We have a little smaller group of racial and ethnic diversity and production departments. And we're really excited to talk to you about that today. We feel like it's one of the first conversations that is happening at the national level. A lot of us are doing this work in smaller groups and have been starting to work on this or working on it for years and years, depending on their experience. But we're starting to bring this to everyone's, hopefully, everyone's consciousness and get working on it. So today, we're going to be having a conversation somewhat. And then we're going to save a lot of the session for surfacing some of the main reasons why people have a hard time focusing on this at their theater. So we're going to surface some of those reasons and talk about why those aren't really reasons anymore. And we can kind of move past them and get to working. So and then we'll have a good amount of time at the end for questions. We're also going to share some resources at the end. There were also a couple of documents that were shared on the conference 2.0. Feel free to take a look at those. That's some work that is being done among the production managers forum, which is a group of production managers all over the country that are starting to work on this a little bit as well. And again, we are just starting in the production managers group. So that kind of gives you a sense of where we're at in the conversation, whereas, like I said, there's other groups that have been working on this for a long time. So we're starting to try to get on the train and start working on that. So we're going to introduce ourselves. And then we'd love to just hear who's in the room, since this seems like not too many people to try to get introduced. And then we'll start out. So I'm Tiersa Tyler. I'm the director of production at California Shades Theater. And I'm also the co-chair of the Diversity and Inclusion Committee for the production managers forum. Hi. My name is Sharisa Joga. And I work at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. And I manage the FAIR program, which is their professional development program at the organization. I'm David Stewart. I am the academic production manager at the University of Texas at Austin. I'm also here representing the United States Institute for Theater Technology, where I am the chair for the People of Color Network and the commissioner for the Management Commission. I'm Jim Streeter. I'm the production manager at Princeton University. I'm also here as representative of USITT, where I am one of three vice commissioners for diversity. I'm the vice commissioner for diversity for the Lighting Commission. And I'm also part of the Diversity Initiative. And I was one of the original mentors for the Gateway program, which we'll hear about today. Great. And if you just go ahead and introduce yourself, we're just going to go right around. I'm Jim Adams. I'm the general manager at the University of New York. I'm Rosalind Barber, the administrative chief of staff at the Public Theater. Steve Martin, managing director of Child's Play. Hi. I'm Sarah Clair, corporate managing director of the Chocolate Theater community. Jenna Perwitzer, director of Community. Neal McNeil, marketing assistant, technical theater company. Marzano Locke, patient services manager at the Alliance Theater. Vivian Bennett, artistic director, Chautauqua Theater Company. Bobby Turkelwitz, trustee, student manager in DC. Camille Schencken, program manager for Next Generation Initiatives at Center Theater Group. Clea Shapiro, casting director and intern program manager at California Shakespeare Theater. AJ Allegra, artistic director of the PANOLA Project in New Orleans. I'm Michelle Weathers. I'm the managing director for our Playmaker Shrevetory Company in Chapel Hill. I'm Jen Collins-Ritter. I'm the producer at Children's Theater Company. Hi. I'm David Schmitz, the managing director at Steppenwolf Theater Company. I'm Mike Schleifer. I'm the general manager at the Alliance Theater in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm Florie Seere. I'm the general manager of Manhattan Theater Club. Suzy Evans. I'm the managing editor of American Theater. I'm Annie Gorlin. I'm the national new play network producer and residence at Mixed Blood Theater Company. I'm Keely Hada Null, and I'm the arts leadership fellow at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. I'm Ella Zalon, and I'm a team council member at Berkeley Rep. I'm Chloe Smith, and I'm also a team council member at Berkeley Rep. I'm Rachel Eisner. I'm the education fellow at Berkeley Rep, and will be the director of education at the Berkeley Playhouse. I'm Ashay Bakari, the council member at Berkeley Rep. Glad to be in student ambassador for theater theater. I'm Fepriza Mitchell, an executive assistant at the Guthrie Theater and co-chair of the university and culture committee. Tim Jennings, managing director of Children's Theater Company, and the incoming executive director of Shaw Festival. Laurie Baskin, I'm director of research, policy, and collective action at Theater Communication Center. Tyler DeBrosky, I'm the associate artistic director at Trinity Rep. Hi, I'm Ann Carol Pence. I'm the associate producer at Amor Theater in Atlanta, Georgia. Shawman Cooper, director and residence at William & Emma University. Dawn Chang, lighting designer. Nancy Schaefer, education director and associate artistic director at Dallas Children's Theater. Great. I think there was a couple other people in the back over there. Hi, I'm Melissa Cashion on the associate production manager and co-chair of the diversity and inclusion task force at Denver Center for the Foreign Arts Theater Company. It's changed. Hi, I'm Jeff Gifford. I'm the director of production at Denver Center. I'm Mark Borow, the artistic director at Pacific Conservatory of Theater. Great. Thank you, everyone. Actually, why don't you all come? I think we can make some room for you here. OK, right here. Here. Great. So we're going to get started. Why diversity? The bigger question that most of you are asking yourselves is why now? Does someone higher above him told you that we need to be a more diverse organization? What does that mean? Here's the thing it doesn't mean. Diversity is not a number. Let me say that again. It is not a number. The word quota shouldn't ever cross your mind because it's not. Because if that's how you're thinking, you are part of the problem, not part of the solution.  It's about time. We need to be able to have this conversation that we need. I've heard people, I'm going to steal something from somebody. Melanie Hobson is the CEO of, I'm not going to scream this out. She's the CEO of Aerial Investments. She did a TED talk two years ago. And I'm going to borrow something she said. She said, we need to stop being color blind and become color-brained. We all go and I've heard this conversation. Oh, I don't see color blind. Because if you can't see color, you don't see me. We have to stop this conversation about being color blind. We have to be color-brained. We have to be willing to reach out to all of our, you use all of our resources to reach out to everyone who wants to do this, what we do for the living. This is fun. This is, you know, I've been doing this now for 35 years. And this is fun. So we need to be able to generate that out to people, let them know that this is something you can do for a living. The other big thing about why we need to be diverse is the ideas that come from it. If the only thing you're doing is dealing with one common idea, you're shortchanging yourself.  Everyone in this world has a different life experience. We need to bring those to the table. Look at the plays we're producing. Look at the musicals we're producing. Look at anything we're producing. We are getting more diverse on stage. We're reaching out to those people and bringing them in. Why aren't we doing that vaccination? That's the bigger question we need to look at. Why are we not doing the vaccination? There's an old proverb that goes, a lot of different flowers make simple sounds. And it is. We're going to talk about in the next 20 minutes or so, we're going to talk about resources. We're going to talk about how to connect with them. We're going to talk about expanding your networks. The last thing I think I've got to say is I'll let these guys do a lot better job than this. We need to start having this conversation with honesty, understanding, and courage. Not because it's the right thing to do, but because it's the smart thing to do. And I get fooled. Those of you who are on HowlRound, you've probably seen this infographic. This was posted up the other day. Of course, I did this breakdown of who are designers in workbills by gender. Now, she had wanted to do this by chance, but this was as close as she could get. As a designer of color, under white designers, I am probably a member of a group that is less than 2% of the number of women. I know personally about 30 or 40 designers of color guaranteeing a lot of them are not and let you take over. So just as I mentioned earlier, I manage a program called Fair at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. And I can point out that Portia is an alumni of color. And as Jim communicated, she initially wanted to look at, as a person of color, look at the designers of color who happen to be working in the field. And because those records aren't being kept, she was unable to do that. But she was able to look at gender. And those of us who are working in the field, we know. I'm assuming you have similar experiences to mine where we can recognize just my raw, unscientific data that there are more women working in the field than people in color. So if you look at those numbers and see those to be drastic, we can use our imagination of what it would look like if they were looking at people. And those are just the designers. So we're not even talking about us selling production. She just wanted to be able to look at an area that was most relevant to her and something that she can actually track, even though the theaters themselves were not trackable. So through that, we were thinking about what's sort of timely that we can tie this conversation to and really make it put it in a place of time so we can sort of reflect on what's going on, what that's in the field. And looking through the prism of production, I think all of us recognize through our own experiences that that's