If you like food, you might not want to watch this.  The reason why I say it's because we took the tomahawk right back, we cut it up, we got rid of a little bit of that excess fat, you don't need all that fat. There's so much rich fat in there, it's just fine the way it is. So we roasted it in that way.  So we basically made our own beef stock, and we throw that in along with one can of pepper cheese. We instepart it 75 minutes, release that pressure, and now we're gonna throw it on our big ol' ciabatta bread, yes, we're gonna strain it, and remember that juice, cause we're gonna get a dip of that. Put it on your ciabatta bread, peppers in all, cheese, bake it, and that's the yum yum, get you some my friends.


Hey, good afternoon everybody Tom Stewart here. I'm with Liz Trotter. Our guest today is Raleigh Potachnik and this is Smart Business Moves. Hey Riley. Hey, thanks for having me on. Yeah, thanks for coming. I appreciate it. What you eat, Liz? Where what? What are you eating? What makes you think I'm eating? We all want to know. All right. I'm eating cheese risks and pistachios. Now you know. Not the not the cheese puffs. No, you know, those are different. These are just real cheese.  There's nothing else in them. Okay. So they're healthy ish. I did eat some little tomatoes right before I ate those. So, you know, I can't can't pass up in the little tomatoes too. Not a bad snack going on there. I'm so hungry today. I think today is the first day that I've actually felt like truly like almost well again. How long is that day? A month and a half? Hmm. Maybe. I mean, then a long time. Since I got back from your place, Tom. Don't blame me. I am blaming you. Oh, longer. So yeah, since end of April. So two months. Yeah. So you caught something in in Charleston, huh? I did catch something in Charleston. Got sick. Got really sick. I remember I had the ear infection and that nasal infection. And then when I came back from Vegas, I had a fever again. So I'm like, what? What? Some stuff just doesn't want to go away. Just one wants to linger. I'm still coughing, but I feel so much better. I can like, I can think again too. I feel more normal. All right. So what's going on with you, Tom? I see you're like all, all growing out here. That going on for, for a while, I guess. Hits and spurts. I think there was a time when I woke up and I was still half asleep and I was trying to trim it and I didn't have the right thing on. And I basically jacked it out. So I had to shave again. Kind of, but, you know, I am positive that if I was a man, I would have some kind of facial hair because shaving is just not all that comfy. It's not that easy. Yeah. Riley, you're like, yeah. Yeah. Maybe I just haven't gotten to the point where it's grown very long quickly, but yeah, it just, I guess it just becomes part of the routine, I suppose. I guess. Yeah. I don't even know what I'm talking about. Yeah. I have no idea. So what are we talking about? Are we talking about grooming and eating today? Yeah. This is going to be like the best podcast ever. Okay. So let's get down to business here. This is marketing and sales. Okay. Riley, I know you've got a lot going on in that area. You help people with a number of different products in the digital world websites. You've got, you've got to be here. Why don't you tell us what do you have going on in the marketing and sales arena? Yeah. So I mean, it's definitely kept me busy for the last couple of years. I've had rocket thruster, which is my website design, my website design freelancer business. And I've worked with Liz. I'm still working with Liz on the number of projects she's, she's had, but for the most part I'm working with many of the home service businesses that includes the green industry, house cleaning companies like that to help create a website that doesn't just look good, but also has the strategy behind it. How do you, how do you make sure that when somebody lands on your website, they're actually going to move forward and reach out to you. So you're generating leads. That's what I've been working on for the past couple of years. And then one of the newest additions to kind of my lineup here, the lineup of products and services that I have is a product called schedule talk. And this kind of work hand in hand with my website stuff, just kind of talking through some of the ideas and strategies for how you generate more leads and how do you get more people that actually follow through and contact you, not only from your website, but really any of the marketing materials that you're running. And kind of, so schedule talk is a software product to help businesses start text messaging to implement text messaging to effectively manage incoming text messages. And the point of that being that oftentimes when a business wants to start texting, they may have to use a personal number, which you can come up with a variety of different reasons why that's not a good thing to have your, especially when your personal numbers out there for anybody to see. But also something that I hear is when it comes to texting, people want almost an immediate response. And that's just, that's a pain in the butt, especially when you have a variety of different things going on in your schedule. So schedule talk, it's the goal is to help you manage these things. And with the software product, you can implement automation and your team can get involved. You just have a number of things. And that's kind of worked hand in hand with the website stuff since things are moving towards a more mobile, a more mobile friendly way of doing things. And people want to text you. That's the biggest idea. They want something fast. They want it so free. And that's the idea behind schedule talk. So, so Riley, the, the texting, one of the things that you said is that people don't like is that you have to be like on all the time. You have to, you know, respond. So the schedule talk handle the call about texting or. To an extent. So the, one of the most recent features that was added to schedule talk or that I added to schedule talk was some form of automation. So if somebody texts you, it'll follow up or send a response back to them, letting them know that at the very least they've received your message and then a team member will get back to you. But as kind of an add on to that, it will also, if they send you, say you're running a promotion, a house cleaning promotion where they would get like 20% off their first service. If you, you can create a little keyword inside the software where if they text you, let's just keep it simple. House cleaning, if they text house cleaning to that phone number, it'll start asking them questions. So you can almost pre-qualify that lead. You can get their name, their email, their, the services that they're interested in. You can get all of this different information that normally wouldn't get from just a simple text message that somebody may send you. It'll ask all of these questions before your team ever has to get involved. Wow. So if they text, is it just the like word, you know, house cleaning or if it's a sentence, hey, I think I'd like to have some information about house cleaning services with that, then trigger that. Yeah. So right now it's just based on the word that you create. It's a tag. Okay. Yes. Yes. So I envision it mostly for promotions or for something like social media where people can get distracted really easily. And you want to just create a one really simple called action for them to take, to kind of move forward on. And they would text that one word like house. You would tell your audience just text house clean and some number. Exactly. And it would start that conversation. But there's a lot of improvement that could be made there like, like what you said, kind of reading into that, that, that initial message that they sent you and being able to identify, okay, what's the intent of this message and then trigger triggering an automated conversation from there. There are a lot of ways that it can branch off and kind of become really powerful for a business trying to just automate everything. Yeah.  The application will handle the dialogue for you. Yeah. That's, that's the ultimate goal when you can start having a basically an automated system that's kind of powered by AI where almost your, your office team doesn't need to be completely involved. Basically the AI just kind of handles the conversation and you just show up and do the work. That's the ultimate goal, but there's still a lot of time before the AI out there without developing a hugely complicated system. It's going to take some time, but that's where the world's heading. It seems like. Yeah, it sure does. Doesn't seem like it's going back the other way. That's for darn sure. Yeah. I don't see people all of a sudden saying, hey, can you just call me? I just rather chat about it. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's a lot. That's a big reason why people are kind of moving in the direction of texting. They use it all the time. It's simple, but they also don't have to hop on the phone with a business, whether that be that they're worried about getting stuck on the phone with the sales person kind of getting pushed in directions they may not want to go in. But a lot of the times when they see your marketing materials, whether it be your company vehicles, your website, your, your ads on Facebook, a lot of the times they don't have time to give you a call on the spot. And if they could just send you a quick text, you're going to get a lot more responses from that because they don't have to carve out a portion of their day to hop on the phone with your team. So I think that's a big, a big reason why a lot of, a lot of people are moving in that direction versus phone calls. It's that simplicity behind it. Yeah. So is the texting app, is that something that they would, a company would, would, would put on their website? If you want more information, you can text us at, it would have a number or the people send it out email campaigns were all the ways that you can encourage your candidate, your, your, your market to our customers really to text with you. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a lot of different ways that you can do this. I mean, the most simple way is just taking that phone number that you have from, from the, from schedule talk or, or if you have a phone number that you've text enabled inside a schedule talk, you can just simply put that number on your website and let people know that they can text you. That's the, that's the most basic form of promote, promoting your text messaging and that you're accepting text messages, but from a standpoint of getting creative, there are a variety of ways that you can do this. You can, like we talked about earlier, implement that keyword feature where somebody texts you, and it starts that conversation. That's one way that you can do it. But you can also use this from a standpoint of just thinking about what your customers are doing throughout the day, what's easiest for them and identifying places to put your phone number. So it could be on, on door hangers, it could be on your company vehicles, places where they just aren't going to have time to, to call you or to email you. That's where it makes sense to kind of put that phone number because it just simplifies that call to action and it's going to make it easier for people to reach out because the last thing that you want to do is that complicated step and you not get contact information at all or not get the lead. Is the number, could the number be confused with a number that you could try to have a voice conversation with? It could be. And I think that comes down to the wording so you can have a separate textable number. You can set that up inside a schedule talk or if you have a phone number that you're already using, most of the time you can text enable that basically just turning your callable phone number and adding SMS functionality to it and have text go to schedule talk and then your phone calls go to wherever they, they've been going. So with just a simple textable number there is that chance that somebody tries to call it. But for the most part, if you're putting it on your website, if you're using it in your marketing materials, it's good to just let them know that they can text this number. And that's partly, part of the reason why is most people don't know that they can text you. So if you're clear about text us at this number, that'll help people start texting. So as a cleaning company, if I had this additional channel and using it properly, are you finding that companies are improving their sales that they're actually generating more revenue by using texting? Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, just from a standpoint of generating leads, that's a, texting plays a big role in that. But also when it comes down to turning that lead into a paying customer, that's also a huge thing because if you look at kind of the stats behind texting and I have a few notes here because I figured this may come up. So oftentimes email, if you're trying to reach out to them by email, it's hard to get a hold of them because when you think about your customer, they aren't spending much much time in their email. They're on their phone. They're on social media. There's just no big reason why they're on their email unless it's work-related. I have people, Riley, I have people that will send me an email, then send me a text telling me they just sent me an email. I've done that. Yeah. Yeah. And that's something that could happen. And you know, it may, I don't see texting at the moment completely phasing out email and phone calls because some people do want to do it that way. Some people may want to hop on the phone. So texting is kind of an alternative to these things that you should push and just give people the option to do it. And I would expect that most people would go up on the option of texting you. I think somewhere there was some crazy stat like 70 to 80% of people would rather text a business compared to call them. It's something crazy. Yeah. From a standpoint of yourself, if you just ask yourself the question of if I was looking for a company to take care of something around my home, would I rather call them and potentially get stuck on hold or maybe not get a response at all? Or would I rather send them a text and move on with my day until they get back to me? And that's kind of where that 70 to 80% comes from is people just want to send you a text and be done with it until your team gets back to them. And that's kind of the importance of texting. I think there was a trying to illustrate kind of the value of texting. I was going to look at some of these stats here. So in terms of open rate, you look at some of the most common things that you get in the emails. If you think about email in the open rate, it's somewhere in the ballpark of maybe 20%. People will open that email and respond to it. So around 20%. When you look at... Sorry, I mixed some things up there. So if you look at text messaging and we'll compare it to phone calls here for a second, if you look at the response rate compared to phone calls. A lot of that comes down to people just don't recognize your number. So their skin ignore it. They're not going to pick up the phone for a random number. I've ignored plenty of random phone calls. Do people pick up their phone for random numbers now? I don't know that that's a thing. Yeah, I mean it may be... It's never a good call. It's somebody trying to like train us just to completely ignore those phone calls. The only reason why I would see any of us picking up a random number is we're expecting a call. That's the only reason why I would pick up the phone for a random number. Maybe I haven't added that person as a contact yet in my phone and I'm expecting something, but beyond that, I'm ignoring it. And then for email, we were talking about open rate. The open rate for email is in the ballpark of 20%. The open rate for text messaging is in the ballpark of like 95 to 98%. I mean, even if it's a text message where I get the little snippet of what's inside the text message, I may still open it even if it's a promotional and just see what's going on in there.  It catches me. I have this window cleaning. I'm pulling it up right now, and it says it's in the SMS businesses. Why do I have to open it up every time? The thing from Dix, it says 50% off now at Dix. Why do I still open it? I don't want to use Dix, but I'm opening it. If time is a currency, text messaging is relatively free. Phone calls are expensive.  Either way, it's like I'm giving up time and whatever it was I was doing, I can't do it anymore, but text usually can keep doing whatever you're doing and do the text in the same way. Email, this was funny. I was listening to a podcast this morning talking about the movie You've Got Mail and this is probably before your time, Riley, but Liz, you might remember this when America Online and the whole email was relatively new and you would log in and you'd be disappointed.  That's true. I do remember that. Yeah. It was a big deal. It was a big deal if you got an email. You're excited, but you know what, I think there's also a I think there's a control issue also like I feel in control of texting like I can, I feel I have no problem not texting somebody and opening or not opening, I feel like I have 100% control. When the phone rings, I instantly feel like they've got control. I'm like, I don't know. What do they want to talk about? What am I going to get stuck having to listen to? No, I just don't want to do it. I feel like they have control, though. But texting, I completely feel like I'm in control. It's kind of ridiculous, but definitely a control issue. Yeah, I don't know where that quite comes from, but you've definitely seen bad or negative reviews out there where somebody's complaining that they didn't pick up the phone when I tried to call them. You've definitely seen those kind of reviews, so maybe that's where it comes from. And texting is so new that most businesses don't do it quite yet, which also opens up the opportunity for you to kind of get a leg up on on the businesses around you and just giving people a really easy way to reach out to you rather than everybody else. But yeah, I don't know quite where that comes from in terms of kind of being more okay, not responding to a text compared to you not picking up the phone right away. I wonder if it's age related to, you know, because we always picked up the phone when we were numb. That was, uh, that was you always picked up the phone. It was kind of like a chord. Yeah. It was kind of like email. You were happy to get a call. Hey, the phone's ringing. Yeah, it was good. It was a great story. Yeah, people would literally run for the phone. Yeah. So, you know, obviously there's some advantages to texting, but, you know, in the spirit of, you know, marketing and sales, this is more of a, I presume a sales activity to do well, explain. I mean, what are all the ways that I can use texting to generate more revenue and you know, have you seen results you have any data that kind of speaks to, you know, this is how you can put more money in the bank if you use this technology properly. Yeah. And I don't have any case studies quite yet. It's like the number one thing and I'm trying to work on putting together these case studies to better illustrate this, since it is still a very new thing that not a lot of businesses have experimented with, those case studies will be really important. So right now, I'm basically just relying on this data and what kind of other people have seen out there. That's kind of what I'm relying on right now. But I mean, when you kind of going back to what we've talked about texting is hugely important for the lead generation in the sales and you can use this in a number of different ways not just from a standpoint of letting somebody text you but also from the standpoint of following up with somebody and you can also use this for promotional purposes although you have to be a little bit careful here because these cold text messages where nobody or where the group of people didn't want you to text them you can get into some hot water there and the first thing is if you're not using a software product it's important to let them know that they can unsubscribe if you're running these cold text messaging campaigns where the person may not have subscribed to you texting them have some way if you're not using a software product to let them know that they can unsubscribe from your whatever list that you put together with a software product like schedule talk it'll auto add that unsubscribe feature so that you aren't getting trapped in kind of a tough spot where people may be reporting you for now practice with text messaging you just want to avoid that but you can use text messaging also for upselling and that's it's something else that you can look at where one good example that I've tried to talk about more and more is just as you're servicing somebody's home as you're cleaning somebody's home keep an eye out for areas that you can help them so let's just take for example you're cleaning somebody's home and you notice their windows are super spotty just super dirty and that's not part of the service that you're there for but you offer window cleaning so one way that you can do or one way that you can upsell that client on say a window cleaning service is snap a picture of that super dirty window and send them a quick text hey we noticed your windows are incredibly dirty next visit and get these cleaned up for you that's one way that you can just super informal just send them a click and that'll go one of two ways I think if that could go badly too like who the heck do you think you are yeah maybe so it's an experiment work but that's one way you can use texting to upsell people upsell existing clients so from upselling from following up and making sure that your messages are being read and maybe re-engaging stagnant leads who maybe aren't responding to your emails or aren't responding to your phone calls texting can help get the ball rolling with those leads who just aren't quite responsive now kind of stepping away from each generation you can use texting for a variety of different things as well like customer service if somebody's just got a quick question they may just want to send you a quick text get that quick answer and be done with it rather than having to monitor their email or get on the phone if they can just send you a text and get an answer that's where customer service could be beneficial as well in using texting now something that I something else that you can play around with is hiring job candidates the tough part is here