Good afternoon, everyone. It's been a long day. I think we made it. Well done to all of you. So this is type context. Let's get started. Founding a startup that does software is hard. Writing an application in Java 2 Enterprise Edition is hard. Building a physical server, taking it down to the data center, wiring it in, plugging it into the internet to go to production is hard. And going home, SSHing back into that server and writing thousands and thousands of lines of XML to configure your Tomcat server is a nightmare. If I worked into a venture capital office in 2017 and told them that was my plan to launch a new hot software startup, I would most likely be laughed out of the room. We spent years building infrastructure as a service companies like DigitalOcean and platform as a service companies like Heroku to ensure that never again do most developers have to go to a data center to get their job done. We spent years building frameworks like Rails and Dejango to ensure that the thousands and thousands of lines of XML of the past are not a thing of the present. But in the year 2000, if I told you that's how I was going to do my startup in the late 90s, you would tell me that was probably a reasonable thing to do. And if not the best thing, then certainly acceptable. You have to remember this is a time when adverts like nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, were prevalent and popular and believed in. And in 2017, it's easy. It's really, really easy to laugh at those things. And for some of us in the room, I suspect we ran screaming from them coming to Ruby to escape the nightmare that all of that stuff was. But the truth is, at the time, these were clever people. They were brilliant. They were working out how to build the internet. They were spending days at a time working together, collaborating to ensure that we could have all of these wonderful technical inventions that we have today. And in some cases, these people now have more money than most of us could possibly imagine. The point is this. In software engineering, context changes. Over 10, 20, 30 years of a software engineering career, the technologies that you use, the places that you work, the sizes of the company, and the domains that you work in will change. And one of the great things that we're able to do as a group of people in the industry is adapt to that change and evolve and buy into the new technology. So let's talk about Ruby. That's why we're all here today. We've gathered as a community to discuss what I hope is our favorite programming language for most people in the room. I think it's easy to be a comfortable person programming Ruby for a long, long time. It's been around for 10 years already, and some of us have been programming it basically for as long as the language has existed. And there are a few reasons why Ruby, and in particular Rails, is so amenable to being comfortable as a developer. You can work in crazy, varied domains in the programming language. I've worked on healthcare, selling children's books, dating applications, music information schemas, and now the internet itself, all from the comfort of Rails. I suspect all of you have also worked in varied domains doing different things with the tools and frameworks, and that's really exciting. We're able to go and learn new stuff that we've never seen before, and we have this shared, common language that Ruby gives us in order to be able to understand and work in new domains. The set of conventions that Rails provides us gives us a mechanism to go in and learn what language people are using to describe things, models, controllers, and views, the names that attach them are English, and that English tells us something about the domain we're working in. We don't have to be an expert in healthcare to understand a healthcare Rails app if we understand how Rails works. One thing that I observe is that every time I come back to wanting to build a new Rails application, a familiar set of moves take over. I'm going to type Rails new and breathe an application into life.  It really is that easy. I think one of the things that Rails is not often given enough credit for is just how fast you can churn out a truly productive application that can start throwing off productivity or business value or if you're bootstrapping actual money, and this is powered somewhat by the mentality of the people who work in this ecosystem. It's not just about the code. It's not about the technical details. This is as much about the people as it is anything else. This is reflected in real applications that we have in production. This is a controller taken from an application that is in production today at DigitalOcean, and the thing that you should note is this is more or less exactly the same as the scaffolded Rails application apart from one line of code, validate people team, which just calls out to a helper to validate that you're a member of the people team at DigitalOcean, and then that's it. The rest is a scaffold, and I've been able to create useful, meaningful production business value without having to write basically any code, and that's a really powerful thing. Now, Rails controllers don't always look like this. Sometimes they look more like this. We build a twisted mess of unpacking parameters, newing up objects, dispatching service method calls. I actually couldn't fit the whole controller on the slide. I should tell you something, but as members of this community, I think most of us have an inherent reaction to that, which is I have to refact to that right now. That's a thing that's built into our ecosystem. I look at this, I have as someone who's an expert, maintainer of open source software, used by every day by everyone, I have strong feelings about how I would begin to break this apart, but if you're newer in our community, if you don't know how to do that, well, it turns out we built wayposts for you. We have talks by people like Ben Orenstein, Katrina Owen, Sandy Metz about how to refactor. We have books also by Sandy and Katrina and other people as well, and the point is this, if you don't yet quite understand how to execute something the community values, we also value learning, and you're able to go in, learn, pick stuff up, and it's kind of an incredible thing that we're all here today, exchanging knowledge, teaching, learning from each other, and I really like that. This has shown nowhere more, I think, than the number of boot camps that have sprung up over the last few years that are teaching people who have never done programming before and wanting to switch into careers new programming skills, and if you look at their curriculums, they almost all feature test-driven development from the very beginning, and that's not to say that test-driven development is an absolute good. I will stand here on stage as an aspect maintainer and tell you that I mostly dislike it, but it's a useful tool when you're new because it gives you a mechanism for understanding stability. It gives you a mechanism for understanding how well-factored a piece of code is, and when you're a beginner, everything is terrifying, and having something to hold onto that