Okay, so the next speaker is Robert Trakti and he will talk about how to improve documentation. Hello everyone. Thanks for your interest in this topic. I apologize for the technical difficulties. It wouldn't be a conference without any of those. Anyway, the topic of this presentation is reaching the gap between legacy documentation and modular content. What I mean by that is basically two aspects of documentation that technical writers at Red Hat are trying to solve. That is the user experience with documentation. At the same time, the amount of work, the maintenance work that documentation writers have to do. So first I would like to outline what I'm going to talk about in this presentation. I will try to provide an introduction about why we even do that. Why do we think that it's time to rethink the way we do documentation. I also talked about the terminology, what's in the title of the presentation, what I understand when I say legacy documentation and what I mean by modular content. I will then outline what we think is the problem with this so-called legacy documentation. I will try to explain why I even think that there is actually too much of the documentation. And I will explain why it is hard to find and how we hope to fix that. And in the main part of the presentation, I will try to introduce what we think could be a solution to one of those problems and to all of those problems that I mentioned. First of all, we will try to cut down on the amount of content that we actually maintain and that the documentation entails. By documenting only what the users really need to have documented. We will also talk about how to facilitate single sourcing of the documentation so that we can bring upstream and downstream closer together. And in the main part, what is modular documentation? And how do you hope to achieve all of the above by switching to a modular form of documentation? Last but not least, I would like to at the end say some time to invite your questions and to have a discussion about what your experience with documentation is and what your project or your organization does in this area and if you are facing similar problems and so on. So, let's get started shall we? About the introduction. First of all, the question is why? Why do we think that it is high time that we rethought the way we do documentation? I like to point out two main aspects of that. I like to illustrate that on two problems or two areas in which the software landscape is changing and that is software packaging and software delivery. We've been for a long time used to these big monolithic, mostly distributions where there would be hundreds or even thousands of packages. They would be sitting in repositories or you would get a CD or a DVD. You would install the thing and then you would have to sort through it and find the stuff that really matters for you. If you were concerned about performance or security then you would have to cut down on that. You would get rid of all the stuff that you don't really need. That is changing. Not that all applications would be containerized now but that is definitely a big part of how applications are being deployed and how they are being packaged. There are other ways to package applications that are not the same as they used to be and the documentation needs to reflect that. You need to try to make the documentation work with those new scenarios as well. With regard to software delivery, again we've been used to more or less regular release cycles. It could be that the distribution or piece of software or project would have a release every 6 months, every 12 months or even if the cadence of the release would not be in any way regular it would still follow the sort of a traditional versioning scheme. 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 then there would be 2.0 and the documentation tended to follow that. There would be a release of documentation for the 2.0 version and then there would be another release of documentation. But then there came rolling updates and nowadays there are web applications that are being deployed multiple times a day. And the sort of documentation that is tied to these release cycles is not exactly covering that. It doesn't really cut it for these scenarios. It should be the way the documentation is released and presented a lot more fluid, flexible and multi terminology. The legacy documentation, I mean the sort of documentation that I touched upon with those releases the documentation that is tied to individual releases. It's those big guides or books and they tend to be comprehensive and complete. While there's nothing wrong with that, it tends to also create a whole lot of amount of documentation and they're based on features. They describe every individual feature that the project or software has that can be used. And as I said, it's important to emphasize that there's nothing inherently wrong with that sort of approach and in an ideal world you would have that as well as at the time of documentation. But in a world where you have to choose where we spend our resources it might be time to look for something else. Where modular documentation comes into picture and that documentation differs from the sort of guide-like documentation and that is based on individual user stories. So it doesn't strive for comprehensiveness. It doesn't even try to be complete. Instead it tries to be highly targeted. It goes after specific goals and it's in concise independent standalone self-sufficient units of content that can be grouped and regrouped in order to achieve documentation that describes specific purposes that goes after specific goals. Now, I would like to illustrate the difference between feature-based documentation and documentation that is based on user stories and a simple example. On the left here there is a silly example of a feature-based documentation. It tries to describe all the features. It tries to be comprehensive. I'm going to give you a second to read through that. Now, are we good? Let's compare that with the example on the right. This one is based on a specific user story and it tries to describe how to take the user from A to B. It's about a specific goal. It's about accomplishing a concrete task. Again, take a second to read through that. Now, when you're looking at those two sides, those two examples, as I said before, it's important to recognize that there is nothing wrong with the one on the left. Its feature-based documentation is the sort of reference kind of guide and it has its users. However, for many users, unless they're really well-versed in this sort of project or features or distribution, for those users to find their way around this sort of documentation, they need to be experienced. They need to have a lot of time on their hands and it doesn't make it very easy for them to use this documentation to accomplish specific tasks. So as I said, in an ideal world, we would have both. We would have the one on the right that would guide the users when they need to solve a specific problem and when they need it to be done yesterday. Then, of course, we would also have the one on the left that would be there to describe the stuff as it happens, how the system functions, what the background is, how the features are laid out. So as I will talk about it in the later part of the presentation, we try to facilitate a scenario where the one on the right takes the user from A to B, but at the same time, the sort of modular documentation that we create would allow the user to experience the same sort of experience that they have with the example on the left. And by the way, as I included down there, when I talk about user stories, I tend to take the sort of a standard agile-alike template, meaning I'm a sort of a user, I want to accomplish something so that I have some sort of an outcome. Are there any questions at this point before I go any further? Okay, cool. Now, let me try to describe what the problems are, the main aspects of the problems with the legacy documentation. The sort of documentation that is based on features and that is compiled in those big large books or guides. Now, in that first bullet, there's a sort of a cliché that nobody likes to write docs. Well, it's not really true that nobody likes to write docs. The problem is when there's too much of that. When the content accumulates over time, where you have multiple versions and then you have to maintain documentation for that version and another version, and over time there's just too much of it. It becomes very difficult to maintain and nobody's really excited about maintaining stuff that has been valid three or four years ago and it's still valid for certain users who still have that deployed somewhere. But when there's a new contributor, they usually want to work on something new that they want to describe stuff that they know about. They want to describe how to perform a specific task. So, there comes the cliché. Nobody likes to write docs because it has become tedious to maintain those guides. And it also invites a lot of duplication because there are different sets of docs for different versions and the content tends to be used, reused, but not really nicely. And if it's updated in the new one, it tends to be overlooked in the old one. Anyway, it leads to documentation that tends to become obsolete. That's a problem. Secondly, the documentation is hard to find and by that I don't mean that it would be hard to Google for documentation and you wouldn't find, for example, in Fedora we have an administration guide. We have an installation guide, a security guide, a networking guide, but when there is a user who wants to configure SSH