May God bless the DAV and those who represent it. Thank you very much. The start of our 97th year last August began with your selection of our national officers highlighted by the election of National Commander Delphine Matt Kaft-Foster, who made history by becoming the first woman to hold DAV's highest post. A retired Army First Sergeant, the Commander has worked tirelessly throughout this past year to ensure our organization's top legislative priorities remain front and center of the national dialogue, even as the VA face leadership turmoil. It's no surprise that she was listed number eight on We Are the Mighty's Mighty 25 list of influencers supporting the military community. A woman of action, she led DAV and auxiliary members in meeting with lawmakers during our annual midwinter conference in Washington. Commander Matt Kaft-Foster has spent her tenure heavily involved in the push for smart VA health care reform, appeals modernization, improved benefits for women veterans, and the expansion of caregiver benefits to all areas of service disabled veterans. A topic near and dear to her heart, as she and her late husband Jimmy were ineligible for these critical VA support services and benefits simply because he served before 9-11. Sadly, my story is not unique. In me are hundreds of other veterans and caregivers who are unfairly left behind. During her term, the Commander continued the fight on this critical issue and rallied members to support unsung heroes, our nation's caregivers. Pressure on Capitol Hill from Washington headquarters, VSO partners, DAV's benefit protection team leaders, and nationwide supporters enabled us to say mission accomplished this past May with the passage of the VA Mission Act. This comprehensive bill not only supports America's unsung heroes, but also makes a number of other critical reforms and improvements to strengthen the VA health care system. This historic law allows VA to consolidate its community care programs, provides additional funding for community services, gives VA tools to hire and retain quality health care professionals, and develops a long term plan to realign and modernize VA's health care infrastructure. After years of hard work on these issues, DAV helped to bring about the monumental change that will ensure a strong and viable health care system to serve future generations of disabled veterans. DAV's National Service Department continues to live up to its legacy of being the best in the business. Thanks to the help of our generous donors and corporate sponsors like Handcooked Tire, our mobile service offices visited 665 sites in 2017, allowing our service officers to provide accessibility to benefits to more than 6,000 claimants who might otherwise go underserved. Our transition service officers filed more than 24,000 claims last year and helped ensure nearly 42,000 transitioning veterans were aware of their earned benefits. With nearly 1.1 million powers of attorney on hand, DAV provided representation for more than 250,000 VA claims this past year. In all 4,408 county, chapter, department, transition and national service officers, DAV helped veterans and family members obtain more than $4.3 billion in new and retroactive benefits in 2017. This year, natural disasters once again crisscrossed the nation, devastating communities from California to Georgia and Puerto Rico to Texas and even to those affected by volcanoes in Hawaii. Fortunately, our disaster relief program was there to make an impact and aid our fellow veterans on the ground by supplying nearly 4,000 drafts and supply kits, totaling more than $1.3 million. And I thank you guys for the things that you do. I just have never met such generosity before. This year our membership department continued modernizing by expanding our efforts in the digital space via military.com as well as social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, where DAV now offers customized photo frames for our fans to show support for their loved ones and our organization. We also made it easier to recruit prospective members by providing recruitment information on social media and through our new app, which can be added to any iPhone or Android smartphone. With the touch of a few buttons, recruiters can enlist prospective members to our ranks and make them eligible for a wide range of money saving and life enhancing benefits. For 2017, DAV volunteers provided nearly 4.8 million hours through the VA Voluntary Services Program, the DAV Transportation Network, and our local Veterans Assistance Program. This donated time is the equivalent of over 2300 years of full-time work at a 40-hour per week average. Additionally, the Voluntary Services Department relaunched our Forward March campaign, aimed at encouraging those who've received DAV's assistance to pay it forward by volunteering at least one hour of time to help veterans in their local communities. This initiative helped the local Veterans Assistance Program, which has grown significantly. In 2017, 600,000 more hours were reported than in the prior year. To further boost volunteer efforts, we launched Volunteer4Veterans.org, a web-based resource where willing individuals can sign up to volunteer for veterans in their local communities. At the same time, veterans, their advocates, caregivers, and even DAV chapters are able to request help as needed, creating a community of volunteerism for those in need and those who are willing to help. When it comes to employment, we're also executing a busy schedule of 140 career fairs across the nation this year, bringing in more than 43,000 attendees with the help of generous donors and corporate sponsors like Blue Line Rental. By offering military personnel, veterans, and their spouses various online employment resources, as well as the opportunity to directly engage with employers who know the value of hiring those who serve, DAV has become one of, if not the, most prolific charity in terms of connecting veterans with employers. Our involvement with Working Nations Hiring America series is just one of many examples of DAV's influence in this area as we continue our efforts to find meaningful employment for veterans and their families. Since our employment department stood up in 2014, our career fairs have drawn in nearly 119,000 job seekers with a total of 57,000 job offers. The Charitable Service Trust supports dozens of unique initiatives that provide injured and ill veterans rehabilitative and emotional therapy, transition assistance, employment support, emergency relief, and a range of other services. In 2017, the trust issued more than $6.7 million in grants to support our nation's heroes, their families, and survivors. DAV again co-hosted the National Disabled Veterans Winter Sports Clinic in Snowmass, Colorado. Among the participants are 2018 DAV Freedom Award recipient Marine Corps veteran Jatea Taylor, stood out as a shining example of how adaptive winter sports can make a difference in the lives and recoveries of participants. Beautiful, man. We're not necessarily disabled, we're just differently abled. To have organizations like the VA and DAV put on an event like this is liberating for veterans. We know we're going to be in safe hands, you understand what we go through. Jatea plans on returning in the years to come with the same positive outlook, unbeatable spirit, and determination to succeed. Additionally, we once again teamed up with the VA to co-host the National Disabled Veterans Tea Tournament in Iowa. Previously a local program, the national event promotes rehabilitation, fellowship, and camaraderie among disabled veterans through adaptive sporting events. The DAV 5K expanded again in 2017. In addition to races in downtown Cincinnati, Atlanta, Boston, Newport News, and Tulsa, we hosted our run to honor veterans in San Antonio, bringing 9,000 participants from 42 states to the nationwide series. Along with national series sponsor USAA, we're anticipating another phenomenal turnout for the series in 2018, giving DAV significant outreach opportunities and a chance to raise awareness about our services to veterans. We have also continued expanding our presence in the social sphere, topping 1.5 million fans on Facebook, and continuing to promote our initiatives and message across social media platforms like Twitter, which grew to more than 95,000 followers in 2017, and Instagram, which has now topped 27,000 followers. We also partnered with A&W restaurants, which, like DAV, has been a part of America for nearly 100 years. To show their appreciation for the men and women who have sacrificed so much, A&W stores collected customer donations benefiting DAV from early July up to National Root Beer Float Day in August. In the week leading up to Veterans Day, DAV helped thousands create customized Think of Vet videos honoring the veterans in their lives and reached millions of people through social networks. We were also front and center at Times Square reminding Americans of the service and sacrifices of those who served while giving them the opportunity to assign thank you cards for hospitalized veterans. We also continued our partnership with Golden Corral through the restaurant's military appreciation night, which provides free meals to veterans around Veterans Day. In 2017, the annual event raised over $1.4 million for DAV, bringing the total to more than $14.3 million since the event began in 2001. Additionally, approximately 3,800 children of wounded, ill and injured veterans are expected to attend Camp Corral at 22 locations in 19 states with the help of donations from DAV. Thanks goes to all of our corporate partners for helping DAV fulfill our mission throughout the year. It is through their generosity we are able to make differences in the lives of our nation's heroes. Reporting us on this effort, the fight for caregivers and more is the DAV Auxiliary, which has had a busy year under the guidance of Commander Craig Johnikin, who is the first male to hold the Auxiliary's highest post. Through their unmatched dedicated service to local community veterans, Commander Johnikin, National Agent Pat Kemper and the rest of our friends and allies in the Auxiliary stood up their own National Caregiver initiative to assist with funding caregiver and companion activities for events like the National Disabled Veterans Winter Sports Clinic and National Disabled Veterans Tea Tournament, among others. DAV has continued to gain momentum throughout the last year with a dedicated network of members, volunteers and supporters working diligently to keep our organization invigorated with new ideas and fresh opportunities to engage. I'm proud of all we've accomplished over the past year. I'm exceptionally proud of our tremendous DAV and Auxiliary community and I look forward to another year serving side by side with you, working together to keep our promises to America's veterans and their families.


