The severe undulating erosion upon the walls of the Sphinx enclosure undoubtedly showed that the Sphinx had been heavily weathered long before the Sahara became a desert. Therefore, one must suspect that it could indeed be over 9,000 years old. Not knowing exactly how much rainfall there's been in the distant past, the Sphinx could indeed be far older than this. The most notable scholarly advocates, Robert Scotch, argues that the Sphinx may be far older than 12,000 years. Robert Baval and Graham Hancock proposed that the Sphinx may have been built around 10,500 BC during the last Age of Leo. Anthony West believes everything on the Giza Plateau testifies to an advanced, secure and long-settled civilization. Therefore he suggests that the Sphinx may have been built not during the Age of Leo but a whole processional cycle earlier. In around 36,000 BC, a date he feels is more in keeping with the history of Egypt as chronicled by certain Egypt kings. Regardless of an exact date, all of these talented Egyptologists propose a date set much further back within history than currently accepted, and they have provided considerable evidence to back up such conclusions. At the time of disclosure, the argument sent shockwaves through the Egyptologist establishment. Not because of the datings, Egyptologists and mainstream historians have grown quite inept at ignoring data, but more because it was realized that there is indeed no other explanation for their arguments. There is little doubt that the Sphinx enclosure was subject to severe erosion within its lifetime, and although it could have been explained away as a naturally formed enclosure, we fortunately know from analysis that the limestone blocks dug out from there were then used within the building of nearby Sphinx temple. Interestingly, no other site in Egypt shows the same type or degree of erosion. Was the evidence hidden away? Concealed from the public in what could only be called a conspiracy? Sediments surrounding the base of the monuments under once existing watermark upon the stone's halfway up the Great Pyramid's sides indicate just that. Two inch thick salt incrustations once found within inner chambers, silt sediments rising to 14 feet around the bases of the pyramids, found to contain seashells and fossils that have been radiocarbon dated at nearly 12,000 years old, have indeed slowly vanished over the years. These sediments could only have been deposited in such great quantities by major sea flooding. The watermark was also once clearly visible on the limestone casing stones of the Great Pyramid. These stones were unfortunately unknowingly removed by invading Arabs. These watermarks were halfway up the sides of the pyramid, or about 400 feet above the present level of the Nile River, 200 feet above the base. It seems the last remaining shred of evidence, the enclosure, survived due to the talented individuals that were required to spot it. There are many ancient mysteries still to be unraveled within ancient Egypt, and although they are rarely academically shared, the basalt floor found upon the Giza Plateau, being one such feature, located at the base of the Great Pyramid's, possessed some of the most compelling fragments of ancient advanced machinery anywhere on earth, let alone Egypt. Additionally, there does indeed exist other areas upon the Giza Plateau that also exhibit these unquestionably compelling fingerprints, left by an, as yet not understood, ancient advanced technology. One such place, known as Abu Ghurab, is a place that many alternative researchers assert could have once been some sort of ancient stargate, originally built as a sun temple constructed to represent the ritually vivifying power of the Sun God Ra. It was one of six temples built upon the site, however, only two have been identified, Yuzarkov and that of Nayusera. At the base of the site at the western end, an enormous obelisk has also been unearthed, which, according to experts, symbolize the resting place of the Sun God Ra. The obelisk's base is a pedestal, with sloping sides and a square top. It is approximately 20 meters high, and is constructed of red granite and limestone. Estimates of the combined height of the obelisk and base vary, although a number of independent researchers believe when the structure was built, the total height of the obelisk was most likely somewhere between 50 and 70 meters in height, an enormous height and indeed weight for any of the currently attested ancient Egyptian builders to have worked with. But what we find the most intriguing regarding this obelisk, and indeed ancient site, linking back to the advanced anomalies located upon the basalt floor, is the enigmatic drill holes found driven straight through the heart of this monolith and many of the other large granite stones which still litter the site, the holes undoubtedly completed using some form of high rotation power tool. Clear, compelling evidence that whoever created this ancient work had access to astonishingly advanced technologies. Additionally, the site is also home to a number of enormous red granite blocks, each weighing in at several tons. Curiously, these massive blocks also exhibit the same uncanny precision cuts and extremely well-polished surfaces which are also found throughout ancient Egypt and the quarries thereof. All once mounted into position with such incredible precision, many investigators have concluded after visiting the site, just like the conclusions one is left with after exploring ancient Baalback, that whoever laid these massive stones into position had an extraordinary technological prowess. Why does modern academia continue to deny such truths in favor of such mundane and incomplete testimonies as to the true origins and builders of ancient Egypt? How can we continue to be expected to believe, in the face of such compelling, overwhelming evidences, that these sites were merely the work of our more modern copper-wielding ancestors? It is undoubtedly highly compelling. It's behind the Sphinx's ear. Hidden in plain sight for many a millennia, there is clearly a blocking stone still in place. A blocking stone we would never have noticed if it weren't for a rather unusual source of information. Recently, we covered the amazing story of Kipri Yanovich Boriska, the extraordinarily intelligent boy from Russia, that from a young age has supposedly been able to remember a past life, a life as a pilot upon the once flourishing planet Mars, destroyed during a catastrophic war. What is extraordinary regarding this claim, however, is the remarkable information that Boriska has somehow been able to share from a very young age, information which has taken astronomers many years to realize. According to Boriska, life on Earth will change irrevocably when the Great Sphinx is unlocked, using a mysterious mechanism behind one of its ears. Unfortunately, he has not given any further details about what exactly the opening of the Sphinx will do, though this was enough for us to notice the anomaly resting upon this very ancient monument. Boriska has unfortunately since disappeared, however, while in the public eye, he claimed that he was a reincarnated soldier, placed here upon Earth to avert the same destructive fate as Mars, claiming that many of his kind exist upon the Earth, calling them indigo children, often stating all of this while in a trance. Which is highly compelling, as he is not the only one who once prophesied very similar astonishing developments that would, one day, arise surrounding the Great Sphinx. Edgar Cayce, an American Christian mystic, would often answer questions on subjects such as healing, reincarnation, wars, Atlantis, and future events, also while in a trance. Was Cayce also an indigo child? Graham Hancock is another figure who has publicly claimed that there are many mysteries still left to be unraveled surrounding the Sphinx, specifically, that a time capsule is hidden within the Sphinx. A capsule that we will only discover as a species once we are intellectually capable of absorbing its message. When it was shared within the mainstream media recently that an enormous cavity had indeed been quietly discovered within the Great Pyramid of Kufu, the largest of the Great Pyramids, the only one with tunnels constructed within its inside, and additionally, the only one which is, in fact, eight-sided. The reaction by the Egyptian antiquities authorities was very revealing of their attitude towards secrets being revealed to the public. Not only were the claims made from reliable sources, but they are also backed up by extensive research projects, and indeed, it's resulting evidential data. However, this has not deterred Professor Zawi Hawass from publicly denying any such cavities as very existence, shrugging off all claims and accompanying research as, quote, lies and hearsay. With such enormous hurdles in place, prepared to stifle any such discoveries from going public, it is inevitably going to be an uphill battle to expose the truth regarding the Great Sphinx of Giza. During the reign of King Tut, between 1333 BC and 1324 BC, the understanding of iron metallurgy or indeed the casting of such objects was very limited. Iron smelting is the extraction of usable metal from oxidized iron ores. It is vastly more difficult than smelting tin and copper. Such metals could be cold-worked in simple pottery kilns and then cast into molds, a process largely accepted as being present within ancient Egyptian times. However, the smelting of iron requires hot-working and can only be melted in specially designed extremely heated furnaces. It is therefore not surprising that humans only mastered iron smelting after several millennia of the Bronze Age. However, there is a pair of relics found within ancient Egypt whose sheer existence disproved the officially held chronological account of when these hardened metals were developed. Or do they? Within the ancient wrappings of the sarcophagus, which contained pharaoh Tutankhamun, two daggers were discovered. Encased in gold sheaths, they were placed there more than 3,000 years prior. One had an iron blade, and the other with a blade made of hardened gold. Yet both are not made from regular metals. Amazingly, these daggers are in fact made from metals not native to earth. It is officially accepted that it would have been quite difficult, nigh impossible, for ancient civilizations to have acquired iron in pure states. So most of the pure iron found in weaponry within this mysterious culture are academically accepted as coming from, quote, meteoric sources. This explanation may be easier to digest for the majority of population of earth. However, it is not only a flawed explanation, but illogical. If this ancient Egyptian civilization, which possessed knowledge we are yet to rediscover, did indeed extract these alien metals from meteorites, yet largely accepted to have not been able to cast such metals, then an obvious question arises. How did they cast the metal into daggers? The official explanation offered provides no answer, as is often the case with out-of-place artifacts. A more logical scenario is that these daggers were in fact the remnants of a far older civilization, a civilization responsible for the construction of ancient Egypt, a group of people visited by, or indeed traveled to, people from another world entirely. Additionally, modern advanced metallurgical analysis found that the iron dagger is not a normal meteoric iron, but a complex, intelligent, and very strong alloy, containing various amounts of nickel, chromium, and cobalt. Furthermore, the nickel content is so high, nearly 25%, it makes this