with job applications you have a lot of information that you need to collect about that person but if you are trying to schedule an interview if you're trying just to keep the conversation rolling with that job applicant maybe doing a text conversation rather than email conversation or the occasional phone call where you have to call them to get some more information maybe it's better to just keep that conversation quick have a text conversation with them and just collect that information when you need it and schedule interviews that way that would be another way that you can use texting but all the time I'm focusing on the lead in sales which is kind of what we're talking about in this video here that's a lot of information when it comes to recruiting though often times that's a marketing and sales activity as well your market is the potential employee I remember reading something from a recruiting standpoint when you're trying to get someone to engage in an interview text often times can be the best channel especially for like cleaning technicians hourly hire type positions a larger percentage of your candidates are going to be a lot more comfortable working off of their phone and texting than email some don't really even there's a lot of people out there that really don't even bother much with email yeah and us as business owners we may have the perspective of everybody uses email because email is a very dominant thing that I use kind of running the website stuff and schedule talk now so it's easy for me to assume that my clients, the people that I'm working with also use email but sometimes we find that that's not necessarily the case so for job applications and hiring just being able to hold that quick conversation over text where that's probably the main thing that they're using that's great especially when you think about they've likely applied to a number of different businesses in the area they're not just applying to you so being able to quickly get your message across to them and hold that conversation rather than waiting for them to respond and maybe them having a more efficient conversation with another company and you end up losing them there's just some issues there and texting will help speed that process up because you're not waiting for them to respond to an email it seems like our industry is a good one for this as well because texting tends to have a more casual feel to it and people think of texting as more casual I think it would be weird to or maybe for now right as I thought it well maybe not if I reached out to an attorney and I got a text back I said hey you know hey Mrs. Trotter or hey Liz I see you're looking for an attorney would you beat up or something like that it's just weird but I feel like with our industry it kind of lends itself to a more casual form of especially with the employees of communication yeah not positive but I think so and I think you're pretty correct about that where right now with who we're generally serving which is the homeowner I think text messaging is hugely important to them because generally they're going to be texting throughout the day so like a lawyer or someone like that email still may be the best place to reach out there it's maybe more of a professional situation where email makes more sense so that's I think texting in the homeowner's mind is the way they want to do it although if you think about commercial rather than residential I think even there will be a pretty critical part from commercial because you're talking to another business owner it comes down to understanding who you talk to and who your client is and right now for those residential house cleaning companies window cleaning lawn care landscaping those who are working with residential that's where I see the most opportunity with texting but you know even professional services law medical if you have an appointment I believe they use text for reminders I get a text reminder and actually my last appointment I did get a text from my doctor as a follow up 24 hours later yeah it was just a quick and she used my first name too Liz just checking in to make sure that everything's going okay did you get your prescription filled or filled I was like dang that's nice and it looked like it was coming from my doctor and the concern is that they send you an email is it going to wind up in spam or are you going to wind up deleting it with the other 150 emails that you know you've gotten in the last hour and really back to the control thing I mean using it with our customers I do think that the customers also feel like they have a level of control like okay it's easy I'm in charge of whatever we're going to talk about and how much I want to talk about if I don't want to text anymore I can always say hey I'll just give you a call or hey can you send that to me by email every once in a while I will ask someone actually just yesterday I was looking for a quote for something and we were texting and I said hey do you mind sending me a quote by email so I'll have that in there and I can go look at it and read it at my leisure they can get all the detail you know so I think there's a time and a place but the chatting by text made that much easier too yeah were you about to say something Tom yeah I was just going to add on to that where I think we talked about this a little earlier this texting thing isn't meant to completely replace some of the things that people are using right now it's to give people the option to text you when that's the most convenient thing to them but like you're saying there is no way to play time in a place for email and phone call so scrapping that side of your business is not what we're trying to get across here it's giving your clients, the people who are interested in the marketing that you're running the ability to quickly send you a text and hold that conversation in a place they spend the most time using throughout the day so that's the main idea behind texting you know what I would really like you know how when you see a phone number usually you'll see in front of the phone number like a C for their cell or P for personal or they need an X in front of the phone number if it's a texting number so I know I can text so I could just text I would always know I can text that because it is frustrating if I text a number and then I get the message back that says you're texting a landline well who has a landline what is that is that a thing anymore like stop lazy landlines it is a thing it is a thing and you know we do a lot of texting and made central and we get trouble tickets it's like hey my texts aren't going through and it's like you're trying to text something to somebody's landline landline so Ronald you mentioned something earlier that I think would probably be a good idea for us to spend a little bit of time on Rose we're talking about using text one of the things you can do with it is marketing so you can have like a list of prospects and you can reach out to them I know something that companies often do in the cleaning world and the residential cleaning world is if you have a last minute cancellation you can send a text to a bunch of prospects and say hey I have an opening this morning who wants that but there's some rules around that and I guess some legal consequences if you don't follow them and sometimes us entrepreneurs we don't pay as close attention on those things as we should could you kind of give us an education there yeah and I will say I'm still reading up on all this stuff the main thing is just making sure that if you are sending out these bulk text messages be sure that you have that unsubscribed feature on it make sure you're clearly stating that they can unsubscribe from this automated message whenever they please and that's critical I think that came through that was a big rule change when GDPR was pushed in Europe which was a big privacy update for a lot of GDPR would you say? GDPR I forget what the acronym stands for but basically the ruling was that all of these big technology companies had to very clearly disclose what kind of information they're collecting and how users can unsubscribe from automated emails and automated in this case automated text messaging all of that kind of stuff it gave more rights to the user and how they control their data online so GDPR general data protection regulation that's purely a European thing right? and though you're seeing a lot of stuff roll over to the US it may not be called GDPR but California is very heavy on their restrictions with things like automated messages so you just kind of have to understand generally it's safe practice whenever you're sending these automated messages just give them a way that they can unsubscribe that's the safest bet so in the text it gives them an option and it's typically how would I refresh my memory what does the copy typically tell you at the end if you want to opt out you enter a code? yeah so it could be I forget the exact text that I append or that schedule talk appends to the end but it's something basic like if you would like to stop receiving messages from us text stop and that would unsubscribe yeah okay so when they text stop then you won't ever send them another text so when they text stop it will unsubscribe them from your bulk text messaging now if they sent you a text message in the future and you were holding a personal one on one conversation it wouldn't stop those messages from going through because they requested you to have this conversation with them but from a standpoint of sending bulk messages again you would need to receive their approval before you can start doing that yeah it complicates a lot of things but from a general perspective being safe with the law and not getting stuck in maybe a lawsuit it's very important to kind of follow these these fairly basic rules but just mainly giving them the option to unsubscribe when they want these and the majority of mine do not have that yeah and that's if you hadn't texted them first which I assume you didn't that's an issue that's something that they can get in trouble for yeah I can't imagine I texted most of these places first if they type in stop and they opt out and say Mrs. Jones opts out of your bulk email and then a week from now there's an issue just with her that you want to reach out to her and you pick up your phone and you text her are you in trouble for doing that if it's a personal message directed for her and it's related to her situation you're okay with doing that but if you send her another promotional message that she may have no interest in at all and doesn't really apply to her situation that's kind of the issue again what could happen to me if I did that it's uh there's a variety for the most part if it's a small scale bulk message you're not going to be in too much trouble maybe a small fine but for the most part for the most part for the size business of a house cleaning company that most people may have in watching this stream here it may not be too big of an issue but you can turn to something difficult or something something more challenging if people start reporting these messages to maybe major government organizations so I don't know the exact punishments to these things but generally maybe a fine something along those lines maybe what's expected I mean like on the merchant accounts I credit card processing there's laws in place that are