Seven seals, seven rings, seven brides for the Scarlet King. They gather around the natal bed, the foolish and the wise. They fear the child yet to be born, whose voice shall run in the skies. The faithful watch the forest for the coming of the King. Their lanterns bright, they wait at night, for the new world he shall bring. The dragon waits in shadows, his breath will scorch the land. The hero in the castle draws his sword and makes his stand. The princess in the tower is hidden far away, but nothing under heaven can keep the groom at bay.  The potter told his apprentice to prepare him seven jars, six he made with grace and skill, the last his hands did mar. The Cretan moon no more is howling, gone its morning black. In their dreams its face is prowling, come to take them back. The king is in his courting clothes, the brides are in their beds. The unborn princes wait in sleep to raise their eager heads. The hens were in the hen house, and seven eggs did lay, till the fox crept in by dark of night, and stole the eggs away. Six were broken by their bindings, six no more shall sing, comes the seventh full unwinding, and all the bells will ring. When the first had given birth, then all the birds did sing, her screaming cries did shake the skies, as she called out for her king. By doctors blade the second bade, a life into the world, untimely hewn, neither the silent moon, the king's red flag unfurled. His bride the third remained unheard, her cries for help ignored. She stopped her life with the surgeon's knife, and gave it to our lord. The fourth prepares a dagger, and places it at her heart. The perfect cure cannot make pure what the king has set apart. The fifth one's crown was bearing down upon the fox's set. The den was sundered with mighty thunder, an apocalypse beget. On the sixth day, the walls gave way, and oceans turned to ash. Her birth gave work, as the earth shook, underneath the king's fell lash. The seventh bride will break the tides, and the moon no more will shine. There comes a day, not far away, she'll birth the death of time. Let's talk about how you're wrong about the Scarlet King. SCP-231's special personnel requirements is a bit of a mystery to many people, mainly because a lot of what's actually going on behind the scenes is deliberately kept questionable in order to allow, let's say, some less than ideal implications to kind of just float. The truth of the matter is that the original author didn't really have an idea of what was going on in the article, and just kind of left it up to people's imagination deliberately, with a lot of very, let's say, less than subtle hints about what was going on. But in the end, the important part is that SCP-231 is an anomaly that is supposed to be used to keep the Scarlet King from reaching reality and coming through and destroying the world. But what is the Scarlet King exactly? Well, that's actually sort of questionable. In the end, there is a tale on the SCP Wiki written by Dejork called Dust and Blood, which covers a little bit of a sort of alternate reality where the Scarlet King eventually manages to make it through. It kind of explains things like, you know, the broken god being defeated and the serpent. There's a lot of different, let's just say, SCP lore concepts that are covered in here in hell. There's even the king on the gallows and he who was hung, which is the hanged king, which we're going to get into in a little bit because, honestly, a lot of what makes this Scarlet King into what he is, is drawn from many sources, but the king in yellow is definitely one of the sources that he draws from. And of course, if you know anything about the king in yellow, it's about essentially there's a play in the stories that if anyone reads it, they go mad, which is very similar to the ideas behind the tragedy of the hanged king. But in Dust and Blood, the hanged king is kind of a lieutenant of sorts to the Scarlet King. Honestly, when we talk about the Scarlet King, we have to think about the things that inspired it. That would be the Cthulhu mythos. The stuff that predates the Cthulhu mythos. The stuff that came after. And of course, I think it would be dishonest not to mention the Crimson King from Stephen King's work. There's a lot of kings in here, by the way. But the thing about SCP-231 isn't necessarily what's on the surface. It's never been about what's on the surface, really. I mean, sure, in the story, there are seven brides of the Scarlet King that are all pregnant. And there are stories that are told about what these, let's say, brides had as children. There's some theory crafting that SCP-682 is one of the children that was birthed out of the Scarlet King's brides. There's also, funnily enough, that SCP-999 is of, yes, that one, is meant to eventually either destroy 682 or destroy the Scarlet King, which is an interesting idea, I suppose. But the important part about this is that the Scarlet King's brides and their purpose is actually explained to the Foundation by an incredibly unreliable narrator. See, the information they have on how to keep the Scarlet King contained is actually based on notebooks they got from a cult called The Children of the Scarlet King, which, if you think about it, makes absolutely no sense, and there's a very strong chance that they're being misled, but they take it as absolute gospel. But, of course, SCP-231-1-6 are all dead, and as each of them died, either an entity was birthed into the world that caused incredible trouble or the world had some sort of apocalyptic thing happen to it. And you'll see a lot of the words like thing and event in here because there's so many black boxes on the article itself. And, you know, one of the more compelling things about the Scarlet King mythos is that on the Wiki, it's not really explored all that much. There's maybe five good articles about it, and that's about it, and I'm including tales. Like there's the one SCP, SCP-231, maybe four or five extra tales that kind of expand on it or based on it, and that's it. The Scarlet King stays some sort of mystery because I think a lot of people don't want to touch the SCP-231 concepts, especially in the modern age. In 10 years ago, well, 11-ish years ago, it was maybe made more sense, but right now, I mean, it's essentially very much trying to sell you on the idea that a sexual assault on this girl is somehow keeping the world safe, even if it doesn't say it explicitly. And this is a bad thing, from a writing perspective, and in universe perspective, obviously, but from a writing perspective, it's just, it's very clumsy. Of course, there are some tales about 231 by DJ Cactus called Fear Alone, and he wrote it, he wrote Fear Alone, which is probably a lot of people's preferred explanation of what's going on in 231 just because it's a lot less uncomfortable, but the idea is that everyone just needs to think it's some terrible, horrible thing, and in reality, it's nothing like that. The fear alone is what keeps the Scarlet King at bay. Of course, there are plenty of arguments to be made that what the Foundation is doing, or not doing, is actually helping the Scarlet King, because as I said earlier, most of the information on what the purpose of SCP-231's all seven of them were, is kind of comes from the Scarlet King's followers, and that poem that I read at the very beginning of the video here is actually a special little note that you will find if you look at the page source for the article itself. There's a bunch of size zero text in it. I left a few things out. You came here looking for secret messages, didn't you? It grabs on you, doesn't it? The fascination, the intrigue, the mystery. You keep searching for answers. You're looking in the wrong place, and then of course there's the poem that I gave you earlier, but there's also four different Bible verses that are quoted, and it doesn't actually put the verses, I mean it doesn't put the actual text of the verses in. It just says like, for example, revelations 1821 through 24, and that's all it says. There's also one that stands out, and it's sort of important to understanding most of these interpretations, because while everything else is size zero, and therefore completely invisible, this particular bit of text is size one percent, which means it should technically still be visible on the screen, and if you look real close you could find it. But it says, don't believe it when they say they're trying to save her. Why would they bother? They've got exactly what they want, exactly where they want it. And then after this line, the poem shifts considerably. See before that line was the poem I mentioned earlier. After that the poem shifts in style, and it almost seems like it's written by a different person. It just feels as though there's a different writer, maybe a more modern writer. The doctor never tells his god which one he really seeks. Instead he hides himself away, and quietly he weeps. The god's own voice he makes the choice, declaring with their word, in fear and pain let her remain lest she be like the third. The doctor's gun ended his run, as he put it to his ear, as she was defiled the pity child he gave in to his fear. Her memory a fickle thing the strongest shall endure when her weeping starts to waver. Their drugs make her mind pure. So the first half very much feels like it was written a long, long time ago, and the second half that I just quoted feels like it was written very recently, because it mentions things like drugs and gun. And ended his run as a very modern phrase. So it's very possible that the doctor who says don't believe it when they say they're trying to save her. Why would they bother? They've got exactly what they want, where they want it, is actually, you know, the person who wrote the second half of this poem. But that's just kind of a short version of what's going on in this particular SCP. I didn't want to go into too much detail because of the subject matter we're talking about. I'm going to close out by reading the various quoted bible scriptures that are hidden in SCP-231's text. The first one I'm going to read to you, it's not the first one listed, but it's the first one I'm going to read, is from Revelations, Revelations 1821 through 24. And a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone and cast it into the sea, saying, Thus with violence shall the great city Babylon be thrown down and shall be found no more at all. And the voice of harpers and musicians and of pipers and trumpeters shall be heard no more in thee, and no craftsmen of whatsoever craft he be shall be found any more in thee. And the sound of a millstone shall be heard no more at all in thee. And the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee. And the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride, this is important because we're talking about brides and bridegrooms here, and that's very key to this girl at Kings Mythos, shall be heard no more at all in thee. For thy merchants were the great men of the earth, for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived, and in her was found the blood of prophets and of saints and of all that were slain upon the earth. And there's that one, there's also Ezekiel 614, so I will stretch out my hand against them and make the land desolate. Yes, more desolate than the wilderness towards Dibblah in all their dwelling places, and then they shall know that I am the Lord. And that's followed by Proverbs 132, for the turning away of the simple shall slay them, and the prosperity of fools shall destroy them. Now all of this leads to the idea that if the Scarlet King gets out he is going to destroy absolutely everything, and that there will be nothing left of the world. But the last quote, which really drives home the point, is Luke 2334. Then said Jesus, Father forgive them, for they know not what they do. Anyway, that's it. If you liked it scroll down and hit the subscribe button, because if you don't I'm going to activate the failsafe nuke. And if you really like this kind of content head on over to patreon.com and pledge at any level, like everybody here on the screen already has. It's nice to know that I'm not alone out here. I'll see you all again on Thursday.  I'm not joking, John. Do it right now.