alloy totally different from those made by man. The alchemy required to make such a non-rusting metal was developed many centuries if not millennia after King Tut's death. Just where did these daggers come from? How old could they actually be? Were they made as a gift by a race who visited Earth? Apart from our postulations, it seems no one can produce a working theory. RC, the American Research Center in Egypt. RC's website states as follows, among RC's many great achievements is our relationship with the Supreme Council of Antiquities, the SCA, within the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, without whom our work would not be possible. RC is viewed as making important contributions that serve to help Egypt directly in its pursuit of cultural heritage preservation. What this statement confesses to is the implication and more than likely collaboration with Egyptian authorities to cover up the real truth about ancient Egypt. In 1992, German robotics engineer Rudolf Gantenbrich was exploring shafts within the Queen's Chamber at the Great Pyramid, using a crawler robot he had designed himself. His intentions were to install an air conditioning system within the pyramid's existing design. While exploring these ancient tunnels, he discovered one of the shafts was blocked by a tiny limestone blocking door, a secret doorway only accessible with the use of robotic technology. Rudolf Gantenbrich, who was able to map, explore, and analyze the shafts for many years, believed a second door would have suggested the possibility that there would be yet another 40 cm further away. His hypothesis, based on the knowledge that many ancient Egyptian funerary monuments were equipped with a series of three blocking doors placed close to each other in succession before the entrance to a sacred tomb. In 2002, the National Geographic Society discovered this second door. Using their own robot known as Pyramid Rover, this event, closely supervised by RC, who subsequently pulled the plug on the whole operation regarding the shafts. The team had a simple solution to Gantenbrich's problem. They sent the robot along the shaft, gripping the walls instead of the ceiling and floor. In this manner, it was somehow able to ride over the top of the obstacles. The rover's journey along the northern shaft revealed yet another door, just as Gantenbrich's claimed. Mysterious hieroglyphs, written on the floor of the hidden tunnels within Egypt's Great Pyramid, were shown to the world in an initial report on the robot's discoveries, published within the due service day antiquities. The images revealed features that had not been seen by human eyes since the construction of the monument. Pictures from around the world were particularly intrigued by three red ochre figures painted upon the tunnel's end deep inside the pyramid. Books such as Giza the Truth by Chris Harold and Ian Lawton, The Stargate Conspiracy by Lynne Picnit and Clive Prince, and Secret Chamber by Robert Balvel have all, thanks to the tremendous and diligent research accomplished within, shed light upon the controversy surrounding the Giza Plateau and the Secret Chamber's existence. The key question the theme witnessed throughout these studies was whether information has been withheld, discoveries undisclosed, and an understanding of the pyramids and Sphinx existence purposefully kept hidden from the world. On the 22nd of March, 1993, Dr. Zoe Hawass was suspended from his position as Chief Inspector of the Giza Pyramid Plateau. It seems Gontenbrick took an opportunity, while the powers that be were distracted, to announce his findings to the world press in early April. It would appear, after substantial digging, that the string-pollars within Egypt originate out of America and are stationed within Egypt in the form of Arce. The truth regarding what is buried beneath these ancient structures may still remain a mystery, but realizing the obstacles obstructing an understanding of this truth is half the battle won. An announcement that seemingly slipped us by was made recently within Egypt. This announcement pertaining to an amazing discovery made within an area of the Giza Plateau that for a number of decades has been conveniently shut off from the public. Although the location is claimed to be a military training base, archaeologists have apparently been secretly beavering away within this remote slice of antiquity. Announced by the Supreme Council of Egyptian Antiquities, Egyptian authorities have apparently found the mysterious traces of the legendary fourth lost pyramid of the plateau. This provocative announcement stirred up a gale of protest among many Egyptologists, and the reason for this may be because the discovery might turn out to be highly controversial. Although the pyramid is in a very bad state, and this may be due to its immense age, with only a few rows of blocks remain, and these surviving blocks clearly displaying evidence to indicate that the missing blocks have simply eroded away over the eons, this ruin may not be the most important find in the area, or indeed the purpose for the video. Along with these pyramidal remains at the site is another amazing anomaly. In the middle of this mysterious desert, an enormous staircase has been found, plunging into the desert floor, seemingly excavated before this announcement and left for those who were fortunate enough to get access to the area to rediscover and photograph. This enormous staircase plunges straight through a limestone basin many meters in depth. This surgical slice has revealed an astonishing implication. It has revealed that the Giza Plateau does indeed extend this far. Not only that, but it demonstrates the sheer, unimaginable cubic size of this area of stone. A block of stone that was apparently man-made. Where this staircase actually leads to is as yet unknown, although it is thought to drop far below that which is currently visible, and preliminary scans of the area are suggesting that it plunges through the plateau deep into an ocean of groundwater below. By examining the pictures of the discovery, it appears that the site has indeed been excavated from the sand, having most likely been submerged from view beforehand. The question is, who did these excavations? Who built this unbelievable structure, or indeed, the mind-bogglingly enormous Giza Plateau? Who built the pyramids and sphinx upon it? Where did such an enormous stone plateau come from? How did they shape and carve such mysterious structures with such blocks? Or perhaps, most importantly of all, where does this staircase lead? Did whoever undertake this excavation task manage to discover where it led? More research and exploration will undoubtedly be undertaken over the next few years. We will, of course, keep you posted. Ancient building techniques are an excellent subject to explore if one wishes to understand just how advanced our hidden ancestors were. Additionally, it allows one to get a true insight into the contradictions currently upheld by academic institutes the world over. There still exists an extraordinarily diverse array of building techniques. Some, interestingly, appear to overlap even older advanced methods. For example, a stone-boring technology, seemingly used upon many ancient monuments, in many cases it appears to have been deliberately used to slightly damage these ancient stones, leaving them etched with uncanny marks, possibly in an attempt to also leave their mark to prove their past existence, later to be realized by us now laying within their very distant future. We feel that these marks, along with many other aspects of these ancient sites, indicates that many ancient civilizations have been and gone here upon our Earth. Ancient metal clamps used to seat enormous stones, precision machine-cut blocks, some left with inquiries, clearly indicating machine manipulation, impossible block building, effortlessly fitting random sized blocks perfectly together. Yet the most enigmatic of these ancient building features, which many suspect was indeed somehow connected to the construction of said sites, has to be the protuberances. Rarely mentioned within history books, yet these protuberances are present on many of the most ancient of block structures, which can be found all over the world. No one seems to know what these protuberance were placed upon these structures for. The biggest of these, undoubtedly carved into the still-in-situ Igaliths at Yangshankori, a feature we have previously noted and pondered over. Not only do these enigmatic notches suggest a past, world-going, highly advanced civilization, having once prospered here upon our planet, but a feature known as the Boss Mark, found deep within the Great Pyramid of Kufu, may link, for the first time, the builders of the Great Pyramids to ancient structures found elsewhere on Earth. Furthermore, the methods used by the pyramid builders are, interestingly, the same methods used by builders of the other sites containing protuberances. This strategic building method, meaning that their ruins have outlived, we feel, many other ancient civilizations now lost to history. Their capability to move such mind-bogglingly huge stone blocks, and their ability to create such erosion-resistant structures, indicate to us that the builders of these sites may have lived an unimaginably long time ago, and probably chose to create such Earth-shifting structures in a bid to indeed survive the eons. Were they doing so in an attempt to leave their legacy on our planet? Or maybe they were, and are, still trying to tell us something. Only time will tell. We have long stated that there is considerable evidence to suggest that not only the Great Sphinx, but also its accompanying pyramids found dotting the plateau, are far older than currently attested. We have shared the premise that many of the ancient hieroglyphs found all over Egypt are a mere 4,000 years old, while the pyramids and the Sphinx, both conveniently absent any of these same illustrative writings, are far older than this age. Why are there no hieroglyphs within the Great Pyramids? Additionally, why were there never any steps or stairs built into such awkward of structures? Is this a clue to the past function of the Great Pyramids? Were they never intended to be entered by humans? Not only is this absence of Egyptian art a compelling clue, but it also indicates that these structures were not constructed by the same people. If indeed they were constructed by the same people, why did they never document this task? There in fact exists an artifact within Giza. Once quoted as a must-see artifact by Zechariah Sitchin, this inconspicuous stone, known as the Inventory Stella, amazingly, is an authentic inventory left by King Khufu. It not only supports most of what we have now come to suspect regarding the plateau, a theory concluded from many different avenues of research, but it is a written description of the Egyptian civilization's activities upon the plateau, including what happened to the Sphinx or, more accurately, Anibis. We have come to suspect that many of the most popular alternative researchers who have spent their careers researching these specific subjects have, just like academia, ignored patently evident materials surrounding the ancient past. Giza's inventory, Stella, Zechariah Sitchin wrote in his book Journeys to the Mythical Past that the Stella was irrefutable proof, provided by Khufu himself, that he did not build a great pyramid, and that the pyramid in Sphinx were already there in his time. Predictably, the Stella is simply ignored. However, some, like James H. Breasted, commendably included the