The Sydney Phillips Podcast

Preparing yourself for a productive day can sometimes feel unproductive in itself. You’re a time conscious, goal crushing being just trying to seize the day. Knowing what to focus on in the moment for the future is a category of puzzling questions, and entire category of books have been wrote addressing these same topics. In this podcast, we will talk about how to plan and prepare for productivity with 5 easy things you can use to keep yourself on track.

The first step is to create 2 – 3 goals for the month. To avoid overwhelming yourself with a gruesome to-do list, choose just a few things that you will focus on for the month. It’s important to incredibly clear and specific about these goals. The more detailed that you are, the easier it will be to set your goals. For example: don’t just say “I want to make more money” ... replace it with a “I want to bring in an additional $5,000 a month of income from my jewelry side hustle”

The second step to prepare for productivity is to create a schedule. It’s widely said that “the key to success is through your habits.” Some even go as far to say “Show me your habits, and I’ll show you your future.” Breaking down what your goal looks like day to day or even week to week is a great way to pencil in the habits that will contribute to your success. Map out your days by creating a schedule and implementing a task to complete that is associated with your goal.

The third step to plan for productivity is to rid yourself of distractions. This requires a lot of honesty about yourself to yourself. What has your attention that shouldn’t? Make a list of all of the things that distract you on a daily basis and then find a way to get rid of those distractions. Time is very important, and we don’t want to waste it by getting distracted with a twitter notification or the ding of a text message every 5 minutes.

The fourth step to preparing for productivity is accountability. Support is always a blessing when it comes to our goals. Finding like-minded people can take a while but, join clubs in your interests and stay in contact with the people you meet. There are certain people that you know you can share ideas with and they will give you honest feedback, spark new conversations or tell you something that you may have overlooked. Having a sense of community and implementing this feedback loop into your productive process will skyrocket you ahead of your competition.

The fifth and final step to preparing and planning productivity is to be positive. The process isn’t always fun. Sometimes you just won’t be in the mood or you will want to give up. It’s okay to rest, but don’t give up. Falling a little short is always better than not trying at all. If you consider redefining ‘failure’ as not trying rather than not succeeding, you will be far more optimistic and excited about the goals you set rather than letting the negative self-talk get in the way of your goals.

 As always, subscribe to the pink suit and we will see you here next week, same time and same place.

Shark Tank has been a long time favorite of mine (and pretty much any kid that had a TV.) The excitement of the pitch, the questions after, and the potential deal looming in the air was enough to make you cheer for your favorite underdog. The startup culture across the world has been supported by the movement of Angel Investors. Essentially, angels can be wealthy individuals, industry experts or even an angel group consisting of a large amount of angels that may come together for a joint investment.

With the popularity of crowdfunding, your neighbor down the block or a total stranger could potentially become a financial backer. As investing in businesses becomes more like investing in stocks, having some guidelines for investment isn’t a bad place to start. But, how do you evaluate businesses that aren’t even in the same realm? If they are private businesses, how do you find information? I’m going to walk you through 5 criteria for investment that I personally use.

The first is founder investment. Is the founder invested financially and operationally into their venture? I’m always surprised by the few founders who have managed to startup without a dime of their own money. If they don’t have skin in the game, they don’t have skin to lose. And if they don’t have skin to lose, they will have less of a problem to lose yours. 

The second is the number of founders. The ideal spot is 2 - 4 founders. A one-man show can be difficult to execute on all of the tasks and milestones that they need to in order to scale. However, teams with a large amount of founders can often have too many cooks in the kitchen. If there’s too many decision-makers, the likelihood of the team in conflict increases and the decisions can be weary. In essence, in order to lead the team, some of the team needs to be followers.

The third is a large total addressable market. When you’re investing into a business, you want to see that they are scalable. Can they expand this business to other parts of the country? Can they expand the business to other parts of the world? As an investor, your greatest return on investment would likely be from an IPO.

The fourth is to avoid high rounds. The truth is to just get in early. Your dollar will go farther, your return will likely be higher but your risk is also inflated. Choose whatever strategy is best for you individually but the higher the round, the less return you will make.

The fifth is post-revenue or history of experienced and proven entrepreneurs. If the entrepreneur or the founding team have a proven track record, they will likely know what they are doing and be able to create those generous returns. However, if this is the entrepreneurs first time around it’s best to see post-revenue. Post-revenue is important to judge if the market believes in their product as much as they do.

