#went to the gym early and started a new monthly program

[jess-abides]

Talk nice bc the 🐱 game mean, ho

[lucythompson]

┈ 🎕 LUCY HOANG THOMPSON

[ Under the cut, you’ll find a summarized version of Lucy’s bio !! If by any chance you’d like to read through my 9 page monstrosity of a bio, you’ll find it here !! ]

( lana condor, cis female, she/her). hey, isn’t that [ LUCY THOMPSON ] walking down bennington street? i think the [ 25 ] YEAR OLD [ UP AND COMING ACTRESS ] is from [ WAITSFIELD, VERMONT ]. i’ve heard some rumors down at mon’s, saying that they're [ VAIN AND SELFISH ], but then again they’re known to be [ CHARISMATIC AND PASSIONATE ].  either way, they seem to be interesting, hope they’ll stick around.

Lucy was born in small town Waitsfield, Vermont. Her parents, Dahlia and Logan, were the owner of the state renowned Thompson Farms. It's a popular destination for weddings, parties, and vacation getaways. Their vast property had everything - rustic themed rooms, heated pools, gazebos, a small scale whiskey distillery, vegetable patches in the spring, and ski slopes in the winter. For the first eighteen years of her life, Waitsfield was all that she knew and lived for. She was the town sweetheart, beloved by the residents for her easy involvement in the town’s activities.

In high school, she auditioned for a role in the school play. She got the role and the rest was history. She fell in love with the buzz of having the audience’s eyes on her as she learned to command the stage and eventually the very ground she walked upon. She knew all the little tics that made people look her way - tossing her hair over her shoulder, casually tilting her head at the right angle, warm smiles given at exactly the right moment. People never called her vain, they chalked it up to charisma. Lucy knew better, though. She knew she was looking for affirmation elsewhere since her parents gave them too far in between. She’d never once felt unloved. But would it really kill them to go home early from work? After all, their house was only a few yards from their office. 

She was often asked to star in advertisements for the town’s businesses and even got calls if she could voice over their radio ads. That coupled with her last gigs in the theater club, cheering almost every week for season games in every sport, and AP class finals, made her lose track of time during her senior year. She hurriedly filled in her college applications and had them sent in the mail. A letter came in the mail exactly a month before graduation. She got accepted into the collaborative arts program. While it wasn’t her parents’ first choice (they’d rather she go in business or finance), they supported her nonetheless since she's the first in their family to go to university.

The program she enrolled in was rigorous - dance, theater, music, filmmaking, directing, and writing - yet she loved it. She quickly climbed the ranks and was soon widely known throughout the arts department. She even launched her own YouTube channel where she documented her university experience as well as doled out the occasional acting tip. What’s garnered her 200,000+ subscriber count, however, were the numerous skits she’d film, direct, and act in. It started out as a project for their filmmaking class but she’s fallen in love ever since. Her hope kept rising in tune with her subscriber count. She feels like this could really make her visible in the entertainment industry. The perks aren’t too shabby either - she could pay rent, got sponsorships, and even scored the occasional brand partnership.

After her first year university, she decided to do some “soul searching”. What better place to do it than Europe? Her YouTube income coupled with her parent’s fat checks made her stay in over 15 Schengen states possible. Unbeknownst to many (besides her closest friends), she’d been performing all across Italy. These shows weren’t big at all. They were usually performed in parks or town squares for the general public. She did this for a few weeks until she moved onto the next country. 90 days came and went faster than she expected. She produced two skits and a short film while she was touring. However, reality came knocking on her door and decided that it was time for her to fly home and complete her undergrad.

Graduation came all too quickly  and she still hadn’t managed to score any major acting gigs. She graduated summa cum laude from her degree but other than her diploma, her hands were empty. After that, Lucy moved into an apartment downtown with her best friends. She kept at it with her YouTube channel and was now at almost 500,000 subscribers. The only few odd jobs she’d taken was to be the voice for a couple audiobooks of recently released bestsellers and the freelance designs she’d make for budding businesses Lucy began to feel scared that she was just destined for mediocrity now that she was out of university. 

Hope planted another seed in her when she passed through two screenings to a new Netflix romcom. They had been looking for a “girl next door” type and Lucy had easily stepped into that role. She’s been on her toes waiting for any announcements on the matter. She might be stoked but she’s also extremely fearful. Sure, she could try again but that would land like another punch to the gut. Her income on YouTube combined with her parents’ monthly checks was more than enough to keep her comfortable. However, she worried if another heartbreak would make her lose inspiration from putting out quality content.She was terrified thinking if she wasted four years of her life just to pack up and go home.

Headcanons:

Lucy’s definitely the type to wear sundresses until it gets too unbearably cold to keep it up.

She’s very particular about her coffee (thank god ginger’s makes it good. Which leads to the fact that she barely sleeps at all. Two glasses of wine could make her feel mellow enough to relax for the night but it isn’t until she hits the harder liquor that she can fall into a dreamless sleep. 

She isn’t particular at all about the alcohol she consumes. Whatever helps her sleep at night is good enough.

She wants a bearded dragon so bad, maybe she’ll get one.

She’s quite into fitness so whenever she has free time, she’d hit the gym a few buildings down from their apartment. You could even catch her there close to midnight “blowing off some steam”, as she likes to call it.

She really wants to learn Asian languages so she’s starting with Vietnamese. She can speak and read like a third grader so she has weekly conversations with her mom to practice. 

Lucy sleeps on the very edge of the bed. She’s fallen off, oh - 5 times the past month but that doesn’t stop her from falling back asleep on the floor

She keeps a rubbermaid of snacks in her closet. She love giving people snacks but DO NOT TAKE THEM WITHOUT HER KNOWING - because she’ll know (she probably counts them).

Has a car but never uses it (Is it even working though?)

[lwjstiletto]

wangxian au where lwj is a popular hand model and wwx is an independent jewellery maker [Part 2]

[Part 1]

their monthly sibling catch-up jenga ruins wwx’s plans to mope for the foreseeable future.

jc is concentrating very hard on wiggling a piece out and wwx would usually make fun of him but he can only conjure enough energy to pull out the easy looking pieces today so he has no high ground.

“name 3 good things that happened to you.” jc frowns as he reads the wooden cuboid, “like ever? or in the last month?”

jyl doesn’t quite give him a look, but a slight downturn of her lip still gets the point across.

jc sighs, “an old student of mine opened a gallery, xichen and i went for brunch and wei wuxian hasn’t bothered me in a while. what’s up with that by the way?”

“my turn.” wwx says unenthusiastically and pulls a loose jenga piece. ‘how is your love life?’ it reads. can jenga be rigged? it has to be rigged.

“you know we’re allowed to ask questions outside the jenga right?” jc snaps.

wwx knows. wwx also knows that the jenga questions were only introduced by jyl to stimulate conversation between an angry jc and a stubborn wwx when he’d come back two years ago from his apprenticeship abroad.

but wwx also doesn’t want to talk about his humiliating interaction with the man who his brother had called ‘wangji’. he even has a nice name. why is wwx’s life so hard?

“a-xian,” jyl starts, “are you alright?”

wwx looks at her with a pout, “how can i be when we’ve not seen each other for weeks? i missed you.”

jyl smiles indulgently, “i missed you too. next time you should come with me, lotus pier seems empty without you two.”

jc looks like he wants to prod wwx more but then he looks over at wwx’s jenga piece and starts to laugh. wwx hates it here.

—•—

lwj wears gloves when he’s not working to shield his hands from things like tanning, small scratches, drying out etc. any normal person would overlook these as minuscule imperfections but it could put him out of his job for weeks

he has custom made moisturising cotton gloves that he wears during the night; and thicker cotton or leather gloves for the day, depending on the weather

at first, he had found this incredibly bothersome. a month or so into it he stopped noticing them and suffered through various incidents where he tried to eat with gloves on or, on a particularly horrifying occasion, wash his hands with them.

but now, he has begun to indulge. he buys gloves in materials which are impractical, which he can only wear when he has nowhere to go and nothing to do.

there are the pastel lace gloves that draw patterns from his fingers up to his elbows, the white satin ones with frills, and finally the fingerless black gloves made of supple, soft leather.

(for ref)

they make him feel a certain type of way that he is too embarrassed to put in words, so he doesn’t.

he puts them away in a drawer on the furthest corner in his wardrobe that he only opens when he needs a confidence boost or after a particularly tiring shoot

today happens to be the latter, except it has been multiple tiring shoots and while his muscles aren’t aching anymore, he still feels like he deserves something nice.

he retrieves a new pair of leather gloves that have an adjustable belt at the wrist. he tightens the strap to the point that he can’t move his hand too much without it hurting. he hums, a pleased sound escaping his lips, and finally lets himself go

—•—

wwx has spent the last hour answering nhs’ questions about his business, future plans and why he wants to work with lan wangji (who is apparently a hand model? and a super successful one at that???)

wwx answers to the best of his abilities as his head spins from the turn of events and the recent information that has come to light. it’s- a lot.

finally nhs nods and picks up his phone to call someone.

“not presentable... what does that- it doesn’t matter, i’m not calling you here for a shoot. just come here and i will explain.” with that nhs hangs up the phone as if someone would have jumped through it otherwise

wwx, who has finally managed to absorb everything, asks, “was that lan wangji?”

nhs just smiles cryptically. wwx’s question is answered soon enough though, as lwj walks into the office twenty minutes later. he blinks at wwx but does not show any other outword reaction as he takes a seat

nhs begins to speak, “i have spoken to wei-xiong and come to the conclusion that he is not stalking you.”

lwj looks at wwx and then back at nhs, not quite an eyebrow-raise but as close to it as it gets.

“wei-xiong wants you to model for him. i will let you two speak for a while. there is no pressure, just a light discussion.” nhs says and then skips out before any of them can stop him

the air in the room gets significantly more tense. lwj’s expression is blank and when wwx can’t look at it anymore, he decides to look at his crossed arms instead

“holy shit dude, are you ok?” wwx shouts, alarmed at the bruised red marks lining lwj’s wrist where it pokes out of his long sleeved sweater

lwj looks down at it, seemingly horrified, and pulls his sleeves down before wwx can get a better look.

“are you... hurt?” wwx asks gently.

lwj shakes his head. “i’m fine.”

he sounds like he’s telling the truth. this immediately short circuits wwx’s brain because.. why else are there bruises on his wrists... what else could possibly... oh my god he likes to be tied up, wwx’s brain supplies

thankfully he manages to keep the thought to himself this time. lwj still looks at him like he heard it all the same.

“you are not stalking me.” lwj states.

“not really? i mean not for the reasons you think.” wwx cringes at himself. but lwj hasn’t walked away yet which means he must be willing to hear him out this time.

“to be honest i’ve been in a bit of a slump these past few months. i saw you at the university and wanted to work with you, i had no idea you were a hand model. i didn’t even know that was a thing.” wwx says.

lwj scrutinises him for a few seconds then nods. “thank you for explaining.”

lwj clearly sees this as the end of the conversation but wwx doesn’t want him to leave again so he starts to talk about the hand chains he has been working on the past few weeks, pulling out his phone to show lwj pictures of a few.

wwx is with his jewellery how new parents are with their babies. he has been gushing about the complicated silver work that he plans to refine over the next few days when he looks up to see lwj’s face inches from his.

lwj is looking at his phone, seemingly absorbing his words, because when wwx pauses lwj looks at him as if to ask him to continue. wwx gulps. being on the receiving end of such undivided attention, no less from such a beautiful man, is almost intimidating.

then lwj blinks again and the spell is broken.

wwx straightens up, “ah sorry for rambling.”

“if we were to work together,” lwj starts, “what would it entail?”

the implication that lwj is seriously considering working with him, a small business beneath his usual collaborations, is both flattering and slightly unreal.

“i would need you to come in to take measurements, maybe a couple of photographs so i can have refrence to your skin tone and bone structure when designing.” wwx says, voice professional.

“my... are you making these specifically for me?” lwj tilts his head, a gesture so adorably confused that wwx wants to coo.

wwx rubs his nose, “more like i’m using you as a reference? having a clear picture in my head helps kickstart my creations. once i have cohesion within my designs it’s easy to expand my range from there if that makes sense.”

lwj nods, looking contemplative. “won’t you need me to try them?”

wwx nods, seeing them on someone is usually important. after all, jewellery is made to be worn. “you’ll need to come to my workshop for that though, so i can make minor adjustments on the spot. my thoughts tend to run away from me sometimes and i forget half my observations as i work. it won’t be often though, i’ll only call you in when necessary. and if you’re too busy then we can always reschedule.” wwx says.

“you are too accommodating.” lwj says, “in this industry, you shouldn’t be.”

wwx feels a little stricken by the statement. he laughs nervously, “it’s not like i can have you sit there for hours while i work.”

“if it makes it easier for you, then you should. i’m used to holding still.” lwj says, serious.

“is that an offer?” wwx raises an eyebrow. because this whole discussion certainly sounds like they’re making a deal.

lwj turns his head to the side and the loose strands of his hair swish with the movement. it’s such a graceful motion that wwx thinks he has surely practiced this before.

when he turns back, wwx notices he’s holding a business card out towards wwx. “you can contact my agent about my scheduling. my number is only for emergency appointments in case you need them.”

wwx is speechless. he cannot believe he actually pulled this off what the fu—

he’s still feeling thunderstruck when he gets home. with numb fingers, he has managed to program lwj’s number into his phone because he knows he’ll lose the card sometime soon. his contact name is just ‘💅🏻’

it’s both because wwx thinks lan wangji is too formal, and because he has an undeniable urge to see his nails painted.

it’s just so he can know what colours and gemstones would suit him of course. the thought that probably everything would suit lwj is firmly shut down and pushed at the back of wwx’s head.

—•—

lwj gets a call at 6am the next morning. he doesn’t know why but he immediately thinks of wwx. it turns out to be nmj

“wangji, have you been well?” nmj asks.

“yes.” lwj says, unsure of why nmj is calling him so early in the morning. isn’t he supposed to be at the gym at this hour?

“that is good to hear. are you busy?”

“no. i have five hours until my shoot.” lwj says, still confused. a feeling of dread settles in his stomach.

“let’s go for coffee then. i want to treat you.” nmj says.

lwj is silent for a few seconds then, “why?”

“i need to discuss an urgent matter with you.” nmj says.

if lwj wasn’t alarmed before, he definitely is now. he agrees to meet nmj in a cafe he visits regularly.

when he gets there, nmj is waiting for him at the door, attracting every passerby’s attention with his muscles bulging out of his grey t-shirt.

when lwj comes to a stop before him, nmj gives him a small smile and opens the door for him, gesturing him to go in.

people look as they walk over to a table in the back and keep looking as they take a seat. lwj makes nmj sit with his back to the cafe so he hides lwj completely from their eyes.

“wangji,” nmj starts seriously, then pauses, pushing a glass of water towards him.

lwj doesn’t touch it.

nmj sighs, “i was at huaisang’s office the other day and bumped into a man. he came there looking for you so i asked who he was. luckily huaisang had told me about him before, su she?”

lwj takes the glass of water and chugs it. nmj looks at him with concern.

“i turned him away but i’m worried about you wangji.” nmj says, pushing his own glass of water towards lwj.

lwj doesn’t frown but it’s a close call. “i do not know what he wants.”

nmj’s face hardens. “clearly nothing good. huaisang stopped me from punching him but if you ever need me to, feel free to call me.”

lwj shakes his head, “it’ll be okay. possibly.”

this makes nmj frown even more. “i’m serious, call me if he dares follow you. we cannot press charges until he portrays to be an actual threat but i will protect you.”

“i do not need protection.” lwj’s grip tightens on his glass.

“i know that.” nmj says, “but i will offer my protection either way. it’s good to know someone has your back.”

lwj wants to fight him on this, they barely know each other outside work and lwj does /not/ need someone to do his dirty work. he doesn’t though, because he is tired of carrying the fear of being recognised/followed all by himself. it’s not like he can burden nhs or lxc.

and nmj is neither judging, nor underestimating him. he is just offering to have his back should he ever need it, and it’s not... a bad thing. it’s almost like having a friend in the industry, and maybe he needs some of those.

so he nods. even nmj seems surprised by this but gives him a smile and orders him a coffee, true to his word.

nhs emails lwj a document containing his schedule for the next month and wwx is nestled comfortably in the only free hours he gets on fridays. he’s not as upset about it as he thought he would be

at 4pm friday, lwj drives to wwx’s ‘workshop’ which is simply an extension of his untidy living space. lwj doesn’t know how someone so meticulous with their handiwork could be so in a borderline hazardous workspace.

wwx conjures up a beanbag and gestures for lwj to sit down. lwj looks at the purple monstrosity and then at wwx, dubious.

“aiyah i’m just trying to make your comfortable!” wwx says, “graphing out your measurements will take a while.”

lwj doesn’t remember the last time someone cared for his comfort when he was at work. he has to stand for hours when only his upper body is in frame, and bend his fingers in unnatural ways as per the director’s requirements. discomfort is his status quo

he has never complained. it’s part of his job to hold still and not draw anyone’s focus to the less important parts of him, i.e. his face, by voicing his discomfort. it hardly bothers him anymore.

“are you sure you wouldn’t rather have me sit upright?” lwj asks, because while wwx seems like a considerate person lwj does not want to compromise the quality of his work.

“it’s gonna take an hour,” wwx says scandalised, “i’m not cruel. besides, i already received the photographs i needed for reference so you can just chill out till i do my work.”

lwj doesn’t mention how an hour is nothing compared to the time he had stood with his hands outstretched for seven hours. with an internal sigh, he gingerly sinks down on the beanbag. he hates to admit it, but it is actually comfortable.

wwx smirks at him like he knows, then gathers his measuring tools and approaches lwj. lwj removes his cotton gloves and places them on his knees.

once wwx is close enough, he takes lwj’s proffered wrist and winds a measuring tape around it. lwj doesn’t want to stare straight at wwx’s.. ehm yeah so he looks up.

this is just as bad of an idea, because where lwj has noticed wwx is attractive, seeing him from this angle is just... too much. he can’t close his eyes either, because that will make it look like he’s— enjoying this or something.

he decides to look to the side instead, spotting a framed picture of wwx and a toddler.

“is he your son?” he asks, because he feels the need to fill the silence for the first time in his life.

wwx looks at the picture, then laughs, “no, that’s my nephew, jin ling. he’s three and already spoiled rotten by my family.”

“do you have a big family?” lwj asks. asking personal questions is both unlike him and probably very unprofessional.

wwx, however, smiles indulgently. “it’s just my shijie, her husband jin zixuan, jin ling and my brother jiang cheng. well those are the nearest and dearest ones.”

“jiang cheng?” lwj asks.

wwx frowns, “yeah. do you know him?”

“he and my brother are close friends.” lwj says.

“wait, xichen is your brother?” wwx asks, then cringes at his informality, “i guess that’s lan xichen huh? i never knew his family name.”

“and what about wen qing? how do you know her?” wwx asks as he starts to try different sizes of measurement rings to see what fits lwj’s fingers.

it takes lwj a few seconds to answer. “wen qing drew studies of human anatomy for her final project.”

“let me guess,” wwx grins, placing a ring on his middle finger, “were you the hand section of her anatomy?”

lwj feels his ears burn for some reason. “yes. it’s how i got discovered.”

“discovered? like you got scouted for hand modelling based on a painting?” wwx pauses in his movements.

“nie huaisang was present at the final display at the university’s gallery, he’s fond of art.” lwj says.

wwx looks impressed, “just like that?”

“it is common for hand models.” lwj says.

“okay, so in your professional opinion, could i sell-“ wwx pauses, “could i be a hand model?”

he wiggles his fingers in front of lwj’s face.

“no.” lwj says.

“oh wow, blunt but effective.” wwx pouts

“you have callouses.” lwj explains, taking a closer look at wwx’s hands, “and dents from using your tools. things like cuticles, tanning and nails are fixable, but the others will remain permanent if you plan on still making jewellery and doing other strenuous work.”

when he looks up, wwx’s face is unreadable. thinking that he has offended the man, he draws back. “i apologise.”

that seems to snap wwx out of it, “don’t! you don’t need to apologise. it’s just– i don’t think anyone has ever answered a silly question of mine so sincerely. i’m still absorbing it.”

“i’m just being honest,” lwj says, “you have a good bone structure. you could have considered this line of work were it not for your existing business.”

wwx drops lwj’s hand and places both of his own on his cheeks, “i’m pretty sure that you’re messing with me but i can’t prove it so i’m gonna let it go.”

lwj suppresses a smile. maybe he doesn’t need the free hours on fridays.

[Part 3]

[chasholidays]

BOOTY DOCTOR

Wells is the one who actually wants to join a gym. His pitch to Clarke is that he needs a buddy to keep him accountable, so they should sign up together, and she about half-believes him, in that she thinks it’s about half true. He really does like having company, but he’s also Wells. In general, he is motivated and responsible and definitely would go to the gym on his own. He doesn’t actually need Clarke to go with him.

But Clarke was lagging on finding a gym for herself, making excuses about how she’d do it later, and Wells probably figured he should just find a gym and come up with a schedule for both of them. They were gym buddies in high school and then she didn’t go to the gym much in college; maybe he’s the missing piece of her fitness routine.

The place he picks is only a few blocks from their apartment, on her way home from work, which is another point in favor of the whole plan, and enough to tip her into actually agreeing. They meet up at the train station, go over to the gym together, and Wells does whatever magic he does to be secretly super ripped while Clarke watches trashy TV on the stair master.

