It's Zynona. Welcome back to my channel. So I wanted to talk to you guys really briefly before I get into the video about what's happening today. I'm really excited. I am doing my first live Q&A kind of get to know me and information session on GetThatSeeUniversity.com's website. So if you have not heard about GTCU, it is the platform that we just recently started and launched to help you get into and through PA school. So if you haven't checked it out, go to GetThatSeeUniversity.com right now because I will be doing that Q&A session and information session today, November 29th, yes, today at 4 p.m. So go on over to GetThatSeeUniversity.com right now so that you can sign up for that if you have not already done so, okay? That will be at 4 p.m. today. But this particular video is going to be about patient care experience. Now I know a lot of you have had questions about patient care experience, but more specifically how to calculate patient care experience. So that is what I'm going to be talking about. I had a question asked to me about how to do that. So we're going to be getting into it right now. If you haven't already done so, go ahead, take a look around. If you like what you see, go ahead and subscribe. But let's get into this question by Amber. It says, Hyodana, how does one calculate patient care experience hours? I have been an MA since April 2016, 40-hour work week. Do I just multiply the numbers of weeks? I've been employed by 40 hours or realistically I probably spent time with patients getting their HPI doing EKGs, flu strep tests, giving injections, et cetera, maybe 20 to 30 minutes an hour on the hour average. So it's a big difference. How should I calculate?  However, there are some schools that are looking for like the nitty gritty, right?  Was it 10 minutes? Because it was a slow day on that particular hour or was it, you know, 15 minutes or was it a full 40 minutes? That is not like every program. And honestly, like when you go to CASPA's website, if you ever have any questions about like calculating patient care experience or what exactly is patient care experience, a place to go is the CASPA liaison website, because they're the ones that are actually like calculating or putting all of this information in, in terms of your GPA and giving you your science GPA and all of your patient care experience and all that. So let's just head on over to CASPA right now. And then we can make sure that we know exactly what we're talking about. Okay, so what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to have this like put up on the screen for you guys so that you guys can see exactly where I am, but also exactly how you can go about and kind of determining what is patient care experience. Okay, let us go on over there right now to CASPA. So this is like the help liaison help dot liaison edu.com slash CASPA. So this is the actual website that you would go to. I really just googled CASPA application, CASPA frequently ask questions. And then I went to the experiences and you see like it's already purple because I've been here before. All right. And so when you go into that particular section where it's talking about your experiences, so your healthcare experience, your volunteer experience, all of that stuff, any research or patient care experience, which is what we're really here for. This is what you go into. So it defines what patient care experiences so experiences in which you are directly responsible for a patient's care. For example, prescribing medication, performing procedures, directing a course of treatment, designing a treatment regimen. And so all of these are kind of like higher level stuff. So like if you're a nurse or things like that, you're, you know, obviously like giving these directing the course of treatment and things like that depending on the type of nurse that you are, right? So that's that stuff or you're actively working on a patient as a nurse, paramedic, EMT, CNA, phlebotomist, physical therapist, dental hygienist, etc. Because there's so many fields in healthcare that you can actually be directing the patient's care. Okay. So now with that being said, when you go down and it talks about how you enter your experience, if you go down to number five, it says enter the date or date range in which the experience took place. So for Amber, she was saying that she had worked from since April of 2016. So you've been working as an MA for four years. Okay. So that's a lot of experience, 40 hours a week. So you would enter that date range. It says, note your experiences will not display on your application in any specific order regardless of the dates. Okay. And then it says, you note that you cannot repeat hours between experience types. So if position duties encompass more than one section, enter the position in both sections and divide the hours and duties accordingly. For example, a 40 hour work week. So this is what we're talking about. 40 hour work week position with 10 hours of a week of research and 30 hours a week of direct patient care would be entered under both research and patient care types with the appropriate hours and duties listed within each entry. So right there, it's telling you exactly how to do it, right? Because you're working a 40 hour work week, right? So I like me, I'm working 72 hours in, well, really, yeah, 70, about 72, a little bit more, almost 80 hours in a two week period. Am I on like doing patient care stuff every second of those hours? No. And in here, it's saying the same thing. You're working 40 hours, but 10 hours, you're really doing like research and 40 hours is your direct patient care experience. You're not on that patient every minute of that 30 hours. You're not. Okay. And then that's, let's just be realistic. Not everybody is sitting up here and they're writing down or documenting, you know, like, okay, I spent 15 minutes here with this patient. All right. I spent 10 minutes. I had to go do the HPI and then get this, their strep test done. No, you're, it's a general term, right? So if you're working a 40 hour work week, yes.   So you do it four times or whatever. If I don't know if you've had vacation time or however you do that. So you do have to take those things into consideration. But whatever, how many hours of work you've had for the last four years, like legitimately and multiply that by 40. And then that is what you would put in. So when you are sitting up here and you're trying to figure that out, make sure you're including any vacation or sick time or anything like that, because you can't just say, oh, okay, 52 hours a week times 40. And that's it. Okay. But this is coming straight from CASPA. Okay.  You want to make sure that what I'm saying is correct. Go to the CASPA website, look at that. But as I always say, okay, you do your research. So it's on you to kind of go ahead and look at the schools that you're interested in and ask them, Hey, you know, I've been in MA for four years. I can't legitimately say that I've directed the patients care every minute of those 40 hours in that four year period that I've been scheduled to work. But I've been doing this for four years. How would you like me to calculate it? And if they say something different than what CASPA is saying or than what I'm saying, then you do that because that's the program that you're trying to get into. And a way to help you get into programs like that is by doing a research coming on places like YouTube and get that to the university and, you know, Googling stuff and going on the school's website because you want to make sure that all of the information that you're getting is like accurate information and information that is actually going to help you get into PA school. So hopefully that answered your question. And hopefully it answers all of you guys's questions that have been asking me, how do you calculate direct patient care experience? But this is how you do it. Okay, so you just go ahead and give the general number. All right, so that is it. Thank you guys so much for watching. Thank you for asking the question. If you have any other comments or questions, please leave them in the comment section below. Follow me on Instagram, add it on the PA and I will talk to you guys next time. Bye.


Okay, welcome to class. I hope you guys had a good weekend. Oh, dear. Sorry about this. Ah, okay. Okay, have a couple of announcements. So, first of all, oh, dear, this is not good. Sorry about this. Okay, let's try this one. Okay, I'm not touching it. Okay, I'm assigning chapter 26 today and that will be due on Thursday in two days and then test number two is next week and that will be covering chapters. Oh, man. Okay, you know what, that's it. I'm giving up on PowerPoint. I may just have to use YouTube. I know that YouTube has caused me all kinds of trouble in the past, but I think I don't have a choice here. So, let's just see if this will work here. Ah, there we go. Hello, I have a couple of announcements before class. So, first of all, your chapter 25 homework was due. Oh, sorry. I just want you to be more towards the center. Go ahead. As I was saying, your chapter 25 homework was due. Okay. All right, I'm giving up on this, too. No, I can still do it. No, I can not. It's not any good. Sometimes you just have to do things yourself. Okay, so as I was saying, chapter 25. I'm still here, you know. Wait, what? I said I'm still here. I can still do the announcements. That last assignment is due Thursday. And don't forget to tell them about the test next week. Okay, fine. You can do the announcements, I guess. And it's the season of Christmas, so maybe in the spirit of cooperation, you and I can do it together.  You know what? I used to think I was indecisive, but now I'm not so sure. Okay, go ahead. Chapter 26 is due on Thursday, and that's the last homework on Calculus. And next week is chapter 4. And you can take that Tuesday at 12.30. Or Thursday at 12.30. Either way is fine with us. So it's up to you. You can make the choice, just show up one of those things. Finally, there are two makeup quizzes. And those are on Canvas. And those will be due next week on Thursday. Okay, that wasn't so bad. See, that wasn't so bad. Okay, well, hey, good job there. Hey, would you allow me to stick around and teach the whole class with me? No, I'm good. I'll let you take over now. Okay, well, I appreciate that, so, yeah. Oh. I forgot, I wanted to make sure I wish everybody a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Goodbye. Okay, well, I'll talk to you later. Okay, so, you know what, there are some people who bring Christmas cheer and joy and happiness wherever they go. And then there are some people who bring joy and happiness whenever they go. What, I can still hear you. That's not even funny. Oh, I thought it was kind of funny. Okay, thank you very much.


