Hi everybody, today we have Charles Boyan on the channel here, so thank you for your time. Today we are in this lovely nice apartment here in Dubai as well. Boyan runs an email marketing agency called Petora, right? Petora. And today he's going to share with us some of the tips and tricks stuff that 7 or 8 figure e-commerce people will do. Also, yeah, share with him some of the tips on how to optimize email campaigns and stuff. So thank you so much for that. You're very welcome. Could you introduce yourself to the audience? Tell them who you are, what you say and what company you've built and who you serve. Yeah, yeah, sure. So my name is Boyan and I run an email agency called Petora. We primarily work with brands between the 1 million to 15 million a year, any revenue type of range. And yeah, I've been doing it for like four years. It's dropped out when you need to do this. It was a good decision looking at hindsight despite the disparage from family members. It's a good vibe. And now we're in Dubai. Okay, so explain to us how it went from the UK and then you dropped out. And then your parents, I dropped out. That's actually an interesting story because how it went was, I realized I really didn't want to go uni because I was like, this is not going to create my dream life. Sorry, just after emails? No, no, I actually did one first year of university. I finished it. I was actually doing computer science with AI. So I think Pat is doing computer science. Yeah, so how it basically went was, I realized it wasn't going to give me my dream life because the way I value evaluated risk back then was because of the whole computer science thing. I understood like math, probability, all of this stuff. So I was like, okay, if I look at life as like a decision tree, I would, I modeled it literally as a decision tree. That's how many I was, right? The branches of me going down traditional uni would not get me to my dream life anyways, which was to be like, like, offensively rich. Okay. But that was not such a short way. It was because I grew up like, right? So I just wanted to not be poor. Anyways, I realized that there was no chance of me hitting that dream life by going down this path or like having uni be useful to me in the future. So I just decided to drop out. And I knew like all of the probabilities back then about all, you know, like 80% of business is fail and all of this stuff. But now I understand that 80% is just like people not really trying and doing taking the right actions. So anyways, I made the decision. I tanked my grades on purpose because I didn't have the balls to drop out. Did you take the uni? Yes. Yeah. So after my second year and I did a study. And back then I was like meditating in chair. I was like, I wonder if I just like don't study how bad can I still pass, right? So I went from like 86 something percent average. And then I just did a study for a whole semester and I went down to like 65. But like after like two, three months. Which is not bad. Yeah. It's not possible.  So time to drop out. So I got that. I could see the university admin won't let me defer one year. Because they're bosses. They just want money, right? Okay. So they wouldn't let me defer one year. And I was like, with my admissions officer, I was like, basically just like, well, I'm going to go up and do this business thing. I need to defer one year. What are my options? And she was like, oh, well, we can't defer you. It's too late in the semester, too late in the year. I was like, so my only option is to go out. You're like, yeah. I was like, great. Easy. So I don't know. And then the next thing I was like, hi mom.  And the crazy part is it was a we chat video for both my mom and dad was present. It was funny.   It's in your own hands now. Which I'm super grateful is like, if they didn't support me, it wouldn't have been so much fun. You know, awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But you wrote an admin. Yeah. Okay. So like what made you feel that way? Like people have their personalities based on inputs. Yeah. They get information from somewhere. So like what did you feel that way? Like I want to dream life. This is not the right path for me. There's so many stories of like instances where I demonstrated that we were poor as a kid. Because like, so I was born in China for the first six years of my life. And then we came to the UK because my dad wanted to basically just move the family abroad because it's better to be poor in a rich country than be poor in a poor country, you know? Okay.  Right. Sorry, which province is it? Okay. That's the city for Zhengzhou. But I wasn't born in Zhengzhou. I was born in this town called Anyang. So imagine Zhengzhou. It's like the biggest city in the province, which was the tier 3 city. Yeah. And then Anyang in the town. That was like manufacturing steel. Okay. But yeah, anyway, so came to the UK and then there was so many instances growing up, you know, like one time I had to get some like dental work done and my mom didn't know that healthcare was free in the UK, right? Because it's in China. We just came here, right? We didn't know it was free for kids. Yeah. So I had this like big tunnel. So that was caused by one of my teeth that needed to be pulled out. It was like, that's fine. Like, go away. Yeah. Yeah. Go away. Don't worry about it. Give it two weeks or three weeks. I couldn't sleep. Couldn't eat. It was a fight. So finally, they scroung up all the money they had, which was about 2,000 pounds.  And they were like, I'm fine. We're like, we need to fix that outside. Take me to the dentist. Like three weeks of raw suffering. Right? Yeah. We got to the dentist.  It's in our pockets. Yeah. Yeah. And the doctor was like, don't worry. You know, like madam, please have a seat. And like boy, come this way, we're going to, we're going to help you out. Right? Throughout the whole time. Is that being picked up? There it is. So the whole time. I feel like I'm being like swaying. I'm just an interest. Yeah. Yeah. And long story short, doctor comes out and I knew my family situated five financial situation as well. So I was asking and then the doctor after the operation gives me a lollipop. I was like, no, thank you. Thank you. He was going to talk to me for it. You know, like, I was like, no, thanks. I'm going to talk to you. What's the receipt now? I wanted to be there. Right? What's the damage? He got me. So anyways, the doctor was like, no, don't worry. Don't worry.  They're trying to sue. They're trying to sue.  And then it was finally, it was like, no, you're free to go. It's no cost, no money. And like the whole way, my mouth was like swollen, kind of bleeding, but now I'm, you know, like from the teeth being pulled out. The whole way I made my mom so happy. Like, so, so growing up, like everyone wants to have like nice professions. I just want to be rich. That's fine. Yeah. Okay. So with the, that's why you love the UK. I love the UK. I know that bleeding memories. Yeah. I love the UK. I just forward to it. Yeah. I think the UK used to be very well run. Still, I think it's like a really well run country to an extent now. I just think like it's kind of on the decline, which is kind of sad. But, you know, I still love the UK. Love London. I still like it. Okay. So, um, then you're at the uni. Yeah. Like, again, computer science is difficult, right? Which is, is it difficult in the UK? Yeah, it's difficult. But yeah. Okay. Like Asian study background. Yeah. Yeah. So your grades are smart, right? Yeah. Your grades. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So it was like computer science. Like you knew that how like, there it is. That's pretty solid. Okay. So here's a story about, especially UK like, Palantir, Apple, Microsoft has fear standard there, right? So it's like, stop it. But UK salaries don't compare to US. That's the thing. UK salaries. It's like, UK salaries. If you, if you're making a hundred K a year, you're bored. But then a hundred K income after income tax, it's like 60. 60. That's 5,000 pounds taken from up. It's not a lot, right? It's like a good money. But as in like, if you're trying to be multi, multi million, it's like, it's not the next station. Exactly. So, how I got turned off from tech though was actually, I did a weekend project thing at Facebook on one of the, like VR things. And then like, I was there, London H few and two software engineers walked in the elevator with the attention. No, it was just a research project on the thing. And me being like, Oh, this is a company that I want to work at in the future. Cause they have free food and bean bag. Like, Oh my God, it's sick. I was like eavesdropping on the conversation. Right. And I heard like the most like one day conversation. I was like, yo, this can't be me in 10 years time. It's not me. Right. Okay. So, so now when I decided, yeah, it's like, I can't do computer science. Okay. So when, how did you encounter the online business stuff? I didn't like it. Actually, you know what, you know what it was. I saw one of emails ads.  Oh, so for me, very aggressive running in 2017. No, no, no, no, no, this was December 2019. 2019. Okay. Yeah. So, oh no, sorry. I think maybe November December. I don't know. But I dropped out and then I decided this is a business. So, okay. Yeah. Okay. So, what did you know? Like, Facebook ads.  I like the longer time. Yeah. Like in 2020, yet media buying was a skill. And now I feel like media buying is less of a skill. It's more like, how do you analyze the data? How do you, like, how do you measure it? Right. And then also, do you understand the unit economics of the business? And then ultimately, a good ad buyer now needs to understand the creativity really well. And audience as well. Like matching the right creative with the right audience. Right. Because that's, otherwise, like, CBOs will take care of the rest. You just need to just make sure your ad creatives are like, innovating all of this stuff. Right. So, ad buying itself became over time, the one year I was doing it. I just kind of realized that it was not a huge amount of future in this because, if I had an eco brand, I would have high analysis agents. You know, I would get a media buyer to the in-house and then be like, the creative director in the beginning and bringing a creative director later on. Right. So, anyway, it's ran that for about 10 months, 12 months, I'm sorry. And then during that 10 months, there was a couple of our clients that didn't do any emails.  So, we basically got charge of their shop by chance, completely. So, we did all of the growth, all of the Facebook ads, we did some entry-level CRO stuff on that as well. And at one point, just because of the supplement brands, a supplement brand generally, you know, it would be not crazy high, and then you just need retention, right? Because supplements, the cat in that space is just white. So, we couldn't get to above break even on the front end with ads. No, sorry, we were running on maybe like two, three percent margins on the front end, right? Which is okay, technically break even. Yes, it's break even, not good, you know what I mean? So, I was like, oh, this brand doesn't do any email marketing. I talked to the owner, I was like, listen bro, can we run your emails potentially? And he was like, oh yeah, no one's doing it now. So, after implementing emails, we were able to actually see all the ads even more, and that's how we were able to like, flex the brand in, I think eight months or something, and then from the six, eight months later, they were like prepping the brand to exit, and I don't know exactly how much they sold for, but it was somewhere between that 15, 20 average, you know? So, through that experience, I was like, oh, this email client was zero headache, very easy to run, very linear as a service, because with email, it's basically like retargeting. So, you're not as heavily reliant upon the client delivering you, like, creative, because it's not video-based, because it's all image-based, and even if it's gifts, we can produce everything ourselves. So, email's also a channel that we can be in complete control, whereas with Meta Ads, or any type of like, paid-spot tool, there's just so many moving parts, right?  