to be able to securely connect to a remote server, what do they use? Well, they probably need to find something in the installation guide, as well as in the security guides about security, after all. It's also about networking, so they will have to find something in the networking guide and the system administration guide. Well, there's probably going to be a little bit of that as well. In reality, they would need to sort of cherry-pick pieces out of all of those guides. And while it's possible, it's certainly not exactly user-friendly and it takes to take a lot of time and the user needs to be familiar with inside all of those guides. Well, so what do they do? Well, they Google it, they end up going to somewhere as a stag overflow or something like that. And while there's nothing wrong with finding your answer at stag overflow, it tends to indicate that there's actually some deficiency with your documentation because the user, instead of being able to find the documentation that you have produced, it tends to go somewhere else. Lastly, documentation is very hard to navigate because those guides tend to be very long and while it's useful for, you know, control F searching, it's definitely not useful for navigation. There's no hierarchy usually and the experience is very hard to customize because when you take those guides and you want to save them, for example, for offline use, you can use PDF or a huge pile of HTML that you have to browse. You cannot really find and take only the stuff that you want. So, well, of course, it leads to people saying this which may or may not be true but we're not exactly happy about that. Any questions? About how we would like to go about solving these problems? We're not going to go into the general size but we tend to think from experimentation and from conversation with support people and with communities that it could be a way to go forward. So, first of all, we would really like to concentrate on the stuff that the users really need and in order to do that, in order to be able to cut down on the amount of content to ease the maintenance burden, users' stories that are really valid for users. We need to work with the community, we need to work with the engineers, we need to work with support organizations and find the users' stories that the users really are interested in and that tend to solve the majority of the problems not the majority of problems but the most common problems for the majority of the users. And by that, we should be able to achieve a more efficient use of our resources. That doesn't mean that there still wouldn't be some sort of a maintenance burden but by trying to cut down on the amount of content and by communicating with the users about the users' stories that they're really interested in, we are able to slowly reduce the amount of maintenance work. Also, when we try to bring upstream closer together and even single source the documentation than upstream downstream users, we not only save time by avoiding duplication and not only duplication of content but of effort but we're also able to bring new contributors on board because it just becomes easier. Upstream may not be at all concerned about how the project or software is being productized by company or some other project but when they have the possibility to contribute to a single source repository it's a very good thing and it also helps to bring the developers on board. Now there's another cliche that developers don't like to write documentation and of course some of them they like coding better and they tend to think that documentation is definitely not across the board and when we make it easier for them to contribute to the documentation it becomes a whole new different story. And lastly about the module of authoring and presentation of the documentation. This is basically the method that we're using to achieve all of the above. Now I will talk in the next series of slides about what the modules and assemblies that I have here listed the main components of our module of documentation what they are, how they're formed and so on. But first I want to touch upon the second bullet about the so-called curated assemblies and ad hoc docs. Now by that I mean and as I'm going to explain a little while later an assembly in our terminology would be a realization of a user story and there exists a user story that has been identified, has been validated we know what the user wants to achieve we write or adopt some modules and we assemble them, we collect them combine them in a so-called assembly and that becomes a description of the user story a realization in documentation of the user story. And of course such assemblies that are based on user stories that have been properly identified and validated they could be called curated because we've put a lot of effort in them and we've made sure that they make sense however we recognize that we're not ever going to be able to identify all of those user stories there's always going to be the guy who wants to install his Linux distribution on his internet-enabled refrigerator and use it to drive his home cinema or something like that it's unpredictable so we recognize that and we also want to allow these users to experience the sort of stuff, the sort of experience that they would have with the reference documentation with the one that's based on features so we try to come up with a really solid system of metadata that would be assigned to the individual parts of the modular documentation and we would allow the user to browse through the entire body of the documentation that we have based on this metadata it becomes highly hierarchical and it becomes possible to select the bits and pieces of the documentation that pertains to the particular problem that the user is trying to solve or the particular area that they're interested in so I choose here to call it ad hoc what this allows us to have the presentation of the doc's dynamic it's not static anymore, it's not one huge page or guide it becomes possible for a user to dynamically select the kind of stuff that they are interested in and go away with that and use that again, questions? cool let's describe those assemblies and modules these are really the main components of what we call modular documentation as I said before I touched upon shortly when we have a user's story and we want to document it we think about the realization of a user's story as an assembly it's a whole bunch of modules and other stuff that is being put together combined in a coherent way to form an assembly I have a short node here purposefully avoid the word topic even though many people say topic-based documentation but we found that it's too loaded the word is just too ambiguous everybody thinks that topic is somewhere something else so that's the reason why we're not using it anyway, so we have an assembly and we have to populate it so we have some sort of an introduction that should have a title what is going to be accomplished by following that piece of documentation might also have a list of prerequisites some sort of conditions or steps that need to be taken before the user goes and follows this piece of documentation the title should be very specific it should be oriented towards a specific task, action oriented such as it was before making an omelette something like that it would then be followed it could be a conceptual module it doesn't have to be there and as an example I've chosen here understanding the importance omelettes in French cuisine now you know that it's not really important or perhaps it's not necessary to understand this kind of stuff to be able to flip an omelette but there are many scenarios where it may be very useful for the user to know the background and by being able to include these conceptual modules into our assemblies we're also recognizing the importance of the sort of feature based documentation that we're supplanting, not really doing away with and if we would combine only the conceptual modules we would end up with something similar that we had before so we don't want to discard that we want to keep it then there would be an explanation of the concept of the background and there could be a list of links to additional resources then would come the real need of that piece of documentation one or more procedural modules they would have again action oriented titles they would describe steps that need to be taken to accomplish a task and as I said there could be one there could be a bunch of them it really depends on how granular is that particular assembly how wide was the user's story when we have started with it the steps in that modules should be very explicit they should be commands they should say edit, open, copy something like that and again each of those modules could have additional resources same as the assembly as a whole points to other pieces of documentation related modules, related assemblies related onion recipes stuff like that and you may notice that the structure of that template for the assembly is the same as the template for the module that is intentional those individual pieces of the documentation are all designed and written or adopted from existing documentation to be self standing it's necessary to have those modules in a way that they can be combined and recombined in different assemblies those individual partial steps may be used in very many different scenarios many different user stories so that is the reason why we're providing a sort of a rigid but at the same time flexible in what the content might be template for these components questions I'm sorry could you use the microphone please how to cope with a great number of assemblies