32: Empowering Businesses Through Education & Collaboration (w/ Roger Curlin)

Roger Curlin, thanks for coming on the podcast. I appreciate it. Your time is extremely valuable and we’re going to dive into it. But you’re very busy person and a lot of people like throw around the word busy.

We even talked about it in one of the last meetings that you facilitated. You stay productive and I’m going to set the listener up a little bit on how I perceive you and how we know each other and then we’re going to dive in. I know you from Edge Insights.

You’re the director of the Edge District in St. Petersburg, Florida. And that’s not a small role which we’re going to talk about. You also spoke at my leadership organization, SunLeaders, which I appreciate and still get positive feedback on that you’re all about the community and being a resource and uplifting people.

You’re big on education. You seem to be like the dude. Everybody who speaks of you is like Roger is the dude and that’s a good person to be.

So a couple of things that you do and obviously we’re going to dive into this. You are a lawyer. You don’t currently law lawyer, whatever it is.

But you, you are in good standing. You’re investor, an investor in Enigma. You’re an educator, a connector, like I said, the director of the Edge District.

You’re on the board of the St. Pete Opera. And I know I’m leaving several things out which we’ll probably uncover. But after I connected with you through I think it was just through Edge Insights, but I knew I had to join that and I admire you as a facilitator in how you structure discussion and discourse and draw out so much value in whatever topic you’re speaking about or other people are speaking about.

And so for me, a big reason why I joined Edge Insights, which is a club for businesses to elevate themselves in inherently network but it was because of you so that I could learn how you go about things and and I value your approach to education. It worked. And in regarding education, I want to leave it at this that I noticed on your LinkedIn profile in your about it has nothing about you, although it says a lot about you is just one quote by Martin Luther King Jr. And it’s and I really like this

I had never heard it because I’m an educator as well. It says the function of education is to teach one intensively and to think critically. Intelligence is intelligence plus character.

That is the goal of true education. And I really like that. And so I kind of wanted to start there, you know where did the education bug bite you? That’s such a great question.

So I want to go back probably to my parents and the. We got allowance as a kid, so not as much as the kids get nowadays for allowance. But what my parents would do is they would split 50, 50 any books that I wanted to buy.

That was my only allowance money that got doubled up. So that kind of taught me like, oh, I can really get a bigger bang for my buck with my folks if I want to buy a book. A book is really special and they’re going to help me with that.

And so reading absolutely exploded my love of education. And if I would tell any, anybody out there that’s that wants their kid to have that passion about learning is give them a passion for reading. Once you’ve got that, like everything else kind of falls in place.

So that’s really where I loved it and I excelled at education. I’m blessed biologically to have a pretty decent brain. And so I’m smart and so I love learning and I love pushing myself that way.

Well, once I learned that I loved it, I wanted to help other people love it. And not everyone’s had a good experience with learning and with education. So going fast forward all the way to today with the Insights Club, that is our educational component for the EDGE Business District Association.

Absolutely. And we do it every Friday morning session, afternoon session. So every business owner gets the ability to clip into that.

And how I built that, I call it my Frankenstein model because I have participated in so many different types of networking and business building and masterminding over the years that I’ve really seen everything. And so I pulled all the best parts together, sewed them up, launched the Insights Club and just got rid of all the junk that I don’t like. And people really have, as you said, seem to have an affinity for it.

And they come back and they’re like, I love this Kool Aid. Like, let’s have some more. Oh yeah, no, it’s very clear, everybody.

I mean it’s a, there’s a buzz about it. And when did, when did you start it? Just for context, how, how long has it been going on? So we started it midway through my first year. So I just had my two year anniversary as the executive director of the edge.

And so it would have been probably in that may range. So about a year and a half ago essentially is when I started the Insights Club. Yeah, the way people talk about it and the high level that I feel it performs at and that you facilitate it at, makes it Seem like it’s been around for 10 years plus.

Well, thank you. Just to say that. Well, the structure of it is.

So I use what I call a modular approach. So we have a bunch of different learning modules that we plug and play each week. So it never feels stale.

It never feels like, oh, here’s the same thing over again. It’s fresh every single week. My passion is our small business owners are really good at the core thing that they do.

They’ve got a great knowledge, a skill set for that core thing, whether it’s making food, making drinks, picking out clothes for their retail, great service, web design, they’re really great at that centerpiece. But the other things on the left and the right of that, the marketing, the staffing, the operations, the technology, the finance work, life balance, they’re not as good. We’re not Coke, we’re not Pepsi.

We don’t have these giant teams to put everything together. And so what my feeling is is we can learn those other side skills a little bit at a time by learning from each other, by implementing, testing, and coming back and getting the next thing. And the business owners that understand that, I am watching them blossom and I’m watching their businesses excel past their competitors.

And like, that is literally all I need to keep me running. That is the gasoline that I’m like, okay, let’s do this again. Oh, yeah, that’s.

That’s incredible fuel. Because also they’re fueling each other in that process, too. So what you’ve created and facilitate is this.

This cohesive, collaborative uplifting of the community, which is the goal as a director of a business district, is to elevate all these businesses so that the district does better and better. So it’s. It makes so much sense.

And I feel like, you know, being a part of it now and, and also having an a. A bug of an itch for education. I didn’t.

By the way, I wanted to say I, like, when I grew up, I was like a class clown, and I was kind of put into a particular box. And so I thought that about myself. And then I got to high school and I was like, oh, maybe I am smart.

And then undergrad, it was like, so I think people can progress and there’s just such power in education, but you know, what you’re doing with the edge and uplifting people. I feel like all businesses who do not participate in something like that are missing out greatly. Especially, like you said, you’re not just Coca Cola overnight at all.

So there’s a lot of hats you have to wear and the more aware you are of, of these different realms of business to equip you. Maybe you don’t do that, but you’re better at bookkeeping or more aware that you need to keep the pulse on something with that. It’s, it’s game changing.

And like you said, you can watch each other blossom. And there’s something really special about that. So I, I commend you for that.

Um, and it’s clear through many of the positions that you’ve had, education is like a thread that kind of goes through there. We had covered that you are a lawyer, you’re currently not practicing. That’s the word I was looking for.

But like my motorcycle endorsement, I’ll never get rid of that and just always keep renewing that. What kind of law did you focus on? Anything? That’s a great question. So I went to law school because, and I was a second career attorney.