Hi everyone and welcome back to another art journal video. In the coming weeks I am planning to share many Christmas themed art journals and I have a bunch of new products here, most of them are by teamholes and I will be using lots and lots of those in my art journals that are coming up. So today I am going to start with some of them and I just want to let you know that there is a great sale on the teamholes brand, everything is 20% off and you will find the link to that down below in the description area. So I got some collage paper, I got a washi tape, lots and lots of scissor ties by teamholes which I absolutely adore the designs, I also got some ephemera and many chipboard sentiments and a bunch of other products from the new Christmas collection. Now for today I am going to mainly play with this scissor tie which is absolutely adorable. The moment I saw the design I knew I had to turn it into an art journal page, it gives you a die to cut out that little elf as well as lots of dies to cut out gifts and bits and pieces. Now here is a standard card size that's 4.25x5.5 so you can see that it makes a great focal point for a card. However I am going to use it on my art journal and I am going to play on a 6x6 art journal, this is the disc bound one that I have. So I have already cut out a 6x6 watercolour paper, this is nice and thick and I am going to place that on top so you can see the size and compare, you can see that it makes a great focal point for a 6x6 journal. And if you are working on an art journal book then that size is perfect as well. I am going to put the dies aside for now and I will work on my background so again this is watercolour paper and I am going to cover it up with this collage paper, this is by Tim Hose and it has a lovely design. Now I want to have some of that colourful design on my page but I don't want it to be centred and definitely not covering up the whole part, I need to have some white space as well so I am trying to figure out which part I am going to use and once I am happy with the placement I am going to use my scissors, cut out a part of it and then it's time to stick it down. To stick it down my collage paper I am going to use distress collage medium, I am going to open it up for you so you can see the colour, this works exactly like mat medium but it has a tint on it and since I am going for an art journal with a vintage look and feel I prefer to use this as my glue. So you can see here how it adds some colour at the background, I am going to cover it up completely with my brush and then place on top the paper. Now if you get some wrinkles it doesn't really matter, these are all going to flatten up once I use my brush on top and also remember that wrinkles add texture and more interest on your background so it's not something that you want to avoid. I get a lot of questions about the brushes, I just dip them in water and I leave them there until I finish the project where I go to the sink and wash them nicely. So now I am going to make sure that the mat medium is completely dry, I am using my new embossing tool, this has two settings, the first one is for drying out things so it's not as hot and the second one is super hot for embossing. I am going to use my scissors to cut off the excess collage paper, for that you can also tear it off if you want to have rough edges and I am going to create a border with white gesso, I am using a flat brush and I am working from the outside towards the center, I am not going to cover it up completely obviously, I just want to have a nice white border that fades out towards the center. The gesso I am using is by Faber-Caster and it doesn't completely cover up the design since it is quite thin but of course if you want to completely cover up the design at the edge then you can use a thicker gesso or just add more layers of the thin gesso that you have at home. Now this is where I decided to add some splashes with the gesso that I have on my table, I am going to dilute it with water. At the finished project I will not have any of those white splashes that I am going to add now, however I decided to leave that part of the video on so you can see the different stages and how we can change our mind as we go. And in any case if I decided to add more splashes I could have done that when the project was finished. Now I am going to do some inking, I have my Distress Oxide ink here and that's Vintage Photo and this is where I decided that I wanted the main part of the paper to be quite darker and that's where I completely covered up the splashes but again you can always add them at the end. Now I am trying to decide where this elf is going to go and you can see here the bug is very busy so I am going to turn it one more time and try to decide where this is going to look better. I don't want to have a busy background otherwise it's not going to help the elf to stand out. Now I think this is the best placement, however if you look at it like that the word Christmas is upside down. I don't care about this detail at all, I will find a way to cover it up so that it's not readable later on. Now these are design tapes, they come in a pack all together and they have lovely designs, very Christmasy ones, I'm going to pick a few of them, a couple of them to work with on my page and the idea here is to create kind of a ground where I'm going to place the elf standing on top so that it doesn't look as if it is floating. I'm also going to bring in one lovely sticker from this sticker pack so I'm going to tear a few pieces and place them one on top of the other to create a cluster of washi tape and I always make sure that the edge on the inside of the paper is not completely straight, I always like to have a rough edge as it adds more to the project. Now just because I have mat medium underneath it is very forgiving so if I don't like the placement of those washi tapes I can always peel them off and place them in another area and you will see that I'm going to do that later on. If you want to make sure that this is not removable then just use some glue underneath.  This is where I change my mind and you can see how easily I can peel it off and place the whole cluster of washi tapes just a bit lower on my project and of course you can add some glue at the back to make sure that they are nicely secured there. Now I'm applying some collage medium at the back of the elf and then I'm going to stick him on top of my project and I absolutely love the silhouette if I had to choose just one of the new C6 and teamhold dies then I would definitely go with this one. Now I'm going to embellish my art journal a little bit more and I'm going to use some of the phrases from this sticker pack.  This one says be good for goodness sake and just because one is never enough I'm going to use one more which is the deck the holes one and I'm slightly inking them up to help them blend with the rest of the background.  I'm going to assemble three boxes, three gifts. For that I'm using my Nuvo Deluxe glue. I like that because it has a very fine tip and at the same time it is great because when it dries it is completely transparent so any white glue that you see at the moment it's going to completely disappear. The color combo that I went with is green and red and I throw in a little bit of yellow as well.  These are little details that really make a huge difference and helps everything come together so I inked up the background to help all those elements to stand even more and I'm also inking up the edges. These are going to make again a huge difference and help them stand out against the background especially this yellow gift which is pretty much the same color as the background. Now I'm going to make this a tiny smaller so that it allows some space for the bow at the top and I'm sticking everything down by using glue of course you can use your collage medium if you like and as I'm looking at this at the moment I think that you can turn this self into a bow for a birthday card holding all those gifts if you cut out the tail on his hat as well as the tips on his shoes so it is really versatile and you can use it all year round Now this is how I'm going to cover up the upside down Christmas word and I just stuck down a sticker that says all is calm all is bright I'm also going to use a few more stickers on the other side just to balance it a little bit and create a triangle a visual triangle of stickers and this time I used Merry Christmas and Filling our stockings. Now one of the things that I absolutely love doing on my art journals is adding some highlighting for that I'm using my gel pen and I'm adding here and there's some white lines and I'm doing that on some parts of Santa's helper and I'm also going to do that on the gifts these highlights are so tiny but at the same time they bring a lot of difference on the page and helps all those elements to stand out. The pen that I'm using here is the Jelly Roll by Sakura. The color is bright white and it writes beautifully as you can see just make sure that everything is completely dry underneath. Now I'm going to do a finishing touch which I think really brings everything together. This is one of the new stencils by Tim Holtz. I'm going to place a stencil on one side of my page and apply some paste with my spatula.  I'm not going to completely cover up the whole space I just want to have those stars around the perimeter. I'm going to clean my stencil before I go to the other side and repeat the same process one more time. Now I have white stars over the white border which gives a great texture and at the same time I do allow some of the stars to come towards the center. Just because the stencil is semi transparent I can easily see where my elf is and I'm making sure that I don't cover him up with stars and I am also careful as I add the stars at the bottom making sure that they don't cover up the washi tape. Now another thing that you can do is to use a gold embossing paste instead of white or while the embossing paste is still wet you can sprinkle some glitter which is going to stick on the stars and add some sparkle. And here is the finished project for today. You can punch some holes and put it back on your disc bump journal or leave it as it is and frame it as it is going to make a beautiful Christmas decor. And here are some close-up photos on the project for today and don't forget that everything that I used by team holds is 20% off for just a few days. You will find the links on everything I used down below in the description area. I hope that you had fun that you got inspired. Don't forget to like and subscribe and share this video with your friends if you had fun watching. Thank you all so much and I'll see you all next time.