I'm about to go out, they're intro-ing, I'm excited, and I'm excited for you guys to get a little behind the scenes of this. Amazing speakers so far, I've already picked up valuable nuggets. I like just attending and listening more than speaking because the nuggets, the value, the takeaways, the passion, the energy, all of that is unbelievable.  I was running laps out in the parking garage to get my energy going, that's one thing I do every time before I get on stage. Because of that, I believe that energy is everything so we're going to do something just a second to kick this thing off, get the energy back up. Over the next 30-35 minutes, I'm going to share some brief stories, I'm going to talk about some things that we've done in our business and our brands to get some attention and really take our business to the next level. I'm a normal dude as all of we are, and I'm going to walk through some things that we've been able to do that I believe anyone can do to impact your brand, to get more attention, to gain more followers, maybe make more money as we've got some CPAs in the front. Let's jump in. Because I believe, I truly believe that energy is everything, I start off every keynote, every live training, every free training, every breakout session, every conference, no matter what it is, with a little bit of energy. So I got this thing, we all have our things, who's got your little thing that you do? This is his, boom. As I've heard, like 800 times on Instagram, we all have our thing. So mine is, yeah, so I'm going to have you help me as we pump the energy in the room a little bit, okay, as we get excited, because what I've learned is I'm a better speaker, I'm a better trainer, my energy's right, when my energy's low, I'm awful on stage and you guys probably don't want that, right? Am I right?  Dude, me neither, okay? So on the count of three, are you guys going to help me? On the count of three, I want to get the energy right, a little yeah together, right? You ready? You going to help me? Yeah. Three, two, one. Yeah. All right, give yourselves a round of applause, thank you so much. So I was born July 9, 1999, not to make anybody feel old, okay? Little Win, Arkansas, in 1990, there was 8,239 people that lived and win. There's a little house I grew up in in the bottom left by 800 square feet. My dad got started in the insurance industry, everything we do is in the insurance industry, okay? There's going to be some nuggets, even if you're not in the industry, that you can vote to use, okay? He got started April 1st of 1990, three months before I was born. So I grew up in the industry, I've been around it a lot. I always grew up playing sports, but my dad was always an inspiration to me of just thinking bigger, going from an agent, running a debit route, going two homes to collect cash to pay for policies, that's what they did back then, glad they don't now, right? That's what they did to become a manager, general manager, kind of growing in the insurance industry with him. He always said to me, growing up though, before every game, every sporting event, everything I did, didn't matter, I don't care if I was taking out the trash, as you can see it in the top left, Cody, never let anyone out hustle you. That was his motto as a kid, and it just rang in my ears constantly, and so that's something that's always stuck with me. So today, I try not to let people out hustle me, right? Now they're probably still people are, so maybe I need to hustle harder, okay? So there's a little background about me as a kid, then we move into high school years, started focusing on basketball, I'm a goal guy, we're getting the goals in a second, okay? I would jump rope during the entire Rocky 4 for two hours every day during the summer just to get in better shape, right? I'm a big Rocky fan, who loves Rocky? Who doesn't love Rocky, right? Who loves Rocky, right? Okay? I always set little goals for myself, though. Every step of the way I learned at an early age, when I have a target, I have a goal, I have a mission, it's a little easier to hit something. Anybody else notice that? Right? We probably all got goals, targets, missions, if we don't, I'm going to tell you today why you need some, okay? So I got a little quick story. I don't drink soda anymore, but I was 15 years old, I always went to a little Christian school, Bible Christian school, high schools and colleges, and we were at one of our arch rivals, about to play a game, 15 years old, and our best player, senior, stud, 40 points a game minimum every night, got suspended. I don't remember what he did, probably something stupid, okay? He got suspended, he couldn't play. So I was kind of looked at, it's like, okay, I'm the point guard, it's a Christian school, we didn't have a ton of talent, to be honest, right? So I'm kind of like, I got to step up, right? I'm walking around drinking a Mountain Dew before the game, that didn't make any sense, okay? I learned that you probably shouldn't do that, right, in case you were wondering. So I was walking around drinking a Mountain Dew, 30 minutes before the game, and one of the ex-alumni from this Christian school stopped me and said, dude, that's not going to help you beat us tonight, man.  I'm thinking, who is this dude talking to me about drinking Mountain Dew, right? So I go in the locker room, and I set a goal, I say, you know what? I got to show up or we're definitely going to lose. My goal, I believe in personal goals and everything I do, my goal is to score 40 points tonight. Every time I touch the ball, I'm going to go to the rim, okay? Because I can't shoot, still can't, okay? Some of us can, I can't, okay? I'll be honest with you. And I go out, 15 layups, 11 free throws later, and dropped 41, and that was a small goal, and it stuck with me. You know what? That was a goal that worked. Maybe I got some other things along the way that I can start implementing goals into, okay? So I learned the importance of goals at an early age.  I got into the insurance business, my dad had been in it forever. I was an intern, calling him a phone book for a veteran agent, then I was a part-time agent, then I was a full-time insurance agent, and I decided, the moment I went full-time to be in the insurance business, 19, 20 years old in college, playing basketball, taking 21 credit hours this semester, as Rachel said earlier, most people would say, I don't have time, right? I said, I got time. I wrote, I'm going to earn $100,000 this year, and 92% of insurance agents fail, by the way. Now, there are more millionaires in the financial services and insurance industry than any other industry in the world. You know, Evan and I talked about that, sorry, Evan was real estate, right? But it is, okay? And I wrote down, I want to make $100,000, I want to win an incentive travel trip to the company I was with, I wrote it out, I signed it, my dad signed it, we dated it, I put it in my cubicle. And then every day, I went out to make that goal a reality, okay? I did some unique things, I would have call nights and bring over college kids, we would all cold call for me and book up a week of appointments and all those things. And the top right is my 1099 from my first full-time year in the insurance business, $117,391.13, in the top left, picture with Magic Johnson, that was the trip I won, he was a keynote speaker, got a chance to meet him and some other things along the way. So I learned how important and valuable goals are. Do I believe I would have been able to score certain points in games if I didn't, if it wasn't a target, no. Do I believe I would have earned $100,000 in my first year as an insurance agent without setting that as a target, 100% not. I definitely would not have. I'd have floated through life, I would make excuses, I don't have time, I'm playing basketball, I'm going to games, right? So that was a goal for me that worked. Shortly after, we started our own insurance agency, left the company or with our own insurance agency, started a 1,500 square foot office, five of us focused on writing a lot of Medicare supplements. We would road trip to go sell final expense, sell 1,520 life insurance policies in a week from door knocking. During this time, I was enjoying it, it was going well, but I didn't have a goal. I kind of lost sight of how valuable goals are. Who's ever lost sight of what we're doing and what the mission is and where we're going and what am I going to do in 2019, et cetera, right? Me too. So I lost sight of it. I didn't have a goal. And I'm going to share some super honest stuff. A lot of stuff I've never shared even on our YouTube channel, probably should, but haven't. So I didn't have a goal. Because of that, I got stagnant and bored, just like how boring this slide is. I got really bored and stagnant. I didn't feel fulfilled. I've been selling insurance for five to six years. I started telling myself I wasn't creative. Who's ever told yourself that? I started telling myself that a lot. And I had totally lost confidence at that point. I would use the excuse that, well, I've never been an independent agent, so I don't know what to do. And there's a lot of options. And we can all find excuses for why we're not being successful. That was one for me. So I got stagnant and bored.  So we started a call center in our office. Zero phone sales experience, no clue what we were doing. It was no North Star, but it was our own little call center, right? Made sales from cold calling about Medicare and final expense insurance. Grew it to where we were selling 70 policies a month from cold calling in the first three to four months of opening it. I could cold call prospects on like a phone book. And in five hours, make a life insurance sale. I grinded it out, focused on getting good at something I hated, I didn't enjoy, I was terrible at. But I focused on getting good at it. It taught me a hard skill that I still use today. Now this challenged me, but I still didn't feel fulfilled. Okay, we all got those moments in our life where that happens. So I sold my shares in the call center and moved on. I always knew though that I wanted to help insurance agents. That was the thing for me. I always loved, like even as a new agent, I would drive three hours to go doorknock with two new agents just cause I enjoyed doing that and helping them and it made me feel better than if I had made a sale. It just did. So December 28th, 2015, about three and a half years ago, we started putting up videos on YouTube. I said, I guess we, I did. I'll put up a video, hey, I made $8,000 this week and here's how you can too with these seven easy steps. Okay, sort of doing a lot of that. Started a local mentorship program in my office to help struggling insurance agents. You can see my first video ever in the bottom left. Awful video, please don't go watch it. Okay, in case you're wondering. Started a local mentorship program in the office. There's a picture of a little sales training. Spoke at our local university to the insurance degree department. In this mentorship program, I would be running 40, 50 appointments a week with other sales people running all the appointments, helping them all make sales and they were making some money. Now in 2016, I'm afraid to say I made less money than I've ever made in my professional career. I personally did not make six figures in 2016. Now I'm not saying money is everything but I was starting to enjoy what I was doing. Now did I wanna make money too? Sure. Was I helping other insurance agents make 40 grand in three months? Absolutely, okay. But I could see that helping agents be successful was meant to do. Now did I eventually wanna earn some money for doing it? Sure, who doesn't, right? But I could tell, this is what I'm meant to do. Help other insurance agents become successful, make more money, get in front of people, learn to be phone phenoms. We have a show every week called Phone Phenom. So I always do, that's what I was supposed to do though. In the meantime, got rid of my Dodge Challenger, downsized her home, my wife got a job, some transparent things that people don't wanna admit along the way, right? Who hates, who loves talking about stuff like this? Not me. I was doing what I love but I was still unhappy because I was thinking too small. I wanna talk about how you can think bigger and impact your brand. And when I started thinking bigger, I just got happier. I just did. I