really challenging. So I work at an organization, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, for those who are not as familiar with the organization. It has, over the past decade, really been successful in its representation and its consistency in presenting people, directors, and designers from a wide range of backgrounds on the stages. But despite all that hard work and real clear articulation and language and rhetoric about the importance of diversity, if we took a magnifying glass and looked at our own production staff, our own staff in general, some of those numbers look drastically different. So we wanted to have an opportunity to sort of look at an institution who is very much in the weeds of the conversation and seeing that we're certainly not talking from a place of authority and high, we're doing it all right, we have significant issues. So with that being said, if you look at sort of our company-wide members, I don't think you can see those numbers showing up. You can look at them. I'll tell them to, so you can look at the colors. I don't get a sense of what the numbers are. So again, the acting company, the directors and the designers are not in this number. So there's about 500 plus people that work at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. So what that number represents is the 376 remaining people that work there. And if you look at the big blue pie, the entire number, that blue number are white and that is coming in at 82%. The smaller pie, which looks like a very sort of burnt orange is 2%, which is Asian. That sort of beige-ish, green-ish olive pie is 4%, and that represents black African-American. That sort of whiter, I don't know, what's that, lighter beige is an 8%, which is Latinos. And what's represented in zeros are native Hawaiian Pacific Islander community came in at zero, and this is a snapshot of 2012. So just recognize, we did some numbers in 2012. So there's been some slight shifts, but we're not too far from these numbers in 2015. So this is what we've got in 2012, April 11th, 2012. And for those who are familiar with the organization, people come and go throughout the season. So that date, at that year, that's a snapshot, all right? The next number, look at it through five departments. And we can see the first step represents administration, the second one is artistic, and the last is production. So we're here to talk about production, right? We're not doing that great in the other areas, but you can see, right? So no one's on a high horse here. This is just recognizing what the challenges are. And this is after doing some very serious work and trying to move the ball down the field. So in production, 92% of our production is back. 139 people are white. What's the average tenure of those employees? So we have people who are in our staff for 20-plus years. We certainly have people who are in our staff for three years. This number represents both our permanent staff and our seasonal staff. So there's a wide range of, you know, longevity and electric. But those numbers are, sorry. And if an organization has made a commitment to diversify its staff, one of the things that we identified in 2012 is we had to look at all of our staff and that we cannot be lulled into a place of complacency because of what's happening on our stages. So fair, very specifically, there was a really quick recognition that fair as a tool had the ability to sort of leverage and open up access points or to OSF through those production fields. So over the course of the fair program in August of 2011, we have hired over 30 people. And many of those people, the overwhelming majority of those people are people of color. So there's a recognition that, okay, if we're gonna change this number and affect this program, how can we actually put together a program that brings in people who are skilled but also allows us to sort of reach our own internal goals? So we're gonna sort of talk about one of the methodologies that we're going to do that. But I just wanted to share with you that despite the hard work, the landscape has really stuck. So if you have not done anything, you still have a tremendous amount of work to do. So part of our charge for you is to get started because that's really the easiest thing. The hardest work is the methodology and the implementation is required to get the work done, which we'll guide you to. Before I do that, I'll turn it over to David. Thank you. How many of you are familiar with US ITT? Excellent. So you're like, well, where are all the technicians? Well, one thing is that I decided to conduct an informal survey on the production manager's forum. We had lost a good friend of ours, Tanisha Jefferson, who's a production manager and stage manager African-American woman, two years ago. And that really kind of kicked some of us in the butt to get moving on her wishes. So I reached out to the PMF, which has 500 plus members. That's all the product of. It's a good representation of the production managers across the United States of America. And I asked, hey, how many of you are people of color? And the results are this. We had 10 that were Hispanic, two of them women. There were six blacks, one of the, or two of them were women. So that means 50% of the black men production managers are sitting at this table. Yeah, to put that in perspective right in front of you. Two Asian women, one Iranian, one Native American, and one Armenian. 21 people, out of 500 plus. And we're gonna talk a little bit about this later. But what I wanted to dive into was more about what US ITT is doing. I'm gonna kind of riff off of what Sharif was saying here about fair. What we're working on now is redefining the pipeline. So many times people look at education and say, hey, they're just not coming up. They're not coming up. It's like, all right, you know what? We're gonna poke holes in that in a little bit, but we're gonna really build a great big hole in it right now. Because what we started doing at USHT is we had the people of Color Network. 60 years ago, there were seven of us, three of us are sitting here at this table, sitting around the table having this conversation. And where were we last time? Cincinnati, I'm sorry, I'm mixing my conferences. We were in Cincinnati and we jumped from seven, six or seven of us, to this. These are production people. These are young production people. There were 85 of us. When we were in Fort Worth, there were 45 of us, so they gave us a room a little bit bigger than this. We came in and people just kept coming and coming and coming and they're like, oh, we have to find a different room. So word is getting out. And part of what is getting the word out is a program that I was co-founder of called the Gateway Program at USHT. The gateway started out in honor of Tanisha Jefferson. Monies were coming in from various sources and her mother wanted to have it go to the best use possible. So she got together with David Grindel, who's the executive director for USHT and said, what can we do? I want the money to go and be used through USHT. David Grindel calls me up and goes, David, make me a program. Thanks, I appreciate that. So I called a good friend of mine, Casey, who's the production manager at OU, and we got together and we started crafting out the Gateway Program. And what that was was a mentorship program where we found three candidates who were of color to come in to USHT because one of the hard things about coming to conferences are their expensive access. So with this, we were able to fully fund three students to come to USHT. With that, they got a mentor to walk them through a conference because we have in excess of 5,000 people that attend our conference each year. So it's a daunting conference to go to. So we paired up and we would walk them through a conference. Well, that was just the beta. Last year in Cincinnati, or this year in Cincinnati, we moved that up to 12 mentees and 12 mentors. So we first select the mentees, we go through a process through the Diversity Committee at USHT, select the mentees, and then we handcraft and handpick mentors for each one of those mentees. So they get a person tailored to them. So one of, an example is that we had a young lady that was biracial, Asian and white. Well, I was like, hey, guess what? I have someone that's Asian and white as well.  And they got together and became fast friends. And the kind of secondary thing that happened out of the gateway program was that all of a sudden, a lot of these young people started glomming on to the group because we weren't exclusive. Just like, come on, join up. So all of a sudden, I'm not just with one mentee. I have five, I have this little pack running with me. And it just came in and we partnered with PMF and again, we'll talk about this in a moment because I think at the center of this is production actors. We do the hiring, all right? And so we have to shift our mindset. But what they did is we had the production managers form come in and do a resume session with these young folks to look at their resume so they can present better. Then we had a coffee session so that any production manager from across the country could come in, have coffee and meet these young people of color and get to know them. Again, poking holes in the excuses that we hear far too often. There's one thing I wanted to add about that photo that I like to point out to people is that that group of individuals represents such a small fraction of practitioners who are out there. So many of us who are in this room who are in sort of the recruitment and outreach game, you may have interacted with many people who aren't familiar with your institution. Well, I certainly have. And many of them have never even heard of you as ITT. So what that number represents is one, the people who are aware that organizations exist. Two, the people who have the ability to get there because they work in their calendar and they have the availability. And then three out of those, that's my group. Who could afford to make that a priority? So when I tell you the small fraction of people that represent, that should not be overlooked. So oftentimes when we talk about the availability of individuals who can be contributors to our organization, it's not mythical for me. It's not sort of theoretical. It's because I've looked into the eyes of people. I've seen their work. I've been to their theaters. I've seen how they implement and create work. And I think at the bottom of all of this, for me, before anything can actually happen, before you can make any movement in them that diverse and qualified pieceings very simple, but you have to actually believe it because it will affect how you do outreach. If you don't believe it, your actions will betray you.  