Peter: Welcome to Improv is no Joke podcast, where it’s all about becoming a more effective communicator by embracing the principles of improvisation. I’m your host Peter Margaritis, the self-proclaimed chief edutainment officer of my business, The Accidental Accountant. My goal is to provide you with thought-provoking interviews with business leaders so you can become an effective improviser, which will lead to building stronger relationships with clients, customers, colleagues and even your family, so let’s start the show.

Peter: I’ve got Kristen Rampe here with me today. First and foremost, thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule. I greatly appreciate you spending time with me on my podcast, and welcome. Kristen: Thanks Peter, it’s great to be here. Peter: It’s great having you. I like to start off by asking a very simple question: tell me about yourself Kristen: Well gosh, that’s not simple [laughs]

Peter: [laughs]

Kristen: I thought you were going to make it easy. Tell me about myself… Well my name is Kristen Rampe, we got that covered. I’m a CPA and I live in Michigan and I went to Butler University and worked with with PricewaterhouseCoopers out of college. I quit the Big Four. I worked in industry. I went back into public at a regional firm that was out there in San Francisco, California, did that for seven more years, and then five years ago I left public for the last time. Now I have my own consulting practice where I consult with CPA firms on communication, team building, client service-type of topics. I guess to add in the more personal side, I am married and I have a pair of almost seven-year-old identical twins and one very large cat. Peter: Wow. Kristen: So yeah, that’s my status.

Peter: Wow, you’ve got your hands quite full. So where in Michigan?

Kristen: I’m in Grand Rapids, which is, if you can see me and I had my hand up, it’s sort of straight across from the bottom of the thumb and below the ring finger, that would be the coordinates. Peter: Got it. So you’re an accidental account as well, based on your background. Kristen: [laughs] Yes Peter: So my first question is the same question a lot of people ask me: how did you end up in accounting? Kristen: Yeah, you know I give an answer that I think many accountants do. It probably all stemmed from liking math. I did actually like math, I do like math, and I found myself in high school needing to take an extra elective, and there were only a few classes available that one would even want to take as a Senior in high school. Accounting was one, which was really bookkeeping, so I took that. I found it to be easy, because I liked math, and apparently I knew how to add by 12th grade, so that worked out really well. Peter: [Laughs] Kristen: So I did that, and then when I was looking at colleges and I ended up at Butler, because I thought their campus was particularly beautiful and appealing, and I met with an advisor. We talked about what I might major in, and he thought accounting was a good idea, and so I said, “Sure, that sounds great, let’s do it.” So that’s how it happened Peter: Wow you just kind of fell into it then, huh? Kristen: Yeah Peter: Because you know everybody thinks this is a very black and white area, accounting, when we all know it’s very gray. Kristen: mhm Peter: I don’t know if you read the book that came out a few years ago about the accounting profession, 50 Shades of Grey? Kristen: [laughs] that sounds about right. Peter: Sounds about right, yeah, I was handcuffed the whole time I was reading it. But let’s talk about accounting. My other question is: where did you gain your communication skills? Because we think of most accountants tend to be a little bit more introverted, maybe not as communicative as others, so where did you develop your skills? Kristen: Well let’s see. How did I develop my communication skills? I feel that they really blossomed throughout my career, and it was definitely working with others who sort of exhibited good skills in that area, and partly it’s a skill set that I had that I was able to put forward when I worked with clients. So I did some auditing and I did a lot of SOX compliance, and especially in my years at Frank, Riverman out in San Francisco, I just started to notice that I was really adept at working with the clients and providing great service, and then achieving great financial results as a result of that, and so I just continued to use those skills more and more, because to me they were more beneficial, not to substitute the technical. But they were the things that really differentiated happy clients and good service and great teams, and I certainly worked more on developing those skills than I did on, say, studying the deeper technical stuff, in part just because it was interesting to me. So, lots of different reasons how it came to be, I suppose. Peter: So why did you leave public? I mean, as you say, you’ve got a huge strength that is needed in public accounting, the ability to communicate, but what made you leave and start your own consulting firm? Kristen: Yeah, I left because – there were a lot of reasons that contributed to my final departure from public accounting – but the thing was that I felt that I had the strengths and I wanted to bring them to others in public accounting. I mean I certainly love the team that I worked with when I was at Frank, Riverman, and that team was undergoing some changes, which was a part of my departure too, but I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if I could go out and work with other people, just on this, and no longer be responsible for chargeable hours on SOX compliance projects,” and so it was really looking at my own strengths and making a conscious decision to spend even more of my time working in that area, because I felt it really could be the most beneficial for me personally – working on things I want to work on – and also for others in the profession at other terms, so that was a big player in my departure Peter: Well we both share the same love of communicating and helping our profession become stronger in the communication skills, but have you found it difficult to get in front of CPA firms and sell them on this message that communication skills are important, if not more important, than technical skills? Kristen: Yeah you know what I find the most challenging is to find those that are ready to make a change, because almost everyone will agree – you know, especially leaders at CPA firms. In fact, I’m right in the middle of a series of interviews of partners with a group that I’m working with right now, and they all agree that communication is important, and it’s all over the headlines of many of the accounting news sources that it’s important, and we need to do it, and everyone agrees. What is challenging for firms is having the right leadership that’s willing to not just give that lip service. Not just say it, but to actually say this is important and I can see how making a conscious effort to work on the skills in this area will actually benefit my firm, because if they don’t see a benefit to it, and think that they’ doing alright, we’re fine, then you know there’s no reason to really make any changes or invest in, you know, people development on these skills. So that’s kind of where I see the challenge. Some firms are really on the cutting edge and they recognize it, and want to actually make improvements in that area, and some firms, they recognize it, but they think that a good place, and for those firms it’s probably not the right time to do additional work in that area. Peter: Yeah I agree, and for those firms who don’t think it’s the right time, I would say don’t drag your feet, because if you always put it off that time, one day you’re going to wake up and it might be too late because you might be gone. Kristen: Yeah, well it’s a big thing in succession planning too, because you have to consider who you can you point to that’s going to replace you, and if you have trouble pointing to somebody, or you kind of have a wavering finger pointing at somebody that you think so but you’re not quite sure, what are you doing to get that person ready and give them the skills that you’ve learned along the way, or even some of the skills you wish you had learned better, earlier? What are you doing in that area to, you know, support your future as a retired partner? Peter: Well you said one very important word in this conversation: you said for them to invest. The more that firms, the more that accounting professionals – or actually the more that anybody can look at it as an investment into the firm, into the company, versus the cost.

Kristen: Mhm

Peter: Because with invest, there’s a return on that investment. A lot of times, with communication skills or these soft skills, they go, “What’s the return on the investment?” and I go, “What’s the return if you didn’t make the investment? Kristen: Hahaha, exactly.

Peter: So it’s part of our job to continue to communicate that to accounting firms, to teams, to anybody we become in front of, because it is going to be very important that we become better at building relationships. What I like to do is, in front of audiences, is to ask them what business are they in, and I’ll hear accounting or tax or something along those lines. I go no, the business you’re in is the people business first and foremost, and you’re in the business of developing relationships. Relationships with your people that you hire, and relationships with your clients. The better that you can build those relationships stronger, the stronger and stronger your firm and your organization will be. Kristen: Ya know, you’re absolutely right. In fact I was just working with a firm about a week or two ago and had a group that ranged from from senior associate up through manager, and we opened with the discussion on that very topic, and talking about: what do you do, and why do clients use your services, and what is it that they’re getting out of the work that you do? The initial responses are always very compliance oriented, well they’re getting a tax return they want their taxes done. They need this audit because somebody said they need that audited. and it is certainly true, you know, generally they’re not hiring a CPA firm just because they think it’s really fun to bring someone in to look through their books for some period of time, but we got around to with this group was that the reason that they stay, and the reason that they continue to be clients – this was a discussion on the client experience and client loyalty – was relationships, and it was neat to see all of their eyes start to open up, and one guys biggest takeaway was – that he wrote down on the evaluation form – was that, “I’m in the relationship business, not the tax compliance business,” and he was a younger guy in the room, but I thought that was particularly impactful to have him realize, “oh, I didn’t know, I’m not just a tax accountant. I’m someone who has clients and works with them, and you know provides a service that includes a relationship,” and that firm will benefit from his new mindset in that way

Peter: I applaud you. I’m giving you a standing ovation right now. [claps] Now I guess the challenge, for that individual in the firm, is how does he take that message to the more seasoned leadership that have been in the firm for a number of years? The baby boomer leadership that’s there, and have them buy in on it?

Kristen: Yeah, well, that’s a good point. I think that at least a good number of them were bought in enough to bring this program into their staff and have them get trained on it, but you’re right. There were many moments in that workshop where I said something like, “You know your partner specifically asked me to mention this thing,” and they would all say, “Well, can you mention it to them too?” [laughs]

Peter: [laughs]

Kristen: And it’s really true, you know, sometimes the lead leadership can recognize that our staff really need these skills, and a lot of times the disconnect is that, while the programs have an amount of those skills that have been sufficient to get them to where they are today – which is generally a pretty successful career – it’s not always easy to pass them down. And there are different ways to do that, but making sure that you invest either in one-on-one training at your firm, or group training, or bringing someone in from the outside, but making sure that those skills get transferred is the key to building that successful firm, with a bench that can then sit there when you want to retire

Peter: Exactly. I think when it comes to technical skills you can do internal training for many people, but I think when it comes to the soft skills that you need to bring somebody in from the outside – and someone like yourself or myself – because what gives us instant credibility is the three letters behind our name. We’ve been there and done that, and we speak their language, which helps in the buy in.

Kristen: Yeah, I think that is true, and the other thing is that people like you and me and other consultants, we do this for a full-time job now, as opposed to the technical side, so I think you’re absolutely right.

Peter: So let’s talk about this communication and connection between team members at CPA firms. What struggles do you see? What have you run into? What are the challenges out there?

Kristen: Yeah, one of the biggest challenges lies in having what a lot of people like to call “difficult conversations,” and the topics are really wide-ranging. Some topics are somewhat difficult and some are really big deals. You know, huge, difficult conversations, but a lot of people who come up in the accounting ranks generally would fall to the side of conflict avoider, as opposed to conflict lover or embracer.

Peter: [laughs]

Kristen: And when you’ve got that as your backdrop, and it’s common, and somebody does something that makes you mad: you know they miss a deadline; they consistently underperform; you’ve tried to give them the information they need to do their job, and they’re not doing it; or, as a staff person, you’d like more experience, but the partner doesn’t seem to be receptive to your request. So that’s a particular challenge that’s hard with with team members, but the good news is there are great ways to see those opportunities, to connect, and there’s certain language that you can use to make those conversations happen, and better. The end result is that you’ll have less of that, “Ugh, I have to go to work again” or “Ugh, I have to work with that person again” and more of the kind of, “Hey, it’s a great day, I’m going to work again,” and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t want to feel better about their work. At all ranks, I hear this just as much as the at the partner level, probably even more, of wanting that work-life balance and wanting to enjoy coming to work every day, and that’s what good communication within a team can do for you.

Peter: Can you give me an example of a difficult conversation? You said there’s some language there that will help in these situations.

Kristen: Yeah, so let’s take a manager who has a staff person who just seems to not be getting it, or kind of always dropping the ball or underperforming, and they’ve tried different tactics to motivate them, and it just doesn’t seem to be working, and they want to sit down with that person and say, “Hey, this is a big deal, and you need to be doing things better or differently,” so there’s a framework that we can use. The first thing, and it’s big, and it takes days and days and days and months and years to really be great at it, but one of the keys is being able to separate your observations from your judgments. So being able to point to really specific, undisputable facts, rather than making generalizations. So when you say something like, “You always turn in your work late,” that contains kind of a judgment and it’s that word “always.” While it may be the case that that person has never turned in something on time, probably they have once, so you can get more specific and say, “The last four times that I asked you to do XYZ by Tuesday, you have turned it in on Wednesday.” So what it eliminates is that judgment feeling that comes through it, and everyone can sort of a agree, if those details are correct, that yeah that’s true, and and we’re not passing the judgment. Then separately, and this is how this gets into a big big big process, a big learning process, separately we can bring in how the person (the manager in this case) is feeling about that. I feel frustrated because I need you to turn these things in on time so I can meet my deadlines, because one of the needs that I have in the workplace is to be on time with my work. So there’s a whole framework that we can bring to this that makes the conversations not only easier, but they just feel better and you’re coming from a place of caring for both people, and it just brings a whole lot of goodness to those types of conversations.

Peter: That’s some great advice, because, as you said, CPAs tend to be conflict avoidant. A lot of times, how we’ll get rid of that conflict is just avoid it, and avoid having the conversation with the individual, and maybe if I don’t address it, and just avoid it, maybe the person will just leave.

Kristen: Right, right. And if how we resolve it is to avoid it, it doesn’t really end up resolving it anyway. It still sits there and it lingers, and then you feel buried under layers and layers of conflicts you’ve avoided. And this doesn’t mean you need to bring up every nitpicky detail, there’s some amount of letting things go that’s healthy also, but you have to really come to terms with letting those things go, and really let them go, and then it’s fine. But yeah, it’s good to get the air clear when it matters.

Peter: And sometimes the person might not be the right fit for the job, or might not be the right fit for the organization, but I am a firm believer that we have good hires and that we should have good departures, because when the person leaves, if we’ve left on good terms and a good standing, that’s a potential referral service.

Kristen: Yeah, absolutely.

Peter: I think sometimes we forget about that. That person might be able to help us down the road at some point in time, so we should have good hires and we should have good fires, let goes, whatever, and as my father always told me: don’t burn any bridges.

Kristen: Right, right. Really very important. Good advice from your dad there.

Peter: Yes, when I first got my first corporate job, this is the advice he gave me: he says, “you get to work before your boss does you, you leave after your boss leaves, and you carry a file with you at all times, even if you’re going to the restroom, because you want to look like you’re busy.”