inventory Stella in his official list of 4th Dynasty artifacts, stating that, regardless of opinion, that it, quote, bore all the marks of authenticity. Also, the French Egyptologist Gaston Mesperot, whose most famous book, The Dawn of Civilization, stated that the Stella was indeed a factual record of the life and deeds of Khufu. Regarding the Sphinx, the text states that lightning once struck the head, destroying a large portion. Khufu then re-carved the head into what we see today. He then built his temple in the vicinity of the House of the Sphinx, and, interestingly, renovated the great pyramid. The Stella inventory not only confirms many things we have already come to suspect took place within Giza, but additionally, this mounting evidence is indicating to us that other suspiciously popular, supposed in-depth investigations, often accompanied by expensive trips to said sites, are deliberately inaccurate works of controlled opposition. Regardless of other opinions regarding this matter, we will continue to present what we always have on this channel. Truth and honest opinions. As always, thanks for watching. During the past few years, we have covered many aspects of Mankuri, Kafra, and Khufu, the three great pyramids of Giza. We have explored numerous amazing facts regarding these structures, which have remained secret for many years. As the interest has grown regarding these three amazing structures, more people with suspicions, hypothesis, and technical and intellectual talents are fortunately beginning to approach these mysterious and wonderful structures in more explorative ways. We are experiencing the beginning of an ancient Egyptian renaissance thanks to the gift of modern technology. At the beginning of this year, an international team of researchers began investigating the buildings from afar, gazing at them with unusual cameras. Using state-of-the-art infrared heat detection technology, they have discovered some surprising anomalies regarding the heat signatures visible on their faces. But these thermal anomalies reveal our undiscovered shafts, more than likely leading to additional and undiscovered secret tombs deep within these amazing pyramids. The thermal scanning that they have successfully completed has revealed that there are many of these temperature fluctuations, in many areas undocumented as containing anomalies. Thus, what the team has done is pinpoint unexplored shafts dotted across the pyramids. The team also found a particularly impressive anomalous signature located on the eastern side of the Khufu pyramid, very close to ground level. From the beginning, the team had always maintained that they would publicly disclose their findings. All of the staggering finds were made public by Antiquities Minister Mamdu El-Damati. During a press briefing, quote, there is something like a small passage in the ground that you can see leading up to the pyramid's ground, reaching an area with a different temperature. What will be behind it? said El-Damati. The scanning was done throughout a 24-hour period, allowing the researchers to monitor subtle temperature changes as the pyramids heated up and then cooled down during the day and night. Though the huge granite and limestone blocks which make up most of the pyramid, this technology was capable of recognizing the slight differentials in their temperature. By monitoring the speed of this heating and cooling, thanks to these miraculous cameras, the researchers were able to isolate several persistent anomalies. Thus, they may have just unlocked more of the pyramid's secrets in one day, using state-of-the-art technology than Egyptian antiquities or archaeologists worldwide have in more than 100 years. While the difference in temperature between most adjacent limestone blocks was between 0.1 to 0.5 degrees Celsius, the largest of heat anomalies discovered on and within the Great Pyramid was an impressive 6 degrees warmer than the surrounding bricks. So far, there are plenty of theories being put forward as to what these heat anomalies might indicate. Not surprisingly, with the leading assumptions being that of just empty areas, a hypothesis I'm sure some would like to make a reality. The good news is that the study, which is called Operation Scan Pyramids, will continue. Next, the researchers intend to use cosmic particles called radiographic muans to create a 3D reconstruction of the Pyramids of Giza in an attempt to map all the secret chambers and passageways within the Pyramids.  There are many mysteries to be found within ancient Egypt. Unexplained seemingly impossible mysteries which litter the caverns, tunnels, flooded underground layers, and indeed the once inaccessible passageways only recently explored using advanced modern technology. However, some of the most perplexing mysteries lay in plain sight. Not only the Great Pyramids themselves, an obvious enigma for academia to explain the construction of, but many anomalous features which can be found within objects often leaving academics baffled as to an explanation. The Cheops sarcophagus being one such anomaly. Although these pyramids are entered and explored by millions of people every year, and indeed this mysterious sarcophagus shown to many of these inquisitive explorers, what many of the funded academic tour guide often leaves absent from their explanation of this supposed tomb is how exactly it arrived at its current location. As we have explored and exposed previously, the casing stones that can be found on many of the pyramids are to us not only indicative of another phase of construction work once having been undertaken upon these structures, but due to the erosion present and the different styles featured are in fact indicative of more than one attempt to conserve these marvelous structures for future generations. Thus one must conclude by more than one now extinct advanced civilization. As such, the age of the sarcophagus of Cheops could be immense, so it is not surprising that it has encountered not only grave robbers, but has been vandalized also at points within the distant past. Furthermore, and perhaps most intriguing and frustrating, is that the sarcophagus lid is missing, a lid that could have explained the past contents of this mysterious box, or, like the Tomb of Pakal, exposed extremely controversial illustrations of possible past technologies. Unfortunately, however, or rather most conveniently for academics, this lid has never been discovered. Yet what is most perplexing regarding this diorite box, notably one of the hardest workable stones on earth, is that no one seems to know how the original builders managed to transport the box to its current location, deep within the bowels of Cheops. The diameter of this supposed tomb, being too large to have traveled down any of the known tunnels, which have so far been discovered within the ancient pyramid. This leaves us with two likely possibilities. One, that the diorite box was placed there, and the pyramid built around it, which is a mysterious and confusing hypothesis, mostly due to the lack of markings of significance found upon the sarcophagus, or indeed the lack of any dedicated markings found anywhere else surrounding it. It is as though the box was placed there without much effort to indicate any importance to its existence. Yet to cut such a box, which has since been discovered to have been cast from one single block of diorite, would have taken tremendous effort, a feat that modern man would only accomplish with the use of diamond-edged power tools. Not to mention the effort that would have been involved in moving this multi-ton stone into its found location. The second hypothesis regarding how this sarcophagus found its way into its current location is that the box itself was transported to its found location through tunnels and passageways we are yet to discover, possibly hinting at the fact that within this great pyramid, there are indeed many more hidden layers and cavities we are yet to explore or discover. Maybe the placement of this seemingly inanimate box was placed there to suggest exactly this. Furthermore, what was on the lid of this supposed sarcophagus? Why is it known as the sarcophagus of Kufu, when Kufu was not discovered within it? In fact, nothing was discovered within it, and why is the lid mysteriously absent? Where did the lid to this sarcophagus go? Why, if destroyed by grave robbers, was it not left where it lay? Did this lid contain controversial information, possibly pertaining to the original contents or indeed purpose of the great pyramids? We find the diorite sarcophagus of Kufu, and indeed its unexplainable journey into the center of the pyramid, highly compelling. When we first explore the suppressed yet very real secret passageways littering the Sphinx base and structure, we were confronted with compelling evidence to suggest another Sphinx existed, on the other side of the African continent in Zender. Not only were there still existing remnants of this once spectacular structure, but there also remains the clearly recognizable and notoriously erosion-resistant accompanying pyramids. However, what some may find astonishing is that exactly 6000 km to the east, in a place known as Baluchistan-Pakistan, another Sphinx can also be found, clearly of a similar antiquity. Supporting the suspicion claimed many times on our channel that a civilization which far preceded the ancient Egyptians actually built these amazing pyramids. Known as the Sphinx of Baluchistan, many funded academics have strongly denied the possibility of this familiar-looking formation being of man-made origin, and many attempt to claim that its familiar shape, along with the surrounding environment's artificial appearance, is mere coincidental, and that the entire area is just a natural formation. These conclusions, made with no official archaeological investigations, ever being undertaken at the site. Thankfully, however, an equal number of individuals who have actually visited this site, most self-funded, have actually concluded the complete opposite. Graham Hancock being but one individual who has concluded that the site is indeed of very ancient Sphinx, quite possibly dating back to the last precision of Leo some 12,500 years ago. As Graham's website put it, the Sphinx appears to be decked up in a headdress that closely resembles the nemes headdress of the Egyptian pharaoh. The nemes headdress is a striped headcloth that covers the crown and the back of the head. It has two large conspicuous flaps which hang down behind the ears and in front of the shoulders. The Sphinx has horizontal groove across its forehead, which corresponds to the pharaonic headband that holds the nemes headdress in place. One can easily make out the contours of the reclining forelegs of the Sphinx, which terminate in very well-defined paws. It is difficult to see how nature could have carved out a statue that resembles a well-known mythological animal to such an astonishingly accurate degree. We find it disappointing, yet not surprising, that many individuals within modern academia accredited with many titles to their name and thus much educational responsibility would defend a paradigm regardless of investigative support, a highly unprofessional yet repeated practice across many fields. The Sphinx is perceived by nearly all concerned as a symbol of protection, a guarding force which was often erected at sacred or highly important sites. And the Sphinx of Baluchistan is no different, appearing to be guarding a temple-like structure nearby. Many have concluded that the Baluchistan Sphinx temple site actually retains clear evidence