Our final speaker this morning before a time for some Q&A is a name that I'm sure is familiar and a voice that I'm sure is Familiar to many of you Charles Goyette. It's not only a longtime radio host in the Phoenix area on several stations He's also someone who's done so much to forward and assist the Ron Paul revolution by working with Ron on his radio podcast and finally I will only I will just note that Charles should be lauded by everyone in this room for having the courage to stand up against The foreign policy disaster and misadventure known as the Iraq war at personal cost to himself Ladies and gentlemen Charles Goyette Good morning everybody. It's great to see so many friends and friends of liberty in one place dangerous to be in one place there aren't enough of us but And it's always an honor for me to get an opportunity to participate in anything that the Mises Institute does Because I consider it and I'm sure you'll agree that it is the vital and intellectual center of the freedom movement in America today It's an honor. It's a real honor for all of us to think and Be able to tell our kids and our grandkids in the future that we had a chance to hear from and break bread with The two most effective champions of liberty of our era Lou Rockwell and Ron Paul today So the question before the house is what is to be done. It's actually a question as a very old pedigree linen addressed it Murray Rothbard addressed it We've in the meantime had a lot of linen very little a very little of Rothbard about what is to be done so as I pondered how to get into the topic this morning the The Arizona Republic landed on my doorstep with the answer yesterday morning And the answer was this a story here on the front page that says the United States spent 384 million dollars to train 180 Syrians now it notes in the lead That's two million dollars a piece of course to train them now It notes in the lead so that you won't be alarmed. It says these are the moderate Syrians Just like the other ones that we do all the moderate they're all moderates when we when we train them and And then it notes it assures us by the way that although this might seem like an exorbitant amount of money That it's not all money down the drain because they didn't spend it all a whole bunch of it is still sitting in Warehouses in the form of weapons equipment and ammunition in Syria. Oh great You know, you know how that will be used. Don't you? So the state engages though in violence and economic waste like this like a like a meth addict and When you ask, what is to be done? It seems to me clearly there is only one answer and we must Decent to disempower the state by any means possible Before they engage in any more ruin and any more any more violence And I will frame this with two examples of the the presidents of this new millennium one example from each of them dealing with both violence and fiscal madness and Let me start with George W. Bush just a couple of weeks before he launched his his war in Iraq the president met in the White House with a couple of Iraqi-American businessmen To discuss What is to be done in Iraq after Saddam Hussein is gone and so help me now I This isn't an internet rumor. I have this from a US ambassador in his book The conversation Went something like this the president said Sunnis Shia I Thought Iraqis were Muslims And of course this is the the intellectual enlightenment that led to you know taking the Letting the genie out of the bottle in the Middle East and the you know the increased polarization and radicalization of the region and the the destruction and the deaths and You know the migration now throughout Europe and the threat to Western civilization over the next hundred years and all of this stuff I thought they were all well. I thought they were all Muslims So but to be nonpartisan I don't like to say bipartisan nonpartisan. Let me tell you about the last presidential election Barack Obama showed up on David Letterman show and And David Letterman happened to ask early in the conversation. He said so how much is the national debt? Oh, you've never seen Obama so nervous Clearly he had no idea Now I mean this is absolutely astonishing You know for somebody that's so kind in and talking about whether the debt limit should be raised how much he spent It's no idea and so he kind of you know And and and so Letterman came to his rescue and he said he Obama said well, I don't know precisely So Letterman said well is it ten trillion dollars? Now for the record the national jet debt had just climbed to ten trillion dollars at about the time Barack Obama was elected At the time he showed up on Letterman show it was sixteen trillion dollars You know, it's about eighteen and a half now and it would be twenty trillion dollars when Obama leaves office so Obama is very widely and he said he said well in in in ducking the question. He said well The thing you have to know about the national debt is We owe it to ourselves Now I was a little shocked to hear this because I heard this all in my public education in college I heard this Keynesian nonsense was all my formative years But I thought they had stopped it Because you know even if you could say it back then you can't say it now You know we owe we over six we own over six trillion dollars with all deference to Lou Let me put it a little better. He reminded us the other day The government owes over six trillion dollars to foreign. I'm not a part of it. Leave me out of this the The government owes over six trillion dollars to foreigners so you can't two and a half trillion dollars to the Chinese the Japanese so you cannot say that you know, we owe it to ourselves, but Listen, I was always on the alert for this kind of Balderdash in from my teachers and so on and I got a lot of it In my formative years, you know a child of the 50s and 60s And I suppose one of the reasons I got I got wary about the things that they would say was in the first grade interested in things about government politics and stuff and I remember asking my first grade teacher to explain to me the difference between a king and a president Now it would be generous and say that I'm sure that she was trying to you know to address my little Vibre six-year-old consciousness and Teach me something about democracy. So she said so help me Well, the people don't necessarily want the king But they want the president Man you haven't been around my house long you should hear my dad So So I feel like I was somewhat immunized against a lot of this this Conventional wisdom stuff went on but there was one I will confess to you That bothered me a great deal In high school and into college when you would talk about you talk about the regulatory state the imposition of the state when you talk about a centralized economic planning when you talk about free markets and This was was a meme that was repeated over and over again. It was well Charles All of that stuff, you know, that might have been that might have been fine for simpler times. Oh That that was okay for you know at the time of the founders and so on but this is a you know This is hopelessly outdated. Oh, that stuff was was okay in a simple agrarian Economy, but you know things are far too complex and we're far too large for any of this kind of freedom stuff And you know, it's an assertion I mean I you can deal with somebody who says we owe it to ourselves and you can point out how absurd that is But when somebody makes an assertion like this, you know, it's there's nothing really to grab on just to sort of oh it's not appropriate for our complex era and It bothered me a lot not not because I thought it was true But I didn't really know how to refute it and the problem with something like that of course is that taken to its logical extreme You know with increasing complexity with increasing growth if it mandates more and more state intervention in our lives You know the end game of obviously totalitarianism, which is clearly where we were all all headed So I embarked in a media career when I was still a teenager and this put me in the company of people with life Accomplishments that were well above my pay grade, you know authors and opinion mongers and people kind of worldly accomplishment and and When I would find one who I thought was you know friendly to our ideas about About about freedom about liberty about markets and so on so forth. I would start to inquire of them You know, what do you say about this now? I? Will tell you Nobody ever could give me an answer. I Never got a satisfactory answer. I got a sir. Oh, no, it's still it's fine everything. No, they're wrong So but I wanted an answer I wanted something that I could hang my hat on and I did not get one now eventually I discovered Austrian economics thank goodness and I discovered Mises and discovered Rothbard and discovered haslet and I discovered the whole corpus the whole body of of Austrian economics and So it was all Suddenly it was like, you know, it was like mana from heaven. It was like a intellectual feast for me that we you know I now had a means of refuting things that what that I knew wasn't true, but I couldn't refute as an adolescent and So and I wonder to this day How any self-respecting or intellectually honest if there is one socialist can have Frankly confronted Mises's critique of socialism and its inevitable failure can't calculate How they can have encountered this and not jumped out the window I Apparently it hasn't gotten to Bernie Sanders yet. Yeah. Oh, I just learned you probably all know this.  