You're clear it's in the living room because you use it to open the door. You haven't got anywhere else. You're gonna move the couch.  You're gonna move everything because the clarity that you have about where those keys are cannot be denied. When you're not clear about where the keys are, you sort of like, you know, surface look.  Because we're not saying that the action is to exclude people. We're not accepting racism. We're not accepting institutional barriers. You have to believe that the keys are in the living room and you have to believe they're qualified and diverse people are out there. When you believe that for real, you will change how you do outreach. You won't be able to help yourself because you'll stop blaming the candidate and you'll recognize there's institutional realities that are not making your institution accessible or attractive. One of the two. It'll become self-examination. What can I do? What can I adjust? Have to be modified. It's not about them. It's about my institution. So anything else that we wanna talk about before we go into these reasons? Because I think that that's a really nice thing. Absolutely, I can continue. I'd like to hit a couple more of those points before we maybe head into this. The first one we're dealing with is gonna take it. So I think after you believe that the keys are in the living room, I think number two is candidates are not the problem institution is. And once you sort of take that on, what you begin to look at is what are your processes? What are your systems? What do your job descriptions look like? Does a stitcher need to have an MFA? Really? Are you looking for the skill of stitching? Where do stitchers exist? How is that reality being mirrored in your application and posting process? If you're looking for a producer, those transferable skills who can produce. Who is steering nonprofit organizations around this country with budgets of millions with staffs of 40 to 50? Those are transferable skills. If you continue to demand that someone have specific theatrical experience, when it's not relevant, there are some positions, carpenters need to be able to use certain tools. I get that. They don't have to work in theater. They have to be carpenters. So there's certain skills that you cannot avoid. But when you have positions that really can benefit from the contribution of transferable skills, really tease that out. Because why are the artificial barriers? Who are you serving? At the end of the day, garments are being stitched. Wood is being connected to carpentry. People are well-off.   We are in a depressed economy. You cannot tell me that people are not looking for work. And when you begin to see your institution as an employer and not an elitist organization like an only function, if someone has a certain level of theater experience and remind yourself I'm employing people for work, you'll start to look at some of your job screenings. I'd love to add one thing to what you're saying too, because I think I would take it even a step further and say not only should you be looking for those transferable skills because this person over here who works in a different industry can also so consider that, but actually by expanding who is in our departments, we're making our department stronger and better and more creative, right? Because the more voices you have from different backgrounds and different companies that might be in different professions, right? That might have skills that we don't even have in theater that could contribute to what is happening in our costume shops and our seam shops. So it's actually, I see it as a narrowing. Right now we're really narrow, right? In terms of what we're using to problem solve and to create art. And the more that we can open that up to different voices and people from other fields but that have the transferable skills, the better, like those will translate around your department and now you have some extra skills inside that department that you didn't have before. They're just the rule. I also think that's- Yeah, let me take you back on something too. As a technician, when my kids were little, they would come see my shows that I was working on. My in-laws would bring their kids. All of those kids now have Walnut Streets in the room. You're welcome. They all have subscriptions to the Walnut Street Theater. They're your audience. You wanna talk about being able to grab an audience, grab a three-year-old kid and let him watch the light come on. He would love you forever. My daughter, to this day, we kid her about the fact that I could never find all of my swatch books whenever I went to the show. Because my daughter would be in her room under her blanket with a flashlight. Looking at the different colors. You're building an audience member.  We're not profit, but boy, we're not making money or we're in trouble. I don't say you go beyond your audience. You're building a community as well. You're servicing a community and having good outreach. So I add to that.  So from an organizational point of view, studies have shown that diversity is not about spinach. Do it because it makes you feel good. It's actually healthy for an organization and fiscally sound because you have employees who take less sickly, who utilize your healthcare services less. They're more efficient because they're working in a safe environment that does not rely on the services of benefits that oftentimes raise the bottom line of organizations. So even if you're not about this, let's go good about it, like, you can be about this, how can I have a healthy organization life? Which is if my employees are feeling safe, like a safety is more about hard shoes and hats. It's about the environment and the culture that we create. Oftentimes with our words and oftentimes with the presence of other people that reflect who we are to validate our own existence in a space. And when you don't have that, the isolation can be profound and oftentimes it's costing your company. So if you think about it that way, in terms of what is gonna, what's the workforce gonna look like in the future? How am I going to be competitive in this workforce? Because believe it or not, there are people of color who I sit down with, speak to you for hours, talk about the organ of it all, the Shakespeare of it all, and they're like, that is cute, but I have some other options in New York and Chicago, et cetera that I wanna pursue. Oftentimes I am extremely successful. Like that's a margin of people that certainly have a tremendous amount of options, but because of the persistence that I have. I'm often, Let me tell you about her persistence. And I may not get them in year one or year two, but the goal is to bring them to the organization. But I also think about it from a very non-selfish point of view. What I try to articulate is that OSF has a significant amount of resources.  We gain from your contribution and I'm good. I don't need a lifetime commitment, but I assure you there are significant amount of benefits and coming through the OSF process. And when you look at it that way, where you're looking really for the contribution that you bring to the organization, and hopefully they're gonna be walking away with something, that engagement really leads to a different level of interest in who you are and commitment from applicants that translates into people leaving really great opportunities to come to a small town in Ashland, freakin' 40. And commit to three to four months sometimes, sometimes to six months, sometimes eight months and oftentimes come back. So that to me, when I meet theaters across the country, I'm really happy that so many people are here, but you guys have so many advantages in the cities that you're in and the populations who have access to demographics. So when you talk to me about the difficulty, I know the difficulty, but I also know the keys are in the living room. Probably. Engagement is just specific. And if your commitment is real and you believe that the keys are in the living room and you actually see the value and getting those keys, then you're gonna actually have those conversations that yield to a different result.   So I'd love to shift us into the next section, which we just wanted to surface some of the main reasons that we hear from people why this is difficult for them, difficult work to do. And talk about kind of a lot of holes in them, hopefully, to show that this is an ideal time to be doing this work and that these reasons aren't valid anymore. So we just wanna kind of talk through those. And hopefully that will lead into a question and answer section because these are hopefully gonna kind of take care of some of the bigger questions. The first one, which Jim touched on a little bit earlier was saying, I don't support a quota system. And obviously, Jim kind of gave the answer. Neither do we. Quota systems are what people quote when they don't wanna do this. That's how I usually can tell an organization has no desire to do this. It's when they tell me, oh, I don't support a quota system. Neither do we. Neither does any person of color. I want you to hire me because I'm qualified. I don't want you to hire me because you need a number. Early in my career, I won't out the union, but I was offered my yellow card for one reason only. I'll let you fill that one in. I have a question for the group because I think the reason why this was articulated as our first sort of thing that we hear often is because we do hear it often. And I wanna remind people that I'm not speaking from a place of, you know, I got it all figured out. You saw those numbers, right? We said a lot. So we're getting this together and I just wanna ask if people have had this discussion about quotas or had this thought about how do I work around this quota? Like who's been engaged in this quota conversation and how does that land with you when we talk about that? We get it from our funders, you know? They wanna know percentages of our board who are people of color and of our staff. And so, you know, they're not engaging in a conversation about quality of workmanship or any of that or engagement in community or anything like that. It is, you know, we