of pillars, a temple entrance, an elevated sculpted structure to the left of the entrance, along with much more interesting geology in the surrounding area. Is the Baluchistan really just a natural formation? If so, why has no official investigation been undertaken? It is clearly a very controversial archaeological site, and one we find highly compelling. The Queen's Chamber, which lays within the Great Pyramid of Khufu, more commonly known as Cheops, has astonished, shocked, and mystified Egyptologists since its mysterious existence was discovered. The intrigue into this elusive chamber, along with its mysterious adjacent shafts, comes as no surprise once one understands the anomalous characteristics of their construction. As we have already covered before, massive cover-ups have been suspected as taking place surrounding this mysterious chamber since its discovery. Strange shaft tunnels, set at a 45-degree incline, no larger than 20 cm in diameter, run away from this room, and no one seems to know why. Not only would these ancient shafts require being hermetically sealed during the pyramid's construction to stop them from becoming blocked, but the excruciating effort that would have gone into making them becomes all the more of a confusing undertaking once you realize they were not even connected to the chamber but hidden 40 cm away from entering the tomb within the walls, completely invisible from the inside of the burial room located deep within the structure. Cheops, noticeably being the only pyramid to have ever been constructed with such shafts, making their addition a popular mystery within Egyptian history. One leads out from the subterranean chamber, two lead out from a termination point some 40 cm from the wall of the so-called queen's chamber, or now popularly suspected to be that of an alien tomb among ancient alien specialists, and two from the king's chamber Here is where our story becomes interesting. Rudolf Gantenbrek, famous for actually discovering the blocking door within one of the queen's chamber shafts, which could lead to an as yet undisclosed tomb, has also made other curious discoveries within the Great Pyramid. Discoveries which could only be explained by modern covert explorations of tunnels that were supposedly to that point unexplored. Gantenbrek's cache being but one example of these mysterious finds deep within the tunnel systems in the royal chamber at a 90-degree turn going vertically upwards, a pile of papers, possibly wrapped artifacts, weighed down with a small piece of timber or stone, possibly another artifact, was discovered by Gantenbrek's robot. Also, during initial location attempts to find access tunnels leading to the queen's chamber, several blocking stones required removal. After the removal of the seventh block, a modern era hexagonal steel rods were discovered discarded upon the tunnel's floor. Each section of the hexagonal steel rods measures 2.7 m in length, and was fitted with a round socket which allowed them to be joined to the next section. In one of the lower shafts in 1872, Wainman-Dixon found three more objects, which could be considered proof of prior covert exploration of the mysterious northern shafts. A copper grappling hook, about 5 cm in length, accompanied by a small gray-green stone ball and a broken-off piece of a square wooden slat or rod, about 13 cm long, the woodwood today be the most intriguing of his finds. These artifacts expected to be remnants of the grave robbers' tools could have been carbon-dated, yet this fragment is the only one of the three to now be missing out of the London Museum's collection. Unfortunately, in his writings, Dixon doesn't say in which of the two lower shafts he actually found the objects, but he mentions them in connection with the northern one. Not only did these obviously highly intelligent people leave evidence of how they must have gotten in, but also traces upon the previous untouched ancient walls of the shafts within geops, clearly left by their previous robotic technologies. Other square metal rods have been recovered, along with other artifacts discarded within some tunnel systems deep within the ancient structures, meaning these guys got to the treasures way before we did. Interestingly, reported evidence of covert excavations continues to this day. Heavy-duty electrical supplies discreetly running into and trailing deep into the pyramids have been noticed and photographed by some of the more astute tourists. Witnesses to the sounds of heavy machinery being used beneath the site is also frequently reported, yet rarely followed up. It seems it's not a question of whether brilliant minds have achieved the seemingly impossible in penetrating these secret layers, but more a question of how and what astonishing finds have possibly been kept concealed. In the first wing of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, close to the room of the mummies, one cannot help but be surprised by what you will discover. In a small inconspicuous display cabinet, an object like no other can be found. Made from a brittle stone known as shisht, it is similar in shape to a wheel or discus. This mysterious and to this day unexplained item has become known among particular circles as the trilobed disc. It has perplexed all those who have examined it, especially the select Egyptologists that have had the opportunity to study it at great length. Its discoverer is known as one of the most important Egyptologists of the 20th century, author of a classic volume on Egyptology, Archaic Egypt, that continues to be an important bibliographic reference of study even to this day. While carrying out excavations in 1936 within the archaeological zone of Sakura, Emery discovered the tomb of Prince Sabu. Among several utensils of varying function, the trilobed disc would be found. Emery's attention was immediately drawn to the object, initially defining it in his reports on the first dynasty tombs as, quote, a container in the form of shisht bull. Years later, he again commented on the subject with a word that perfectly summarized the reality of the situation, indicating to the discomfort the object was causing, describing it as a kachibachi, a small hole that threatens to become bigger and bigger. It seems Emery, like many others within the same field, retained their success in notoriety by deliberately and publicly denying such artifacts any traction within the public domain, denying us all a true understanding of Egyptian history, or at least a questioning of the currently upheld teachings. He finished his quotation by stating that, a satisfactory explanation has not yet been obtained on the particular design of this object, or indeed its construction. The accepted and predictably rigid view regarding the introduction of the wheel into ancient Egypt coincided with the invasion of the Hiskos at the end of the medium empire in 1640 BC, this date being over a thousand years after the disk's construction. Egyptologist Cyril Alred reached the conclusion that the object was, without a doubt, a copy of a previously much older metallic object. A detail next to the orifice in the center also made him suspect that this object was only a small part of a more complex mechanism, and that it was saved thanks to a stone reproduction for unknown reasons, made by an artist with unknown tools. And the fact that it demonstrates such a complex design at such a primitive time in ancient Egyptian history suggests its origins may have been far more unusual than modern tenets would have you believe. It is highly possible that this artifact is a fragment of one's highly advanced technologies, which have subsequently been lost over the millennia. Regardless of hypothesis, its true function, history, or indeed construction, its reason for existence remains a mystery to this day. If you enjoy our content, if you think our battle worthy, please help us to continue our voyage of discovery in unraveling the mysteries of history. Links to donate can be found within the description. Without you, we cannot survive. Thank you.


So, Word Camp Atlanta, it's 9 a.m. on Sunday, and I am very happy to see all of you here, not too hungover from the after party last night, hopefully. And so today, I am here to try and help everyone in this room avoid all of the landmines that I stepped on, so very, very delicately and accidentally over and over and over again for the last 15 years of my career, seven years starting off as a freelancer, and then the last eight years starting to grow a small agency, and then this year we have a team of 10 salaried employees and we are about a million dollar a year agency at this stage. So it took us a long time to get there, and we're going to talk about some hard lessons learned throughout that process this morning. Just before I get started, just to give me a rough idea of where everybody in the room is, how many in here work for somebody else? You're an employee, you're on a team, or you have an employer currently? Okay. Okay. So here are full-time or part-time freelancers, okay, awesome. And is there anybody in the room that runs a small business with employees or an agency? Okay. Okay. Awesome. We got a good mix. So this applies to everybody that falls into that range. If you didn't raise your hand for any of those, I assume that you're either a Nigerian prince or perhaps you inherited a lot of money from an uncle in Alaska. I think those are the only other two options there. Good morning everybody. Good morning. All right. So we're going to jump right into this fun. I'm going to be taking us down a road today. This story is a long hard road and our goal as we're going on our journey in building our business, building our agency, building our freelancer universe is to try and stay on the main road, try and stay out of the weeds, and that's what we're going to talk about a little bit more now. So here's the road to success. And I'm going to start off with a long road of failure here. I come from a very, very long line of business owners. All of them lower-class business owners. Just to be very, very clear here, I looked back in my family history and the oldest record I have of a business owner in my family was a Smithie in the Highlands in New England. There's actually a hamlet in New England that is called High Forge. It's in the Highlands up there. So that's actually the oldest place. I don't know if that's actually where the Smithie was, but it's close enough and that's kind of where the name of our agency came from. I'm guessing that that's about what's left of it today. So that's our first record of a failed business in our family. My grandfather, he ran a cement business into the ground. He had way too many friends. In fact, all of his clients were his friends. He gave his business away.  There's only a handful of people like that in the world. Not necessarily in high demand, but if you need a master leather Smith, you're going to have to look pretty hard to find one. And my mother for the last 30 years of her life has built custom leather creations for about $10 an hour. Failed business. And then my dad. My dad was the nicest guy you'll ever meet in your life. He was born in 1929. He grew up in the Great Depression. He spent his entire life giving everything he earned away to other people. Literally the shirt off his back. I saw him do it once on the side of the road. He was a mechanic. He pulled over on the side of the road any time a hood was up. It didn't matter where we were. If we were late to something, if we were going to church, it didn't matter. He was pulling over. He was helping them fix their car. And his mechanic shop, he literally did most of his work for free. He's like, you buy the parts, I'll take care of the rest.  