Hilary Topper On Air

If you're training for an endurance event I'm sure you have felt tired before or after a workout. Custom athletic supplements can help you achieve your aspirations. But, with so many supplements out there, what one is best for you? And, how and why are supplements important for endurance athletes overall?

About the Interview

In this episode of Hilary Topper on Air, Hilary talks with Craig Dinkel, founder of BioTrōpic Labs – a sports performance company specializing in custom formulated supplements designed to enhance training and give you a competitive edge.

Craig discusses his background and why he founded BioTrōpic Labs, including her personal experiences with his custom supplements. Listen as Craig talks about whether supplements are good for you, the negative connotation often associated with them, and how to do your due diligence. They'll also discuss how supplements are not just for competitive moments, but also for tapering and recovery and even touch upon overuse. Learn why supplements are important for endurance athletes.

About Craig Dinkel

Craig Dinkel is a sprint freestyle and fly swimmer, having trained and competed for years on a world-class level. He was coached by two different Olympic coaches as well as the second-winningest swim coach in NCAA history in all divisions. Some of his accomplishments are:

• Twice qualified for Olympic Trials
• Earned 23 All-Americans
• Set 4 NCAA records
• Won 3 NCAA Team Titles
• Competed in several International competitions
• Won 3 gold medals at Jr. Olympics
• Was the fastest inductee into my collegiate Hall of Fame

Craig has intensive experience with training and competing with the very best athletes at the National, World, and Olympic level. Just like you, he knows what it means and what it takes to train and compete at the highest levels. He's gone toe to toe against Olympic Gold Medalist and World Record Holders. Competing against the world’s toughest and best competitors has pushed him to be better and the best he can be. Contact BioTrōpic Labs

BioTrōpic Labs serves athletes by giving them the ultimate edge in training for sports performance success. Engineered by leading world-class athletes and trainers with the focus of helping athletes to achieve their goals, there is no better sports supplement to help you train better and gain a competitive edge. They share with you a common passion and goal of working hard day after day to not just beat our personal bests, but the competition itself.

BioTrōpic has one mission in mind: to make the highest quality, leading-edge, and high-octane athletic performance supplements. Their unique position of being experts in our field and being high-level athletes ensures that their products deliver the most amount of value possible. BioTrōpic Labs exists solely to assist you in achieving your best ever sports performance.

For more information or to purchase custom supplements visit https://www.biotropiclabs.com/. For FREE shipping and 20% off your order, use code: hilary20. 

Children’s books have always had a special place on bookshelves. They often act as the first window to a child’s new experience. They can teach life lessons, peak curiosity, and create fun for children of all ages. And, they’re an important educational tool for children to spark imagination, learn literacy, and see the world from different perspectives. But, what does the future of children’s books look like as we continue to battle the COVID-19 pandemic?

About the Interview

In this episode of Hilary Topper on Air, I’m speaking with Michael Girgenti. Michael is an author and founder of Strawberry Pencil Magic - the future of original children's stories & content.

Michael Girgenti of Strawberry Pencil Magic discusses the current state of children’s books. He speaks to us about his vision of where he’s taking the industry. Listen as we chat about his classroom Zoom experiences across the US and learn what’s in store next for his new book brand!

From more books, new toys on the way, and jumping into animation, there is a lot to discover!

About Michael Girgenti

Michael Girgenti, a Chicago native, is a California creative and has published more than 15 children's books. To date, he has over a hundred in his archives and is still expanding. Exploring all creative platforms from music, film, and modeling, Michael is an entertainment specialist. He recently landed a Barnes & Noble global distribution deal. His new children’s book brand is ready to compete with all of the top children's book writers, publishers, and kids-oriented media companies. From the words of Michael Girgenti of Strawberry Pencil Magic, and his brand's trademarked slogan, “Look for the star!”.

Contact Strawberry Pencil Magic

Strawberry Pencil Magic is the future of original children's stories & content. Strawberry Pencil Magic will provide an ingenious alternative to the conglomerates in diversified multinational mass media & entertainment. To contact Michael or learn more about Strawberry Pencil Magic, visit www.strawberrypencilmagic.com.

In 2012 after the passing of my mom, I interviewed my dad. We talked about his life with my mom and their 55 years of marriage. I wanted to know what the key was if any. How could people stay together for 55 years? What was the secret to success?

I thought this interview was appropriate now since, on Thursday, September 9, my dad passed away.

Give a listen. It will put a smile on your face as he talks about the way he met my mom, the crazy honeymoon they had, and some of the "nutty" trips we took as a family growing up. This is truly a celebration of his life.

Thanks for listening....

Is your child having strange symptoms? Imagine your child wakes up one morning and can't move an arm or a leg, has trouble speaking, can't taste, is suffering small seizures, or even temporarily blinded, all the tests come back normal and the doctors can't figure it out. This is an alarming trend that's happening now in children and some adults as a result of acute stress due to COVID-19. This is called conversion disorder. And although it's usually temporary, it's a way the brain copes with too much emotional stress. What parents do and what do they need to know?

I'm Hilary Topper and this is Hilary Topper on air. Today I have the great pleasure of speaking with Dr. Fumi Stephanie Hancock, CEO of Pool of Bethesda Psychiatric Health and a bestselling author of 24 self-help books. Dr. Hancock, welcome to the show.

Dr. Hancock - Thank you so much for having me, Hilary. Thank you.

Hilary - So can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?

Dr. Hancock - Oh, wow. Well, I'm a board-certified psychiatric, doctor of nurse practice out of Arizona. I own a group of clinics, but, prior to that, I was a social worker. This means that I was already exposed to seeing children go from foster care to adoption and just the cyclical, you know, go in and out and in and out. And I was able to see a lot of mood disorders going on. And because of that, I went back to school to do nursing until I got to the advanced practice. And now this is all I do. I see patients from four years old all the way to 99 years old.

Hilary - Wow. Let's talk about conversion disorder. What exactly is it and why is it prevalent right now among children?

Dr. Hancock - Thank you so much for asking that question. Uh, when you look at that word convert right conversion, which means something changing from one state to the other. And so when you talk about conversion in psychiatric, we're talking about people who exhibit certain symptoms, but when you take them to a physician, you really cannot find a medical reason for these things that they're going through. So it's more of, it becomes more of a mental issue, even though that what they are exhibiting looks like a physical, like a physical thing that primary care can take care of.

Hilary - So, how do you go about treating this? I mean, first, it's gotta be diagnosed and I'm sure these children, they put them through a lot of different tests before they come to this.

Dr. Hancock - Absolutely. A lot of times, because it is not something that is so known, so I thank you for even bringing it to the forefront because, with the pandemic and everything, kids are being brought to someone like me, brought a family, going to primary care and thinking, oh, well, you know, they have seizures or they can't move or, oh, well, they can't speak well. So you have people really looking at all the things before, even looking at conversion. And so, because of that, it's important that we ask them. Parents were with that, seeing all these signs that are there feel like physical and you're going to the primary care and they say, uh, yeah, it looks physical. We ran a test, we did an EKG. We did all kinds of blood work. We do all things, nothing. We don't see anything there. Then it's time to come to a psychiatric person like myself because we know that it is more of a mental health issue than a physical issue.

Hilary - Well, before we move on, just have to say that I am so appreciative of our sponsors and must take a moment to thank them. Please support our sponsors and tell them that you heard about them on Hilary Topper on air. Special thanks to the Russo law group, the Profit Express with Tim Healy, Pop International Galleries, Gold Benes LLP, and the Pegalis Law Group.

Now, Dr. Hancock back to you, we were talking about conversion disorders in children. What tips can you offer parents regarding mental health for children as we start to come out of this COVID-19 pandemic.

Dr. Hancock - Thank you for asking that again. One of the things that I want to talk about each, the fact that our children are going through a lot of stress. So it's important that we put our kids in a routine, they need to have a routine as much as, they've been in the house, cooked up in the house for over a year. Some of them are a bit online, you know, not doing well, so great on online schools. So it's important that as they begin to now swittch from an online school into on-site, they need to have a routine. And by that, I mean, For example, if they have whole walk time, make sure that they're all work time sticks to, for example, if it's 2:00 PM, let it be 2:00 PM. If it's, 12 noon that they have lunch, stick to that. If it's a playtime that is 3:00 PM, stick to that, they need to because they're already going through panic. And because they do not know what's going to happen going back to school, they are one minute excited about going back the other minute. They're not too excited because they've been out of touch for a while. So the anxiety is there, but if you can calm them down, and give them singing then that can really slow down, the need to want to kind of them, the brain wants to switch into, well, uh, let me find ways that I can cope with the stress.

Hilary  - And are there any other methods that kids can cope or parents could teach kids or, you know, how you teach parents to teach kids to cope. For example, do you do any kind of like meditation or anything like that?

Dr. Hancock - Well, some of the things that we do is the breathing exercise is really very great. A lot of our kids, they panic. And so they go into this hyperventilation. I remember several years ago I had a opportunity to travel to Saudi Arabia and I worked in Saudi Arabia for several years. And I would see this in kids, but I did not even understand what it was. They would come into class and boom they'll drop and you'll see. As soon as one drops, the other drops and the whole class is dropping. I just drop in with incredible amount of seizure. This is the way of coping. We need to give them, we call it cognitive behavioral therapy, where you take irrational thinking and turn them into rational. And for example, you teach them if they come to you and they say, oh my God, I know I kept me in school today because, and they give us all the days irrational. Your role is to say, okay, um, that sounds rational to you, but let's think about that for a second. What could happen if this, if what you say is true or what could happen if it's not. So you need to teach our children how to take that irrational thinking to rational thinking by really. You as a parent, making yourself an example of making the right decisions, stress management is, it's a good thing, exercising. It's a good thing. Debriefing exercising is also a good fit too. And of course, giving them time to really play with their friends, giving them time to use. Even the internet is not as bad provided is not something that you sit in front of for 11 hours a day.

Hilary - That was my next question. You know, is it okay for kids to do use a screen time? You know, there's been so many different studies out there that are so conflicting about screen time. Could you. Just address that a little bit more.

Dr. Hancock - Yeah. Let's talk about that for a second. Now here's the thing we live in a technology age. We cannot shield our children from it, you know, even in advanced technology. So there's not, there's nothing wrong in giving them time. To be there, but of course, you also want to be watched for, to understand what they're doing on there. I've often found, parents that would just leave their kids and say, oh, they just want to be by themselves in their room. I'm just going to leave them alone. And then you leave that kid alone to his hers own device. 10 hours on the internet now that could, that could smell trouble. So there is nothing wrong with growing in technology if it is used the right way, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. We think it's where they've come together. I have some books where they just come together and they use the technology to come together to talk about the anxiety. Talk about depression, talk about bipolar. So there is a great way that you can use the tool. However, depending on the age of your kids, you've got to be a participant in the tube. You just cannot do ends off with a five-year-old and than go sit in a bedroom, doing something else. Why you leave your five-year-old to play around on the internet for 10 hours crazy.

Hilary - And, and I guess people do that and that's so sad. I know for me, getting outside really helps my mental health. Does this pertain to children too?

Dr. Hancock - Oh my goodness. Oh, absolutely, a lot of parents who tell me, oh, he just wanted to stay in his room. She just want to stay in her room for ever. But then we have something called vitamin D. Right. And the sun is the best way that you can get natural vitamin D.So when you have kids indoors all day with that, you'll have the coordinates or the room is dark and everything like that. What happens is that increases their anxiety. It increases that depression, but when they are out there, the sun. They get that natural vitamin D that helps, that helps to uplift them away from that depression. Then they also get a time to actually breathe and just breathe fresh air into their system. That's also good. Then they're out there playing with others or maybe with their family members. And just exercising every part of their bodies. Some of them go through like fake the call, them false seizures. And because they've been home for so long doing absolutely nothing. So their brain, to cope with all that, go into seizure. We really, I mean, you need to really see this, and looks like seizure. It feels like seizure. The mother is just like, oh my God, what is this? Well, it is not really a seizure.

So when we take them out, they're exercising themselves when they come back. I think even with adults, I don't know about you. When I go out and take a walk and come back, I feel a lot better. My mind is clearer. And so we have to expect that our children are like that.

Hilary - Absolutely. Now let's just talk about. What a parent should do. So their child is having these seizures or there are things going on and they just don't understand what would be your suggestion on what are the steps are to do for, you know, for a parent to take care of their child is the first step to take them to their general practitioner. Should they see someone like you?

Dr. Hancock - Wow. I tell you this, the very first one is seek help with a psychiatric provider because it is a psychiatric issue when you have, I actually had a mother about a few weeks ago. She actually took a picture because this always happened to the kid is a 14 year old and she will go into seizure at 12 midnight and they kept watching it, that it was always between midnight and 12:15. And so. She took a video and actually sent it to me. And I actually literally watch all that movement with our kid. So when you start seeing your kid going through this, I would advise any parent, please seek help with a psychiatric provider, because there are so many ways that you could treat this with a professional.

Hilary - Now I am a big proponent to therapy and psychotherapy, but there are some people who are not, they feel that there's a stigma and there's a shame around this. Can you talk a little bit about that? And if you have any case studies in regard to that?