see that only 8% of your staff are people of color. That's unacceptable to us as a funding agency. You need to get your numbers. And so we get it from another song as far as quotas go. We resist that conversation because we wanna talk about people who want to be engaged with us and we want to engage with us. But it kind of falls on deaf ears sometimes when we get marked down for slots because we're not diverse enough according to the quotas that they've said. Do they, just a question, do they also say that about production staff specifically or is it mostly? Not production staff specifically, but it's the full, the dollar staff. Yeah, that's there, the way they're saying it. It's the dollar staff. Just curious. I doubt that throws up an interesting question which is just when you're met with. That idea of staffing according to quota, what would you recommend as a way to change the conversation? I think it's really important that people understand that goals that you're shifting culture, the goals that you're creating an environment in which bringing my entire self is welcome. And no matter how hard you try, if I'm isolated, you are not, I am self-editing my entire self because I don't see a reflection of the welcome any face or body around me. So what you're hoping for is that you're adjusting culture and the culture of inclusion allows everyone to bring their entire full self to an organization and they're not dodging conversations, they're not being bruised by words because the awareness of the organization is so low. What I find is the awareness increases when you have diverse voices who contribute to conversations. In their absence, the conversation is sort of loopy. And people are being bruised along the way. I say this very common for this group of young people that's in this room. We asked them to stand up and identify themselves and it didn't take about a third of the session. But it was important because the common thread was the word, the phrase I always heard was and I'm the only, and I'm the only, and I'm the only. And it ended with tears in their eyes when they looked around and saw the reflection of themselves and if they could be themselves and not self edit in the group. So I think that speaks a lot to why it's important to change the culture. Oh yeah, and just to clarify it, my question is not, is it important or why is it important? But actually, because I think oftentimes the conversation that we're seeing is actually initiated from this perspective of the program. It feels like part of what we're saying is we wanna change where the conversation is. So like I'm a director person. So if I come to a theater and what I'm met with is, so in the casting of the show, it's important to us that you include at least this number of actors of color, for example. And part of what it feels like we're saying is that's not a useful place to start the conversation. Absolutely not. So the question I would say, after you throw it back to them, is why? Yeah, exactly. Why? Have them actually articulate the reason why it is that they want that. And that's gonna say a lot about the organization. Because if they, if their whole reasoning as well, because we have to, because some, yeah, as you said before, because of funding or whatever, you just gotta ask why? Why are we approaching it this way? I mean, that's it. I mean, that's the only thing I can tell you to do is just ask why. And keep asking why. Do what you have to do to get the show up. But keep asking why. And this is what I can add.  That's the aim. So looking at a person's racial identity solely, right, is an old paradigm. If I have a person of color, they're the expertise, they're gonna change everything. There's not a recognition and people of color are also on their own arc of racial identity developments. So you can have a person of color who's mirroring the same racist, sexist, ridiculousness in an organization. If it's not actually, if the culture itself is not prioritized. So what has to happen concurrently, which is my, value, like the real value of those transferable skills and the value of the contribution has to be existing in the organization. Because if you do all that work, you get somebody there and it's drama, they have options, they're out of there. So part of what has to happen is the organization has to be, has to commit to a change of the culture, which oftentimes means creating a process that increases awareness. And for at OSF, it became at the very basic level. What does racism mean? Terminology. What does it mean? You say racism, you say diversity, you say inclusion, getting really clear about terminology. Then understanding privilege, where do we have its privilege to manifest itself? What does power look like? Implied power, unimplied power, things that are structured, things that are not structured, conscious and unconscious by, all of those things have to be part of the lexicon of the organization. So when someone comes into the board, they can smell and sniff it. If it's a problem, they're out of there. They have options are out of there. So you certainly have to till the soil. So all of those seeds have a place to run. So, bringing us to the next reason, because I think we're hitting on some of these points a little, I think it'll surface more questions from all of you as well. Another one that's really common is I can't find anyone. If they applied, I would totally hire somebody. And so, speaks to networking, but do any of you wanna take that on? I do. I might. Yes. As I said earlier, I think it's production managers that are at the center of this, in particular in hiring for production. When I came here last year and I spoke to the group about what USHT was doing, Jaws dropped for artistic directors and managing directors. I was like, I never even thought about my production staff being diverse. They're just the little magic theater folks that take care of everything and get everything going. Well, oftentimes the mindset of a production manager is, I just lost a welder. I have to hire a welder. Who do I know? My network. My network. There was a study on, dang it, I forgot to include that. Remember what we were talking about the study about? Out of 100 people, for a white person, for 100 people, they may know a single black person. So if you put that into white, straight, male production manager, which is dominant, that's their network. So they're never thinking about diversifying their pool. They're thinking about getting the welder. I have to get the show. I have to get the show. Eight o'clock on Friday, the curtain goes up. If I don't get this done. So, very often, production managers don't think long-term in terms of their organization and their culture because it'll touch base on one of those. Why? Why is it important for us? Well, oftentimes like Jim was saying earlier, top-down is said, it's important that you diversify. And if you don't have it, you don't wanna find the keys. You're not gonna find the keys. So I think the production managers have to have an idea of where the culture wants to go, what the bottom line is for the organization, and what is out there.  No students are coming up. Nobody applied. I did my due diligence. They aren't coming to me. Well, what are you doing to go out to them? Have you inquired at US ITT? Have you gone to the historically black universities to their theater department to say, hey, who do you have in the pipeline? Have you gone to FAIR and see what they're doing? Have you reached out to TCG and see what they're doing? Have you used everything that is at your disposal? And the answer, more often than not, is no. When I stepped foot in the production managers for, I'm sorry, 13 years ago for the first time, I was one of two groundfaces in the room. When I stepped into the production managers forum in Cincinnati, I saw two groundfaces in the room. I wasn't one. You were not one, because I warned him about the room. Because oftentimes I would bring up an idea and it would just get off to the side, but one of my counterparts would bring up the same idea and it was like the best thing ever is because my experience was not valid because of this. So that conversation is starting to shift from the production managers. But I think it lies there. You have to have that conversation with your production managers about why is it important and what resources are out there. I'd love to add real quick to what you're saying because the other thing that's important as a production manager is that the other conversation that's happening around that table every year with the production managers is that we can't find anybody. Like they're starting to, because their networks are so narrow, they're starting to actually need more places to look at all of it. And all I wanna say is especially in the USHT because PMF meets at USHT, I'm like, you go down the hallway, around the corner, to room two C, there's eight to five of them in the room right there. Can I just ask, who feel like this is a real issue for you? It's like, look, I can't find anybody, which is why I'm in this room. Like who, what is that land? Yes. I don't know that it's an issue that a question I have and if you're charged with the educational outreach arm of my organization and I'm wondering how I can bring this to my production manager in a very... Okay, I play? Yes. That's what I'm saying. No, Frank. Yeah, but it really, so suggestions on this for the folks that are charged with this task, because the production manager of World is a tough one to do it on the hallway. You're coming from a different department, but that is charged with this. No, I actually, I'm gonna disagree. Being a production manager in the room, which there's only a few of us, I don't agree with you. I think it's actually very easy. I think the institution that you're working for has to decide that diversity inclusion is a way of life for that company. And then they set policy when you have a job available, then it goes out to this network of places. That's where it gets advertised, period. Then you take it out of... I mean, I imagine what Dave is expressing about my own circle is probably very true. But when an institution takes on the idea that we are going to try and break down that situation and change the color of our staff, then you don't let the production manager decide, well, I'm only gonna send this announcement to this one place. You set, you know, there becomes policy that any job that's available goes to this array of places. It just, it gets pushed out to all those places. And then we see what happens. I hear that, I wanna disagree though. I manage an internship program. I'm not gonna turn the shift of my giant organization and I've had the same experience. And often it's also worry about the unions and how that's gonna apply with the unions. So I totally understand. Are you bringing in production interns? Yes. The union should care. The union should not care. I worked in Philadelphia, I worked in Philadelphia for two summers as an intern. Local 15 didn't care because I wasn't taking a job away from one of theirs. The unions won't mind. The internships won't say. And for designers as well, because that's, I so admire fair and we have not been able to get design interns because there's, I feel like I always get the, you know. I am like, don't you want to check it on that? I'm a very ex-unit gardener, so there is no walk. Yeah. If you advertise for a design intern. The keys are in the room. You probably will get in on data. But it again, we're gonna talk about this later. Where do you go? Like we were talking about the little network. Go on Facebook. Honestly, go in and type, and I'm a member of it, of USITT, USITT, PEOC, right?   