Thanks for fixing my stuff. And the bottom line is all of them ultimately failed businesses. Not saying that they didn't have a rewarding life doing it, but they weren't able to sustain them. They weren't able to bring other people into their enterprise. They weren't able to help other people succeed. This is also a common scenario where we'd be driving along the road, and he would pull over really, really fast for this. So there are some other dangers here. When you're giving your business away, there's a lot of things that we're going to go over today. We're going to kind of touch on these points a little bit more and more. Just read that, learn it, memorize it, burn it into your mind. Be very, very aware of the most important part of your life, which is your time. The one thing in the world that you can never get back is your time. So be very, very aware of how you're using it, and think about how much you can help more people if you handle your time wisely instead of just freely giving to the first person that asks you for it. Let's move further down this road. If you give, make it a strategy. If somebody asks you to give, and it's not a part of a strategy that you've already planned in advance, don't give, think twice. So as you can see, I'm going to back up here. We went from the main road over here. We're going to jump off the road, and we're going to go way off into the weeds here. If you haven't read a book called Atlas Shrugged, this is where the term looter comes from, but looters are people who are very, very good at asking for help and are not very good at rewarding other people for getting that help. And so I'm going to say some things. For all the freelancers and agency owners in here, you have very, very likely heard one or all of these phrases in the course of your career so far. And these are the things. These are the keyword phrases that you should be putting in your anti-SEO vocabulary. You want these to be your negative keywords for doing business with people. Can you do it cheap or free because we're about to get funding or national exposure and you'll get all of our future work? We're a popular nonprofit and we'll give you credit and sponsorship credit on our future events. Tens of thousands of people will see your name up in lights at all of our events. I will be the first to tell you that that does not lead to future business. No matter how many times you do it, it does not lead to future business. It does not lead to other people knowing who you are or how awesome you are. Please help us be a hero and save our hacked or broken website now and we'll pay you later and give you lots more work. Yeah, the do the work now and we'll pay you later scenario. That is absolutely not the way to get respect in your business. Do this for me cheap and I'll refer you to some big companies I know who need your help and I'll give you all of my future work at full price too. Right? Yeah, so if they were going to pay you full price, why don't they do it now? If they respected you and if they respected the quality of your work, they would pay full price up front every time. And hey, I can't afford you, but I'll pay you this flat amount. That's all I got. This is my budget for the project.  However you want to do the project is totally up to you. I'll make it so easy on you that it won't even feel like work. So if you haven't stepped on this landmine before, I will tell you now that this is the most difficult client to work with.  I think the last time I stepped on that landmine, it was an $8,000 project. It was about $25,000 in labor by the time it was done. And that was about five years ago and that's the last time we ever did a flat rate project based on someone else's limited budget. So let's get back over to the road here. What is another way that you're giving away your business and you don't even realize it? This guy here, discounting is one of those ways that sneaks up on you and you have no idea how much of your business you're giving away until it's too late. We started in QuickBooks about five years ago, we started tracking our discounts. And then at the end of the year, we pulled up a report and we looked at the total dollar figure of discounts we were giving away at 10% here, 5% there, $100 off this project, $25 off hosting, whatever the number was, we added it all up. And it turns out we were giving about 25% of our business away over the course of a year over what our, quote, retail prices were. And the reality was, all of those people would have paid our full rate. Had we not offered the discount, had we just simply said, we don't do discounts. This is what we are worth. That 25% I could have used to catapult my business at a much higher trajectory, higher on better talent, people who are even more amazing at their job, than I am at doing any one thing in the business. And then be doing much better work. And then in fact, charging more money than our normal retail rates. So you can kind of see the steam rule that can occur by discounting. Be very, very careful about that. So here are some dangers in it. Offering discounts is a form of selling on your price.  And you're saying, hey, it's just a price thing. It's just dollars. And let's focus on how much something costs instead of how much I'm worth, right? So any reduction in your price damages your integrity. This is a really important point. It's a very important psychological point. If you discount your prices, the reality is, people will respect you less, and they will trust you less, believe it or not. They actually did some studies on this. And the studies were really, really simple. They had people, two different groups, and they've done a study over and over again. One group bought it at full price, and one group got it at a severe discount. They both got the same exact thing, product and services they've done this test on. And they did a study afterwards to ask people what they felt, how they felt about the value of what they got. And the people who paid full price every single time were happier with the end result. So, I kind of have a little bit of nice guy disease. I think a lot of people in here, anybody who would call themselves a people, pleaser falls into this realm. And I am calling it a little bit of a disease. However, it can be cured and you can still stay nice. And these are some of my tactics to handle that scenario. If something is small, let's say we've been doing work for a client on a regular basis. Let's say it's a scoped project, so we gave them a flat rate price. And they ask for something that's in a little bit of a gray area. Maybe it's just a little bit out of scope. We really should be charging that client for that extra time. If it's not a big thing, this is my favorite thing to use in the world. I'm giving a client a one-time warning. This is my, I'm being nice, hey, we're going to do this for you. It's no extra cost. I am going to have a communication. I'm going to have a conversation with the client about this thing so that they know this is the only time that will ever happen. And so they're very, very thankful. And then they're expecting to get charged the next time it happens. So yeah, total win-win for everybody. Going back onto the discount scenario, there are worlds where discounts are absolutely critical to a business. For example, if you're selling a product or a SaaS type of a thing, or you've got some sort of business that has a cyclical scenario, you've got a lot of competition in some scenario. Again, this is going back to, if you're giving it away, you have a very, very good strategy for it. You can use discounts as a strategy, but only, only if you're giving the reason for why you're giving the discount. If the client's asking you for it, you don't have a strategy there. It's like, oh, well, okay, I'll do it cheaper. No, it doesn't work that way. You actually have to say, hey, I am giving you this discount up front to buy right now, but it's because we're doing this just for the winter and this is a summer business that we have, so we're doing it for that reason.  If you're paying for everything in advance, let's say a retainer that you normally do monthly and somebody wants to pay for it a year in advance and you're getting that cash flow benefit, there's a valid reason to give a little bit of a discount there. All right, so here's another way that everybody gives their business away. A lot of people do. I know I did for a long time. At one point, again, about five years ago, I think we had 60 different clients with overdue invoices and those invoices ranged in being overdue from 30 days all the way up to one of them was at 235 days, I believe. None of them were getting penalized for being late. None of them were sent to collections. We were quite literally giving our business away in just not chasing people for getting paid. So try and move, and this is what we've done. We're getting paid upfront for everything that we do now, with rare exception. For some enterprise level clients, we're doing a 50% upfront, which is technically getting the payment for the whole project cost upfront. And then we get our profit on the end, or we might have, if it's a much larger project, let's say it's a six month or 12 month project, we may have regular milestones with payments attached to them. But if we don't get paid for that next milestone, we literally stop the project and then we charge them a fee to reboot the project once they pick it back up again whenever that payment comes in. Net terms is a dangerous thing. Whether it's net 10, whether it's net 15, whether it's net 30, what you're saying is I'm going to do the work now and you can pay me later. If you've got really, really good clients, maybe you can get away with that. But the reality is, is you're giving away your cash flow. And if you start to get really busy, and let's say you're trying to pay yourself, you're trying to pay your bills, or you're trying to pay your first team member or something like that, and you get a bunch of work all at once, and they're all paying net 30, you will have what you call a cash flow crisis.  