that came out in the project history so if with legacy doc we have big manuals I guess with this approach we will end with having a great number of these documents so you're asking how to organize the assemblies that we're going to end up with and maintain and maintain them that's a very valid question I actually have that included in one of the latest slides about the discussion that's something that we have to apply a lot of planning for we try to come up with content strategy that would allow us to keep organizing this we have explored many different ways to keep track of what user stories are being put together what assemblies are being populated in order to describe these user stories so that we don't lose track let's say that we would have a whole bunch of assemblies for beginners but we would be lacking the more advanced stuff or we would have user stories that would be identified for a specific area and some other ones so what we have come up with is for different products or different projects that we're documenting mind maps that would allow us to keep a visual overview of what we have available what is missing and what still needs to be done and how it all relates together so that we don't have an overly limited one part of a project and then big gaps in another part thank you really short quick question you're doing this in dog book in the formats that you're using for structuring your documentation is that dog book that you're using or the question is whether you're using dog book or a different format so I'm a technical writer at Red Hat most the majority of our both upstream and downstream documentation is either in ASCIDOC or in dog book so we're sort of in the middle of a transition from dog book to ASCIDOC but we have these templates in all of the formats that we're using for in order to be accommodated all the different writers who want to work with them there was questions cool let me wrap this up we're going from legacy to modular now as I said before by legacy I mean the kind of stuff that is based on features that is included in big long guides and that tends to be complete comprehensiveness as I said before nothing really wrong with that but we want to sort of reposition the documentation into stuff that is being based on user stories that describes specific tasks that is action oriented and that is based on this modular approach as I said before the modular approach allows us to have the same sort of experience or not the same but a very similar one as with the feature based documentation when we make rich use of the metadata that we apply to the individual modules secondly this allows us by identifying the user stories that we really want to use that the users are really interested in to reduce the amount of content to ease the maintenance burden of the documentation writers and also to attract new contributors because the learning curve is not too steep for them when the documentation is in these modular pieces because it's very hard for a person who comes and is new either in an open source project or in an organization to start contributing to documentation when it's all about those big guides you know you get a system administration guide and you have to first read it so that you know what's in there you have to become familiar with that it's very daunting when you present people with the opportunity to actually document short user stories the kind of stuff that they're already familiar with they have figured something out now they want to share with others so they can document they can provide a procedure that would become a module they can provide a bunch of modules they can even populate an entire assembly slash user story so not only are we cutting down on the amount of content we're also making it easier for people to pick the pieces that they want to document and start right away and thirdly improve the experience for the end user by making it easier to navigate the documentation and by taking it from static documentation into dynamic presentation and that is being accomplished by heavy use of metadata which allows us to present the documentation in a highly hierarchical way starting from the top where it's not really granular through a hierarchical structure based on the dynamic presentation of the metadata-based documentation yes there are two questions there can you please before you get on to maybe a more technical side the thing that I've been trying this technique a little bit myself and the thing that bothers me slightly and maybe the next talk is going to go into a bit that's a bit more is how to keep things modular and still maintain a kind of consistent storytelling narrative that doesn't just sound a bit disjointed with steps that sound like they're written by different people or in different styles and just maintaining that a document still sounds like a cohesive whole I suppose right so the question is how we go about making the modular documentation still coherent still that so that the different pieces are not disjointed it's still sound like something that the user would like to read understand it correctly well so as I mentioned before when I talked about the so-called curated assemblies those are the ones that we focus on when we put together the individual user stories and in between the different parts of the assembly the different modules and the introduction and perhaps the conclusion where there are links to additional references we are not against including you know sort of stuff that I could call you know fluff stuff that you bridge you over from one module to another the kind of stuff that would make it easier to read now those would be the curated assemblies those would be the one that we spend time on at the same time as I said it's not possible always to be sure or to identify or to document all the user stories that the users would really need so it may be that there is a certain topic or an area that people are interested in which we haven't covered in this curated assembly that is easy and nicely read so then it would be with the understanding that the individual pieces are being compiled in an ad hoc dynamic manner and then of course there wouldn't be the nice experience that we offer with the curated assemblies but as I said we try to work very hard to identify and validate the user stories that we put effort into so that the experience would be nice for the user so we are definitely talking about documentation in times of processes and something like that what's your recommendation where should I maintain such kind of modular documentation is it alongside the source code just another piece of the source code in the same repository or something like that so the question is where to maintain this sort of modular documentation whether it would be in the same repo as the project code or somewhere else well this really depends on what sort of project or community it would be a part of we have no strict rules or guidelines about that now we are part of many different numbers of communities and we don't really want to impose on them some template or rigid structure that they would need to follow we try to accommodate the request of the community that said what we try to encourage all communities or projects that we are involved in is to use a specific structure of a repository we are using Git for those repositories of a repository that makes it very easy to combine and reuse the content we have this structure which we have available for anyone to use that can be included either as a separate repository if that's the preference of the project or that can be a part of a larger repository that includes also code or other artifacts so it's very flexible and it really depends on what is the common ground what is the understanding in a particle project it has so far worked very nicely for us in both ways both separate repository for documentation and repository that includes both code and docs just one thing it's not clear in the dynamic presentation when you create a user story this is composed by several parts but these parts are made only for that user story or are still part of small sub pieces because I was just wondering if I could create my own user story using these sub pieces like picking up smaller amounts that you use of information that you use to create your user stories and making it because if the user story that I'm looking for is not existing can I make it up or not well the question is whether you can come up with your own user story that is not part of what we have been documenting is that correct on the one hand we try to encourage documentation writers not to rely on themselves only when identifying the individual user stories because they as documentation writers might have very different ideas about what is necessary to describe as a part of documentation as opposed to what the users really need so we always try to encourage collaboration in on all the different levels and trying to involve as many people as possible in identifying those user stories that said if there is a user who has a specific use case or has a specific task that needs to be accomplished and so they identify user stories for themselves and then they want that user story to be documented we either accept that as a bug or an enhancement that needs to be done or we invite the user to be the one to start the documentation and document that user story does that answer the question Chair? It's a bit of a plug we're working on an open source Drupal distribution for doing modular content that allows you to pull topics or modules or however you want to call them from different repositories and then compile them into