That's something a little more romantic But he went to he went to the Soviet in any event it may not have been known Hasn't been learned yet By Bernie Sanders, but they knew it in the Kremlin and that's why they had the Sears catalog this poor pathetic effort to To impute the prices and the relative value of things in the absence of a price system and they used they turned to the American Sears catalog to try to fake it so Austrian business cycle theory how can anybody Be fooled how can anybody be taken in how can anybody? accept, you know QE 1 2 3 4 5 whatever they've got planned for us however far fed manipulation of interest rates without seeing the hard record that all of this stuff means as though there's magic money, you know We can magic magically create it and it has no impact We just get there's no cost to doing so and but you know, we don't believe in magic because we're adults so And it's the same. It's it's the same with in my view Hayek's distinction between what he called the taxes and The cosmos and how anybody can confront it that idea and still support its central plan a taxes was you know It was a structure a top-down Organized thing, you know, we get the word taxonomy from it, right? We we have a tax on in the animal kingdom, you know, it's everything classified, you know We have Cordata and we have you know kingdom fine class order family genus species So the duck bill platypus comes along kind of screws the structure up a little bit But you know it has it has its place and a cosmos is a spontaneously arising an Autodynamic a self-generating system and Hayek likes to talk about language. It's a great example of a cosmos Self-generating nobody nobody handed it down Nobody created it. It didn't come from a committee or the state, but it's not just language. It's it's the evolution of money and Markets of course are great examples of this sort of stuff when Donald Trump builds a high rise He appropriately Uses the the taxes model. I mean, you know, so many so many spans of steel such and such structural strength So many, you know miles of copper wiring for this so much this so much that you know It's all and it's all has to be very very precise and that's the appropriate application of the taxes model but Were he to succeed in the same kind of structure, you know forcing the top-down order on The economy on trade on all the things that he's going to force it on You know with the obvious result would be a calamity and of course we have all the evidence of the world of this I don't understand why it's so often overlooked. You know, you have the the failure of the soviet union you have East germany and west germany you have north korean south korean have ample evidence of this kind of thing when when a president say bush decides to impose An order like a jeffersonian democracy on iraq Calamity is going to resort is good. It is going to be the result because if you understand the Centralization and command nature of the structure you understand that it destroys culture It destroys spontaneous order that people have created in their own lives over time with things that have worked it destroys what we call it then a cosmos so This is how I began to immunize immunize myself against the The central economic planners of the state and the global empire builders and and so on now Rather than their assertion, this is evident to all of you already The rather than the assertion of my teachers that you know the more complex the argument complexity and size and so on Makes you know the cosmos model or the freedom model the market model inappropriate. The truth is just the opposite the more complex The larger the more imperative the market is I mean you can imagine I guess a you know a closed economy and island You know state of one guy that makes bread and one guy that fishes and the chief that tells them what to exchange things at and so on and He rakes off his take and then he tells them what to exchange it for but Maybe they could get fed maybe that would work but everything changes in the real world everything changes You know somebody you know oceans change A fishing patterns change crops fail somebody dies Somebody's born a castaway washes ashore with whatever whatever it is But if you multiply those few actors by by hundreds of millions you begin to be staggered By the complexity of it all and yet it all solves itself organically Without a central command in new york city. It's estimated that there are something like tens of billions Of sku's these are stop keeping stock keeping units For products and certain tens of billions for products and and services and only a madman Would think himself capable of intervening in this process Well, this is something I wrote about in uh In red and blue and and broke all over Um, but I do want to say that when I suggest that being immunized against the plague of statism We can depend upon austrian economics I I do want to suggest that I mean only people With healthy human consciousness Now that means not politicians With the obvious exception of uh of of one But anybody eager to control anybody ambitious to uh to rule others any anybody that is hungry the native criminal class um Don't have what I like to call healthy human consciousness in In uh early world war two richard nixon worked in the office of price administration in washington dc These were the price control guys. He worked in tires These were the rationing guys the price control guys and and uh, he learned What a nightmare this stuff was But the white house tapes show us That when he introduced his leninous sounding new economic plan In august of 1971 and phase one phase two phase three richard nixon's price controls. He knew That it would be destructive to the economy and he imposed it any way why Because it would be good for his reelection chances. He surmised in 1972 Not healthy human consciousness The the very existence of these people though in their hunger for for uh for power Desire to rule to control and so on is as great an argument as any that the state Needs to be disempowered and it needs to be disempowered right away. So What is to be done? When murray rothbart addressed this question more than 50 years ago about the freedom movement about the liberty movement about libert libertarians He said he said well, what we really are going to need is a center of gravity We're going to need a hardcore center. We're going to need a a a center That we can all kind of be around you know to hold this together and and so on and and uh, We have such a center. We have one of demonstrable capability of great achievement The kind that uh rothbart was talking about 52 years ago or so when he wrote what is to be done And I began by saying calling him out. I said, you know that the mesis institute is the is the vital And the intellectual center of the freedom movement in america today I shuttered to think where the freedom movement would be without it so I will tell you from my my lifetime and Trying to bring people in trying to recruit people talking about freedom in the media and my personal life and And so on in the public debate. I have found that the single Most effective way to immunize people against the blandishments and the lies and the Conventional wisdom and the the naked assertions of the state and the status the most effective way To immunize people against the state and its desire for ever more violence and economic destruction Is is austrian economics So There is a great deal to be done, but so much has been done for us. There are so many resources available to us Thanks to the mesis institute and we must all help I believe in every way that we can Thank you very much


All right, so here's the scenario. Suppose somebody comes up to you and they've got a weapon, got changed and they say, you belong to me now. Whatever you do, whatever benefits or products you produce, I get to keep it their mind.   They're going to enslave you, is what they're doing. So the question is, according to Locke, do you have the right to retaliate with lethal violence if somebody tries to enslave you? And the answer is, yeah, of course you do. Once again, this is an attempt to usurp your authority, your sovereignty. You're the one that's supposed to make the decisions for your life. If somebody else tries to use force to enslave you, you get to fight back. You don't have to retaliate with lethal violence. You don't have to try to kill and self-defense. But you have the right to, right? You have the right to. You're not obligated, but you have the right to, according to Locke. So here's the question. Do you agree with Locke? Do you agree with Locke that you have the right to retaliate with lethal violence if somebody tries to enslave you?


They celebrated their birthdays far from home so that we could enjoy freedom and peace of mind. Away from family and friends, they spent birthdays in harm's way and without the parties and the celebrations we enjoy. Help honor them by signing up to use your birthday to raise much needed funds for DAV. We help make it easy to use your special day to help give back and pay tribute to the sacrifices made by these special men and women. Find out how at DAV.org slash birthday.


When he goes and he tells Firaunis, look at the response of Firaunis. Didn't we raise you as a child among us? Basically, his response to him was, you ungrateful person. The personal attack is one of the primary strategies of an oppressor. They will go and they'll attack you and say, what about that? To try to undermine your credibility so that whatever you're trying to say, even if it's correct, it's going to be a distraction for everybody else. They will always try to justify their actions. Sometimes they're just going to lie completely.  Propaganda that oppressors are pushing out.


Welcome to Unit 1 of Communications 001. In this video, we're going to quickly highlight a few things you need to keep in mind while working through the unit. This unit is designed to introduce you to the basic components of communication and to introduce you to many theories that will help you understand the phenomenon of communication. Key concepts to watch for in this first unit include the models of communication, the process of perception, and the complementary relationship between listening, verbal, and non-verbal communication. Best of luck on Unit 1 and we'll see you again before Unit 2.