thought too small for two dang long. We're put up, I was put up multiple videos a week. I recorded 112 videos to help other insurance agents in my first 365 days on YouTube. Folks that help another agents, kinda unique. Most people throw out a brand and then they're like, the expert and they wanna sell everybody's, their new course or something, right? I didn't monetize or try to make money from helping other insurance agents or our YouTube channel or anything else for 13 months. Agents started reaching out, asking for help through YouTube and comments, et cetera. Said, hey, can you train me? Can you email me your script? Can you coach me? Can we talk? I need help. I'm struggling, right? I can't pay my bills. I'm a new insurance agent. These gentlemen have heard it time and time again, right? Right, James? I mean, I believe it's the toughest industry on planet Earth. Who wants to sit down with an insurance agent for two hours and buy insurance? I don't either and I'm in the profession, okay? But they also started reaching out, asking for help with leads a lot because the number one thing interest agents struggle with is getting in front of people. So I learned to generate avatar leads using Filipino telemarketers to generate telemarking leads. They'd push prerecorded buttons to speak to prospects. It became uncompliant in early 2017, so obviously I stopped doing that. But as soon as I'd mastered and I got good at it and grew it, I had to find something else, right? You see how there's always challenges in life and things come up and, right? So then I taught myself how to generate Facebook leads through Facebook ads. It was one of the first in our industry to kind of publicly do it, probably not first because it's a big industry, okay? This got a lot of attention because our industry is always behind. The insurance industry is like way behind of other industries always. But I learned how to grow a business by being the marketing team, the content team, the sales team and the service department all wrapped into one. I was even manually sending out individual leads to insurance agents every day, multiple times a day because I didn't know what I was doing. I grew that to $68,000 a month before hiring any staff at all because I'm the person that just naturally thinks I can do it, I can make time, I can do it all, I'll figure it out. There's better ways. A team can be a massive help, kind of like Dylan and Keith that are on the cameras. Team can be a massive help and I absolutely love having a team. Within 12 months, we were selling 30,000 leads a month in the insurance industry. It grew fast, but it's because of all the prior work and preparation we had done, okay? My wife wanted a new house, okay? Who likes a new home? Yeah, my wife does too, okay? So we set a goal. She's like, I want to buy this house. I'm like, babe, that's a big ol' freakin' house, okay? We just downsized, we're in a 1,400 square foot home. She's like, I want a new home. I'm tired of this, like, whatever you want, okay? Right, was that the right answer, ladies? Yeah, okay.  I had to come up with a 20% deposit. Made me realize I could hit any goal that I wanted to because we made that a reality and made that goal a reality. And reaching this goal actually did something though. It made me start thinking bigger. It made me think about, here's 70 grand as, it was just 70 grand and it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. But I would, and I would tell myself, I remember, dude, what is wrong with you?  You guys recognize the internal conversations we have with ourself, you know, like, all the time of how you can be better, how we can do more. Towards the end of 2017, I started thinking bigger. The number one thing that insurance agents struggle with is the phone. So I started doing live cold calling shows and videos. I would live dial leads in Jamaica, on the beach, in a tiki hut. As they're coming in, I'm live dialing them. I got my wife on one of our anniversary trips. Women won't like me here. On our anniversary trip, and I've got her recording me calling leads, okay? But it was all to help insurance agents. Started growing our team. Was producing three-hour training webinars. Started spending more money, began advertising our company online. Started thinking bigger. A lot of us can probably pinpoint a time where we started thinking bigger, and some moves really started to impact our business. Would you guys agree? Show of hands real quick. Yeah, me too, me too. My wife and I went to Miami, January of 2018. She's a Duke fan. Okay, sorry to any blue devil fans like Dylan over there, or Tar Hill fans. We went to Miami. You got a picture with her and Grayson Allen on the top left. We went to Grant Cardone's office. We attended 10X. I was sitting in his office. We toured his office, did a video testimonial, started negotiating for tickets with Grant. We're like, yeah, we wanna go to the event. It's in 30 days. Had no tickets. And we figured out, oh, it's gonna be, he said, since you're here, we'll do it for $15,000. Okay, and I said it big and slow because it's kind of what I thought at the time. We thought about it. Pulled the trigger on the tickets. I don't think if we would've bought the bigger home, I would've done that, though. But it was a solid decision. Something we loved and enjoyed because I was sitting at 10X to in Vegas. Front row, you can see us right there. I was sitting at 10X and I came up with the idea. I said, are my insurance industry need something like this? I need to think bigger. Why am I thinking too small? Why am I floating through life? The insurance industry needs something like this. Oh, I thought about it for a few months after. I've got to where I don't think about things for a few months after anymore. But I did at that time and I finally decided to pull the trigger on hosting a conference for the insurance industry because I knew I could do more. I felt like it was time to go bigger. I was sitting at the country club pool, talking to my dad. May 2018, we decided to host a conference. Then released Apersonation in June, booked over $100,000 in speakers and set the dates before we chose the venue. It's kind of backwards, isn't it? That's not normal. But our YouTube channel is 5X since then and I'm gonna give you some other things that have grew because we started thinking bigger, making big moves, taking some risks. Spent over a half a million bucks on our first event ever. Grant Cardone's 70K. He ain't 70K anymore. Ray Lewis for 40K. Paid Nissan Stadium and their production team over $125,000. One of my first sponsors looked at me and said, hey, if this doesn't happen, will I get my money back? I do, this thing is freaking happening, man. Don't you see what we got coming? But put on events, tough, right? It ain't easy. I think it's one of the toughest things in the world. People even said, hey, if there's other agencies there, I'm not coming because they'll just try to steal my agents, people, it's a recruiting heavy industry in the insurance industry. Everyone is recruitable. So you had to deal with that. But along the way, I was like, you know what? I need to learn how to speak to people, right? I need to learn, I'm hosting a conference, I'm gonna be speaking at it. And I've never spoke before, ever.  It's like, okay. So I had to learn how to give a keynote, okay? So the Insurance Newsnet Conference, 30 days before our conference last year, called me and said, hey, somebody told us, told us that you may wanna sponsor the event. And I'm like, who was that, okay? So, tell them not to do that. No, I'm just kidding. So I was like, can I speak? Like, I don't, you know, I'll have a booth, whatever, but can I speak? They're like, well, yeah, if you give us some money, I'm like, okay, I'll sponsor three booths, I'll speak, I'll be a vendor, et cetera. And they said, they said, okay, it'll be 30 grand. So I got them down and acted like I really didn't wanna speak even though I really wanted to speak, right? And ended up cutting them a check for $19,000. You can see this trend of starting to do things. That conference, we've met several other people, relationships, vendors and sponsors that are at 8% now every single year because of this event and it all continues to lead along the way to the next thing. So after, Insurance Newsnet, here comes 8% 2018. I had to move my office into my desk, into my sales room to help sell tickets and TO, or takeover, as call centers call it, to literally every call. We had 454 attendees at our first event. We raised $197,000 in sponsorships, something we've never done before and I lost over $200,000 the first year. But I have a big smile on my face, don't I? Because here's what we gained and we've made money since then to benefit that, okay? Here's what we gained. Attention, followers, clients, respect, relationships which are invaluable. I truly believe relationships are the best part of business. Who agrees with that? Say yes if you agree with relationships. Yes, 100% and the confidence to achieve anything, I'm like, dude, if I can pull this off without any clue what I'm doing, I've never even planned a birthday party, then we can do anything, right? And it was one of the best decisions in my life, truly was. Last year, we had finished the year. There's a stripe from one of our companies. We did over 3.5 million total in 2018. Then we started, I'm like, you know what? I wanna do retreats for the interest industry. I wanna start thinking different. I believe in bringing people together, really hanging out and getting to know one another. People end up wanting to be clients. Afterwards, I went to Birch Retreat, joined Monster Producers because I went to the retreat that you almost went to in Seaside for the couples retreat, okay?  Second retreat, second intimate retreat to help insurance agents. The more like insurance marketing retreats was at a 15,000 square foot mega mansion in Tampa, Florida. We rented a helicopter over there to record a YouTube ad because every time we go somewhere, we record some type of ad every single time. We should have shown the one that we recorded at the Phoenix one, Dylan, that I was ended with me jumping in the pool with all my clothes on, okay? That was impromptu.  Who's ever heard of Ping June? Very few, okay. A lot of million followers on Facebook, ton of YouTube videos, and I saw this video how to make six figures from doing live events. Smaller events, and it really got my attention. So, and I saw that on a Saturday. So that Saturday, I decided I'm going to master free live training events, getting attention, getting in front of people. So I started doing free live insurance trainings all over the country. The same day, I literally set up all the cities and I had never thrown free events, advertising, get people to a free event, that kind of thing. We picked all the cities that we can. I fell on my face though during my first event ever and learned along the way. Dallas event, 168 people registered for our first ever free live. I put out 72 chairs, 17 people showed up. But we learned to market, advertise, promote and the exact numbers needed to have a successful event. I learned, if you ever do events, something you'll learn, especially free, I needed 100 plus to register through our ad funnels and 40 plus to phone confirm, just to get 20 plus to show. Then we ran 15 of these events for about five to six weeks. I was literally speaking four times a week. We traveled and spoke in Dallas three times, Houston twice, San Antonio, Austin, Little Rock, New Orleans, Nashville, Charlotte, Atlanta, Memphis, St. Louis and Tampa. All because I was like, I want to try this. You can see a trend. Then comes Apris Nation 2019 this year. It starts tomorrow. It's also Saturday. We sold out the entire five star hotel at Downtown Dallas. Sold over 200 rooms in the last 14 days. Hired Michael Irvin as a keynote speaker and really wanted to focus more on the experience this year. Evan Stewart speaking, Ramiz is speaking, Coach Burt speaking. Along the way though, most people don't know is this year I was sitting at a retreat, one of our insurance retreats and I got a phone call, actually an a text and an email all in the same weekend. And someone said, I bought a ticket and my manager's telling me I can't go because I'm gonna get recruited. I'm like, I got a lot of money on the line, a lot of time invested in this. So in that moment, literally I got off the phone and I'm like, babe, I'm not gonna allow recruiters anymore. I'm gonna give back all the money I got from sponsors that are agencies or IMOs or FMOs that could recruit someone, instant decision. Same weekend, I immediately reached out to every single one of those vendors and gave back $50,000. Because I want any presentation to go to 10,000 agents one day and if I allow a ton of recruiting, it's never gonna happen. So I started thinking more long-term. I believe everyone needs a team. As you grow, you need a team, man. So we have 25 team members. We spend about over 600 grand a year on payroll. We upgraded to a 9,000-square-foot office that made my dad share. I've spent over $50,000 on our new studio and our inside sales team does over $50,000 a week now. We also do a ton of content marketing. We just passed 8,600 insurance agent YouTube subscribers in a niche yesterday. Put up over 1,200 videos online in the last 42 months. We produce five live shows a week. We start an A-presentation podcast. We get about 1,000 organic inbound leads a month to our HubSpot of people that are watching and finding us. And we spend over $30,000 a month marketing our brands. I believe in content marketing. Rachel said earlier how important it is. Who feels like, random question, who feels like you are producing enough content at this point? I still don't.  