When evaluating the SharePoint framework, you need to determine not just what you can do, but if your SharePoint environment supports specific customizations and where you can apply these customizations. So in this episode, you're going to learn not only what versions of SharePoint support which framework customizations, but also where these customizations can be applied to a page. Hey, I'm Andrew Powell. This episode is also available as a blog post on boytonos.io and as a podcast on boytonos.show. Check out the description below the video for links to these other resources. If this is your first time here, be sure to hit that big red subscribe button. Hey, I'm Andrew Connell. In this episode of my SharePoint Framework 5Ws Answered series, I'm going to tackle two questions in one episode. Who can use the SharePoint framework and where can you use the SharePoint framework? So let's start with the first question of who can use the SharePoint framework? The SharePoint framework was released in February of 2017 to SharePoint Online. So ever since then, every single release of the SharePoint framework is deployed to SharePoint Online. And this means that regardless of the SharePoint framework version that your component is created with, it'll work in SharePoint Online. Now initially the SharePoint framework wasn't available outside of SharePoint Online, but then in late 2017, Microsoft shipped Feature Pack 2 for SharePoint Server 2016. Feature Pack 2 included the SharePoint framework version 1.1. Now due to the nature of the SharePoint framework being primarily a cloud first extensibility model for SharePoint Online, the SharePoint Server 2016 implementation of the SharePoint framework has never received any updates beyond version 1.1, nor has Microsoft had any plans stated that they plan to update it. I don't think we're ever going to see an update to it. Now when Microsoft shipped SharePoint Server 2019 in September of 2018, that included the SharePoint framework version 1.4. Now just like the one that we just talked about, SharePoint Server 2016, Microsoft has not shipped any updates to the SharePoint framework for SharePoint Server 2019, nor have they stated any future plans to update it. So in summary, the answer to the question of who can use the SharePoint framework is customers who have the following SharePoint environments. SharePoint Online can use all SharePoint framework versions. SharePoint Server 2019 can use SharePoint framework up through version 1.4.1. And SharePoint Server 2016, as long as you have Feature Pack 2 installed, you can use versions up to SharePoint framework 1.1. So now let's tackle the second question of where can you use the SharePoint framework? So for this, I'm going to focus on the capabilities in the SharePoint framework as far as where they can be used. Some features are only available in specific user implementation experiences like Classic versus Modern, while others are only available in a hosted environment versus an on-premises environment. So let's look at the first category of the Modern experience. The SharePoint framework was built as the preferred way to customize the Modern experience in SharePoint. And this means that everything the SharePoint framework has to offer is going to work within the Modern experience, including client-side web parts and extensions. Now both SharePoint Online and SharePoint Server 2019 include the Modern experience, so this means that SPFX web parts and extensions are available in SharePoint Online and in SharePoint Server 2019. And furthermore, SharePoint Online supports everything the latest version of the SharePoint framework has to offer, with one exception. The Classic experience in SharePoint Online only supports client-side web parts. And SharePoint framework extensions are not supported and they don't work in the SharePoint Classic experience. The reason for that is because the extensions were designed to replace classic customizations that didn't work in Modern. So we have a new way of doing it. It's kind of like this old way translates to this new way. SharePoint framework client-side web parts are available in all supported versions of SharePoint that I've previously mentioned, as well as in both the Client, the Classic and the Modern experience. Now some features in the SharePoint framework are only available within the SharePoint Online due to their cloud nature. And this includes the following features that are only available in SharePoint Online. Tenant-wide deployment, search extensions, the Microsoft Graph API, specifically the MS Graph Client Factory and the MS Graph Client APIs, and the Azure AD secured endpoint support, and that's specifically the AAD-HTB Client Factory and the AAD-HTB Client Objects. In my previous episode that I published on what is the SharePoint framework when I talked about the page context, I explained where Microsoft established a contract with developers for which parts of a page could be customized or modified. These modifications shouldn't be done using the DOM, rather they should use the API that's been provided to the developers. So let's look at a typical modern page in SharePoint Online first. Now I've added a couple callouts here to show what areas of the page that you can customize. So let's look at each one of these. The red box across the top area where the number one is, that's the top placeholder where a top placeholder would go for an application customizer SharePoint framework extension. And for the number two area at the bottom of the page, that big red box across the bottom of the page, that's called the bottom placeholder, and that's where we would be able to do our customizations for application, using an application customizer SPFX extension. The yellow box in the middle, that's where our client-side web part goes, and the yellow box on the right side, which is number four, that's where we have a property pane with the associated client-side web part. This is the component of a web part. It's not something you build independently of the web part. It kind of goes hand-in-hand with the web part. That's just where it's visualized. Now while I don't show it in this picture that you just saw, rather I want to show it to you in a new picture, you can also customize the search box at the top, but not visually. Like the search customization component type is going to allow us to modify the search term that is sent to SharePoint before it's been submitted. So in other words, this extension has no visual component to it. Now let's also look at a list or a library page, and that's what you see here. So number two, you can use the command set extension to add a menu item to the context menu of items within lists. That's number two. But also in the number one area, the number one box that I have there, that's a command set extension as well, and that allows us to add buttons to the toolbars and lists and libraries. I can also define under what conditions that these buttons should be shown. Should they be visible or should they be hidden based on certain criteria? Now the red box for number three, that's for a list item cell. That's where a field customizer extension can go. This can be used to control how a cell is rendered for all items in this list. Now field customizer is defined at the column level and it has access to all data for the list item that it's rendering the results for as well as the list itself. As I mentioned previously, you can also associate the search extension in the site's search box to modify the search terms that are sent to SharePoint, and that's in the red box at the top labeled number four. And again, when it comes to extensions, while I didn't show it in this picture here, you saw in the previous one, remember that you can use an application customizer to add content to the top placeholder and the bottom placeholder across the page. And in fact, placeholders are defined in all modern pages in the site. They're not even just defined on specific pages. They're everywhere and you can use them absolutely everywhere. You got a question or comment? Let me know what you think by dropping a comment in the video below or tweeting me at Andrew Connell or at Voitanos. And if you liked this episode, man, I'd really appreciate it if you'd share it with the rest of your friends. This episode is also available as a blog post on Voitanos.io.


