And there's a few areas that I didn't get any stamping on so I'm going to drag that water down there so I get some light color there and just add a little bit more here and there. I'm leaving some white spots and what I found was if I colored it all in and didn't leave white spots it didn't look as water colored but it looks perfectly water colored now and you can tell those those little holes that didn't get filled in look awesome. While I had paint on the brush I just made basically a little triangle and stretched out two sides of the triangle out to either end and then I cleaned my brush and painted water down below so I just got a really soft bit of ground underneath of my tree and spread that out and then I just heat set it. You could just set it aside and let it dry but I'm impatient and I wanted to use my wooden board to tape something else down and get another one done so I tried to do my heat setting and you can just watch as the paint starts to dry it the color kind of as watercolor dries it congeals around the edge a lot and that's what this is doing so we're getting a dark edge around the outside and some of the texture of the stamping is preserved inside the tree so it it has a really cool texture as well as some real dark burnt looking edges and I just love how how simple it was but how beautiful it still came out in the long run I put it on an oval I cut it out and that is brush show on the panel behind it it's a scrap that I had used for a different card that didn't work out but it works perfectly to do for a background on the card and now I'm going to do three trees and this first tree I stamped just like I did the one that we just finished but I'm going to stamp two more trees one on either side and I switched the order of the ink because that's going to help the trees to look like they're all different I just cleaned them off with baby wipes in between and now I'm doing the same thing I'm going to have a third round and I'm even going to turn some of the stamps so it doesn't look like the same tree repeated and it'll look like a natural collection of trees and this time I'm going to do something a little bit different in how I add the water because I'm going to add it with a mini mister and a mini mister is going to go everywhere if you're familiar with those so what I'm doing is grabbing a piece of scratch paper it's an old scrap of watercolor paper and I have it a couple inches maybe an inch and a half or so perhaps above the paper so that I protect those those tree trunks because I didn't want to stop the tree trunks with water I just wanted the water to hit the top section so I'm trying to see how light of a spray I can get and I was spraying from quite a distance to try to make it really soft because every time I tried this earlier I got it too close and it just splooched everywhere I do have a paper towel on hand to do some dabbing here and there either around the edges or right around in very specifically in some of the sections in the middle because you can see it's starting to pool a little bit and that's just what watercolor will do when there's a gathering of water it's going to gather color into it and that's kind of what it's doing there in the center a few of those spots I'm just going to dab with a rough edge of a paper towel because I didn't want it to look like it was all even I wanted it to look very natural and then some of the other areas where there's heavy color I just started pulling that color around with the brush a little bit just doing some adjustments to that and I'm mostly just waiting and watching to see what it does because it's going to continue moving over time so I noticed that none of the color in the center had really remained none of the the mixture of color with a little bit of green so I'm stamping again on top of the damp paper I'm not stamping onto pool paper but just onto the damp paper so you can add other colors on the very top if you did these trees in all greens then you could stamp like with a pink to make some pink flowers in the trees for a spring card which would be really pretty so I'm going to finish off the bottom section of the image while I'm still waiting on the top and I wanted to make some grass under the trees this time so I just put a little bit of ink onto my acrylic block by tapping it on there and then I'm just going to pick up a little ink and again I'm going to make just a line along the bottom it does touch that brown ink that's already stamped there so I'm going to get a little brown green grass which is fine because it looks really gorgeous and watercolor-y anyway cleaning off my brush again and then adding just clean water down in the bottom and this this water brush is actually really nice I haven't used this one very much but I do like it and there's links by the way to all the supplies in the description down below as well as more information on my blog so I'm just making a few grass hairs now just a couple places where I'm making little tiny tiny tick marks above the grass just to create a little interest there and then I saw that section at the top I wanted to just feather it out but I'm just doing it very very gently because I didn't want to have that that section just go up in flames so I decided to give it a shot and then I had my paper towel handy so that I could stop the color from moving too far and then I'm just going to heat set it so it stays in place and doesn't get too rambunctious on me and get it all dried up and then add it to a card and all I had to do with this particular one which was actually pretty nice was to add a sentiment to it I added it to a panel and put the sentiment on and it was super simple to finish this one off so if you stamped a bunch of these and then you know went and sat in the backyard or go to the kids games or something you could do the watercolor part while you're out somewhere how's that for efficiency in getting your cards done so let's move on to the winter trees these are Christmas trees but again you can use these any time of year because pine trees are green year round and notice there that my stamping is bad I am a bad stamper and it doesn't help to be stamping with distress inks because distress inks and clear stamps don't go together all that well so you'll notice there you may have some issues and that background stamp for this tree is a solid one so it makes it difficult anyway for me because I'm not really good with solid stamps and getting my inking done but as you know with this technique I'm just going to be slathering on color and water so I'm just spreading the water around on this and you can see it it's just looking immediately like a tree I'm going to do some heat setting so it stops everything and then just decorate really simply I've got some liquid pearls and some stickles and all kinds of fun stuff to put on here as garlands as little ornaments and just decorate it for Christmas you could just leave it blank if you wanted it for a summertime tree just put a sun or some clouds