There isn't any, the annual biannual biannual conference in North Carolina, which is coming up soon. There are places to look. If the only thing you're doing is putting it in Playbill, Art Search, The New York Times, or Backstage, you have limited your pool. Don't be reactive, just be proactive. Yeah. I'm gonna pick up on what you said and what he said. And I think that this idea of, you know, how can I affect the hiring manager, essentially what the hiring manager or whoever it is, because I think, when I look at my organization, it's also our decent staff and administration. So I think that one of the things that I just wanna underscore is that it'll be ideal if anyone who is willing, any ally in the conversation takes on the responsibility of reaching out, identifying particular actors. If you become known as the person who's like, you know, meeting people, et cetera, people will start sending stuff to you, okay? I have people now who don't hire anyone, but they know that I will go to the ends of the earth to find people. So I have emails coming to me from stitchers, from carpenters, you name it.  Truth, it comes from everywhere. Once you're identified as a receiver of people who might come to the organization, people will start sending stuff to you. I think you're absolutely right. The institution has to absolutely institutionalize the process. It'll be ideal if there's a baseline of where things are posted, that gives you maximum exposure. But I also think another step is needed. Every position should be curated in terms of what are the transferable skills that we can tease out? Where do those transferable skills exist? Because those places need to receive postings too. So it's both and. And just know that you have a lot of power and influence just by having the information of who's out there. So if a posting is put out there through your company, email it to your network that you've created and just you care about it. And all they have to do is apply. And if they're qualified, Hallelujah, you have affected that hire. There are many people working at OSF right now. The hiring manager has no idea. I emailed that person. I called that person. I begged them to apply. They will have to know that I was involved. What's the goal? I just want them to be hired. That's all that you have to care about. How it happens, who cares? If you're committed, you have power and influence in the process. Because Evangeline Liddler, she called me and said, I'm trying to diversify our state contract. How do I do this? She was proactive in reaching out and trying to figure out how she could do it in her organization. So I don't think it's just enough to lean on your organization and hope that those policies carry it through. But you have to be invested in this conversation in your own heart because if you're not, you're not. I wasn't invested in this conversation 10 years ago. For real. I wasn't invested in it. You didn't believe the keys were there? I did not believe the keys were there. They were keys. But if I had to become invested in it, I had to have that desire and I made it happen with my allies and my friends that I sit around at this table. It was all me, like nobody's business. So this is what's going to happen next. I've already booked you plenty of tickets to OSM and we will be building a pipeline in August. I'll see you then. Goodbye. But there was no buts. It was this is what's going to happen. The other thing that I'd say just to kind of go back to your question is that we're trying to, that is the point of the Diversity Inclusion Committee that's inside the PMF itself is to try to figure out how to make it like give the tools for how to go about doing the change in culture, which is what we're really talking about here. And I think that some of them who are on that committee are actually in organizations that don't support it and they're still trying to do that work. So there's also just a way in which feel free to connect with me or with anybody here about it, but we can also help connect that person to tools and ideas and maybe for me it's those one-on-one conversations that's been really useful where someone comes to me and says either it's come down from on high, my managing director says I have to do X. And they say but I don't have any ways of doing that. And when all it is is a conversation at the end of the conversation they're like, oh wow I actually have opportunities, I have some network ideas. Like it's really, again we're surfacing why these reasons are not reasons anymore. Like there really are ways of doing this. And I think it's just a matter of spreading the word in a way. So I would love to connect with your production manager for nothing else, let's give him my. So I'd love to move us on to the next one, save a little bit of time here. We said I don't have time and why don't I just put it together with why isn't my job changing recently? Because it's a little bit, we've been talking about all that right now. Right. And then just give whatever points were. So one of the questions that we were talking this morning about is why? Why is this important? And why is it my job? Like I said 10 years ago, I was a stage manager in a room and my job was to make sure that the actors were taken care of. I didn't understand what my impact of the person in the room and nationally could be or is now. So going back to why is it important I think a lot about how I interact with my boss at University of Texas. She brings me in oftentimes on things that are not necessarily in my purview but she brings me in because I have a very different lens to look at things through. She's like oh I didn't think of it that way. I didn't think of that approach. I have a diverse opinion on that. So we were able to play devil's advocate with one another and come up with a better solution whereas it doesn't become just a singular lens that we're looking at this one issue. So that's why it's important to me again as a production manager to try to be as diverse as possible. Just recently at UT we hired an African American technical director and that was important for us especially in Texas to be able to show folks that we are here and that there is work that can be had and to see examples of that professional work that can be done. Was that person right out of school or did you steal it from someone else? He was actually a student of mine from the University of Wisconsin when I was there. And I track a lot of through Facebook from the University of Wisconsin sometimes. I would track a lot of my students progress. We have the people of color network. We have the gateway folks and I track a lot of these students in where they're going and much like Sharif I get a lot of these phone calls like, hey, I need, I need and then the first thing I do is I go to the people of color network, we're a nation or wherever and post these jobs and actually heard a fair amount of folks at this last conference saying we are actually able to get candidates from that pool. I just wanna speak to the whole I don't have time issue because I certainly recognize that at OSF it's an institution that can afford a position to run a program and there are other theaters who have smaller staff, we don't have a dedicated person and how the hell can we do all this with the workload that we have. So I think that there's certainly a difference in terms of the speed that the work can get done when we have someone in a position but it doesn't eliminate the ability to actually get it done. So I think what has to happen is what are some of the small steps identified? Really clearly. First, do you believe that the candidates are out there?  