pretty stiff yeah that's fake yeah and where you see the most trouble is when you get up to and this doesn't necessarily apply to house clean but when you get up to where you're bulk messaging millions of people at a time for say large retailers or larger companies that's where you're going to land in big trouble if you're sending out these massive amounts of text messages and you don't have this unsubscribed button or you don't have this like Walmart or somebody yeah if you don't give that user that end user an opt out and you're a large company large being you're sending millions of text messages that's where the government's going to come after you try and make an example but I don't think you're going to find that with the size of the companies that that I have or that many people watching this video or have I don't just be clear y'all he's not he's not advocating that you go ahead and do it right yeah yeah regardless of the size of the business that you have follow these same rules that companies follow that's the safest way to operate yeah and if we're using schedule talk we really don't have to worry about it because these are features that are built into your product right yep so if you are running say bi-weekly text campaigns and somebody unsubscribes the next the next week that you send that campaign it won't send a text message to that person because they're unsubscribed in the system so we handle the the the inclusion of that unsubscribed message and then for the next batch we filter out all of those people who unsubscribed so you don't get in trouble I have a question about schedule talk specifically so if I were to sign up for a schedule talk right I got a hold of you and I was like okay sign me up do I have to now come up with promotions am I deciding how to use it are you going to say here are our top three ways to use schedule talk like like what what what would what would happen coming about that yeah so right now right now I don't have a templates in place but schedule talk is still small enough where I'm pretty much working hand in hand with the people who sign up for schedule talks I'm gonna help you get this thing set up and help you come up with ideas for how you can use it so I'm working with you to kind of put this thing together and actually get it implemented so I'm working on putting templates together for to be accessible but right now it'll be a little bit of a partnership and me working with them to set everything up how they want it so the people that currently are using schedule talk Riley what do you think the most popular thing that people use it for is it comes down to what we talked about earlier in the video which was giving people the ability to text something that schedule talk does and there is plenty of room for us to grow or for schedule talk to grow here is at some point or over time the goal of schedule talk is to be a place where you're managing all sorts of messages so at the moment text messages is a big key item in schedule talk you also receive your facebook messages in schedule talk so people are using schedule talk to manage these two platforms which tend to be the platforms that most people want to use to message a business because it's the thing again that people spend the most time on so one thing they're doing is putting it on their website so that they can now have easy conversations with mostly leads it sounds like that they can then hopefully turn into sales correct yeah yeah and I don't want to make it just sound like it's just a lead generation platform it's more of a communication platform to help these businesses send and receive text messages and get their team involved where if you have an office team or a number of office staff members they can get into schedule talk as well and start helping you managing the inflow and outflow of these text messages and facebook messages so you're using a lot of them then for like customer service customer service generation following up with existing clients that sort of thing but you mentioned website and I'm just kind of thinking about the workflow and all of this and either people are texting you or you're texting them and whichever side of the equation you're on that whole relationship probably started with somebody going to your website to find out something about you so that's a whole other part of this as well and I don't want to let the hour get away from us without taking advantage of talking about website design a little bit I know that you would do that for a lot of home service businesses and hey it's 2022 you know we've seen a lot of change here in the last few years but what are some of the latest trends you're seeing in website design and you know what what do we need to know is cleaning business owner yeah so I think if we kind of touch back on what we've been talking about we've talked about when somebody's ready to text message you but to get them to that point they need to learn some information about your business to actually get them kind of comfortable and confident and actually reaching out to you and getting them to believe that you're the right company to kind of solve their challenges they may be facing so ultimately that comes down to just as a general foundation for the website that's answering their questions what questions are the things that they need to address before they feel comfortable with you building that trust with them with testimonials pictures and then that kind of gives them a foundation in kind of an idea of what kind of company you are and how they should feel about you if you don't answer their questions if they don't see testimonials or any way that would build trust with them you're not going to get that text message because they don't see the value in reaching out to you so that's kind of the key foundation but in terms of trends for this has been going on for a little while so I don't know if I consider it a trend but it's that that movement towards mobile first focusing on your website on mobile devices is the first thing when you're developing a website because most people coming to your website they're going to be on their phone which is why text messaging is also becoming critical because everything's done on the phone nowadays so when you're designing a website when you're developing a website to kind of move the needle for your business make sure that when somebody goes to your website on their phone everything looks good text isn't falling off the page your images aren't aren't too small or maybe too big just make sure everything looks good so that people going through your website on their mobile device get the information that they need and you're not communicating the wrong first impression with a broken mobile website that's kind of the main thing what I really try to focus on is getting that mobile site right and then that will translate to the desktop or we'll say the computer website that's a lot of what we're trying to focus on right now websites more mobile friendly now that it's 2022 and everybody's using their phone what roughly do you have any idea what percentage of website traffic to home service companies is coming through a mobile device who nowadays it's it's definitely over half so I would think for a homeowner that is primarily on their phone you could be 60 70% of that traffic coming through it may differ but I think nowadays just as a general average for most industries you may be seeing over 50% of that traffic being mobile I believe you are right I bet it could be even higher than that it seems like it would be I'm betting it's 60 maybe pushing 70% yeah it seems like it just keeps growing by the day that percentage for the last for the last week castlekeepers.com 83% is mobile 4% tablet 12.5% desktop not even surprising either the world is just moving so forward towards mobile devices that 83% makes total sense people are just on their phone all the time they take it with them wherever they go it's right there so whenever somebody needs to look something up like finding a house cleaning company they're going to do it on their phone yeah totally what about SEO do you do anything with SEO in regards to the website how does that play in Riley yep so SEO is kind of a big piece of what I do it's I would say I have a small service offering I primarily focus on the website and SEO is a big portion of that okay so is that like in product as you're designing and building the website or is that like I know there's a lot of a lot of companies that do the ongoing service where they're building backlinks and writing blog posts I mean do you guys do that too yeah so when we are designing and building a website SEO is something that we do in terms of like ongoing that's something that we also do as well just keeping up with the SEO and making sure everything stays good because this thing it needs to be updated you need to show Google that the website is staying maintained that's something that they look for in terms of kind of taking on just SEO projects right now I'm kind of trying to limit that just because things are so busy right now I'm mainly just taking on full service projects but SEO for those full service projects which include just designing and building the website along with the SEO it's a SEO is a huge part of that making sure that we're not just designing a website that looks good but it's actually showing up so it's an important aspect for any website because one of the things that we see with website design that more and more companies are moving from just a lead capture form and they're doing like online booking where you know they integrate with an app that will capture a credit card run a credit card say hey we'll be at your house next Tuesday to claim do you see that becoming almost an expectation with the customers you're working with in website design the ability to kind of self-book is that what you were thinking right where the whole sales process is processed through scheduling the first job and processing a payment is done through their consumer website yeah and Marcus Sheridan he has the book they ask you answer and he does a number of conferences he has started talking about this exact thing the self-service aspect of a website and I think this may still be fairly industry specific it's probably growing and I think house cleaning is probably a big place where this can be implemented successfully where if you have a tool that can kind of identify okay what are your availabilities maybe what times can they book and maybe it will auto give them a price that they can just go ahead and pay for and get that house cleaning on the calendar that is absolutely something where that's definitely somewhere where the world is moving where they don't have to get in touch with the business or with the company they just go to the website they pick the day of the week that they want to have their house cleaned okay it's done that is the easiest thing and you know as the world yeah as the world moves further and further down the line of automation you can't go wrong with implementing a tool like that I had to have my washing machine the boot was broken and so I went on to appliance repair and the one that let me book it on their website yeah they got my business and I I didn't even really this the truth I didn't even care how much it was going to cost I was just like oh good I mean they did give me the