In a world where there are a bunch of dating apps that focus on the first moves, it can feel like dating is created exclusively for extroverts. You have to come up with a clever line that's funny, different, not too weird, not offensive, and get a good response back. It's intimidating. Even though the game of online dating seems cured towards extroverts, introverts deserve love too. Let's take a look at some clever, non-traditional dating hacks that every introvert should know. The first thing we need to address is the negative connotation that is often associated with introverts. Because introverts are often assumed to be uncomfortably quiet and antisocial, many introverts see themselves as undatable, and believe they must display faked extroverted qualities to feel valued or loved. Psychotherapist and author Sean Grover says, Yet that's just how introverts are made to feel.  You are not undatable. The world of dating awaits you. Slow and steady. Have you heard the phrase, slow and steady wins the race? This phrase comes from one of Aesop's fables, the tortoise and the hare. It's a story where the title characters have a race against each other, thinking he'd win no matter what. The arrogant hare takes his sweet time and even takes a few breaks. The tortoise kept steady with his pacing and ended up winning because of his consistency. When it comes to dating, be like the tortoise. Clinical psychologist Dr. Robert Puff argues that happiness is best achieved when we make slow and steady choices, instead of fast and impulsive ones. If you want to take things slow, tell your match. Relationships don't have to be rushed. If you aren't ready to meet your Tinder match for real or aren't prepared to set the next date, that's okay.  Introverts often need extra time to recharge their batteries after a social outing and it's essential to be honest with your partner about that. This will help to set realistic expectations about you and your relationship.  Everything will line up in the best way. We all know that finding the perfect partner can be a challenge, but what if there was a way to make the process a little bit easier? Introducing our sponsor, Sosynct, the introvert friendly dating app that pairs couples based on their personalities and interests. Think about it, when you're dating someone who truly gets you, it's like a breath of fresh air. Sosynct is designed to help you find that special someone who really understands you. The app takes the guesswork out of dating by using a comprehensive personality test to match you with compatible partners.  From there, it's up to you to make the first move and start messaging. But don't just take our word for it. Listen to Hannah, a psyched goer who discovered Sosynct through one of our videos. She downloaded the app, found Brandon, and deleted the app within a matter of hours, and found Brandon and deleted the app, so why not give Sosynct a try, as our sponsor for today's video. Download the app today and give yourself a chance to find deeper, more meaningful love. With Sosynct, you'll be on the fast track to finding your perfect partner. Someplace quiet and familiar Meeting someone for the first time can be nerve-wracking. If you think it'll make you more comfortable, try suggesting someplace familiar for your first date. Instead of meeting at a club, bar, restaurant, or theater, suggest meeting at your local cafe or park. Particularly somewhere you and your date can share a proper conversation without too many distractions. Behavioral analyst and co-author of New York Times bestseller, Reading People, Wendy Alpatrick says that the best first dates take place in settings designed to facilitate comfort and conversation, not awkward and appropriate intimacy. If you're in charge of choosing the location of your first date, try to pick a place that will not stir any wrong ideas. A crowded, classy restaurant may not only intimidate you, but also intimidate your date as well. Instead, pick a place that could put you both at ease and allow you to get to know each other. No ghosting. Okay, this isn't really a hack, more like a strong suggestion. No one likes to be ghosted. It often leaves you feeling sour and rejected. But there can be valid reasons for someone to ghost or get ghosted. Researcher at Jent University, NEMAC M. Schockenbrock, Ph.D. says that except in cases where you fear for your safety, it's generally best to be open and honest with your dating partners about your feelings and intentions to avoid hurting and confusion. For example, if you're feeling anxious about the first date, your anxiety might tell you to cancel it and ghost the person you've been talking to. If you feel a genuine connection to someone, don't let your anxiety win. Then you've been talking to. But give them a chance and then you've been talking to. You can end up having a lot of fun. Does anyone have any stories of a really good date they went on instead of ghosting? Tell us in the comments. Self-check. Don't let the books and movies fool you into thinking everything will be perfect for your first date. Sometimes it can end up like the first date in the rom-com hitch. Will Smith stars as Hitch, a date doctor that can easily set up other people but can't do anything right on any of his own dates. First dates may never go as planned, but that shouldn't necessarily be a deal-breaker. Instead, it's important to check in with your own expectations and ask yourself if they're practical or fair to the other person. Licensed clinical psychologist and author Dr. Seth Meyers suggests that before you start a relationship, it's helpful to know what you expect once you're in one. In fact, many relationships end because one or both individuals and a couple didn't get their expectations met. Maybe your date has marriage in mind, or perhaps they're just looking for something more casual. If you and your match have different expectations, it's essential to bring them to light. Meyers insists that unrealistic expectations are poisonous to relationships, so it's important to practice checking in with yourself concerning your expectations of any relationship. We aren't saying having expectations in a relationship is bad, but having incredibly high expectations based on fictitious relationships is not fair to the person you intend to date. And it isn't fair to you. 100% authentic you. As we mentioned earlier, introverts can often feel pressure to act more extroverted when it comes to dating. They fear that being their introverted selves may make them less attractive to their potential matches. As nerve-wracking as that may be, being yourself is essential to finding the right person for you. In fact, licensed clinical social worker and psychotherapist Leah Aguere insists you absolutely do not need to change who you are for the sake of being as what you may believe to be more attractive to someone else, period.  Think about it. Let's say you start seeing a very social butterfly and you are an introvert. Pretending to be a chatty catty or Kyle can give your potential partner a very skewed idea of who you are. Once you become comfortable and return to your original introverted settings, your partner may feel like you don't have anything in common anymore or even like you lied about who you are. Instead, just be you. The right person will appreciate you for who you are. No changes needed. Being introverted does not make you undatable or unattractive. If you found this video helpful, please like and share it with any friends looking to join in on the dating scene. Until next time, remember to hit that subscribe button to be kept up to date on our latest videos. Take care, thank you for watching, and remember, you matter.


We are so glad you're here, the nonprofit show. This week is dedicated to Ida Bailey for a non-profit Power Week. So grateful to have them back. This has been more or less an annual occasion. So thank you to Beth Farley, CPA and partner at Ida Bailey for joining us day in and day out this week as you take us back to basics. And today you're going to share with us how we can document our way to success. So, you know, I witnessed to you earlier, I am not an accounting nerd, I'm more of a fundraising nerd, but I very much appreciate the accounting nerds because they help my life as well. So again, this entire week, Monday through Friday is dedicated to non-profit Power Week. This is a unique opportunity. We don't have these weeks very often. We reserve them maybe just a handful throughout the entire year. So again, day in and day out, we will have Beth with us for this Power Week. Thank you to Ida Bailey. And hey, if you have not joined us before, we are thrilled that you're here. Julia Patrick joins us, of course. She's the CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. And I'm Jarrett Ransom, your non-profit nerd and CEO of the Raven Group. We are honored to have the ongoing commitment and support from our sponsors that allow us these non-profit Power Weeks in addition to Ida Bailey. So thank you to Fundraising Academy at National University, also to Blumerang, your part-time controller, non-profit thought leader, American Non-profit Academy, Staffing Boutique, non-profit nerd, as well as non-profit Tech Talk. These are the companies that have allowed us to produce so many episodes. And if you missed any of them, that's okay. We have you covered. You can find them on numerous platforms, which include, you can scan the QR code, and you can access all of our episodes on the app. You can still find us on streaming broadcast, as well as podcast platforms.  And feel free to share these because they're free and they are available to your entire team, regardless of your time zone. So Beth Farley, CPA, welcome to you. Thrilled to have you here. Again, for those of you watching, yeah, watching and listening, Beth is a partner at Ida Bailey. So again, just thrilled to have you here this week. Yeah, I'm really excited. I'm excited to talk about this. Accounting is my jam. So I'm excited. I'm always excited to talk about it. I love that we we need that, you know, we need to have our zones of genius, if you will. And so I always love when there is an accounting nerd, because like I said, it really does help, you know, the organization work in such a seamless way. So I'm so glad this is your jam. Yeah, you know, before we get on to this, and we're going to be with you every day. But can you back up a little bit and explain to us what Ida Bailey is and what they do and your piece of it?  You didn't just show up yesterday. So talk to us maybe a little bit about that trajectory and your organization as a whole before we dig in and we start peppering you with all these questions. Okay, great. Yeah, so Ida Bailey is a national CPA firm. We have offices in about 15 different states. We have, you know, close to 400 partners and about 3,300 different employees across the United States. And we service internationally and locally. And we also have an office in India as well. And we work with nonprofits, we work with all types of entities, of course, but my focus is nonprofits. So we work with nonprofits across almost every state within the United States. So even if we're not located there, we are able to. We do a lot of different things. Traditional audit and tax, of course, that's what most CPAs, you know, you think about. But one of my big focuses is working with nonprofits who are looking for outsourced accounting, help with that. And this sort of thing too, let's do some consulting, make sure that you guys are on the right track and following what nonprofits need to do. You know, I love that. And I think that that's what's going to be really interesting about this week, Beth, because, you know, it's not just, okay, here are the files, turn them over and then spit out a document. And, you know, Jared and I are seeing more and more of this just across the board, more of a willingness and a demand, maybe, maybe that's the place to start of consulting and saying, look, we need to educate our, the folks that we work with so we can be better and then get to the heavy lift. And so I think this is going to be a really fun week for us to kind of get into that. So let's go ahead and start right off and have you helping, help us to understand about the whole documentation piece of this. And you always say documenting your nonprofit's key accounting processes, kind of what does that look like in an overview? Yeah, absolutely. So really, when I say key accounting processes, it's, of course, we like to see everything documented. So it's very clear what's happening. But you really want to focus to start with, like, what are the biggest things that have the risk and the concerns and the potential for either reporting something wrong, or having something go missing? We don't like to say the F word, the fraud word, that doesn't occur. So, you know, where are the risks for misstatements for just personal human error too? Because we want to make sure that we're evaluating all of those different things.  