Dina and Don Ortiz: To Better Grow the Business Try to Solve the Problems Not the Symptoms

Welcome to the Science of C. X podcast. My name is Steve papa's a former serial entrepreneur turned C. X obsessed expert and each week we bring you an inspiring message and insight into how customer experience can catapult your business to soar grow and accelerate beyond what you thought was possible. We seek out experts to interview and help you on your journey to see X in the Science of C X. Well welcome everybody to another episode of The Science of C. X. As always, I'm your host, steve Pappas and we're constantly trying to search the world for really incredible guests and we do have a great show for you today. If you remember last season, we really cover all aspects of what we've lost during the pandemic when it comes to live performances and live music. We talked to venue operators, we talk to musicians, we talked to all of the people behind the scenes that make music great and that make us feel great when we go to see it live. Well, this is kind of an extension on that because we have a couple today, Dr Dina Preston Ortiz and her husband, Don Ortiz. And they have built an incredible business that has gone global and they have been to so many countries around the world, spreading music and spreading love for music to various countries and they're representing the U. S. In all ways. So welcome Don and Dina to the show today. Thank you steven. Hey listeners. Hi everybody doing out there today. Thank you for having us. So happy to be here. This is going to be my pleasure because all of my listeners know that I'm a longtime frustrated musician that has not been on stage for many, many years. So any time I can talk music, there's no work involved here. This is just all pleasure. Now let me give a little bit of your background to our listeners so they understand what they're in for today. So for performing as a street musician to meeting and starting with only 31 cents in their pockets collectively, Dr Dina Preston Ortiz and husband Don Ortiz have successfully performed in 43 countries and 26 global tours without Management or a record deal. That's an incredible feat in itself. By working with the Department of Defense, Armed Forces Entertainment Division, The. US. State Department and Fortune 500 companies. They bring a message of how to guide and lead success in some very dynamic environments, demand on a passionate about entrepreneurial thinking. As international speakers, they enjoy sharing their expertise on how to launch and how to grow companies in environments of constant change. They love coaching on how to capitalize on the unknown, well finding solutions in difficult situations and growing the bottom line organically. So that's quite a mouthful and it's an incredible bio. And what really strikes me as I read through your bio is that there's a direct correlation between your music business and your entrepreneurial thinking and I don't know if people always think of the two exactly together, but you guys have figured out the code, you've cracked to the code on how to approach music as entrepreneurs And not only that you're sharing what you learned along the way through your book and the book is called 31 cents to 43 countries. We're going to talk about that a lot more today. So tell me, how did you realize that you were really cracking the code in business with your music? I think we're still cracking the code, so I'm not sure that journey is over. We're always fine tuning that code because technology is constantly changing the way that we do think. So once you learn something oftentimes it's out of date and you gotta relearn using new technology tools. But I think we finally started to feel a little More restful, I guess is a good word. After we had looked at our bio went, Wow, we've already been to 15 countries, how do we keep this going? Your job and business is always to grow, grow, grow, so you really don't have a moment to rest on your laurels, you've gotta constantly promoting and getting out there. Plus we were fine tuning our music also to reach a large palette of audience from all types of cultures and backgrounds. So we grew in that sense to and we started to realize steve that we were actually customizing each and every event that we did, because no two events where ever the same and no two requests wherever the same. And even though we're in the music business, we have to deliver value to our clients and value for every group, maybe a little bit different depending on who it is that we're working for. And so that's really, really important. Make sure you're delivering outstanding product and giving them more than what they expect. And that goes beyond just the performance. That means meeting with our clients before, during and again afterwards to make sure that we are fulfilling all of their needs, just so our listeners know who are your clients and how do things start. So this is where it gets interesting, of course, early in our careers, you know, we really started from the bottom up. I started as a street musician busting in front of san Francisco's Ripley's, believe it or not between college classes and by the time I hired gone my husband to play guitar for me and my road band. And we moved on to Delaware and formed our own band. We were a road band like anybody else. I mean we were moving week to week two different cities all over the US and in Canada and at some point I actually came back home and our son needed to start school and so that meant we have to get off the road. I mean we're musicians, we needed to figure out a way to support ourselves and our family. I remember going to