price and everything but as long as it was within the realm of what made sense to me I was going with it because I wasn't going to what I'm going to call somebody no and for what because you can get five other quotes and maybe save yourself you know some modest amount of money but it's door to comparison to all the extra time and calories you had to burn to get those extra quotes as long as it's in that normal realm what I'm kind of expecting I'm going to go yeah it's amazing how much we value simplicity if you can just give that end user just the most simple way of booking you're going to get a lot more people reaching out to you that way they're going to they're going to say I don't want to even bother researching these seven other companies if the price seems fair to me and it's easy I'll just go and book it and be done with it do I have to have my own booking tool to get you to put it on my website how does that work do you have booking tools or how does that work I personally don't have a booking tool that can do something like that so to kind of find the tool that works best for you that's happy that you're happy with and I will happily get that implemented on your website has a booking tool yeah Tom yes anybody can pretty much use anybody that's using main central should probably be using the booking tool yeah I you know I see a lot of companies I'll speak to castle keepers we're well over half of the jobs that we book now or through online booking that we never even speak to the client and people are so afraid of this are you so you've been doing it for a long time Tom are you getting so what are what is it I hear people are afraid of oh they're afraid that I'm not going to have availability on that day they're going to book a day and I won't be able I think that's the number one thing oh no I'm going to they're going to book their job and they're going to say that it's like in this condition and then we're going to get out there and the place is going to be a pit it's going to be garbage dump there's always that risk there's that risk you're going to do if you're quoting it over the phone of course so you handle it the same way and you're dealing with the exceptions and if you let the exceptions drive your business you're leaving a lot of money on the table you know I mean if it's happening half the time you got a big problem and you need to rethink how you're marketing and setting expectations but you know if one out of 50 jobs that winds up happening that's still you know more than fully expected to be but okay it's a cost of doing business you can deal with it so I try to tell people like if they say something like yeah but this one time I went out to this job blah blah blah I'm like well was it like one of the first few times that you ever did it because I can understand that if it was like the first time that you ever tried it and you go out and the place is trashed alright you probably have a mixed up idea about how this works you probably think you're going to have this happen a lot but realistically it does not happen enough to keep people from doing it everybody's got an online booking tool so it must be working for some people and you don't see the bigger company saying oh no I got to get rid of that booking tool because it's happening so much now I'm sorry Tom no I'm agreeing with you and it's where it's going I mean it's already there but you're just going to see more and more and more it's going to be like just an expectation and nobody you know the day's coming when nobody's going to want to pick up a phone and talk to you same as the texting yeah it's all along the same idea of people don't want to talk to you they don't want to talk to their own families much less talk to some company about stuff people don't want to pick up my son still text me or he'll box me if he wants to hear my voice right that's like as close as you can if you call him there's no answer and you can text back what do you want mom although I have to say at my last event in Vegas Gavin did call me actually called while I was presenting and I was like y'all it's my son and people were like pick it up what happened something must be big going on if he's actually calling so sometimes they call it's just not common oh look how cute you are there Riley so young we're still young but you were even younger yeah we're pushing up to the top of the hour here so Riley if anybody wants to get a hold of you to talk about your web design services or schedule talk I'm going to drop the links to both of these sites and chat I'm assuming they can reach you through either or both yeah yeah either way works or if you want to just send me a facebook message that works perfectly as well I keep a pretty close eye on my facebook messages so and I have to give quick props to that so one thing that you are amazing at Riley I don't even know if I'm sending facebook messages or texts but I just drop you stuff all the time hey Riley blah blah blah I don't think it's ever been even an hour has gone by before you respond right I feel like you're like on it yeah I mean I try and be as quick as possible although I don't want to set like an expectation that I'm always going to respond within an hour because that's it yeah we're going to be testing you now you are and sometimes you might not even respond but you'll respond when the thing is done it's like okay Liz that's already handled blah blah blah so you actually practice what you preachers around the texting okay this was fun Riley this was good information truly and always like talking about the text oh my gosh he does particularly funny unfortunately we are at the top of the hour so we're going to have to wrap it up for the moment but we're going to be back next Wednesday five o'clock eastern we are going to be back next week right Liz we are who are we going to be with next month I don't know but we'll be getting the you like how I asked first we should probably be texting folks through what's coming up the smart business that actually would be smart that actually would be really smart it would be a smart business wouldn't it it would be a smart business Riley thanks so much thank you Riley bye everyone


All right, now we can talk with Emily Simmons general counsel about the bill that we brought her in for be asked her to come in for, which was s 16, you realize we're dealing with 1613 1415 and 16, which has had our heads been spinning just a little bit, and wanted to get your feedback. A presentation from Wendy Geller that dealt with a lot of the. A lot of data information and representative Brady is is kind of being our lead on this so she was going to be working with, I believe, just to Carol us and I think it was you Jay correct. I think it was Jeff Fanon but I did write the representative Brady instead of she need help with the expansion expulsion language but I really didn't want to help with the data collection language I trust the AOE and what they know about that. Okay. So we're going to review to she's going to review that and get the work with Jim damoray to get that language sorted out in the bill. And I guess we were just going to ask you a few questions, and why I think that I asked for you, unless you had a presentation presentation now. The task force in section two. We weren't wondering where the time I was wondering where the task force came from. And your thoughts on the task force. Sure I'd be happy to give the context that I'm familiar with, especially as it originated in the other body. Yes, so there were two ideas for a bill and a bill that was introduced as a 16. The bill as introduced focused on that data that is collected and that maybe should be newly collected by the agency of education around discipline in schools and around protected class of students and the disparate impacts on those students and discipline. The agency separately from the development of a 16 by its sponsors submitted some ideas about changes that we feel are warranted for serious and I'd say truncated study to recommend legislative action to you about our statutes on suspension and the students. So, there's two complimentary I'd say, but two sources of the language you have in your bill now before your committee started making any changes. So those were the data elements and the study of data through a task force. Coincidentally, the agency's proposal to institute a task force to make recommendations for very targeted changes at what we actually do what we actually require in the statutes for what happens to students are subject to discipline. Now they all all that those two concepts live together happily under the roof of the 16 that you have before you know, so that task force that the secretary recommended what had a sort of. I came up with the idea thinking that there was some low hanging fruit in our discipline statutes and it's probably way past time to look seriously at prohibiting suspension and expulsion for all students except for some very, very narrow categories of student behavior. And I was primarily focused on the idea that through the gun three schools act which is a federal piece of legislation that we have to retain the ability to expel a student who brings serious weapon to school under certain circumstances. So starting from there. The idea was, there's probably not much else that we after working with this task force would identify. This will be legal grounds for suspension or expulsion, but that we had some stakeholder work to do we weren't ready as the agency to come with legislative language that we'd want you to pass tomorrow, but that should be subject to a good transparent stakeholder process and a report to you with valuable information and a recommendation. The secretary was asking to choose a task force to work with from among a list of characteristics such as please include special educators, families, teachers, administrators, groups who do social justice work in schools. And it was to that level of detail that our proposed language over on the Senate side started with, you know, secretary work with people who fit these characteristics, come back to us next year very quickly with legislative language about that the language is still in the bill, several tasks and we can go through those if you want to but they were the real, they were the real doing aspects, as opposed to the data. So that's why I know it was a point of discussion in your committee last week why is this task force look different why aren't the names of organizations and their executive directors, or designee used. And who is the agency's proposal to rather than name the people we lovingly call the usual suspects the V's to have the ability to look more broadly at individuals who might not be associated with those advocacy organizations who have an interest in that stakeholder the Senate Education Committee changed the language a little bit when they put the data ideas and the statutory changes ideas together. Do you have a problem with it being the way it is a little and it's nuanced and how I would say this to you and I think you know me well enough to know that this just comes from a friendly place of observation. And I'm not pushing hard on this but we have a habit in our community of legislators and the field agency the V's of naming really hard working advocacy groups to every task force that we come up with every committee every study group. And I have