Hello everyone. Welcome back. We had a good break extended break. Okay Right, let's get started from where we left off We move into the next section What are some of the lessons that we can learn from David's worship team and as to how he went about You know setting setting it up Yep, let's go to first chronicles 25 First chronicles chapter 25 Okay first chronicles chapter 25 verse 1 onwards it says David Together with the commanders of the army set apart Some of the sons of asaf he manned and jerethen for the ministry of prophesying accompanied by harps liars and symbols Let's pause there. Okay The first thing that you see there is David together with the commanders of the army Okay When's the last time you see military army putting together a worship team But here David is doing it. Okay, the commanders of the army in first thing he set apart Okay set apart That is the root word for holy Okay Like very rootwood is from that's where we get them word Holy in the Hebrew root word simply means set apart we cut aside Right and so we as people in worship ministry. We are called to be set apart To have nothing to do with the world so to speak, right? But for us to understand what it is to be set apart. We need to understand the one who is set apart and That is our God right our father He is holy. There is no one like him Right and we can read tons of scriptures is just for us to understand You know about the holiness of God Only when we understand and get a glimpse and a revelation of his holiness We will understand the importance of the calling of Why we are called to be set apart Right. Can we just go a little deeper in that? Sam 22 verse 3 it says But you are holy and thrown in the praises of Israel Exodus chapter 15 verse 11 Exodus chapter 15 Verse 11 it says who among the God is like you Lord Who is like you? Majestic in holiness awesome in glory working wonders right Job 15 verse 15 Job 15 verse 15 And if God places no trust in his holy ones if even the heavens are not pure in his eyes Okay Then Job 25 Job 25 verse 5 if even the moon is not bright and the stars are not pure in his eyes Is all of this is to say that he alone is holy that means there is no one like him That is the ultimate statement when we say that God is holy It simply means that there is no one like our God Right talk to me. Are you with me? Yes Okay, just some of the quotes This is a lovely quote by Sam Storms He says the holiness of God Only secondarily refers to his moral purity his righteousness of character now When we talk to each other about holiness, right? the first thing that would come to our mind is Righteousness or sinlessness or moral purity, right? I will not lie. I will not cheat.  So the holiness of God only secondarily Refers to his moral purity his righteousness of character. It primarily points to his infinite otherness to say that God is holy is to say that he is transcendently separate Set apart Holiness is not one attribute among many It is not like grace or power or knowledge or wrath Everything about God is holy each attribute part takes of his divine holiness Right, this is so beautifully put as a side note Pastor Ashish has a sermon series. He's done it like five years ago. I think on the holiness of God It's a three-part series. I would encourage you to listen to it. It's awesome and also you can read this book By R. C. Sproul. He's the author His book called the holiness of God It's brilliant Okay another court Like this is by Charles Spurgeon This in holiness God is more clearly seen than anything else One goes guys. I hope you don't mind. I just hang in there. Okay Yes, because I Really like all of these quotes This God's holiness means he is separate from sin But holiness in God also means wholeness God's holiness is his Godness it is his being God and all that it means from him to be God to meet God in his holiness Therefore it is to be altogether Overwhelmed by the discovery that he is God and not man How do these guys write so well This is the last quote by the way, okay By Jerry Bridges. He also has another book. I think it's called the pursuit of holiness if I'm not sure I read it long back. I forget the title of it of holiness You should check that out as well. He says holiness is the perfection of all God's other attributes His power is holy power. His mercy is holy mercy. His wisdom is holy wisdom It is his holiness more than any other attribute that makes him worthy of our praise it is his Holiness more than any other attribute that makes him worthy of our praise Right, isn't that awesome? Our God is holy it's He's talking about his holiness is like I'm scared to even draw a comparison or give an example. He's okay. You take a diamond. Okay It take a piece of diamond and you lift it up to the light And you can see the different lights that will fill the room Isn't it? And that's it's still a man-made thing. It's it's still a thing. It's still an earthly perishable thing And think about his holiness. This is go to Psalm 89 Psalm 89 with me if you will please Okay Psalm 89 Verse five onwards Okay, if you're there just give me a Yes, just so I'm not rushing it. Okay All right, Psalm 89 verse five. It says the heavens praise your wonders, oh lord Your faithfulness to in the assembly of the holy ones For who in the skies above can compare with the Lord? Who is like the Lord among the heavenly beings? Listen to that line right who? In the skies above can compare with the Lord who is like the Lord among the heavenly beings That means the angels and the seraphs and the cherubims and the seraphims the living creatures in revelation 4 that we read In the council of the holy ones God is greatly feared. He is more awesome than all who surround him By the way the root word for awesome, uh We use awesome for everything. Oh man, that place is awesome.   He is holy Right Ken is it it does anyone have a another language Say tamil or canada or anyone from Any of the language from africa and just read those scriptures hindi also is fine Um if possible, I just thought it'd be nice sam 89 verse Um 5 to 8 Yes, please go ahead Yeah, I think you're a mute if you're reading it. Yes. Yes, pastor bhajan sahita 89 verse 5 to Eight eight Oh Thanks This is what the english translation is saying, right?  I think you're still one you have any you can hear me, right? He's faster. We can hear you. Okay. No, I was asking so is it was there any other Interesting choice of words in the hindi version besides Besides the one that's mentioned in the english translation Pastor, sorry. Are you you mean to say any other language? Uh, no, I was asking so from the hindi version that you just read a hindi translation So is there any other like interesting choice of words that is that kind of stood out to you? Like what we read from the english Uh, I think we the word yahua that comes it's a hebrew word yahweh, which is uh in hindi called yahua So they have used that word to explain the grandeur of his name of his present and Right, right. Okay.  Yeah. Uh, any other language guys, uh, canada anybody or tamil Can I read in malayalam? Sure, sure. Yes Yeah, thank you Yahweh Yes, one more language is one more anybody from Africa. Okay, great. Yeah, so it's so important for us to understand the holiness of God to have a revelation of His holiness for us to understand the weight of the calling to be set apart because that's what David that's the first thing that he does, right? He's set apart. That means the Levites, the people that were set apart, they were set apart for the ministry unto the Lord, right? And the notes, if you see, that was a caution that was constantly given to the Israelites is that, hey, don't compromise with the canonites, right? When you get into the promised land, don't compromise your ways of worship with their ways of worship with your way of living to their ways of living. Don't compromise to their immoral lifestyle. But that's what it's challenging us nowadays, isn't it, from all age groups is, what do I say? It's like we have this chaltahey attitude. Chaltahey, it's okay. Just this, no problem. It's just one time. It's just a small thing. It's just a small whatever, whatever, right? Compromising with the ways of God, with the world of God, to the ways of the world will kill our spirit for more of Him. It will not make us want more of God because we've compromised. He says, in James, he says, don't have anything to do with the world. You know, you're living in it, but you're not off it. Be mindful of it, right? John 15.19 says, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of this world. I have chosen you out of this world. He's called me out, right? He's called you out. He's set you apart. And I've mentioned this so many times, and forgive me if I'm saying this again, from Genesis to Revelation, the heart of God is that I will be your God, you will be my people, right? I have set you apart. I will be your God, you will be my people. Exodus 19, right? It says, you yourself saw how I brought you out of Egypt and on eagle's wings. Out of all the nations of the earth, although the whole world is mine, I have chosen you to be my treasured possession, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, right? That's his heart. It's like, I will have, I want you for myself. I am not willing to share you with anybody else because that is how much I love you, right?  He's a jealous lover, so to speak, right? So to say that he does not want to share you with the world. He wants all of you, all of you, only for himself. It's such a beautiful image, isn't it? And so in our journey as worshippers, it is a, let it be a constant reminder is that our God is holy and we are called to be holy, right? We see that have mentioned, being mentioned again in 1 Peter or 2 Peter, that we are, we are set apart. We are now a royal priesthood. We are, each one of us are priests, just like how a priest minister unto the Lord in the tabernacle of Moses. The tabernacle, we are to minister unto him, right? So that's the first thing, set apart. And the second thing we see is, they were set apart for some of the sons of Asaph, he managed for the ministry of prophesying, ministry of prophesying. So very simply, we are learning about worship ministry and we've learned quite deeply about worship from the first year and here a little bit. The root meaning for ministry simply means a cup bearer, a server, a waiter, right? And so when you take worship and put ministry to it, it's all about just bringing these two things, serving and with a heart of worship and just serving before, serving our God and serving His people and that's simply what worship ministry is. Right? In John chapter 13, we see that Jesus stooping down to wash the feet of His disciples, right? Just the previous section, we see how, you know, how God is holy, His magnificent. He's set apart. There is no one like Him. In His holiness, He is humble, right? They're like the two sides of the same coin, the holiness and His humility. In His humility, He stooped down, right? Second Samuel, that you can check it out, Samuel 22, 36, the second part of it, it says He stooped down to make me great. I think it's also in Psalm 18 verse 56 or