Okay, we have almost the full house. There are some seats here and there, but let's get going. So welcome to the life in the fast lane achieve sustainable growth. My name is Janne Galliola and I'm the host. This afternoon of tonight. And with me there is Jeff Valpol from Phase 2, Paul Johnson from CTI Digital, Tim Deeson, Deeson online and Vesa Palom from Wunderkraut. People that we together employ more than 450 people. So we should know at least something about growth. So short introductions first. So as said, my name is Janne Galliola. I'm CEO of ExoWe. We are 70 people started in 2006 with one person. So we have grown quite a bit. And then off to panelists please. Yeah, hi, Jeff Valpol and CEO at Phase 2 Technology in the US. Started in 2001 with four people and we now have 130. So 13 years. We've been in business. We have headquarters in Washington DC, offices in New York, San Francisco and sizable office now in Portland, Oregon. Hi, Vesa Palomo, CEO of Wunderkraut. Started about five years ago. Today we are more than 150 people in Europe. So pretty much all over Europe. Officially headquartered in London, but we are quite distributed. I'm Tim Deeson. I run an agency called Deeson. We're about 30 people based in the UK. We kind of, we've been a group agency since about 2007. We've kind of concentrated on full service to the, in the sense that we do user experience design strategy as well as Drupal services. So some clients uses for typical agency services and some uses for Drupal as well. Hi, my name is Paul Johnson. I'm a director at CTI Digital. We were founded 10 years ago. We're based in Manchester. We have offices in London and a developer down in Brighton now. We have a CEO as a majority shareholder and five directors as a management team. We've grown over 10 years from four people to about 32 years ago. And now we're touching 58 people. Okay, thank you. And if you want to have questions in the middle of this session, then use hashtag Drupal fast lane all together. And I'll monitor with my fancy iPad here and then maybe, maybe index the questions here. And then later you can have questions also by the mic. But let's get to the, to the discuss. So the first topic, we have three topics here. So first topic is why do we want to grow? That is the question. So panelists in a free formed order, what is the business reason why you want to grow or what was the defining moment you found out that you actually want to grow and why? So I'm not actually sure I do. That's a joke. So I think for phase two, the initial first five years of our company was very small. We had no growth plans and no growth path. And I think it took a while for us to understand we were a business. And I think that's really the key defining point is once you realize that the point of a business is actually to make money, you learn that by figuring out that model and that engine and then scaling it appropriately, I think you earn more profit for your shareholders. So there's an economic reason. The other part about it is just opportunity. Once you get good at doing something, I think you want to be able to replicate that and you hire people that take a lot of pride and enjoyment in delivering success and they want to do more. It's addictive. So actually say be sure you want to grow because it's not something that you definitely need to do. Being a mall freelancer is a pretty sweet place to be at but you can't do all sorts of stuff. And basically one of the primary reasons for growing is to be able to do different kinds of projects for different kind of customers and go to places you wouldn't otherwise. That said, it's really like a balanced question on like do you want to grow and how big do you want to be where your life and business changes quite a bit when you keep on growing? I think certainly for me as a founder it's been interesting to understand I think why grow is a really important question when you're moving from being a freelancer or as you go through those different points because your job will change if you're at the top of that pyramid and understanding what you want to be doing day to day and why, I think it's quite important because otherwise you can end up with a business plan that doesn't really reflect the reality of what you want to achieve. I think it's been good because it's allowed us to align to opportunities well and certainly part of the driver of that is being to take on more interesting opportunities or clients or skills that feels like we can do better and better work and kind of I think in line with that that's allowed us to keep optimizing the business to work on those blue chip clients so it's certainly something that we did badly and didn't really understand at the start and I think as we've learned from those mistakes to understand where you need that clarity it's been important to kind of get better and better at that. I think the reason that we've grown is partly that we've won bigger and bigger projects as time has gone on and realised that we're quite good at servicing these large clients but in order to do that we've had to get subject matter experts in certain areas like scalability or migration or accessibility and in order to do that you have to have a certain size to be able to attract those you know expensive specialists Thank you. Let's do a quick quick gallop from the audience so how many of you are working alone in a single man entity single woman entity less than 5 people or 5 or less people less than 10 people less than 20 people less than 50 people less than 100 less than 100 more than 100 more than 1000 okay so there is still plenty room to grow good so what's the benefit of growth of growing to the clients what the clients get when you grow so I think the client gets a lot this is definitely something that we utilise to our advantage in the sales cycle the clients about like Paul said the ability to bring specialist to the team that a smaller organization couldn't afford so we can take a full breath set of experiences from strategy and design through content strategy UX development get into deployment and dev ops and infrastructure scalability and all that so we can deliver a very broad set of services and I think that's a great selling point for some clients however I think there's a point at which size becomes you hit a point at diminishing return and so we try to target ourselves and imagine ourselves fitting the sweet spot between you know I call it the Goldilocks strategy right so you had the three little bears you know and this one this bed's too small and this bed's too big and three little bears I'm mixing my I think I'm mixing my my fairytails but so you know I'll go with the porridge right the porridge was too hot the porridge was too cold this one's just right right so we see ourselves as being large enough to deliver all those services but not so large that we've reached you know an Accenture, IBM you know one department doesn't talk to each other and we create bureaucracy sort of thing so we're targeting that sweet spot for clients in between yeah what we really the reason for founding Wunderkrauts really was was quite simple it was customer demand so customers were really looking to get a international vendor who would be able to service them globally or European wide or whatever it may be for different customers but they wanted to have a vendor that is small and agile and flexible not a very easy thing to do and very few companies have managed to do it and that's one of the reasons why we ended up being what we are today being like small and flexible and not even trying to be one of the elephants like IT elephants we don't want to be an IBM really we want to be able to be flexible and move quick and change and do different stuff and also do stuff differently from time to time so that really was the primary reason for getting started yeah we've certainly been finding a sweet spot of where clients have been either shortlisting or selecting us to pitch on the spaces that were not so big were not kind of a WPP group tens of thousands of people agency but were not too small an agency that they feel like the size of the project is a commercial risk for them based on our turnover and I think part of that sweet spot has been around having those specialist services like user experience or content strategy were some of those things that smaller agencies can't have and it feels risky to the client for them to be brought in on a freelance basis but not be a huge agency that they start to feel like even as a kind of a very large pharmaceutical client for example even at that size that they're not really that valuable to them based on billions of billings and I think within the kind of Drupal community and the agencies that are out there seems to be kind of an emerging opportunity for kind of big enough to take on big jobs but not so huge that they're kind of those network agency size companies where clients are just really sick of kind of not having that customized service or people paying attention or high staff turnover and we've certainly been winning business on the basis I think to do full service on those jobs but not be so big that they kind of feel impersonal even to a really large client I suppose for CTI one of the big things was that we needed to be large enough to be able to service organizations like the government enterprise and large public sector bodies that they require a certain scale and that's partly through things like resilience so sickness absence we're also more people means we've got better availability to resource so we can plan around their changing requirements we can also achieve a higher velocity that's not just because we've got more hands on deck it can mean that we've got specialist roles so through the full project life cycle so we have people who are satisfying the kind of client relationship and sales and then we have people who specialize in planning and then we've got separate teams for development and then the support and in life services that's been a really important thing for us to kind of segment those because we found the development team were being pulled into support aspects and being pulled off projects and now that we have these two sort of like finite roles it's a much more productive environment okay so we talked a lot about sweet spot so hands in the air question for the panelists who is currently at the sweet spot below the sweet spot above the sweet spot certainly in the north west of the UK there are quite a few examples of companies that have taken that bridge between 15 and 100 and we're kind of at 50ish at the moment and it's a very dangerous gap to take you have to introduce extra layers of management and you become the profitability sort of wanes during that period and there have been plenty of agencies who have folded during that journey so I'd say we're at that sweet spot about to take a leap of