Dr. Hancock - So, yeah, so here's the thing, cause when we deal with situations like this, I, like you, talk the language that a parent out there would understand. Here's the deal. This is your kid. It is nobody's kid. You're the one who have to face not sleeping overnight. You're the one who have to deal with the pain of watching your child go through the ups and downs. Right. And so as much as we want to talk about stigma, which is out there, there's a lot of stigma out there, but the truth is we know that one right now. Where we are right now, particularly with the COVID pandemic, one in five kids right now are dealing with depression and anxiety, but they're not able to tell their parents now what if three are dealing with seizures, not just seizures alone, but suicidal ideation, particularly in the area that I'm in right now. This is what I'm seeing. One in every three per child that comes to see me. Tell me, I have suicidal thoughts as suicidal ideation, and I've been checking that and just watching that trend. So as a parent, well, we know and understand that there's a stigma because of the pandemic. Things are erupting right now that we can no longer talk about stigma. We have to talk about how to treat our child, how to make sure that they're okay.

Let me give you an example. About a few months ago, I had a four-year-old that attempted to hang himself in a closet. I want to parents hearing this to sit on that, hang himself a four-year-old. And by the time they caught him, the rope was around his neck.

He hit the on that, on that set. Some reason that the sister, the older sister, a 16-year-old was going through something. So they called me and I was going through medication with educational with her and somebody just said, well, ask about it. So I said, well, what would have been the house? How's your brother doing?

He said, oh, he is in his room. I said, oh really? I said, oh, bring him out. Let me talk to him. Well, what. Well, they went in and guess what it was right on that with the wrong, and this is, so this is a key that I come out five minutes before smiling, laughing, saying like everything was okay.

Hilary - That is so incredibly sad, and this is such an important topic. And I so appreciate you bringing this to my attention and to my listener's attention because this is really. This is something very, very serious and people really need to know about this. So, Dr. Hancock, can you tell our listeners how people can get in touch with you to find out more information?

Dr. Hancock - Well, they can always go to www.pobpsychiatric.com. That is my clinic. And then we have resources there for them that can talk to you that they can read. They can watch some videos that can tell them a little bit about not just myself, about the clinic and what we do. Well, more importantly, I would urge parents right now to begin to look particularly now that things are opening up slowly. We need to begin to look for signs of anxiety signs and talk with our children. Tell them, give them that opportunity to say, look, if you're feeling a certain way, you have to share with me so that I can help it is time to begin to have this conversation and begin to do it at a massive, a massive pace, because as the pandemic goes, this is yet another pandemic that is growing and many people are ignoring it because, and the fact is there is no shot. We don't have a vaccination mental illness. There's no vaccination. We have to deal with this.

Hilary - So, let me ask you something. One last question. Do you take people from all over the country?

Dr. Hancock - Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. There is tele-psychiatric now. So that's the great thing about it because of the epidemic all of our health plans have now kind of open themselves up to the possibility that we can see patients from different parts. So I have patients that dial in from New Jersey. I have patients in New Jersey. I have them in Wisconsin have in California. So I do have them that dial-in. So that's the cool part about this, and this is what also helps with the stigma, right? So if you, if you feel okay, you know, particularly those who are from the silent cultures, like myself, Africa and all those other countries, You have the tele-psychiatric, where you can do it in your home with nobody know nobody looking or that they'll never know unless you tell them.

Hilary - Right. So this is the great way that you can actually use and tap into the services. Well, we'll be putting your information on the website with this interview. Thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Hancock for being on the show. This was so informative. This was a real eye-opener and very upsetting, you know, so I do hope that if you are listening to this out there and you see an issue with your child, please give Dr. Hancock a call.

Dr. Hancock - Thank you so much for having me.

Thank you. I'd also like to thank our sponsors, the Russo Law Group, The Profit Express, Pop International Galleries, Gold Benes LLP, and the Pegalis law group. And last but not least, I want to thank you for tuning in and listening to this. If you want more information on this show or any other show, you can visit us at www.hilarytopperonair.com or you can find us on Spotify, iTunes, Google Play, Amazon Alexa, Apple podcasts, you name it. We're out there. Have a great week and we'll see you next time.

Now that the country is opening back up again, many people are excited to see their loved ones, eat at restaurants, go to shows, and live their lives in a more pre-pandemic way. But as excited as we all are, sadly, many of our favorite places to visit no longer exist. They shut down during the COVID-19 recession and couldn't survive. So today I am absolutely thrilled to welcome back my guest to the show. While others weren't so lucky, today's guest is excited to give us an update. I'm Hilary Topper and you are listening to Hilary Topper on Air. Joining me today on this episode is Jeff Jaffe. He's the founder and owner of Pop International Galleries. They are an art gallery on the Bowery at the junction of Spring Street in New York City. Welcome to the show, Jeff.

Jeff - Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here, given what we've all gone through this last year and a half or so.

Hilary - Gosh, it's been, it's been crazy. Um, well, I'm very happy to have you back on the show and I'm so glad that Pop International Galleries, which is one of my favorite in New York City, is still open and doing well. Can you remind our listeners about who you are and what Pop International Galleries is all about?

Jeff - Sure, The Pop Gallery started back, believe it or not, it's hard to even comprehend back in 1997 when I sort of came to realize that there was a need for an art gallery to focus on specific things. And in those days it happened to be pop art, which was Andy Warhol and Keith Haring and big names, John Michel, Basquiat, and Roy Lichtenstein and so on and so forth. And we did really well with that. But as things began to progress, it dawned on me that Pop International really meant focusing on pop culture more than pop art per se, that pop art fits into the realm and genre of, uh, what we're sort of interested in, but there were more things too, we were missing out on. And so we began to focus on sports, photography and rock and roll photography, and, more recently, street art and graffiti, and, as a consequence of which, Pop International Galleries has become this sort of iconic little center for focusing on anything that has to do with pop art and popular culture.

Hilary - So, as we were talking at the beginning of the show, I said that this year had been like no other, how was the gallery doing? And how did you fare during all of this? And how did you survive?

Jeff - It's funny. I was just going to say before you said the word survive that we dived into survival mode. There were choices that had to be made. And then there were decisions that were made for us that we had no power to overcome or resist or embrace. We just had to sort of take them on. And as a consequence of which, we sort of began to look at what the virtual world was going to offer us. What technology was going to offer us and help us with, that goes past the questions of having conversations with landlords and dealing with those kinds of things. And we were fortunate enough to have a lovely landlord who was willing to help work things out and help us through so that we could really remain in business.

And then the other thing is I made a very, very strong decision. Some people questioned me why, but I decided not to let a single staff person go. I was just sort of, of that mind where I felt a certain amount of responsibility. And so I took steps to enable remote working and remote selling, which was very difficult because selling art remotely is not something that we would ever have thought we would ever encounter. People like to come to an art gallery, they like to look at the art and smell it and touch it and look at the frame and we really had to come up with different sort of means and strategies to get people comfortable with the notion that they could buy a lot this way.

Hilary - So during this pandemic, you told me that you developed even stronger client relationships. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Jeff - Absolutely we, well, again, it sort of goes back to this notion of virtual business and sort of doing things with Zoom and Skype and all kinds of things. And what we discovered was that by actually picking up the telephone as opposed to sending emails, reaching out to people individually and touching base with people, especially regular collectors about us. And we have, we have a huge collectors base and I mean, people have been buying from us for 25 years. We have thousands of people that we've sold out to and we decided that one of the things that we would do is reach out to people individually. And so it began. And emails became phone calls, emails became texts, messages, and text messages, became phone calls. And then it sort of blossomed into this ongoing dialogue between our consultants and our collective base and which led into larger events using a Zoom to have virtual openings and that kind of thing, which had been very successful.

Hilary - So, can you tell us, or, share with us some of the interesting artists that you represent in your gallery today and why you represent them?

Jeff - Well, we represent roughly about 25 artists or so from around the world. And again, it goes back to what I said a little bit earlier in terms of representing art is certainly pop related, but it has much more to do with the notion of what popular culture is. And subsequently, we still do represent Andy Warhol and Keith Haring and John Michelle Buskey out and so on. But we've edged out into other realms, which focus on things.

Like, for example, we did a very, very special event with the godfather of street art, Ron English. And Ron was thrilled at the concept of making a type of work that he had never made before, which is paintings on paper in the manner he had never made them before. And so running this book has become a very important aspect of the pop gallery.

We represent a Danish artist whose name is Ola Olberg and Ola has taken the cartoon character Tintin, who many people know lots of American people don't know about Tintin, but put Tintin into different scenarios, sort of naughty sort of sexual scenarios, which is something that most people don't associate Tintin with. But the idea of Tintin and popular culture and cartoons and things, that many people and I grew up with Tintin comics. So, that's been truly successful.

We represent an artist by the name of Tony Ray Negro, who did all the backstage passes for the grateful dead. When, you know, from the age of 20 back in the eighties and nineties and so on. So the whole concept of rock and roll and music fits perfectly into this notion of pop culture. And then of course we represent two other artists that really fit into this concept so beautifully that I couldn't have even imagined it. It was just a natural thing.

We represent the art of Dr.Seuss, which besides all this sort of nonsense and drama that occurred with the audit Dr. Seuss recently, we represent the estate of. Dr. Seuss, which means all the illustration drawings and things that he made limited additions of and the estate represents and a very special what we call the secret audit Dr. Seuss, which has stuff that he made in his spare time or the midnight audit Dr. Seuss, along with what he called the unorthodox taxidermy, which are these really beautiful, funny sort of taxidermy heads, which are just hilarious.

And then we represent Tom Everhart, who was the protégé, if you will, of Charles Schultz of Peanuts and Snoopy fame. Tom was a young guy who saw Schultz Sparky as a mentor. And they had a really wonderful father, son type relationship. They and Tom started to interpret all the Snoopy characters and Schulz gave him permission before he died to be the only artist in the world to be able to make art using Snoopy and peanuts characters without a license. He has a lifetime license. They had a show together in the loop a number of years ago. So again, this whole notion of popular culture and pop, all these, The Seuss, the Tintin, the Snoopy Eberhardt pieces that all fit in really, really well.

And then of course we move into street art and graffiti. And I have some lovely stories to tell you about that when you're ready.

Hilary - Tell us we'd love to hear.

So the very first sort of graffiti street art experience happened with pop and about 12 years ago, actually I got a phone call from a collector, a good friend collector. They said Jeff, these two boys who live in Bushwick in Brooklyn, I've started to collect their art quite, quite seriously. And I think you should go and visit them in their studio. And I said, Mike, if you are sure that's what you suggest, I trust you and happy to do it. So Mike set up this little meeting and I drove out to Bushwick 12 years ago.

Bushwick wasn't what it is today, 12 years ago or so. And I arrived in this sort of funny little loft odd building where these two guys lived and worked. They had a studio together. Their names were, Mike Buck, Michael Bucca and, Fernando Romero, their street names, graffiti names were 2ESAE and Ski. So Fernando is Ski and Mike is a 2esae and I arrived at this place sort of not expecting a whole lot, but it was kind of exciting. And the first thing of course was they had a big pile of donuts and coffee for me on the table. And on the other side, they had a big bottle of Hennessy. They had no clue who I was going to be, and they were wondering what I was going to choose. It was really hilarious. And I meant, I went for the coffee and donuts just for the record, but, I'd forgotten to mention that they went by the name of a group that painted and work together. They went by the name of UR New York. And I saw their work around, you know, they used to sell this stuff on the street for a hundred bucks. And here I had this opportunity and as I went through the space studio, whatever you'd like to call it, I knew instantly that they belonged in the gallery. So I pulled him aside and I said, Fernando, Mike, we're definitely going to do something, but there are a few things that we have to deal with first.

And they said, yeah, sure. I mean, they were really, really excited. And I looked at them and I said, you know, the 37 indictments that you have against you and the five years probation that you're on. I mean, these guys were like, looking, how do you know? How do you know all this? I said, how do I know it? Mike told me, you know, Mike referred me to you. He told me all of this stuff, they said. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But how does Mike know? And I had to sort of at that moment in time, decide, should I say how Mike and I figured out what the heck? I said, well, I hate to break it to you but Mike is the undercover cop who arrested you guys.

It was always the uniform guys who took you in, but Mike was undercover. So you never knew who he was. And he developed a relationship with your love, of art and started collecting your art.

Hilary - That's so funny. That's a great story.

Jeff - There's a documentary in there somewhere. I'm sure. Mike, I'm telling you, they went bananas. These two guys jumping up and down hooting and hollering. It was just hilarious. And I said, and based on what. In order for me to put you in the gallery, we have to get rid of those issues that we just discussed and the way we're going to do it is by doing community work and getting involved with children in need and homelessness and whatnot. My attorney is a former judge. Mike, the undercover cop eventually became a DA. We're going to write letters. We're going to do all kinds of things that are going to sort of help mitigate this. And so the first thing we did was a big project in Chelsea in that there's a public housing center in Chelsea, on the west side of New York City.

And we arranged for the boys to do a big mural and to work with all the children, helping them draw and paint and do all that kind of stuff. Got a fair amount of press and coverage. And one thing led to another. And the boys started working with children everywhere working with charities and organizations that we were able to connect them with.