So I started law school at age 30. And when I finished with law school, I went to work for the office of the county attorney down in Sarasota. And I was kind of a hired gun in about every little thing that they did as a newbie.

I helped them with all of these really great variety of cases and niches and I love that. But it was a six month contract. And after that was up, I went to work for a boutique firm doing construction litigation.

And while it was very interesting, it was also very lonely because I really didn’t get to engage with many people. And even though I am an introvert at heart, I understand the power of extroversion to grow and to learn, et cetera. And I just wasn’t able, I was just kind of stuck without contact with people and that really shrank me.

And so literally the day I turned in my keys at this boutique law firm, thanking them for trusting me and et cetera, the position for program attorney for continuing legal education at Stetson University College of Law, my alma mater, opened up. It was literally posted the day that I put my keys on the managing partner’s desk. So that was a little bit of fate.

I threw my hat in the ring thinking there’s zero chance. I’ve got almost no experience, I’m a fresh green attorney. But through fate was able to get that role.

And then worked my way as a program attorney for CLE at Stetson, then migrated to Holland to night and did that for a couple years and then to Carlton Fields where I did that for nearly five years. Best time of my life doing education for attorneys. And so not Only administering that.

But sometimes I would teach as well, but really just had a great time doing that. Wouldn’t trade that time for the world, and would not trade that legal education for the world. What it taught me in how to strategically think and how to digest information at a pace that I’d never done before was amazing.

The last thing I will tell you about that law degree is when I went back to school as a second career attorney. I’d always been a high performing student. I was in the 50th percentile, and that didn’t sit well with me, even though I knew I was up against the best.

The best. You know, everyone’s coming right out of college and they’re going to law school, but I’m like, man, I’m smarter than that. And I’ve done all the studying and I knew the information well.

I went and I met with all my professors, with all of my exams, and what I learned from that was I knew the information and I was giving them the information that I learned in my language. They were not understanding me completely because I was speaking in my language. So then what I learned is I had to speak to them in their language.

I had to understand what the professors really felt was important phrases they used, people that they really extolled in class. And so I started to shift how I learned. I learned not only the information, but I then learned the professor so that I could communicate back to them in their language.

And then I started booking exams and I graduated in the top 10%. And that’s not easy to do for folks that do stats starting in the 50th percentile and clawing up to the 10th percentile. But it taught me that valuable lesson of it’s the ability to communicate in the listener’s language is where the magic is at.

Absolutely. And that was like a great side lesson that law school hadn’t set me up to think I would learn. Oh, yeah.

Oh, that’s, that’s great that you talked about that. Because I, I feel that probably applies to most anything people do. You know, education at the root of it, what I do, you know, I have to educate my clients on web development or why branding is important.

And there are technical terms and I have to use analogies or metaphors maybe in their industry or whatever, to speak their language in order for them to quickly absorb it. Because I want to be efficient with our conversations, to respect their time and my time. And there’s an art to it.

Just like soft and hard skills. Right. Like they’re equally as important.

I, I always used to tell my students, you know, hey, we’re, we’re learning some stuff in Photoshop or whatever today. This could go away tomorrow. What you’re learning is how to learn better.

And that’s what you need to embrace. You should, you should be able to go, I’ll learn that. That’s okay, because I know the principles behind the art, you know, the principles of design to implement in whatever way, whatever scenario.

And in law, I’ve had Doug Jackson on Lawyer Awesome. I had Nick Fantino on awesome as well. And he’s going to come back and do a debrief of his, his election run, which he agreed to do sometime this year.

He’s cooling off. And, you know, he was, I mean, like 800 votes or something like that, but it was so cool to watch him, like, flourish in that. But I really, I always like that diving into law, because first off, I don’t know much about it, but it’s fascinating and it’s always interesting to me because every time you step out your door and even, I guess, inside your door in your home, we are governed by the laws.

Yet there are so much that a normal citizen doesn’t understand or know. Well, here’s a little secret. Attorneys know less than 1% of the law, and it’s an infinite percentage of less than 1%.

Right. So it really, to your point, is about the skill of learning, the skill of applying. Yes.

Knowing some of the basics. But that communication skill, to be able to talk in the language of your listener or your audience, I mean, that’s marketing 101 is. And that’s where a lot of small businesses, I feel, drop the ball, is number one.

They don’t explain their why well enough. And they’re not talking in the language of their listener, of their audience, of their customer. They’re using terminology that they’re familiar with, but the customer’s not always familiar with that.

And so, like, teaching, that’s one of the core things we teach about with the marketing aspects of what we do, is get your why out there, understand where your avatar is at and how they think and how they listen and what’s going to inspire them and activate them and make a memorable message. So I’m in marketing is my other degree from the University of Florida. So I have a degree from the Journalism and Communication college up in Gainesville.

So go Gators. Yes. Oh, there we go.

That helps complete the puzzle. And that was your. That.

That was before Laura. That was my undergraduate. Yes, before I went and ran Nightclubs up in Gainesville as a, as a little puppy.

Yes. Okay, that is a powerful combo then, that you’ve collected. Because I feel like with that marketing background, you know how you, you know how things work in that way of getting word out, generating buzz, getting people excited to act.

And then with law, and I kind of wanted to dive into this. You, you, you sat down here 10 minutes ago and you were like, yeah, I just, I, I just had a meeting with the mayor of St. Pete. I was talking to the council.

We were talking about the, the state of the city and that. I feel like law kind of poised you for that. But I don’t know exactly.

But, you know, that’s, that seems like a common thread for people who start to work up into the, into the realm of decision making or politics or running cities and towns and, and governance in a way. And so like, in my opinion, that’s extremely powerful combination of education that you have embarked in, and you’ve done a really good job of just like bottling that up and, and exploding with it. Well, a lot of it has to do with I’m older, so 55 years old, be 56 this year.

I’ve had amazing, amazing, amazing experiences in, in not only my educational degree, but the businesses that I’ve built, the businesses that I’ve consulted for, and just that having that life experience and being able to watch the good, the bad and the ugly, really, I want to give that knowledge back. And my biggest thing is I know where a lot of the potholes are at. Let’s all come together and I’m going to help steer everybody around these because the quicker we can get around those and not

And I tell people, survive is having those core skills for your business. Thrive is having those other things on the left and the right. So that’s.