So once you get past all of that and you believe and you're invested and everything's ready you can think about the small things like where are we posting work that really don't require another staff person. It just really requires intentionality about what pools of people, what pools of eyes do you want to have the gains over your application. And after you tease out your job descriptions making tweaks between do I need an M&M for this? Do I need a degree at all for this position? I'm looking for the experience. Do I care where that experience comes from? Looking at each individual access point to your organization that will increase someone's ability to one, know that you exist. Sometimes the problem is, I don't know, I'm sure you have great thoughts about your institution. People give you all kinds of accolades and you assume people know about you. Trust me, there's a lot of talented people who don't even know you exist. And if they, one thing know that you exist their contributions can be phenomenal. So first take the time and think about how can I increase the awareness of my existence? It's great that many people in theater know about you. But we've already identified that people solely in this theater category are not generating the applicant pool that you need. But you have to be outside of the theater category particularly when it's an institution in the field that historically has been white. You can't look to a field that's historically been white and then require that historical experience to be part of the application process that you are saying you want to be diverse. Do you see the contradiction in that? You have to be able to go outside of that historical reality and tap into the qualified people who have tremendous amount of skills but have been historically outside of this institution or this institution. Well, I'm one of those people. I've been at Princeton University for 25 years. I've been a master electrician. I've been the technical director of the shop supervisor. I'm now the production manager. I don't live in BFA. I don't. I'm a year short. I'm a lighting designer with 125 credits. I don't have an MFA. Got to look, you got to look. To open it up for these last few minutes to talk about any other kind of questions that have been on your mind during this and of course feel free to talk with us afterwards and we're gonna share some resources right at the very end. So what are some questions that are coming up? So I totally agree that the key is the question that I'm a little more worried about is how do we support people? The reality is we're not good at that and when you're in war three or four people you bring on into your organization of color very commonly look around and go, man, this is not good. So we're having, I mean at my theater I would say we've done some good work on that occasionally and some sort of work on that the reality of trying to find ways like I love when Paul, way back when when we even before the DNI Institute we started that Eliminating Races in the Theater workshop that one of the things that really jumped out at me was the conversation about like there weren't any hairdressers in Ashland, Oregon for black women, right, so like it just wasn't a thing and so why would you move to Ashland, Oregon?  I mean that's a reality, right? How do we support, what are the advice you'd have for supporting people as they lead and not saying and not getting into the situation saying you're the only representative of your race, of your gender, of your in this role. How do, that's not your burden, that's my burden or our burden, how do we help you, you know? I think that's such a great point you bring up and I talked about it's not the can issue as your institution, it's a look at the institution and that hair thing is a really big deal, right? So the more people are part of the comes to the organization the more the institution learns about the needs of the various communities and for African American women, black women hair was like you were on your own, right? So what do you do if you recognize that you're in a community, I explained it, so we were five hours from Portland, five hours from the Bay Area, so you're not going to sprout up a population out of nowhere. So you have to decide is this an equitable issue? What do we do? You hire an African, you create a position so that's what happens. A position was created and a person was hired. So that required a tremendous amount of conversation because we have a hair and wood department, right? So if there's a hair and wood department that exists there there's 10 people every season that wig and style people's hair. They, many of them were required to be cosmetologists because they're literally just running shows, right? So we said, listen we have a department that's doing this. Why can't we out of those 10 decisions think about defining one of them, just one. As a cosmetologist who has the expertise to do black women's hair, that we will teach how to run a show. Now I'm not saying fix somebody off the street, I'm talking about a cosmetologist who has two, three years of training on how to do hair. All we have to do is teach them the necessary steps you can take to run a show. And we learned for us that was a three week process. We had a 75 year institution that eliminated a group of people because of a three week process because they come with hair skills, hair care skills. They just never had to run a show. And to go to your kind of culture question too, I think that that change of culture is, for me it's the next conversation like that needs a whole session, right? That's what I imagined that because it was too hard to cram that in here as well but I think figuring out what you need to do and this does come from us production managers, is how do we create a culture among our staff that is more open and allows for different voices to be heard because who you have there already? The question is are their voices even being heard? So how can you first change that internal culture to create a place that is... And I do think there's an answer that can be taken away out of this room, right? So there are resources that are available to you just as members of TCG, right? So TCG has created a DNI Institute where they have taken theaters who have opted in to go through this very long-term process. For those of you who are not in the Institute, those member theaters have a certain level of learning and understanding that they can share with various people. But ultimately, the goal is to increase the awareness in the organization and tap into people who are actually doing the work with you. It's a phone call, it's a... Hey, what was your first step? Well, we did this terminology thing and we're gonna do this and then you organize that internally? Well, that didn't really work. Just what do we do next? Whatever, you pick up the phone or if you have the privilege of having the resources to have your own consultant, then you bring your own consultant in to have those conversations. But depending on what resources you have, those are the steps that you take. But TCG has those resources available to share with anyone who's willing to get started. You just have to ask. Other questions? Well, let's go ahead. This is kind of going back to the basics, but if you do not have the institutional support and I never had someone say to me, no, I don't believe in diversity or no, I'm not gonna... Everyone verbally agrees to it, but if you in reality don't have the institutional support, do you have suggestions for either working from the bottom up or to other ways of convincing the organization? One thing I can say is that part of what we found really valuable in the diversity inclusion committee that we created for the PMF is that we have monthly conference calls where all we do is share the small things that we're doing in our cultures, right? In our cultures and expanding networks and hey, I tried this one program where I brought in someone who had worked in construction and brought them into the shop and this is how it went. You know, there's like this sort of sharing that I think is really good and we have no resources in the PMF. We are just a network of people. So that is how like, and it's been incredibly valuable. Like people really, of all the things that the committee has been able to do so far. We've only, by the way, we started in March of 2014. So it's a short amount of time that we feel like that's been a really valuable resource is just sharing like what's been happening. So I think reaching out to people so that's one piece of sugar. Anybody else? I would just add that you look for the other ally in your org. I don't care who it is. And you guys begin to meet on a regular basis and you share your observations. You share your concerns. Initially, there might be a lot of tears and a lot of woe. But then what happens is you get through the pain of it all. You guys begin to start strategizing about steps and you continue to add a person to the service. Sometimes it might just be two people. If you're lucky, you might have five, right? And then if you find other people and other organizations who are like-minded, you expand that out. You put together one thing on your top. You get the confidence to take this first step. You might get beat down. Okay, Bob? Don't give up. Racism is not an option. Racism is not an option.  Working in isolation is a death knell. You're alone. You're just fatigued.  You need to find at least one ally and take that information out. Keep bringing it up. So, yeah, go ahead and then we need to- I think one thing too, really important to remember is that at Children's Theater, we started getting a lot more into this work in lots of different areas of our theater. And one really valuable thing that's been said to me recently was you're gonna make a mistake. You're gonna say something wrong. You're gonna have found somebody. You're gonna do something wrong. And what you need to do is learn from it and do better next time. These are hard conversations to have. And you're not gonna hit a home run right away. So that was really liberating for me to just then be able to have the conversation at least and not feel like, oh, I'm gonna say something wrong and I can't have this conversation because what if I say something wrong? And so just that little nugget made it a huge difference in the way that I approach what I do every day and support other areas of organization as well. I think- I see. Yeah, just what I think and I wonder is what's great, one that's been great for me, I have been at Playmakers with Joe Hodge for about eight months. And what has been great is, can you call it a plurality of voices? Right, so we don't talk so much about diversity and inclusion, what we're talking about is a plurality of voices. And that means women, that means of any gender, gender identification or color. So you can have those difficult conversations and make those mistakes and use words that help you feel better about it. And so I have discovered that when you say plurality of voices, that means so many things. It makes it easier to then say, I said this plurality of voices thing, but then I'm probably gonna say something that's good. You may not be right, but I know that that's what we're looking for. Thank you everybody. So we're actually out of time and they're gonna kick us out. If there's other questions or online conversations-


So, when you try and bake from low to high poly, substance keeps crashing, not a problem. Now when this happened to me, a quick look at the official Adobe website helped me find a solution, so I'm gonna share it here with you guys. If things keep crashing, go to edit, settings, and under general, and baking options, uncheck enable live preview. That did it for me. But if you're still having problems, Adobe say you should try and also disable ray tracing. And that should solve most of your problems. Anyway, I hope that helps and as always, I hope you have a fantastic day and I'll see you around.