corporate event and waiting tables as like a part time gig to bring money until we figure out what we're gonna do. And I saw a band up on stage performing and it was a high end band doing a corporate gig, an event gig and I looked at them and I'm like wow this is a wonderful atmosphere, it's clean, they're getting fed, they're well taken care of and the best thing about it, they were really average and talent and I went wow, if they can do it we can do it better. And that opened up a whole new distribution for us in terms of bands we no longer needed to work in bars that were paying us you know maybe $1800 a week, six nights a week. We now could be making $1800 a night as a corporate band. And so our clients then became corporation event planners, destination management companies. From there we were actually picked up by the government by the Armed Forces entertainment program and from there because of our work with the Department of Defense. We often talk to go and perform at embassies all over the world which regarded by the marines. And we started having that experience in the U. S. State Department picked us up like we shared with you had such an outstanding give our clients such an outstanding value in the product and the music that when they picked us up and I got my doctorate which was later on in my career they started having me lecture and do master classes in entrepreneurship in small business. So again we have a new product line and like Dina said we also started when we were meeting people they would take us with them. For instance when we went to Saudi Arabia they brought us back for New Year's And we also got to open up the US. embassy in Jordan. We were the first band to play there as well and it became a great relationship and then he took us on to Honduras, Puerto, Rico and Guantanamo Bay, then to Brussels. We played for the United Nations there for four July and then on to for an eight week toward the South Korea. So what I would say to your listeners from a small business perspective, look for those distribution channels. I mean when you and I first talked, you're asking about fan base and selling tickets, we don't sell tickets, we don't have to sell one ticket corporations come in and pay for us to do what we do. They want steady work. They want good musicians, they want outstanding performances and they'll pay for it. Yeah, exactly. Because our listeners have heard from all of the venue operators from last season as well as musicians and it's been interesting. It's amazing that you can take that out of the equation having to sell the tickets. But the things that you can take out of the equation is the fan experience or the audience experience. So maybe it allows you to concentrate more on experience when you don't have to worry about the other thing. So tell us how you customise the experience for them to walk away with something that is just incredibly memorable and remarkable. We're in the Southwest. So when corporations come to southwest, they want the cowboy experience and so we might start off as a country ban. However, most of our clients that are coming in from Europe from back east from other parts of the United States, they don't want to stay there. They want to move into another genre of music where they can party and dance. You know, don I've been together 31 years. Are musicians are season as we are. We have at least 200 plus songs under our belts that are standards and so based on the audience reaction literally while Don is playing a lead, I'm gonna look at the crowd, see how they're reacting. I'm gonna walk over to Don while he's playing a lead and whispered in his ear, We're gonna move this song next. Or Don is leader of the band, might finish the song and just do a riff that everybody on stage knows we're going to go into this song because they know the rift they're familiar with. The ref. Yes. So we've learned not to use a set list ever. And we read the room in real time because like Dana said, we might need to shift gears from a country band and all of a sudden realized they wouldn't hear brutal marks or something else classic rock or something that's going to motivate them to dance and then it's our job to keep them there dancing. And like you said, provide an experience because it's what you create in that event that they walk away with. That creates it forever time capsule experience for them. And remember it's not just us, we have to take care of our musicians to take care of them well too because we're a team. It's not just myself and got up there, the musicians that are up there playing with us have to know what the queues are and so we have to get them ready and train them so that they understand in a moment's notice we're moving, we don't wait, we call off the song, you better be there. We keep it constantly going. There's never downtime when we're playing this event. This is fascinating because as you're speaking, it shapes up more and more like a dynamic business that you put the initial product out there. Now, most of the time in business, we put an initial product out there, we either have focus groups or we try to figure out what feedback mechanisms we can put in place to understand what nuances do we need to change? Where do we tweak, what direction do we have to go in? And it also sounds like you've got some early warning systems in place to that before the audience turns, allows you to make course corrections in the course of let's call it business, even though it's a concert. So you put the initial out there, you have all the capabilities to tweak it necessary. You have feedback mechanisms, you have early warning systems and you can make course corrections