wondered, as I have done more of this work, how that looks to folks who don't regularly work in this room, this room, or within those advocacy groups, whether that looks like good government best government practice to name specific groups, or or to be in the habit of always naming the same specific groups. So I was excited when the language survived through the Senate where just more general groups of people based on their interest or their work or their expertise generally were named because I thought maybe we can improve that this idea works, and that the agency can be trusted to pull in a diverse group of people to work with, improve through the stakeholder process and writing a report that that that can work. But if that's not how you're comfortable doing that I'm not going to push. Questions. Okay. MIDI, do you want to keep it the way it is or do you want to change it back to where the Senate did it where the Secretary was doing the appointments. Do you want to keep it that we are having the groups appoint someone remind me how the, the list language, whose recommendation that was, I'm sorry I've lost track of the conversation because it came up in conversation because we noticed that the Secretary was appointing everybody and it was a different way of doing it and we went wow that's really different, but we didn't ask why we just went ahead and did it. Yeah. I prepared for today by going back and listening to your conversations last week. It was while you had the ACLU in and before that testimony someone else that day from the best Institute said we would love to be involved. And then ACLU said we would love to be involved and then you had the conversation about well let's put them in there. Yeah. So then we started making our list. Yes. Again, I always look at outcomes. So I, you know, I would tend to look at what skills and knowledge that people have to have to be on the task force to effectively have the outcome that that is desired. So, that's kind of how I would look at it. Yeah. I would still air towards where we have it spelled out more. I do still worry overall it's too many. It's a giant task force and if you see how we're struggling as a committee to get things worked out. But I think some of the specificity in here, maybe beyond the V is which I think we need some of their just institutional knowledge and expertise on some of this but our, we're naming some folks that are not you sort of usual suspects on you know, the best project the Vermont family network. And I think that was sort of justice group that that I was hoping we might include like I think there's some representation here the Vermont school counselors that are not our kind of typical suspects on all the task courses but are going to have enough of like what you're you're talking about representative Austin of some background and expertise on this that they come and we're asking for, especially if we don't change the date, really quick turnaround. So there's hopefully a little bit less need to. There's something gained by people who are used to working in this process and can then hopefully do it a bit faster than if it's a more sort of citizen based group. My other concern about it would be that if it's a much more sort of broadly sort of citizen based group that the AOE is putting together is, does it drop from people who have very particular individual experiences that then that's their reason for wanting to do it which is a good thing. However, if people are really narrow about like this happened to my kid I saw this one thing in one school. Is it bringing together more anecdotal experience but doesn't give us the kind of breadth of knowledge that particularly I think there's, there's some really interesting thoughtful people included in this list. I'm worried about how long list is still representative James. You know, I'm for this time around, you know, I think convinced by what Brett Brady said but I am really intrigued by Emily's comments about you know best practices and the creation of these lists that we always do and whether we always tend to go to the other aspects and I just I want to give that some thought in a broader, in a broader sense. It's really interesting to me it's not something I thought about the only thing I've been able to crystallize and my first few years in the legislature was that feeling a perpetual shortcoming about trying to come up with the perfect list, and how it never seems, you know, it kind of never seems like we're really getting there. So you know maybe there is a totally different way we need to go about this. I'm not sure right this very second is the time because this is sort of a more interesting list than our usual list. This is what would it look like if we did like a compromise if we had some of these spelled out, and we left a certain number of spots for the agency to fill does that. I understand the concern you're expressing Emily and I'm new to all of it and clearly Task Force are like, we create a lot of tasks. I have a concern about how many task forces we create but if this one was populated sort of in two ways with us, putting some particular expertise there and giving the AOE some discretion to field it with, or does that just sort of make both groups unhappy. I don't know what does that seem like. Yeah, good question. I'll take it as a question, I could have taken it as just like an interesting thought and not it but I'll jump. You could I could imagine that you state a number not more than, and, and the group shall, you know there are some of those groups that share characteristics like they represent school administrators or they record represent community groups you could try to bucketize and give a maximum number for the whole task force you could bring it down from 20 and say there must be at least one who represents each of the buckets. But if I say anymore I'll get myself a piece of drafting homework so I'll stop there. I'm just thinking. You read my mind can dangerously close. I might have crossed the line. I'm my Simmons would you mind drafting some that might take into account what representative ready saying. Yes, I'll do that because I know that you all will just absolutely go after it. It'll give you time to respond to so there's very little pressure on me just edited to death. Yeah, just quickly, again working having worked in the schools and looking at the work of the Howard Center or NFI. You know their work worked. I mean the kids they work within my school and their behavior improved, and they were able to acquire the skills so again, you know I'm not saying those agencies but I think we need to be looking at what works, you know what has some track record of working. When it's implemented, I think Patty Tomesha said about restorative practices if it's done with fidelity. I remember she, she really emphasize that point. So, again, you know we I think we all want to do what's going to work for these kids because otherwise they'll be in jail. You know if they don't learn how to regulate their emotions or delay gratification or manager behavior they're headed for real trouble so you know hopefully we want the people on the passport that can advise us as what works to help these kids. There's. Okay. Representative Brady, it would be great if you could. I had a task. Pull that together do you want Jesse to try to set that up for you, and it might mean a little time out of committee. Yeah, she started an email chain and we'll get going on it but I wonder, do we need to involve Jim and all of them or should I get a few things worked out I'm worried there's a few. It's going to be a more than one step process and so I don't want to waste Jim's time, or not pull Jim and until we're all everybody else is. I generally find it really helpful to have him in the room. Okay, because he hasn't very often has an ability to just go boom. And he's definitely helped me in the at those times when just kind of going off like this he's an ability to sometimes pull it back together and put it into sentences. So, certainly in the new punishment instead of suspension could be you have to figure out how to make all the different changes of this bill work together instead of any expulsions or suspensions that will be right that on the board 100 times. Yeah, so great. That's only for legislators. There's also been a little punishment for Emily Simmons to when we asked her and then we just completely ignore it. Representative Austin. I just wanted to ask Jay. I think I might have misunderstood and I think I spoke to a representative chair web about this in terms of suspensions and expulsions when you send a child home, because they, they're not behaving they're being disruptive you have their parents come and get them. That call. If it's if you're doing it for disciplinary reasons and it's not part of the kids, the child's plan. Yeah, a suspension. It is, because you're, you're, it's a suspension, a cessation of educational services. So you're taking away that kids fate for us for a period of time they're free and appropriate public education access for a period of time. Okay, a lot of people try to get around that but I really think it's going to call a spade a spade. Thank you. Okay. Yes, please. I had a request and I really don't mean for the agency to double team this bill. I knew that you were asking me to come in to answer some specific questions so I didn't prepare testimony, but I did give the bill and other scrub and there's an aspect that I would request that you may be this you've thought about it and this is exactly what you need to require and I'm just unclear on page 12, which is section four, specifically on lines nine through 15. You have a direction for the Secretary of Education and the State Board of Education to directly incorporate the task forces recommendations for practice changes and for new data collection. Absolutely. So that the chain of authority is that the task force makes a decision about a recommendation or a new data collection and the agency and the state board are supposed to do that. Period. That's highly unusual that you invest task force with the authority to direct a state agency without that coming back to you. You can always see a report and find it very persuasive and then direct as it's fine, but as the agency's general counsel I just have to protest that really, that really big step on our authority is state agencies operating under the law. So right now we have shall incorporate. That's strong language. And on page online 14 I have a feeling that the districts might also object because we would then be required to require them to report new data that is not current practice and I'm not saying we would never change our current practice we just usually would take our direction from the general assembly. So they need to present it with. Okay homework. What would you say. I actually would recommend that you strike section four. Well you need section for a so it's section for B. That you would strike in its entirety. So it leaves it with. It says shall collect and distribute to the task force. But does it say anything about what you do with it. So next section for is where the agency is collecting and distributing information to the task force, I would recommend you keep that. Yeah, but then I would recommend you strike lines nine through 15. Is there a place where it gets reported back. Someone has to look