I’m all about thrive because when somebody is thriving, they’re to your point then able to give to others and to teach others. And that’s my thing is like, I want the Insights Club to be, to be a lesson, to be an inspiration to have people go out and to do things like this and to help each other learn and collaborate. And certainly that has happened.

I’ve seen that happen. I mean, we had to launch the morning edition of the Insights Club because the afternoon just got too busy and we lost our interactivity, the degree that I wanted. And so that’s why we bifurcated.

And now their seats are almost full with both of them again. And I love it. What, what are you going to do? There’s not going to be an afternoon one, so.

There, there. I have some other little plans to spin, but we’re. We’re good for now.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I, I’d like to talk to you about some opportunity there, like, you know, what a collective podcast could be for edge insights or, you know, group communities.

That’s a good, that’s a good sign that you’re doing, doing the right things. And I think I’ve answered one of my questions that I don’t. That is, is on my list.

Although, you know, I don’t stick to the script, but, you know, it seems like that’s your fuel because you, every time I see you, always positive, always energetic, high energy and, and ready to go and, and ready to connect and ready to facilitate and, you know, that’s not an easy thing to always harness to be all of, all of those things always on in all those switches. Would you say that that’s your main fuel? Do you have any other secrets? Do you do a protein shake that has special sauce? I’m

So I don’t need a ton of sleep time. There’s all these studies on the. I guess it’s the REM sleep, which is the deepest sleep.

Some of the greatest thinkers were able to actually go right down into it, stay in it for four hours and come out. They only needed four hours of sleep. I’m not that good at it, but I can function really well on six hours consistently.

And it’s fine for me. My fuel comes from thinking and creating, but it also is what exhausts me. So there are moments of time where I have to absolutely disconnect, but nobody sees that because I’m just not around at that moment.

Yeah. And so. And then I just refuel very quickly and then I dive back in again.

And it really depends on the project, the complexity of it. If it’s something I’ve done before, it’s easy for me to rattle off ideas and create and think and maintain. But if it’s something really complex and new like we’re putting together, we’re going to do a holiday festival in the Edge district this year.

What it looks like, I have no idea. It’s just in its formation stages, but it’s going to be in my brain for weeks and weeks and weeks as I hone it Together, along with my retail and my hospitality people that are helping me with this that are behind it. So, gosh, there’s no real rhyme or reason to it.

I’ve made up the analogy or the picture of an octopus on roller skates on ice. So that is kind of how I operate most of the time. And Amanda Meyer, who does our social media for us, actually made this duck octopus on roller skates on ice thing for me.

So I have that sitting on my desk at home to remind me to have fun with that. That’s the Roger avatar now. That is the Roger avatar.

That’s great. If you have a personal logo, that’d be great. It’ll have to be.

It’ll have to be. But knowing how hard small business works and the headwinds that they face and watching them battle day after day makes it very easy for me to step up and help. And the educational component is massive.

I’m a big believer in that. And probably out of all the networking groups, out of all of the different chambers and things like that, we, the Insights Club, the Edge District association, we are the most aggressive with that component. Our other two components for the district are advocacy and promotion.

Because what we’ve done is we’ve leveraged our 125 businesses in the association. We have 135 businesses in the Edge district. So we’ve leveraged the association and our power of us, of community to be amazing advocates for things that we need in the district, whether it’s traffic, parking, sanitation, development.

So advocacy takes out about. Takes about a third of my time. Education about a third of my time.

And then the other third is promotion. Because I am a massive believer, going back to my background in marketing, that we must be able to get our story out. We must be able to get our message out there.

If we’re not doing that, the less effective we are at doing that, the less business happens. And we are the collaborative district where our businesses flourish when we’re all stronger and working together. Perfect example, the Moxie Hotel just opened up.

Sparrow Rooftop restaurant and bar just opened up. My little small businesses are all telling me the same thing. People staying at the Moxie, oh, my God, they’re coming down, they’re shopping, and they’re opening up their wallet big time.

And then they’re coming back again and they’re bringing friends. And, like, that’s one new business in the district. Now a big business, but it’s still one new business that is helping everybody else around them.

And that used to be a parking lot. Wow. And now it’s 120jobs.

It’s a lot of other things, but what I really like to have people be thoughtful and just stop for a moment was a parking lot, and now it’s 120jobs. That is incredible. That’s why I get inspired and activated.

Oh, my gosh. Yeah. I mean, I want to go activate in some way right now, and that collaboration is everything.

You know, as a. As a business owner, I’ve never. There’s.

There’s people who come to me and go, hey, I have this friend or this connection. They have a. Another marketing firm.

Are you. Would you want to ever meet them? I’m like, yeah, let’s be. I want to be their friend.

Even if we are absolute 100% direct competition, which never happens, I would rather link up with them and share, you know, hey, what about this program? Or talk to them or know them rather than just be like, no and stay in my bubble. That’s when you get trapped. That’s when, like, growth stagnates, you know? But most of the time in those introductions, we go, oh, yeah, we don’t do video.

You do video. Great. And they’re like, we don’t do podcasts.

Great. Boom. There you go.

It literally just happened Friday, you know, and it’s also fun to talk shop with people who, you know, are excited about the same things, but that collaboration is literally everything that fuels. I don’t know what else we’re doing as far as humans, you know, like, at the end of the day, what are you doing? Like, is money that important to you? And also, I think money comes with way more with the coopetition, as my business coach, Eric Nutting, says, rather than non, you know, keeping people shut

What are we. What is your. What are your goals at the end of the day? You know, we’re here on this earth walking around.

We should want to hold hands and hang out and have fun. And once walls start to come up, I feel like that’s where awkwardness happens. Or, you know, I think that’s where progress stops.

And. And I just. I don’t know, knowing you and what you’re doing with the edge district and.

And. And everything like that, it’s a. For me, I believe that’s a model for businesses and areas as big or small as you want.

Like this park that we’re in, we. We should all be collaborating. Yeah, well, insular businesses tend to.

Tend to atrophy and die. They certainly do not produce what they could if they collaborated and if they got outside of their insularity. So you’re 100% right with that.

But it also comes down to demography and what city you’re in and what part of the city you’re in. St Petersburg is a city of collaboration. It is a city of community, it is a city of creatives, it is a city of embrace.

That is not every city. It. And I’m not going to call out cities, because that’s not what I do.