It’s a good system, one that Clarke likes and feels no need to disrupt with anything drastic like group classes or making eye contact with anyone else in the gym for a good three months, right up until she first notices The Guy.

The Guy is showing someone in street clothes how a rowing machine works in front of Clarke’s machine, and she notices him slowly, his features coming into focus as she realizes he’s worth looking at.

He’s got nice arms, that’s the first thing that grabs her attention. Then she sees the curly hair, the freckles, the warm brown of his eyes and the curve of his smile. He’s hot, but also an employee, and as far as Clarke is concerned, that means he’s for looking only. No one wants to get hit on at work.

But when she leaves the stair master to go work on her arms, she sees The Guy behind the front desk, alone and looking a little bored, and she goes over before she can remind herself it’s a bad idea. It’s not like she’s going to be inappropriate. It’s fine.

He straightens and gives her a smile, which is even more to deal with full on. He’s wearing the standard A-to-Z Gym tank top with his name stitched onto the left breast–Bellamy–and his whole upper body looks even better up close and personal.

“Hi, can I help you?”

“I wanted to see a schedule?” she says, the words coming out as a question largely because she’s still coming up with them herself. “For classes?”

“Sure. Weekly or monthly?”

“What’s the difference?”

“We have a lot of weekly and bi-weekly programs, but there are also ones that happen every other week or just once a month. So–how regularly you’re coming and how often you want the class to be, pretty much.”

“I’ll look at the weekly.”

He pulls a laminated sheet out from under the counter and slides it over to her. Clarke’s only just met him, but she can tell he’s watching her, interested, like he’s waiting for something.

It doesn’t take her long to find it, but she makes herself keep going, gives it a few seconds before she flicks her eyes up to his. His face is straight, giving nothing away. “You guys have a lot of zumba.”

“Yeah, it’s really popular. We keep having to add new sessions.”

She scans the rest of the schedule, sees the same listing again on Saturday, just like Sunday: 9 am, BOOTY DOCTOR.

“Okay, fine,” she says, eyes flicking back up to Bellamy. “Booty doctor?”

His mouth twitches. “It’s a class.”

“Clearly.”

He cracks with a small huff of laughter. “Yeah, uh–that’s Roan, he’s the owner and founder. I’m pretty sure he decided to open a gym just so he could come up with his own curriculum. He does most of the zumba too, and the kickboxing.”

“So is it a clinic or what? Does he give you feedback on your booty? Honestly, it sounds kind of creepy.”

“It’s, uh–” He opens and shuts his mouth. “Honestly, it’s indescribable. If you can make it in on a weekend, it’s worth it just to see it.”

On the one hand, Clarke’s not sure about doing additional gym stuff just because there’s a cute guy who’s smiling at her and she wants to see more of him. On the other, if she’s going to do something to see more of a cute guy, there are so many worse things she could be doing. At least this is good for her. And Bellamy is telling her to come, which makes it minimally weird. It’s not like she’s stalking him.

“Are the sessions both the same?”

“Yeah. But I work Tuesday to Saturday,” he adds. “So if Saturday works for you, you can report back to me on how it went.”

It’s probably something he’s supposed to say, a way to get people to actually show up. The personal connection people have with trainers, or whatever. If she’s supposed to tell him how it went, she’s more motivated to come in the first place. It’s not personal, and she’s not reading into it.

Still, she smiles. “I could probably swing it. But be honest: is it worth being at the gym at 9 am on a Saturday?”

“Maybe not every week. But at least once, just to say you did it.”

“Can’t argue with that,” she says. “Sign me up.”

*

“I can’t believe you’re making me do this,” Wells grumbles.

“You don’t want to find out what Booty Doctor is? It was in all caps on the schedule. That’s got to mean something.”

“It’s nine am.”

“You always wake up at eight. You say getting up early on Saturday makes you feel productive.”

“Yeah, but I don’t work out this early.” He makes a face. “Booty Doctor? Really?”

“Apparently.”

“This guy from the gym better be really cute,” he grumbles, and Clarke pats him on the shoulder.

“We’ll get coffee after.”

Bellamy’s behind the desk again when they get there, chatting with a cute girl with long brown hair in a tight ponytail. He turns at the sound of the door and smiles, causing a rush of self-consciousness in Clarke’s chest. She’s been thinking about the encounter off and on for the last few days, ever since it happened, but it was probably routine for him. For all she knows, he doesn’t even remember. She might not have made an impression at all.

But he smiles at her as he scans her ID card. “Hey, welcome back. Ready for Booty Doctor?”

“I don’t know, you won’t tell me what it is.”

“I wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise.”

“So you’re actually kind of preventing me from getting ready for it.”

He smirks. “You’ll thank me later.”

“I’d say this is a bad sales pitch, but I guess you did actually convince me to do it, so–which room?”

She very pointedly doesn’t look at Wells as they go in and set up their mats. It’s decently busy, to her surprise, the space already full of people, mostly women in the twenty to seventy age range, which makes her wonder if “check out Booty Doctor” is a standard sales tactic for Bellamy.

Then again, all of these people can’t possibly be new, so whatever the class is, it’s good enough that they keep coming back. So even if Bellamy is the one bringing people in, whatever Booty Doctor is has to have some continuing appeal.

Possibly sex appeal. Maybe Roan is hot and–

“Okay, yeah, I’d probably wake up at eight on a Saturday to flirt with that guy,” Wells says, sly, and Clarke rolls her eyes.

“You didn’t even talk to him.”

“I didn’t want to interrupt you flirting with him. You seemed to have it under control. Well, as under control as you ever have it.”

Clarke’s about to protest, but the lights in the room dim suddenly, lasers streaming out of a fixture in the ceiling she hadn’t noticed, and some bass-heavy music starts to thump. She and Wells turn their attention to the front of the room, watching as a shirtless man in a white lab coat makes his entrance, waving his arms to encourage the already cheering audience.

“What is happening,” Wells murmurs, and Clarke shrugs, eyes still locked on the makeshift stage.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” the man booms. He’s wearing aviator sunglasses. “Greetings and salutations, happy Saturday. It’s been a long week without you.”

The music cuts out and the lights come up, and in regular lighting with the regular context of an exercise room, the man–the booty doctor, presumably–looks even weirder. Like he’s a character in a fighting video game, wearing a special outfit you have to beat the whole game to unlock.

“For our newcomers, welcome, I’m delighted to see you. I am Roan Iceman, PhD.” He deliberately drops his gaze, looking out at them over the top of his sunglasses with a smirk. If this was a TV show, his teeth would sparkle. With a sound effect. “The booty doctor.”

There’s another huge cheer from the crowd, like they’re at a concert, and Clarke doesn’t even know how Bellamy could have spoiled this for her. Even if he’d told her that there was a shirtless guy in a lab coat coming out to a light show, she wouldn’t have really been prepared. She probably would have thought he was fucking with her.

But in a way, the weirdest part is that after the introduction, the whole thing is pretty normal. Clarke hasn’t done a lot of workout classes, but it’s basically what she would have expected from TV, Roan leading them through a variety of exercise designed to give them better asses. The music selection is good and Roan is energetic and charismatic, and it’s even fun. He’s still wearing his sunglasses and lab coat, but she can live with that. In fact, by the time they’re winding down, she barely even notices them anymore.

Roan guides them through cool-down stretches and then asks, “So, how do we think we’re doing?”

“Not sure!” the crowd calls back, as one. It seems like a weird answer for a call-and-response, but Roan grins.

“Do you think we need to check?”

“Yes!”

He whips off his coat, throws it into the crowd for someone to catch, and turns around, bending over and presenting them with his own (admittedly flawless) ass. His shorts say BOOTY DOCTOR in glittery letters, one word on each cheek, and Clarke’s brain is still trying to catch up with that as the crowd goes wild.

“I hope to see some of you tomorrow!” Roan says, putting his sunglasses back on and waving. “Until next time, may the booty be with you!”

Clarke and Wells file out in silence, too stunned by what they’ve seen to offer commentary. Everyone else is apparently used to it, and they’re surrounded by happy chatter as they leave. No one else realizes Booty Doctor is bizarre and surreal. Maybe there are subliminal messages in the lasers that slowly convince people this is okay.

To her surprise, the first thing Wells says is, “Okay, so I’ll see you at home?”

“What?”

“I’m going to go grab Starbucks and go home.” He rolls his eyes significantly, and Clarke sees Bellamy wiping down some of the weight machines. “See you later.”

She does want to do a postmortem on the whole thing with him later too, but privacy for checking in with Bellamy is appreciated. And, honestly, she wouldn’t want to be Wells, awkwardly hovering, either. He’s too good a wing man to participate in the conversation, so he would have just been awkward.

“I don’t think you could have prepared me for that if you tried,” she tells Bellamy, and he jumps, looks up at her with a surprised grin.

“Yeah, it needs to be seen to be believed.”

“I was wondering why he was wearing the lab coat if the butt was such a focus, so it was nice that he had the big reveal at the end.”

“He said that if he showed his ass right away, there wouldn’t be any reason for people to stay. You have to make them wait for it.”

“Obviously. Does he get the lab coats back, or is that a souvenir for whoever catches it?”

“If you catch it, it’s yours to keep. He has one of those Amazon buttons to buy more of them whenever he needs to.”

“Wow.” She considers, trying to remember her other objections, not wanting the conversation to end yet. There was so much to process, it’s hard to bring it back. Especially when she’s actually pretty worn out. “I also would have expected the booty doctor to be an MD, not a PhD, but I guess I don’t actually know what degree you get to become a booty doctor.”

“Women’s and Gender Studies,” Bellamy supplies, straightfaced. “From Rutgers.”

Her jaw actually drops. “He’s a real doctor?”

“Rich people,” he says, with a shrug. “He got his degree and then decided he wanted to start a gym. I know Dr. Roan Iceman, PhD sounds like a porn name, but he is a real doctor somehow.”

“And a good one,” says a voice, and Clarke turns to see the man himself, still shirtless, still in the same pair of shorts. “If I do say so myself. I don’t believe we’ve met.”

“Clarke,” she says, offering her hand. Once they’ve shaken, she offers it to Bellamy too. “We haven’t actually introduced ourselves either.”

“Yeah, but my name is on my shirt and your name is on your ID.” He shakes, and then points to his breast. “Bellamy.”

“I thought it might be creepy if I knew that.”

“I sent you into Booty Doctor unprepared, so–”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” says Roan. “What did you think?”

Bellamy looks relaxed and easy, so Clarke figures she can be honest. Assuming she figures out what honesty is; she’s still not actually sure what she witnessed in there. A normal gym class sandwiched between surreal stage shows, maybe.

“It was something,” she says, and Bellamy snorts softly.

“And will you be back tomorrow?”

Bellamy works Tuesday to Saturday, and even leaving that aside, Clarke’s not really sure she could handle two sessions with the booty doctor in a single week. Even one was pushing it.

“Not tomorrow,” she says, smiling. “But next week for sure.”

*

The Saturday Booty Doctor class is easy to slot into her schedule, even if waking up that early is something of a challenge. It’s a decent workout on top of being genuinely fun, and after it’s over Clarke gets to go and report back to Bellamy, who continues to be cute and charming and generally appealing, but also continues to be a paid employee of the gym she attends, which is one of those things that can be hard to navigate. Bellamy is the assistant manager, a kind of jack-of-all-trades who works with clients both individually and in groups, so Clarke has seen him interacting with basically everyone. He’s unfailingly friendly and charming, patient and happy to talk to anyone, and while Clarke can tell herself he smiles at her wider, looks happier to see her, seeks her out more, she second-guesses it every time.

Wells tells her that too, of course, but he’s biased too.

“I’ve definitely seen him checking you out,” he says, as they’re walking home on Thursday.

“Well, I do wear low-cut tank tops to the gym,” she says. “Just because he’s looking, it doesn’t mean he’s interested. I check you out at the gym too.”

He flexes for her, and she whistles appreciatively. But he sobers quickly. “Look, I’m just trying to help. I know you like him.”

“I barely know him,” she protests. “I think he’s hot and I like talking to him. It’s not that deep.”

“It doesn’t have to be that deep,” Wells shoots back. “I’m not telling you to marry the guy, but the requirements to ask someone out are pretty low. I know you haven’t really been into the dating thing since Lexa,” he adds, before she can protest. “I get it. But if you just ask if he wants to get a drink sometime? That’s so safe. He can just say no and it’s done. You can still talk.”

“Isn’t don’t hit on service professionals at work a pretty standard guideline?”

“Asking him if he wants to get a drink and backing off if he says no is probably fine. You don’t have to, but I think he wouldn’t mind. And I think it would be good for you.”

“I’ll think about it,” she says. “But I think he’s just being professional.”

“Well, I think he wants to make out with you. And not just because of how much cleavage your workout shirts show off. And I know that if you didn’t have the he’s working excuse to fall back on, you would have come up with another reason you couldn’t possibly make a move, so I’m not buying it.”

That one hits home. He wasn’t wrong about her lack of interest in dating since Lexa, and part of her is aware that if Bellamy did express overt interest, she’d panic a little. And, okay, she’d probably get over it and go out with him. But she’d panic first.

“Yeah, you’re probably right.”

He claps her on the shoulder. “And that’s why I’m not going to the Booty Doctor classes with you anymore.”

“Wait, what?”

“If you want to go hang out with the guy, you’re going solo. You can flirt with him without me having to make excuses to take off. And I can have my Saturday mornings back.”

It’s completely reasonable even leaving aside the Bellamy part; Wells doesn’t have to come to her weird fitness class, and he deserves to do whatever he wants during the period from nine to ten on Saturday mornings. She can go to Booty Doctor alone.

Still, on Saturday, when she opens the door to the gym by herself for the first time, she can’t help a surge of nervousness, against all logic and reason. She’s never been here alone before. She’s always had backup.

Bellamy’s not at the desk, to her surprise, but Octavia is, looking half-awake and mildly surly. But when she sees Clarke, she straightens and smiles, just like her brother would.

“Where’s Bellamy?” Clarke asks. She hasn’t gotten close to Octavia like she has Bellamy, but they’re friendly enough.

“Assistant manager duties. I’m sure you’ll see him later.” She gives Clarke an odd smile. “Have fun in class!”

Since it’s Saturday, she just changed at home and can go straight in without hitting the locker room first. With a couple months of classes under her belt, she’s gotten familiar with some of the other participants, even has a group of older women she usually sets up with. As usual, they’re already there, stretching, and Clarke joins them with a round of greetings.

“Where’s Wells?” asks Ingrid, frowning.

“He decided nine is too early for him. I guess the booty isn’t a big enough draw.”

“Now that’s a shame. But the two of you don’t have to do everything together. Once you’ve been together a bit longer–”

Clarke holds up her hand. “We’re still not dating. Best friends.”

“The best relationships start with friendship,” says Diane. “It makes for a solid foundation.”

There’s no real point in fighting them on this, so Clarke just smiles, tries not to think about Wells saying the same stuff about Bellamy. It’s so easy for people on the outside to be sure they know exactly what they’re seeing, to put together their own narratives based on bias.

Clarke herself is, of course, biased toward thinking she doesn’t have a chance. But at least she recognizes it’s a bias.

The lights dim and the show starts up, still bizarre even after a couple months of attendance. She’ll get used to it eventually, but there’s a part of her that can’t help hoping she never will, that the Booty Doctor experience will always be this fucking weird.

She notices the difference right from the start, from the first flash of the white lab coat. Roan is fluid and confident in his movements, and the person taking the stage now is lagging, hesitant. The hair is different, the build, the whole–

She figures it out a split second before the voice booms, “Ladies and gentlemen!” and it’s Bellamy.

Bellamy’s assistant manager duties are being the booty doctor.

The rest of the crowd has noticed something is up by now, although Clarke doesn’t have a good sense of how many know it’s Bellamy versus just not being Roan. Murmurs race through the class, and she whispers, “Sounds like Bellamy,” before anyone else in her vicinity can speak up.

“I’m not Roan,” he confirms, smile crooked, a much less bombastic opening than usual. He recovers with a smooth, “But I am very happy to be here!” that Clarke is sure is a complete and total lie.

The lights come up as usual, and there he is. He’s clean shaven, face free of the usual dusting of stubble, and wearing, well, the traditional garb of the booty doctor: white lab coat, no shirt, tiny shorts that cling and, presumably, say BOOTY DOCTOR in glitter on the ass.

It’s not hot, exactly. Obviously, the all the component parts are hot: Bellamy looks great, the lab coat somehow works on him, his chest is amazing, and the bulge at the front of the shorts is distractingly there. But the full image is mostly just–too much. Which is maybe good; she’s just as glad Bellamy’s booty medicine isn’t a kink for her.

“So, as always welcome to our newcomers,” he says. “And to our regulars, sorry for the change in plans. As you know, I am not the booty doctor.”

He seems to be going for a kind of aww shucks persona that draws on his understandable self-consciousness about the whole situation, and it seems to be working. The crowd cheers, and someone calls, “We still love you!”

He laughs. “Thanks. I’m, uh–Bellamy Blake, I guess I’ll be your booty nurse for the day. Roan came down with something, so he’s going to be out for a few days, but hopefully you’ll be back on schedule next week.”

“Where are your sunglasses?” Clarke calls, and he spares her a glare. She gives him a thumbs up.

“You need a PhD for the sunglasses. Okay, are we ready to work our butts off?”

It hadn’t really occurred to Clarke that she’d never seen Bellamy actually instructing anyone before. Or, well, she’d seen it, but from a distance, watching him help someone figure out how to use weight machines or demonstrating a yoga position. She’s never been in one of his classes or been close enough to really know what he was like, as a fitness instructor. And of course she wouldn’t have expected him to be bad at it, but she wasn’t entirely prepared for how good he is. Not that Roan is bad either, of course–he’s probably the best booty doctor there is–but Bellamy has a completely different energy, less suited to this particular medium, but easy to imagine in other contexts. He must be great one-on-one and with kids, and it almost feels like he’s wasted here in the gym.

Here, especially. He was never meant to be a booty doctor. He’s got his own skill set.

He leads the group through the cool-down exercises and then straightens, smile nervous. He’s been hiding his discomfort pretty well during the actual exercises, but now it’s back, in every inch of his frame as he watches the crowd. “Okay, so, that’s it for me this week–”

Clarke doesn’t protest, but everyone else does, an immediate wave of discontent rolling through the crowd. Someone calls, “Show us the booty!” and Bellamy ducks his head on a laugh.

“Okay, but let’s all keep in mind that I’m not a professional booty doctor, okay? Be nice.”

He makes eye contact with Clarke before he shrugs off the coat and tosses it towards her, and she moves forward as if in slow motion, snatching the coat out of the air like no one else is even there.

As soon as that’s done, the inherent ridiculousness of the situation sinks in and she remembers that she’s holding a cheap, sweaty lab coat that Roan bought in bulk off of Amazon, but whatever. She’s being supportive.

She folds the coat as Bellamy spins to display his own perfect ass to the cheering crowd. When he comes back up, he’s bright red, adorably sheepish. “Thanks again for having me. Let’s all hope Roan is back next week.”

As always, a handful of people want to talk to the instructor, and this time it’s a much larger handful, people presumably wanting to tell Bellamy he did well and thank him for filling in. Clarke doesn’t feel any need to join them, just slips out and heads back to the front desk.

Octavia grins. “How did he do?”

“Surprisingly well. He hated it, but he did fine.”

“And he took the coat off,” she says, jerking her chin to the lab coat in Clarke’s arms. “I thought he was trying to get out of that.”

“You’ve seen the Booty Doctor crowd, they weren’t going to let him get away with not showing off his ass.”

Octavia sighs. “We’ve got Lincoln doing it tomorrow, I’m going to see if I can sneak in to watch at least some. If I say it’s for moral support, he probably won’t notice I just want to check him out.”

“Is Roan okay?” Clarke asks. “How long is he going to be out?”

“Not for as long as he should be,” Octavia says, with a roll of her eyes. “He’s not, like, dying or anything, just a stomach bug. He still tried to come in, but Bell pointed out that the booty doctor projectile vomiting all over his class would really jeopardize his reputation as a medical professional.”

“And if the booty doctor doesn’t have his integrity, he’s got nothing.”

Octavia grins. “You get it. Where’s your boyfriend, by the way?”

“My boyfriend?”

“The guy you always come in with.”

“That’s my best friend,” she says, frowning. “Does everyone here think I’m dating Wells?”

Octavia shrugs. “You guys always come in together, you usually leave together, you seem close. I figured it could go either way, so I was definitely fishing.”

“Single and bisexual,” says Clarke, going for casual. Given Octavia was just talking about going to check out Lincoln, it seems unlikely she’s fishing for herself, but Clarke wouldn’t mind checking Lincoln out either, so they could both be single and bisexual. And there’s always the possibility that she was hoping Wells was single, not Clarke.

Or she could be fishing for her brother. That’s a possibility.

“Wells is too,” she adds, just in case.

Octavia smirks. “Bell too. Big bisexual party.”

“Title of your sex tape,” Bellamy says, absent. He’s pulled on his usual tank top and workout pants, looking more like himself, and Clarke’s stomach flops with fondness. “What are we talking about?”

“How Clarke doesn’t actually have a boyfriend.”

He frowns. “What about Wells?”