Kristen: [laughs[ Excellent. And and how did that first job go for you? Was it successful?

Peter: It went real well. I mean, I carried files into the restroom with me.

Kristen: Yeah

Peter: People thought that I was crazy, but I said, “Hey, I gotta work, gotta work,” but yeah that was all about the baby boomers, right? The cheeks in the seats vs productivity.

Kristen: Yes, exactly. There’s a little bit of a shift these days, although I wonder what the statistic is on the number of accountants who take their smartphone into the restroom with them. I remember my boss, I would always see him walking down the hallway, just eyes on that phone, checking something out, he’d walk straight in the bathroom with it every time. It always gave me a bit of a chuckle, and I will admit I am guilty on that front too.

Peter: I’m going to say 110 percent that take it.

Kristen: Yeah [laughs]

Peter: So what do you see out there in the horizon, as you look into your crystal ball from Grand Rapids?

Kristen: My crystal ball from Grand Rapids, we’re really forward-thinking place out here Grand Rapids.

Peter: [laughs]

Kristen: [laughs] No, but what I do spend time all around the the country working with different firms. You know, I see that firms are certainly – we used the word before, investing in these types of things with their people in the leadership development and recognizing the value that it adds – and I would say that the ones who are going to get the most out of it, and the ones who are going to have the best outcomes in terms of sustainability for their firm, if they would prefer to stay independent and not merge – because that’s a big deal – are the ones that… The first part is leadership buy-in and interest in it, you know. If you’ve got one person who thinks something’s a good idea but everyone else says not worth it, then you’re not going to have the competitive advantage that another firm will – one who’s got the vast majority of their leadership team on board and supporting initiatives. The firms that don’t just bring something in, a sort of a checkbox, and say, “Well, remember, we we did that one thing for one day once?” and then expect it to infiltrate and become part of your culture. You really have to have someone inside your firm leading the charge on these things, and defining what’s important for the organization and the people at that organization. And that varies, but you figure out what’s important, and having the captain, the cheerleader and the taskforce making sure that that the firm is, over a period of time, consistently bringing these values and skill sets that they have steamed into their organization.

Peter: That’s great. I love that, I love that view. But as you are winding up, I started to think, what about the other side of the coin? What about the communication between CPAs and their clients? What challenges are you seeing out there?

Kristen: Yeah well the first one is lack of communication. So many firms and so many practitioners, you know, you speak during tax season or during the audit period, and then its radio silent for the rest of the year. So even just having communication of any sort. I’m working with a small firm, structured more or less like a sole practitioner, but there really are sort of two seasoned leaders in that firm, and they’re right now coming up with a plan for staying in touch with the clients that they serve throughout the year. And it doesn’t mean bombarding them with an excessive amount, but I think that’s hardly the risk at most firms. But having touchpoints, you know, and figuring out when will I give them a call just to check in, or when will they send them an article that I think is interesting, or a reminder for a deadline, and making sure you’ve got those touches in. So that’s one thing. There’s also a great opportunity there for additional services, you know, and providing a bigger fee because you’re providing more service to your clients. More planning, more advising type of work, and there’s a huge opportunity for firms there in the client service area, but there’s also an angle of just being able to communicate as well with your clients as you do with your staff, and understanding their perspective and being able to bring to them the value that they need, and the relationship that they are staying with your firm for.

Peter: Exactly, and I’m gonna give a shameless plug here, but I had an article published in Accounting Today that says it’s time to get out from behind our desk. Basically what I would say is to go out and learn about your clients’ businesses. Learn what they do, not just from a tax return perspective or financial statement perspective. Learn all aspects of the business so you can be their trusted business advisor, versus just perceived as the accountant.

Kristen: Yeah, and more on the shameless plug side: I have a list of questions that you can ask your clients, and some of them are for more the kind of partner level, but some of them are even at the staff level. So if anybody listening to this would like a copy of that, just shoot me an email and I will get that out to you so you have a framework for that conversation, because that can help.

Peter: Give me your email real quick and i’ll also put in the show notes, and in the transcript.

Kristen: Sure, it’s Kristen@KristenRampe.com.

Peter: Perfect, so hopefully your inbox will be flooded with requests for this information. As well, I will give you a not even shameless plug. This is just a plug. I loved your book: Accounting Dreams and Illusions.

Kristen: Thank you, yes, I had a hood of a time creating it, so it’s definitely something that I also appreciate.

Peter: Yes, Accounting Dreams and Illusions: Scenes From a Professional Paradise, And What Really Happens In The Accounting Industry, and one of the first things in in your book are CPA Dreams: “So there I was, and you’ll never believe what my client said.” And the first one, “Wow, great rate, who knew accounting fees could be so reasonable.” [laughs]

Kristen: [laughs] That’s right, that’s right. Yeah, the whole book is filled with – I would sort of call them accounting memes – of things you you wish your client would say to you, but probably never would, but there’s also a chapter of things that clients wish their CPAs would say to them, but probably never will. That’s really right on the the client service provider relationship, that’s the purpose of this book and what it goes into is just, you know, why do we have these funny interplays that are highlighted in the book, and what can we learn from that too? So if you know somebody who needs a gift for their birthday and they work in the accounting world, this would be a great gift.

Peter: It would be. I’ve given a couple of them out, and I’m looking at one of the quotes that you’ve got in here under Part 2, Client Delusions: “And then my CPA said to me, I chose a career in accounting because I love working with people.”

Kristen: That’s right, that’s right. Right?

Peter: Yeah

Kristen: Not most CPAs out with their clients ever

Peter: Or, “I made sure the staff on your engagement are the same as last year, so we won’t ask any repetitive questions.”

Kristen: Mhm. That’s right, all these things, and so you can get a peek inside minds of your clients. That’s what part 2 of the book is about, for those who are wondering, “What is my client is really thinking?”

Peter: Oh I read this, and I laughed out loud really, really hard, because it hit way too close to home, and it was very, very funny. Thank you for putting this book out there. I think every CPA should have a copy of it.

Kristen: Absolutely, I would agree. I think it deserves a place in every office and many of the desks.

Peter: Or have them send it to your clients as well, because, remember, it is a two-way street out there.

Kristen: Yup, it is, absolutely.

Peter: So as we’re wrapping things up, I’m starting something new, and it’s a rapid-fire session. I’m a big fan of David Feherty, watching This Morning on the Golf Channel, some old episodes, and he has his rapid-fire session, and I thought, “Wow this would be cool,” and who better to try it out on than you?

Kristen: That’s right, and I’m ready. I’m prepped for this, you know?

Peter: [laugs] Okay so there’s ten questions.

Kristen: Okay.

Peter: First one: Kevin Hart or Robin Williams?

Kristen: Oh my gosh, if I don’t know who Kevin Hart is, I guess I’ll pick Robin Williams. Should I know who Kevin Hart is? Who is hey?

Peter: Kevin is a stand-up comic, and he’s played a number of movies recently

Kristen: Oh! Yeah, okay, well I’ll stick with Robin Williams.

Peter: Okay

Kristen: Yeah. You know, I like him too, now that you described a little more, but yeah.

Peter: Kevin Spacey or Mark Harmon?

Kristen: Ooh, Kevin Spacey.

Peter: Who’s your favorite musician?

Kristen: My favorite musician? Gosh, and it has to be just a single person not like a group?

Peter: It can be a group.

Kristen: it can be a group. That assumes I have a favorite group. [laughs] This is so hard, this is certainly not the rapid-fire you were hoping for. I’m gonna just pull one out of my, you know, my high school past, and let’s go with with U2 and Bono.

Peter: Can’t go wrong with U2. Here’s a softball: what’s your favorite adult beverage?

Kristen: Ooh, my favorite adult beverage. We’re gonna have to go with gin and tonic tonic.

Peter: Alright, Microsoft Excel or your fingers?

Kristen: Ooh, Excel.

Peter: What’s your favorite song?

Kristen: Oh my favorite song probably depends on the day. There’s a song out right now that I have somewhere on my playlist, “Ain’t It Fun” by, I think it’s Paramour. I like that. Catchy, fun stuff.

Peter: Is there a go-to song that you have, that when you need to get pumped up or something, that you automatically listen to that?

Kristen: Yeah that might be one in the same, that same one I just mentioned, because I got that on fast repeat when I’m ready to get energized.

Peter: Ok, next question: debit or credit credit?

Kristen: Credit.

Peter: What’s your favorite movie?

Kristen: We’ll go old school again: Shawshank Redemption.

Peter: Love Shawshank Redemption, great movie. As it relates to toilet-paper rolls, over or under?

Kristen: Over

Peter: Okay, and who’s your celebrity crush?

Kristen: Oh gosh. Oh, you know that guy, I think I heard he just turned 30, that Robert Pattinson from the teen crush vampire movies, Twilight.

Peter: Right

Kristen: He’s younger than me, but that’s alright, right?

Peter: That’s a – you’re the cougar I guess. [laughs]

Kristen: [laughs] I’m not a cougar yet, I’m not in that territory… I’m not far from that age, but, in between him and cougar.

Peter: [laughs] Okay, great.

Kristen: Although I did just get called – Mark Koziel from the AICPA referred to me as an Old Maid the other day, so I want to put that out there, but I don’t really think I’m an old maid either, but it was interesting to get the label, this early in my career, yeah.

Peter: Old maid, wow…

Kristen: Well, season consultant was I think what he really meant, but it came out as old maid, so…

Peter: Wow…

Kristen: You know, I roll with it.

Peter: Yeah, I’m not sure how to take that one, old maid. I would not put you in that sphere yet. Maybe people around my age might be almost Old Maid… I think that’s called retired partner, so we’ll just keep moving away from that. [laughs]

Kristen: [laughs]

Peter: Any last parting wisdom that you can give to my audience?

Kristen: Oh boy, you know, I would say my parting wisdom – things that that make firms in CPA successful – is just keeping an eye on that, you know… be the change that you want to be. If you see something that’s not working, take the time to make the change. And it might not be today. Today maybe isn’t the right day, but don’t let yourself sit in a situation that’s not working for you. Pick up what you need to do, and go make that change.

Peter: What great wisdom to pass on to the audience. Kristen, thank you so very much again for taking time to have this conversation. I look forward to our next conversation, hopefully in the very near future

Kristen: Thank you again, sounds great. Thanks, Peter.

Peter: Hey, welcome to episode 15 of Improv Is No Joke podcast. I’m Peter Margaritis here, and thank you very much for listening today. Today’s guest is Hayden Williams, who was recently promoted to CFO at the Washington Society of CPAs. At the time of the interview, Hayden’s role was the VP of Education, and the conversation is around the topic of professional education. I’ve known Hayden for about six years, we think. We met at a conference at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park Colorado – just as a side note, the Stanley Hotel is where Stephen King got his inspiration in writing the novel The Shining. The hotel plays the movie 24-7, if you care to watch it while you stay in there. it is a wonderful hotel, but I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep for those couple of nights I stayed there – As I’ve gotten to know Hayden over the years, I realize what a visionary he is in the areas of learning and development at the professional level. He has integrated technology in the classroom and online so that he can serve the members of the Washington Society of CPAs in their learning needs. For example, the Summer I was scheduled to present a course at the Washington Society of CPAs, but the enrollment in the class was low. There was some discussion about canceling the course, because the economics of bringing me out to Bellevue from Westerville is costly. We came up with the idea of holding the all-day course, but I was going to facilitate it from my office in Westville using Adobe Connect. Now I could see and hear the attendees, and they could see and hear me too. Long story short, it was a huge win-win for everyone. Being a visionary means taking risks, and Hayden, by far, is a visionary and an all-around great guy. Before we get to the interview with Hayden, I’d like to share with you a review that I received on iTunes from alimacadam, who wrote, “Peter is such a great host, and his guests are just as amazing. Love the key concepts of the show, and the message that Peter’s putting out there to his audience. I would definitely recommend this to any entrepreneur or business owner working to build up their business and improve their communication skills.” Thank you so very much Alimacadam for that wonderful review. If you listen to this podcast, I would appreciate if you take a moment and write a review. It helps the podcast find greater visibility in the iTunes community. Here are the seven steps you need to take in order to leave a review: Launch Apple’s podcast app Tap the search tab Enter the name of the podcast you want to rate or review Tap the blue search key at the bottom right Tap the album art for the podcast Tap the reviews tab Tap “write a review” at the bottom and begin writing the review

Peter: If you’d like to leave a review but remain anonymous, all you have to do is go to your iTunes account information page, go to your settings and click, “Edit nickname.” Also, if you’re not signed up for the SN challenge, please go to my website PeterMargaritis.com and scroll down to the SN challenge call to action, and click to register to begin building the effective habit of “yes and,” and the principles of improvisation. And remember to share your experiences on Twitter using the hashtag #yesandchallenge. By the way, I have been tweeting using this hashtag. If you’re not sure what the SN challenge is all about, please go back and listen to episode 0. This is where we discuss the SN challenge in more detail, so go back and take a listen. This week I’d like to share with you an article that was published on CNN, titled, Why Using Improvisation to Teach Business skills is No Joke by Mark Tutton. In one of the interviews for the article, it was stated that, “Improv teaches you how to think on your feet and how to react and adapt very quickly to unexpected events and things you may not have planned for,” and, “It applies to leadership and it applies to negotiation, where you never have control over what happens … Negotiation is a dynamic process — you have to be able to think on your feet and adapt.” I put a link to this article in the show notes, along with the link to an article that I publish titled, Successful Negotiating In Corporate America. Well I believe my to-do list is completed, so without further ado, let’s get to the interview with Hayden Williams.