If you can't pay your bills or you can't pay your employee because you have 10 projects that came in simultaneously and you have to cover the costs yourself for the first 30 days and you don't have that much in the bank, you are sitting on a landmine. So be very wary of those net terms in the beginning because it will scale up and potentially harm you later. So here's another little trick for larger clients. They've got billing cycles. What we noticed is that we were sending bills to clients and it was on a net 30 basis. And we were getting paid at 45 days consistently every single time. So what you do in that scenario, you can actually call the client, get a hold of their controller and say, hey, what's your billing cycle? On this date every month, if you get in the invoice, then it will get put in their earlier billing cycle. You won't actually fall in between the cracks between their cycles and you will start getting paid on time every time. You just got to know what their little secret sauce on the timing is. If clients are late, you can offer discounts to pay you faster or you can work towards ending the relationship. That's honestly how strongly I feel about this subject. There are all sorts of different tools online. FreshBooks does it, ViewPost does it, Fat Merchant does it. Lots of cool startups are doing it where you can send invoices to clients and it will be built right into the secret sauce that if they pay you really, really fast on something, they'll get a 1% or a 2% discount. And if cash flow is really important to you, offering that 1% or 2% discount moves you to the top of their vendor payment line and you will get paid very, very quickly if you haven't gone to the all up front method like we have. So this might be really hard. We had a client that had been with us for 15 years. Ever since I was a freelancer, they had started as a mom and pop shop. I helped grow their business into 300 plus employees over the course of the relationship. But they kind of treated us like family. We kind of treated them like family. And they just never paid on time. I mean, literally not once in the history of that company do they ever pay us on time? It was just like they'll get to it when they get to it and usually I'd have to remind them three or four times a month. And eventually I got to the point where I was like, hey guys, we love you to death. You're amazing. We'd love to keep you as a client. Unfortunately our business model no longer allows us to work with clients that pay past their due date. So either you guys can remedy the situation or we're gonna have to move on. Let me tell you, that was very, very hard. This was a client that was paying us a large retainer. But the reality was I was stressed out about it all the time. I was chasing them all the time. And we'd gotten to the point where we had a enough good clients now that it was not as painful to say goodbye to the tough clients, the ones that bring stress. And so that was exactly how it went down. They paid on time for about 90 days and then they went right back to their old habits and then we helped them transition to working with another agency. So other ways to speed things up, just make sure that you have a way for people to be able to pay online obviously. And then I'll give you just a quick little trick that helped us dramatically. And it's specifically using a piece of SaaS software that's not super popular. A lot of people don't know about it yet. But again, back five years ago, actually this was about three years ago, we still had, I wanna say we had about, we had about 45 overdue invoices. We signed up for a piece of software called Invoice Sherpa. And Invoice Sherpa basically automates chasing clients for payments. And we tied into that system. And in a matter of three weeks, our 35 late invoices went down to two. Honestly, it was like some sort of like miracle occurred. I think, I'm pretty sure I heard a chorus in the background, lift up and harmony. It was awesome.  All right, so this is another thing that I was doing all the time. As a people pleaser, I like to just do an awesome job. I like to do, I like to go above and beyond and deliver way more than they were expecting and do it quietly. And I say that again, do it quietly because hey, if you do a good job, you shouldn't need to tell anybody you did a good job. They should just know it on their own, right? Every good boss should recognize your good work without you having to tell them, right? I will tell you, it's a dramatic world of difference when I started standing on top of a mountain and screaming to the client, I did you this favor. Just want to let you know. Occasionally you'll run into a client, that will make them kind of angry. They're like, stop telling me what you're doing, you're awesome, okay, you can leave that client alone. But everybody else scream it because none of them know it. None of them have any clue how much awesome value you're giving them. Let no favor go unspoken in your business from this day forward. It will make a dramatic difference in the perceived value that your clients and customers have. Yeah, so there's two different ways. If it's a big favor, it's always a phone call. If it's a big favor, it's something that took more than a couple hours to do and it's not technically something maybe that they paid for or maybe you were able to work it in. It wasn't part of scope but you were able to make it work within the time frame. I give them a call and say, hey, look, this is this really cool thing that we did. I wanted to let you know that it wasn't part of the deal but I think you might be really impressed with the thing. Another way that I build it into our process now, actually our team, when they're building out websites, I don't have time to go in and look at all the cool things that they did. So I've actually trained my entire team to make a running bullet point list of all the cool features or things that we worked into a project as we were going along and when we launch or when we release the code to the client, we give them this list of all the cool extra value ads that we worked into it and then the feedback that we get from that point is usually overwhelming and dramatic. They'll give us reviews and testimonials. When in the past they were like, okay, thanks for the thing. Now they're like, oh my gosh, thanks for the thing. So yeah, that's the two of the ways that we do it. So qualify potential clients early. This is about giving it a way up front. Giving it a way up front is all of the conversations and emails that you have with somebody before you have a check in your hand. These are other ways that you're giving your business away and you don't realize it.  So those four things are the most important things but I'm actually gonna go out on a line and say that of all of those things, the power to buy, the money, they're kind of interrelated. The power to buy means that there's somebody in the company who has the ability to get a check stroked. So a marketing manager might say that, hey, the CEO has to sign off on purchasing this. So then that person technically that you're talking to does not have the power to buy. You need that CEO in the room to get that power to buy. But money is the key. And how do you find out if somebody has enough money for your project without wasting time on them? We wasted hundreds of hours one year when we started tracking, hundreds of hours. And what turns out is if we had just asked a couple questions up front or given a very loose ballpark range on a project before we get into the details of something, then we would have saved those hundreds of hours of labor. I mean, honestly, it's unbelievable. So just asking a couple questions. Sometimes you can do some research. When somebody comes in, if a new client or customer is coming in and they're hitting you from a Gmail or Yahoo account, likely they do not have the power to buy, they do not have the money. You need to qualify them aggressively. If they're a large enterprise level client or they're a brand name in your local market, you don't have to qualify them as aggressively, but you still need to get them a range upfront to make sure it's within their realm of viability. So the faster you get money in your pocket from a client, I promise you the more that they will respect you. If you do a lot of discovery work for them upfront, if you help them build a scope of work, if you create documents for them on how to plan it out, if you work with them to determine what technology should be used, oh yeah, we're gonna use WordPress, we're gonna use all of these plugins, this is how we're gonna solve the problem. If you're doing all of that without a check in your hand, you are giving your business away. Perhaps the most important part of your business, the most valuable part of your business is being given away in that scenario. So even with our enterprise level clients now, we are getting a discovery fee or a project audit, money upfront before we have a second meeting with them every single time. There are no exceptions to that. If they wanna do business with us, they're paying for our time to figure things out if they haven't already got it figured out themselves. Yeah, we're gonna have questions right at the end if you wanna, because I gotta burn through this real quick and then just save it and we're gonna have like 15 minutes for that and then of course I'll be here for you for everything after that. And this is where I'm saying, get paid for, you can call it any number of these things, discovering, audits, planning, these are all different ways that you're gonna give your business away that you should be getting charged for. So let's jump on down the road here. There's a little bit of word to the wise. This is something that I've, we haven't run into, but I know some people that this has happened to, but on a weekly basis now, we get solicited by a new client that's like, hey, you guys look awesome. We looked at your website. You guys do awesome work. You're amazing. We wanna hire you sight unseen. We're ready to rock on this project right now. It's a $10,000 project. Hey, do you accept credit cards? So this is the key. This is the absolute key. I promise you, if any of you have a website and you do kind of digital work, the fraudsters are targeting everybody in this audience right now. And I know people who are at this word camp who have been affected by this specific type of fraud. What happens is, they will absolutely pay you with a credit card upfront. You will be like, oh my gosh, I just made the most money on a project upfront I've ever made in my life. This is awesome. And then they're like, by the way, we've got this other vendor that you're working with and they only accept cash. So we're actually gonna pay you more than the project's worth.  And you get to keep the rest, right? Money's already in your bank account. Like, okay, it seems obvious, okay, you do the thing. Well, it doesn't matter whether you do the thing or not. That is a stolen credit card. You will start to spend that money and then you will get a charge back for all of it. And you will lose it every single time. So the key phrase is here, and these guys will send you all sorts of messages, all sorts of different ways. They'll say they're deaf so they can't talk on the phone. They'll say that they're a wounded Vietnam vet. There are all sorts of tactics that they use. But the one thing that they all say upfront is do you take credit cards in the first communication they have? If you see that, run screaming for the hills, you know they're the bad guys. All right, so another way, you're giving your business away. You probably heard this preached if you've been to other word camps in the past, this is a very common subject, it's a very common topic. And how you raise your prices, the way that you do it, the methods that you use, the style that you have. All of them are applicable. I'll kind of briefly run through some of those today. But the first thing I will say is 90% of this room is charging way too little for what they're doing. And that might be a conservative number. Everybody in here is worth more than they're charging. And in fact, I'm gonna raise my hand on that one too. I'm not charging what my agency is worth right now. Our agency hourly is 150, but the honest truth is is I've seen other agencies who don't do work as good as us charging 250 and 350 an hour. Just doing WordPress consulting work and small commercial websites. You will be absolutely shocked what your value is in this market today. The people who build the internets should be charging what lawyers are charging, honestly. You're the core of their business. You're where their business is born.  You're the ones building it. Let's get what we're worth. So level up regularly. A good tactic for leveling up regularly. How about this?  