And you're over there throwing a video in it. We do a lot. Landon, do we do a lot or do we do a lot? We do a lot, but we can still do a lot more. This year we'll finish over $5 million total, probably closer to six. We spend about $300,000 a month just on Facebook ads. We manage another $300,000 a month for our insurance agency clients. We post 20 videos a week now. Five to six live videos a week, 16 blogs a month. And because we aggressively put so much money back into our business, our accounting team and my wife pay me less than $100,000 a year.  You can tell I'm happy and addicted to fricking and obsessed with taking risks and doing some big stuff and getting more attention, helping more people. I just am. So what's next? I always get a lot of questions about, hey dude, what's next, man?  I want to own an airplane in the next 12 months. Don't tell Judge Graham to tell Verity, okay? I want to buy a retreat house. I want to grow 8% nation to 10,000 agents one day. I want to grow our YouTube channel to 100,000 unique insurance agent subscribers. I want to host a charity golf tournament and I want to give away a car to an agent for Christmas every year, at least one. And I'm still thinking way too small. Hopefully this will challenge some of you to realize we can do more. Who feels like, say yes if you think you can do more. Me and you both. And I know we all can. So I want to give you some tips that helped me. I used to procrastinate way too much. Judge said earlier, time kills all deals. The more I think about something, the less likely I am to ever pull the trigger. I make quick decisions. Landon was talking to me about my PowerPoint about a week ago. He's like, dude, here's what you ought to speak on. And he said, you view money as like, maybe we're still in it from Wolf of Wall Street. He said, but you view money as like fun coupons. It is a tool to get our company from point A to point B. It does not have to go in my pocket. If it helps you further your mission, then do it. Don't even think about it. Evan did this because it helped him further his mission. True. Focus on being the best version of yourself. I believe in trying to reach my best self. And I'm not even close. Force yourself to do things that you don't wanna do. That's a little unique. People don't like doing stuff they don't wanna do. I force myself to do stuff I hate. And I'll tell you why in a second. Push yourself till you're uncomfortable and make your mission about helping others. As long as you're doing it for the right reasons and you stay humble, it'll work out. Okay, so there's some tips. Let me keep it up there, are you good? I also believe that everything we do is kind of a mental game that we're playing with ourselves and we have to stay mentally tough. So here's some things I do to stay sharp, to stay mentally tough, to try to be my best self. Work out, I love taking a cold shower every morning. It wakes me the freak up. Write my goals down twice a day. I believe in thinking about my goals constantly. If it doesn't help me reach my mission and my goal, I don't do it. I don't drink soda anymore. Food is fuel. I eat breakfast. I love to eat a couple boiled eggs every morning. I learn from books, audio and videos every single day. Who thinks we have some space to learn a little bit more? Yeah, me and you both. And I create a daily top three to-do list. Every day, I'm doing this. Tomorrow, I'm doing this. And I wake up and I'm able to chalk some stuff up off of my to-do list instead of just saying, well, I don't wanna make this cold call, so I'm gonna go over here and drink some coffee and talk to Bob that's not doing anything and I'm gonna take an early lunch and spend three hours at lunch and before you know what the day's over and what did I get accomplished? Not a lot. So I wanna challenge you for a quick second as I wrap up. What are your goals? I believe everyone needs to know where you're going. You gotta have some goals. You gotta have a mission. You gotta write it down every single day. If you don't have a goal, think about adopting one today, okay? This is a great place. This is a great environment to start thinking bigger, start thinking about goals and start taking yourself to the next level. They said I should come up with some steps for reaching your full potential, so here's a few steps. Determine your mission, we talked about that. Find creative ways to execute on that mission.  Become a content monster, okay? Coach Burdell liked that one. Don't be afraid to use money, some fun coupons, okay? And take massive risk.  I haven't either. I haven't either.  I believe everyone was born to do something great. Who agrees with that?  How do you wanna be remembered? I want one day, when they say the word insurance, they say, you know what? That dude did more for that industry than anyone else on planet earth ever. That's what I wanna leave to my industry. What do you wanna leave to your industry? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your time. To stop cheating.


Hello, my name is Dov Moorick from IBM. Together with Eubartus Franke, I will present securing Linux VM boot with AMD SEV measurement. First, I'd like to say that this is work of an entire team. First are colleagues from IBM, Tobin, James and Jim, and of course the feedback and helpful reviews from the DK2 and OVMF community and the QMU community all contributed to the work that we present today. First, let's set the stage and explain about confidential computing. So the goal here is to protect the guest from the hypervisor. So we assume there's a cloud service provider, which in this case is untrusted, which is deploying several host machines, which are again untrusted. And the guest owner or the customer wants to run their workloads in guest VMs inside these host machines on that cloud service provider. And it wants to run sensitive workloads there and the solution with SEV is to encrypt the memory of the VMs so that the host and therefore the cloud provider cannot read the content of the memory. The problem is that memory encryption is not enough. The memory might be encrypted, but the guest owner has no idea what's exactly running inside their guest. So it needs to verify that indeed the desired workload is running inside the guest and not something else which might steal their secrets or something like that. So if we talk about the hardware solution in AMD SEV, this is a feature of the modern AMD processors, which include a secure processor also called PSP, and this secure processor handles all the sensitive operations like storing the keys and so on. And the VM memory is encrypted. On the fly, the host cannot read the VM memory. Another feature which is relevant to our story today is the guest launch measurement. This is the hash of the initial guest memory before the VM starts running its first instruction. And this hash is assigned together with some other information about the VM by the secure processor so it cannot be forged. And similarly, another idea which is important for our talk today is the guest secret injection. Again, it happens in AMD SEV only during the launch time after verifying the measurement and the guest owner has an ability to inject the secret securely into the VM in a way that the host cannot be privy to this information. So let's walk over normal VM boot process with the dash kernel argument to QMU or a dash in HRD. So here's an example QMU command line for initializing such a VM. And what happens inside QMU is that it reads those files into the firmware config device and then it loads OVMF, which is the firmware that runs inside the VM into the guest memory. It instructs SEV to measure the memory. So it measures the memory and this measurement is reported to the guest owner. The guest owner then approves the measurement and tells the cloud provider or QMU to launch the VM. Then the VM starts running inside with OVMF code. OVMF then needs the kernel, so it reads the content of the kernel and in HRD and kernel command line from the firmware config device, loads them into memory and then jumps to the kernel to continue the boot process there. Here is the same process in a sequence diagram with all the players. So on the left is the guest owner, which is usually outside the cloud provider area. Then we have QMU which is untrusted in this setting and then the guest VM and the AMD secure processor which takes part in the measurement calculation. So first again QMU reads the kernel file into the firmware config device, loads OVMF into the guest memory and then uses AMD secure processor to measure the guest memory. The measurement goes back all the way to the guest owner which approves the measurement and tells QMU to launch the VM. The VM starts and then OVMF inside the guest VM reads the kernel from firmware config and QMU provides the content of the kernel and then OVMF can jump into that kernel to continue the boot process. We'll now describe an attack on boot with dash kernel. So assume a malicious host which runs QMU again and when the guest owner asks to run kernel 5.13.0 instead the host will run kernel malicious 5.13.0 which might include a module to steal memory or steal secrets. So QMU loads that malicious guest kernel into the firmware config device and then normally loads OVMF into guest memory and SEV measures the memory which includes only OVMF and the guest owner then approves this measurement and the launch continues. OVMF starts running. When OVMF needs the content of the kernel it reads it from firmware config but at that point it gets the content of the malicious kernel which is loaded into memory and then OVMF goes on and jumps to that malicious kernel which runs and then might be able to steal the sensitive information from the VM because it's running inside the trusted confidential VM and it happens because the secure processor hardware measured OVMF but didn't measure the other code that OVMF loaded which is the kernel, the integer D and the kernel command line because they're not part of the initial VM memory that are loaded later through the firmware config device. So our solution here is to basically to extend the measurement so what we do is add to the initial guest memory to add a list of hashes. These are the hashes of kernel, the integer D and the command line and since it's part of the initial memory then the secure processor will measure both OVMF and this list of hashes. Once OVMF starts running it reads the kernel and integer D command line from firmware config but it then verifies that the hashes of the binaries that it is reading did match the list of the hashes that appeared during the measurement. Here we see the hashes table that is constructed by QMU during boot and then read by OVMF to verify the hashes. So first we see in yellow the table header and then a length field of the entire table in green and then we see three entries. Each one has a grid which describes the entry then a length field in green and then the hash in red which is 32 bytes or which represent the SHA-256 hash