[music]

Hey, welcome to the Improv is No Joke podcast. This is Pete Margaritas your host, and today I’m interviewing Hayden Williams, Vice President of Education with the Washington Society of Certified Public Accountants. Hayden, welcome to the show, I greatly appreciate you taking time to be part of my podcast

Hayden: It’s an honor Peter. Thank you.

Peter: Thank you very much. Hey, can you take a moment and tell us a little bit about yourself? About your background and what you do here at the Washington Society of CPAs.

Hayden: Sure. I am, as Peter said, the Vice President of Education for the society, and I started off as a CPA almost 20 years ago. I worked in a small public firm in Arizona, and from there I went on to become the vice president of education for the Arizona Society of CPAs. I worked there for about seven years and had a dream of living up in the Northwest, and had an opportunity to come up and be the CFO here at the Washington Society of CPAs, and so I started there. I worked two years as a CFO, and then was asked to transfer into education and run the education department here. So we provide about a thousand webcast and webinars to our members, 300 live programs – and we actually webcast a hundred of those – and then we have 15 conferences – and we webcast five of those conferences as well. So we’re really heavy into the technology, and have been for about the last five years.

Peter: So how long have you been in the Association world?

Hayden: About 17 years.

Peter: And no matter whether it’s the Washington Society of CPAs, or the Columbus bar association, or the real estate association, how have you seen the education landscape change during this period of time?

Hayden: Well in the last seven or six years, education has changed dramatically with the introduction of the internet – the internet was always here, but when the downturn in the economy came, I’m not sure if people were looking for new opportunities, or what it was, but there was an onslaught of education being provided via the web. So whether it was self-study, webcast or webinars, and that changed the landscape totally for CPE, where a state society or a county bar association had a geographic lock on education. That doesn’t exist anymore. So where we had, seven years ago, 400 live programs and a few conferences, we actually had to reduce the number of live offerings and start in on the webcast seven years ago, because of the the change in technology, and the use of technology, for CPE purposes.

Peter: This change in technology. I’m happy to say that I understand Hayden’s love for the Pacific Northwest, because I’m actually sitting in his office today, and it’s actually sunny in Seattle.

Hayden: It’s beautiful today.

Peter: It’s absolutely beautiful today. But I’ve been in the continuing education business for quite some time, and what I can say is – I’ve known you for a number of years, we can’t figure out exactly, 5 or 7 –

Hayden: Right

Peter: But the one thing that I’ve noticed about you, and the way you approach education, is you’re very adaptable. You’re not stuck in, “Well this is the way we’ve always done it,” you have this approach and demeanor about, through conversation, how can we fix this? How can we make it better? In a lot of ways, I think a lot of other associations aren’t going down that path. How have you been able to be successful and, you know, sometimes visionaries are chastised initially but once it’s seen, then they’re glorified. Can you speak to that?

Hayden: Yeah, well, it was clear after the downturn in the economy, I mean, the attendance at our live courses dropped dramatically, and we had to do something, and so we actually had seen a piece of equipment called a tricaster. I realized that, if I bought that tricaster and a couple cameras, that I could do some of my own webcasts, and what would happen if we did something like that. Well as luck would have it, we actually did our first webcast before I was the VP of Education, and we had 300 people from all over the country attend this 990 course via webcast, and that that always stuck in the back of my mind. And so I thought we should be doing this on a regular basis, and so we bought the equipment and we actually started producing our own webcasts a week later. What we did was, we packaged them up and sent them off to a platform to replay out to, let’s say, 46 states. And our ethics course had done very well, so we knew we had a hit there, so we’ve really embraced technology. We have partnerships with five or six states that we webcast, they were buying our webcast and we have webcasts that we purchased from other entities, and so we really embrace that technology. We’re not worried about saturating the market. We will have a class, let’s say on 1040s, and three days later we’ll have a webcast of a 1040. What we’re trying to do is penetrate the market as much possible with all forms of CPE, meaning webcasts, webinars, seminars. And it might be the same subject matter, but if we don’t have that class for our members, somebody else is going to, and they can use the web to easily do it. So we came up with the concept seven years ago called the one-stop-shop. So we’re trying to provide all of the self-study that they would need; all of the webcast and webinars that they would need; and conferences and live seminars. And that’s really helped us. We haven’t grown the market share, but we certainly maintained our market share, where I can tell you that a number of other societies and associations are decreasing. We’ve been pretty good about maintaining that market, because what’s happened is the live seminar – what we call live butts in seats people actually coming to the event – has decreased. But we increased in self-study webcasts and webinars by really embracing technology, not being worried about stealing a live butt-in-seat for a webcast. What we’ve done is, we’ve known what’s going to happen, someone is going to steal it, so we stole it ourselves, and that really has helped us.

Peter: So just so the audience knows, because whether they’re at a CPA or the law profession or whatever, give me the definition or the difference between a webcast and a webinar.

Hayden: A webcast is a video and audio presentation with a powerpoint. A webinar is the audio and the powerpoint presentation, so the difference is you’ve got a talking head on a webcast. Now entities will use the webcast title, and it might be a webinar, and it really is just a marketing ploy because you get there and it’s actually a webinar, but that’s what you should expect when you hear a webcast. There should be about a video and audio portion to the powerpoint presentation.

Peter: And these webcasts that are video, they’re live, they’re not pre-recorded?

Hayden: Well, the webcast can be pre-recorded, but they’re considered live. Now this is for CPA education, and maybe it’s the same rules for other entities, but a webcast can be pre-recorded as long as the speaker is there, present, at the time of the showing, or the rebroadcast, so they’re there to answer questions. Typically what happens is, somebody will have a question, they email it, and that speaker needs to be available to answer the question at the time, and that is still considered live, even though it’s been recorded. So it could be a live broadcast, and a speaker’s there to answer your question live, or it could be pre-recorded, but this speaker is still there to answer your question live.

Peter: Okay, got it. And from a a a webcast perspective, you’ve been able to grow the size of your conferences dramatically by having them, or certain sessions within that conference, webcasted out to your audience? Whereas before there could be a lot of constraints that might not bring someone to your conference. Now they can attend, for lack of a better term, sitting at home having a cup of coffee in their slippers.

Hayden: That’s right. So we’ve grown with the conferences that we do webcast, in some cases as much as twenty percent. So we’ve got a fairly sizable audience coming, 40 to 50 people, and we try to create an atmosphere. Because we’ve got three or four cameras at the conference, we try to create that atmosphere as if they were there themselves, and so we do close-up shots; we have what we call lower thirds, where we introduce the speaker across the bottom of the screen; and we change up the different camera angles, so that way people will pay attention. It’s not just one shot. I think that it’s important to have varied angles, so if they happen to look away or they lose their attention span, the camera angle will change and might bring their attention back to what’s being said, and have them refocus

Peter: Yeah I can imagine that’s a challenge. For anybody who’s ever taken a webinar. The challenge of a webinar is maintaining that focus.

Hayden: That’s right.

Peter: I have a greater opportunity to maintain the focus with a video feed on it, as well as just from the visual stimuli, by different camera angles, you’re helping me try to stay focused –

Hayden: Right

Peter: Versus drifting off and –– hey, what was that a squirrel that went… back now, okay.

Hayden: That’s exactly right.

Peter: Okay, so what you want from cheeks in the seats seminars

Hayden: Right

Peter: Saw the that audience decline, but the webcast, webinars, self-study things maintain. You haven’t lost market share, but you said that you’ve done better than most

Hayden: Right

Peter: And my question is, this is 2016, what is the future out there in continuing education for CPA’s, for attorneys, for engineers, for realtors? What do you see out there as what’s potentially next? What keeps you up at night, as it relates to this?

Hayden: CPE in general keeps me up at night. When I think about the vastness of what could be and what needs to be, I can’t get my arms around it sometimes. What I’m working on next is, I think we still need to work with webcasts. I think they need to be more interactive. Webinars more interactive. I think that the speakers that are working in this venue need to also be thinking about how they can be creating an experience, if you will, for the web audience – because this is only going to grow. When I look at a classroom event that we have and we’re broadcasting it live, and I may have eight people in the live course but I have 18 out on the web, that’s the majority of your audience. So we have to start thinking about: how do we embrace that audience? How do we create that experience? So multiple cameras, having the speaker talk to the audience by using their names, knowing who is out there in the webcast, so you’re engaging that audience. For the webcasts. The webinars, that’s tough, but I think, also, there’s engagement there. There’s an opportunity to engage, and I think you have to use the folks that are on the webinar. You need to use their names when they’re asking questions, ask people to ask questions, engage them differently. So I think there’s also an opportunity in self-study where I think we need to start looking at how to create an interactive environment with self study, as well. A true interactive environment, where maybe the speaker is also available – not on demand, because that would be impossible – but the speaker that’s doing the self-study might be available from 2:00 to 4:00 on Fridays, and so you would know that if you took a self-study program that that speaker was available from 2:00 to 4:00, and you could ask them a question about something that you were studying. I think that the Millennials, and the folks that are coming up after the Millennials, all they know is digital, and so we have to embrace digital on a constant basis. So we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.

Peter: And as you were saying that, I’m thinking about my course today here.

Hayden: Yeah

Peter: And I made a comment, I said maybe seven eight years ago, if I came in and taught a course, and there’s laptops up, and people are on their iPhones, I would feel… and I i left a blank. Someone said disrespected, and it probably along those lines, but not today. Because we have to remember, a lot of people, no matter whether they’re Millennials, Gen X or baby boomers, they are taking notes on their laptops, are taking notes on their iPads, taking notes on the phone. As you’re talking, we’re thinking about this live audience and how to keep them engaged, this idea just popped into my head: Are we utilizing Twitter in that virtual space, to say, you know what, you may have a question. Why don’t you use this hashtag? And there’s some Twitter feed – I know there’s platforms out there – that you can ask it from a virtual environment, and maybe a little bit more engaged versus I may have to call in, or there’s a maybe a chat piece in there, maybe to turn it into a live stream. Actually I’ve seen – it’s been awhile, but Tom hood with Maryland Association of CPAs.

Hayden: Right

Peter: He had a live Twitter stream going up one of his conferences so that people could ask questions. It just helped with that interaction, because CPAs aren’t really the most gregarious people –

Hayden: Right.

Peter: So it inspired them to be able to ask questions without having to stand up, and maybe feel embarrassed. As you get this virtual world out there, how do we get them more engaged?

Hayden: Well one of the notions, and this is going to sound way out there, and this was about 4-5 years ago and have yet to see it, but what if you could have the live audience, and the remote audience, using the same platform to take the course. So imagine this: so everyone has an iPad, and there’s a piece of software that the instructor runs on each of your iPads. You sign up, and the software is downloaded whether you’re remote or you’re in the course. So when the instructors teaching, the book’s in this piece of software, and so when he turns his page remotely he turns your page, and you can take notes, and those notes would be annotated, and then after the course is done – this would be for both the remote and the live audience – that course goes up into their digital book shelf, where it stays. So everything now is completely paperless, but what you do is, you have taken the classroom and replicated it, but digitally. So then there could be opportunity in there to also type in questions to the speaker –

Peter: Mhm.

Hayden: and so there’s that digital chat that I think most people are going to, when we think about the fact that I rarely talk to anyone. I text them. So I think we’re going that way anyway, and I think you could get more involvement with something like that, but it’s got to be a platform that everybody can use, so it’s no different for the webcast audience and the live audience. Because I think you’re still going to see people that want to take it live, and I think there’s a lot of value in live. So what if we could have some type of software that would basically replace the book and the classroom situation, but we digitize the classroom so to speak.

Peter: Wow, that would keep me up at night. Probably will keep me up tonight just thinking about that. How do you do something like that? And I hear, in creating this classroom experience, which is outside of a compliance role, because even though we have to have X amount of hours in CPE, that’s not the real meaning of CPE. It’s learning. It’s continually learning, not checking out the box, and if I’ve got these different platforms I have to be as engaged online at a webcast (or a webinar or self study) as I do if I’m live and in person.

Hayden: Right.

Peter: And I think that’s a challenge a lot of organizations like yourself have, and I think you’re doing a great job here in Washington in embracing that and engaging that audience to do this. I think the challenge is what’s next in creating a classroom experience? And if I think about our audience, the size of the Millennial population has exceeded the size of the baby boomer population.

Hayden: That’s right

Peter: So baby boomers are now number two. We’re not number one. And the only way we can be number one again is… we’ll never be number one again.

Hayden: That’s right, we won’t.

Peter: So we still need to respect that part of our audience. But I truly believe going in the way of digital and virtual mixed with live – because I still believe that there needs to be, at some point, some live – and having that blend, is really where the future of continuing education in the professional marketplace will move. If you’re not moving down that space, you might be the next Blackberry

Hayden: Yeah, there’s no question, and associations in general all are facing this exact same issue, and I would love to be the guy that has figured that out, and I hope I am at some point.

Peter: I think you’re well on your way to being that guy. It’s just resources, opportunity, but I think first and foremost, and I talk a lot about this to my class, I believe you understand your audience, and that is number one. I think once you understand that audience, understand how they tick – what makes them work – then you can adapt to that situation.

Hayden: Right

Peter: In order to provide a learning experience that they walk away, whether it’s a 4-day course or a one hour course. So say, “If you can walk away with three takeaways from today, then I’ve done my job,” and I believe that can be done in a virtual environment as well.

Hayden: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

Peter: Hayden, I’m glad I’m not you, because it doesn’t look like you get a lot of sleep, but you know what? I don’t get a lot of sleep too, because I think a lot about the same things. About where this is going, because it’s part of my business model as well, but what I do know is that you are one of the national leaders in CP education in the United States, as relates to the CPA profession. I’ve enjoyed working with you for I can’t remember how many years, but I don’t care, and I enjoy our conversations. I thank you immensely for taking time out of your very hectic schedule to spend a little time with me talking about the future of continuing education, what you have done, and what you’ve shared with our audience. And if somebody wants to get ahold of you, how can they get in contact with you?