along the way. Ultimately, you're doing it for the best experience possible. Absolutely. We want our customers to be amazed and we want them to walk away with joyful encounters and experiences because it's those encounters that they will remember and talk about. And here's a good example. It's not always smooth either. I mean sometimes we do run into problems. So in Fiji we just a big show the night before and it was wonderful. It was so exciting and so much fun that they asked us in Fiji if we do another show at the Teachers College, which is the university that trains teachers. So we retired. We needed to have a day off, but we wanted to make sure that we took care of our clients. So we all said yes. So when we got to the college, the Fijians are in care of us. Pure bodies. Teachers tend to be shy. There's a shyness about the culture, beautiful culture, beautiful people, but there is a shyness. So when we got to do our show, you know, we did a whole introduction where Don is playing, you know, we're doing an instrumental. Dons playing guitar behind his head and the drummer is throwing the sticks up in the air and the bass players doing cool things. And we finished it. It's like we did everything but a somersault like you do in the Blues brothers, so we're doing everything like that. We end the Santana, nothing crickets literally there just staring at us and I'm like, you know, I'm handing out the next song 123 and we start again and we tried something else. We went a whole other direction, get Donna crickets strike two and this is what we just had this great show the night before. So I'm thinking to myself very quickly, okay, this is not working, I gotta go down another path. And so I thought, okay, I need to bring them into the show. And so I called out to the students, I said, okay, we're gonna have a twist contest. I want you to pick your favorite teacher and escort them up here. And all of a sudden the room just started going, talking, talking, talking, talking, they're picking their teachers, we're bringing their teachers up. We're now having to twist contest created teams, created teams where the students can get behind their teachers. And I'm telling you that broke the ice. And it's actually on our website, you can actually see the video on our website, everybody's laughing, rolling. It's actually in our video, get back to you and you can see them actually laughing and you get to see the twist contest in action because it's live, it's there and it's part of the song and it's such a happy moment. I mean you're touching people, the experiences that you're touching and once we broke that ice, it was smooth sailing from then on out. But in that particular, cause we really needed to get them involved. We've even had the president or a ceo of a company end up saying sweet child of mine as like the encore at the end of the night and I mean like wearing the tie around the head and really becoming actual rose, we make them the stars of the show. We learned a long time ago steve that it's not about us. And he talked about Two Systems. One of the things don doesn't always meet with a client before we even do a show because oftentimes his production issues, the clients just not aware of that can really affect your performance or the sound of the performance. So we always meet with a client, no matter household gig to make sure that everything is in place for us. Do we have issues? Yeah, sometimes there's gremlins that you have to work out while you're on stage. We walked into Azerbaijan, we walked into a system we're supposed to do a concert for Center city. I mean thousands of people. And we walked into outside a DJ system because that's what they had. J system is not going to fill that sound that unique. And so Don quickly figured out how to re engineer for quality over size and he brought everything in and it only covered a smaller piece. But at least that piece got a really great presentation and great sound. Yeah, it was quite harsh. You're recalibrating something, especially in the moment like that. It's on the fly. And I had a person that actually had the system, he did not know how to operate it, he didn't know what was capable of and very fearful for us to come in and just all of a sudden takeover his system, we're putting it to the max too. I mean it's a full band, it's a concert outside and he was really worried, I'll never forget the look on his face, but we got him to come to our side and he got to see how successful we made that concert happened. It really is about re engineering resources for value, over volume. And I think that's what you're talking about when you say you're taking systemic or systematic approach, I understand that you have to be able to do that quickly in our business. We don't have time. Time is not on our side. No. Gosh I got off the plane and we were doing a show for the U. S. Embassy in Budapest. We had literally been knocked out of the sky from a Habu then rerouted, then tried to get there. We had checked in iron our clothes And did a two hour show after 27 hours in the air and we're toasting. Got there. None of the power was correct for any of my pedals and I always make sure when I asked for things like any kind of power conditioner, I always ask for three of those because it seems like two of them never work and one works and then keep the one with me the rest of the tour. This is mine, nobody gets it. So we're able to make it work at the last minute and for us being able to solve those problems quickly and making its success. That's the big part of the line. But oftentimes is about rearranging your resources or reengineering your resources, getting documents