something, I'm not sure, but He stooped down in His holiness, leaving all His glory as we read in Philippians chapter 2, right? He left the glory of heaven and walked down and He stooped down to make me great. And that's what ministry is all about is, and which is related to the next point, submission in the notes. So they were set apart for the ministry, that means to serve. Okay, I know it's been mentioned out there quite many times, but then we have to be very careful as ministers not to feel entitled and not get, not let any titles or positions or whatnot get to our head and saying, okay, you know, or become over familiar because over familiarity or familiarity even is quite, it's the danger zone, right? In ministry, as soon as you become, as soon as you think you become familiar with God, you're kind of losing track. And so always leaning on His heart, leaning to see what He has to say, that all of that is a posture of humility, right? So in humbleness, in humility, we go before Him in every season of life, in every stage, at every age in ministry, we constantly need to lean on Him, on His understanding to serve Him and to serve His people better. And then we see all the sons of Asaph, I'm not going to read their names. Okay, let's just read their names. So the sons of Asaph, Zako, Joseph, Nathanaia, Asarela, the sons of Asaph were under the supervision. Okay, you can underline that if you have a hard copy of the Bible. They were under the supervision of Asaph who prophesied, underline this, under the king's supervision. As for Jiruthin, from his sons, Ghedalaya, Zeri, Jashahaya, Shemai, Hashabaya, and Matathaya, six in all, under the supervision of their father Jiruthin, who prophesied using the harp in thanking and praising the Lord. And He-Man and his sons, verse five, all these were sons of He-Man, the king's seer. They were given Him through the promises of God to exalt Him. God gave He-Man 14 sons and three daughters, verse six. This is an important case. All these men were under the supervision of their fathers for the music of the temple of the Lord. With symbols and liars and harps for the ministry at the house of God. Asaph, Jiruthin, and He-Man were under the supervision of the king. Okay, Christopher has a question here. Please expand with examples on being over familiar with God. Examples. I can probably see about getting some right examples. I hopefully find that here. Give me a second, Christopher. I'm just looking at this. Okay, let's go to the previous chapter as in first Chronicles 14. Okay, first Chronicles 14, verse eight onwards. I just want to read the passage for us. So Christopher is asking a question. So please expand with examples on being over familiar with God. But I'm using a different example, Christopher. So we hit first Chronicles 14 verse eight onwards. It says, when the Philistines heard that David had been anointed king over all Israel, they went up in full force to search for him. But David heard about it and went out to meet them. Now the Philistines had come and rated the value of Rafa Hameen. So David inquired of God. Okay, if you want to, you can underline that David inquired of God. Shall I go and attack the Philistines? Will you hand them over to me? The lots answered him, go, I will hand them over to you. So David and his men went up to Baal Perazim and there he defeated them. He said, as waters break out, God has broken out against my enemies by my hand. So the place was called Baal Perazim. Verse 12, the Philistines had abandoned their gods there and David gave orders to burn them in the fire. Verse 13, once more the Philistines raided the valley.  As soon as you hear the sound of marching in the tops of the balsam trees, move out to battle because that will mean God has gone out in front of you to strike the Philistine army. So there are a lot of things that's happening in this passage. For me, what again stands out is the way David is handling, how is he responding? So David has fought enough battles by now and God has been with him and time and time again in the scriptures we see that David won this battle because God was with him. And his posture of heart, he inquires of God. He's asking, he's leaning us, okay, Lord, tell me what to do, tell me what to do. And the second time also he asks, he is not responding or is taking matters into his own hands and saying, okay, you know what, last time I went into the battle, this is what God told me to do and let me use that same strategy and go and do the same thing my own way, thinking that God is okay with it. That is like acting out of being familiar, right? That's one example, I hope you get it. Say, yeah, I see your hand being raised. Oh, I just wanted to add another example is that maybe when we started out with God, we were so fervent in his presence, we worshipped, you know, and then over the years we grew in Christ and we just approached God's presence as if it's something we already know as, it just becomes an everyday routine. I think that's an example of being familiar with God whereby we lose our reference for his presence. Yeah, thanks, say, thanks for sharing. And Kennedy, yeah, please go ahead. Thank you. Like in the case, let's just give an example, in the case of Moses, you've been instructed the first thing to do, then when he got familiar with that, he just struck the road instead of talking to it. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for sharing that, Kennedy. Yeah, Christopher, I see your hand raised. Yes, Pastor.  So it is more the current sort of examples.  And sometimes it could not, it may not be very pleasing to God sometimes. And I mean, if there are any examples that come to mind in a current situation, maybe you can share that here. Okay. So I can't pick one and say, okay, this is, because it can come in any shape or form, Christopher. And one of the things, classic thing is like what Sai, you know, explained, is that, you know, actually, Bobby Connor, he says his best, he says, we've become all too familiar with the God, we hardly know. Because I think, okay, you know, sometimes it might not be intentional, like for example, let me just share from my own experience, this is a bad example, okay, and I'm not very proud about it, but anyway. So I had planned for a camp, a youth camp in 2019. And I remember that was my first year being as a youth pastor, and I was so nervous and afraid. And I didn't know what to do.  And so long story short, you know, the camp was awesome, God moved in a beautiful way into 2019, Tarun was there. But then when I started planning for the next youth camp into 2020, and there was this like, okay, you know, we tried this, we did this, and I think we should just go ahead with a very similar kind of a theme and whatnot. And so when I said that, I'm not proud about me sharing this is I did not lean into asking God about what you wanted to do for a new camp in the new year.  And I was arrogant enough to think, okay, I've been one year, I've been a youth pastor for a year now. So I think I know what to do. And I didn't feel the need to inquire of God, like what David was constantly doing, his that he constantly inquired of God. And that's a beautiful sign of humility is that we basically, we don't lose the wonder of who this God is. Yeah, I mean, if anybody else wants to share, feel free to unmute and share. Okay. Hello? Yes. Yeah, I think there's a familiar saying that familiarity builds content. So in many occasions, you tend to lean in your own understanding and continue in the way into the humanity. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks. Yeah, that's wonderful. Yeah. Thank you. Yes, Rupa. Once I was invited to share in a women's retreat. So the word the Lord gave me was remembers Lord's wife in the afternoon session. And they were all when I went there and shared in the morning worship afternoon, I saw they were all in a festive mood. And I was thinking in my human understanding, how can I share about Lord's wife. So I had a ready made PPT on my laptop. I thought I would present that about the virtues of a woman. That was the first time I was thinking in my understanding. I always was very careful to lean on to God and faithful to deliver what he wanted me to. But when I opened my computer, it suddenly crashed. Then the fear of the Lord came into my heart. And I was very sorry. And I asked for God's forgiveness and continued with that sermon which God has already given me. So I just wanted to share. Thank you. Thanks Rupa. Thank you for sharing your experience. Yeah. Anybody else? Any thoughts? That's a good question, Christopher. I think it's a much needed question. It's a question that keeps us on the right track. There's a song by Keith Green. I like the bridge of it. Oh Lord, you're beautiful. I think it says, the bridge says, I want to take your word and shine it all around, but first help me just to live it Lord. And the words of the song is always minister to me, is while I can be very busy with doing God's work, ministry and whatnot. It's very easy for me, us to say that. I want to take your word and shine it all around Lord, but first help me just to live it. And that's a posture of humility. And like it says, in 1st Chronicles 25, as we've been reading, is submitting ourselves under Lord's will. Let your will be done. So yeah, that's not have familiarity. The opposite of that is to have a posture of humility. And you can see that in the life of Jesus. This is beautiful book by Andrew Murray. It's called Humility, Lesson in Humility, but something to do with humility, okay? Andrew Murray. And there's a very one interesting chapter, I think chapter three or four, it says Humility in the life of Jesus. It's beautiful. It's a must read, I would say. It's about how in everything that Jesus did, in a time and time again in the Gospel of John itself, we see that he keeps saying, I'm not here to do my own thing or to say what I want to say or to do what I want to do or go where I want to go. Everything that I do is because my father wants me to do. It is his will. It is his will. It is his word. It is his thing. I'm doing what I see my father do. So it's he lived in. The last person on this whole planet to be familiar with God should be Jesus. It's like, yeah, he's my father. Okay, I don't have to keep asking him. You get what I'm saying. But you see his posture and how he constantly submitted himself to the will of the father to the end where in Luke 20 to 42 it says, let not my will but yours be done. That's a posture of humility and not being over familiar. So opposite of submission, guys in point three, that's the next thing we see. All these people, the sons of Asaph, Asaph himself, and Jonathan and He-Man, they were all under the supervision of the king and the supervision means they were under the submission. They submitted themselves. It's a sign of humility. Humility is the world has portrayed it as weakness. But it's not weak. You have to be strong to be humble. You have to be strong to be the first person in a relationship to go and say, sorry, even if it is not your fault. If there is a huge wall that you want to jump across, there are two of you, you need to have a strong person to bend down and give them your back so you can stamp on their back and climb the wall and jump, isn't it? And so you have to be strong to be humble. So humility is a sign of strength and that's in line with submissiveness. So because Bible is very clear about pride and proud, what God thinks about proud people, what He does to them. We've read enough scriptures about it, you know it all. Proverbs chapter 6 itself is enough. Proverbs chapter 6 verse 1 to 6, it says, there are six things that the Lord hates and the seven things in total that He detests. The first in the list is a proud look. James chapter 4 says, He resists the proud. The last thing that we need as worshipers, as worship ministers is that God resisting our worship like He resisted kings. You know, it's not a pleasant scene, isn't it?  