And they say, you know, maybe one of their first questions is, so how much does it cost for you to like build a website for me? And then you have to have that conversation about, well, it's not quite that simple. It's, there's a lot of work that goes into discovery and what your goals are and everything. So today we're going to be going over some of the different strategies and models that you can use for pricing so that you can make more money and hopefully not be bound by the limitations of the hourly rate, which we'll be talking about. So this presentation will be online. The video will be on wordpress.tv within a week or two and the slides are available right now at these, at this link here. So my name is Jeff Myers. I'm one of the four co-organizers of this WordCamp and I'm also a co-organizer of the local Milwaukee WordPress Meetup Group. So if after this, after today you're, you're eager to continue the conversation, feel free to come if you're in the area, feel free to come to the Meetups this year. We'll be announcing those on meetup.com. So I was a speaker at a WordCamp Milwaukee earlier or last year. I have a digital marketing agency. So I do digital marketing consulting and strategy but I've really been sort of shifting my focus into custom web application development using WordPress as an application framework. So that's sort of been my late, my most recent shift and I absolutely love doing that kind of stuff because I can use WordPress to its full extent of capabilities and it's amazing. So I've been doing this for 13-ish years since 2004 and I'm sort of the awkward intersection of design development and sort of business marketing. So if I had to pick one, I would say I'm a developer but because I'm constantly working at that intersection of those three things, I think there's a lot of, I think that's somewhat unique in that they all obviously are related to each other and sort of depend on each other. So we'll be talking about how the technical, how the business side connects to that technical side here. So feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions afterwards or after the talk I'll be over in the happiness bar. Also please interrupt me during this talk.  So don't wait till the end to ask your questions. Ask them when you're thinking of them, when it's relevant, when it's the right time so that we can make this a little more conversational and a little more interactive. So please blur it out or raise your hand, whatever. If you want to add a comment or you have something that would go well with something that I've said or if I say something wrong that you want to correct, please do that as well. So this talk really is for anyone on this list. Who here identifies with one of the labels on this list here? Okay, so you're probably in the right place then because this talk is for you. Yeah, this talk is really aimed at any service-based business where the service is highly unique and high value. In other words, it's not aimed at services that are sort of cookie cutter or sort of generic by nature. So what we're gonna talk about today is first of all, why pricing matters and why it's something that you should analyze and review regularly. But also look at some of the biggest challenges or problems that people face when it comes to pricing their services because it is, there's no, it isn't in art.  I mean, sometimes it really is, you just don't know because the thing is this is a market where we're all selling in a market where pricing is not transparent. It's very opaque and it varies so much because it all varies on what the scope is and the quality and the value that you're providing. So it's really hard to, you know, you can't just do market-based pricing like you can in other areas of the economy. So we'll be talking about the challenges and problems but also sort of the goals that we're trying to achieve. Obviously making more money, working less, working on higher quality projects that we enjoy, working with clients that are less of a pain to work with and are more appreciative of the value that you bring to the table. And so we'll be looking at some of the most common, not all of them, but some of the pricing models that are available to you for different scenarios. But really this talk ties into a greater conversation about how you're positioning and selling yourself. And so this, although this is gonna be focused on the pricing aspect, it all plays back into how you're marketing yourself and your branding and the way that you are positioning yourself in the market and the types of clients you're attracting and you may not be attracting the clients that you actually want. So that's something that we're gonna talk a little bit about. So I probably don't need to go through this list but pricing obviously matters because it directly affects your business and your profitability as well as your time and your work-life balance. It basically touches everything. So having the wrong type of pricing may attract the wrong types of clients and that may cause a lot of pain working with clients you don't like or projects that are boring or uninteresting or clients you don't appreciate you, things like that. So just the pricing in and of itself can attract a different type of client. And if you're trying to move up market and make more money as you're growing, you'll want to start to shift how you're targeting your positioning and your pricing to attract the clients that you do want. So obviously it is I think important and there are lots of challenges that come with that. The title of the talk is about don't be a commodity and that's unfortunately a lot of people just in the services industry, whether designers, developers, copywriters, marketers, salespeople, anyone who's selling their time, there's a tendency for people to compare apples to oranges. So one of the items on here is that in the next slide is that when people are, if you're using an hourly rate and I'll get to a rant in a second here about why I hate that hourly rates, but if you're trying to differentiate yourself and attract new clients and interesting clients, you don't want to be generic or boring obviously. And so how you price your services does affect the way that you're perceived by potential clients and commoditization is what you want to avoid obviously, because then you're just one of the millions. I mean, we're in a pretty saturated market in a way, but it's actually not as difficult as it might seem to differentiate yourself and really focus on a niche and be really good at one thing. So we'll talk about these challenges and how different approaches of tackling them. And obviously the end goals here are, again, pretty obvious, but difficult to attain. That is making more money, working less, again, delivering more value to the client and therefore making more because the return on investment the client is perceiving is greater and greater. So we'll definitely go over this. And to me, and this will vary, this is subjective, but to me, I think one of the ultimate goals as far as business or pricing is concerned is to eventually possibly achieve a healthy amount of passive recurring income, because I mean, as much as I love working on projects and I do, and I wouldn't want to stop doing that, one of the, I think a lot of people would, wouldn't mind having a little bit of passive income from services or subscription-based products that they have. So we'll be going over a couple of these, all of these pricing models and strategies here. These aren't all of them. These are just some of the basic models that help you start thinking about how you're approaching pricing for your business and for your services. The most simple, we'll be going over the hourly or daily, weekly, monthly rates, any type of rate or model where it's your exchanging time for money and it's that direct relationship. We'll be going over fixed scope, fixed price projects, as well as productized services. So sort of turning your services into products that are sort of pre-packaged, where you have a predefined scope and it's sort of something that you're selling, it's sort of more cookie cutter, but it's still, it's not an actual product so you don't have to put a lot of effort into building a product in that way. We'll go over recurring income from retainers and subscription models, as well as some of the more difficult to define and more difficult to attain models like value-based pricing, which is sort of one of the holy grails is that you somehow have a way of directly connecting value to the client to the price that you're charging, as well as things that are a little more involved as far as commitment is concerned in terms of commissions or profit sharing or even equity partnership ownership in a business. So who here charges or currently charges by the hour or maybe by the day or something like that, where it's the time, money relationship? Okay, and what are some reasons that people do that? Just shout them out. Work in progress? Work in progress? Some of the clients doesn't know what they want so if they keep going over, you know, if you want something else, then at least that it grows instead of just having a face, you know, perception. Absolutely. Right, it's much, it actually is very, it protects you as a freelancer or an agency because it puts the risk on the client because, you know, whatever they're requesting, they're being billed for every hour. And so, you know, it's low risk for the person doing the work, it's high risk for the client. But it is, I don't need to define what it is here, but so, I mean, I think the hourly rate or any kind of model where it's time for money, it's very simple, it's easy to understand, it's very common. A lot of people use it, but there are a lot of disadvantages to it. One on here that, one pro that I didn't mention is that it is lower risk for the provider. Maybe in the short term, but in the long term, I think that there's some opportunity that you might be missing out on by using this kind of model. So, as I said before, having an hourly rate encourages people who are shopping around to compare numbers to numbers when it's not a fair comparison. So, that's really, this is one way where you're sort of, you're putting yourself in a position where you're sort of commoditizing yourself or you're encouraging that kind of comparison.  