“We’ve been best friends since birth,” says Clarke. “And not in that secretly-in-love way. Just regular friends.”

“Oh,” he says. “Good to know. Is he okay? I saw he wasn’t in class.”

“He decided to quit Booty Doctor and get his Saturdays back. He’s going to be so sad he missed this.”

“I just hope no one filmed it.”

“You did a great job,” she says, and his expression softens into relief.

“Yeah?”

“I don’t think booty doctor is the right gimmick for you,” she admits. “But you’re a great instructor and everyone had fun.” She holds up the coat. “Did you want this? To remember your big debut?”

“You can just throw it away,” he says, but there’s some lingering tension in his voice that Clarke doesn’t like.

“If you don’t want it, I’m keeping it. I’ve never caught it before.”

He ducks his head. “It’s all yours.”

It’s a moment where Clarke gets to make up her mind, where she can either let this go or try, put some minimal amount of effort in. She likes this guy, likes him as more than just a pretty face and a nice smile, and this won’t be her only chance to make a move, but this is natural, easy. And she can still pull back, if it seems to be going wrong.

But it might go right.

“Did you really think Wells was my boyfriend?”

“I thought he might be.”

“He’s not.”

“And you’re single.”

“Yup. Your sister said you are too.”

“Yeah.” He bites the corner of his mouth. “You know, I get that a lot of people who come to the Booty Doctor class want to check Roan out, but I never got it. Is it actually hot?”

“It’s probably exciting. Why?”

“I don’t know if being the booty doctor is actually something I can use as a pick-up line.”

“You’re not the booty doctor, you’re the booty nurse.”

He cocks his head. “Does that make a difference?”

“In what?”

“Picking people up. Picking you up,” he adds, before she can even start to worry. “Specifically.”

“It’s not a deal breaker,” she says, smile growing on her face. “But it’s not a turn-on or anything.”

“That’s probably good, honestly.” He rubs the back of his neck. “So, uh–are you doing anything tonight? I get off at three, which is kind of early for dates, but–”

She leans up, gives him a quick peck on the lips. “I’ll be back at three.”

A pleased little smile plays on his mouth. “Cool,” he says. “See you then.”

*

“Wasn’t the whole point of going to Booty Doctor to flirt with Bellamy?” Wells asks the next week. He’s awake, but still in his pajamas, and Clarke can admit she’s a little jealous of him for not having to get dressed and leave the house yet.

On the other hand, she’s going to leave the house and see her boyfriend. That’s pretty great.

“And?” she asks, filling up her water bottle.

“And now that you’re dating him, you don’t need excuses to see him anymore. You could just stop going to Booty Doctor and sleep in on Saturdays.”

“But then if Bellamy ever subs in again, I’ll miss it. Wasn’t going to the gym your idea? Shouldn’t you be proud of me for going more? I’m setting a good example.”

Wells snorts. “Shouldn’t you be buying me expensive presents to thank me for getting you to sign up for a gym and helping you get a boyfriend?”

“I probably should.” She kisses him on the forehead as she passes behind the couch. “Thanks, you’re the best. You sure you don’t want to come?”

“Definitely not. But have fun.”

“Always do,” she says, and somehow it’s actually true. She gets to kiss her boyfriend, attend a ridiculous gym class, and she still has time to go home, shower, and get some adult shit done before she picks Bellamy up after work to hang out.

She’s really got this physical fitness thing worked out, if she does say so herself. Dr. Roan Iceman, PhD, might be onto something.

[dmtikey]

Tyquan Robinson’s Forbes #Under30 Pitch

After graduating from the private educational institution, ASA College of Excellence, with an Associate's in Occupational Studies for Business Administration-Accounting during the summer of 2017, Tyquan “Tikey” Robinson has quickly elevated into one of the most innovative and crafty individuals in the business world of New York City. At the age of 22, Robinson is projected to become one of the youngest individuals to join the Forbes: Under 30 list in the Social Entrepreneurs category. His unique approach to business, along with his rare resources has shaped him as a future Hip-Hop mogul in the making.

With his hands in several sports, media and entertainment ventures, he has created a sense of community in not just his hometown of Far Rockaway, NY, but also other communities throughout the Queens and Kings counties of New York City.

Here are all of the ways Robinson has developed, and is currently developing his personal and business assets.

Trooper Tikey

Even though Robinson elevated from his humble beginnings of producing music during high school, it is the least of his concern and grossing income. Hip-Hop artists do not make as much money as they did off of music at one point in time — but Robinson has taken a unique approach to the music business world; with the brand of Trooper Tikey, currently evolving him into the super-producer he is today. Trooper Tikey has made ends meet as an entertainer and independent artist, taking advantage of social media marketing tools through popular social networking apps, such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram; whilst distributing music through free online music streaming platforms like Soundcloud, Spinrilla and Bandcamp. The music content is what turned heads and created several networking opportunities for the young entertainer, landing him a freelance job as a record producer and studio engineer at the professional recording studio Signature Soundz, and has also gotten him numerous event hosting gigs. His musical brand has also landed him joint ventures with the music distribution company Distrokid, where he receives 100% of his music royalties, with an endorsement from the music streaming company Spotify. He has also partnered with a non-profit social justice organization The Rockaway Youth Task Force, for two promotional music videos to spread awareness about the organization in the past. Robinson stated that he has been making music money off of music since the age of 18, by engineering recording sessions from his home with a $250 recording set his mother bought him for his 16th birthday. He claims that the recording set is still his most important asset, even upgrading it with an expensive $300 Blue brand microphone he received as a gift from his former studio engineer and mentor Castro. Robinson has since used musical talents as his main source of leverage in urban culture, and the Hip-Hop business world.

Degenerate Entertainment/Young Kings Entertainment

In the fall season of 2015, Robinson achieved his high school dreams of starting his own record label during his first semester of college. He was given an assignment in his Introduction to Business class, which required him to create a business plan in the field of business he would like to pursue, which just so happened to be the music industry. Robinson researched and gained inspiration from some of the most successful "artist owned" music brands such as Shawn "Jay Z" Carter's Roc Nation and Aubrey "Drake" Graham's OVO Sound. He admired how the two companies were able to become brands bigger than "just music", and how they were able to adapt to today's music industry so efficiently. Even though Robinson felt these companies were flawless, he felt like there could be a way to be more innovative and up-to-date with today's music industry.

Robinson later invested into the music distribution company Distrokid, after reading about the company in a Forbes article during his business class. He was curious to learn how the company was able to "cut out the middle man" and ship music from independent artists straight to any music streaming platform in a matter of hours, while promising artists 100% of the music royalties they make off of streaming. Robinson tested the service out by paying a small fee of $19.99 per year, which guaranteed unlimited uploads to any online music stores and streaming platforms of his choice for one artist, along with monthly earnings. Robinson chose himself to market as the artist, releasing his single Watch Ya Back under the stage name Trooper Tikey, he only earned $1.09 in a span of a month, but was amazed to see how simple and efficient the service was. He later partnered with his best friend from high school, and frequent music collaborator Giovanni “KingYungGio” Gates to upgrade to the Musician Plus package for $35.99 per year, to form a joint venture and music collective by the name of DMYK, combining Robinson's Degenerate Militia brand and Gates' Young Kings brand for one big duo brand. The two released several singles under their separately operated independent record labels Degenerate Entertainment and Young Kings Entertainment.

Robinson and Gates currently operate as independent record labels and receive 100% of their music royalties every month for the money they make off of their music streams and music store purchases. They've have recently upgraded to the 10 artist record label package for $139.99 per year, where they can sign artists and offer them distribution deals through the online service, which handles distribution for both labels. The two have gone on to have sponsored pages on Spotify and Apple Music and curated playlists to help promote other independent artists on the same mission. At the current ages of 22 and 20, the two are bound to become future music moguls with the path they are on, along with the pace they are operating at.

The SBC Network

Even though Robinson has elevated tremendously in the music world, his prior passion for sports still holds a special place in his heart. After graduating high school in 2014, Robinson began to volunteer as a photographer and videographer for his high school's football team, which he participated in junior varsity and varsity for during all four years of his education at the school. He believed that the lack of media outlets, along with bad grades was the main causes of the drought of student-athletes from the educational campus not being scouted and/or recruited by top-tier schools. Student-athletes from the campus began to gravitate towards this philosophy, and encouraged Robinson to continue his efforts. During these operations, Robinson was able to create a Facebook page with content such as in-game photos and highlights; he even shot and directed a campaign video to help with a fundraiser for the football team, which was able to support the team with new equipment and alternative jerseys with names on the back; something that the campus was not able to accomplish in over a decade. One senior also went on to commit to Division I school, Michigan State University, and later went on to play football for the institution. Robinson and the school saw the efforts as a success and continued to increase media efforts throughout the campus.

One year later, Robinson took on the position as an after school tutor for one of the high schools located in the Far Rockaway Educational Campus building, by the name of Queens High School for Information, Research and Technology. After realizing that a majority of the students lacked motivational factors, he began offering open gym time for basketball in exchange for academic efforts. The practice became successful, and he decided to enter some of the students a basketball tournament at a local community center in the neighborhood ran by the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation for their Jr. Knicks program. He later unintentionally volunteered as the coach for the team, which didn't go as planned, with the team losing every game, due to his lack of experience and knowledge for the game of basketball, but he was inspired by the potential of some of the players, and saw a bright future in developing student-athletes in both, football and basketball.  

In the fall of 2017, Robinson developed The SBC Network brand, which was originally formed to increase the media exposure of student-athletes.  He began to produce several sports-related media content through his personal social media platforms for various high school, college and little league sports teams. Various student-athletes from all over the city began to gravitate towards the brand, and Robinson saw it as an opportunity to officially tap into the sports business. He took tips from Shawn "Jay Z" Carter's Roc Nation Sports division and began to hand-pick specific athletes from all different levels of competition to promote, later offering verbal contracts to athletes looking to find alternative routes for their passion of sports. He produced several sports-related media content through his personal social media platforms for athletes who corresponded with his vision, while being an independent contractor for athletes who just needed temporary services, but did not want to participate in the company's efforts. He later took on jobs to participate as an temporary employee for several NYC based basketball events sponsored by online sports broadcasting company, Baller TV.

Robinson soon expressed his interest to form his own sports teams. He formed an AAU basketball team, called Team Fame, in collaboration with his cousin Tariq Robinson, to prepare student-athletes for high school, collegiate and pro level basketball. He recently showed support for Lavar Ball and the Big Baller Brand's Junior Basketball Association, encouraging his AAU participates to chase their dreams as early as they can, even if it doesn't involve playing in college. Robinson also advocated to bring a semi-pro football team by the name of the Rockaway Neptunes to his hometown of Far Rockaway. He received co-signs from important stakeholders such as City Council member Donovan Richards of the District 31 community, who Robinson was a former unpaid intern of, and members of the community who believed a sports team could bring pride, spirit, traffic and profit to the city of Far Rockaway. The team is expected to have their inaugural season in the American 7s Football League, in the Spring of 2020. Robinson's sports ventures are guaranteed to be some of his biggest entities in years to come.

Other Ventures

Robinson does not seem like he plans on slowing down anytime soon, and considering his somewhat youthful age of 22, he is not expected to. He participated in several other business projects and partnerships that have also helped solidify his title as a future mogul.

• Cloudgunk

Robinson has endorsed the online cloud storage company Cloudgunk. They have recently released a commercial featuring his single "Clouds" and currently have a commercial starring Robinson in the works.

• Distrokid

Robinson has partnered with Distrokid to provide distribution deals for up and coming independent artists through his Degenerate Entertainment label.

He has reportedly already signed five artists to the label, which consists of rapper/producer Lil Mizfit, his half-brother/rapper LA Rio, cousin/rapper GP Dopeboy, and two female artists, a rapper by the name of Ressie Monae and singer by the name of Lexee.

• Sony

Robinson has gravitated towards Sony, due to the influence of the company on his life, owning manufactured Sony products such as the PlayStation 4, a pair of Sony studio headphones and a Sony credit card. He currently holds stocks in the company.

• Nissan

Robinson recently financed a Nissan Altima towards the end of March 2018, right before his 22nd birthday. He has since supported the company fully and promotes it as the perfect first car. He plans on investing stocks in the company soon and plans on becoming a brand ambassador for the company.

• The Child Center of New York

In 2015, Robinson began working as an employee for the non-profit agency The Child Center of New York, where he operates as a student mentor for Queens HS for Information, Research & Technology, which is the high school he graduated from. It is currently his biggest and most reliable income, helping him rake it $25,000 annually. His contract was renewed for another three years in the beginning of 2018.

[calorieworkouts]

How Going to Fancy Fitness Classes Actually Made Me Lazier

I have actually concerned enjoy functioning out in the morning.

Even though I have to physically drag myself from bed and also set three alarm systems so I don't snooze via my wake-up phone call, working out initial point in the morning establishes me up for a better, a lot more productive day.

My exercise always varies: In some cases I run solo outside, various other days, I fulfill my exercise group for a cost-free boot camp in the park. In the summertime, I regularly swim laps at an entertainment outdoor swimming pool. And less often, I'll take a drop-in elegant fitness course at a regional studio, hesitantly paying the (horrendous) rate and packaging a bag the evening before, so I could bath as well as going straight to work afterward.

I follow this exercise "strategy" 4 seasons a year, as well as with the exception of torrential rainstorms and blizzard-level snowfalls, I attempt not to allow the elements outside dictate my timetable. An 8-mile run is merely as far in bad weather condition as it is on a bright day. And also as an individual that is frequently educating for the following marathon or triathlon, I'm all too aware of the reality that a training strategy awaits no person.

This strategy was functioning out merely fine-- until I enrolled in a two-week introductory duration of ClassPass a few months ago.

My New Fitness Infatuation

If you haven't become aware of ClassPass, it's a popular company that allows clients in various cities to participate in a selection of health and fitness classes at boutique studios and also mega-chain gyms for a fixed charge monthly. This all-encompassing service is a dream become a reality for physical fitness fans like myself-- that is, obviously, if you could manage it.

Costs vary each city, but in New york city, where boutique fitness workshops generally charge around $30 per class, the $125 monthly membership charge ratings you a significant bargain, as long as you drop right into enough health clubs every month. The rate is still high. So you can most likely picture my exhilaration when I found an offer for two weeks of the membership company for merely $20. I hopped at the chance to join as well as started registering for courses instantly.

The fabulous I took was The Ride, a Spinning class at Grind health club. Afterwards, I sprinted my way with rate job periods in the front row of the treadmill workshop Mile High Run Club. I hustled hard on a row machine in Brick's B|X workout and also climbed mountains on a stationary bicycle (well, at the very least they felt like hills) at Revolve interior biking studio.

The alternatives were unlimited, I remained in cardio heaven. A good friend had actually additionally signed up for the deal, so we would excitedly question over which studio to attempt following. Possibly a HIIT workout at The Fhitting Space? A competitive ride at SWERVE? Or probably we should inspect out Mile High Run Club's marathon class, 'The Distance?'

The First Sign of Trouble

As impressive as this newfound health and fitness splendor was, I need to admit: I was getting seriously spoiled. Towels, water, and glossy new workout devices was offered to me at an unprecedented rate. Flywheel studios even provide cost-free apples and bananas. (Yes, truly. Free healthy snacks!). Running the home of shower in between my workout and also my day was no more a concern, as all the studios I picked had showers finish with expensive shampoos and rich body lotions I wouldn't usually alleviate myself to. All of a sudden, I scoffed at working out in the rainfall, sleet, as well as snow. I had the safe house of a dry, warm studio readily available with simply a few touches in the app on my phone. Forgot a hair connection? Psh. Of course the workshop had an excess for me to select from, not to discuss antiperspirant, hairpin, as well as breath mints!

Before I knew it, the second week of my trial began, and it became significantly hard to publication classes. I discovered myself staying late at the workplace, scrolling with the site to see if any type of open courses captured my eye. When nothing did-- or everything I had an interest in was scheduled-- I hesitated to go back to my normal program of running outside or going to the park for a quick exercise utilizing a Do It Yourself routine for motivation.

To be clear, by hesitant, I suggest I hesitated as well as unmotivated. Plus I had banked on exercising inside, so I really did not bring the extra layers necessary to survive in the cold.

In a word, I came to be soft-- at the very least, when it concerned my physical fitness routine. My original mind-over-matter, no-excuses perspective had actually been crushed by the promise of pricey equipment, instructors that held me answerable, and also, pathetic as it appears, extravagant shampoos. The concept of going with an impromptu run prior to work or going outside when the weather report showed an opportunity of rainfall became less and also much less appealing to me in a devastatingly brief time period.

My motivation went from 100 percent personal willpower to being reduced to the worry of paying a charge if I didn't appear to class.

That's right-- the $20 offer had not been a final-price kind of deal. There's a cancellation fee if you terminate a class within 12 one hours (typical with a lot of workshops). One early morning, I was so tired from my speed dating experience with physical fitness studios that I rested via a hr of health club time I 'd enrolled in, as well as $15 was taken straight out of my represent being a no-show. Oops.

How I Got Over It

Picture: The Rise NYC

Now, allow's be clear: ClassPass, or any kind of membership-based physical fitness company, like FitReserve, is still a fantastic idea for individuals that like attempting out new workouts and also have the moment to book their favorites the moment new classes open up. However in my encounter, the membership-- also one as short as 2 weeks-- caused my inspiration to dwindle and my commitment to waver.

Signing for a class and also showing up is easy, but making your very own workout (whether it's a running course or bootcamp-style circuit), dressing appropriately, as well as getting it done without a trainer barking orders at you is hard-- and also One Hundred Percent around you.

Waiting on a course that I desired to attempt to open made me fail to remember that exercising anywhere, also if it was for just 15 minutes on my living area floor, was way far better than avoiding a sweat session completely because the time, temperature, or shower situation was undesirable.

That's not to claim I would certainly never ever go back. Instead of stopping my ClassPass subscription cold weather turkey, I chose to downgrade to just five classes a month for a portion of the cost. In this way, I could still alleviate myself to an elegant workout( as well as delight in some of the luxe additionals )as soon as a week without the option to wuss out on my other workouts.

While going back to outside and also on-my-own exercises in the weeks that complied with was a little tough( there were several snooze button hits, irritable moans, and also requests for responsibility messages from my exercise buddies ), I was ultimately able to obtain back to my initial program.

If anything, my brief fling with elegant fitness courses instructed me that motivation shouldn't originate from needing to pay aggravating charges or reaching work out using modern devices. It needs to originate from within me, for me-- to accomplish my objectives, to run a faster race time, to obtain stronger, to really feel even more positive-- and most significantly, to do something that I like, for no one else but myself.

[real-life-pine-tree]

Counterpart Cousins: Dance Lessons - Part 1 (1/?)

When Yuto discovers his connections to the Sakaki family, his once-bleak and lonely life becomes a lot brighter. A series of Yuya and Yuto familial fluff oneshots based on the Arc-V Aftermath series. Co-written with @violetganache42.

One day, in the newly-revived Heartland section of the mashed-up unnamed city, Yuto Osaku was working out in the Obsidians' gymnasium. Ever since he and his counterparts split, he began a new chapter in his life; he started working for the family's company ObsidianCorp and has been living with his girlfriend Lulu and her older brother Shay. After accepting the job offer of being in charge of the company's new dueling branch and getting hired right off the bat, he has been adjusting to living in a high-class environment since he was born a middle-class civilian.

Today, he wasn't at work today because his schedule assigned him not to work on weekends, so what better way to spend the hour by gaining some muscle. He obviously isn't buff, but dealing with the Invasion helped make him a bit buffer than all of his counterparts combined. Lulu doesn't mind though; it was one of the many qualities she admired about him.

As he was doing some push-ups, a knock on the door was heard and a robotic voice wanted to tell him something important. "MASTER Y-YUTO, THERE IS A PHONE CALL FOR YOU."

"Who is it, Orbital?" Yuto asked.

"YUYA SAKAKI," Orbital answered.

Yuya? Why would his cousin want to talk to him? Was there something important he wants to discuss? "You can come in," Yuto said as he completed his last push-up and got back on his feet.

"YOU HAVE COMPLETE 32 PUSH-UPS," a robotic coach stated. "THAT IS A NEW RECORD."

"Thanks for the update," Yuto said after taking a sip from a bottle of water. "What's my update for weight lifting?"

"YOUR CURRENT WEIGHT LIFTING RECORD IS 3 POUNDS," the robotic coach answered.

Yuto chuckled. "I can do better than that," he said, wanting to beat Shay's record. "Add two more pounds."

"VERY WELL, MASTER YUTO," the robotic coach replied.

As the door opened, Orbital wheeled towards Yuto to hand him the phone as the robotic coach went over to where the weights were to make the total weights five pounds. "Hey Yuya," Yuto spoke into the phone. "What do you-"

"TEACH ME HOW TO DANCE!"

The sudden outburst scared Yuto, causing him to almost drop the phone. As he managed to catch it before it fell onto the floor, he wondered what was wrong with Yuya and why on earth he wanted to learn how to dance. Whatever the reason, he sounded pretty nervous.

"Calm down," Yuto said. "What's going on?"

"It's Zuzu!" Yuya exclaimed, still panicking. "There's a school dance in a few days, I asked her out, and I realized I DON'T KNOW HOW TO DANCE!"

Yuto chuckled. "Yuya, you already know how to dance," he pointed out.

"Not with a girl!" Yuya cried out. "I need you to teach me how to dance like how you dance with Lulu!"