As always, subscribe to the pink suit and we will see you here next week, same time and same place.

Augmented Reality first got its claim to fame with the release of Pokemon Go. Part of the reason this technology is so desirable is its incredible accessibility. What’s the one thing that you wouldn’t dare to leave the house without? Your phone. Tech companies aren’t the only ones that know this. Augmented Reality is going to completely change the ways in which we interact with our environment.

The first way is through education. The ways that we teach are dated and past the stage of adoration for “old-school.” Augmented reality can help educators to create interactive experiences. Rather than reading from a textbook about chemical reactions, students will be able to use their phones to hover over the page and witness the explosion, watch the molecules move and more.

The second way is through retail shopping. Retailers have started to use augmented reality in their stores. With the increase of online shopping, retail has to be an experience to entice customers to come into the store. One of the most common use cases is using it to suggest other items to complete a look. This is certainly not going away anytime soon. Several retail shoppers have already started to use this method to engage customer and have tremendous success. As the new generations of individuals would rather spend money on experiences than items, retailers have found ways to make material items an experience, proving themselves worthy of longevity.

The third way is through navigation. Augmented reality can be used to navigate from within a building as well. Your calendar will sync to an AR interface that will point you to the elevators, to the correct floor, and then walk you to the direct office for your meeting. Convenience is king and on-site property organizers will quickly disappear. But, how does this effect office work? Well, like many other emerging technologies, it allows you to use your resources more efficiently.

The fourth way is through health care. Augmented surgery will become a new norm – imagine bring able to conduct surgery with the confidence and digital overlay of augmented reality. This will help to prevent errors in stressful and detailed times. Additionally, augmented diagnosis can help a doctor to accurate diagnose their patient. There are a number of augmented reality companies to help nurses find where a patient’s vein is. This is incredibly helpful to speed up the process of diagnosis and the accuracy that the doctor can diagnose.

The fifth way is through real estate. Augmented reality will change the way real estate is bought, sold, and interacted with. Let’s begin with the process of finding and selecting the property of your future home. Augmented reality can create a virtual walk through of the property before you even have to visit. This saves you as the buyer time and money and does the same for the property manager. In addition to using augmented reality for the selling and buying of homes, it can also be used in offices, hotels and apartment complexes to create a young and vibrant interactive community.

Augmented reality will change our world – regardless of industry. The key to being ready. for it is to just be adaptive and nimble with the new technology.

As always, subscribe to the pink suit and we will see you here next week - same time same place!

 EPISODE 5, Season 1: Over the past month, coronavirus has quickly escalated in the United States. Wherever you listen, you’ve been affected but with such an uniquely challenging event, it’s hard to pinpoint how life will return post-corona. While some seem to think it will go back to normal, this possibility while optimistic is far from likely. So what can we do to be prepared? What’s going to change? While there are hundreds of ways that coronavirus will change our world as we know it, I’ve decided to focus on just 6 ways that it will permanently change Gen-Z.

The first is global resilience. From coffee-shops, and grocery stores to dinner with friends, these moments used to be constantly interrupted by our phones and hurried through to get onto the next task of the day. These minor moments will be replaced with presence and appreciation for community, as we are careful about the things we take for granted.

The second way is our loss of innocence. We now know that being in close quarters with people, not washing your hands, touching the elevator keys, or being in big crowds is risky. The old comfort of being around people could be replaced with a feeling of being alone, especially those who we don’t know. There’s some interesting stories about how this will affect the growth of mega-cities as well and the hustle and bustle of New York City where the streets are crowded with people from around the world.

The third way coronavirus will permanently change Gen-Z is the importance of corporate reaction to the crisis. As millennials and Gen-Z were ostracized for their lack of loyalty to employers, we will ask our employers about their loyalty to their teams during Covid-19. Did they fire all of their team overnight? Did they furlough or did they keep the books running? Unsurprisingly, the adaptability of millennials and Gen-Z allowed these groups to respond more openly and adapt to the pandemic quickly.

The fourth way is the increase in remote workers. Perhaps this one is a little more obvious -- but as teams have shifted online many workers have reported an increased level of productivity. They can now throw in the laundry while working on their annual reports. Employees will begin to ask “Is there a reason to do this in person?” However, this will leave the 56% of the world, totaling to roughly 4 billion people who don’t have the internet farther behind in every aspect.

