How did you guys, cause I wanna just hear the story on how he ended up making that song with you for you and how did you guys end up doing it? You got suckers, they faith me, but I'll lose you, I know. Yeah, we on boss talk one on one.  How did you guys, cause I wanna just hear the story on how he ended up making that song with you or for you or how did you guys end up doing that? Okay, the gentleman, his name's Ron. Okay. I'm there, here we go. You have the same Ron that through the concert, went and wow, he was a big boy, big boy. And but he was quiet. A lot of people didn't know and I grew up with him from junior high school long. So he wanted to get into the music industry.  And so, you know, we, this is it.  We worked out all the paperwork. Come on down, Chad. So Chad gets to my house, Ron shows up to give him money for his room. Yeah. Right? So we get the money for the room. He don't even come upstairs to meet him. I go downstairs and just get the bread.  So we got studio that night. I can remember we were scanning Curtis Mayfield's a discography, trying to find a sample. Okay. So he said, oh, I got one. Don't ask me where it was, but cause too many blunts away. Too many blunts since then. Went away. He just found like a little baseline. You know what I'm saying? He said, it's the one. He was funny like that. And so I can remember he made that beat at Dub 1 studio standing up in about 15 minutes. Wow. And the guy never showed up to come pay him. Ron never paid for the studio session. Never paid for nothing.  You can just have a beat. I looked at him and said, I can just have it. He said, yeah. And then I could just, I sat on that beat for about two years. Wow. Before we recorded it. Yeah. And the night from all the stuff happening from I know you strapped that song. We were in the presidential suite at the Anatole when we came up with the hook. What's up, black? You know, out of Memphis. Okay. You know, female rapper. Yeah. That's my home girl. She was there, Pimp, me and DJ Bird. Okay.  And then we go to the studio the next day and that's when I let budget happen. Wait. Hey. So let me ask you this. It was a known fact that on the, and he may not have even said nothing to you about this, but when he did that big pimping with Jay-Z. Did you ever talk with him about anything about that? No. I'm gonna tell you what he told me and what I do know. Yeah. And I don't know how true it is, you know, but this is what he said. I said, I do know what that's it.  But at that time, I don't like talking about stuff like this cause I'm married now. And at that time I was married to someone else. Okay. So anyway, again, I'm at work at Sears. I'm working at the time. You're working, man. Oh yeah. They love him. He over at Sears making that money too. Oh yeah, I did. Give it a loop.  Break yourself in. In a way, I'm working at Sears. About time I get home. Well, the song's over there, you know? I remember being at the spot on Greenville. I'm a ref, I'm a Rewind. We at the spot at Greenville, UGK is on concert. And I'm standing right there by the DJ. I'm in the DJ booth as they're performing. And we, I'm rolling weed in the DJ booth. And handing it to him on stage. And then he say, Bobo, they a bird to give you that album. And then I look at this record and they say, Big Pimpin' about you. I said, oh, wow. This doing the show. Yeah. It's been baby. And so he played at that night.  So Fat Fortune, I'm at work, right? He calls and, well, excuse me, I get home.  I say, what?  And he say, man, I had Jay-Z right here trying to talk to you, man. I'm down here. I said, he wanted Jay to talk to me. Just wanted to talk to you. I don't know why. I don't know what Jay-Z had to tell me about the dude from the song, let me talk to him. But that was the album that really touched Jay-Z. I don't know. But he wanted you and him to talk. I don't know why. I never asked you why. What made me come up or anything? Just the fact that he said Jay-Z wanted to talk to me. Or he wanted me to talk to Jay-Z. One of the two. Wow. That's dope, man. That's dope to have those type of memories and know that those conversations went on between you and Pimp. Oh, he got me. I thought the chat back then. Oh, shoot, for sure. I would say when we befriended each other, if we didn't talk every other night, you know, I know you hear a lot of people say, man, chat like to call those late night. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, he call those late nights and wouldn't get you off the phone. Mine was every other night. Mine was every other night. For a long time, it was every night. He just wanted to talk to you. But you don't want to call like this. Within the one of the times that I'm too sleepy, I'm pretty sure it was when he called the other night. He called me every night, man. So, did he like the big Pimpin song? Did he love it? He never said anything to me. He just told me, you know, everybody knows story about him. Not wanting to do it. Not wanting to do it, but I just wanted to know if he, after it happened, didn't embrace it, you know? But he was doing so much, man. Gotta move on to the next thing. That was a different dude, bro. Move on to the next thing. Chat was a different dude, bro. He was truly underground king. He never, ever wanted to give bad impression to his fan base. He always wanted to stay street in Southern and Texas. That's it. That's what, that's what Locke is seeing right there. I mean, he represented for Texas and poured Arthur in the south. Yeah.  Yeah, I heard a DMD say he will, I remember the first time I heard him rapping like that. In other words, he must have had a different style. Yeah. At first. And when he say I heard him rapping like that, that must have been that Southern brawl. Yeah, he wasn't trying to hear it at that point. Nah, man. But that Southern brawl is what made us. What made, what made, yeah. Yeah, we on Boss Talk 101.


That's where I've been shopping this summer. Well, please be seated. We'd be delighted to have all of you here and to congratulate you on your stunning success this week. Leon Barmore, the coach of that fine Louisiana tech team that you defeated, said that Tennessee played the greatest defensive game I've ever seen. Believe me, I had a special feeling about all of you coming here today because, perhaps you know, lately I've been playing a little defensive ball myself, but I, well, I do know what this victory meant to all of you, and especially to Coach Pat Summit. Pat, after 12 years of tremendous effort, your coaching and the heart and skill of these terrific young ladies gave you the victory that you so long deserved. I've heard that you were up until 3 o'clock in the morning devising that defensive strategy. Obviously, it was sleep well lost because it worked masterfully out in the court. So it's wonderful to see someone as deserving as you lead this team to victory, and we all support you. And I want to compliment Captain Shelley Sexton and the members of the team on a tremendous season, a season that demanded a great deal of each one of you. The University of Tennessee is a remarkable educational institution, and I think all of you have shown yourselves to be representatives of that great volunteer education and sports tradition. Your President, Ed Boling is here, and Ed, I hope you take back my personal congratulations to the student body, the alumni, the trustees, and the people of your great state. Tell them for me that I was very proud to have such a great group of young athletes here at the White House today. By the way, you might throw in my thanks for loaning me Howard Baker, too. But again, Pat and ladies, each of you has done something very special this year. You've made your friends and neighbors and supporters very proud, and your victory is something to enjoy now, to remember all your years. When I was playing college football, our coach used to tell us in an effort to inspire us that the things we would really remember the longest were the games we lost, and we'd be the rest of our lives thinking about, well, have we done this or done that. I have a hunch that you'll remember this game for a long time and well, you should. So thank you all, and God bless you. President Reagan, I knew if there was anyone in America that could appreciate that defense, it would be you. Thank you. I think you also can appreciate, as we appreciate, just say no to drugs. And the campaign that Nancy Reagan has done such a great job with. For this team, just say yes has been something that we've been proud of. First of all, for our program academically, our 100% graduation rate that we are very proud of. And athletically, we've made eight trips to the final four in the past 11 years. I can tell you that winning the national championship was indeed the greatest honor that this team could bring to our university. And we, today, when we got up, I said the team was as anxious, as excited, and as nervous, coming here to have this opportunity as they were playing for a national championship. The honor is just as sweet as the victory. Thank you. Mr. President, on behalf of all of us from Tennessee, we thank you for inviting us to be here today. We are very honored. We have a few gifts that we would like to present to you. First of all, we have your converse weapons. Now maybe you can play one-on-one for a day in our shoes. And these also are for Nancy Reagan. Ms. Reagan, we thank you. Next, we have a basketball from a 1987 women's basketball championship team with our autographs on the basketball and coaches. And we present that to you. And Cheryl has the championship t-shirt we'd like for you to have also. Well, thank you very much. He's ready to play. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm most grateful for all of these. And I have a hunch that in a couple of years, this will be on display in a presidential library. And I'll be very proud to have it there, and proud for all of you. And thank you. Thank you very much. I'm ready to go. I can't help but take a little second and tell you something. I used to be a sports announcer. And back in the Midwest, back in the early 30s, that was a whole different sensory practically to all of you. But at that time, I developed quite a thing about girls' basketball. Because in Iowa, you may not know this, but in that era, high school girls' basketball was so great and so prominent that every year at the state tournament for the championship, the girls' box office was greater than that were the male players for the state championship. So any of you from Iowa here that maybe found your way? Didn't find your way down there. All right. Well, again, thank you very much. Thank you.