signed while we're all working from home now. That's been tough. We all know that pain because we've all felt it and been through it. We built a better solution. Seeing the problem that everyone has gone through now that we're working from home to get documents and contracts signed just requires so much effort and it's been difficult for everyone. We've solved that problem with sign pdf doc dot com. Sign pdf doc dot com is your one stop simple solution to get all of your documents commented shared and signed easily. You can even import from google docs and dropbox into a single manageable dashboard. Sign up today for your free account at www dot sign pdf doc dot com. I want to go back to something that I heard you say that. It's not really about us, it's about them, right. Especially a music experience. We'll call them customers, even though their fans right there, an audience, there's nothing more important than when you can be in a situation where there is a shared hive mindset and in a music experience, the people are there because they want to listen to music. They're there because they like the type of music or what you're playing or the songs that you're playing or they're in that moment where they want to be elevated by the music experience. But the key is that they're sharing almost a hive mindset at that moment, right? If you look at any concert you've ever been to, besides the ones that you give, and if you've been in the audience, Everybody around you is wearing the same t shirts or t shirts from the tours from the last 20 years. I remember some of the bands that I've gone to see. I look around, I say, Wow, that shirt was from, like, almost 30 years ago, you know? But it's everybody that is thinking similarly. It's all people that are the same fans, they are of one mind during that concert, and we can relate it to customer experience, because the loyalty factor that that mindset brings is absolutely unbreakable at that moment, because it's not just a product, it's an experience. That's one of the things that we tend to maybe overlook when we're going to it, because we're just enjoying ourselves. But if we dig into why are we enjoying ourselves so much, why does it get into our soul? And we can leave out all of the science of, you know, the 128 beats per minute, and once we could get the music to a certain tempo were aligned with the circulatory system and all of those things. It's much deeper than that. It's the fact that we're all going to the same place for the same thing, because we like the same thing and we don't know all these strangers around us, but they're really like kindred souls because even though they're strangers, you look at them and you're like nod to each other strangers, you're nodding to your high fiving them at the end of the set. Yes, absolutely. That is just an amazing thing. And I'm so envious that you get to live that life of making those people feel that way day in and day out when you do. So, let's talk about some surprises along the way. I mean, you guys have been to so many countries through so many world tours and you talk about the electronic system. But what are the other surprises that you encountered? You know, the snafus or the things that I know you mentioned some of them in the book where you've gotten stuck in places. Let's talk about some of those types of surprises that you know, it's not all peaches and cream right now. I mean we look back and smile now. But no, not at the time, definitely not. I say think of yourself flying into the cold mountains of Afghanistan as leaders of a civilian band of musicians into an active military theater and nobody knows that you're coming. Nobody and you land and the military is looking at you like why are civilians in this act of peter? What are you doing here? Well, it wasn't quite that nice. Yeah. It's like we're the band. What? No, you're not. Nobody told us about a band coming. What? You know? So not only do we not have lodging? We had no performances schedule. We had no food. So one of the things that we have to do very quickly is we have to break down the part. So we have to solve each of those issues where we're going to get food. How are we gonna get lodging? How are we going to schedule? Performance is how we're gonna get the escorts that we needed in relationship to working with the military because they have very strict standards and codes and processes that you have to observe. And so we definitely did. We broke down each of the parts. So for example, we certainly could have feasted off of the packaged food that the military had at the time. But we know that there Don noticed right next door to us for the Jordanian mine sweepers that we're cooking fresh food on open pits every night. So Don pulled out his guitar and literally we sank for our supper in Afghanistan. In exchange, We've got this beautiful fresh clue that was cooked every night at 100 and night stars in Afghanistan. Don worked with the heads of the military to make sure that we got scheduled. Not just Afghanistan, but they sent us also to Uzbekistan and to carry stand. Which means they did that because there was no getting out of Afghanistan anytime soon. We were stuck until the next platoon flew out. Yeah, I mean when we got to bagram, the general goes, oh, so you're the band that's causing all these ripples in the rough right now, huh? We're glad to have you here. We need some of that music from home. So you're at the same time you're boosting morale and you're also changing the snapshot of the dynamic just for that moment that you're performing. That's the time that they don't have to say yes sir. No sir. Ally sir. They also lose their nickname