We recently published an article in World Development and it's part of a special section that's focused on land tenure and forest carbon issues. And we really looked at four sites in the Brazilian Amazon, including Acre, but also the Trans-Amazon Highway, São Felix do Xingu and Northwestern Mato Grosso. They're basically red type initiatives, initiatives that are looking to bolster rural development through a low emissions approach. And we looked at the early intervention strategies of the project and program proponents and basically wanted to know if land tenure regularization was an issue and how proponents were going about dealing with those issues. And I guess there were a few key findings from that paper. One is that while many people are concerned that areas with poor rights recognition and not clear land tenure, those kinds of people would be excluded from forest carbon projects. We actually found that project proponents were really prioritizing clarifying land tenure and land rights in the areas where they were planning their interventions and linking that to environmental compliance. Incentives like helping producers do more sustainable agriculture, helping implement agroforestry systems, all kinds of different incentives that help small producers have a reason to actually reduce some of their deforestation and forest degradation. So they're a key target group for the intervention strategies by the government of Acre here in the state to reduce deforestation. The proponents of red initiatives are partnering, when they're NGO proponents, they're actually really partnering with government agencies in Brazil who actually have the mandate to make a lot of change on the ground policy change. And that's a really important finding because you need civil society and government cooperation to make a lot of these things happen and Brazil, the Brazil situation holds a lot of promise that these early red initiatives show just that. These very serious and successful partnerships between government and NGOs to get these things off the ground.


Good morning, everybody. How are we doing? Can I get a better response than that word cam? How are we doing everybody? Good morning. Yes, we are in the Winter Garden room and we're about to hear a wonderful talk by the illustrious Jesse Gerr. Some intro facts about Jesse, her love for website development started back in 1993 when at the age of 12 she learned HTML and secured her first .com. Does everyone remember GeoCities? With the black backgrounds, the lime green text and the running dog, GIF or GIF depending on your preference. Oh, those were the days. So Jesse actually started Iceberg Web Design in 2005. She grew the business from two employees in her basement to a full staff of seven in less than two years. Jesse lives in Anoka, Minnesota with her husband and two young boys. She enjoys organic gardening, making candles every fall and vegan cooking. Thank you so much for coming out and sharing your knowledge with us today. And everyone, please welcome to the stage Jesse Gerr, freelance agency taking the leap. Do you want to step the door back there? I need to sound a little bit. Good morning. So I'm Jesse. Like she said, I own an agency, a small agency. We are seven in Minnesota. And I'm going to start this out with a little bit of a story. Day way back in the year 2015. I was about 10 years in my career as freelance web designer and things were going pretty well. I was making a respectable living so much so that my husband was able to quit his job and become a full-time stay-at-home dad. At that time, our kids were one in three, and we were kind of living the dream. We paid off all of our debt.  We even bought a new car. You know, thinking to myself, this freelance gig is not so bad. Except that I was very, I was completely stuck running my business. We went on a vacation to Disney World. Our song was two, and my husband took him on the pool ride. And I had to sit on the sidelines with my laptop, fixing a form into one of my customers. They went on Small World twice without me. It was the high of our life financially, and it was below of my life personally. And I couldn't stop thinking how much of a strain this was. And quite frankly, I was reaching a point of burnout. I mean, if I had to answer another customer's phone call while I was sitting at Disney World, if I had to add more to my website, if I had to explain to Joe over at half this in the 50th time of using the global website and his desktop website, we're the same website. So if we may change this to the content on one, it was automatically going to change on the other. I was completely at a breaking point. So at this point, I realized that I was not on one. So I want to kind of get a feel before we dive in for who we have here. I'm curious how many of you are freelancers? How many people? How many of you are the main points of contact for your customer? How many of you could take a cell phone, take your laptop, set them aside, walk up the door tomorrow and take a week-long vacation without giving customers any... a couple of days. So this is why I'm giving this talk. This is kind of my driving force behind this. In 2015, kind of when I started to make a shift, I went to a B&I networking group. A lot of you are in networking organizations familiar with this. A business strategist stood up and he said, you guys, a good business makes money, but a great business makes money without you. And I went home that day from the networking meeting and I sat there in my home office in my basement and I saw a lot harder of all this. Good business makes money. A great business makes money. And I decided then that something had to change. I sat down. A really close look at all of our operations, everything that I was doing, and I decided that I had to shift. I had to get myself out of that house.  Fast forward, this is January of 2015. I took the entire second half of January 2015 off, or 2018, January 2018. My son, he is now five. We went to Disney World again and this time I went on every single two rides, 32 times. I went on the small world until I could sing the song forward and backwards. I did not answer a single phone call for the second half of January this year. I did not talk to a single customer. And you know what was even cooler? I didn't have to do any management with my team. The only conversation I had with my staff was through our Facebook and Messenger app where they would send me a picture of the cars buried in snow. And then I'd send them back a picture of the house. And then they'd send me a picture of the computer that was open. That was a little scary, but I figured they had it under control. And so I'd send them back a giraffe from the animal thinker. And what happened was I had two weeks of uninterrupted time with my family. I went back to the office with sales had been closed, money had been deposited, websites had gone live, and all of the team members went around their face. A good business, makes money, a great business. I should throw a little disclaimer in here that this is not a how to get rich quick talk. And we're going to talk a little bit about that as we go through here. I mean, if I was rolling in maybe millions of dollars a year, I probably wouldn't be talking at work camps. But what this did for me was it gave me the freedom. Financial freedom is great. Everybody likes to think about that. For me, this is a personal freedom journey that I've been going on. And so I've been doing a lot of traveling, talking about this. I've been building websites, like I said, since, you know, the early 1990s. I'm self-taught, as are the majority of my team members. I'm self-taught. And I can stand up here and I can talk all day long about building websites, about coding and HTML. But this is really my passion now. I get a really great side every day when I walk into the office. I see six people sitting there who are collecting a paycheck, who are thriving in their personal lives through this business endeavor and I get an even greater sense of joy when I'm able to move into you to take my family on vacations. So the big thing, kind of where I want to start out with all of this, is anyone here thinking about growing an agency or thinking about a handful of us?  Starting. All right. This is great.  But I really want this kind of to be the main point of this talk. You think along and hard, why do you want to grow? What is no reason behind getting yourself out of the house? Why do you want, there are plenty of good reasons to grow. Maybe you are overwhelmed. You're working 40 hours a week and 20 hours every night. Maybe you're focusing on your customer by providing super fast customer service and things are falling and you're getting good bills and it's really going well, like it was for me. Maybe you are seeing such a fast increase in growth but you just can't manage it yourself. Maybe you want to take it to the next level. Maybe you've dabbled around with outsourcing or you're already hiring other freelancers to work for your freelance business. Part of my motivation was do you want to create jobs? Maybe you want to see what it's like to help someone else in their career. Maybe you need more personal money. You want to travel. You want to go on a vacation. You want to start talking at word camps. You need to get out of the office and start doing that.  Or, quite frankly, it's the real reason that I did all of this. So keep that in your mind. Why? Why do you want your business to grow beyond just you? And we'll come back to that throughout this talk. But first, I'm going to touch a little bit, sort of, so this is going to be kind of a practical approach to starting a business. Not, you know, there will definitely be some information about starting a team, growing your team. But we're going to talk about the logistics because quite honestly, starting a business is not a cakewalk. There are a lot of different things that you need to come to terms with. A lot of different things that you need to learn. And things that, and a lot of people, people that you need to rely on as your business grows. So the first thing you need to do is figure out what your business structure is going to look like. There's a lot of different types of businesses that people form. Most people who are, most of you who are freelancers right now, you're probably in a sole proprietorship. A sole proprietorship basically is a type of business where you, the business owner, is not distinguished from the actual business. You may have incorporated a DBA so you can operate your business under a different name, but financially and from a tax standpoint, from a legal standpoint, you are the business. So this is how most people start out when they start freelancing. And it's also super easy to set up a sole proprietorship. You just file a form with the Secretary of State. And I'm not 100% Sharon Luz here in New York so it's like a $35 filing fee. You just mail it in and then you got to run a couple of weeks in your local newspaper so that people know that you're offering the business. A partnership is when two people come together and they form a business. This is really common in our industry because you see graphic designers and developers coming together to share their talent and share their resources. Maybe you've been designing logos for 20 years and your friend has been developing websites for 20 years.  