I don't care how good you sing, I don't care how skilled you are at your instrument, I don't care how well you look, how well you dress, yada, yada, yada, I don't care, but if there's pride in your heart, I don't need your worship. That's the last thing that you and I as worshipers need God to do. So first three things, we see that they were set apart to ministry, that means to serve. And then three is they were under this supervision. In our worship ministry, I'm under the supervision of my senior pastor, Pastor Ashish Raichur. You know, I have to work with him to understand his vision, his heart for the church and then take the worship ministry in that direction. Just because I'm the worship pastor, I was like, yeah, I'm the worship pastor, I will do whatever I want to do. You know, this is the vision of APC. I'm going to go in this direction because this is what I believe and whatnot. No, I can't do that, right? I'm under the supervision of my senior pastor and I have to lean into him to see, okay, what is his heart? What is his vision for the church and for the city and the nation and the nations, right? You see what I did there? Okay. So they were all under the supervision of the king. And the next thing we see in verse seven, okay, 1 Chronicles chapter 25 verse seven, it says, along with their relatives, all of them trained and skilled in music for the Lord. All of them were trained and skilled in music for the Lord. David just didn't put up a board saying, okay, everybody who wants to be in the worship team, please come on on board. No, I'm sure they've had their way of auditioning people. You know, like we do at APC and most churches, they have an audition to filter out. I'm not going to put a billboard and say, okay, everybody who can sing, just come, we're going, there's a process, there's a procedure, which is an important thing part. So everybody were trained and skilled in music for the Lord. And finally, we see the number 288 young and old alike teacher as well as student cast lots for their duties. Young and old alike, multi-generational worship team was David's worship team. In the next chapter or chapter after, we'll learn a little bit about the difference between a band and a local church worship ministry. But just one point, one feather from that chapter is a band is all exclusive. It's just us. It could be a girl band. It could just be a boy band. It could just be a youth band and us four and no more and whatnot. But worship ministry of a church is not like that. It's open to every age, every generation that wants to serve in the worship ministry. And that's, we see that happening here in David's worship team. Right. So these are the five simple lessons that we can learn from how David set up his worship team. He set them apart, teach your worship teams about the seriousness of living a holy life and not to compromise living a holy life. I would rather have a person's heart whom I can mold and train them in music and in singing rather than have someone who's living an immoral, unholy life serving because I wouldn't want that. So seriousness of set apart because our God is holy and it's all about serving one another. Just because you're part of a worship team doesn't make you entitled to say, I want others to serve me. When I get to the stage, the water bottle should already be there. Why is it not here? We are there to serve. You are not entitled to be served. Right. So that's a very good reminder under the submission, humility, submission of a senior pastor is key. And all of them were trained and skilled. Right. Make sure your team members are trained and skilled emphasize on that and then seek to learn and teach young and old. There's humility written all across all these five points people. So you need to be humble to go to someone and say, teach me. Right. That's why I'm humble that you guys are all here to hear me teach. It's a sign of, it's a beautiful posture of humility to go to someone and say, it's like, Hey, I don't know this. Can you teach me? Right. So instill that in your teams, as I mentioned in David's worship team. And so I hope this helps. Okay. So that's the end of this section. That's the end of section one chapter one. We've covered from the life of Abraham to Moses is tabernacle, David's tabernacle. And here we are finally come to an end. Okay. So I hope you've learned something. I hope you are learning something. Please go back home and meditate on the scriptures, whichever God puts on your heart. Right. I'll see you all again next week. Thanks guys. Take care. Have a great week ahead. Thank you. Bye bye. Thank you.


I'm Brian Sacawa, you're watching He Spoke Style and today we're talking about five great luxury watch alternatives to Rolex. So just to clarify, in this video I'm talking about pre-owned watches, though of course all the picks I make are certainly great alternatives whether you're talking new or pre-owned. Pre-owned is always a great option for that person who is looking to maybe get into luxury watches for the first time or just generally anyone who is looking for great value for their money. Today's video is sponsored by eBay. If you are thinking about buying a pre-owned luxury watch online, be sure to check out the offerings on the eBay luxury watch page. I'm not talking about regular eBay, I'm talking specifically about the luxury watch page. Tons of brands available. Honestly, any brand you'd be looking for from Rolex to Langa to Omega to Cartier to IWC to even Richard Mille if that happens to be your thing. Now I know if you haven't bought pre-owned online before that it can kind of be a little bit of a nerve-wracking experience especially in terms of knowing whether what you are getting is authentic. If you're spending the money you definitely don't want to get ripped off and eBay actually has an authenticate program that ensures that all the watches in that program are authentic and that you are not going to get burned. It's a great service. Link to the eBay luxury watch page down below in the description. All right, so alternatives to Rolex. Don't get me wrong. Rolex is an awesome brand. I love my Datejust but I understand that there are a variety of reasons as to why someone would not want to wear a Rolex including that there are just so many out there and so many people wear them. I totally get it. The good news is that there are tons of brands out there that are fantastic alternatives that you are also getting a lot of watch for your money. So I've put together a list of five brands along with some specific models that represent some really solid alternatives as well as a great value proposition all for under $3,000. Let's check them out. My first pick is the Omega Seamaster. Omega of course amazing brand heritage. We all know the Speedmaster and the reference CK 2998 first Omega in space. I love the Speedmaster but honestly I really love the Seamaster as well which is the watch that's been worn by the world's most famous spy James Bond since 1995. I have actually what is called a pre-bond Omega Seamaster so prior to 1995 that I did pick up on eBay for just around a thousand dollars. Such a cool watch. It has that Submariner look to it. One thing I really like about this watch is the size. It's 36 millimeters which may seem small by modern standards where 40 millimeters is kind of the usual but for me it wears really well on my six and a half inch wrist and it just feels a little more elegant while still being sporty. It's got a date window at three o'clock. I love the look of the hour indices and the hands. It's a great watch for daily wear, very versatile, a great addition to any collection or a great way to start your collection. I want to move to a different Omega Seamaster now and that is the Seamaster Deville. This is more of a vintage watch so it's going to have a smaller case size around 34 millimeters so just be aware of that if you're looking for this particular model. It's called a Seamaster Deville which is not to be confused with the Deville which Omega introduced as a separate collection later on down the road. The Seamaster Deville is a dressier option than the Seamaster. Maybe a little bit more versatile because it is on a leather strap. You can find them in steel and gold various style colors from silver or champagne colored to black which is actually the watch that Don Draper wears episode six of season five of Mad Men. Prices range but you should be able to find one decent example between $750 and $1,250. Next I want to turn to a German brand that is very highly regarded and that is NOMOS Glasschutte. The brand itself was founded in 1990 just a couple months after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Their watches are known for their quality and affordability but maybe more than anything else their design. They're very simple and minimal and have a very clean and modern aesthetic. They have a really wide range of models including the very popular Tangente, Ludwig, Orion, Zurich, Metro which is a little funkier and the Tetra which is a square model. One thing that I really love about the brand is that I feel they're sort of under the radar. I would say for the average person looking to buy a first watch that NOMOS probably wouldn't be on the radar at all but that's one of the things I really like about these watches and then when you do see someone with one you kind of look at him and know that he's someone who really did his research and picked a brand that is very very interesting. Price for a pre-owned depending on the model you're talking somewhere between $2,000 to $3,000. Next we're talking about a brand that is often considered Rolex's little brother or cousin and that is Tudor. The specific model I'm going to be recommending here is the Black Bay. The Black Bay is more of that diving style watch like the Submariner. Very cool, very sporty. I've not met anyone who doesn't really love the look and style of this watch. It's hard to quote-unquote compete with the Submariner but the Black Bay is a model that has its own kind of die-hard following. You can find them on metal bracelets, leather straps and in my opinion these look really really good on a NATO strap. Pre-owned you're looking at about the $2,900 price range. Now if you want something that doesn't have that dive watch bezel and look I would recommend looking into the Black Bay 41 Heritage Black Bay which is more kind of in that style of the Rolex Explorer where you have the plain bezel instead of the dive style look. I would say it's a more versatile choice if you're looking to have just one watch and price here is right around $2,000. Moving on now to a brand that's kind of overlooked in my opinion and that is Zenith. Really great watches, very classy and the particular model I want to talk about here is the Zenith Elite Ultra Thin. It's a 40 millimeter case available in gold and stainless steel but we're going to focus on the stainless steel here because that's going to keep it under our $3,000 cap for the video. It's a mechanical movement, really simplistic design with kind of an interesting little flourish with a sub-second style at 9 o'clock. Leather strap, this is a very versatile watch. It's dressy but it could definitely be worn with more casual outfits as well. This watch is very much like the Nomos watches we took a look at earlier in that it's kind of unexpected when you see one in the wild which for me is not that often but it's such an interesting watch and one again if you're looking for a one watch collection would fit the bill absolutely perfectly. Priced for a pre-owned Zenith Elite Ultra Thin you're looking at right around $2,500. Finally something super sporty and that is the Tog Hoyer Carrera caliber 16 chronograph. Some people love chronographs, some people hate them. Personally I happen to really like chronographs, I use mine all the time. Anyway, getting off topic. The Tog Hoyer Carrera caliber 16 chronograph. 