Hi, y'all, Liz here with Smart Business Moves and Tom is not here today, but I do have Dan Smith, one of my very favorite people. So welcome, Dan. Thanks for coming today. Well, thank you for having me. I, uh, two for one, miss Tom, but I'm glad to be here. Well, Tom is in Phoenix from anybody that doesn't know. He's doing a Made Central Academy live today. If you're missing out, you're not in Phoenix. Make sure you sign up for the next one. Um, but we're here and I really appreciate you coming on down. I mean, of course, I love to talk about listening cells, but also kind of filling up last minute. Sad that Maria can't come though. Yeah. Yeah. Prior engagement, but, uh, okay. Ironically, she's on a sales call. Yes. Yeah. That is true. That is true. Yeah. She's supposed to be able to come here. We wanted her to, but sales calling. Y'all know sales, sales trumps everything. All right. So let me do a little bit of housekeeping because normally Tom does everything and I just come and visit, make sure that I got everything set up correctly. I think I do. All right. So Dan, the topic today, the title for our, um, uh, live today is do you hear what isn't said? So we're going to be talking about listening cells. Of course. Um, but before we do, I wanted to talk about real quick. Mmm. Do I want to do this all at one time? Yeah. I kind of do actually down.  Uh, yeah. Um, my name is Dan Smith and I am a residential house cleaning. Business owner. I started in 2016 and out of Oklahoma city, uh, Oklahoma. And it has been a journey and a fun road that has led to just, um, Increasing opportunity to learn and grow myself for sure. So Dan, I don't know if you've recognized this or not, but at this point in time, you would actually, I think be considered a serial entrepreneur. Because don't you also have business made better? Yeah. Yes. I've got, uh, a business made better, uh, listening sales, um, Homemade better.  It's brewing. Yeah. And something in the works there. Right. So I think that, yeah, you would be called a serial entrepreneur at this point. So it's, and it started when I was 26 years old. So I've, I've got a few stories under the, under the, under the book of, um, past ventures and other, other industries, if you will. When you say it started at, when you were 26, what started? Yeah. So my, my entry into, um, self-employment, uh, was, um, nurtured, I would say by, um, by a physician. So I worked for a national medical management company at the time in the technology space. And, uh, the, uh, medical director of the whole facility came to me and said, Dan, I need help over here in the technical space. And if you're willing to get a tax ID, I think I'm 26 years old. If you're willing to get a tax ID, that would help me out. And, uh, I said, uh, you got it. I'm a yes man. I'll do it. But the first thing about, uh, about the self-employment and business. And the end of the story is I wandered into the secretary of state office and, and I started at 26 and I've been going ever since. All right. So really, um, about four years then, right? Dan, like. Give or take. Yeah, give or take. If, uh, if I, if I get rid of the beard, I, um, I'm fresh out of college. Yeah, you do kind of have that baby face look. I do, I do.  So book talk is started. If you love to read, like I love to read, join us at book talk. It is the first and third Tuesday of the month at 10 Pacific time and one Eastern. So join us there. Also, we have Dan, you and Marie and I have been really kind of pushing on this crispy community thing. Wanna explain what that is a little bit? I'll put the link to. Yeah, for certain, for certain. So crispy community is a dedicated group for individuals within the home services space intent on improving their sales skills in a way that is going to increase their wins and also meet the objective of the business that they work for. Most people on our team are center focused on helping and all moving in the right direction. But when it comes to certain aspects of the business, well, some things are easier than others. So we can have all the processes in the world, all the protocols, we can clean the best in town. We're the best of the best of the best. And we've got a wonderful logo, but none of that matters if we're not selling and if we're not closing and if we're not growing by way of adding additional clients to the companies that we operate. And that's where crispy community comes in. It is the invitation to all people, sales related, sales minded, whether you're professional. Home sales. What's that? Home sales. Yes, yes, yes, yes. I was getting there, I was getting there. Whether you're professional or you know, you're seasoned or you're just starting out and center focused on home services because that's inherently different, right? Selling home services, selling to the homeowner, if you will. Well, that's a little bit different than walking into a business and selling a printer or selling perfume at Sephora. I hope I said that right. Very close. All right, so tell us about the crispy community. Why should people know about it? Why should they join? What is it? Yeah, so crispy community is a structured weekly. It's Facebook. What's that? Facebook, it's Facebook group. Oh yes, pardon me. The platform is on Facebook. And it's a closed membership group that, I don't know why I said closed membership group. It was a really good deal right now but that's not what we're here for. So the group itself involves structured events, activities, training, live calls, the review of calls and being able to extract what we've learned, what was done well, what we could do better. Different topics throughout the month. We have quarterly events, we have challenges. All things intended to help us improve. And done so Liz, very intentionally in a community contribution style. So everybody has something to add and everybody has something to teach everyone else. And I think that's the beauty of this community is growing together. Yeah, I don't really have a lot to add to that. You did a good job, Dan. That's rare that I'm thinking I don't have anything to add there. I did put a link about that deal that you were talking about. So Dan did mention it was a membership and the membership right now is it's $24 a month to join the crispy community. Daily conversations, like we said, weekly lives on Thursdays. There are monthly challenges. There is quarterly, some quarterly assessments type stuff that we're doing. But there's also a special deal right now. I think it's through January, but don't quote me on this. Dan, you can correct me if I'm wrong. Special deal is that if you get two other people to sign up for the crispy community, then you will pay $24 for the entire year versus $24 a month.  And here's the thing. We want this to be a huge group. We absolutely want a ton of people. Y'all together know way more people than we know individually. We're not going to be able to grow the group as quickly as if we're all growing it together. Together we can all have a much better experience. Somebody asked me, well, so if you just want this huge group list, then why are you charging? Well, I'll tell you why. Because when you charge for things, people tend to participate more. And that's the bottom line. I swear, charging a little bit of money because we want to make it a little bit painful. Nobody wants to lose out on their money, but enough that people will come and participate and do the things. Because if it's Dan and I on the calls, it's gonna be pretty boring. So, all right, so that's Krispy Kandy. All right, but I really wanted to talk more about listening cells today, Dan. I think a lot of people have heard about Krispy Kandy. They've seen, I put up the code too, so that they can see all the different things that we do for the month in the notes. I don't think a lot of people know about listening cells.  Around the 50 mark. I think around the 50 mark is where we're at. So not very many people at all. So not very many people even know about it. So I really wanted us to kind of just chat about that a little bit. Maybe you could, so sorry, y'all. Same as every smart business moves. We don't have any kind of a big PowerPoint or anything like that. Hoping to just chat about it and figure out if it's a good fit for anybody. An introduction, yeah, for sure. Yeah, for sure. So tell us, how about, start us off, Dan, with why we, you and I and Maria, even started the program. Yeah, for sure. You know, it's gonna sound like I'm just telling you how wonderful you are and there's a sprinkle of that in there. Everybody knows Liz. Everybody knows Liz and everybody knows Maria and the two of you are involved in so much and you help so many people. What people may not be aware of is the three of us have been working together in one capacity or another for going on four years now. Maria and I for over a decade. Yeah, so you, yeah, much longer on your part, but I was gonna say the same thing. Me and Maria and I together even longer than that. So that relationship was already established there and to say why or how we, I don't wanna be too mysterious, but we were working on a completely different project. We had a different idea in mind. We were going in a different direction and the one thing that kept popping up was