The fifth way coronavirus will permanently change Gen-Z is a decline in polarization. The pure shock of coronavirus left American’s to figure out how to serve themselves and others. While some were busy buying carts of toilet paper, others were figuring out how to help their favorite restaurants and small shops. Coronavirus became the “common enemy” rather than each other and in return we took time to care for one another.

The sixth way coronavirus will permanently change Gen-Z is a boon to virtual reality. As our homes have become our place of work, family, worship, fitness and everything in between, a change of scenery can feel like a new boost. Virtual reality will certainly become more popular and widely adapted in correlation to the increase of remote workers.

As always, be sure to subscribe to the pink suit! –we will see you here next week, same time, same place. 

EPISODE 4, Season 1: In almost every business book, you’ll hear the same phrases. They go a little something like this:

“innovation comes from the front-lines”

“inspire creativity in your workforce” and

“listen to what people have to offer.”

These clichés leave you with all the right desires and absolutely no action. If you’ve ever asked people to share their ideas, chances are you’ve experienced this ... crickets! You see, as a leader you are supposed to inspire them, and as a manager you are supposed to listen to them. But you can’t do either if people don’t have ideas or if they don’t want to tell you about them.

There is a lot of fear about sharing your ideas only to have them stolen. If you are fostering a workplace, there is undoubtedly some form of competition. Afterall, promotions, pay-raises, and pure office politics are a part of a lot of company cultures. In fact, according to Forbes, 65% of Americanswould forgo a raise to see their boss fired. Let me repeat that. 65% of Americans would forgo a raise to see their boss fired. Let that one sink in. This strategy isn’t for those leaders, this strategy is for the leaders that love their teams, want to inspire them and care about them as the person.

That’s why this little investment into them works. You can call it whatever you’d like, the creativity budget, the experimental budget, the inventive budget, or the interesting budget. 

Here is how it works: You set a low budget and give each member of your team that amount in cold hard cash. I typically do $200, but depending on your team size and financial constraints, adjust the amount to fix your needs. Every quarter, each member of the team receives $200 to create, build, and do something epic with. At the end of the quarter, they have to share what they did with everyone on the team. This can be literally anything – from a personal hobby, to just something they thought was weird. The point is to find something that is interesting and pursue it. It’s a low-cost way to inspire and create without taking a huge risk and reaping the benefits of satisfaction, newfound discoveries and utilizing the team’s passions.

It’s important to have fun with it. Risk-taking is inherently scary. Providing a small budget and a time frame to do something risky without losing a sense of security in their jobs allows your team to connect more, innovate more, and collaborate. It also shows them that failing isn’t the worst thing you could do. In fact, not trying is the worst thing that you could do.

Three months later, you’ll get all kinds of wild and out there ideas: some will be goofy and silly, some will be interesting and some you will be able to implement into your business. As the leader, go into it with the sole objective of having fun, nothing else. It’s important to have this light-hearted joy, as you’ll find that having the most passionate people is far better than having the most intelligent people.

Be sure to subscribe to the pink suit – we will see you here next week, same time, same place.

EPISODE 3, Season 1:

Today we are going to be talking about “How to get a CEO to answer your email (and get the response you want).” The truth is organizations are filled with obstacles so that you can’t access the top tier talent. Regardless of how “accessible and open-door policy” as they claim to be, it could still take days, weeks, or even months to schedule a meeting with someone in the C-suite. If you’re not an employee of the company – well, forget it. You just won’t get heard.  They have assistants, managers, directors and about every title you could imagine to guard you from getting into touch with those C-suite execs.

If you’re anything like me, this is frustrating. I’m a natural system breaker – and quite possibly a HR nightmare, but we’ll talk about that another day. These corporations are incredibly successful and yet, we can’t access their knowledge and their leadership. Just like with coding, there is always a way around the system and today, I am going to show you how.

You’re going to start out with “Dear So and So, I know you are incredibly busy and get tons of emails. This will only take sixty seconds.” You want to make sure that they realize in the first 10 seconds that this is going to be short. If you want someone, anyone, to respond to your email, a great question to ask yourself is: Can they read it entirely and respond to it in the time it takes to step into an elevator and get to the 4th floor?