The frantic teen remembered his cousin telling him and their counterparts one morning about the Heartland Duel School dance and he has a good visual of how romantic it must have been for the couple. The only problem is he wasn't there to fully experience it first hand to get an understanding of how to formally dance because he didn't knew about the other dimensions at the time.

"So you want me to teach you how to formally dance?" Yuto asked.

"Yes!" Yuya exclaimed.

"Alright," Yuto said. "I'll come over."

"Thank you!" Yuya said.

Yuto hung out the phone and gave it back to the head robo-butler. "Orbital, ask Mr. Obsidian if you could borrow the family car," the eggplant-haired teen ordered. "I need you to escort me to the Sakaki residence."

"BUT MASTER Y-YUTO, YOU ARE NOT SUITED FOR VISITING YUYA SAKAKI," Orbital pointed out.

Yuto looked down at the gym clothes he was wearing to see they were drenched in sweat. It seemed Orbital was right about him being unsuitable for a visit. He then altered the instructions to ask Kameron about borrowing the family car to see Yuya while he takes a shower. Once he was done, he'll know if was given permission to do so by then. The robo-butler understood the declaration loud and clear as the two departed through the gym doors.

"SHOULD I PROVIDE YOU WITH FRESH CLOTHES FOR YOU TO WEAR AFTER YOUR SHOWER?" Orbital asked.

"Of course," Yuto answered. "Go get one of my more casual outfits."

"YES SIR, MASTER Y-YUTO," Orbital replied with a salute.

As the two headed upstairs, they parted ways: Yuto going to Lulu's private bathroom to shower and Orbital searching the house where Kameron was and where he last saw him.

Lulu was experimenting with new ways to style her long hair when Yuto entered her bedroom. "Hey there, handsome," she casually said, her gaze never leaving her vanity mirror. "How was your workout?"

"I had to end it early," Yuto answered, blushing slightly at his girlfriend's compliment. "Yuya wants me to teach him how to dance."

"How cute!" Lulu remarked as she started brushing her hair. "You could use some cousin bonding."

Yuto knew what she meant by "cousin bonding". The Sakakis were the only people left in his family tree: Yusho, Yoko, Yuya, and Sora (who was adopted by Yoko not long ago). He still couldn't believe that he had been going against the Fusion Dimension alongside his own cousin all this time and didn't realize it until after he got the job of running the dueling branch at ObsidianCorp. It also explained why Yoko reminded him of his mother Lono. This new connection, without a doubt, changed his life and he actually did want to find the time to bond with Yuya now that the Interdimensional War was over. Since he doesn't have work, why not today?

"You're actually right," Yuto told Lulu. "I spent a lot of time with Yuya, but I never really got to know him. Maybe some bonding could help." He walked over to Lulu to kiss her cheek. "By the way, you look cute with pigtails."

Lulu giggled and thanked her boyfriend for the compliment. The last time she wore pigtails was before Lono's funeral and when he was practicing his Skill for the Team Duel Tournament. It was one of the many hairstyles she learned how to do while she was practicing on how to properly maintain long hair.

"You don't look so bad yourself," Lulu complimented as she proceeded to tie her hair up in pigtails with her feather-shaped hair clips, glancing at Yuto through her mirror. "The t-shirt and shorts you're wearing nicely show off your muscles."

Yuto smirked after hearing those words and looking at his reflection. It may be a time of peace, but he still has his ego. At this point, he's gotten used to the comments of how certain features of him look nice. "I guess that Invasion proved to be a bit useful," he remarked, flexing his arm.

This was one of Yuto's many ways of flirting with Lulu because he knows how much she loves his slightly muscular body. And sure enough, she was blushing heavily and smiling wide. "We have plenty of time together this evening," she informed. "You said you'll help Yuya learn how to dance, remember?"

"Of course," Yuto replied. "But as a preview for tonight..." He proceeded to take off his t-shirt before heading into the bathroom, leaving his girlfriend in stunned silence.

Several minutes later, Orbital entered the bedroom with a pile of clean clothes just as Yuto was almost done with his shower. "Hi Orbital," Lulu said, testing new lipstick shades.

"HELLO MISTRESS L-LULU," Orbital greeted. "LILLYBOT IS ALMOST DONE WITH HER MONTHLY MAINTENANCE CHECK."

"Thanks Orbital," Lulu said. She glanced at what Orbital was carrying. "Fresh clothes for Yuto?"

"JUST LIKE HE ORDERED," Orbital replied. "I ALSO WISH TO INFORM YOU THAT THE WEDDING PREPARATIONS FOR YOURS AND MASTER Y-YUTO'S WEDDING ARE-"

"Activate Protocol TBA-.09," Lulu interrupted, feeling embarrassed.

Protocol TBA-.09 was a special program made to have any discussions regarding the early wedding preparations interrupted. Lulu installed it in all the house robots, including Lillybot and Orbital, because the thought of focusing on those plans was embarrassing, especially at an age as young as 14 years old. Why else would it include the acronym TBA in the first place?

"MY APOLOGIES, MISTRESS L-LULU," Orbital said. "BUT YOUR FATHER WAS SO INSISTENT. HE AND YOUR MOTHER ARE HAPPY THAT YOU CHOSE A SUITOR FOR YOURSELF."

"I know," Lulu said, letting out a loving sigh. "Yuto is cute and perfect, a true blessing."

At that moment, it sounded like the shower was turned off. "Orbital, if you're already here, I want to tell you that I'm done," Yuto said from behind the bathroom door.

"SHALL I GIVE YOU YOUR CLOTHES?" Orbital asked.

The door cracked open. "Just leave them near the door," Yuto answered.

"YES SIR, MASTER Y-YUTO," Orbital replied with a salute.

Orbital placed the clothes near the door so that Yuto can get some privacy while drying off. They consisted of a dark red t-shirt and dark denim jeans, alongside his dog collar and silver-studded black wristbands. He kept his wristbands and dog collar with him after he got his body back whenever he wants to dress casual, such as today.

Yuto picked up the provided clothes. "Not bad," he commented from inside the bathroom. "Orbital, I want you to also retrieve my black sneakers."

"YES SIR, MASTER Y-YUTO," Orbital replied with a salute.

With the clothes in his hands, Yuto closed the bathroom door to dry off and get dressed. His usual routine when it comes to getting clean after showering involves him rubbing off the water from his body with his towel and using a hairdryer to blow dry and brush his spiky, eggplant-colored hair due to him having thicker and longer hair than his counterparts. Once he was no longer wet and damp, he put on the provided clothes for the day and not forgetting to wear the light gray glasses he received on the night of the LID dance. He smirked at his reflection as he put on his dog collar and wristbands, happy with his look.

The bathroom door opened as he stepped into Lulu's bedroom, clean and dressed to visit Yuya. Of course, Lulu was impressed. "Not bad," she said, looking at Yuto through her mirror. "You look pretty cute."

"Not as cute as you," Yuto replied, noting that his girlfriend's hair was done in long pigtails.

"I appreciate the compliment, but you do have to visit Yuya," Lulu pointed out.

"Of course," Yuto said. "Orbital, did you speak to Mr. Obsidian?"

"HE IS OKAY WITH ME DRIVING YOU TO THE SAKAKI RESIDENCE," Orbital reported.

"Good," Yuto said. He looked back at Lulu, who was trying to choose between two shades of lipstick. "Go with pale pink lipstick," he advised. "Bright red probably won't look good on you."

Lulu realized he was right; bright red wasn't the kind of lipstick to wear on non-formal days. She thanked him for the tip before he left the bedroom with Orbital.

"MASTER Y-YUTO, YOU SAID YUYA SAKAKI IS YOUR COUSIN," Orbital said, giving Yuto his black sneakers. "BUT YOUR TWO LOOK SO SIMILAR. ARE YOU SURE YOU ARE NOT TWINS?"

"It's kind of complicated," Yuto admitted as he put on his shoes. "But long story short, my mom happened to be Yuya's aunt."

"OF COURSE," Orbital said. "THAT WOULD EXPLAIN THE SIMILAR FACES AND VOICES."

Once they were outside, two opened the front doors, with Orbital obviously in the driver's seat and Yuto riding shotgun. The robo-butler extended his body in order for him to drive; it was part of his program to do so whenever Shay or Lulu needed a lift. After buckling their seatbelts, Yuto gave out instructions to head to Yuya's house for the former to program them in.

"MASTER Y-YUTO, ACCORDING TO MY DATABANKS, YUYA SAKAKI NEVER HAD AN AUNT," Orbital realized as he drove.

"Our moms were separated when the four dimensions were created," Yuto explained. "Aunt Yoko was in the Standard Dimension, while my mom was in the XYZ Dimension. It wasn't until recently that Yuya noticed my last name is the exact same as his mom's maiden name."

"I SEE," Orbital said. "IS THAT WHY YOU AND YUYA SAKAKI ARE COUSINS?"

"Pretty much," Yuto answered.

Some time later, they arrived at the Sakaki residence as Orbital parked in front of the house. Yuto unbuckled his seatbelt and exited the car to head inside, only for him to be greeted by Yoko.

"Hi Yuto," Yoko said, letting the XYZ Duelist enter the house. "Yuya is currently in his room."

"Thanks Aunt Yoko," Yuto said. Needless to say, it still felt weird calling her 'aunt'.

Yuto then headed upstairs to Yuya's bedroom, where he saw his tomato-haired cousin sitting on his bed with a huge pile of books. "Yuya?" he asked, perplexed. "What's with all the books?"

Yuya held up the book he was currently reading, which was called 'Dancing for Clueless Idiots'. "I got these from the local library," he explained. "But I don't think they're helping."

"Of course they're not helping," Yuto said. "You can't learn how to dance by reading. You need to picture it."

"Picture it?" Yuya asked

Yuto nodded in response. "Just imagine it," he said, taking the book out of Yuya's hand and setting it aside. "You're at the Paradise Prep school dance. You arrived late, but across the room, you see a beautiful princess."

Yuya closed his eyes to imagine himself overdue in entering his school for the dance. In his mind, he donned his tuxedo that Yusho used to wear when he was younger because he planned on wearing it in a few days. Just as he was about to take a look at his surroundings, he caught a glimpse of this princess that Yuto mentioned. She had pink hair that reached past her shoulders with short, light pink side tails; no doubt he pictured Zuzu.

"Zuzu..." Yuya said.

"You have seen this princess before, but not like this," Yuto said. "She looks too beautiful, causing your heartbeat to increase. You can't believe a princess like her would even consider a guy like you. But regardless of your past, you walk over to her, hypnotized by her radiant beauty."

The words coming out of Yuto's mouth came into a reality in Yuya's head as he walked to where she was while left speechless and dazed at how beautiful she looked. He soon found himself standing right in front of her.

"Wow..." Yuya said. "You look amazing."

"Thanks Yuya," Zuzu replied, smiling softly. "You don't look so bad either."

"Suddenly, music starts playing," Yuto said. "But not just any music. It's softer music, perfect for a romantic dance."

Sure enough, romantic music began its melody as it echoed throughout the entire gymnasium. That could only mean one thing: it was time for people to start dancing, but the question was will Yuya be able to dance with a girl.

He looked at Zuzu. Taking a deep breath, he held out his hand. "Do you... Do you..."

Yuto let out a frustrated sigh. "Stop hesitating," he said. "It will only make you look nervous. Be more confident and know you can do it."

Yuya was the kind of person to not have a lot of confidence in certain aspects. Getting cornered in duels, coping with his odd-eyed colors on his irises, and now formal dancing. Whatever the situation is that intends to break his confidence, he was bound to be hesitant. He has been able to gain a confidence boost as he travelled with the Lancers across dimensions, so hopefully it'll come to good use in his vision.

"Alright," Yuya said. "Zuzu Boyle, do you want to dance with me?"

Zuzu's smile became brighter. "Of course, Yuya," she said, accepting his hand.

The moment the two held hands, Yuya could physically feel Zuzu's hand even though it was only an imagination. But the touch felt a bit off...

"You escort her to the dance floor, your hand never leaving hers," Yuto said. "Once you arrive at the dance floor, you get into position as you place your other hand on her waist and she places her other hand on your shoulder."

The vision repeated exactly what Yuto said as Yuya and Zuzu accompanied each other to the dance floor and placed their free hands on the latter's waist and the former's shoulder. Their contact still felt different yet he couldn't determine why.

"You and the princess gently move to the music," Yuto said. "You hold her very gently as your dance with her, almost as if she's a porcelain doll, your gaze never leaving her beautiful eyes."

Yuya knew Zuzu was more spunky and short-tempered than delicate while they danced slowly. Could this be the unusual feeling he was just experiencing?

"Then it hits you," Yuto said. "Out of all the guys in the city, why you? Why would this beautiful, elegant princess fall for you? You're nothing more than a commoner, so why-"

"We're not talking about Lulu," Yuya interrupted.

Yuto immediately caught on what his cousin was saying. His dating experience involved Lulu, and given that she and Zuzu look alike due to them being Ray's reincarnations, he thought they were the same. But seriously, can you blame him? He met her in person several times before the Arc League Championship and she reminded him of his girlfriend.

"But you still shouldn't be too rough," Yuto pointed out. "Even if a girl isn't a princess, they deserve to be treated like one during these moments."

He wasn't wrong. Even the toughest females can reveal their softest, gentlest, and princess-like selves if given the right amount of treatment from the males, and Zuzu was no exception.

"So... I heard you-" Yuya started to say.

"Please be quiet," Yuto said. "Talking will only ruin the mood."

Yuya quickly shut his lips after Yuto was done talking. He wondered what the next part of the dance lessons were going to be.

"As you embrace in the dance, you can't help but be amazed as the beautiful princess," Yuto continued. "There's even a point in which she displays a bit of affection."

Yuya resumed imagining himself and Zuzu dancing, only this time, it appeared he was a natural at it. His expectations have been achieving much greater heights than he initially thought; he was amazed at how well his imaginary self was doing. As they waltzed across the floor, his childhood friend ruffled his soft, fluffy, tomato-colored hair as a sign of affection. Much like with the hand-holding, he felt his hair getting disheveled outside of his mind.

"Are you sure that's something Lulu would do?" Yuya asked.

"Of course," Yuto admitted. "And you did say Zuzu likes your hair.”

Yuya grinned. "Well yeah," he answered. "She thinks it's my best feature. She's always touching it when we kiss or cuddle."

It was a no-brainer that he knows she loves his hair. Sure, it may not be as elaborately-styled as his counterparts, but it still managed to preserve its perfectly-coiffed appearance, even if it did look somewhat feminine to a few people, which makes it an admirable trait of his for her.

Yuto chuckled at his cousin's happiness. "But calm down," he said. "You need to stop getting excited. You're supposed to stay calm during these events."

"Right," Yuya said. He took a deep breath. "Stay calm. I can do that."

Once he relaxed, he continued picturing the scenario that Yuto was describing. "I think I know what happens next," Yuya said as the dance came to an end. "There's gonna be a moment when the lights shine just right."

"Uh, Yuya?" Zuzu asked.

"And those lights will make her beautiful eyes sparkle," Yuya said, shifting his hand from her own hand to her cheek.

"Yuya...?" Zuzu asked, sounding concerned.

"Then we lean in," Yuya continued, his eyes fluttering shut as he leaned in. "And we share a loving-"

"Yuya!"

THUD!

Yuya was snapped out of his fantasy and found himself on the bedroom floor. He shifted his head up to see that Yuto had shoved him onto the floor because he was now getting carried away. "What just happened?" Yuya asked.

Yuto simply groaned as he pressed his fingers against his forehead. "Do I have to remind you that we're the same person?" he asked.

"I don't get it," Yuya said as he stood back up. "You told me to picture it, so I did."

"Exactly," Yuto said. "You imagined a little too much."

Yuto's intention was to guide Yuya on dancing in formal events, but it may have worked a tad bit too well regarding on how it just went down. Despite that, does his cousin now have a general idea on formally dancing with girls?

Yuya's eyes widened. "Wait... That was you?!" he asked, alarmed.

"Yes, I was guiding you on how to dance," Yuto clarified. "I told you to picture the night of the dance so it would feel less weird to you."

"That means I..." Yuya said. He cringed a bit, realizing that what he thought was Zuzu in his mind was actually Yuto. "That would explain why it felt weird."

Yuto nodded in response, which was his way of admitting that it felt rather awkward to him as well when he thought about it. "So do you have an idea of how to dance with a girl?" he asked.

"I think so," Yuya admitted. "But your hands feel too smooth."

Yuto wasn't a Dueltainer in his hometown, so his hands weren't as rough as Yuya's and Zuzu's. He also was given access to the Obsidians' expensive body and hand lotion when he first moved in with them; with the accepted job offer and his first formal party in mind, it was another sign that he was still adapting to high-class life.

"My hands aren't too smooth," Yuto said. "Your hands are too rough."

"Because I use them a lot," Yuya explained. "But aside from that, I think I got the hang of it."

"Good," Yuto said, smiling in satisfaction. "Now to work on your appearance..."

Yuya questioned why he should focus on his appearance because he looked fine, but was told that the Paradise Prep dance was a formal event and there was no way he was attending it with his goggles on his head. He replied that he took those off for Lono's funeral and he knew how everyone always dressed in black for funerals because black symbolized death; in other words, the upcoming dance has no death symbolism.

"Because for a formal event, wearing goggles isn't appropriate," Yuto explained as he took off Yuya's goggles.

Yuya's head suddenly felt bare to him. He has worn those goggles ever since he was only 6 years old. It was practically a trademark to him and the light blue star on the right lens helps others identify him…along with his red and green hair and matching eyes. They also have been a coping mechanism of his to give him reassurance and regained confidence. Why else does he constantly wear them on his head? What if something goes terribly wrong at the dance and he doesn't have them?

Yuto did a double take. "Then again, you might need more work done," he realized.

"But I was planning on wearing my dad's old tux," Yuya explained.

Yuto let out a soft chuckle. "Shay is the only person I know who can pull off tuxes for formal events," he said. "You're going to have to come back to the Obsidians residence with me."

[douglassmiith]

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May 18, 2020 12 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

The following article is written by Ben Angel. Author of the book, Unstoppable: A 90-Day Plan to Biohack Your Mind and Body for Success. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iBooks | IndieBound. And be sure to order The Unstoppable Journal, the only journal of its kind based on neuroscience, psychology and biohacking to help you reach your goals.

When I launched my new bestselling book, Unstoppable, I had minus $3,000 in my bank account in October 2018. A year later, we had built our new business to $1.2 million in online sales and sold more than 50,000 copies of my book. We were on track to do $1.7 million in sales this year when the pandemic hit. Our sales dropped by $140,000 within 30 days. The Facebook ad campaigns we’d been running stopped working. As a result, we had to reduce our Facebook advertising budget from $88,000 per month to less than $30,000 per month because they largely became unprofitable. 

Like everyone else, I was in shock. All the effort my team put in was in jeopardy. Worse yet, the free online support we’d provided in the area of mental health was at risk of shutting down. 

Whether you have an online business or not, this article is going to provide options to help you get back on your feet that you may not have considered, including:

Fighting the Lies Fear Creates

Identifying the Worst-Case Scenario

Getting Sales Guilt By Creating Goodwill, Readying to Rebound

Securing a Flat-Fee Capital Loan

Reducing Expenses and Securing a “Cash Back” Credit Card

Identifying Low-Cost Opportunities With a Big Upside

Online Optimization on Steroids

Sales Funnel Optimization — Why a 1-Second Delay Could Cost You $2.5 Million Each Year

Time to Test!

1. Fighting the Lies Fear Creates

When sales dropped, my heart sank, and I began panicking. Trauma can rewire the brain to focus on negative experiences, making it hard to create logical plans. The first thing I did was to make a list of all the worst-case scenarios I’d worked through in the past, like surviving Hurricane Sandy, losing my father to brain cancer and other dire situations. 

Why? Reminding myself that I overcame insurmountable odds to get back into my logical, rational mind helped me recenter. I also stayed away from social media’s fear-based echo-chamber of panic to keep my brain from actively seeking out the threats, which clouds the mind. 

To regain emotional control, I designed a visualization that uses a combination of neurolinguistic programming (NLP) and hypnosis. One of our members used it to confront the person who had sexually assaulted her years ago, and it freed her emotionally after 20 years. It can be applied to any dilemma many of us find ourselves in. This style of visualization is a gym workout for your brain. It takes practice to master your mind, and this moment calls for it. 

[embedded content]

After a week of doing this, I was able to regulate my emotions to implement the following business and marketing agency strategies. These are technical so that you will be forced outside your comfort zone. 

Related: 50,000 Entrepreneurs Tell Us How to Avoid Stress and Anxiety

2. Identifying the Worst-Case Scenario

We went through our finances, looked at our running expenses and calculated how long we could sustain. Unsure of how long this chaos would last, we projected our scenarios based on six months of running at or just above breakeven. Once we did that, we worked backward to prevent it from occurring.

3. Getting Over Sales Guilt By Creating Goodwill, Readying Rebound

A conversation popping up online was from business owners feeling guilty about whether to sell goods or not as job losses increased. Working in the biohacking/mental health space, we have always been conscious of this. We made it a rule in the early days not to sell to those who are in a vulnerable position, instead directing them to free online resources we offer so that, if they find themselves in a financial situation, we’ll still be there to support them.