As I said before, it's also higher risk for the client. So, it's not particularly good for the client either because they're not quite sure how many hours it really will take and as probably a lot of you know, estimating time is so difficult. Especially when you're working on a project, if you've done something before that's pretty similar and you've done it a lot of times before, yeah, you can get pretty good at estimating hours or estimating time. But if in this kind of highly unique, high-value-based industry, it's really hard to estimate time. And that's frankly probably been one of my biggest challenges is trying to figure that out. But it does, it's not beneficial to the client in that way. If you're working by the hour, it de-incentivizes laziness and inefficiency, which is sort of the opposite of really what a pricing model should do. It should incentivize you work faster, you work more efficiently, you make more money in less time, right? That should be sort of the incentive structure that's being used, but the hourly rate sort of contradicts that and encourages slowness essentially in completing something or inefficiency. So another thing is, and this is bad for both parties, is that time has a very loose correlation generally with the value or the results of the project. Generally speaking, the more time you put into something, the better it becomes, right? But it's a very fuzzy relationship and it's not, time is really not always the best indicator of how valuable a client or an end result is to the client. So that poor correlation makes it difficult for clients, including clients, to really assess the cost benefit analysis. And it also, for the person who's providing the services, it severely limits your potential revenue or profitability because everything goes back to the amount of hours in a day. And you can't, you have a fixed number of hours, yeah. I have a good analogy for that. When I'm with clients, I describe an orange and you can, someone can paint an orange and they can take an hour for it and you build for that hour. But then you get a, we have an employee that is not happy with spending an hour, he wants to spend four hours painting the orange because he's made a better looking orange and the client was happy with the first orange but now we've got a bill for the four hours of the orange. It's still an orange at the end of it. And when you explain that back to your customer, then they understand why they're making a choice of time. That's the way I handle it when that question comes up. Yeah, absolutely. No, that's great. And I'm happy to, by the way, if you wanna share, yeah, I'm sorry, I made a, I wanted to move up, I wanted to speak earlier. I was just gonna say that I use it hourly sometimes as like an incentive for them to stop bothering me because I have a typical client that they have two, I set up two nomination sites for them. When people come and they nominate, so they have outsiders come and they register and they do all these things. And then the person says, oh, I can't, they didn't get in and they just call me and say, well, they couldn't get in. Well, I didn't tell them to check the spam folder or they can tell them to check the spam folder. And if they ask me to do it, I charge them by the hour because I don't want to contact their customer and say, check the spam folder. Yeah. So I kind of use it to say, okay, I'll do it for you, but you can really do it yourself. Right, yeah, we have difficult clients and sometimes you need to put incentives in places so that they do things that are more beneficial for you. So yeah, I mean, a lot of the cases, if you have a client who doesn't really know what they want and they really need to spend more time themselves to put time into discovering what they actually need for their own business, if you're trying to encourage that, using the hourly rate is good because it incentivize you're not wasting your time or your money while they're trying to figure out their own stuff before they even contact you. So I mean, there's a huge discovery process that the hourly rate just totally skips over the discovery process unless you charge for a discovery process, which is something that I would love to talk about too. So I think the cons of hourly pricing are relatively obvious, but it is such a widely used and common and simple. It is so simple and easy to go with that. You can jump right into a project, you can just hit the ground running and just start billing. And I'm not gonna say that there aren't cases where you might do that, but I think in a lot of cases, especially if you can define the scope, there are ways that you can make more money, hence I'm getting into the fixed price, fixed scope model here. So who currently uses a fixed model for project-based work? Okay. Yeah, this is what I use the most. And it does require a lot more work because you have to go through a discovery process and that can be time consuming, but if you have a good sense that the client is committed and is serious, that big conversation up front before you seal the deal makes a huge difference in building trust and all that. So, and they're picking the fixed price is still something I struggle with because I loosely base it off of the hourly rate I would like to achieve, but I also base it sort of on historical data.  And they actually have a specific number and they know exactly what their budget is. How many? Not very often, right?  I mean, it varies quite a bit just like websites, but it's transparent pricing and we can do more fair comparisons there. And so we have a good sense going in. You know, if you go, yeah. I have a colleague who works exclusively in the nonprofit sector who by law have to publish their budgets and incomes and all that stuff. And his pricing is set on their budgets. Yeah. If you have a million dollar budget for your nonprofit, he charges X% and it's that much. If you have 10,000, it's the same percent.  He doesn't have to have those budget valuations at all. Yeah, no, I love that. I mean, I've had several nonprofit clients and it's always, the conversation about pricing is always quite a bit easier because they have fixed grants. They have a budget set out. They know what they have. They're not trying to maximize profit because they're nonprofit, but yeah. So that is the case where it's kind of nice when you have a nonprofit because they have a much better sense. If you're talking to somebody that gives you a budget figure, chances are you're not talking to a decision maker. That budget figure was probably set by somebody else. In order to get above that, they're gonna have to go up in their organization, which they might not be willing to take the risk to do. They just want to look good to get whatever they can within that budget figure or less. So kind of make sure you're talking to the right people if you want to start off with the ante. Yeah, that's a great point that you want to make sure that when you're having this conversation that you're having with the right people who have the ability to actually make decisions, important decisions, it's great when you have a small business and you can speak directly to the owner or a shareholder within a larger company. When you actually can talk to those people, then it's much easier than going up the ladder. And so yeah, that's a fantastic point. So I won't really go into detail about all the different ways that you can approach fixed pricing. That could be its own talk and it's really hard. I just, there are lots of different ways you can look at it. But due to the interest of time, I want to dig into the pros and cons of this. So with the project-based pricing, there's a lot more upfront work and commitment because you have to establish a relationship, you have to figure out what are the goals, what's the scope, what are the deliverables, all that stuff. And I think for smaller projects, I think it can make sense to do that discovery process as a complimentary service, as a free service. But for as a project, it's bigger and bigger and bigger. It's riskier and riskier to start the discovery process without maybe having a contract in place or billing for a discovery process, which I think can be extremely helpful. I haven't done it personally myself, but I really would like to. Has anyone done that build for the discovery process and what experiences? Super duper good. So basically the free discovery part is, do I need to charge them for discovery? Just kind of give you an idea of what they have in mind. And if it's some grand, all-encompassing, oh my God. And you say, okay, that's what we discovered in this first three hour or two hours. Now we're going to do a discovery. It was good. They gave them a budget for a warm cost for that discovery, what would we do? But that actually set the total for the entire project. Very big project. But the cost of discovery was more than lots of small upside projects I've done in the past. Just discovery. But that set the whole total. Now we know he has a very good expectation what he's getting, what he should expect, pay, et cetera, et cetera. Super, super duper good. Absolutely. And it's portable. If they decide not to go with you, they still have something that is of true value. They have something that they can hold that they can take elsewhere and they know exactly what they need. Hold them on that. We said, take this, shop it around and compare our price with the same project. And when they come back to us, I don't know what he did with it, but that was part of the selling process of the discovery phase. Yes.  Really? Yeah. I'd have to start putting that more into practice. That happened to us, because the second time around, we had the decision maker there and you could give him those choices and you also had the opportunity to upsell. So if you want better product photography, if you want video, now the decision maker's there and he's like, no, we're going this route because we're going to do it right this time instead of doing it wrong back in time before. So definitely you can get a second discovery with the decision maker. It makes your life so easy. Absolutely. Yeah. So much of this is subtle nuance with all the conversations you're having with the prospect. The first discovery meeting is like a half hour or an hour? It was an hour. Okay. I'd say that's about right. I mean, a certain amount of that stuff, if you have an interest in helping clients and building sites, you're just interested, you know, and you've got to get in and I don't usually turn my timers off but I kind of stuff like, it just depends. Especially if you think it's a big fish, you might invest more time than you would for a smaller. Right. Also have everyone who's going to be involved in the project in those two discoveries. If it's web work, we've always had the designer, the developer, the project manager, the accounts person, the sales person and have everybody in there. So everyone's going on the same page before and everyone's getting introduced to upselling and all your account managers there and those about the upselling and those about changes. So, and as the project gets further along, start weeding out people that don't need to be in those meetings. Yeah. So present your whole team. Yeah. We had a similar experience. They wanted to, they flew us out. It was a finance, it was based in New York. They have a 40 employees and some of them were kind of, we kind of came in essentially now after six months or more, like I was like consultants and people were like, we're also like consultants but getting to know those people, having everyone there helped us smooth over so people who were a little, not so happy that outsiders were coming in and maybe threatened a little about what they'd be doing later after we helped and stuff. So having that meeting was important for that also. We'd call them up and say, hey, let's talk about this so they feel comfortable and move on. Absolutely, yeah. Next year I should totally just do a talk just on discovery, project discovery. I think that is one of the biggest things that I've made where I've made mistakes because I'm eager to get started on the project and there's so many details and oh, I don't want to get bogged down with all these details and really defining the scope of the project because that can be, I mean I don't, I don't particularly like putting together proposals especially when there's no guarantee that there's gonna be business that results from that but yeah, I think, yeah, the whole discovery thing is, maybe I should have just made this talk about discovery but no, but with the project-based scope, fixed price, obviously it's much lower risk for the client because the client knows exactly what they're getting. Well, it depends on how well the scope is defined. If it's a loose scope, then there's risk involved but again, you can't always define the project. The scope will always change no matter what so you always have to have a certain level of buffer and flexibility in the end net scope but generally speaking, it's lower risk for the client. It is higher risk probably for the provider because depending on how well they have scoped it out and how well they can estimate their own time and expenses for that. So it is higher risk for the provider but there's a lot more opportunity to make more at the same time. So there's again, higher risk, higher reward and then for the client it's lower risk but relatively high reward, right? So I think it's a pretty good model but it does have some cons, right? It has again, less flexibility. If you need to be really fluid or adaptive, one thing you can do is just split it up into smaller sections and do it in smaller phases. Put it in micro projects if you will, right? And then you just work on one thing at a time. So that's one thing