faith yeah you always, the challenges keep on changing when you grow there's always the next thing and people say it's difficult to go from 10 to 20 or 50 to 100 or whatever it's difficult to go from 1 to 2 it's always just a different challenge on what you face and in our case for example the challenge right now is like time zones we get like without doing any proper sales we get like US customers who want to come in and all of our staff is based in Europe which is a massive challenge on how to manage that because we don't want to keep people working in the middle of the night so there's always the next thing, whatever it may be so it's a fleeting sweet spot then really really quick answers this is important question so couple of words only starting from Tim this time what's the value of the growth for the staff I think learning opportunities probably if you want two words yes bigger parties ability to specialize in something that you're really passionate about I think those would all be mine all those are better for staff excellent and then the next topic that we know now that why we want to grow for the fleeting sweet spot so the next one is how do we grow and let's take a first once again hands in the air for the panelists that have you grown organically all those that have grown organically hands in the air there will be more yeah you can answer to the several so have you grown through mergers and acquisitions have you grown using extensively freelance networks okay we have one that used all the three something else that I have missed okay that was it hosted then so let's go to the planning question that how do you plan growth or do you does it just happen that suddenly you found out that you are CEO of 200 people company or have you actually made a plan and followed it so in our case we started to get real growth and we made a plan and followed it believe it or not so we started a budgeting cycle and the budgeting looks at head count and it looks at profit margins and it works backwards to try to make sure that we achieve a net profit and then it essentially establishes a growth path based upon what we think we can sell so it's a difficult problem obviously you have to factor in what you can sell the size that you want to be and how you can recruit qualified people so we did achieve this year our growth plan and then at the end of the year we seized an opportunity to do another small not acquisition technically and aqua hire but that was outside of our growth plan but we looked at it as an advance against better hiring decisions than we would have made next year so we had an opportunity to get a really great team and we took it at the end of the year but it was when we were literally at I think almost exactly at the number it was the literal number that we were supposed to be at for the end of the year so we were there early and then we said ah screw it let's just get another 14 and add it on so the plan is very helpful but you always have to I guess allow yourself the ability to deviate from the plan to seize opportunity yeah it's good to have goals we have rolling goals usually so it's not like an annual budgeting or planning cycle it's more like well this is what we are going to do next kind of thing and it's also like ongoing and rolling and kind of a moving target you mostly grow sales first because of the nature of the business you need to have the sales to support the growth and then for example we are always hiring like at any given time if we find the right person we always hire them and then the sales follows also so I would say sales first whenever possible but if you find great people their work will also follow those people acquisitions are tricky but I guess that is a perfect topic I think there is certainly kind of an ongoing cycle mentality you need to be it's just as important to concentrate on your sales infrastructure and classically agencies struggle when they oversell but don't have the processes or people to keep delivering and you can end up with kind of a turnover and head count graph that will just keep dipping up and down unless you can understand as your head count grows that your problems will keep changing in terms of management infrastructure or process you know the sales stuff is a kind of a completely different problem I think too often agencies, smaller agencies haven't had to have dedicated sales teams and I found sales teams and business development are something to manage compared to project delivery and other things which you have to do all the time even as a kind of very small agency and I think recognising those different challenges and managing them specifically to their nature so not trying to treat sales teams as development teams and etc is quite important to understand and break up your business that way because it's easy to kind of fall into nasty traps that catch you out later I suppose CTIs some advice would be make sure you're selling the right projects know what you're good at and don't necessarily go for every single opportunity that comes along we do have a long-term plan I think it's important that you have a management team and also your staff bought into that plan so that it echoes throughout the business and two years ago it's fair to say that that wasn't the case in our company and we shrank because some of the management team were trying to pull the business in a different direction and had quite a negative impact and to resonate what Jeff has been saying you need to always be appraising things and be opportunistic so that may that be through hiring or there may be the next big project that you think you should go for because it's good for the long-term plan Excellent, there's a question from the audience so at least somebody's awake there so the there's a question that would it make sense for a small agency to hire a dedicated business development specialist to help with the growth so what's your take on that only if you've got staff you can deliver what they can sell it depends what you mean by business development specialist if it's a sales person as it is in the UK, fine, do it if it's really like developing your business I wouldn't be prepared to hand over your company and sell part of it and whatever you do it has to be all or nothing kind of thing because companies need strong leadership and if you try to like outsource that leadership that's not gonna go well Excellent so we have been talking about sales so what is the I guess that the input sales is the key to growth that you get more money in so how do you get the new clients or how do you evaluate the markets where you want to expand Sure Yes, I think first and foremost having market specialization or strategy to go after something specific is critical because if you can't be able to tell your staff whether they're dedicated salespeople or not dedicated salespeople if you can't point out a specific target and focus and say that's how and where we're gonna grow and that's what we're gonna work, we're interested in doing then you're essentially just taking what comes to you and if you take what comes to you you're at the mercy of your inbound lead generation process and that's demand that you don't control and you don't wanna be growing a business off of demand that you don't control because that can turn around on you if you can say hey, I'm only gonna sell you know, Drupal and I'm only gonna do it in the UK and I'm only gonna do it around projects that have you know, philanthropic cause or something and I'm making up a very specific niche but if you can say that and you can hold to that and you can demonstrate that to your team and you put those growth goals in place as well and you say and we're gonna go from you know, one million pounds to four million pounds doing it and here's the research and I know we can do it and then you go outwards now you have a forward looking not a passive sale strategy you have a more offensive that's offensive not offensive sale strategy I'll just add a bit on top of that basically so whatever he said also what I see in Drupal shops we talk about acquisition quite a bit and what I see in most Drupal shops is like they are first of all they are kind of busy running with the bicycle because they don't have time to learn to how to ride the bicycle so they run with it instead and the second thing is like they don't get to do the stuff that they would like to do like specialize in a niche and do some great stuff cause they are so busy in cleaning up their messes cause they sell whatever just to get the next paycheck and that's a really really like business circle to be in so breaking out of that circle somehow and getting to the next level and decided hey look we don't have that many customers for some time but at least now we are doing what we really want to do and what we are really good at and that can be tricky because believe it or not people need to have their paychecks in order to eat so tricky Definitely one of the most important things we found is that kind of deal evaluation work so we've got quite kind of a rigorous way of pulling apart both the client and the project of successful can we be successful with it what is the commercial context does the client even understand what they want to achieve are they capable of achieving it what are the kind of context of the business risk so if you're building something that's going to be on national television a week and the client doesn't really know what they're doing inevitably that flak and backlash is going to come at you even if you were really never going to kind of succeed and that's going to hurt your reputation your profitability you're going to spend a lot of management time kind of fighting around stuff that was just always a kind of inevitable conclusion so we've kind of got better and better at kind of turning down as much work as we take on and that's really let us focus on where we can really go and do an amazing job of something that leaves the schedules the mindset the people the business development all of the processes there to kind of do a really good job of the things that we can succeed with and sometimes that takes a bit of kind of you know kind of steal nerves really to kind of turn down things you think okay well the pipeline is not looking great we don't have tons of stuff booked in but really and this is a blue chip kind of name or something but actually we just think this isn't going to work and there's a UK PLC who I won't name actually but we went through a kind of a period of turning down work for them and saying actually we just don't understand these projects we don't think this is going to work and actually we've been working with them having seen those projects fail with other people we've now been working with them for a while and we actually got credibility by pointing out the kind of flaws in their project process to then be invited back in