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Lights that sparked fire nation JLD here and welcome to entrepreneurs on fire brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network with great shows like the salesmen podcast. Today, we'll be focusing on a prepping for the post pandemic transformational retreat rush to drop these value bombs. I brought Dr. Sheri Rosenthal into EOFire studios. Sheri is chief retreat, strategist and CEO of wanderlust entrepreneur, where she's taught thousands of passion driven entrepreneurs, how to design experiential transformational retreats that allow them to stand out in their niche change lives and make an incredible income. She's also the owner of journey of the spirit travel, a boutique agency, specializing in the planning and management of group travel and today fire nation.

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And we'll talk about what exactly is a retreat, why it's so critical to be running them. Now, how can you actually make money and fill your retreats? And so much more. When we get back from thanking our sponsors, the HubSpot podcast network is the audio destination for business professionals who seek the best education and inspiration on how to grow a business. Whether you're looking for marketing sales, service, or operational guidance, the HubSpot podcast network hosts have your back, listen, learn and grow with the HubSpot podcast network at hubspot.com/podcastnetwork. Dr. Sheri say what's up to fire nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful.

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That most people disagree with.

1 (1m 33s):
My pleasure, John, I really don't believe in success or failure per se. I believe in outcomes that are either expected or not expected pleasant or not pleasant and people who don't believe in failure never feel wounded by things not working out. And that makes them resilient because they don't take anything in business personally, not even their own supposedly success or failures. That's what makes them invincible

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And fire nation. You'll be seeing throughout this interview, we are talking about mindset. We will be talking about resilience. Of course, as we focus on the overall core concepts of this interview, which is prepping for that post pandemic transformational retreat rush. And there's nobody better to talk about this than Dr. Sheri, because let's just be honest. A lot of people are just saying the wrong things. They're calling their live events or retreats. So even before we get rolling in this interview, I want to just break down for fire nation, what you mean by retreat. So that we're just all on the same page.

1 (2m 39s):
Absolutely. John. So retreats are a really popular word these days and everyone and their brother is calling their event to retreat, but to retreat means to pull back and go inside. You know, you just went online. So I have a very definitive opinion about what's a true transformational retreat and it is not a workshop in a pretty place. So an event where someone's teaching all day in a nice location for me is a workshop or a mastermind. It's not a retreat. There needs to be time to learn and lounge and go inside and process. This is what makes a good transformational retreat.

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And the critical key is that your activities help teach you material. And then your, a location is perfectly aligned with what you're sharing. So for example, an essential oil retreat could be at a resort on the beach, or it could be an Oregon when they're harvesting peppermint and your group helps in the harvest and distillation process of the oil, right? That, that is what I call a full balls to bones experience. And it's experiential. It's what people want right now, especially post pandemic. And just so folks know, I have literally been living, breathing and running retreats since 2000.

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When I worked for Don Miguel Ruiz, the New York times bestselling author of the four agreements, which I know so many of your listeners love. So that's 21 years of retreats. So yeah, I'm a little opinionated about them.

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I love people being opinionated. I let people, you know, really talking about things in a black or white scenario because, you know, the gray just leaves so much, you know, for our own type of definitions that we bring on experts to help us with these. And I love how you put this, Dr. Sheri balls to bones experience. I mean, that's a keeper right there. I'm going to be using that one going forward, but I want to get deeper into this because running transformational retreats is important. As you mentioned, I just got back from an incredible 17 day, a wellness retreat, and it was so experiencial. It was so transformational. I just had the best time.

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And, and I'm still just feeling on such a high in a rush from it. And we live in crazy times right now. I mean, the world is never going to be what it was before COVID broke out. So why are transformational retreat specifically so important in our current environment? So

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True, John people are starved, literally starved for connections at a hook, you know, community and something to look forward to in their lives, besides staring at the four walls in their family, as much as they may love their family. That's interesting after nine 11 and after the 2008 global recession travel actually exploded. So we do have a precedence for what is to come and from my, from my point of view, you're either on the front part of the tsunami or the end either you're ready to show up for your community and support them during this time of great change or you're not.