at it. Emily would you mind repeating why you would recommend striking section be there. What that language does in the shall adopt and shall require and everything in between is just related describing those two actions. Gives the task force the authority to change the data that's required for the field to report. Change the rules of the state board of education, change the internal practices of the agency of education. So there is a report. There is a report. Page 10 lines 16 through 21 and it goes on to the next pages is where you describe the report back from the task force to you. Okay, so you don't know where that language came from. Can tell you I didn't ask for it. Okay. I wonder if it's appropriate I asked about this earlier and we talked about what Emily came in. Section six around the suspension of students suspension or expulsion. That's on page 13 Emily. I just recommended that the language be amended there to say that that would also apply to schools that are receiving public dollars in other words private schools that are receiving public dollars. Currently it only says public education. And so I know the committee wanted to want to talk to you a little bit about that. Okay, so we have two important statutes on discipline, and they don't treat approved independent schools the same. One of them that I don't know if you've discussed it or not is just about discipline generally and it's 1161 a. It describes a policy that every district and every approved independent school has to have and it describes the minimum elements of the policy. That I think in the most pertinent part requires some description of minimum due process that will be afforded to students before they are suspended. And that might even be as as you all talked about earlier just the student leaving school for for the rest of the day that would count. So the policy should articulate what due process the student is entitled to rather than, you know, the statute doesn't set the standard for due process the school does. So the approved independent schools are required to have a policy that complies with 1161 which has a lot of pertinent information and I would encourage you to review that. So 1162 is where the minimum amount of due process is stated. That's only for public schools. So that requires a public school to seek the approval of the school board for suspension and more than 10 days. And that's where you get the ability to suspend a student up to 90 days and then we start calling it an expulsion for 90 days or until the end of the year whichever is longer. And the behaviors for the behaviors that can cause a student to be suspended or expelled are outlined for public schools in 1162 and I know you've looked at that because your bills amending 1162 it's adding any section on to the end of that. If the question is whether you have authority issues recommending yeah I think you do. The distinction of students were publicly funded at approved independent schools. I think that's just totally a policy call, but I'll point out that every approved independent school has to have this overriding discipline policy. And the policy applies to all of its students not the publicly funded students only. Anything else let's say representative conlon. So Emily just just to clarify on that point. We have the authority to just say private schools without saying publicly funded. There are approved independent schools, as opposed to saying only those students who are publicly funded and an approved independent school. Yes. Okay, representative James. So I guess I'm not. I guess I'm not clear on whether we feel like we would need to hear. Quickly from independent schools on. I feel like we would. Absolutely. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Great. I've not given you a small task. And it will probably likely it would require missing a meeting. Giving your time given time. If it would help Aaron, I'd be happy to follow up on the private school or private schools. I support, I support it philosophically, but I also don't want it to derail the bill. But I'll, I'll reach out to the head of the organization. I think we know what the answer will be. That'd be awesome. Thank you. Yeah. And would you like someone else to do you think represent a common you could also just help represent a Brady along the way on this one. Just to be a backup. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. I wasn't sure as long as we have Emily here, whether. She could provide any feedback on my sort of overarching. The overarching concern I raised earlier, which is that. Nationally, it seems as though LGBTQ students also suffer. It seems as though we have a lot of information. We have a lot of information. We have a lot of information about gender discipline and suspensions. And that doesn't seem to be addressed in this bill and whether we should and ought to. And how we could do that in a succinct way. We talked about that a little bit earlier, Emily. I don't know if you were watching our conversation earlier, but. It seems as though national stats bear that out. I don't know what we need. I remember it went to update her on what, when the Geller had said about that too. Unless you already know. But her concerns were what are the challenges were in it. Yeah. So if I'm summarizing correctly, what Dr. Geller said was that we are under act one or when we collect information on hazing and bullying incidents, for example. We have a lot of information on what happened during that incident. So if somebody was called a slur or hazed or bullied for being gender nonconforming. We have that information as part of the. What happened. Whereas if a student who's, I think I'm understanding this correctly. Whereas if a student who is, you know, LGBTQ, for example, or gender nonconforming is suspended or has a gender nonconforming problem, they don't necessarily have that information about them. And is it like a, you know, is a privacy problem. Yes. It seems so important to get out to me, but I don't, I don't know how we do that. I'm not aware of any data collection at the agency where other than the school climate survey potentially. Where it is collected as a, to identify themselves as LGBTQ plus or none of the above. Right. I don't, I question whether we want to do that. Yeah. I question whether we want the, the state to have that database. Yes. But that's not your question. So I want to respect your question. Well, but I want to respect your response. So that, I mean, yeah. So anyway. So I do know, and it sounds like this is also what Dr. Geller told you that when we are working the data collection about HHB, he's saying harassment and bullying, that the information about the target is not the collection, that the behavior is defined as harassment as opposed to bullying. That the data collection is not the target. That the data collection is motivated by the protected class status of the target. And the data collection is totally focused on the harassment, not the harassing. We have processes that are focused on the target and making them whole in the HHB. Policy and procedures, but the data collection is its own animal. And the data collection, so we abide by the feds rules for what they want. And we, as a general rule, do not collect more information at the agency than we need, either because we're required to buy you by the federal government or buy one of our programs. And I think that's good ethical data practice when these are expert on this, but I think. Thought experiment. I think it's scary when flip around in 50 years, the people who work in government now, change their identity according to how you want to imagine the thought experiment and ask yourself, do you want those people having all this data about our students that we don't know that we need? Yeah. Yeah. Maybe we need it, but I just always ask myself that question. To make you feel better not to leave you out there hanging when the agency proposed to take some action to quickly work with us, take holder group and come back to you next year with new language for the expulsion and suspension statute. We really didn't feel we needed to see any more data to know it was time to make those changes. Didn't need to see any more data to be convinced that we should reduce the behaviors for which a student can face the exclusionary discipline. That's been the theme for us that we want to have, we want the public to have the data they feel they need for accountability and for advocacy and all, all of that good work. But when it comes to changing the statutes and really bringing down the level at which we can suspend a student or raising the bar for when we can suspend a student, we didn't need any more data to be convinced that it was, it was time to do something. I think that's a great idea. Would it, would it just put this on the radar to add? I mean, I know findings. You know, just to add a finding. I think that's what findings are for, right? I think that's a great idea. I love findings. I know, I know not many people like findings, but anyway. All right. Thanks. There might be something in the, in the. Exclusionary edition of the discipline support. That you could find. Okay.


Last week, I climbed aboard a Pike County school bus to see how many drivers were passing stopped buses loading and unloading children, and what I saw was shocking to both me and law enforcement officials. I was very surprised, actually shocked, it's just disturbing that people are in such a hurry that they can't stop for a school bus. There's no excuse for that, none whatsoever. This week, the Pike County Sheriff's Office organized a special detail aimed at targeting drivers who passed stopped buses. We've got myself and two support vehicles and three chase vehicles. Children of all ages are unloaded off these buses and they need to know that they're safe. On Wednesday, I climbed on the same bus I rode last week, but this time Chief Deputy Lynn Cross rode two. My purpose on the bus is to ensure the safety of the children on the bus while this detail is going on. I want to make sure that they are not in any kind of danger and that they are off the bus in a proper and safe manner. As the bus traveled and made its stops, two unmarked police cruisers watched from a distance and amazingly not one vehicle passed the bus as children were unloading. It is a victory. Today we didn't issue any citations. We had no infractions involving the school bus or passenger cars. So the publicity that the media is doing for it is causing a decrease in the infractions of the law. But we are going to continue this just because you know how things are, sometimes it gets real important and it kind of dies down. So we want to stay with the story and stay with the enforcement action. Chief Deputy Cross says it truly takes a team to make enforcement efforts like this one successful. Superintendent Atkins and Pike County Board along with members of Pike Central High School are the bus drivers. Everyone cooperated and invited us and wanted us and encouraged us and we want to thank them. But we are going to continue this and we will do this hopefully at least once a week and maybe ride other buses as well. Preston Rife who drives the bus that we rode says since our story first aired last week, he has seen a significant decrease in the amount of drivers passing his bus when it has stopped. And we hope that trend continues.