the community has blessed and built and developed over many years is really, really powerful. This is all to say that Ruby is an ecosystem, I think, of caring about software quality. We spend a lot of time thinking about our objects, our factorings, our growth, and our applications, or at least we say we do. I know everyone in this room has, at some point in their life, worked on a Rails app that they were not proud of that was full of bugs and mistakes and code that was coupled together far too strongly and they weren't happy with it, but I think the thing is we all hold in our heads where we want to go. I posit that the ideal Rails application is a well-factored monolith. It's one big code base that you like working on and everyone on your team is collaborating on one piece. It's backed by a single large database. There's maybe some caching mechanisms, but it looks kind of like the Rails way. It turns out that despite many of the things that have been said on the internet, that design is good for certain people, but who are those people? Well, if you think about who's in the room and the age of the Ruby programming language and how businesses tend to work, you can sort of plot a curve like this and Rails is a relatively young framework. It's only been popular for five, six, maybe seven years at this point. Ruby is not significantly older than that in any way that matters. And so most Rails companies are small. They just haven't had the time to become huge runaway successes. That is not the normal case. And so if most Rails companies are small and we are an ecosystem that values sharing our knowledge, that implicitly means that we have created an ecosystem of tooling for small teams and small companies. And that's not a bad thing. That's who we are. That's where we came from. But the other fact that's really important is that in 2017 it has never been more likely that you as the engineer on a Rails app will succeed. It's never been more likely that Rails is going to work for you and you're going to become a runaway success and you're going to have to hire hundreds and hundreds of engineers. And those are the outliers. Those are the survivors. We don't have a great number of cases represented in this room. I mean, in the previous talk, we just heard about how painful it is to scale a Rails app to millions of lines of code. And it's not yet a solved problem. Like, these are effectively researched talks and new inventions that we don't yet have good patterns for. So the question I would like to pose it is how can we make Ruby great for the companies that scale, that get bigger, that run away beyond our wildest dreams? Because that's going to happen more and more often. And I think the reason we hear all of this Ruby is dead rhetoric is because our community is growing in a way that it hasn't before. And it doesn't quite fit. And so when I think about how we can change our perspective on this, I like to go as far away as possible, look at the things those people are doing differently and come back. And not to be that guy, but there is one language, one ecosystem, one group of people who are really well designed to build big scalable teams. And that would be Google and the Go programming language. I know, don't lynch me, it's going to be fine. So none of us have Google's problems. Google's engineering organization is bigger than not only any engineering organization represented here, unless you're from Google, but also like the probably, probably the sum total of the sizes of all of the engineering organizations represented here. It's unfathomably massive. And that's interesting because if they have things that they value, those aren't necessarily the things we want, but it might be interesting to think about why they value them. To understand why Google invented the Go programming language, you kind of have to look at what their hiring pattern is. And basically what Google does is hire thousands and thousands of fresh college graduates every year. Those college graduates are working on teams where it's extremely unlikely that they will ever actually talk to the people who software they're consuming.  I have a few examples, and I wanted to sort of talk through them with you today. The first one is this idea, ah, these slides are in the wrong order, that's a problem. So the idea is that machine communication scales better than human communication.  And one thing that Go does really well to demonstrate this is this idea of forced error handling. Forced error handling is a concept where if you have an error that can possibly happen in your system, you have to deal with it or the program refuses to compile. I mean, Ruby is a happy path obsessed ecosystem. Matz is nice and so we are nice. Ruby is for programmer happiness. We obsess and think about how we can build programs that work, but we mostly spend our time considering the happy path cases because frankly, Ruby is a programming language, doesn't do a great job of exposing those sad cases. How many of you have an exception tracking framework running in your application? It's probably all of you. And the thing is, right, if you look at the underlying reasons why programs can fail, it basically comes down to any operation that performs IO can fail at any time for any reason, but it's not always immediately obvious whether or not an operation is performing IO. I have to, if I'm making a request, I have to dig all the way down into source code, see what exceptions it might throw or read documentation, but that means a human has to write the documentation in order for it to be correct and there's a burden placed there on people that the machine is not taking care of. The forced error handling go takes the opposite approach. Functions can optionally return an error as a value type and errors are values.  Functions just return them and then the compiler makes you deal with them and you'll see in many Go programs that if you read just down the top, there's the straight line and any indentation is error handling and anything down the straight line is not. This pattern really, really helps you ensure that you're building correct network communications which when you're building larger teams that are potentially communicating across many services is really important. And there's nothing about Ruby that prevents us from doing this, actually, right? We can invent forced error handling in Ruby, look, I'll show you. So, load Faraday, define a get method that takes URL, boots it up, gets the URL and returns a response object. In order for this not to explode if the network is down, there's a timeout, something catches fire, someone starts a microwave and the Wi-Fi goes down, I have to rescue the base Faraday client error, but to know that I have to rescue the base Faraday client error, I have to go to the Faraday documentation, read it, consume it, understand it, I can basically get going in my head and then work with it. We can force consumers of this client to actually deal with the error. It's not even hard. Add two keyword arguments, on success, on failure. These are procs. You must pass a success and failure proc in and if you don't, this program