So, your shipping prices affected your, could you land it, it goes up. But, variety of factors, anyway, it's not very short, it's stuck with you. Okay, killed all the ads. So, we basically like all the moment, but, oh man, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, Okay, I'm not a master yet, but so I know I know that market cap was my evaluation was not great yeah five billion yeah um maybe it's gonna do some really sick things in the future I would just rather invest show yeah yeah so you get exposure to failure anyways yeah I was looking at you know prospectus is like 600 mil I think in AR so 600 is probably like one more than 10x but they have really strong retention though because for their business model to collapse it would either like you know much into the same time yeah like omniscient would need to take them over which I doubt um or like a Shopify would essentially have a business model need to collapse right which I don't think they're going to collapse but I do think in the next couple of years DTC is going to be quite rough because people's pockets aren't going to tighten you know I've already noticed that because like I have quite a lot of friends in the call space and selling like high ticket programs is much farther today than it is like in 2020 when they were just printing cash giving like same reason yeah back to your clients I think so I'll leave you with it for the email side right um how how did you learn the skill obviously like true experience on yourself and when did you start hiring so um so I want to have team members because you know like I had a Facebook agency so the Facebook agency had some team members which I was able to pivot across like my designer my designer we've been working with for like three and a half years like since the beginning where do you hire one oh oh my god which I'll serve you I'll serve you yeah yeah it's pretty yeah you can tell it's been a few years because um he's like got married and had a kid and it's like probably like it's gone crazy and then I moved to countries you would say he's you know so um yeah so I had team members since the beginning of the email agency but like I was doing a lot of the I was doing all of the strategy and uh majority of the execution by myself for the first year or so and then um 20 on the design itself no no I'm I'm a useless design okay yeah it's just all automation in total step strategy yeah yeah yeah like if I did the design that looked like a monkey drew okay so um so everything I did myself except the design for about yeah and then 2022 was largely the same we had a couple more team members come on but the thing that was going to change the game for me was actually hiring like a COO and getting proper team structures in place um because without because agency is where repackaging human resources to sell out profit by adding value to like our team members right yeah and without like a proper team team structure in place you just can't scale labor so oh that's actually one other thing so slight slight hand zoom over all of the brands I've noticed go from like seven figures eight figures yeah um if they are running like a portfolio of brands doing about the same they always have a really strong team structure in terms of like uh they have like a plus an inch barge of this specific brand or like inch barge of media buying across the floor or something along those lines alongside the COO so you mean a hit of a function so one specific function you have one hit yes COO yes not even one function but let's say you're in a portfolio of brands right you have like one uh CEO uh I guess like CEO of this specific brand CEO of this specific brand yeah um so for me it was hiring a COO and then that's why how we were able to work from like last December we were like four people including me now we're like uh 16 full-time including myself with one more coming on in general yeah that's just about having that dialed in team structure well what does a COO actually do because they don't do execution like they don't they don't do actual campaigns so what are they so how I how I did it I can't speak to what the formal process should be but how I did it was basically my COO started off as a strategist for me right oh so now like you're doing campaigns yeah yeah so you was going to campaigns all of this stuff and then I kind of like I was like this is Adam you I need you to step up into this role um here's all the perks that comes with it and basically I just spent a lot of one-on-one many many hours like translating like my skill in management communication everything that I've accumulated over the years to him and then I I mapped out like this org chart which org chart is just a fun way of saying like hierarchy right there you know clients strategies be well so he started off by being a blend of strategists and a COO at the same time but then as team leveled up now he doesn't really have any of his own clients nice so you know it just started a team basically yeah yeah so he he's transitioned into this new layer of management right because as you uh as the organization gets bigger you can't have too many points of contact if you do then um yeah yeah it's just going back a lot you know because you can only manage like five people at once anymore it's just cool so he ascended to the new layer of management and then that was me so now I do the sales he manages the team and it works really well like the service delivery is sick because we have great retention um and then I can focus all of my time producing content okay and then how does one person can probably manage five people at a time right if you have 30 clients when it was easy talking to because each team probably can take four right maybe yes yeah so he's talking to five uh teams is that correct yeah something like that something like that but when when I say team the strategist manages the designers so they work with the designers okay so there's just him strategists right so that way it's like much more linear so he has less points of contact I just have him as a point of contact and then I oversee like the team once a week just make sure like like a one-on-one basically okay no I don't do a lot for the team it's in one one to team yes yeah not one to team once a week so that I get a pulse of what's going on as well as I get the updates from him and then it's okay what have you seen such that like a team what's the maximum capacity that they can take on because after a while you know you know what it's it's like three to six three three to six maybe seven it could some clients um are just easier to handle than others honestly because like some want a lot of revisions um some plan things uh like super last minute so we just want to make sure we're stepping up to adapt to that because ultimately it's like we're here to fulfill a role for them we're here to get the results and wherever it takes you know yeah so it's not like this team has everything has four back clients this team might have three this team might have six seven but generally speaking it's between that four to six range how do you can you say if I promote you roman came back and make sure that just for co someone needs they need to be incentivized quickly right yeah one of those folks uh here with the publisher that's him okay yeah he has a publisher in the agency he's uh based in he lives in Malaysia but he's he's Malaysian but he uh studied in New York so he's like nice mix wait I thought you said he's from serving no that's my designer oh okay so right now 14 16 you will go down something there how do you spend it I think it's a really content selling itself right yeah but if you get sick you don't sell is there a sale person no it's for me it's founder let's say I think having founder let's say this is really important especially if um because I have a really good knowledge of how to grow an e-commerce and it's hard to replace that and my style of selling is consultative so we'll hop on a call a lot of the time because they come the leads come so we only have two channels of acquisition yeah YouTube and now referrals that's it so referrals obviously they practice because there's there's already an established connection if it's from YouTube they trust because they like have over a hundred tutorials teaching like not just play me anymore because earlier this year I branched out into general econ about like you know economics how to build customer service teams blah blah so there's a high degree of trust there so on the course a lot of the time it's just like talking about their brands overall and what like their scaling bottlenecks are um and then they already trust me to do their emails so it's like a really straightforward thing yeah but they don't you're not the one to the execution of course yeah of course um and but like a lot like something the last time I ran agency next prediction always I think it's real panoramic even through your content yeah and so I expect you to pay I have that as a limiting belief as well yeah but you know what it is it's about the handover process between you and the client during the sales cycle to you and your team so for example um I'm very hands-off with it now in the sense of like let's say you just signed as a client I would say hey um John I'm going to introduce you to Adam my coo and then also he's going to be adding the rest of the team this is the expectation like we're going to get the first campaign out for you in the next like 72 hours for 48 72 if it's like a weekend or something you know um so it's going to drop you the updates along with the sample designs you can give feedback or make modifications and and yeah it's like that handover process is very close as soon as they jump in the slack channel the team introduces themselves ASAP like ideally with generally within like the first 10 20 minutes you know um sometimes quicker sometimes a bit longer bits of silence and then because that touch point is established it makes it much easier to like peel them away and then one thing I have with my team is it's like we all have sex on our phones so if a client messages we respond right away it's not like you can't wait 12 hours it's not like you know it's it just I need I need time now you know so when other client messages in the channel initially they may attack me but my team responds in like three minutes five minutes whatever and so over time it brings the behavior of just yeah because all those thoughts they know what they're doing yeah okay guys who from the agencies I have to talk about you moved to Dubai oh yeah so what happened there and what was uh the motivation are like yeah yeah absolutely so um I moved to Dubai July 14th this year 2020 yeah okay so it's about online business for years and yeah I didn't get all this yeah so I started in 2020 January and then three and a half years later I was like it's time to make the Dubai move um obviously tax is a big factor in it yeah not okay not absolutely not I'm proud because like everything that that you pick up and send money on I basically disagree so yeah yeah okay so anyways so um made the Dubai move but the factors were not just tax because I heard I can't remember exactly who said this it might have been Alex but it might have been so much well basically like you know why move to a tax haven if you genuinely don't enjoy living that as much right because yeah that's the point yeah quality of life yeah like yeah yeah like you we started our businesses to have more freedom in our life and choice in the blah blah so why go to a place that you enjoy less just for more money so I visited Dubai three times one 2022 April for a couple weeks and then last week I came here for Formula One in November and then this year April I spent a whole month here just a recce yeah yeah do a little bit of recon and also like make some friends honestly because I think like it's not really about where you live it's just about who you get to be around right so made a few friends and I realized like the thing I liked about Dubai is I can learn from it it's every every deny going absolutely humble like like wow these people are so interesting they're like wow this is big city shit and and obviously you know like in networking scenarios you don't show it but like in my heart unless we just sit back yeah yeah um but yeah like it was really the network that was a big factor and then also like the convenience it's okay yeah but imagine so this morning right my partner looks clean clean as came oh yeah okay yeah yeah clean as came 9am they come twice a week I can order them from out right any food I want there's so many restaurants to order from it's not like in the Manchester which the place I was living in previously for a year and a half it's like very limited choices right here you can have this you know I'm five minutes right from the beach five minutes to Dwight more it's just nice run the apartments here are so much bigger like this apartment in London would probably cost like no three now probably central London yeah like one one to one and a half mil yeah but this is much cheaper um and then a lot of Dubai yes it's like more expensive to live in but like it's basically Greek it's so how much tax against it yeah yeah okay so have you uh I'm pretty good at talking about it do you you have any do you have a UK entity or did just kill Dubai like no so there's a USNC now uh that I'm like building through uh is it because about like US clients or like why no US strike because the problem with the device right is your payment decline rates is very same with UK like even when I was in the UK I would invoice if you looked at my favorite payments it's like it affects core sales it affects clients because I have to change my billing uh payments I am I don't know the UK would be probably easier it for us because it's like still uh one country to another US gripe to US gripe is green black but even with payment here's good payment histories and stuff cards still get declined yeah um and you suck on the forex so yes exactly so everything gets converted to GBP okay so I suck on the forex and then Dubai plus because Dubai like US doesn't like Dubai you know like I've tried to have US wire payments go from a US bank accounts to buy like some of my clients have to pay me wire they're like in funding idsets like lock it up you know return to center type of buy yeah so yeah okay wait how do you get a bank account it's just a pure bank account not like checking savings bank holders uh here's uh I believe there's a checking account I have so I have a business account of a plus that's okay then you just need your average ID and then you need your company okay how do you stay here is it a tourist visa like hold on so basically like I I'm employed by my company as a general manager so I'm paid by the general manager yeah yeah and then I get paid salary which I decide but that's the US entity employee lawyer no no no so I'm like uh I don't know the specifics of that but long time my question is how does the UAE government recognize US illegal what's oh because I'm employed by my Dubai company okay which that's the Dubai company as well yes okay owns the US company okay and there's no need for you to must you move the it's from the US company to the Dubai to say oh like the legitimate business yeah okay I think that's not what okay that's not financial advice yeah okay okay we'll last thing we'll talk about you can't ask student about things right um is there a specific niche particular niche that you generally work with and that like you do great research or prefer um you talk about something that's just not so I I know a couple of some of the guys in Singapore as well they do at crazy numbers um yeah tell us more about that way I don't have like a specific niche that I'm really good at yeah but I can't tell you I one weird thing is I know it's like way too fucking much about like women shampoo and women's pants okay that I know way way too much about um but that's just because we had a client that was like very education for us basically yeah we work without we are working with uh for like just over two years now um so I know like a lot of waiting around women's hair products okay not as I and obviously I'm very good mocked for that as well but uh yeah yeah funny thing to know about right yeah so everything has been dvc so far there's no like b2b brand approach because like to me like on the b2b side the aob's and helping b-side crazy right so like they could definitely need email and yeah sorry but the retainer you can't shop it's like could be insane but that's before the album right no so like b2b companies like wholesale or still don't need gen okay uh they do they close themselves but they still need they still have like a database they could use like a market or tell you whatever it is but they still have a database that they need to sell them yeah so the problem with doing b2b and wholesale orders there's a lot of the core to actions are not so product pitch it's uh but could call more this number or like register your interests yeah so we're only in charge of a very small segment of that funnel whereas with email marketing for need to see products we can be in charge of the whole one and you can show them that much better yes exactly okay we are branching out into other niches though so one of my new videos is how to work with strike businesses because there's a direct integration between strength and failure so you can kind of track that for me so we're expanding into uh adjacent platforms that's it okay all right uh one of the challenges that you see from the the if they clear 3-4 mil clear was that a 12-50 mil way to search it now uh what is the client experiencing oh okay and also yeah like how does that mean value to them such that they can overcome each other sure so in terms of scaling bottlenecks a lot of the time of the difference I've seen between brands are doing 3-4 mil a year to like 10 to 15 is um the size of their market matters to an extent okay obviously you know most markets can facilitate 15 mil but in one market it might be easier to facilitate that compared to another market because your marketing message like the degree in which it needs to be dialed in is much higher um but a lot of the time honestly I think it comes down to like team structure because at 3-4 mil a year it comes down to either the CEO needing needing to fight comfort mentally right like 3 to 4 mil a year you're making good money you know like 20 margins uh okay 600k 700k like fighting the comfort of just being okay that's set of what yeah yeah I'm wanting to expand if the CEO is like successful with that then it's about like um couple of ways really I mean normally you can scale to like uh one to million a month with just single products it literally just depends on how much product market figure right so we've had clients scale the most simple products to a mil a month from the first 30 days and it's literally just because the market shine yeah right but then together to get it consistent to that 10 to 15 mil you you really need to have a good product because you're you can saturate your market so quickly if your product sucks because um I can't reveal the product of this but I'll say it appeals to this like niche fan base right it let's pretend it's like video games for example right you play video games you buy from this client guess what you have gamer brands right so you just bought this product that you're all excited about you buy it and it comes and it's it doesn't align with expectations you're going to tell all of your other gamer brands shit so it's like network yeah yeah yeah I think the thing that kills most brands is are actually the intangibles the shit that doesn't come up on facebook dashboard it doesn't come up in your facebook engagement score or like your google ad cpc whatever right it's the intangibles like because you cannot measure john telling boyan about how shit his product is because guess what if like if you're selling to you as a demographic yeah your friends with the same demographic you know so if you're like that or like um facebook ad comment sentiment a lot of it is just basically a complicated way of saying well yeah right so try to fight that super difficult okay so you have to nail product quality nail fulfillment times customer service if you can enable those things and have the product market fit yeah it's not okay sorry well i'm not understanding you said excellent documents right because i'm guessing you'll be working with brands why would we have why why would um product quality be an issue at that stage um you'll be surprised because so a lot of the drop-lipping that we work with right i mean they could start the product thing as a fulfillment model and then transition it to a brand that's where that danger that's because it's that awkward age of like yeah yeah yeah uh i mean my inventory yeah like 150k net this one join that's the product quality and then also because it's again it's the intangibles right like on paper this product is scaling to the moon right now so the bucket why because then you saw why not what my catch is yeah yeah you don't think that's only about product quality right okay um because you're so focused on the numbers because the numbers make sense but i can scale ads so i can do this i can do that i can do this suddenly like oh shit the brands are profitable the skill that's too bad negative and yeah it's yeah you basically yeah and then like the so that's if you're using drop shipping as a fulfillment method doing like i'm talking like private like custom packaging drop shipping not like you know i don't know like aliexpress will see the document straight to the customer um but then there's the other side of if you're a brand going from three month three four million a year to uh 15 let's say yeah obviously there's a fighting comfort element but also your product quality is probably decent the main thing is i think a lot of founders get like shiny object syndrome because they hit the scaling plateau yeah and then rather than trying to you know refine that current winning product to fit a wider demographic they just think ah i just want a complimentary product uh i could uh you know i could in theory double my revenue the upsell balance basically yeah yeah so they go into different verticals and start trying to scale horizontally when a lot of the time it's the wrong move because on paper this product let's say you're selling if you're in the pet niche right you sell uh ah you sell this dog chew toy which goes viral for some weird reason and then you're like bright idea let me sell the food that goes in the toy don't you right and then it's like and that product takes i don't know three months to develop and then one month for the samples to arrive into your warehouse and then you you should develop that you know because how the fuck you run marketing angles around their stock food that everyone can buy from supermarkets ultimate right okay so i think a lot of founders they maybe they develop products with like oh this is complimentary to my existing winning product so that boy has a product market fit not understanding the they don't they don't understand the secondary product basically yes they they um they don't think about how am i going to market this to a top of our audience because that's what's really going to drive like that growth right you need to be reaching new top of our audiences yeah so this product yes it's complimentary to the first visit a top of our product yeah if it's not then fucking you know so expanding product base is huge and then also doing things like cash flow management is huge in big problems right so making sure you have uh like good payment terms with your manufacturers um seeing where you can cut like drop cost of goods sold with the volume um having good credit with like you know all right yeah yeah like stripe stripe being shut down is a huge problem if you scale to Boston like brandy drop shipping for example example um payment processing with like planar and stuff there's a lot of like things that you got to get dialed in and like infrastructure that you got to build before you can just take the brand to like that uh sharing telling me wrong personal experience so like when you say for example like take the product from zero to a middle of a month for example in 30 days i've done some things in love my uh my suspicion like my what i think is that a lot of brand owners say never get to eight biggest they never get to like 800k per month uh because they don't focus on front end and they do all the stuff on the back end like zero optimization whatever this is like just get front end profitable on the profitable way and just steal the budget and that's how we get to eight biggest but yes would you agree with me and like no 100 but i guess maybe i'll approach it slightly different because i work on the back and you work on the front end so i would actually love to hear your theory on this because i think a lot of brand owners like active brand owners not branded dropshippers and brand owners said who in love with their products to the point where because you're you obsess over your thing you believe that you can make it work but if you just look at the raw unit economics of your products it makes no fucking sense you have a $50 average order value right and 35 going on half a good soul yeah good luck buddy good luck on sale you know like yeah fuck you all from you just you just count it so so i think like unit economics optimization falls on the back end but that drives the top of fun because if you suddenly go from 35 pods with 50 aov down to 10 pods now you have $40 ad budget it's essentially played with on the board which is a lot of money for the bigger brand that you work with right um obviously to grow the list extremely important for you i can uh to grow this unique marketing machine like kind of traffic coming in yeah i'm pretty sure like pay traffic is great like you can scale about your like amplifying what amplifying what you're really doing right yes how is the mix in that role the top of our traffic where it's coming from and besides pay traffic um it depends on the brand we we have like brands that were exclusively organic um organic is a really strong channel we just see it how can i mean fco or like organic um some brands are fco focused like we have this long brand that we're we're just we're working with they they're primarily fco focused because they have a sick domain name that's been around okay 20 years 20 years something like that um so ethio does really well for them they spend like a thousand dollars a month on google ads uh and then i'm just like how the fuck are you collecting like 180 back end a month and i'm like crazy 180 thousand on thousand dollar ads and they don't run on facebook like we're retelling kind of thing um just ethio sorry niche like is it like the boring like car fires they kind of um it's not car fires but it's in like it's it's a boring niche yeah um so yeah man there's a lot of ways to organic traffic again varies like youtube organic traffic is higher compared to tiktok organic traffic for example tiktok organic traffic is like is it well as in as in the intent it starts high but so when you're doing cro on a tiktok organic exclusive store you know embroidery it's going to be much lower it might have really flat plastic parts but low initiative checkouts and it has to do with the traffic intent right yeah so uh if you're doing that it's quite hard if you're like multi multi channel with no consistency so then cro kind of becomes a little bit possible as well if you work with any red is like predominantly pr like yes no no i'm actually so curious about that because one of my friends he runs a multi seven figure brand out in hong kong and he was like yeah like i don't know if i can say the name of the brand but basically this this brand that sells travel stuff they do about a hundred million a year sorry they have only like travel accessories okay um they do about a hundred million a year and they're basically exclusively pr and the same with actually i can't say about this front you know case supply yeah case supply is basically exclusively pr the guys boss the hong kong from the you know case it came they sell cases iphone cases at a stupidly expensive price for no reason 200 million oh 300 million and how they grow apparently it's just like pr people's around collaborations they have with brands other brands yeah and that's how the influence is so yeah and it works on mine because i'm like i don't care if i'm making like two three four five ten million yeah i'm never selling 80 dollars or the fucking okay it's like a dragon dragon i don't have five of my experiences i really want you know they're basically like uh if they be forgotten yeah like insane connections it's basically what we're doing just at scale oh yeah but they've been getting off there though like i know he's doing a bunch of collaborations with like the costume characters yeah i know they should maybe not sure what you should talk about but like personally i feel maybe it's restricted because uh who do you really want to it's like this but sleepwear is just this it's a very he guys got transition from a hoodie to a sleepwear because people in the temperate countries can buy the hoodies right but then you're just dead but that has an early has again has a viral marketing angle component to it yes but then they go to the sleepwear that generic again they come up they're competing on a combo size market yeah um that's right i think like you make struggle like 200 mil right but how do you get to it i don't know i don't know i i think it's like taking a global because australia is also capped yeah australia is a really small place if you're right now that's doing like 50 million australia alone if you take it to the u.s. exactly in chinese i i have a friend who does like musketeaux in ok they sell musketeaux or sorry sorry sorry this is like you guys you're like a pioneer of malaria like see you're over there it's not like everyone is musketeaux no yeah musketeaux uh rebellious not rebellious killing us yes killing things there's even not recurring they put the lamp on yeah oh okay yeah you don't have two mil one you don't feel that a little sure yeah but if you're not like you buy up at that market base well yeah yeah but then also you could that would pop on amazon yeah it's extremely commodified basically of course yeah so you're competing but then you're competing on volume so you get the best like so you have a good um what's it called a good defensible business in that case right yeah back to the pre-forminal to the 10-year that's our thing any advice for those brand owners besides being not motivated on the founder side any advice for the musketeaux that's not only the communal inside and maybe also for them email site oh yes we ramp up the volume a little bit we can do a bit more segmentation but emails it's like once you know what you're doing it's largely the same we would build out like post-toucher journeys a lot more intricately for them for example yeah um on the outside i think you could probably speak more to it but because i'm like three years out of the game so i well my insight that i have to add it in chat and share it basically right um but i do think like dialing in unit economics is really important and just understanding like how big is your active market supposed to be because you know if you're trying to sell a musketeaux that's in like Dubai there's a lot of many musketeaux so you can't scale to that two million so so it's like understanding the audience the needs of the audience and then just your product is okay i've been very raised because of the email question because i did email before um after your automated flows like your manual products right how do you maintain consistency and uh catered for sending out sending out those emails without the message of the email being like failed so i really could always be saying okay we are live now yeah get the sale and then also sometimes there's notification you know like you know the shambles thing right can talk about shambles but after those two things how else do you maintain the freshness of that list oh that's a good question i mean uh the answer is you will end up repeating content regardless you know and it's like most brands they have enough things to talk about uh over let's say a one-year horizon right and get for people just the game just get it see and yes bro even with my youtube yeah i used to think oh i already made this before in the past no like beginners guide 2024 play here beginner's guide for beginners agency so i mean that's every year that's basically the same video that's gonna be minor tweaks because obviously like for example in 2024 uh gmail and yahoo they're gonna have more deliverability requirements so yeah like the tutorial's changed but it's like it's just same dish that's why the last time it's like 2b you know so yeah i think it's just you know repackaging a little bit but also realizing that you know the people reading your emails number one they may not read the whole email number two they may not have opened that annual last time number three um even if they've read it in detail and number four a lot of the time you know with marketing it's just you need to remind people because you're in a noisy marketplace right if you look at like retargeting ads the frequency is never like less is never just one yeah you know it's always two more yeah exactly so people need multiple reminders because they don't listen on that first talk so you know you could say oh my shampoo will make your head grow back five inches a day yeah inside of this but that even if it's a subject plan they might be in an area where there's no or like you embed that somewhere in your content but they just don't read it or they read it and they're like oh yeah you know what i need that two weeks later bomb again again again again and that's how you frame behavior right through repetition so yeah how much frequency how much how often do you say depends on the brand depends on the size of the brand actually and also the time period so it's the range is like two to five but five being like very big black friday big big brand um generally i think brands either lean into the extreme of severely undersending or severely oversending okay um but a good cadence so majority of brands is like two to three a week two to four yeah okay yeah can people ever um um brands to do uh sell to the u gdr big thing uh do i you know the or that often oh yeah yeah they're different big we don't do double options for you no we want this so i have so we've never had an issue yeah but is it because the brand is not big enough to get audited or like what perhaps okay but i don't know because i've never done double option in the year i don't think it's that strict of a requirement you know um but yeah like because the problem with double often is if you do double often you slash your email cap right back off yep yep like literally you cap your 100 percent less yep so so uh okay i guess because you professionalize like the business really becomes uh much bigger than the that's quite pretty yes yeah yeah i think it's like if you if you're like formalizing everything for like a public listening moment yeah yeah it's it's a big compliance issue but really large corporations but i think for small companies they don't really give a shit um um we've never been flag spread there's no issues last question for me oh we do abide by gdp r in terms of often a bite from jr yes it's something like you're like oh yeah just now when you were saying like hey we don't really care about that's like an anus you're like gdp r like what's that uh but i even see advice by gdr yeah really good line okay uh oh yes sorry last question on the email side i see beautiful graphics or time right from the email agencies and stuff uh but then when you populate an email sucks uh too much multi-medium deliberate deliberate action great uh back then as well as a loading speed etc thoughts on that and any advice don't use too many gifts i think like one mistake i've seen is brands use gifts in every email makes it a lot heavier uh but also i think if you do like good amount of segmentation as well as like less high g you're not really going to have that much of a problem and then also with um uploading the images just make sure you use a lost compression output yeah something like that if it brings the image for example a uh couple years ago we did we uploaded the pngs very gross yeah yeah loss of pressure is terrible so now we do jpeg if we need to upload images um but yeah it's it's not like a huge issue we have seen i mean it's kind of like freeing up if you want to build it natively in clavio between aesthetics and um the side of the email if you want beautiful looking email you can't really be custom coded yeah you know yeah and if you do it's just too labor-intensive and you know for a brand that's doing one to let's say six million it doesn't make sense for them to be paying us premium for like more developers and stuff if we can get very slow results so while you're building it in big numbers and then you're just doing it in paid offers yeah people give me shit for it but like we get big results so like hey we're gonna see twice yeah yeah yeah like okay because you know how like i i put made a post about this on i did a couple youtube about about uh email just right on camera and shit and the camera was a beginner's story there wasn't like what we'd actually do this right yeah i am like oh actually you know what do you look for take a jpeg like like this video was made for brands doing sub 50k like the fuck do they care about like files like they should be as he said like focus on driving top of bottom right and then on linkedin you know like linkedin people like love and comments yeah like that expertise and coming across as the expert is like yeah obviously like it's going to impact the deliverability but what's the alternative like you you want me to custom code everything but like it makes no sense you know yeah okay um we're coming at an interview point would you like to tell people how to get in contact with you if you want to engage your agency what email or consulting or whatever it is yeah sure so so my youtube channel is just my name boy on cell and then my instagram is real boy on cell and actually really good at emails so you should check out my youtube channel and yeah we'll yeah like if you like our videos then consider booking on the call because we're going to kill you not sure thank you for your time see you see you sir bye bye


Hi, welcome to Issues and Answers, a production of the Government Information Service and the National Television Network. I am Miguel Fabrié, communications officer within the Department of Infrastructure, Ports and Transport. And with me today is Mr. Schanger, the Chief Electrical Engineer in the Department of Infrastructure, Ports and Transport. Mr. Scher, this welcome. And this is our second time meeting today, meeting on this program. The first time we spoke, we spoke about the street lights, the traffic lights on St. Lucia and some of the issues that we're facing, whether it be driver error and the whole operation of the traffic lights. But today we're here to discuss a different type of lighting and that is a street lighting project which is ongoing on St. Lucia. So once again, welcome Mr. Scher and welcome to Issues and Answers. Thank you very much, Miguel. It's a pleasure to be here. Before we get into the ongoing project, Shane, let's just speak to the process by which we apply for street lights in a particular area. Well, as you know, there are many places in St. Lucia where you find that there are street lights that are missing, where basically you find that there are the areas of darkness in St. Lucia. Now, when situations like that arise, usually they are brought to our attention by the general public, right? And there are multiple ways that they can do that. First of all, right? They can simply come into our offices. There is a form there that they can just fill out, right? Obviously that form must have certain information, for example, the area, a contact number if we have to reach the person, and very importantly, a pool number. Also, there's a second way that they can also do it. There is an email address, electricalcomplaints.govt.lc, right? That they can also send that same information that they would have placed on that form in our offices. They can just send us an email with all the necessary information. Now, in a situation where a street light is existing but isn't working, right? They can also go to kled.lc, and there is a map there. If on that map they can locate the street light, they can just click on it. And basically, by clicking on it, it's going to inform us that there is a fault on the street light, whether it is not working, it is flashing or whatever it is. We'll get our information, and then we can address whatever needs to be addressed. Let's just get that addressed once again so maybe we can have it on screen. It's complaints. Electrical.complaints.govt.lc. Now, you didn't mention kled. Let's just get to that web address again. kled.lc. The latter day is for situations where there is a light, right? But the light is faulty. Whether the light is there, it's not working or it's flashing or it's basically blinking, as people prefer to call it. In a situation like that, they can just go to kled.lc. If they can locate that light on the map, there is a map. If they can locate the light on the map, they just click on it, and by clicking on it, it's going to send us a fault report, and then we can address whatever issue that it has. And kled, obviously, is the company that's currently undergoing... Engaged, yeah. The company that is currently engaged in executing the street light retrofit project. Okay. Are there situations where a request for a street light may not be approved by the Ministry of Infrastructure? Yeah. This is... We have had situations where we have had to reject certain applications for street lighting. But this happens on very rare occasions, right? You find that on some occasions, right? If we receive an application for a street light, right? Especially a new street light. And we go to the area, right? And we find that there are street lights there already that exist in. And the primary purpose, right, of this application is to light up some bodies. Let's see some bodies backyard. Right? We mostly, on some occasions, we are going to reject such an application. Because as the name suggests, right? Street light is for the street. Right? And not necessarily to light up some bodies. For public infrastructure. For public road infrastructure. Public infrastructure, exactly. Okay. You said that... So you're saying that there are people who may request for their backyard. How do we get many of those requests for personal lighting? It is not a lot. But you might... You find it on some occasions. For example, I'll give you an... I'll elaborate on something there. There are places in St. Lucia, right? Where you go to, right? And you find that there is a track or a road, right? And obviously that light. And there's a pool right next to that track or road. There is a house next to that track. Now, obviously, logically, logic dictates that the light should be facing the track, should be right above the track, right? But for some strange reason, on some occasions, right? It is not on the track. It's facing the opposite direction, shining into some bodies yard.  And on many occasions, the track itself is left in darkness. Now, situations like that, right? If it's a situation where somebody applies for street light what we try to do is to try to have that street light directed towards the street, right? So, therefore, the street light should be illuminating the street. And not the other direction, right? Where it's illuminating somebody's backyard. Now, speaking of illumination, we're going to move segue right into our ongoing project, which commenced in August of 2023. And that is the street light replacement project without having to say too much about it before you give your information where we are replacing the high pressure sodium lights with LED lights. Can you just brief us on the background of the project and where we are now? Well, to be honest, for our purposes here, we're simply going to refer to it as the street light retrofit project. Now, obviously, this is not all that's happening under this project. Obviously, as you know, we're also installing new lights and not just replacing them. Now, this project started in earnest. Although sometime in 2001, we had about 800 lights had already been installed in 2020. That's LED. LED lights had already been installed. Or the same kind, the same type. However, in earnest, that project started in late August. And to date, we have installed over 16,000 lights. Now, this is a process that is very fluid and it's ongoing. So to date, we have installed over 16,000 lights. Basically, we're replacing, along the highways in St. Lucia, we are replacing 250 high pressure sodium lamps with 75 watt KLED, should I say LED lights. So just to clarify, 250 watt. 250 watt. What? High pressure sodium. High pressure sodium lights. With 75 watt LED lights. And in the inner communities, the secondary roads, we are replacing 70 watt high pressure sodium lights with 21 watt LED lights. As a layman though, I would ask you what is the difference or maybe the savings in terms of usage between the 250 watt high pressure sodium and the 75 watt LED. Okay, I'm going to think about it in that way. What is the typical wattage of an iron at home? It's about, I'll say about 1.5 kilowatts, about 1,500 watts. Now, along the highways, with the high pressure sodium, with the high pressure sodium, 250 watt lights, right? We are looking at about six of these already, right? Only six of these lights will be quit to like an iron left for 12 hours per day, right? So therefore you get the pitch already. So replacing that with a 75 watt light, right? With a 75 watt LED light, which means that the savings is basically threefold. Additionally, with high pressure sodium lights, right? We have a situation where you can only basically get these lights to... As a matter of fact, that's the reason why they are called yellow lights, right? Because these lights basically are yellow. Now, this may not seem like a problem, but actually it is, because with these lights, right? It is more difficult in the night to tell the real color of an object that these lights are illuminating. However, with LED lights, right? And the temperature of the lights we are installing is about 5,000 feet, right? These are more daylight. Now, with these lights, right? They are better for security in that, right? Basically, if an orange object appears beneath lights like that, then you see the real color orange. However, with these high pressure sodium lights, right? Because of the fact that they are yellow, it is more difficult to make out the true color of an object. It is illuminated. Okay, so a blue item may appear green because of the mix of the yellow lights. Okay, now that said, moving from there, since we embarked on that project, in fact, before we even go into that, can you just tell us where we are in terms of how many lights we have on Island and how many lights we've replaced so far and the percentage as it relates to? Okay, so on Island, we have between 22,000 and 23,000 streetlights, right? Along the highways, we have about close to 4,000 lights. So therefore, initially, before the project even started, we had about roughly 3,500 of these 250-watt LED lights, right? And obviously, the remainder would be these 70-watt lights, right? Now, as I said earlier on, to date, we've replaced over 16,000 of them. We're talking there of about 2,500 with retrofitted so far, about 2,500 75-watt lights, which means that we've replaced the 250-watt high pressure sodium lights, and obviously, the remainder will be the 21-watt lights which we have replaced. Now, that is the first phase of the project. So basically, the first phase of the project is just a straight swap. So basically, replacing the 250-watt with the 75 and replacing the 70-watt with the 21. In the second phase of the project, that is when we are going to start installing new lights. Now, when do we expect to finish with this first phase of the project? That first phase of the project will come to an end. I'm almost certain that it's going to come to an end by the end of the month, by the end of January. End of January, 2024. Yes. Okay, now the second phase. The second phase is important because since we embarked on this project, we've got numerous complaints whether it be through talk shows, people coming into the ministry, which has been increasing over the past few months, coming into the ministry, particularly electrical departments, regarding the illumination and how much illumination they get from the new lights as opposed to the high-pressure sodium. Can we speak to that issue? You're saying that the LEDs are not as bright as the high-pressure sodium. Well, to be honest with you, I wouldn't describe the LEDs as not being as bright. Here's the issue. You see, with high-pressure sodium lamps, right, what they tend to do is to project light outwards at a 360-degree angle. So therefore, with high-pressure sodium lights, when you have a high-pressure sodium light at a particular location, especially at the height at which they're installed, they project light all around. However, that is not the case with LED lights. With LED lights, the angle of illumination you're going to use is about 180 degrees, which means that these lights are more directional, right? Now, dark spots in the solution have always existed. However, with the fact that LED lights are more directional, these dark spots are now more pronounced, right? Now, in the second phase of the project, what we intend to do is to treat these dark spots. So in certain situations, you find that they are dark spots that are usually brought about either by a corner beam between two poles that are illuminated, or secondly, you find that on some occasions, the poles are distant. So therefore, you find a dark spot in between them. Now, we are going to address all the situations when they arise. So that would involve basically installing new poles where it is necessary, right? Or basically putting a light between two lights that exist presently. Okay, we're about to head into a break, but we will continue this discussion as it relates to the dark spots when we come back. You are watching issues and answers. Miguel February, the Department of Infrastructure and Transport Communications Officer, and with me is Mr. Shane Shear, the Chief Electrical Engineer at the DIBT. We'll be back in a minute. Hello ECS. Yo, ECS. This is your ocean. If I am to protect your future, we have to work together. It's the time to work together. If I am to protect your future, one science to be so pure. Hello ECS. Green actions. Welcome back to Issues and Answers with me, Miguel February, the Communications Officer within the Department of Infrastructure, Ports and Transport. And again with me is Mr. Shane Shear, the Chief Electrical Engineer. And we're just going to pick up from where we left off as it relates to addressing those dark spots following the replacement of those high pressure sodium lights with LEDs. And just to reiterate, how are we going to address those dark spots which currently exist following the installation of those lights? Yeah, so I was saying basically, these dark spots, they've always existed. However, it's a situation where they are more pronounced now that we've installed LED lights that are more directional. And we intend to address these dark spots by putting up additional LED lights where these spots arise. But I've also heard concerns where people are saying that, then why is it that we are removing a light, a high pressure sodium light which basically gives light at a 360 degree angle and replacing them with lower wattage LED lights when we do know that we're going to have to install more. I'd like to address this point by simply saying that we're comparing here a 70 watt light, a 70 watt high pressure sodium light to a 21 watt LED light. And we're also comparing a 250 watt high pressure sodium light to a 75 watt LED light. So even if we had to double the number of lights we have in St. Lucia, we would still find ourselves in a situation where... It's about 60% the usage of one light. So therefore we still find ourselves in a situation where the savings would be enormous both in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and obviously financially. Additionally, we have other issues with high pressure sodium lights also. These are lights that generally the world is trying to get rid of for the simple reason that they contain toxic harmful substances and especially we're talking there of mercury because we have to understand how these lights work. Basically these are discharge lamps, these are discharge lights and as the name suggests, right? These are... where basically you find sodium in a gas state mixed with, should I say, amalgamated with mercury. So therefore all these discharge lamps from the fluorescent you use at home to the high pressure sodium light you find under all these things contain toxic substances, unlike the LEDs that we're installing. Okay, in terms of the percentage, or maybe you could give a figure, an actual figure, how many more lights do we intend to install following this first phase of the project? We intend to install, after the initial phase of the project, as I said, we're going to begin the installation of... As a matter of fact, we have started inserting parts in certain areas. For example, along the highway between Denver and Vuford, we have already commenced the installation of new lighting along that area, also in the Grosilli area. And we intend to install an additional, let's say, 2,000 lights to address the situations in the dark spots. And we believe, based on the complaints that we have received, we believe that that is going to be sufficient to address all the dark spots that we have on Island. But obviously, we have the lighting storage, so as the need arises, we're going to address them as the complaints come along. Okay, so members of the public, obviously, once we've done with this second phase, if there are any areas where dark spots are located... We're going to address these. All they need to do is come to the Ministry, file a complaint... Or the same email address that I mentioned at the beginning, electrical.complaints.govt.lc. I think it's important to note that this second phase, it involves our staff and the KLE, our contractors, working at night just to have to observe those spots. So it's not just a process of we figure that they may not be sufficient. We actually go on site at night after hours. Here's what happens, right? We have our personnel on the ground. So therefore, what usually happens after lights have been retrofitted in a particular area, right? When the sun sets, these people, these hard-working individuals, what they do, they drive through the area and take note as to where all the dark spots are. So most of the dark spots that we are receiving... Most of the complaints concerning dark spots that we are receiving, we are already aware of them. And as I said, we are going to address them. Okay, before we get to the next point on that, actually we haven't spoken about the savings that we've been able to amass so far since we started this project in August. Can you speak to that? Okay, well, as I mentioned earlier on, right, we've installed so far about 16,000 lights. However, we have not... The last calculations we have, right, is for the period basically ending on December 31, 2023. And based on the last figures that I have, right, we are realizing a saving of $377,000 on a monthly basis. That's a little... That's well over a quarter million dollars a month. Absolutely. So we're looking at in two months, three months, three months we can save a million dollars. So basically we are looking there as we continue replacing these high-precious sodium lamps, right? And we're going to continue to gradually be seeing an increase in the savings. Wow. I'm trying to do the calculations in my head. If we look at $350,000 by two months, that's $700,000 already. Absolutely. So for four months it's $1.4 million? Absolutely. Wow. That's by four by three. Four, three, 12. So we have about $5,000,000 saved a year. But as I mentioned earlier on, it is not just financial, right? The savings are not just financial. Because as we know right now, we also have certain goals in St. Lucia, right? Sustainable development goals. Exactly. We sign on to. Exactly. We can involve the reduction of greenhouse gases and so on and so forth. Let me give you a typical example, right? Street lighting, right? For countries like St. Lucia, which cannot be considered metropolitan in any way, right? Far from. Street lighting accounts for about 10% of total energy consumption in St. Lucia. Now this does not seem like a lot. In metropolitan countries, right? It may not seem like a lot. But for a country like St. Lucia, that is quite a bit. When a government has to pay for this a lot, we could be using that money for other means, our security and all that matter. Exactly. Now another issue, and of course, part of this job is paying attention to the talk shows social media and all the criticisms that come our way as a department of infrastructure. And one of the suggestions or the questions is why have we not gone solar, gone LED instead of skipping it? Why have we not skipped the LED part, just gone solar, which it is believed would save us more in the long run over time? Any reason why we have not chosen the solar aspect, solar lighting as opposed to LEDs? You see, presently as it stands, right? Solar lighting is a very good idea. But it is more, it is something that you would look at or you would implement if you are looking at smaller scale projects. Because what we do have to understand is that with solar energy, street lights do not work during the day, right? So basically, when the sun is out, you do not need these street lights. You need these street lights during the night. So basically, you need these street lights when the sun is not up. So the question to ask yourself is you have to capture this solar energy during the day, right? And release them at night. So therefore, you have to store them in batteries. Batteries are not cheap. So basically, it speaks to the high initial investment involved, right? In the installation of solar lights. Because you are not just looking at the light there. The most important part of it is the storage component basically, which is the batteries. Batteries are not cheap. Secondly, right? Solar lights, they do have the disadvantage. It is not an uncommon thing in St. Lucia for the sun to not be fully out, right? For weeks at a time. Especially when you come in towards the end of the year, like September, October, where the days start getting shorter, right? And you might find that they are weeks sometimes for elongated periods of time. But it has always been for cloud. Now to get a battery fully charged, right? You require a situation where you need a certain amount of solar power to be hitting that solar panel, right? Are we going to achieve this thing? Are we going to keep that battery charged to the level required there, right? To give us light every night when the sun is not fully out. I don't think so. You might find that you come across a situation where during what we referred to as the summer, the dry season, right? These lights are working perfectly. However, during the rainy season, when the sun is out a bit less, right? That there are certain nights where you would have lights, street lights in St. Lucia at all. Unless, of course, you choose to go for a hybrid process. A hybrid system that uses both electricity and solar. But I mentioned earlier on the initial costs, the initial investment involved in installing solar lights, right? Where you have the battery component, the other battery component which also exists is not a cheap investment. And the summer months are also the rainy months as well. And with climate change now, we really can't tell when we're going to get some and when we're going to get rain. Absolutely. More or less to end this discussion, we have another component with the street lighting project and that is the installation of new lights which we spoke of in regard in certain areas. And there are areas where we need to install low-tension lines. Can you tell us more about that? Okay. So you find that there are certain areas in St. Lucia where we've never had street lights. So basically, we've never had high-precious sodium lights. We've never had LED. I can mention a few of them. There's the Windward Road in Capestit. There's also a large section between Belvedere countries and Kachime. And you would know that that's your area so you wouldn't be traveling there often. So I'm aware that this area exists. And also, as we go around Ireland, during the implementation of super vision of that project, we also notice that the other small sections in St. Lucia where there are no street lights. And the reason why all these areas do not have street lights is because there's no low-tension. You see, electricity in St. Lucia is transmitted at 66,000 volts. Now, that's not very important for this purpose. They're distributed as 11 kV. Although you may see poles in that area and you may see these lines running. These lines travels in the island. Somewhat, they may be at... In these areas I'm talking about, the other Windward Road along the West Coast Road, you have the 11 kV line that travels the island, that area of St. Lucia. However, street lights operate at 240 volts. And that's what we refer to as low-tension. So 11 kV is high-tension. So 240 volts required by these lights do not exist presently. So for them to deal with that situation, we'll be in conversation with Lucia. And the intention is to have Lucia installed low-tension in all these areas so that we can have the electricity required to energize these lights. So as soon as that part of the project is done, street lights are going to be popping up in the Windward Road, as I mentioned, and also the Belvedere-Kachim area. And as I mentioned, there are all the areas in St. Lucia also that are like that. All of them are going to be addressed. We have just about two minutes to go, but just from a layman's perspective for clarification, the 11 kV lines which are the high-tension, what exactly are they used for to power? What do they power or can you just let us know? You see, I think the proper question is why do we have high-tension at all? Now, obviously, there's very little to do with street lighting. I still believe that it should be explained. You see, it is better to transmit electricity, right? Over large distances at higher voltage and lower currents. I believe that the further it goes, the less currents or the less voltage you have. So that's the reason of these high-tension lines. Now, obviously, because they cannot be utilized, most equipment, you find most equipment, three-phase equipment will be at 415. Single-phase equipment will be at 240. So basically you need electricity in your home at 240. So you're going to take that distribution line now at 11 kV and reduce it via transformer to 240 and then distribute it over short distances to residential buildings at 240. I think we've covered basically everything regarding the street lights for today, but I think there's more we have to discuss in the future. I'm talking about even wiring for homes, certain things that are people that residents will have to look to and things that you need to know. Shane, once again, it's wonderful having you here. I think it was very enlightening for me and I hope the public can get some of what I was able to pick at. I'm sure they did. You explained very, very skillfully. Once again, thank you for joining us here for Issues and Answers. I am Miguel Fabrié, communications officer within the Department of Infrastructure, Ports and Transport. And with me was Mr. Shane Zhe, the chief electrical engineer. This is our second discussion and I'm sure there will be many more to come. Like I said, we have other things to discuss as it relates to electricity on island and your houses and wiring and everything. But for now, we'll say goodbye and see you soon. Thanks for tuning in to Issues and Answers.


Everybody forced here ripping 20 22 gold standard football hobby six bucks number 22 random teams You can always find these results at late in sports cards calm. Thanks for joining everybody and good luck Let's see what we got right Steelers TJ Watt numbered 3 of 75 a Cardinals Marquise Brown 36 of 99 Bengals Evan McPherson Jersey 38 of 299 Broncos white gold Jersey Javante Williams 174 of 299 Hackers Aaron Rodgers mother load five-way Jersey one forty nine of two ninety nine Hacker's again a Christian Watson rookie Otto 21 of 49 nice Watson and Cardinals rookie dual patch out of Trey McBride 32 of 49 Go Cardinals Nice gold ink on the McBride Tim McBee Let me tweet out Chronicles really quickly 13 to go on Chronicles next guys It is tweeted Browns rookie Perry and Winfrey 11 of 99 Got Colts rookie Jelani Woods five out of 25 Eagles AJ Brown patch card 19 out of 25 nice hit Eagles AJ Brown The Beast Eagles again Brian Dawkins Jersey card 115 of 199 Chiefs on the me Cole Hardman jr. Auto 96 of 99 Chiefs Texans rookie auto Jalen Petrie 92 of 199 And a nice hit here for the Jets on the back of the second box garen wilson rookie jersey Otto 98 of 149 Here you go Jets nice G money I don't know does he have any game does anybody these guys have any game The last playoffs here for the T Wolves 0-4 Good lord That was only the loss of the lake Can the T Wolves win a playoff series this year you guys you think so Raiders Devontae Adams 61 up 75 Steelers TJ Watt 10 of 99. I mean is the best thing they've had on paper since then Broncos Belvingord in the third jersey card 25 out of 299 Titans rookie jersey Hassan Haskins 38 of 399 Packers rookie Otto Tyler Goodson 21 of 199 49ers Danny Gray rookie Otto for 49 In Saints now Chris Alave rookie triple jersey Otto 76 of 149 Heck yeah Saints there you go Wilson and Olave in the break now Nice hit there in New Orleans. He might be Odds leader for rookie of the year Steelers TJ Watt 3 of 99 God Jets on of a Knight rookie 42 of 49 Broncos gold play to jersey Devontae Williams 94 of 299 Bengals Tyler Boyd 5 way relic 23 of 299 The mother load Chiefs Patrick Mahomes jersey 229 of 299 Oh nice Travis. Yeah, that'd be great for you then Jaguars rookie Otto Trevon Walker On the redemption jaguars We got commanders rookie triple jersey Otto Sam Howell 63 of 149 third 13. They got this So are you a header behind? What are you doing, man? Well, I said it was live Interesting Oh, well, Malik Willis rookie Titans 64 out of 99 All right, did Raiders Darren Waller 15 of 30 Niners Brandon Ayuk patch card 10 of 25 Chargers Mike Williams five-way relic 13 of 25 Rookie patch card Lyange James and Williams 28 of 49 Titans Malik Willis rookie Otto 17 of 49 nice hit Titans Ready to see that guy play And Patriots one of one NFL shield patch Otto Pierre Strong Jr Patriots big congrats Out of one of one Patriots in the last break too Ryan a there you go NFL shield Pierre Strong Get that bagged welcome back Shane got Raiders Devontae Adams 34 of 99 They achieved Travis Kelsey 5 of 25 Panthers DJ more patch card 5 of 25 That guy needs to get out of Carolina. That guy needs an actual quarterback. He deserves it Jaguars rookie Jersey Trevon Walker 347 of 399 So you hit see your Cowboys rookie Otto Dantario Drummond 43 of 49 Seahawks Kenneth Walker the third rookie Otto 58 of 99 I have no idea And rookie triple jersey Otto Lyons Aiden Hutchinson 96 of 149 Nice hit Lyons with Aiden on the back That's gonna do it guys again not gonna recap.  So I'll keep going here try to get chronicles filled next Uh, thanks for joining. We got like I said chronicles up next


I didn't tell you this was healthy That's looking a lot more like it next step. You need some grains flaky layers Cut them in half and Rob them up into a little ball like that throw your balls in the sauce and toss them in We quickly realized that one can of biscuits wasn't gonna do it So not only we get some more biscuits, but we also grabbed some danos original and the spicy at Kroger I guess we got about one more stick of butter and that third stick of butter It's more garlic paste as well some more danos and a little more Parmesan cheese and a little cheddar as well Continue to sauce up our balls Once we got a solid layer.  All right. It's been 50 minutes time to get a bite Check it out y'all simply just pulls apart Everyone's it's each the own little biscuit. You got the danos. You got the garlic.  I'm gonna get you some keep sprinkling. We'll see you next time


So what we want to do now is look at a couple of different types of outputs together to see if when we work through the process we can actually get to a solution. Here are some outputs and the question is what is this organic compound? So the first thing that I want to look at is the mass spectra. The mass spectra is telling me that the maximum value here, the molar mass, is 74. So that's a good starting point that gives me a little bit of information that might be useful to me at some point. I also have when I look at mass spectra a peak at 57, 74 minus 57. So that's going to be 17. Now 17 is an interesting number because 17 is equal to 16 plus 1. Now I know 16 plus 1 is an OH group. So it's possible that this is already telling me something about the presence of a hydroxy muscle group. There's another peak here at 45, 74 minus 45. Now this time I have 29. Now 29 is also an interesting one that I've looked at in the past. You may want to have a look at a few different variations and of course there can be more than one but 129 that I know comes up quite often is an ethyl group. So C-C-H-H-H-H. So what we have here is two 12s, 24 plus five 1s is 29. So I have a fragment here that has an ethyl group on it, a hydroxyl for the first one and an ethyl for the second one. So there's a couple of little bits of potential clues that I have. Of course other other combinations that might bring me a 29 maybe so I need to explore a few more things if I'm going to be sure about what I actually have here. The fact that there's no UV-Vis above 220 means we probably don't have a double bond. We probably don't have any of those complications in this particular molecule but we're not sure because no information doesn't necessarily tell us anything definitive but I'm just making that little conclusion at this point in time. So now I'm going to go up to the IR spectrum. Now the IR spectrum is showing me something interesting because I would expect a nice broad tongue for around the 3000 region up here to indicate the presence of the OH group that I think got cracked off this molecule. But when I look at it it's not the tongue, it's the hairy beard. So that means that I've potentially got a C00H group. So I can confirm that by saying okay well that sort of broad region around where I expect it is where an OH appears but the hairy beard one is more an indicator of the carboxylic acid group than the OH group. So of course one of the really important things I can do is I can look at where the carbon oxygen double bond is and that sits in that 1680 to 1750 region and as we've already looked at in a previous example there it is right there. So that is actually confirming to me the presence of the C00H group because I've got that hairy beard so I've got the broadness up where the OH group is but I've also got the presence of that a C double bonded O. So now I'm starting to be a little bit more confident that I might actually have a carboxylic acid here. Now what I can do since I've got both of these outputs together is just do a quick calculation. So for my C00H group I haven't calculated one of them before but if I've got one carbon that's 12 and then I've got 16 and another 16 for the other oxygens and a hydrogen so let me see what I've got here I've got 8, 14, 15 and then 45. So notice that 45 is the value of the mass of a C00H group and of course when I look back here 45 is one of my fragments so therefore that means that could actually have cracked off from that molecule and it'd be sitting on its own as it's passing through the mass spectrometer. So now I'm starting to feel quite good about my identification of this molecule. I think I've already got enough information here that I'm close to being able to put it together but just to be sure let me have a look at my NMR data. So when I look at my NMR data now I have one, two, three. Let's not worry about the top one just for the moment. Let me look at my three different types of environments. So my three different types of environments tells me that I have at least three carbons and this is starting to be consistent with what I have before. Notice too that one of these carbons is way, way to the left and usually this is an indicator of one of these more unusual bonds. So let me just go to my chart and see if each of these things make sense. So 5 to 40 is the carbon-carbon hydrogen bonds so that could be this region here. It could also be this region here. My marker on the 29-ish kind of mark looks like it's coming in somewhere around here. So this one is a very low value. It's around about the 10 mark. This one here is more like around about the 29 mark and so it's possible that I have this. It's possible that I may also have, if it's a 29 mark it could be this or it could be this, it potentially could even be this and then my final one is a really big one. It's up at 180 and up at 180 you can see what I've got up here is this one here. So there's another piece of confirming evidence that suggests to me that this is actually an acid. It could be an ester but what I looked at from my IR and my mass spec suggested that this probably was an acid. Now if this is an acid this would mean that this confirms this one and it also confirms this one because I know I've got more than one carbon. I'm not thinking I've got three C00H groups. I'm thinking that there are different types of environments so that's more consistent with the fact that I've got these carbons attaching in these different kinds of ways. So this is another little piece of confirmation. So I'll then finally look at my NMR. The NMR is a little bit difficult to read here but you can see that there are a couple of regions for hydrogens and these regions for hydrogens are around the sorts of places we might expect. A peak of 3 and a peak of 4 this indicates that we've got something sitting next to a CH3 neighbor and this sitting next to a CH2 neighbor and we might expect another one way up the end for that hydrogen that's sitting on the oxygen that's attached to another carbon. It's not on this output here but you can see the line is just so contracted that the little blip is so far off to the left that it's actually being truncated and it shows it up there so we would expect that something's going on up there as well. So there are three different types of hydrogen environments. One up there on the oxygen and two others with those methyl and the CH2 neighbors. So I'm pretty confident now that I have a molecule that I can identify. It has this group which I got from MassSpec. I've confirmed, I feel like I've confirmed that I also have an acid group and therefore I feel pretty confident that I have propanoic acid which also goes by the more common name of propionic acid. It's my three carbon carboxylic acid and I think from the information that I've been provided with I can be reasonably confident in my conclusions that I found propanoic acid. There's a lot of steps in this and you can see some of them are confirmation steps not necessarily critical steps but I think once you've started to put some of this information together particularly with the info from MassSpec and IR if you leave the NMR to the end and look at it more as confirmation I think it's harder to start from NMR. It's better to come back in and use it as confirmation. Hopefully this is a useful little technique for working through the different types of spectra in order to identify an unknown. Good luck, do plenty of practice and thanks for watching.


A joint security team comprising SWAT police operatives of the Inukul State Command and Dren Police Force Special Forces in troops of the 82 Division of the Manjaro and Ami Inuku have burst the criminal hideout of IPUB ESN in Ezioha, Nbo'o, and Ogu, local government area, while they were setting plans to enforce the illegal seated home order in the state. This was contained in a statement issued by the State Police Public Relations Officer, DSP Daniel Ndukwe. The PPRO set the three of the hoodlums who opened fire and the joint team, upon sighting them, were neutralized while several orders escaped with severe degrees of gunshot wounds in the ensuing, gone fight. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


Hi, my name is Meos Kvavek, I am a video producer for the NextLot marketing team. Part of my job is to bring you more regular content here on YouTube, so we're starting this video series called NextLot News, where I bring you all the news from in and around NextLot. So let's get started. Our in-person NextLot conference is coming back. From October 1st to October 4th, in Berlin you can expect some Keynotes, Talks, Lightning Talks, Workshops and much more. The first two days will be for Keynotes, Talks and Workshops and the last two days will be for more workshops and coding sessions. We've also just announced the first Keynotes speakers, Felix Reder and Renata Avilia. I can also share a tiny secret with you, I mean it's not really a secret if you follow what we're doing on GitHub, you can kinda see how we schedule our releases, but I think you can expect to see some more of NextLot 25 at conference, so stay tuned for that. Also, if you're working on an app for NextLot at the moment, now might be the time to submit it to the store. We are doing a NextLot app developer contest, where you and your team can win travel and documentation funding for the conference, a one-hour private mentoring slot with a NextLot developer and a design review with a NextLot designer. On top of that, the developers who built the winning app will win 500 years and the NextLot mark. Oh wow. We usually don't give them out. Register now for conference and maybe submit a Lightning Talk, I'd recommend you book your travel and total soon. There's also our NextLot Include initiative, check out all the links below to see if you qualify for our travel support program. Also during conference week, there will be another NextLot Enterprise Day. On October 4th in Berlin, you can learn more about what's going on in the industry, how companies are using NextLot, more product news and case studies. There's even still an early bird discount code on our website by the time this video goes live, so register now and maybe come a few days early to also see NextLot Conference. Speaking of in-person events, our founder Frank was at scale, the Southern California Linux Expo in Los Angeles, and he gave a talk about why the GPL is great for business. If you couldn't make it to LA, there's a recording of Frank's talk linked in the description below. Frank has also been interviewed on one of Germany's most popular television programs, Galileo. He talked about our antitrust complaint to the EU against Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior. You can find all the info on antitrust.nextlot.com and we will also link to our blog post about that Galileo episode. These are the four biggest stories that happened over the last little while, we will do these kinds of videos every few weeks. The next video on this channel will be a Q&A video where we try to answer your questions about NextCloud, so make sure to leave your questions in the comments down below. Thank you for watching, please let me know what you think and also let me know what kind of content you'd like to see here in the future. That's it for this video, I'll see you in the next one, take care, bye.