outside of a tender just to be commissioned to do the work so that was kind of gratifying although that kind of year in the middle Yeah I can only resonate that there was work that we won through the British Council and there was a get out clause after the discovery phase and we used that opportunity to say we could walk away because the platform that we were going to develop upon was not satisfactory but the outcome of that was that we migrated them to Drupal 7 so sometimes you need to be prepared to take a brave step and be confident about what you're doing but with reference to sustainability I'd just like to add that I think you should find work which your team enjoy or they find satisfying but it should also be profitable and use that the profitability look to your previous projects and be honest with yourselves about how they went and having satisfying work helps with retention of your staff they're more likely to stay for a long time and seek out work which complements to your long term goals that management team have already established Good, and then there's other question from the related markets from the audience that the world is the large enough organization to serve the government and the enterprise markets, quick answers This would depend a lot on a country It is like say for example in the UK the government is actively trying to say use SMEs like small and medium players whereas in markets like say Sweden or Finland or whatever it's going to be like if you don't have a million employees you can't even bid for a major project it really varies from country to country in some places you need to be one of the big four or five players in order to play in some markets it's quite the opposite so this is highly reliant where you're operating it How do you get to learn that by accident or by just trying or Well, you kind of know it by talking to local vendors but I guess not many companies are trying to actively move to another market so you would know it for your own market probably and I think that should be easy for us it's we've always just poking to the local players and know how it is and it's easier to to determine that for the public stuff that's quite simple usually for the private companies there may be very different restrictions from size there may be like language or cultural issues or you're not being German or you know whatever you actually run into quite a few different roadblocks when you're trying to go into a new market Okay and then the third section start with the sustaining the growth and let's talk about stuff we briefly touched the stuff but it's a really important important topic in the growth that you need to have people that you can grow so what is the what is the importance or meaning of division and the culture in your organization regarding growth let's start from that side this time I would say beyond you kind of informs everything that you do the way that you conduct disciplinary actions if you've got issues with the developers what work you go to win how people interact with one another on a day to day basis the culture it's integral to the whole business I can't really emphasize it enough and I think it's something that you need to have clearly communicated because as you grow you're bringing people who perhaps don't you need to make sure they're aware of what it is that they're coming to so part of your recruitment process should actually express the type of organization that you are otherwise it's going to change and it might not be in a manner which is going to contribute to your sustainability I certainly think the kind of clarity and communication of the two the two kind of keys that if you don't understand what you're going to do as a management team then no one else will for a fact either and if you don't communicate that in a way kind of regularly and often then other people can't collaborate with you to kind of achieve those goals and I think it's something certainly I've underestimated in the past the kind of thing old as in obvious what we're doing and actually what often is the kind of leadership level of the company I think often you're kind of moving faster and looking at things in a way that not everyone else has the opportunity to and I think it's really important to kind of set those goals and then keep communicating and collaborating on them and working through them otherwise people often you know change is something that humans just aren't geared up to kind of enjoy and accept without kind of having that context for it too and I think letting people know where you're going and why it's really important and can often smooth over the kind of humps and bumps that you get with growth where things people's roles change, people's processes change people's kind of working habits are going to change and that can often be more difficult than you anticipate I think in my experience It's largely down to culture culture eats strategy for breakfast it doesn't make any difference what sort of strategy you have if your culture is conflicting with it the culture is always going to win how do you create the culture well it's a living thing first of all it's something that when the organization grows and changes the culture keeps on changing but you can do like cultural leadership as well mostly by doing the right thing and doing the stuff you're believing and actually your daily actions as a leader have to reflect your values and your vision and your goals and all that so you have to be like all the time walking to talk basically on daily basis and leading from the front line really so that's the only way I know how to create the great culture in a company problem with going last is you start to forget the question I think it was twofold it was the impact of culture but also sort of sustained growth right and how those are related so I think first and foremost you can look at growth two ways you can look at it as responsive growth that's kind of pulled by demand we got one or two large projects and they wanted us to scale up so in response to that we added people the problems with that are similar to what I said earlier about sales in that that's someone else's plan for you not your plan for yourself that's being pulled in a direction by demand not determining you're going to go in that direction proactively and those are the situations that typically don't last they're not sustainable growth the company wasn't controlling that destiny and the second side of it the other way to do it is really in more of a proactive way and that's what tends to be more lasting and more sustainable and the reason is because you're focusing hopefully and we haven't mentioned this yet but you're hopefully focusing a lot more on scaling than growing which is to say you actually understand the structure and the leverage that this organization needs with regards to management and certain skills and talents and resources to go to that next level and stay there and be there productively and that's where management and leadership become a big deal because that's when you can actually say hey there is a mission there is a vision for this organization there's a strategic plan and there's culture and all of those things are done in a planned and organized way if you're growing in response to something you don't have time to align your mission and your vision and your culture in a way that makes sense to those employees so I think they are very related it was a good question even though I didn't remember it okay let's have a short wording from the audience so how many of you think that you know your company's vision by heart surprising many how many of you think that you are working in a growing company even bigger amount and how many of you think that the fleeting sweet spot is still ahead of you that you still need to grow to be the sweet spot how many think that you have grown already past the sweet spot where one guy okay we'll need to talk with you okay we'll need to talk with you later so we have been talking about structures and levels and the others so what is the what are the risks involved in when you step up the operations when you grow to the next level what kind of things you need to be prepared for should I start down here you choose I'll go just go online so I think there's we could do we could do three hours on the topic alone but I think first and foremost part of the risk in growing is you start to lose the culture that you had before and I think you know like Vessa said focusing on that culture as a primary thing has to be your job whoever is the CEO your job is to ensure that that culture is not affected by your ambition for growth or your scaling plans I also think that you have to support you have to start to think about the infrastructure that in the general sense that's required that infrastructure includes financial and legal aspects you know making sure that you actually have the sophistication to do your your numbers and run it like a business it includes sales and marketing making sure that you have the ability to sell more work in the future it includes management of all forms, project management product management, staff management any you know we all tend to think of management as overhead but the reality is it's scaffolding for growth it's the scaffolding that sits outside the organization and ensures that you can stack the next layer on top and so creating a management structure that both enforces the things that you're doing strategically but isn't a negative impact on the culture is one of the hardest things you can possibly do but it's the most critical it is literally trying to build a building without understanding what that structure is so I think probably the biggest risk is it becoming a job or just a job so basically it no longer it's something that you on Monday mornings are really glad that it's great to go to work and do all of this great stuff because you have all sorts of hustles and you may have even a temptation on copying the big boys on how they run corporations because surely they know because they have tens of thousands of employees and you copy all of the bureaucracy and layers and all this additional crap which part of it maybe is scaffolding really for growth, part of it maybe just because that's the way it's done because that's the way they teach you when you do MBAs which is complete crap if you ask me so all of this may actually turn it as a like work where it's like oh my god it's again Monday I don't want to go to work and that's the biggest risk I think it's really important to understand the business in terms of kind of turnover and head count of what is just good business and that's nothing to do often with kind of being a Drupal agency or an agency or anything else I think ensuring that you've got the right kind of financial or professional advisers the work you're doing which may have been different when