one single website that publishes your documentation so that you could combine documentation from different projects if there's anybody in the room who needs a system like that just come and see me Any other question? I do have a remark a question sort of I think that something that is hard with the modular approach is to be able to oversee all the modules and how they can be reused so if you have one user story I agree that it's much easier to change it somewhere but there is a new role which is assembling in assembly all those modules and having an idea of what should be specific what should be generic and I think that that's a role that really needs to have an overview of even more even wider overview than in the legacy documentation do you have something to say about that? So the question is how we track where the different pieces of the module documentation are being used basically? and also to have an idea of what needs to be done and what can be reused people start with their own stories so they do their own modules and then it's nice if some can be brought together because they are similar maybe they just need some little stuff to be different at the beginning and overseeing all that kind of process that seems to be quite hard to do and really need some very big overview of a lot of things I understand so two levels of an answer to that question first as I mentioned before we use mind mapping software to keep track of the different parts of the project or the aspects of what needs to be documented to keep track of what we have already documented and what needs to be still done but at the same time as I mentioned the metadata based hierarchical presentation of the documentation allows us to very easily filter for what for different pieces of documentation so for example if you are interested in security documentation it's very easy for us to filter all the pieces of documentation that we already have that touches upon security and you can go deeper, more granular the deeper you go the narrower the selection is going to be but it allows you to very easily see what sort of documentation already exists in what areas so that when somebody wants to document a user story they first go through the available body of documentation and they see whether some of the procedures for tasks have already been described and whether they can reuse them so that they wouldn't do it over again and as I said the hierarchical structure makes it quite convenient to browse through that documentation even though it starts out as a very large body of documentation you can easily get down to what you're really interested in Hi, you mentioned moving from dot book to ASCII doc did you consider also I like ASCII doc, I do like it but did you also consider markdown, is it too simple or just not as a fully feature so the question is whether we also consider markdown as a format for documentation and yes we do, some of the communities that we work with do use markdown for various reasons for example I have now been trying to figure out a way to work with markdown in combination with ASCII doc because the Go language has many different tools that allow the automatic generation of markdown reference documentation and we need to find ways to sort of make that work together with other parts of ASCII doc documentation so there's nothing really that we would have against markdown it's just that ASCII doc provides us with more options, it's more flexible, it's a little bit more complicated but it's still very easy to learn the markup of ASCII doc is quite simple to learn so it was just a conscious choice to go with ASCII doc because the tooling around ASCII doc such as ASCII binder and other pieces of software are very convenient and allow us to do a lot of things with it What sort of tooling do you use with ASCII doc? So for ASCII doc, for rendering we mostly use ASCII doc as I mentioned we also use ASCII binder in different projects to actually present the documentation on websites and then we have many different in-house tools that are out in the open on github and stuff and that solve different problems and provide different templates for individual pieces of documentation I can go into details if you're interested afterwards I would suggest we have just one more I think perhaps Excuse me Another question Do we have time? I haven't heard the last Okay, sorry Can you speak a little bit more about more media sort of video do you see that like I mean don't get me wrong I think that the majority of the users are like beginners or entry level so they like rather watch videos than documentation and even if you do your modular approach and you synthesize a very small they still tend to go and see a video so how do you counter I apologize I'm having a hard time to understand could you try to speak up please I thought that you hear so my question was how do you approach some sort of emotion other way of expressing documentation because these users despite your modular approach I think that they tend to go to look into videos instead of reading documentation so are you asking how we work with videos okay so I believe that's that's a whole larger question which we probably don't have much time for at this point but I really happy to discuss that with you we have in several projects we've encountered a problem and we have worked with videos within ASCIDOC with mixed success but I'd be happy to talk about that more actually my last slide was just a couple of points for suggestions for discussion which we have gone through I'm afraid we are out of time at this point so if there are any more questions please feel free to find me down here I'd be happy to discuss with you


Hi everybody, welcome. Welcome to the Spring Fever Garden Forums where we connect gardeners with the experts at North Dakota State University. My name is Tom Cobb. I'm an extension horticulturist at North Dakota State University in the Department of Plant Sciences. Tonight is the last of our four Spring Fever Garden Forums and our theme is small spaces and trees. So let's get started. Container gardening is something that any gardener of any age or experience can do. And so here to share with us some tips on how to be successful at container gardening is Kelsey Deckard. Kelsey's NDSU extension horticulture agent for Burley and Morton counties. She educates the public on caring for landscapes and gardens, along with providing local leadership for the NDSU master gardener program. She enjoys teaching youth about gardening and bridging the gap of farm to table. So Kelsey, welcome to the forums. So like Tom said, container gardening is something for all ages of all experience in gardening. In general, gardening is a great way to teach youth about responsibility and growing your own food. Urban settings don't necessarily allow for an in-ground garden and poor soil can cause very much frustration and headaches when trying to get something established. Physical disabilities in age can even impede our ability to bend over and be on our knees. Have you ever heard of somebody growing a lemon tree or lemon plant, let me say in North Dakota? I actually used to have a co-worker that did grow one inside his house in a container.  Next to maybe a sign or an old piece of equipment. And tonight I'm going to talk about all that you need to know for container garden. So let's get started. Containers can be of a traditional planter pots. You can utilize almost anything for container. This is going to be probably your most convenient type that you can find out there, just a plastic container. Many garden stores and big box stores will carry an array of types of them. Even last week was out at the Dollar Tree and was just amazed on the variety of containers you could find there. They got a lot of containers in their spring section. You can even construct your own container, but you do need to know that any container you use needs to have one thing in common, and that is going to be drainage holes. So if we look at this photo here, we definitely would want to make sure that there is holes at the bottom of it. And you can even upcycle everyday items for containers. The one thing that I would caution people if you are going to use something that maybe previously is an everyday item. It's just to be aware of any safety concerns the container may have such as like chemicals that were in there. And then again, if they are lacking any drainage holes to simply take a drill and put some holes in the container. So just an example of something that you know you may need to be aware of a container that would have chemicals. If you're utilizing something that maybe was like an actual chemical container or like a chemical totes for spraying fields. Those make great containers, but again you would want to make sure that you have thoroughly clean them out. And kind of like I mentioned in the beginning, it can be a great focal point in your landscape. I know there's some North Dakotans out there that we have a hard time just letting go of older vehicles. So I love the picture here in this photo. I don't know that it came from North Dakota, but I do know of some family and friends that have older vehicles that are similar to this one and what a way to dress up and maybe highlight a vehicle you had growing up. And then of course I always like to mention to people when I talk about container gardening that another type is simply raised beds. So raised bed gardening would be considered container gardening as well. The one thing that is great about container gardening is you can even do themes with it. This is something that I've found very useful when I am teaching youth. We've done in different programs themed gardens. So whether that's growing a pizza garden or a salsa garden, again highlighting some of those ingredients that you would put on a pizza or within salsa is a great way. Up in that left hand side of the photo there we have a succulent garden and it seems like succulents are just something that has been trending the last few years and it's always a good way for me to tell people that like my sister who really wants to have a green thumb but doesn't necessarily. Succulents is almost a full proof way of gardening because they can take a lot of abuse. In the bottom right hand corner. I like to highlight fairy gardens again with our youth that is something that can be really fun for them to do in a container.  