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And I think if you really care about your community, you were going to put yourself out there and help them go through this very challenging time. One

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Thing that I really want to call a spade, a spade about, cause we've kind of mentioned it a few times already in this conversation is COVID is in this world. A lot of people aren't getting vaccines. You know, a lot of people aren't, you know, there's a lot of talk about how different strains are happening and who knows what the future may hold. I mean, we never know what the future's going to hold. So I mean, this is kind of controversial is like getting people together and same rooms or same environments and, you know, traveling and all these different things. What is your take on the controversial topic of, you know, basically holding retreats during this time

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As a physician, I feel it's imperative that we have to travel responsibly and that we're prepared to protect our participants. I don't feel like COVID is going anywhere soon. So we just have to find a new normal, you know what I'm saying? We've got to find a way to live our life with the virus. Now, as a retreat leader, you get to set the rules for your retreat. You can require vaccines if you want or not. You can require folks to all take a single room unless they're friends or partners, you can require folks to stay six feet apart and requirements. If you like, it's up to you. I'm not going to tell anybody what to do, but keep in mind that you can be sued for negligence.

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If someone gets sick at your event. So I'm just saying, be smart, whatever that smart is for you. This

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Is a really critical thing for our nation, because you do need to protect yourselves legally. If you're going to have people travel, if you're going to, you know, have events where people are actually in the same room talking to each other, and this is, you know, for all times, cause you never know what's going to happen at an event. I mean, again, this wellness retreat that I was recently at, I mean, they've had situations over the years because people are fasting at this event. So sometimes you get light headed, you might fall down, you might hurt yourself. You might have this medical complication, that medical complications. So no matter even the time has always been important as a business owner to protect yourself. And you've been doing this Dr. Sheri for 21 years, as far as retreats and gatherings and all these different things.

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So what specific advice would you give to our audience fire nation if they really want to make sure they're protecting themselves legally, you know, after having people travel, get together in these times.

1 (8m 28s):
Absolutely. So there's three things that are critically important to understand. First you have to have proper insurance. So that means professional and general liability insurance on your coaching business or whatever it is you do, and whatever it is called in your country. But most countries have the same thing, some sort of professional and general liability insurance. So the second thing is to have killer legal forms. So in my business, our legal forms that we share with our community are six pages long they're. They are really long. You cannot use a waiver anymore.

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There's so much texts that you have to have in your forms now, especially for COVID that it's just a disservice for yourself to just have a waiver and some retreat leaders. I know don't even have waivers at all that has to change now. So you can't live in a bubble. You have to be a responsible and do what needs to be done. So that's the second thing, killer legal forms. And then the third is you have to understand seller of travel law. So for most folks, it may not apply, but if you're in the United States, there are four states that have seller of travel law, which means that you can't really sell a retreat unless you are a travel agent.

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So the reason why this is important for retreats is retreats are normally all inclusive. So they include your room, your board, your food, your activities. That means you are packaging, a travel experience, which is different when we do like them, right, John. So we go to the hotel and people pay for the hotel and food separate it's broken down. But as soon as you do a retreat and it's all inclusive, you're selling travel. So for example, in California, Washington, state, Hawaii and Florida, these are strict seller of travel states. And if you are, for example, in Kansas and you're selling to California person, you still have to follow those laws.

1 (10m 43s):
And in Canada, especially in Ontario, they are not allowed to run retreats, period. They will actually shut you down. So it is important to be aware of who you're selling to and where you're located and make sure you follow the law. And just because you don't know about it, doesn't exclude you from the ramifications of it. It's important for us to know what's what, when it comes to doing retreats and making sure we know the law, we are legally prepared and we're legally insured. Also, you should have insurance on your retreat itself because you are normal professional and general liability. Insurance is not going to cover you.

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If you go out of the country and something happens to your participants and in my business, gosh, we have seen every crazy outrageous thing happened on a retreat. Like you mentioned, people can get lightheaded. People could die, they could fall, they could break bones. They could be abducted. They could be attacked. Marriages can go to hell. People could stop taking their medication. I mean, they could have sex with guidance. You would have believed the crazy, that can happen when you're doing retreats, but it's all good because in the end we just love, love them so much. And we managed to be smart, set everything up.

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So we don't have to worry about any of these issues.

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And this is why I bring on the best in their specific niche and their specific area of expertise. I mean, Dr. Sheri has over 21 years of experience with this. So she knows you can't just have a waiver. You need six plus pages to make sure you are covering yourself because let's be honest. Anything can happen. Literally, anything can happen. And one thing we're gonna be talking about after the break is like, Hey, you've got to actually make money by doing these things. And you can actually get people to these retreats. So we're gonna be talking about some details on that. Plus Dr. Sheri has some amazing future content on this. When we get back from thanking our sponsors, are you ready to take control of your business is branding, but don't have a design backgrounds.