Hayden: They can email me at hwilliams@WSCPA.org.

Peter: In the subject line, if they put, “Improv is no Joke podcast,” just so you have an idea where this is coming from. Would that help?

Hayden: That would be great.

Peter: Super. Once again, thank you very much Hayden for your time. I look forward to interviewing you again here in the coming year or so to see what changes have been made, what changes you’re making, and more importantly seeing the success that you’re reaping from all the hard work that you’ve and selling well.

Hayden: I appreciate it Peter.

Peter: Take care.

Hayden: Bye

Peter: Welcome to episode 14 of Improv Is No Joke podcast. I’m your host Peter Margaritis, and thank you very much for listening today. Today’s guest is Tami Gaitten, who is a certified health coach and the CEO and founder of Gaitten Wellness LLC. I’ve known Tami for 20 years, because she’s my next-door neighbor, and she has an interesting story on her journey from 16 years in the corporate IT world to her business today. Our conversation centers around nutrition and its relationship to productivity. The fuel we provide to our associates can either give them a boost of productivity, or the exact opposite. She provides excellent advice on what types of foods help us fight stress, and the types of foods we need to consume during high peak stress times in our business. Before we get into the interview with Tami, I’d like to share a review that I received on iTunes from cdy32, who wrote, “I never thought improvisation would bleed over into the business world, but after listening to Peter explain the concepts, I now know that it is vital. Great show and I’m looking forward to future episodes.” Well thank you Mr. or Mrs. cdy32, I greatly appreciate your feedback. If you’ve been listening to this podcast, I’d appreciate if you take a moment and write a review. It will help the podcast get greater visibility in the iTunes community. Here are the seven steps you need to take in order to leave a review: Launch Apple’s podcast app Tap the search tab Enter the name of the podcast you want to rate or review Tap the blue search key at the bottom right Tap the album art for the podcast Tap the reviews tab Tap “write a review” at the bottom and begin writing the review

Peter: Also, if you’re not signed up for the SN challenge, please go to my website PeterMargaritis.com and scroll down to the SN challenge call to action ,and click to register to begin building the effective habit of “yes and,” and the principles of improvisation. And remember to share your experiences on Twitter using the hashtag #yesandchallenge, or on the Accidental Accountant Facebook page. Now, if you’re not sure what the SN challenge is all about, please go back and listen to episode 0. This is where we discuss the SN challenge in more detail.

Peter: This week I would like to share with you an article that was published in Crain’s Cleveland Business titled, Medical Improv Putting Physicians to the Test. The article is the first of Dr. Karen Chan, a first-year resident at University Hospitals, was looking for a research project last fall when a mentor suggested that she combined her longtime hobby of improv with her medical work, something she hadn’t thought about before. Soon she began using improv as a tool when something was going wrong in a conversation with a patient. She says, “Patients who are really angry at me for whatever reason, I’ll try to calm them down by trying to find something to actually agree on,” Chan said. “So that’s the first rule of improv: ‘yes, and.’ It’s hard to argue with someone if you find something to agree on.” She did more to develop a curriculum, and in February began teaching her fellow residents on how to apply improv into the work. In addition, the Cleveland Clinic has also incorporated medical improv into its communication training. This is great advice, and it applies whether you’re dealing with an angry patient, an angry client, an angry employee, an angry spouse. I’ll put the link to the entire article in the show notes. Well okay, it appears that I have completed my to-do list, so without further ado, let’s get to the interview with Tami Gaitten.

[music]

Peter: Tami I greatly appreciate you spending time with me today on my podcast. Thank you very much, and I’m so looking forward to our conversation.

Tami: Me too Pete, and thank you for the opportunity to be here. It’s really fun.

Peter: I’m looking forward to learning more about an integrative nutritional health coach, what you do, and how you help people become healthier in their lives, and the first question I’d like to ask is: tell us about yourself. Give us your background.

Tami: Well, I didn’t start out as a health coach. Actually, when I graduated from high school, I went to college and my father suggested that I major in computer science, because that was the wave of the future back then, and think it still is.

Peter: Yeah

Tami: So it really wasn’t my thing, but I went ahead and followed his advice and got my degree, bachelor of science in management information systems, and got a job right out of college, which was a really good job, well-paying, so my father was a smart man [laughs] But I worked in corporate IT for 16 years. I’m actually it got very crazy. I had a stressful job. I was writing programs probably for the first three years in COBOL on punch cards, if you can imagine. You know that gives you some idea how long ago this was.

Peter: Oh, I remember punch cards.

Tami: Back then my husband was also working an IT job, and we were juggling schedules. We had four children, and when my youngest was born in 2003 things were just really nutty. I was coming home from work, trying to get the kids and we were going out, and eating chicken nuggets and french fries, and coming home trying to get them bathed and in bed, and then I would dial back in and probably work till two o’clock in the morning so I could complete my projects. I had moved from being a programmer to being a business analyst, so I was kind of a liaison between programmers and the end users. I was designing a lot of training materials and traveling, and I actually I loved that part, when I got out of programming and was actually working with people. That was more my thing.

Peter: Yeah.

Tami: But by the time that fourth baby came along, we were pretty broken.

Peter: [laughs]

Tami: We were sick all the time, our kids were in daycare, and, you know, they would just pass things from one to the other, and Brad and I would get sick, so we made the decision that I would stay home, and I thought this is going to be a piece of cake. You know, I thought, I’ve been managing projects, I’ve got these three little kids, should be no problem. Well, boy did I have a lot to learn. [laughs]

Peter: [laughs]

Tami: They pushed all my buttons. I realized that, you know, nothing was going to go as planned, but we were able to get healthy. One of the things that I did, when I was working my corporate job, was this kind of an escape for me, was I would go to a health food store that was right next door to where I worked, and the lady that owned it mentored me on natural health. I mean, she really ignited my passion for healthy food and healthy living. She taught me about organic food and why pesticides were bad. She taught me about trans fats – and this was all 20 years ago, when these things were not, you know, in our common vocabulary today. And then I would also go in some days to a spiritual center that had free lunchtime guided meditation, and I think that really helped me a lot when I was under so much stress. So the combination of those things kind of ignited my passion for natural health, and as I stayed home with my kids I was able to start really applying these things that I had learned to my family, and my husband and myself too, and we got pretty healthy. Then I decided to go back to school. I decided I wanted to pursue, you know, a career in something that I was passionate about. So I went to the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and got my certification as a health coach, and started to practice, but about that time I also started to have my own health issues, and going through perimenopause. I had some cervical spine and neck issues, vertigo, dizziness, and then I was diagnosed as hypothyroid. So here, I had becoming a health coach [laughs]

Peter: [laughs]

Tami: And I’m like, “What’s going on?” You know, I’m eating well, applying all these things I know, and I’m falling apart.

Peter: [laughs]

Tami: So again I went back to school in 2013. I had come across functional nutrition, which is a really interesting concept because it looks at the person as a whole, and how all of your systems are really intricately connected, and It also looks at each person as being incredibly unique, so no two people with the same diagnosis or the same problems are going to be helped by the same protocol. Everybody has, you know, variations in their genetic makeup, what type of problem that maybe you’re working on, and also the makeup of the bacteria in their gut can be different. As a coach, what I learned is that, you know I’m studying physiology – how things are all connected – but I also learned that it’s really important to listen to your your client ,and to find out what is going on with them. Then from there you can move forward and create, you know, a plan or protocol, or an action plan that’s gonna work that they can start with.

Peter: Wow.

Tami: Sorry that was kind of long, wasn’t it?

Peter: No, that was very interesting. I’m still dwelling on the fact that you spent 16 years in IT, but I think about it: you’ve transitioned yourself from that corporate stressful environment into a role that now you’re trying to help those in the corporate world on how to become more healthy. How to deal with all the stress that we’re under, and it’s an interesting journey.

Tami: It’s been a very interesting journey, and you know, as I look back, I can kind of connect the dots between some of the things that I did as a liaison between programmers and end-users, I’m now doing with how to get healthy. It’s all very complex with nutrition, and it can be confusing, and there’s so much conflicting information out there. How to to help somebody figure out what’s going to work for them, and then put it into a plan that they can understand, it’s a kind of a discovery process too that we work through. But yeah, I look back and I see how what I was doing when in the corporate world applies now to the clients that I work with, and also the presentation skills when I was doing my training and traveling and documentation. Those skills have all come into play as I work with corporations, because I can go in and I can present information in an easily understandable way. I know what these people are going through, you know, when I go in and do a lunch and learn I can talk about stress, and you know, how do you mitigate stress? How can you eat to fill yourself? How can you nourish yourself with healthy foods? How to eat for energy, you know, those types of things that are really helpful for people that are in that corporate lifestyle.

Peter: So what what advice would you give someone, a novice? I needs to hire you, and as you said we’re going to co-create this program. Now what would be one of the first things you would have this person do?

Tami: Well usually we talk. We sit down and we talk, and I listen, and I listen to their lifestyle, I listen to their background. There’s a lot of stuff that comes out in their history, when they talk and then we will track. I will have them do what I call a food-mood-poop journal. [laughs]

Peter: [laughs] Okay, wait. I have to hit rewind there. [tape rewinding noise] What was was that again?

Tami: [laughs] It’s a food-mood-poop journal. So, just for a couple days, we kind of look at what is coming in, how they’re feeling, and what’s going out. It’s a diagnostic tool, again coming from a computer background, and the systems and logistics type of mindset that I have. I like to see, you know, what they’re eating, and it’s not about counting calories, and it’s not about any shaming, it’s just let’s see what’s coming in. Let’s see how you feel and let’s see what’s going out. That way we can start to look at, you know, foods that you might be sensitive to, or things that might be triggering agitation or fatigue. So that’s kind of been the starting point. We take a look at that, and then we make a plan together of what things we’d like to address.

Peter: So, let’s say I’m a fifty-five-year-old executive for any type of company. I’m in a high-stress job, my morning consists of a couple slices of bacon, maybe some eggs as I’m flying out the door. Lunch I’ll go down to the cafeteria, grab a burger, grab lasagna, just grab whatever, I’ll eat it at my desk, or every now and then go out to get some restaurant. But I’m not eating that healthy. In the evenings, I get home, and if I’m single I’m having a TV dinner or or I’m just eating out, or maybe if I’m with the family, maybe I’m getting a decent meal there. Let’s say pork tenderloin with some pineapple and broccoli. So, I think the first thing you would say is slow down? [laughs]

Tami: Yeah, exactly. Breathe, slow down. But I also notice, I mean what screams at me right away, would be the missing plant foods. Like, where’s the color, you know? Where’s the green and the red and orange and the yellow and the blue and violet? That’s one of things I address first with people too, is increasing the plant foods.

Peter: Hey, I said broccoli. [laughs]

Tami: You put pineapple in there too [laughs]

Peter: But yeah, that’s true. Plant-based diets are better for you, being a type 1 diabetic I have – and I read the book The China Study – and actually I did change my diet, at one point probably more than ninety percent plant-based. Fruits and vegetables and all that, more than anything else, and it was great. I could feel a difference, but the thing that always trips me up is the holidays.

Tami: Oh yeah, and I think you have to you have to be gentle with yourself and just know that, you know, those are times when you may be my getting off the highway a little bit. You may be taking a few detours and things. You just have to know how to get back on. You don’t beat yourself up about it, but you know that you’re going to get back on and take care of yourself.

Peter: So that comes to be New Year’s Eve, and I make a New Year’s resolution that I’m gonna get back on the train again, and I’m on the train and just like everything else we do as it relates to New Year’s resolutions, by February 1st I can’t even spell resolution, and I I’m not maintaining that habit, so what advice would you give someone who’s having a hard time? I think everybody does this. We all set diets, we all set plans, but then we fall off the wagon and we end up going back to our old ruts. What advice would you give on how to stay on track?

Tami: It’s just the little things, you know, it doesn’t have to be an overall big diet change. Just starting to make little upgrades, and add in, and that’s one of the things I work with people is how to make it easy to to get more plant foods into your diet. Just like adding in a smoothie in the morning, you know, or taking a walk at lunch. it doesn’t have to be a huge, big deal, but these little things add up. They’re like a snowball effect. Once you start doing one little thing, you get motivated and you start to feel a little bit better, and then you suddenly have a little bit more energy, and then that motivation and energy coincide to, you know, push you forward. And then a coach comes into play, you know, and that’s where the coach is helpful and saying, come on, you know, take my hand and we’ll walk through this together. I’m gonna be a little inspiration and motivation.

Peter: I find it interesting that, coming from the IT background, you use the word upgrades. So I’m going from Pete 2.0 to 1.1 to 1.2 to 1.3. The add-ons. But that does make sense. It’s just taking the little bits, and I’m a firm believer – in a conversation on the Dan Forstyhe podcast about if you want to get better at doing something, and you need that help, hire a coach. Don’t look at it as a cost, look as it as an investment in better health. It’s always been my mantra that, if I want to become the best or try to become the best speaker possible, I’ve hired two or three coaches. Getting different opinions. But I’m a big believer in hiring a coach. One, to help you maintain those habits, but as we’re sitting here talking – and this episode will most likely be aired and in September – and we’re right here at the end of, well we think it’s the Spring, I’m not sure if that fits with the weather – do you coach about nutrition for the seasons? Is that even a thing?

Tami: Yes it actually is a thing, and in fact I coach, too, that we should be eating with the seasons. You know that nature is designed to provide us the foods that we need during the season that we’re in. So in the Spring, you’re eating the leafy greens that are coming up and they’re giving you energy, and they’re like the dandelion greens and things, although a lot of people don’t need those. They’re designed to to help your liver, to help clear out the sludge from the Winter. And then of course, as you head into Fall, you’re eating more of the root vegetables and those things are designed to kind of ground you, and to get you ready for Winter. So yes, I think that that is definitely a thing, and I think that we should be eating with the seasons also, because that way we’re eating the freshest food possible. You know, what is being produced in your area locally at that time of year.