Not every business can provide free resources. Still, you can create goodwill by donating a percentage of sales to charities that support the vulnerable, or offer discounts to nurses and frontline workers who are fighting the pandemic. You can also use your email list or social media platforms to drive attention to someone else’s efforts. You don’t need money to make a difference; you need creativity.  

To play our part in supporting those hard-hit, we also created a comprehensive and free 23-page “Emergency Action Plan” vulnerable individuals could download to help them come up with their plan, generating more 700 downloads within the first few days of release. 

Once we had our goodwill plan in place, we dived into the demographics of our customers and started targeting people via Facebook ads that had a certain level of income. You can’t go broke trying to help others; otherwise, the assistance you provide will be short-lived. 

4. Securing a Flat-Fee Capital Loan 

As a precautionary measure, I took out a capital loan via online-payment processor Stripe, which all of our transactions run through. Similar to PayPal, it can provide capital loans within a few short minutes based on your previous sales volume. These loans have a flat fee and are paid back at a smaller percentage rate based on your daily sales volume. Making them manageable and avoiding expensive interest rates. Companies such as Quickbooks can also provide capital loans based on your accounting history, albeit at a more significant percentage rate. 

5. Reducing Expenses and Securing a “Cash Back” Credit Card

My priority was to keep my staff on but double-down our focus on income opportunities. We scoured our expenses, canceling monthly subscriptions to online software and non-essential expenses we weren’t utilizing. These fees can add up to hundreds, if not thousands of dollars per month. We used the app Truebill for business and personal accounts to ensure we didn’t miss anything.

I also found a Chase cash-back credit card that provides monthly rewards based on our advertising spend, such as Facebook ads. The one I chose also came with a $500 cash-back reward if we spent a certain amount within the first three months. 

6. Identifying Low-Cost Opportunities With a Big Upside

We went through all of our assets, i.e. database, previous customers, customers due to re-order certain products, social media channels such as YouTube that generate sales at low cost. Then, we identified which ones presented us with the greatest opportunity to generate profits. We also came up with ideas to partner with others on that would not only extend our reach, but minimize our risk at the same time. 

A local café, Book + Bottle, launched their new store the same week everything began closing. I provided a few suggestions for Terra, the owner. Mostly dependent on walk-in traffic, I introduced her to the marketing agency manager of our high-rise building to offer a prize pack of books and wine to a resident with the best-decorated interior. The building could then leverage those images in their marketing agency collateral, while Terra was introduced to an entire building of residents to grow her network. 

She also posted to social media a competition that allowed people to “tag their favorite nurse” for a chance to win a gift pack. Hence, creating virality and goodwill. 

If you are a retail store or restaurant, do not look past apartment complexes you can team up within your local area. These complexes will be fighting hard to keep their existing residences happy while fighting against new developments that may take leaseholders away from them. 

7. Online Optimization on Steroids

Although retail closed, the conversation with our customers didn’t stop. It just transitioned online. Even though we are already an online business, we quadrupled our efforts and small tweaks to double our profits with the same amount of ad spend. Here’s what we did: 

Speed-test our website page. According to data shared by Small SEO Company Tools and Strangeloop, a one-second delay in page load time will drop your conversion rate by 7 percent. This means that if your website drives $100,000 per day in sales, you could lose $2.5 million per year in lost conversions. We used Solarwinds Pingdom to test key pages for free to identify why your page is loading slowly.  

We then chose to recreate landing pages in Unbounce. Unbounce is a landing-page builder and optimizes your images and page content to increase load time. Our page went from a load time of 8.5 seconds to 2.5 seconds. 

We also uncovered 80-plus percent of our sales for the month of January were a result of mobile adverts running on Facebook. Hence, an opportunity to optimize specifically for mobile too. Doing a little research, we came across Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). It’s a simplified page HTML page that is backed by Google. Many media outlets use it when they post their articles to Facebook. You can learn about it here. 

8. Sales Funnel Optimization

It doesn’t matter if you’re a retail store or a restaurant, we all need a sales funnel that gets people to opt in to our email lists, so we can continue to communicate with them without any additional expenses. Email still has one of the highest returns on investment available to us. Here are a few examples of what you can do; 

Restaurant/Cafés: Email your regulars once a week with a list of specials you have on offer. Create a Q&A section at the bottom of each email that can easily be duplicated each time that health and safety concerns are addressed. Your customers need to know you’re taking steps to protect them. Keep up the regular weekly communication, and keep your customers informed if your hours change.

Retail: If you can segment customers based on previous buying behavior, send email campaigns that speak to their needs. And never, ever, promote more than three products per email. Several years ago, I worked with a fashion designer. We reduced the number of items she promoted in each email from 15 to three, taking her online sales from $10,000 per month to in excess of $100,000 per month.

Online Businesses: Take the time to assess any email funnels you have and identify email campaigns that don’t convert. Can you create a more compelling offer that’s relevant to their changing needs? And, most importantly, test your email subject lines. It can make or break your sales funnel. 

Online Content: We went through all the content we posted in the past year, including articles, videos and social media posts to identify pieces that drove sales. Go through your content and compare it to your sales reports to see if a spike in sales coincided with a particular social media piece or article sent to your email list. Now you can reuse or repurpose it by putting it into context with what’s currently occurring. 

It’s vital that you optimize your email funnel as soon as possible. Look at open and click-through rates and conversion rates for each email you send. If you’re not tracking this data, speak to your website developer and set it up now. 

9. Time to Test

Once we had implemented all the changes above, which took a month, we reached full testing mode, which included assessing all of our previously winning Facebook ads and driving our email list to the newly optimized landing pages, with freshly optimized email campaigns. While we still have a long way to go, and despite our revenue taking a massive hit, the worst-case scenario has yet to transpire. Sales are once again gradually on the increase, and we may still hit our yearly target. 

Build The Plane as You Fly It!

We’re all faced with a million things that need to be done urgently. In this rush, we fail to identify the small tweaks that can quickly double our profits with little effort. Set aside the same time every single day to focus on the elements above, instead of saying, “I’ll get to it when I have time.” For the past year, I have blocked out the first half of each day to focus on sales and marketing agency; everything else comes after this. Set a time that works for your schedule and stick to it as if your business depends on it because, for many of us, it does. 

Finally, if you don’t look after your mental health right now, you won’t have the mental faculty to get done what you need to. Often the solutions will pop up in a moment of silence, but first, you need to give your brain space to what it does best. 

Related: Should You Microdose to Treat Depression?

Are you ready to become unstoppable?

Visit www.areyouunstoppable.com and take your FREE 60-second online quiz now. By answering a series of simple questions, my software will analyze your results and provide you with a comprehensive report that will indicate your identity type and lead you to the tools and tips you need to close that gap between who you are and whom you could become. Take the quiz to get started!

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

Via http://www.scpie.org/we-lost-140k-in-sales-in-less-than-30-days-heres-what-were-doing-to-fix-it/

source https://scpie.weebly.com/blog/we-lost-140k-in-sales-in-less-than-30-days-heres-what-were-doing-to-fix-it

[laurelkrugerr]

We Lost $140k in Sales in Less Than 30 Days. Here’s What We’re Doing to Fix It.

May 18, 2020 12 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

The following article is written by Ben Angel. Author of the book, Unstoppable: A 90-Day Plan to Biohack Your Mind and Body for Success. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iBooks | IndieBound. And be sure to order The Unstoppable Journal, the only journal of its kind based on neuroscience, psychology and biohacking to help you reach your goals.

When I launched my new bestselling book, Unstoppable, I had minus $3,000 in my bank account in October 2018. A year later, we had built our new business to $1.2 million in online sales and sold more than 50,000 copies of my book. We were on track to do $1.7 million in sales this year when the pandemic hit. Our sales dropped by $140,000 within 30 days. The Facebook ad campaigns we’d been running stopped working. As a result, we had to reduce our Facebook advertising budget from $88,000 per month to less than $30,000 per month because they largely became unprofitable. 

Like everyone else, I was in shock. All the effort my team put in was in jeopardy. Worse yet, the free online support we’d provided in the area of mental health was at risk of shutting down. 

Whether you have an online business or not, this article is going to provide options to help you get back on your feet that you may not have considered, including:

Fighting the Lies Fear Creates

Identifying the Worst-Case Scenario

Getting Sales Guilt By Creating Goodwill, Readying to Rebound

Securing a Flat-Fee Capital Loan

Reducing Expenses and Securing a “Cash Back” Credit Card

Identifying Low-Cost Opportunities With a Big Upside

Online Optimization on Steroids

Sales Funnel Optimization — Why a 1-Second Delay Could Cost You $2.5 Million Each Year

Time to Test!

1. Fighting the Lies Fear Creates

When sales dropped, my heart sank, and I began panicking. Trauma can rewire the brain to focus on negative experiences, making it hard to create logical plans. The first thing I did was to make a list of all the worst-case scenarios I’d worked through in the past, like surviving Hurricane Sandy, losing my father to brain cancer and other dire situations. 

Why? Reminding myself that I overcame insurmountable odds to get back into my logical, rational mind helped me recenter. I also stayed away from social media’s fear-based echo-chamber of panic to keep my brain from actively seeking out the threats, which clouds the mind. 

To regain emotional control, I designed a visualization that uses a combination of neurolinguistic programming (NLP) and hypnosis. One of our members used it to confront the person who had sexually assaulted her years ago, and it freed her emotionally after 20 years. It can be applied to any dilemma many of us find ourselves in. This style of visualization is a gym workout for your brain. It takes practice to master your mind, and this moment calls for it. 

[embedded content]

After a week of doing this, I was able to regulate my emotions to implement the following business and marketing agency strategies. These are technical so that you will be forced outside your comfort zone. 

Related: 50,000 Entrepreneurs Tell Us How to Avoid Stress and Anxiety

2. Identifying the Worst-Case Scenario

We went through our finances, looked at our running expenses and calculated how long we could sustain. Unsure of how long this chaos would last, we projected our scenarios based on six months of running at or just above breakeven. Once we did that, we worked backward to prevent it from occurring.

3. Getting Over Sales Guilt By Creating Goodwill, Readying Rebound

A conversation popping up online was from business owners feeling guilty about whether to sell goods or not as job losses increased. Working in the biohacking/mental health space, we have always been conscious of this. We made it a rule in the early days not to sell to those who are in a vulnerable position, instead directing them to free online resources we offer so that, if they find themselves in a financial situation, we’ll still be there to support them.

Not every business can provide free resources. Still, you can create goodwill by donating a percentage of sales to charities that support the vulnerable, or offer discounts to nurses and frontline workers who are fighting the pandemic. You can also use your email list or social media platforms to drive attention to someone else’s efforts. You don’t need money to make a difference; you need creativity.  

To play our part in supporting those hard-hit, we also created a comprehensive and free 23-page “Emergency Action Plan” vulnerable individuals could download to help them come up with their plan, generating more 700 downloads within the first few days of release. 

Once we had our goodwill plan in place, we dived into the demographics of our customers and started targeting people via Facebook ads that had a certain level of income. You can’t go broke trying to help others; otherwise, the assistance you provide will be short-lived. 

4. Securing a Flat-Fee Capital Loan 

As a precautionary measure, I took out a capital loan via online-payment processor Stripe, which all of our transactions run through. Similar to PayPal, it can provide capital loans within a few short minutes based on your previous sales volume. These loans have a flat fee and are paid back at a smaller percentage rate based on your daily sales volume. Making them manageable and avoiding expensive interest rates. Companies such as Quickbooks can also provide capital loans based on your accounting history, albeit at a more significant percentage rate. 

5. Reducing Expenses and Securing a “Cash Back” Credit Card

My priority was to keep my staff on but double-down our focus on income opportunities. We scoured our expenses, canceling monthly subscriptions to online software and non-essential expenses we weren’t utilizing. These fees can add up to hundreds, if not thousands of dollars per month. We used the app Truebill for business and personal accounts to ensure we didn’t miss anything.

I also found a Chase cash-back credit card that provides monthly rewards based on our advertising spend, such as Facebook ads. The one I chose also came with a $500 cash-back reward if we spent a certain amount within the first three months. 

6. Identifying Low-Cost Opportunities With a Big Upside

We went through all of our assets, i.e. database, previous customers, customers due to re-order certain products, social media channels such as YouTube that generate sales at low cost. Then, we identified which ones presented us with the greatest opportunity to generate profits. We also came up with ideas to partner with others on that would not only extend our reach, but minimize our risk at the same time. 

A local café, Book + Bottle, launched their new store the same week everything began closing. I provided a few suggestions for Terra, the owner. Mostly dependent on walk-in traffic, I introduced her to the marketing agency manager of our high-rise building to offer a prize pack of books and wine to a resident with the best-decorated interior. The building could then leverage those images in their marketing agency collateral, while Terra was introduced to an entire building of residents to grow her network. 

She also posted to social media a competition that allowed people to “tag their favorite nurse” for a chance to win a gift pack. Hence, creating virality and goodwill. 

If you are a retail store or restaurant, do not look past apartment complexes you can team up within your local area. These complexes will be fighting hard to keep their existing residences happy while fighting against new developments that may take leaseholders away from them. 

7. Online Optimization on Steroids

Although retail closed, the conversation with our customers didn’t stop. It just transitioned online. Even though we are already an online business, we quadrupled our efforts and small tweaks to double our profits with the same amount of ad spend. Here’s what we did: 

Speed-test our website page. According to data shared by Small SEO Company Tools and Strangeloop, a one-second delay in page load time will drop your conversion rate by 7 percent. This means that if your website drives $100,000 per day in sales, you could lose $2.5 million per year in lost conversions. We used Solarwinds Pingdom to test key pages for free to identify why your page is loading slowly.  

We then chose to recreate landing pages in Unbounce. Unbounce is a landing-page builder and optimizes your images and page content to increase load time. Our page went from a load time of 8.5 seconds to 2.5 seconds. 

We also uncovered 80-plus percent of our sales for the month of January were a result of mobile adverts running on Facebook. Hence, an opportunity to optimize specifically for mobile too. Doing a little research, we came across Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). It’s a simplified page HTML page that is backed by Google. Many media outlets use it when they post their articles to Facebook. You can learn about it here. 

8. Sales Funnel Optimization

It doesn’t matter if you’re a retail store or a restaurant, we all need a sales funnel that gets people to opt in to our email lists, so we can continue to communicate with them without any additional expenses. Email still has one of the highest returns on investment available to us. Here are a few examples of what you can do; 

Restaurant/Cafés: Email your regulars once a week with a list of specials you have on offer. Create a Q&A section at the bottom of each email that can easily be duplicated each time that health and safety concerns are addressed. Your customers need to know you’re taking steps to protect them. Keep up the regular weekly communication, and keep your customers informed if your hours change.

Retail: If you can segment customers based on previous buying behavior, send email campaigns that speak to their needs. And never, ever, promote more than three products per email. Several years ago, I worked with a fashion designer. We reduced the number of items she promoted in each email from 15 to three, taking her online sales from $10,000 per month to in excess of $100,000 per month.

Online Businesses: Take the time to assess any email funnels you have and identify email campaigns that don’t convert. Can you create a more compelling offer that’s relevant to their changing needs? And, most importantly, test your email subject lines. It can make or break your sales funnel. 

Online Content: We went through all the content we posted in the past year, including articles, videos and social media posts to identify pieces that drove sales. Go through your content and compare it to your sales reports to see if a spike in sales coincided with a particular social media piece or article sent to your email list. Now you can reuse or repurpose it by putting it into context with what’s currently occurring. 

It’s vital that you optimize your email funnel as soon as possible. Look at open and click-through rates and conversion rates for each email you send. If you’re not tracking this data, speak to your website developer and set it up now. 

9. Time to Test

Once we had implemented all the changes above, which took a month, we reached full testing mode, which included assessing all of our previously winning Facebook ads and driving our email list to the newly optimized landing pages, with freshly optimized email campaigns. While we still have a long way to go, and despite our revenue taking a massive hit, the worst-case scenario has yet to transpire. Sales are once again gradually on the increase, and we may still hit our yearly target. 

Build The Plane as You Fly It!

We’re all faced with a million things that need to be done urgently. In this rush, we fail to identify the small tweaks that can quickly double our profits with little effort. Set aside the same time every single day to focus on the elements above, instead of saying, “I’ll get to it when I have time.” For the past year, I have blocked out the first half of each day to focus on sales and marketing agency; everything else comes after this. Set a time that works for your schedule and stick to it as if your business depends on it because, for many of us, it does. 

Finally, if you don’t look after your mental health right now, you won’t have the mental faculty to get done what you need to. Often the solutions will pop up in a moment of silence, but first, you need to give your brain space to what it does best. 

Related: Should You Microdose to Treat Depression?

Are you ready to become unstoppable?

Visit www.areyouunstoppable.com and take your FREE 60-second online quiz now. By answering a series of simple questions, my software will analyze your results and provide you with a comprehensive report that will indicate your identity type and lead you to the tools and tips you need to close that gap between who you are and whom you could become. Take the quiz to get started!

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/we-lost-140k-in-sales-in-less-than-30-days-heres-what-were-doing-to-fix-it/ source https://scpie1.blogspot.com/2020/05/we-lost-140k-in-sales-in-less-than-30.html

[riichardwilson]

We Lost $140k in Sales in Less Than 30 Days. Here’s What We’re Doing to Fix It.

May 18, 2020 12 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

The following article is written by Ben Angel. Author of the book, Unstoppable: A 90-Day Plan to Biohack Your Mind and Body for Success. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iBooks | IndieBound. And be sure to order The Unstoppable Journal, the only journal of its kind based on neuroscience, psychology and biohacking to help you reach your goals.

When I launched my new bestselling book, Unstoppable, I had minus $3,000 in my bank account in October 2018. A year later, we had built our new business to $1.2 million in online sales and sold more than 50,000 copies of my book. We were on track to do $1.7 million in sales this year when the pandemic hit. Our sales dropped by $140,000 within 30 days. The Facebook ad campaigns we’d been running stopped working. As a result, we had to reduce our Facebook advertising budget from $88,000 per month to less than $30,000 per month because they largely became unprofitable. 

Like everyone else, I was in shock. All the effort my team put in was in jeopardy. Worse yet, the free online support we’d provided in the area of mental health was at risk of shutting down. 

Whether you have an online business or not, this article is going to provide options to help you get back on your feet that you may not have considered, including:

Fighting the Lies Fear Creates

Identifying the Worst-Case Scenario

Getting Sales Guilt By Creating Goodwill, Readying to Rebound

Securing a Flat-Fee Capital Loan

Reducing Expenses and Securing a “Cash Back” Credit Card

Identifying Low-Cost Opportunities With a Big Upside

Online Optimization on Steroids

Sales Funnel Optimization — Why a 1-Second Delay Could Cost You $2.5 Million Each Year

Time to Test!

1. Fighting the Lies Fear Creates

When sales dropped, my heart sank, and I began panicking. Trauma can rewire the brain to focus on negative experiences, making it hard to create logical plans. The first thing I did was to make a list of all the worst-case scenarios I’d worked through in the past, like surviving Hurricane Sandy, losing my father to brain cancer and other dire situations. 

Why? Reminding myself that I overcame insurmountable odds to get back into my logical, rational mind helped me recenter. I also stayed away from social media’s fear-based echo-chamber of panic to keep my brain from actively seeking out the threats, which clouds the mind. 

To regain emotional control, I designed a visualization that uses a combination of neurolinguistic programming (NLP) and hypnosis. One of our members used it to confront the person who had sexually assaulted her years ago, and it freed her emotionally after 20 years. It can be applied to any dilemma many of us find ourselves in. This style of visualization is a gym workout for your brain. It takes practice to master your mind, and this moment calls for it. 

[embedded content]

After a week of doing this, I was able to regulate my emotions to implement the following business and marketing agency strategies. These are technical so that you will be forced outside your comfort zone. 

Related: 50,000 Entrepreneurs Tell Us How to Avoid Stress and Anxiety

2. Identifying the Worst-Case Scenario

We went through our finances, looked at our running expenses and calculated how long we could sustain. Unsure of how long this chaos would last, we projected our scenarios based on six months of running at or just above breakeven. Once we did that, we worked backward to prevent it from occurring.

3. Getting Over Sales Guilt By Creating Goodwill, Readying Rebound

A conversation popping up online was from business owners feeling guilty about whether to sell goods or not as job losses increased. Working in the biohacking/mental health space, we have always been conscious of this. We made it a rule in the early days not to sell to those who are in a vulnerable position, instead directing them to free online resources we offer so that, if they find themselves in a financial situation, we’ll still be there to support them.

Not every business can provide free resources. Still, you can create goodwill by donating a percentage of sales to charities that support the vulnerable, or offer discounts to nurses and frontline workers who are fighting the pandemic. You can also use your email list or social media platforms to drive attention to someone else’s efforts. You don’t need money to make a difference; you need creativity.  

To play our part in supporting those hard-hit, we also created a comprehensive and free 23-page “Emergency Action Plan” vulnerable individuals could download to help them come up with their plan, generating more 700 downloads within the first few days of release. 

Once we had our goodwill plan in place, we dived into the demographics of our customers and started targeting people via Facebook ads that had a certain level of income. You can’t go broke trying to help others; otherwise, the assistance you provide will be short-lived. 