At Audiology Associates at Prestonsburg, you can live your life the way you want and find the freedom of better hearing. You'll experience patient care that is specific to you with exceptional follow-up care that ensures your hearing and balance needs are being met. Audiology Associates at 1428 Northlake Drive in Prestonsburg. The East Kentucky Dream Center is currently accepting donations for their holiday food drive. The center's pantry has reached critically low levels and donations are greatly needed. People come here daily. We're open Wednesdays and Fridays, but we're open also every single day. Wednesdays and Fridays is when we do our meals, but people come in here daily. Grandparents are coming in here to get food for their kids, their grandkids. But people come in here every single day to get groceries for everybody in their family. But, you know, people get food stamps, and that's not enough for people in this area. So they come here to get food from us. The center is currently accepting unexpired, non-perishable food at 127 Hibbard Street in Pikeville, Kentucky. The items most needed are cans with pop-top lids, pasta, and can openers. Like I said, people get food stamps, but that's really not enough for some people. People are at an all-time low right now, and they come here for us. But we're also at a low. Our food pantry is at the lowest it's really ever been. People come here at their low, and they come here for us. And not only do people come in here for groceries, but they come here and say, hey, I need groceries, but I also need prayers, and we pray for them, we pray with them. We're not only here for groceries, we're here for anything else that they need, for whatever they need. Communications are being accepted Monday through Friday from 11 to 3 p.m. For more information, visit East Kentucky Dream Center on Facebook. For Mountain Top News, I'm Brianna Robinson.


So how do you know if you're doing the right things in your business like you're maybe you're creating content or you're you know reaching out to people for collaborations or whatever you're doing. How do you know if your business is on the path to success. Or if you are working with a coach or a consultant or a virtual assistant or a team. How do you know that they're doing good work for you. What is your measure is your measure just more clients. If your only measure is well I work with this person or I doing some work and I didn't get clients. Then that's, that's going to be a really hard way to measure success because there are so many other things that can point you in the right direction. If you keep doing those things, you will get clients you will have more profit, you will have more, you know, resources to build your building grow your business. Don't just measure that one thing called clients because you need to do a lot of different things before you get to have clients. So how what what what are the what are the 10 measurements. So that's what I'm going to explain to you briefly in this video and there is a blog post that you want that you may want to read to, you know, learn more about about each of these 10 things. So, the first thing to know if you're on the path to success is, are you creating content consistently. No, really. If you are already doing that, then you are already doing something right. And why is it so important I talk, I made a worth 1000 videos, and many of them talk about the importance of creating content but let me just briefly briefly explain it again. You, the consistency of your content is the consistency of the growth of your knowledge. If you're not creating content consistently you are being stagnant in the growth of your knowledge in your field. And if you're being stagnant in your knowledge growth guess what your competitors your niche mates guaranteed some of your competitors are growing in their knowledge consistently and you're not. Well, your, your potential clients are going to going to continually go to other people who are on the leading edge of their field. And you can be on the leading edge of a field as long as you are creating content consistently because then you are sharing what you're learning. You're also exploring your own experiences and your own skills and potential clients see that. Oh, okay, so you're serious about your continued development and not just your serious but they're also getting value from you continuously. And you're the one that they keep remembering that they keep seeing. Okay, are you going to be the one to keep seeing or is it going to be somebody else. It's going to be one or the other. And of course there's room for everybody, but so many reasons why to create content consistently, not just for marketing purposes but really, I always talk about it's really for your own growth. That's why you should be creating consistently for the, for the growth of your own knowledge and the strengthening of your own authentic voice, which makes you even more attractive the client so lots of reasons. Please, please be creating content consistently. How consistent, it's up to you, but you can start at a rate that's consistent for you, and then you can go increase it if you are able to okay so that's that's the first metric. The second metric to know if you're going in the right direction is, is your content reaching more people. I can't, I can't tell you like I meet so many people where some people have been creating content consistently, but they haven't been watching their numbers in terms of okay I'm creating consistently and publish. But am I actually reaching more people because if you're not reaching more people, the content is not making an impact. So you have got to watch those numbers to see if over time, you need to watch for the trend is your content reaching more people. Okay, so the third metric is engagement is your engagement increasing over time. So what trends that you need to notice engagement is are you getting more likes, more comments more shares over time you don't, you don't look at it like well I posted this one thing or I'm brand one ad was a successful that people always ask me that it's like George. Tell me, this was my Facebook ad successful. I can tell you if your Facebook ad was successful, nobody, they have to look at your trends that nobody can tell you one ad is successful that there doesn't make any sense. You can only tell something successful. If your ad is successful by looking at the trends over time, you could say, Okay, this ad got this much engagement. Oh, that's interesting. How do you compare is that successful or not successful you look at the numbers. Well, how did your previous ads do, or how was your previous content. You have to look at the trends know if something is going in the right direction or not. That's what success means is it's going in the right direction whether, rather than, well this one got 100 likes or what does that mean. I guess one get 200 likes well then then you're less successful. You see, so it's about trends not about a snapshot in time. It doesn't tell you anything because are you in business for this one moment. Well, yes, but you're in hopefully you're in business for a long time. So you have to look at the trends to be able to say whether your engagement or your reaches is successful it's really trajectory of success or failure. Okay, so the fourth metric to look at the trends is is your audience research giving you more market insights over time. And I've talked about this in the in my blog post called the seven disciplines of authentic business and one of the disciplines is to is to do audience research and audience research is done in a couple of ways. And one is you look at the people who are engaging with your content, and you look at their profiles and you say, are these the kinds of people that I want to be reaching more and more of. And if you, if you've taken my Facebook ads course you know that it give you a way to track this. Okay, you will give you a way to track the trends of the people who are liking your posts are more and more of them your potential clients. And this is an important thing to track, because if more and more are are then you are going in the right direction, but a few are fewer than are then you're going in the wrong direction and you need to make changes to what audience you are reaching, or the kind of content you are making these tracking these metrics are all insights to help you to figure out whether you should make changes in what you're doing or not if you if you're not going in the right direction you should make changes. I feel that you are going in more of the direction of your dreams and of your vision. Okay, so audience testing audience research, as well as fan interviews will give you insights on their buying patterns, extremely helpful. Are you doing that is it being done in your business if it's being done, and you're getting more insights and better insights than you are going in the right direction, if you're not doing audience research, then you, your, your business is not going to do well over time because you're going to become farther and farther removed from really understanding the buying patterns of your clients, and whether or not you're reaching the right people to know if you are growing your audience correctly. Okay, so the fifth metric to be tracking is the responses to your calls to action or your CTA CTA stands for calls to action. Your calls to action could be like hey do you want to subscribe to my newsletter list. Hey, do you want to get on a call with me. Hey, do you want to buy my course, or do you want to sign up for my services these are all calls to action or CTA. And you need to measure over time, whether there are more and more responses to your calls to action, or whether there are fewer and fewer. You need to change direction. Okay, if there are more and more than some things are working and you need to see to watch what's working and do more of what's working. So again you could be tracking these things or you could be working with a coach or consultant to track these things over time but this is very important for you to be tracking the trends to notice the trends and see if you're going in the right direction or not. Now the sixth metric is, are your collaborations growing. Are you doing collaborations first of all. Okay, if you're not doing collaborations, then you are working on your own and you're going to have a hard time growing