But I will tell you, if a city wants to flourish like St. Pete is flourishing, come and study the collectivity, the community, the collaboration, the creativity of what we’re doing in St. Pete, it’s replicatable, but people are not taught. People are taught competition first. And a lot of it has to do with the consumerism that’s out there and in some of the drivers behind that, where it’s competition first and sometimes you don’t even hear about collaboration, but St Peter’s collaboration first,

And as you have said, most of the time, whatever niche you’re in, there is more than enough grass for everybody to eat. There is more than enough food for everybody. And understanding who the good players are in sharing clients.

Because if you’re not saying no to some clients, you’re doing your business wrong. You can’t say yes to everybody because you’re going to get some people in there that are going to slow you down. And that’s when it’s best to have an array of businesses that you like, that you appreciate.

Where a client’s not good for you, give them to somebody else and vice versa, and then everybody’s fed. And so no, I agree with you. Collaboration is everything.

I promote it all the time. Yeah, also that’s, you know, at the heart of like, you know, I like to get down to like the heartbeat education in you. Education is about collaboration.

Like, think about science. How do we progress in science? Well, someone puts out a theory or hypothesis and then everybody comes together and goes, I’m going to try to prove you wrong in a positive way, because if I don’t, then we’re more right and there’s beauty to that, or understanding what happened in history or this or that, sorting through the truth about things. And it’s collaborative.

If you do it in isolation, you’re likely going to be wrong. You’re missing things in your peripherals and behind you and everything that other people can see. And also regarding the grass being plenty of grass, being around for people to eat, I like that analogy.

And I was Thinking, well, even if all the grass is taken, collaborating will figure out a solution to grow more grass. Oh, let’s, let’s build up and have several levels of grass. And we can do that together or pivot or, you know, if, if the, if the field is shrinking and there are some industries that are shrinking, I think back in time, this will date myself again, but I’ve already given everybody.

I’m 55. There used to be a thing called travel agents. Before the Internet, there were travel agents.

Almost all businesses used travel agency to do all of their booking and planning, et cetera, et cetera. It’s a massive industry. Well, then the Internet comes along and Expedia and Travelocity and all these other tools, and that industry shrank significantly as far as the number of people that were soloists and entrepreneurs in that space.

But those that are still in it or those that are excelling in kind of the new travel agency of today are because they stayed with it, they collaborated, they became the top of the spear. Other people went and did other things. And so you have to understand the niches that are coming and the niches that are going.

AI is going to be a massive. You hear the word disruptor and you can use that term, that’s fine. But AI is going to change everything.

It already is. And so be prepared for that. Understand the effects on each particular industry and understand how we can leverage it as business owners to become more efficient, more effective.

And I know tons of my businesses are now using it in multiple ways, some small, some larger, to make themselves better at what they do. And I’m like, bully for that. You know, we do have to watch out for the dangerous side of that, but everything has a danger side.

And so looking to that, one of the pieces last night at the chambers 126th annual chamber meeting, how cool is that? That they’ve been at that for 126 years here in St. Pete is that they had an economic expert that flew in from New York to give a Preview of what 2025 may look like. I don’t want to dig into it too much, but if you follow economics like I do, I’m a bit of a wonk and too much. Probably too much.

But for me, it helps me understand how I can help my small businesses pivot before they have to pivot. In other words, be proactive versus reactive. And so that’s why I follow it a lot.

So some of the. And I rarely talk politics or religion, except as an example of things I need to bring up in the business world. But without taking a political side, this administration is taking a different approach than the prior administration.

From a federal level, those may have impacts on industries such as housing, agriculture, hospitality, on and on and on. So understanding those moves and how they could affect us are really, really important. But I also see people get overly fixated on federal when state and local is as powerful to what their business can do as not.

And for those of the, those of my folks out there that are despondent, that may not agree with the current administration, one of the things I say is just dig into your local community, make as big of impact as you can locally. Do everything you can to empower our not for profits in our community locally. That will, that will give you a salve for how you may be feeling.

And a great owner told me this one time and I’ve never forgotten it. So Dan Bavaro at Bavaro’s, which is a great Italian group here in the Bay Area, I got to listen to him when I went to the Entrepreneurial Academy back in 2018, and one of the things he said really struck me. So he had moved his whole family down here from New York to have his dream of starting this Italian restaurant, and now it’s a little bit of an empire with five locations locally.

But he said, if he’s having a hard day, I am telling you, hospitality, hard days are way more often than the easy days. He’ll stop everything, cook some pizzas and take them to a fire station or take them to a group that works with the homeless or, you know, go out and do a cleanup and bring some pizzas to them. So what he would do is he would give.

He would turn challenges or stress or anxiety or those days into giving. And what he found in the lesson behind it is he immediately became refilled with joy, with appreciation, with thankfulness, and then was able to get back to the things that are the hard things to do. But if you don’t do that, if you obsess and go into the minutia of the challenge without having that refresh time, it becomes a very lonely world and we miss that person that could then go out and amplify the good things that are

So, Dan, if you ever listen to this podcast, thank you for that because I’ve spread that word a lot. Oh, thanks, Dan. Let’s face it, there are times a business absolutely needs a new website built from scratch, done the right way, and naming creative can help with that.

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He goes out outside of himself, outside of the business or whatever that may be and gets re energized. Refuels takes another tactic that’s. That’s enormous.

A couple comments regarding AI also, if a business is not adopting it right now in some way, I feel like businesses will fall behind if you’re not doing that because other businesses are going to. My big thing that I’ve been doing, I feel like with my business since inception and even before that on like how I like to go about marketing is keeping the human aspect. So what’s authentic? Is this content authentic? Can I see this person? Can I hear this person right now, like this podcast? You know?

You would. You would be able to tell at least now. But there, there’s, there’s no synthesizing this conversation right now.

And so people, as we move forward, I think are going to only be looking for the human, you know, threads through everything, the human element of marketing or a restaurant or politics or whatever it is, because AI will start to fill in gaps of the stuff that we don’t need it to be human. And I was having a really interesting conversation with a client who I stopped by. I was, I was in this building and I was like, oh, I’m going to go see him.