because everybody in the military has a nickname. So the strength for us was not necessarily learning how to calculate, but learning how to reason through these problems. And learning that reasoning early. Afghanistan was fairly early in a tutorial career. So that helped us as we've gotten more season. Now we know how to reason and get prepared before, during and again after. Now we chat with our musicians and let them know this is what to expect. We are going to have challenges out there on the road because we can't control what happens the external environment. We could not control that. Somebody who was supposed to be taken care of us put us on the wrong plane to Afghanistan and said, the study has to kuwait, which is what our orders said. And so that happens. And if that happens, this is what we are all going to do to pull as a team to make sure that we get through this and also getting them to follow directions. I mean, we had strict orders when we're in Bosnia, you do not get out of the convoy whatsoever and make an exit out of the vehicle. First little stop that we had after like an eight hour stop. Our drummer and bass player got out to relieve themselves in the field to only find themselves standing in a landmine field. You know, it was very drastic and very dramatizing for us, of course, as you imagine being in that moment, but we're glad that nobody got hurt. So, following the rules and doing protocols. Now, Dean and I have a sit down with every musician would go on tour and we go over all the protocols and etiquette even right down to assigning justification because oftentimes we're out with the government, especially if you're out with the embassy, foreign press likes to come in and of course their job is to try to trip you up if they can. And so we even talk to them about, we never talk to the press. Everything is positive. We have no political agenda zero. That's not what we're here for. And if you get asked, you send them back to us and either don, I will take care of it or we'll send it to our embassy officials to let them take care of it. Depending on how we've been instructed. Because we get instructions to Yeah. And you don't want an international incident. So we're very careful, wow. So this wasn't how you necessarily set out to do a business, but it's been an evolution because I imagine you probably started out like most musicians and recognized an opportunity of sorts, but it wasn't just about recognizing an opportunity, it was about seizing the opportunity to and then causing the evolution to happen around it too. Because at some point you are conscious of an evolution, you were saying we are making a pivot here, this is a pivot in our business and then it unfolds somehow. So how conscious was that along the way? And I mean obviously stuff happens, but how much of a conscious pivot was happening during that and maybe it continues to happen. And maybe it's something that you are very adapt at being able to be chameleon like and move to the needs and move to the opportunities where they are to be able to seize them. So like any small business owners steve or entrepreneur, we have to eat, we have to put a house over our head and our family said. And so money bottom line, especially for me because I was a single mother before I met Callen for a while, that has always driven me, I have to provide. This is my talent. I align my natural talent to purpose, so this is what I'm going to do. This is what I do for a living Now. I need to figure out how to make it work and so you do start learning and seizing our opportunities and when it's about money, I say this, but you can't be picky, you don't get how this is going to be done. If an opportunity opens up for you to make money and your talent aligns to that, you're going to take advantage of it and more doors will open up and you've got to be able to see that light. But again, it's funny how needing food and shelter, just the basics will align you to that and open the doors and shine the lights on things that you need to do. And you have to learn to get you're asking here, I mean that's the whole thing. If you don't ask, you don't receive and you don't know. So if you've got a great product, like for us, dean and I are always looking 120 days out. So if we're starting to see that things are thin, we know why. So if the phone is not ringing it's our fault. So you have to be able to do that. And we're used to having our group being almost booked a year in advance. So for us it's a big deal for us, it is a business. We continue to make those relationships happen. And what's great is when people go to another company or another organization, they usually will take us with them. I think if you're following your internal compass and you're constantly getting better at it, you can't just have a talent. You've got to continue to get better at that talent. And you're open to a path to clarity will show itself and you just reap the rewards and you reap the opportunities that you see. I mean, who would have thought that we would have done this kind of work? This is very obscure work for musicians do and make a living at it. There are corporate bands out there, but there are a lot of corporate bands that have done the government work, right? Or the embassy work that we've done. We saw the opportunity, we made sure that our product was outstanding. We make sure that we delivered memorable experiences both onstage and offstage, offstage is as important as onstage people that are hiring you that are taking care of you there as important you're representing them. But they also need to have a good working relationship if you're paying to work with who wants