that you can do. And you can always build on extra add-ons or things that are beyond the project scope you could do with hourly or you could build that as a separate project, right? So there are solutions to that and of course it takes more upfront commitment but hey, if you're charging for it then that's totally, totally worth it especially if you're building trust with the client and then they'll probably go with you anyway even if they're shopping around. So moving on to the next model here, productized services and I think this is super interesting and I've started to do a little bit of this but basically it's the idea that you're basically selling products but it's actually just a bundled, you're bundling your services into some kind of package and maybe you're offering your clients various options and the scope is fixed. It's not custom per client. It's you're selling something and if that's what the client wants, that's great. If it's not too bad there isn't usually much flexibility there. So actually, has anyone done this where they've basically sold services as if they were products in a way? Anyone wanna share their experiences with that? My situation was a full branding for a company that also included a website and various print packages but that's this, I'm more than just a web designer so but it totally worked for the client that they're ridiculously happy and I pocketed a lot of money so. Yeah, this is probably one of the most scalable thing models that you can use because you're basically creating something that's somewhat cookie cutter or templated. I'll get on to the next slide here. So yeah, so basically there's a lot of work to do upfront because you have to do market research and you figure out what the right offering to have and then targeting your audience making sure that they're in alignment and all that stuff but I think if you're really looking to grow your business this is one of the things that you'll definitely wanna get to at a certain point, I haven't, I've started to do it in the early stages but I think this is a fantastic model for scaling up eventually, yeah. Is this related to selling SEO services on a monthly basis? So yeah, there's crossover so we're gonna be talking about retainer and subscription based models which often are paired up with productized services so you have a productized service that you pay on a monthly basis or whatnot. So yeah, you can combine these models in a lot of cases, you can create hybrid versions of them. So obviously there are pros and cons obviously and one of the things is because the scope is predefined before you even start having the conversation with the client, you'll still have to have conversations to make sure everyone's on the same page as far as expectations are concerned but generally speaking when the scope is predefined it encourages, it basically puts the provider and the client more in alignment as far as their expectations are concerned for value and results so that's super helpful. I think every project that I've had that has gone wrong it's been because communication was not good enough and or expectations were not in alignment so the constant communication obviously helps with keeping them in alignment but right off the bat you have pretty good alignment as far as expectations are concerned. In addition, because it's kind of cookie cutter and it's sort of fixed, it's set, it protects against scope creep. I should have mentioned I could do a whole talk on scope creep too but I'm sure everyone in here has experienced that where it's like, oh, can we do this? And you're like, well, can we? Is it possible? Yes, it's not in the project or maybe the scope is not, my scope of work is usually not so detailed that you, there's usually, there's gray area as far as is this in the scope, is it not? And so that's always hard but that comes back to the discovery phase. But it protects against scope creep and things are well-defined, which is always nice but again, it's more cookie cutter, it's more fixed, it's not going to be as, you'll attract a certain amount, a type of client but you won't be able to, you'll have to turn, more people will be, it won't necessarily be a good fit for everyone or for many people so there are disadvantages to that as well and it may not be the ideal solution if it's not custom tailored for that client. So who in here charges, has any services where they're billing on a monthly or maybe weekly or quarterly basis? And are they retainers or are they more subscription based? I guess that's kind of arbitrary, I mean there's sort of crossover there but anyone want to share their experiences with sort of moving to that recurring revenue model? I found that it keeps clients much happier just in terms of keeping that constant communication going. I had a university client where we had just a set budget of like 20 hours a month in addition to like once a year big projects and by keeping that flow of communication of small fixes or big change around the site then we kept them happier and we ensured that we were going to get that next project and the clients where we didn't have that but we didn't have a regular check-in moment we were much more likely to lose them the next time they had a big project. Right, I think it's super beneficial for clients in the long run because most campaigns, digital marketing campaigns it's not just you do it and then it's done it's an ongoing thing and you have to keep putting in time and effort into constantly iterating and evolving the product or the solution that you've built and so you're much more likely to be successful if it's an ongoing long-term relationship and constant improvement. So again, this is sort of there are lots of different ways of doing this but retainer agreements or service level agreements are quite common and of course it gets back to that what's nice for any small business or freelancer is that consistent cash flow which is one of the major pros is that if you can build up enough recurring revenue that makes that cash flow roller coaster much smoother and more predictable and it's really nice you know I would give up a certain amount of income just to have more steady income, right? And, yeah. Is there a market for Google and the report? Absolutely, yeah. Will other people do that? I don't know if I'm the best qualified person to answer that but I mean there are all sorts of analytics and reporting for different KPIs like that but yeah, I'm sorry, I'm not... Yeah, we have like five to six clients that pay us to produce a monthly or quarterly analytics report for them and include them through social media they do email marketing we put that in the report for them so it just depends on the client but we've got quite a few that have been interested otherwise they don't go for themselves so... I think oftentimes you will have a regular report or some kind of analysis maybe it's a phone call, a scheduled phone call or something where you're updating them on the current progress or status of things whether it's SEO or I don't know AB, iterative AB testing, things like that but we spend a lot of our time chasing after one-off client projects or maybe they turn into a couple of projects here and there but I think I'm probably not alone in wanting to do less chasing after projects and have more long-term ongoing fulfilling projects and clients like that so this is something that encourages that however it's difficult too because especially if it's a lot of money that's recurring you have to constantly prove your worth and your value to the client it's not something where you can just become complacent you have to consistently provide value and show that it has a positive return and sometimes it's hard to find things to do especially if you're waiting on the client for something and you're trying to help their business it's hard to consistently deliver that level of value and if it starts to go down they may reconsider and I typically don't encourage like commitments of like a year but sometimes that's really helpful because especially with SEO or things that are just by their nature longer term you need a certain level of commitment for it to have a good chance of working but and it's more hard to sell to a client because it is an ongoing expense that they're gonna see every month any other notes to add to that? I've worked out a quarterly way of doing this because I have one client that first quarter and fourth quarter they're almost not existed but second and third they're full tilt so the quarterly thing worked for that particular client and it actually works really well for me Cool, yeah that's fantastic yeah I mean I'll have ups and downs where a month goes by and they're not really communicating with me and I'm like well I wanna provide services because I don't wanna lose you as a client but if there's nothing that they really need for me at the moment it's hard and we did all the planning in the first quarter for the second and third Great, that's fantastic It holds that accountable Sure, that's fantastic We're a marketing agency so we kind of want that retainer model but the thing that we find is it brings us a lot more responsibility to ourselves you have to have a lot better understanding of your client because you're gonna be touching base with them more so now you need to understand that business more to make the right decisions for them Exactly, yeah When I'm on a retainer I'm having to constantly think of things that the client hasn't thought of because I'm having to seek out additional opportunities that are not on their radar to prove that that's sort of the additional value that you're adding is that you not only are doing what they're asking you to do but you're thinking of things and doing things that they're not even asking or not even thinking about and that's I think where you're really truly providing that incredible value to the client when you're really more of a consultant or you're part of the business you're really almost it's like you have ownership in that, in that business I love you more but you have to have less of that Yeah, it's and then right and you want to say diversified too if you don't want to be basically working for you know have one giant retainer and that's you know 90% of your business so this is a more difficult but more ideal or utopian model I guess is the idea of value-based pricing where you have some kind of anchoring for the ROI or you're able to measure performance anyone used models like this where they're measuring or they're calculating the cost based on the or you're billing by the actual performance or results that the clients are getting Okay, yeah it's I propose to build out a affiliate page for somebody and get a percentage of revenue for that Right, yeah commissions I mean yeah sales commissions or yeah those kinds of arrangements are great because you only get you only pay when you get referral or you know so yeah that's a good way of doing it but yeah this is something again that's just kind of elusive but I've been reading more about and it's definitely something as sort of an ideal to work towards did you have, yeah Yeah, yeah right we'll get into equity in just a second I mean believe me I've been I've gotten in trouble there too but yeah, so this is a hard one to measure you know there's some it depends on the client to the industry sometimes there are ways that you can easily you know sales is one area where it's pretty easy to define you know what sales performance is just based on the amount of sales that are made in the revenue there but that's about the only cut and dry area where you can directly associate the cost with the performance at least that I'm aware of and again I won't claim to be an expert on this particular model but it's something that I'd like to strive for but obviously there are pros and cons you know it's great for the client if the client can somehow agree to this sort of thing because the client knows they're only paying for actual results that matter to them which is ideal for the client but it's really hard to define