Let's start this agency. We both have a wide customer base. Why don't we pool our resources? We pool our finances. Similar to a sole proprietorship, oftentimes a partnership also is looked at almost as a pastor business where both of you have a stake in the company. The things to be careful about with a partnership is making sure that you have to find who has the final say in tuition making, what percent owners are you. We had an agency in our town where that exact same scenario happened. We had a logo designer. We had a developer. They came together. They formed an agency. Things went great for about a year until they had a single business. So with the partnership, make sure that you're a little bit careful going into business. Make sure that you have documentation. You know, if you want to do a 51, 49 percent ownership so someone always has the strings, you know, maybe make this a financial decision. Have something in writing and definitely talk it over with your attorney. A corporation is what you will see, you know, what's the larger businesses. The biggest distinction between a corporation and a sole proprietorship is that there's a legal distinction between the two entities, between the business and yourself. So the business is taxed as a business entity and you typically would then be an employee of your corporation. Corporations can be public or private. A public corporation allows for shareholders to move at the end of the day in the state. The people that you see on the stock market. Private corporations can also have employee sharing. Limited liability company, this is how my company is set up and this is also how a lot of newer agencies are set up. This kind of is a combination of the corporate and the sole proprietorship where there is a legal protection for your business. So for example, if my business necessarily is my car in my house and it also allows for some accounting tax benefits where part of the other parts of it can be set up as a business employee. It's mostly, this is kind of what you will see a lot of agencies set up until they reach kind of that threshold of 15 or more employees where they can see financially in their business. The incentive is a business that's owned by its members. You can see this with the co-ops. A lot of non-profit organizations will be set up as cooperatives where members will buy a share in the business kind of like stock except for it's more of a collaborative individual private sharing and then members either get a cash incentive at the end of the year or perhaps they get a discount on other incentives for supporting the business. The non-profit organization is an organization where all of the money is gone towards some sort of a charitable organization or to a cause. Non-profit organizations absolutely can make money, they do make money, they can have employees on payroll as long as they can justify their operating expenses. Lots of great tax benefits for running a non-profit. I don't think people in the marketing agency are going to set up as non-profits unless you're specifically marketing to other non-profits that might be happening in your target market in charity or churches you may be able to find a way to. So, back to the actual practical implications of starting a business. The very first person that you should talk to when you've decided that you're going to start your business is your accountant. You're going to need to find a really good accountant. Your accountant is going to help you make that determination in which type of business should you set up. Did you do that as a sole proprietorship? Did you do an LLC? Did you jump right in inside a corporation? Are there two of you? Who's finances are being distributed to what? Your accountant is going to help you get your employees or your contractors set up. There are a lot of forms that need to be filled out when you engage a contractor or when you engage an employee. Employees need to fill out W-4 forms. Contractors need to fill out W-9. At the end of the year, somebody needs to wrap those all up. They need to report them to the IRF. They need to distribute them to your employees. If they're passive, your accountant is the person who is most likely going to be doing this for you. Other things that you have to consider is unemployment insurance, top insurance. It's possible your insurance agent will handle those. My accountant handles both working with top and unemployment insurance for our business. And then it's really nice if you can find an accountant to work with you both on a business and a personal level because as a business owner, your finances are a lot trickier than someone else's. There are a lot of tax write-offs for a business. You travel to work camps. You eat at McDonald's. That's tax write-off. So you need to make sure that your accountant is keeping track of these things with a bookkeeper or, you know, you can have accountant and bookkeepers oftentimes work hand-in-hand. You may do the bookkeeping yourself. You may bring in a third party for a bookkeeper. But at the end of the year, your accountant oftentimes will sit down and say, okay, look, this is how this business did. And here's the tax rate for your business. And then here's what you collected. And as an LLC, the way that our business structure is set up is that the owner collects a paycheck on a regular basis. But at the end of the year, there is either a dividend or a draw from the business to kind of balance out the finances. And I don't know anything about accounting, so I'm very glad that I have an accountant in my back pocket. We touch base at least once a month to build a payroll and then we meet about every quarter to really kind of dive into how are things going. How is your business going? What do your income projections look like for this income? Your accountant is going to help you prepare for growth the next step. So after you have your account and your employees, what life is going to look like? If you are hiring employees, your employees probably should be signing some sort of a contract, whether this is just an employee handbook that they sign to acknowledge that they know the roles of the new organization, or if this is a sales employee that you're hiring, you need to have contracts in place to clearly outline pay, commission schedules, so that at the end of the day absolutely no questions from your employees. The worst thing that can happen is you can get in a dispute with an employee over their pay. This is where business is starting to turn sour really quickly. So having an attorney draft up these agreements is an absolutely essential first step to hiring employees. Having an attorney review leases if you're renting office space is also beneficial. You never know, you may need to have a lot of insurance protection. Your attorney will look at that. Your attorney can do a little bit of research on the landlord and on the office space bring up any issues that might come up. If you ever have this kind of dispute, and I have been in this really tough scenario, really tough situation to get into, and as a business owner you're going through another. So having an attorney who can help you draft up a severance agreement, or even just help you get through the process of terminating the place is incredibly valuable. If for any reason, you can talk with a law so you can see where you're going to need to hire an attorney. So there are a lot of legal services out there where you can draft up contracts online. I recommend that you actually meet face to face with an attorney who will be able to see you in their office. Most attorneys do three half hour consultations. Ask around, this is a perfect place for the other three letters, other agency owners, ask who their attorney is ask who they recommend. You're going to want someone local.  Your attorney should review also your terms of service agreement and your privacy policies and any other contracts that you are providing between you and your customer and then give you advice on how to either draft those or enforce them. The third person that you're going to need as you get your agency set up is a great insurance agent. So there are a lot of different types of insurance that the business needs. General liability is a big one. Everybody here should already have general liability insurance if you're freelancing or operating as a business in some respect. I mentioned unemployment insurance earlier often times that is through your accountant insurance agent may be able to help with that as well. Erin Emissions, I specifically pointed out here of this, we're in Erin Emissions is the cover your butt insurance. So let's say that you make a website for a roofing company and you're selling the hosting services and then they run a big national television ad and the host goes down to say hey my website was offline for a few minutes. This is your Erin Emissions point to or if one of your customers accidentally uses some sort of cover material maybe your customers are adding content to their blog and they go for the photo op result. You can tell your clients what they should and should not do but if that somehow makes their way back to you this type of insurance will keep in for that. So Erin Emissions is one that most businesses owners don't think about. A lot of businesses have an insurance a good insurance agency will talk to you about this. In the tech world there are some very specific insurance policies a tech policy or for hacking there are a couple of different policies specifically that my insurance agent recommended to me that don't apply to retail businesses for people. Do you have questions? So the question was so your customer has to go off of Google and all of a sudden you're slapped with copyright infringement law too can you cover that in the upfront? Yeah that would be a great question for your attorney and something absolutely to spell out at the end of the day who owns the website who owns the content. If you are clearing your contract that you are providing this as a service to them to use their website they are the owners of the website they are the owners of the property on the website and they're responsible for it then that very well could be but go back to your attorney about this and make sure it's in the contract and if your insurance policy has to kick in maybe you want to bridge the gap between your attorney and your insurance agent One thing about that there's a type of insurance called publishing apparel or media apparel that you might look into depending on the situation Okay that's great that specifically covers copyright infringement A bunch of attorneys have copyright and trademark law as well if you find yourself regularly working with content that you are worried is going to be copyrighted if you work for publishers for news agencies you might want to talk to your attorney and your insurance agency about coverage for that news articles for company are shared they are straight for content so that's a great point looking for publishers specifically Other types of insurance that your business is going to need is not that you're going to need property insurance on your staff you're probably going to need some sort of an insurance policy for your employees there's employee liability insurance that helps protect you from that disgruntled employee that you should have gotten when his contract states out If you own a car that you primarily use for business your insurance agent may be going to give you other rates for your car through an auto policy and then sit down with your insurance agent There are a lot of great insurance agents out there I work with a broker so my agent she's able to shop around a lot of different large companies so every year we sit down and review and she asks the questions how many staff you have this year, how many hours are they putting in how many sales you have how many people are in your office how many people work out in the field the insurance rates and the amount of insurance that you need to take on for your business your own individual scenarios so at least once a year sit down and review with your insurance agent because chances are if you set up a policy today in two years, you're not going to be covered for the official shape of your business in two years you know two years ago we had three computers today we have eight it's a very big difference especially when you're using the same stuff alright so those are really kind of a nitty gritty basics the things that you need to have in your back pocket before you go are you ready, should we move on alright so the biggest, alright so now getting kind of the logistics, the legalities out of the way the first thing you're going to have to do is stop for this because you've been working for how many years within your