End up talking to him for like 30 minutes. Steven, if you listen to this shout out to you, he’s really smart in the real estate game and, and helping people bridge gaps on capital investment. And you know, we’re just diving into the repercussions of like, what does it look like when in 10 years or five or two at this rate, when AI is even more intertwined in everything we do? Well, I feel like it’s a positive if we can make it, because especially as a creator, it opens up the time to do things

For instance, art and music and creativity and coming up with new things that are more authentic. And I think that’s beautiful because I feel like for me that fuels my life in a very big way. And if other people who might not have been able to experience that because of redundancy or tasks that AI can now help them, now they can explore these other realms, which is very powerful.

Well, and to your point, one of the things that we, we have as a society been through many changes from an agrarian society and then hunters and gatherers and industrial and then the information age and on and on. So we’ve been through these large adaptions as a society and there’s some pretty cool writings on it. Eventually, between AI and robotics and some other technological advances, we may indeed become what I call a recreational society where most of our time is spent recreationally because

And what do we look like as a society then? What do we appreciate? You know, where, where, where do our ties go? So that’s a really kind of, we think that science fiction, that’s fantasy, but it’s that that reality is closer today than it ever has been before, especially with the direct up movement of technology. So technology has always moved on a curve. Well, the curve is actually pointed straight up now, which means very rapidly we’re going to see changes at a pace we’ve never seen before.

Now that pivots back to what you said before, where people are going to be looking for authentic human generated XYZ versus AI generated xyz. And that that also goes to a lesson I like to talk about which is experiential consumerism. And that’s where I tell my businesses.

If you are not creating an experience for your customer, for your client, for your consumer, you are going to be a dodo. You are going to be extinct. Although someone said they’re going to be able to bring the dodo back with DNA.

Love to see it. I’m putting my order in right now for Dolly the Dodo. But that right now you must be creating a memorable experience for your consumer, for your client.

And it’s easy to do, but traditionally that’s not been something people have had to think about. They’re like, we’re just going to open our floral store and, and people that need flowers are going to come in and we’re going to sell them flowers and on and on and on. It’s about the experience now.

And that’s those people that provide the top experience will be the alpha. They will be the apex predators, as I call them. And you already know them in St. Pete and other communities.

Like who’s at the top of their game in any industry. You can list them and if you think about it, it’s because they have an experience that they apply to how they work with their consumer 100%, and that also is part of their branding. And then that fuels that experience, then is talked about, and that is marketing.

So it’s like this perpetual motion machine when you’re talking about that too. Also on top of that, as a business owner, for me, I’m trying to do that. I don’t think about it in the way of experience, but I should, and I probably do.

But it’s the fun part. Like this podcast, it doesn’t directly give me revenue, but I know it comes back and it’s fun and I’m giving back. And there’s an educational component.

It. It ticks all the boxes and it’s fun. These, these, the things of, of the experience are fun.

Like for instance, if that flower shop was like, yeah, on Fridays we’re gonna have a DJ all day or something like that, and there’s gonna be a little fun flower dance party every hour or something like that. Boom, that’s fun. And I don’t know, it’s just those things are sticky.

They don’t, they don’t let you forget it. And then again, that’s branding and that’s marketing, and you can use that as vehicles. The story I use is if you imagine going into a retail place, any retail place, you know, small, mom and pop, you shop, you look around, you may or may not buy something, but if the owner or whoever, the person that was running the store walked you to the exit when you were leaving, pulled a little lollipop out of an apron they had on and gave you a lollipop and said, I

Have an amazing rest of your day. When has that ever happened to you? Never. But imagine if you went into a place and that was your experience, you would tell everybody about that experience.

So. And if everybody that went in that store had that same experience and told everybody in that cost a few steps, right? In some lollipops, which are not that expensive, right? Oh, yeah, no, that’s. That’s, that’s huge.

I think that’s a great illustration that these things sometimes can be the most simple. You know, there’s a lot of places where I’ve left and they didn’t, like, they didn’t greet me or they didn’t say bye. You know, really simple stuff where it’s like, man, you just missed an opportunity.

Like, leave another positive impression as I remove myself from your establishment and you missed it and all you had to do was like, look up from your phone, you know, and maybe now that’s, that’s the determination from me coming back or me bringing 10 other people or telling about it to not. We did conferences at Stetson and during the break, you know, you’re at your all day conferences and sometimes they kind of, the material’s a little bit dry sometimes. And we had these warm cookies, you know,

And one year we didn’t have the warm cookies and you thought we had thrown a baby into a wood chipper. I mean, so it. But it’s those little touches of those warm cookies during the break that really had people that they remember that and they attached like a warm feeling to it and it allowed them to talk about you.

As you said, you want your customers and your staff to be ambassadors for you. Ambassadors that never stop. Exactly.

And God bless everyone that’s drank the Insights Club Kool Aid because they are amazing ambassadors. They are. Part of the reason I’ve had to add a morning edition is because they bring people and people see it and they’re like, oh my God, I need this.

And then we grow from that. Yeah, that’s huge, man. I’m like, I haven’t really looked at my notes, but you know, as we talk and you’d kind of hinted at you divide your time between this and that.

You do a lot. It’s clear if anybody listening is now like, huh, that guy’s very productive person. What are your top methods or just your, you know, your main method that might be more unique because everybody’s like, oh, lists or something like that for time management.

So I think especially when you start something new. So this was the first time I’ve ever been an executive director of a not for profit business district. And so I, that first year was a lot of learning and a lot of doing things that I don’t do now because I didn’t know that I didn’t need to do those things.

And so I would really tell people to be ultra aware of what they’re doing. And I tell all my small businesses, you must at least once a year take one week where you’re tracking all of your time, all of your time, not only how much time you’re spending on things, but when you’re spending times on things and also feeling like where your emotions at are, when are you tired, when are you like really understanding that work schedule? And some people have it so kind of Fractured. Maybe you need to do it

So it’s understanding the pattern, and then I use the buckets of do, delegate, delete, or delay. And delay needs to be the last thing on the list. Right.

So really, you find that thing that you need to do, you do it. Be really, really good at delegating and so understanding those things that you don’t need to do yourself. Yes, you’re going to do it the best.

I don’t care if it’s done 85% as good as you do. It’s better to delegate it and focus on the core things that you need to. Another smart person that I learned from long ago said, do not let perfection get in the way of productivity.

And that’s a huge, huge thing. And for those of us that are alphas, A plus personalities, I can’t give it to someone because they’re not gonna do as good a job as me. Forget about it.