the topic of sales. And it's challenging to address other areas of business or other areas of growth if sales aren't where they need to be. And so we looked around, we started to talk and the not so short answer as I keep talking, the not so short answer is we went circles and circles around the options out there to help our teams improve their sales skills and output today. And that started a whole different conversation and ultimately direction. Well, one of the things I wanted to point out, Dan, cause I know you'll hate this so much. And I love to make everybody, at least a little miserable on smart business moves is when we were naming the program. So we knew that we wanted something around listening because we really saw that as a big gap and a place where not in the focus was everybody is using fancy words and fancy methodologies, but we really just could see that just a huge piece was the listening piece. But then what happened with that last half? Like listening cells. Listening. Yeah, so I'll add to what you said. The word listening kept coming up over and over and over and over. And it was like a light bulb. It was like we can't move forward without talking about listening. So the last part was very comical and to this day, it's entertaining. And that is, is it listening cells? Is it listening sales? Or if you're dealing with any sort of, online captioning, well, then it spells it C-E-L-L-S. So it's like we can't win one way or another. So the program is listening cells, right? It's a single statement in itself, listening cells. Now the outcome is sales, but it's not listening sales. And I don't know if we're better off explaining it or even having to explain it. I don't know, but it is listening cells. The good thing is somebody had an idea along the way to buylisteningcells.com. So that was you. We both know that was you. Somebody had a great idea right there. Some very handsome gentleman was so smart. So if you go to the wrong website, it takes you to the right website. Don't worry, yeah. But the idea around listening cells, it's so simple, but it's so easy to overlook too, right? It's a complete statement. When you listen well, that sells your product, your service, whatever it is that you're trying to sell, just listen, because that's what sells the stuff. But it's just hard to comprehend. It seems to make more sense to a lot of people listening sales, including one of our partners who is absent today, because she's on a sales call or a sales call. Yeah. Yeah, give me a little brief of that. For sure, for sure. You know, to illustrate the point, it transcends sales altogether. I mean, listening cells. Well, listening also builds relationships. Listening builds friendships. Listening helps comfort people. Listening is the root of empathy. It's intensely powerful. And if we put sales aside for a minute, I know that's what we're here for, but if you're not listening in almost any facet of your life, what are you missing out on? What are you missing out on? So it's fundamental to communication for us all. So I'm trying to pull up right now this book too, because you all know I have to have a good book. And there's always a good book out there. But Tom was, and usually we go back and forth, right? We both love to read. So I recommend a book to him. He'll recommend a book to me. And we usually just mention it one time and then we drop it. We don't have a lot more to say, except for shoe dog. We have gone back and forth about shoe dog multiple times. This is just a great book. If you haven't read it, it's about Phil Knight, founder of Nike, how he, you know, his entire path, and we both cried during that book, y'all. Oh, I'm not positive Tom cried. If I'm lying there, Tom, I'm sorry, but I'm pretty sure he said he cried too or at least teared up. It's like, it's a really good book. But I veer off. What I want to talk about today is there's a great book that Tom mentioned to me. It's by David Brooks. It's called How to Know a Person. I'm gonna show it here. It looks like that, y'all. How to know a person. And I was like, yeah, yeah, sounds good, Tom. I'm gonna get it. And about three days later, he's like, hey Liz, have you gotten that book yet? Have you read that book yet? And I was like, no, I haven't. Okay, I'm gonna make sure and went and got it. And about three more days went by and he's like, hey Liz, how are you liking that book? And I was like, what the heck with this book? This book must be amazing, right? And so of course, I finally started reading the book and the book is all about listening. It's all about how you get to know someone well is by listening deeply. And we talk about this at least in one module of listening cells about how listening is not just about listening, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. But listening deeply and how many people have never actually even had the experience of having someone listen deeply to them and how you can get to know them and just build relationships really quickly by doing that. But this book, it closed on my phone here, but this book explains a lot of that in depth to the point where I was thought, okay Dan, we gotta make sure that we use this as one of our resources. Yeah, in the crispy community. So, side note there. But, so listening is just so huge, not because we're listening and yay, now it's great. An entire book, y'all, more than one book. Actually, there are references to many other books also that talk about this. But the idea of listening deeply and really hearing people from where they're coming from create such large relationships. So, how do we transition that to our businesses, our teams, our sales teams and what we're doing here? You had not shared that story with me and I've been on enough of these calls to know that we're not scripted, right? So, what comes to my mind there, Liz, is there's a lot of companies out there, no matter which industry you're in, that are already crushing it. They're already doing amazing and nowhere are we coming from a perspective of everybody's doing it wrong because there's a hundred ways to get to the finish line, right? All right, absolutely. I saw a bunch of good programs, name them. What are they? Yeah, Sandler Training. Jeremy Miner. Jeremy Miner, Gary V, yeah. How are selling pros in our, kind of in our space. How are selling pros is in our space, yeah. Jonathan Belfort, the Wolf of Wall Street. Jonathan Belfort is in Jordan. Jordan, pardon me, Jordan Belfort, yes. There's a lot of programs out there. And we've taken many of them. Yeah, yeah, for certain. And if what you're doing today is working for you, great. If what you're doing today doesn't have, if it's missing a piece, and we're gonna talk about that missing piece, if it's missing a piece and you're crushing it today, what is possible when you apply a different twist? Whether through listening cells or through your own means of research and methodology. I know oftentimes, just as human beings, we fall into the habit outside of sales, within sales, but let's talk about our sales teams of doing things the way we do, simply because that's the way we've always done them. Oh my gosh, yeah. I put a hand for all y'all that listen to smart business moves a lot. Ends with a hand right there.  For sure. So here comes your second salesperson for this year that you've hired, and what are they doing? Well, they're doing what the person before them is doing. And fast forward later in the year, the following year, you've got two new salespeople, well, they're doing what someone else showed them. And every time somebody shows them, it's another layer, or it's another twist, or it's another version. I mean, yeah, iteration. And then that person inserts their own iteration. So yeah, there's a lot to be said for an effective sales program. There's no doubt about that, but you want me to continue talking. You wanna talk about our discovery versus our approach in terms of the existing programs and listening cells. Well, I guess you can go ahead and keep talking. I'm hoping that you're gonna hit on how we took all of these different programs and we thought they were all great. And we were still looking for something for our small businesses and our industry. And we were looking for something that was a little bit easier and maybe spoke a little bit more to what we wanted, but all the programs were good.  