Peter: So if Spring is greens and stuff, what’s Summer? What should we be eating in Summer?

Tami: So, again, it’s a more greens. A lot of fruit. Fruits and fresh vegetables that are in season. Here in Ohio lot of the stuff you know isn’t ripe until toward the end of August, but definitely fruits.

Peter: And in the Winter, I guess, alcohol’s not the main food group? [laughs]

Tami: [laughs] Maybe not, but it can be worked in their a little bit, definitely

Peter:: What we should eat in Winter since it is cold and snowy?

Tami: Basically, you know, your soups, you’re warming foods, and looking at spices: your cumin and turmeric, and again the beans and things that are soothing and warming. What I typically talk about for Winter goes along with common sense, you know, what you’re used to eating or what sounds good to you that time of year.

Peter: And soups do sound good to me that time of year. I do make a lot of soup during that time of year. I know you’ve got a number of clients. When you go into an organization, and they hire you, can you describe that process and what you do? How you set up your programs for maybe a larger audience?

Tami: Well one of the things I do for corporations is participate in their wellness events. A lot of times they’ll have wellness days, where I’ll come and I’ll have a table and talk about what I do, you know, as their employees comes through, and then I also provide lunch and learns, and then sometimes the lunch and learn is on the same day as the wellness event, and that can be tailored to what their employees, or may be interested in hearing about. I’ve done lunch and learns on sugar, ways to reduce your cravings for sugar, and also lunch and learns on how to eat for energy. Lunch and learn how to get more plant foods into your diet. Then the other interesting thing I started doing is what we call coaching days. So I will go into an organization for a day, and they have employees that have signed up for 30-minute health coaching sessions with me, and basically in that 30-minute session they come up with whatever their main role or challenge might be the time, and I can give them some tips on moving forward, and then I followed that up with notes afterwards so they can have a review of what we talked about.

Peter: What do you do with your long-term clients, and what is the length of time if I said I want to hire you to help me become better, and it’s not going to be like shell out 1-shot deal. I really need your help. What is the average length of time that you’re spending with your clients?

Tami: Usually three months. I mean that seems to be, and a lot of times the three-month client will extend for another three months just because it’s nice for them to have that person there. Every other week is typically how often we meet, and you know during that time we will decide on what they want to work on for the next time, and put together a plan together for the next two weeks. But I do offer one-time sessions, if somebody just needs some tips or something to get them started, then there’s the three-month program. Six month. But basically it’s designed for the person, so if somebody doesn’t need that much, and if they just want one month, we can do that.

Peter: So I can just imagine. So if I hired you for one month, great, I would implement that immediately. Do you send an email maybe two or three months out saying, “Hey are you staying on the road here, don’t fall off the wagon, you know, it’s been a couple months since we’ve talked, just a real quick reminder to stay on track.”

Tami: Yeah, yeah.

Peter: Good

Tami: Working with somebody, when we’re in a three-month program or six-month program, they have access to me every day, so it’s not just when we meet to talk. You know whether it be a Skype call, on the phone or in person, it’s not just during that session but every day they have access to me via email. So anything coming up, any questions they have, I am their support person and their advocate, I’m their friend. I’m in it with them, basically, you know, we’re doing this together.

Peter: You are their help desk. [laughs]

Tami: Yeah [laughs] yeah.

Peter: Well that’s good. So it’s 24-7 access to you during this time to make sure they stay on that, and then after the time period they’re taking off the training wheels and going out there –

Tami: Yeah

Peter: – you’re still providing some type of follow-up to them in order to keep them motivated and moving forward.

Tami: Right, definitely.

Peter: That’s great. I’m learning a ton today.

Tami: Wonderful.

Peter: And the food, mood and poop journal, that’s going to stay for quite a while. [laughs]

Tami: [laughs] We can have another call about that.

Peter: Now, Is that journal only done the first couple of weeks?

Tami: Yeah, basically it’s just a diagnostic tool so we can see what some of their triggers might be, where we might be missing some foods that can be helpful, and like I said, it’s not about calories. I’m not a calorie counter. It’s more about learning to nourish yourself well with whole foods. I’m an educator, you know, I like to help people understand why those foods are important, and what’s in them. The plethora of nutrients that are In plants is just amazing, so when you can show somebody what’s missing, and why it’s important, and how it may help them to feel good, then that’s the beauty in that Journal.

Peter: That’s great, because I think of my audience, and for the audience that will continue to grow over time, that we’ve got a lot of business leaders and hopefully a lot of CPAs, and if there’s a profession that is equally as stressful. Not anymore year-round, but at those peak seasons, I can still remember being in the firm – this is years ago – and Wednesdays was pizza night. And Monday was, you know, they would have breakfast force. Tuesday was ice cream sundaes and stuff, and working these long hours, and I’m thinking, after listening to you, it should have been something completely different. Some type of food to help give you more energy, versus make you sleepier.

Tami: [laughs]

Peter: Hey, and nobody likes their tax accountant sleeping when they’re preparing your tax return.

Tami: [laughs] That’s true, yeah, and that’s one of the things I coached on a lot, because I know, I remember. I was there, I lived it. I know what it’s like, and if I had known then some of the things I know now, about how I could have improved my own energy levels when I was going through that time, you know, maybe I never woulda quit. Maybe it wouldn’t be where I am now. [laughs]

Peter: [laughs]

Tami: It all happens for a reason, but yeah, there’s a lot of things you can do.

Peter: Well great, as we wrap this up, we will do the rapid-fire session with you.

Tami: Oh no, okay.

Peter: This is not painful, and this is tailored to you, for the most part I beleive.

Tami: Okay.

Peter: So the first question: chardonnay or chianti?

Tami: Chardonnay.

Peter: What’s your favorite book?

Tami: Living With Joy. Peter: What’s your favorite vegetable?

Tami: oh gosh, that’s a hard one, it depends on what season it is, how’s that? [laughs].

Peter: [laughs] Alright, it’s Spring.

Tami: Greens [laughs]

Peter: And since this will probably air in the fall?

Tami: Oh, and sweet potatoes.

Peter: You have to say sweet potatoes?

Tami: Yes. [laughs]

Peter: That’s one of the ones I’ve never been able to stomach, is a sweet potat.

Tami: Really?

Peter: Yeah, I know that’s strange.

Tami: I’ll have to fix you a sweet potato.

Peter: PC or mac?

Tami: PC

Peter: Little punch cards or hanging chads?

Tami: [laughs] Punch cards.

Peter: What’s your favorite song?

Tami: Oh no, another hard one. Actually, “Adelvice,” from The Sound of Music.

Peter: Okay. Justin Timberlake or Beyoncé?

Tami: Oh Justin Timberlake.

Peter: That was easy.

Tami: [laughs]

Peter: Favorite movie?

Tami: Sound of Music.

Peter: Favorite plant? Favorite plant that deer won’t eat?

Tami: Oh, lenten roses.

Peter: And what’s one thing on your bucket list that you haven’t accomplished? Now that you can check my podcast off of your bucket list.

Tami: Oh my gosh, my bucket list is long, but I would not to go to Italy.

Peter: You’re the second person who has said that

Tami: really?

Peter: And I I’ll tell you something I told Tom Hood: Go. Mary and I went, I think we’re going on seven or eight years ago, and it was the best two weeks that we’ve ever spent out of the country, and we both have been to Greece before, and we even kid each other nowadays that, if we were going to go international, it would be a hard pick between going back to Greece and going to Italy, and yeah we would probably have to flip a coin. That’s three out of five or something.

Tami: [laughs] Yeah I definitely want to go. There’s lots of places I want to go, but that one is top on my list.

Peter: So tell my audience how they can find you.

Tami: You can find me on my website at www.GaittenWellness.com or email me at Tami@GaittenWellness.com.

Peter: And I will have her contact information on the show notes, as well as the transcription.

Tami: Thank you.

Peter: You’re welcome, and thank you for taking time to spend with me. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I know my audience. If they listen to it, hopefully through either call you or start making changes in the way they interact with nutrition in order to become a healthier and more energized person.

Tami: Well thank you, Pete, this has been a great opportunity for me. I really enjoyed it. You made it fun. [laughs]

Peter: [laughs]

Tami: And I would love it if they want to give me a call, or if they’ve just been inspired today, that’s my goal. So that’s great.

Peter: Thank You, Tami.

Tami: Thank you, bye

Improv Is No Joke – Episode 13 – Jack Park

Peter: Welcome to episode 13 of Improv Is No Joke podcast. I’m your host Peter Margaritis, and thank you so very much for tuning in today. Today’s guest is Jack Park, who’s a football radio commentator and author; professional presenter; and quite frankly an all-around great guy. I met Jack back in 2001 when I was on faculty at Franklin University, and Jack was an adjunct professor. Jack introduced himself to me one day and told me that his son had been a student in one of my accounting classes, and that he enjoyed my class a lot. Well here was one of those Cliff Clavin “it’s a little-known fact” moments. Jack’s son, Jim, went on to become a CPA, just like his father. Now I’ve got to know jack a lot better over the last seven plus years, because we have a lot of the same clients and present to similar audiences. We are also both members of the National Speakers Association Ohio Chapter, and we both are on the chapter board this year. As you’re hearing this interview, Jack is a football historian, especially when it comes to Ohio State football. He constantly amazes me with this extensive knowledge about college football. Just the other day we were talking about an acquaintance who graduated from Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, and he immediately said that in 1921 Centre College upset the undefeated Harvard University on Harvard’s home field with the score of six to nothing, and Harvard had not lost a game since 1916. Hey, if you don’t believe this story, just google it. Before we get to the interview with Jack, I’d like to share with you a review that I received on iTunes from NCAVLDup, and they wrote, “First I must say reading Pete’s book “Improv is no Joke” was a very easy read with a wealth of great leadership information. I have listened to several peeps podcast. With each guest, I’m inspired by how improvisation with the two words “yes and” is a vital part of business. Each podcast is like going to a free seminar and walking away feeling better about yourself, growing your business, and even helping you in your personal life. Those two words “yes and” are so positive in every part of our lives, and Pete has made it so easy to understand them in his book and with his podcast guests. Thank You Pete.” No, thank you for taking time out to write that review for me. If you have been listening to the podcast I would appreciate if you would take a moment and write a review. It will help the podcast get greater visibility in the iTunes community. Now here are some instructions on how to leave a review: Launch Apple’s podcast app Tap the search tab Enter the name of the podcast you want to rate or review Tap the blue search key at the bottom right Tap the album art for the podcast Tap the reviews tab Tap “write a review” at the bottom and begin writing the review

Peter: Also, if you’re not signed up for the SN challenge, please go to my website PeterMargaritis.com and scroll down to the SN challenge call to action and click to register to begin building the effective habit of “yes and,” and the principles of improvisation. And remember to share your experiences on Twitter using the hashtag #yesandchallenge or on the Accidental Accountant Facebook page. Now, if you’re not sure what the SN challenge is all about, please go back and listen to episode 0. This is where we discuss the SN challenge in more detail. This week I’d like to share with you an article in Fast Company titled, Yes, And… Improv Techniques to Make You a Better Boss by Lindsay Levine. Lindsay is interviewing Charna Halpern, co-founder of iO, formerly known as Improv Olympics, a Chicago and Los Angeles-based theater and training center that launched the careers of comedians like Tina Fey, Amy Poehler and Mike Myers. She says, “business leaders can benefit from incorporating improvisation techniques into their leadership style.” Halpern says iO emphasizes a high-level communication and collaboration. She goes on to state that, “Improv is based on soft skills such as listening and communicating. Listening is crucial because you need to be present and in the moment, Halpern says. ‘Most people are waiting to speak and not listening in the moment. Instead, they’re thinking of what they’re going to say,’ she says. In improv, you must listen to what’s been said and pay attention so you can react appropriately. If you’re not focused on what’s happening around you, you miss an opportunity to build the scene, and the show comes to a screeching halt,” and Charna is spot-on. But then again, of course she is. Hello, Captain Obvious! I’ll put a link to this article in the show notes. Okay, it appears that I’ve completed my to-do list, so without further ado, let’s get to the interview with Jack Park.

[music]

Peter: Welcome everybody, I’m really excited that today I am actually in the home of Jack Park. First and foremost, Jack, thank you so very much for, one, letting me in the door.

Jack: Peter, glad you’re here today. You’re welcome.

Peter: And thank you and thank you for taking time out of. I know you have a very busy schedule, a little lighter maybe in the summer now that Ohio State’s not playing, but thank you anyhow. Greatly appreciate you taking the time to spend with me on my podcast today.

Jack: Happy to do it and I feel privileged.

Peter: Oh thank you. Wow, I’m glad we’re reporting this. I’m gonna keep my for posterity purposes. I know everybody heard a little bit about your bio in the lead in, but tell us a little bit about yourself, because you’re a very, very interesting individual.

Jack: Well, I’m a CPA to start with, by profession. I never practiced public accounting. I was in industry several years, and then I formed my own business, more than 20 years ago now, called Financial Insights, and I basically do leadership training for corporations and associations across the country. I have done a lot of leadership training for state CPA societies, institutes and associations. As you of course you do, and we work together of course in doing some of that. And I like the corporate work, basically going in to do leadership training for them. I’ve also been a radio commentator for Ohio State football. It’s a very small piece of the Ohio State football radio work, but I do a segment every Saturday, and I do a daily commentary on Ohio State football called the Buckeye Flashback. The 2016 season will be will be my 38th year as a regular commentator for sports radio 97.1 The Fan. We’re the flagship station of the Ohio State football radio network, and it’s something I never really started out to do, but it just kind of happened. And from there I’ve written some Ohio State football books, and it’s become a big part of my speaking business. And so a few years ago, actually it’s been probably more than 10 years ago now since I decided to marry the two, so to speak, and I created this leadership program called, “The Leadership Secrets of Football’s Master Coaches.” It’s basically a leadership program, it’s not a football program, but it’s how to develop leadership within the Association, within the organization, based upon what made the greatest football coaches of all time so successful. And almost without exception, the great coaches were great coaches because they were even greater leaders than they were coaches. So basically that’s what i’ve been doing over the years. It’s a program that basically never stops growing. There’s always something else to be doing. It’s always a work in progress, and I always find it very invigorating, and and that’s still what I’m doing today.