Do that. It’s gonna allow you to concentrate on things and delete. Learning to say no, and I’m a very bad person with that.

I’ve said, I say yes way too many times. I’m much better at that now because I know by saying no, I’m better when I say yes. And I cannot do everything for everyone.

And I have to just kind of understand that, that. Understand that dynamic. So understanding.

Looking at my schedule, I do have, you know, kind of a CRM lite system that I have through an email filing system and an Excel system that I use that keeps me very organized. I don’t, I don’t drop anything because of the system that I’ve organized. That way, you know, there’s really no secret sauce.

I can help other people once I know where their hiccups are. Time bundling is very important. So there’s a lot of people that, oh, I’m great at multitasking.

Well, there’s less than 1% of people are actual able to do two things at once, which is multitasking. Most of us are what is called task switching. And every time you switch a task, it’s like an engine changing gears, you’re breaking down.

So if you do, let’s say, five different things during the day, five different kinds of things, but you’re in and out of those five things all day. At the end of the day, you are going to be exhausted, and things will not have been produced at the level of quality that you need if you were to take those same five things and bundle them together. So the first Hour, I’m just going to do emails.

The second hour, I’m just going to focus on callbacks. The third hour, I’m just going to work on my design stuff. And then the fifth hour, you know, that’s what I’m going to do.

My calls or whatever. That fifth, you are going to be rock star productive and you can take care of that by scheduling and structuring your calendar that way. One thing I did last year was because I was finding myself over, kind of over committed and over frantic is I set up Mondays and Thursdays as my paperwork days and I block giant chunks of time to do the ever fun paperwork.

If there’s something important that comes onto my plate, that is like a meeting with the mayor or, you know, I’ve got to meet with my president or the board, that’s, that’s ultra important. Yes, I’ll put that onto the calendar. But other than that, I really protect those times because I know if I’m just doing paperwork, I can crush it rather than try to go in and out of it all week.

So that’s just a couple things I do. Boy, that’s great. I’m going to transcribe that and just like hand that out like candy because that’s huge.

I’m a switcher and I probably could have been diagnosed with ADHD or whatever it is. But also like as a designer, I have a lot of clients. I’m like constantly in and out.

And then also like you get the call or a team member needs something, it’s like, you know, just dealing with all of the moving parts and the things that are coming in and out. But those chunking of time, that, that’s enormous. So I appreciate the, the tip and you have to set expectations.

So what we have done, and I, I am throwing stones from a glass condo because I was that person also that was constantly into this, then over to here, then over to here, then pick up the call and then do the email and oh my God, I see this over here and I need a cup of coffee and just run, run, run, right? And it’s exhausting and it’s not productive. But we think, oh so and so loves us because we’re very responsive and all. But at the end of the day, at the end of the week, at the end of the month,

But it’s about building the expectations with your team, with your clients, and giving them the why. So it could be a simple statement like this to a team that is used to you being email responsive within 5 minutes. Team.

I am shifting around my work productivity to bundle certain tasks together so I can be more efficient, effective and get more done. This is what it’s going to look like. This may mean you may not get an email back at certain time frames, but I always have my one hour block to get emails done.

If there’s ever an emergency that you need an answer for me immediately, don’t email me, call me, because I’ll always pick up that phone from you on the call. So now you set expectations, you set some orderliness to it, but you’ve also done the why. The why is the missing part 90% of the time.

And then that creates the, oh, well, they must not care about me if they’re like, they’re not going to get back to me in the normal five minutes now, maybe I’m not important anymore. But really it’s about building expectations, building that strategy, giving the why behind it. It’s going to take time because we are, our smartphones have rewired us to actually like that task switching.

It’s created an endorphin rush with that task switching. And so we have to kind of break away from some of that a little bit to reorganize ourselves and reorder things. But it’s so worth it.

It really, really is. You’ll be more productive and less exhausted. Absolutely.

And that’s expectations everywhere, whether it be your business to your team, your business to a client, or personal to the ones that you love as well. I mean, that applies across the board. So that’s, that’s enormous.

I, you know, and I always find when I tell a client, look, I am slammed this weekend. I can’t wait to get to your proposal, but it’s going to be the end of next week. They’re like, that’s cool, you know, because also for me, I’ve surrounded myself with people who are not on fire.

If you’re on fire or have a bunch of fires going on, it might be a red flag that there’s something dysfunctional that maybe I don’t want to dip into. And, you know, and now we’re in a position where I don’t, I don’t have to engage in that necessarily. Maybe, maybe it’ll be okay, but otherwise it’s normally okay, but it’s getting that out right away rather than, than letting it linger or sit.

So, man, that’s huge. I wanted to ask real quick before we get to a special segment is what is it like, you know, Being able to tap into the mayor and key decision makers of a. Of a community, and sitting down with those people, can you just.

I don’t know, just like, what’s unique about those interactions and what. What. What kind of stands out to you in that? Because obviously a lot of people don’t get that, you know, and that’s a very unique thing.

Well, number one, we’re very blessed in St. Pete to have an incredible. An incredible city team and the mayor and his administrative staff in every single department. I basically have all them on speed dial.

They. They may not always love me for that, but they do because I’m able to spot challenges ahead of time and really position it for how do we overcome it? Because I’m never bringing a problem to you without a solution or an idea of a solution. So you’ll never gonna hear Roger call you up and I’ve got a problem, and there’s just like, empty space after that statement.

So when I talk to the mayor or I talk to council people or I go, you know, I’ve met with the raise teams before. I’ve had these really. I’m so honored that they give me the time, but I think they give me the time because I’m a voice of 135 businesses, 125 businesses in our association.

And I’ve got the gray hair and the experience to have seen a lot and done a lot, and I’m coming to help solve. I’m not coming to have grief. I’m like, I want to help.

And they are given information with a fire hose. They are given so much information, and I feel like they really respect and they like to get out of their own bubbles of the information they get and get some on the street information. This group is the most accessible I’ve ever seen and the most caring that I’ve ever seen.

And I look people in the eye and can see if there’s care behind it or not. And really just what the city has been through in the county and the area from these storms. They collected 2.

1 million cubic yards or feet, one of the two of trash. But I was told it’s as long as the football field. So 100ft long, 50ft wide, as tall as the Empire State Building.