you attend people on a 50,000 pound deal compared to something that's on a quarter of a million deal you can find yourself in traps that are far less intuitive I think as you start to work with larger and larger clients or on riskier projects and I think kind of studying your business and studying businesses of the same size to understand what are the kind of some of the techniques and it could be around tax, it could be around liability there's lots of things that kind of keep shifting as you go through and ensuring that you're kind of paying attention to the kind of agency space because lots of these things apply to businesses of those size regardless of their type and not kind of getting too stuck into just what kind of goes around amongst your immediate peers or kind of people that you'd speak to anyway but kind of studying it in a more wide sense I found useful. I think one of the risks of becoming quite largest that the management team can become isolated from the production team the people who are actually making these things temptation to hire people just to satisfy demand you hire in the wrong people that can be a big risk you get one bad apple that can spoil things it also has an increased need for better process and good documentation so that it is scalable so that people know exactly what they're doing and also resource planning is quite a big issue with us so we have a manager who spends his whole time horizon gazing and speaking with sales and production because the more projects you have and the bigger clients and the more likely there are shifts in the client requirement projects may go away for a period of time leaving a big gap in your guys tapping the bench and you have to run a profitable business avoid all costs so Paul already mentioned so we'll start with you this time that they are about the risks that you mentioned that you had some some bad things happening a couple of years ago so have any risk realized and how did you mitigate them I mean that that situation is kind of concurrent with when I arrived I was brought in to try and help to I shared the vision of the company and I suppose the CEO mitigated that by finding ways for that and those individuals to depart but a lot of the risk that we have is around resource we have a lot of staff it's a hungry monster to feed so we have to ensure that the sales pipeline is well filled we're looking into the middle of next year to ensure it's all about planning so I think having somebody who is not only the managing director of the company thinking about finances and that aspect there's also the long term resource planning that really has been fundamental to us turning the company around okay and the others can also share war stories now about things that went wrong if something went wrong where do you start certainly we've seen risk I think risk can come in many forms some of the risk we've seen has been from some of our bigger successes when we've had really rapid growth periods and you are trying to manage that growth and it feels good and you're succeeding but also you're growing possibly quicker than that scaffolding we've definitely had some retrenching periods where we've just tried to to kind of take a little bit of a step back and make sure that where we've kind of achieved on that growth curve that's sustainable and we've been lucky to kind of had have permanent growth I guess so we've certainly kind of grown slower and smaller than other people but we've been lucky to be able to kind of maintain it and sustain it rather than kind of dipping up and down so I think that's kind of one of the keys I think is also just when which sounds a bit kind of negative but when things when things are going really really well just understand what does that mean for the next thing if you've just hired ten people don't forget to look at that pipeline that's three months out and six months out because all of that growth needs to be kind of sustained otherwise you just deal with really really irritating problems about kind of dipping up and down and having to bring people in and take people out and that just takes a lot of energy and time which would be better spent on kind of investing in the future I think we have a culture of celebrating failure other companies have employees of the month we have the fail of the month so this may sound strange but we really do focus on like if you fail on something and stuff goes wrong try to learn from it try to make it public because failures are not expensive hidden failures are expensive and this leads to into sort of retrospective also and the fun part being like all of the most expensive failures tend to be my failures always so I get to the really expensive stuff and there's so many risks and you can't avoid all of them you just have to try to fail fast and fail cheap basically with those risks most of the risks are of course around people because the entire business is around people so you may have co-founders who want to leave the company at some point because they don't feel like it's a company that they want to build anymore you have to try to be civilized on how to deal with that and of course you know if people want to leave they have to be able to leave on good terms and yeah so many stories around that when you do integration of companies and we have like 17 native languages spoken in a group so cultural diversity is there so yeah people I saw a bunch of wonder crowd people celebrating at the bar last night I don't know if they I don't know what they failed on but something something went wrong so I think there's two types of risks that as the leader of the organization you have to look out for there's like economics there's micro risks there are things you can control inside of your own environment and that's what most of us probably have to spend most of our time on and then there's the macro the environmental risks that we sort of can maybe influence or we can kind of steer around but it's like the weather you can't control it if Drupal disappeared off the face of the planet tomorrow what would they do to our businesses we don't like to define ourselves as Drupal companies but we're dependent on it and so things like that are also scary so the things that it's disproportion I think the things that a CEO probably stays awake at night thinking about are the things they can't control disproportionately and then the things that you can't control you don't always do a good job with so when it comes to the specific things I think our biggest failures our biggest failure came two, three years ago when we it was not really because of growth it was because of not understanding how quickly our organization moved how much we had to have a pulse on the numbers and we didn't really have a good sense of our own numbers we're much more data driven now than we were a couple years ago and you have to be if 10% growth is actually 15 people then every hiring decision that you make there has to be driven by some further future planning it's really important that you understand the pipeline understand the metrics, the profitability your gross margin you have to know what your expenses are you have to know your cash and how much cash you have and how long you can go and so those types of and then the operational metrics your utilization, your effective rate your cost per employee all of those things the KPIs the key process indicators that you want within your organization are probably for us maturity point in the last year or two just really knowing those gives us confidence to grow because we can hopefully see any kind of issues coming a little bit further out in the future excellent and then there's a one question from the audience that I brutally will will mangle a bit so the question is the original question is are larger customers better for growth than small customers but my question related to that how has your clients changed when you have grown quick answers and then we'll go to the last topic start here so yeah as we've gotten bigger our clients have gotten bigger and that's been both reality that I think everybody will reflect and also one of the reasons we got bigger was to serve those larger clients so it's by design as well as by effect I didn't really have anything to add, that's the case we've definitely found larger clients to be beneficial because you can sell multiple projects to them and that relationship is more valuable you think you have to recognise that the cost of sale goes up to larger clients, that initial foot in the door stuff can take a lot longer and be a lot more time consuming than it can for smaller clients our clients have gone from having small enterprises that have strong owners and you've just got to convince that one person to CEOs maybe boards that you have to go through a very bigger process and convince a lot more people and be more authoritative in how you're doing it so it can be a lot longer process you have to be very self assured okay and now listen carefully because now it's time for the key takeaway from the panel so one sentence advice to the people that are thinking of growing please I would say the most important thing is is well it's cliché world peace the most important thing is the people you hire just make sure you don't lose track of what Vess or Tim or somebody said just each person you add into that organisation while they may be small relative to the size you're growing to they have the ability to either make you successful or start to hurt you and so each person you bring in is critical to the success I'll try to stick in one sentence don't forget why you do it that was half my one issue I think be really clear what you want to achieve and why because if you don't get those two things together I think it can get quite complicated quickly have a long term objective and take small steps to get there excellent so now all of the audience are experts in growth so now it's time to go deeper so any questions so you can use the hashtag Drupal fast lane and we won't answer them right now but we won't kind of ask you to come to the microphone but these guys have promised that they will they will get back to you in twitter for those questions that I didn't ask now but we have now 12 minutes and counting for any questions that you might have please go to the mic you can form the line there what if should the founder of the company presume the founder of your company is a developer I'm not talking about myself here and this developer says very very good should that person become the company leader like yourselves or hire in a company leader let's say and remain as the top developer in the company what do you want to do it depends on that really what do you want to do if you want to become a leader go and get trained up in business stuff it's really not all that fancy just go and do an MBA or whatever that simple developers will be excellent