Peter: I think the audience would want to know: how did you fall into the radio job? You said it just kinda came up or what happened, how did that happen?

Jack: Well I met a man named John Gordon, who was that time with sports director of what at that time was known as WBNS Radio, and of course those are still our call letters. Today we’re known as 97.1 The Fan. Actually we’re an ESPN station, sports radio 97.1 The Fan, and John asked me to come in and be on a new sports talk show, 38 years ago, and he said she seemed to have some interest in Ohio State Football. And this was in September, just as we’re starting the football season. It was kind of interesting, at that time the station carried the Columbus Clippers AAA franchise. At that time they were franchise of the New York Yankees.

Peter: Right.

Jack: They’re now a franchise of the Cleveland Indians, but they were in the the playoffs, which started in September, and John said we’ll be on the air for probably about 30 minutes, and then we got the Clippers game tonight, and we’ll have 20 or 30 minutes to talk about Ohio State football history. Well that clippers game was rained out, and John had nothing planned for the whole evening. So when I got there and he said that he can you stay for an hour, and I said sure. Now I’ve never been on the radio before, I have only met John briefly before that, and so basically we do an hour and he says, “gee, you know it’s a rainy night, everybody’s home and a lot of people are calling in. Can you stay another hour?” I said sure, I can spend another hour, and of course he doesn’t have anything planned. Now in the second hour, he says, “can you stay a third hour?” And I said, sure, I can do that, and basically that’s how it started. Had it not rained out that Clippers game that night, my radio career may never have had an opportunity. Really, I may have never had a radio career. It’s just kind of interesting the way things happened, so to speak. Looking back I can tell you the exact night: it was Thursday, September 13, 1979. Earl Bruce had just coached his first game with Ohio State. Of course you know he replaced Woody Hayes, who had been here 28 years, so everybody wanted to know what about Earl. I wanted to know about Earl also. Enthusiasm for Ohio State football at that time was pretty high

Peter: Wow that’s… if it hadn’t… you had to have pondered that at times over the past thirty some odd years.

Jack: [laughs] I tell you, I still go past the studio. At that time the studio was at 62 East Broad Street and Columbus. it’s just a small building, and anytime I’m driving down East Broad Street to this day, I look over and see that building, and I say, “Well I remember coming into that building getting soaking wet one night, getting in there because it was really raining, and that’s where it all took place.”

Peter: Where did you gain your Ohio State football knowledge prior to that? I mean you’re an encyclopedia as it relates to Ohio State football.

Jack: I grew up in this area. I grew up in a small town right outside of here, New Lexington. I never played any sports beyond high school. I played high school football and basketball. I went to undergraduate school here at Ohio State, but as a kid growing up I had a tremendous interest in Ohio State football. It’s just something that I was attracted to. I was very fortunate as a kid. My dad, mom and I went to the games and so I got to see a lot of the games. Hopalong Cassidy was my childhood hero of course, as he was for everybody back at that time and so forth there. And then I went to graduate school to University of Pittsburgh, and joined the Westinghouse in the corporate world. A couple years later, Westinghouse transferred me, of all places, back to Columbus, Ohio, where I had gone to undergraduate school. That was one of those coincidences, you might say. I changed jobs a couple times before starting the consulting and leadership development business, but it’s just kind of funny the way things kind of worked out, you might say.

Peter: Man, that’s a great story, and the the other part that fascinates me is, one, you’re a CPA. You’re very financially astute. You wrote a class on How to Identify, Explain, and Present Pertinent Financial Information to Non-Accountants, which a lot of people think, “Well, that’s like a really technical course,” and I’m going no it’s more of a communication type of course that you wrote.

Jack: Absolutely. Yeah, and you do a very good job of presenting that for us, and we appreciate that. You’re doing a great job.

Peter: Thank you very much. That’s two “good boys” I got on this thing that I gotta go for three now. I’ve heard you speak a number of times, and most recently put out of Audubon University for the Ross Leadership School, and you did your your football coaching leadership presentation. What’s the title of that again?

Jack: It’s The Leadership Secrets of Football’s Master Coaches, and the one coach I used probably more than anybody else is Vince Lombardi. Lombardi was one of the greatest leaders of all time, a very self-made guy and very confident. Lombardi, in my opinion, could have done many, many things in life and have been extremely successful, and he chose football. He played college football at Fordham, and in my opinion he became the greatest coach. He left a lot behind. He left his leadership model, and he left a lot documented. His son has documented all that in books and everything, and thank goodness there, because he left he left a lot for the rest of us to really understand what helped him become such a great coach.

Peter: And quick, please correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t there an Ohio connection to Lombardi somewhere? In how he got to be the Green Bay Packer’s coach?

Jack: Yeah, it’s interesting. I would say maybe the greatest coach in college football was Knute Rockne, because he was such a creative guy. He really knew football. He played football at Notre Dame. Rockne also had a personality that really helped expand football across this country. Rockne was basically the Henry Ford of the automotive industry. He was Andrew Carnegie of the steel industry. I call him the Father of American Football. Now here’s an interesting thing if you live in Ohio: A lot of people don’t know this. He became head coach at Notre Dame in 1918. Notre Dame’s first game that year, which would be the first game ever coached by Knute Rockne at Notre Dame, was played in Cleveland, Ohio. It was played at the Van Horn Field on the campus of Case Institute of Technology, which is now Case Western Reserve.

Peter: [laughs] Right.

Jack: I have walked that field. It’s basically empty now. It’s a beautiful field used for intramurals, but the stadium and everything is all gone now. But an interesting thing happened that day. The date was September 28, 1918. Notre Dame won the game 26-6. The second and third Notre Dame touchdowns that afternoon were scored by George Gipp. Most people know the “win one for the gipper” story and Ronald Reagan and all this, and George Gipp. A lot of people don’t know is that this guy even played at Notre Dame, let alone scored the first touchdown, but the first touchdown ever scored for a Knute Rockne coached football team at Notre Dame was scored by Curly Lambeau, and THE Curly Lambeau.

Peter: Okay [laughs]

Jack: After Notre Dame, Curly Lambeau would go back to his hometown of Green Bay, Wisconsin, then take a job with the Indian Packing Company. Curly is a pretty ambitious guy, and after he was a little while he persuaded the leadership, the ownership of the Indian Packing Company, to appropriate $500, so that they could start a semi-pro football team to compete with some of the other semi-pro football teams throughout the state of Wisconsin. Well Curly has has been gone for 51 years now, he died in 1965, but Curly’s team still plays today. In fact, they play at Lambeau Field, and of course we all know that team today is the Green Bay Packers. Now, Curly was a very ambitious guy. He also coached Green Bay East High School, and they won the state championship in Wisconsin in 1920. He had an excellent, excellent halfback there that he encouraged to go to Notre Dame, Rockne wanted him. This kid ended up on the Notre Dame campus in the Fall of 1921. In 1924, he is the starting left halfback, in probably the most glorified backfield of all time: the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame. His name is Jim Crowley. Crowley is really inspired by Rockne, and he’s been inspired by Lambeau. He decides to go into coaching, and he ends up as head coach at Michigan State from 1928 to 1932. A better job at that time was Fordham University – Football has obviously changed since that time.

Peter: Right.

Jack: He leaves Michigan State to go to Fordham, and there they compete for the national title every year. They don’t quite win the national title, but he has tremendously talented teams there. They win about seventy-six percent of the games he coached there, and one of his players is a kid that I say basically grew up on the streets of Brooklyn, and is educated in the South Bronx. He’ll play right guard on that offensive line known as the Seven Blocks of Granite, and his name was Vince Lombardi.

Peter: [Laughs]

Jack: Lombardi will struggle for 20 years to get a head coaching position, but will finally get one, and that will be in Green Bay, Wisconsin. So what we say is, “What goes around, comes around.” Lombardi will coach the packers for 9 years. He’ll take over a team that hasn’t had a winning season in 11 years, and within the last seven years they’ll win five NFL titles, including the first two Super Bowls. He’ll retire in the winter of 1968. So we say what goes around comes around. Lambo scores the first touchdown for Knute Rockne in Cleveland, Ohio in 1918. Fifty years later, Vince Lombardi will retire from the Green Bay Packers. That one took 50 years, but as we know in life and as we know in the business world, what goes around comes around, and that’s one of my favorite stories of, “What goes around, comes around.”

Peter: I love that story. I’ve heard you tell a couple of times and I’m still amazed at your photographic memory, and the ability to remember that much detail and dates, and it was a Thursday and stuff like that. That’s always fascinated me about you. You said that Lombardi is one of your favorite coaches out there. What’s the one leadership attribute that you admire from Lombardi?

Jack: So there’s several. Maybe his biggest strength, Peter, was his persistence. It took him 20 years to get a head coaching position. He got turned down for head coaching positions, and at one time it was estimated he got turned down 22 times, and he was a great assistant coach. He also, then, when he was an assistant and kept trying to get the head coaching positions, he still continued to build his craft, so to speak, and he was mentored by Red Blake at Army from 1949 through 1953. Red Blake, a lot of younger fans today may not remember that name, but Red Blake is basically the Urban Meyer or the Nick Saban of college football, back in the 1940s and 50s. He had I think four national championship teams at Army. Colonel Blake actually grew up in Dayton, Ohio, and started his college at Miami of Ohio, but then he went into World War I, and so he ended up graduating from West Point and became a football coach. He ended up going back to West Point several years later as their head coach. He was one of the greatest coaches of all time, and Lombardi was extremely fortunate to spend five years under him. He learned so much under him and then he went to the New York Giants, basically right as a man named Jim Lee Howell had taken over as head coach the New York Giants and completely surprised everybody. Nobody ever heard very much of Jim Lee Howell. He’d been head coach of Wagner College over on Staten Island. He’d actually played for the Giants as an end, but nobody thought of him much as a head coach. What Howell did was basically revolutionize football. It had been done maybe a little bit, to some extent, but not to the extent that Jim Lee Howell did. He hired two coaches: one to run the offense and one to run the defense. Now he had other assistant coaches too, but he basically put one coach in charge of the offense and one coach in charge of the defense. Today we call those offensive and defensive coordinators. I don’t know what title was used back at that time, but it really doesn’t make any difference. But the interesting thing about Jim Lee Howell, he hired two unknown guys at the time to run the offensive and defensive. The offensive coordinator was a young man named Vince Lombardi, and his defensive coordinator was a young man in his first coaching position ever, by the name of Tom Landry. They of course would go on to become two of the greatest professional coaches of all time. So he’d learned an awful lot from these people, and he was persistent. He was 46 years old before he had a chance to become a head coach, and he never played professional football either, so it was quite it was quite something for him to do this.

Peter: Persistence.

Jack: Persistence, yes.

Peter: I listen to that story, and I’ve heard that story a number of times. We can equate it to today, that some of the great leaders that we have are very persistent. I also hear you say that Lombardi listened.

Jack: Yeah.

Peter: Learned.

Jack: They learned from everybody, yeah. Yup yup yup.

Peter: You also told me a story about Vince: he was a very religious man.

Jack: Very much, yeah. Actually, when he was high school-age growing up, in what was known as the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn, New York. That’s right down on the waterfront, not very far from… I’ve walked through that area. I’ve gone in there. I’ve taken pictures to the home he grew up in, and just want to get a feel for the area. This is obviously years and years later, he was born in 1913, but when he became high school age, he actually decided to study for the priesthood, and he went to a school there in Brooklyn run by the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, for young Catholic boys who wanted to be priests, by the name of Cathedral Prep. And for reasons that he never talked about very much later in life, he came within one year of finishing that, and for whatever reason he decided that maybe the priesthood was not his calling.

Peter: Okay

Jack: So he went to St. Francis High School, the largest high school in Brooklyn, and there he played high school football for the first time. You know Cathedral Prep, for preparing young men for the priesthood, obviously didn’t have a football team

Peter: Right [laughs]

Jack: So he plays one year of high school football. He’s a very, very strong guy, he played a lot of sandlot sports, but his ambition was to go to college. He was the oldest of five children, and his mother and dad never finished high school, and so his ambition was to go to college. Through playing one year of football at St. Francis, he was good enough to earn a football scholarship to Fordham University. I think at that early age, we could also see he was a little bit of a visionary. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do, but getting back to your point on religion, even though he didn’t follow up and become a priest, he went to church every day of his life. The players on those Packer teams could tell you: Basically, he would get up in the morning and he would go to St. Willebrord Catholic Church there in Green Bay, and attend the service there on his way to the office. You know, any time of the year.

Peter: Okay.

Jack: When the team was on the road, he knew where the closest Catholic Church was in every one of those cities. He would get up early and go to church that morning, and then come back to the hotel and join the team and go play the football game, and he was not a man that wore that on his sleeve. A lot of people didn’t know too much about him. That was a very private thing, but he is one of the most religious people that ever walked this Earth.

Peter: Wow, I bet a lot of people in my audience are listening to that going, “Wow, I never even knew that. Never had any idea.” When I’ve sat through your your leadership course, especially this last time at Audubon University, you kind of wrap it all up, and I believe you wrap it up by talking about five different coaches. Who are those five different coaches?

Jack: Well the first coach I talk about is, and you’ll be surprised when I talk about this one being an Ohio State guy. I talked about Woody Hayes, can you believe that?

Peter: I’m shocked. Oh, stop the presses. Let’s rewind.