41 millimeter stainless steel case, steel bracelet, though the Carrera Heritage caliber 16 has a leather strap. It's an automatic movement. You've got your pushers at 2 and 4, chronograph registers at 12 and 6, running seconds at 9 o'clock. It's a big watch, it's sporty, not as versatile but if you're looking for a sport watch I think it's a great option. Price kind of varies for these watches but you can find them somewhere in the range of $1,500 to $3,000. So those are just five picks of solid alternatives to a Rolex, the Omega Seamaster, a variety of watches from NOMOS Glashuta, the Tudor Black Bay 41, the Zenith Elite Ultra Thin and the Tog Hoyer Carrera caliber 16 chronograph. So what would you add to the list? Let me know down in the comments. Thanks again to eBay for sponsoring this video and all the watches I mentioned in this video are available through eBay's authenticated luxury watch platform. Links to examples of each are down below in the description. Thumbs up, subscribe, hit the bell and until next time. Thanks for watching and stay tailored.


Hello, in this lecture, we're going to work a problem that will liquidate a partnership, close up a partnership and distribute the assets and pay off the liabilities. We have looked at a problem in a previous video where we had a liquidation process where we sold the inventory at a gain up here in part one. Part two will now sell the inventory at a loss, so the process will be much the same. However, now instead of selling the inventory here at a gain, we're going to sell it at a loss. It's on the books at 5.30, and we're going to sell it for 4.50. We're going to put this information into two formats, one being a worksheet format such as this, where we can see our accounts in a worksheet. We can see our capital counts in a worksheet. We're also going to record it in terms of a journal entry. So we're going to record the journal entry in this area here, and we will post that to the trial balance to see what happens in terms of a trial balance. So here's going to be the trial balance over here. And then we have our accounting equation of assets, equal liabilities, and owner's equity. So in our trial balance, we're going to have assets, the only two assets being cash and inventory. We've got the payable, being the liability, and credits are going to be represented with brackets in this worksheet. Then we have our capital accounts. We've got the three capital accounts here. We don't have any net income at the time or expenses because those have been closed out to the balance sheet, and that's the process that needs to happen before. We can then close out the company, liquidate the company. Now the order of liquidation will be that we want to first sell the assets. The only asset we have is going to be represented by inventory. That's going to represent all assets if we had a larger company with obviously more assets, larger partnership with more assets. We're going to sell the inventory. Then we're going to see whatever gain or loss we have. In this case, we'll have a loss and we're going to recognize that as a gain or loss. We will then allocate that gain or loss to the capital accounts in accordance with their profit sharing, which we'll put over here. Then we'll pay off the payable accounts. We're going to pay off this liability. Again, all liabilities we should pay off. We're just going to represent all liabilities with one liability, in this case being accounts payable. Then we'll be left with just cash and the capital accounts, and we can pay off the partners in that way. Why do we need to do it in this order? The reason is, well, what if, for example, C here asked for the money right away, C says, hey, I'm a partner. The partnership is closing. I have a capital account balance of $212. Why don't you just pay that now, $212.5, or pay me what you can. Notice we don't have the cash. We've only got $182.5. If we gave C $182.5 and say, okay, here you go, that's fine because we have inventory that we're going to sell here. What if we don't sell the inventory for $530? What if we sell it for less? We then have a problem with the other two partners saying that, well, now the money has been given away already to one partner and we have a loss. Therefore, we want to first sell the inventory, then pay off the liabilities, and then allocate the cash to the partners at the end of the process to make sure it works out as fairly as possible. So we're going to do this in two different ways. We're going to say that first we have these partners sharing a partnership at a three to one ratio with KCM respectively. So what does that mean? What does the three to one mean? And note that if we, the simplest way to think of a partnership is if we have two partners and we say, well, we split it 50-50, 50%, 50%. Why do we have to represent this in a ratio? Why don't we represent it in percentages? Sometimes the percent is not precise. And so sometimes we have a situation where the ratio is more precise. This is one of those situations. Therefore, the ratio is actually more precise than a percentage allocation. So how would we then convert this to a percent? Well, let's think about that. We're going to put it into a percent in Excel. We're going to put K here. K has three out of the three to one or six. Therefore, it's going to be equals three divided by, and I'm going to put brackets in the list of those, divided by three plus two plus one brackets. So we're going to put the division problem three over six. We're going to represent it in this format to show the whole information. Equals to make a formula three divided by, which is of course the slash brackets because we need the order of operations being adding before division. And then we're going to have three plus two plus one. That's three divided by six, which is 50 or 50%. If we want to convert that to a percent, then we can go to the home tab. We can go to the numbers group and we can go to percentage and there's the 50%. Then let's do the same thing for C, who has two out of the six. So we're going to go to C, same thing, we're going to say equals. Then I'm going to say two divided by slash brackets. We're going to say the three plus the two plus the one. Yes, we could just type six, but we're going to put the whole thing in there. And then we're going to say enter and we come up to 0.33. And if we want to see a percent, home tab, numbers group, percentage. Now note that that percent is not actually 0.33%. It's actually, if we go to the home tab, numbers and increased decimals like so, it goes on forever. It's 33.3333 on forever. That's why the ratio is more precise than the percent. Note that even though we are reporting it as a percent in Excel, in the cell, that's what it looks like. It looks like 33.  Then at 33.33. But if we use that cell in a calculation, it is really a ratio because what's really in there is two over six. So keep that in mind. I'll point that out as we go. I'm going to add a couple of spaces to all of these to make them equal so we can see a little bit more of what the actual number is. So I'm going to add a couple of decimals. That's 50. Obviously there's zeros after that there. That's an even one. We're going to do the same thing for M which has one over six. So we're going to say this equals one divided by slash brackets for order of operations three plus two plus one and brackets. So one over six would be point one seven. If we make that a percent home tab numbers percent. I'm in the wrong cell. I'm in the wrong cell undo. We're going to be on this cell and I'm going to go home tab numbers percent. And it's not really 17. However, because if I go to the home tab numbers increase decimals. It's really 16.67 right. So or it's really 666 on forever. And so we're going to leave it at 16.67 and recognize the fact that that is not the whole number. It's really one sixth or 16.666 on forever. All right. So keep that in mind anytime we have an issue like that. If the number comes out if we have a rounding issue it's probably due to or it could be due to the rounding of Excel using the rounding function. Okay. So now we're going to go down here and we are going to sell the inventory. So we're selling this inventory for cash. So we got 450. If we see this in terms of a table will do it in terms of a table first. Then we'll do it in terms of the trial balance. So we're going to receive 450. So cash is going to go up by 450 like so. And we're going to take the inventory off the books. The inventory is on the books at 530. So we're going to do a subtraction. I'm going to take a negative 530 like so. And then we have we have this difference here, meaning the inventory is greater than the cash we got for it. We lost money and we lost 80,000. So that 80,000 then is going to have to be eaten. It's going to have to be allocated to the partners. We're going to have to reduce their partnership balances by the loss that we have there. So we could do that. What we're going to do is we're going to take that 80 and multiply it times their profit percentages. So I can do that in this way. I'm going to say this equals the sum of the 450 and the 5 brackets. The 450 and the 5 is a negative 80 because it's a loss. And then we're going to say times and I'm going to point to that 50% and enter. So let me do that with a calculator. This is the formula that we're using. Obviously what we did here is that we took the 450,000 minus the 530,000. We have an $80,000 loss that we're going to allocate to K based on the profit percent of 50% times .5. That's how we're coming up with this negative 40. Let's do the same thing