So it's just another great way that you can utilize and do container gardening with. So let's go ahead and talk about the basics. So when you are selecting a container we definitely want to make sure that like I said earlier it has draining so like I said up here anything that can hold soil and has drainage holes is perfectly suitable. And again, if you don't have one that maybe it's really appealing but it doesn't always have that drainage in it just simply again drill some holes in it. So when you are selecting the container I always say maybe think of the purpose are we highlighting vegetables in it. Are we highlighting flowers, succulents herbs. Is it going to be decorative so just knowing what you're going to grow in it will help you in selecting maybe the depth and the width of that container so you can see in these two photos this is actually out at my in laws place and my mother in law has made me realize some old lick tubs for cattle and stuff that again she cleaned out thoroughly put some holes at the bottom and she is growing her vegetable garden. You can even see next to it there is a palette so again she's got that raised off of the ground put some soil in there and had fabric underneath it and has some of her leafy greens growing in it so you can be really imaginative when you are selecting a container. The question is, you know, soil, what should a person use. And we had Emily at the beginning of the spring fever webinars talk about, you know, selecting different media types and everything like that so again just kind of highlighting a couple of the points she shared is, you know, a soil based medium, meaning it has soil in it. There are some pros for it so it's going to be heavier. It is going to retain moisture and it already is going to contain nutrients. The cons of having that would be it could contain insects, weed seeds, or even carry over disease.  The cons is it can lack longevity, and it can be costly so again, depending on where you're looking and what type of container. This is something to kind of go back and forth on on which one's going to be better. In general, if you were going to be using a container that you maybe have on your porch that you're going to move around from year to year, or smaller containers, I would just go ahead and recommend, you know, going with a soilless medium and media, excuse me. And so, again, just to highlight what Emily talked about previously, those typically contain of like peat, vermiculite, bark, some of them can even have coconut halls in it, but over time you will lose kind of the drainage and aeration properties they contain to begin with. So that's just one thing to remember. I just added a picture here of one of my raised beds at home. And so with this one. I actually did just take basically some composted sheet manure and then some topsoil and blended that in together to put that in the one that I have here at home so it's not I'm not planning on moving it, it's going to stay there for long term. It's tiered. So I had to bring in a lot of soil to fill that. I believe we did two by 10. So, you know, the height is definitely there on that. But again, just wanted to show this as a way of, you know, there are reasons that you may, in some incidents, go with a soil type media for it. So as far as constructing a raised bed, I always get the questions, you know, about pressurized treated lumber. And that is one thing that now doesn't contain like the toxins and chemicals that it used to. So it is okay to go ahead and use treated lumber. The great thing about it is because it is treated it's not going to wear as bad as something as wood untreated. So you could look at that you could look at, you know, a variety of oak, redwood, cedar, you can even use like tin, plastic, lots of different things to construct that. I do say to go ahead and avoid the railroad tides though. Railroad ties can contain toxics that can leach into your garden. Location. So again, you need to ask yourself really what are you, what growing conditions are needed for the plants you are growing. Typically, you're going to want to find a spot that receives full sun, or more than six hours each day. And then also find a spot that the wind isn't going to cause too much damage, which I know can be a little tough here in North Dakota. I just want to kind of drive home the point of location is going to play the key factor in being successful with the container garden. And if you are, you know, protected from the wind like in this photo that's nice for this plant, the one thing though, that is a little bit iffy for this photo here is it is place that container next to the rock mulch and on hot and on concrete on top of it. So those hot days could really cause some heat scorch to the plant. So in this case of this photo I would probably bring that container up on the porch just to eliminate more that heat that's going to radiate off. So again, think about that too. Maybe you don't have any other options, but by concrete but just think of again what you're planting in there and what type of plant in the growing conditions it needs. As far as watering, watering for containers is usually going to be more frequent than an in-ground garden. The one thing I can say for raised beds, if that's the route you're going to go like the one I showed, I actually have another one at home that's like a 10 by 10 that I grow just pretty much straight vegetables in. You know, generally our gardens require one inch of water per week and I would say that fit and held true for both my beds last year. I didn't water them any extra. But again, if you have those containers and especially if you are going to use like a soilless media, they're probably going to need more frequent watering could even be up to daily. It's easy to tell. Of course, you can just simply feel how wet or dry the soil is. Excuse me by sticking like your index finger into the soil about an inch deep. So, and then one other thing about raised beds too, if they don't have a bottom which mine doesn't and I didn't line it, just treat it similar to an in-ground garden. As far as fertilizing, again, it's going to vary. If you're raised bed, you may not need to fertilize as often, but a container will need to be fertilized. That soil doesn't have the nutrient, a soilless media doesn't have the nutrients. So what I would suggest is to find like a water soluble fertilizer and start out with about 50% of the recommended amount. And then as your plants really start to grow and need those extra nutrients, just adjust as needed. So container fillers, this is another one that I get a lot of questions on. And large containers can get very heavy depending on how much growing media is needed. So fillers can be used to line that container and again, reduce the cost of how much you need to fill those up. So just some things that you could utilize would be like crushed aluminum cans, plastic milk jugs, even packing peanuts. That would be some ways that you could do it even if you looked at putting like shredded mulch towards the bottom would be great. And so I would tell you to go ahead and you can fill them up to a third of the pot up from the bottom so anywhere from one fourth to a third of the container. And then what you would want to do is put a layer of landscaping fabric over the top just so when you do add in your growing media that soil isn't going to get lost below. One thing that is great if you go the route of a raised bed garden is square foot gardening. And so square foot gardening is going to be a great option that maximizes limited space. So again, maybe you don't have a large backyard, maybe you have like an apartment setting that does have a balcony. So some advantages of square foot gardening is it is going to make harvesting easier. You can maximize the amount of vegetables in there to get, I guess, more vegetables within a smaller area. Watering is going to be easier. There's going to be less weeding, and then simply you can rotate the crops by square instead of location. So again, just a couple more to add on there why a person might do it. Maximize your space less labor intensive. The setup is really simple. This is something that I've done again with youth that I'm going to highlight here on the next slide. And then a big advantage to that I would tell people is there's no tilling involved. So you can see right here how easily you can set this up and just measure, you know, 12 inches across the bottom and take string and stretch it across and then just go horizontal and vertical on your container. That would be a really easy way. That photo on the right is from several years ago that I had an in-ground garden with some youth in Wing North Dakota. And I just wanted to show them the concept of it and stuff. So again, we didn't make it like permanent. It was more so when we went to plant that garden so they could see how many were in there. And going back and