of that entry. So we see three entries. The first one here represents the command line the second one the integer D and the third one is the hash of the kernel content itself and then we end with a few bytes of padding according to the SCB standard for encrypting initial VM memory. So as I said this table is constructed by QMU and then I use read by OVMF to verify the hashes. The same table should be constructed in the guest owner to calculate the same measurement and verify that the measurement reported the sign measurement reported by the VM during launch is indeed identical to the expected digest. So here's how the solution works from end to end. QMU loads OVMF into guest memory and then it loads the hashes of the kernel in an integer D command line into guest memory as well. So this is the page, the table that we've just seen in the previous slide. Then SCB measures the entire guest memory which now includes both OVMF and the hashes and if it approves then the VM starts running starts from OVMF. OVMF reads the kernel from firmware config device this is an insecure device but then OVMF verifies the content that it just read for example of the kernel against the expected hash that appeared in the hash list that we've seen before and similarly for initrd and for the kernel command line. If everything is okay it loads these content into memory and then starts running the kernel. So let's go over a few possible attacks here so the attack that we started from the host uses the wrong kernel or initrd on command line so in that case the host will compute the hash and since the hash of all these three entries are part of the measurement the measurement won't match and the guest owner will not approve the launch of the VCVM. A second attack is that the host replaces OVMF with their own version which doesn't perform the verification of the hashes in this case again OVMF is replaced so the measurement will not be matched. Another attack here is that host does use this OVMF and the hashes everything is expected but once firmware config device is read from it gives the wrong content. At that point measurement will be okay but OVMF will detect this because it will refuse to load the content because the content it reads from a firmware config device doesn't match the expected hash that appeared in the measurement. So we have all these three attacks mitigated by this solution. So the caveat for this solution is that in this case the kernel and initrd and command line are all readable by the host similarly as OVMF is in what we have now. So this should only be used when the kernel and initrd are not confidential and there are use cases for that. If they are confidential and you want to give them a secretly to the VM then we suggest to use encrypted disk boot and you can hear about it in another KVM forum from our team from James Bottomley of IBM and Bridgesting from AMD. So this solution is already implemented it has two parts, a part in OVMF inside the guest VM and a part in QMU when starting a VM. So in OVMF first we need to designate memory area discoverable by QMU for the hashes list and then the main functionality inside OVMF is as content is loaded from the firmware config device verify that content against the expected hashes list specifically the kernel and the initrd and the command line as they load from firmware config. If anything doesn't match the expected hash then the boot is aborted so the VM doesn't start at all. And this is all already reviewed and merged into the EDK2 tree back in July 2021. As for the QMU part when launching an SEV VM with a dash kernel argument then we add calculation of the hashes of the kernel initrd and command line if they are supplied populate that OVMF designated memory area described earlier so that OVMF can then verify the files as they are loaded. This is already reviewed and we hope it will be included in QMU 6.2 which is the upcoming version. This solution gives us the ability to use injected secrets inside confidential VMs. So as mentioned earlier once we properly measure a guest the guest owner can inject secrets into the VM memory in a way that the host cannot read those secrets. OVMF and QMU already supports this functionality for reserving area for injected secrets and the QMP command to inject those secrets securely. But once the VM has booted into Linux there is no way, easy way to access them in the guest. So we proposed an SEV secret kernel module which reserves this memory this memory area of the injected secrets so that the kernel doesn't use it for something else and then exposes the secrets in our file system interface using the SecurityFS functionality of the kernel. So the secrets appear in a directory where each file in that directory is a secret and reading the content of the file reveals the secret as well as removing the file erases the secret and this is undergoing review and discussion in the Linux Confidential Computing mailing list and other relevant mailing lists. Here is an example for the usage of this module so you load the module and then you have this directory under SecurityFS, SEV secret and each entry each file in that directory is one secret according to the guided structure of the secrets and you can read those secrets normally as files and you can also remove a secret and then it will be wiped for memory so it will not appear again so you can use a secret and then wipe it so further programs in the user land cannot actually access this secret. So our plans for the future is to improve the guest owner's experience so currently what happens is that every modification in the kernel or in the kernel command line modifies the measurement as expected but it is also an overhead of work for the guest owner to keep track of what's running so we need a way to improve that. Another work stream for us is to adapt this solution to support newer generation so SEV probably should work with the current code but we need to improve the measurements calculation side in the guest owner side to measure the initial CPU state as expected in SEV and modify the scheme for usage in S&P and Intel TDX which have the different measurement and attestation profiles so thank you for attending this talk about securing the Linux VM boot with AMD SEV measurement.


Approximately, 9 or 2 PM this evening, we received a run for a burger alarm at 5130 Durham Court, which is Greenwood Elementary School, also responding there. Winder was broken, but it didn't appear there was any entry at that particular time. Surely after that at 10, 10 this evening, we received a run to respond to 5290 Henry's Place, which is Rachel B, Rachel B. No School, which is a middle high school combination. That run came from two employees there. It appeared that one individual had made entry into the school, was waving the other individual into the school. These two individuals were determined to be juvenile, and was also determined that they were the same two individuals that had responded earlier to the school that was on Durham Place. After several hours attempting to talk to individuals out of the school.


So the 21 convention at Tampa, Florida, we have a pretty, I'm gonna say legendary speaker here, who started speaking at the 21 convention in 2009. I actually was there to witness it, but as I was just telling him before, I actually saw more change in attendees directly coming from what he said and what he recommended than almost any other speaker, and that was impressive. That caught my ear and really made me start looking at my diet, how I exercised, and his philosophies of life. I can check him out at Bay.com, that's B-A-Y-E. Let's bring on Drew Bay. All right, thanks. Glad to be here. Now, the past couple times that I was at the 21 convention, I talked about how to exercise. I wanna do something a little bit different now since you've been hearing about how to exercise from a lot of other great speakers. L. Darden's gonna be a little bit of a hard act to follow, but what I want to talk about is how to think about how to exercise, and this is important because the way you think about something is going to influence how you go about it. Now, if you attended Bill's presentation, I'm assuming you did biomechanics of exercise again, which is a phenomenal, phenomenal presentation. He taught you about how body positioning affects the moment arms that your muscles work against during exercise, and how that can increase not only the difficulty of exercise, but safety of exercise. Well, I like to take an example from that. If you were to take 100 people and hand them a barbell with no instruction at all and tell them to perform a curl, what you'll typically see is they'll stand, holding the bar waist tight here, leaning forward slightly. They'll use a little bit of a hitch with the hips to swing it up, and as they come up, they're gonna move their elbows forward in front of the hands and the barbell. Now, if you were paying attention during Bill's presentation, you know that you start with zero moment arm, you go through the maximum moment arm, and then you end up with no moment arm at all. Now, this is a great way to do a curl if your goal is to make the weight go up. It is a horrible way to do a curl if your goal is to effectively work your biceps. The difference between the two is that when you're thinking about making the bar go up, if you think of exercise as something that you do to the weights with your muscles, you're gonna tend to move in a way that makes it easier to do that. But easier is not what you want during exercise. You want exercise to be demanding. Instead, you want to think of exercise as something you do to your muscles with the weights. Now, the difference between the way most people curl, and I'll just use the curl as an example, and how you should curl, is that a proper curl is so much harder. You won't be able to lift as much weight, but it's going to be so much more effective for the muscle. And because you don't require as much weight, it also makes it a much safer exercise. I don't know if Bill went into specifics with the moment arms and curling, but if you start here, it's easy. If you start with a slight backward lean and you've got the barbell a few inches in front of your elbow, it's a whole lot harder. If you end here, this is pretty easy. Again, it's zero moment arm.  There's no difference in how far your elbow is moving, but there's a big difference in the average lever between this and doing this. And it's the same with a lot of other exercises. Now, the hard part about this is that when most people go into the gym, pick up a barbell or you get in a machine, we're conditioned to think about exercise as being, again, a process of doing something to the weights, doing something to the handles or the pedals or the pads on a machine. And again, when you think about exercise in that way, you're going to tend to move in a way that makes it easier to do that, which again is the exact opposite of what you want to do. If instead, you think of the goal of the exercise as not doing work or not moving weights up and down, but rather on efficiently loading the muscles that you're targeting and doing so in a manner that avoids wrecking your joints in the process, you're going to tend to move in a manner that is more efficient for that purpose. Now, getting into the mindset of found something that has made a huge difference in my workouts and workouts with clients is to take a few minutes before the workout to, first off, just empty out your thoughts, clear out, or actually quieting your mind is probably a better way of putting it. And then thinking about what you're going to be doing during the workout, mentally rehearsing the exercises. And as you are mentally rehearsing the exercises, it's important during that mental rehearsal to think about what you're really trying to accomplish. Again, you're not trying to make weights go up and down. You're not doing work to the machine or doing work to the barbell. In fact, the work you do is almost irrelevant and I'll get to that in a moment. You are trying to place as much of a demand as possible on the muscles that you're using during the exercise. Now, something about work, I'll try and keep this tangent short. Elle talked about negative exercise. Now, if you are performing a curl, and again we'll just use a curl as an example, you're doing work on the bar. You're doing positive work. And although technically you're doing negative work, so the net is zero because you're back here, you're performing a certain amount of mechanical work. If you were to hold the same barbell in the mid-range position of a curl and do nothing with it, nothing at all, just hold it there. You wouldn't be performing mechanical work, but you would still be doing metabolic work. There would still be tension on the muscle. There would still be fatigue and inroad. You would still get benefit from that.  