for C. We're going to do the same thing and say this equals the sum of this and this, which is a negative 80 brackets times their profit percent for C, which is 33.333 and entered. So once again, you could see the formula here. Let's do it with a calculator now. And we're going to say that this then is the 530,000. So let's do the cash first. We come up with a loss of 450,000 minus the 530,000. We lost 80,000. We're going to allocate to C 33.33 or times .3333 if we put it into decimal format. That comes up with 26.664. Why is that slightly different than the 26.667 over here? Because over here, this is actually a more accurate number in Excel. It's more accurate because we're using the cell reference of this cell to do the calculation. And even though that cell says 33.33% it's really two sixths, which is 33.3333 on forever. So keep that in mind when you're working with Excel. That's that's a distinction that could kind of drive you a little crazy. So if you don't see what's happening. So we're going to do the same thing here and for H in H 27 for partner M equals the sum of we're going to highlight these two cells again. Brackets times and I'm going to point to that 16.67 and enter. Once again, this is the formula. If we did that on the calculator, all we're doing is the 450,000 minus the 530,000. That's a negative 80,000 times. If we make this a decimal point 16.67 and enter. Once again, 13.336 slightly different than the 13.333 we calculated over here. Why? Because we used this cell reference, which is not really 16.67%. It's really one sixth. So that keep that in mind. All right. So we're going to do that same thing. Well, now let's bring our balances down here. So we in cash, we had 1825. We increased it by 40. Let's do the calculation equals 1825 plus 450,000 gives us 632.5. Do the same thing for inventory. We're going to say inventory was at 530 minus the 530. But in Excel, it's going to be a plus because this is a negative number. So it's plus a negative 530. That'll make it go down to zero. If that's confusing, just realize that if you did it the wrong way, if we said 530 minus 530 and it came out to that, that doesn't make sense. And obviously what happened is we went the wrong way. We doubled the 530 and we want to do a subtraction problem. So we realize, oh, that means that delete equals this plus this because this is a negative number. So it's plus a negative number. It means it goes down to zero. Nothing happened to accounts table. So we'll just bring that balance down. I'm just going to say, and notice I'm starting to hit plus instead of equals. It's going to be the same thing. If you start with a plus, it's going to Excel knows it's a function. We're going to point to this 240,000. I'm going to select tab and tab over that. I'll do the same thing here. I could hit plus or equals. I'll hit equals this time equals the beginning balance for K, which is 93,000 in case capital account. And once again, I'm going to say plus this negative number. So it's going to reduce the capital account like so. We're going to do the same thing here for C. We're going to say this equals the 225 beginning capital number plus this negative number 26667 brings the balance down to 185,833. One more time for M. We're going to say this equals point to the 167 plus this negative number, which will bring the balance down to 153,667. Now we're going to do the same thought process, but now do it in terms of the trial balance and the general ledger. Some people really like to see it in terms of a table such as this. Some people such as myself would rather kind of see it in a trial balance because I've worked a lot more with the trial balance format and we can see that what account will go down as we post them. So if we think about this in terms of a journal entry, we can think, well, what's happening here? We're selling the inventory for cash. So we can ask our questions, is cash affected? Yeah, cash is affected. We're getting cash for the sale of the inventory. Cash is a debit balance. We need to make it go up. How do we make something go up? We do the same thing to it as what it is. That's a debit. Therefore we're going to debit it because that's the same thing to it. So I'm going to copy that cash. We're going to put that in cell J25, right-click and paste it 123. So there is the cash and the cash we receive is the 450. So we're going to say the 450 will be the debit 450,000 and enter. Then the credit will be going to one credit will be going to inventory. Inventory here is what we sold. It's on the books for 530,000. We sold all of it needs to go down to zero. How do we make something go down? We do the opposite thing to it as what it is. That's a debit. Therefore we're going to credit it because that's the opposite thing to it. And we want to make it go down and doing the opposite is how to do so. So we're going to copy that going to put this over here in J26. Right-click, paste 123 and the credit will be for then the amount that is in there of a negative for the credit 530,000.


Welcome to how to scale your business. I've just gotten thrown into this, and I'd like to start out by just letting everybody give a quick introduction of themselves and your 10 second elevator pitch. Tell us what you do. Kim, I'm gonna put you around the spot. I'm Kimberly Leperi. I am COO for Valet. We are a site management and development company. We take sites and help them grow specifically to their needs and scale up. We are long-term partners, digital partners, and we're just full-on agency, so. Hi. Thank you. I'm still, Ann and Aurora Cross. I still run React. As of now, I still run React Studios. We're an agency based in Tampa, distributed. We do a lot of custom development, both in the custom plugins. We do site builds. We're one of the VIP feature partners, and we like to focus on building things that haven't been built yet. Still Curry Maruki and, like Norcross, still CEO of CrowdFavorite. But my history for this panel is I've scaled four organizations from zeroed over 35 million in services revenue, and I wanna bring that here to the WordPress community. That's on. My name's Brett Cohen. I'm CEO of a digital agency called Imagine. We're outside of Boston. We also have an office in Delray Beach. I've been, I'm an overnight success. It just took me 20 years. I'm actually filling in for my partner, Bill Gadlis, whose name is in your program. He's sick, so I'm gonna do my best.  You said this, but how long have you been in business? I built my first website in 1996. Okay, so. 20 years. Is that 20? That is 20 years. Congratulations. 94. 2008. Okay. Valet's been fully up and running for four years. And let's start off by defining scale. What does scale mean? And what does scale mean to your business specifically? Who wants to go first on that? Just jump in. It's okay, Brett. Go ahead. I think from us, for our business, it's scaling employees, obviously, you know, how big of a company we are. I also think it's the types of projects that we work on and have worked on starting in 1996 with our first project, or my first project, it was $800. So scaling from that to where we are today with the number of employees and when to add those employees and who are those employees, especially the first few, those are the key ones. I think that's what it means to us. Okay. So for me, scale is a formula. And it's a formula of type of project, revenue, and employee per revenue. In the services business, really, whether you're doing value pricing or charging by the hour, at the end of the year, profit and loss is gonna come down to how much money you're making per billable employee. And a scale that's used a lot in professional services is a minimum scale of, for instance, $100,000 ahead. So can you get multiples on that? Can you get to 200? Can you get to 300? Can you do like Bain Consulting does and get over $400,000 per head in revenue? That's what scale means, whether you're doing it for the enterprise space or you're doing it for medium-sized projects or if you're doing it for small-sized projects. And it's a little bit different with the product world. Yeah, for us on the service side, they've pretty much outlined it. It's the type of project, the scope of project, our ability to handle those projects, employee count, things of that nature, on the product side, it's how much market saturation we're able to get, where the marketing reach goes, where we're able to find product revenue, where it matches up with needs in the community from a user base, from a development base, like things we can actually build that are realistic for us to build, maintain support, compared to what the market will bear from a pricing standpoint, and actually be able to determine where those numbers go and be able to manage multiple commercial products out in the same space at the same time without having to have a whole lot of overhead to constantly manage and keep them going. Yeah, for us it's a lot of the same, trying to make sure that we can bring people on, add on new services, do it in a way that's profitable. I think one of the major concerns for us scaling was to ensure that we could grow in all of those areas, money, revenue, services, processes, systems, but do it in a way that retained the quality of service that we wanted to have as part of our company. So once time to scale, what do you use as a measuring stick? I use lack of sleep, okay? I mean, jokes aside, like what happened for me, like was I realized that I was spending a lot of time, you know, I would have a full scale, a full scope of work to do, and then I would have to do all the other work to manage the work that I was doing. And, you know, I was getting the point where I was doing 80, 90, 100 hours a week, I was not sleeping ever, like people, like I had to switch my phone to 24 hour time because I didn't know if it was 7 a.m. or 7 p.m. anymore. It's funny, but it was legitimate, like, you know, people were starting to get worried about me.  I was like, no, I just don't sleep anymore. And that was when I kind of learned, you know, realized that something had to give. And that was where I figured, okay, is the revenue high enough? Where do I need to scale?   Fatigue is your measuring stick. That was my first point. There's so much truth to that. So much truth. It's panic and cold sweats, right? Like at some point when you realize I can't do this, my hands are too full or you lose sleep for consistently over a single issue or a problem, something comes back over and over again. And we've learned from that, thankfully. We sleep a little better now, but we started tracking the work that we do in measurable numbers. You know, how many tickets do we get? So how many hours do we spend? How much money goes out per lead that comes in? So we've started tracking things that we can measure and create relationships between to determine when that is. So we sleep better than Norcross now, I think. Oh, it's so sleep-welfing. To riff off of what Norcross said, the measuring stick of when to do that is exactly that, are you too busy for X? But what's interesting is, in my opinion, if you're a smaller organization, don't hire to double what you're doing. Hire specifically what your weaknesses are. So if you're horrible at writing, hire a writer. If you're a great developer and you don't do design, get more into, hire for your weakness, whatever that may be, that'll help you faster than doubling down on what you're already doing. Then once you have filled some of those weaknesses on whatever that is, then move on to actually trying to get depth of expertise.  