won't execute. If you do, if the request fails, you will be forced to deal with it in your error handling proc. And if you succeed, you'll just call the success proc. We did it, we invented forced error handling in Ruby, it wasn't even hard. But just think about that for a second. This is now documented literally in the method signature that this thing can fail. I don't have to go and read source code or documentation, I don't have to dig deeper. I think that's a big win. I think we could do a lot better to make our API consumers deal with errors in Ruby. Next up is something called GRPC, which stands for Google Remote Procedure Call. So there's this problem in the world where JSON exists. Apparently that guy really likes that that's a problem. And sometimes you get keys wrong or like your remote API sends you the wrong response payload or something goes crazy wrong. GRPC is another example of documenting how your service works. You have to declare a manifest of what your service does, all the RPC methods that are on it and all the messages that those take. Those then get compiled into server and client implementations that you then expand upon. And this means that you know for a fact your client and your server can talk to each other with no difficulties whatsoever. You don't have to bother with error handling on a response to code, you don't have to deal with serialization. It's all handled for you. And again, this is an idea of scalable machine communication. You don't have to guess what those JSON keys are, you don't have to come up with a crazy contract testing cross-service discovery thing, which is something I think every larger Rails company has done at this point. They all tell me about how they're using their aspects and I'm like, please stop. Or like cross-service integration tasks because who wants to boot up five Rails apps to validate that something is working? We have a system here to prevent that just entirely and it's really, really nice. We use it a lot at this lotion. We began a lot of mileage out of it. This is something you can do in Ruby, you don't need to go to go to do this. But the idea comes from this core concept of machine communication scales better than human communication. To move away from that idea just a little bit, I wanna talk about Go's context package. Context is an object which is basically just a map of strings to other strings. But you can parse it through functions, request IDs, user IDs, basically in Go, every function takes a context and every function does something with that context object. It gathers state and you use that state to rehydrate information later. How many of you hate dealing with your Rails logs? I suspect it's a few of you. When you do an active record call, for example, you don't know which request caused it to start. You don't know when it began, when it finished. Production Rails logging can be a nightmare. Did this third party service get in vote? Did it not? What's going on? It can be very confusing and the Go context object is designed to prevent that and it's really interesting and I recommend you take a look at it. So to sort of quickly summarize, there's this idea in software engineering that your code base reflects the design of your organization.  It's a great way to build a system. I'm not trying to hate on Rails. I wouldn't be here if I was. But our organizations grow and it turns out that beyond a certain size of team, working on a single monolithic Rails application turns into a real pain. I suspect some of you have gone through this at least once in your lives. Excuse me. And so as companies that are using Ruby grow, the question I keep pondering is am I beginning to dislike using Ruby in this context because of Ruby's fault or because of where we have come from? And I think it's that latter one and I think what's gonna happen is the Ruby ecosystem is gonna grow and grow and grow and we're gonna get bigger and bigger teams and to prevent the Ruby is dead meme, I think we need to go with that current and change the way we build our applications, not fight against it. If your code base reflects your organization, then at a larger scale, your ecosystem reflects your community and our community today is under change by any stretch of the imagination and I think we need to change the ecosystem with it. So that's kind of all I got. I just have two quick wrap up notes. So I work for Digital Ocean in case that point hasn't been flogged to death yet by the rest of the conference. Like every other technology company in the world, we are hiring. I would love for you to come and chat with me or Austin right at the back there, organize a t-shirt, also works with me at Digital Ocean, we just hired him so he can give you the new person experience, I can give you the old grizzled jaded experience. It's fine. I have a This Is Fine dog on my desk at work. It's the best thing. I just have one more thing. So, if you couldn't tell by my accent, I am not from here. But I do actually live here in New York City now and it's been an amazing experience. I've really been enjoying it. But for me, tomorrow marks a really special occasion. Tomorrow is the New York City Pride Parades. I am very excited to go see my first one. I think it's gonna be really, really enjoyable. And if you're around tomorrow after the conference, you should consider maybe going to see it too. So, that's everything. Thank you very much. I'm Sam Perkin.


New America has always been there for me to supercharge my work. They help me think about communications, how can I talk about a problem or a solution in a compelling way. New America really advances justice in the digital age. And so it allows advocates like me to do my work within New America as well as outside of New America. When I think about the world that my kids and grandchildren will grow up in, I hope the world that we get to is one that recognizes the dignity and value that each of us has just because we exist. A lot of people working on social justice issues don't have the time to really look up and think about telling the stories about the people who are affected and you really need to do that. Family Story does communications, storytelling and research that corrects the most damaging misconceptions we have about family and creates a new narrative about what it means to be a good family. In the Financial Justice Initiative, we hope to assess and reform these tickets, fines, financial penalties that hit some of the most vulnerable people in our community. I'm so excited that we're starting this first ever Financial Justice Initiative. And we really hope to inspire and work with other cities that want to take a hard look at this and develop their own financial justice agenda. California is at the forefront of social policy on a number of things. And it's difficult for leaders from the nonprofit sector, from advocacy sectors as well as the private sector to come together and actually tell their story and collaborate in ways that would even further move the ball forward. New America puts me in front of the people who make decisions and they amplify the perspective that I bring to the conversation.