Yeah, so I'm guessing that you're gonna talk more to all that stuff. Yeah, yeah, I wanna clarify. If not glossed over, not drilled down deep enough for what we need. So these various programs that are out there or maybe the methods that you're using today, they're effective, but when we started taking the sales courses, digging into the sales courses, there's a huge emphasis, Grant Cardone. I mean, another just like it's the people and the programs that you think of immediately when you think I need to get better at sales. And if you take a step back and you look, a lot of those programs tremendously successful are rooted in enterprise sales, business to business sales, walking into a boardroom and talking with the CEO, selling a technical solution or selling an object or an item that is relative to a business decision. Also coaching programs, how to sell coaching programs. We saw a lot of that, y'all. How to sell coaching programs. Yeah, there's a lot of money in telling other people how to make money. And this is no different, but we're not trying to teach you to be coaching or to help other people make more money. It's the differential, the secret sauce. Here's what we discovered is missing. And that is the approach, the methodology, the dialogue, the style that is center focused on the homeowner. Center focused on that B to C or business to consumer interaction. Now some sales programs out there touch on B to C. Many more touch on business to business sales. So when you put in a box, the homeowner, the homeowner's not looking for that high-end methodology, sales script, business approach, C-suite, come at you with all the reasons why you need to buy today. Instead, we are tilting, we're shifting the tilt a little bit. And we're focused on building relationships by way of trust that begins with empathy. And when you're having those conversations at a homeowner level person to person without a sales approach, it's an organic native conversational dialogue. But yet there's strategy, there's strong method and practice the outcome not only gets the sale today, but it builds the foundation for repeat sales and for a higher return on referrals and a deeper relationship for certain. You know, I don't really think that that is the main thing that is different. I do think that that is, I know, I'm always, anybody that knows me knows, I got to disagree with something and I'm just not happy. Well, I do think that's really, that is like the thing that we, you're right, that we started with it, we dug into. But as the course evolved, we, I think the thing that we do that makes it so much more impactful is that it's personalized for every individual company. So, I mean, I really do think, I do think that that's the big thing. Now, not for people that are just going through, racing through the program, just being like, okay, answer all the questions, answer all the questions. Okay, I got the quizzes all, you know, I got a 95, so I'm good to go, not that. But for the companies where the sales people are trying to improve their sales for their specific company, the tools that we give them to build out their personalized specific sales program for their exact company, that's unique. That's why nobody else is doing that. No, nobody else is doing that. And not that they couldn't do that and not that they can't start doing that today, but that is the big thing. It's hard because the thing I think is hard about this is the people taking the course are not, they're not passive. They have to be active learners in this process. Just like we teach in the program, you have to be an active listener. You can't just sit there and wait for the customer to quit talking and then start talking. You have to be actively listening, actively engaged, trying to hear from where they're coming from. And our students, we need them to also be active learners, actively engaged, figuring out how does this best fit with what I have and using the tools to build and create their sales program. That's unique to them. Yeah, that is golden. I thought I had a wonderful pitch. That is not to be overlooked because it helps us and it presents a challenge because if you have purchased a sales program before, if you've gone down the road of investing in any respect whatsoever, more often than not, you've been handed the binder that says, just do this. Here's your script, do this, and you're gonna win. Whereas to your point, this is inherently customized to your company, your method, your core values, your messaging, because you're the one that designs that piece when going through the program. So yeah, that's a winning statement there, winning proposition. So also, I think everybody has this experience that you buy something, you buy information, you get it, you're like, oh yeah, that's good. I love it, I love it.  And that's where it stays. Sometimes you might remember, oh, what was that thing? And you'll go and you'll pull it out for that one thing. But this program is not built that way.  I think that's very, very unique and different. But it's also very hard. And people aren't used to buying a program and having to actually work. They want magic. Really, almost everybody is like, when do we get the scripts? Sorry, y'all, no scripts. We have an unscript, right? But there is no actual script. So. And we have to pause for a minute, right? Because we might've just lost 20% of the people. There's no script. There's no script. I'm out. I think it goes without saying that who is this for? You guys are talking a lot of buzzwords. You guys are, you're throwing a lot at us, but you haven't told us what we're doing. So, you know, if I could briefly unpack this, I don't know about, I don't know your company. I don't know who's watching, right?  I don't feel comfortable. Asking people for money. Or like, you know, if they said no, they're not interested. Or worse, if they were interested, they would have called us by now. And that person is uncomfortable because they're not accustomed to selling and they don't want to sell. And it's not natural to them. And when you turn upside down the process in which they come to discover that they're helping and your entire business is operating at sales division from a listen to what the customer's looking for or the problem they're trying to solve so that ultimately we can help them, then two things happen. One, that increases sales, I'm gonna say three things happens, that increases sales, it builds tremendous confidence in the people who thought they couldn't sell before. Because now it's a mind shift. I'm helping people, I'm not selling to people. And then third, when we're truly understanding what the customer wants, we're hitting home runs a whole lot faster and out of the park, as opposed to falling into a status quo, right? You've called me and you need a cleaning. Well, I've taken 70 other calls and I know how it goes. So let me walk you through it real quick. And that's what we see most of the time. I was hoping you were gonna hit on that point, Dan. Great job there. Because that is what we hear all the time. Call any of your competitors and they immediately start telling you what they do. This is what we do, this is what we offer. This is how we do it. So I'm gonna tell you a quick secret. This is something that we hit on a little bit that people don't recognize. They go into the script and they start telling, we do all of these things and they have a huge list and they're like, I don't know why people aren't buying the thing. And so what do they do? They add more under their list. I'm gonna tell them we do even more. In the kitchen we do blah, blah, blah, and in the bathroom they get a bigger and bigger list. Y'all, here's the secret. The bigger that list is, the bigger your chances that they will not purchase from you. Because the more you put on that list, the more opportunities you give them to think, oh, I don't need that. Oh, I don't actually want that at my house. Oh, I guess this isn't the right company for me. There's just a quick little tip for you. If you're one of the companies that thinks you need a big list of all of the amazing things that you do, back off, back off, listen a little bit more to what your customer is, this specific customer is wanting. That is so hard.   Yeah, because you've heard enough times the opening line, I just moved into a house. And as soon as you hear I just moved into a house, you know what you're gonna say. And you've got it all figured out, right? But what you may not realize is they just moved into the house and their mother-in-law is going to be joining them. And she is allergic to this and that. Well, now you're having a conversation about addressing that particular concern for that customer. So you're in a conversation where you're addressing what matters to them. You're addressing what is going to help move the call along and build trust that you might be the right company for them. As opposed to they've heard all of the things that you do and you get off the call and they didn't even have a chance to address their concern or worse is they don't even recognize that their concern was never even addressed. Something's missing. There was something's missing. I don't know what it is. Let me call some other companies and there goes an opportunity. Yeah, that is just now lost. Because they just didn't get the big yes, which brings me to something that we haven't talked about yet. When we were talking about the crispy community, we never talked about why crispy? What does crispy stand for? We're so used to it y'all that to us it seems like a normal term. But forever the other people probably have no clue. I was just on a one-on-one coaching call with a company that is, they've got some pretty steep goals this year. I think they're looking at like 24% growth at 3.2, they're at 3.2 million right now. And so that's some pretty significant goals there. And so we were, if you wanted to know like, I can get stuck sometimes Liz. Like when I'm talking about crispy, I get stuck. Even though I know so well, I know that if I don't follow crispy, that I'm gonna go down a bad path, but why do I keep doing it? I don't know y'all, but let's talk about what crispy is and then maybe you can figure out why she does it, why you do it, why we all do it. I don't know, crispy. So crispy is the acronym that was actually begun. It was originally coined crisp at Sarah Mitchell's business EcoMama in Phoenix, Arizona. And I was explaining the order of why your customers leave without the thing that makes them leave and also the things that make them stay, the things that your customers need to say, oh my gosh, yes, this is company for me and the things that actually make them leave. And together we all sort of came up with this idea of telling them what they were and we came up with the words that would match. So the first thing is consistency. If you are in home service of any type, there needs to be consistency for the client. Now, if you have a recurring service, like we do, like we all have cleaning companies, all of us here, I see Deni and you, et cetera, that are on here, we all have cleaning companies, we need to be really consistent. The clients need to feel like they know exactly what's happening, what's coming, what they can count on. They need to feel like it's part of their rhythm, their day, their lives. So that's the seed, that's the very first thing. If they don't have consistency, you can't become part of their life.  