REACH OR MISS - Entrepreneurial Marketing Success

Bart Rupert has a strong Mergers & Acquisitions background across Fortune 500’s and startups within industries such as technology, software, energy (oil, gas, and solar), healthcare, real estate, managed services, and construction.

He founded nearly 30 companies, negotiated over $500M in contracts & business deals, grew a corporate start-up from inception to $10M, grew a healthcare company from $8M to $75M, and grew an energy company from $22M to $115M+.

He has made a career buying & selling companies for a living, facilitated the sale of luxury, premium real estate, and taken ownership of companies across three different countries using none of his own money.

Most passionate about

• Today I help entrepreneurs learn how to buy and sell companies for a living. The reason we do that is because, statistically, 88% of all new wealth in the world is created by selling small medium-size businesses and real estate.
• I started off extremely poor. We couldn’t make rent or pay bills. I figured out that I should become an executive to achieve a true level of financial freedom. I stepped into that role and had some degree of success.
• However, I then met a guy who was paying himself $365,000 so that he could tell everyone he was making more than a thousand dollars a day. At that moment, I discovered that I should be an entrepreneur and not an executive, to achieve the level of wealth I dreamt of. I looked at this guy and thought, ‘I need to start some businesses.’
• The organization I was working in asked me to work on a special deal and I found out that this entrepreneur was looking to sell the company. I was a major part of these negotiations. We made the deal and I really loved it.
• This entrepreneur ended up making $20 million on that one transaction. Then I realized that selling businesses was what could enable me to reach the wealth I wanted.

Bart’s career and story

• I’m the classic immigrant type of achiever. Money is very important. However, what I really love is the achievement. When you help someone sell their business and you can help them change their lives in a way that most people can’t, that feels fantastic.
• Everybody says that when you make your first million dollars, it feels phenomenal, and it does. But a lot of people also say you’ll never feel better than that and I would disagree; I think you can recapture that feeling each and every time you achieve an accomplishment, but it’s got to be something you really love.
• For me, doing that for myself is great and I like that, but I really have fun being able to do it for other people.

Bart’s best advice for entrepreneurs

• Almost all the entrepreneurs I talk with are focused on growth. And that’s the right thing to focus on. The issue is that 99% of them focus on organic growth. What we are offering is taking the elevator to reach the same goals instead of using the stairs. Entrepreneurs should consider inorganic growth as part of their strategy.
• You can buy your competitor, their products, their customers, and find a way to merge them into your organization. Through that strategy, you can double or triple your revenue instantly - just by going through the path of an acquisition instead of trying for five or ten years to double or triple your revenue organically.
• Today, it’s much easier for entrepreneurs to buy their competitors as part of their growth strategy. The best part is that they can do it without their own money.

Biggest failure with customers

• The biggest failure I had with customers over the course of time is communication. And it’s a big lesson learned. If you are not open and transparent with your customers and if you don’t communicate with them regularly, you will lose them.
• You should set...

Shane Barker is an instructor for a Personal Branding -Influencer Marketing at UCLA. He has been in the influencer space for over 8 years and has been a keynote speaker at the Influencer Marketing Days Conference, Influencer Marketing Hub, and Influencer Marketing Summit Mexico.

Shane was recognized as one of the 100 Most Influential People in Influencer Marketing alongside Kim Kardashian, Gary Vaynerchuk, and legendary PR leaders like the CEO of Edelman.

He does 2-day Influencer Marketing Workshops for brands and agencies all over the nation and is a top contributor at INC, Huffington Post, Forbes, and Salesforce.

Most passionate about

• I help businesses grow offline and online. That’s what I’ve done for over 25 years and what I’m most passionate about.

Shane’s career and story

• I started working for a restaurant chain store, where I was in charge of opening up new restaurants. It was mainly taking care of the POS (Point of Sale) system. I did that for several years all over the US. That was my first part, what I call my Shane 1.0 version.
• Then I started the Shane 2.0 period, which is everything about the digital space. We build websites, my team is extremely good at SEO, we do influence marketing. I teach at UCLA about how to become an influencer.
• It has been a long journey. I used to own a bar in California. I built, with two partners, a company from a zero to $25 million valuation in two years. And I had plenty of businesses that failed in the meantime.
• You have to fail. It’s part of the business. People ask me, “What can I do to become successful?” and I say, “Fail fast and fail hard. Fail as quickly as you can and keep doing that over and over because those lessons are invaluable.”
• The main similarity between the restaurant world and the digital world is the concept of really “wowing” people with your service and product offering. In any business, you should treat your customers beyond their expectations. This is something I did with the restaurants and it’s relevant to any customer.
• If you treat people right and you treat people well, they will come back for the business and good things will happen.