business within your view you're giving everything to your customers now it's time for you to stop you need to take a step back and look at everything as a whole you're going to have to stop devoting your time to the work and you're going to start devoting your time to the business this is why you're hiring employees you're going to have to make some serious changes raising your prices is absolutely the first change the minute I hired my personal employee our prices doubled and they continue to go up as we add staff and this is just when you add staff to your base you are increasing the level of service that you're providing to your customers you're also increasing your overhead make sure that you're not being stupid about your pricing price fairly do some market research talk with your customers talk with your customers about what they're paying now what they could pay think really hard about what your business does you're going to start an agency that's great are you going to come up the gate doing everything are you going to do logos and ad words and websites and graphic design are you going to specialize on what you're good at and then firm strategic partnerships with other businesses to refer customers to or to outsource work as needed so think really hard about what it is that you want to provide what's your core service keep an eye on your numbers track how much money you're making how much money are you spending every day my VP of sales asked me the other month how much money does it take for us to operate on a daily basis and I sat down and I had not thought of that before it was pretty easy if you're tracking your numbers it was pretty easy to sit down and figure out my payroll is expensive divide that out and that number is shocking and will really change the way that you look at your businesses and that number alone is how much is it possible that your daily basis to operate is going to help you set your prices and structure as well establish systems make sure that your employees are on board with your systems document processes it's super important to have processes in place for every single step along the way so that as you have turnover as you onboard new employees you have documentation in place for them makes the onboarding process a lot smoother the biggest thing with starting a business is and I said this a little bit earlier you're going to have to prepare for probably the biggest financial investment in your entire life maybe you're going to take out a significant business loan to borrow money whatever it is starting an agency is not achieved ever especially when you start bringing in employees you have to do this for your employees you have to have all this for your employees so keep this in mind and prepare for this goes back to talking with your accountant talk to your attorney make sure that you're making wise financial decisions but be prepared you're not going to be rolling in money tomorrow just because you're old most importantly thinking to delegate is possibly the most difficult part of giving up your freelance career this was the hardest for me to do was to find somebody else to do the things that I did really well you are never going to find a web designer that's as good as you you're never going to find a logo designer that's as good as you you're never going to find someone that writes as great a content of you and you're never going to find someone that's awesome with customer service with you and that's just the fact of being your business owner you're doing things your way you're really good at doing what you do and if you are going to start relying other people to do them you're going to see people so start with the easy stuff I started by hiring assistant that was my pain point I was done with the phones I needed more time to focus she took the phones that was great so one thing at a time eventually I would still be building out the website and then she'd build up the 50 pages that came with it so that was easy and then eventually we had her actually building out the homepage after I installed WordPress and then she started doing that by the time that my project manager started I pretty much picked up the doubt on hers so the more and more that you delegate the easier it gets again back to processes and systems make sure that you're explaining to your employees why you're delegating work to them what their job is make sure that you set your expectations and make sure that you're paying and compensating fairly for the job I mean if you're unloading something that you really don't like to do you're going to have to find someone who really does like to do it or pay them for that if customer service is the vision of your company you're going to have to find someone who's really great at customer service and you're going to have to compensate them to continue to treat your customer as well and check in regularly be available don't be a distant business owner don't delegate and then go away help people through the process check in with them maybe you need to practice a little bit delegating to different people maybe Jennifer is great on the phone but she hates designing websites Harry loves designing websites but she's great on the phones and so this brings us to actually building your team finding the people that are going to do doing all the good jobs that you can't do anymore on growing and running your business you know who who do you need to hire to do the things that you at least like to do who do you need to hire to fill in the gaps that aren't being filled what is your biggest pain point with your own business this is something that we ask our customers how can we help you how can you help your business by bringing in someone to assist in the areas that you're lacking right now we have a need to fill a social media void in our agency we're figuring out and we are now currently in the process of hiring someone specifically there's kind of three tiers to most businesses you've got the, well you've got you sort of as the overarching CEO the owner of the business sales operations and finances sales staff so if you sit down and think about how big do you want your business to be and what are the areas in your business that need to be filled everybody's going to need a sales department, is that you? are you going to hire somebody to do sales? operations, this includes your project manager any design staff development staff, customer service will fall under operations and then we have the finances which will be, you know, your accountants people, price keepers making sure that payroll is met in the beginning you are likely going to be filling a lot of these areas typically the financial area is the one that most finances is typically the part that most business owners hang on to the longest in my age of three years and seven and I am still the person that is in charge of finances even though I do work with a bookkeeper and accountants I don't give control of that department operations is typically the easiest one to start with if you can find a website developer you can find a graphic designer who works for you sales, most of us at Freelances most of us at Freelance are really great at sales already do you want to keep doing sales do you want to do the business owner role or your networking or do you want to hire people I chose to hire sales staff to free up a little bit more of my time in customer meetings so once you have your organization chart figure out who you need in your business to perform the task that needs to be done do you want to hire contractors or do you want to hire employees and there is not really a right answer here there are pros and cons to both contractors are people who are set up under a 1099 schedule you don't actually they don't fill out a W-4 you don't give them a W-2 at the end of the year you don't deduct taxes from their checks, you just pay them hourly, compensate them for their time in whatever fashion that may be the pros to hiring contractors is that they are super easy to find there are a ton of Freelance web designers that would be loved to their websites for you but still do their own side projects contractors are great because they are usually already trained you don't have to tell them how to do their job they often times have a high skill set and they are going to come in and immediately start producing for your company you don't have to worry about payroll you don't have to go down that route with your accountant you have an entire contact with faced company and they are super easy to get rid of so if you got a contractor that does their side projects and then they are just not up to the ball or maybe you are not getting it now business is super easy see you later, adios I don't have anything else for you the consiring a contractor though is that they do typically come at a higher price than employees and this is because they are usually a little higher skilled they are hard to conform to fit into your business to get behind your mission and your values so if you are thinking about why do you want to grow how can you bring a contractor on board with that there are plenty of organizations that have very successful teams made up entirely of contractors who are on board with the vision for the business so this is from a management standpoint how do you bring people in it is easier with employees to get them on board than with the contractors also contractors as easy it is for you to get rid of them super easy for them to get rid of you so if they get another job from your competition that is paying them twice as much they are going to say adios and they are going to head that way now you are back to the drawing board to find another contractor so employees and this is the direction that I decided to go with my business you can train your employees to fit your business we had an intern that we took on last summer who had no experience building WordPress websites she has now built 10 or 12 WordPress websites all by herself she was full time all summer she is going to school through graphic design so we kind of had that as a little bit of an added bonus so the benefit to employees is usually you are going to see them stick around a little bit longer and you can train them mold them into the people that you want them to be you can get them invested in your process in your system and you can get them behind your company vision really easily because you are writing them they are invested in you because they want you to get a job they usually aren't side hustling or other opportunities and employees generally are going to stick around quite a bit longer than your contractors the downfall to having employees is that you are immediately locked into a monthly salary that you are obligated to pay no matter how many customers you go so if you hire someone and you promise them 40 hours a week and you've got no work you still have to write them a paycheck this is in your employment agreement with them it's going to determine how you are set up as a business with your accounting you are going to have to make sure that you are on top of your W-4 and your W-2 you are going to have to deal with payroll taxes either you are going to have to hire an employee from your learning dot system depending on where your employees work if you are running a business where your employees are remote in other states there can be some tax difficulties there figuring out how to pay them by hiring someone earlier it's really hard to hire an employee emotionally so how to find the right people so I went about this by posting on Indeed and this is what I have heard from a lot of employers a lot of agency owners at Indeed is a great place to find candidates people are on Indeed all the time with the caveat we always tell people to find our data posting on Indeed but apply through our website so we turn off the ability for them to actually apply when you let people apply through Indeed you have to be prepared to get any five job applications we hired a project manager through and we put it on Indeed and immediately we got 50 