All right, how about the next one, Dan? Yeah, relationship, building that relationship. So consistency is in place, you're part of their life and their swings open the doors for building a relationship. You start to, your team starts to learn the pet names and the children's names and the kids are excited when your team comes into the house. The relationship takes you far, takes you to the next level of success in the eyes of longevity with that client. So I've got an example for this that almost every cleaning business owner out there has experienced. Unless you're really small and you're the only one doing the cleaning, if you have employees and you have multiple employees, you have run into this situation where you have Mrs. Johnson who absolutely loves Amanda, love, love, loves Amanda. Doesn't want anybody else in her house. And your quality assurance person goes to do just a courtesy regular quality check and checks Amanda's work. And Lody, what are we gonna do about Amanda? She hasn't been doing any cobwebs, her baseboards are bad. What is going on? Why does Mrs. Johnson love Amanda and not wanna change service? Why is Mrs. Johnson willing to cancel your service? If Amanda can't come, even though she's not cleaning up to par because of a relationship. That relationship is huge. So I think everybody has experienced that. Every cleaning business has experienced that where why are they loving her? She is not amazing. And why are they not loving someone so much? Our best tag who does everything perfect but doesn't with a blank face, never says hi, never talks, right? Next one is integrity. All right, you wanna hit on integrity a little bit Dan? Yeah. By integrity? For certain. So at the end of the day, we're making a promise to our clients and there's kind of two aspects to that. There's the execution piece in the home, right? The relationship, the text going into the home. But on the backend, there's every bit of opportunity to make right any situation in which the customer is not where they need to be. So the customer needs to know that they're doing business with a business of integrity. And Liz, this is your wheelhouse of presentation, but the other day Liz said to me, we were in a conversation, a group of others and Liz had said out loud, you know, when it comes to customer service, there is no room for judgment or, oh, don't go blank on me now. There's no room for judgment or emotion. When it comes to customer service, there's no room for judgment or emotion. So, you know, how are you serving the client in meeting their needs for integrity when they bring forward an issue that maybe they're not right or maybe you don't agree with. But at the end of the day, you're going to have the integrity to build upon the relationship, to build upon that consistency, to ensure that they never want to leave your company. Yeah. Yeah, I love that. I hadn't heard us talk about integrity in that way, Dan. I like that. I think we usually talk about it like around trust. They have to feel like they can trust you. And I like that well-rounded view of integrity. I think that's really, really good. All right, the next one is, so we got the C, the R, the I, and we're talking about Krispy. I want to point out that we're halfway through the work, Krispy. So the first half is all about things that don't have anything to do with cleaning if you're a cleaning company, right? No cleaning here. Consistency, relationship, integrity, huh! So now we're going to get to cleaning service. What is the actual service that you provide? And it might not just be the cleaning. Might also be how easy is it for them to book online? How easy is it for them to move a clean or skip a day or whatever it is that they need to do? How easy and how seamless is the service for the customers? So, but don't lose sight of the fact that service comes at the latter half, right? Not in the front half, it's at the latter half because what do we focus on? We focus, well, let me say the next one first real quick before I say that. The next one is the P. Dan, what's P? The P is price. Finally. Price. Finally, right? Most of the time people are thinking, no, you don't understand, Liz, the people in my area care about price. We have a ton of people here that are undocumented or whatever the reasoning is and they're working maybe under the table, et cetera, et cetera. And they, all that my customers care about is price. Guess what? There are people in your area that are charging a whole heck of a lot of money and getting it. So it's easy to think that it's price, but I challenge you to look at your own life and look at the things that you spend way more money on than you're even comfortable talking about. You might not even be comfortable spending money on, but you do anyway. Some of you spend a lot of money on bags, organic produce over here. I spent a lot of money on organic produce. I did when I had little kids, right? So we think that price is a lot more important than it is. I'm not saying it's not important. It absolutely is important, but it becomes more important when there's less, what? Not, I'm not gonna say value because how I'm defining value is consistency, relationship, integrity, and service. When those things are less, now I need a lower price. But if you can show me how I'm going to get all of this other stuff, I'm going to have more value. I'm happy to pay a higher price, point two. All right, so here we are through the, did you have anything else to add to that, Dan? You know, I can't. I know I do. So it's a double-edged value statement there. Price in all of the definition and context that you shared, but the flip side to that in learning crispy, be it yourself or the team, is realizing that the price that is quoted to the client from a sales rep perspective, there's a whole mind shift there. There's a mind shift there when you go through the program and realize that their budget is not our budget. And we're comfortable speaking to the price because we are confident in all the other aspects of crispy that we deliver. So it really can be a game-changing perspective for your technician as much as it applies to, excuse me, for your sales rep, as much as it applies to the client. That's funny, you said technician. I heard sales rep, you corrected it and I almost heard technician. I was like, what? I'm confused now. Okay, yes. Thanks for making that point, Dan. That's good. All right, so last one here, y'all is just the why. Nobody's ever gonna guess the why. The why is, and when we first created this acronym, the why was not on, but we needed it. And the why stands for yes. They have to have an overriding feeling of yes about you and your company and about what they're getting from you. The overriding feeling, not thought, but feeling that they have has to be, yeah, uh-huh, yeah. I have to just internally feel like I'm nodding and yeah, it's a good company. If somebody asks about your company, they need to have a feeling of, yeah, I definitely wanna tell you about my company. Yes, I definitely refer my company. Yes, they do a great job. Yes, you want to have Amanda come and do your cleaning. She's amazing. Now, is Mrs. Smith gonna like Amanda as much as Mrs. Johnson does if she's not doing those baseboards and those cobwebs? We're gonna have to do a little something there, right? Cause we gotta make sure that we're CRI, again, we gotta hit that and that S, otherwise we're gonna run into trouble. Yeah, gotta have that. So we've broken down CRISPY, consistency, relationship, integrity, service, price, and yes, and to help clear things up a little bit, this is in the context of what the client needs. So in case you missed that at the beginning or we didn't say that along the way, that is what the client needs. Now, Liz, I don't wanna confuse him even more when I mentioned our use of solve CRISPY pains, but we can get into that another day. Yeah, I think we're getting off with CRISPY in the community, right? Yes, so solve CRISPY pains is