Shane’s best advice for entrepreneurs

• One of the things that I didn’t do and that today any entrepreneur can and should do is to take a mentor. My advice to any entrepreneur is to find a mentor or a consultant and ask them the questions that might otherwise take the entrepreneur six months to figure out.
• I was more of a ‘go-getter’; I was sure I could figure it out, I could do it on my own, no one was as good as me, and the like. I had great people around me but I needed great people who were smarter than me.
• I wasn’t asking for help. I felt like, as an entrepreneur, I should figure out everything by myself. That this was part of the journey.

Shane’s customers

• Today I have a team of 36 awesome people. We focus mainly on SAS companies—helping them with their marketing and doing a lot of SEO. We have become very good at it over the years and we help our customers’ sites get to number one as a result of leading many keywords.
• My current website has 160,000 visitors each month thanks to the knowledge we have gained over the years.
• We focus on inbound marketing. People find us through many points of contact. We use speaking events and podcasts, I write posts for the media, and much more.
• So, we are a good fit for SAS companies and anyone looking to get more exposure in the digital space.

Biggest failure with customers

• One of my biggest failures was in the company we brought from zero to $25 million in two years. And one of the things we had issues with was customer service. Although I was trying to wow the...

Jason Keath is Founder and CEO of Social Fresh, a social media education company. He is a social media analyst and speaker.

He graduated from the UNC Charlotte in 2004 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Design and Photography. He has worked in leadership consulting and as a creative lead for various advertising and digital agencies before becoming an independent consultant in 2008.

Since then Jason has worked full time on building Social Fresh, a company that offers insights, training, and education resources to companies that range from the Fortune 50 to small businesses.

Most passionate about

• Obviously, there have been changes in the world today, but at the root of our business, we are an advent company in many ways. We teach people social media marketing, we teach them how to improve their businesses using social media, we produce in-person conferences, we train some of the big companies, and we do consulting.
• Recently, obviously, we have been doing much more consulting with medium to large businesses because we can’t do physical events. We pivoted to helping people virtually the best we can. We’ve done virtual events and we’re having a lot of fun with our customers. We’re also doing much more virtual consulting.
• We help people improve their social media at the highest level. We’ve been doing social media conferences since 2008, and we’ve done more than 25 of them in the US. We are now doing them annually, usually in Florida.

Jason’s career and story

• I was working in agencies as a creative lead—I was an artist-designer and photographer. I was always writing as well; however, I’ve loved most of the creative parts of marketing. I enjoyed working with the agencies, and when social media came on board I was very interested. I experimented a lot with social media, so I started to be more of a strategist in that field.
• When social media started, people had a ‘trust gap’. Many companies were really interested in social media and started to ask their agencies, “How should it work for us?”, “What should we do?”, and “Where should we be present on social media?”
• Eventually, I started my own small social agency. Then I sold it and started consulting because I noticed a need for an advent that focused on results for businesses. So, I decided to do it. Originally, the events were meant to drive more business and to help me find more customers for social media consulting. However, that first event ended up more successful and more rewarding than consulting, so I ended up focusing on the events.
• I’ve done events my whole life. I’ve always helped to produce events, so I felt very comfortable with the medium. I wanted to create an event that I would want to attend, something intimate and practical. I would bring the smartest people I knew from all over the social media industry to get very practical and hands-on, on one stage, one track, having community discussions.
• This year, we’ve done our first virtual event - Social Fresh X. We focused on how to understand, to adopt, to pivot in response to the pandemic. We had great response there. We had four or five times the number of people who used to attend our in-person conferences, from 90 countries and states. It’s a great way for us to get to more people and we’ll be doing another one at the end of the year.

John’s best advice for entrepreneurs

• Talking to your customers in many ways and getting to the root of their problem. That’s what was the ‘pre success’ of many successful entrepreneurs, and it was ‘pre successful’ for me early on. It has been the main way that we adjust and adapt our product.
• You need to talk with a few potential customers. Even talking with five people will allow you to see and understand patterns.

Biggest failure with customers...