And so how do you have people looking at it so that you catch things to correct them internally before they become a bigger issue? How often should we be documenting? And I can't imagine how many processes there actually are that go into this. But is this an annual thing by annual? I mean, what's what's kind of the timeline on that? Minimum annually, you should be reevaluating them. So if you've never done this before, obviously, this is not a one and done kind of project. This is not something that you can start today and end by the end of this week. When you look at all of your processes, because there's going to be a lot of people involved, which I know we're going to talk about. And so making sure that you're looking at all the processes you have, once you have them documented, when you have a change in staff, when you have a change in maybe board members, reevaluating, but minimum, probably taking a good look at it annually. Okay, so I'm going to fess up. When we first met, and, you know, we've done nearly 900 shows, we sit down and we figure out what people are interested in, what we're interested in, you know, all of the stuff. I kind of was like, wait a minute, aren't all these systems already documenting themselves? Like, you know, we're using software, we're using accounting programs and procedures. Isn't that already baked in? And so that's like, for me, kind of a big question so that I can even move move on. Right. So you've got software and, you know, a lot of nonprofits, when I started working with them, they were using Excel when they started. So that's real basic. But then you've got QuickBooks and then you grow up and sometimes you get bigger and you start doing other accounting programs. But what the accounting program is documenting is your general ledger. It's documenting where you posted something. So was this, you know, an office supplies? Was this a salary? But it is not telling you whether or not you posted it correctly, whether or not what the supporting documentation that proves that it was posted correctly. It also doesn't document who reviewed it to make sure that you had two sets of eyes on certain things. It sometimes doesn't document a reconciliation. So QuickBooks, let's take that one because I know that that one's pretty common for nonprofits. You could do your reconciliation within the program. And so then that's documented, you've done your bank reconciliation. But what about you, you're looking at prepays. Have you documented that? What does that look like? Sometimes that's not inside the system. So you've got to understand your program, what it can and can't do and make sure that well, yeah, you've got the end result. But what went into that? Where is that documented? And I'm curious too, if all of this is super important for audit, assuming we're having an audit at the end of the year or perhaps a financial review, do these processes and the documentation of them best show up at that time as well? Yeah, it definitely would. And it's not just I'm going to take even a step further back because I want to make sure that everybody's included. So in certain states, you're required to have an audit if you're over certain levels. In certain states like Nevada, there's no requirement to have an audit. So you may have nonprofits no matter what level they are that never have an audit. You still have the IRS. The IRS can still come in and do an audit. A grantor can look at something. So even if you think you're not having a financial audit, you've got to maybe prove some of these things. And so, yes, that's where it's important is that you're making sure that you can provide this support when somebody requested internally or externally. What if, you know, you guys are evaluating a program or a special event?  So you've got support for that. That makes sense. It makes sense. And it's just, it's such an important aspect of navigating the information and figuring out where you're going to go next. And so that kind of leads us to Sally. Explain what that is because this is interesting. So Sally really comes from my audit background. That's what we use a lot of times. Just do the same thing as you did last year. So same as last year, that's Sally. And we say, okay, we gotta not just always look at Sally. But I think it's twofold. When you come into an organization, you sometimes hear people say, well, we've always done it that way. We've always posted it that way. Okay, great. But maybe there's a reason for it. Maybe there's not. Or you come into an organization and you say, I'm going to scrap everything. And you don't really take the time to understand why maybe at the end of the year, that extra step is needed for end of your reporting or something like that. So understanding, so what I say is, let's look at your year end. Let's look at your external and internal reporting. You've got your 990, your financial statements, you've got your board, you've got your management, your budget. What's the end result you're trying to get to and work backwards versus just saying, well, we've always done it that way. We're going to continue. Or I don't think we need to do it that way. We're just going to scrap it. So really understanding the long term, what you're trying to get to at the end. I was sharing with you, Beth, I had a meeting last week with an all volunteer led organization, although they're over a million dollars. And their processes have been the same for 30 plus years, right? And I cringed a little bit because I think there's so many advancements. There's so much integration, so much with technology has changed. I'm sure that also changes that sally, right? Because even six months ago, processes could be different. Is that right? Well, of course. I mean, and I think we, you know, the standard answer now is like, remember COVID, right? Everything changed. Yeah, nobody's forgotten. But we used to do a lot more things in person. We were writing hand checks, we were going to find signatures. Now a lot of people using online processes to pay bills online. And is that still working for you? Is it not working for you? Is it supporting, you know, your goals at the end of the year? And so you can't, you can't just stay stagnant. Otherwise, you're not being efficient. And you're also maybe not able to do new things. Think about if you can't hire a new staff, but then they find more time. What if they found five or 10 more hours a month? Could they do a new program that you guys are really looking for? So really, really evaluating it so that you can get more, I know, more for what you're already paying for is always the best, right? Well, and you also mentioned that sometimes you walk into organizations and you start to audit their processes. And that's actually not what they do. Tell us about that. Yeah, I had an organization one time before where we started to audit. This was a long time in my career in the beginning, and nothing that they said they were doing, they were actually doing. So they were actually having check signed, blank check signed by board members in advance, right? So that's never a good thing. You always need to have anybody signing the check, see all the supporting documentation. So what had happened is they had written these policies and procedures, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, and nobody's looked at them since then. And so the people as they were trying to, as individual changed, as board members changed, nobody kept continuing to talk about, what am I supposed to actually be doing? What is my role? Yeah, but so then let me ask this question, because who does that? Is it like the treasurer or is it accounting and finance team? Is it is it the auditors coming and saying this? I mean, where does this leadership come from? I guess maybe the better question. Yeah, and it's really going to depend on the organization, Julia. I think that's such a great question. As Jared mentioned, you know, all volunteer organization, you don't have one person who maybe is there all the time who's going to do that. So is that the board of directors? Probably in all volunteer organization, the board of directors going to take that role. Maybe you have an organization with 500 employees, and you've got a CFO and a controller and a CEO, and you've got a lot of different positions. You've maybe got a champion there that's going to take that role. So it's really going to depend, but you've got to have one person who's going to say, I'm going to champion this, but I'm going to dole out the responsibilities to multiple people because if multiple people are doing it, they all have to be a little bit involved to make sure it's documented properly. So as a follow up to that, who would be the best person for oversight to say, yeah, you are looking at the right things? Because when you think of that Sally, she's not just sitting in the third cubicle and they're counting in finance department. Like if you've always been doing what you've been doing, where do you get that guidance to say, yeah, look at this in a different way? I mean, because yeah, you've got to have a champion. I see what you're saying, but where does that champion get that oversight? If you're lucky enough to have somebody who has that experience and has done this before has really, so a CFO. So if you have a CFO, somebody who has that background has gone and has worked with nonprofits too, because I think sometimes what happens is you have somebody who's worked with accounting and other types of organization, but accounting for nonprofits sometimes is slightly different. We're fun, we're unique, nonprofits are amazing, but we're a little different, right? We're quirky sometimes. So do you want to make sure somebody has that experience with the nonprofits as well? And if you don't, then maybe you need to look outside and help you. And every once in a while, maybe you can have somebody actually do it for you by working with you too, because maybe you just don't have the time, but maybe you have some funding that could help with it.  I know we say it all the time, it depends, but it depends. Well, I have a question that's a little bit twofold, but one, in our workforce, right there, it's ever changing. We've seen a lot of resignation. We've seen a lot of turnover. And within that, Beth, we also see new people come in that say, let me prove my talent. This is why you hired me. What you're doing, we need to scrap all of that. And I'm going to bring in a whole new system that's tried and true through my career. Can you maybe talk to us about both of those? And I kind of see them working hand in hand, because we're having turnover in our accounting teams and departments. And then we have new professionals step in. Right. And it's great to have new professional step in that have experience. But hopefully, they can take a moment and really understand your organization. Because even with a nonprofit, if you've worked for a food bank versus a housing organization, they can be slightly different in what they need. That's the unique thing about the nonprofit industry is you've got everything from manufacturing to service based, right? So really taking a step back. And so maybe your champion is the financial person, but the board, the CEO, the other people should be involved so that they're having those conversations of like, well, we really have to make sure we're meeting this documentation or this reporting standard that we only do quarterly. You haven't seen it yet. So we've got to make sure we're doing this too. That's why it just really has to be a team effort. But if you don't have one person who's pushing the needle, everybody will point to somebody else to keep it moving, right? Like, oh, I was waiting on them to do it. Right, right. Now, that makes a lot of sense, which brings us to compliance, because this accounting is not something that we can do just willy-nilly. We really need to understand workflow as well as compliance. Talk to us about that. And like, what are the eyes we need to dot, T's we need to cross? How can we stay, you know, clean and clear? Yeah. So the first thing I want to mention is your 990. You know, it's so crucial that we're having a solid 990 that is telling your story, that is meeting the IRS requirements, because that's public information and you can go out to various websites and pull that off, even if you're not putting it on your own.  