within the listening sales program, just to close the loop on that. Yeah, all right, good job, Tam. I do wanna talk about the actual title of today's call was, do you hear what isn't said? And I think that we really hit on this strongly, obviously we hit on strongly in listening sales, but in the CRISPY community, I think we focus really well on this. One of the things is with the WTH Thursday, when we, I actually break that down for us a little bit. Will you, Dan, what do we do on the WTH Thursday? Yeah, on the WTH, WTH stands for what they heard, and we are analyzing what the sales person heard in a live actual recorded call. So it may be in our industry, it may not be in our industry, but... And I just gotta cut in real quick and what the prospect heard. So we go both sides. Yeah, that's exactly right. And it's analyzing from an outside perspective, right? If it's easy to have somebody tell you, well, when they say this, you should do that. And it's easy to sit on the sideline and say, oh, if I were in that seat, I would have said something different. But if you pause and we all come together and we're discussing what was amazing and you realize, ooh, that was so good. I don't do that, that's amazing. And we unpacked the why, why it works, what's the psychological or emotional component behind why that is successful or why that works. It builds your tool set. It builds your repertoire of sales. And conversely, ooh, that was, that was cringy. You didn't hear it, that was not good. You didn't hear it, yeah. So working together through all of this, what did you hear? What did I hear? Because we do all hear different things. And we think what they said is exactly what we hear. But we find out really quickly that it's not true. So I'm thinking of our good buddy, Grayson, who shows up on most of our Thursday calls. How amazing was his pitch last Thursday? I think he was on Pitch Perfect, wasn't he? Yeah, he was. And he, y'all. So Grayson is a seasoned salesperson. He's been in sales for a decade maybe? Yeah. Yeah, long time, young guy. But he's been in sales for a really long time. Ooh, we didn't even talk about how listing sales is really good for the seasoned person versus the brand new person. But anyway. Grayson's the best example, so go carry on. Good point. All right, so yeah. Anyway, he's in a new field for him. He's only been in this field, I don't know, maybe six-ish months. Oh, I probably got that wrong. I'm sorry, Grayson, you're hearing this snack me later. A while. And he is, he goes through all of the stuff with us as well in the Crispy community. And he just came up with the best line I feel bad sharing. I don't think I should share it. Should I share it? I should share it. It's a nugget, it's a nugget. It's a valuable nugget we can share with everyone on the call here. I think Grayson will be all about it. I go. Yeah, so the scenario was walking through- Like you just read, I'm like. So I'm wondering, are you gonna give it away? Because it's so good. The scenario was we were role playing and we were walking through an objection. And the objection is someone who has a pre-existing cleaner, either they're a friend or they've been cleaning for, they're an independent cleaner and they've been cleaning for eight years. And they're now shopping for a replacement because that person is moving. They got pregnant, they're a military family and they're not gonna clean anymore. And we're in the middle of role playing and Grayson is faced with trying to overcome that obstacle. And without skipping a beat so naturally, just very organic mentions a correlation between, and I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do him any justice here, but the takeaway is golden. Yeah. Well, of course you got an amazing deal. Right? Of course- As I was saying, let me set you up just a little bit better. Yeah, yeah. The saying, that person is saying to, I'm gonna do it with Dan here, saying to Dan. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, but I've only been paying $20 an hour. It's a great deal. And I would really, your price is really expensive. I've been getting my whole house clean for only $100. Yeah, it was a price objective. Yeah, so Grayson comes in with the slide. Oh, I don't doubt that one bit. My friend is a mechanic and every time I need my car worked on, I get the mechanic discount, I get the friend discount. He charges me next to nothing. I just have to pay for parts. And that shifted the whole call. The position was, well, of course you pay less. You have relationship. I recognize that. I have that too. And Grayson said, if I took my car to, in role play, if I took my car anywhere else for service, I would have paid an extra $120 more. So now, if you unfold that and kind of play that out, as a consumer, you're one for one. You got the friend discount. We know the friend discount. We get the friend discount too. And we didn't try to, he listened to exactly what the objection was and he addressed it head on. I think this is like part of the goal of working through the process is, you do have to actually listen all the way and not try to skirt the issue. Most people try to get around it or say, well, yeah, but they are an independent or yeah, but we're licensed to insure and bonded. Those things don't mean anything to the prospect. Yeah. And I have to add, it was in such an uplifting positive, uplifting positive acknowledgement as opposed to any negative connotation of, well, they don't have insurance or they, it was like, how wonderful are they to have hooked you up for this long? How lucky you are. Oh my gosh. Yes. Oh, I have an amazing mechanic friend that I get the same kind of deal from. Yeah. You must be so sad that they're moving away. Yeah. And you have to- I know we're running out of time, but he closed it, he transitioned so smoothly when whatever phrasing or wording he had used, I don't remember verbatim, it put the other person in position to acknowledge that fact, which then removed that whole objective off the table. Yeah. Yeah. The prospect then was like, oh, I know. You're right. Yeah, you're right. You're so right.  Yeah, it is sad that she's moving away, but moving forward, yeah, it's awesome. For sure. Anyway, we spent a lot of time on that. I didn't mean to, but the idea there was just about what they heard, right? Yeah. And that we don't always hear. We hear, we think we hear exactly what the person is. We hear their words, but we don't hear the message behind the words. And there's so many examples of this. You gave a good one earlier to Dan Nguyen. The prospect right out of the gate says something about, you know, I'm just moving into my home and we think, oh, we know, we know what they need. They need a deep clean they need, but we didn't hear what they were actually, didn't even have a chance to say, right?    It's important to recognize that even on your best day, and even the sharpest salesperson could be drug into that just by way of the caller's direction. So you're sharp, you know your game, but the caller starts going down the road and then you kind of fall into answering and your reactionary and all of a sudden you're doing the very thing that is not helping your case. So it's not to imply that your sales skills aren't great, but if you're not on your toes, a customer can take us in the wrong direction. And they do. There's a reason why seasoned sales professionals take more sales courses. There's a reason why my daughter who makes bank in her business took the listening sales program. There's a reason why they're always looking to invest in their sales skills because a lot of times it's just the smallest tweak, the smallest saying that can make you, and like she says, listen deeper, be able to hear what they're trying to say can make all the difference. You could be, in her business, she struggles, she doesn't, she's not in home sales. She is in electric fencing, y'all. How hard would that be to sell electric fencing? But sometimes she'll be working with a client trying to close a deal for three, four, five, six months, a year. Long sale cycles. Yeah, long time, long term. When I hear her stories, I'm like, oh man, our situation is so much easier. So much easier, right? Yeah, yeah. So Liz, I do wanna differentiate between the two different things we've talked about here. Make it quick, because we just realized we got a minute. For sure, so Listening Cells is a sales program that we've talked about. It's a 12 week course dedicated to the cause for your team or for yourself. Over the week, yeah, for sure. Separate to Listening Cells is the Krispy Community and that's the Facebook group that we talked about, $24 special going on right now, and that's the group that we're inviting both members of Listening Cells, the sales course, and those that are not members, and maybe never will be, because at the end of the day, that group of dedicated home service sales professionals, a space to help and elevate one another is for the greater good. Yeah, oh, that was a great way to wrap that up there, Dan. All right, well, thanks so much for coming on with me today. Tom, we missed you, we wish you would have been here today. I know y'all are having a good time in Phoenix and we out, we'll see you next week. Bye, y'all. Bye, y'all.