your business. Yes, you can spend money on ads, but collaborations will make your money spent on ads so much more efficient and effective collaborations to help you to reach audiences you could not reach just by your ads, and just by your yourself. So are you doing collaborations over time and are your collaborations becoming more quality and becoming more profitable. So that's something for you to notice and track. The seventh metric is, are you growing more sales. Are you getting more sales or you're getting more clients. This is obvious and hopefully you are noticing the trends over time. Look at the trends. That's the main point of this video. Too many of you are not looking at the trends you just so, oh I got a new client great. Oh I didn't get a new client. And you're only looking so myopically at just one thing in time one thing in time, but you're not looking at the trends is like, over time am I getting fewer clients there's a problem here. What am I doing less of that I used to be doing. Okay, or what am I doing more less skillfully than I used to be doing you should be watching these trends. That's what you should be working with a coach on your coach should help you to be tracking these trends or a virtual assistant or a consultant. Are you doing this. Okay, so number eight is is your profit, growing or stabilizing it's a one thing to get more clients or more sales, more revenue is great. But if you're spending even more money over time, and you're not watching that, then you're just, you're just eating more and more into your savings, you have to be watching your profit growth over time. You should be watching more clients but are you is the great of your business expenses. Is that growing or slowing down. Don't just be keeping on hiring more and more people over time. You should learn how to automate more and more over time use things like zappier.com to automate more rather than hiring more, you're hiring more spending more money on trainings and things. Then you're just, you're just losing money more and more money to profit growth or stabilizing is the eighth metric. The ninth metric is, are you getting more and better client case studies, because you can be getting more clients you can getting more profit. But if you're not making a real impact on your clients and you're, and you're not. How do you know you're making an impact on your clients. Oh, I felt good that session felt good. Felt good to you. But are you getting the feedback from your clients testimonials is a very basic way of a case study. Over time, I hope you are, you are using your own efforts or using the efforts of a consultant. Okay, or coach or VA to be contacting your clients to say, What was it like before working with you. And what was it like after working with you. What is the difference, can you track the difference of what you're making your clients lives. So, so be creating more client case studies and better client case studies over time. This is helpful to observe whether your business is actually fulfilling its mission. And also it's helpful for your marketing. And finally, the 10th metric is, is more of a qualitative one.  You should look at your calendar. Over time, you should look at your calendar and say, Yeah, I'm feeling even better about my calendar. This year, then I do about my calendar last year. You should look at how much what you're spending your time on and ask that question. And over time, I'm grateful to say that yes, I feel like I am spending my time more wisely more purposefully in my business over the years and I'm very grateful and proud of that. So these are the 10 metrics to look at your trends. Again, it's not a snapshot it's not how you're doing now, but how you're doing now compared to how were you doing last year, or last quarter, etc. Please, please look at this, read the post, start to track these 10 things. You don't have to start right away with all 10. But that at least now you understand them of hopefully a little bit more and start to track each one maybe maybe this month you'll you'll track one and the next month you'll track another one and next month you'll track a third one. So gradually add these metrics into your tracking of your business over time so that you'll know whether you are being more successful, or not, or you're going at least in the direction of success, even if you don't have any clients that are going in the right direction, if you track the first couple of metrics. I hope this is helpful. And if you have any comments or questions, go ahead and let me know and I'm going to go ahead and go to my Facebook page as I'm doing a Facebook live right now. And I'm going to go see if there are any questions I'm just stalling so that you have a chance right now to post your, your comments or your questions below. So thank you captain for your comment below here in my Facebook live and captain says, each person's experience is going to be different. You give a general idea, how long one might reasonably expect to start seeing some of these improvements three months or six months great. So I purposely put these metrics in order so that the first metric you should be able to see an improvement of in a matter of weeks. The first metric of course is consistent content. And you could basically say, was I more consistent with my content this week versus last week.  Okay, so the consistency, you can start seeing right away. But the reach you can start seeing a month over month so even within two months you can start or even within, you know, a few weeks you can start to see the, the trend going in the right direction or not. And so each of these things. So for example, engagement is more in terms of two or three months you'll start to see the, the, the reach audience research, you know has to depend on your engagement if you're getting engagement then you have people to research. Right. So that takes that takes at least three to, you know, four months probably calls to action responses probably takes four to six months. You know, if you're I'm just assuming you're building from zero like nobody knows nobody in the whole world knows who you are, you're building an audience completely from scratch, the CTA responses are probably more in the realm of three to six months to start seeing that. And collaborations you can actually start doing pretty quickly. And I might have maybe I should put that earlier on because you can actually grow collaborations pretty quickly, right in the beginning, more clients or sales now that is more of a, again, depending on how what audience you already have if you're going from zero completely at zero. And depending on how consistent you've been with content and with research with audience research. It could be within four to six months you start seeing the growth of clients or sales. But some clients some people might take six to 12 months to start seeing their first client if you're again we're growing at zero. It might take six to 12 months if you're working diligently and you're tracking these things. And some clients, I mean, some people who are very part time with their business and just barely doing anything it might take more than a year to start seeing clients roll in but if they give up within the first year. They'll never see the clients and then they'll realize after a year okay and they start to see clients, if they give up all I only have one or two clients and they give up, they won't see anything. They'll realize if they kept going after two or three years they may have a full time business. It really depends on how strategically you're doing your, your, the seven disciplines of authentic business, and whether you're noticing that the metrics grow over time. So thank you for that great question and I hope that this is helpful. And let me see if there's any other. Any other questions here or comments and Okay, and captain says calls to action I know you're not a great fan of freebies but what if you want to use that as a way of testing the audience to know that they are engaged they're interested in our message. You don't need freebies to know whether they're interested in your message. You're they're interested in your message just by the content. Testing audiences captain says finding the right people. I want to put an offer to download a PDF article of not just to build my email list but to test if they're the right audience. And do you encourage this. No, I still do not encourage people to. I see what you're mean I mean see what you're saying so maybe they are, maybe they're liking your posts maybe they're commenting and could a call to action be hey download. You know, I don't see what the difference is between downloading a PDF and reading an article and commenting on it. What is the difference. Well the difference is they are willing to download something to the computer. How is that I don't see that as being more meaningful than making a comment. Now if you were to tell me well I want people subscribe to my email list, then make a call to action to say hey, you've been enjoying my, my posts. If you don't want to miss out if you want if you want to get a once a month collection of the best post that you may have missed. I think that is a good call to action, and that is a good metric to see well, when I say that how many people are actually signing up because the people who are signing up are telling you, for sure. Hey, I value your stuff so much that I don't want to miss out on it. I want an email in my inbox on a regular basis so I think that's a better, better metric than just whether or not they clicked on download to put a file on their computer because you don't know if they read it. That's a problem right you download something you don't know if they read it. But if they comment on your videos or your posts, you know they've read, you know they've read it. So I hope this is helpful. And if anyone else has any questions or comments go and put it up below. And start to watch these things know if you're going in the right direction or not or whether you need to make changes, because it's not going in the right direction you need to make changes. And you need to look at my other posts called the seven disciplines of authentic business to know what changes that you should probably be making. All right, so I wish you well, and I look forward to hearing how this helps you to be smarter about how you how you work your business. All right, take care.