So understanding how the information is moving through the system to get to those.  So making sure that you're kind of considering the deadlines and who's involved in those pieces so that you know if something's stopping, why it's causing the stoppage. You know, it's not necessarily just one person in one department that's involved. You might have programmatic information that's coming and going to get a report on the 990. Are they doing their part to make sure they're gathering the data as well, not just the financial data too? So understanding where all the information is coming from within your organization and who's supposed to make sure it's getting done. So compliance calendar can be very important. Compliance calendar, I love that as opposed, because we always say, oh, well, you need to calendarize this. But then the reality is, okay, whose calendar? Where does it go? I mean, compliance calendar, brilliant. Let me ask you a follow up to this whole thing. And that is, is that, you know, we hear, especially when we have somebody on from iBailey, we're like audit, audit, audit. I mean, you started off by saying, you know, you have the audit background and everything. It seems to me that this is a completely different discussion and a completely different time frame that when, while we are in the audit process, if we do it or we don't, yeah, that's a different issue. But if we are engaged in that, is it too late or is this when we start? I mean, it seems to me like this is a heavy lift outside of the audit. Yeah, absolutely. And it involves so many other things. So you've got your IT, right? So you've got security that you need to think about with IT, you've got cybersecurity. Are you going to be attacked? Are you going to lose data? Is data being backed up or using the cloud system? So those, everything that touches and, you know, something that iBailey really considers is we're working with clients and we've got resources for a lot of those. So basically, if it touches your financials, we want to talk to you about it because we want to be able to understand all of those different things. Your auditors are going to ask about IT, your accountants are going to ask about that. So it's not also just the accounting program or they finance people, but really just kind of looking at your whole organization, everything that can potentially touch the documentation of your financial system is going to be affected by this and making sure that you're evaluating it. So no, don't wait till your audit. Don't wait till your 990 is done. You know, that you've got to start thinking about that. You really, today, let's start today. If you haven't done it already, let's start today. Yeah. You know, Beth, I just, I feel it's important. Non-profits were changing constantly. We're ebbing and flowing in our revenue. I just got a call two weeks ago from a client I did strategic planning for. He has been awarded over $2 million for the next three years of government funding. Now, I can only imagine that probably changes their accounting systems and processes and a whole new level. And I appreciated so much, Beth, because he said, I believe this funding is going to outgrow our current accounting system and bookkeeping. What do I do? Right? So I know. So that to me, it just makes me think, you know, it's probably not a one size fits all organizations at all times. We probably need to go back into, you know, our systems to say, do we have what we need for where we are right now? Do you see that constantly? Yeah. And what I see probably more often than not, because when you get a $2 million reward, you're, you're thinking those things and you've probably put in some indirect cost into that budget. What I think becomes almost more of an issue is when you're getting $16,000, $10,000 rewards and you're not considering the effect that has on your accounting system, because that can be a really big deal. You know, every time you get a little project here, and especially if you jump into new funding. So say you've been doing private foundation funding and personal and business contributions with not a lot of detail needed when you're doing reporting. Now you've got a state funding or you've got federal funding. You've got a whole nother realm of information that you've got to be collecting and reporting on and rules and regulations you have to comply with. And so you've got to understand that the, you're not just hiring the program people to do that with that $2 million, but what is that going to do to your accounting team to make sure that they're following those rules and regulations and get them the support for that too? Yeah. I think it's such, I love it when people consider that when they get new funding. Like how is this going to affect all aspects of our organization? Right, right. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, we've heard that Julia over the last four years, organizations, you know, have received a huge influx of cash. And then we've gone down, you know, depending on where we are in our funding cycle, but so glad Beth to have you here. I want to also call out that I Bailey has a beautiful website that has tons of information on this website. Now Beth, you're going to be with us tomorrow in the next day and so on through Friday, but please do check out I Bailey's website. It's E-I-D-E-B-A-I-L-L-Y.com for those of you listening. But so many great resources and Julia, you were sharing that the team is going to put these episodes up or tell us a little bit about that. Right. So, you know, I Bailey being such an enormous organization with a lot of different moving parts, they really have a separate part of their website just dedicated to the nonprofit sector. And as you mentioned, Jared, there are a lot of different resources that are free. You do not have to be a client of this organization and they will help guide you and really make you, I think, better informed and so that you can ask the right questions and figure out what it is you need to do. And part and parcel of that is all of these episodes are going to go up into this section of the I Bailey website. So you'll be able to share them. So for example, some of the things that Beth is going to share with us this week, sometimes they're more actionable by the board. And so this might be something where you, here you go, board member, here's the link to this episode or, you know, to kind of move the information around because whether you join us live or not is not the issue. It's the issue is getting the information. And so that will be up on the I Bailey.com website. Beth, you are really cool. I've learned so much from you. And compliance calendar, my favorite thing.  Have you ever heard of just a compliance calendar? No, but I love learning from the accounting finance team because again, that is not my zone of genius. So really learning what are these resources and tools that can better support the entire team, which supports the entire organization. I just appreciate this. And so for me, really learning more about this, you know, I see this as a wonderful opportunity for all nonprofit leaders because we shouldn't just stay in our lane of genius, you know, like really me learning through you, Beth is so fantastic because of course now I'm like, well, I want to see your compliance calendar. What does that look like? Let's get that set up. I would love to know what it looks like. There's just so many processes that go into finance.  It's a little unique. And we need to be mindful of that. Yeah, I love that you say that, you know, you're personal because you think about that your DMV registrations once a year, you know, you can't just like hope that you don't forget that, right? So there's things that we do in our personal life. And if you can extrapolate that to a business and a nonprofit is a business, you know, we've got to make sure we're doing our Secretary of State and all these different things. But we want to keep our nonprofit status. It's so crucial as a nonprofit to make sure you're meeting those requirements in each state that you're in. Right. And every state is different. Yep, every state is different. And I love what you said, Beth, you know, we're all doing different things in the nonprofit sector. 1.8 million organizations in this country have a 501c3 status and no two are alike. And so yet, we do have things that we need to navigate. And this has been fascinating. Part and parcel of this week are every single day we're going to be talking about, of course, documenting your way to success, which is how we started it. But we're going to also be talking about how you set up these documentation protocols and what does that look like? And how do you manage that? More importantly, we're going to be talking about how you get everybody to row in the same direction and getting your staff and your board on that. And then monitoring, how do we really align this process again, starting with that calendar? I see that as one of the tools, you know, but how do you get an environment situated so that this is a natural function? It's a really interesting, interesting process. And we're just thrilled that you've been here with us today. Again, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of American nonprofit Academy, been joined today by the nonprofit nerd herself, Jared Ransom, CEO of the Raven Group. Again, I Bailey is with us this week for nonprofit Power Week. And this week is really a unique opportunity. As Jared mentioned at the top of the show, we only do a handful of these a year. And we are so grateful to our sponsors who allow us to do this. They include Fundraising Academy at National University, Blumerang, your part time controller, American nonprofit Academy, nonprofit thought leader, but excuse me, staffing critique, nonprofit nerd and nonprofit tech talk. These are the folks that are with us day in and day out.  You've proven once again that CPAs and bean counters can be fun engaging people. Good job, Beth. Yes. We have more personalities, just our love for numbers. I so appreciate it. You know, you mentioned cybersecurity. I believe it was last year the entire week was on cybersecurity. So again, for those of you watching and listening, you can access that certainly through the nonprofit show and probably through I Bailey as well. So if that piqued your interest last week, last year, the week was dedicated to cybersecurity. I learned so very much. And again, it was just fantastic because I also don't play in the IT world very often. And so learning about cybersecurity and the impacts and, you know, how we can safeguard ourselves, just make sure you go back and you listen to that because I Bailey provided so much information on that power week. Absolutely. Hey, we have a last minute question that came in and I want to make sure to our viewer that asks question, we will address it. It goes, it's kind of directed around what is it that we're going to be putting on that compliance calendar and how do we manage that? And so we will specifically address that later on in the week. I don't want you to think that we're not listening or watching what our viewers are asking. And so we're going to dig deeper even into that. Wow, this has been a lot of fun. It's gone by super crazy fast. Yeah, but join us back tomorrow. Beth and Jared and I will continue this conversation and really help our nonprofit organizations understand how they can document themselves on the way to being a successful nonprofit. Hey, everybody, as we end every episode, we like to remind ourselves, our viewers, our listeners, our guests to stay well so you can do well. We'll see you back here tomorrow, everyone. Thank you, ladies.