John Jonas has helped thousands of entrepreneurs succeed in their business by doing outsourcing differently. He created and runs OnlineJobs.ph, the largest website for finding Filipino virtual workers, with over 1,000,000 Filipino resumes and over 300,000 employers from around the world using it.

He works about 17 hours per week, choosing to spend his time with his family rather than working.

Most passionate about

• The thing I’m always working on is helping people to outsource their businesses. I love it; I see so many people succeed with it. I see so much good in it, from both sides, the employer and the virtual assistant.

John’s career and story

• I’m a terrible employee. Out of college in 2003, I had a job for eight months, and my only goal was to quit my job. Because I hated it, and it took me eight months to make a little money online, and then I had an opportunity, and I took it, and I’ve been making money online ever since.
• In 2004 when I was making money, I didn’t get rich, but I saw how things are working. And I was good with websites; we were ranked on Google, and we were having ads on our websites and were getting money when people clicked the links and so on.
• I realized that there is a business online. Still, the business models of AdWords wouldn’t work for long, so I started learning other things regarding online - like copywriting, marketing, SEO, and the like.
• I started my online business, and very quickly, I got overwhelmed, I was overworked; there were so many things to do. I thought it’s going to be easy and obviously I was wrong.
• I tried different outsourcing solutions; I Tried to hire people locally and to hire someone from India, then I tried Elance, which today is UpWork - and all that didn’t work for me.
• Then I had a conversation with someone very successful in Internet business, and he said to me, ‘when you ready to hire outsourcing, make sure to go to the Philippines’. And he gave me a reference so I can hire someone full time, and I didn’t do it, but it gave me some hope.
• But after a while, I realized I couldn’t keep working 60 hours a week without getting enough done. And I hired someone through the agency he gave me, and it was the single most liberating experience of my life!
• This employee was doing whatever I taught him to do, and after like a month, I realized that there is like two of me… I replaced myself in my business.
• That guy is still working for me today. Since 2005…! What I didn’t know about the Philippines is that they are loyal almost to a fault.
• That changed my life, and since then, I’ve helped hundreds of thousands of people do that, and it changed their lives as well.
• In 2008 I directly recruited a programmer to build a simple Job Board for direct interaction between companies to job seekers. In the first month, we passed a couple of hundreds of profiles, last month we passed a million profiles.
• The VA sets the terms, and we don’t take a cut of their salary, so they get all the money you pay them. We get paid $70 by employers for access to the database.

John’s best advice for entrepreneurs

• I have two pieces of advice. The first one is to make sales! That’s where entrepreneurs fail. Many of them think that ‘if I build this, or if I have just one more feature - than it’s all going to work. No. It’s not. You need to make sales.
• The second piece of advice is to make sure you add value; meaningful value to your customers.

Biggest failure with customers

• My biggest failure is entering a market where I don’t understand the marketing plan. If I don’t understand what they are looking for and what the offer should be, then I usually fail.
• Six or seven years ago, I paid a realtor for creating training...

Hi, my Reachers.

Last year we started a new amazing series of the Reach Or Miss mountains project; Today I want to share with you the 5th and last (for the coming mounts) episode where successful entrepreneurs share their mountains stories.

Listen to these incredible mountain stories I heard from the successful entrepreneurs I interviewed on my podcast.

You can then listen to the full interview with each of them and hear about the visions, the struggles, and how these entrepreneurs reached their success.

From the entrepreneur that climbed Big Bend National Park, the tallest mountain in Texas, when they realized they lost the way back and there was literally nothing below them.

To the entrepreneur that went for three weeks of backpacking and climbing the Sierra Nevada mountains at the age of 16,

To the entrepreneur who isn’t a big mountain climber, but loves Miley Cyrus song “The Climb” or ‘There will always be another mountain. And it says, “There’s always gonna be another mountain. I’m always gonna wanna make it move.”

To the entrepreneur who lives in Portland, Oregon and climbed the mountain around it: “I have never done a hike where there wasn’t at least one step that I thought, ‘What the hell am I doing? Why am I doing this?’

To the entrepreneur that keep setting new goals and climbing the mountains of life on the metaphorical level, because he believes that we’ve been programmed by our creator to want to make a difference and to want to have something bigger than ourselves to live for.

I hope these mountain stories will encourage you to find out what should you – as an entrepreneur looking for your breakthrough to success – take from their stories to help find the necessary steps to reach your peak?