Biomaterials include bioceramics, biometals, biopolymers, and biocomposites. They play important roles in the replacement and regeneration of human tissues. However, dense bioceramics and dense biometals pose the problem of stress shielding due to their high young's modulus compared to those of bones. Porous biomaterials exhibit the potential of bone ingroth, which depends on porous parameters such as pore size, pore interconnectivity, and porosity. Unfortunately, a highly porous biomaterial results in pore mechanical properties. Gradient porous biomaterials have many advantages over gradient dense biomaterials and uniform or homogeneous porous biomaterials. Internal pore surfaces of gradient porous biomaterials can be modified with organic inorganic or biological coatings and the internal porous themselves can be filled with biocompatible and biodegradable materials or living cells. Gradient porous biomaterials are generally more difficult to fabricate than uniform or homogeneous porous biomaterials. With the development of cost-effective processing techniques, gradient porous biomaterial. This article was authored by Shigeng Miao and Dan Sun. We are article.tv. Links in the description below.


The floor may not be in your old box. Bored with what I see every day, I wanted to try out something new. I watch a lot of shows these days, more than I used to before. But one show in particular that's one of my most favorites that I've been watching since day one would be none other than Family Die. That show has always been a part of my daily life ever since I was five. Then I got a message from a friend telling me they're gonna be having a sleep over in a week. Not only will there be extra popcorn and my friend is making noodles, but that's the main focus of the night will be a Family Die marathon. I went over to the sleepover, and after setting up everything we went into the kitchen to make all of the food before we started the Family Die marathon. I used this special kind of butter that I imported from Germany that made the popcorn taste way better, and it spread on better than typical store butter. Then we all went upstairs into Rod's room and we started watching all of the episodes. We watched about like 20 episodes all night. Eventually we saw an ad come up on Netflix saying there is a secret episode and that you have to find it in order to see it. So we tried looking all over here and no luck. Eventually we decided to look it up on YouTube to see if that would help. That didn't help either. Not even people on Reddit even knew there was a secret episode of the series. So we decided to go, well even deeper to find this since we did at least see on some 2000s blog about the existence of it. Pretty soon we went into the dark web using my VPN and started to look further. Eventually we stumbled across a very basic HTML website that clearly looks like it was from the 90s that has Family Die memorabilia, and when we were looking, we stumbled across a video titled, and it said it was made between 2011 and 2012. We all instantly knew this was the secret episode they were referring to. So we downloaded it and I ran my antivirus software in case it might do something to my life. After it had been downloaded, we turned off all the lights so we can see this better. I've seen most of the Family Die episodes and I have never even knew about this particular one. Not even any of the creators of the time or even Seth MacFarlane said anything about it. The episode didn't have the intro.  Then a voice in an old cell phone filter started saying something. It didn't really sound audible enough, but I think it was possibly saying, and this is what it's gonna be. And the screen faded to white for a second. Then the music stopped and it went to black. Then it displayed a white text in the black background saying, as if this was some kind of test or something. We were all a little confused but we moved in closer. Then it cuts to the outside of the house with the same jazz music playing. It then cuts to Peter packing a suitcase and then it cuts to everyone packing something of some sort as if they were going on a vacation somewhere. Everyone was slightly off I will say. Peter was sad and slightly remorseful as if something awful had happened. Lois looked pissed, Meg looked weirdly happy and her room was more neat and clean. Stewie was scared and was packing his inventions and thinks they wouldn't fit in a suitcase. And Chris looked depressed as much as his dad was and it almost seemed like he had a hatred of his father based on his body language. After they were done packaging they all went downstairs and gathered up at the door. Then Peter looks at his family all lined up and says, Oh because of a friend, I'm gonna miss you.  Then it cuts back to the family and Peter looks even more depressed and remorseful. Then Brian walks into the room and asks everyone what's going on and why they're packaging. He seems strangely happy and joyful almost to the point of being out of character. Then Lois looks at him and says, It had to be this way. Then Stewie sticks a sticky note onto his forehead which he takes off and reads, You want to prove your moral. Then he tries getting his one suitcase with his stuff very quickly and Stewie stops him and says to him sadly and remorsefully. It's over. Then cuts him. Then the family all rush out the door and gets in the car and drives away to the airport. Leaving poor Brian alone and not explaining where they are going at all. We were almost thinking this may have been a fan animation or a meme considering the fact that something like this would never happen in the show. But we continued watching. Then it showed the house again and then it shows that Brian went upstairs and started going from room to room looking at everyone's bedrooms with choir music playing in the background. Then he stands on the ledge of the stairs and looks at his paws and suddenly we see that he has realistic looking human hands and he grasps them. Then we hear a weird squeal going off in the background. Then the same hand in the shower from before again is time scratching against the glass. And a text showed on the screen very quickly. We went back and paused at that part and the text said, It's over. Then it cuts back to Brian who came back from the store with more groceries for his stay at home. Pretty soon it focuses on the shop where he puts the milk in the fridge. Then he stops and looks up he sees a flea on the ceiling. Then it falls and he tries to dodge out of the way but then the flea falls on top of his head. Then he tries scratching like a dog and no matter how hard he tried the flea never came off. Eventually he just gave up and tried to live with it. As he was eating his dinner he made a parfait using rare berries. But when we looked at the berries closely they looked strangely weird and it wasn't the animation. They looked like they didn't even belong in the shot. We zoomed in on it and they looked rather realistic. We then realized he didn't get the berries from the store but from the backyard. Right after the sequence of him eating we then went back to walking around the house. Then shortly afterwards he started to feel sick. We then realized that the idea supposedly was that he was eating poisonous berries and he was driven insane at this point due to his family going on vacation without him. Then violin music started playing and it sounded very cell phone quality and it also sounded distorted and out of pitch as he started to stumble around feeling sick. Then it cuts to him in the middle of the piano room and he looks down and then suddenly it cuts to Peter looking horrified at something. Then opening his mouth and making the same screeching noise from before. Then it cuts to Brian and now his face is starting to deform. Then it shows Lois and she also looks dreaded about something as well. Pretty soon it eventually shows that Brian's eyes are now just scribbles. Almost being completely done, his mouth now being way wider than usual, his fur was all messed up looking and his nose now being very pointy. He then stood at the stairs and started making a screeching noise. He looked scared at first, but then as it flashed all of the horrified faces of everyone else on the vacation, he started to become happier and happier. Then he screeched even more. Then he went into the middle of the room where the rug is and lies down on the floor. He then looked up joyfully at the ceiling and we saw the sun and the faces of everyone he ever knew flash in the clouds and the sun looking down on him smiling. Then we hear reversed screaming. Then we hear a crowd screaming and then Brian makes the screeching noise again. His mouth kept getting bigger and bigger as he lays there on the rug continuing to make the noise over and over at the ceiling.  Then as he lays there in the sleeping bag, we see him shaking from the poison. As he dies, he sheds a couple tears as it zooms in on him hyperventilating. While it zooms in him it flashes clips of all of the members of the family and all of their friends being tortured and hurt in many different ways in a dark room with a dark figure within them, playing loud music so they become deaf, breaking their teeth, and even inappropriately assaulting them. It didn't show it, but it was implied and it showed the figure's devious face smiling while we hear the family and even all of Pierre's friends scream in agony all in the same room as one another. Then it shows the hand on the window banging and looking like they're dying. While it's cutting back and forth between all of these footages at once, as the scenes flash more, Brian starts to screech while dying in the sleeping bag in that same screech again, and he starts to do it even louder and louder and harder too. Pretty soon the family and Pierre's friends all pass out from the injuries, the hand on the window bangs one more time before slipping off, and Brian screeches so much, and then eventually after a couple seconds he screeches for the very last time almost screaming like a girl now, and piercingly loud before he dies with his mouth open and his corpse looking happy. It then shows the house at sunset showing that Brian has finally passed away. Then it plays sad music as it shows a black text that says, goodbye family and friends. Then it shows the credits with the sad music playing. That's where the video ended. After it ended, we were also shocked and one of my friends started crying because of how depressing that truly was. I took screenshots from the video so I can tell everyone about this for later.   The next day after that happened, I was so shocked, and after going back to school, I suddenly got a Twitter message from Seth McFarlane, even though I'm not following him and he said, I am so sorry that you had to see that episode. You must promise me on behalf of my fans not to tell everyone about this. Even though he apologized, I still don't forgive him because I still have the aforementioned nightmares.