forth like I would have used more of a permanent so maybe take some wood and create a grid because of course like I said earlier North Dakota is quite windy. So towards the end of the season our string wasn't tight anymore. But this is a great way to that if you are utilizing the beds and container gardens, it's going to help you, you know, from having to bend over as far as an in-ground garden as well. So I'd like to show this picture because here is more of a permanent picture of square foot gardening. And it just really kind of shows you a good progression of the vegetables and you can see how each of those square foot are really to the maximized area and how you can go ahead and get the most out of each area. So again, you can see there's some radishes in there. Marigolds, I would guess over on this towards the right side of the photo there that those are onions growing. It's really nice. And then here's a chart that you can find online. Just a reference chart pertaining to if you wanted to use the route of square foot gardening. It may be in a raised bed. So according to the size, how many plants could be in each square foot. And so you can see our extra small plants, which include radish, carrots and onions. You get about 16 plants. And our smaller plants, you're going to have bush beans, beets and spinach. You get nine. Medium plants, lettuce, basil, marigold, corn, parsley, potato, strawberry turnip, four. Large plants like a tomato, eggplant, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, cucumber, cucumber, okra, pepper, you're only going to do one. And it does show extra large, but I will just say I've never seen a person be able to contain a watermelon, zucchini, pumpkin, any of those listed to two square feet. So just kind of shows you that. And one thing too, if you did want to do this, this is another thing working with youth, if you're trying to work with youth. One thing I discovered is paper towels are almost one square foot. And so you can create like a seed tape and have kids before they're ready to put them in the garden actually take seeds and glue them down on that paper towel. So that was an activity that I did as well with you just to show them how many, according to the plant size, how many seeds we could get in that square foot to grow. So just to kind of get wrapping up here with my presentation going through a couple tips. mulch. You know, again, it's recommended in in ground gardens, but it's very helpful in container gardens. I will say that picture that you seen of mine, the top of it that had the statue in it and stuff I actually utilize mulch at the top, again to just conserve moisture. And it did a really good job as a barrier for weeds I just use some shredded wood bark and there so think about incorporating this again in your containers. And then of course, think vertical, I would tell people to do the same with an in ground garden to but just getting those plants off the ground is going to lessen the number of problems, such as disease and damage from wildlife.  Getting them up off the ground as well as going to encourage that airflow and reduce that humidity, which does create a good environment to promote disease, and even harbor, harbor pests. So make sure that in your gardens as well that you're growing your recommended varieties whether you're doing seeds or transplant plants. You want to buy seeds from reliable sources. It's going to be best recommended to not use seed that's over your old and look for if you're going to go with transplants look for healthy ones so they shouldn't be pale they shouldn't be small in size. If you have any leftover seed that you do want to store just make sure that you're storing it in an airtight container in a cool dry place until next season. A refrigerator is going to work really well. And then of course to like I said in any garden so I would apply this in a container garden or raised bed. Let's make sure we are planting flowering plants throughout the growing season so just highlighting a couple that we see in spring that are good to attract pollinators such as a crocus wild combine and chives mid summer you can look for b-bomb black eyed Susan and cone flower, and then in the fall see them new England Aster and stiff golden rod. So again, it doesn't matter if it's a raised bed or container, maybe even if you have a container that you're doing a lot of vegetables in, maybe just adding a container that you can do some flowers and to attract those pollinators. And so with that, I will take any questions that there is this evening. Okay, thanks Kelsey. So if anybody has a question please type in the Q&A box. And we've got a little controversy right away here, like about is pressure treated lumber really safe, or does it have very toxic chemicals. And today's you shouldn't have to worry at all on it. It's just, it just has it took the arsenic out and it added more copper and so there's, there's no chemicals that are toxic to people. And so don't worry about it. It's great value. Hey, Kelsey, are you familiar with soil moist crystals as a media? I'm not. No, I'm not. Okay, we're going to pass maybe somebody in the audience is familiar. There's a question if it's okay for vegetables. How about, you know, what you talked about with your, your tall raised beds using fillers like aluminum cans and styrofoam peanuts and that stuff. Don't you worry about leaching with that? Leaching from the aluminum leaching and causing toxicity to the plants. No, like I said in there, if you use a barrier between those fillers and that soil, you shouldn't have any issues with leaching. I've never heard of anybody having issues with fillers within their gardens. So that would be you mentioned landscape fabric as the barrier. Yep. But that's not a that's not permanent. Yeah, yeah, like water can still go in there and come up. Yeah, I've never heard of anybody having issues unless you have Tom. I have not. I have not. And I do know of people who who views various fillers. Yeah. And how about this? Have you ever planted potatoes in a container? Yes. So similar to the photo that I use that I said was my mother-in-law's that was like lick tubs. Again, when I gardened with youth, kind of in that I went to wing and Wilton one year or a few summers in a row. I actually bought like the plastic similar to what she had plastic blue that totes that you can carry that have handles on them. And what I did is I cut the bottom of that out. And then again, because it went directly on a playground in their grass area. I put some landscape fabric at the bottom, filled it up implanted potatoes in there and no problem had great potatoes out of there. I heard there's a guy named Jaden Dekert who does a lot of no till potatoes. No dig. Yes. No dig potatoes. They're growing upward vertical potatoes. So maybe he's quite an esteemed speaker. You can Google him Jaden Dekert and learn about no dig potatoes. See if it works for you. How about have you ever thought about growing hostas in containers and would they survive the winter? I've never done hostas myself. I don't know of anybody who's done hostas in the container. So I don't, I don't have an answer on that one personally. Yeah, I would say you have to be very careful with perennial plants in general in containers, because the most sensitive portion of the plant to the cold are roots. So if they're not getting given protection, some mulching, for example, you could have a that perennial could actually end up being an annual about, you know, you were making fun of that drawing about growing zucchini in a two by two area. Have you ever thought about growing and we have to have zucchini. It's so critical for our nutrition in North Dakota. I like zucchini. I don't hate on it. There you go. I think there was something good about you, Kelsey. And now, how about if you're there about staking it or staking the pumpkins, you know, or watermelons growing vertical. Yeah, yeah. So again, I haven't personally, but I did this last summer visit a garden that a gal was growing her squash and she created an archway with like a cattle panel. And I thought it was just like running TSC and they're flexible she created an archway and then she showed me she bought some clips from online off of Amazon, I believe. And so yes, as it she basically had them trellis and so when you'd walk under her archway, she had squash hanging and she would just be able to pull it off. And seeing it in person, you can be successful with it. I have not myself done it but I mean, I think if you get to like a watermelon, I think zucchini would be okay watermelon. I don't think that that would probably be very feasible with just how heavy they get a pumpkin would be the same but like squash your smaller squash. I think you can easily do it there. Decorative pumpkin, like when I was checking, you see that. Okay, this person has got a family argument here, the husband says that you can use railroad ties if they're old and the chemicals have been leached out so she planted her strawberries in a bed with railroad ties. Do you think her husband was correct? You know, I'm not no expert on that I would not know if the chemicals have leached out it kind of gets like I get questions similar to that like with compost telling if compost is ready you know and using manure. So, I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I don't know that answer. There's, there's, there's a risk though, right fact that they're old railroad ties that's probably the creosote has leached out most likely. And as far as weed barriers, do you need to take that up each year? I don't quite get that question. I don't know that I mean, again, like if