to work with you. I don't care how much the audience loves you, if you're high maintenance, who wants that. We always support our clients brand. That's what it's about for us. It's not so much us, as you said, we found a long time ago, it's about them And they refer us and bring us back and we expand our product line and change it up. And we're always creating a new experience. And I think that's why we've been around 31 years and I want to say shout out to my team too, because we know as musicians, we always want to hire better talent than ourselves. We always want to surround ourselves with the best talent and often times that means hiring better talent, people that might be better in one area than we are. And we are not afraid to follow if we get in a situation and one of our musicians may have more knowledge or information that will make the whole experience better for the client, for the audience. We're going to step back and let them lead while we follow and asked the team to follow as well. And I think you need to be able to do that as a small business owner and entrepreneur, you need to expand that leadership opportunity and take advantage of the talent that you have surrounding you. I think you're right on the money and I think a lot of small business owners or founders don't know when to step back. They feel like they always need to stay in control when the opposite really can be true and can move the needle much further. That if a founder knows when to step back and to bring someone that is better than them to drive the growth and scalability and the ongoing viability of the company or the product or the band or whatever it is we're talking about. I think that's key and all of these things that we're talking about, I think all of our listeners have figured out that they all have correlations to what they're doing in their business. In this case here, we're talking about a global brand and band that has traveled the world, has traveled to more countries and done more tours, et cetera. But all of the learnings and all of the best practices that we have been talking about, I think everybody can read between the lines and understand how they can take that knowledge and they can bring it into their business So that they can affect a positive result there too. So I want to encourage everyone to head over and look for the book. 31 cents to 43 countries. Where is this available too? By the way, when Amazon and good reads, we've been really blessed to have this book out and we actually received the Ian Award for it, which we're really happy about. And so the biggest part is we find that people definitely have been able to utilize the tips that we provide after each chapter. We have three formats. So we have the e book format, we have the paperback, but we just released the audible. The audible actually has our music in it. And so if you're a music fan and you want to hear the music, we encourage you to take a look or listen to the audible. We have a great voice actress that did a really phenomenal job with that. So we've been getting good feedback on the audible as well as we wrote the songs for the tours that go with the stories. So you actually get to hear the songs that how they went and why we wrote them for particular tour and how that was done. We'll be putting all the links in the show notes to. But before we go, I have to read a passage from the book, page 11. I've got to read. Don Ortiz arrived at my parents home in a baby blue custom chrome dodge sports pickup truck. My first thoughts were related to business. Dawn's truck was the top of the line. So that meant he was a working musician. If he was able to afford a tricked out vehicle, he must be making good pay. Good musicians could demand good pay. He was probably a good musician. He wore black spandex shorts and a neon yellow T shirt with the sleeves cut out with broad shoulders and an upper back shaped like a V that tapered to a narrow waist. He had a swimmer's body. He was handsome and totally rock and roll. If he played guitar as good as he looked, then he was just what we needed to keep the women are audience coming back for more. If women came to the club to see Don, the men would follow. I have to tell you that passage. What I was reading. The book just struck me because it was so visual, so vivid and I could hear the almost love at first sight it is that makes us lab. But yeah, it was so true. I remember going back to the I gotta feed my family and put a roof over it. That's what I was thinking. The dude looks great. You can play great. And you know what true the women came and the men followed and I can see you guys and I could see nothing has changed. It really hasn't still 31 years later. It's a lot of fun. We have a great time is the best time. I mean, our band has a great time. Dean and I have a great time. And the biggest part again is our clients have a killer time. Yeah, it comes across, you know, for our audience pick up this book. I urge you to pick it up because you know, it was one of the most fun reads that I've had, even though it talks about the trials, the tribulations and every step of the way listening through the evolution, it's written so well and so real. It's almost as if you didn't hold back anything, but it is also a great business primer to. There is such insight in here that you'll pick up every step along the way. So I think it was so well written, my compliments to you both and I really think that everybody will get a lot out of it if they took the time to pick it up and read it. Let me ask you one more thing. We always like to have our expert speakers come on and give our folks a little exercise to make