applications so yeah you get lost in Indeed? yeah yep he was commenting Indeed is great for employers but not so great for employees and so I will tell you that I have never hired an employee that only applied on Indeed they have all taken the measure to find the listing on Indeed and go through our website and apply we also at the bottom of every ad encourage walk in come walk in and drop off your resume that gives us a really quick ten minute in front of you hey who are you? will you fit with us? and that helps a lot with screening candidates so for those of you looking for jobs on Indeed I would recommend absolutely be going and pay attention if you're hiring to the employees that do do that 50 resumes on Indeed you can look through resumes all day long you don't know if they wrote their resume or if they paid someone to write their resume and you don't know anything about the person unless you screen them screening takes a long time so pay attention if you are outlier we read out everyone who doesn't write a cover letter right away if you can't take the time to write a cover letter then you're probably just clicking apply apply apply apply so that's a good indication there's something to be said for just knowing that someone is the right fit for your team or the right fit for your job and look for people who are willing to commit one of the things that I always ask in job interviews is what do you want to be in five years what do you want to be in ten years what do you want to be when you throw up and if they're applying for a job as a web designer but in ten years they want to be an entrepreneur I mean is this the right fit for you are you just doing this so that you can go start your own business later or are you doing this because you want to be committed to this position you want to be part of our team I said this earlier don't be a distant leader make sure that you're staying involved with your team, ask questions do periodic reviews I just got done the last two weeks two hour one-on-one review to my employees I got a ton of information out of that that I was able to bring back to the team and make changes and improve our processes based on that ask for feedback and don't be afraid to get criticized being a business owner is a tough job and your employees are the people who are essentially running your business let them critique you get their feedback value their opinions and create a vibrant culture that I think is the most important thing in our company we make it pretty clear that families come first don't require anybody to work after hours we are nine to five business I have one of my employees who is working in the bus and she leaves in time to meet them off the bus after school and do what works for you and what works for your employees alright so now you've got your team you need some place to work so this is kind of how you want to set your business up do you want to have an entirely remote business do you want to have a place for them to go so I personally have chosen to run an office space we have a big open office environment that really comes to work to find a place where you can house people if that's your model location is super important the location where you decide to put your business is also going to a little bit dictate the people that apply for it that being said we have a couple of people who drive more than an hour to work every day at our office just because they like the culture and they like the job if your employees are working on site do they need a parking permit to expect them to provide that and then don't forget to have your attorney review your leases budget for rent utility signage keep growth in mind if you are renting an office space that's you know this size how many people can be super loud if we do that how many people do we have right now how many do we think we're going to have in five years keep that in mind with the length of your lease if you're signing a three year lease and you're expecting to add 10 people in the next three years ask around go and talk to the other tenants hey how do you like working here how's the landlord make sure you're super clear with your landlord on what facilities have to offer other sprinklers where the emergency exits are handy to have access for customers who might need that or a lot of believe it or not there are a lot of office spaces located on second floors especially in cities like this that do not have access so who is your customer base how important is it that customers come up to your office how important is it that you're offering an accessible space for your employees and then keep your attorney keep your insurance agent part of that process and back to the beginning can you really revisit your job as a business owner why do you take time to work on the business take time to work on yourself let your team run things sit back and that is what I have we'll open it up for about five minutes of questions you talked about how your costs drive your pricing at some point you got pushback from your customers about the prices from the market driven website yes and no there are always customers who are going to push back on your prices because there's always a freelancer who is going to do that job for a quarter of the price I can tell you that we doubled our prices we have monthly recurring subscriptions built in we doubled those prices and we lost three customers so out of 200 so do you have any quick advice on what to look for in a project manager yes the project manager was the most important hired that I made so the way that I grew my business I started with myself I hired an assistant she turned into a developer we hired more developers I have actually spoken on project management quite a bit you need someone who is organized you need someone who is super comfortable talking with customers someone with great customer service skills your project manager is going to basically be giving you communication points for your company we chose to hire someone who did not have project management experience in the past but had actual management experience her history was working as a sales floor manager Adam Balvin so she had a lot of experience managing people so I think that is a great skill side to look for someone who can juggle a lot of different paths and someone who is comfortable delegating because they are going to be telling your customers what they need from them and they are going to be telling the developers what to do hiring a project manager was probably the best business assistant that we made because it took the developers out of their conversations with the customer it was really easy for a designer to do that I kind of recommend hiring a project manager that doesn't know anything about building websites because they will take a higher level approach to running a project and they won't have that technical know-how so when a customer asks for something they can legit say I don't know how to do that I will ask and tell you what it will take the project manager is going to be kind of your financial saving point sales is a tough one for me when I first started growing my team I was hiring part-time sales and they never worked out I changed the structure full-time so we have two full-time sales they receive a respectful base pay and a fairly aggressive initiative on top of that and I have tried this different ways one tactic is to provide double rental pay on a stack and it works on bringing up their base on a higher full-time and I would recommend not making sales after a step they had to walk into our office to apply for the first round Sean is here today I found him on Indeed Indeed, LinkedIn Recruiter I got a LinkedIn Recruiter account it was 100 bucks per month and I sat down and looked through Resley and I replied 15, 14 years and are fortunate enough that we're getting a lot of involved leads so no, we're not doing a lot of cold calling for sales right, so that is a different but in the past when I was essentially a sales person I did a ton of B&I networking I still do chamber events B&I chamber networking events were a little bit of a longer play depending on your business structure it might make sense for you to do that each of my sales employees do different B&I for 10 years we did a lot of that for our company but for us chambers worked really well for the cold outreach and then when we do some mailers we mail direct mail and have sales staff directly reach out so it's not overwhelming we try to work our way into the door we know someone else in your industry or we just work with someone else in your industry I didn't use a recruiter, I did it myself so I got a LinkedIn recruiter account and then I went through and just hand-picked people I found that extremely useful yes, and what I was looking for in sales was people who don't pop around people who hold jobs for more than 3-4 years in sales I was not specifically looking for sales in our industry more someone who's been in sales for a while who looks like they are committed and a lot of that you will get a sense one of the tactics that we use for hiring is also to have people take their strengths finder test that will tell you a little bit about their strengths their skills maybe about one more one more question so now you already have like agency setup and all the answers do you find problem in your employees doing them or forgetting about it how do I manage employees staying on board with this business following this process and system that you are a little bit so our employees are building the process in the system it's kind of the way that I cook it so we've been really growing very quickly and every time that we add any system we sit down as a team and we talk about the system that we're adding no, we really talk through every single project that we do through group and throughout the entire process there's a lot of collaboration and a lot of communication we had processes in order because I didn't hire contractors I hired employees who haven't necessarily always been in this industry it was a new process for them to learn and to follow and so I think it was a little bit easier for them to get on board since they had never worked for another website development company before so they were able to really adapt to my system and my way of doing business does that answer your question? alright can we get another round of applause for Jesse please there will be a 10 minute break and then the next talk is up at 11


I'm Deborah Borchart and this is your marijuana money minute. Thank you for your patience with us last week. We lost power due to the tropical storm 2020. Am I right? This week we are back and boy all the earnings that came out from all the major cannabis companies. Canopy growth reported that its first quarter physical revenue came in at 110 million dollars still though the company reported net losses of 128 million. So there's a little bit of a problem there truly had an eye popping second quarter of 120 million dollars but the company said its net income fell to 6.6 million dollars that's a big drop from last year's net income of 57 million for the same time period. Harvest Health and Recreation said that their revenue grew 109 percent that went up to 55.7 million dollars as opposed to 26 million but their net loss for the quarter was 18 million acreage holdings second quarter revenue came in at 27 million also an increase of 53 percent so that's good but their net loss came in at 37 million dollars so still having problems there. The hydroponic store chain grow generation had an excellent quarter they reported revenue of 43 million dollars and they raised their guidance for the full year to a range of 170 to 175 million dollars so great stuff going on there. Now despite the titan capital situation we are still seeing companies raise money. HEXO raised almost 35 million canadian dollars in an at-the-market offering this week and Philo the cannabis tech company raised 10 million dollars as they look to expand beyond cannabis and that's it for this week I'm Deborah Borch out with the Green Marker Report.