They went overseas, they went to Australia to work with Aboriginal children. When they went to South Africa to work with children in need, they went to Israel to work with Palestinian and Israeli children to show them how we're all the same. They really did some beautiful things and, as a consequence of all of this, all of those charges and probations were dropped and they have gone on to become two of the most important artists that we represent here. And my relationship with them is incredible. I mean, we are talking about a father-son relationship, and we've sold hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of their art since then.

Hilary - Two boys selling their art for 50 bucks on the street, wonderful story. That's awesome, that's awesome. Thank you for sharing those stories with me. So let's take this a step back. Someone walks into your gallery and they're looking to start a collection. How does that process work?

Jeff - So the one thing about Pop International Galleries, which I believe was a game-changer and for many reasons, was that we decided to break down that whole barrier. You often walk into these galleries where someone's sitting behind a desk and you can barely see them. It's a high sort of desk and it's just white walls and maybe three pieces of art on the wall and nobody even talks to you. And then they look at you and they want to know what shoes you're wearing or what handbag you're carrying or how big the diamond is, or the watch on your hand. You know, that kind of stuff. We broke that completely. We have a much more open, friendly, inviting, environment. And as a consequence of which people absolutely love coming into the gallery. And so we focus on people who have never bought a piece of art before and on people who have big collections. And so we don't differentiate. We just help people find all that they love. We've always had a policy not to sell art on the basis of investment, when people say to me, well, if I buy this print, you know, it's 3,000 bucks, what's it going to be worth in 10 years? And I say, well, I have a really good stockbroker who has an office down the road. If you'd like, I could send you there, but we try not to. If you came to me with 5 million bucks and said, hey, could you help me invest in art? That might be a different story, but we break down all those barriers.

Hilary - That's awesome. Let me ask you something. Do you have any exciting exhibits coming up that you want to share with us?

Jeff - I do. Actually. There are a few things that we're working on. I'll just tell you about two that we had that sort of part of what this conversation was about. Where these virtual exhibitions, the first one we did was with Ron English and it was a big test for us to see if we could sell art while the gallery was shut down, or while we have contracted hours or while there were rules and regulations about social distancing and so on and so forth. So we did a test actually with two artists, Ron English, and McKenzie Papa, British artists who I'd been working with for many, many years. And they were amazing, absolutely amazing. They were RSVP events only. So you couldn't come to the Zoom call if you didn't get, if you didn't RSVP, couldn't join the thing. The idea was to show some videos, moderate with questions. My team here had questions for Oscar, the artists, and then, we opened up some of the questions to collectors and again, moderated things well enough so that it didn't get drawn out in long, sort of like into a sort of drawn out thing.

And we sold a whole bunch of art. And so it opened up this idea for us. To do some more of them. And, we're now going to be working on a curated show of street art, that Ski from that team that I was just telling you about Fernando Romero is going to curate, that's going to be absolutely amazing, it's going to be a smash hit, no questions about it because he's going to, he has a lot of connections, obviously in the street art world and graffiti world. And he's going to bring in people who we've never represented, um, and curated in a way that will sort of open up art that had never been shown before in this manner. So we're very, very excited about that one.

The other one that I'm working on is an Australian couple, the names are Gillie and Mark a husband and wife team who make art together. And, they're actually very well known in New York City for their outdoor monumental bronze works. And, before the pandemic, they did this beautiful, beautiful exhibition of women of valor. They had come to realize that women bronze, sculptures and statues of women, we're sadly lacking female sculptures, and monumental sculptures of women. There were less of them than there were men and they were going to change that. So they did this really beautiful collection of sculptures of some fantastic women, from Ruth Bader Ginsburg and so on and so forth, it was just really beautiful. And then they've done these large outdoor installations. People may have seen it up at Astor Place in Brooklyn, the big rhinos stacked on top of one another. Monumental pieces and part of what they do besides them tease and make fun of themselves. Gillie and Mark, Gillie is a bunny rabbit and Mark as a dog in their paintings and they sit on Vespas and bicycles and do all kinds of sweet, lovely things. We're going to do an event with them online and sort of tied in with the time zone with Australia. Those are two really great things that are coming up.

Hilary- So cool. How could our listeners get in touch and actually sign up for any of these events?

Jeff - Really easy. All you need to do is shoot us either an email, to, you could send it to me, [email protected] or just [email protected]. And just say, Hey, I heard the podcast, or you could, um, just call the gallery. And the number is (212) 533-4262. And we'll put you on the list and, and sort of begin to develop a relationship with you the way we have with our many, many thousands of collectors that we have over the years, we look so forward to it.

Hilary - This was really informative and congratulations on your successes. I really appreciate you being on the show.

I want to also thank our sponsors, the Russo law group, The Profit Express with Tim Healey, Pop international galleries. Thank you. Gold Benes LLP, and the Pegalis Law Group. And last but not least, I want to thank you our listeners for tuning in. If you want more information on this show or any other show you could visit our website at hillarytopperonair.com or you can find us on Spotify, iTunes, Google Play, apple podcasts, even Amazon Alexa, where out there you'll find you can find us have a great week and we'll see you next time.

Bunions are fairly common problems in the United States affecting approximately 25% of the country's population. They can cause severe pain and discomfort, making it difficult to walk or perform many daily activities. I'm Hilary Topper. And this is Hilary Topper on Air. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Jason R. Miller DPM, a foot and ankle surgeon at premier orthopedics in Malvern, Pennsylvania. He's going to discuss Lapiplasty® 3D Bunion Correction™, a relatively new procedure that uses special titanium plates to restabilize and secure the joint. Welcome to the show Dr. Miller.

Dr. Miller - Thank you.

Hilary - So can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?

Dr. Miller - So, I'm a doctor of podiatric medicine, meaning that I specifically specialize in below-the-knee surgery, but an ankle surgery, in the state of Pennsylvania. So my four years of training at Temple University Hospital was unique to basically performing foot and ankle surgery on adult and pediatric patients of all walks of life. So, unlike some other physicians that may specialize in foot and ankle, where they do a general residency and then do maybe a year of fellowship or worked with an ankle, my training specifically involved a foot and ankle surgery. So that's where my area of expertise lies.

Hilary - So talk with us about bunions what are they and how do they occur?

Dr. Miller - So most people assume that a bunion is actually just the growth of bone on the side of their foot. In reality a bunion is actually a bone deformity that's caused by an unstable joint. And that is what allows the big toe to begin to drift out of alignment. And then your tendons and ligaments. Sort of add in on the toe by pulling it over even further, once the toe begins to deviate against your second toe on the side. So it is a relatively progressive condition and certainly leads to a lot of discomforts and severe pain. Really, a lot of times patients come in and say, look, I've tried different shoes already. I've tried, you know, these variety of things. I'm having problems now. It was originally when I would run or exercise. Now they even hurt when I'm walking or just going to work on a daily basis. So, you know, the really scary thing about it is that really one in four Americans have bunions.

And that number can be much higher in certain other parts of the world. But here in the US that's the reality, it's about 25%. So it is a problem that we see more frequently in females, but, quite honestly, after doing as many labral classes as I have, I've seen quite a few men as well. And one of the reasons I think men tend to get away with the bunions deformities is men's shoes. You can get wider widths and you don't have the problems that women have where they try to go wide, then there's heels or something in the shoe and the Bunion, then, yeah, it becomes a problem, a friction problem for them. So those are kind of the little statistics and really the real thing that finance is now, why always thought that Bunions were a genetic thing.

Hilary - So you're saying it's not. Well, genetically,

Dr. Miller - You are prone to inherit one of your parent's bedsides so very frequently, and I've seen three generations in my practice, of patients where they all have almost identical types of feet. So mechanically you inherit instructionally or inherit a certain foot site. Whether or not that leads to a bunion or not depends on a variety of factors, how active they are, maybe what type of shoes that they wore early in life. But certainly the foot type itself that is inherent to a lot of Bunions is probably a genetic or inherited condition. But they certainly will develop outside of either one of your parents. Maybe neither parent had a Bunion, but you, the child may get it. So, there is a genetic factor to it. There's certain feet that are more prone to getting bunions and that's something that we'd certainly see and practice.

Hilary - So what are some of the options available for people who are looking to get rid of these Bunions?

Dr. Miller - Well, as I mentioned earlier, it's definitely something that some patients can manage quite well with padding or different types of shoes. And those things do work for some people. When those things fail to work with provide the relief that the patient needs, then we start talking about surgical options. So traditionally, one of the things that we've done in the foot and ankle world is performed what's called a 2d or a two dimensional or two plane type of correction. And that's essentially where we would cut the metatarsal bone somewhere in the middle or towards the head of the bone and then move it over and shave off the remaining portion while cosmetically that would oftentimes give the result that people were looking for. The problem was is that it wasn't a hearty long-lasting resolve because the instability really lies more proximal than that. Further back at the joint behind it. And by not correcting the instability there. That's what leads to a much higher rate of recurrence. What we've seen is that up 70% of patients who’ve had this traditional type of bunionectomy can experience a recurrence of their body. And they become unhappy not only with the cosmetic appearance but functional properties of the body and itself. And in some of these cases, these patients were off their feet for six to eight weeks with these surgeries before they were able to get back on it. So it's a unfortunate investment, the time investment for the patient that didn't lead to, uh, a long lasting result.

Hilary - So now you, you are now performing this Lapiplasty® 3D Bunion Correction™ surgery. Can you tell us what this is and how it works?

Dr. Miller - Yes. So the Lapiplasty® 3D Bunion Correction™procedure is, is based off a tried and true surgical procedure called the Lapidus, on the anatomy. So the concept here is based on a tried and true surgical correction that we've been using for, well, over 50 years. However, what this system does is it allows the surgeon to get a reproducible, consistent result. And correcting all three planes or that 3d dimension of the immune and getting that joint stabilized in a way that allows the patient to get back onto their feet much more quickly. So the system really is designed in a way that's very creative and basically allows the surgeon an almost robotic type of approach to performing it where we can get the same type of results. Every single time we do this. As opposed to some surgical procedures where there's a little factor, so to speak of trying to get things aligned. Three-dimensionally so what we see with this procedure with lapiplasty is that because of the fixation construct being so stable is that 97 to 99% of our patients maintain that 3d correction. A year or two, a year and a half later in the clinical trials that we looked at. So there are just under half a million bunny procedures performed every year in the US. And over 30,000 patients have currently been treated with 11 plasty procedures since it was FDA cleared in 2015.

Hilary - Wow. Well, before we move on, I just have to say I'm so appreciative of our sponsors and must take this time out to thank them. Please support our sponsors and tell them that you heard about them on Hilary Topper on Air special. Thanks to the Russo Law group, The Profit Express, Pop International Galleries, Gold Benes LLP, and the Pegalis law group.

Now back to you, Dr. Miller, we're talking about bunions and a treatment option called Lapiplasty® 3D Bunion Correction™. What are some of the benefits of this treatment option? Is it just, the recovery is quicker.

Dr. Miller - Well, the recovery is, definitely, quicker when we're talking about, on average in my patient population, about 10 days patients for weight-bearing in a boot. So this is a far cry from the six to eight weeks of being in the cast, that we used to do with this type of procedure. But I guess the other advantage of it would be the fact that the procedure really does address all three dimensions of the bone deformity that caused the bunion in the first place. And with, with it also doing that, it also has that lower recurrence rate of one to 3% in these, uh, 12 months to 17 month clinical trials that have been performed.

Hilary - Hmm. Interesting. I'm curious how people feel after the procedure. Can you share any case studies or success stories with our listeners?

Dr. Miller - Sure. I'd say probably, you know, one of the most remarkable quick recoveries is as a patient. I perform this procedure on a triathlete and she's a true warrior. She's in her sixties and finishes in the top of her age group consistently probably would beat a lot of, 30 year olds, triathletes. And she really struggled with it for a few years. And it was beginning to really significantly impact her ability to train about the only area where she could train without pain was swimming. So riding the bike was painful, running was painful. So we examined her. We did radiographs that determined that she was a good candidate for the lateral plasty and that she truly added a tri planar 3d bunion. So we got her corrected with the Lapiplasty® 3D Bunion Correction™ and six weeks post-operative, she began to go into sneakers.

Now, keep in mind, this was something where somebody was in a cast for six weeks, let alone getting into sneakers. And between six and eight weeks, she was running and zero gravity trainer, which you may see professional sports athletes where they have no special shorts and they're able to get into that treadmill situation and begin to run by taking off nearly all the body weight off their feet. And by week 9 to 10, she was actually getting onto pavement and training. And by week 12 she was beginning to train for a marathon. Again, I'm pleased to say that she finished in the top of her age group when she went back to compete, 5 months later. So it's a very rewarding experience not only for her, the patient, but for me, the surgeon, when you receive an email with her with a metal and, you know, pictures of her performing this race down Delaware shore.

Hilary - That is really awesome. I know so many people that suffer from these bunions and Lapiplasty® 3D Bunion Correction™sounds like a really great solution for them. So let me ask you something. How can people get in touch with you and learn more about Lapiplasty® 3D Bunion Correction™and even hire you to help them alleviate this?

Dr. Miller - Yeah, well, there's, there's certainly a bunch of resources. Check out www.fixedmytoes.com. There are fantastic computer-generated videos on there. So there's nothing gory that any patient has to see. Some people choose to find videos on YouTube that show actual procedures, but the website itself has really well-done computer-generated images that really provide the patient with everything they need to know. To make an appointment with me directly we do have our phone number, which would be (610) 644-6900 or you can visit our website premierortho.com to find more information, not only about Lapiplasty® 3D Bunion Correction™ but about myself as a physician and the other physicians in our group at Premier Orthopedics.