I think in our case, and maybe in some of you, your case, it was just about the checkbook. It was looking in that checkbook and not seeing any money in there. Our scale was, we need sales and need customers. So our actual first employee was a cold caller. Our method was, let's get customers and then we'll figure out how to get the job done. And then it's pressure from clients. So we take on too much, we sell, sell, sell, take on too much work, and then we say, okay, now we gotta hire some people to do the work. And that's kind of how we did it over the years. So you're scaling, you're identifying where you need to scale based on a whole or a void or a weakness. What if I'm not able to identify that weakness for myself? If you can't, someone else will. Tell me about that. That was a serious question. So tell me about that. My experience was, I was having issues. I would forget to invoice clients. I would, you think you would never forget to get paid. I would forget to get paid. I would launch sites and forget to tell them that it was live. I would not answer emails because I was just so busy that I would be like, all right, I'm not answering. I'm not looking at email from this time to this time because it's too distracting. And then there'd be so many emails that were there. I'm like, all right, well, which ones are super important right now? And I forget once, okay, I'm gonna respond to that, but I gotta do some research and then it'd be two weeks later. And I would, the leads, I wasn't able to respond and keep getting the work from the leads because I didn't have enough time to respond to the leads that I was getting. And that was, it became apparent to me when like new work was slower and slower coming in because I simply didn't have time to actually get it. Like they were coming to me from a reckoning out. There were referral recommendation. Essentially all I had to do was, yes, I could do it and it would have been mine, but I didn't even have time to say yes. And that became readily apparent when those things stopped coming in. Yeah, sometimes you'll figure it out from going to an event like this. For us, we went to a builder.com show probably in 1999 and it was the first time that we actually heard the concept of a project manager and we said, because it was just us doing the work. So sell, sell, sell, then at night do the work. My partner's at home doing design, I'm doing some development, we're uploading together. And we hired a project manager, our first one and it really helped us out a lot and we wouldn't even have known about it or thought about it even though we could feel the pressure internally but we just didn't know what the answer was because we were so young and we just didn't know. And going to a conference, we started to hear other people talking about the notion of, hey, a project manager and you should have a project manager and we kind of bit the bullet and hired a project manager. And every single hire, especially at that time was like a big dilemma. How are you paying them? Do we have enough business? Do we have enough clients? So it's a struggle which is why I said earlier those key initial hires are big decisions. So I mean we've heard a little bit in the other panel, we've heard some of this panel today about risk. We're really talking about risk. So how do I, I know I'm covered this a little bit. I'm asking a leading question on purpose but how do I know when that timing is right, right? I've identified my weakness, right? I've identified that I'm, I've got fatigue, I'm lacking sleep, right? I'm not invoicing, right? I need this. When do I know when the time is right? When do I pull that trigger? Usually by the time you know, it's been for a while. For me it was, it was a few things that I realized that like for a good two, three month period that I needed to have done this.  Or it is risk, absolutely risk, a lot of it's blind risk, it's just, it was, I'm gonna do it. The first person that I hired, you know, Bronner and his contract, he's now partner in the agency, I vetted his code for 10 minutes. Cause I had so much work that needed to be done, I didn't have enough time like to go through and be like, that looks good. And that was it. And that was the extent of it, I didn't know. He and I are officers, we're not very good friends, but, and it worked out extremely well. I mean, it was much luck as anything else, but it got into that point where like, I didn't have enough time and I didn't have enough resources to go through a large process of doing this thing, I just had to just do it. And if it didn't work, I would have had to deal with it, but at that point there, I didn't really have much of a choice. I was kind of back into a corner. And I know Josh and he's right. He was extremely lucky, Josh is a great partner. And the same thing happened with me when we started what is today crowd favorite, we had a small team and we didn't realize that we needed to scale on one particular aspect until quite literally an existing client decided to leave the organization he was with and I thought to myself, he'd really be good for us. He's got the right something that might add to us. Started to think about it and talk to him and even though we didn't have an exact place, it's like that skill set would probably be really good for us and he's now become my business partner. I had no plan, it just felt right. So go with your gut, go with what you know is right for what you need to build. And what happens if I make a mistake? I think make a mistake and make it quick. I always say fail fast, don't be afraid to fail but do it quickly and move on. The business we're in, it's all labor. So it's not like you're making a mistake investing a million dollars in a printing press and then figure out that printing's dead. So you're hiring people and if somebody doesn't work out you just move on and hire someone else or say, oh, maybe, okay, we didn't need that person. We figured out we didn't actually need that person and you just move on. And there's other jobs and there's other people and people will move on from you in a heartbeat and sometimes in business when you wanna grow you have to do the same thing even though it's very difficult to move on. You take the risk and you learn from it. You take that mistake and you learn from it.  This isn't a good fit. Something's not going well or a client comes to you and says, I gotta go. You just, you take it and you use it and you move on and that's what helps you to make the risk next time with a little more confidence and with a little more certainty. So we've talked about scaling staff specifically so far. Wouldn't I know it's time to scale the type of projects I'm going after or the type of products I'm building? The amount of monies that I'm trying to tackle. From a services standpoint, the reputation that we were able to develop sometimes in spite of myself, we would, not the classiest, but yeah, I know, surprise to me too. But the scale of my development skill got better and especially when Josh came on we had now had two people who had a solid development ability. You know, we knew people, you know, we were active in the community. We knew people that we could reach out to if we had a very particular thing that we were working on. So some of our clients grew with us. We maybe built them a simple website or a small plugin for something and now two, three years later, they've grown and they need larger scale services and they're like, well, you built it then, can you build it now? And there's a lot of times where I felt, I felt comfortable with 90 to 95% of what they needed. And I was like, I can probably figure out 5%. It wasn't like a 50, 50 thing or like, I don't know how to do any of this and I'm just gonna say I can. And it was like, I know I can do almost all of this and I can figure out that a little bit. And let's talk, I have an issue with your question. And my issue with your question is this, not all scale of revenue is about getting a larger project. I know of more than two agencies in this particular community that do a really good job at volumizing smaller projects. And when they try larger projects, they'd fall on their face. Sometimes we'd help them, but it doesn't necessarily mean because I did a project of X size, my next project has to be of Y size. You don't need to necessarily do that. So what you're talking about is potentially scaling profitability. Yes. Correct? So with the current project base and the current product base, current service space, scaling profitability. Let's talk about that a little bit. I mean, you kind of did, but how do I go about doing that? So those of you who know Crud favorite, oh my gosh, you've grown so much in the last three years. What people don't realize behind the scenes is it's not a hockey stick.  Beware, beware of anybody who's doing that. It's a stair step. Major growth, plateau, figure out what you're doing, optimize, deal with trying to make sure you get your profit margins under control, try to get your processes going, do a general check. Because I know there's a mix of people who work in agencies here and agency owners here, but not all people in agencies will be comfortable with the growth path of where necessarily the entrepreneur wants to go. Not all the same people will be on the bus three years in that we're on the bus the first day and that's okay. If you handle it right, you can help them get a job somewhere else if you want to move your agency or maybe they do want to follow that journey with you and then it's your responsibility as a business owner to help them scale their own service, their own set, skill set. But if you do that, what'll end up happening is you will grow almost a further desire of those people to see your agency succeed and work with you and they'll watch your profit margin as much as you will. So everybody will benefit from that. Our scaling and profitability was, for us a lot of you talked about risk and hiring, we was also about risk and projects. We had some clients that would come on that we had great relationships with and we were talking to them every day and the one and one asked, well, do you do this? And you would thought, why not? Like Norma said, I can get most of that, sure, why not? And then somebody else asked, well, can you do this? And it was the same thing. So we went out on a limb, we tried it and then we did it twice and then we did it three times and we said, okay, is this something that we can add on to our services line? Is this something we can be profitable with?  