you're putting maybe they're referring to if you put mulch. I don't know. Yeah, maybe. I mean, like the mulch that I had, like I referenced in the slideshow on mine personally, I put mulch around basically that little statue of the cowboy on the bucking horse and did that as a decorative thing, but I didn't have mulch throughout the whole spot. I had wood chips. I, and you're planting I don't know why you would have to take them out like you could just move them next year and plant whatever you wanted into it. Okay, so you talked about seeds and paper towels. Yep. What kind of glue did the kids use for the seeds? I just use your non-toxic Elmer school glue. Is it okay to use old soilless media under new soilless media? I don't see why not. Yeah, it's not toxic. It's okay. Yeah. How about do you have a good resource for companion plants for raised beds and in particular vegetables? I don't have any particular one. I will tell you go do a Google search. You'll find lots of information, books that have been written on companion planting. And make sure you get your resource from a university if possible because then we know what science based in that a bunch of food. How about when using large containers in the yard, should they be placed directly on the ground or should they be put on pallets or some structure to lift it off the ground? I don't, there would be no reason to have to have them on anything. If you're worried, like I said about if it's a drainage thing, like I talked about the potatoes, you can cut the bottom out and I put landscape fabric underneath it just because it was going on grass, a grassy area. If it's going to be a permanent structure there, go ahead, set it on there. No reason to lift it off. This person, can you put vermiculite and perlite in with the soil mix before you fill your pods? Sure thing. How about this person's, a lot of interest in aluminum cans in the audience here. They say, well, one person wants to use rusty cans to kill insects in the garden. I have no idea about that. How about this person recommends you rinse the aluminum cans or the water jugs, rinse them out. Otherwise the raccoons are going to dig the plants out and she thinks they smell the liquid residue. They might. Let's sugar if you're using popcans or... They like their beer, huh? Yeah, that's right. Get some slugs in there. There you go. Does the container size limit the amount of produce that, for example, tomatoes are produced? Yeah, I mean, well, like off of one plant? Well, I think it's obvious that, you know, if you restrict a root development area, reduce the tomatoes that you can produce. This person likes zucchini jam. Another zucchini lover. Never heard of zucchini jam. A lot of people use soda, milk, ice cream containers. They seem to work. Do you have a recommendation of how deep the soil should be in a raised bed or a square foot garden? Again, depends on what you're growing. If you're doing like rooted vegetables, you know, know the size.  Are you doing regular carrots? You got to know the size of what you're growing. Maybe eight inches is a good minimum in general as far as a minimum goes. How about, have you ever used stainless steel raised beds at your mom? No, not stainless steel. No. Okay. Do you have any tips on how high you should feel a container with soil, like one inch to the rim, or do you have a recommendation for that?  You want to leave a little bit, but again, know that when you are planting it and you water, it obviously is going to drop down as well. So there's no real rhyme or reason to that, you know, as far as like you need to leave it at one inch, you know, I'd fill your container and then let it settle. And if you need to add some, you add some. Right. How about do roots of plants go through the fabric barrier? I have not seen any of mine go through. Okay. Is TikTok a good place to learn about growing carrots in containers? I don't know that you want my opinion on TikTok. I don't utilize TikTok. We're at the end of the questions you could tell. We're at the end. Let's use extension. That's a good, that's a good way to end it. Call your local agent. Also, one last comment on zucchini jam. It's made with any flavor, jello. It's very high in vitamin C. There you go. Okay, on that note, Chelsea, thank you for your wonderful presentation.


Gunmen have attacked and raised divisional police headquarters in Umuuma Community, or its local government area of Umu State. The attack comes less than 24 hours after an attack on the country home of Professor George Obiazor and the divisional police headquarters in Umuuma Community. The hoodlums who came in large numbers attacked the station at about three o'clock on Sunday with various calibers of improvised explosive device while shooting periodically. The Umu State Public Relations Officer Mike Abatem who confirmed this note that the command's tactical team and operatives of the DSS on duty swiftly repelled the attack. According to Abatem, the engaged hoodlums in a fierce gun duel and in the process four of the bandits were neutralized on the spot while others camped into the bushes with a number of them sustaining various degrees of bullet wounds. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


Hey guys, my name is Wilson.  Talent is one of the most difficult things for us as food entrepreneurs have to deal with it's something that is super super annoying Which is the reason why I'm sharing with you the top five reasons why they're leaving so then that way once you are aware of them You can actually make the change and now you can start retaining your staff a lot more So now that we understand the importance of it We're gonna dive right in the number one reason why someone leaves is because of the lack of respect So many times as owners like even for myself. I'm sometimes guilty of it It is because of the fact that I am a owner I treat other people as my Minutes as my staff and in turn we tend to forget that they too are humans So then we sometimes don't give them the respect that they demand People work not just for money. They also work for respect. They also work for fulfillment So at the end of the day if you don't respect them if you don't care for them They're gonna leave for sure because we as humans we want that gratification We want to be appreciated and at the end of the day as owners We often forget about that which is a reason why it's super important for you to actually See the good in your staff Compliment them and actually truly care about these compliments that you're providing them because at the end of the day They're the ones that are serving your customers And if they have a good experience with you, they can translate this good experience to your customers as well So at the end of the day make sure you respect your staff and actually care for them Sometimes maybe give them a compliment a genuine compliment that you see in them Not just a compliment saying that hey, you know what? I love your smile But truly truly see what is it about them that is so special and give them an authentic True compliment. They're gonna feel it and they're gonna feel Appreciated and they will reciprocate and treat your customers like their own the second reason why some of your staff might be leaving you is because of Hiring bad apples and what I mean by that is you may already have a very very good Interviewing process that aligns with the vision that make sure that they might be answering all the right questions They might seem like super bubbly and super happy and yet when they are working they become a bad apple They spread rumors. They have poor work ethic. They're lazy They're leaving their slack behind for others to carry out for them And when that happens it bleeds through to all the good people that you have your good people and your good staff would feel a Little bit off. They feel like that. They have to pick up this person's slack They feel that they are not performing as much as they are and in turn, there's gonna be conflict You don't want conflict when there's conflict that happens when the values don't align You're basically just making the working environment Terrible and not as enjoyable for your staff and sometimes a lot of times actually These dramas are the reason why some of your good apples will quit because they don't want to be poisoned They don't want to be working in this stressful and unhealthy environment So what that means is that you as an owner need to make sure you understand the dynamics of how your Staff is working. You need to understand and always always fire the bad apples quick and fast because It's gonna cost you a lot more if you don't fire them as an example with 720 sweets There was actually a staff that we picked on and super negative always always spreading negativity and talking like rumors and spreading different things around the group and in turn just because That was happening. It really changed the morale of the whole team I didn't really know what was going on because I was just like wow all of a sudden we hired this person We thought that they were amazing But then yet now this person is quitting that person is quitting and in turn I realized that the reason why they were quitting was because of a rumor that was spread that you know what? We were trying to cheap out that we were not taking care of our staff And that was just a really horrible experience because of this bad apple that I let slip through the crack So unfortunately these things do happen and it's gonna be very costly If you don't catch them at the beginning the third reason why someone would want to quit your Establishment is because of the lack of empowerment and what I