Many successful entrepreneurs climb mountains, while others use mountains as a metaphor to describe what is necessary to conquer the peak – including the fatiguing yet rewarding journey to the top. Still other entrepreneurs use mountains as an analogy for a significant goal they wish to achieve – such as becoming a billion-dollar-market-cap company. (See Mellissah Smith’s mountain story.)

For many years, I’ve compared the act of taking possession of your potential customers’ minds and of building awareness, likability, and trust of a leading brand to the act of climbing the highest mountains.

You climb step by step to the peak, reach your position as a market leader and a leading brand, and then start climbing a new mountain with a new product line or another brand.

The idea of mountains as representations of a strong position in the market is mentioned by Al Ries and Jack Trout in the excellent book, Marketing Warfare.

“In military warfare, mountains and higher altitude areas represent strong positions and often are used to present a strong defense. In marketing warfare, the question is one of who holds the mountains in the consumer's mind.”

So, at some point after the launch of my podcast for entrepreneurs, I started to ask the successful entrepreneurs I interviewed about their habits or dreams of climbing one of the highest mountains in the world.

Listen to these new inspiring mountains’ stories, find which entrepreneurs and stories you identify with most, and review your entrepreneurial objectives, market overview, and plan. By making your business as strong as possible, you will be able to quickly and easily achieve entrepreneurial success.

Amy Vernon: “Listen to your customers and talk to them, though that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to do everything they say”

Amy Vernon was Internationally recognized as an influential voice in the realm of community, audience, and content, she has worked in media,...

My dear Reachers.

Last year we started a new amazing series of the Reach Or Miss mountains project;

Listen to these incredible mountain stories I heard from the successful entrepreneurs I interviewed on my podcast.

You can then listen to the full interview with each of them and hear about the visions, the struggles, and how these entrepreneurs reached their success.

From the entrepreneur that climb the Everest base camp, but the toughest mountain for me was Mount Kilimanjaro

To the entrepreneur that reminds us that the sweeter fruits, the animals, the trees, the water - are all down in the valley. Not on the top.

To climbing the Pyrenees, and thinking that mountains are like their vision: “it’s my North Star. I know I will never reach it but it will always guide me. The vision is the top of the mountain.”

To the fantastic entrepreneur that one of her favorite songs has to do with mountains. It’s called “The Climb” or ‘There will always be another mountain by Miley Cyrus,

To laying in a frizzing lake on top of the glacier, and feel: “It’s moments like this that you believe that God exists.” It’s the happiest, purest, and most rejuvenating moment in the world.

Many successful entrepreneurs climb mountains, while others use mountains as a metaphor to describe what is necessary to conquer the peak – including the fatiguing yet rewarding journey to the top. Still other entrepreneurs use mountains as an analogy for a significant goal they wish to achieve – such as becoming a billion-dollar-market-cap company. (See Mellissah Smith’s mountain story.)

For many years, I’ve compared the act of taking possession of your potential customers’ minds and of building awareness, likeability, and trust of a leading brand to the act of climbing the highest mountains.

You climb step by step to the peak, reach your position as a market leader and a leading brand, and then start climbing a new mountain with a new product line or another brand.

The idea of mountains as representations of a strong position in the market is mentioned by Al Ries and Jack Trout in the excellent book, Marketing Warfare.

“In military warfare, mountains and higher altitude areas represent strong positions and often are used to present a strong defense. In marketing warfare, the question is one of who holds the mountains in the consumer's mind.”

So, at some point after the launch of my podcast for entrepreneurs, I started to ask the successful entrepreneurs I interviewed about their habits or dreams of climbing one of the highest mountains in the world.

Listen to these new inspiring mountains’ stories, find which entrepreneurs and stories you identify with most, and review your entrepreneurial objectives, market overview, and plan. By making your business as strong as possible, you will be able to quickly and easily achieve entrepreneurial success.

Bill Cates: “For me, success means abundance in my life. Money is OK, as long as it doesn’t own you – as long as you own it!”

Bill, is an internationally recognized client-acquisition expert, author, and speaker who motivates others to take action with proven strategies.

Bill’s Mountain

• I’ve been to the Everest base camp, but the toughest mountain for me was Mount Kilimanjaro. It’s 19,200 feet. It’s not a technical climb; it’s just a really hard walk. It took me six-and-a-half days to get to the top and one-and-a-half days to get down. It was a great experience, a very tough experience, but I loved it and I would do it again.