or technical people in general will be excellent leaders if they just get the experience and training but if what you want to really do is hack Drupal yeah no then you need to do that so you wouldn't have a problem with the founder of the company for the recording that the question was that whether the is it a problem that the founder of the company is below the management in the bigger company so I think as you grow so I actually have I have four original founders four original founders then through acquisition another founder then we have an employee stock plan we've been giving some stock to various management so we're starting to get to a point where we're more like a corporation and less like a firm that's controlled by a few owners and we're encouraging that by drawing distinctions between those that own equity in the company and those that are officers acting on behalf of the company and we think this is helping us professionalize so we've brought in people from the outside like my COO for instance who was not an equity owner in the company but is a very experienced business executive and we've taken a founder in this case one of my partners originally and we have essentially put him underneath him based on skill and we think that every time we do that we're doing that for the employees we're telling the company we will run this company as efficiently and effectively as we can regardless of our ownership interests and that's also in the interest of those people that own it because they get to watch professionals build value for them that they would otherwise be trying to do themselves so we're actually embracing the distinction between ownership and management in a very strong way If I can add one more thing don't ever be worried on hiring more senior and smarter people than you are because most founders are actually afraid of that it's like what if I bring this person on board and they are smarter than me and more experienced and they cannot take over and your business grows Excellent, next question Hi, percentage wise what was your split between developers sales personnel and project managers when you were small and compared to now that you're big I think we found we would develop a heavy start because you don't have much process or infrastructure around that and then I think we're at the ratio of about a third developers and then the rest are support staff, creative project managers, finance things like that, so I think the ratio does change and it's really important to understand who's billable and who's not because as you get bigger your ratios of who's actually charges rates will go down which shifts your numbers on your head count quite quickly I think it's natural to have a shift in the proportion often times in a small company people will wear several different hats so I mean currently we've probably got about 60% developers we've got so it's 50 odd staff we've got four project managers to dedicated sales people so we're very very heavy on the dev still but we've got could you repeat those numbers 50 staff we've got about 50% developers we've got three or four project managers and then we've got a management team about five people a very small design team and then administrative staff on top of that I mean the developers are the filthy business there you guys are earning money I think our stats are something and don't quote me on the exacts but so 130 people about 60 of them or just straight developers then we have our like UX business analyst requirements people project managers and all that sorry that's like 70 developers then it's like 30 in those other categories so when you add all that up it's like of the 130 100 of them are delivery staff so billable you know in some capacity 10 in sales 20 in the rest of the business function so like 15 between sales and marketing something like that I think the biggest change we've seen is we are more diverse now so we are hiring more experts on say UX or something like that we haven't our structure is a bit different we don't have sales at all so that's why the shift hasn't been so dramatic for us if I look at the numbers and I don't have the numbers right now I can't remember them but it's also been you know more like specialists on staff that's been definitely the biggest change we've seen over the years did you say that you don't have any sales personnel like pure sales well we call our sales consultants and they are billable so that's the you can call them key account managers they do the same job but the difference is we actually build their hours what's your vision in sustaining growth with multiple leaderships and does it have a positive or a negative effect what do you mean by multiple leaderships if you have multiple people in the company having strong ideas or visions about the future well I have some experience on bad and good examples of this in a good healthy relationship you are aligned and you complete some of your weaknesses and so on in a bad relationship you end up disagreeing on everything and you can't get anywhere because of that and if you end up in the later situation you know somebody has to leave if it's the first one great so depends on the people quite a bit so you can what I said earlier about the ownership versus kind of officer thing is important here because you have to reign anybody in who's an owner who feels that they should be in any way driving things differently than your chief executive so even if you're a five person company you should have a CEO and that CEO should be in charge and the rest of the team is there to do certain parts of the business the CEO is not supposed to run all aspects of the business there's a delegation and there's a dividing up of roles and responsibilities that's critical to getting growth because if you've got even you see this a lot in this community in the Dripville community you'll see the two owner shop and the two owner shop goes to about 15 people maybe 20 and what happens is you got one tech guy and one business guy two tech guys with split up roles and if they are pulling in different directions equally then it's impossible to move forward they have to either be 100% on the same page or divide and conquer on what those roles are and one of them is deciding strategy and one of them is focused on the operational aspects or something like that that works as you get a little bit bigger you're going to want more of a CEO and then someone who handles marketing someone who handles sales someone's going to handle the operations and those people need to have clear what we call swim lanes it's like exactly who's swimming and what lanes so they're not bumping into each other and the best tool I can use to recommend for that is a racy chart if you're familiar with racy it's an acronym you can google it it's a great exercise to get people to focus on what value and what purpose they're doing for the organization and make sure that those all align with the vision and the strategy and they're not pulling away in different directions so they're complementary next question just be close to the microphone so you talked specifically about how important culture is and I'm curious as you've grown what you've done to be intentional about preserving culture if that's been sort of top down leadership or if that comes from within your organization or how you've made that work and given how important that it is what steps as CEOs you've taken to sustain that as you've grown and be intentional about it we could do a really long answer to this one but the very short version because I think we are a bit short on time would be just set an example and be consistent on that I think it's important to remember too is you're going to have a culture regardless of whether you're mindful of it and kind of understanding what you're trying to kind of cultivate and having kind of a finger on the pulse as you go is really important I think it's important to know what your culture is to admit that externally so that you can attract people who are like-minded so that you can grow that Excellent, and then the last question Hi, I have a question regarding growth we've been talking about that we need to have good employees and find good employees what would be your advice when you have a company of the size 15 to 25 before we can hire somebody to take care of finding employees somebody has to find the employee and then often the CEO of the company or who is in the top position in the company how much time would you say that you have to spend on finding good employees so your company can have a good growth I think it's the most important thing you can do because a bad hire will cost you time good will, it's really kind of toxic so I've always kept quite close to that process in terms of the final parts of it to make sure that we don't have people that it's not going to work out for either party they're going to be unhappy and want to leave and they're not going to be good for the business so it's something you want to make as efficient as you can but never lose sight of how critical it is in a service business because it sets the tone for everything The way we do hiring is we first have the local managing director direct for a country being as a filter so they spend a fair amount of their timeline filtering the candidates after an assistant has such dropped really bad applicants to be honest and the last step actually is a team interview so the team who actually will end up working with the person makes the final decision so the say is not the manager or the CEO anyone else is the team and that helps quite a bit because it's a nice and honest discussion between what the company is like making sure that because the team has to survive with that person as well so it's going to make your life a bit easier if you're running a company as well As a company we spend quite a bit of time doing it because if we don't do it right then we're going to spend even more time because it's going to have to be done again I think the size point that you mentioned is particularly difficult and I do remember being at that point we did it somewhere around 40 we get our own dedicated person focused on recruiting and that made a huge difference we did dabble with staffing agencies and we worked with them for a while but it's a difficult, I don't want to go in here and all the reasons why it's hard but I think that one of the most effective things you can do my best advice for you would be get your core team together have them brainstorm good strong people that they've worked with before and have a really strong understanding what you need and see if there are any matches and if you get even one really great person that someone worked with before who just comes in and adds a ton to your culture and your ideas and your growth that will spiral out and so it's a network effect of really it's basically a network effect of good people and so I think if you can brainstorm people that you can bring into the organization people that all of you have worked with that you trust that will get you really far excellent thank you panelists, thank you audience don't you leave yet, I have two topics so first and foremost give feedback this is important, this is the only way that we can improve and the other one, the even more important thing that the discussion continues at quarter to four at G111 room at the x room there's a both business track both growing durable business so squeeze in there to continue the discussion thank you