and to achieve its higher risk for the provider because unless they really know what they're doing and they're confident and competent enough to deliver on their promises but ultimately you know it perfectly aligns the incentives of both parties and so it's again it's harder to really put your finger on it but it's something that sort of as you're pricing on any project to again correlate that the price with the actual value expected value so then we'll get into more higher commitment models where it's either percentage based on a commission or profits sales through e-commerce site for example or actual ownership or equity in a company anyone have experiences with that that they'd wanna share or briefly summarize so and these are kind of they can be the same thing because if you have ownership you get a percentage of the profits but you don't necessarily you know you could get a percentage of the profits for example I had a client who I offered to basically they were a legitimate company and they offered or they wanted me to build their e-commerce site for free in exchange for a fixed amount commission on every purchase on every sale and at the time it seemed like a great idea and it could have been you know maybe it could have been a great thing but you know it incentivizes me to make a really good e-commerce site do really good at marketing and sales and actually get those sales in the door to actually make up for the time that I put in but again these are these are higher risk higher potential higher return models here and this gets more into startups and more you know business risk evaluation things like that but You take the job and when are you retiring? I took the job the thing is it was a it was eventually abandoned two years later because the business simply was not ready to go to have an e-commerce site because they had tens of thousands of products and they couldn't decide you know they were doing so many sales through other means that you know it wasn't worth it to the owner to follow through on the e-commerce site which is a shame because they're in the technology industry which is kind of interesting but you know if you evaluate the company and they seem like you know they're making solid sales you know this company was making at the beginning at least 300,000 in annual sales and even if I could have gotten a piece of that that would have been great and they were growing but again you have to do a lot of analysis and risk assessment here but it does require a huge commitment and a really really strong relationship where you have a lot of trust where you really know the other person or other party company to come up with an arrangement like this and it is you know there's a lot of negotiation and all that stuff so this is probably not gonna be very commonly used but it is something to consider. I wanted to leave enough time so that there can be more of a discussion but there's some great resources out there for these kinds of conversations about positioning, pricing, your strategy as far as discovery and all that stuff. Some of my favorite are, I love Brennan Dunn of Double Your Freelancing listening to like every podcast he's ever recorded really really great guests and he's been an inspiration to me as well as Mike Dermott the first one on there he's the CEO of FreshBooks if you use the invoicing software FreshBooks he wrote a great free e-book called Breaking the Time Barrier which is a great e-book to read to sort of start changing the way that you think about pricing, your services. Consulting success is great too. Again that's, a lot of these are not specific to the web you know our WordPress area but apply our great application so anyone else have recommended resources that you wanna share for this kind of, this sort of topic, okay. So now I just wanna open up the discussion here. Questions, I should have probably provided more examples from my own business but if you have examples to share, experiences to share I think those are always helpful the case studies, yep. There it is. Yep. Did you take into consideration affiliate income? So if you wanna get into that I haven't done much of that, I've done a little. What's that? Oh thank you, see I didn't even follow my own rule here. The question was do you take into consideration affiliate income? I think affiliate income can be a great revenue source. It depends on again on your audience and on your market and on your website of course and what you're promoting but affiliate income, the expert on that really is Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income. He's basically built on, I think he's now making easily $100,000 a month from affiliate income not average case, very much probably one of the best in the world as far as affiliate income is concerned but that can be something that's great for if you put enough time and energy into that that can be passive recurring income which again is kind of a holy grail. So yeah, I think that's definitely something to consider. Hardly for the same question but how do you take into account hosting? So as far as in what context? Reseller hosting. Yeah, I do reseller hosting. I manage hosting for 30 or so clients. That's a great passive, relatively passive income source depending on how good you are as a server admin or as just tech support. So yeah, I make some decent money from hosting. That's definitely something that is relatively hands off easy to set up a reseller hosting plan and then sort of sell that. I know I'm getting close on my time here but that's definitely something to consider. A lot of what we're talking about here is when you're starting off a project picking what sort of pricing model you want to go with but have you ever had a situation where you actually switched pricing models? Like I had one client where I did a number of hours of hourly work and then later on said hey actually I think we should switch to a fixed price model for the future and that would be okay for a while. Eventually they fell off and I kind of wonder if the switch in the model might have affected that. Yeah, a lot of the time the scope starts out very fuzzy and it's very blurry and so at that point it's hard to really, it's hard to put a fixed price on it so hourly is a great way to maybe start something and then as the scope becomes more and more into focus and becomes clearer what the requirements actually are and what the goals actually are then the fixed pricing model starts to make more and more sense. So yeah, it totally makes, or I guess it could work the other way if somehow the scope all of a sudden lost focus and you didn't really know what you were doing you might go to the hourly rate but there are other problems that you might wanna address first if that's happening. But yeah, depending on how well the scope is defined and the risk tolerances of both parties if that changes then that may incentivize a different model. Any other questions I think I'm up here but well, thank you for coming to this. I hope this was helpful. Check these out, these are all links and let's continue the conversation if anyone wants to.


Well, the Global Symposium for Regulators, or GSR as we call it for short, is the unique gathering of the regulators around the world once a year to discuss issues that are relevant to their agenda and to exchange experiences and views among them about them. And we have also added recently a dialogue between the regulators and the industry leaders so that this discussion would not be done in a vacuum so that we have also all the players in the sector getting together and discussing the hot issues. So this is the 13th edition of the GSR, so we started back in 2000, and from them we have evolved into a gathering of more than 130 regulators, this time in Warsaw, in Poland. And we've had also industry presence, not only of the traditional industry players, but also of the new players or the game changers as they have called, like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and additional players that are not necessarily from the sector like the banking and financial institutions that we gathered into a financial debate that was one of the highlights of this GSR in order for them to let us know also what their views are in terms of investing in the ICT area. Sure. Well, there are several. One of them is the evolution of the regulatory frameworks. We are talking now about fourth generation regulation, which is the main topic of this year's GSR. So we've had several waves of regulatory reform frameworks, and we are now starting the fourth wave, if you want to call it that way, where regulators are more and more looking into a way of not only deploying the networks and ensuring competition for the services as it was in the past, but now more focused on bringing the ICTs to all in an inclusive manner and reaching the population that is either not in urban areas or even if they are in urban areas but are marginalized from ICTs for one reason or another, like people with disabilities, like indigenous populations, like aging populations, and this kind of inclusiveness is more and more into the regulatory debate. This is one of the issues. Another issue is also the convergence of the various players in the economy that are more and more using ICTs for their activities. So ICTs is not any more telecommunications, but it's also all the data and internet related issues. So health, education, agriculture, you name it, they are all part of the ICT environment. So how do you do when you have several players of this type playing in the same field? For instance, the banking system and the operators that are working together towards digital transactions that we do every day over the Internet. So who regulates those? The financial system, the telecom system, both, none. So this kind of discussion is very hot on the table. Also the broadcasting, as you know, is one of the converged industries. So who regulates them? Is the content regulator? Is the telecom regulator? The transition from analog to digital broadcasting and implications for the society. All these topics have been hot in the agenda of this year's GSR. Well, the feeling of all players, not only regulators, but also the industry players and all those that are coming into this dialogue between, they are somehow using the ICT infrastructure for their socioeconomic activity, is that the ICTs are here as a solution to these type of problems. It's a contributor to the solution, not to the problem. And in particular, the youth unemployment problem that is high in the agenda of all there is an opportunity in the ICTs for them to be employed. ICT is generating lots of employment, not only direct employment in the ICT sector itself, but indirectly so, because as I said before, we use ICTs for everything. So in any other economic activity, there is an ICT component nowadays. So there is a huge potential for the youth, for young people to get involved in the development and the deployment of these applications that are more and more in use in every day's life. And it will be even more so in the future. More and more gadgets and, let's say, technology-related applications are being issued every day and they are going to be more and more used by everybody in the planet.


In this presentation, we will talk about payroll controls and documentation. Exempt and non-exempt employees. It's important to know these terms because the regulations will differ depending on whether an employee qualifies as exempt or non-exempt. So in other words, the employees that are exempt are not subject to the Fair Labor Standards Act, FLSA wage and hours laws. So amongst other things in particular, the overtime calculation would not be present or not be needed or required for employers given the employees who are exempt. So if they're exempt from that status, then they aren't required to have, amongst other things, an overtime calculation based on the federal law, the Fair Labor and Standards Act. Now, why would that be the case? Well, if someone is exempt, then typically we're dealing with highly skilled workers.