Jack: There’s a lot you can learn from any of these coaches. I picked five, and it’s tough to bring it to five, but the thing that I think is the most important thing, as a business person wanting to continue to expand their leadership skills, or anybody in life, basically, what we can learn from Coach Hayes is: you will get to a place in life where you can look back and say, “Gee, I’ve been able to accomplish a fair amount,” (maybe), “I’d sure like to thank those people that helped me get where I am.” and you know what? A lot of them are gone now, and you can’t do that. He found himself in life that way. We’d love to go back and thank maybe that third grade teacher, that high school football coach, that Sunday school teacher, or that neighbor across the street that did all these things for you. So he said, “Hey, you know I can’t pay those guys back. In fact, I can’t even thank them. But I can pay forward to the next generation,” and that was basically the whole theme. You get down to my office, you’ve seen that. You see that big poster of Woody, and it says, “Pay it forward.” I look at that every morning as I go to work: pay it forward. That’s what we really doing the business world. Nobody’s gonna buy our products and services unless it’s going to help them become better into the future, and I think basically that’s what a successful business does: it pays forward to that next generation. The second guy we’ve talked about in the course is Knute Rockne.

Peter: Right.

Jack: To me root Knute Rockne is the type of guy that you want to learn a lot about to help create maybe a new industry. Now most of us are not going to create a new industry. He helped really create American football

Peter: Right.

Jack: But there’s a lot to be learned from him: that whatever stage we are within the business world, we can enhance a little bit by looking into the future. So there’s some commonalities there between Woody and Knute Rockne. Vince Lombardi’s the third one

Peter: Okay, that’s another shocker. [laughs]

Jack: [laughs] Yeah, another shocker. I have seen, and you’ve seen, and everybody listening to this podcast I’m sure has seen organizations that tried to do too many things. Tried to be everything to everybody.

Peter: Right.

Jack: When Vince Lombardi went into Green Bay, they had a playbook that was = tremendously big, and they had every play imaginable in that playbook, and they weren’t very good at executing any of them. His basic philosophy of running a football team was: we’re going to decide what we can do best and then we’re going to work on that to be maybe the best ever that’s done that, at the exclusion of everything else. So you can’t be everything to everybody. So he picked basically a very strong running offensive, which became known as a Packer sweep, and later became known as the Lombardi sweep. He basically supplemented that with some really good passing patterns.

Peter: Hm.

Jack: But they didn’t have a huge offense in terms of number of plays. They had a basic offence, and there were variations of them, but we’re going to do only what we can do best, and we’re going to exclude everything else, and then we’re going to work on becoming the best that we can be there. You can think a lot of companies there that have too many products and many services. You know, there’s an ice cream store up here that I love to go to rather than Baskin-Robbins. How many do they have, 31 flavors or 51 flavors?

Peter: Yeah.

Jack: This Tom’s ice cream here has six flavors. I like that. Just decide what I want to do, you know what I mean?

Peter: I thought you just say Graeter’s ice cream. [laughs]

Jack: Graeter’s is pretty good too.

Jack: The 4th coach I use is a man by the name of Urban Meyer. He’s new into the mix

Peter: That’s another shocker. [laughs]

Jack: Yeah. Urban is basically the organization man.

Peter: Yeah, yup.

Jack: Everything fits together in a big organization. A lot of coaches have plans, Urban has a system. You just reload the system. But there’s plans laid out within that system for everything imaginable, all the way down to the nutrition and looking ahead to the Sophomores that are in high school that won’t be coming into college for another three years, and doing everything and laying everything out. I mean, basically, it’s got an excellent system. He’s an excellent recruiter, and he surrounds himself with tremendously talented people, and that’s what he makes it go. He is truly the organization man, and you got to have one of those to lay it out and see the future. The fifth guy is man by the name of Bo Schembechler, from the University of Michigan. Bo grew up in Barberton, Ohio. He is a graduate of Miami of Ohio, and he was also an assistant coach at Ohio State, under Woody Hayes for five years. In fact, Woody was was his college coach at Miami of Ohio. That was in 1949 and 1950. Who would ever guess that those two would become such fierce competitors, starting in 1969 when Bo took the head coaching job at the University of Michigan, of all places, and of course that was Woody’s real nemesis. When he came in there, he said, “We’ve got to beat Michigan,” and he did a pretty good job of it.

Peter: Yeah.

Jack: And so forth there. I didn’t know Bo really – I interviewed him once, and I’ve gotten to know his son pretty well, Shemmy Schembechler, that lives just about five miles from me. I mean, who would ever thought that Bo Schembechler’s son would live about five miles from Ohio Stadium?

Peter: [laughs]

Jack: But he does. His wife is from Columbus, and they love being here in Columbus. Bo really put a high priority on the people. Now other coaches do too, but I don’t think anybody ever did any better than Bo. His players were his number one priority. I’ve gotten this second and third-hand from a lot of people I know up in Michigan, and I’ve spoken in Michigan a lot. You have a pretty thick skin if you’re a Ohio State guy, to speak at corporations and associations up in the state of Michigan, but we have a lot of fun doing it.

Peter: [laughs] Yeah.

Jack: But they will tell you about this story that he told his secretary one time: “If a player comes in unannounced to see me, and he just wants to see me, you make sure that he doesn’t leave here until I can get in to see him, because he’s probably got an issue.”

Peter: Yeah.

Jack: “He may have some difficulties, and it may have taken some courage for him to work up the courage to come in and see me because he’s got he’s got an issue.”

Peter: Right.

Jack: “And if I’m not here and you tell him to come back this afternoon, he may not come back.”

Peter: Right.

Jack: “So you don’t let him get out of this office, and you get me in there, and I don’t care if I’m in a meeting with the president of the University of Michigan, I will leave that meeting with the president of the University of Michigan and come in and see what my player needs that I can help him with.” And there was something about the way he put players first that many of the Michigan guys I’ve interviewed over the years that played there – guys like John Wangler, the great quarterback around 1988 that played there. I mean, they respect him just like the Ohio State players have respected Woody Hayes, but Bo was a guy that put people first, and I think in any organization that’s one of the things that you have to do.

Peter: Because Bo recognized early on that the business that he was in wasn’t the football business. The business he was in was the people business.

Jack: You know, Woody Hayes wrote a book and it’s a great book. It is an evergreen book, it will never go out of style, and it’s called “You Win With People,” and it’s true. It’s a very simple title, but you do win with people. If you have the best people, and I think if we go way back Jim Lee Howell was a good example of that. When he hired Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry, and by the way the finish a story the New York Giants had been really poor up until that time, and within three years he had them win a NFL title. Jim Lee Howell was the guy that the took a lot of kidding. They said, “What do you do around here?”

Peter: [laughs]

Jack: Jim is jokingly supposed to have said to a sport writer one day, “Well, you know what I do? I make sure Vince has everything he needs to run the offense. I make sure Tom has everything he needs to run the defense. And me, I make sure all the footballs are blown up so we can play those football games on Sunday afternoons.” Now, that’s a little bit of embellishment Peter, but it does show that, basically, he put tremendous amount of power in those two guys to run their part of the program.

Peter: Right. He trusted them immensely to be able to do that, but he also provided them with the tools they needed to become successful at what they were doing.

Jack: And they had great players. They had great players back at that time. A guy by the name of Frank Gifford wasn’t too bad.

Peter: He wasn’t too bad, yeah, I’ve heard of him before. [laughs] Of the five, I have to think that I know which one you would rate number one of the five, if you have if you had to rank them, but I’ll keep that one to myself, and ask you the question: of the five that you talked about, which one you rank on top?

Jack: Vince Lombardi.

Peter: Okay.

Jack: And there’s about three or four reasons there. First of all, it took him 20 years to get a head coaching position. He had confidence in himself, when other people apparently didn’t. I know Lombardi was never an arrogant guy, but he really had good self-confidence. There’s a big difference between arrogance and confidence.

Peter: Correct.

Jack: And he had that confidence. And while he was continuing to work toward getting that first head coaching position, he continued to hone his craft, he continued to get better and better and better. Going to Fordham University was a great thing for him, coming right out of high school. Basically Fordham is a Jesuit institution, and its really been founded on the the the philosophy that people can really better themselves through hard work and dedication to excellence – and those two characteristics I think fitted him perfectly. He was a hard worker. It just opened up a whole new world to him when he went to college out of Sheepshead Bay, there in that section of Brooklyn, and so he really struggled getting that first head coaching position. But he stuck with it, then when he got there, there was far more talent in Green Bay than anybody realized. What they lack was leadership at the top. They did not have a real coach there before he got there, and so the town basically was going to waste.

Peter: Okay.

Jack: And that turned over a hurry. Lombardi did not make a lot of wholesale changes in the players. Sometimes you do.

Peter: Right.

Jack: Coaches go in and get rid of the players, they bring in other players, and all this, and basically he took the players that had won one game this season before, and eventually turned them into world champions.

Peter: And if I remember the story correctly, and I think it equated to, “Let’s do what we do best,” and as you’re describing it I’m thinking about when I was in corporate America, at the performance review.

Jack: Yes

Peter: And in performance review, usually at the end you had goals.

Jack: Yes.

Peter: and I may write down maybe four goals that I could accomplish this year, and and my boss would write maybe five more on top of that. I don’t know two people that can accomplish nine, ten goals, and successfully execute, versus here’s your top three. Sounds like a balanced scorecard method, as you would described it.

Jack: Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you have eight or ten, maybe that’s a little bit better for somebody coming right out of college, who’s gonna get a lot of things done, but they’re not overly huge goals. As the years go along, you’re better to have two or three, and and make them worthwhile.

Peter: And make them worthwhile. So, let’s talk a little Ohio State football. You’ve been to a game or two?

Jack: A few. Just a few, yeah.

Peter: Have you ever attended the Ohio State-Michigan game at all?

Jack: Just a few of those too.

Peter: How many? And you’ve attended them here in Columbus as well as that state up north?

Jack: Yeah. I really don’t go up to the state up north anymore. I mean, you know, I’m on the pregame show, radio-wise. We do that locally here, and then I usually watch it on television when it’s up there. I have not missed a Michigan game here at home. The last one I missed would have been 1952.

Peter: Wow.

Jack: Something there. So, I started out very, very, very young as kid, about this tall. Hopalong Cassidy was my childhood hero at the time.

Peter: [laughs]

Jack: But Peter, I think I’ve gone to 14 games up there over the years. A couple times my work schedule was such that I couldn’t go. I actually remember, I think one game in 1977 I had tickets and and one of my friends used them because I had a work schedule and was coming back from somewhere Saturday morning, and doing that and everything. I love the Michigan game. When I was little bit younger, I never thought I would say what I’m now going to say, and I still love being at the games much more than watching them on television, in terms of the entire experience, but… you see football today better in your living room, or in your rec room, than you do in the stadium, because of technology.

Peter: Yeah.

Jack: And all the replays and everything like that. I really see the plays better, and I think most football fans do when you watch it at home, and the big screens now are so great. So that’s probably had a little bit to do with it, too. Never miss a home game. Never miss a home game.

Peter: You’ve never missed a home game, okay. It’s funny you should say that because, you know, I graduated from University of Kentucky, so big basketball guy.

Jack: Yeah.

Peter: And this year I had tickets to the final four in Houston.

Jack: I know you did, yeah.

Peter: And we were sitting somewhere up in the rafters away, but that the big screen we could see, and it was a really exciting championship game, by far, Villanova hitting that shot right at the end.

Jack: Yeah.

Peter: But then as I reflected back, one I think the game goes by quicker in attendance because you don’t see the commercials and stuff. It seems like the game was started and was over so quickly, but where’s the replays?

Jack: Yeah.

Peter: And I actually missed the commentators. Final Four next year is out in Phoenix, Arizona, and I’ve been putting in my application for over twenty plus years. I have not put my application for this next year, and I think, to your point, that I’ll probably take a few years off and just be able to watch it at home.

Jack: I don’t think anybody will ever see a better game than you saw this year with Villanova. That’s maybe the greatest college tournament game of all time, would you say?

Peter: That was one of them.

Jack: One of them.

Peter: Yeah, and the other final four I attended, the game was was in a last second shot. It was in New Orleans, I forget the year, Syracuse was playing Indiana, and Keith Smart hit a shot from the corner to beat Syracuse. I still remember that, and I’ve been to a couple other Final Fours. I have been to Indiana, where I saw Kentucky play Arizona. They lost in overtime, but yeah that Villanova game, and being a Kentucky fan, I just said through the weekend: I just need to remember my ABC’s. ABC’s: Anybody But Carolina.

Jack: [laughs] Right, okay. Right.

Peter: Yeah, the Carolina folks I have told that to are say they have the ABK’s: Anybody But Kentucky.

Jack: [laughs] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Peter: What was what was your favorite Ohio State-Michigan game?

Jack: Jim Tressel second year was pretty good, and his first year was also pretty good. You may remember, when Jim was hired, basically the press conference was Wednesday, January 18, 2001. By chance, Ohio State is playing a home basketball game that night against the University of Michigan.

Peter: That’s right.

Jack: Now how many times has that happened? He’s introduced at halftime of the basketball game. Of course, he comes out and speaks to the crowd for just a minute or so. Something like that. When he addressed at Ohio State basketball crowd that night, he says you’ll be proud of our young people in the community, in the classroom, and most especially in 310 days in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Well, we went up there to Ann Arbor, Michigan, 310 days later as huge underdogs.

Peter: Right.

Jack: And we ended up beat them 26 to 20. Now the game didn’t have anything to do with the Big Ten title or anything like that.

Peter: Right.