mean by empowerment is that we don't support them We don't support them with the right equipment right tools for them to do their job at the end of the day It is a very stressful environment already as is in a food and beverage environment So if you do not provide Equipment that would make their job easier make their life easier Then they're gonna feel even more stress and that stress really just comes from the fact that they feel that their owners Don't care that you don't care and if you don't care why should they care? That's the reason why it's super important for us to Invest in equipment to make sure that our job as owners is to empower Our front-end staff to do their job So anything that we can do to make their life easier You should definitely do that and the number one thing that we can do is to make sure that all the equipment that we have is up to standard and is up to the The way that it should be to make their life easier. So for example with 720 sweets We were actually limiting how much our Staff is able to produce and yield because of our machine the machine that we were using is a gravity pump machine And what that means is that we're using gravity To pull the liquid out from the machine which turns into a soft-served ice cream and because of that reason When there isn't enough liquid in the machine the product doesn't come out as fast and in turn It's a very frustrating process when 20 people are waiting in the queue and The ice cream doesn't come out fast enough Which is the reason why we ended up upgrading our machine to a pump machine and what that means is it doesn't matter How much liquid is in the machine it still comes out to be the same? Consistency because now we use a pump instead of using gravity. Yes The machine is a little bit more expensive But nonetheless our staff is happy because they feel like that they're doing the job They feel like that they don't feel bad About getting our customers to wait because now they can actually serve that turnover at the end of the day It's our job as owners to empower our staff for them to do their job And the number one thing that we need to empower them with is a proper equipment for them to do their job Whether it be POS system, whether it be the kitchen area Anything of that sort we need to empower them The fourth reason why someone would not stay with your company is because of the lack of growth and opportunity And what I mean by that is a lot of people don't just work for the sake of money Although many people do they work beyond that they work for a sense of learning a sense of fulfillment and a sense of Purpose so if you are just competing on price if you're only providing a salary for someone Then they can go to any other restaurants out there However, if you can actually provide Growth and learning opportunity training to your staff that itself Combines with the money gives your staff a sense of belonging a sense of the fact that who they're actually learning They're getting paid and they're learning they're gaining different skillset and that itself would create a lot more loyalty To your brand versus other restaurants who don't provide this training who thinks that they should save on the training Who thinks that training is just an added expense rather? I see training as a way to invest in the future of our team and in turn When your team learns when your team grows they can bring much more value for you as well They can actually now know the proper way to treat their customer Give you better way for operations and logistics and these are all things that pays you back in dividends without you Seeing that direct ROI Nonetheless, it's up to us as owners and leaders to empower and to train and to help our staff Develop and grow and that itself Is the number one reason why someone would want to stay with your company? For example One of the person that we actually hired for five years close to five years Swirling ice cream is still saying with us because of the fact that we push them to different conferences From marketing conference to serving at right conference and in turn They were actually able to learn a lot of different skillset and for them working here It goes beyond swirling and ice cream because they're able to bring more to the world They're able to feel that they themselves are Significant and in turn it validates them not just as being a server there but as an important individual in our team that itself comes from our investment in Conferences and trainings in this individual So if you have an opportunity to train your staff push them out to different conferences and then view this expense as A way of retaining your staff and not just as a conference Expense the fifth reason why someone would quit your organization is because of poor scheduling and poor pay This is a mistake that I see so many of my peers making because they're trying to penny pinch Their staff they're trying to save that quarter They're gonna they're trying to save that 50 cents and in turn their staff sees that And they quit because they feel like that their boss is cheap frugal and not understanding At the end of the day we as owners We need to understand that our staff have bills to pay as well that they have a life out there as well And if we always cut their schedule and if we always just penny pinch them Then at the end of the day they are gonna find a job that is much more fulfilling that actually take cares of their basic needs We need to understand for someone to perform well They need to have the security in their job They need to have security in their standard of living and if we cannot even provide that then it is very difficult For us to ask our staff to go above and beyond to take care of our business to actually care for our customers You need to make sure that you start caring for your staff You need to make sure that you give them the proper schedule that you give them fair pay Because in an industry like food and beverage that turnover is super high What if we just give our staff proper schedule? Food and beverage is known to have horrible schedule because we always need to work on the holidays and it is really really Unfortunate because it really sacrifices other areas of our lives of our staff's lives So in turn if we can give our staff good schedule that they can take multiple days off Outside of the holidays that they can have enough schedule to pay for the living that they could have not just minimum pay But maybe a dollar or two dollars extra. They're gonna find a lot more Security in the job that they're working in and in turn, they're gonna love staying at your food and beverage restaurant So if you think that paying that extra dollar is too much or if you think that extra shift is too much Then unfortunately, you need to make sure that you reconsider that because if someone leaves The money that we need to put out to train that new staff would outweigh That extra dollar that we're paying that stuff to outweigh the loyalty that we get from that stuff So next time you're thinking about like nickel pinching or penny pinching your staff Really do consider the gravity of the situation. So there you go I've just talked to you about the five reasons why your good talent will always leave you if you continue making these mistakes If you don't care for your staff, they'll always leave you Okay, so make sure that you truly genuinely care for your staff because they're not just Anyone off the street. These are your family member These are your team and you need to make sure you care a lot for them The second reason why you should always always Employ good people is that the bad apples will poison the whole pot These bad apples with spread rumors these bad apples would poison the rest of the values that your good stuff Have and a lot of times when your good stuff can't handle it anymore They will leave the third reason is that we need to empower our staff empower staff by giving them an Environment giving them all the the tools to go to war for you Giving them good equipment so that way they can produce the result that you're looking for the fourth one Provide them with growth and learning opportunities Events conferences the more you invest in your team the more value they can bring back and the more value They can bring back the better they're gonna treat your customers the better for your business And this just becomes a really good flywheel So that way your good stuff will always stay with you in the final reason That your stuff good good stuff will always leave you if you don't give them a good schedule If you don't give them proper pay, this is a very very easy fix But yet a lot of people have this mistake because they don't give them good schedule and good pay So if you want good stuff to stay Make sure you don't make these five mistakes. Nonetheless, I really really hope you find value in this video If you want more information on how to build a successful restaurant business check out in the link below I've actually compiled everything. I've learned in the last 10 years And I put them all in this course have a look at it We talked about how to find the proper Location we talked about how to negotiate for free rent how to get in the heads of your customer How do you actually design a winning matrix of a menu so that way you become very profitable and some crazy marketing tactics That's gonna have a lot of lineups around the block for your restaurant Nonetheless, check it out in the link below Otherwise if you like more of these videos smash the subscribe button and like our video Leave in the comment section below. Let me know what you think about this video. I'll see you guys next week