Good morning everyone. Welcome to morning prayer. If you're here in the room Let's all join together stand to our feet. Those of you who are joining us online Welcome and we want to remind you that we are joining in with the Isaiah 62 fast that is Compilation of over a million some are saying four to five million right now intercessors globally That are praying for the 21 days between May 7th and May 28th for the people in the nation of Israel So we're joining in together on this and you know, it's interesting about a called a Focused prayer and fasting and intercession around Israel This is really the heart of the Apostle Paul and Romans chapter 9 and chapter 11 He says that he was even willing that he himself would be lost if it meant for the restoration and the salvation of his kinsmen after the flesh which is natural Israel and So it was definitely in the heart of Paul as an apostle to pray in the intercede His heart was broken His desire was for Israel to be saved And so we're joining in and for those of you who maybe are brand new to this initiative encourage you to visit Isaiah 62 Fast.com and You can get some more resources there. Isaiah 62 is a beautiful beautiful prophetic Promise that God gives the nation of Israel that he's going to set watchman on the wall who will Call him into remembrance day and night until he makes Jerusalem Joy and a delight in all the earth. That's God's Kind intentions both to the Jewish people wherever they are and to the nation of Israel Psalm chapter 22 Verse number three says you are holy and thrown on the praises of Israel Love this promise that in the time of David and song 22 Said that Israel's praise and their worship actually created an enthronement or a Manifestation of God's government God's reign in his rulership in the midst of his people in the midst of Israel And what we know prophetically down the road is that as God reestablishes and redeems Israel to himself That they're going to be Delighted all the earth in the way that Israel praises their God our God it's actually going to Radiate the glory of God to the other nations of the earth so this morning we're going to take the first few minutes And we're going to pray and Intercede right off the bat for the nation of Israel. We're going to pray out of this Psalm and also Psalm 65 Where it says that praise is waiting for you oh God and Zion So father we come before you today And as always Lord, we begin with just Thanksgiving in our heart thankful to you God for the election of the nation of Israel for Jacob you Said that you are mine I've established an everlasting covenant with you My Lord today, we give you thanks for the Messiah that has come through the line of Israel the line of the tribe of Judah Jesus Yeshua who is our redeemer our savior That his blood has redeemed us out of every tribe and out of every people group and nation on the face of the earth Today we stand as intercessors in the gap Watch men on the wall Praying Back towards the people That you established your covenant with made a promise that the everlasting covenant that you established with Abraham that you would be faithful To fulfill it in its totality So now we're praying God You would be faithful Lord God to Jacob And we prophesy over Israel today That there's coming a day When praise will once again be awaiting you in Israel from Zion Lord and we will not give rest to our eyes until we see that day Or that you have determined that Israel that Zion is your favorite hill That from it you will rule and reign over the nations from it Nations will pour in to Israel and worship you and bow down before you We declare even now Lord Praise awaits you in Zion We pray right now for the remnant of believers that are in Israel at this particular moment Even though they are a remnant even though they are a minority Lord their praise is rising to you Their intercession is rising to you And we're praying Lord for boldness and courage in their worship from the heart of the Israel today That it would break through the darkness That would pull back the veil Lord that their praise would Stir to jealousy those who do not know you even at the western wall today were rabbis gather with their students Where thousands of Jewish people are going to place their forehead on the retaining wall of the old Temple Mount and They're going to pray to the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob and they're going to sing songs of praise Lord even as that praise and those prayers arise we're praying for a spirit of revelation To be response of heaven towards them spirit of revelation and understanding of who Jesus is in And all that Jesus has done as the Isaiah 53 suffering servant the one who was bruised for their iniquities The one who was beaten for their transgressions the one whose chest ties been brought peace Jesus our suffering servant Being thrown on the praises of Israel today Being thrown upon the praises of Israel today Lord and do not rest until all of Israel is saved Until all of Israel is saved not just a seed not just a remnant But until all those who according to the flesh are grafted back into the olive tree of the covenant the source of life And that their worship rises before you day and night as a sweet smelling aroma at an acceptable sacrifice Lord even now in the midst of all the pressure that Israel is experiencing from inside and from outside Lord we're praying that it would push them towards you Throw them towards you to worship you To call upon your name to not hold disdain in our hearts towards the name of Jesus To not just see Jesus through the lens of their pain and their suffering and persecution of past years and Generations, but Lord that they would see you through the lens of Isaiah 53. This is the one This is the one who would come take our reproach away. This is the one who would come Suffer on behalf of all of Israel. This is the one who would be the sheep let the slaughter who utters not a word This is the one that God takes delight in putting all the reproach of Israel upon as he hung upon a cross Lord lift up the eyes of Israel Lift up the eyes of the Jewish people that their hearts would be rent and their desire would be for you. Oh God This is our prayer today that the name Yeshua would be exalted in all of Israel and among all the Jewish people Receive worship from your people Israel today. We pray to redeem Israel to yourself Solmus said Lord if you counted our transgressions who can stand we're praying For a revelation that righteousness does not come through the law. It comes through the stretched out arm of the Lord His strength His grace His ability Lord grant Faith eyes of your people that they might truly believe the risen them of God and so Lord We stand in solidarity with those intercessors Globally right now praying day and night for the nation of Israel We pray for strength and endurance to the watchman on the wall Thank you for moving in this hour This significant hour of Israel 75th anniversary Or let this be a year Of revelation attitudes and hearts Raise up a remnant raise up prophetic voices within Israel That declare your goodness today. We're going to shift into a time Of worship right now of just adoration to the Lord And we thank you for joining us in specifically praying for Israel Even as we shift right now, let's be reminded At the same praise that we're praying to flow out of Israel Flows out of us that God is searching for those who will worship him in spirit and in truth Your praise matters your prayers matter. So let's lean in as we worship the Lord together Like water from our pour my praises like perfume To every drop is gone. This is my desire Praise Thanksgiving praise with oil A thanksgiving God rightly would they love you son of God son of man in Israel Rightly but really easy for us in this room small room in the middle of kalamazoo to not historical momentation of Israel It's really easy for us To just see ourselves in this room Really far away from those people in that land and not realize that we have the backup Of legions all standing on a wall together That we're not in this alone That it's not just us in this room It's not just us on this live stream right now But there are millions of people around the world right now all lifting up their voices Crying out to God out with this isaia 62 initiative this focus In verse 10 through 12 says Go through Go through the gates prepare the way for the people Build up build up the highway cleared of stones Lift up a signal over the people's behold the Lord has proclaimed To the end of the earth To the daughter of Zion behold your salvation comes Behold his reward is with him And his recompense And they shall be called the holy people the redeemed of the lord and you shall be called sought out a city not forsaken right now I want us to with our voices not just with me on a microphone or the team leading us in song and prophetic song But I want us to see our prayers Our intercession are taking our stands on the wall with our millions of brothers and sisters around the world as actively doing this as preparing By praying for israel by building By preparing for israel by clearing stones and lighting up a signal By praying for israel so lord right now for zion's sake For the sake of zion we say lord, would you open up the ears of the death? Would you open up the eyes of the blind? Would you save would you redeem for the time has come just like i say at 56 verse one says the time has come So for zion's sake god, would you move in a powerful way?  