Jack: Because basically, we would end up seven and five in his first season. But there was something about that game that I’ll never forget. It was 23 to nothing at the half, and we held on and we had some injuries in the second half, and Craig Krenzel started his very first game ever as quarterback for Ohio State. The interesting thing was that Craig had grown up in the Detroit area. That was a great Michigan game, in terms of just the love for Jim Tressel. Of course the second one was the one that put us into the national championship game. We beat Michigan 14-9, and that game came down to the last second. Michigan had the ball right around the Ohio State 20-yard line with one second to go, and a pass into the end zone was intercepted, then that saved the game. Basically it won the game 14-9.

Peter: Wow. Jack: And that was typical of what happened that year. So many of those games in 2002 went right down to the last play, and of course we won the national championship over Miami in double overtime.

Peter: Right

Jack: A lot of close games in 2002.

Peter: Was the Purdue game in 2002, with the the catch touchdown, because we were behind most of the time?

Jack: Yes, Yeah, it was called Holy Buckeye. And Ohio State played its very first overtime game ever in history out at Illinois that year, and we had to basically beat Illinois in overtime to put us in a position where we then could beat Michigan, to get the bid to go to what, at that time, was called the BCS, to play Miami. They were a huge favorite over us, and they were defending national champions. I think they had won 31 games in a row, and a lot of people told us that we had no business being in that game, and that you’re gonna really get embarrassed out there, and of course we were able to win in double overtime.

Peter: You have written how many books on Ohio State?

Jack: Well, four. Basically it’s three-and-a-half or four, however you want to count them.

Peter: Okay.

Jack: Our first book came out, called Ohio State Football… The Great Tradition, and it’s basically a chapter on each of the series Ohio State has against each of the other Big Ten opponents. Naturally, the Michigan Chapter is probably the largest, and the Illinois chapter is big. It’s the highlights of great games between, let’s say, Ohio State-Illinois, Ohio State-Michigan, Ohio State-Michigan State. All those chapters. And the second book was called The Official Ohio State Football Encyclopedia, and that’s about a 700-page book.

Peter: Wow

Jack: That actually goes into pretty good detail of every season of Ohio State football, up through 2000.

Peter: Okay.

Jack: It was published in the Fall of 2001.

Peter: Right.

Jack: Well, Jim Tressel, of course, would lead Ohio State to the national title in two years, so the publisher had us come out with an updated version of that called The Official Ohio State Football Encyclopedia: National Championship Edition, so technically it’s another book because it’s got a different ISBN number on there. So that would be the third one.

Peter: [laughs] Okay.

Jack: The fourth one is known as The Ohio State University Football Vault. It’s kind of a book for the eyes.

Peter: Right.

Jack: It’s just of pullout memorabilia and so forth, and that came out in the year 2008, and Jim Tressel actually did the forward for that one, and Archie Griffin had done the forward to the first two. Kirk Herbstreit had done the introduction to the encyclopedia, and so forth. We felt very privileged that pretty high-profile people in the Ohio State football program lent their credibility to our books and everything.

Peter: And you’ve got one coming out next year?

Jack: Yes, yes. Maureen Zappala, who you know, is a very outstanding member of our Ohio Chapter of the National Speakers Association. She is a real, real excellent writer, and she’s also a huge football fan. She’s a Notre Dame fan, and she’s a Notre Dame graduate. She and I are collaborating on the book, which will probably be titled Buckeye Reflections. We’re not sure yet on the title, but that title kind of tells us what the book is. It’s going to be made up of short, anecdotal stories connected to the Ohio State football program: unusual things that have happened, outstanding things that have happened, humorous things have happened. Brothers that have played against each other in the Michigan game. Some of the stories will be very very short. There’s a game back in 1944 against the Great Lakes military base, that naval training base, where one brother threw a pass and his brother intercepted the play for the other team. The Cane brothers.

Peter: [laughs] Okay.

Jack: Unusual and outstanding things like that. We’re going to have that. So we’re looking at the publication date of August 2017, and we’re having a lot of fun working on it.

Peter: I know we’ve talked a lot about your travels, and going to the Hall of Fame and and just gathering up all this information, this unique information, and I know you and Maureen had a really good time putting this book together, and I’m excited for you because i’m looking forward to reading it when you’re all said and done with it.

Jack: We’re the stories of things that maybe people were not aware of. The first female drum major in United State marching band history you know, Shelly Graph, where we were interviewing Shelly. We have a little story on what it was like to become the first female drum major there. Some usher stories that are really funny, the ushers get into all kinds of situations. Of course a lot of players have Woody Hayes stories that we’re using, but a lot of the fan’s stories – the cheerleaders and things like that. Real quick when Peter, this is a very short story, but I say it was just a bad day for Indiana all the way around. In 1932, Indiana is playing in Columbus, and so the they decide to bring their marching band to Columbus for the game. They board that marching band in buses in Bloomington, Indiana about five o’clock that morning, and as the buses take off for Columbus, and they put all the instruments in a truck. Well on the way to Ohio Stadium, the truck got lost some way, and the truck did not show up at Ohio State until the end of the third quarter.

Peter: Oh wow.

Jack: So the Indiana band was forced to play it’s halftime performance halftime show after the game, plus Ohio State beat Indiana at the end of that day 20 to nothing.

Peter: [laughs]

Jack: So we just say that’s a short little story that was just a bad day all the way around for Indiana, in 1932.

Peter: [laughs] That is a bad day. That’s a great story. Jack, I could sit here and talk to you for hours, and we will have another conversation again, especially around the time that your book comes out.

Jack: Yeah.

Peter: I’ve been ending my podcast with a 10-question rapid-fire. You have no idea what I’m gonna ask, so we’ll see if we can learn just a little bit more about Jack Park.

Jack: Okay

Peter: My first one is: Urban Meyer or Woody Hayes?

Jack: Woody Hayes.

Peter. That was easy. What’s your favorite movie?

Jack: I don’t go to very many movies. Probably Marshall would be my favorite movie. That came out about five six years ago, about Marshall football team. I’m told that movie was very accurate too.

Peter: Okay, I haven’t seen it but I will see it. Pittsburgh pirates or Cincinnati Reds?

Jack: Pittsburgh Pirates.

Peter: I knew you were going to do that.

Jack: The greatest athlete I ever saw was Roberto Clemente.

Peter: I love Roberto, and Willie Stargell in that group, but I grew up a big, staunch Reds fan.

Jack: Yeah, yeah.

Peter: I have a ball signed by everybody from the Red’s team from 1972.

Jack: Yeah, yeah. Well, as a kid growing up I followed the Reds somewhere in there, but hey, when I was at Pitt going through graduate school, the Pirates played at Forbes Field. You could look out the Graduate School of Business windows on the 19th and 20th floor.

Peter: Wow.

Jack: And you can look into Forbes Field. So, probably some Saturdays I should have been studying all day, I went over and watched the Pirates in the afternoon. [laughs]

Peter: [laughs] What’s your favorite restaurant to go to?

Jack: You know, probably Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse. I don’t go there a lot, because it’s pretty high-end and there, but you know maybe a couple times a year I like a really, really good steak, so maybe a couple of us or go out there. Locally here in Columbus, you know I don’t do much cooking so I eat out maybe one or two nights a week, and I kind of like the Rusty Bucket.

Peter: [laughs] Yeah.

Jack: They have a good menu for a spur-of-the-moment going in, and getting a decent meal and so forth there. So, I like the Rusty Bucket.

Peter: I like the Bucket as well. What’s your favorite city to visit?

Jack: Chicago.

Peter: [laughs] I just got back from Chicago.

Jack: Yeah I know you did. I like going to Chicago. I just love walking on michigan avenue and so forth there, taking in some sporting events there. I’d have to say Pittsburgh would be a very close second. In Pittsburgh, for some people it may still have that image of a smoky city going way back to steel days, and course they’ve erased at many many years ago.

Peter: Right.

Jack: I would say to people, if you’ve never been the Pittsburgh and you go to Pittsburgh and you have the opportunity, go up on Mount Washington overlooking the city, and you’ll see where the two rivers come together, the Allegheny and Monongahela, meet to form the Ohio River, at what is known as The Golden Triangle. It’s one the most beautiful views I think of any place I’ve ever been, so I like Pittsburgh.

Peter: I haven’t been to Pittsburgh in a long time, and I recently was speaking in Pittsburgh, and I remember going through the tunnel, and when the city opened up I was in awe, and I was so much in awe I almost got into a wreck.

Jack: I always have to throw New York City in there too, because I’ve spoken in New York City many, many times, and I usually like to in the day before, but if I go in real early the day before then I can walk around, and you go through Central Park and take your walk in Central Park. If you think you’ve seen everything, just go to Central Park. and you’ll see something you’ve never seen before. [laughs]

Peter: [laughs] Right, and you know the next day and still see something that you’ve never seen. Packers or Browns?

Jack: Definitely the Packers.

Peter: And if my memory serves me correctly, you’re a season ticket holder.

Jack: I am a season ticket holder. I was very fortunate to get those some years ago, and I get what is known as a gold package, and that’s three games

Peter: Okay.

Jack: And so that they don’t play favorites of who gets the best game, the way the gold package works is you get one exhibition game

Peter: Okay.

Jack: Then you get the second home game and the fifth home game. You know in the NFL there’s a 16-game schedule, so you play eight games at home and eight on the road, and whatever the second game is and whatever the fifth game is, you get those games. So I can’t go up for all the games, and some years I don’t get to go up at all because the Packers might be kicking off at noon on Sunday, and Ohio State’s playing over here at 3:30 the Saturday before that.

Peter: Rigt.

Jack: A couple years ago I was able to go up to two. I took my son-in-law up to one, and then I took my daughter Julie up to one. It just so happened that the first game, which is the second game of the the regular season but my first game, was a Thursday night game

Peter: Oh wow, yeah.

Jack: So we could fly to Chicago the morning of the game if it’s a night game, and then drive to Green Bay and see the game, and you better get your hotel reservation far in advance, and then the next morning you drive back to Chicago and O’hare and fly back home and everything. So it’s a busy two days and everything, but I would say to people, if you are a football fan, and if you’ve never seen a game at Lambeau Field and have the opportunity to do that, definitely take that opportunity, because it’s a wonderful, wonderful place to see a football game.

Peter: and I have seen pictures of you in an empty Lambeau stadium before.

Jack: Yes yes yes. I’ve done a lot of research up there on the on Vince Lombardi. I think one of the pictures you’ve seen is the Ice Bowl game.

Peter: Right.

Jack: Which was played on New Year’s Eve Day in 1967. It was 10 below zero when the game started, and I guess it was around 15 below zero when it ended. Probably the most famous play in Green Bay Packer history: the packers are down by a score of 13 to 10, and Bart Starr, with 13 seconds to go, will go across then behind a block by Jerry Kramer will score on a 1-yard quarterback sneak on fourth down to win that game over Tom Landry’s Cowboys, and put the Packers basically in Super Bowl number two. I’ve had my picture taken where I’m told is exactly the place there in that south end zone where Bart Starr, way back in 1967, scored that touchdown in about 15 degrees below zero weather by the end of the game.

Peter: [laughs] That’s great! What’s your favorite quote?

Jack: I’ll have to think about that. Basically, I don’t know if this would be a quotation, I guess maybe my favorite principle that I’ve tried to live by, particularly in later years, is coach Hayes’ “Pay It Forward.” You get to a certain stage in life where you know, you’ve got fewer years left than you already lived.

Peter: Right

Jack: And you’ve got to be paying forward to the next generation, and look back and appreciate basically everybody who has gotten you to the place where you are. John Maxwell has a quote, and I I’m gonna paraphrase this, I maybe don’t have it exactly right: People basically believe in the leader before they will believe in the leader’s vision.

Peter: That’s a good quote.

Jack: That is, you have to buy into the leader right as a person, basically as a person of character, before you will buy into his or her vision of the future. In other words, what John Maxwell is saying is, if I can’t buy into somebody as a person, there’s maybe something about their character or something about them but I don’t really care for, it would be very hard for me to buy into where they want to lead us.

Peter: Right.

Jack: But if I buy into that person as a person and then as a leader, I’m much more apt to be able to follow them, and probably the organization as a result will get much more accomplished then, yeah.

Peter: And we see a lot of that in today’s leaders. If you think about coaching, and that quote that you just gave us made me think of Chip Kelly, because he lost that locker room.

Jack: Yeah, yes.

Peter: He lost that locker room, and after that –

Jack: It doesn’t matter how great the players were, right, it doesn’t matter.

Peter: Yeah. Microsoft Excel or a legal pad and calculator?

Jack: Microsoft Excel

Peter: That one surprised me. Bear Bryant or Nick Saban?

Jack: Bear Bryant

Peter: I kinda figured that.

Peter: And the last one: July 17, 1937. What day was that? July 17, 1937.

Peter: Okay, 1937…

Peter: He’s not Googling this, I’m watching.

Jack: Let’s see… it was a Saturday.

Peter: It was a Saturday. So, I just Googled July 17, 1937, and that day was a Saturday. Your photographic memory just astounds me.

Jack: Yeah, yeah.

Peter: That you can do that without looking at or surfing or doing anything. You just went through the calendars, and it’s a Saturday.

Jack: Peter, I don’t know. I really don’t know how I do that, except I can see those calendars. Now 1937 took me a lot longer than it would be if it was 1987 or something like that.

Peter: Right.

Jack: I relate some of it to the football dates, and I’m not sure how it all works, I just kind of see those pages some way, and I miss it from time. But 1937, yeah I thought was a Saturday after I worked that back.

Peter: And you were right.

Jack: Okay, great. Happy birthday, your mom’s birthday will be coming up here.

Peter: Hahaha, yeah, Jack like you said, thank you so very much. I enjoyed this, I know the audience is going to enjoy this. I love listening to your stories, I love hearing you speak, and I look forward to the next time.

Jack: I appreciate our relationship very much. We’ve become very, very good friends over the years. I appreciate being your guest, and I want to wish you much, much continued success Peter.

Peter: Thank you very much.