them think right to make them understand a little bit more of their aspect of business? So is there an exercise that you can think of to give our listeners that might help them along the way when they're talking to their team or they're wrestling with a problem or they're trying to figure something out. Is there an exercise you can explain to them that maybe they can do and hopefully they're not driving right now? Maybe something that will make them stop and take stock in their business and visualize something that could be more positive for them. Sure. So one of the things steve, if you read the book, you know this, we work in a dynamic environment. So we're constantly committed across problems. One of the things we have to learn to do very early on was solve the actual problem and not the symptoms of the problem. And if you don't know how to do that, sometimes you actually fall, you're solving for the symptoms and you're not solving the problem at all. And the problem keeps happening over and over again. So a couple of things that we do when we do work towards solving the actual problem. The first thing we have to do is we have to make sure that we're framing the issue correctly. And one of the things that can alter that is our own bias, right? So we have a perception of what the problem may be and often times it's not the problem. So I know it's been helpful for us is to go back and check our own biases by considering alternate opinions and we can do that either through our clients. We can do that with our team members. But we want to make sure that we're checking our bias. We also want to avoid escalation of commitment are getting locked until losing course. And that happens sometimes because we as owners or as leaders, our ego gets involved and we might have spent a lot of times on a particular problem or process and we just know it's the right way to go and it's not the right way to go. But we've invested so much time. We don't know how to let it go. We can get overconfident and oftentimes we get overconfident, we're not honest about the evaluation of the outcomes and then the other thing that we can do is reconstruct the situation. One issue at a time to clearly identify the problem spots. And if the situation is not improving clearly you have not identified the actual problem. So a good example of that. Your employees coming late to work is the problem. Your employees coming late to work are coming late to the gig. No, it's not. The problem may be car and the the health issues and maybe a communication issue. And once you can solve that and remove that barrier, you'll start to see that the employees coming on a regular basis and that will remove the problem. So again, you want to frame the problem correctly. You want to avoid escalation of commitment or getting locked into losing course by checking your ego. You can reconstruct the situation. One issue at a time to I clearly identified the spots and then again, if it's not working, then you know that you have not solved the problem. The other thing you can do quickly and don does this really well as you can scan the environments for clues. So do a quick environmental scan. We talk about this in our book when we were in um, I'm sorry I'm going to 42 countries there, but we're on they actually confiscated our equipment and we were told never to leave our equipment. If they confiscated chances are we're gonna get our $50,000 worth of equipment, guitars, p. A. systems back and the officials were not going to let us go through. And so they took down back into a room with the equipment and don just held his ground. But he started scanning environment for clues to help him get out of that situation. And he actually found some clues you were lost in South Korea. We were on the road. So we started looking for environmental clues. He saw plane, military helicopter flying and then a military truck on the road and you decided, okay, those are my environmental clues. I'm gonna follow those to see where it takes me to get back into the military base. So you can also scan for environmental clues, find your anchor and then be resistant. Sometimes you have to be resistant until the right resource will pop up and eventually it will interesting. Well, I think that's a great exercise. I think our folks will really enjoy that. And I have to tell you, I've really loved our time together. I really do feel like we're cousins. We are absolutely. Well, this has been great. I want to thank you both for being on the show today and we will give all the links to you. But if you want to check out Don Adidas music, you can go to Dina Preston band dot com or you can go to their website. D E o speaks dot com And I'm sure you could find the Dina Preston ban on Youtube and start to enjoy all those countries and all those various audiences have enjoyed for so many years. And we want to thank you for all the service that you've done out there, helping our boys and gals wherever they have been in the world too. So thanks for being on the show today. Thank you. Thank you. You're awesome. Thanks. And this has been the science of C X until we meet again, Please stay safe, stay healthy and please take care finding one place to see all customer experience related tools for technology has been difficult until now we just built it. Get ready for a science of C. X. Original customer experience technology has been helping to drive businesses by giving them insights into better methods to engage and delight their customers for some time now. But if you're looking for C X tech, you have to search far and wide to understand the whole landscape. 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