in the sky and I put some distress stickles in the background for snow super easy to do right right right right I hope you're thinking this is easy because it actually really is it is as easy as I'm showing you you're just going to add water after getting your stamping done with distress inks all right let's do a seam with trees this will be a little tougher it's harder of course when you do multiples of anything but I'm going to layer the four stamps and you don't need to layer all four stamps but I thought the four actually gave me a good variety of color when I hit it with water because if you do you can easily get away with doing less stamps than four on these but I wanted to make sure that I got good color in there now here's a place where my post-it note got overused and I had some ink that went through but look how easy you can clean up distress ink super simple just wet it with clean brush and dab it off all right now I created a little mini hillside with my post-it notes and I'm just going to stamp the top section of the tree background and throw some water on it to make it a hillside isn't that a simple hillside just a little swoosh and then throw some water in there and I'm adding just a little bit of trees in between kind of now my image for this in my head was to have that one tree out in front and the other trees I created kind of a hillside ish it didn't come out super clear in this but I think it still works in the long run because of some of the things I'm going to do to that tree that I wanted to make stand out and I wanted to add some water to this one as well but it's trees like this don't actually feather out nearly as much as the other kinds of trees so I'm trying not to go a little bit crazy I just wanted it a little softening of them with the spritz of water and I decided to heat set it real quickly so that it would stay and not keep running then I took some of the darkest green and put it on my block and I just added more detail into the middle tree because when you add all this water you start losing detail and I just went over a bunch of it with my water brush and some dark ink and then decorated it again with more stickles and all kinds of beautiful things to add some shine to it and then it makes it a Christmas tree but you could have the same kind of a scene without the decorations and use it anytime of year aren't these fun trees I hope you enjoyed this and my four little happy trees I feel like this is the Bob Ross of card making video so if you like Bob Ross leave a comment in the description and tell me a memory you have of Bob Ross and his happy little trees and in the meantime there are a couple more watercolor videos the one on the right hand side actually shows where I thought about this technique in the first place I did this with flowers in the very same way with layering stamps and it works with a lot of images like that all right thanks you guys thanks for watching talk to you later have an awesome day


Hello chip friends, and welcome to my chip lab. I'm going to show you how I process an image of a chip. I won't show you decapping the chip since I've already covered that in a previous video. Today's target is a Texas Instruments Plastic Packaged 74LS01 chip manufactured in 1986. First, I place the chip under my inspection microscope and take a couple pictures of the top and bottom so that I have a record of the chip's markings. Then, I decap the chip. Boom! Done!  I use the lids from ceramic chips which have a nice flat surface. I use a drop of cyanoacrylate glue and spread it around.  Then, I just have to wait for the glue to dry before I can move on. While I'm waiting, I grab a small container and make a label for it. The chip's number, manufacturer, date code, and decap date go on the label. 74LS01, TI, 10th week, 1986. I wonder what the top of the charts was back then. Oh, Curie by Mr. Mr. I miss the 80s, especially that hair. Now I take the carrier and fit it into one of these 3D printed holders. The holder goes on the microscope stage to prevent the chip from moving under vibration. Now, I adjust the stage's rotation, tip, and tilt to get the chip perfectly square in all axes relative to the microscope. This lets me move the stage around without having to worry about losing focus. Now it's time to work with the camera. I set it up in manual mode. Then I refocus the microscope onto the camera's image sensor because it's a different distance from the chip than the eyepieces were. Then I move the chip to the initial position for scanning. I power up the servos and the Beaglebone driver, which is running machine kit. For now, I enter the gcode manually to control the stage, because I haven't gotten around yet to writing an automated shell script. Each picture has a 50% overlap, which makes it a lot easier for the stitching program to stitch the images together later. With my setup, one picture is 600 micrometers by 400 micrometers. With the die scanned, I can take the card out of the camera and move it to my computer. I copy the images off the card into a directory for the chip. Then I fire up ICE, Microsoft's Image Composite Editor. Then I select the images for stitching and setup various parameters such as number of columns and rows, and importantly, the hint for 50% overlap. ICE goes to work, and shortly I have a stitched image. Now I just crop the image to get rid of the borders and export to high quality JPEG. I run the result through Microsoft Photos and just let it do an auto-enhanced so that the image pops. Now for this particular chip, the top metal layer obscures a lot of the detail underneath, so I need to de-layer the chip. First I etch away the top glass layer with armor etch. Then I put the chip in a solution of 6 parts, 3% hydrogen peroxide, with one part, 32% hydrochloric acid. This eats away the metal in about 15 minutes, but there's more glass underneath the metal, so I have to use the armor etch again. Another round of scanning, and the de-layered image is ready to go. I use Inkscape to trace the components on the die. The base images go in first, then I trace out resistors, collectors, bases, emitters, metal layer, shot key and regular connections, and finally labels for pins and components. Next, I put together a schematic in KiCad. Finally, I upload all the images and files and prepare a page on the project 5474.org wiki, and tweet about it. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this look into how I deconstruct a physical chip into its informational content. Even though it didn't look like it, all the steps I've talked about can take days. I also do blog posts and make videos, and also search for chips that I don't have. It's a lot of work. To keep me motivated, I've set up a Patreon account where you can support my work. You can click here or see the link down in the description. Supporters get access to exclusive content and they can interact with me directly and help me decide which chip to cover next. I really appreciate any support you might give.