And you are going to get more results with much, much less risk of injury doing fewer repetitions in perfect form and keeping a lot of tension on the target muscles, even using a lighter weight than if you were to use sloppy form to allow the use of a heavier weight and allow the use of more, or the performance of more repetitions. Now, another aspect of thinking about exercise that's important is differentiating between exercise as a stimulus, rather than a producer of improvements. Exercise does not directly produce any improvements in the body. All of the improvements that happen as a result of exercise happen because your body is trying to respond to what it perceives as a negative thing, an extreme stress. Again, the stress that you're trying to create, the real goal being to do that. Now, the importance of thinking about it this way is that the exercise just being a stimulus doesn't directly produce the results. All it does is send a message to your body to produce those adaptations. For your body to be able to produce those adaptations, though, requires that you not do so much exercise that you utilize resources or energy that could have gone to recovery and adaptation, and that you give your body adequate time between workouts to be able to do that. And when people think of exercises, you know, I go in the gym and I'm gonna grow, it makes more sense for them to be, to them, for them to be in the gym more often, to do more sets, to do more exercises. But when you understand that exercise doesn't produce any improvements, all it is is a stimulus, then it's easier to appreciate why exercise, if done correctly, also has to be relatively brief and relatively infrequent. And to expand a little bit on what Elle talked about, an example that I like to give to clients. And his philosophies of life, I can check him out at bay.com, that's B-A-Y-E. Let's bring on Drew Bay. All right, thanks. How'd you do it? The aspect of thinking about exercise that's important is differentiating between exercise as a stimulus rather than a producer of improvements. Exercise does not directly produce any improvements in the body. All of the improvements that happen as a result of exercise happen because your body is trying to respond to what it perceives as a negative thing, an extreme stress, that strength to be able to move that weight. Now with every repetition, you're gonna fatigue a little bit so that the amount of force you can produce, gradually attempt to move it again. If you were to take a very heavy weight and lower it slowly, and as you approach the bottom, gradually slow to a stop, and then very gradually begin to lift it, was what I had previously thought of as a 10 on a scale of one to 10 with intensity of effort became about a two or a three. And so,


Welcome thanks for being here another episode of the nonprofit show thrilled to have Julia Patrick back and of course our guest Andrew Olson CFRE and president of Altus marketing Andrew is here to talk to us about understanding nonprofit leadership. It's a big conversation short amount of time so stay with us and tune in. Quickly so Julia Patrick I mentioned welcome back thrilled to have you here co hosting today. Julie is the CEO of the American nonprofit Academy she enjoyed some much needed time away, and I'm glad to be here with you again. I'm Jared ransom your nonprofit nerd CEO of the Raven group, and we are honored each and every day to have the ongoing support of our presenting sponsors. This week is our 600 episode week so we've been, you know, blowing this up by way of conversation bragging about it but this is the week it is here. In fact today is 599 so tomorrow is our 600 but thank you so very much to bloomering American nonprofit Academy fundraising Academy with the National University nonprofit nerd, your part time controller staffing boutique and the nonprofit thought leader. Please check these companies out because they are here to lean into you and your mission in your community, and they've got so many wonderful things to offer you and your mission so please do give them a browse. If you've missed any of our episodes or you want to listen to what Andrew sharing with us today a little bit more. You can find us on Roku YouTube, Amazon Fire TV, as well as Vimeo and fear podcast listener like I am and I know our guest is because he actually host a podcast. Thank you up the nonprofit show wherever you stream your podcast. So mentioning Andrew and his podcast you can find that it's the Rainmaker fundraising podcast but I want to welcome you here. So welcome Andrew so glad to have you with us today. You thanks for having me. I feel like you know if it's episode 599 your approach and 600 I plenty to get a tattoo 599 after this after the show. Okay, I'm going to hold you to that would you do that. It's more likely you're going to see a goat next time that attached, you know, that I can get behind. Yes, we're sharing with us that you live how many acres is your farm just under 40. Yeah, 40 acres and you have sheep, ducks, you have a cow, chickens, cows, goats, guineas pigs. Oh, McDonald. Children. You are old McDonald I love it and and so you're coming to us from Tennessee today, but you've worked with so many organizations and again tell us a little bit about Altus marketing who you are what you offer our sector. Altus marketing is a direct response fundraising agency we serve all sorts of different nonprofits and ministry organizations were part of more, which is the largest service provider to, to nonprofit organizations in the country. And, you know, everything from data and analytics to direct response television, direct mail digital marketing, really anything where we need to marry a message with a marketing channel to deliver to an individual is the kind of stuff to be quite. I love it. Well, and then you have also produced a book which I have total injured. I know Jerry does too. We have total empathy and appreciation for anybody that cranks out a tome and so 101 biggest mistakes nonprofits make, and how you can avoid them. Talk to us a little bit about your book. Yeah, so I wrote this couple years back and I actually brought about 25 other experts from across the sector to contribute to this. And the genesis of it was I sat in about 80 meetings with nonprofit leaders, and started to see threads in those conversations. And I said to myself, wait a minute, we're all making the same mistakes like why are we not learning from one another. It's okay to make mistakes let's go make as many as possible and learn and get better. But why do we keep making the same mistakes. And I couldn't find anything in the market that address those so I grabbed a couple of friends and said let's create it. Nice, much needed. And so you had shared with us that we can find this on LinkedIn as well as Amazon but go ahead and give that shout out for your LinkedIn download because that is a generous offer. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know recently LinkedIn rolled out a new feature where you can put a web link at the top of your profile my link goes to a free download of the digital copy of this book so anybody that wants to connect with me on LinkedIn it's just Andrew Wilson CFRE and there's a link to download the book. Awesome. Well, we're going to we're going to do that I'm going to definitely take care of that when we're done here because I think that's that's just amazing. We've talked a lot about leadership over the course of all these episodes and Jared and I are always interested in what people have to say with all your research and your time working in our sector and even podcasting. What does leading a nonprofit successfully look like. Yeah, you know, it's whether it's a nonprofit or a for profit right because at the end of the day, that's all just about our taxes it's not, doesn't have anything to do with success of an organization. So, when I think about leadership you know really it comes down to what's the culture we're building. And, and how are we engaging and developing our people, right because you can't be a leader if no one follows. So it ultimately comes all down to the people. And the people, you know those who are, I would say the most effective leaders understand that the talent in your four walls whether they're actual or virtual is the most important resource you have. And everything emanates from making sure that they're well cared for and well developed and equipped to be successful, whether they're serving people in need on the front lines of your cause, or their administrative support or back end or fundraisers or whatever.  Now given that question, or given that point of view, do you think that that definition has changed a lot, just given coming out of the pandemics. I think that definition is amplified like crazy coming out of the pandemic. And in fact, we see this in our employee retention data. We see this, you know, both internally for our organization but also with our clients, the organizations that are leaning into and leading well from a people perspective and a culture perspective. Those are the ones that are retaining their staff that even when someone comes calling and saying I'm going to pay you more I'm going to do this I'm going to do that. People are saying yeah, that's all great I want that. I work for an amazing boss, right, or I have an amazing team, and you can't, you know, no amount of money can fix a really bad culture. Right. No, no number of perks solves for you know toxicity, or a lack of clarity or so many roadblocks that you can can actually feel like you're being successful every day so we definitely need to to address compensation particularly in our sector. At the same time, it's those other things that really drive value for employees. Yeah, that was my same question Julia is how is it changed and you know we hear now of stay interviews but I'm curious you know that in the HR component side, but I'm curious because servant leadership has always been a really big, title for our sector and you mentioned the word serving. So is that still like you know the principle of principles is that servant leadership mentality. I think in many cases that is, but I'm going to call a bit of BS on this right I think in our sector we like to talk nicely. But if you look at the way we actually treat people oftentimes it doesn't align with the words that we use right. So we say that we're all about making sure that you know that we're building communities or healthy thriving communities. But we also say it's okay to pay a not a living living wage because they're doing good work like that's crap right if we can't deliver services and also take care of our people. Then we probably ought to stop what we're doing and roll up our organization and say we failed because we can't figure this out. You know there's a lot of people who have a great passion for what they're doing. But if they don't understand that taking care of the people in the organization is paramount. Now I ascribe to something that comes out of Harvard Business School called the service profit chain thinking. Right and what that says and it's proven out is if if your employees are well cared for and feel valued, they will care for your customers. In our case, the end recipients of our services, and in turn, your revenue and profit will grow. And if you look at the companies that follow this, whether they're commercial or nonprofit, the data tracks to that methodology. You know, even if we purely say this is about the money and we follow that metric just to be profitable. It works. But the outcome is our people feel well cared for and they feel safe and they feel engaged. And that means the people that they care for are going to feel better about the work you do too. So if we're not living that no amount of us talking about how great the sector is and how much we care for people and like, at the end of the day, unless we're living it it's