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Great news fire nation brand crowd can help. Brand crowd is a logo maker tool that helps you create an amazing logo design online. How do they do it using high quality handcrafted designs, brands, crowd, take your business name and industry and generates thousands of custom logos just for you and seconds. And once brain crowd generates a logo, you like, you can edit the font, change the colors and tweak the layout until it's exactly what you want. Once your logo is complete, simply by that logo and download all the files you need. And because brain crowd is much more than just a logo maker, they also offer a whole suite of design tools to help you create social media posts and other print materials. Using hundreds of design templates in their massive photo library. It's time to create market and manage your businesses.

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Branding and brand crowd can help check out brandscrowd.com/fire. To learn more play with the tool for free and get 55% off your logo. That's brand crowd, B R A N D C R O W D.com/fire. Knowing what factors are driving your business performance and growth is critical to your success until you know, what's working and what's not there isn't much you can do to scale your business or better serve your customers. That's why there's HubSpot with HubSpot. You can align your team with a single source of truth, giving them access to powerful prebuilt dashboards and reporting that helped prove the impact of your campaigns provide intuitive sales and coaching insights and give clear business performance at a glance across marketing sales and service.

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How do they do it? For starters, HubSpot offers conversational intelligence, ensuring all interactions between your team and your customers are automatically captured, transcribed and analyzed to effortlessly drive productivity, scale best practices and improve win rates. And with their sales forecasting tools, HubSpot allows sales leaders to have total visibility and control into sales performance so they can drill down to what's working best on their own, on the fly without needing help from a data analyst. It's time to say goodbye to siloed systems and hello, to powerful analytics and custom reporting available to your entire team on a United system. Learn more about how you can scale your company without complexity hubspot.com, Dr. Sheri we're back. And as I kind of teased before the break at the end of the day, we get to make some money.

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If we're going to keep providing our genius to the world. So what are the actual elements that can lead to a profitable? Well designed a retreat, John,

1 (15m 12s):
I might sound a little repetitive, but experiential experiential experiential create something that creates unique elements. Make sure as I mentioned that your location teaches your materials. So your activities create value and that they're not commonplace. For example, I once did a retreat on transcending fear and I took my group down to Havasu pie falls, grand canyon. And part of the challenge on this retreat was jumping off a 30 foot waterfall. So the location aligned with what I was trying to teach on the retreat, that key element is what's going to get your retreat sold in the first place.

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Alignment without alignment. Your retreat is just like a boring what I call boil chicken event. And no one likes boiled chicken.

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I like the word alignments, Dr. Sheri she's at a few times. So you've really got to think about that alignment with what your doing fire nation. So you gave one example, Dr. Sheri, can you give maybe a couple other examples that you've seen over 21 years that were just really aligned? It doesn't even have to meet per se, yours. Maybe it can be, but like, it's just like, you're like, wow, that is so aligned for these specific reasons. Yeah.

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One thing that I love right now, for example, if you're doing a health or wellness retreat and you're teaching people how to eat healthy, what I love is the new thing they have now of wild dining. So for example, create a wild dining five-star experience in the forest at night on a table that's covered with fine China and a symphony of flowers, right out of Alison one delay on, you know, all foraged and found food. So it really aligns with what you're doing it, depending on what you're teaching on. If you're visiting a foreign country dining in the home of a local family.

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So you can make deep connections and foster understanding and compassion because if done right, travel changes people, and that's, what's going to make you stand out in your niche when you're known for designing something extraordinary. Because honestly, John, there is nothing worse than one more boring yoga retreat. It just drives me crazy. So you, you want to make sure that it's something different and you can ask your retreat center, or if you're staying at a boutique hotel, what in that area is extraordinary that you connect with to add to your retreat, to make it stand out.

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And I'm going to add one other quick thing is that my whole travel philosophy can be summed up in one quote by marching gins, which I really love. And it goes like this adventure is a path real adventure self-determined and self-motivated often risky forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world, the world, as it is not the way you imagine it, your body will collide with the earth and you'll bear witness in this way. You'll be compelled to grapple with the limitless, kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind. And perhaps realize that you yourself capable of both.

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This will change you and nothing again will ever be black and white and we need tremble. John. That's why we wonder. And that's why retreats are so important and why we need to create them. So out of the box

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Fire nation, I hope you got shivers because I got shivers with that. And it's so important to realize when you're looking back in your life, you're not going to be thinking about, you know, that's car you bought, or you know, that physical product that's, you know, you, you spent a lot of money on, you're gonna be thinking about the life experiences that you had about those trips. You took those retreats that you had about those life experiences that moved you to your core. But let's talk about another struggle. I mean, it's obviously hard to make money on these retreats, but also how do you get butts in seats? I mean, it can be so tough to get people to actually commit to doing something.