I got into business because my mother and father ran an online entrepreneurship website where they basically sold websites to people that came by and buy them and they would buy the business. So that kind of inspired me to get into business. And I was playing college soccer for a while. I was playing up at a Division I school in Asheville, North Carolina. And then I had to transfer over to a NAIA school over in Oklahoma City. And I lived there for about six months. And I was dead broke. I mean, I could barely pay rent. I didn't have any money to my name. Maybe 500 bucks, 600 bucks. I mean, I'm asking my grandparents for money. It was that bad, right? So I eventually about month three, when I was in Oklahoma, I was like, you know what, like, I can't do this anymore. I don't want to be living paycheck to paycheck or, you know, door to ash to door to ash payment, you know? So I was like, all right, let me, let me start a business. All right, how do I, how do I start? What am I good at? All right, well, I'm a soccer player playing my whole life. So let me start coaching soccer. So I looked up Ben's YouTube video and I actually saw Ben in February of last year and reached out to him, texted him for a couple back and forths. And then he never responded to me because he totally forgot about it for the next two months. And then two months later, I got a text message from him. It's like, yo, I am so sorry, man, like, let me get you on a free phone call and we'll talk about it. And we jumped on me and him and he, you know, just blew my mind with some information. And then I started and then once that ball started rolling, I just kept going and about month two in, I realized I had something good here. And then I was like, all right, well, the market's not good enough here in Oklahoma City. So let me move to carry North Carolina, which is a massive market for private training and all the private trainers here are not like what we do. So I saw the niche and I moved over here, made the jump and haven't regretted it since. Awesome.  So what was the motive behind the switch from Oklahoma to North Carolina? Was it specifically to start your business? Well, so I grew up here in this area. So I know a lot of people there. And I personally, I didn't enjoy the Oklahoma City area.  So I was like, all right, well, let's go start here and start building my life. And, you know, eventually I moved out, got my own place, and kind of just kicked it up from there. Okay, awesome. So tell us a bit about your your business. Okay, so right now. So what we do is a lot of private one-on-one, two-on-one and small group training, soccer training specifically.  But basically, you know, we've noticed and I've noticed a niche in this area is the problem is there's a lot of private trainers here. It's loaded with private trainers actually in this area. But the problem is they only coach soccer and they only do it for an hour a week. You know, what our business model is we train each player, each client one hour a week. And then we've got an in total online community with the school academy, as you guys know, and then I've got my own mobile app to where I assign drills to specific players based on, you know, what they need to work on. They say they need to work on some technical ability. I'll give them some technical drills. And as they get better and better, I assign them harder and harder drills. So the development never stops, right? And people have been eating that up and they love it and the kids are getting so much better from it. And, you know, that's kind of where we're rolling right now. And I'm trying to, you know, the one-on-ones and two-on-ones are great. It's just margins are hard, right? So we're starting to move into some group stuff. But we're all coached every single coach that I have on staff. So former division one division two soccer player, you know, high level players have played in college.  That's really what our business model is. Okay, like it. So talk to us about the importance of having accountability for clients in your business. Because as you mentioned, there's a lot of trainers but I can probably guarantee you over half of them don't have accountability for clients. They literally see them once a week and then that's it. So how important is that accountability for them? Well, it's extremely important, right? Like for the players to get better, they have to be doing the stuff that we work on at home. If they aren't doing that at home and being held accountable for it, they're not going to get any better, which is for, it's just a poor business model for us. And it's very poor for the kids, right? For the players, they won't get any better. So, you know, with kind of that mobile app that we do have, like I'm able to see, all right, who's doing the trainings? Like I see, I see, all right, they last logged on two days ago, three days ago, 40 days ago, you know, multiple different, right? And I'm able to reach out and be like, Hey, why hasn't so and so done its homework in recently keeping them accountable? And then, you know, as they do more and more homework, they get better and better. So accountability is a massive part of it. So talk to us a little bit about the beginning phases of your business. So what were some obstacles you faced when you first started? Yeah, I mean, shoot, I'm still, I'm still kind of in the beginning stages, right? I mean, I moved back here, like, seven, eight months ago, right? But in the very beginning, I mean, biggest obstacles and still the biggest obstacle to this day is field availability, right? Like, all the local clubs, they own all the turf fields. And they leave grass fields, right? But, you know, we get rain, we get storms. And so to make this business, you know, something that you can rely on, something that's bulletproof, you need turf fields at the end of the day, right? And it's, it's very, very difficult to rent those fields off of the local clubs.  So we'll be renting all the field out for all of the fall and winter time on Fridays, which is huge, no other trainer's going to be doing that in this area. But that's 100% the biggest obstacle is finding where the availability of space is. That's cool. So you, you obviously mentioned that because that's something when I speak to a lot of coaches out in the US, they do mention that finding, finding turf fields availability. How did you overcome that? What piece of advice would you give a trainer watching that is going through that similar problem? So know every single field in your area.  I don't care if it's a local park with a playground in the middle of it all the way up until your turf fields. Know all of them, find all the schedules online. A lot of the places around here, they post the field availability and the rentals online so you can see the calendar. So I'll go in and I'll look at the calendar, be like, okay, this field's available here, here, here and here. And I'll schedule accordingly, right? But learn all the fields in the area and find a field that can't be rented. Find a, if possible. So there's a couple and carry, it's called a, it's a multi-purpose field where no, no companies allowed to come in and rent the field, meaning that it's open to the public at all times.  Okay, awesome. So how many clients are you currently working with? Currently, we've got about, I want to say, 32 to 35 kids. And we coach a lot of siblings. So probably 26, 27 total single-year payments. Okay, awesome.  And I know because you updated, updated it on the, on the community. So talk to us a little bit about that milestone you reached, how you did it and what piece of advice you'd give other coaches who are trying to get to that level. Yeah. So I hit my first 10k month between April and May, which was huge for me. Because again, I had just started, right? And, you know, kind of how I did that is I'm hungry. You know, I work every single day. I grind on this stuff every single day. But the biggest thing is going out and talking to people and going and doing the marketing and calling people up and following up on text messages. And a really big referral program was also thanks to that as well. You know, a lot of, a lot of clients, they don't want to, they don't want to do the referrals for two, 300 bucks.   And then they start bringing in clients.  