Wow, three amazing talks. I'd like to open up the floor now for your questions. Do we have a first brave person with a question in the front row? Thank you. Hi, my name is Rose. I work for Transparency International UK. My question is for Eshbun. In Parliament Watch's campaign to share what we're talking about on Twitter, did you get any pushback from Parliament to sort of downplay anything that made them not look good, or did you sense that maybe they weren't having conversations that they would have had if you weren't in the room, and how did you respond to that? Thank you. Yes, so there's been a lot of pushback from Parliament, and how do we respond to it? Essentially, like I said, Parliament is a very difficult institution to access. So a lot of our work is really dependent on how much access they give us. So what we've done, or what we've been very specific to do, is to cultivate relationships with the speaker, as well as the mainstream press. So for the few times when we haven't been able to tweet or to publish, or to have our work on Facebook, what we do, or what has happened, is that a lot of people in the online community have come in to say, guys, we're not getting this information from you. We had something that we called Accountability Friday, where every Friday we would put up information from the Auditor General's report. And the day we missed Accountability Friday, luckily for us, the online community, or the Twitter community in Uganda, came out and said, oh, Parliament Watch, what's happening? Where's Accountability Friday? So we use some subtle things like that to quote-in-quote blackmail Parliament and say we are needed so that when they're not happy with us, the backlash is not too bad. But they also know in many ways that, like I said, our work is to publish information, whether it makes them look good or bad. And sometimes they have some good content out there, so they also know that there's a benefit in maintaining a relationship with us. We had a... Thanks, all three for your presentations. Really interesting material. My name is Catherine. I work at Open Contracting Partnership. We're the organization that maintains the Open Contracting Data Standards, so Jamil actually had a question for you. So in designing the standard and later, the technical advice that we give about how to implement the standard, we keep use cases at the forefront. So we want to make sure that whatever data is published is ultimately used, and that really means that we need to focus on who's using the data, how they're using it, what formats it needs to be in. And one of the biggest challenges that we face is that governments are very on-board with the idea of transparency and anti-corruption and all these really big, nebulous terms. But it's really hard to create spaces where we can have government talk to civil society and talking to private sector to identify the really specific use cases and how concretely to use these data. So I was wondering if, in your experiences, you could give any advice on how to create those spaces and make sure there are safe spaces that everyone's voices heard. Thank you. I mean, you're the experts in Open Contracting, so I won't get too much into the specifics on that, but we have found that on a lot of the issues that we're tracking through my project, we kind of have a good bridge between government and other civil society groups. We have a pretty good, I would like to say, reputation as being fairly government-friendly, although critical we want to, but a good thing between the two of them. Specifically on Open Contracting and the data, how you want the data to be. In TRUK, we don't, I don't know, I don't think that we have anybody that's looking at it specifically, although we have tracked that it's started to be implemented, although we recognize it's not the highest, the most advanced rung yet, I think is the way it is. But in terms of advice on how to bring people together, it's just trying to get government to do that themselves. At the moment the government is very willing to do that, but it's just pushing them to do it themselves without asking them to. I think it's what we'd say. My name is John Buckley, I'm an Irish experience designer. My question is for Ashban. And essentially, I'm just curious about the citizens who engaged on Twitter. Do you know who they are, were they politically engaged before, or do you think you opened up parliament and government and democracy and engaged with two new people? So far the data that we've been... Okay, sure. So far the data that we've been able to collect on the audiences or on the followers that we have on Twitter is only segmented in as far as age, what kind of devices they use and gender as well. So yeah, I have to say that right now we have no way of knowing whether these were individuals that were politically engaged before. But I'll say that 35% of the users are women and I think that maybe says something about Uganda's society and Uganda's online community and that most of them use smartphones as opposed to laptops, which also tells us what kind of social class they belong to, what kind of social class they belong to and we'll place them somewhere between 15 to 37. Hello, thank you very much for the presentations. My name is Tom Miller, I'm from the European Commission and I'd just like to say my mission expense is forms of open for analysis later on. I had a couple of quick questions for Jamila first of all. You talked about the global pledge tracker and I wondered if there is that much pushback or feedback from that from governments. You talked about government departments in the UK giving you feedback. Have you had feedback from particularly international actors? And second of all for Espan, you talked about the feedback from parliament and the pushback if you like and how you made sure that you were essential to that dialogue. What about from the presidency there? I mean particularly when you're talking about the budget, the presidency budget in Uganda is disproportionate shall we say. Did you have the executive giving you pushback in Uganda? Because I imagine a lot of the countries we work in, that's where the real issue is. I'll go first. So the global one was really interesting. So it followed the same methodology. So we still base, we have asked our chapters in those countries to still base their assessments on what's public and they did that. They researched, they found either there was information or there wasn't and that's what they used to make their assessments and a couple of governments when we published it pushed back and were quite upset that we had said they hadn't acted when they said they had. And then so I think that hopefully in the future iterations it will encourage them to be proactive with publishing just as Louise was saying. I think in general the way that the tool is there's a tendency to think that there's a comparison that can be made between countries. So you can say Spain's doing so well and it's doing way better than ex-country but because of the nature of the commitments you can't actually say that. And often it's the governments themselves that like to pitch themselves against each other in that sense. You can say yes you might have completed more but none of them were new and none of them were ambitious and it was all the bar was so low. So the discourse around it has been interesting. I don't think there's been that much resistance to it but I know that there's an example from Kenya for example our office there when they started to research the work that was being done they went to their different government departments in Kenya and none of their departments even knew these commitments had been made in the first place. So again it's the story of if we hadn't been looking with anything of been done.  At least it's starting the conversation. Do we have other questions? Okay. Thank you very much. My name is Safia Bicci. Oh, I'm so sorry. Okay. Yeah, so pushback from the presidency. Well, there's been some pushback but the Ugandan president is very subtle. He's not, he's confrontational but also very subtle person. So we did a study on the presidential pledges and it showed that they were close to 300 unfulfilled presidential pledges and almost half of those were, you know, promises that he made in specific districts where he would go and promise electricity or a road, et cetera, and we published that. But to say that there's been any direct pushback from the presidency, no, at least there hasn't and we haven't felt it. Most of the resistance that we get is through institutions such as parliament or other government institutions which would be, you know, the method or the hand that he would use, yeah. Can I go ahead? Go ahead. Okay. My name is Safia Bicci from Yaga Africa based in Nigeria. My question is to parliament switch and thanks for the nice presentation. I was very interested when you talk about the analysis you did on the presentation of women and looking at how probably it reflects the issues discussed around gender or women in the parliament. Did you also consider doing such analysis for the marginalized group like youth and also people with disability to also see how maybe it's a reflection of how the parliament refers to issues that concerns them? Then on the other side, I love the analysis you did around the qualification of the parliament so I don't know if you went ahead to do a comparison with their performance probably using the Uganda scorecard to see whether this reflects the performance or this is against the rationale or the common knowledge that each qualification or the benchmark in terms of their qualification is what reflects to poor parliamentary activities. All right. So when the persons with disabilities, yes, we did that but I didn't have the time to show it. So we have five disabled members of parliament in Uganda and in many ways that's also reflected in the way legislation is passed. We have a persons with disabilities bill that has been in parliament for the last four and a half years now and so they brought it the first time then they took it back because of reasons about it not being clear but you're absolutely right I think because parliament is really a game of numbers so the more numbers that you have the more likely you're going to have your issues prioritised. On education and the scorecard well, when we produce that list of qualifications for members of parliament it compelled us to think does having a PhD make you less sexist? Does having a master's degree make you less homophobic? And I mean clearly it doesn't but also some of the challenges that we have is how to reconcile what we know as the roles of parliament and what the society expects members of parliament to do because when we go into the communities we find that a lot of people have a very distorted understanding of what members of parliament do. In Uganda when they send you to parliament they're not sending you to legislate on death penalty or minimum wage or whatever proposed law. They are essentially sending you to go get a piece of the national cake however you get it and bring back to split with them. So you have MPs who will not say a single word in parliament these are the most silent people but when they go back to their constituencies they'll distribute patronage use their personal resources to extend personal generosity. So in parliament they're doing really badly but in the communities they're rockstars. So when we're putting together a scorecard those are the two things that we must reconcile. Do we go ahead and rate them based on what we think is right or do we completely disregard society's understanding and expectations of what their leaders should present to them. So the scorecard is something that we've been thinking about a lot we are still thinking about because in an ideal world we like to reconcile those two things. Hi, thank you for all your presentations. It's inspiring and it's always good to have success as presented. I'm from France and what we've seen is that it's very difficult for civic tech developers in France to go against the government because usually they depend on the funding from public institutions so my first question was to the three of you how are you funded and how do you manage to not have a conflict of we might not get funding from the government if we publish something. And then I had more specific questions on how you build community because for instance Luisa you mentioned that all these people engaged in the campaign for a short amount of time and I was wondering if they got the response as well when the commission sent back the forms did they get them as well, were they involved in other activities and Jamila I was wondering if maybe you had thought of something similar to focus on companies in addition to institutions it's a difficult question I'm sorry and finally there's an initiative in France it's called Acropolis where what they do is they comment in live what is happening but by video so you have the video of what is happening in the parliament and then there's someone