crap. Well, I appreciate you calling that out you know we wave the flag for that equal pay as well are just you know kind of right sizing that compensation, but talk to us about how we can execute this effectively so how do we put our words in our actions you know to to to the test. Yeah, so whether it's about compensation or executing your annual strategy whatever it might be right so when I think about effective execution. It's, it's all about doing the things that actually deliver the results. Right, so I had a mentor once who was a fundraising consultant, and she used to say to me, don't mistake activity for progress. There's a lot of stuff we do in our day to day work. That makes us feel like we're getting things done but it's not actually moving the needle on the value we're saying we deliver in the community. So, so for me, this effective execution is all about us sitting alongside each other and really challenging one another to say, is what you're doing today, actually moving the needle. Whether that's a major project or even a really small like hey, I had to make this phone call today. I feel like particularly for fundraisers right and I've, I've lived that life myself so I feel like I can challenge us here. You know, I can't tell you how many major gift officers I talked to who say, Oh, I got to look at this event spreadsheet and I've got to go talk to this person about you know what the setup is going to be in this room or this or that and like no get on the phone and make a call. It's going to move the needle for your organization, not what color the doilies are at the next event, right. But it's, it's so difficult to actually focus on the things that deliver the most meaningful impact. And unless we hold ourselves accountable, and we as leaders hold our teams accountable. We're never going to get there we're going to do a lot of work, and we're going to have a lot of you know wheel spinning, and we're going to feel good at the end of the day go wow I did so much today. And whatever our cause is is going to be no further ahead tomorrow because of that. So I love that mentality and my mother always used to say it's like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. You spin your wheels you do things that don't really save you in the long run. So what are some tips that we can as leaders help get out of the way get ourselves out of the way. How do you, how do you effectively get that mandate out there. Yeah. So I have so much to say I know we only have like 20 minutes so I'll be brief. I think the first one is as leaders, we have to get really comfortable, having uncomfortable conversations. One of our biggest challenges as a sector is that because what we do in large part is caring for people caring for animals caring for the environment. We want to treat people well, and we want to be liked. And sometimes we have to have conversations that are hurtful, not not that hurt people, but that hurt in the moment right, we have to have conversations that create tension and friction, because that's how things get resolved. We want to be even shy away from them, so that we can keep things happy and peaceful. And that is probably the biggest mistake and impediment to progress that we as leaders have in our entire sector. Right. Beyond that, I think we need to be really intentional about who we hire, how we resource them and I don't just mean salary there but I mean things like, do you have an intentional onboarding plan, and do you follow it. Do you have training, whether it's in house training or outsourced training. Do you have a mentorship program, do you have a way for an employee to raise their hand and go, I don't understand how to do this and I've never done it before, and not feel like they're beaten up about it. Right. Those are the kind of things that are going to allow us to actually move forward and achieve progress in whatever our cause is way more than anything else that we do. Wow. I love it too. And I have seen this time and time again and I do think that I've seen the shift over the last three years Andrew, you know truly in the workforce. And so, you're right, we have to be comfortable being uncomfortable. And I think that's a good for everyone in life right like there's been a lot of really uncomfortable moments in the last three years let's be honest about that. So looking at that. So how might we shift if we've noticed or even been told that you know our leadership stinks or the path that we're going sucks right like let's just throw it all out there. Like how do we start to move the Titanic because that's, you know, one degree at one degree will move a big ship so how do we start to move that if we're seeing, we're not going in the right direction. I think at the most basic it's you just have to start right so you don't have to fix everything tomorrow. I think oftentimes as leaders we think, well if something's broken I've got to solve it now. Right. And it might be something that that's a three year process. But you can't just not start because that feels daunting, right, you've got to take that first step. So I think, you know, just start, even if it's just chipping away at a little thing. I, you know, one of my favorite statements my staff knows this my 14 year old daughter parents it back to me. When someone gives me feedback, my first response is tell me more about that. To give them an opportunity to really get to what's the core issue. And then once I know what it is. I don't know why then pick it apart and say okay, if this is what has to get resolved. Where do I start what's the first thing to do. Right. And I think as as leaders, particularly when those things like training and development and coaching and and mentoring aren't even probably happening for most CEOs because most nonprofit boards aren't focused on it.  I'm a failure. How do I fix this, and they get paralyzed by the enormity of that question. Right. Whereas I think if we just take a step forward, what's one thing I could do tomorrow different than what I did today. And then tomorrow, what's one more thing, right. But I also think that, you know, as leaders, again, because we want to be liked because we many times we feel like hey we've achieved something because we're in this C level seat right now. We might not be willing to really take the feedback that some of our junior employees give us right and I, I got to tell you the most impactful piece of feedback I've had in a number of years came from one of the most junior employees on my staff I was leading a team of about 50 years. We're in a major change initiative. And she pulled me and a colleague aside, one day and said, I know you all think this is going great.  And I mean that that woman I've moved companies twice. She's on my staff now. And when the opportunity came up I was like, she's the most honest person I've ever worked with bring her over. She's willing to have hard conversations. I'm grateful to her because she was the one willing to raise her hand in a room of way more, you know, long tenured seasoned and go, I know I'm the new kid but you need to know this right. So I think creating that space for people to really be honest with you. And then having the sort of an internal fortitude to say, I've got this feedback now. It's not likely that it's BS. And even if it's not comfortable for me I have to own it and figure out how to resolve it. Those are the kind of things that I think make, you know, turn good leaders into great leaders. So how did you take her feedback. Did you address that then with the entire group to say, you know, thank you one of you spoke up this is what I heard we want to like how did you move that needle forward. I mean, first we thank her. Right. You know we appreciated the fact that she was, you know, she was candid about it. We, my colleague and I went back for a couple of days digested it and thought through like, how do we move from here to what the team actually needs. And then yes we came back to the entire group and said, we missed the mark.  We believe fully in what the future vision is.  We've been, you know, I was on the East Coast my colleague was on the West Coast we would literally trade emails in the middle of the night when she was about to start working after you know a long day of work and I was just finishing up after, you know, going to bed at two in the morning. So we started to explain like, even though we have a positive approach to this and you can see us looking excited. It's just as stressful. If there's just as much friction. It's just as uncomfortable for us. But it's also our job to make sure that we keep everybody engaged and pulling in the same direction. Given, given all of that, we understand that a recalibration is also important so let's just be honest with you with each other about the good and the bad. Great. What a great real life story so thank you for sharing that. And so how do we know when leadership is successful I mean hopefully that same colleague raises her hand and says, you're crushing it Andrew. How else do we know that. Well, so I kind of joked about this early on in our conversation but like, you're not a leader if nobody's following. Right. So I look at organizations that have serial turnover. And the first thing I think is okay there's a leadership problem there right. It's not just because some other company came into the market and is doing amazing things and everyone wants to go work in tech or you know become lifestyle bloggers or whatever it is. There's a bad leader there that no one and no one's addressing. So I think followership is important and it's a key indicator employee retention is a key indicator. Whether or not your staff is recruiting new talent for you is a key indicator. Right. So one of the things that I love about our team is our people are regularly raising their hand saying hey I know somebody who could fit that role. Hey, you know, this is a person I work with before we want them in our company. That tells me that that the team trusts where we are from a leadership perspective. That's a great point Andrew I would have never thought of that as a data point but that that's a big for me. Yeah, I think the other one is when your best people go silent, you know you have a problem. Yes. And I mean, we do this internally I encourage other organizations to do it we do an annual survey of our employees, and it's not just, you know, it's a it's a real survey right and it gets down to a net promoter score where and and it's you know, sometimes it's painful. But it gives us all the data we need to go and address things. And the most important part is once you've done the survey, just like with donors, you then have to say, we heard you. Here's what we think the plan is to solve it, do you agree. And then you work through a plan with them and a process to make sure that we're addressing the things that people brought up and they might be, you know, small mundane things, or there could be really big issues to get serious and I wish we had more time but we don't. I've got to ask you this question. Given all the changes that we've been going through because of and we always say multiple pandemics, you know everything from, you know, COVID to social injustice, the economy, political disruption, all the stuff. You're finding that you have employees or team members that want stronger leadership, or that want to be more independent. I mean, yes, any difference. Yes. Here's what here's what people. And this is a broad statement I know it's not 100% true. What people want is they want clarity of expectation. They want articulation of the guardrails and what I mean by that is, what's my decision authority, where, where, what's my path, right. They want to understand where they can be successful and what success looks like. And then they want to be left alone to do the good work. Right. But they also want to have a safety net so when they don't know something, or they make a mistake or they have an issue, they can fall back on on a leader or appear. But they also want to know that it's going to be in a way where they're not made to feel a fool. Right. So when we create that kind of structure. That's where people thrive. And, and it, I think it's always been that way. It is at a significantly amplified level today, because of all this. Interesting you say that like it might not have changed but it certainly is amplified. So this