So after that, then you'll be making money with the kids that come in. But I mean, one huge thing that helped me drive in a lot of clients is Facebook. Parents are all over Facebook. All I do is simply just go into the local clubs in the area. I look at the posts, you know, who's interacting on the posts. And then I hit every single person on that post with the singular message that Ben gives us in the community. You know, hey, I'm a private soccer trainer. I see your, your son or daughter is a competitive soccer player, you know, blah, blah, blah, and try to get that, you know, I'll send out 200 messages a week and maybe six or seven of them respond and maybe three, two or three of them will actually get their phone numbers. And then maybe two of them, I'll get to a phone call and then maybe one, I'll get to sign with us. But that one out of that, you know, so you do that once a week and that's four times a week. I mean, you're signing for people just from Facebook DMs. And then, you know, it's hard. You can, I've hired, I've actually, I've hired my little brother to do it because it's so simple. I say it's funny because I say it's a monkey could do it because it's so simple. So I did a little job, pay him a little money to do it, send all the messages. And you know, that's something you guys can do, right? Like just hire somebody simply just to send out all the messages, if it's not worth your time, but it's definitely worth putting in that 30 to 45 minutes a day, just sending out messages. Yes, absolutely. So 22 years old, you hit 10K of your business, right? Now, for me, that's not normal. Okay, because I speak with a lot of coaches of your age, and a lot of them are just distracted. A lot of them want to do well, but they have a lot of excuses. So talk to us a little bit about discipline and the importance of discipline in this type of industry. Well, I mean, discipline is very important, right? But for me personally, I think at the end of the day, you either got it or you don't. Like you either want it or you don't want it. If you want it, then you're going to do whatever you have to do to get the job done. If you don't want it, then you know, it's not for you because the guys that want it, the guys that want to make a lot of money to help a lot of kids like they're going to be working every single day, putting in the time, getting smarter, reading a ton of books, financial books, learning self-help stuff, right? To just progress their mission, right? So discipline, if you're not showing up every single day, there's no point showing up at all. You know what I mean?  You can be 60%, but you still showed up and you put in 60%. The guy behind you who decided to take the off day did nothing. You did 60%. So you're going to put in so much more work than everyone else by purely just being disciplined and showing up, you know, six days out of the week, right? Absolutely. Great, great piece of advice there. And also, congratulations on hitting that milestone. I've got no doubt that, you know, in two, three months' time, you'll probably double that if you continue what you're doing. Hope so. I hope, man. That's the plan, right? It's just got to keep reinvesting and see if we can keep growing the company and go in the right direction. Absolutely. So tell us a little bit about where you see this industry going in these five years. So where do you see private training? So, I mean, in this area or in the US, like it just overall, like... Yeah, I mean, in general. I mean, in the US, in your area. Okay, so, I mean, the way that Ben does it in the community is that's how I see private training in that direction going, right? Like online training, online is a huge part of, you know, what marketing will be for us and, you know, people moving forward and training online will be huge. I think there will always be a niche for in-person training because, you know, players and parents, they love that one-on-one connection, two-on-one connection and just connection with a coach, somebody that cares, right? So there will always be a market for that. It's just the direction that I think honestly, I think you'll stay stagnant and there's just going to be a lot of trainers that keep doing what everyone's doing now, which is just showing up and, you know, shooting the Venmo over for the little hour training session and then maybe you show up next week, maybe you don't show up next week. You know, who cares? They don't give you drills. They don't give you homework. They don't do make-it workouts. That's just not what they do, right? So people like us who are advancing the cause, we're going to be moving a lot online, giving them everything and anything we'll ever need outside of soccer training because these kids can go and get soccer training from wherever, right? You know, it's not like, you know, we're the only game in town that will coach the kids. We are the only game in town who are going to give them work off the field and talk to them off the field and mentor them off the field, right? Putting that extra time to care for them at the end of the day. That's really what it is, just putting in a ton of care into it for those kids to really succeed. Absolutely. So tell us a little bit about what do you look for when you bring a new client into your program? So what I look for typically is, first off, I look for somebody who is responsive to my text messages. So somebody who seems like they actually care, right? Like somebody who's actually like wants to get on the phone calls, not pushing it off to another day, you know, not another hour, being very up and volatile with it, right?  Then, you know, when I get on the phone call, you know, I see if they're on time. I see if they're, you know, asking lots of questions during the call, how responsive they are and how they talk about their child as well, right? Like some parents will be very, you know, lackadaisical and sound like they don't care. And some others sound like, you know, it's the end of the world if they don't get private training, right? They need help. So the, you know, the clients that I'm looking for are parents like that who are very responsive and care a lot and really, really want to see their child grow, not to just get them babysitting, you know, for an hour each week, but to actually have them come in and be a part of the program and take advantage of it and get to the next level and get to play in college. Like all that kind of great stuff, you know, that's really what I'm looking for at the end of the day. So how long roughly are on average your clients staying in your program? So on average, so the first since, you know, I started up like eight months ago, right? Like pricing is a lot different. I mean, it's about near doubled, right? Because I'm offering double the double the services, right?  So eventually, I kind of had to filter those people out. And, you know, the price, the price will do that for you, right? Like the people who are committed, they will make the investment. The players who are not committed, won't make the investment simple as that, right? So for somebody who's watching this, like, it's not a problem to keep your prices cheap in the beginning and, you know, filter into lots of clients, build some content, get some social media running. And then once you start picking up steam and you actually want to take on better, better players, the business model only works with players that are, you know, elite level or are looking to take their game to the next level year round, right? So the price, you'll have to raise your price to reflect that. So I mean, all the, I've probably, I mean, I've kept, I started here in all last August or September. I've had two, three of them that have been with me for a full year. And then about four of them that stayed with me since October. And then I think I've lost, I mean, I've lost maybe eight or nine of them. I've had to just kind of, they didn't want to do it anymore. Just, you know, didn't think it was worth the investment. But, you know, I'm starting to pick up, I'm now starting to pick up a lot more clients that are, all right, we're going to do this for a while. Like this is going to be something around for us. We believe in this, you know, we want our kid to get better, right? So it's just finding those people is the hardest part. But once you start tapping into that, it's, it's kind of, you go from there, right? Yeah. So on average, would you say more than three months, they stay with you? Oh yeah. So three months is the minimum. I make it a three month commitment, a commitment minimum.  