Do that every time until you start to get pushback. That's how you find what you're worth. Until you, and not just one pushback, until you're consistently getting pushback on your price. Raise your price 20% every time you get a new lead. You will find out very, very quickly what you're worth and what people are willing to pay for how confident you are in selling the thing that you're doing. Set expectations up front and remind clients in advance of price increases. So here's another very important point. If you bring somebody in, it's on a monthly or it's a retainer, don't let that sit. Tell them that this holds for 90 days or this holds for a year or these rates are good for X amount of time. Build that into your contract so that, and then put it on your calendar so that you get to have a conversation regularly about your rates. If you don't create a talking point in the expectations up front, it makes it really awkward and weird to call them out of the blue and say, hey, we gotta raise our rates. It's so much easier to say, hey, remember when we signed up on your contract, it looks like we've hit our 90 day point or we've hit our year point and we're gonna talk about our rates. You've actually been a wonderful client.  There's a lot of really nice ways to still have it but they're expecting the conversation. It's not awkward, they're expecting it. They know that it's coming. So, and every time you raise them, you do need to have reasons. You need to be confident about it. Hey, I have a lot more experience than when we first started working together. Hey, we've added new resources to our team. We're actually providing a higher level of service now. We're doing cool things. We've added this new piece to what we're doing here. Whatever it is, just make sure that you're not arbitrarily doing it. That being said, SiteGround for example is arbitrarily raising their prices. They did give a reason though and this is awesome. I don't know if anybody saw the email from SiteGround a couple weeks ago. They're a great hosting company, awesome folks and they just sent an email and said, hey, everybody thinks we're too cheap. So we're raising our prices so people think we're more valuable. That's literally the reason they gave which is an awesome reason you gotta have respect for that. But when you're raising your prices, you need to be, when you go to a client and if they say, oh, I can't work with you then, you absolutely, before you even start the conversation, you need to be willing to lose the client. It happens exceptionally rarely if it's handled well but you can't have confidence and you can't raise that price if you're not confident. Cause if they say no and you still agree, you're stuck.  They own you and they will never respect you again. So stand firm. Here's another way we're all giving our businesses away. Nonprofits, social companies, I love nonprofits. I absolutely spend a ton of my volunteer time working with nonprofits and we certainly do pro bono work for nonprofits but the first five years of my business, I was doing pro bono work for nonprofits that asked me to help them. These weren't companies I was passionate about. Yeah, they all had awesome causes but they weren't companies I was personally passionate about. Just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should. These are really, really good questions here. This is the important point.  If somebody comes to you and asks for free work, the answer by default is no.   That is the key determination on how to do it. So be proactive, not reactive to giving your business away in that sense. So you can give your business away for three things, money, knowledge, and relationships. I think when you do work for anybody, I feel like you're gaining knowledge and you're building a relationship every time by default. So why not make it all three? And that leads us to the end of the road and a lot of success, hopefully for all of you and hopefully you will step on less of these landmines. But every single thing you saw in there is something that I have done and it has harmed my business. And what you're looking at right now is a wounded warrior. Not in the literal sense, I don't wanna take anything away from our vets, but every agency wound that you can get, every psychological scar that you can get from being too nice for somebody, I have been slapped for it. No good favor goes unpunished. I can't tell you enough how many times I went out of my way to save somebody or help them solve an impossible problem only for them to walk all over us at the end of that project only because I didn't set it up right up front, I didn't get the respect that I deserved before we started and I didn't make sure that they know how awesome of a job we did it all the way through to the end of the project. So we're good. This is, we're about perfect on time so I like to have a lot of time for questions afterwards so, thank you. And I'm gonna repeat your questions because it'll be on wordpress.tv so make them good because they'll make you famous too. So, Karen, yeah, Karen has a great point when somebody's asking you for pro bono work or a discount, say we have a certain amount that we can give away every year and we've already given away that amount, feel free to come back and approach us next year. So, yeah, that's a great tactic. Yeah. You said that you always have a summary feeling when you try to get back and sign how do you handle it? Yeah, so actually we're testing out three different ways right now but I'll give you kind of the two that we're doing the most of. First off, Discovery is a slippery slope. It could take two hours, it could take 200 hours to do Discovery on a project. The more you're in business and the more you see the same kind of projects coming in, the more you kind of get a good feel for how long it'll take to figure something out but there is a mystery portion to this that you can't control, which is the client. Like every client's totally different, like you already know what this project's gonna take, you know it'll take about 10 hours to do Discovery on this project but what you didn't count on was the fact that this client is gonna ask a million questions and they're gonna change their mind 10 times in the middle of Discovery. That 10 hours is now 40 hours, right? So how do you control that? So there's a couple of things. Typically for small stuff, yeah, we're gonna charge like a thousand dollar for a flat Discovery, for almost anything as a minimum, just for us to get engaged with somebody. It's not worth it to do it for just a couple hours. So yeah, we'll charge a thousand dollars or if it's a large project, we might charge five or even $10,000 but then yeah, whatever time and materials aren't used in that would get applied towards the actual quote that's being generated from Discovery. At the end of Discovery, you're putting together an actual scope of work with dollar value with scope. So yeah, you can do the credit method but then there's another way that you can do this as well. You can just do flat time and materials. As much time as they're willing to pay for it. You're charging them on rent. Right, so we're charging them in labor blocks upfront. So let's say we do 10 hours of labor or 30 hours of labor or whatever the amount is. We're charged by the block upfront. The money is in our hand before we set the meeting. And in fact, because they want the meeting so bad, they will pay it way faster than they normally would. They wanna get started. So that solves the problem we were talking about earlier about getting money upfront because it'll get you the respect and it'll get you their proper attention. So charging that block of time upfront allows you to then start doing the work. When you get close to the end of the block, you tell them, hey, it looks like it's gonna take longer. We're continuing on. If they're enjoying working with you, if they like the process, if they feel confident that you're going the right direction, they will pay for that other block. But you need to tell them that when this block runs out, we stop until the next one is paid. We will literally stop and not have the meeting. So make sure, make sure you tell your billing team, that's gotta get paid really quick because we're getting close to the end of this block and we wanna keep going on this. Does that make sense? Yeah, so that was technically two of them. One of them is to charge some sort of flat rate and then credit towards the end. The other one is to do blocks. And then the other one, which we did for a little while, but we don't do anymore, is just tracking time and materials. We say, hey, client, what limit do you wanna put on how much money we spend on discovery? We let them kind of pick a limit. They say, oh, well, don't spend more than 20 hours on it at whatever your hourly rate is or don't spend more than five hours on it at whatever your hourly rate is. And we're like, okay, no problem. We track our time on it and when we hit that limit, we send them a bill. And so we're doing it in arrears in that way. Does that make sense? And so some of them, where money is not an object and they're gonna pay on time every time, you can just track time and materials and invoice that every week on however much time you spend. So let's say you could spend five hours on a week or you could spend 60 hours on it on a week as long as you're not surprising the client with a bill, you're doing it the right way. I wanna repeat that. That's a really important point. If you don't surprise a client with a bill, then you're doing it the right way. There should never be a scenario where a client gets a bill and they're like, what? And their eyebrows go up? Yeah, don't know. That always has to be communicated up front. There always needs to be a stopping point where they agree, they won't spend more than that and hey, if it goes higher than that, let us know in advance. And so that's how we do business. So yeah, in the back. What are some of the main drivers to get good clients in the door? What are some of the main drivers to get good clients? Good clients or any clients? Good clients, great clients. Yeah, so the reality is there are two effective ways of getting new business. The first and by far the most powerful is literally what you're doing right now. Everybody in this room is doing the most important thing they can do to get new good clients and that is networking. Showing up at a tech event, you're in person. You're doing more than 99% of the other people out there who are trying to start up a business in their home. Everyone in this room is doing that stuff. I would say take it even further. You shouldn't just be going to tech events. You should be going to local networking events. You should be getting involved in the Chamber of Commerce. You should be joining referral lead groups like B&I or any of the meetup groups. If there's, and here's another thing. This is important. If you join a group and you're in that group for a year, you should consider taking your time. No matter how much you like the group, you should consider taking the same time you've invested in that group and move to another group the following year. You will find an entirely new circle of people that you can do business with. So, okay, that's the physical world of getting new business. The other way is digital marketing. Everybody in here probably has a rough idea of what digital marketing is, but the reality is is when you're a shoestring budget startup, you have to get creative online. There are all sorts of free, awesome tools, though, that you can use that don't cost money to build clientele online. I'll give you an example. One of our larger enterprise clients, we literally picked up off of a WordPress question forum on Facebook. This guy went