Oh, my goodness. That is the amount that they did in 90 days. That is the amount in 90 days they picked up that much.

And it was a collaboration between the city’s teams doing it, and they pulled other teams from other departments that normally don’t do it to help with that. And they became very organized and had different pickup spots. And they looked to community haulers.

Now that community haulers program, I think it was like $1.6 million went into the pockets of local haulers to have them help get all that stuff off of the ground. Sure.

So for me, it’s an honor to be in those conversations. I don’t tap them that often because I know those folks are busy. I only bring things to them that I think are really community movers that can move things in the community.

Yeah. And they. Then they’re more likely to interact with you, accept your call, want to work with you.

Because, yeah, you could easily come and go, hey, look, this person’s venting about this. They’re mad at this. What do we do? Instead you go, here’s their concern.

And I have X, Y and Z ideas. What do you think? And that’s so much more productive. You’re moving the needle in progress.

One comment about the hurricanes, because St. Pete was hit so hard and I think it would be almost worth. I. I was been thinking about it because now it’s kind of like not in the heat, although there’s still recovery happening. Of course.

But, you know, getting like a panel together on, like, what transpired and how we overcame it as a community, I want to do like a panel on that. But you had mentioned 90 days. All of that being taken up.

The power of Mother Nature doing that in a day is even more wild to think about. So I just wanted to say that real quick before we move on. Do you wanna.

Is your trajectory going to. Do you wanna run for mayor? Oh, my God. This is.

I get. People tease me all the time and say, I’m the mayor of the Edge. So the first thing I always respond is, I love this mayor, period.

Full stop. Yeah. If he wants to run again, I am waving flags.

I am. I am so cheerful for him. Although when we are not allowed to take positions on city council races, I’m not sure about mayor.

I’ll have to ask Gary Jones about that. But I’m just a big fan of what he’s done and the team that he’s put together. My current vision and my current goal is to do the executive director position for the Edge until my retirement days.

Okay. When I retire, I will never fully retire because it would drive me insane. More than likely, what I would do is pivot to coaching at that point and do the consulting that I’m already doing now, but in a more specific vein and then really being able to control my hours more and control my.

Right now, I rarely get to travel because I’ve got to be here for all my little small businesses. So that’s one thing that I would probably do. But, yeah, I’ve got no desire to run for higher office.

Although I love consulting with folks that do to give them the tools they need to flourish. Once they get that role, it’s a thankless role. Yeah.

Yeah, you’re. And you’re in a sweet spot right now where you are able to influence so many people in businesses and the community as a whole, but it’s also a direct line to people who are at a higher level. But you’re not getting inundated with the.

What would happen if you leveled up into that realm, you know? But I was curious, because people like you, I’m glad that you’re in the position you’re in because the world, the communities, need that. We deserve it. That’s what is needed in the world, in my opinion.

So I just wanted to kind of see what your plans were. Yeah. So no mayoral plans.

Although people can continue to say I’m the mayor of the Edge. I love that familialness that comes with that. So I have no office in the Edge.

My office is the Edge. So it’s working out of Intermezzo or Sourdough or Flagship bank or Enigma or a Moxie Hotel, or my office is the entire district. So I’m really blessed with that.

And just. I love my job. My statement, I use.

And I would also encourage other business owners to think of a unique way to talk about what they do and their why. And mine is every day I get to get up and help small businesses. Like, how cool is that? Like, that’s like.

I mean, kind of drop the mic. Yeah. Won’t drop this mic.

Don’t think the podcast. They’re very expensive. They look.

So I feel you so much on that because I am fueled by the businesses that I get to work with every day. It’s. I. My whole thing with.

With our. Our company is to help businesses grow. That’s why we turn down certain work.

Because I might not agree with how you’re going about things or want to help you grow, to be honest. And I’ll say, hey, but this is a resource that you can use. I wish you all the best for the most part, you know, but that, for me, that’s the fun.

I can’t count the number of businesses I get to go in and out of every day. It’s. That’s.

That fuels me, too. So we’re we’re in alignment on several things, which is why I feel like I am connected to you and get along with you so well. I have so many more questions, but what we’re going to do is get into a section that will end this episode called the Rapid Fire.

Are you ready? Sure. The sound effects there scared me for a minute, but that’s all right. Okay.

I’m sorry. I’ve never startled anybody, but yeah, hopefully you’ll forgive me there. It’s the most sound effects we do.

It’s pretty top notch budget. I’ll tell you. It felt Star wars moment for me, but I love it.

No, I’m ready. I’m ready. All right, cool.

And Jordan will put in a couple other like laser sounds later. I love it. It’s the only post production besides the editing that we do.

Anyways, if you need to expand on one of these answers, go for it. But the intention is wrap it. All right, so you ready? All right, here we go.

Buckle up everybody. Your biggest source of inspiration, my father. Love it.

Yeah. And he passed away 10 years ago. But for folks that have lost people that they love, if they, if they haven’t realized this, if it’s somebody fresh that they’ve, that they’ve lost, you can always talk to those folks.

You know what they’re going to say, right? And when they talk back to you, you can talk back to them. Yes, I know I’m not talking to my father, but I am talking to him and there is a great comfort in that. And you know, he such a giving person, such a mentor to other people, a businessman’s businessman.

So yeah, my dad. Well that makes sense then on his influence on you and regarding AI, I think, I think down the road like for instance my podcast, however many episodes I’m going to have before I die in, in my speech, you could feed that into a program and my daughter could like then press play and interact with me. They could probably be pretty accurate as far as what I would might say and in my tone that’s even wild to think about.

I just thought about that but I think it was in a like Black Mirror episode or I can’t remember something. But yeah, anyways, thanks for the thought. Do you have a favorite book, Give and Take by Adam Grant.

If real quick to give people an understanding of that book. There’s three types of people in the world. Givers, takers and matchers.

A matcher is somebody that will give you something if you have something to give them in return. Every single statistic and this has been studied. Shows that givers are the most successful.

They are also the least successful of every single category. And it’s how you give that defines your success. This book will tell you how to be a giver and to do it while you’re constantly refreshing yourself instead of being a doormat.

Highly recommend that book. Yeah, it sounds great. Oh, gosh.

And yeah. Cause there’s an art to giving and there’s. There’s nuance there.

It’s not just. Here you go. Yeah.

All right. You can listen to one album or artist on repeat for the rest of time. Who.