For jerusalem's sake god Would you open up their ears? Would you open up for the light has come and the glory just like isaus 60 says lord Lord, would you move for zion's sake god? Would you move for jerusalem's sake lord Session this morning god We're not gonna would you move in a mighty way in jesus day Deathness and blindness going through his a new series at radiant church and i'm overwhelmed Right now is where the lord has me the book of jog But i'm also overwhelmed just with the reality of the deafness and the blindness As it pertains to what we're praying for right now and i say at chapter 42 verse 18 It says hear you deaf And look you blind blind but my servant who is deaf as my messenger Whom i sin Who is blind as my dedicated one or Or blind as the servant of the lord Lord i pray right now that you would Truly open up ears to hear what the spirit is saying in israel Lord i pray that you would give sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf in israel lord Which you awaken their senses the five senses that you have given them Not just to see the things of this world and hear the sounds of this world But to see you in your goodness To truly see your son with their eyes god to hear your son with their ears god So lord i pray that you would open up blind eyes lord I pray that you would open up the blind eyes of your servants lord god your messengers lord I pray that you would open up the deaf ears of your servants your messengers god that they would truly be The people that you've called them to be Your holy beloved treasure your precious Servants god lord would you open up their ears would you open up their eyes lord?   Jeremiah chapter 31 Serenity verse nine says with weeping they shall come And with pleas for mercy i will lead them back i will make them walk by brooks of water In a straight path Which they shall not stumble For i am a father to israel to israel verse 10 Of the lord o nations They declare it in the coastlands far away Say he who scattered israel will gather him and will keep him as a shepherd keeps his flock For the lord has ransomed jacob had has ransomed him From hands too strong for him They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion And they shall be radiant Over the goodness prophesied this now Over israel lord would you lead them? With mercy back to you Would you leave them? By brooks of water in a straight path where they will not stumble lord i pray that they would hear your voice today Lord for you have ransomed them and redeemed them In and through christ jesus So lord i pray that out of israel will come A song a loud song from the heights of zion full of israel Would be radiant that they would be glowing and shining in the radiance of your glory lord For you will be glorified in israel That is what your word says and i say at 44 you will be not you might not might be not you could be So lord i pray that from israel would arise That a song out of israel would arise and that your people would be radiant as they sing over the goodness As we pray as we take our stand on the wall That this is just the first week of 21 days and that we would just grow stronger And that the number of six million people would double next week god i pray that 12 million people Across this globe would be crying out to you Interceding standing in the gap between you and israel god glorified in our lives today god Just like you will be glorified in israel would you be glorified in and through our lives today as we Go into all this world That you have called us to go into Lord, we love you and we bless israel this morning in jesus name. Thank you for joining us today We will be back praying continuing to intercede for israel with millions of people all around the globe tomorrow morning Monday through friday every single day eight a.m. And then also i want to invite you to the To the prayer room at noon and at 6 30 as we continue to pray for israel and also our cities around the nation Have a blessed day


Trini girl natural hi everyone i wanted to come on today to talk to you about scalp massages so it's almost wash day and i my goal is to do a scalp massage once a week with my pre-poo so i like to kill tubers with one stone so you always hear me trying to do two things at once you know if it's kind of possible to combine them and the first thing i like to combine is my scalp massage and my pre-poo so first of all scalp massages are really good for your scalp for hair growth because they help to stimulate the scalp which helps to stimulate hair growth and i think they also get for just releasing stress and just relaxing because i find them so pleasant and so relaxing so you know try it out even if you don't see the growth you will see the benefits from just the relaxation and just that you tie with your hair so how to do a scalp massage so i'm going to do a demo where i kind of show you clips of what i do but i wanted to like talk a little bit first about one of the important things to know when doing a scalp massage so first of all you want your hair to be not too wet not too dry you don't want it to be crunchy but you don't want it to be like something wet at the end either and this is especially true if you're trying to combine it with a pre-poo and you're trying to do an overnight oil pre-poo so you don't want to go to bed with like soaking wet hair you just feel it if it's like too dry just sprinkle a little bit of water and then you get your oil the next thing to note is that you can kind of do three things in one by warming your oil a little bit so oil is good warm oil is even better in terms of like simulating your scalp and just helping the oil is to penetrate if you feel like it and you have the time you can just oil some water and then put a little glass container with oil in the water and you just kind of swirl it around and then like keep shaking it up swirling it around until the oil warms i don't do anything super hot but i you know you know your business if you whatever temperature you like to do your hot oil treatments at you can do this at so your hair is good not too dry not too wet your oil is warm if you're not lazy if you're lazy your oil is cool which is totally fine and then on to the scalp massage the important thing to know about scalp massaging first of all is that you're not rubbing your fingers on your scalp like this you are putting your fingers to your scalp and then you are moving your whole entire scalp you know like that it's not like like if you're scrubbing the way everything is moving so i think a lot of people are confused about that and i see a lot of people talk about you know they're trying to massage their edges and it's like coming off more and it's probably because they're not massaging it the right way so definitely fingers to scalp move scalp and the more relaxed you are the more your scalp can move so right up in there is just relax if you need to close your eyes and hum whatever you need to do just relax so this is when my scalp is tense you know what this is how much i can get you know it doesn't really go very far but it's very relaxed it goes a lot further okay relaxed tense you know i'm trying to face that i'm not just making motions if you try to face that you see the more relaxed you are the more you can move your scalp the more effective um your scalp massage is going to be so the next thing to note is that you don't have to get every single inch of your scalp near to where your fingers touch are also going to be stimulated so your finger touch it's going to kind of radiate outward and near to that area is also going to be stimulated so you don't want to just put your hand like in one spot especially because it's kind of big like mine so but you don't have to get every single inch either so you know you just do you do you do you know until you get everything covered so add attention to your edges and maybe a crown that must pay more attention to that so you don't need to drum yourself in oil you can just like dip your fingers in the oil or just wet your fingers with the oil and do the massage especially if you're not gonna shampoo the next day or something just dip it and you know if you are going to shampoo the next day you can be more liberal especially if you're using coconut oil and trying to prevent high growth fatigue and so on that only works if you're on your strands so what I usually do is kind of do a little bit first just do my scalp massage first basically and then put some more oil in my hands and like smooth down my hair and do the creeper part afterwards once you're finished kind of massaging everywhere like I showed you the next thing you can do is tap with your fingers to stimulate the scalp some more so I know a lot of people now use a vibrating brush but if you're relatively tool-free like me you may be a little bit wary of them so I mean I haven't decided how I feel about them yet but you know I don't really use combs or brushes like every six months I might use a denman brush just before I go to get my hair trimmed I might use a comb every other week just to pack my hair and that's it so I'm not too sure yet about just the vibrating brush and all the finangles I see you know they were like giving it away so like hold bunch of youtubers which are suddenly loving that scalp brush so you know that's you instead of using your fingers that's gonna work it's my fingers to do the actual scalp massage because I don't see a brush really moving your scalp like I showed you the brush is probably rubbing out your hair like I told you not to do so yeah I don't know about that but for the part where you just want to stimulate your scalp you can like pat it with your fingers like this and this really works especially after massage like you know just patting so this really stimulates the scalp especially after you relax from a massage or you know if you have a vibrating brush you could just kind of put it you know place it and just you know get a little vibrations all over your scalp to stimulate now I'm gonna say something that really might be controversial in the natural hair community my first controversial statement you really shouldn't be doing scalp massages on a clean scalp the reason being the sebum production naturally stops when you have enough sebum there so that you don't drown yourself like yes you know so as soon as you put something happy like oil on your scalp your sebum production is going to stop until you clean your scalp so I never do it I always do it like with my preacher I do it before wash day you know if you don't want to if you want to do it more than once a week at least give it a couple days after wash day where you already have some sebum and again you don't need to flood your scalp with oil you can just oil your fingertips and and do it a lot of people say that they have dry scalp issues but they're actually giving themselves dry scalp issues because they're cutting off their sebum production because there's oil in their scalp on wash day so your body's all confused and you know a lot of people do actually have genuine scalp issues they've been to a dermatologist but other people who have scalp issues are given it to themselves by putting heavy products too close to their scalp so if you want to wean away from oil in your scalp I suggest using like aloe vera gel and using that to massage your scalp or moisturize your scalp instead of using oil so that's lighter and that's going to evaporate faster and you know that's going to allow longer sebum production until eventually you can just kind of let your sebum do its thing so at least by the end of the week I won't have any paper handy but at least by the end of the week and I guess I've