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Avi Yaron Invented a 3D solution for brain surgeons;

“If you ask me what is my greatest achievement, it’s being able to save lives worldwide.” 

Hi, Reachers. 

This week I continue to dedicating this podcast to the entrepreneurs that choose to make this world a better place and to bring (for the 2nd time) the story of Avi Yaron.

Avi Yaron is a visionary entrepreneur, Executive Chairman, and strategic adviser with extensive knowledge of medical / Neuro technology arenas.

Passionate about disrupting medicine, for enhancing life quality, and utilizing advanced technologies.

Invented, founded, and led disruptive companies targeting un-met needs. Envisioned “emotion based personalized predictive preventative solutions” (see TEDxAmsterdam talk), set strategy and led Joy Ventures, to pioneer and cultivate a Neuro-Wellness consumer product ecosystem.

Most passionate about

• I prefer to help them to stay healthy and happy, or even delay the onset of disease Instead of helping people after they already developed the disease. As a technologist, this is what I’m focusing on.
• I would like to develop global, sustainable companies and services that can help mankind. After my TedTalk, I founded, with a team, joint ventures, which basically bank on the neural wellness products for individuals. This is not medical, but to enhance their resilience, reduce stress levels, improve moods, should be a gigantic market and joint ventures. I left them, but they are still continuing and are developing an ecosystem, both among the entrepreneurs and among academia, meaning funding long term start-ups and providing grants to academia to research the field.

Avi’s best advice about customer focus, marketing, and sales

• Everyone is my customer. My employees are my customers, the physicians are my customers, the CFO in the hospital is my customer, and I’m here to serve. Meaning, they are always right, and I’m always thankful for whoever tells me that I’m wrong because I would like to improve all the time, continuous improvements. I would say that generally I don’t give advice and I don’t believe in teaching; I believe in learning.

Biggest failure with a customer

• The difference between success and failure is very thin, and each of my companies, before eventually succeeding, failed miserably. Only because I had a phenomenal team and only because we were mentally flexible, and only because I gave a hug to whoever told me that I’m wrong, that we made it.
• There is a case study that I taught in Stanford MIT about my biggest failure. We were in the process of raising $20 million with one of the best banks, called Piper Jaffray for the go to market phase in 2001, when the big crash happened. My friend in Piper Jaffray called me one day and told me, ‘I’m so sorry, it’s not personal, everything is crashing. We can’t raise the money.’ I set an immediate board meeting. Before this point, they told me, ‘Avi, the company is great, you’re great, we’re always behind you,’ because I always manage risks, and then they told me, ‘Avi, we’re sorry, things have changed. We will not support you. You need to close the company.’ The company was a phenomenal success before then. We managed to get a FDA clearance in 18 months and here we were, in early sales globally, with a burn rate of $450,000, and then we learned that we had no more money and I had $1 million in the bank. That weekend, instead of closing the company, two board members and myself instituted a completely different plan and I had to let go a majority of the employees, buy back all the product that we sold, give back most offices that we had, and reduce the burn rate to $80,000, delay all payments, etc. Keep the company alive, and all of this over a weekend. Then, on Sunday, I called my...

Katherine Parker Magyar is a New York-based writer with a focus on travel, culture, and adventure—and a preference for far-flung-locales.

Katherine is a travel columnist for Forbes, as well as the Caribbean expert for TripSavvy; her work has also appeared in Architectural Digest, The Week, The Daily Beast, and Business Insider, among other publications. She has traveled to 6 continents, 63 countries, and all 50 states in pursuit of a good story.

Most passionate about

• Today, I’m in lockdown. However, I’ve had amazing experiences while I’ve been traveling pretty much non-stop over the past two years. I visited 41 countries in 23 months, and I saw so much and moved so quickly, it almost felt normal. Being forced to slow down and take stock of everything I’ve seen, what I took away from everything ... it has been a fortune to be forced inside and reflect.
• I tracked every single travel experience that I had. It helps give me a broader, nuanced perspective on the places I’ve been and the people I’ve met.
• I think that traveling is automatically like a force for good. There is a quote by Mark Twain: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness…” He said: “Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
• When I was traveling, I felt like I was constantly getting affirmation of the goodness of society and people. I started scrapbooking. I took all the photos, the letters people wrote to me, the stories I’ve been written, and started compiling them and reliving those experiences.
• I think now more than ever, people need stories about the good that is happening in the world. It’s easy to be pessimistic and fall into desperation about everything that is happening now.
• So, what I started to do, and what I’m most passionate about today, is compiling all the stories of the last two years into a book.
• I had such amazing experiences. I felt history come alive for me and I felt so inspired by it. I like to explore.
• Other travel writers told me, “You need to focus. You can’t go for only one morning, or only for a week to Kenya. You need two weeks, or you need at least 10 days to go to China. You can’t go to China for only five days.” But I disagree.
• At the end of the day, you have only one life. If you keep waiting to have the perfect time, and the perfect amount of money, and the perfect schedule, you’ll never go.