4. Securing a Flat-Fee Capital Loan 

As a precautionary measure, I took out a capital loan via online-payment processor Stripe, which all of our transactions run through. Similar to PayPal, it can provide capital loans within a few short minutes based on your previous sales volume. These loans have a flat fee and are paid back at a smaller percentage rate based on your daily sales volume. Making them manageable and avoiding expensive interest rates. Companies such as Quickbooks can also provide capital loans based on your accounting history, albeit at a more significant percentage rate. 

5. Reducing Expenses and Securing a “Cash Back” Credit Card

My priority was to keep my staff on but double-down our focus on income opportunities. We scoured our expenses, canceling monthly subscriptions to online software and non-essential expenses we weren’t utilizing. These fees can add up to hundreds, if not thousands of dollars per month. We used the app Truebill for business and personal accounts to ensure we didn’t miss anything.

I also found a Chase cash-back credit card that provides monthly rewards based on our advertising spend, such as Facebook ads. The one I chose also came with a $500 cash-back reward if we spent a certain amount within the first three months. 

6. Identifying Low-Cost Opportunities With a Big Upside

We went through all of our assets, i.e. database, previous customers, customers due to re-order certain products, social media channels such as YouTube that generate sales at low cost. Then, we identified which ones presented us with the greatest opportunity to generate profits. We also came up with ideas to partner with others on that would not only extend our reach, but minimize our risk at the same time. 

A local café, Book + Bottle, launched their new store the same week everything began closing. I provided a few suggestions for Terra, the owner. Mostly dependent on walk-in traffic, I introduced her to the marketing agency manager of our high-rise building to offer a prize pack of books and wine to a resident with the best-decorated interior. The building could then leverage those images in their marketing agency collateral, while Terra was introduced to an entire building of residents to grow her network. 

She also posted to social media a competition that allowed people to “tag their favorite nurse” for a chance to win a gift pack. Hence, creating virality and goodwill. 

If you are a retail store or restaurant, do not look past apartment complexes you can team up within your local area. These complexes will be fighting hard to keep their existing residences happy while fighting against new developments that may take leaseholders away from them. 

7. Online Optimization on Steroids

Although retail closed, the conversation with our customers didn’t stop. It just transitioned online. Even though we are already an online business, we quadrupled our efforts and small tweaks to double our profits with the same amount of ad spend. Here’s what we did: 

Speed-test our website page. According to data shared by Small SEO Company Tools and Strangeloop, a one-second delay in page load time will drop your conversion rate by 7 percent. This means that if your website drives $100,000 per day in sales, you could lose $2.5 million per year in lost conversions. We used Solarwinds Pingdom to test key pages for free to identify why your page is loading slowly.  

We then chose to recreate landing pages in Unbounce. Unbounce is a landing-page builder and optimizes your images and page content to increase load time. Our page went from a load time of 8.5 seconds to 2.5 seconds. 

We also uncovered 80-plus percent of our sales for the month of January were a result of mobile adverts running on Facebook. Hence, an opportunity to optimize specifically for mobile too. Doing a little research, we came across Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). It’s a simplified page HTML page that is backed by Google. Many media outlets use it when they post their articles to Facebook. You can learn about it here. 

8. Sales Funnel Optimization

It doesn’t matter if you’re a retail store or a restaurant, we all need a sales funnel that gets people to opt in to our email lists, so we can continue to communicate with them without any additional expenses. Email still has one of the highest returns on investment available to us. Here are a few examples of what you can do; 

Restaurant/Cafés: Email your regulars once a week with a list of specials you have on offer. Create a Q&A section at the bottom of each email that can easily be duplicated each time that health and safety concerns are addressed. Your customers need to know you’re taking steps to protect them. Keep up the regular weekly communication, and keep your customers informed if your hours change.

Retail: If you can segment customers based on previous buying behavior, send email campaigns that speak to their needs. And never, ever, promote more than three products per email. Several years ago, I worked with a fashion designer. We reduced the number of items she promoted in each email from 15 to three, taking her online sales from $10,000 per month to in excess of $100,000 per month.

Online Businesses: Take the time to assess any email funnels you have and identify email campaigns that don’t convert. Can you create a more compelling offer that’s relevant to their changing needs? And, most importantly, test your email subject lines. It can make or break your sales funnel. 

Online Content: We went through all the content we posted in the past year, including articles, videos and social media posts to identify pieces that drove sales. Go through your content and compare it to your sales reports to see if a spike in sales coincided with a particular social media piece or article sent to your email list. Now you can reuse or repurpose it by putting it into context with what’s currently occurring. 

It’s vital that you optimize your email funnel as soon as possible. Look at open and click-through rates and conversion rates for each email you send. If you’re not tracking this data, speak to your website developer and set it up now. 

9. Time to Test

Once we had implemented all the changes above, which took a month, we reached full testing mode, which included assessing all of our previously winning Facebook ads and driving our email list to the newly optimized landing pages, with freshly optimized email campaigns. While we still have a long way to go, and despite our revenue taking a massive hit, the worst-case scenario has yet to transpire. Sales are once again gradually on the increase, and we may still hit our yearly target. 

Build The Plane as You Fly It!

We’re all faced with a million things that need to be done urgently. In this rush, we fail to identify the small tweaks that can quickly double our profits with little effort. Set aside the same time every single day to focus on the elements above, instead of saying, “I’ll get to it when I have time.” For the past year, I have blocked out the first half of each day to focus on sales and marketing agency; everything else comes after this. Set a time that works for your schedule and stick to it as if your business depends on it because, for many of us, it does. 

Finally, if you don’t look after your mental health right now, you won’t have the mental faculty to get done what you need to. Often the solutions will pop up in a moment of silence, but first, you need to give your brain space to what it does best. 

Related: Should You Microdose to Treat Depression?

Are you ready to become unstoppable?

Visit www.areyouunstoppable.com and take your FREE 60-second online quiz now. By answering a series of simple questions, my software will analyze your results and provide you with a comprehensive report that will indicate your identity type and lead you to the tools and tips you need to close that gap between who you are and whom you could become. Take the quiz to get started!

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/we-lost-140k-in-sales-in-less-than-30-days-heres-what-were-doing-to-fix-it/ source https://scpie.tumblr.com/post/618497087154388992

[scpie]

We Lost $140k in Sales in Less Than 30 Days. Here’s What We’re Doing to Fix It.

May 18, 2020 12 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

The following article is written by Ben Angel. Author of the book, Unstoppable: A 90-Day Plan to Biohack Your Mind and Body for Success. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iBooks | IndieBound. And be sure to order The Unstoppable Journal, the only journal of its kind based on neuroscience, psychology and biohacking to help you reach your goals.

When I launched my new bestselling book, Unstoppable, I had minus $3,000 in my bank account in October 2018. A year later, we had built our new business to $1.2 million in online sales and sold more than 50,000 copies of my book. We were on track to do $1.7 million in sales this year when the pandemic hit. Our sales dropped by $140,000 within 30 days. The Facebook ad campaigns we’d been running stopped working. As a result, we had to reduce our Facebook advertising budget from $88,000 per month to less than $30,000 per month because they largely became unprofitable. 

Like everyone else, I was in shock. All the effort my team put in was in jeopardy. Worse yet, the free online support we’d provided in the area of mental health was at risk of shutting down. 

Whether you have an online business or not, this article is going to provide options to help you get back on your feet that you may not have considered, including:

Fighting the Lies Fear Creates

Identifying the Worst-Case Scenario

Getting Sales Guilt By Creating Goodwill, Readying to Rebound

Securing a Flat-Fee Capital Loan

Reducing Expenses and Securing a “Cash Back” Credit Card

Identifying Low-Cost Opportunities With a Big Upside

Online Optimization on Steroids

Sales Funnel Optimization — Why a 1-Second Delay Could Cost You $2.5 Million Each Year

Time to Test!

1. Fighting the Lies Fear Creates

When sales dropped, my heart sank, and I began panicking. Trauma can rewire the brain to focus on negative experiences, making it hard to create logical plans. The first thing I did was to make a list of all the worst-case scenarios I’d worked through in the past, like surviving Hurricane Sandy, losing my father to brain cancer and other dire situations. 

Why? Reminding myself that I overcame insurmountable odds to get back into my logical, rational mind helped me recenter. I also stayed away from social media’s fear-based echo-chamber of panic to keep my brain from actively seeking out the threats, which clouds the mind. 

To regain emotional control, I designed a visualization that uses a combination of neurolinguistic programming (NLP) and hypnosis. One of our members used it to confront the person who had sexually assaulted her years ago, and it freed her emotionally after 20 years. It can be applied to any dilemma many of us find ourselves in. This style of visualization is a gym workout for your brain. It takes practice to master your mind, and this moment calls for it. 

[embedded content]

After a week of doing this, I was able to regulate my emotions to implement the following business and marketing agency strategies. These are technical so that you will be forced outside your comfort zone. 

Related: 50,000 Entrepreneurs Tell Us How to Avoid Stress and Anxiety

2. Identifying the Worst-Case Scenario

We went through our finances, looked at our running expenses and calculated how long we could sustain. Unsure of how long this chaos would last, we projected our scenarios based on six months of running at or just above breakeven. Once we did that, we worked backward to prevent it from occurring.

3. Getting Over Sales Guilt By Creating Goodwill, Readying Rebound

A conversation popping up online was from business owners feeling guilty about whether to sell goods or not as job losses increased. Working in the biohacking/mental health space, we have always been conscious of this. We made it a rule in the early days not to sell to those who are in a vulnerable position, instead directing them to free online resources we offer so that, if they find themselves in a financial situation, we’ll still be there to support them.

Not every business can provide free resources. Still, you can create goodwill by donating a percentage of sales to charities that support the vulnerable, or offer discounts to nurses and frontline workers who are fighting the pandemic. You can also use your email list or social media platforms to drive attention to someone else’s efforts. You don’t need money to make a difference; you need creativity.  

To play our part in supporting those hard-hit, we also created a comprehensive and free 23-page “Emergency Action Plan” vulnerable individuals could download to help them come up with their plan, generating more 700 downloads within the first few days of release. 

Once we had our goodwill plan in place, we dived into the demographics of our customers and started targeting people via Facebook ads that had a certain level of income. You can’t go broke trying to help others; otherwise, the assistance you provide will be short-lived. 

4. Securing a Flat-Fee Capital Loan 

As a precautionary measure, I took out a capital loan via online-payment processor Stripe, which all of our transactions run through. Similar to PayPal, it can provide capital loans within a few short minutes based on your previous sales volume. These loans have a flat fee and are paid back at a smaller percentage rate based on your daily sales volume. Making them manageable and avoiding expensive interest rates. Companies such as Quickbooks can also provide capital loans based on your accounting history, albeit at a more significant percentage rate. 

5. Reducing Expenses and Securing a “Cash Back” Credit Card

My priority was to keep my staff on but double-down our focus on income opportunities. We scoured our expenses, canceling monthly subscriptions to online software and non-essential expenses we weren’t utilizing. These fees can add up to hundreds, if not thousands of dollars per month. We used the app Truebill for business and personal accounts to ensure we didn’t miss anything.

I also found a Chase cash-back credit card that provides monthly rewards based on our advertising spend, such as Facebook ads. The one I chose also came with a $500 cash-back reward if we spent a certain amount within the first three months. 

6. Identifying Low-Cost Opportunities With a Big Upside

We went through all of our assets, i.e. database, previous customers, customers due to re-order certain products, social media channels such as YouTube that generate sales at low cost. Then, we identified which ones presented us with the greatest opportunity to generate profits. We also came up with ideas to partner with others on that would not only extend our reach, but minimize our risk at the same time. 

A local café, Book + Bottle, launched their new store the same week everything began closing. I provided a few suggestions for Terra, the owner. Mostly dependent on walk-in traffic, I introduced her to the marketing agency manager of our high-rise building to offer a prize pack of books and wine to a resident with the best-decorated interior. The building could then leverage those images in their marketing agency collateral, while Terra was introduced to an entire building of residents to grow her network. 

She also posted to social media a competition that allowed people to “tag their favorite nurse” for a chance to win a gift pack. Hence, creating virality and goodwill. 

If you are a retail store or restaurant, do not look past apartment complexes you can team up within your local area. These complexes will be fighting hard to keep their existing residences happy while fighting against new developments that may take leaseholders away from them. 

7. Online Optimization on Steroids

Although retail closed, the conversation with our customers didn’t stop. It just transitioned online. Even though we are already an online business, we quadrupled our efforts and small tweaks to double our profits with the same amount of ad spend. Here’s what we did: 

Speed-test our website page. According to data shared by Small SEO Company Tools and Strangeloop, a one-second delay in page load time will drop your conversion rate by 7 percent. This means that if your website drives $100,000 per day in sales, you could lose $2.5 million per year in lost conversions. We used Solarwinds Pingdom to test key pages for free to identify why your page is loading slowly.  

We then chose to recreate landing pages in Unbounce. Unbounce is a landing-page builder and optimizes your images and page content to increase load time. Our page went from a load time of 8.5 seconds to 2.5 seconds. 

We also uncovered 80-plus percent of our sales for the month of January were a result of mobile adverts running on Facebook. Hence, an opportunity to optimize specifically for mobile too. Doing a little research, we came across Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). It’s a simplified page HTML page that is backed by Google. Many media outlets use it when they post their articles to Facebook. You can learn about it here. 

8. Sales Funnel Optimization

It doesn’t matter if you’re a retail store or a restaurant, we all need a sales funnel that gets people to opt in to our email lists, so we can continue to communicate with them without any additional expenses. Email still has one of the highest returns on investment available to us. Here are a few examples of what you can do; 

Restaurant/Cafés: Email your regulars once a week with a list of specials you have on offer. Create a Q&A section at the bottom of each email that can easily be duplicated each time that health and safety concerns are addressed. Your customers need to know you’re taking steps to protect them. Keep up the regular weekly communication, and keep your customers informed if your hours change.

Retail: If you can segment customers based on previous buying behavior, send email campaigns that speak to their needs. And never, ever, promote more than three products per email. Several years ago, I worked with a fashion designer. We reduced the number of items she promoted in each email from 15 to three, taking her online sales from $10,000 per month to in excess of $100,000 per month.

Online Businesses: Take the time to assess any email funnels you have and identify email campaigns that don’t convert. Can you create a more compelling offer that’s relevant to their changing needs? And, most importantly, test your email subject lines. It can make or break your sales funnel. 

Online Content: We went through all the content we posted in the past year, including articles, videos and social media posts to identify pieces that drove sales. Go through your content and compare it to your sales reports to see if a spike in sales coincided with a particular social media piece or article sent to your email list. Now you can reuse or repurpose it by putting it into context with what’s currently occurring. 

It’s vital that you optimize your email funnel as soon as possible. Look at open and click-through rates and conversion rates for each email you send. If you’re not tracking this data, speak to your website developer and set it up now. 

9. Time to Test

Once we had implemented all the changes above, which took a month, we reached full testing mode, which included assessing all of our previously winning Facebook ads and driving our email list to the newly optimized landing pages, with freshly optimized email campaigns. While we still have a long way to go, and despite our revenue taking a massive hit, the worst-case scenario has yet to transpire. Sales are once again gradually on the increase, and we may still hit our yearly target. 

Build The Plane as You Fly It!

We’re all faced with a million things that need to be done urgently. In this rush, we fail to identify the small tweaks that can quickly double our profits with little effort. Set aside the same time every single day to focus on the elements above, instead of saying, “I’ll get to it when I have time.” For the past year, I have blocked out the first half of each day to focus on sales and marketing agency; everything else comes after this. Set a time that works for your schedule and stick to it as if your business depends on it because, for many of us, it does. 

Finally, if you don’t look after your mental health right now, you won’t have the mental faculty to get done what you need to. Often the solutions will pop up in a moment of silence, but first, you need to give your brain space to what it does best. 

Related: Should You Microdose to Treat Depression?

Are you ready to become unstoppable?

Visit www.areyouunstoppable.com and take your FREE 60-second online quiz now. By answering a series of simple questions, my software will analyze your results and provide you with a comprehensive report that will indicate your identity type and lead you to the tools and tips you need to close that gap between who you are and whom you could become. Take the quiz to get started!

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/we-lost-140k-in-sales-in-less-than-30-days-heres-what-were-doing-to-fix-it/

[andrewdburton]

My 2019 year in review

On a cold first of December 2000, my car was totalled during morning rush hour. I was cruising along in the slow lane — I drive like an old man — when a tractor-trailer rig changed lanes into my Geo Storm. According to the guy behind me, the car spun around twice (although that seems unlikely) before slamming into a guardrail and coming to a stop.

The entire accident probably took all of five seconds but it seemed more like five minutes in subjective time. From the moment I felt the first jolt, my mind entered a state of hyper awareness. I could see everything happening around me — the truck looming to my left, the airbag deploying, the chaos as the car whirled about, the traffic in other lanes — but I was powerless to do anything about it.

When my vehicle came to a stop, witnesses pulled over and rushed to see if I was okay. I was stunned, but I was fine.

Over the next couple of hours — and then days — I went about picking up the pieces. The accident itself had been chaos, as I said, and it left a bit of a mess to clean up afterward. I had to have the car towed. The insurance company had to evaluate it. They had to issue me a check. I had to buy a new car. And so on.

Five seconds of chaos, five weeks of picking up the pieces, and then life settled into a new normal.

My 2019 felt much the same, my friends. I'm not trying to be overdramatic (or to catastrophize), but for a lot of the past twelve months, I've felt as if I'm stuck in a spinning car, clearly able to see what's happening but powerless to stop it.

This is, of course, a product of my anxiety and depression. Objectively, my life is fine. Great, even. Subjectively, everything's been spinning and the airbag has deployed. I know this is all in my head, but that doesn't make it any better.

That's the bad news.

The good news is that I believe — hope, maybe? — that the wreck has come to a halt. The car that is my life has stopped spinning. Over the past month, I've been “assessing the damage”. Things are messy, sure, but they're not as bad as they might have been. Now, I've slowly begun to pick up the pieces, to work toward a new normal.

Fortunately, nothing's totalled. It's a mess, but there's nothing that cannot be repaired.

2019 in Review

Hello! And welcome to 2020.

I, for one, am eager to dive into the new year. It's almost guaranteed to be an improvement over 2019, which was (subjectively) one of the most difficult years of my life. Things can only get better, right?

But when I look back objectively at the previous twelve months, things were great. Especially financially. After hemorrhaging money during the previous two years, I managed to stop the bleeding. The austerity measures I implemented last January worked. My spending declined. Meanwhile, my investments — in the stock market, in my home — all gained value.

As a result, my net worth grew substantially despite being in drawdown mode (as opposed to “wealth accumulation” mode).

At the end of 2018, my net worth was $1,334,227. This was a 15.2% decline from 2017!

At the end of 2019, my net worth was $1,449,808. This is an 8.7% increase over last year.

In 2020, I intend to continue pursuing frugality. Kim and I have talked about various ways we can both cut our spending even more than we already have (while still enjoying the things that bring us value, such as travel). But my top financial goal is to increase my income with Get Rich Slowly. That means publishing more articles and organizing the existing material so that it's more useful to new visitors.

As I get back in the habit of writing for GRS, I've noticed that some readers have questions. My sporadic publishing schedule has left gaps in what I've shared about my life.

“What happened to working at the box factory?”

“Why are you renting an office?”

“Did you ever buy a new car?”

And so on.

In my head, I've shared about this stuff. But that's probably just in my head. Today, as we wrap up 2019, I thought it might be a good time to fill in some of these gaps.

Health and Fitness

From a health and fitness perspective, 2019 sucked. And because my health and fitness sucked, the rest of the year seemed to suck more than it actually did. When you're not well, everything else seems off…even if it isn't actually so.

At the start of the year, things seemed fine. I was heavier than I wanted, but I was going to the gym and generally happy.

Something happened in March, though. Every spring, I get deeply depressed as my tree allergies flare up. This year, though, things were especially bad. At the end of March, I went to the emergency room with what I thought was a heart attack. It wasn't a heart attack. It was probably a panic attack.

As a result, I started attending therapy for the first time in ten years. Over the next few months, I sunk deeper into depression and my anxiety worsened. It sucked. Now, though, things seem to be improving. But I've suffered a lot of lost time and productivity.

“A lot of your self-worth seems to come from accomplishments,” my therapist said last week. I hadn't ever thought of that. She's right. Work, school, play — a lot of how I feel comes from the results I achieve rather than the effort I expend. Something to work on!

In November, I had a colonoscopy. Cancer runs in my family, and I don't want to take any chances. The doctor removed nine polyps. Two were hyperplastic (“of no significance”) and seven were adenomatous (not cancerous, but could lead to cancer). So, good news there.

All of this healthcare stuff was expensive. I met my $7900 out-of-pocket health insurance max this year, which boggles my mind. Plus, I ended the year ten pounds heavier than I started it.

Despite all of this, I'm hopeful for the future. I seem to have turned the corner on the depression and anxiety. I'm making progress. And I have a plan for improving my fitness, a plan that involves walking and biking to work every day. Much of my mental state seems to be tied to my physical fitness, so this is all good stuff.

Work

At the start of 2019, I went back to work for the family box factory. I was training to replace my cousin, who has throat cancer and is continually told he has three months left to live. When it came time for him to leave, I'd take over as bookkeeper and office manager. That was the plan.

That didn't work out.

For one, it was taking time away from this website. For another, it was tough to justify commuting an hour each day, especially when I don't really need the money. Plus, I felt like working together was placing a strain on our family relationships. So, I stopped working for the family business at the end of June. (Fortunately, Duane is still with us and still managing the office. We're even talking about taking another trip together!)