been in here you saw me I didn't touch any oils by the end of the week my hands are already you know they're not gunky but they're already because I have some sebum in there because I'm not messing with it you know I'm just explaining what science says and what's been working for me and that if you are an institution that you have dry scalp and you're always oiling your scalp this could be something you can try aloe vera gel or like maybe once or twice a week and just see what happens maybe I might pre someone from dry scalp issues then we'll be with it if you don't want to do it and you want to oil your scalp every day all day that's perfectly fine as well for scalp massages and for people you want to use penetrating oils cooking that oil is good like I said it's special because it has more than the other oils and it also helps to bind the protein to your hair so it helps to keep your hair stronger longer so I don't use pure cooking oil because it kind of a drying effect and makes it with olive oil or avocado oil or both for your hair stuff like that is good for your hair all of that and then just add a little bit of peppermint or rosemary to help stimulate the scalp that helps give you that tingle and help stimulate your scalp without having any negative effect you know so I didn't say teach your oil because it is good for your scalp but you don't want to overdo it but in terms of like peppermint you can kind of use it without worrying too much about that so those are the oils that I recommend now I'm going to show you a slow demo of exactly how I do it place the oil in some recently boiled water and just shake and stir until it's warm spritz your hair if it's dry so that it's not too crunchy and it's kind of malleable then you start massaging so I just oil my ends and edges and my fragile areas I make this massaging motion everywhere on my scalp you can also make the motion in the top right corner then I just kind of pay special attention to my edges and go around and massage my edges and I do that tapping motion to further stimulate my scalp and that's pretty much it for the pre-poo pot I add some oil on my end zip kneaded and smooth to release any shed hair and then I just twist it up to stretch it so I'm using a tie that I made myself I just bought the Ribbon on Amazon after twisting I just put on my bonnet and I'm ready for bed and that's it okay so that was it guys thank you so much for watching I hope that was helpful I can't say you're going to get picked at me because that's a lot of genetic but you will most likely see improvement and you will definitely enjoy it so good luck happy massaging and enjoy see you in the next one bye


As reactions continue over Muslim Muslim tickets by the APC ahead of the 2023 general elections, the PDP has described the Muslim Muslim ticket as a threat to national peace and unity. They say each tribe, religion and region must have equal representation in government so address their challenges to promote national peace and tolerance of the masses, which is key to development. The 2023 elections are coming with some political parties backing a Muslim Muslim ticket for the presidential candidate of the APC with other schooling, eat and fare. Speaking in Kaduna, the People's Democratic Party, Kaduna State Secretary, Ibrahim Ali Ussono says APC, same fit ticket is improper and unfair as Nigeria is for Christians, Muslims and even those without any religion, noting that in governance every part needs to be present and participate in decisions that will affect all. They said Muslim Muslim ticket was to deceive Muslims to vote for them without minding the general interests of the people. It lamented a high level of insecurity in the state with same fit ticket as the government of the day cannot spare one religion and leave the other where calling on all Nigerians to get their PVCs to vote for a credible candidate that will change the country as no government can be changed without voting in elections. In Kaduna we have been practicing it, in Nigeria it has also been practicing it, in Kaduna we have Muslim governor, Christian as deputy, when it was sometimes Christian governor as deputy because there everybody should have a sense of belonging because the country if God want us to be a Muslim all of us will have been a Muslim like Sokoto. If God want us to be a Christian we can be a Christian like Cross River or River State. So when we mixed people together there is a need for you to everybody to have sense of belonging. Why? Because according even to my religion says that you have to lead justice, lead by justice and lead by justice is to give every opportunity to those that deserve it and that is what PDP has been doing. So when we look at the issue of APC Muslim Muslim ticket at the national level, Muslim Muslim ticket at the state level, while they are looking for votes at the same time if they didn't consider that they will lose votes. So everybody need to have representation in terms of leadership appears. For example, when you want to take a decision, that particular Christian will you take a decision of Christian without a member of Christianity? It's not possible.


What's the number one answer that can kind of sum up why Japan and Korea are considered cooler than China right now? Well, they are way tighter with the US and Western society that has dominated the world for the past like 300 years than China is like way tighter. In fact, you could almost view in modern day 2022, China as oppositional to that. So one's basically homies with the US and one's almost like the rival enemy of the US. Now we're gonna break down the mechanics behind all this. Okay, so Andrew, when you're the homies of the big dog, Andrew, there is something called cultural reciprocity.


Hello, I'm James Randi. Today is the 12th of January 2010. This last New Year's Eve, I made a scheduled visit to Broward General Hospital just down the street here in Fort Lauderdale. Specifically, I went to their infusion ward, where 48 hours before I had the start of the last of 12 doses of chemotherapy chemicals I had been taking bi-weekly since last summer. This procedure involved the painless insertion of a tiny needle into a small port inserted just under the skin of my chest six months ago. Now the port has been simply forgotten, I'll keep it in place for a while just in case I might need it again, but I'm totally finished with the chemo as we patients refer to it. In two weeks, I'll be having a peck scan, which will determine whether the chemo was successful and the prognosis is excellent. Thank you. Now a lot of people are afraid of chemotherapy and no wonder, chemotherapy is famously unpleasant. When people share stories about it, those often involve hair falling out, a loss of strength, equilibrium and mobility, a feeling of constant nausea and fatigue, but that doesn't characterize my experience. You see, medical science has made great strides in this process and things have changed. I was diagnosed with intestinal cancer in June of last year. Near the end of that month, I underwent surgery, a laparoscopic minimal invasion procedure that left me with three navels and obviously introduced confusion to my regular navel contemplation sessions. They removed not only my tumor, but also a small portion of the gut to which it was attached. A week later, I attended the annual JREF conference, the amazing meeting in Las Vegas. Upon returning home, I immediately embarked upon the chemotherapy regimen and discovered to my delight, if I can call it that, that chemo isn't necessarily as awful as they say it is. Every other Tuesday, I visit Broward General Hospital down the street and check into the infusion lab. There, I would first be injected with all kinds of fluids to clear my system in preparation for the medication to come. Appropriately flushed, I was then hooked up by a very fine plastic tube to a small pressure pump bottle filled with a cocktail of chemotherapy agents which would deliver its contents to me over the next two days. I'd simply drop the bottle into my pocket, then I'd go back to the JREF or go home. During those two days, I'd feel just fine. I came in to work at the same time as always and went home at the same time too. I was told to drink more water than usual and this I did to keep up my hydration, you see. The tubing, taped down to my chest, came out after infusion and I then noticed that I began to tire. I was profoundly fatigued by Friday morning and that continued through the weekend. Sometimes I didn't want to get out of bed even, once or twice I didn't. My muscles felt very weak and my equilibrium was really shaky. Nevertheless, it was on one such weekend in the final term of my chemotherapy that I attended a banquet to celebrate the first annual Carl Sagan Day. The following night, I delivered a 45-minute address in Carl's honor. Even at my energy's lowest ebb, I still decided to come into work, perhaps because I was excited about something I was writing or perhaps because I just didn't feel like staying home. No matter how badly I felt during the weekends immediately after the infusion, I was always a great deal better by Monday and then I had about 10 days of good health to look forward to before my next chemotherapy infusion.  I'm worried that these people are risking their lives needlessly. Yes, chemo does cause hair to fall out. As you can see, my beard is considerably thinner and less lustrous than it once was. But hair grows back, there's some of it, not this part. Yes, chemo does tire you out, but you can always take a nap.  None of the difficulties posed by chemotherapy are insurmountable. I can honestly tell you that I didn't have one instance of nausea. I never lost my faith in my oncologist and I kept busy every hour of the sixth month I was being treated. My most important item of this message is something I discovered during the ordeal. Attitude is of paramount importance. If you allow despair or fear to get hold of you, you'll not do as well as I did. During my visit to the Broward General Infusion ward, I went out of my way to be the Willy Wonka sort of without the candy and held a lot of hands, chatted, joked, and generally cheered up my fellow chemo partners. It worked and all of us felt better for it, I can assure you. So please do yourself a favor, friends. If your physician says you need chemo, get it. Don't risk your life and especially don't risk your life over the bogeyman of the ravages of chemo or the silly words of TV stars with no expertise whatsoever. I am an expert. I just went through it. Medical science improves by the month and the experience of a cancer patient in the hands of a good oncologist is very different from what it was 2010 or even five years ago. Don't be afraid of medicine. Medicine you can handle, be afraid of going without it. I'm James Randi. And the Educational Foundation, make sure you visit randy.org.