I'd say probably on average, I mean, they probably say like five, six months. I'd say six months is probably the average right now, which honestly, isn't that great? Just because that average is getting held down by, you know, people who were in the program before and didn't think it was worth the investment now, right? But I've also had a lot of people that have stayed for a while. So it's, it's such a go, right? That will get better as we progress as a company. Nice.  Okay. A lot of coaches, well, majority of coaches out there will be listening to you thinking, you know, you're nuts because most coaches can't hold on to clients for more than a month. Okay. And it's mainly because the way they structure their business is like a week to week thing. And I'll see you on a Saturday morning. Oh, I can't make it. All right. We'll see you in two months time. So talk to us a bit about how do you build that commitment? How do you keep clients for long? And how do you make clients stay with you for three, six, nine, 12 months?  Like bare minimum, that should, you shouldn't do anything less than that because clients, a lot of them, they want to see results like that. Like they want that instant pleasure from that being much better. They think they're going to come in into one month's time, players going to be so much better and they won't need the training. It's just not how it works, right? For the first month, month or two, the kid comes in and is quiet, real quiet, real shy, doesn't want to talk to you is real reserved. And then they start to pick up some confidence and start talking to you a little more. And then they start getting into the training around month two, when they really start taking advantage of it. And it doesn't really start to pick up for them until about month four, month five, really for them. So, you know, for coaches that are doing week to week, you know, if you, if you really value what you provide them and your training is a lot more than just that one hour of soccer training a week, and you know that you can make this kid better over time, then state that you tell that to the parents, make them understand because all the trainers in your area, I can guarantee you is across the country, across the world, they're all doing the same thing, which is the week by week thing, where parents think they can do whatever they want and, you know, show up and come in and out and kind of just operate that way, right? Explain that to the parents, make them understand that your child's not going to get any better in one, even two months time. They're going to get better in three, four, five, six months. That's where it's really going to start to be a very good investment and be very, very valuable. So just make it a minimum commitment. And, you know, I know it might be scary. It's, of course, scary. There's going to be people that reject you, of course. I mean, one in four sales calls.  So it's, it's, that's just how it works.  Just go get more leads. That's it. Great piece of advice. Like that. So, so talk to us a bit about what you currently do to sell a market. So how, where are your clients coming, coming in? So believe it or not, this, I have not really been able to do much marketing, to be completely honest with you. That 10k month came from completely this Facebook marketplace and referrals. You know, we've been swamped and it's, it's difficult, right? When you're trying to build something and going out and marketing is, it wasn't really, so many clients were coming in that I didn't, I haven't seen it to be necessary. It's, it's necessary. Now I have to do it this month and start. I haven't even gotten to the promotions and kind of all that stuff, which just kind of blows my mind a little bit because of how much value and how much more money you could actually make. But it's really how I market it is purely through Facebook. Post a couple pictures of you at training, you know, with the kids, enjoying, maybe post a video or two on your personal Facebook page, then take that personal Facebook page and just start hammering out parents on those, on those club, those club pages on Facebook, just go to the comments, the lights, get each individual parent and you have to be consistent. Like it worked very, it's working very well for me because I'm consistently doing it every single week. I used to just do it for a couple of weeks and then take two weeks off and then come back and do it another three weeks and take a couple of weeks. Like that doesn't work. It's not consistent enough. So just posting and, you know, keep consistently sending out messages. But I mean, outside of that, if you're a new trainer, just starting, get on coachup.com and lessons.com. That's going to be your, that's how I started my business. If I didn't have those two platforms, I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you right now. So simply just get on those websites, get your bio up, make it sound real good.  Just have something to where parents are going to take you seriously as a coach, get onto those sites and then just start hammering all the leads there, get them in for free evals even, you know, free evaluations work really well as well.  And then I can assure you, if you think that what you have is valuable enough, they will love what you're able to provide if you can get to them in person. Perfect. Love that.  So the next five years from now, you know, I hope to continue to dominate this area, like continue to grow it. And because I mean, right now, we're really the only one on one, two on one air trainers in this area that are doing it like us, right? So I look to, and we just started rinsing out the Friday fields, every turf field. So now I'm looking to, maybe next spring, we go into now Tuesday, Friday, and then move into Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday.  If we can get fields that are ours, that where we can stay and have those fields. And eventually, you know, I'd love to buy some land and throw up our own field with our own property, you know, maybe set up some concessions, different stuff like that, right? But definitely, definitely getting the field down. That's going to be that's going to be the number one, because right now, like, you can't you can't create a bulletproof business model without fields that you can rely on. Unfortunately, and that's just a hump you have to get over, and you just got to make enough cash and then eventually just reinvest it. You know, the 10k month was fantastic, but it's not I don't have any of that money. I had to put it right back into it, right? Just so you can need to grow, because we care about the business, right? We don't care. I don't, I don't care about having nice shoes and nice clothes or a nice car. Like it's that's not what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to create something in my local community that's going to be around for decades, and people are going to be talking about it. And we're going to have hundreds of kids that went to college because of what I did and what I started. That's really what we're in for, right? Some legacy within our own community. I absolutely love that. And I've got no doubt you will, you will reach that. And hopefully one day you will have your own facility. At the rate you're going, I've got no doubt that you will do it. So keep up the great work. It's been a pleasure having you on. I know your story is going to definitely inspire coaches who watch our channel on a regular basis. And to finish off, if there is any coach that wants to connect with you, what's the best way for them to follow your page or getting contact with you in any way? So if you want to get in contact with me, you know, you guys can always shoot me an email. It's at contact at nv5performanceacademy.com. You can always send me an email. I'm on Instagram at Varner underscore NOE. So Noah, you can contact me through my, you know, my personal Instagram, you know, reach out to me via email. I'm in Ben's community as well. So, you know, you guys can always reach out to me there. And I'm on Facebook as well. Just search on my name, NOE, and then Varner, V-A-R-N-E-R. And you can find me. Just send me a message. I'm willing to talk to anybody. Perfect. Love that. Awesome. All right. No, well, thank you very much again for jumping on. It's been a pleasure to have you on the podcast. And I wish you all the best. You know, I'll see you in the community at some point. I'm always on there seeing what coaches are doing. So, all the best. And we'll catch up very soon. I appreciate it. Let her know. You have a great day. All right, Emma. Take care.