Umar Akshar with us, he's going to give us a talk on stop selling software and start selling Lengas, a very interesting title. So without much delay, over to you Umar, you can go ahead and share your screen. Okay, it's a bit of a weird conference as an interesting and weird because I have never done a talk where I had to sit in front of the computer screen, not have visibility of my audience and try to connect. So it's going to be a little bit of a trial and error for me because this is first time but I hope I can deliver the message that I'm trying to and we can have questions so at the end of the session. So this whole session is about a little bit of my journey in the entrepreneurship space and how I came about building the brand and a lot of people that I've spoken to have asked me to share a little bit of the context of the story before I go on to what the actual brand was. So I'm going to actually start off with a little bit of a background in terms of what what the story is and how did it start? How did I really stop selling software and started selling Lengas, right? So in 2016, I quit a very successful IT 3 year of 18 years and decided to move on and set up a chain of retail stores that would sell Lengas, right? But as dramatic as it may sound, the journey was not so dramatic for me personally because for me it all started way back in 1991. I was just 17 and I was in my second field that felt great as we call it in India. I was just starting to go to college, been a year there and that's when my whole whole life got shook up. The whole world shook up around me and what happened? What happened was my dad was in a business of doing wholesale. He was in some sort of a wholesale business. I was not too involved in it but one day he came up to me and said, Sam, I need you to help me out. I need you to quit your studying and move to Kolar. I used to live in Bangalore so I was asked to move to Kolar which is a small sleepy town to the north of Bangalore about 70 kilometers and run this store for me and you're going to be running the store for the rest of your life and it completely shook me because I was never prepared. I was just a teenager growing up just starting to go to college and I could never relate to not going to continue my studies, not going to continue a career path that I was hoping to get to. But as we had it, I had to make a choice of going to Kolar because the family really needed me to go and look after the business and it was a new store. My dad had acquired it from somebody and he wanted to start doing retail. We were a very lower middle-class family and the reason we had to move from Bangalore to Kolar was because we did not have the resources to start a business in Bangalore to Kolar with a small town so we somehow managed to get started. That's how the shift happened. So I agreed that I'm going to take this up. I'm going to do what the family needs but I had one condition that I put in front of my dad and that condition was I want to continue to pursue my studies. I do not want to stop studies and I requested for a one-month break every year where I could use that month to go and actually pursue my studies and it was approved.  So that's how it started. My life would be 11 months of running the store six days a week. I would open the store at 9 in the morning and shut the store at 9 in the night. It was not like a software job where you have an 8-hour day. It was a good 12-hour day every day and it was a very traditionally run business so I had to actually sit in the store the whole day. So I was the salesperson, I was a cashier, I was a manager, I was a purchaser, merchandiser, everybody, everybody was me and I had about two or three staff that would work with me to run the store that's how it all started. But at the end of every year I would take the month off that's when my dad come and support me in the store and during that month I had to figure out how do I get through my entire syllabus for the year and you know give my exams in class and the idea was so I would approach it in a way where every year one month I had 30 days I had six subjects so to analyze question papers over the last 10 years that would come for the exam figure out what are the probabilities of the questions that are going to come which are the questions that I need to really target on study those aspects and go and write my exams. So I finished my POC, I did the same thing with my graduation, I did a bachelor's in commerce, I finished my graduation in a similar way and then finally I wanted to do an MBA and MBA was not happening because the town where I stayed there was no college that did MBA and no MBAs were willing to give me an opportunity to not be a regular student and just write the exams. So I had to opt for master's in commerce instead because I figured that in Colorado let me do that. So then I pursued my master's in commerce in the same way and I finished my master's in commerce and after I finished my master's in commerce the second shift happened. So what was the second shift? I finished my master's and at that time in 98 I topped the institute where I was doing my master's in commerce and at this time my dad came up to me and said dude you've never been to college the whole year, you've been just spending this one month doing your study stuff and you've topped the college. I think you should go and figure out your life somewhere else.  That was great for me, I was super excited about hearing what my dad was saying and luckily for me we were six siblings so my dad had planned for it I think. We were six siblings and what he said is I will get one of your younger brothers to come and help me and you can go and figure out your life. So that was the second shift which was great but now I was armed with a master's in commerce degree, zero capital in my pocket and I had no idea what to do so I started talking to people and tried to figure out what really I need to do and then there were people at that time this was you know in the 1998's where everybody was saying software is the way to go, software is the way to go, that's where the world is going to move, that's where everything is going to happen and I had no idea about it because we never could afford a computer at home I had never dealt with a computer so I was trying to figure out how do I do this man I have never done software in my life but then my dad was like dude you have done all of this other stuff without being too much involved so you'll do software to just take it up you'll see what happens and a few other incidents happen and I decided to take on software so somebody who I really trusted advised me to go in that direction and we also suggested that you need to learn Oracle and Java and these were two very alien words for me what is Oracle what is Java no idea but I need to learn software that was the whole thing right go and learn software and you will be good so I joined this institute in my show which had a six month course and they promised me that they will teach me both Java and Oracle in six months and I started my my course over there and the first the first few weeks where everything was going over my head I was not understanding anything in the classroom but then I had access to a computer I spent 16 hours in front of the computer and over a period of the first two or three months I started to get to know a lot about what's happening with Oracle what's happening with Java I started learning bits and pieces I started building small bits of software funnily three months into the course there was a company in my show that came to do campus recruitment at the Institute and for that three months course they hired me as a software developer and that's how in 98 my software career started and that's how the next shift happened where I moved from being a retail guy into software so since then career the career spanned over 18 years I had the opportunity to to work in multiple different countries I worked in the US I worked in the UK I worked in Europe I worked in Singapore worked in India and over a span of 18 years I traveled multiple different countries I consulted with multiple different domains in terms of software big banking insurance e-commerce retail government many many different organizations like this gave me a lot of exposure I enjoyed every bit of it I drew a lot in my career but somewhere deep down inside I was still that that boy who was 17 year old who set up this store and with every consulting assignment that I did I realized that there were new insights that I was getting the new insights about retail new insights about operations new insights about marketing new insights about different things that you could do as possibilities in the business and I always would try to apply that to the business that I did when I was 17 how would I do that differently if I did it today how would I do this differently if I did it today and that kept bothering me for many many years that I would always apply things to the same business and somewhere there was a calling deep inside that that is where your life is that is where you need to be and then came the next leap of faith so around 2009 I took the next leap of faith but I was still working in the software world and I decided to start a business on the side on my own at that time I had a grand saving of 14 lakh rupees or from all the salaries and everything that we had say I had saved over the over the years the general advice at home was go buy an apartment and give a down payment and start your EMI and then be settled in your life but I had different plans I really needed to follow my dream and build my business so there was a time they were at this time in Bangalore there was a very small store about 700 square feet that was that was shutting down I heard that the store had shut down three times because different people had tried to revive that so it never worked and finally the good news was it was going away at the price that I could afford so I decided to take the leap of faith I took all my savings I invested in the store and I went very lean because what I did is when we when we took the store over we did not invest anything in the furniture or the branding or anything else we used the store as it is clean it up we did a bit of branding we could not afford a branding agency at that time so it was me and my brother pulling up Photoshop taking our old brand name which was Nina Bazar initially when my dad started the business doing a bit of Photoshop on it and creating a little bit more classy name and getting started my primary objective at that point was to understand how do we do this business with all the learning that we have applied and test these things and learn from these things and evolve and we started applying all of the different learnings that that we had from the consulting background that we that we worked in and very soon we realized that the business was picking up we understood the business model we recovered our entire investment in one year's time and we figured that there was a product to market fit and we figured that there was a really profitable business line and we started taking that on up so this store became successful I was still working in I T and on the back of this store is over the next four years I set up three more stores small little experiments trying things out learning from what we are doing and it kept building on its own so for four years I had a parallel track of being a full-time software developer working in