Who is that? Or what album is it? So I’m going to take it and twist it a little bit. So most people have not heard of the group Girl Talk. So look it up now.

It’s. It’s funky. It’s irreverent.

It is. I’m not going to say anything else besides you. You’re either going to love it or hate it.

I happen to love it. And it was my jam on the way over here today, so maybe not the one I’m going to listen to forever, but Girl Talk is something you probably have not heard before, but now you’re going to go check them out. Cool.

Awesome. It is ringing a bell, and I don’t know why, so I will. It will.

When you listen to it. Cool. I’ll do that on my way home.

All right. Couple more. You can hang out with one person for an entire day, dead or alive.

Who is it? I’ll say my dad again. All right. When it left my lips.

I’m sorry. It’s like that. Don’t apologize.

That’s an easy one. That’s an easy one. Yeah.

It’d be my dad again. Yeah. Okay, fair enough.

Fair enough. Lastly, and I’m excited to hear what you think about this one. What is your definition of success? So my definition of success for me is.

Is at the end of the day, I’ve helped as many people as I could. I mean, it’s just a really simple success for me. But I’ve also felt like I want to help other people understand what success is for them.

I think we said it before the podcast began. We get one trip around the world. Like, we get one trip.

We get one life. What do we want to be known for? We want, like I tell a lot of people, what do you want people saying at the front of the room after you’re gone? Well, now live that. Because a lot of people aren’t living that.

So that, to me, is when I’m gone. I want to be able to have helped as many people as I possibly could during my time here. And that’s success for me.

Love it. And it seems like you have set yourself up in not just a position, but positions and created vehicles to, to make that a reality for yourself in your life. And I know that a lot of people, including myself, appreciate you very much for that.

Well, to your point about Insights Club, so one of the biggest drivers to put that together was I knew, I knew the power of teaching education on these topics, but I knew I couldn’t teach 122 people individually. It’s impossible. Nor do I want them to hear one voice.

So pulling everybody together, picking the topics, helping moderate it, helping guide the conversation. But it’s not just me talking. It’s a variety of voices and real life experiences.

And so that aspect of it is the amplification, where now I can help multiple people all at the same time. So when the family is buying flowers for my loved ones, I will have been able to have helped more people because of that amplification effect. So my success and how I’m judging it will be greater because of that.

So it absolutely dictates a lot of what I do and how I do it. One last thought. So I run a billiards tournament.

It’s one of my passions from Enigma Bar and Lounge. On Saturdays, it’s in the afternoon and I co run it with a friend of mine, Michael Cole. But those are actually some business hours for me, impromptu, where I’m there for two hours if somebody needs help with something.

I’m like, hey, come see me up there. We’re going to spitball. We’re going to try to find a way.

So I’m all the time like looking for little nuggets of time to help other people. That’s awesome. That’s clear.

I mean, it shows. And yeah, again, I appreciate you for that and I know so many people do. You’ve already answered some of my outgoing questions.

You’ve set your vision of what you’re looking for, who Roger is in the coming years. I like to leave it on. Your favorite piece of advice for any person listening, whether they’re a business owner or an educator or a sports person, young or old, what’s your favorite piece of advice that you’d like to leave people with? So most of us, and this, this is a animal instinct, most of us focus on the negative and it’s a natural instinct.

It’s a survival technique. What is danger? What do I have to worry about what is the negative. But we migrate to that too often.

And what I have found is that which is positive, that which is hopeful, that which is joyful, is way bigger than that which is negative and hopeless and all of these other things. And so if I would give any advice, it’s to understand that reaction you’re having to be negative, to feel negative, to look for danger, all that, It’s a very natural understand that. But you control that emotion.

That is one thing as humans where we have stepped above our emotions, that we can think about these things and understand why we are looking at that negative thing and fixating on it and pull back from that and then think about all the things we can be thankful for, Think about all the people that we have helped, all the people we can help, all the people we will help. Give yourself joy, seek out happiness, help others do the same thing. Because as you create both in your personal and your

They’re going to have less moments of sadness and negativity and then we all feed off of each other. I have a hyper empathetic character and so when there is negativeness around me or sadness, et cetera, it pulls me down. And so part of my mission and it’s self preservation and my emotional state is to make everybody around me uplifted and to concentrate on the positive and the changes we can make, enjoy and things like that.

So if I tell anybody, it’s both professional and personal, like business and non business people, just think about the joy, be in a state of thankfulness more often because that will help with that balancing out against that negativity that we are animals and we’re going to lean into that. So especially nowadays with a lot of things we’ve come through, whether it’s politics or storms or the economy, I mean there’s uncertainty in this year, in next year and uncertainty is another thing that we as

Oh boy. I just want to keep the mic rolling and let you keep going. What you just said is beautiful.

Also, it is incredible that you said it in the way that you did. My wife and I were laying together for an hour and a half just last night talking about that exact topic, exactly what you just said. And it’s wild that you just said it in the ways that you did.

For an hour and a half you said it. We’re matched up, man, we’re matched up. We’re on the flow.

So I love it. Yeah, I think people will gravitate towards that and, and I hope through this conversation people really took something out of it and also realize the special place that St. Petersburg is. I am from Indiana.

I came down to Largo to work in an art group and then ended up in St. Pete. Community. Just as a domino effect.

And I’ve never felt community quite like what is happening in St. Pete. And the things that you have just described, you have illustrated for me in much clearer way why I connect with it so much. I knew I knew things.

But you have condensed it into an hour of why. And so I appreciate that. I appreciate your time.

Real quick to give you and anybody listening, how do they connect with you? How do they support you? What do you want them to do? Yeah. So I mean, the biggest thing is supporting me and what I believe is doing some of the things that we talked about on the podcast. Right.

Is giving back to the community. Be involved. You can follow me from the edgedistrict.

org that’s our edge District website. A new website’s coming soon. By the time you listen to the podcast, it may be launched.

Right. So that gives you a connection to all of our businesses. You can email me through the website, things like that.

But really it’s just give back. You. You will be.

And I’m sure many people that’ll be listening to the podcast do that. The more you do it, the more it’s going to come back to you. There’s never a time that I’ve given that I’ve not gotten back way more when I gave.

I appreciate you giving your time. It’s coming back. Thank you very much, Roger.

I appreciate you. Ah, thanks for having me. Take it.