Are you stepping into your 30s, but haven't had much dating experience? Or maybe you've been divorced for a few years now, but you're ready to enter the dating game again. Whether you consider yourself a late bloomer or want to avoid making the same dating mistakes, here are five dating tips when you're older. 1. Give online dating a try. People often fear meeting creeps online, and while they do exist, times are changing. With the evolution of dating apps, meeting people online has become more common today. Here's a fun fact. My boyfriend and I met on OKCupid. What matters most is using good judgment when you decide to talk to someone. Do you guys live too far away from each other? Will commuting be a problem? When the two of you meet up for the first time, make sure you agree upon seeing each other in a well-lit public area such as a coffee shop, museum, or restaurant. Avoid meeting at parks at night or at each other's homes. This makes the meet-up safer. 2. You don't have to date with marriage in mind. Who said your 20s was only for fun and flings? As long as you and your partner agree ahead of time that none of you want anything serious at the moment, you can date casually for as long as you like. There's no need to settle down with someone by the time you turn 30, especially if you haven't dated much. If you're not sure what you want, don't stress about it. Dating is all about trial and errors. Just make sure you make this clear with your partner and you're both on the same page. 3. Don't let age gap scare you away. Maybe you feel old because your date doesn't know any of the bands you listen to, or you make antiquated jokes no one tells anymore. But don't let age gaps stand in your way of finding romance. My boyfriend and I are eight years apart. Sure, he was reluctant at first to date me because he was scared that I didn't know what I want. He was wrong, of course. As long as the two of you are of legal age, if you guys have good chemistry, age just becomes a number. What's more important is dating someone who is emotionally mature enough for you. And age doesn't determine that. Experience is due. 4. Try new things. Don't use your age as an excuse to turn down dates at the amusement park or 20 bars that make you feel old. You also don't need to try so hard in order to stay cool. As cliche as it sounds, someone will like you for who you are. Just keep an open mind and don't be so quick to turn down opportunities that can be fulfilling and worthwhile. 5. Remember love doesn't have an expiration date. Thanks to social norms, we often have a pressure to get married and have kids by the time we reach a certain age, as if there's an expiration date. But marriage doesn't equate to love and having kids doesn't save a broken relationship. Go at a pace you're comfortable with and don't let anyone make you feel small for where you are in life right now. People don't have all the answers when they grow up. So expect to make some mistakes along the way and have fun. We wish you the best of luck on this wonderful journey of self-discovery. Are you inexperienced at dating or giving it another try? Please share your thoughts with us below. Also be sure to subscribe to our channel for more helpful tips and share this video with others. With your help, we can reach more people and provide our support. Thanks for watching.


Good morning students. It is Wednesday, April 22nd, which means it's Earth Day. So I am recording my morning announcements out here, enjoying the sound of all of the birds chirping very loudly at me and the sun shining in my eyes. But we love our Earth. For my lab students, you're going to celebrate Earth Day over the next week by completing the lab on distances in space. For my physics students, you'll be celebrating Earth Day by learning more about the magnetic fields inside Solenoids. Yes, I know this is an incredibly exciting way to celebrate Earth Day. Hopefully you can find some time to be outside and enjoy a little bit of nature and not just the cars driving by. I wish I could be celebrating on campus and doing all of the Earth Day things that we had planned to do, but that's not going to be. So we'll just have to figure out how to celebrate it at home while doing online learning. I hope you have a really good day and I'll post some more specific information about my classes to those classes.


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Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage here in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco Live Europe 2019. I'm John Furrier with host this week, Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman. We're here all for three days. So we're wrapping up Cisco Live 2019 here in Europe. Guys, we're breaking it down. We had some great editorial segments where we unpacked everything here. But as we look back over the show, want to get your observations and insights into kind of what's going on with Cisco, the secret formula around why DevNet, their developer program, which also has DevNet Create, which is cloud-native, is growing very rapidly. Huge resonance with the customer base at Cisco. It's created a revitalization of Cisco as a company. And you can see that permeating throughout the organization with their branding, how the teams are organizing their engineering, their products. Is this the future model for all infrastructure companies that don't have a cloud? And why is that successful? And then other observations. So guys, we'll start with DevNet. A very successful program led by Suzy Weese, New Vice President and CTO, executing flawlessly how to transform a community without killing the old to bring in the new. Stu. Yeah, so John, it's been fascinating to watch. We've talked about the ground effort. A lot of hard work by a small team, build a community. Last year, over 500,000 were here. They're at 560,000 people using this tool. Four and a half years ago, Cisco, mostly a hardware company. It really, what I've seen over the last year or two, they were talking about software, but have really seen deliverables here. You talk about Cloud Center Suite, you talk about the DNA Center platform. If they're a hardware company, there's a disconnect between what's going on the DevNet zone and what's happened in the company. But we've seen rallying around software solutions. I've heard it from the partner ecosystem, from the customers. This isn't Cisco of a few years ago, very fragmented, lots of lines of businesses, lots of different things. I remember back when Chambers announced like, oh, we've got 37 different adjacencies we're going to go into. No, now it's solution suites and platforms, and DevNet, it is a unifying force of what they're doing, that's a great term, John. Love it and see that transformation of being a software company, that DevNet set some of the groundwork and we heard the CIO of Cisco saying that security and the developer activity are his partners in crime, helping him driving change. And they did a nice, clever play on words, data centered, and that's kind of a shot across the bow of the classic data center, which shows that it is a cloud world and data is the center part of it. And I think the API centric economy is certainly doing it. But Dave, I want to get your thoughts because you asked a question to Susie Wee, at DevNet, a very important question. Other companies couldn't be successful with developer programs. Cisco has been, what's the secret formula? I asked Amanda Whaley who's her right hand woman around what's going on and she said, well there's no secret formula. Well, guess what? There is a secret formula, they're being humble. It seems to be content, seems to be the unifying force of the community. They understood the need. They saw the future around cloud native and APIs being a very important connection tissue, connective tissue for this cloud native world and an upstream path for Cisco. They understood the future, knew the need and they provided great content. The sessions in the education are open and inclusive, very education oriented, but conversations with their peers have been key. theCUBE's been here talking to, they treat everybody the same, not the big pitches, real authentic and genuine content that allow people to learn and grow and connect with others. To me, I think that is kind of a consistent one of my observation. Your thoughts, Steve, on that. Yeah, so first of all, there is a secret formula and this is the new blueprint, or the blueprint that infrastructure companies should be following, Cisco's clearly leading there. I think it's content and community and they've used their programmability of their infrastructure and they've socialized that, they've developed the technology. They say big companies can't innovate. I mean DevNet is a real solid innovation and we witnessed all week people coming in, training, learning, these are network engineers that are learning new skills. They're learning how to be developers and that is to me a huge innovation in business model and technology. It's creating a flywheel for them. So they've created, they've come up with the idea that the network is a data platform and it's now also become an application development platform on which they're deploying applications all over the place. Edge, we heard applications being deployed in police vehicles and so this is a very important trend and from what I can tell, they're way ahead of other infrastructure companies, HP, I don't see this, they talked that game, Dell EMC, we talked about code, IBM trying to make it happen with the Blue Mix, Oracle owns Java and it still sort of struggles to own the developer marketplace. This is Dave, I love what you say there. I saw Jack Welshby a number of years ago and he's like, ah, people always tell me all the time that big companies can't innovate. He's like, well, maybe big companies but what are companies made up of? Companies are made up of people and people can innovate and I think that's the key there is it was very people focused, absolutely content. When you talk about what were the big sessions here?  