So there's a lot of questions that come from it but really it's, you take that initial step, talk to your clients, the people that you work with every day. I mean, that's how you figure out if there's even another stream, right? There's something you might be interested in but it might not even be relevant to what you're doing. That might be a different conversation altogether but for us that was, the first step was actually just doing it a little bit or finding help to complete it and we did it most of the way. I think it's looking internally and refining your business and figuring out what you're actually good at and where you make the most money internally and once you can kind of separate out each individual piece and say, okay, I make a lot of money doing this and these are great projects and we have these great clients, you wanna try to do more of those types of jobs and don't take on the ones that are on the outskirts because you might need the money at the time. We've had so many projects over the years that we took that we knew what kind of outside of our range at the time but we couldn't pass it up because it was the dollars and then we take them and it kills our company because we're just not set up to do it. We had, it was too much stress on the employees. It was just didn't work and we over time have refined who we are. We have a really good sense of who we are, who our clients are, what are the types of projects we wanna work on and what we can actually execute on and we just work really hard at just selling those types of projects over and over again and we don't need to be everything to everybody. So there's a lot of stuff that's kind of outside our wheelhouse that comes in that we have opportunities for that we're just smart enough now after 20 years to be able to say that's not the right project for us. Now in that kind of a situation, do you find a person that you can refer to you? Do you have a network of people that you could refer those projects out to? We're trying. So I would say historically we've been in a bubble just so busy with our own stuff. We spent 10 years on our own content management system built in .NET and launched probably 700 or 800 sites just nonstop. We were like a little factory and we weren't part of a community until really WordPress and we just, we had some people who had worked for us in the past that if something that was too small for us came in we would give it out to them but then for whatever reason when we referred it out and things went south we ended up owning it so we kind of stopped that. But yeah, now as we move forward we definitely, so if anyone wants to talk to me about stuff we don't do that you may be interested in taking on I'm all is. That's great. I've got a follow up for both Andrew and Kim. When you got these requests for new services that were outside of your wheelhouse as you took on these new services or as you approach these new services were you completely transparent with your clients as to what your capabilities were and were not? It would really depend on what, I mean if it was so far out of our wheelhouse that we just simply didn't know what we were doing we wouldn't take it. If it were something where we have familiarity with e-commerce but we hadn't used this one particular package we'd be like that's not one that we've normally used however we've done enough e-commerce work that we feel confident. Internally we'd be like okay if we're gonna have to spend a little bit of time researching we're not gonna build that. That's on us. If it's something where we dig in we realize that this is just a terrible thing. We might be like we build milestones so we both either the client or us can kind of cut at certain points and we're not stuck in a whole project that none of us wants to do. We focus a lot on foundational growth we're like the things that we've gotten better at and added into our services like we've spent time making sure that we're actually confident doing it and we want to do it. Like there's work that we're qualified for that we couldn't be more bored doing so we don't do it. And that's fine. Different people find different things interesting. Like we don't have design at house. We have designers that we work with when the client needs it. We've tried having design at house much twice and for us it was horrible and it wasn't worth the effort of the management and the added revenue just it didn't make sense for us. For other agencies they couldn't think about not having design at house. So yeah there's gonna be certain stuff that comes our way that yeah we know designers. It's not a matter of qualification it's a matter of like we're not gonna project management design. Like we're happy to build it when it's done but we're not gonna sit on timelines because you don't like the shade of blue and you know which is fine that's design and that's great and people that love that stuff and I'm just not one of them. So you know that's where we kind of focus on like how far out of it is it really. Part of it was just kind of gut like do we wanna go there? Do we not? And then whenever we would talk to the client about it we kind of internally talk about what that would look like and if we'd be willing to go after it. But yeah we were always transparent with this isn't what we normally do. We're willing to do it for you but we would always show up with a list of this is what we can get you. There was always some minimum guarantee of we can do this for you. It's not gonna have star stripes and glitter but you know it'll be here. You'll have a box and it'll be done at the end of the day and if they were fine with that that was great for us and then we would use that to kind of over deliver if possible at the end of the day so that we could exceed our own expectations and the clients but it was a great way to learn be transparent so that they knew what they were getting at the end of the day and we felt confident that we could at least deliver something. And Kareem how do you handle requests for services that are outside of your wheelhouse? So full disclosure, you. That wasn't meant as a softball. Yeah, none of that. We have commercial partnerships with Rebecca Gill of WebSavvy with Zeke. We have found different expertise in different verticals and we use those and sometimes they go well and sometimes after a couple of projects we don't use them anymore but we're always looking and we're always looking to try and expand that because the more we verticalize the more respected we get in what we do well and that's really as important as it is to try and grow your business is what this panel is about. It's important to make sure that you're seen as an expert or you're gonna lose the base of why you're there. I'm gonna open it up to questions. So I'm gonna try to summarize and that's what I heard was basic question is subcontractors versus hiring full-time employees. Let's start there. We've done that with almost every employee. Everyone that we've hired full-time has been on contract for a period of time first just to make sure that we're a good fit both from a culture standpoint and from an actual work standpoint because I mean you can look at somebody's code and get a good idea if they actually wrote it or not but sometimes it's every now like there's some code that I've written like that's amazing I don't know how I wrote that and I don't think I could ever do it again. Then there's some stuff that I look at and be like clearly I was drinking Dayquil because that doesn't even look like something I would do on a dare. So we try to do contract for a period of time simply to make sure that everything's a good fit before we bring them on board. There's some people that we have existing relationships with as a contractor that they do very specialized things that like say buddy press we don't do a lot of buddy press work. So we have one or two people that we know that that's the real house. That's what they do. That's what they love. If we happen to have a project that that's a component of we'll bring them in because the amount of time that it's gonna take us to get re familiar with where it is from the last time we've used it is not worth that amount of time on our end whereas we'll bring them on even if it's a you know our rate compared to what their rate is even if that works out flat and it's not like extra not a margin on top of it we know that we have the expertise that we're not gonna be spending more time internally learning a thing that we're not gonna do a lot. Some things aren't worth contracting out and some things aren't worth hiring someone internally for to have somebody that has a specialty we'll house you that you can kind of bring in on projects. We from day one it's probably one of the few things that we did right from day one was have a 30 day kind of onboarding test out period you know you you can work for us and we'll give you a check but you know after 30 days we're gonna talk about how well you did and that has grown we now have a 90 day boot camp where we push people through we make sure that we give them all the tools they need to succeed if we are looking to keep them on long term so we'll push them through systems we'll push them through our meetings and our processes and then at the end of 90 days we see okay is this a good fit and that's how we handle it. Yeah we've had tons of contractors over the years and you know it's been a struggle to get the consistency of work that we're used to producing with our internal staff and the project managers that we have they would just rather work with the people that they know and trust in especially the tight deadlines and we're a volume shop so we're doing a lot of projects and with the people that we you know well let me back up it's always bothered me especially as we were adding people over the years that our next employee always had to be a full time person you know I wanted to not have to do that I just you know there should have been a transitional process but it's just so difficult for some reason for us to find qualified people to do the work even though we know they're everywhere around us so I you know we have internal meetings where I say maybe we just don't work well with other people it's probably us because it seems like everybody else can do this except for us so maybe there's something in our process if we can't get people to work the way we work maybe we need to figure out how to work the way everybody else works and we've explored it so we're open for it and we've traditionally been a traditional business where you come to the office and you work and we're transitioning more because of where we were located we don't there's not a huge talent pool so we're south of Boston we're kind of right in between Providence and Boston and we get nobody from Boston because they're just not going to travel that way we get a lot of people from Rhode Island but there's not a huge talent pool so we have to if we want to add qualified people we have to add people outside and we're struggling I know there are companies that are just strictly remote companies but we're struggling with that hybrid mode of traditionally being a traditional shop and then adding remote people you know how do you trust issues and how do you manage them and that type of stuff so we're a little bit the anomaly all our people are actually employees some of the people who are