Hilary - Awesome. This was so informative. I really appreciate your time coming on. And thank you for sharing this information about Lapiplasty® 3D Bunion Correction™ us.

Dr. Miller - It's been my pleasure Hilary to join you today.

Hilary - Thank you. And I also want to thank our sponsors, The Russo Law Group, The Profit Express, Pop International Galleries, Gold Benes LLP, and the Pegalis Law Group. And last but not least, I want to thank you our listeners for tuning in each week. If you want more information on this show or any other show, visit our website at hilarytopperonair.com or you can find us on Spotify, iTunes, apple podcasts, Google Play, Amazon Alexa, you name it. We're out there. Have a great week and we'll see you next time.

Doctor is a paid consultant of Treace Medical Concepts, Inc.

As a business owner, you make a lot of mistakes and it can make you feel like a failure. But, what if I told you selling mistakes can help you navigate your way to success? Learn why a business leader would want to buy a mistake in this episode of Hilary Topper on Air.

Tune in as Hilary speaks with Dan Schaefer Ph.D., CEO of Peak Performance Strategies who provides psychologically designed strategies to quickly separate individuals and companies from their competition.

Dan will discuss, how everyone right now is trying to sell solutions, when in fact there is an invisible solution that works on everyone’s behalf called, “short term discomfort versus long term regret”. Meaning, you don’t want to be looking back years from now wishing you had taken action sooner. Learn about the six-second, not 30-second, elevator pitch. Discover how selling mistakes is a lot less expensive than making one yourself. Dan will also provide insight into how professional mindset can be applied to sports performance strategies.

About Dan Schafer

Dr. Dan Schaefer, Ph.D., is a noted performance consultant, author, speaker, and executive strategist. He provides psychologically designed strategies to quickly separate individuals and companies from their competition. He is also a guest faculty member of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, and the graduate schools of New York University, Adelphi University, Hofstra University, and Rutgers.

About the Peak Performance Strategies

Peak Performance Strategies, LLC, is an organization dedicated to assisting individuals and companies in achieving the competitive edge quickly through enhancing both personal and business performance. Clients include professional athletes, performers, and executives throughout the United States, Asia, South America, and Europe. They describe PPS as “Street Smart Strategies for a Competitive Edge.” For more information visit: www.danschaeferphd.com for a free consultation, or contact Dan directly at [email protected].

Podcast Transcript

Hilary - Through my tenure, I've made a lot of mistakes in business, and it always made me feel really bad. But my next guest says mistakes are good on Hilary Topper, and this is Hilary Topper on air. Today, I have the great pleasure of speaking with my dear friend Dan Schaffer, PhD, and CEO of Peak Performance strategies, who provides psychologically designed strategies to quickly separate individuals and companies from their competition. Welcome to the show, Dan.

Dan - Good to be back. Really good to be back.

Hilary - So can you tell my listeners a little bit about you, your background, give a little refresher,

Dan - We don't want to start a third grade Hilary. So basically, when I got out of school, my family owned 225 year old businesses in Brooklyn, New York. One was a funeral service business, the other was a real estate company. And, when I started to work with them, I noticed with parents who will come in, who had losses had a tremendous difficulty in explaining death to their kids. So in 1986, I wrote a book called How do we tell the children it's a guide to helping parents explain death to kids. And at that time, I was teaching at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia, and dealing with Columbia University with medical professionals, anybody who had to deal with loss and life transition, almost immediately, people came back and said, we really need some help in explaining death to our kids when somebody is dying in a family. And so the second edition, which came out in 92, dealt with that. And that time, I was contacted by the Pentagon and I worked for seven years with the Pentagon on military loss over the impact that loss and life transition had on errors, omissions, accidents, and safety. So looking at external situations impacted personal performance.

The third edition came out in a printer when September 11 happened. So work with a lot of people met life in particular, around issues as to that September 11, looking at how those losses were dealt with, through that whole process, I became introduced to hypnosis and hypnotherapy. And I found that hypnosis had a tremendous impact on a whole variety of things. One of the things that impacted me particularly was, it helped me with my golf game. So I said, Look, you know, this can work on my game strategies, very quickly, getting people into a situation where they could operate at their peak performance and understand when they weren't. So from that point, I was introduced to Anthony Beck, who was at a tight end for the Jets. I was then introduced to Chad Pennington, who became my client in 2005. And we worked on strategies to help him both recover from injuries and play really well, even when he went down to Florida. So with that in mind, I started to look at some situations that came about.

One is that everybody who is like everybody else is trying to sell solutions, when in fact, there's an invisible dynamic that works on everybody's behalf. It's called short term discomfort versus long term regret. I may not want to deal with Hilary Topper’s company now, but I'll tell you what I really don't want. I don't want to be out in 2026, looking backwards wishing that I did. And so the objective is all of my clients today are in 2026, working backwards, so we look for anything that could possibly disrupt them. And so what we find is, that people who need to separate themselves very quickly, have relied on a couple of myths. One is a 32nd elevator pitch, when in fact you only have six seconds. So how can you separate somebody from their competition very quickly in the mind of the person they're talking to. And so what happens is that People really need to think about when talking to somebody, how do they pitch themselves and direct themselves in a way that generates conversation with me. When somebody asks me, what I do is I tell them very simply, I sell mistakes. And the first question is who, whatever by mistake, I said, somebody who doesn't want to make one, because it's a lot less expensive to buy a mistake than it is to pay for the solution.

So it's like you said to me, I'm going out with my family, I'm driving to LA. And I say, I have a book with all the radar traps routine here in LA, do you want to buy it now and not? Wait till you get to LA. So coming back, coming back to you as an example, you know, people may say, most marketing people would want me or somebody to put together a thought process in somebody's mind that says, I want to hire Hillary Topper. That's not the message I want delivered. I think it is a lot more powerful if somebody says, I don't want to not hire Hilary Topper. And that's designed through purpose, specifically designed conversations that somebody would have based on word is a language strategically designed for what they want to accomplish. So that's what I hope people do.

Hilary - Now, that's really interesting. And can you give me another real life case example of someone who was trying to sell mistakes?

Dan - Sure, a lot of people sell mistakes and don't realize, I have a client and a personal friend who's an expert witness in construction in the city. He was doing a very famous restaurant for the owner of the restaurant. And the owner called him and said, Alan, I'm not going to, I'll get into see you as soon as I sign this lease. And he said, Don't sign a lease. And he said, Well, this lease was developed and put together by my attorney, who's got a lot of experience in infrastructure lease, he said, Please don't sign it. He may be great with contracts, but he's not a project manager. So he said, I got the lease, I read the page lease and I noticed there was one word missing. He said, If you add latent into this lease, you'll protect yourself dramatically by adding the word latent into the lease. He saved $150,000 for his client.

I have an attorney who I talked to, I said, Give me a mistake that you've seen other people make, that you prevent your clients from making, because it's not the mistakes that you make, Hilary, that I make are the mistakes of my clients. Anybody who's interested who wants to send me a note, or go on my website there’s a whole list. There's a whole article on it, there's money and mistakes there. But the point is the guy said to me, I'll tell you about the $350,000 handshake. He said, My client now started a company with his partner, 15 years ago, on a handshake, they said, we're such good friends, we don't need to have any legal documents, we'll just put it together. So he said, I got that he's dealing with me now the company is coming down. And I said, Of course my client $350,000 to extricate himself in his company. Very, very costly mistake.

On the other thing, much more current now is I'm doing a lot of work with cybersecurity professionals globally, on helping people break into cybersecurity and deal with these issues, and mistakes people are making without even knowing it, without knowing the information that you have, what's not even being aware of the risks they're facing. And so it's like anything else, when you look at a situation and look out for what's there, but look for what's missing. It becomes a whole different picture. And so that the question comes back to how do you bring this back into your company? How do you use it personally? How do you use it economically for your company? How do you help your teams to perform more effectively with this? Because you know, today, when I ask people to put together a mistake list, I ask them to give me the list of mistakes your client has made before they became your client that would cost them money, emotion or reputation. And that's the kind of thing that people start to look at. But one of the things that's interesting about this is they don't talk about it. People who see these tracks, keep them very much under the radar to give them an edge. So that's the kind of thing we're doing.

Hilary - So, switching gears for a moment, I'd like to talk a little bit about preparing the sales pitch or a business meeting. And compare that to an athletic race. Right? I know that you do that a lot. Could you tell us how you see these two things connecting, and what the similarities are between them?

Dan - Sure, after just coming off two fantastic football games yesterday. Let's go back and relate it to football. Football fans are very much aware of the 42nd play clock. Somebody says “How can you compare a business deal to a 42nd play clock”, I said, easily. Every quarterback has 40 seconds to put together a business deal amongst his people, assess the talent that he has put a play together, read the defense, change the play in just before it starts. But on top of that, he has to realize that I don't have in at 40 seconds, any latitude to think about what didn't work well. So I'd have to be talking to myself perfectly, I have to be using the right language with myself, and decided if something didn't go well, in a previous play, I'm going to deal with that at another time.

Now, once again, while this is happening, does anybody notice it? No, not really. But I will tell you that and I use this example of Super Bowl three. Now, yesterday, you know what my granddaughter said to me “You were alive at Super Bowl three?” I said yes. But Superbowl three taught us a lot about preparing to compete. Because Dave Herman, who protected John Emeth and Bubba Smith. Dave was saved to 250 Bubba Smith was six, seven, I don't know 300 and some odd pounds. I said, How are we able to do that? He said, Well, I watched game films. And I figured, well, most people watch Game films and prepare. And he said no, he said, I figured what a guy that big, it's got to move forward, he has to be standing on one foot just a little bit longer than everybody else. So he says I never waited till the ball was snapped, I just waited till his foot came out, but he was sitting on one foot. I said to myself, if here's a guy who's got four quarters and numerous downs to win a game. He prepares it out degree, how does anybody who had a way of presentation?

Do they profile who they're talking to? Do they understand what the person wants to have happen, that a look at? And how do they talk to themselves? You know, I work with triathletes and I had a client who was a swimmer. And she said that was always afraid of the swimming portion. I was afraid of getting run over and all that. So with hypnosis, we changed the whole focus around where she wasn't seeing herself, swimming the event, she was standing on a shore watching herself come in. So it changed the whole perspective for.

So right now I have a young woman who's a swimmer who will swim every one of her events under hypnosis at night, just before she goes to bed. And the interesting thing is at exactly the time she wants to swim, and she sees herself performing that way on a regular basis. The interesting thing is, her subconscious mind where the performance come from never knows the difference between actually doing the event and actually swimming it or actually watching yourself though. You're very much familiar with as you do with your triathlons. I mean, I know how much you practice how much you were in the water. But you could practice being in the water without being in the water.

Hilary - Absolutely. Absolutely. I definitely agree 100% with you. Now before we move on, I just want to take one moment and thank our sponsors. for their support. Please tell them that you heard about them on Hilary Topper on air. Special thanks to the Russo Law Group, The Profit Express, Pop International galleries, Gold Benes LLP and the Pegalis Law Group. Now back to you, Dan, I want to talk a little bit about mind game strategies. Can you tell us what that means? And if you have any tips and strategies to get people in the right frame of mind, whether it's for business or for Sports, especially during this time of COVID?

Dan - Sure,the biggest issue for people today, if you want to boil it down, is how people talk to themselves. It's identical listening, I would say to you, Hilary, what is Hilary? Hilary saying to Hilary, when Hilary over his Hilary, talk to Hilary? What's the internal conversation like? And I've spoken to professional athletes, and they said, I need to increase my concentration, and to increase the concentration what gets in the way? He said, Well, I get distracted. I said, What distraction, they say I talk to myself. So when I worked with Chad Pennington, wrote the foreword to my book, click, we would start out as a minute the schedule was published for the year. And we get down to whole teams that he was going to play it. I said, like, give me the name of the team. You tell me what you hear yourself saying to yourself about that team? how we'd have to make sure that was in line so, hypnotically, because you're working with the subconscious mind, you can help change some of that language very quickly. So the question is what does it cost me to change it? What does it cost me just to let it happen away normally happen?

Well, it can be very, very costly. So you listen to the way you talk to yourself, and what distracts you, people, if they just started, just even now, after this phone call, if they hear this, just start to listen very carefully about the way you talk to yourself. And in particular situations. negative self talk is like trash talk on yourself. But you know why it's so successful, because it's your own voice. So I'll give you an example from wild, let's say you went to the city and your valet park your car, and the guy and you're on your way to Montauk. And the guy brings your car down, you get into it, he's got the radio blessing with music you absolutely hate. What do you do with it, you turn it off, or you change the station? Well, a lot of people don't have another station to change it to. But you can change it, I'll tell you what you don't do. You don't find yourself in Southampton halfway to Montauk oh, this stuff is still playing. So here's a quick tip. If you hear negative self-talk under any circumstances, and you want to change it, and you want to stop it, just push your tongue up the roof of your mouth right now, when your tongue is on a roof, your mouth can't think of anything. And so where do you need to apply that? Certainly in a race of things that are going well if you hear negative conversations going on. So you want to really make sure that you stop this negative self talk. The other thing is people frequently tell themselves, what they don't want to have happen in a room full of people.