The Mutual Broadcasting System, in cooperation with Family Theatre Incorporated, presents Descent into Paradise, starring Edgar Berrier, Natalie Wood, and Phillip Terry. John Lund is your host.  Do you remember a day, maybe for some of you a day long ago, but a day to remember always? The day when you stood beside someone you love and pledged your faith in one another until death do us part.  That is a prayer that should be on our lips, not only on the day of marriage, but every day. And when we as a family join together and ask God to bless our home, we can be sure that he will hear our prayers and help us in all difficulties. Pray together as a family. Make daily family prayer a family practice. And in your hearts and homes there will always be the peace and happiness that comes with God's wonderful help. If you stand at the bridge where the Chicago River meets Lake Michigan, you can see the towering skyscrapers shoot up from the river banks. You can see the great Michigan Boulevard with its elegant shops. And then as you look down below to the lower level, a subterranean passageway that follows the black, swirling Chicago River westward, a panorama of contrast unfolds, unequal by few cities in the world. The lower level was roofed by the streets above, shadowed by the skyscrapers and warehouses on its north and south banks. As you move along lower level, you will note the ghoulish-looking shops, one-time speakeasies during the Chicago's reign of terror. All are deserted now, save one, the lower level cafe. Proprietor, Adam Adams. My name is Adams. Before I took over the lower level cafe, it was a hideout and hangout for the Chicago underworld. I ran the cafes, I found it, red checkered tablecloths, sawdust on the floor, and an old upright piano with a few bullet holes still in the framework. My customer is called to place, quaint. Coming down those 40 steps one rainy evening in the early 30s on my way to the cafe, I saw a guy leaning up against one of the pillars. A coat collar turned up and soaked to the skin. He finished smoking a cigarette, tossed the butt into the river and started for it, so I grabbed his arm. I wouldn't go after that butt, son. Why not? It's too wet. Have a dry one. No thanks. Just finished. You know, it's kind of slippery on that edge, especially during the rain. Sort of makes sliding in much easier, don't you think? Ah, it's the coming back that's tough. You see, there's nothing to grab on to. I wasn't figuring on coming back. Well, that's generally the idea until you're in. What's the matter, you broke? Does it make any difference? Ah, ah, it does. Hey, hey, look, I, ah, I know a joint where we can get some hot coffee. Free. How about it? Why not? I've got lots of time. At my cafe, I found out something about Robert Morrison. It was a piano accompanist for some big concert singer on tour. There was an Astiata smash-up. She was killed and his whole left hand was crushed. I'd been on a bum ever since. And the river was his last beat. After I fed him, I told him I needed a piano player in my cafe. He suspected I needed one like I needed two heads. But he did take the job. A week later, I handed him his first paycheck. Ha, he broke down a crop. Well, he had a good one coming to him.  And today, today was going to bring her home. You see, today was her birthday. Well, late that afternoon, I was leaving the cafe when I saw them having a picnic on the north bank of the river. Wouldn't it be fun, Daddy, to have a picnic every day? You wouldn't want a birthday every day, would you? Oh, yes. Then I'd be real grown up. You mean grown up. And I could cook for you and sew and everything. But you'd get old too fast. Well, you'd be 365 years old by next July. Well, I could stop having birthdays after I was grown up. Grown up, darling. Grown up. Look, Daddy, the locomotive across the river. Looks like it's backing up. But it's leaving that car all by itself. They've moved it to a siding. Must be a special car. What's special about it? Oh, important people generally have private cars. Sometimes the president of the United States rides in one. I remember the great musician Patoreschi always traveled on his concert tours in a private car. But do they just leave the car there? Oh, no. When they're ready to go to another city, the locomotive pitches it on and off they go. My house, like we do. Well, geniuses are not usually sociable people. They don't like crowds. Is that why you're not sociable, Daddy? Who told you that? Mrs. McGivney at the AIDS Society. She did, eh? What are you writing, Daddy? Oh, just some music. Oh, I know. Do re mi fa si la. Oh, no, no, no. Do re mi fa so la ti do. Is that what you're writing? Not exactly. I'm writing a story of that river. A story? Like Alice in Wonderland? Well, it's not that kind of a story. It's a musical story of the river. Please tell it to me, Daddy. Well, it's kind of hard to tell in words. Those notes tell of that river when it was a little stream far, far away, beyond the railway station, farther than we can see. Farther than the steam shovel? Much farther. And the music here shows this happy little stream flowing in from the meadows, playing along its banks filled with willows, making the flowers grow in the grass and giving life to the small trees. And birds, too? We'll put in birds, too. Now these notes, they tell how the stream moves up and becomes a river. And it gets wider and wider and the water rushes faster. And that brings on a new kind of music. Then we hear the sounds of the city in the distance, the pounding steam shovels, the blast of locomotives. Just like the one we heard? Exactly. And we come past the skyscrapers and those big buildings over there, and then comes the music of the bridges, opening all along the rivers the big boats come through. And then, where the river rushes past Adams Cafe, it sweeps onto the Michigan Avenue Bridge, and we hear a thousand tones swelling into a terrific crescendo of chords. And that's the death march of the river disappearing into the lake. Now, if I could only hear it play it as it should be. Why can't you play it, Daddy? It takes two hands to play that sort of music. But when your hands get better, you'll be able to play it, won't you? We'll see. Can't we be in the story? You are, darling. You're the inspiration for every note. Now you go and play while I finish putting this music down. That was real good. Oh? Where did you come from, young lady? Across the river, by the bridge. Are you lost? No. Daddy and I are having a picnic, but he's busy now. Oh, I see. I know why you don't live in a real house. Well, why?  Who told you all that? My daddy. He's not sociable either. And what does he do that makes him unsociable? He plays the piano. Uh-huh. So that's it. Can you play Chopsticks? Chopstick? You mean like this? There. No, that's not right. It isn't. Can you play it right? You have to play it with one hand like this. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. What happens to the other hand? My daddy plays it with me. Would you play with me? You mean you want me to play the right hand, is that it? Yes, and I'll count, huh? All right. You count. Now, ready, begin. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. Wasn't that much better? Bravo. Much. That's the way my daddy and I play it. What's that music on your piano? Something I was practicing. Would you like to hear it? Oh, yes. My daddy writes music like that, but he can't play it. Why not? He heard his hand, and he hasn't played for a long time.  I'm sure it will get well again. Now, don't you think you'd better run along to your picnic? Your father might wonder where you are. Do you live in a train all the time? Only when I'm traveling. Wouldn't you rather live in a house? Well, this is a little more convenient. You could come and stay with us. I could ask my daddy.  What's your name? Margaret Morrison. What's yours? Jose Miguel Arantino. Gee, that's a funny name. Is it your real name? Yes. You're sure you're not making it up? Like Jabberwocky and the Gryphon or the Bandersnatch. No, no, I didn't make it up. Didn't they tease you about it at school? When I went to school, it didn't sound funny. I tell you what I do. For you, I change it. You can call me Jose. How's that? Nope. I don't like that either. You don't. How about Joe?  Why couldn't you just call me Joe? It isn't respectful. All right, Mr. Joe. Now you better run along. Can I come tomorrow? Any time. You are always welcome. Maestro, maestro, good news. The hall is a complete cell. Who's it is? This is Margaret. Margaret, may I present Sr. Pietro de Nerval, my manager. How do you do? Maestro, I don't understand. Who is it this Bambini? What's she doing here? I heard Joe playing the piano. I mean Mr. Joe, so I came to visit him. Joe? Joe who? Joe me, I am Joe. Mr. Joe, and what's your name? Look a little girl, please. Please go away. Nobody interrupts the maestro at this hour. She is my most critical audience. Audience? A street away thing. Can you play chopsticks? Joe, chop a steak. Maestro, this is an unprecedented. Of course he plays chopstick. All managers are frustrated virtuosos.  Is that bad? All three of us can play together. Like Daddy, Adam and me. Dear little girl, is it dollar? Go away, please. Do you want me to go away, Mr. Joe? No, of course not. Maestro, my bish is lost. I will take her myself to the police. She is not lost. Now perhaps if we all play chopstick, then she might go away. Am I Margaret? All right. I'll sit next to Mr. Joe and you. Say, what is your name? His name is worse than mine. Call him Kilroy. All right, Mr. Kilroy, you sit beside me. Maestro, this is a sheer madness. I refuse. Pietro, Pietro, do as she asks. Yes, maestro. Now you, Mr. Joe, play with the right hand. And Mr. Kilroy, play with the middle. All play down here. Ready? Ready? Pietro, ready. Now all count. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. Mr. Kilroy, you're playing the wrong note. One, two, three. One, two, three. It was the next day I met little Margaret skipping across the bridge. She said her father had sent her to the music store to get some manuscript like the kind she was carrying. And on her way back from the music store, she stopped by the railway sighting to see her pal, Mr. Joe. Hello, Mr. Joe. I'm a no, Mr. Joe. I'm a what do you call a Kilroy. So it's you again.  Hello. And a goodbye. The maestro's in a no mood. He's upset. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. You mean Mr. Joe's stomach is upset? His stomach is ahead. Everything is a bad, bad goodbye. Why, that's terrible. I know just the right thing for him. Now you just hold this music for him. Now what do you want? I'll go to Mr. Gleason's drug store. No, no, please. You put him right to bed and take his temperature. I know just what to get for him. Oh, maestro. Yes, maestro. I thought I heard you talking to someone. No, no, no, maestro, I was talking to myself. There is a place for people like that. That manuscript in your hand, what is it? It must be the one Massini asked me to look at. Why didn't you say it was here? Well, it's a... I don't know what's got into you lately, Pietro. Let me see it. Pietro, listen to this. I would have sworn Massini didn't have it in him. I would have sworn it too. Why aren't you in bed? I brought you some castor oil. Bed castor oil? Mr. Kuroi said your stomach was upset. You just said he was upset. You said stomach. Oh, maestro, this isn't too much. You don't sound like you're sick, Mr. Joe. It really was, but you have restored me. I'm fine now. Oh, well, I better go home now. My daddy is waiting. Oh, yes, yes, darling, go home. Can I have my daddy's music, Mr. Kuroi? Music? Oh, yes, yes, here it is right on the piano. Wait a minute. Pietro, I thought you said this was Massini's music. That's my daddy's. Mr. Kuroi was taking care of it. Well, maestro, I tried to... Let me get this straight. That music was brought here by the child. Yes, and it belongs to my daddy. Look, maestro, it's very possible that this man, Morrisini, can be a copyist for some well-known composer. He does not. He works for Adam, and he wrote that because I sawed him. Saw him. Well, Margaret, maybe he was copying those notes from some other score. He did not, because it's all about a little stream with flowers and trees and the birds singing. You mean this part? Yes, and then the river gets bigger and the steam shovels and the trains make all kinds of noise and Clancy's barge whistle. And then there's the big buildings and then the river goes by Adam's Cafe, where my daddy works. He plays the piano in Adam's Cafe. Yes. So that's it. Where's the rest of the music? You didn't lose any pages, did you? No. Maybe Mr. Kuroi lost some. I did not. Pietro, this man has written a great musical story of that river. It should be completed. Something like this on my program would be fresh, vital. Oh, Mr. Kuroi. Long age of man Beethoven. Yes, of man Beethoven. But can someone write great music now? This is heart and imagination. Now he must finish it, I insist. You insist.  Margaret, I must see your father at once. Oh, my daddy doesn't talk to anyone, but Adam and me. He's not very sociable.   Margaret, couldn't you tell your father that aren't Tino... Oh, he wouldn't believe you. I could tell him my friends, Mr. John, Mr. Kuroi would like to see him. I don't think that would do it. And we could go to see him. Oh, one of the worlds the greatest of atosos. Go to see him. A bar room piano player. Oh, that would be outrageous. No. I alone shall go to this man. I shall request him to come here. I know who self-sacrifice Pietro, but that would be no way to treat a genius. Now I tell you what we do. We'll all go to see him. Oh, goody, then we can all play chopsticks. It was later that same afternoon when Morrison came to my cafe looking worried. He told me how he sent the kid for some manuscript paper more than two hours ago, and she hadn't come back. He thought she might have stopped over to have a chat with me because she was a great one for making friends. Well, we both started to look for when all of a sudden, coming down to 40 steps from the bridge, was little Margaret with two men. Morrison said, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Well, Margaret, with two men, Morrison's first reaction was Trojan officer, so he asked me to talk to him and he slipped back into the cafe. Yoo-hoo, Mr. Adams. Oh, Mr. Adams. Oh, hello, Margaret. Gentlemen, I'm sorry about this. It won't ever happen again. This is Mr. Joan, Mr. Kilroy. Yeah, Mr. D-D-Dil-Kilroy? The name is Dene Rale. Pietro Dene Rale. Never mind. As you were saying, sir. Well, I... All I was saying is, what can I do for you boys? Do? Do you know who this is? Pietro, please, please. Mr. Adams, where could I find Margaret's father? Oh, you're an old friend of Morrison's. Is that it? No, a new friend. Well, that's okay. He's right inside the cafe. Where's my daddy? Daddy? This is Mr. Joan, Mr. Kilroy. The name is Arantino. Arantino? The pianist? You see? He knows. Why don't you crawl into the woodwork, pal? Morrison, this manuscript. Is it your own composition? But how did you get it? That's another story, but is it yours? Yes, but I still don't understand. Margaret brought it to me accidentally, of course. I left it with Mr. Kilroy. It was a heavenly-inspired accident. I knew it was great the moment I heard it. Yes, yes, Pietro. Of course, indeed. But it isn't finished yet. That's one of the reasons I am here. If you would finish it. I should like permission to include it in my repertoire. I want to present it next Sunday at Orchestra Hall. The maestro will bring you fame and fortune. Pietro, please. What do you say, Morrison? May I use it? I don't know what to say. I wrote it just for something to do. No. You wrote it because it had to be written. And what difference does it make? Why or when? It's a wonderful piece of music. I had thought of it as a symphony. You need strings, brass, so many instruments. I can't promise you Toscanini. But if you will accept an arantino with piano and orchestra, it should be great. Gee, Daddy, as then we can hear the steam shovels and the squeaking bridges and everything. Well, it may not be ready in time, maestro, and possibly we can play it later in the tour. Possibly we will play it here. It means cancelling a dozen engagements throughout the country. Mr. Arantino, I'd like to ask a favor. Yeah? I've never heard this composition played with two hands. Would you play it for me? Thank you for the privilege. Shall I tell him about the little stream and how it growed? Grew Margaret. Yes. Yes, I think he understands these things and much more. I'll tell you what you can do, Margaret. You can explain them to Mr. Kilroy while I play the music. First there was a little stream far, far away, farther than the railway station. I played among the meadows with the flowers. Standing there, all this was like remembering a dream. I saw thousands of people in orchestra hall listening to the life and death of a river. Arantino, little Margaret and Morrison. Each held a child's hand as she went skipping up the 40 steps to the upper level. And I said to Kilroy, he was walking with me. Well, I seen it happen. A stairway to paradise that led down to a riverfront. But Kilroy wasn't listening. He was looking up at the little girl nearly, nearly bawling and mumbling something about, of such is the kingdom of the heaven. Of such is the kingdom of heaven. I guess there isn't one of us that has to admit that at times we get to worrying. We worry about a lot of things, business affairs, our jobs, our future. And when we pick up the papers and see that one marriage in three goes on the rocks and we see reports about juvenile delinquency, we even begin to worry about our own family. Yes, there are many things today that tend to separate a family. That's why we need all the help we can have to bring our families together. There's nothing that will bring a family closer in unity and understanding in the common bond of trust and faith in God. The simple expression of that faith, the daily practice of family prayer is the greatest inspiration and example we can give our children. Family prayer can and will bring God's blessing on our home, the blessing of harmony and understanding because a family that prays together stays together. This is John Lund saying good night and God bless you. Before saying good night, we'd like to thank Natalie Wood for her performance as Margaret, Edgar Berrier for the role of Jose, and Phillip Terry for his performance as Morrison. Our thanks also to John Slot for adapting his play for radio and to Max Tehr for his music. Heard in tonight's play was an adaptation from Victor Young's Manhattan Concerto played by pianist Harry Souffman. Mel Williamson directed, John Ryder produced the program. Others who appeared in tonight's program were Lou Merrill and Jack Petruzzi. Next week, our family theater drama will be No Greater Love. Your host will be Frank Leahy. This series of the Family Theater broadcast is made possible by the thousands of you who felt the need for this kind of program by the mutual broadcasting system which has responded to this need and by the actors and technicians in the motion picture and radio industries. This program is heard overseas through the facilities of the United States Armed Forces Radio Services. Tony LaFranco speaking. This is the Mutual Broadcasting System.