In one or two lines, you are going to establish your credibility. This can be something like “I am at this university, I have been working in the NYC area for the past year, I heavily indulge myself in quantum computing on the weekends” ... hey, I’m not here to judge. You do your thing! Just make sure that they know what your “thing” is and why your name is in their inbox.

Next, you’re going to ask a very specific question. This is where you shine. Don’t ask some baseline question that they have answered in a magazine for years. Don’t ask about their biggest struggle.... or their journey to CEO. If they were honest, they would say “a lot of hard work and a little bit of luck” – and you know what that does for you? - Nothing.Absolutely nothing. Ask them a question that you can actionably turn into something.

Lastly, you’re going to say “I totally understand if you’re too busy to respond, but even a one or two line reply would totally make my day.” This tells them that you’re not entitled, and you just want to talk to them and get some advice, direction or knowledge. They don’t have to write you a novel about how quantum computing work or the retail brick and mortar stores will change in the next 5 years, they don’t even have to respond ... but if they did, they would make your day. Anyone – let me rephrase that, most people that are in the public eye, just want to connect, share and build. Sign it with your name and press send it.

There you have it! How to get a CEO to respond to your email. Check out my website www.thesydneyphillips.com for endorsement, collaboration and topic requests and ideas. Connect with me on Youtube, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Most importantly, subscribe to The Pink Suit podcast for your weekly dose of innovation, straight-up talk, and inspiration. 

EPISODE 2, Season 1: 

Hi everyone! As the world is under a lot of pressure right now due to coronavirus, it's hard to fight this looming feeling of uncertainty. With the recent release of the stimulus package, the world is facing a growing unemployment rate, misplaced workers and those who are working at home for the first time – not to mention a shortage of hand sanitizers.  In this time of uncertainty, I wanted to share with you 3 mindless ways to make money while you sleep that you can start doing today. Now I’ll admit, some of them are very small margins – but, waking up a thousand dollars richer every morning starts with small changes and habits. If you have a savings account, you need to learn how to make your money work for you, so without further to do... Let's hop in!

The first way is through dividend income: a dividend is a sum of money paid regularly (typically quarterly) by a company to its shareholders out of its profits. Basically, when the company makes money, whether you own 2 shares of 2000 shares, you get a slice of their profit. One great habit to get into is to reinvest the quarterly income from dividends back into the stock market. 

The next way to make money while you sleep is interest income: this is a great way to invest if you are unsure about the stock market or aren’t totally confident in it. A lot of people have very mixed feelings about the stock market, and if it’s not your thing, no problem. You can still make money while you sleep. Essentially this is bond and treasury notes. Your yield is going to be anywhere from 1 - 4% which is lower than the average stock market return, at about 7%.

The third way to make money while you sleep is through capital gains: capital gains are essentially assets that appreciate in value, meaning that over time they got more valuable rather than less valuable. Two of the main ways capital gains is achieved is through real estate and stocks. One of the big advantages of capital gains is that it's taxed at 15 - 20% rather than at the ordinary income tax rate (which can be upwards of 40%).

There you have it! 3 ways to make your money work for you while you sleep. Check out my website www.thesydneyphillips.com for endorsement, collaboration and topic requests and ideas. Connect with me on Youtube, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Most importantly, subscribe to the pink suit podcast for your weekly dose of innovation, straight-up talk, and inspiration. 

EPISODE 1, Season 1:

In this world of infinite information, The Pink Suit isn’t here to tell you all the answers. In fact, it will probably leave you with more questions than answers. I'm your host Sydney Phillips —  A Kansas City born and raised, 20-year-old millionaire serial entrepreneur. 

The Pink suit will dive into business topics, like company culture, emotional intelligence and dealing with failure. As well as, starting and growing a business, something that I have a lot of experience in.

We will explore real estate and emerging technologies, like augmented and virtual reality, artificial intelligence, drones and 3d printing. 

I know it sounds like a lot … but I've never been able to put myself into one box … why the hell would I start now? 

Check out my website www.thesydneyphillips.com for endorsement, collaboration and topic requests and ideas. Connect with me on Youtube, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Most importantly, subscribe to the pink suit podcast for your weekly dose of innovation, straight-up talk, and inspiration.