Absolutely, is it a product pitch and a product training? There's plenty of that going here, people need that, people build their careers out of Cisco but this new career, big question I had coming in is it's a multi-cloud world, infrastructure developer and everything, Cisco's a piece of that, how do they make sure that they get stickiness with them and helping them to build their career and move forward, there's going to be some nice activity there and you get a good glow and Cisco makes themselves relevant in those communities. The other observation that I saw and I want to get your reactions to it guys is that we saw scale, we talk about it all the time in theCUBE, scale is now table stakes to compete in this global landscape but complexity with multi-cloud and these things is there and in every major inflection point in the industry, abstraction layers and software and or hardware advances, certainly Moore's Law Kickstand helps that but it's been software abstractions that have really moved the needle because that's where you can have complexity and still remove it from an integration standpoint, from a consumption standpoint, this seems to be Cisco's buying into this across the companies too, software, not just hardware, they've decoupled it but they all work together, this isn't the magic of DevNet, it's the magic of APIs, it's the magic of an internet operating system, your thoughts? And look, we talked to a number of the companies that were acquired by Cisco over the last few years and I think those are helping to drive some of the change, you have, of course, APTI is the big one, Duo and Security, companies that born in the cloud and helping to move that change along the way and as John, as you said, that unifying factor of we're rallying, it's not just the new chip steps standing up on saying, okay, we spent millions of dollars in developing this thing, everybody go out and sell that, it's now, there's co-creation, you're seeing that evolution of that partner ecosystem and it's a challenging change but Cisco is moving in the right direction. It starts at the top too, Stu, and I wanted to make a point, we learned also, and this is learning for me, Chuck Robbins is behind all this, okay? The CEO has identified DevNet and said this is strategic to our company, all new products now that are introduced at Cisco will have API support and a DevNet component. This is a radical change from Cisco of the past. This means that every solution out of the box, literally, and software will have that in there. So with APIs and DNA center, those are two areas to me that I think will really be a tell sign. If Cisco can execute on the DNA center and bring in APIs and a DevNet, a real supporting community behind every product, I think the programmable network will be a reality. So help me squint through this. You know, we talk to a lot of people, we go to a lot of shows, we're getting the Kool-Aid injection from the DevNet crew here, but there's real substance. We're going to challenge some of the other companies that we work with, some of the other infrastructure companies. The IT business, it's like the NFL, it's a copycat league. So will others, so HP is going to say, oh, we got APIs, EMC, Dell, they're going to say the same thing, but what's different here? I mean, clearly you see it in the evidence of being able to cultivate a community of developers. Is it because of the network? No, it's management. HP has people, I've talked to them on theCUBE, that believe in CloudNative. The company just doesn't fund them properly. They get the smallest booth at the events. They're actually in a partner booth. They're part of an ad jungle, something else. HP and Tony O'Neary, I don't think is funding open CloudNative, or certainly the marketing people or product people are not funding developers. Well certainly not to the degree that Cisco is, obviously. Visible signs of any kind. We go to all the shows. What about Dell? What about Dell EMC? I think Dell EMC is kind of keeping it open, but there's no coherent group.  They got bigger problems now. It's how do you consolidate the portfolio? Michael Dell's stated goal is for Dell to be the leading infrastructure company out there. There's a big hardware component of that. Absolutely they participate in open source. They have some developer, APIs are great, and they love standards, but this is a software movement. Infrastructure's code is where they're going. VMware, they've made some pushes and moves in this space. With developers, but where are they with developers? They have the operators on the IT side. So, back to Dell for a second. I think Dell Boomi is one signal. I've seen some sign there, but then, and that's still relatively new, but there's no one, there's no DevNet for Dell. On VMware. You can go to labs, this is someone that's helping customers learn to code, do that kind of activity, but broadly across the Dell family, haven't seen as much. I think VMware has a good ecosystem. I think they have good technical people. I don't think they need a developer program per se. I think they need more of an operator program. I think that's VMware world. When you go to VMware world, you see a lot of the partners and how they integrate in. So, who are the favorites in the developer world? Obviously Microsoft. I mean, to me, it's Amazon. It's just a kid in a candy store.  They have great stuff. They're always introducing new candy to the kids all the time. New services, Amazon number one. Azure, I think, not so much in my mind. I think it's a lot of legacy there with Azure, but they are, they're putting up the numbers on the profit, and you know what, might stand on Azure. I think Azure's sandbagging the numbers, but the growth's there, and it's going to be a matter of time. So I think Azure is on the path. And they have the legacy developer program, world class, Microsoft. Microsoft is in the Cisco kind of wheelhouse. If they can transform their existing developer community to be cloud native, they hit a home run. John, you were talking about like IT ops out there. Microsoft does great in that. They've got a lot of big push there. They absolutely, the .NET developers are there. You go to the build conference, they play. We go to the KubeCon and a lot of the developer shows, Microsoft's just strongly there. Let me clarify my point. Let me clarify my point on Microsoft. Yes, they have a pre-existing, huge development. They've been successful, been a core competency, no doubt. Cisco had a developer community, all networking. So I think Microsoft has that legacy win, but they have to transform and go to the next level. The question is, do they have that? So with Azure, I'm saying they got it. What about Google? You guys were at the Google Cloud Show last year. We'll be there again in April. Yeah, you got to put Google in the mix, no doubt. I mean, no question. And what about Red Hat? Would IBM on the developer front? Yeah, I mean, look, when you talk to developers and a lot of the training they're doing, if you've got Linux skill sets, you've got to leg up in a lot of these environments. There are a lot of developers. It's not like people at Red Hat Summit are like, oh wait, here's my first hoodie and I'm going to learn to start code. They're already there, they're in this ecosystem. Red Hat, huge part. Everybody we just talked about, Red Hat has strong pieces there, and that's one of the reasons why IBM bought them, Dave, is to help ride that way. That's expensive, but they got the ingredients now. Check, I love those guys. Google has a lot of developers, they contribute heavily in open source, but in terms of a Google community, that's really the CNCF in my mind. I think they're doing a great job stewarding CNCF, but there's not a lot of people, users in the Google ecosystem, they got tons of developers, and that's an opportunity for Google, in my opinion. Well, so let's bring it back to Cisco. So are we in agreement that they've got a leg up on the other infrastructure competitors? Yeah, I do. I think they have a- Particularly as it relates to developers. They have a huge leg up, but I think it's even bigger than that. I think that this company is going to skyrocket if they crack the code on network programmability. They're at the early stages now, you're talking about intro to Python, they get more advanced classes, give them 24 months, if they continue the momentum on DevNet, that's the tipping point in my mind. Two years, they could own everything and just be a whole nother level company if they crack the code, because the network is the value, payload, network effect, this is the new normal in today's- It's a great challenger, I mean, it's really not. I mean, the networking companies for years haven't been able to, the Aristos and the Junipers haven't been able to unseed them as the leader. They still got 60% of the marketplace. VMware and Cisco. VMware, right, VMware and Cisco. Because VMware and Amazon, that's a lethal combination. I think that's what I'm going to watch, the frenemy action between VMware and Cisco, because I think that level of where NSX and what Cisco's trying to do with intent-based networking. Kind of. Well, now that there's a hybrid infrastructure, does that eventually become a multi-cloud play? Maybe it's a few years off, but yeah. Absolutely, and look, we watched, a year ago, we were saying, okay, Google's a strong partner, Cisco, how about AWS? Well, they're integrating with Kubernetes, they're starting to do more with AWS. It's always a interesting partnership with Amazon. Cisco's got lots of products in the marketplace. They're growing in that environment, but Amazon's learning from everybody and can potentially be a threat down the road to where Cisco is. And I'd love to see Cisco doing more in the Microsoft space too. We'll be watching Cisco over the year, going to continue to go deep on Cisco. We've got the Cisco Live North America show on the calendar. San Diego. This year in San Diego, so we'll see theCUBE there for multiple days as well. Of course, we'll be following all the traction software defined, everything as the world goes. Completely cyber, dark, encrypted, whatever it is, we're going to be covering it. Well, thanks for watching. And I want to give a shout out to the crew. Good job, guys, well done. Thanks for watching theCUBE here in Barcelona. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching.