Excellent. So for those watching on recording, I'm Mel Hauser. I use she they pronouns and I'm executive director here at all brains belong.   All right. So, we're going to be talking about something we spoke of when we first started brain club back in January. Which is what goes into creating a culture of safety and neurodiversity affirming culture of safety in everyday life and whether you are a parent and looking to revisit the co regulation dynamics with with with your children, or if just in co regulation experiences with other family members or self regulation feeling safe within within your own self in your everyday environment, these are some of the topics that we're going to talk about. And Hannah bloom is a pediatric occupational therapist on our board of directors. And we gave this talk together synchronously in January and we revamped it asynchronously and so we'll have a video of us, we were synchronous, but I'll play the video. Just by way of introduction. If you've not been to brain club before all forms of participation are okay here you as many of you have already figured out you can have your video on or off. So, even if it's on you do not need to, you know, look at the camera or like do conform with any kind of default zoom thing, because in fact we actively discourage masking conforming to defaults. So please do do whatever needs doing, and you can communicate however you want to you can unmute and speak with mouth words you can type in the chat box gesture you can you know just what whatever's most comfortable for you. And, in addition to affirming all aspects of identity here. And another thing that we do to intentionally create a culture of safety is that just respecting and protecting one another's access needs. So you are welcome to talk about anything that you feel comfortable talking about here. And we just ask if that if there's something that you personally experienced as traumatic or stressing we just ask you to give a content warning with the topic, so that others can can listen within for a second. One more point of access is that if you'd like to be using captions and they're not popping up for you automatically. Just click either the live transcript close captioning icon, or if your version of zoom doesn't have that option, then just click the more that that that and choose show subtitles. If they do pop up automatically and you don't want them, you can do those same things to show high subtitles. All right, so you know what I'm going to do is I'm going to Sarah can I make you co host. Sure. Okay this way. Someone else can do Sierra I'm going to make you co host to both be co host there you go. So that if folks are joining, they can be let in. So, here you go. I'm going to take us on a tour of past brain clubs to get everybody on the same page. All our archives are available for free on the website so I encourage you to go back and and listen to the original brain rules versus world rules. And we actually did a whole a whole month of this topic in August, think August yeah. So it's about unlearning and reimagining right so so the assumptions the things that we think are the way the world needs to be, they don't need to be that way necessarily if they're not working. So, when you tell people that when they're not ready to hear it. That's regulating. So, on month long, we're going to be talking about lots of things that are amazing to talk about at brain club within a community of people who are on this journey together of unlearning and reimagining. And sometimes we want to have these conversations everywhere once we, you know, start drinking the kool aid. So, that's what this month is going to be about. It's about how do you take the oblique approach to make to make this relevant for other people. So, that's why, for example, we talk about inclusion, right, we talk about inclusion and belonging because that's not controversial, like inclusion matters and someone disagree with that out loud with me. But that's, that's, that's, that's different has different impact than focusing on correcting specific things within society, for example. So, you know, when we, when we think about inclusion. It's, it really can be simplified that the reason we talk about neurodiversity and access and universal design is that when something in society is offered as a default.  And so when you feel other, you are unlikely to feel that you belong so anytime there's a default. There's others. And so there's no inclusion. And we're going to apply that same concept here all month, talking about family life relationships. So if you have a week, please join us for the COVID conversation that talking about workplace issues and recreational opportunities, particularly for adults. Because when we think about inclusion. It all begins with safety and regulation, or lack thereof right so that's where we begin. In, in January, actually, we had a whole month long theme called help everyone in my home is flipping their legs, all about co regulation and self regulation. I'm, I'm, I want to leave time for, for lots of conversations today so I'm not going to play this video clip, because we got up to such a late start sorry about that. Everyone flips their lead. And that happens because when things in our environment trigger our limbic system and using the analogy from the whole brain child by Dr. Dan Siegel and Dr. Tina Payne Branson upstairs brain downstairs brain. When downstairs plan is triggered and we don't get to pick when that happens. It's, it's because we're not feeling safe. And when downstairs brain is triggered we don't have access, full access and he would upstairs brain. And so we don't, we don't get to necessarily make choices. We, we downstairs brain calls the shots. Most of the time. That, that can take many different forms. You know, if, if, if someone is overtly like throwing things and screaming, you might be able to detect that they're dysregulated. But dysregulation can take many other forms and sometimes it's even hard to know when someone's dysregulated, or even to recognize when we ourselves are dysregulated. So, all brains belong in addition to being governed by our board of directors, we have a community advisory board. And so this spring, we asked, hey, how are we going to know when our community is more neuro inclusive. And what they said, I'm not going to like invite you to study this right now it's up on the website, one of my favorite things, but I'm just going to show you that so many people in our community. This comes down to access needs being able to communicate access needs explore access needs, negotiate conflicting access needs that that that is one of the ways that we're going to define our impact and that's why for this summer, all we've done pretty much is access needs. And we, and if you've not been to a brain club in the last couple months to hear us talking about this access needs or anything that is required to meaningfully participate in life, and everyone has access needs. They may just not think about it that way. But when framed that way, it really can explain a lot of things. And often, we have conflicting access needs on the example I always like to give in my house is like when Luna, my five year old needs to make noise at the top of her lungs at the exact same time that I need complete quiet. Yeah, that's that's conflicting access needs. And why this matters to these conversation is that often we are in co dysregulation encounters and we may not even know it. And if we do, we may not realize that a lot of co dysregulation, meaning rather than co regulation like we are returning to calm together, we are doing the opposite together escalating co escalating was relates to conflicting access needs, where we to two or more people have things that are required for them to meaningfully participate. And of course, brain rules are an example of cognitive access means. So, go back and watch January and February because there's a lot of, there's a lot of gems and old brain clubs about about the co regulation versus dysregulation experience. And that is a just a recap to get us on the same the same page for my conversation with Hannah bloom. And I'm going to actually have to stop share so that I can reshare what sound forget to do that. We were talking yesterday about how a lot of people think that there's like a set of things to do, and that's going to make their family environments and their relationships feel better, like that there would be like some strategies top down, but that that doesn't really play out. Right. But there's some prescription of how to exist that create this end goal. Right. Doesn't exist. It does not exist. And I think that I know as a as a parent just as a human, like, I am so rarely regulated. And when I am regulated or when I am distracted enough, like, I'll give an example. Okay, so typically when it's time to leave the house. I'm like Luna, I want you to leave the house. Let's go leave the house. Luna's limbic systems like yeah. No, like no. And it's not like, it's not volitional it's automatic involuntary it is not safe when someone is inducing me to comply. Right. And this week when it was time to leave. I was on the phone with my colleague, and I opened the door and I was like, you know, I'm going to be leaving for the thing. I thought you might want to get dressed. And then I went back to the phone call and I like my energy was like not directed at her. Right. And she was like, bring me my clothes. I put them in and I said, and she's like watching a screen and I was like, um, you might want to put them on and I was like distracted again back to the call. And then 10 minutes later I go back in dressed. She's freaking dressed. This has never happened in the history of my life. Yeah. So you removed any time constraint, because it wasn't, I'm leaving. Are you coming or going and leaving, which is like time constraint now this is happening. And you removed pressure of your presence and energy by being in a different mental space. Right. And the time thing was not actually removed. I talked about time. I knew about time kind of although I don't really experience time so like energetically time was not part of my mental space. It was more so the ladder. It was more so like my energy was diffused by paying attention to something else. And that contributed to us. I think I think it contributed to a sense of safety. Yeah, well and a sense of safety in a removal of not being able to meet an expectation. Yes. Yeah. So the fear or the, or the fight or the, the limbic response to an expectation being put. Am I going to be able to meet this expectation. I don't know. So maybe I'm going to say no right away. I don't want to meet your expectations. I'm going to say no right away. Yeah, I'm not your, your expectations feel unsafe to me. Yeah. So I shut them down because that's what my little limbic system is supposed to do unsafe. I actually did not have expectations. I, I didn't have enough cortex to have expectations. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So sometimes we remove expectation of transition by adding like a, a speaker story and then the speaker travels with you. So like there's an audio, a podcast or an audio book that we're listening to and it just kind of gets turned on. And this is like, then I'm helping Isaac get dressed and I'm right there with him and we're listening and then the speakers just move into the car. And we're going to follow it because that's what we want is the story. That's amazing. And it's not like a gimmick. It's, it's like the lens it's almost like reframing the lens like if the primary goal is to do the thing. It will fail because it will feel unsafe. Yeah. The primary goal is a safe experience is a safe experience. And the primary goal is a, an on time arrival for my need. So I'm, I know my need but lindically, I can maintain a calm in relationship. So I, I, I know my need of getting somewhere by a certain time. So I can rewind that by two hours because this is how my brain works, but and I can know that, okay, it's going to take this amount of time to do these things. And what are the tools or what's the safety net that's going to allow this to happen so that I'm not late, which is when my limb kicks in and I get stressed. I'm going to give like a huge amount of time to be able to, to, to get to that point. And it's removing for my, for, for Isaac it's removing a list of must do is before a final external unsafe expectation. You getting to work is not me getting to work on time is not a need of his. So I don't even put that on this schedule sometimes, right. So, so you're also talking about framing this as, as, as an access need issue. So your access is to arrive on time. It doesn't matter whether it's rational or irrational. It could very well be a brain rule and not a world rule, but it is your brain rule and it is serving you and so you are keeping it. And so the way that you have negotiated conflicting access needs is to plan your day with this two hour lead up so that your energy. So it's just about like, like planning your life around having to think basically it's planning your life around being regulated, regulated. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. So that mean that meant that must mean that it's not just about blocking out two hours like you're essentially building your life around being regulated. That sounds like a good idea. How do you do that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you have to do that. A lot of tools. I mean, a lot of access needs a lot of accommodations that fit that are forever changing because sometimes what works one week isn't what works today but that's okay.  So a cognitive engagement that's enjoyable gives him more access to that hard stuff. It's the threshold piece. How much, how many stressful pieces of my day can I do without it all adding up into full system stress. Yes. You know, that is making me think about cognitive regulation, because just as you're saying that Isaac's cortex is engaged with the story and following along it. And that reminds me of Luna today when we were leaving for school. Luna entered character. Luna was the ground critter and everything we did was about the ground critter doing the thing that made it more accessible, because Luna was using her cortical strategies to make her feel more safe. And so by my, I actually, by interacting with ground critter, I, I had no it actually like shifted my expectations I'm like, we're in a mode where she's crawling on the floor and rolling around in the dirt, and it's 750am and we're, it's 36 degrees and we're rolling around in the dirt. And like, I'm going to engage in that. I'm going to correctly enter that space and like it made me shift out of expectation, because part of me was like, All right, I'm with the ground critter. We made it to school. Because I am in this different space now. Yeah, and because I'm using, and we all have different self regulation strategies. One of mine is the mantra of safety and connection is primary. And so there is arriving 10 minutes earlier to school is not actually going to be worth it to me, even my cortex when I like do risk benefit calculations, anything that can come from my be like we got to do the thing. It's never worth it because of that cortical strategy of like regulation and safety connection safety is primary. Yeah, yeah. So your one brain, the human brain will not have expansive access won't be able to engage to learn to have partnership. It's all right if it's all in sympathetic fight, fight, see, flop mode, and the way to keep that cortical is connection and safety. So you use that cortical top down method to achieve your state of regulation and be present in the environment and the emotional and neuroceptive energetic energy that's right there and available. And in that you access a different level of connection and regulation and togetherness. Right. Yes. So, we've had the experience of being around a small group of kids with hypersensitive neuroception for detection systems. And this has gone really well. What do you think has made it go well and by go well I mean the kids feel safe and want to come back. Yeah. It's made it smooth or accessible.  I mean, that we are not only have we had the privilege of being with kids with heightened neuroception but we have a group of adults with them, caregivers, parents, loved ones who are very neuroceptive and aware of energy. And I think setting us all up as a group of big people in trust and connection. And, I mean, going on three years of connection and collaboration, building that as a safe place. These little humans are walking into what is already very accepting and open and valued space. So I think the energy for sure in that space is huge. You help me regulate I help you regulate the other big people in this space equally help all of us regulate. Leah and I had the conversation when we first started working together, we as another one of the big people in this space like for her to understand my nervous system when I start to get really flighty and kind of hyper and like I have a lot of things to say and I may be like running all over the place. Please Leah just give me this like down here Hannah. And she's so she is so solid and she is so much that grounding force like even just working with her for the last three weeks I've been able to be like alright. I can get hyper and I can get flighty and that's a part of who I am and that's a part of you know I will play tag and run in circles because that's great for my nervous system and then when I sit down and I get a drink of water and I feel the energy and like, and I'm back here. And this is a good solid space for me to be observant and be a draw to the nervous systems that are still really high energy. Yes, the other thing that you do, and that Leah does, and that I, I work hard to courtically get myself to follow your lead on this is that there, I don't have an expectation of what play looks like in that space. And energetically, these sweet little limbic systems, they feel, not just energy and angst, but they feel expectation they know when someone is expecting them to do the thing.  Yeah, because of who we all are. We actually like, don't expect them to do the thing and they don't expect each other to do the thing. Right. Yeah, absolutely. And that's a lot of rewiring social construct in our own neurology our own narrative of what the world is. You know, it's definitely a new space of being the therapist being the occupational therapist on the team like, I'm not showing up with my agenda, and my whiteboard, and all my systems of we're going to do a regulating sensory piece and then we're going to do a social exchange piece and then we're going to do a regulating sensory piece like I had a whole formula 10 years ago that that that I was stuck that were there was a brain rule. And to liberate that from my expectation gives this authentic engagement space for the little people that I'm working with that can come into connection and engagement and self actualization in the past that fits their nervous system in their brain, not that fits our socialized expectation of when you graduate from therapy you will have learned right. So that's been like, I mean it's just been unlearning brain rules, but it's also been noticing where the noticing where the where the good stuff is noticing where the joy is and where the really sweet connections are and where those little places of like, just you feel it you're like, Oh, this is it. This is like this is, this is worth holding on to I want more of this. And noticing those times that came up they of course were always when the child or the student when the kid when my child felt the safest right, and so they would come into that as looking for acceptance connection, who I am and showing up as me, totally different, and it was never in any prescription. It was never in anything that I would show up and be like, and at this point we will have self actualized you know connection. I think I wonder if many people, because of their lived experience of feeling unsafe by the social constructs in their own lives. And that that limbic response even in remembering because trauma stays in your body right so so like you enter a space like a playgroup, and your kid does a thing and energetically, whether real or imagined, the energy of like, there's no judgment, judgment on my kid judgment on me and like, yeah, even though nothing happened, the energy that goes out into that. They feel that energy of like, oh, I'm safe. And then chaos. Yeah, what do you do in that moment to be like, like, to return return to a place of, I'm going to let go of that. And you how do you so I like, for me, and this is the practice and so I mean this is also the good question about what it means for the family to so for me in the family the way that I return to regulation, the way that I, and bring my nervous system back into other people's attunement reading other people's nervous system instead of being overwhelmed by my own. Whatever it is going on the way that the best way for me to do that is to get down on the ground. Again, this is me and this is experiments of years of knowing how to attune for me it's it's it's squatting down close it's putting both my hands on the ground for a second the floor. So I'm I squat and I'm low. There's something about the proprioceptive work like I think because my glutes kick in so much I'm like, Oh, here's my body.  This is my contained little nervous system. Putting my hands on the ground feels strong. I feel like, yep, I am strong. I am a strong person. I can do this. So I'm building from the sensory system back into regulation. And I've practiced it enough over the years that I can do it fairly quickly in my nervous system those cues kick in safety for my for my neuroception. And it's subconscious it's it is something our brains are always doing all the time scanning the environment scanning the interrelationships scanning the internal relationship the internal environment for safety. And we are geared for it. So, once we feel it once we find it, it's, it's what our system wants to go to that homeostasis is where we want to be a cellular Lee. Yes. Okay, so for my nervous system it's that it's getting low it's getting grounded.  Don't create some expected emotion. So that like that shame fear response might might create this expected like, Oh, I'm okay. Right. Like, everything's fine. Can you tell this isn't really a smile. Like, but it's what we do because it's what we've been socialized to do. So, actively neutralizing softening my face. And then, like, something about the environment for me usually helps find the horizon, look at a tree root, some sort of queue to me that's like, there's no saber tooth tiger here.  This is solid ground. I'm just describing that you begin with a bottom up strategy, you get into your body and you ground yourself whatever that means to you you ground yourself, and then you have access to your cortex where you are immediately mediating your limbic response. Because now you have access to your cortex, because you did that initial bottom up. Yeah softening to take the edge off to like bring your cortex back online and then you go to that I think a lot of people skip right to that, or they try to skip right to that and they don't have access to their cortex. You can't skip it. You have to do something to access your cortex.  Yeah, you, you don't have access to the impulse control to stop. You don't, you may not even be able to like metacognitive metacognitive Lee, like zoom out and watch yourself you just don't have access to that so it's really just like it's happening. Get to the ground if that's how you ground like something in your body. Yeah. Yeah, and it's it's it's experimental for a while it's trial and error to figure out what your physical somatic sensory system responds to. And then once that is kind of once that's a queue of safety for your physical sensory being it gets stronger. And sometimes maybe it needs tweaking like you know, when my knees can't squat anymore and hopefully not for another 20 years I'll have to figure something else out. The other thing is that if, if someone knows that they are their go to self reg plan is a top down trying to use their cortex. The other thing that I found helpful is to prepare ahead of time. What I'm wanting my cortex to do. Yep, because if I can, like, ID and motor planet ahead of time, I can maybe access it as like automatic, like automatic loop I can pull in as like you trying to use it in the in the moment, because then it becomes not an a stop, you know impulse control stop it's like don't like like what's on the gas already. Don't try to step on the break of stop screaming your kid. It's I'm going to go to my automatic loop. And so for me that is like the, like I said before the mantra of like the relationship, the relationship, the relationship is primary like like, like, like a thought I can try, even if I don't have full access to my cortex that I can I can try that I mean doesn't work maybe but like it might work a lot better than like, I'm going to talk myself out of how this is not this is okay. Right. Well, I mean and this is also gets to some of the course of like there's the unnumberable amounts of different brains you think when we've talked about this you think in specific word patterns.  I do not. I do pictures and I know which rock is at the driveway that I want to drive into, not where it is on the street in words ways. So I think that's also just a self awareness piece of what works for your brain and language works for yours. It's so seen right now. The language doesn't work great in my brain so to start to do like an internal talk in the midst of feeling really dysregulated is just like, oh that's really that would be too much work. Yeah, yeah. And so it begins with self awareness of like what what actually calms you and maybe even developing an awareness of like your go to patterns of how you negotiate life even when you're like generally regulated enough. Yeah, yeah, no absolutely which then I mean gives you that base of being able to have the space for your family to feel safe and heard and seen. I mean, the goal is acceptance and connection for all of us and that requires me also having that grace and acceptance of like, you know, I understand myself sometimes. That seems like a great stopping point. Yeah. Oh my goodness. I don't know how to get out of this. Get out of there. Alright, so I took notes while I was watching that recording. So today, I took notes on some like words. And I used one of these like word cloud apps, I didn't like the font and I didn't like the size and like anything about this but this is this is this is all I could come up with without getting put on the gas about it. So I think of what Hannah tried to highlight grounding connection play expectations awareness and all of those pieces, I think, in form, like what becomes the priority in in interactions because like you could practically say that you would like, you know, you could say you accept something. I love you unconditionally I accept you unconditionally but like if your energy doesn't have those other pieces in place, your, your, your energy enters into the environment. And it's, it's, it's, it's almost like you have to achieve co regulation before you know how to do it again so you can remember, remember how you did it. So, I think that for many of us, we're just like trying to survive and treading water, as opposed to like, like Laura shared in the chat. It feels overwhelming because I have no sense of like what my go to strategy is to manage chaos and all the things so, but yeah.  That was self regulating before and then you like stop doing it because your life changed and you're like oh I feel terrible. Oh, it's because you stopped doing that thing that you didn't know because a lot of nervous nervous systems find a way to regulate a lot of the time and so like Christina shared like oh I like to sit on the floor in the morning. Well, you kind of figured out that that worked for you that's so cool. She's also sharing. I recently realized that I have to hijack my brain to get tasks done. Oh yes. Yes. I have to trick myself to go to the grocery store have to make it a game or a word system. Yes, spoken like a true dopamine down brain. That's the story of my life. Yes. Yes. I wonder how how this resonated for others about about how energy may be playing out in your co regulation experiences. I have an example today. I'm trying to like at this kind of reinforce this talk reinforce like where I kind of maybe went a little wrong. But similar to your daughter my daughter doesn't like direct demands, and that could be like do something but it could also be stopped doing something. She's 10 and she still has this kind of like, if I directly asked her to stop doing something. She's definitely not going to stop doing it. She's going to look at me and do it more. So today, she was like rocking a chair. And she's when she rocks a chair. She rocks it so hard that sometimes it's like Dan going to like get damaged. So I tried to like implement like like transitioning strategies to get her to do something else. But I think because I was so irritated that she was doing the thing. She was just focused on me and like, she couldn't move her brain towards the other strategies that I was giving her, because I was dysregulated. And I was unhappy of the things she was doing and I realized now after this conversation, if I had just been more neutral, and then like, you know, I'm not sure that the chair really likes being treated that way maybe you could like go roll on your yoga ball that yoga ball likes that something like that. And that's that's what I'm thinking about today resonates a lot. So, as someone who is in an equivalent situation to what you described like every day, every day there's something like that. That is where I'm going to try to choose my words, because this is this is what I hoped we'd get to. And I am grateful that you shared with us because I think that story. First off, I hear other people tell me that story meant like the equivalent of that story, all day this is like what people talk about here. And I live it all day. That is the oblique angle, but I'm trying to get at it like I don't I don't really know how to do it so I'm just going to do it. And that is where I use my strategy of the relationship is primary. The relationship is primary will override my initial gut reactions to protect the chair or protect the thing. The thing that is was actually important to me before the episode, but having because I'm a top down regulator. That is the exact situation that I had to come up with some way of reallocating one priority in a world where I have 50,000 priorities. I want to reduce chaos at all times. I would maybe have thought, you know, don't thing on that thing. It's going to break the thing. But really, that gut instinct. That was because the sound was exploding my brain. That's why I wanted to stop. And like when first step was acknowledging that part, but then even more so, being able to somehow sort of, and you can't just, you can't just decide one day. You're going to care about the destruction of property like not going to work. And for me in my house, I'd love to hear others. I had to pick. I had to pick. I could only keep one thought in my head. Only recently, did I like actually build enough of a neural pathway to like with enough repetition. At least my words this hour. The relationship is primary, or some version of that, that actually is a lens that that takes care of all other decisions. What do you say, when do you say it, when do you intervene when do you don't, when do you issue a demand, when do you not. When do you completely scale back demands, because attuning to the energy of yourself. And the other person. You can tell when there's a breakdown of that safety and connection.  Oh yeah, there is literally chaos. I need, I like, I drive is to stop the chaos. But the relationship is primary. Like I was saying, she's a, she's, she's a ground up processor so she's like, you know the equivalent of like the rocking chair is going to break thing is like, there will be no communication, I will get to the floor. And that helps her so like eat like I think just having, having a collection of strategies in that moment. There's a lot of it in like this, this is what's radical, glory is the word radical in the chat before, what's radical is that there's a lot of stuff that gets broken in my house, because I had to pick. Sorry, brother monologue. So, you know, the first find themselves in situations like this, we're like the over rehearsed neural pathway that's like, I have to stop the thing I have to intervene in the thing with that intervention has keeps the cycle going. So, so, so it sounds like Jeff. You're, you're, yeah, so, so it's interesting so as that says that, that, you know, we're not the only ones, I think people think that they are the only ones, because no one talks about this. So, this is like another example of just like transparency actually being the way out of chaos because I think what happens a lot is that in the moment, if you think you're the only one and you start like judging yourself as as a parent as a partner as a parent, you're judging yourself and then like the shame response actually makes you more dysregulated the same way that they get more dysregulated when you when you give them feedback. Like so you make yourself more dysregulated and then your energy comes into the space and it. I'm just like talking about this to know like, no, you're not the only one that has chaos, there's a whole lot of chaos, and that hopefully will like take the edge off of the shame factor, like at least to start the journey. I have a question for you Mel mentioned noise level before. And I also have a problem. I, I have a problem with noise. Most of the time I try to redirect it, but there's this part of me that feels like I'm asking my child to regulate my nervous system by asking them to take their noise somewhere else. So there's like this kind of like, all right, it is bothering me and I'm overstimulated by this level of noise but like, also, I don't want them to feel like they're responsible for regulating my nervous system too. So how do you deal with that. That's a great example and a super common example of conflicting access needs. So, first off, when it's not happening. And then I talk about like, we all have different brains and I talk about sensory processing and there are things that stress me out just like there's things that stress my street little love out so that then there's that background knowledge.  My first thing was because I initially was feeling self conscious about even putting my earbuds in, because I thought that even putting earbuds in would be sending a message of rejection. So, but that was the first context of like, this is about me. This is not about you. You make your sweet little baby noises you do what needs doing to regulate, but I'm going to put in my earbuds to take care of myself. And the next layer is that is like, I need to take a sound break. I need to go over there for like two minutes, five minutes, whatever that is, because I need to just like charge my battery by not having sound to process. And because we've been talking about this and she's two and a half. It's like not a big deal. Sometimes though, she's in the room, I'm on the phone. And I need to just like, get the thing down and I just like I can't. Anyway, just like need to get the thing done and I don't have access to my cortex to like plan all this and like deliver the language just so. So we've kind of like, at some point I asked like, Luna, if there's a time when I need, I need less noise. Are there, like, what do you want me to do. I kind of taking the collaborative product solutions, PS approach of like, what ideas do you have any because like, she has incredible ideas we've been doing this and she's three. She said, Mama, I want you to turn the volume down like the Alexa. She came up with that at four years old. Anyway, so today I was on the phone I was like hey Luna, can you because it was like like insurance on the phone or whatever and I was, I was like, Luna volume one, and she. I mean it wasn't volume one by any means but like anyway definitely like. It was, it was, it was, it was less loud. Laura's asked in the chat, how do we teach us and also teach our children to respect other people's access needs outside the home rate so it's framing it about access needs. Right, it's not that another person's access need is more important than their own and it's not there's like one correct default type of access need. It's, it's that, like, when something happens, there are going to be a variety of ways that that people respond, some brains respond this way some brains respond that way some brains don't respond at all and like, it's all on the on the continuum. And so it's just about asking people what their access needs checking in about access needs normalizing that whether they're in your home or without you. But it's not actually different the problem is the people who are out in the world who have never thought about this before and presume that their access needs are world rules when they are their individual access needs Sarah. Yeah, I just wanted to highlight advice that you gave me now a while ago, which was like at the beginning of the day. Everybody can choose an access needs that's like their priority for the day and like being okay about like accommodating your other access needs to meet the like priority access need for the rest of your family. And, and I think that's been really helpful and another thing that I think, especially as we're talking about the like, when you have put on the gas and everything's chaotic and it's really hard to zoom out because it just regulated using non verbal cues is something that we use in our house that I find really helpful of like, like when my partner is hyper focused on her computer and I know trying to interrupt her is going to trigger her nervous system I flash the lights instead of like tapping on her shoulder saying anything and that's the like amount of stimulation her brains able to handle at that point. So it was helpful.  So, so we have an access need board in our house. But we listed everyone's acts like usual actually your access needs are going to change context, the context and day to day but like the the sort of predictable deal breaker access needs we have like a little, you know, laminated piece of thing on our fridge. We don't necessarily participate, but I kind of know what his access needs are so put them on the board. Anyway, so anyway, so we have these up there. And, and, and, and like they're just there, they're there, and like they're they're kind of string for us to like remember and keep them in mind.  So one of lunas is that unsolicited bids for attention are dysregulating. And so that requires like some massive on learning I mean like all day long I just go around having unsolicited bids for attention I'm just like interrupting her every five seconds, saying learning is an unsolicited bid for attention when I started respecting her access needs. She started like actually seeking me out for interaction like on purpose. So anyway, it's because like safety comes first and you have to be regulated before you can engage. So anyway, knowing, and anyway, so naming the thing, teaching the framework having the visual, because like, honestly, I, my executive functioning needs to be reminded every time I walk into the kitchen. No unsolicited bits for attention, otherwise I'm just going to like start blurting out into the thing because it's like impulse controls like major impulse control to not be able to say good morning your child, but it has done wonders for the relationship. So the story that Sierra is talking about the picking one in the morning.  And it's because they were like, you know, they were like 20,000 of them. So that's, that's, that's how we taught that concept to the five year old. I have one more question before we wrap up today, and feel free to type in the chat. We learned to share is you need that at bedtime my son has 47 routines we must do. So it's interesting. So, so, so I would teach the concept that brain rules and like bringers aren't bad bringers keep us safe so like today I'm actually this is I'm glad you brought that up. Because brain rules like they are, we create them when we feel unsafe. And we have this idea about what's going to make the world make sense and orderly and like keep me safe and like all the things anyway.  And we sit and she eats her chocolate peanut butter cup, and then the food comes and all this is what we do. We did not buy the chocolate peanut butter. We forgot we went outside, we're sitting down, we're having real except that our water out of fancy glasses, and then she's like, I need the chocolate peanut butter cup.  And I need the chocolate peanut butter cup and I'm like, dude, brain rule. World rule. And, and then I'm like, oh, routine predictability, the connection the thing you look forward to that is always this way and it's the same food it always tastes the same. This is an access need isn't it. Yes. All right baby let's go get your chocolate peanut butter cup. Anyway, so like, the free meter on access needs makes it easier to meet them than like a super out there like what do you mean you need the green towel. You know, we all have access needs. We just get older and we have perspective perhaps. We have access needs, or we become so used to courtically overriding our limbic system that we forget we have access needs. So it's a lot. It's a lot of unlearning. Yeah, and so many, so many of us grew up with Sarah's editing the chat. So many of us grew up with, what do you mean you need the green towel. Oh, that was my entire paradigm shift. Yes. So speaking of paradigm chefs, join us next Tuesday, 6pm or we will be taking the oblique approach to the COVID conversation.  So we're going to be joined by a panel. We're talking about about this, about when we think about how, you know, safety is a prerequisite for inclusion sure that on slides earlier today. When, when, when we think about how so many public settings are not safe to breathe the air. So we look forward to seeing you next week. Bye everybody.


Good morning everybody. Welcome to Amsterdam, welcome to Drupalcon and I've hoped you've really enjoyed the keynote by Dries this morning and the picture that's the reason why we're starting a bit later than expected. It's good to see a lot of familiar faces here, a lot of new faces and today I'm going to basically address to you on how I grew my company and basically how I've crossed all the hurdles I've come across. So basically it's an open session and you are free to ask me any questions afterwards on how we did it, what hurdles I took and if you have any questions about my slides, you can visit me right after the presentation. My name is Michel van Velde and as I said I will give you a talk on how I grew my company called One Shew. First a little bit of an introduction, this is necessary to learn about you know why we took the hurdles we took. We're an advertising and digital agency, we're with 40 plus specialists based in Newtract, the Netherlands and we provide services for offline and online communication. We've been growing rapidly. We entered the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 and we won the FD Gizella Award and we're quite proud of that because we were number 25 in the Technology Fast 50. That's number 172 on the EMEA ranking list, EMEA 500. Yes it's possible to grow rapidly with the Drupal Agency especially in this era when there's more demand than we can offer. We work for companies, governments, NGOs and we create and realize seamlessly integrated communication solutions and not only our solutions are seamlessly integrated also our processes and workflows adapt to those of our clients which means we follow a client strategy and I will come back to that later, all the different kinds of strategies you can follow with your company. So what we do and this is quite well it's quite a lot of we offer we combine creativity and strength of the strategic agency, UX design agency, an online agency, a mobile agency and an advertising agency and when we started the company we had a dream basically to build this and we started off me and my companion Flores Daxen, I'll introduce later in my slides, we had what we call a big hairy and audacious goal. We wanted to become a global agency with officers all around the globe. We're now eight and a half years later and we're now working on a subsidiary in Germany and one in Amsterdam as well. So basically we're expanding and it will take us a while to reach this goal and that's why it's called a big and hairy audacious goal and it's good to have a big hairy audacious goal because it sets you know a mindset to grow if you have something to wish for but it's not there yet you can work towards it and it gives you a lot of energy. And we have another dream and I can share that as well. We want to go to the Bahamas. So once we're finished with this all in a lot of years time, we're going to fly out to the Bahamas going to sit there drinking beer, have a laugh and say do you remember Drupal Con? Do you remember growing? Do you remember all the hurdles we've taken to achieve success? So the first thing I want to basically tell you is that think big, dream big so you can grow big. If you don't have a big hairy audacious goal then you can work and basically on your daily projects and you can't work towards that big hairy audacious goal. And a study recently showed that only 2% of all entrepreneurs have a big hairy audacious goal but those 2% are also the most successful ones.  So we started this agency basically at my house, at the dinner table, 2 second hand laptops, yes we're going to create a full service agency. How? We didn't have a clue at all. But we had one thing, we had Google. So we started Googling on how to set up an agency. And the day we registered at that evening I had a party at my house and this guy walks in and he says hey how are you doing man? He's a good friend of mine. He says well I started an agency today, a company today. He says all right do you have a website yet? I said no I don't. He says yes you're going to be my first prospect then. So that evening I signed my first deal, wasn't the most profitable one. But then again we were starting off and within a couple of weeks time we decided to focus on bringing in quite a few nice brands and that worked out fine via my network. But before we started off the agency, with my companion Flores Derkse, we had to define rules. Rules on how to cooperate, how to work together, what to do and what not to do. And one of the rules was is that we didn't want any investors in our company. We wanted to be an independent agency. And we knew that would give us hurdles along the way. We could not grow rapidly as rapid as we could because we didn't have any investors. I always see it as there's two ways to the south of France. You can take the tall road, cost you a lot of money or get you there quickly. Or you can take the country roads. Takes a bit longer. It's a lot nicer though. And when you get to the south of France you know you don't have to meet your investor there who basically invested all the money so you could pay the toll roads. So yeah, we had rules. So no foreign money, no investors. And not working on projects my wife wouldn't allow me to. So not working for clients that would not be generally expected to work for. So we had a different set of rules. We written them down. So we had a ground basis to work on.  We created our website using Drupal. And we had our first client. So together, this is Boris Dax, by the way, he's my companion. We combined in our, you know, board of directors or management team, two different personas. And this comes in quite handy in the future. This came in quite handy in the future. Because I have a marketing and sales background. And my companion had a UX design and development background. There was no way we could basically not work together because we had our own different sets of expertise. And this would basically, you know, give quite a lot of balance within the management or team or, as you call it, board of directors. So we found this two new clients. It was as was children's villages, a major NGO and go ton. That is a large food producer in Europe who works in over 17 countries. And we were allowed to work on their website with the two of us. So I did the consultancy. I did the selling. I did project management.  We were working. And I say we started early at 830 in the morning, definitely until one at night, you know, and that comes with the job if you want success. Because you have to create first some profit, you know, profit you can invest later in new stuff. And you have to, you know, you know, break the ground floors and set your company in motion. So we were working really, really hard. They say if you've worked 10,000 hours on a project or a specialist, well, we've worked 10,000 hours plus in the beginning to create our company. So when we got the first two major brands, we started to shout them, you know, like shout it from the roof, you know, we created a press list. And we send out a press release to every new station we could find. And that got picked up, you know, and suddenly people were talking about this new agency. Everybody was thinking that we were with 10 people already, but it was just the two of us. So everybody's talking about these new agencies like hey, they got two new brands, big brands, they choose for one shoe. Something is happening there. We created a boss around our company. So we didn't do project management, sales, marketing, development, designing, no, we also did present PR for our own company. And that's really valuable. That's what most of the agencies don't do. They create successful projects, but they forget to promote it, you know, and not just promote it on Drupal.org, because that's where the developers come. No, promote it to your local press. That's where you start or or the national press or the international press. There's a lot of websites, you can find where you can promote your work. And we did. And then suddenly, independent persons were talking about one shoe. They were talking about our agency. Something is happening there. And that's really important. Independent people talking about your company. Because I always say, Hi, I am from Coca Cola, and I'm selling you Coca Cola. Yeah, right. You know, because you're from Coca Cola. But then this independent person says, Coca Cola is great. You know, you got to buy it. And then suddenly people think, Hmm, could be interesting. So one of the major reasons for success is to promote your work via independent channels. And we did that in the early days. And we were lucky as well. I can tell you that. Not only because I had a network with a few large customers, potential customers in it. But also we were the first agency to adopt Drupal in the Netherlands. So what we started to do is giving back at the same time. We started looking if there was a community around Drupal. And we found out there was one event and there was about 10 or 11 guys sitting around pizza boxes at the university talking about Drupal. So I have a marketing background. I decided to join the meetup. I would go there and sit down with the guys and they were talking about code. Okay, I'm not a coder. I know marketing. I know sales. So I sat down there and then suddenly I see this guy walking in with a suit. So I walk up to him says, Who are you? I says, Well, I'm from KPN, one of the largest telecom providers in the Netherlands. And I've heard something about Drupal. There's a meetup here. And then I thought, Okay, there's 11 guys 10 11 guys sitting around pizza boxes here. We need to professionalize this as well. Not only professionalize my company, but I also need to professionalize the community. So the next meetup, we started promoting fire independent channels as well. And Drupal.org and and all the channels we could find. And I created a role better, you know, and then suddenly two new large companies would walk in in their suits. And suddenly we had a table there and we can all those large companies would basically address the Drupal developers there and talk about Drupal in a more professional way. So the event we was called the Drupal gem. And the Drupal gem became the biggest Drupal event in the Netherlands with more than two to 300 visitors every year now. So we basically started giving back and I want to address to the keynote of trees, which is really good, give back to the community and it will bring you profit along the way anyway.  So very well done trees. So events is another way to promote yourself. So we decided to do some more. So in Holland, now you have the Drupal gem. We organized Drupal cafes at our office. It's all about sharing knowledge. I set up the Drupal Business Foundation in the Netherlands to promote Drupal independently. So my company is not linked to that. We're an organization member of the Dutch Drupal Community Society and of course the Drupal Association member. Really important to have those badges on your website. Why? Gives you credits. If potential customers see those badges, they think, hey, this guy or this company is giving back to the community. They know their stuff. So it gives you credits.  Grow faster than those who don't. So we started growing our company with our first profits we made. And that was the biggest hurdle, I think, is hiring my first person. You know, I was lying there.  And I got regular costs coming in every month. Oh, my God. How am I going to do this? And then I came up with the idea, okay, I'm going to hire an internship, an intern, you know, it's cost effective for six months. I can find out if he's well enough. And if he's well enough, you know, we can hire him anyway. And we hired this guy who was good at a development, but also user experience. Well, that came in handy. So he could decide beside work with our clients. So we started to look for what we call T shaped personnel. Yeah, you can find specialists who are focusing on either PHP back end development. But we were looking for T shaped personnel. T shaped personnel is they're really broadly educated in several subjects. But they go deep on every subject as well. And this guy, this intern we found was really good in UX, really good. And in development. So there's a win win situation for us. By doing so, this guy internship, paying, I think it was 300 euros a month, at the time, brought in a lot of profit. And with that profit, we bought faster laptops and we could invest in new stuff. And then we started growing. We started hiring new pet personnel. And there's a lot of opportunities that came our way. I can tell you one, we wanted to be a full service agency. And then I had this miraculous idea. At the times, the Olympic Games were being organized in Beijing. And I decided, okay, how cool will it be to drive from A to B from Athens, birthplace of the Olympic Games to be Beijing, create a program television program around it, an advertising campaign to hire new staff for the Holland Heineken House there. And, you know, just by a whim of an idea, I all wrote it down on paper. Floris, my companion in the evening, made a design and I drove to the Dutch Olympic Sports Association. They thought it was a brilliant idea and gave me 100,000 euros straight away and connected me to all of their sponsors to create this expedition. Shit, didn't thought it was going that fast. So I was in my car and I'm like, oh my god, I got three websites to build. My pipeline is full. Maybe this was too big a step. Then we came up to this. Everybody needs a coach. We were basically introduced to a coach in the beginning. And even, you know, as I want to depict here, is that even the best of the best in the world need a coach. And we needed a coach as well to give our guidelines, you know, creating a television program and we were only like with four people. It's a bit too much. So to be honest here, the project didn't go off. I called them and said, okay, you know, company goes first. This television project is off the charts. Sorry about that. And I've learned from that my mistakes. So what I did is started focusing on one shoe, creating that full service agency. The coach didn't like that we wanted to be a full service agency. And he said, focus on web development. Yes, we can. But in a society where we have always connected consumers, you know, being reachable my mobile phones, telephone tablets, anywhere, we wanted to give this full surface option to our clients. Everybody was against it. Everybody.  We're going to do this. We're going to show the world that it's possible to create a full service agency. We had a challenge. And our coach gave us guidelines on how to interact with new customers, set up a pipeline, pipeline management. And basically, a great coach will definitely lead to success. And it did, you know, once we found a structure to run our agency, it was possible for us to grow even faster. We had a strong focus on what we wanted to live to deliver in which years we knew that we would first focus on web development, Drupal web development. And besides that work a bit on marketing and communication, because we knew the biggest market would be Drupal. At that time, there were three agencies in the Netherlands to work with Drupal. And I think every month we had three to four pitches. And they also had like, okay, I always ask like, okay, who are my competition? Do you know that? He says, oh, there are two others. And I already knew, okay, who my competition was because there are only two other competition competitors in the Netherlands. Working all of those long hours gave me another hurdle to take. And although I won't present a picture of her here, I want to thank my wife. She gave me the opportunity to grow the agency. She was taking care of the kids at the time. And she allowed me to work from nine till midnight for the first couple of years. It was basically ridiculous when I think back of it. But now I have my agency and it all works out fine. And now I have time for my kids and my wife a lot more. So behind every great leader, there's even a better partner. If you don't make good, how to say it, if you don't work closely with your wife, you know, and discuss all the hurdles you have to take in growing a company, it will lead to disaster somewhere along the way. So if you have a partner, discuss what your vision is, discuss your dream, tell her that you'll take her to the Bahamas. But also tell her that it's necessary to work those 10,000 hours to create your company. And this is vital, vital for success. So I want to thank my wife, Alice, for allowing me to grow my company and be there every time I needed her. Right from the beginning, we knew that we wanted to grow our agency. Not as big as we are now. We didn't expect that to happen that quick. But we knew we wanted to grow. And what we also knew is that we had to grow in terms of leadership. And that's a problem I see with many agencies. I organized a Drupal CXO event a while ago in Utrecht. And I spoke to this guy, I know I have no idea if he's in the room here, and he says, I just hired my third star, my third person. And he's been dreadful, it's taking a lot of energy.   And another one. And another one.  But is there a leader? Is there a guy who knows management, project management? Is there a visionary person within the company who will lead the company past all those hurdles? In most of the times that person is not there right from the start. And that will, that's one of the reasons why a lot of agencies are still down to about a maximum of 10 people. Because it's easy to run a company of up to 10 people, you know, because it's small, you can do your agile projects, you do a bit of sales or a bit of promotion, and you get enough work coming in, and your cash flow is right in order. But if you want to grow past the 18, you know, the 18 mark is a really difficult one, then you have to change as management as well, as a leader. So that there's four levels of leadership.  Then you get to a point where you have to manage a team of people. So that's only direct support on this. You're a typical manager, and all the typical management works comes with it. Then if you start to grow, you have to start leading a team of teams. For example, a team of project managers that will lead a team, that requires different skills, and a different mindset because you're distancing yourself from the company. And that is, sorry, commerce guys, didn't do that on purpose. So you have to distance yourself from your own staff. And the question is, are you willing to do so?  No, not at all. You have to be on the floor regularly, but you don't work in a team closely together with them. That's a change. And it depends on you if you want to make that change. But it gives you time to go out there to basically hunt your vision and find new staff, find new clients and just to go out there.  You set the long term visionary goals, you know, basically tell that to your board of directors. They will address it down towards the managers and to your staff, et cetera. Those are basically the four steps of leadership that you will have to go to go through if you want to do so. So you have to grow as well. It requires discipline, time, knowledge, some gray hairs. And you have to read a lot of books as well, management books that will support you and consult a coach every now and then to see if you're on the right track, because you will come across hurdles you won't believe. They say, there's a saying, I wish you a lot of personnel or I wish you a lot of staff. Yes, it's totally true. It gives you hurdles. I will leave it to that. All right. So we decided to focus on Drupal Enterprise. We've chosen what we call a specific market within the Drupal community. We didn't want it to work for the bakery around the corner. We love his bread, yes, but we don't want to work for him. Why? A bakery around the corner is basically working all day busy with his bread. And he's not focusing on marketing or his website or anything like that and he has no knowledge of that as well. But he has some vague idea on what he wants to do with his bakery. So the amount of time you have to work with this bakery guy, you know, to get his website off the chart, is taking you the same amount of time working for an enterprise, a client who has a lot more cash to spend, who has an IT person or marketing person available, who has knowledge of the projects. It makes working a lot more easier and they pay better. So we started to focus on the enterprise market of Drupal and that was a good choice because it gave us bigger clients and we started to shout it off the rooftops again like, hey, we found another large client, people started believing it and what we did is what we created, the an ecosystem where it would lead to success. And we call this the wheel of fortune. We came of this, we created this ourselves. So we started off with our proposition. What is it that we offer? Well, as I said before, strategy, UX design, development for web and mobile and advertisement, that's our proposition. So we are a full service agency that can help you with your seamlessly integrated communication task. And we started to promote or tell this to clients. And we also did marketing. Marketing is an essential part in growing your agency. Never forget that. So we communicated our proposition to our clients and via all the marketing channels we can find. This would lead to a business, but also new employees. And we told our proposition also to our employees who started basically communicating our proposition as well. And that will basically lead to growth. What comes with that is that you have to set up an operation that serves your proposition in the right way.  So when you have your operation in order, you have to stay in touch with your knowledge as well. The world is changing rapidly. We all know that. Drupal 8 beta is coming out pretty soon. So yes, you have to get that knowledge up and running within your agency.  If you don't innovate, if you don't learn, it will basically start your engine somewhere along the line. With that new knowledge, you know, in an ever changing market, you have to check in with your proposition every two to three years like, okay, you know, markets changing. There's a lot of new knowledge. Is my proposition still working? And then you've got a wheel, and it just starts turning, you know, and Dries Boudart showed us a rocket, a rocket aerial company, and we were just driving around this road all the way to the south of France, eventually leaving us, leading us to the Bahamas. So this wheel of fortune, take it into your mind and make sure that every part of it is done correctly, that you have all those items written down. So you have an agency that works with leadership comes also a lot of responsibility. I told you that my agency has grown now up to 40 people who are expanding rapidly now. That comes with a lot of responsibilities. And you have to learn, you know, I was a creative founder once, and I have to learn how to act responsible as well. Three of them, I will mention here. So you got your organizational goals. I discussed earlier the dot on the horizon. As a manager, or as a leader, you are the captain of the ship. Keep in mind what the dot on the horizon is, and that you sail towards it. But also be aware that a ship never sails in a straight line. It also goes like from left to right to reach that horizon and tell that to your staff as well. Productivity and results of colleagues and your organization, this is an operational role. And you have to grow into that as well.  And then suddenly you're looking at charge on how the productivity of your staff is, you know, that's a difference, that's a change. And that's a role you have to take as well. Definitely in the beginning, later on in the process, you can address that to somebody else. In the future, when you grow, your team leads can start reporting to you, but that's one of the levels of growth you can reach when you're growing bigger. And there's a social responsibility as well. You have staff, you have a role in society. Don't take this too lightly. This is a task you have to address as well. So work with your staff. Make them feel at home. If there's trouble at home, work with them to resolve those problems at home. And take a role in society as well, especially in an open source society, is that you have to give back as Dries noted already. And another thing I just wanted to tell you, just be so cool, they can't ignore you. Be a cool company or being a cool company is another reason for growth. Why? Just people want to work at a cool company. That's really basically it. So what we did, we were now in quite a large office. So we created the bar. We have our own lots of bar slash discotech for Friday parties.  I'm off to my wife and kids early. Here you go guys, have fun. We create barbecues. And we go out regularly. We have a game room, all that kind of stuff that every developer dreams of. We have it. And that's really important to grow because if you can't find the right stuff because you're not cool, you're not cool to work for, then it's difficult to grow because it all comes down to finding the right stuff. So if you grow from being a creative leader, a creative founder, I must say, into a leader, this is what it also comes down to. This is really a hurdle because you get distracted every day by operational things that will basically draw you away from the task and goals that you have one to reach. So first of all, make use of your time wisely, absolutely focus on clear results and definitely also long term success. Not only on the day to day stuff. If you focus on that, I'll come to that later, then you won't grow. Avoid perfectionism. Developers by nature are perfectionists, zeros and ones. If something is at 85%, you can make the decision. You don't have to know if it's 100% correct to make this decision. If you're at 85% and you have the gut feeling to think, hey, this is cool. We're going to do this. We're going to build this application. There's always a developer coming up to you and say, no, no, no, we've got to do some more research and go client research, et cetera, et cetera. If it feels right at about 85%, just do it. Don't be a perfectionist in making choices. Be perfectionist in code. Yes, if you want to produce code, you have to be a perfectionist. But in making choices as a manager, you don't have to be a perfectionist at 85%, just give it a go because it feels right. Update the way you work. There's different work habits.  Another thing I want to share with you is that innovation leads to growth. And I'll tell you why in a second. There's a lot of people questioning me. It's why I spend so much time on innovation. We've just hooked up the Google Glass to Drupal and iBeacon technology. iBeacon technology didn't work that well for Google Glass because it's overheating. I'm going to tell you that straight away. But will it lead to a lot of business straight away? No, not all. You know, you can't make money out of innovation itself at all. But then again, why should you do it? Well, it leads to present PR. Because if you do stuff, that nobody has done before, it will lead and you send out a press release. You know, people will pick it up and then say, hey, this company is doing cool stuff with Google Glass and Drupal and iBeacon technology. Like, wow, they're doing some great stuff.  Great thing is that the Dutch government gives you subsidies for that as well. So you can basically deduct it from your wages. And yes, it's fun. It's fun as well, because your staff can work on the latest technologies. And so they have fun.  Your present PR agent has a lot of fun because hey, they can send out press releases that are being absolutely printed. And then suddenly your name is being picked up as an innovative company. You know, and some innovation would lead to products we've done there. We've built products based on Drupal and QR codes in the past. And then even the largest publishers in the Netherlands now even work with our products. Yes, sometimes it would lead to a product, but in 90% it doesn't. But it leads to growth growth of your company because you get attention for being innovative. So take that in mind, you know, if you want your staff to work on cool projects, just give them time, but make sure there's a PR plan behind it as well. So you can publicize it and spread the word. When we look at short term thinking, that's the enemy of long term success. So you grow your agency. We've passed the hurdle of 18. We started growing. I needed to get my processes in order. I needed to get my operations in order. And I was working on my daily to daily business. I needed to change offices. We've been moving already for four times now. So every two years we moved our office. And that takes about four to five months, you know, organizing it and buying new cables and tables and all that kind of stuff. You know, I love IKEA. So if you're just purely focusing on your day to day business, you forget to work on your long term success. You don't work on finding new clients or new markets. So that's a problem. So you're working on your day to day business, but no new business is coming in. And other agencies are taking specific markets. So if you don't work on your long term success, then suddenly your short term process has a problem. But if you only focus on your long term, you're always busy with finding new clients and new markets, then your day to day business starts lacking.  So there's a challenge, you know, it's like, okay, should I focus on my long term success? Should I focus on my short term success? No, you should do both. You know, you should find a balance between them. Yes, work on new clients, work on new markets, new products, new services. But then again work on your daily operations, as well.  If you lose sight of your new markets and new customers, you won't get new money in. It's a lose, lose situation or if you do it correctly, a win, win situation. So Google this one, the disciplines of market leaders. It's an interesting one. And I've made a mistake here. We grew rapidly because of Drupal. Thank you, Dries.  It's basically called that our clients were our main focus and every everything we did every process we created was focus on our clients. Then after a few years, when we passed the 18 hurdle, your processes will get, you know, difficult. You have to change your management style. You have to change your processes, everything. And then the idea came up, okay, maybe we should, and this was done by an operation manager, should we focus on being a product leader in terms of Drupal. And what he did was created, he set up an organization on creating Drupal products as fast as possible, losing sight of the customer intimacy focus we had. So he was focusing on the daily operations on to create them as smoothly as possible and as fast as possible to get more efficiency. But in meantime, he lost sight of our clients. And that was a big, big, big mistake. Because it's not about how fast we can produce a Drupal site as quickly as possible. No, it's about delivering success to our clients and even better the clients of our clients. So we made a mistake there and lost sight of our customers at the time.  And now we are 100% focused on customer intimacy.  I believe that well, we're now with 40 people, I've heard that the next hurdle, the big hurdle will be at around 50 to 60. No idea what that one is, but I can tell you maybe next year. But focusing on customer intimacy is something really important because you don't, unless you are, of course, a product oriented company that sells hosting or which is a product, you know, then you can make things as smooth as possible. Then you should have product leadership in that one. But if you build Drupal websites, Drupal platforms or other services like that, please focus on your customer. So when I meet people, successful people, I always ask 100 questions, you know, okay, how do you do it? How did you grow? And the reasons to what they attribute their success to is actually the same persistence, hard work, and best of all, hiring good people. Don't be afraid to hire someone who is better than you. Make sure you find people who are better than you. You're the leader. You can't think of everything yourself. You don't want to. You don't have the time to. So surround yourself with a team that's better than you. And we're closely together. If you have a dream, a vision, a dot on the horizon, which is a big, big vague, doesn't matter, hire good staff, ask me in your room, sit down, legs on the table, drink a beer. Guys, I have this vague idea on where to go to. Let's plot the route together. And if you surround yourself with people who are better than you, your company will strive. Definitely. So hiring good people is a task of a successful manager. And I've read in the books somewhere that 60% of your time, you should be focusing on hiring good people, 60% of your time. May I see some hands? Who's working 60% of their time on finding new, better staff? Someone there, he's doubting. Yeah, that's what I, you know, and I find it hard to believe as well, is that 60% of my time, I should work on finding better staff. It is true. Why? Because all those daily problems you have can be solved by people who are better than you instead of you. But it's difficult. And I can absolutely understand why nobody raised their hand here, except for you there. All right. Another thing, you know, make mistakes, make a lot of mistakes. I've learned from my mistakes. I've made many of them. And I can laugh about them. I've learned from them. So I've decided to make some more mistakes. Seriously, yeah, I'm going to make a lot of more mistakes, you know, because I learned from them. People who make mistakes, they dare to do things differently. They try to find new ways of growing a company, they make mistakes along the way and then immediately decide, okay, I'm going to take another route to success. Because this is the one way street doesn't work. And keep laughing about them.  You know, and, well, don't be be sorry for yourself. Just just laugh about it. It's all part of business. Now we make mistakes. We're humans, we're not computers who are being programmed. No, laugh and move along. It's one of those hurdles you come along. All right. What's also really necessary, this is no actual data, this for your information, is get your reports in order once you grow. A lot of organizations tend to grow. And then they forget that one of the key issues is key issues of management is to look into reports on is your business doing well, is your cash position in order, is your pipeline in order. If you have 40 people working for you and you have a pipeline which says 10,000 euros within the next three months is going to be close, you have a problem. And you know that beforehand, if you have your reporting in order. So you need your cash flow position, you need your sales pipeline management, you have your marketing reports. And also your product, your staff efficiency reports, really important. And get your reporting in order as soon as possible. I already started reporting when we Flores and I were with the two of us, you know, he was programming and I made sure that he got the information about, okay, what's my pipeline, this is what's coming in. And so we can make management decisions based on numbers. Makes it a lot easier. If you do everything on gut feeling, you'll get a discussion along the way. If you, if you base your decisions based on numbers, it makes it a lot easier. So take your time to set up your reporting. Yeah. You said in the beginning that you didn't want any investors, so assume that you don't have any investors. No. But did you ever finance any parts of your growth? For example, when you meet a person who is highly skilled, did you ever go through a phase where you either thought about getting a credit in the bank? No, I have a bookkeeper. Also, basically, I'll your question is, did I ever finance my growth? No, no, I didn't. I don't care about money at all. And my companion doesn't either. We love to build great stuff and get rewarded for that in a way that, you know, we get on the podium and things like that, you know, we love that, but we don't care about money. So we don't spend. Our bookkeeper says, guys, this is getting ridiculous. Start spending some money, but we don't. And we haven't done that for the last eight and a half years. So our cash position is nice, I can say. And the funny thing is, is that we've we've created this ridiculous cash position. Now we can finance our growth into Germany or set up a shop in Amsterdam. No problem. Higher new stuff. No problem. But for the last eight and a half years, you know, we didn't spend at all.  We have small discussions about that one. Why? It says money in the end, you know, so think big, act small. That's what we do. Don't spend at all. So you can finance your growth yourself. And I always say that there's two types of, of agencies or companies. You have companies and you've got independent companies. I'm an independent entrepreneur, not an entrepreneur. So and that makes it a lot different. There's nobody, you know, I have to address to and say, okay, you know, my company is doing well and he says to me, no, you should do it differently. No. If I want to have fun tomorrow and Google and Oculus Rift is coming in within two weeks time, I'm gonna have a lot of fun with that because we're gonna have a program.  I don't have to tell an investor whether I can do that or not or spend ridiculous money on an Oculus Rift. Things like that. So it gives us freedom. So we're 100% free. And we have money, enough money to grow ourselves now. But yeah, it's getting dark here. All right. So you don't. Yes. I can tell you that there was a competitor. One of the three agencies that started right outside along us in 2006. They brought in a investor. And they grew rapidly. And I already saw them, you're growing too rapidly. This is not healthy anymore. The investor will basically guide your company in a direction you don't want to. That company is now bankrupt. It's finished. It's gone. And at the time, I was afraid. It's like, Oh, my God, everybody's growing more rapidly than I do. You know, it's like, should I get an investor? Of course. So those questions came along. We decided not to, you know, and we're now, you know, one of the bigger agencies and we're having still a lot of fun and we're still 100% independent. All right. So I'm going to tell you, and I see the slightest is not correctly and made a mistake here. I want to tell you about the blue and red ocean theory. Who knows about the blue and red ocean theory? All right, good. Um, it's a theory based on an ocean and there's a lot of fish swimming in that ocean. And then the sharks come in and he's hungry and he has a lot of fish, you know, he's laughing, you know, that's basically what happened when we started off with Drupal. There was a lot of demand and we're only, well, we started as the first agency in the Netherlands later that came three, three agencies. There was so much market, there were only three sharks within that ocean. So we had plenty of fish to eat and everybody was laughing.  So a blue ocean can turn into a red ocean and that will happen. If an ocean is full of fish and there's only one shark in there, believe me, new sharks will come in, you know, as I said, you know, three agencies in the beginning, there's now I think over 102 agencies in the Netherlands, you know, doing Drupal, promoting Drupal, working with Drupal. Fortunately, the pie has become bigger, you know, sometimes there's a bit of blood, but you know, it's still okay, but it will become bloody. So what can you do against it? You can choose a new blue ocean. Let's say you're going to do iBeacon technology development or Google Glass development, something completely different, or you can position yourself as an agency in a corner. We do Drupal commerce. We do purely community websites. So you're there in a corner. And if that's really successful, of course, some shark will follow, but most of them will stay in the middle of the ocean, competing each other. So that's that you can diversify yourself. You can offer new services or you can specialize yourself. So that's part of the blue and red ocean theory. Keep in mind, keep focus on your market. When it gets bloody, make sure you adopt your agency. You know, that's information you're getting. And with that information, you can change your proposition and your strategy. So take that into account and sorry for the wrong slide. When you grow your company and you don't want to get investors, you'll find bottlenecks. That's why I got the right slide here. You'll find bottlenecks. What's happening? So first you have your strategy session, then you have your UX session, and then you've got your front end development, your back end development, and suddenly more work is pouring in. And you have a large development team and only one UX developer. And everybody has, every project has to go through this guy.  And first, you have to identify and exploit the bottleneck. See if he's truly full. If he's truly, truly, truly full, then hire someone else and make sure that you have your, your hiring team up to speed so they can quickly find somebody else. If you grow this way by identifying bottlenecks and basically get rid of bottlenecks. As soon as it's really, really necessary, then it's possible to grow without funding, you know, without external funding, as we did. And this is the correct slide, of course, celebrate success. It's really important to enjoy the ride. You know, there's there's a lot of hurdles in terms of staffing. That's the biggest, you know, hurdle you'll come across. You have your your your finance issues that will come along. But don't forget. It's fun. It's part of the job. It comes with it.  You know, and that makes you different from all the people who work at companies, large companies that makes you an entrepreneur, because you can tackle those issues. And if you tackle an issue, celebrate it. But celebrate also your success.  So celebrate success. Don't forget that. And that's where I want to basically end my presentation. If you have any question, please now. And otherwise, you can find me at the booth. First question. Sorry, there's a microphone here. I've heard. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah, so one challenge we have is that work kind of finds us in a very reactive way. So we make ourselves identifiable as a Drupal agency. And then we get leads in. We win those leads, we get business. The challenge I get with that is how I actually kind of plan my pipeline, because I can tell you what I'm doing for the next six or seven months. I couldn't tell you what I'm doing in 18 months because I don't know what the pipeline looks like. So how did you resolve those challenges? Well, what we do is, yes, we have a pipeline. And we give every new lead a score. We know at which dates what the expected close date is, what kind of percentage we give them is like, okay, this is a 10% you know, we don't focus on that one. But this is an 80% you know, we got to focus on that one because there's 80% chance we can focus, we can close them off within the next, you know, three or four weeks. So if you have that projectory based on your planning, you can look ahead how much stuff you need for your projects. And then you have somebody to hire new stuff, you can work that out. And we haven't done that with flexible stuff like freelancers working for you. They can come in, do the job, but you get less profit on working with a freelancer than working with your own staff. So if you're confident enough in attracting leads, you have your, your, your, your sales team up and running up to speed. You've got your forecasting in order. You can also forecasting the work ahead. Six months time it within six months time it's easy to find new stuff. The only problem is, is do you have the capabilities to train your staff as well? Because they have to adopt your ways of working, do your work with SVN or Git, all this kind of stuff. So, so training is, is part of the, the process as well. And yeah, you have to take into account that if a new developer comes in, if it's, if it's just a PHP developer, you can get them up to speed within a month or two, but he won't be a Rockstar Drupal programmer yet, because he has to learn his modules.  So find a balance in that one. All right. That's a question. You mentioned that you made the decision not to do full, full service at a certain point, focus on web development. Yeah, well, at, at, at that time, at that time. Yeah, because we had a limited amount of time. And how did you fill the gap for the services that weren't part of? Well, that was really in the early stages. Yeah, that was really in the early stages. So, so pretty soon after that, we started to promote our other services like strategic advice, to consultancy, advertisement, all that kind of stuff. And we hired to write stuff when demand, you know, when, when we partner at all in the early days. With affiliates. No, well, on some parts, we got a job. That was really funny, actually. I'm at this client and I knew they wanted an advertising campaign. So I thought of, you know, OK, we have to create a few banners, a billboard. And then this, this, this girl sits down with me and she says, OK, you've got to think big. And this is external consultant sitting there as well. And I'm asking the question, how big? And then they showed me the Apple TV commercial, the first one. And I'm looking at it. This big. Yeah, this big. So I'm like, OK, so I sat down with the team and created this, this campaign with 3D characters. Absolutely. It was commercials with 3D characters flying through the air. And it was a woman based on the how to say it, a computer game model. And it was just awesome. It was radical at the time. And we worked long hours again to do that one. But we didn't have the developers in-house to do all the animations. And we worked together with guys who also worked together on track. So it was massive. Yeah. So, all right. Now, what kind of software do you use for planning long term? So your pipelines make rather than on a per project basis? Are we we have a CRM system we call we use sugar for that one. And basically every leads we turn into sugar and we create a report every week.  So we come through them every week, you know, and then we say, OK, this is a lead, but it's not interesting for us or there's too much effort going into it. We can get any margin on that one. So we scraped that off the list. Always the bottom of the list. You got to scrape away. Yeah. If you use the microphone, then it's recorded. Yeah. Thank you. What do you see as a healthy ratio between innovation and paintwork? Well, yeah, that's a difficult one. It's always a challenge. Sometimes, you know, there's a lot of work coming in and then you have little time for innovation. Not more than 5 percent of your work should be done on innovation, because depending. It totally depends if you're a product company and you want to outstand your competition and you're, as I said, a product company. Yes, you should invest a lot more in innovation, because if you stand still as a product company, you die. If you are a Drupal web agency and you build Drupal web platforms, yes, innovate in front-end and back-end development or create new modules and things like that and share them with the community to get your credits there. So I think innovation about 5 percent max, they'll be healthy. You mentioned at some point you needed a coach. Yeah. Why? And what were you looking for? Well, at the time I was taking too much hay. I don't know how to say it in English, too much hay on my fork, you know. As I said, I was selling a television program which was it was a great idea still. But, you know, they believed in it, but it was ridiculous for a two-man company to create a TV program that would normally be done by the BBC. So we were thinking too big at the time. And what he did, he sat down with us and he said, OK, how much time do you spend on sales? How much time do you spend on hiring new people? How much time do you spend on? So he made a full list with percentages behind it, not ours, percentages. So he we said that we come through the list and I gave him percentages of how much time I thought I was working on projects. And he came up to the realization that I was working 200 percent of my time, which was not feasible, you know. So I should have worked like more than the ridiculous hours I already made. And I was not working effectively at the time. I was basically working on projects that would not gain traction like the television program. So we started focusing and focusing on actual growth, on the actual needs of the company and, yeah, getting things done, as I said earlier in my slide. Some more questions. All right. Thank you very much for coming. So if you have any questions, we have a booth downstairs. And if you want to experience Google Glass, just let me know. There's one at the stand as well. Thank you very much.