I don't read books about the world. I go out there and see it for myself. First blood has been slain. Deploration runs in my family. It's in my-


So, the penultimate speaker, I've been wanting to say that for days, is my good friend and colleague Dr. Alberto Ferreres. Alberto is Professor of Surgery and Chair of the Department of General Surgery at the University of Buenos Aires. He's a GI and Minimally Invasive Surgeon. He's the President of the Argentine Chapter of the American College of Surgeons, the President-Elect of the International Society of Digestive Surgery, and the President of the Argentine Society of Medical Humanism. Alberto has not only a medical degree and a Ph.D., but also a law degree, and his talk today is on the ethical care of surgical patients. Alberto. Thank you. Thank you, Peter, for your kindness. First of all, I am really honored to be standing in front of all of you, and I particularly want to thank Dr. Max Iglo, all the Associate Directors of the McLean Center, as well as the McLean family, for the insight and support. I would also like to state that being a fellow, a 2009 fellow, an ethics fellow, made me not only a better surgeon, a better physician, but also a better person. So, thank you, all of you. So, let's move on, nothing too disclose, and this is the overview of my lecture. A couple of characteristics that make surgery unique is that we have to harm every time we operate on a patient before we can achieve healing. In the second place, it's fallible, and there has been a public awareness about the fallibility of the surgeon, who are not gods, but just humans after the IOM report in 2000, 1999 as well. Uncertainty. Many of our decision-making processes under conditions of uncertainty, and one of the issues that we have to discuss is if we can convey this sense of uncertainty to our patients, because many of them will run out of our practice. And last, but not the least, surgery is prone to risk, two errors, anti-complications. We have to deal with complications on an everyday basis. Having said this, also not to forget, we penetrate every time we operate, we can do the scalpel, we introduce a minimally invasive trochan, we are penetrating the patient body, and as Judge Benjamin Cantor also stated a long time ago, the surgeon who performs an operation without the patient's consent commits an assault. So, as Dr. Pellegrini mentioned in his presidential address, surgery is a moral practice. The surgeon should be considered a moral agent, and a moral compass is a tool which is required for everyday practice. So, ethics remains at the core, at the center of the competency of professionalism.  We need to be diligent, and what do we mean by achieving surgical diligence? We need to be competent enough to practice surgery, and be ethically and morally reliable. Otherwise, with ethics, it's not enough to take care of our patients. So, the three tenets of a supper surgeon or a master surgeon should be good surgical habits. That means technical skills, 30% according to the research. Supper decision-making skills, 70%, but we have to review these with humanistic and ethical feelings towards the patients, towards our colleagues, and also towards society. Otherwise, you are not going to achieve an excellent performance. Ethical practice means that we have to respect the dignity of our patients, we have to be tolerant of their beliefs, and we have to respect their decisions, whether for approval of our proposal regarding surgery or their refusal. So, we have to do unto others as you will have them do unto you. The patients, we have to remember they have seven basic rights, two or three of them are negative, and four of them, they are really positive. The last one is to decide whether to accept treatment, to be on his or her body to accept treatment or surgery. The goal of this research was to examine, we prospectively performed the incidents on the cause of ethical conflicts during the process of surgical care of patients at our institution, which was approved by the IRB, and we analyzed ethical conflicts which required either an ethics consultation or the surgical residents of the faculty requested some support in the decision-making process or in the relationship with the patient. So, we were really broad and we first of all redefined what meant to have an ethical conflict or an ethical dilemma, and the initial results, as you can see in this slide, were rising ethical conflicts every year from 2009 to 2013, and you can better view this in this diagram. Regarding the causes, most of them close to 50% were issues related to surgical informed consent and through telling, and I will approach the issue of through telling later in my talk. The implementation of palliative care, advanced directive, we covered change in our legislation. The involvement of surgical residents in surgical care, futility, DNR orders, some challenges to address for social patient relationship, and according to our population, advice about alternative treatments or medical keywords. Here in this graphic, you can have a better idea about the incidents of issues related to the surgical informed consent or through telling. Let's go with some reflections. Surgical ethics is related to the recognition of the rights of patients who are requiring our surgical care. So, we have to give answer to two questions. One is the character of the surgeon that has nothing to do with our activity unless the impairment of the surgeon affects its relationship and his or her clinical practice. The second question we have to address, which ought to be the conduct of the surgeon, and this is about right and wrong issues regarding surgical care. The four ethical principles can give a good framework as described by Boshamber Childress in 1979 for the first time, but they were not originally developed based on Sir William David Rose, who had defined the prima facie duties, which included, as you see, non-maleficence, justice and beneficence, and his book, The Good and the Right, was published in 1930. What support gives literature? This is one of the first papers published in 1980 about the ethical conflicts, especially regarding the surgical arena. According to Lockwood, clinical trials were in the first place, surgery for the age and resuscitation measures, informed consent. The barefoot doctor applying to economies of places in the world with scarce resources or lack of appropriate resources, an organ for transplantation was just a concern at that time. More recently, Maccahill published in the Journal of American Colleges of Surgeons, and some of the issues confronted with, surgeons confronted, providing honest information with a strange hope, and I think this is a main issue for us. The uncertainty about the patient's prognosis, many times, which is challenged by the patients are kids of her family, preserving the patient choice, sometimes difficult, and as was said before, withholding or withdrawing life-sustaining support, which is very difficult, especially in huge surgery or major surgery. In 2001, Wagner Meyer from Canada related all these ethical conflicts related also to surgery, and she introduced the issue of making mistakes and concealing information from a patient, not only about his or