Since all your performance is in your subconscious mind. The interesting thing, one of the interesting things about your subconscious mind is that it never hears a negative command. It never hears, don't I don't want this to happen. So as anybody who's teed up a golf ball over a waterhole and said, I don't want to hit the oil in the water. It's the worse though. So you know, it's just understanding and getting control so you can anticipate the negative conversations.

I ask people, if you hear negative self talk, when does it start? What starts? Who's around? I had a kid who was going for a college golf scholarship. And I said to him, when do you start to talk negatively to yourself? He said, I said what port what whole on a golf course. He said on a driving range. It's already been a driving range. He said we have one kid that comes to play in this league who dresses all on black? Is like Darth Vader, black hat, black shirt, jacket, black bag. Is it the minute I see him it throws me off. Well, if he anticipates that he could talk to himself differently but it's taking control of this stuff. You know how much this plays in performance Hilary, we've talked about this.

Hilary - Absolutely with everything that you do not only performance, but in business in life. Now I want to just before we end the interview, hold on a moment. Excuse me. I want to talk about the golf mind game. You tell people and I know I've heard you talk about this before is that you can help people knock three to six strokes off their golf game without touching a club? Can you just explain that?

Dan - Sure. People who play golf, if they would accept that the golf swing takes three seconds. If they shoot 100, they have to concentrate for about five minutes or around the golf.

If they shoot it at maybe four minutes of a whole round of golf, but I've had people come to me and say, God, I was out there for four hours, I couldn't concentrate. I said, you don't have to concentrate, as long as you know how to bring yourself right back into your performance zone. And I'm gonna flip from golf for a second over to my hockey players. I work with hockey goaltenders. So I said to this one guy, tell me what it's like when you perform at your best. And that's really important for people who want to improve performance. To know how it feels like, looks like and sounds like when you're performing at their best. Because when they know that they know when you're not, they know when they’re off. So I said to this kid, and he had been drafted by the NHL. I said to him, Tell me what's it like when you perform your best. He said I don't hear any crowds, the pockets the size of a dinner plate, and the game moves very slowly. He said, if anyone of those three things change I know I'm losing my concentration. I said, What do you do to get it back? He says, Well, I hope that it'll come back. I said, Well, hope is not a strategy. So let me show you how to get it back quickly. If you focus on a spot directly in front of you on your desk, and you focus intentionaly as if your eyes were laser. And you just become aware of something out of your right peripheral vision, and out of your left peripheral vision. When you get all those three things together, your mind shuts down and you're playing just from your subconscious mind. So what he would do is he focused on a POC, he'd become aware of something as right and left so he could control his mind.

The fear is that when an athlete starts to lose his performance song, who does he talk to? He's like a CEO who's running a company who's alone at the top has nobody to bounce anything off, no security, nobody can have confidence and he can't have people lose confidence in him. So he can't talk to his trainer. He's not gonna talk to his wife or girlfriend. Who does he talk to? So they are alone. These kinds of strategies implanted in somebody's subconscious really help them move forward. So when somebody starts a triathlon, what's your mind game? How do they talk to themselves in a swim? How do they talk to themselves on a bike? How do they talk to themselves on the marathon? And then what happens afterwards? How do they deal with this? I had a guy who did a triathlon went out to the Midwest, he said, I never thought I needed a plan B. He said, but I had to put a plan B together, because when we got there, we found that they ran out of Gatorade and water. So it was like, what are we gonna do next? So it's his plan with all of those things.

And then the other thing I tell people about the Golf is just as a football player that doesn't want to take anything over the white lines didn't apply to the game. You don't want to take anything into a business deal. It's not part of the business, or onto the golf course. And so a client of mine who's an ultramarathon runner who runs the bad water to Death Valley, 135 miles through Death Valley in the summer, and is now mixed martial arts cage fighter in 56 said to me, when I was running a bad war, my support crew had done something that could have gotten me disqualified very early on. So I was very angry with them. And she said, I realized that I carried anger for 100 miles. She said, it drain me. So I had to find a way to do it. And she helped me construct a trunk cord. So if you're going into a golf course, as long as you're triathlon, you have to trunk your car, you open a trunk up, you take out a card, and you write down all the things that go on in your life that you don't want to take onto the course with you. Whether it's a golf course, a basketball court, a football field, and you write those down. You put them in the trunk of your car and you slam the trunk. Anytime you're thinking of those issues as you're competing, they're going to distract you. So you snap your fingers, a trunk, trunk, trunk, trunk, trunk, and your subconscious mind will let you go to the trunk and open it up and read those things and deal with them when you get back. But if you don't show it's in the truck. It's not playing a game with anymore. It'll say to you know, last time we were here, you told me you would come back, you didn't read them and now you're gonna pay for it. So that’s how you do that.

Hilary - That's awesome. Thank you so much. You are amazing Dr. Dan, I loved having you on the show. I want my listeners to know how to get in touch with you at peak performance strategies.

Dan - So it's danschaeferphd.com if you send me a quick note about this, I can send you back a way to contact me by phone or go to my website, danschaeferphd.com there are ways to contact me there I have a free consultation 15 minute consultation just going on register on my calendly. And we can talk about any of the other things that we work with student athletes. I have a bunch of student athletes now who are competing to get into college or already in college and they're looking for careers after they leave. So it's a simple question what's not happening right now that you need to have happen and away we go. And thanks, Hilary.

Hilary - Oh, thank you so much. This was awesome. And I want to thank our sponsors, The Russo Law Group, The Profit Express, Pop International Galleries, Gold Benes LLP and the Pegalis Law Group. And last but not least, I want to thank you, our listeners for tuning in. If you want more information on this show or any other show, please visit us at hilarytopperonair.com or you can find us on Spotify, iTunes, Google Play, Apple podcasts, even Amazon Alexa, have a great week and we'll see you next time.

There are people who you talk with in business, or just in life that you tend to bond with for no apparent reason. My next guest is one of those people. I've known Tim Healy of Healy Success Solutions and podcaster of The Profit Express for many years now. Pre-COVID we would meet up and have business lunches, post-COVID we’ve been talking on the telephone. The one thing about this guy is that I feel like I've known him my entire life. He's excellent at what he does. And I know today's show, you will learn a lot. I'm Hilary Topper and this is Hilary Topper on Air. Tim Healy, welcome back to the show.

Tim Healy- I think this officially goes down as my best interview introduction ever. That was, that was fantastic. Thank you so much for the kind words and yeah, we just have this chemistry, when we chat, we talk business over lunch. We've just always had a great back and forth together.

Hilary - Absolutely. So let me ask you to remind our listeners about who you are and what you do.

Tim Healy - Sure. Uh, as you mentioned, I own Healy Success Solutions where my purpose is to help my clients turn their prospects into profits. Right? That's what I get up every day doing, helping my clients turn prospects into profits, and I do it very simply very directly by helping them create winning sales organizations through the power of personal communication. That's how I do it. That's what I do. And that's how I do it at Healy Success Solutions.

Hilary - Okay. What about your podcast?

Tim Healy - The podcast is, as you've mentioned, The Profit Express, it's like over 11 years now and I've always had a focus, obviously, in the business side, Healy Success Solutions. I'm very focused on the sales process, everything from the first point of contact to close. But when I created, it was started as a radio show. It still is, it's evolved into a podcast, obviously. When I created the profit express, I did decide not to be just so specific on sales, but more focused on the journey of the small business person, the entrepreneur, the startup, what they go through each and every day to win the battle for business because listen, Hilary, you know what, and I know it each and every day, some days it's more challenging than others. But it's a battle and we are here to win at each and every day, each and every day to me is a competition and we're competing. And it's a matter of bringing on guests to the show who can help the small business owner who can help the start-up in everything from sales and marketing and branding, finance, anything and everything that can positively impact a small business owner. Because so many of them I have found that's been a big focus of the show. They kind of operate on an island to themselves, and I've always wanted to just be a resource for entertainment, for education, for information, for motivation, as they head in the direction of success for their small business.

Hilary - So today we're talking about sales. And let me ask you something and I really want you to be really serious with me about this. Can everyone sell or are some people just natural salespeople?

Tim Healy - That's a great question. Can everybody sell? No. But the reason I say no is if you don't want to sell, you're never going to sell. That's probably true for most professions. And actually, the people say, oh, some people are natural-born salespeople and they could be, but I think there's been a misnomer over the years that, oh, you know, that person has the gift of gab and they can talk to anybody. Believe it or not, I've seen over the many years, working with my clients, helping my clients interview and recruit some of the sales professionals who have the quote-unquote gift to get, who can talk to anybody that can make them a good networker, might not make them a good salesperson because, and I've had conversations about this, I wholeheartedly believe one of, if not the most important characteristic of a great selling professional, is listening and putting the prospect first. And if you were the kind of person who's got this great outgoing personality and you're gregarious and all that, and you know what, you might not give consideration in the conversation to the other, you might interrupt, you might not listen enough. And it's having the discipline to listen, to ask great questions, to have empathy for the prospect that I think can make a great salesperson.

Hilary - I mean, how many people do you come in contact with and they just talk about themselves. It's all about themselves.

Tim Healy - Well, it's good. Cause it kinda, it kind of keeps me in business to a certain extent because when the business is eventually not doing as well as it should, they reach out to people like me. But it, you know what, so much of sales is human nature. I mean, you have to understand human nature in order to relate to somebody because I think long gone are the days of feature and benefit selling. Because then you can't relate to, and you can't understand why somebody would need your products and services. So again, it starts with the conversation, starts by asking great open-ended probing questions. So those people who talk about themselves or about just about the products and services, there's no connection. There's no emotional bonding whatsoever. And I think it goes back to human nature. People like to talk about themselves, they want to show how smart they are. And again, if they don't listen, if they interrupt they never going to, I won't say never, but their chances of making great connections are greatly reduced. And I think somebody who's a great listener will eat their lunch every day.

Hilary - Now, what about if you have a company and you hire a salesperson. What can you do to motivate them? I mean, you know, you and I both know that sales are tough and there's a lot of rejection. So how do you get people to be motivated?

Tim Healy - There's, well, when it comes to motivation, I'm sure your listeners are probably familiar with extrinsic reward and intrinsic extrinsic is the compensation, the commission, the dollars, the bonus, the intrinsic is a sense of accomplishment. You know, doing the right thing, helping a client out, right.

Both are very valuable, but how do you motivate somebody? A really good sales manager, a really good sales coach has an understanding of the salesperson and believe it or not sure money is a motivator. Of course it is, but it's not the only motivator. It really isn't. And if you just going to do the carrot and the stick for a commission, you're really going to miss, I think a lot of opportunities to increase somebody's ability to become a better salesperson. So you really have to understand what they want to accomplish, what they want to do. And it often goes beyond just the dollars and the commissions and the quotas. And, is it, you know, getting to another level of relationship, really just cracking into a client or a prospect that they've gone after for years and have never made headway. That could be a huge sense of accomplishment and reward and really connecting to clients. I think the best way to answer that is, as a sales manager, never make an assumption that your people are only motivated by money. Is it a key driving factor short, but it's not the only one that takes time to get to know your sales team, your salesperson, and you can often find out there are other things that they can relate to that can help positively impact their behavior.

Hilary - So let's take this one step further and look, and can you offer our listeners some tips on how, if they are a salesperson, how they can be irreplaceable?

Tim Healy - That's a great question. That's a great word. Think about that in, in just about, I never want to say a hundred percent, but in just about any industry, you've got competition in your field and what you do. So, most of us do some more than others and a lot of our products there's, people can't get across the street. While you may think that you have the world's greatest products, and you should absolutely think that it should be absolutely excited and pumped up about what it is that you offer, there are other good competitive products and services, and that's fine. So with that in mind, knowing that we are going up against the competition on a daily basis, I think it is a great way to start off a great mindset to develop. To ask yourself, how can I be irreplaceable in the mind of my client? So what does that mean to be irreplaceable? It's a big word, right? Not easy, not easy thing to do, what to do to, to accomplish, to achieve. So, typically, it goes beyond just offering and selling your product to service. So what can you do beyond that? What value can you offer your client beyond? You know, the exchange of money for service or money for a good, the better relationship that you have with the client and Hilary, it goes back to listening, the more that you know about what they're looking to accomplish, the more that you can help them. And I've often said, in becoming irreplaceable, when you get known as the guy or the gal, the go-to person, and somebody would just let me call Tim, maybe he can help. When a customer asked you for advice and something that you don't even offer, you know you become irreplaceable. Do you know what I mean? Because then they're like, they see you as such a resource that, well, I know Tim, I know Hilary doesn't sell this, but she probably knows somebody. And then if you just make a simple introduction, whether it's to a person or a resource or a book or link or a website, and you just help that client help your client.