in there and posted, hey, I need some help with this thing, and all these people responded and said, hey, you should go ask this other company. They specialize in that thing. I was like, huh, those people don't know who I am, but I'm gonna message that guy personally and I'm gonna say, hey, that company, everybody's recommending, they're awesome. If you can afford them, do business with them. But we do similar quality of work and we're in Orlando and we have a different price point than them and we can do the same kind of thing. So if you're interested, let me know. They're one of our best clients today. That totally cost me nothing. I didn't pay a penny on Google AdWords. I didn't have to advertise on Facebook. I was just hanging out in the right places online and that's really the key. Whatever you're passionate about, the thing that you love to do, go join all of the groups online, all of those forums and start answering everybody's questions. I promise you, we'll lead a business. Yeah. No, no, okay, so yeah, great question. So he was asking about discounts for clients on invoices. So there's two different things. Clients who pay late, my suggestion is simply have a conversation with them about how they can't do that anymore if they wanna continue to do business with you. They won't be the best client for you long term. The percentage discounts, those are for clients that pay early and this is different than clients who are paying up front. So a lot of people are still doing invoice billing on net terms. If you've got a net 30 or something with a client and agreement for a net 30 already, offer them a one or 2% discount off their bill if they pay in the first five days. So that's exactly, yeah, exactly. She had her hand, I'll come back around. Yep. Some of your paying, the client's paying, all of a sudden, let's say you're getting, you're doing 50% and 50% or one third, one third, one third and they stop paying. They say, we wanna take our project to somebody else because they don't like your rates anymore or whatever else. Do you give them that project or do you say, I'm sorry, do you have something that, is it theirs at that point if it's not a completed project? That is actually a very gray area and let me repeat her question. Her question is, if you're doing a milestone project that has set points where payments are made at each point in the project and then the client mid-project decides that they don't wanna continue forward, how do you handle that, who owns the code, who owns the work that's done up to that point? So this is handled different ways by different agencies. It's up to you, but what I do recommend is that you build it into your contract upfront. You decide how you want that to happen.  So we've added this thing into our contract and the way that we do it is with milestone projects, technically I like to consider it a little bit of a waterfall or an agile method, technically.  The shiny new word is agile, but any work that's done up to a paid milestone, we treat that as belonging to the client. We consider ourselves a nice guy agency and because we live in a WordPress world, an open source world, as far as I've been started, if they've paid for it up to that point, it's theirs, right? Anything beyond that point, let's say you're doing it in arrears, right? So this is where it gets sticky. You're billing them for a milestone in arrears instead of an advance, if you're doing that and then they cancel before making this payment and you've already done all this work in the middle, now we've got an awkward situation. The situation now is we don't give you any code, none of this belongs to you and you can't have it until you pay for that milestone. So that's basically it. And what I would recommend is just making sure you bake it into your contract up front, however you want that breakup situation to occur. If you do that, don't give them a WordPress login. You guys don't give it to another developer that can just strip all that code. Yeah, no passwords go out, no access goes out until you've been paid for the work you've done up to that point. Yeah, next, yeah, sure. So her question is, how do you gently raise rates with a client that you really don't wanna lose? And what I'm gonna tell you might be hard news for you, but the reality is you can't. If you don't wanna lose them, if you're not willing to lose them, you've already lost. You can't raise your rates. You need to be willing to lose the client before you can have that conversation. And if you have that conversation with confidence, so first off, you have to have the conversation with confidence. You got a great deal. I am now moving up, all of my other clients are paying me this rate. We are more than worth it. We're awesome, we love working with you. We'd like for you to come along on the ride. And if they're a good client, and if they value you, they will come along for the ride and they will raise their rates. But you can't have that conversation and say, hey, we're gonna raise it. And then they say no, and you're like, ah, well, I guess we'll just keep doing it. Yeah, just kidding, it's a good way to put it. Then you, yeah, yes. So in fact, what you're talking about is what I call the leapfrog method of raising your rates. If you work off retainers, this is an awesome, awesome way to level up your business pricing. If you work off of retainers or a steady set income over time, it's really, really, you can't just blanket raise your prices because you could lose the big chunk of your business. There's actually another way to do it, which is very, very effective, which is, like I mentioned before, raise your rates 20% each time with each new client that you add on. So that means your old clients are getting, are paying very little and your new clients are paying a lot, right? So what you're aiming for is look at your books, look at your business's books, look at your profit and loss, look at your overhead. As soon as you have enough business that covers your overhead, including your salary, covers the cost of your team, covers the cost of your software, covers the cost of replacing your equipment over time, once you have enough retainer work that you're covering all of that cost, the next new client you add on at the highest rate allows you to go back to the first client and say, we're raising our rates to this new rate, would you like to stay or would you like to go? Guess what? If you lose them, your overhead's still covered because this one just replaced them. So you can go into that conversation not carrying the slightest bit about losing them. It will not be painful at all. And you'd be surprised, most people will sign on to the new rate. So then you get a double win-win there. So just leapfrog it. Yeah. All right, so feel free to say my question's just too weird. I'm a client that pays really well. He pays on time, he's a nice guy. Problem is he's so unfocused that we have a hard time getting things accomplished. And so I'm wondering, is there a conversation I could have about price of a jolt him into being more... Yes. Yes, I've had a couple of those clients. So his question is, we have a really awesome client. We do good work, they're good money. We love working with them, but he's super unfocused and so it's really hard working with them all the time. Is that a good way? Okay, so with those types of clients, it's really, really simple. It's painful because you're not getting paid for all of that unfocused figuring it out time and wishy-washy time. That's why it's painful. It would not actually be painful if you're billing time and materials for that odd ball time. So if he's on a retainer, okay, you need to start setting a, you get this much time per month in that retainer, put that and make that part of the writing and then beyond that, you get charged hourly. One of two things will happen. Either you'll start making a lot more money and it won't feel painful or he will suddenly get magically focused. So yeah, that's how we solved that problem. We had like four of those clients. Yeah, yeah, one or the other. So just refocus it in the back. Yeah, I just want to make a statement. When I raised my prices, my business actually increased by 25%. Yep, yep. All the way around. Yeah. I've never talked about this number of days. So it's 14 days and we're still not there. So they still have to pay and I don't move forward or 30 days. Yeah, good, good, good comment there. Any other questions? Yeah, well, I'll go over here first. You had one earlier, so I'm trying to give it a spread around a little bit. Yeah, arbitrarily cutting 20% of your business out makes no sense. That's dangerous and painful. The way that I said is safe and guaranteed. So yeah, that's a good way to put it. Yeah. How did you do that? Oh, you didn't? Sorry. I'm terrible at this. Okay. For new clients, how do you ask? Oh yeah, how do you close? Yeah, so she's asking when you've got somebody on the line, you've had a conversation, how do you get them to stroke a check? Really, it comes down to one word. Confidence. You need to know what your process is and you already need to be walking the client down the path as if you're already doing business.  If you act like you're already their client, you would be shocked how many of them will become your client. So know what your process is and when you get to the point of asking for a close, one of the most important and most powerful phrases you can say is I want your business. Please tell me what it'll take to get your business and let's move forward and get to work, right? All right. I think we're out of time. I'm gonna go ahead and move on out into the hallway and if anybody has any other questions, we'll be happy to chill and... Yeah.


Welcome folks, we have the Dow industry trading up $4.07, Nasdaq up $54, S&Ps up $35, Gold contract down $4.10 traded at $19.72 an ounce, Silver down $0.51, $23.20 an ounce, Light sweet crude, Dow $0.67, $82.15 a barrel, notes and bonds, Ten year note flat, $1.1104, the 30 year down $14 at $1.2118 and $1.00, $1.00 trading up $22.6 at $102.039, Euro at $1.10, Yen at $1.42, British pound at $1.27 to $1.00, U.S. dollar. We get over and take a look at the S&P, bottom line, you still got an S&P with an ABC down, that being said, what we just did, you want to see something kind of cool here, we just did a .618 retracement of the whole move down on Friday and it does have a spike, and that spike had some volume on this bar, so more than likely we're going to go up to that spike, which would be the 45-36, well, we're only two points below it right now, you can see that, bang, it's pretty amazing, it just whacked that line and you can see it get an expansion volume. That's being said, then we go back to the dailies, with the dailies, you're coming back up with light of volume, tremendously light of volume, going up with 38 million shares, you know, last, what, last Friday, last Wednesday we came down with 93 million, Friday you came down with 100 million, you're going up with 38, so this market wants lower price. We go to the Qs, we take a look at the Qs, see how they're setting up right now, so the Qs have 30 million shares, yeah, that's even, you know, the 30 million is going into 72 and 61, and if we go look at the end Qs, take a look at this baby, this has, this hasn't done a 50% retracement yet, so that's showing right now that the S&Ps are stronger than the Qs, which is unusual by the way, okay, so the bottom line is that even the, and the NDX, that can get up to that, what was that, yeah, that 473, yeah, we're at 460, 473 is game today, stay right there folks, come right back.