the software industry while at the same time having a business running parallelly where I hired a full team to run the business everything was technology driven I had access to all the data I had access to all the stores so I would look at them via video camera then I was in the US I would look at all my stores via video cameras when I was in the UK look at all my stores via video cameras and had access to all the data so that's how the business started building but then after four years I figured we had built something beautiful we had a lot of good customer responses people kept coming back to us customers were repeating and they gave really good feedback about what we had built about our products about everything else and I thought this was the time where where we call it quits right and in 2016 I quit IT full-time to pursue my dream of building a retail brand that would span the entire country and that's how the the final shift happened from IT to selling Lengas again full-time right so that's the journey that's a bit of the story and now what I'm going to walk you through is a few of the things that we did I think half an hour is what we have that's too short of time for me to talk about applying the various things that I learned in in IT in the agile context in my consulting life and how did we use all of that to build the brand that we have built but I'm going to touch upon three aspects of it and walk you through some of those those processes that we followed and I'm hoping that that led value to anybody who wants to apply them in their own businesses or in your own life for that matter so I think the first thing I figured is while we did agile and while we had a bunch of different rituals that we did in terms of stand-ups in terms of your walls in terms of your ice cream eaters or whatever else it was not it was not just a software context practice it could be pretty much applied anywhere because I found that a lot of these principles were not about software it was about people it was about how people come together and how people deliver maximum throughput and when you in any business what you really want is people to come together and deliver maximum throughput and a lot of these practices you could apply to any context not just software so now that in 2016 I quit my career and I said I'm going to be back in India back in Bangalore from Singapore where I was working before I actually came back to India I had to now think about this is going to be my life this this brand this little business that I've created is going to be my life so I need to look at how do I scale it and the first thing we started thinking about is we need to create a brand for ourselves because we've been riding on top of this brand which was conceptualized 20 years ago we also figured by that time the name Mina Bazar was something that was very very common we had more than 250 registered Mina Bazar in the country so our vision of scaling the country would have never been possible if you would have used that name because nobody would gotten the IP of that name so we had to start thinking about brand and this time we had enough money because we had been post told we had made some money over the period so we decided to hire a marketing or branding agency so they came in and they did a lot of research about our customers about our products and about various different aspects about you know they went through the ideas of going from different perspectives of how do you come up with the brand name and the brand concept after a lot of research and a lot of exercises they came up with a couple options of names so one of the options was Koski the other option was Haseem and there was a dilemma within us of which of the two options should be used should we go with Koski or should we go with Haseem and the thought process was Haseem is a Urdu word and it means beautiful and it's a it's probably a word that most people would understand in the country people connect to it much easier so it seemed like the direction to go in at the same time Koski was interesting because it sounded very different nobody knew what it was and Koski actually means girl it means girl in a language called Naviti which is the spoken language of a community in in a small village called Mureshwar and that Naviti community and why Koski because we are actually the Naviti community and Navite is my mother town and that's how the word Koski came about so while we were had this you know intellectual discussions about what we needed to do we said the simplest way to make the decision is to let the customer decide what that name should be and we took a very simplistic low-profile approach we did not go for high software we did not go for complex survey mechanisms and all of that we took a simple sheet of paper like you see on the screen we wrote Koski and Haseem on the two sides and every customer that walked into our existing four stores we said we asked them a question between the two what would you choose and the customer always asked us what does Koski mean I don't know but it sounds cool it sounds interesting and some people like Haseem and depend based on every customer's feedback we just tracked okay Koski or Haseem Koski or Haseem Koski or Haseem and over a period of one week across four stores we captured enough data to tell us from a customer perspective what is more well received is it Koski or is it Haseem and the results were pretty clear and starting clear actually we saw that 70 plus percent of the customers voted for Koski and their thought process was I don't know what Koski means but it sounds very different it sounds very enigmatic they they feel like they want they want to get it they want to get a hold of it they want to know what it is they want to discover it so it was very it felt very cool to most of the customers that that were giving a vote for Koski while on the other hand all the votes that we got for Haseem what we figured is the demographics of the two groups we got about 25 38 percent votes for Haseem but the demographics was that most people who chose Haseem were 35 plus in terms of their age groups and most people who chose Koski were below 35 30 25 18 and as a brand our core customer is the bride and the girl who's going to get married the woman is going to get married so the age group that we are targeting is 18 to 25 or 28 or whatever that bracket is that's a core audience right so it gives us total clarity in our heads that the core audience is going with Koski and we should absolutely choose Koski but that's how we we use the voice of the customer to actually decide what should be the name of the brand and we got a lot of great acceptance once we launched the brand because even today we have a lot of people saying it's a brilliant name and there's a big story behind the name which I can share with you anytime you meet or at a different a different forum that is one aspect of how we bought the customer's voice into creation of the brand right now now that we had a brand I have to figure how do I get a team to be engaged in driving this brand to its vision because we are very small and our vision was to take over the nation in terms of a vision was to be a national brand and it is still to be a national brand so we are well in our journey to to be an actual brand so charting the journey meant I needed a really focused team we needed to be very focused on what are step by step progress is going to be and at the same time because we were a startup we were not funded we're very small our strategy had to be very dynamic we had to pivot based on what knowledge we get from the market what information we learned from the market and we had to have a very dynamic strategy to be adopted a very interesting interesting way of managing our strategy which again I learned from being in agile and being in thought works and consulting across the world so we would start off with getting first of all getting the team together and we didn't have a very large team so that way it was easy we had about eight or ten people in our corporate team so we'd get the team together on an outside for a day and we'd bring some about first a first thought process was we need to see what a long-term process and we would say five years five years from now where do you want to be and it would be a bit of a ballpark you don't go into too much of detail five years from now we need to be so many strong we need to be so much of revenue and we need to be whatever right so we had sort of a not star not star vision that way and then you break it down to two years down the line where they're going to be and the focus should always be the next year where do we want to be and then you look at so we want to be here and it was all written in sticky is you know what are the different aspects of where you want to be so we want to be here what is going to stop us from getting there from based on where we are today so as a team you're brainstorm all the different constraints that will stop us from reaching to a goal at the end of the year and the whole team would write each of these constraints on a sticky and you'll stick all of them on the wall so the orange stickies that you see on your left are just a few examples of some of the things that the team would come up with right so once we have a whole bunch of sticky is like that you triangulate those stickies to figure out what is the priority what are the things of these that we think are real problem that will give us the solving which will give us the biggest bang for a path and once we prioritize those for each of those problems you'd come up with what are the concrete actions you need to take to solve the problem and achieve the goal that you want to do and what you see on your on your right-hand side is we have one problem which itself don't have visibility of inventory real time which is a huge thing in retail if you have visibility which we did not have a few years ago so how do we solve that problem well we needed to upgrade a backend software because the software was not equipped to give us a web web interface we need to build a little app that would be distributed to all our all our stuff so they could use it you need to hire a data analyst to build it and there'd be a many more such actions that you need to do to solve the problem so as a team the entire team would brainstorm and come up with solutions of how do you solve a specific constraint to meet our goals and by the end of this whole exercise you'd have a whole bunch of solutions that would be sorted out for each of the problem spaces that we have defined as a team so once we had that the next exercise was to say okay we have these problems we have thought to a solution of the team who wants to own this problem space and what would happen at that time is very naturally people within the team would get up and each of them would walk up to the wall and say look I'm really interested in solving this problem I want my name against it and you'd actually write your name on a stick and stick it up against that problem statement and each of the team members would come and sign up for their own spaces and say okay I want to drive this I want to drive this I want to drive this so what it gave me is it gave me a team that was completely engaged with what we want to do as a strategy owning up each of these functions and promising to drive it so what did we do next what we did next was we broke up for the day and each team member had the responsibility of taking their