That's one more opportunity became irreplaceable. And that's another chance that they remember you again in the future. So you always want to be selfless and say, what can I do to be irreplaceable? Here's one thing I want to share with you. I think your listeners would love this. I like to remind myself every time I deal with a client and I try my best to do it as often as humanly possible. Sometimes I forget. I'm not perfect, but here's a great thing. Write this down. This is a pen and paper moment, Hilary, remind yourself that today may be the last time you see your client and I'm talking about a great client. I'm talking about clients, you’ve being do business for years. They love you. You've gone to their kid's wedding. It doesn't matter. And the reason I say this may be the last time you deal with them, may be last time you see them, it keeps you humble. It keeps you humble and you never take the relationship for granted because we all have, if you've been in the business, you're a sales professional, you have clients for years. If you're doing the right thing, right. We all have clients. If you're doing the right thing for years, never take them for granted and remind yourself: This may be the last time I see them. So what can I do value today for them? What can I bring different to the table?

Let's not take this relationship for granted. And that's another way. Do put you in a place to be irreplaceable.

Hilary - Love that. That's awesome. So before we move on, I have to say that I'm so appreciative of our sponsors and must take the time out to thank them. Please support our sponsors and tell them that you heard about them on Hilary Topper on air. Special thanks to the Russo Law Group, The Profit Express, Pop International Galleries, Gold Benes LLP, and the Pegalis Law Group.

Now back to you, Tim. So we're talking about sales, but I'd like to shift gears a little bit and I want to ask some personal questions as they relate to sales. So for starters, what did people call you when you were a little boy?

Tim Healy - Oh my God. How did you, we’ve never talked about this before we’ve never chatted. Okay. So this is, I talk about transparency and I know it's a big topic of yours and something you've helped me with. And by the way, for everybody listening to Hilary's podcast, keep listening and tell five friends because the things you can learn on this podcast from Hilary alone on branding, are phenomenal, it's worth the lessons. So as a kid, my name is Timothy Joseph. My middle name is Joseph. I always wanted to be called TJ when I was a little kid. And I grew out of that. So everybody calls me, Tim, I can't stand the word. Now people might use this against me now. I'm exposing myself here, Hilary.

Hilary - No, I was wondering if they call you Timmy.

Tim Healy - Oh, I hate it. I did have your father. May he rest in peace. He was, he was a sweetheart of a guy. He called me Timmy. I dealt with it cause I loved the music. Great guy, but that's the one thing I hated, but I was a little kid, it was TJ, since grew out of that. So Tim is, Tim is fine now that that's.

Hilary - So if somebody calls you Timmy in business, do you correct them?

Tim Healy - I really do because it's like nails on a chalkboard. I do correct them. Yeah.

Hilary - What about now? I know your, your name is very easy to spell Tim T I M but what if someone spells your name or wrong or mispronounces, should you say something?

Tim Healy - I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Like if somebody really botches your name, I actually did this. I won't say who she was a sweetheart of a guest and I take great pride. It's funny. She says, take great pride in pronouncing my guests names correctly. And for the love of God, I don't know how I butchered this poor woman's name. Her first and her last name, like three times on the show and she was so sweet about it. She ended up like, oh, I'm so sorry. But like if somebody, mispronounces it say, Hey, that's a great pronunciation. That's, I've never heard that before, but actually, it's pronounced, have some fun with it, thank them for the unique pronunciation.

Hilary - How many times people call me, uh, say, write down Hilary with two L's.  I usually don't even say anything at this point, but this one person said to me the other day, oh, I was looking you up online and I couldn't find anything on you. Maybe that's because she spelled my name with two L's. Then is it's impossible not to find Hillary Topper, uh, online is you're everywhere. It's impossible. So. Let me ask you another question. This is also sales related, how often is too often to close the deal. You know, for example, somebody, you have a great relationship with somebody, you meet somebody. They love you. You love them. You write a proposal and then they go MIA, how often should you keep calling them or reaching out to them when they are MIA?

Tim Healy - We could do a show just on this one topic. So, If the cause you are now, what you did say in the setup of the question was, you know, a great relationship and all this, then you give your proposal, then they go dark on you and it's MIA. For that to happen, there are a few, a number of things you probably did not do correctly as a sales professional.

As far as qualifying as far as urgency, as far as timeline, as far as a decision-making process, in how I do it and how I train my clients and work with my clients, you qualify in the front end. You know, really you leave nothing to chance because it's on the one-yard line that you get surprised in this scenario that you just described. And there's a great scenario to describe Hilary because so many people get kicked in the backside with this, and I get so excited about it because it can be prevented. If somebody spends a time, they sit down and you do a meeting, you put together proposal presentation, do yourself the favor. And usually just a handful of good questions.

Find out how they're going to decide on this is their competition. What factors are they going to use? Who else is involved in the decision-making process? And by the way, there's always somebody else involved when they're going to decide, okay, is having this something you'd like to have? It's something you must, that's a powerful question right there.

Cause you don't get paid for proposals. You don't make a dime a proposal because here's one thing I would say, you have to earn a seat at my table. I don't deal with pipelines in sales. Okay. We've all heard of pipelines. Pipelines can be very dangerous. We just throw lots of stuff in them hoping that they'll close. It's a seat at my table. And you Mr. Or Ms. Prospect have to earn a seat at my table because I know that it takes time for me to put my presentation together. And I know that there are more people in this world. Forget the world, even, even just New York, I can't even, I don't have time to get to. So I have to talk to the ones who are most qualified, cause they deserve my time and attention. I don't want to waste my time with somebody who's not qualified because it prevents me from helping somebody who really needs Healy success solutions...

Hilary - All right, let's take another route. So you're at a business meeting, you're at a lunch meeting and the salesperson decides to show you photos of their babies or their dogs. What do you say do you show your photos too? What does that say about them?

Tim Healy - Well, it's what it says is it's a completely natural element of human nature. Everybody's favorite topic is themselves or an extension of their children or their dog, their cat, their Chinchilla, whatever. You look at it. Oh my God, Fantastic is beautiful that, you know, oh, what's the name of that? You have fun with it, you know? And then your next few, the second part is, should you show your pictures? Maybe you do, maybe don't you, you honestly played by ear because if they're so engrossed in their own stuff. Okay, fine. I'm here to learn about them anyhow.

Hilary - And on that same topic where you are going out to lunch, and maybe the prospect asks you to go out to lunch, who pays for the lunch, you or the prospect, or do you go Dutch treat?

Tim Healy- So this is a great question. It is never worth. Even if you go to a really nice lunch and you drop a hundred dollars, right. And that's not that common. Right. But even if you do that and you're in business, It's never worth the 50 bucks. If you split it to make an uncomfortable moment, you know what I'm saying? Can you believe Dutch? You know, especially if diner, you know, what is it going to be? 40 bucks. They eat it, you take it on it always because you know what, they can never take away from you. Hey, Tim bought me lunch. He's a nice guy. Even if we don't do business, I'm a nice guy. It was worth the 40 bucks. Always, always, always, always, always. And don't cry about it.

Hilary - So you're at a networking event and the person that you are talking with is sitting there chewing gum. Well, I mean, what do you say to them? Do you say like, I swallow it, spit it out or you just ignore it and walk away?

Tim Healy- Part of me would love to stay. Would you like a napkin? Cause it will be funny but I would, I would ignore it, you know, it just is sometimes, you know, but that's the funny thing about business. Again, you're dealing with human nature and there's a lot of you. One great thing is you can, I will never say I've seen it all. Because something's going to happen tomorrow that I haven't seen yet. So by the way, you're a fantastic host. I love I'm having a blast.

Hilary - Right. Here’s another one. So now you are at a coffee shop and you both order cookies and milk. So the person that you're out to lunch with, or, you know, out for cookies with he’s dunking their Oreos or chocolate chip cookies into the milk? What's your reaction?

Tim Healy- I think my internal reaction, which I do not share is I think cookie dunking is disgusting. That's me, my wife, who I love dearly, she loves to dunk cookies. So you know what is the great thing about life. She gets to dunk her cookies and I can be a dunk less cookie. You know what? Listen, some of your listeners may know me, some many, many, I'm sure don't. I could be a little wound-tight sometimes, I'm a type a personality sometimes. As long as, this is how I'd answer it, as long as they didn't dump their cookie in my milk, Hey, you know what enjoy life. If they decide to dunk their cookie in my milk, then I'd have to say. Wow. You know, what, can I get you to know the glasses?

Hilary - Isn't it the same as when someone takes a fry off your plate?

Tim Healy- Oh God. Oh, geez. God. I, yeah, I just, I can't I'm I don't know. In a business setting I'm talking about not, not personal. I mean, personal is not the greatest either, but what it is, this setting, you know what I, I would, I would let it slide and oh, okay.

Here's a true story. I can not mention the client. True story. I'm at a dinner with a dear client, a great client. And there are 12 of us there. It's the owner, his wife, one of the VPs of sales and about seven or eight sales guys were there. Dinner comes out. We dinner, dessert and I saw an apple crisp pile mode kind of thing. I'm like, Aw, that sounds delicious. The owner sitting next to me, he goes, what are you getting for dessert? And I tell him, Oh, that sounds good. He's like, I'll have a piece. Oh my God. I love this guy. Can't say enough good things about him. So that's what he does. That's his thing. So the dessert comes out. The second it comes out, I dive bomb the dessert and I want to eat as much as I can. And then he goes, oh, and he grabs the piece. I'm like, okay. Oh yeah, good, good, good, good. And that's the last I have of it and I just, oh, okay. I start talking and I just let it, do you know, I'm fine. I got my couple of pieces in first. I'm good. My client was happy. He went to my plate, okay.

Hilary - You're you're terrific. And you just one of those people that just keep making me laugh. Thank you. I want, I just want to find out how people can get in touch with you and learn more about Healy success solutions and also listen to the Profit Express.

Tim Healy - Well, thank you. Uh, it's healysolutions.com you know, for and anything from anything and everything. Sales management, reach out to me. healysolutions.com and the show of course, you can follow me on Instagram at The Profit Express, at the profit express page on Facebook, that'd be great.

Hilary - Terrific. All right. Well, thank you again for being on the show. And I want to thank our sponsors, the Russo law group, The Profit Express, Pop international galleries, Gold Benes LLP and the Pegalis law group.

And last but not least, I want to thank you, our listeners for tuning in each week. If you want to know more about this show or any other show, visit us at hilarytopperonair.com or you can find us on Spotify, iTunes, Google Play, apple podcast, Amazon Alexa, you name it. We're out there. Have a great week. And we'll see you next time.

After a year of shutdown and no racing, it looks like racing is happening again with some variation. Today's guest is familiar with all the new protocols, especially, in triathlon racing. I’m Hilary Topper, and this is Hilary Topper on Air. Today I have the great pleasure of speaking with Tim Delss of CBMultiSport. Tim is also the head coach of WeREndurance. Tim, Welcome to the show. Let's talk about the return to triathlon racing.

Tim - Thanks for having me, Hilary.

Hilary - So can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?

Tim - Sure, I am the owner and coach at CBMultiSport, which is a company that I operate here in Maryland focusing on coaching age group triathletes of all ages. My specialty is people like you and me, that work normal jobs and have lives and families and things to schedule work around. In addition to that, I am the head coach for you guys over, WeREndurance. I'm also a business partner with AJ Baucco coaching. And then I also helped the first time Ironman athletes at iron man Maryland, and do the secrets to success clinic and help with race staff there as well.

Hilary - So, can you talk to our listeners about what to expect from Iron man and other long courses, this racing season 2021?

Tim - Yeah. First of all, it's great that we're seeing transitioned back to racing. The return to triathlon racing is very exciting. Last weekend I was actually down at a race in Virginia, the kinetic triathlon festival that had sprint Olympic at 70.3 distance. So, it was fun to be back at a race and see what was going on. There's a lot of variables and what's happening because, obviously, CDC guidelines are changing, each state they're managing their guidelines and their standards all individually. And then, below that, it funnels down to counties and local jurisdiction. So there's no real, set protocol. It depends on where your races are, but, the most important thing is racing is coming back. And from what I've seen, what I've heard, as races are taking off is that the race organizations, the race directors and the staffs are they're putting a lot of time and effort into making things as safe and reasonable as possible. I know, and this may change since the guidelines were just changed by the CDC. But, prior to this weekend, races were requiring you to wear masks, to pack and pick up their space and people out to maintain social distancing.

I know for Eagle man, 70.3, which is our first Ironman branded race. Now this season here in Maryland, we are going to be having people call or schedule their packet pickups. So that'll be coming soon. For those athletes, and their return to triathlon racing, they will be getting an email to schedule when they actually want to pick their pack up to try to minimize crowding. And will be doing the same for bike racking. We'll see how that progresses into the year with other races like Maryland or things like that, but that's just one of the things that Angie and the staff is doing, for Eagle man to make it as efficient, as easy as possible, but, I'm sure you noticed that so many things are in flux right now, especially with the new revisions by the CDC. So, pretty much everything I thought we were going to talk about when we set this up last week, it is about to change. I find it's changing. So, being an awesome podcast, I'm going to give you a lot of “I think” as opposed to “I know”.

Hilary - Yeah, yeah. I know. It's just, it's crazy. Every day something comes out that's completely different than two days before. And, in that vein, what do you think about triathletes? I mean, should we all get vaccinated? Let's take politics out of this and just what do you think in terms of these long races and that type of thing? Should we protect each other and ourselves in order to return to triathlon racing?