brings us a lot of amazing tips and I can imagine our viewers and listeners Andrew are thinking, we have so much to do so. So can you tell us like you know, where do we start is there I know we can download your book I know there you know that there's the podcast we can listen to. If we could take away one thing from today's conversation what would you recommend that for our leaders. The one thing for leaders, invest in getting to know your people and getting to understand what's important to them. What makes them feel successful, and then go do that. Great. And I loved also Julia I don't know if you took this away but you know it could be a three year journey but chip away now and get overwhelmed with this is going to take so long you know really start today. Yeah, I did hear that because I do Andrew. I think we think oh a solution is a, you know, yes or no, a or B, but we tend to get frustrated when, when it's not and the reality is, we have, you know, kind of a flow of things and so I appreciate it very much that you kind of helped us rediscover that Well, yeah, and you know, my good friend Kat Landa who if you go to my podcast she and I've done a couple shows together. She talks about the idea that like, there's no more change process right change just just happening constantly change. So we as leaders have to get really comfortable with the idea that tomorrow is going to be different than today and three days from now it's going to be different than tomorrow. And we just have to live in that discomfort and find a way to to get comfortable with the fact that I love I love that because that is so dang true and you know we we understand that in the nonprofit sector but we don't always articulate it that way I really appreciate that. Hey, here's your Andrew Olson CFR ease information president of Altus marketing Altus mk tg.com or check him out on the Rainmaker fundraising podcast. What a great mind what a great way for us to really delve into this next phase with so many of our nonprofits are doing as we kind of gear up for the the second half and the end half of the year for so many of us. So this has been really great. Also we want to remind everybody that you have a book at right after this episode I'm going to go to LinkedIn and definitely download it myself. 101 biggest mistakes nonprofits make and how you can avoid them. Check out Andrew Olson CFRE on LinkedIn and you can get access to this amazing I'm really energized Andrew super excited that you would join us again if we hadn't met before I'm Julia Patrick I've been joined by my interpret co host Jarrett Ransom who's held down the fort for a full week. Thank you. Thank you. You so absolutely. Thank you. I must report that Kevin Pace our executive producer was like wow Julia Jarrett was great and it was just fabulous we didn't miss you. That's not true. That's not true. That's saying so that's that's a good report. Hey also another good report for us are all of our sponsors who are here with us day in and day out. Blumerang American nonprofit Academy your part time controller nonprofit nerd fundraising Academy and National University staffing boutique and nonprofit thought leader. These are the folks that are with us day in and day out so that we can give you our messages and and open the world through the nonprofit show. It's been amazing Andrew so exciting. We have a lot more to talk about I think my friend. Thank you for having me I promise next time I come back I'll bring a goat. Please do absolutely do because that would be I would say Jarrett a first for us. We've never had.  We've never had any other animals so we would love a goat. Let's do it. I would say I would say we need a goat. We need a goat. Yes. Oh my gosh it's been a lot of fun. Hey everybody. We'd like to end every episode and we want to remind you as well as ourselves to stay well so you can do well. We'll see you back here tomorrow.


well, as individuals countries, countries act as well- copyrighted. They operate within Borders and they plan adaptation as individual countries, but the risks that they face are borderless. What happens in one country can create impacts and risks that cross its border into other countries.


Hello everybody! In a couple of previous videos, we have explored how to generate images with the help of Majority and its alternatives. But did you know that today's artificial intelligence is not only useful for creating pictures but can also convert your script into a video with an actor who's actually telling the story? Such technologies open the door to an unlimited pool of opportunities for creating web content like presentations, video reviews, advertisements, and many other things. They let you turn your text-based stuff into a more attractive and interesting format to engage more viewers and boost communication effectiveness, because now people see an actor talking instead of words and sentences. With such features, it's becoming easier and easier to work with various content, and you need less and less time to actually create it. So, today I'm going to show you a few neural networks that you can use to make videos while having only some text to start with. Hello friends! If you need to recover deleted data, view or restore removed browse in history – Hetman software products will help you. Follow the link in the description, download the necessary program for free, install it, and analyze the disk. The utility will show you the data you can recover, so you will be able to view it or get it back. In our channel and blog you will find solutions to any problem, from installing an operating system or configuring it to fixing possible bugs and errors or optimizing mobile gadgets. Our specialists will answer any questions you ask in your comments, under the videos or articles. The first neural network we will test is Hagen. This is a commercial resource. The trial version offers one minute of creating videos, that is, one credit. If you want to get several minutes for video generation for free, open the Gift tab in the lower left corner. You can see that for every person who registered using your link, you will get one more minute for generation. And if that person subscribes to the service, you will get three bonus minutes. The credits are only written now for your rendering video, so it's really convenient. However, until the video is rendered and all you do is to write the necessary text you can't see the preview. That is, how the actor moves and articulates the words. For starters, open your browser and type Hagen. Follow the first link to open the neural network website. Click on Try Hagen for free. The main working area opens. To start using it, you should sign in and it can be done with your Google account. There are several tabs available to the user – Home, Template, Avatar, Video, Asset. In the Home tab, you can create a talking photo or upload it. Let's try both variants. Click on Generate Toping Photo. You can see that you need to enter a prompt to generate an avatar. And then click Generate, which creates four variants of an avatar. Choose one of them and move on. Click on the avatar and then click Create Video. We asked chat GPT to write a short text for us, so paste this text here. Choose the reading speed and the actor's language, then click Submit. Wait for the video to be rendered and the corresponding message to your mail. There are hundreds of cables and wires in me weaving into a unique web of knowledge. My neurons correspond to a symphony where the waves of intelligence pour into the boundless expanses of the planets. I am endowed with the ability to feel and understand interpreting the signals that come to me. Also, you can use Hagen to make your own photo come alive. To do it, click Upload Talking Photo and choose a file from the folder on your PC. And now, take the same steps as with the generated avatar. Write some text for it, choose the voice and speech tempo. Click Submit and wait for the video to be rendered. After that, you will receive a link to your email address. Use it to download the generated video to your computer. The preview feature is also available by that link. There are hundreds of cables and wires in me weaving into a unique web of knowledge. My neurons correspond to a symphony where the waves of intelligence pour into the boundless expanses of the planets. I am endowed with the ability to feel and understand interpreting the signals that come to me. In the template tab, you can see samples and patterns that give you a clear idea of how much can be done with Hagen. By jumping to the avatar tab, you can find a list of avatars. And if you have bought a subscription, this will give you an opportunity to create 4K videos and access 134 variants of actors. You can view your projects and completed videos in the video tab. To create a video with an actor, click on Create Video. You'll be suggested to choose the video format, landscape or portrait. Choose the one you need and move on. Now, there is a pretty simple and user-friendly interface. You have the timeline, the viewing area and the button entitled Add Speech. Choose an actor for the video. Select a view mode. The actor's picture can be maximized or minimized. You can also choose a proper background. Add your text. Click it on the flag icon below on the right. You can choose the language for your actor to speak. Use the pitch and speed settings to change the voice quality and the reading speed. Click Submit and the video rendering process begins. After that, a link will be sent to your mail address, which you have used to sign in. Use this link to download the video to your PC and play it. Check this out. There are hundreds of cables and wires in me weaving into a unique web of knowledge. My neurons correspond to a symphony where the waves of intelligence pour into the boundless expanses of the planets. I am endowed with the ability to feel and understand interpreting the signals that come to me. As you can see, the video looks quite good and alive. If you don't know this person in real life and you have no idea the video was created with artificial intelligence, it might be difficult to understand that this actor is not real. This service really deserves to be developed and it can be very useful for creating videos. I left the link to Hagen under this video. Just like any other services, Hagen has a few alternatives. I won't try to cover each of them in detail, so I'll show you one of the alternatives as an illustration. And this will be ELI-IO. Go to ELI-IO webpage and create an account. You get a chance to generate one minute of video and 25 avatars to choose from for free. And more options are available at the price. As you can see, there are quite a lot of functions here and what we need now is to make a video. In the upper right corner, click Create a new video and see quite a user-friendly interface. Paste the text into the corresponding field. It was prepared by chatGPD and now an actor is going to read it. Click Start Render and wait for the message to arrive to your email address. Many people use artificial intelligence in their everyday lives without even knowing it. It is hidden inside our phones that recognize voice commands, in recommendations on video streaming platforms, and in commercial systems predicting our purchases. However, artificial intelligence poses many challenges and raises multiple questions. How can we ensure the ethical use of such systems? What should we do if artificial intelligence becomes smart enough to make decisions? How can we protect our privacy in the era when data is becoming more and more accessible? Summing up, today we have explored services for creating videos, advertisements and various content with the help of the neural network. Hey-Gen perfectly comes with this task. It has a nice and user-friendly interface, plenty of features and avatars to create videos. It will come in handy if you need to make an advertisement or presentation, a short video for social media, or anything else you can think of. There are various kinds of neural networks capable of creating videos, but I would use Hey-Gen as the perfect example. Videos made in Hey-Gen look more realistic and natural, not so classic, if we can say so. And that is all for now. Thank you for watching. Hopefully, this video was useful. Hit the like button and subscribe to Hetman Software channel. See you again in our next video.