At Get Rich Slowly, I struggled to find rhythm and direction. I feel like I've managed to achieve a sort of balance now, thankfully. I'm writing what I want when I want, and that takes a lot of pressure off me. Tom and I are still trying to get the stupid redesign finished — it's only taken two years! — but that's all on me. I'm the sticking point.

As I've mentioned in passing, GRS has increased revenue over the past year. I'd still like to boost income even more, but I'm unwilling to do so in ways that compromise the user experience, so that limits my options. Tom and I will keep experimenting, though.

Meanwhile, I've begun working on a project that excites me. I'm creating a five-hours, ten-part introductory course on financial independence and early retirement for Audible and The Great Courses. That'll be sucking up most of my time for the next four months, in fact.

Lastly, I should point out that I have moved into a new office space. At our family meeting on Thanksgiving, Kim urged me to rent space outside the house. She thought it would give me mental separation between work and home. Turns out, she was right.

In December, I rented a small (129 square foot) office for $325 per month and it's awesome. It's a great space that I love. Best of all, it actually seems to be fostering productivity. Yay!

Money

Now, let's get to the good stuff. Let's talk about personal finance.

I was relatively pleased with my money management this year. After seeming to vomit money in 2017 and 2018 (from remodeling the house, buying back this website, and investing in other businesses), I buckled down and looked for ways to not spend. I actively worked to reduce my discretionary expenses in 2019, and have plans to reduce them even more in 2020.

Normally, I have lots of numbers to share. I'll certainly share some in a moment, but my records are spotty for 2019. I spent two months on the road, during which I didn't keep good records. I stopped tracking at the end of July, and didn't resume until the end of October. When I did resume, I switched from Quicken 2007 to Quicken 2017. I thought it was time to enter the modern era. I wish I hadn't.

I'm now left in something of a pickle. My Quicken 2007 records stop in late July. My Quicken 2017 records start at the end of October. After using it for nearly three months, I've come to the conclusion that I do not like the modern version of Quicken, and for many reasons. (Maybe I need to do a review?) I want to go back to Quicken 2007.

That said, Quicken 2007 is near the end of its useful life. Intuit no longer supports it. It will not run on modern versions of the Macintosh operating system. So, I'm keeping an old machine to run the program (and to play World of Warcraft), which is silly.

What I'll probably do is “reset” Quicken 2007 to 31 December 2019. That means manually entering adjusting balances, etc. Long-term, this means I'll lose six months of financial data, which will make spending comparisons difficult. But it's probably the best solution.

Anyhow, let's look at some of my spending for 2019.

In the spreadsheet below, I've included monthly averages for three time periods: all of 2018, for the first half of 2019, and then for the two months between October 20th (when I started using Quicken 2017) and December 19th (when I created the spreadsheet). Here's my average monthly spending on selected categories:

Some intersting things to note:

After forty years of collecting comic books, I sold almost everything in 2013. Since then, I buy funny books only rarely. In 2018, I stocked up on some digital comics (thus the relatively high monthly expense), but nowadays I buy maybe one collection per month…if that. (I just bought the To Kill a Mockingbird graphic novel yesterday, for example.) Progress!

As you may recall, I was very concerned with my iTunes spending when I crunched the numbers for 2018. I was shelling out over $250 a month to buy movies and TV shows. Holy cats! During the first half of 2019, I worked to bring that number down. And over the past couple of months, it's fallen even farther.

One of my big goals for this year was to reduce my food spending. It's absurd that I spend so much on this category. In 2018, I spent $1038 per month on food, which included $619 per month on groceries and $390 per month on restaurants. To cut costs, I decided to try the meal service HelloFresh for the year. It didn't work. My combined spending on groceries and HelloFresh increased instead of declining. This week will be my last order from the company. (I have another article in the wings that explains more about this decision.)

Finally, I've made some progress on my “sin” spending, but not enough. My sin category includes alcohol and (legal) marijuana. I should note that I don't use pot recreationally very often, but I do use it to sleep almost every night. Anyhow, I'm spending $8 per day on “sin”, and I feel like that's too much. This is something I'm working on with my therapist, so let's hope that when I do my 2020 summary, we see some progress here.

Looking at my numbers for the last two months, I spent $10,987.24 between October 20th and December 19th. Of this, $3817.81 went to property taxes, which means I spent $7169.93 (or $3585.97 per month) to support my lifestyle. Not bad. Not bad.

If we amortize the property taxes across twelve months, we get $4221.27 of spending per month, which is $50,655.26 per year. I think $50,000 seems like a resonable spending goal. Let's see how close I can get to that in 2020!

Final Thoughts

To wrap up our look at my financials, here's how my end-of-year net worth has progressed over the past few years:

2016 –> $1.58 million

2017 –> $1.58 million (does not include the value of this site)

2018 –> $1.33 million (does not include the value of this site)

2019 –> $1.45 million (does not include the value of this site)

That huge loss in 2018 still stings, but I know it wasn't money frittered on fast cars and loose women. It was money spent remodeling the house and buying back Get Rich Slowly.

Oh yeah. I forgot to answer one common question. Did I ever buy a new car? No. I'm still cruising around in my 2004 Mini Cooper. Plus, last January I spent $1900 on a 1993 Toyota pickup, which I love. (“I know this is a piece of junk,” I told Kim as we were driving to IKEA yesterday. “But I love it. I'd give up the Mini before I'd give up this truck.”)

When the Mini Cooper dies, I do intend to replace it with a new one, but I hope that won't be for several years yet. Meanwhile, Kim is actively looking to replace her 1997 Honda Accord. We've done one test drive, and she may do another while I'm here at the office today. She's a big fan of J.L. Collins, so she plans to take a similar approach to how he bought his new car.

So, that's how my 2019 was. How was yours?

The post My 2019 year in review appeared first on Get Rich Slowly.

from Finance https://www.getrichslowly.org/2019-year-in-review/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[filipeteimuraz]

7 Reasons Why You Do NOT Need to Hire a Website Designer

I’ve had a dream for a while to quit my job and build my own business.

Recently, I did just that. One of my businesses pays the bills while I build another one up.

I gotta say, it’s as amazing as I dreamt about it all those years. I wake up relaxed, calmly walk down the street and grab coffee, work on stuff that I want to work on all day, then hit the gym for a few hours. No rushing, no stress, no dead-end projects from my manager. Every day is a great and enjoyable day.

I didn’t make this happen on the first try. I have a closet full of failed sites and businesses that never went anywhere.

Looking back, a few things finally made it all come together. But hiring a web designer for my site wasn’t one of the critical pieces. Horrible site designs didn’t hold me back, nor did it finally give me the freedom to quit my job and build my business.

I’m going to be blunt.

By the end of this post, I’m hoping to convince you that a hiring a website designer is a waste of your time and money. Not only are there cheaper ways to get a great-looking site (I’ll show you them below), there are also much more important things to focus on before getting a fancy website design.

Reason #1: A Website Design Won’t Help

After countless business and site failures, I’ve learned a few things about what to prioritize.

Here’s what I obsess about when I’m starting a new business:

Do I have an extremely compelling offer that a specific market really wants?

Can I define that market precisely?

Have I proven a repeatable process for acquiring customers from that market?

Is it an attractive business model with healthy cash flow?

Do the challenges in this industry align naturally with my personal instincts?

How can I de-risk the opportunity as much as possible?

Guess what’s not on that list?

Website design.

Don’t get me wrong, website design can have a tangible impact on a business. But that opportunity happens at a much later stage.

If you don’t have enough revenue coming in to cover your rent or mortgage, hiring a website designer won’t change that fact. You’ll still be struggling to pay the bills. The only difference is that your savings with have gotten smaller by several thousand dollars.

I’ve used a personal blog to attract consulting clients for years. It also helped me get a few jobs that accelerated my career quite a bit. Have I ever paid a designer to give it a great design? Nope.

First I bought a $30 theme from Themeforest. Then I paid for Thesis (a WordPress framework) for about $100 and used the sample theme for years. Recently I bought Genesis (another WordPress framework) for $60 and currently use its sample theme.

After almost a decade, I put less than $200 into my website design. That didn’t stop me from landing speaking gigs, getting amazing jobs, closing clients, doing paid workshops, and having enough income to support myself while I quit my job to start another business.

Before getting a custom site design, I make absolutely sure I have a great offer that customers are paying for, a specific target market, and I know how to get in front of that market consistently. Any money spent on website design before hitting these milestones is a waste.

These days, there are plenty of low-cost ways to get great design assets anyway.

Reason #2: Buy a Theme for $60 Instead

What would you rather do at this stage of your business?

Hire a website designer for $10,000

Spend a few hours looking for a new theme for $60

To get a good website design that’s worth the extra hassle and time, $10,000 is a pretty conservative estimate.

For me, this decision depends entirely on the stage of the business. For a larger site that’s making real money, the $10,000 option makes perfect sense. The site has enough unique requirements that a theme really isn’t an option any more.

But when I’m just starting a new site, I’ll gladly use the $60 theme until the site is large enough to warrant a bigger design budget.

There is a catch to all this.

In order to buy a theme, you need to build your site with a tool that allows themes to be installed.

For blogs and basic sites, WordPress is perfect and has an enormous theme ecosystem. There’s an endless list of professional themes for $30–60. Our favorite web hosts all have one-click installs for WordPress which makes this option super easy. After you’ve installed WordPress, head over to Themeforest and pick the theme you want.

For an ecommerce site, Shopify gives you a ton of ecommerce features you’ll need while also having world-class themes. Many of them are free, some are $180. It’s our top recommended ecommerce tool.

You’ll get a great-looking site for a fraction of the cost it would take to hire a website designer.

Reason #3: Or Use Squarespace for $12/month

What if this whole WordPress or Shopify thing is too complicated? Is there an even easier way to get a website built?

You betcha!

Squarespace is your best option, it’s considered the market leader for website builders. These are tools that make building a website as easy as possible. It’s all drop-and-click and basic text editing. No programming or complicated settings to figure out.

It’s kind of like WordPress in that Squarespace is the tool that runs your site. Then you’ll pick a theme that changes how your site looks.

The main differences are that Squarespace is much easier to use and the theme is included in the monthly price. Pricing starts at $12/month which is very reasonable. Squarespace is your best option if you need a basic website that describes your business. A homepage, an About page, a Contact page, and that’s about it.

If you’re building an ecommerce business, use Shopify.

If you’re building a blog or want to focus on SEO, use WordPress.

Regardless of which option you choose, you don’t need a website designer for any of them.

Reason #4: Use These Logo Hacks Instead

Any designer that’s really good will charge a boatload for a logo. For a major corporation that depends on its brand identity, it’s well worth the cost.

But when I’ve started websites and businesses, the last thing I want to spend money on is a logo. I need to conserve every dollar I have to get the business off the ground.

Among online business owners, there’s a hack for getting a great logo at a reasonable price.

The hack is 99 Designs.

It’s a platform for connecting designers to clients. And it works like a contest. You put in your design spec, a bunch of designers submit designs, you give feedback on the top 3–5 that you like, then you pick the winner based on the one you like the most.

I’ve done a bunch of these over the years and have always ended up with a great logo.

It’s super easy to run and you’ll have a great logo for $299. Other than your website theme, this is the only money that you should spend on design in the early days.

What if $299 is too steep? Is there a cheaper way to get a logo?

Yes, a lot of folks have been using Fiverr recently. You can nab a logo for as low as $10. Keep in mind that these logos will be very derivative and basic. The designer has a bunch of basic logo templates and styles they’ve used in the past. They’ll take your company name and plop it right into one of these standard logos. It’s the only way to crank out logos for $10. As long as you’re okay with that, Fiverr has my full support.

Reason #5: The Best Website Designers Aren’t Available

When I was running website growth and optimization teams, I’d occasionally come across a good designer available for a reasonable rate. Can you guess what I did next?

I hired them full-time and took them off the market.

I had more than enough work to keep them busy and a good designer is indispensable to a larger site. I’d quickly employ them full-time and give them more than enough work that they’d stop freelancing.

This happens all the time.

Senior designers know their worth and are super expensive. Younger designers with talent that exceeds their cost are only available for brief periods. Either a client brings them in-house or they figure out what they’re really worth and up their rates. Regardless, it’s super hard to find talent at reasonable rates for a new business.

The last thing I’d do is pay through the nose when I’m just getting a business off the ground.

Reason #6: Cheap Designers Won’t Do Much Design Anyway

I can’t believe I’m about to tell this story.

Years ago, when I was just getting my career going, I did a bunch of freelance online marketing. I ran AdWords accounts, did conversion optimization, wrote copy, and built a lot of websites. Building websites was the bulk of the work that I brought in. A bunch of small businesses needed them and asked if I could help. Of course I said yes because I was living out of a barn and needed the cash.

So I teamed up with a good friend of mine who was a front-end developer.

Here’s the problem: we had no design skills whatsoever.

I wrote solid copy, my friend could build whatever you wanted, but we couldn’t design our way out of a paper bag.

Clients would ask me if I could design a website, I’d say yes, then I’d go buy a WordPress theme that was 90% of what they needed. We’d tweak it just enough to make it look unique.

Here’s the part that will make you cringe.

I’d pay like $30 for the WordPress theme. Then I’d charge the client thousands of dollars for the website. I never felt too bad about since we spun the site up, wrote all the copy, and got everything in place. But still, that’s a lot of extra money you don’t really need to spend.

And this was back when WordPress themes weren’t that good. You could tell the difference between a theme and a real site in those days. Themes are so good these days that if I was a junior designer, I’d play this theme arbitrage game all day long.

Moral of the story: if you find a cheap designer, they’re charging you to find a theme and make a few basic edits.

Reason #7: Website Designs Age Fast

If you find a great designer who charges you thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for your website, you’ll be thrilled with the design.

For about a year.

Then it will start to age.

By years two and three, you’ll desperately want a new design.

Design trends online charge so fast, I can barely keep up myself. They change so quickly that I’ve accepted the fact that my sites need major overhauls every 2–3 years. Instead of a website design being an investment in the future, it behaves more like a fixed cost.

A great design only looks great if it’s better than everyone else’s site. A great design from 5 years ago does not look great anymore – it looks pretty shabby.

Let’s say you buy a WordPress theme for $60. In 3 years, you can easily buy another WordPress theme for $60 that looks more up-to-date. Now you’re spending $20/year to keep your website fresh.

What if you get a spiffy site custom built? If you spend $9,000 on the design (a very conservative estimate), that works out to a budget of $3,000 per year. For a lot of small businesses, that’s a hefty price tag.

I Only Hire a Website Designer When I Can Afford One Full Time

Here’s my rule: I only start doing custom website designs once I have the budget to hire a full-time designer. I might choose a website design agency or a freelancer instead if I don’t have enough ongoing work for a full-time role, but my business should be large enough that I could hire a designer full-time if I really needed. Otherwise I stick to templates and small design projects.

http://www.quicksprout.com/hire-website-designer/ Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2019/03/7-reasons-why-you-do-not-need-to-hire.html

[loudlyzealousarcade-blog]

The Workplace Lift.

http://kreativszepseg-blog.info to the fact that you like not looking like The Hulk, maybe you're persuaded you shouldn't raise weights. But in justness to your non-sick fellow physical fitness enthusiasts," Matthews claims, if you're getting some exercise in while you're battling a chilly, you ought to select an at-home exercise - probably your favorite physical fitness DVD or an exterior workout." If you do decide to exercise at the gym, be considerate of others and make certain to effectively sanitize all tools that you use - which you should always do, sniffles or not. From the decor to the devices to the general look of your gym - you need to be suitably pleased. The lift was constructed from wood dropped in the Sabina hills north of Rome. He makes no transfer to approach, only watching me thoroughly as I raise the gold disc from the morpher, analyzing it very closely. The smooth balance and also set motion could also make you believe you could raise more weight than you ought to be. Continue to use the Smith equipment as well as you will certainly get really strong in specifically one aircraft of motion, which would certainly be wonderful if there was only one airplane of motion. http://kreativszepseg-blog.info had actually figured out that the one of the ways that she might amaze target markets was to lift a male on her shoulders. Every single time I have actually felt this way, I've offered every one of my interior power to the complying with exterior variables: a male, to function or to the suggestion of 'success'. This lift has the ability to hold both conventional and powered wheel chairs and are very easy to make use of. People didn't need to be encouraged, they merely should be asked at a moment when they had the power to act. I am taking into consideration abandoning my costly health club subscription in favour of a community-led fitness centre that's just as proficient at half the cost. My hope is that the 3 Phases of Failure structure will certainly aid you browse the difficult choice of making a decision when to quit when to stay with it. It's not excellent, yet I wish you locate it to be useful. Although a lot of fitness centers offered handicapped garage, for instance, the survey found that some bays were not large sufficient to allow a mobility device to be unpacked from an auto. These health clubs offer an enjoyable location for your children to have fun with grown-up supervision, as well as assist educate them physical fitness skills. The rangers bravely faced the Putties' advances, however with severe care for fear of the fatal venom that almost eased them of an Eco-friendly Ranger. He regularly goes along with beasts to Angel Grove, and holds his very own against the Rangers. Also, the truth is that fixed-grips typically cannot perform at complete capacity, due to the fact that fixed-grip chairs are harder to lots and discharge. You seem like going no place-- you seriously require a dose of self-motivation to raise your spirits. With EPA's basic legal authority already established, the oppositions are attempting to beat the Clean Power Plan by attacking exactly how EPA has actually managed nuclear power plant. You can be checking out from someplace pleased like Denmark (722 visitors last month), Costa Rica (109 site visitors), or Bhutan (3 site visitors). There are 3 major sorts of dumbbell home gyms: the weight bench, the power shelf as well as the power cage. Pfeffer outlines a survey degree argument of why power national politics exists, exactly what it takes to get and also maintain it, and why the system is not disappearing. Jeffery Pfeffer uses a well-crafted, how-to handbook of gaining power in an organization via his appropriately entitled book. This is the Globe Fitness center that few individuals know of. It was constructed in View City as well as was twice the dimension of his various other gym. Power is calcuated as Velocity x Toughness, so the objective for our job is to get you removaling faster and also with more pressure. The energy poles have high voltage insulators to aid with the power transportation in a secure manner. Lots of various other factors additionally contribute to whether you miss out on a lift or make or hit a brand-new Public Relations. It become power's intent to use its present power in establishing more strength. Additionally look for provisions which allow for fitness center agreements to be extended without your permission. Crashes can occur in a limited area, specifically with the kind of items utilized in a fitness center. By all civil liberties, Power Rangers should be a hyperreal, bombastic and entirely outrageous riff on well established superhero styles. Critics Consensus: Power suffers from excessive outlining as well as making use of extremely familiar by-the-numbers story aspects. Comprehend the NSD Powerball as well as utilize your wrist to turn the gadget in a clockwise direction. I struggle at the end of a lengthy day to obtain myself to the gym even though I recognize that I need to go. And also at the end of a long day, I likewise deal with the wish to enjoy my favored TV programs as opposed to getting work done. You Are Your very own Fitness center shows the workouts performed with makeshift device where necessary. That began top of a comparable quantity of coal power being closed in between 2012 and 2014 since updating the stations to satisfy greater air pollution requirements was regarded uneconomic. As the Navy Thunder Ranger, Blake takes advantage of the power of rumbling, as well as pilots the Navy Beetlezord. When we offer somebody or something power by neediness and desperation, we lose link with our very own power and also true capacity. At first sight, faith appears to support unilateral top-down power, as magnificent power is commonly perceived in exactly by doing this. This flick actually takes you back to the 90s, with all the one-liner jokes, the ridiculous looking computer system produced special effects, as well as naturally, the power rangers. It had been moved a lot of times and also people misplaced it. Joe died in 2004, the fitness center shut down then the participants all returned to Gold's fitness center to train again. When she raised her face to curve that damn eyebrow of hers again, I caved, prepared to get down on both knees, pleading. Like lots of others, I have paid a regular monthly cost to use an industrial health club as well as neglected facilities - both more affordable and also nearer my house - run by my regional recreation centre. So by complying with the above precautionary steps you can reduce the power usage and expand the life of your computer. Bannatyne Health and fitness, David Lloyd Leisure and Physical fitness First have all been required to transform their contracts after they were found to be making it difficult or challenging for individuals who were wounded or made redundant to leave their fitness center arrangements early. The men experiencing reduced sex drive can boost sex power and also period normally if they take Kamdeepak pills frequently for a couple of months as it assists in battling infections and also illness of the body which cause these troubles. The power of getting in the circulation is best when they customer could act upon the pointer immediately. The power of a routine, or just what I want to call a pre-game routine, is that it offers a meaningless means to launch your habits. There are fitness centers with first test memberships if you're concerned about your remaining power. The last phase, the power and also fatality, was a bit unusual, as it connects to fatality and after. Though Curry has made extra passes to teammates this year compared to in previous periods, his overall percent of passes made in a game has gone down, from 33% of all group assists two years ago to 13% this period. According to Tom Holland, an exercise physiologist based in Connecticut and writer of Beat the Gym," leaving your towel holding on a maker doesn't provide you dibs on that particular tool. Do 6-8 reps on this workout and see to it you rather work on raising your ribs towards bench then trying to lift you chin up. In this way you get the best exercise and don't risk stretching your neck. Afterwards she went back to her birth country of Uzbekistan, where she toiled for years in a second-rate gym with bent cords as well as corroded bars. He reached under the water, unholstered his pistol, and also brought it to going degree trying to find a target. Maximum Stamina lays out a four-phase program that could assist any individual end up being larger and also stronger, as well as see results-- while investing much less time in the fitness center. Je trouve cela dommage auto j' ai toujours fait de la gym et c'est la première fois que j' ai vu un résultat aussi vite! At most health clubs, progressing from starting gymnastics courses to intermediate requires the approval and referral of the coach or a supervising instructor. In the cases of authoritarians and despots, they continue to be in power by both armed forces as well as preferred regulation, for the most parts. Additional benefits: you could do these body-weight exercises anywhere, you don't need a fitness center or any type of expensive devices, and also there's an almost endless range of workouts to select from! If you are not doing the ideal workouts after that you run the risk of placing your body in problem, functioning out in a health club Sydney will certainly look very easy yet. Either via tax obligations, army task, support (defending/praising them openly), or other approach, power involves a leader by the assistance of others. Pure Gym stated that regardless of solid capitalist passion, the ₤ 500m listing intends introduced last month will certainly not go ahead due to the fact that it can harm the lasting passions of its stakeholders.