Tim - Sure now there's a lot of things to consider there. Some people have cultural beliefs, religious beliefs, their own opinions. Right, and I'm never going to tell someone what they should or shouldn't think. And, unfortunately, in the climate we have here, almost everything is being politicized and the vaccine is… Those are waters that nobody really wants to wait into and rightfully so. But, from a pure triathlon standpoint, if you have access to the vaccine, if you can go get it, like I know here in Maryland, mass vaccination sites are walk up now and we bet we're actually getting to the point where in a lot of places we have more vaccines and we have appointments being filled. Because the initial rush kind of over, everybody can get one versus you have to be a certain age or have a certain predetermined health issue or things like that. If you have access to it, unless you have a very specific reason not to get it, then I don't really see why you shouldn't. I can't tell you not to, but from an endurance sports standpoint, triathlon, especially a long course, it's very hard on the body with the training and the racing, it wears you down, it makes you more susceptible to illness and injury and things like that, and so yes, we are that small percentage, generally of the most healthy people in the country, right? Because we're incredibly active and most people are pretty decent about their eating in some form. And we generally take care of ourselves, which, on the surface, makes us less predisposed to get an illness than someone who smokes two packs a day and doesn't take care of themselves or whatever.

When you're going out there and training hard and racing hard and doing all that stuff, you compromise your immune system, that's why recovery is so important. You know, and that's why triathletes and during south fleets come up sick within, oftentimes, a couple of weeks of a race cause their immune system's down or they're immunocompromised at that point. So to return to triathlon racing, the vaccine can be a tool to help in that regard. I personally got my second shot, last Thursday. So, after my two weeks lapse, I was fully vaccinated and I was never worried about myself. I'm 36 years old. I'm a healthy guy. I don't have, I wasn't worried about me getting COVID, but what I was more worried about is me giving it to someone else or, you know, something like that. So, that for me was an easy personal step. So it's, unfortunately, it's something that everybody has to decide for themselves most Americans have at least one shot at this point, the majority of people that are eligible, right? Not, it's not accounting for children who aren't yet eligible or things like that. And I think that's why we're starting to see things open up and seeing more racing coming back. And, you know, we're getting towards that level of herd immunity that people have been talking about for so long. And, but we're doing it more by vaccine than we are by you catching it and me catching it and everybody else catching it. So that's why things are starting to open back up. I know that's why the CDC relaxed their guidelines because we hit some percentage that they wanted to see. So things are on the up and, hopefully, within a year or two, it's going to be kind of like the flu. In that, they understand more about it. And every year they have a shot that people can get if they want to get it, based on what the strands are doing and the evolution and all that stuff. And it'll just become a small, but normal part of our culture, like the flu.

Hilary - Do you think, sorry to interrupt for a minute, but I just, I'm curious to know your thoughts about whether or not race directors should require either negative test or proof that you got the vaccine in order to return to triathlon racing, is that happening?

Tim - Not that I know of, I know some people in the industry, not necessarily race directors, but bike fitters like chops, stuff like that that are requiring things like that for like bike fittings and stuff like that. As a small race team, if you're a local race director or anything like that, you run a private business and as private business, you're allowed to allow to require those things and request those things. There's been debates on whether or not someone asking you if you're vaccinated to violation of HIPAA laws or whatever, and I'm not a lawyer, I don't study medical law. But I was like, well, I mean, you have to provide proof of vaccination that your kids have had a their measles, mumps, and rubella if they're going to go to school, and that's not a violation or, you know, at the same time, I've read a couple of things that were like, well, there's a, if you're a business owner, race director, whatever, you have an obligation to keep your employees and volunteers safe, that's kind of a counter argument, so to speak. But I don't know of any race directors doing that to return to triathlon racing. The couple of running races that I've done during COVID time has been, you have to wear a mask until the race starts, they're spacing out, starting times. The race I was at this past weekend, they did the same thing. Everybody had to wear their masks in the corral. And then they did like time trial start. And as you were going up to the edge of the beach, they had a trashcan there for you to throw masks. And they also provided two masks to the athletes, and then once you finish, before you lead the finisher shoot, you had to have a mass back on, so I think that race directors are in a really sticky spot because it's, it's a business. Everyone has personal opinions there, but they're also trying to be as safe and welcoming as possible. They're really in kind of a situation that they can't win, so they're kind of trying to balance everything to allow us to get back to racing. And I certainly don't envy the position that they're in with having to make their decisions. But the few that are the ones I know that I've talked to in a couple of races, I've seen, they seem to be doing a pretty good job of doing the best they can.

Hilary - Before we move on, I have to say that I am so appreciative of our sponsors and must take the time out to thank them. Please support our sponsors and tell them that you heard about them on Hilary Topper on air. Special thanks to the Russo law group, the Profit Express with Tim Healey, Pop international galleries, Gold Benes L L P and the Pegalis law group. Now back to you, Tim. So we're talking about racing and triathlons and the return to triathlon racing. Can you tell me if you think this year is a good year for a newbie to race? Why or why not?

Tim - Every year is a good year to try something new. In my local tri club here in Maryland, I actually run a beginners program, where I provide a group focus training plan, they're not individual fully customized, like I do my normal day to day work, but, kind of a group focused plan that leads towards a race that our tri club. And it's a way to welcome the men, give them a little guidance. It allows me to be there to answer their questions and, and kind of help them on their journey. Like someone helped me when I got into this sport. It's never a bad time to try something new and to get in. I don't know how long you've been in the sport, but you know, if we go back 10 years ago, when the triathlon exploded, there were always new people coming in. There was always a rush of excitement. Like there was an atmosphere in the sport that was pretty amazing. And everything kind of settled in the sport retracted a little bit, like most things do after they boom, to what it has been the last few years, which is good, has been steady. Races are still selling out and things like that. So that’s great. It's not like it's just falling off a cliff, but there is something that new athletes bring to the sport that the anticipation, the anxiousness, the nervousness, the excitement that they bring that really kind of excites all athletes, even people that have been doing this a long time. And so I love seeing new people in, the other thing that's happening is with COVID, with the pandemic, the race directors have had to get very creative in trying to figure out ways to bring race and back last summer, fall, and now for 2021. And so, the new athletes can actually use that as an advantage. There are more races popping up. There are different formats popping up, they're now spreading races, instead of having one big race on one day, they're spreading it out over two days. So there are things that are happening that kind of take a little bit of that entry pressure off.

Cause like when I got into this sport, you had to sign, you had to commit to something a year in advance, sign up right away, know everything sold out fast. You had to jump in the deep end just to guarantee that you could get to a starting line. Then you had to work your way back, no matter what distance you were racing. But now there's so much more variety and variability and option that an athlete can really kind of way into the water instead of jumping in or immersing ourselves at kind of their own speed. And after a year off of racing, the seasoned athletes and experienced athletes, they're all really just kind of happy to be getting back to racing. And so the dynamic it's reminding me more of when I first got into it, the atmosphere in the sports, a little different. So, it's more inclusive and it's less, the pressure is less intense. Like people are just happy to be back racing. And so I think that's a great atmosphere for beginners to come into.

Hilary - Absolutely. Now let's just, I just have a question about the pandemic. How should triathletes be careful during racing? I mean, you know, is there anything that you think, advice that you would give a triathlete or an athlete when they are racing with hundreds of other people?

Tim - Well, the biggest thing is, and this we're talking about the pandemic, but this is always going to apply in or out a pandemic is don't do something that you're uncomfortable doing. There's a certain level of discomfort in triathlon. Whether it's tackling a new distance or your legs are tired or lungs are burning, right? There is a saying in triathlon that you get comfortable being uncomfortable and that's very true. What I mean is don't do something that you fear, don't put yourself in a situation that you're worried would be harmful to you. So it's one of those people who has an underlying medical condition or has older family that you're really worried about while everything's still happening with COVID or whatever, then wait a few more months and see how things progress, right? Like there's no reason that you have to just rush into something that you're unprepared for. As far as the racing standpoint goes, the truth is like, I could tell you, make sure you're staying away from people, make sure you're legally not drafting, right. That's more than six feet, right. That don't run close to people when they're sweating and breathing and all that stuff. And I can say all those things, but I think for most of us, once we get into a race, you're not really thinking about a lot of those things. You're kind of you're in the race. So it's like, you're thinking about making sure you get your water and you get your nutrition and you're staying on your pacing and there's so many you just kind of do when you're racing, and for the most part, like being in the water is not really that concerning of an issue right. On the swim portion, on the bike portion, you're not actually supposed to be close enough to really have any issues. So, the biggest sticking point would be the run from a safety standpoint.

And, in that case, it's like, well, don't grout around an aid station. You know, things like that. I haven't raced yet this year, so I can't say personally, but like when I've done running races during COVID we've been required to carry a mask in case we needed to stop at an aid station for the safety of volunteers. I don't know if that's some race directors are requiring that for triathlon aid stations or if they're going self-serve and you know, some of them are doing self-surveyed stations. You know, where someone pours the water and puts it on the table, and then they stay out of the way so you can just run through and grab it, but it's pretty, for the most part, it's pretty easy and triathlon to maintain a reasonable distance. There's been very few times that I've ever been shoulder to shoulder with someone on a run or something like that. Like most things, common sense serves you best, you just have to, you just have to think about it. And unfortunately, it doesn't really seem so common anymore, but, just practical, common sense will serve people well.

Hilary - Absolutely good, good advice. Could you talk a little bit about how you personally help triathletes grow and develop?

Tim - Sure. Triathlon is a sport that rewards two things: time and consistency, and by consistency, I mean, whatever your distance, whether you're a sprint athlete or an iron distance at one 40.6 athlete, or the more consistently you can train over a longer portion of time, the better you will be. It takes years to reach an aerobic peak and things like that. It’s a sport that rewards consistency. So, whether, if I'm coaching an athlete, then obviously I'm managing their day to day training schedules and things like that. So we're shooting, my job is to make sure that they're consistently training, hitting their progressions in their training plans, things like that. If I'm not, if we're just having a conversation and I'm talking to some new athlete at a race venue or something, then usually the advice I give is to find a training schedule that fits your life. You know, it has to fit within your life. I could build the best training plan on earth for you. For example, you know that they'd be like, oh man, we're going to blow some things out of the water and, in a year, you're going to be awesome. But if the schedule doesn't fit into your daily life, it's really helpful to you at all, cause you're not going to do it as it was intended, so you're not going to see the improvement. So there would need to be revisions made, so they need to pick a schedule that fits. The second thing is don't be afraid to take your time. There's been kind of a rush of athletes that come into triathlon and they jump in and they want to get right up to do an iron man because they saw on TV in December when NBC aired it. And you know, it becomes a bucket list item. So they jump in and they want to do it. That's fine and good. And that's a great goal and a great ambition. There's also an extremely high likelihood of injury. If you come from not doing this to try to jump in and do 140 mile race. So don't be afraid to take your time. It should take a few years for you to get to the point of doing an Ironman and then the last thing is don't take it too seriously. Like generally we're kind of type a people, right? We care about data. We care about the numbers. If you use training peaks, you want your work out to be green at the end of the day you don't want to miss stuff, we want to improve. We want to get better. And, and all those things are good traits and there, it can be good and positive. But you still have to remember that this is supposed to be fun for 99.9% of the people. This is a hobby and so while it is good to want to be better and to focus on getting better, don't beat yourself up if you have a bad race, they happen. Or if things don't go the way you want, or, there's always going to be another race on the horizon and it's still supposed to be fun. So enjoy the fact that you're able to do it and take in the experience because if you pay attention to the experience around you while it's happening, it, it really is. Triathlon is an amazing world to live in.

Hilary - Totally. I totally agree. And coach Tim, can you tell our listeners how to get in touch with you to learn more about your services?

Tim - Sure, guys can reach me just about anywhere, you can find me on Facebook, my coaching pages CBMultiSport, or you can look me up by my name. Tim Delss, you can find me at www.cbmultisport.com or www.ajbcoaching.com . For my partnership with A.J. Baucco Coaching, you can also find me roaming the grounds at most triathlons in the Mid-Atlantic area, you can join the WeREndurance team. You can find me there and you can find me on Instagram at CB multi-sport or you can if you don't remember any of that stuff, you can contact Hilary and she can get you to.

Hilary - Absolutely. And I just want to thank you, Tim. This was a great show as always talking about the return to triathlon racing. You're always an amazing guest. I also want to thank our sponsors, the Russo law group, the Profit express, Pop International Galleries, Gold Benes, LLP, and the Pegalis law group. And last but not least, I want to thank you our listeners for tuning in. If you want more information on this show or any other show, you can find us at hilarytopperonair.com or you can find us also at Spotify, iTunes, apple podcasts, Google play, even Amazon Alexa, have a great week and we'll see you next time...

Marketing to consumers isn't new, but the way in which we reach our target audiences evolves every day. With everyone doing things virtually due to the pandemic, savvy marketers know how to digitally impact consumers and elevate their brands. So how do you best market to today's consumers?

I'm Hilary Topper. And this is Hilary Topper on Air. Today, I have the great pleasure of speaking with Farissa Knox, CEO of RLM media and integrated marketing and communications advertising agency, skilled in understanding how platforms like digital and video solutions, search engine, social media, lifestyle, music, and news platforms integrate into consumers 24-hour cycles. So Farissa, welcome to the show.

Farissa - Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

Hilary - So can you tell me a little bit about yourself and your background?