spaces of the problem statement of all the solution that we have spoken about and review them mall on top mall money in their head and come back after a week and when they came back after a week they were to fill any gaps that might have been there in that whole definition of the solution and they had to lay the each of the actions out on a timeline to let the team know when do they plan to finish each of these activities within the timeline and the timeline was always one year but we would really focus on the first six months of it so by the so this was all driven by the team the team was fully engaged and each of these areas were driven by the team so by the end of this exercise you end up with a wall like this right this wall on your left hand side you see names of the people which is the orange sticky that you see and on the top you see the months which is the lavender sticky November December January if I bring it up so you see these are the names of people who own that area so that entire line that is against umar is what umar is going to be doing for that entire for the next six months and on the top what you see is very loosely laid out December January February that's a timeline so we always lay out a six month's timeline and we lay the stickies in terms of what is going to get done by when and this wall is a wall in our office where we sit every single day of our life right so our strategy is always always completely visible to the entire team we all know what we have agreed on what are the next steps that we need to do and the best part of it we know what the progress is because every time a task gets done we track it by marking it with a green dot which tracks the progress of that particular car a green dot means it is done and we are moving on to the next task so what this gave us is it gave us a strategy that was very low-fi as in it was on the wall it was wound by the whole team it had complete visibility of the team and it was very flexible within a business we realized many a times that you had to move things around you know for example right now we have the pandemic your entire strategy goes haywire when you have something like this happening obviously in the past it was not so dramatic but shifts and changes is the norm it is going to happen and you have to have strategies around how you're going to pivot and how you're going to pivot very easily it shouldn't be complicated and very often we see this cars moving but what you do is every month you'd have a ritual where you'd all go and stand up against the strategy wall and you'd update our own task and you'd give an update to the entire team saying you know this month this is the one task that I had from a strategic perspective that I wanted to achieve and you know what it's done and sometimes we also hear that we couldn't do it we actually constraints and we all understand that and then we support each other to make sure that we had that person in trying to finish the task that's how we attract a strategy so right from 2016 until 2020 just before the pandemic we were on target with all the plans that we have made but obviously the pandemic throughout of God we are coming back now but this has been a fantastic tool for us to manage manager progress so that is the second piece now I'll talk about the third piece that the employed and this is a more on the ground very simplistic piece so what happened when I was in the software world is my team was a very highly intellectual team in the sense I work with engineers I work with you know MIT grads I am grads and you know very very intellectual people and when you're working with a group of people like that it's a whole different dynamic of how you work right but when I moved to running this business here I had a very small corporate team of about 8 or 10 people but my real team which was my my staff on the store front that actually was the bread and butter of the company which gave us revenue were people who had barely educated half of them did not know how to read and write but they were very good at selling on the floor a lot of these people barely knew how to read and write they did not understand a lot of numbers so how do we write them so a lot of retail what they do is they have this weekly target such a gift to your team and then an excel sheet goes out they print the excel sheet out they circulated with the team members and overall what I learned is over a period of time most of these people on the ground don't understand excel sheets they don't understand numbers but they're just driving towards they don't know where and it was becoming hard to see how do we motivate this group to get results to get achievements and what we did is we used something from what I learned from the software world so in the software world when we did when we did iterations most of you who are in the agile context would understand what iterations are when we did iterations you'd have this concept of ice cream meter where every point that you progress you fill the ice cream meter and when ice cream is meter is full the whole team gets to eat ice cream right so he implemented something very similar what we did is we we called it the jar score so every koski store was given an empty jar empty transparent jar and every time an event happened that was going to be recognized as progress the person who was involved in that event would have the opportunity of dropping balls into the jar and every time a jar was full the whole store got ice cream right that was the idea very simple very very basic and there could be different metrics that we could be driving for example sometimes a metric could be look there is a certain category of product that is not moving very fast in the in the company but this month of focus is going to be on that product so every time you sell one of those products you get to drop one ball in the jar every time you sell five you get to drop five balls in the jar but anytime the jar is full the entire store gets ice cream right so this was the idea so we implemented it and very soon what we saw is that there's this interesting you know motivation and energy on the whole in the whole flow people were craving to go and fill the jar people were running around to figure out how do I fill my jar and what became more interesting is the at this time we had eight stores and all of these stores have a shared WhatsApp group but all the managers kind of pitch in so every day a picture of the jar would go into the store group and every store would look like oh my god that store is filling their jar we need to fill ours too so tomorrow I'm going to work harder to figure out how am I going to fill the jar and very soon we saw that this whole thing got gamified there was a lot of visibility every person on the floor could see that the jar was filling or the jar was empty and anytime the jar was empty the team was always striving towards fill it and we saw a lot of progress so we we also captured metric in terms of the impact this is one of the times when we were trying to reduce inventory that is older than six months in the store so we said okay anytime you sell one piece of inventory that is older than six months you drop a ball and we tracked it over a month from October 1st to the 30th of October so the first nine days we saw a bit of a drop that's around the time when we introduced the whole jar score and the second nine days we see a further drop next four days is a big drop and the last nine days is a huge drop so we could see visible progress without having any accelerations without having to share any numbers it was basically creating visibility creating gamification and getting the team to own the whole idea of driving sales and driving metrics through a very simplistic approach and this worked brilliantly well for us so that's the that's the third aspect I think those are the three main things I wanted to touch upon it seems like we may have about five or eight minutes for questions this is basically a slide that shows the transformation of where we were in 1991 that is the store that I started working in that is where nine hours of my life were for about seven years of my life and today on your right is what you see the transformation of the same brand into Koski this is one of the stores that we have on in Bangalore commercial street and we have about eight stores at the moment that's it thank you I think I'm ready for questions all right thank you so much Omar that was a fantastic session you can see the thumbs of coming up and I can count in more than one K now so yeah you can see the flood coming in that's how interesting it was and obviously the transformation journey the story was fantastic it's it's so refreshing I think people are just mesmerized by the way you were explaining your journey so I think one of the things that I really want to say is that for me following my dream was everything and when I a lot of people asked me how do you how do you really quit how do you manage to quit a very successful career and go back to something that is so uncertain and it's a tough decision always it's never easy but I also figured till you don't give it your hundred percent entrepreneurship is not about being into boats entrepreneurship is being about a hundred percent of yourself and a hundred percent of everything else and you end up giving more than a hundred percent sometimes it's a lot of hard work so the quitting thing is interesting because you can never you can always think about you know what am I going to do if this happens what am I going to do if that happens but the strategy that I really followed for my career is I I always thought about what is the worst case scenario worst case what will happen and for me when I was when I was at the peak of my IT career and I had enough resources to sustain myself for a year or two I said worst case if things goes out I find a job and come back again and I had enough and more people waiting to hire me back into the industry so I had not much to lose but if I wouldn't have done that I would have never had the opportunity to build what we have built today and I would have never been able to see that like right so I think taking the leap of faith and making sure you have a bit of a backing in terms of your resources so that you don't struggle with your day-to-day life is is necessary and for me it was not very difficult one of the things that worked beautifully is I started setting up the business while I was still working so I already had a running business when I quit so the decision was not very difficult and it made things easy so yeah there are many more things that we have done I've just shared three I can tell you there are at least 60 to 100 things that we have done that are different that are interesting that nobody else would have done in the in the retail industry per se and I'm happy to share things with people if they want to know more so get in touch I mean I'm happy to share any ideas that I have with anyone in the group um Ruti Ruti says it was a very basic yet important dates umar exhibit in his story Guru Prasad says a very interesting session Madhu don't worry we are recording the session it'll be available in youtube um so you would be able to see it even if you've missed a few portion uh so I think there are no questions as of now but thank you so much umar one last thumbs up for umar guys so that we know he knows that we've loved the session thank you so much everybody thanks for listening in today it was a pleasure