[swagstarlighttiger-blog]

5 Dumbbell Workouts For Eruptive Muscle Growth And Quick.

In an effort to create a more comfortable workout environment for plus-size females, Body Exchange, a Vancouver-area gym, has taken on an unusual subscription plan. Their brand-new golden pal Antonio shows the Power Rangers he also could be a samurai with his lightning-fast Barracuda Blade, the ink-spraying OctoZord, and also the ClawZord's megamodes! Yet as Andreas Bernard reveals in Lifted: A Cultural Background of the Lift (2014), this story of creation is itself a development, promoted as well as cemented in position by the Otis company throughout the 20th century. My gym occurs to have fractional plates, however if your fitness center does not, after that you can purchase a decent collection of fractional plates as well as toss them in your fitness center bag considering that they don't evaluate very much. At his one year Senior high school get-together, Conner is offered the future by Broodwing where he, Ethan, as well as Kira assemble with the S.P.D. Rangers. When taking a trip from the primary island (Fitness center Island) to the various other islands, raising your stats will certainly assist you to defeat your enemies. His expert swordfighting ability as well as remarkable firepower make him among the Rangers most unsafe bad guys. When Master Vile turned around time and returned the Rangers to children, the Ape Power Coin was later destroyed by Zedd and also Rita. The good news is, the spell is broken as well as he retrieves himself as he later ends up being the White Power Ranger. Gymnastics entails a ton of jumping and also activity patterns, so connect these activities to pets and have children mimic them. Tanya went back to the Command Facility with the crystal, as well as presumed her function as Zeo Ranger II. Tanya's power levels were improved when she later ended up being the Yellow Turbo Ranger. If your purpose is to earn a complete fitness area with toughness as well as cardio devices, you'll need to provide a larger location as well as take a look at long lasting rubber floor covering such as the ones made use of in business health and fitness gyms. Up the Eggalm Nord lift and after that a long run down 2 and 5 down station of the Rastkogelbahn gondola. In the Abrahamic practices, divine power goes to times more very closely linked to individuals power than to the power of rulers and kings. The tubing park is being exchanged a novice lesson area, offered by a new Magic Carpeting conveyor lift. Although you could raise weights to flatter your flexing muscles, each time you exercise you're indirectly targeting those little muscular tissues that help maintain you upright as well as take care of daily tasks such as stabilizing on one foot to reach a high rack or quiting yourself from falling on an icy surface. Conditioning workouts put added focus on including conditioning ball plyometrics for trunk torque and also power advancement as well as enhancing speed-endurance for under 40 lawn conditioning. After shedding those powers, he then obtained the brand-new powers of the Environment-friendly Terran Rangers. The best body gave the Greek person a tough design to live up to. To get http://cartedesanatate.info in shape required training, which suggested, firstly, the fitness center. To punctuate his declaration, the ship rocked even more challenging compared to before, throwing all the rangers from their seats, and causing control board to spark with fury. Additionally, they have the tendency to maintain their elevation also if there is power failure consequently curtailing opportunities of unexpected risks. It's so strange; I recognize Tori's a Power Ranger, but I do not want to ... discolor our time along with talk about bad ninjas, deception, and also revenge. Holland suggests ditching the regular monthly fee altogether by paying up front if you could afford it (as well as if you're devoted to utilizing the gym). His parents have gone without a vacation for Ten Years to help money the ₤ 12,000 a year required and Behan has had to work on his daddy's building site or clean the Tolworth gym in the early morning prior to bouncing around it in the mid-day. Finster assists Zedd and also Rita with his understanding of scientific research and also magic, developing monsters and also new tools for them to use versus the Rangers. Too many individuals lose time in the fitness center due to the fact that they bounce around without any real objective, doing a little bit of this machine and also a little bit of that device. It has only 4 fitness centers around the country, nonetheless: Birmingham, Cardiff, Slough and Timber Green (London). I might feel the Devil's power burning my skin where my hand touched the door, one more spiteful strategy to get me to let go so he could slam it shut and also ward me clear out to the road. It didn't faze him one bit due to the fact that he just stood there as the various other guy, who looked a lot hotter by the way, lifted the gerny from the ambulance all by himself. This is a magnetic wire pull form of health club equipment that is intended to tip up your heart price and also keep it within the appropriate area for the most useful exercise in the tiniest quantity of time. Kelly stated the travel luggage lift was part of remodelling plans in 2010 however validated that only Malcolm Turnbull had lived in the reconditioned Lodge. Weight makers, free weights and resistance devices are made use of for this purpose. When you're exercising and your devices is smoother this also indicates that you're functioning your muscles much more efficiently, getting a better workout in general. The flick appears to be asking us to go out of the theater drinking our heads in disillusionment, but I was much more puzzled compared to disillusioned. To Zack went the White Zeo Fragment, giving him the power of the Light, and control of the White Cheetah Zord. Functions a little far better than the very first Power Rangers motion picture however will certainly not prolong its allure beyond the program's follower base. The Crimson Ranger exists, laughing, throwing screws of lightning at the Wind Rangers. However it is likewise the sort of power that Gandhi accessed, that at some point brought the British Empire to approve India's self-reliance. Both rangers drifted to other sides, permitting the blast to fly harmlessly past them. Using useful play has been boosting in appeal in health clubs around the world for some time currently, however Awaken takes this technique of health and fitness one giant action additionally. The Environment-friendly Samurai Ranger's Samurai Saber is linked to Ninja Ops' computer systems, so Webcam can from another location send the Rangers Zords and keep track of the city. The Red Zeonizers brought brand-new challenges, new obligations, a better understanding of his past, and real power of synergy. It was an amazing time for my digital photography, however I had not been making it to the health club very often. When utilizing a power drill always cut on flat regular surfaces, wear your personal safety tools to prevent obtaining struck by flying products, clamp down the product you are dealing with and also begin your opening with a center punch or nail. When she recognizes why Seeker and I counted the Wind Rangers as our adversaries, I didn't believe she might perhaps feel so highly about exactly what occurred in between us ... not. The health club includes weight management classes twice a month and has actually signed up dietitians on team. Women whose largest aspiration was to obtain a clerical job at Smith Barney and also vacation with their bosses in the Bahamas unlike those of us in the Program, who imagined facing down F5 twisters as well as soothing surging rivers. Galen came up to us, and also the power available to him without any thought from me. The 3 of us stood there filled with the night. The clean-and-jerk is a two-part lift where the weight is drawn from flooring to take on elevation, after that pressed expenses. Beginners should carry out the pelvic tilt regularly before starting the pelvic lift. On the one hand, it includes passages that John S. Wright could have composed, as when it flatly states, Chicago is currently facing the momentous truth that fifty years therefore, when the youngsters of to-day are at the elevation of their power and influence, this city will certainly be larger than London: that is, larger compared to any kind of existing city." On the other hand, it rejects the suggestion that the city's success could or need to be reviewed in terms of numbers alone, or that the future would certainly care for itself. Physics: From pebbles to water to 2-ton vehicles react as expected, as they comply with the laws of mass, rubbing, buoyancy, as well as gravity. Think of exercising at http://cartedesanatate.info as well as the stress as well as strain the equipment could put on your body. She mosted likely to graduation as well as prom, for instance, but really did not go to the post-prom event since she had to go to the health club the following early morning. However that gym was hazardous as well as unorganized: some devices were half-broken, the improvisated squat rack was also taken care of with duct-tape and there were no Olympic barbells. Vapor cleaners with connected vacuum make any heavy steam cleansing task easier, and gym cleansing is no exemption. At this moment, I don't feel like a Power Ranger, Wind Ninja, or careless surfer.

[wallythayer]

Change Makers

Of the many uncertainties Americans face today, the future of our health is among the most worrisome. With health-insurance coverage in flux, medical-research funding on the chopping block, and science itself under attack, it’s only natural for us to be concerned about our collective health, which is already less robust than that of people in many other industrialized nations.

Yet there is still reason to believe better times are ahead. Plenty of people are devoting their lives to improving everyone’s well-being, and most of them work outside of government and the insurance industry, where positive changes are often bungled or bogged down.

Meet some of the visionaries who are rethinking health, healthcare, and well-being from the ground up — and inspiring us to take our wellness into our own hands.

Food as Medicine: Jeanne Wallace, PhD, CNC, Oncologist

Jeanne Wallace is committed to fighting cancer with food. In her practice, Nutritional Solutions, she teaches doctors and patients how to support standard cancer treatments with evidence-based nutritional strategies that focus on altering the body’s environment, making it less friendly to tumors.

Her work is rooted in personal experience; several of her  family members are cancer survivors. When her partner, Cheryl Clark, was diagnosed in 1997 with an aggressive brain cancer, Wallace did intensive research and developed a protocol to support Clark’s treatment. Clark reduced her intake of sugar and carbohydrates and employed specific herbs and supplements, all of which boosted the effectiveness of her radiation treatment.

Today, Clark remains well, and Wallace is a sought-after speaker, as well as a respected authority in the burgeoning field of nutritional oncology.

Learn more about Wallace’s work at www.nutritional-solutions.net. 

Feeding Justice: Ron Finley, Founder of The Ron Finley Project

Before he became internationally known as a food activist, Ron Finley was a clothing designer. He had an eye for beauty — and for its absence. In 2010 he looked around his South Los Angeles neighborhood and saw only fast-food joints, liquor stores, and corner shops peddling processed snacks. He calls this “food injustice.”

“You can’t tell me that’s not by design,” Finley argues. “Some people say, ‘If these people wanted to eat healthy food, they could.’ But there’s no healthy food in their neighborhoods to eat, period.” His response? “If they’re not bringing it, let’s grow it!”

Finley started planting vegetables on the city-owned parkway — the strip between the sidewalk and the street in front of his house — offering them free to anyone willing to harvest them. The city ticketed him for “overgrown vegetation.” He refused to pay the fine until better grocery stores were recruited to the neighborhood, and an arrest warrant was issued. With the aid of other activists, Finley convinced the city council to amend the law.

That was the beginning. Finley then turned his emptied swimming pool and the rest of his yard into a colorful, edible garden. “Food is the problem and food is the solution,” he declared in a 2013 TED Talk that went viral. Finley soon became known as the Gangsta Gardener to thousands of justice-seeking green thumbs worldwide.

He’s now working to change the meaning of OG from “original gangsta” to “organic gardener.”

“My thing on the gangsta is to flip that on its head [so] people don’t see it as a negative,” he explains. “Being educated is gangsta; being self-sustaining is gangsta. Being a nerd — that can be gangsta. Because what you’re doing is creating.”

His organization, The Ron Finley Project, continues to promote com-munity self-sufficiency, celebrating the political power of gardening. Finley regularly hears from people in other cities who’ve launched garden projects inspired by his work, and he notes how these spaces can be ideal platforms for widespread change.

“You’ve got to change culture through soil, because the bottom line is, that’s what we all go back to,” he explains. “We turn to soil, and people seem to forget that. That’s not nature out there. We’re nature.”

Watch Finley’s popular 2013 TED Talk at bit.ly/1sVuD84. 

Teaching Doctors to Heal: Victoria Maizes, MD, Integrative Physician

During her medical residency in 1989, Victoria Maizes fell in love — with her patients’ stories.

“I became fascinated with how it was that Mr. X got diabetes, and Ms. Y had terrible health habits but was perfectly healthy,” she says. “I was trying to understand the influences [of life experiences] on health.”

This love affair has had a significant impact on Maizes — and on American medicine. The stories she loved helped her see her patients as whole people and not just their symptoms, which led her to employ a variety of treatment methods. If medication improved someone’s condition, she prescribed it. If meditation would work, she recommended it. And she often counseled for both.

This approach, now known as integrative medicine, considers the environmental, psychological, social, and spiritual influences on illnesses, and it integrates a variety of healing modalities — from antibiotics to acupuncture.

It took some time for Maizes’s broad-minded perspective to catch on in the medical community. She directed strategic education at Kaiser Permanente in Santa Rosa, Calif., during the early 1990s, and was eager to offer complementary support for patient health. “There were mind–body programs designed after Jon Kabat-Zinn’s work and parenting and anger-management programs,” she recalls.

Yet she found that many of the patients knew more about these healing practices than their doctors did. So she began sharing her passion for integrative medicine with other physicians.

“Doctors haven’t been trained” to know all the things that can support health, she explains. Without training, they can’t help you. “If you ask your doctor what you should eat, he or she may say, ‘Eat a healthy diet.’ Well, what is a healthy diet?”

Many more physicians can now answer that and other holistic-health questions effectively, thanks to Maizes. When she began directing Dr. Andrew Weil’s integrative-medicine program in Arizona in 2000, it included only four fellows in training. Today she supervises more than 150 fellows and 500 residents each year. Some 1,200 doctors have graduated from the program.

“This approach has [become] an established direction in medicine,” Maizes says. “People can now access this kind of care more easily, and they’re getting the relief they hope for.”

Read Maizes’s articles for patients at www.victoriamaizesmd.com.

Good to the End: BJ Miller, MD, Palliative-Care Physician

BJ Miller rides a motorcycle around San Francisco and camps regularly with his dog. He’s also a triple amputee who lost his left hand and both legs below the knee after an accident in college.

Rather than seeing his condition as a disability, Miller trained himself to view it as a new reality, a specific set of limitations that were nonetheless like the limitations all mortals face. This perspective is part of what makes him a leading palliative-care physician, who is helping to spread the word about the vital importance of quality of life at the end of life — and along the course of serious illness.

He spent five years as the executive director of the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco, blending hard-won spiritual insight with skillful symptom and pain management, and he now lectures nationwide about the art of end-of-life care.

Watch Miller’s TED Talk on end-of-life issues at bit.ly/1KeX2j5. 

The Write Thing: Aseem Malhotra, Cardiologist, Columnist

When he’s not practicing with the National Health Service in Britain, cardiologist Aseem Malhotra campaigns tirelessly against obesity and heart disease. He’s no shill for the pharmaceutical industry, though. In his columns for the popular English newspaper The Guardian, he illustrates how socioeconomic conditions influence obesity, heart disease, and diet.

His educational campaigns about the risks of sugar and the value of healthy fats, the need for better-quality school food, and the importance of greater transparency and responsibility in healthcare have brought these issues to a mainstream audience.

He also writes about personalized medicine and improving communication between doctors and patients, so he’s changing the message from the ground up.

Learn more at www.doctoraseem.com. 

Taking the Next Steps: T. Morgan Dixon, Cofounder of GirlTrek

“Black women are dying faster than any other group of people in America from preventable illnesses like heart disease, diabetes, stroke. Heart disease alone kills 137 black women every day. For us, that sounded an alarm.”

T. Morgan Dixon is explaining why she cofounded GirlTrek, a Washington, D.C.–based nonprofit and nationwide public-health movement that promotes wellness through organized walking. The group’s 100,000-plus members are African-American women and girls who’ve committed to regular 30-minute group hikes. (Research shows that daily walks can cut the risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes by half.) The group issues monthly challenges to the walkers — to double their distance, for instance, or walk mindfully — and encourages them to establish new walking groups of their own.

Dixon worked as an educational consultant before founding GirlTrek in 2012 with a college friend, digital-media professional and social-justice activist Vanessa Garrison. “GirlTrek started with two friends,” explains Dixon. “Now there are over 100,000.”

The health issues they address are complex, Dixon notes. Obesity in the black community is connected to chronic poverty, lack of access to healthy food, and the fact that many black women lack sufficient leisure time to work out at a gym. “And there’s a history of zoning that’s denied African Americans access to green space,” she adds.

Dixon emphasizes that GirlTrek is not about vanity; its goal is wellness. “I think women of all shapes and sizes are incredibly beautiful,” she says. “This is about living well and living for our kids.”

Their focus on community health is also rooted in African-American history, Dixon says, when “women walked for change.” GirlTrek’s presiding spirit is Harriet Tubman: The abolitionist firebrand not only walked out of slavery herself, but returned multiple times to guide others to freedom on foot. Tubman lived vigorously into her 90s.

“We’re concerned with reclaiming the streets of our neighborhoods,” Dixon continues. “A walking group becomes kind of a neighborhood watch in sneakers, right? Then you want to tackle a community garden. Then you want to tackle a dangerous intersection. Then you want to tackle other things in your neighborhood to make it safer and better.”

Watch Dixon and Garrison’s TED Talk at bit.ly/2qFr62x.

Leading the Way: Abdul El-Sayed, PhD, Public-Health Advocate

At 33, epidemiologist Abdul El-Sayed has earned a doctorate from Oxford, taught public health at Columbia University, and served Detroit as the youngest health commissioner of any major U.S. city. He’s largely credited with rebuilding a department shuttered during the city’s 2013 bankruptcy.

“After medical school, I was a lot more interested in health policy, and the reasons why people get sick in the first place, than what I could do for them after they got sick,” El-Sayed says. He wanted to address the “pretty drastic health disparity” he saw in our society.

As Detroit’s health commissioner, he witnessed stark evidence of this disparity: The average life expectancy of a Detroit citizen was 10 years less than a suburban resident living 30 minutes away. Detroit children are four times more likely than other U.S. kids to be exposed to lead.

As commissioner, El-Sayed focused on seven critical outcomes: infant mortality, teen pregnancy, lead poisoning, asthma, poor vision, “misnutrition” (malnutrition and obesity), and elderly isolation. He saw that physical health couldn’t be treated as separate from social and economic conditions.

“Public health has a lot more to do with all of the things that allow people the best opportunities in their lives,” he explains. “Access to a high-quality education and then a good, stable job that pays a living wage, that puts healthy food on the table, and [that] allows people to live in a walkable neighborhood and put a roof over their heads. These are what shape health and disease.”

Despite broader challenges in his community, El-Sayed can point to some significant public-health victories. He led a successful fight to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions, instituted lead testing of Detroit’s water (to avoid another Flint), and created a program to provide free eyeglasses to schoolkids.

More recently, he’s taken his experiences in public service into the political arena, running for governor of Michigan in November. That campaign illustrated his ongoing commitment to the work of healing and uniting communities in a time of rigid political polarization.

“The thing about this moment is that we have to recognize that we’re all in this together,” he says. “If we fail to do that, our challenges will persist. There’s real courage being demanded of us.”

Groundswell: Betti Wiggins, School Nutrition Director

When Betti Wiggins became director of the Office of School Nutrition in the Detroit Public Schools in 2012, the district’s challenges were substantial: a dwindling economic base, a shrinking population, schools closing.

But where many saw only decline, she saw an opportunity for a revolution. Specifically, a revolution in how kids eat at school.

Wiggins grew up on a Michigan farm and moved to Detroit in her teens. After leaving to serve as a school-food-program administrator in Washington, D.C., and other cities, she returned home, where she connected her childhood farming experience with her adult administration skills. In her view, urban agriculture was the solution to Detroit’s school-nutrition problems.

“How do you build communities back up?” she asks. “Well, you can do something sustainable like gardens.”

Detroit was already teeming with urban farmers growing food in their yards and on vacant lots, and this inspired Wiggins. “When the city closed 140 schools, I saw it as an opportunity to do something with some of those playgrounds and ball fields,” she explains.

In 2011 Wiggins created the Detroit School Garden Collaborative, a network of some 80 gardens on the grounds of closed (and open) schools. In place of lunches built around deep-fried corn dogs and other dishes that Wiggins calls “carnival food,” students began eating zucchini, spinach, and tomatoes from the district’s own gardens.

She instituted free breakfast and low-cost dinner programs while extending the free-lunch program to all students, regardless of income, so poor kids wouldn’t feel stigmatized. Meanwhile, she supervised the sale of surplus produce to charter and parochial schools. And, moved by her own vivid memories of her family’s unsold produce going to waste, Wiggins contracted with local farmers, creating a thriving secondary market for their crops.

Wiggins is now at the helm of the school-lunch program in Houston, a city with far more resources than Detroit. Still, nearly a quarter of households there lack sufficient food, and she hopes to make a dent in that number.

While she’s rightfully proud of the numerous awards she’s won, including one from the James Beard Foundation, Wiggins says she’s inspired by encounters like the one she had in a Detroit grocery store. She overheard a student say to her mother, “Ma, get those avocados, because we’ve got to learn how to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables. I’ll show you how to make guacamole.”

Get the full story at https://experiencelife.com/article/change-makers/