Farissa - Absolutely. So, uh, yes, as we mentioned, I am a business owner. I am from New York originally, now, living in Chicago. And, really from a young age, loved and authentically understood that this art of communication, like legitimately the art of finding the right words and putting in, putting them in the best order possible in order to communicate a message or a desire or a call to action or even a poem, you know, for that matter, when I was a child is something that I've gravitated towards and loved my entire life. So the fact that I am now in this seat owning and running my own ad firm and really working to integrate all of those things into what we call really uniquely, ingredients served, marketing proposals, and solutions for our clients. It's no surprise to me at all that I'm here now.

Hilary - Very cool. So tell us a little bit about RLM Media and how it helps brands market to today's consumers.

Farissa - We started about 12 years ago now, really in the paid media space. So when you think about my world, it's very vast and one of the things that has to happen once you create the media and the messaging, it has to be placed in the right location for your target consumer to see it, and then engage with the message. And that's how our alum got its start mainly because my background is in advertising sales. So I started selling ads. Space for local and then ultimately national radio stations out of New York, and then here in Chicago and was able to pivot my professional experience into what was the first phase of RLM back in 2008.

So we started with that, just placing the media for our clients, but as we grew and as our client base grew and our client's needs expanded, they started to ask us for more. So they started to ask for not just the space on the billboard, but can you make the ad, and then it's can you bring any insights to who our consumers are and what their needs are and what they desire? They wanted to know how to market to today's consumers.

As competition started to rise in the marketplace. So seeing that, allowed me to be very comfortable with expanding our services and building out departments within the agency. That now how we help our customers reach their consumers. It starts with insights and research, right? So really understanding who your customer is, what is it that drives them to even want, or need your product? Where are they spending their time finding out more information about you before they even start talking to you? From their whatever insights we can pull from the actual data. Utilizing those insights and our experience to cultivate what is going to ultimately be the brand message. So, what you want your customer to know about you, how you want them to engage with you and, ultimately, what action you want them to take. Whether it's click here, sign up here, buy this, vote for me, whatever it might be. And then beyond creating those creative concepts, we can then produce them into the actual assets that go into the marketplace. So if we're buying a digital campaign then making sure that there's video or audio or graphics to go along with that or radio ad or TV ad or billboard. And then from there, my media team, executing that and placing that in the marketplace and tracking it and making sure that the results that we said we wanted at the upfront are what we're actually getting in the backend. And if not, how do we pivot? How do we change and how do we make sure that we adjust accordingly?

So high level, that's basically how we're helping our customers market to today's consumers by talking to their clients, understanding their clients, and learning as much as they can so that the next time they do it, hopefully with us, um, there are better results. You know, each time we do this.

Hilary - Definitely. Now, with everybody virtual, right, these days, you know, I mean, a lot of people haven't gone back to the office. I mean, in New York, they're saying January to go back. I mean, so it's, it's a long time that people are at home at work. You know, how do you feel like consumers have changed this past year and how do you reflect that with your business? I mean, cause it's like a totally different thing, right?

Farissa - Yeah. I mean, so yes and no, to be honest. So yes, we, as consumers, as people have completely changed our way of living these last year and a half. So with that, there comes changes to how we do a lot of other things, how we consume media really hasn't changed that much if you think about it. So on a regular day and a regular workday before COVID, people were waking up, getting ready for work. They were at home listening to their local radio station or streaming something online or watching the local news, then they would go on their commute, depending on where you live in the country. That commute could be like in New York, you know, public transportation. And then you're probably in earbuds listening to something digital, but in a lot of the places, the rest of the United States, folks are still getting in their cars, driving to work. So that's like regular radio or satellite radio, and then the work they continue, right. Where a lot of folks are either, you know, glued to a computer and so you're consuming media, whether it's social or digital, that have you, then you go home and you have like your evening routine and that could be streaming TV, broadcast TV, cable, you know, digital. The thing that has been removed from our lives because of COVID is that commute, and nothing else, really.

So with the commute gone, now that does bring some value of some media down a little bit. So for example, I think out of home, outdoor has really suffered the most because we're not, we're literally not outside, right? Like we haven't gone outside. So how we've helped our clients, really understand this dynamic and shift is instead of buying transit like trains and bus ads and bus shelters and that stuff, when it made sense for their strategy instead if outdoor still makes sense for your strategy. Now, when people are outside, especially during the height of the pandemic, what were we doing? We were going to the grocery store. We were going to the pharmacy, we were going to the essential places. Right. And so those essential places became the new train, the new bus, the new commute to work.

And then, our increase of media happened where digital skyrocketed TV, in some cases skyrocketed. So we're still consuming ads on a regular, almost 24-hour basis. Our time spent with different mediums has changed, from a percentage perspective. And we're just helping our clients continue to navigate how to market to today's consumers because to your point, it's still changing, right? Depending on where you live, your office is either talking about six months from now going back, some places this summer. But in a lot of places, it's more about what is the future, right? What's this hybrid model. And so yeah, there's going to be a lot of movement in the next year, even more, but I think, for strategic, smart, thoughtful people, we'll just keep watching and then, helping our clients, adjust accordingly while we're paying attention to what the consumers are doing.

Hilary - That's awesome. So before we move on, I just want to do a shout-out to our sponsors. I really have to thank them. Please support our sponsors and tell them that you heard about them on Hilary topper on air. Special thanks to the Russo Law Group, The Profit Express, Pop International Galleries, Gold Benes, and The Pegalis Law Group.

So Farissa back to you,  we were talking about digital marketing strategies and how to reach consumers online and we're also talking about some of the challenges that companies are facing today, in particular, that awareness and visibility. Could you also talk about some of the solutions to these problems? Like how do you recommend brands cut through the clutter of all these different places that they can have ads.

Farissa - I separate clients into two buckets when we talk about this. So there is like the mass reach bucket where you have, the resources and the funds to spend money like McDonald's and Coca-Cola and those folks, or really everybody else, right. Everyone else. And so I'll answer the everyone else because that's really more important here. So for everyone else, who isn't McDonald's and Procter and gamble and these folks. You really have to start with understanding who are all of your different consumer groups, right? Because you can't afford to just blast your messaging 24 hours a day to anyone who's willing to listen. So the idea of being hyper strategic becomes more and more important and not just from a media perspective, it really needs to start with understanding who your customer is because with digital and being so hyper-focused, we have the ability today to say, okay, my customer, for example, if your customers are moms, so you understand your customer is a mother. Now, is it a mom who has one kid or a mom who has three kids? Is it a mom who works out of the house or is it a mom who works at home? And really keep asking those deeper level questions because when you're specifically with digital, you can get that precise now from a planning perspective, when you're talking about your paid digital strategy and the more things you know about your customer if you can know her down to literally an individual and, and create a profile, a persona of who she is, then you can go find all of the people who match that and meet that online.

And then you're spending every dollar really strategic, instead of hoping that it's reaching your customer or praying that it's reaching your customer. Now you will know that it is.

Hilary - Absolutely. There are so many different outlets today and a lot of people will say, oh, I want a television ad or I want to be on cable or I want to do a Facebook or Instagram and a campaign. How do you narrow people down, especially a small business owner with a tight budget. Maybe you have some case studies that you'd like to share with us.

Farissa - In reference to how I helped people narrowed down, there's no one answer. So, unfortunately, there isn't any particular case study that I would point your audience in the direction of. But I would say, not every medium is for everyone, right? If you are, let's say a local restaurant owner, and you're now opening back up because CDC and state laws are allowing us to now eat safely, buying a TV ad is not going to be your best bet, again, understanding where are you located? How many locations do you have? Who were the folks coming to eat on a regular basis at your restaurant before COVID and how do you get back in contact with those folks? Is it through social media? Have you stayed in contact with them in spite of the pandemic, in spite of them being able to come to your restaurants to eat. Where is your customer spending time on media? So there isn't one, there is no like one size fits all for this. It's really just understanding. And if you don't have it, internally from a marketing perspective in-house someone who works for you, then really taking that extra time to understand your customer will be super helpful. And I've had clients, especially when we were first getting started and we were working with smaller groups. Just ask your current customers. If you have nowhere else to start, it's starting there. It's saying, you know, how did you originally find out about us? What do you tell your friends when they ask you? Would you recommend us to your friends? And just collecting that data because it's with that, that the strategy is developed and it's with that strategy that tells you what you should do with your dollars from there.

So if you wind up learning that, the majority of the folks who were utilizing your space to come eat before, did it after let's say Sunday when they went to church, I'm literally making all this up, but if after church, everyone came to your restaurant to eat, utilizing that information, not only to get them in after church but coming up with creative, fun ways to reach them during other days of the week that matters to them or other occasions throughout the year that matters to them. That's a family event that they would do with the family. So it's a combination of rich data collecting and being creative and combining those two aspects to stay in constant communication with your customers, whether it's 50 or 5 million.

Hilary - Awesome. And now. Can you share with us some success stories that you've had during the past year?

Farissa - Yes, I'll start high level for just my business in general and then maybe for a client of ours. But for me personally, as a business owner and an entrepreneur, I looked at COVID and what it did to our day-to-day lives as an opportunity to just sit down and take a seat for a second. Cause you know, we were all running a legitimate rat race, but to just sit down and take a seat and pay attention and look at what I had built already. Right. What was, ultimately, in my mind, what did I think COVID was going to do to my business? Or what was it doing to my business? And when I sat back and looked at that, I saw that, in reference to my counterparts, who might've been bleeding out and losing business and having to close their doors, we just had a scrape on the knee. And I was like, well, beyond my gratefulness wanted to know, well, why is that the case? And really it boiled down to the types of clients that we were servicing and understanding that these categories were almost pandemic groove. In my agency, we deal a lot with healthcare and higher ed and financial services, employment, and recruitment. So all of these areas became hyper-focus importance to almost everyone during COVID. So understanding that, I decided to do a brand refresh of my agency, and make sure that we were communicating that these were the types of clients that we service. We've been doing this, and this is how we did. These are the lessons that we've learned, and this is how we present ourselves to the world where we had never done that on purpose before. And quite frankly, we never really had the time until the start of COVID to really do that and present that to the world. So that for me is my success story, RLM success story, coming out of this past year, really understanding my business on a deeper level than I have before. And then, with that understanding, using it as the communication to our current clients, but more importantly, using it as a way to go get new business, because now that the world is coming back to life, we've been spending this past year sharing that. Collecting new potential clients, sharing our story, sharing our experience and using it to grow and expand. So that's RLM success story.

One of our newer clients. Also has a very similar story. We work with an organization called  Ruby and what they do is help small business owners with all of the things that entrepreneurs have small businesses need and, before COVID, they were focused on, let's say helping the plumber who has a day books of appointments, answering his phone for him while he's out on appointments and scheduling new ones, right? Because you can't be in two places at once, but when COVID hit, they understood that their small business clients, their needs changed, it went from answer my phone to how do I navigate PPP loans and getting that access to that money. And so what they did was pivot to a model that allow them to expand their services to their clients where now it's everything that you need as a small business owner, you can go to them and figure out how do I insert blank here and they will be a resource for that. So they really grew through the pandemic as well. And we're proud of that and now we're working with them to do the same thing we did. How do you take all that and build it into your brand, build it into your communication and let people know that this is what you are now, so that you can attract new customers that need you on all of those levels.

Hilary - Well, I just have to say first for starters, congratulations to you. I mean, for number one, being in business for 12 years and number two, just really reinventing yourself during this pandemic and for this case study that sounds amazing. So thank you for that and sharing that with us.

Farissa - No problem.Thank you for the kind words.

Hilary - So tell us just quickly, if you have three best practices that you would offer my listeners on marketing in today's digital world.

Farissa - So three best practices. I've stated this already, but it really has to be said again, number one, know your customer in and out, number two, know that you might not be the customer, right? A lot of my clients, not so much now, but when I was getting started, we would recommend something for them and they would go, oh, I don't do that. And it's like, wait, but are you the customer or are you trying to attract new people? So really keeping that marketer's hat on and understanding that people are different and have different habits and consume media and do things in a different way. And then that third piece is allowing for flexibility across all ways to be flexible, because not every person, even if they are your unique customer, is going to respond to the same type of messaging. So being okay with being flexible and having multiple messages out there, being flexible for language, right? Because some folks are more comfortable speaking English as a second language. Just flexibility I think, more so now than ever, is going to be super, super important for business owners to manage.

Hilary - A hundred percent agree. That's awesome. Thank you so much. And finally, how can people get in touch with you and learn more about your business, about you, and how to market to today's consumers?

Farissa - I have a website it's for farissaknox.com. So folks can find me there. If you're a social media person, same handle on all the platforms, just add Farissa Knox and RLM, specifically, you can find out more information about RLM at rlm-media.net.

Hilary - Perfect. Well, thank you for Farissa so much for being on the show. This was so informative and I'll be following you on social. So thank you.

I also want to thank our sponsors, The Russo Law Group, The Profit Express, Pop International Galleries, Gold Benes and the Pegalis Law group. And last but not least, I want to thank you, our listeners for tuning in. If you want more information on this show or any other show, you can visit our website at hilarytopperonair.com. Or you can find us on Spotify, iTunes, Google Play, Apple podcasts, even Amazon Alexa, where out there you can find us have a great week and we'll see you next time.