explaining and going back on the issues and sort of making jokes and I was wondering if you had some initiatives like this to also keep building the community over a longer term. So first can you hear me? First in terms of funding for us I guess it was easy in that sense because we have depending on the time period a text it's info from very little to zero public funding so our main funders currently are the Open Society Foundations and a private foundation which is called Adesium that funds work related to democracy participation transparency accountability etc so in that sense it's true that it's easier in terms of field independence to do this kind of campaigns targeting very directly public institutions and in terms of creating community it was certainly a very very big part of the campaign also first to get the campaign running and to manage to file as much request as possible in the shortest amount of time but also to keep the campaign going after we had this setback from the commission so to prepare we reached out to many many organizations with whom we usually work with so it was freedom of information organizations organizations that work on transparency on participation every contact we had with whom we worked earlier and also some members of the academic circles working on transparency people from media outlets we usually work with we told basically everyone that this was happening and we gave them this kind of alert to just spread out the word take part in the campaign cooperation and afterwards we had a list with all the people that had participated in the campaign and we communicated with them consistently throughout the different developments of the campaign so for example when there was this refusal and we had to go to the ombudsman we told the requesters well this is what's happening this is what we plan to do that's how we managed to get the signatures for the European Commission Complaint when we had the first release we also were in contact with them and actually we managed to work with the investigative journalist at NAC because he was one of the persons that had participated in the campaign and when we informed the requesters that this two months disclosure had happened he got in touch immediately and he said well this is very interesting and we said well we're glad we find it you find it interesting why don't we work together so it's this constant communications with them that managed to keep also the campaign together throughout the whole process no we don't get any funding from the public sector one specifically I should tell you that one of the things if you wanted to if you wanted to read a committee report of a meeting that happened in Parliament the only place you would get it would be the Parliament Watch website but Government and Parliament has funding to do these very things but I don't know for some reason they just don't so the way it is structured right now because some of the work that we do is essentially work that they should or would be doing so they keep all the money for themselves on video I think video is the language of the future and literally increasingly we are debating whether we are still interested in doing policy analysis we occasionally publish about four page policy briefs and analysis on issues that are happening in Parliament but more and more we find that nobody is reading it we put it up on the website and it doesn't get any hits but you do a video on the same I mean you have 10,000 hits you have 10,000 views and you have a lot of days so I agree with you absolutely I think video is something that we ought to be doing a little bit more the challenge is that sometimes I guess the way the development world is organised is that sometimes you need consensus or the people that support you you also need the guys in the team to buy and to eat for everybody to know okay you know this is where we are going the very first tracker which was the UK was initially funded by the media network and that was the first year of the project and since then we have received funding to extend the idea to other countries from the UK government so our entire summit follow up project until 2020 is funded by the UK government and we wrapped the UK stuff into that but it is mostly the way that we do that work on whether we would do the same thing or are doing the same thing with businesses I don't think I have the expertise to do that but my colleagues back in London we have a business integrity programme who do a lot of work looking at the efforts that business do to uphold their integrity and see if they are sticking to the standards that they set themselves and the work they do is actually a lot more robust than this I should also say that in the global pledge tracker we include information done by those five international organizations that were there so the IMF, the OECD the UN World Bank and the Commonwealth Secretary are also included in that so not businesses but we are looking at multilaterals as well I think we are now out of time for questions but I encourage you to continue the conversation over lunch there just remains to ask you to join me again in thanking our three fantastic speakers


Hey everyone, next up in our handstand prep progression, if we've tried the quadruped walkout from knees, because maybe we're having a little uncomfiness in our wrists and we still need to train the abdominals, the ribcage position, the shoulder mobility that is required for handstands. Well, maybe you've tried that quadruped walkout from knees and maybe you're thinking now, I got that one, I mastered it, I have mastered it. So the next step is just increase the lever, increase the load that you put on your abs. So it's really just a next step. It's a continuation of what you've already done. So we're gonna just do all the same stuff. We push my neck away, tuck my hips, got my abs.  Let's take a breath, make sure I got it. It's okay, let's do another one. And that was a lot better. Now, from knees to feet, that is our progression, quadruped walkout from knees to feet.  But that is the quadruped walkout from knees to feet.


Hey guys, welcome back to another video. I hope you're having a great week so far. If not, I hope the content of this video can change a bit of that. Today is a good Friday to plan your next beach trip. If you're someone who loves going to the beach and enjoying the sound of the ocean, walking barefooted on the shore, or maybe sitting just quietly and relaxing, and finally if you love doing all this with your friends, then you're going to love what I'm going to share today on the vlog. If you go to the beach often, you may have encountered this issue where, you know, sometimes there are too many people at the beach and it makes it very difficult to have your own space just to chill. So perhaps having the luxury of your own deck where you and your friends could just enjoy your own private beach experience with music and the snacks and the drinks and the grills could elevate this experience for you. So last weekend, I got to experience that at Kokoree Tailangma beach with Elaine and a couple of her friends and that's what I'm here to talk about if you're interested in trying it out too. I'm going to try and break it down as best as I can so that it's easy for you to judge if this is something you would want to do with your friends. So if I'm not able to do full justice, I'll leave a link to the Instagram account in the description below so that you can make further enquiries after this video. Now the deck. The deck as the name suggests it's a small beach front property with a deck which according to the renters was a beach private beach place that has been in the family of the owners about for about three generations but now it's available for rent if that's something you would want to explore. It's a hut with a kitchen and a shower and a toilet as well as a grill and a spacious enough deck with lazy beach chairs and other things that you may need to make your beach day much more enjoyable and it's kind of accommodate about 10 to 12 adults with your snacks and food and drinks and all. So where is the deck? You will find a deck at Kokrobitae landmark to be precise. I think the closest landmark to use as your point of reference is Sankofa beach or Betayet Wakanda beach. It's right around the corner from Wakanda beach and the road isn't the best but it's definitely motorable so you can get there. How much does it cost? That's the reason why I said that this is a place for you and your friends because it costs 550 dollars to rent the place for the whole day so the more you are the easier it is on your pockets because I would assume that yes you would split as friends to rent the place. So for an average of 10 people it's 55 cities per head for renting the place from about midday till you leave. Now this is what you get for renting the space. You have a caretaker or someone who's going to wait on you the whole day prepare your grill, your food and also clean up the place when you're done. You also find that like I've already said there's a kitchen, there's a shower after your ocean swim, there's a toilet in a very spacious deck with a long table to put your food on, you know, your grills. There's a grill for your meat and your fish as well. There will be tumblers, wine glasses, ice buckets, bowls, seven cutlery and lazily chairs like I already said and this is what you're getting for renting the place. Everything else you have to pack and bring yourself when you're going there. The great thing is the renters will give you a list of things you should pack and have on you before you get there but to spare you that this is what you may need to pack. All essentials. A fully charged portable speaker for your music is very important. You need your power banks, you need your sunscreen if you have to pick them up, ice chests or cooler for your drinks, towels and beach blankets and of course body cream and soap. Ideally this also means that you need to take some snacks along. If you're going in a big group for about 10 to 12, everybody can bring something so you have enough for the whole day. Let's talk about the food. You can order some sides from them. The grills as well, lobsters, fish and whatever it is will be prepped in time just for your lunch. What's nice about this is that the fish and the lobsters that you can order is mostly fresh catch and some you can even purchase as extras for later to bring home. Godwin is a caretaker who will make sure that you are well cared for and making the fire and grilling the food and prepping the sights like Friday and all that. You do that for you. Of course it's important to consider taking some snacks along if you don't want to order their size that they have there. We had so much food that we packed a lot of leftover. The beachfront is clean and overall is very enjoyable for your friends for the whole day. So I would definitely recommend the deck for you and your friends for your next beach hangout. Like I said before, I'll leave a link to the deck in the description. You can contact them via Instagram and arrange yours. And yeah, that's it on this Good Friday edition of the vlog. Leave me a thumbs up if you found this very helpful and I'll catch you in the next one. Enjoy the rest of long weekend. I'll see you in the next video. Peace. Apologize.


I wrote out a little post on patreon I'm like hi guys.     But anyway, we're working on it and it's growing and I want to put my heart into this thing So in order to help it grow I now need to start promoting it outside the Esperanto community It's kind of hard to do that when you run an Esperanto YouTube channel So I'm going to do a lot more videos in English and I'm going to do collabs with the local YouTube community here in English I'm going to like try and meet up local organizations businesses. I don't know I probably just harass people in the street, but of course Esperanto still plays an important part of my life So it's going to be like more pushed down and like hidden in there and I'll be like blah blah blah blah Esperanto blah blah blah blah blah blah and I'll be like cool What was that?   No, I won't do that I'll probably just ignore you but I'll try and like respond as much as I can now I know again. This is a big thing. I'm moving mainly from Esperanto to English I believe it's for the good of the community because I need to promote a Mikumu and it's so freaking hard with an Esperanto channel Anyway, that's it. I'm just bubbling on it out bubbling on blubbering on right now So if you've enjoyed this video like it share it around sub to the channel if you haven't already Abuse me in the comments because now I'm changing direction. I'm using English Which is I don't know some people see it as like the imperialistic language of the world serious side note I didn't learn Esperanto because of any type of political motivations or idolism or anything like that I'll let the language because I enjoy it and I enjoy the community and I can still take part in it Anyway, that's the end if you liked this video share it around