Katherine’s career and story

• I hope my story inspires people who think, ‘Maybe it’s too late for me.’ I had always wanted to be a writer. I just love writing. I feel it comes naturally to me.
• Travel is another passion of mine. I always wanted to share my travel experiences with people.
• I’ll tell the story of how I started my entrepreneurial journey. In college, I was an English major and I loved it. After college, I wanted to become a teacher and a professor. I wanted to become a poetry professor, an American Poetry professor.
• I didn’t want to start teaching right away after college, so I got a job in advertising. It was 2009, at the end of the recession, and it wasn’t easy to find a job. That was the first step, and I think that every step along the way makes sense ultimately.
• There were advantages to working in “corporate America” and to making money, but I wasn’t passionate about my job. I guess that’s why I wasn’t so good at it. I was afraid that I wouldn’t reach my dream of becoming a writer. After a year, I was fired because, as I said, I wasn’t passionate about it and wasn’t good at doing...

 Hi, Reachers.

 We are going through very important times in the last two weeks, in America and all over the world.

 I chose to dedicate this podcast to the entrepreneurs that choose to make this world a better place and to bring (for the 2nd time) the story of Deborah Levine, the founder and editor of the American Diversity Report.

Deborah Levine is the award-winning author of 14 books and the founder/editor of the American Diversity Report.

Deborah was born in Brooklyn and raised in Bermuda. Her background includes advanced degrees in cultural anthropology, religion, and urban planning. Inspired by her father, a US military intelligence officer assigned to interrogate Nazi prisoners of war during World War II, she is a former executive director of Jewish Federations.

Named by Forbes Magazine as one of the top 10 Diversity & Inclusion Trailblazers, Deborah is the inventor of cognitive technology for addressing unconscious bias.

Her work as an entrepreneur includes creating the Women’s Council on Diversity, the DuPage/Chicago Interfaith Resource Network, the Youth Multicultural Video Contest, and the Southeast Global Leadership Academy.

Most passionate about

• My passion today reflects my work for a decade, making a difference in the world by looking at prejudice, religious diversity, and hate, including how to deal with it.
• I started this journey almost by accident many years ago. I was living in Chicago; my daughter was just a little one and I needed a job. My parents were both working in the Jewish community. My mother was dying of cancer and I thought it would be a gift to her if I worked for the Jewish community while she was still alive so that she could see how much she had influenced me.
• I started engaging in an interface dialog with international organizations. Then I looked for an executive position. Because I’d never been an executive director of a non-profit organization, no one would hire me. So, here, I started my entrepreneurial journey. I created my own nonprofit and made myself an executive director.
• My mother was so proud, so pleased. So was my father.

Deborah’s entrepreneurship development

• I started my company with the mission of addressing the problems that communities were having as they became more international. I also created what I called the Do-page Interface Resource Network, which is still in existence today.
• Across the nation, when communities became more international, they had to face prejudice toward newcomers, especially those of a different faith.
• This affected the entire city, the county, the state. It was ongoing and affected people from India, people from Muslim countries, and Jews. It caused tremendous friction. My mission was to fix that.
• Eventually, I was approached by different groups, like the county law enforcement department, which wanted to prepare materials that would help their people understand the communities that they were trying to assist. Other examples included public schools (for their educators), hospitals (for their chaplains), and many more.
• So, I started to document everything and write books so that if I couldn’t be everywhere, at least I had a voice.
• The need for this kind of education grew quickly, especially among enterprises and the organization. That’s how my business grew and how I started to publish the online American Diversity Report.
• There were times when I decided to take what my friends call a “real job.” I was hired by a Jewish federation in Tulsa, Oklahoma to be its executive director. After that, I took another job as...