her prognosis, but about the disclosure of surgical error. This is a paper from Norway about the ethical conflicts, and all are related with starting withholding or withdrawing treatment, but also they include overtreatment and meeting patients' expectations. As has been said, I will not... It depends on this issue about the components of the surgical consent, but regards that the second point, information, we do not only have to give information, but we should give some recommendation, and that's a surgical complication, a surgical consultation concludes with the recommendation, what you should do in my place, or what you should do to my children. But why do ethical conflicts arise in surgery? Well, I have a couple of reasons. There is a team approach versus the Augusta director approach. When I started training in surgery more than 30 years ago, the surgeon was the owner of the patients. Accountability or responsibility was mandatory. We, as residents, were like the owners of the patients of our attendants, and this sense of appropriateness has been fading along the time, and now we are performing a team approach. Hospitalists also in Argentina are developed and many surgeons do not take care on their own of the post-operative course. Communication breakdowns. Young people communicate quite different from all surgeons or expert surgeons, and besides health literacies and other issues, especially in most countries in Latin America, in state-run hospitals. The lack of time, many times young physicians, young surgeons do not have enough time. The lack of trust and the empowering relationship within the physician and his or her patients. This opposition between fiduciarism, as was described a long time ago, versus a contract. Always the fear of malpractice litigation is surrounding the arena of surgical complications and surgical disclosures, not only of errors but about information. We are in mind that in Argentina, as in some other countries in Latin America, we do not only undergo civil litigation, but also we have criminal litigation. A physician can go to jail, and there is also a difference between the behavior of the young versus the old, some grown-ups, the faculty. When a patient comes looking for surgical assistance, he's also asking for help, for support, for advice, and for guidance. So we have been to address all these issues, and many times the path are not that defined, and sometimes we have encountered difficulties when we have to give a patient information about the linear pancreatectomy. Some will try to have as much information as possible, but sometimes we know that we are harming the patients. We can give what the data is, what our institutional data is, or even the surgeon's personal rate of complications on this and that, but we know that sometimes the patients will not be in the best condition to make his decision. So, as Mark Siegler and Johnson told, we have the four issues, the problem of solving tools, medical indications, patient preference, quality of life, and contextual factors. I will not extend on this. The issue of the classics, we could go to John Gregory, start stating about the fiduciary commitment and the role of honesty in the patient-physician relationship, as well as trust, as stated by Marshal Bay-Mai Modines, who was born in Cordova, Spain, and died in Egypt. And then the issue we have to address is how to treat, which is a matter of knowledge and medical science, but the way to treat, and there we are, that's related to medical ethics. The surgeon develops a role as an authority due to whose expertise, training, and knowledge, but the patient is the one who is in a position, in authority to consent, that something is going to be performed under his or her body. As Plato, here we can see the first term of informed consent, and regarding truthfulness, don't be consistent, simply be true, tell Oliver Wonder Holmes. When the event of neurosurgery cashing, and he's one of his colleagues, the Walter Dandy, they have a lot of discussion about how to inform the public, but the son, the Baltimore son published his failures in 1905. Then this, the writer followed by a story announcing that the patient had died. They have a huge approach to this issue in the literature as well as in the media, in the newspaper, and now this has been in the last century. Stetson and Moran, in the paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, offered the council to keep a cautious tongue, which is a moral rule, and that was a safeguard against a malpractice suit, 1934. It's not present time. And so we have to address the issue of truthfulness, whether a way to tell the truth is not the issue, but what is the truth, and when and how to disclose it. There's another truth telling when we have to tell about the truth. But there are different approaches, as you can see in this slide, there are two sides of the coin. One anticipates the need for trust and the other directly points to the necessary life decision making, which is the best. I do not have the advice or the possibility to say one is better than the other. You have to adjust this to each patient. But defining the truth can be difficult because many times we do not know the real facts about the truth. The assumption that the faulty process necessarily leads to the poor outcome can turn this issue. The assumption that the poor outcome requires a faulty process can also make some difficulty to know which is the truth. And the members of the team may have different motivations for disclosure of information. And last but not the least, the different reports of families and patients with their caregivers and surgeons.  Take home messages. Ethical guidance, excellent expertise are needed in the management of surgical diseases to achieve adequate and patient-oriented decision making. Ethical conflicts will probably increase in the future and their surgical ethics will be at the core of surgical training. We have to change our paradigm from the curative model with the goal of curing to the palliative model with the concern to relieve suffering. And the training and education of a modern surgeon should be scientific, evidence-based, up-to-date, humanistic, social, but above all ethical. Thank you very much. Alberto, thank you very much. Thank you. Okay. That was wonderful.


If you love the piano, if you hear something that the word virtuoso, is this not one of the glamorous words in the world? It's a word that has enigmatic overtones, it has a word that is complex, it's a word that has obsessed all of the great writers of the piano. How did this one do that? How did this one play that? Rex Ahan, wonderful Chinese pianist, will be playing on the program and Barbara Nisman, an extraordinary virtuoso, will be there and will be having music, will be having talk, will be having recordings of great pianists such as Simone Maraire doing things that only he could do and many recordings within and I will be reading wonderful little excerpts about what it means to be a virtuoso and what is the grand manner which is so much a part of the idea of virtuosity and the literal gentlemanly aspect of a world that was once so extraordinarily glamorous headed by Pottersky and Friedman and Hoffman and Ananan from every country.