well known in this community who are team leads for us for instance Kerry Dills she is an employee yet because she wants to do things in the community she is an employee that is contracted so to speak her contract says we give her 25% of her time back for the community for her podcast for working with the WordPress community committing code to the open source project so she is an employee yet we give her time back we are a reflection of what our clients wants are and our clients want us to have employees that we have under contract rather than subcontractors I'd like to add something to that because one thing that I think is a nuance it should be a nuance but it's very important if you're considering full time part time contractor a portion of that is the work and what you're hiring for in the term but the other portion of that in the thought of scaling and profitability is the revenue that you're going to have to have and maintain to keep that person on board and continuously pay them month after month after month after month so if you're looking at a short term project where you need somebody and you're like oh maybe I can use them later on on the road but you don't know that's a good instance where you would just default to a contract situation because you don't want to promise somebody something and you're going to have to take that back after a while so a part of that equation is going to be the revenue you have to have that money before you hire that person or make sure that you can maintain it after you hire them because if not, it doesn't matter who you hire or what for you're still out somebody at the end of the day I was actually going to ask that as a follow up question then I was going to duck behind Brett do any of you use overseas resources? We haven't personally because the people that we've brought on as employees, we're not big enough to deal with foreign tax issues and that's just a scale issue that it's not the extra overhead and work and money to pay one foreign employee we're just not there yet but at some point we hope to be I'm sure that we never wanted to just bring in work and contract it out and just kind of be a storefront that no one really knew because eventually it does reflect on us and at times it was like if I had the time to QA all of this code that someone I don't know wrote I had time to write it to begin with and we would rather do a little bit less work and just know kind of what was going on at the door than try to shepherd a bunch of stuff that we don't know and then they disappear and then I kind of write it anyway so We've tried with contractors in Epic fail and again it might be the way we work it could have been a difference in time zone it was too much trouble with communication between our people and we've tried both companies where we've hired a company that's supposed to give us dedicated resources we just haven't been successful doing it So we actually have an office in Romania and when I found an individual that we wanted to hire in Romania actually flew over there started a small business in Romania paid the corporation tax to start a business there hired him as the first employee there and today we have 15 employees in Bucharest it's not as complicated as it sounds it just takes the effort to figure out what country and what their laws are and just talk to somebody who's done it before but it is more expensive at the beginning to figure that out and find the right cultural fit because people talk about offshore there are giant cultural differences around the world and depending on your personalities and your work culture you need to find the right fit And thank you for mentioning that because I was going to say as a follow up it does vary from country to country and you have to know what country and what personalities you're dealing with that's where it becomes hard to manage yep so that's a great question actually we didn't really cover that but let's cover that down so let's talk about pricing models and as it relates to scalability time and materials versus value based pricing versus any other models you might have at the end of the day you're trading time for money it really doesn't matter what you call it there's some people and some models work for like a single person like Curtis McHale who's in Canada does a lot of e-commerce work membership site stuff really good he does value based pricing he talks up and down it's absolutely the best way to go for him it makes perfect sense he's one person he has X amount of time he charges X amount for that week or whatever and he knows he's gonna get a certain amount of stuff done in that week works totally fine for him because he's the only person in charge of his time as soon as you start adding employees and you're tracking multiple people's time over multiple people's projects that model breaks out a little bit and you're still paying your employees for their hourly time because your employees don't really care what your pricing model is they care what their paycheck says so at that point again you're trading time for money how you wanna trade it and what you wanna label it it's really just window dressing value based pricing is hard it's very hard we've embarked on that journey and I think at the end of the day the major lesson is how you present your pricing to your client and how you factor it internally or what you label it or again it's time for money and we found one example it's a lot easier to talk to clients about doing work if we don't talk about what's this many hours you know we'll say oh it's gonna take this three days or something it's really just in how you present it to them how you calculate that internally you don't have to be that transparent with them right you can just give another subset of what it is you're gonna be giving them but yeah that's value based pricing is very hard it's doable but like he said with one person and a larger scale project is probably the better way to use it so I'm a giant fan of value based pricing with one caveat the top 2% of enterprise clients don't even start the conversation they will rip your argument to stretch but outside of that value based pricing works and it works better and better the more experience you have at pricing your own projects because what you can do is if you can control those costs you can control your profit margin and you're not talking about hours you're not talking about dollars you're talking about a fixed price we do that a lot with a lot of our clients but it's quite literally like walking up to a craps table or a roulette wheel if you don't have a very solid process for pricing and we probably spend 30% more in the estimating process than any one of our employees would like but the reason we do that is so that we can lock that down and understand it we have multiple iterations where we have the people doing the estimates or being questioned and talking with management and the client and it just goes back and forth and you're like why would it take you three weeks to get me a price it takes us three weeks to get you a price because we're gonna make sure we've covered all our bases and it's gonna be a fixed price and if something happens that is in our control it's our problem not yours but then you also have to have very important scope creep and scope management I know there's several other questions in the room but we are out of time on this one so I'm gonna invite the panelists to step outside if you have any further questions for them but a big round of applause for all four this is great


What's up everybody, Jason here for jazzybeadscasebreak.com. This was our last filler We needed to sell out to unlock the hip parade dual case break with this 2022 pristine Topps pristine packed filler Random teams number 19. So first we do the break, randomize customer names, teams It should be the hits out and at the end we'll take the customer names, randomize them, and the top 9 out of the 30 get in And this will be coming up next after that Dice roll it. We got ourselves a 1 out of 6, 7 times. Good luck So packed filler first. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 1 out of 6, 7, 7, Jordan down a monte.  It is a quick little packed filler So no trades. All of you guys there Andrew McCutcheon orange for the fillies. It's going to tie there to 25 Switching back to the round of the arc screen and again top 9 get in roll 3-0-1 four times. Good luck 1 2, 3 And 4 4 times So Nestor down a bill. Unfortunately you guys are not in Benina is Dwayne last spot mojo Zachary, Rosario, Zachary, Chad Wright, Chad Wright, Jeremy Port, Jordan Cohen, and Jeremy Port There you go.  Thank you guys


I have been challenged by almost 100 of you, you think I cannot do this. George versus Civilization 6, Beyond Earth, it launched two days ago and I got 95 dislikes on my latest video because 95 of you thought I can't meet the challenge. 98 of you thumbsed up the video so it's about half and half. Here is the challenge. I said I can beat Civilization 6 at the hardest level of play, Apollo difficulty. How many of you agree?  So I accept the challenge and I will start a new Let's Play on the MGM channel, youtube.com slash MGM, and it will be at the hardest level of play so we can all learn together, you and me, how to beat this new game by Sid Meier. The game is very hard. I have lost many times and I have a full Let's Play 13 episodes on the MGM channel right now at the Soyuz difficulty which is the hardest level of play minus one, but now we're gonna start on the hardest level of play, Apollo difficulty. How many of you are playing this game? Tell me in the comments below. How many of you are playing this game at Apollo difficulty? Tell me in the comments below. Let's see if I can beat this game with your help and let's learn together. Who am I? I am George, founder of Freedom and this is Freedom. And you've been watching Let's Discover Freedom. Click the first video to learn what is freedom and how it helps you grow. Click the second video to learn about sponsorships for all Freedom partners even if you have just 10 subscribers. And click the other videos like How Do I Leave Freedom to Learn More? Click Get More Views to learn how to build your audience faster on YouTube. Click Get More CPM to learn how to make more money from your channel and click Get More Music to learn where to get more music to spice up your videos. Click the first playlist to watch The George Show on Freedom. That's my show. Or watch The Anthony Show or The Alex Show also on Freedom. And we will grow together as a family because this is the Freedom family. You are part of it, we are all part of it and we're all growing together. So grow with us and partner with Freedom. That play now button right there on the video bar is all you need to click to get started.  What happened to being doctors and teachers? What happened to being your brother's keyboard?


What what give us something? Right The body was in cafeteria and the person I literally just saw bent and I can't remember if it was pink or if it was purple So Julian, I'm sorry if it's not you Felix and Chris Okay, so then it must be corpse because I saw somebody bent.