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And now they have all the excuses in the world, at least in their own mind to like not travel and X and Y and Z. So give us some real strategies.

1 (19m 41s):
Absolutely. So one of the important things for filling a retreat is having an extraordinary retreat sales page that puts someone into the experience that's critical. Now, when most of us think of sales page, we think of programs and products or live events, sales pages that mostly focus on program benefits, which of course they should, but a retreat sales page needs to highlight the experience itself. In other words, the location, the food, the activities you need to literally put someone in the experience. Otherwise, again, it comes across as a workshop.

1 (20m 23s):
So I'm going to give a few quick marketing suggestions. First market, you retreat to your list. Not strangers since retreats are intimate. You want to make sure that your peeps are top notch. You don't want a problem Childs on your retreat that doesn't know your work and makes trouble the whole time. Believe me, been there done that. You've number two, you to work at growing your list and following all year long. Because if you do that, your warm audience will fill your retreat with grace and ease. Number three, consider promoting your retreat like you would launch a program or PR or product.

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So take the time to get everything that you're doing on your promotional calendar, whether it's Facebook lives, webinars, challenges, a three-day virtual live event, a live workshop, whatever you were doing, whatever actions you're taking to actually sell your retreat. And 0.4 is start marketing early, especially for international retreats. You've got to do that six to 12 months ahead of time. Minimum. This is not a, a workshop. People can sign up for the last minute. The more days you retreat is the more time you need to market it so that people can carve out time to join

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You. Fire nation. You want to get people to your retreat so that you can actually give them the transformation, the experiences that you know they want and that you know, they need. So you need to follow these principles, follow these elements that Dr. Cher is walking us through right now. But at the end of the day, if someone's going to actually embark on this type of project, that this type of commitment, Dr. Sheri, they need to know that they can actually profit something from a retreat. So let's just talk real numbers. I'm a big transparency guy. I love transparency. I just love openness. I love talking about numbers. How much can somebody expect to net from a retreat?

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I love

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Your monthly P and L's most folks don't understand how to price a retreat. We constantly get asked Sheri, how much should I make this trip to Bali? What should it be priced at? Lauren can answer that pricing's based on hard costs. Once your hard card costs are totally determined, then you have to decide how much you want to net per person and add that amount into your pricing. That's the last line item that goes in there. So in other words, your pricing has to do with nothing more than the hard costs first.

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So that differs depending on what hotel you're staying at or retreat center. Now, once you have that done, you add that net per person. Now you can net at least 10,000 to a hundred thousand, just from your retreat alone. Nevermind. If your up sell, you know, is a really nicely priced item. In other words, if you monetize your retreat with a up program to support folks on transformational journey, which you should do, because otherwise I think it's abandonment, you know, to just do a retreat and then let people flail when they go back into the worlds again.

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So going back to, how much should you charge for your retreat? Well, how much do you value the transformation you share? Because that's going to, that's going to determine the final cost. Once you have those hard costs, you have to decide how much your transformation is worth her person for those amount of days that you're working. And you weigh at that in, and that's your final price. So it isn't about, oh, I'm just gonna throw spaghetti on the wall. And the price is whatever everyone else is charging and I'll make whatever the net is not. That's not how you do it.

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Fire nation, real numbers. And I love doc Sheri, how are you shared that? You love our PNLs? Cause we've been doing that for now 92 months in a row and as critical fire nation, like it is critical that you know what you're getting into when you're doing this process. So before we move on to the next and last major part of this interview, is there anything that you want to share from what we just talked about when it comes to potentially maximizing your profit, getting butts in seats and you know, just overall making it the best experiential experience possible? I

1 (25m 9s):
Think people need to consider their retreat as part of the income, income producing activities they do in their business. Not just something fun, which a lot of people have that mentality. I'm going to do a retreat and it doesn't matter what I make. I'm just going to have fun at it. That's not what you should be doing in a retreat. Every single item that you do in your business is part of your business plan and your income producing activities. It also needs to be part of the client journey. So it needs to make sense in what you're offering. That's why I say, do you have something afterwards? That's an upsell off of that, or is your retreat part of a year long program.

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So when you start getting more strategic with your retreats and makes a lot more sense for your participants, they understand why they should come in the value they're going to get from it. John. So

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Critical fire nation. And this is why we bring experts on the show to talk about their area of expertise and share us something pretty cool for fire nation today. So why don't you share that?

1 (26m 15s):
Absolutely. As I said, John, it's critical that we're ready and positioned for what I call the post pandemic retreat rebound. And because people want to travel so badly right now, if you don't have a retreat at the ready, you're really going to miss out. And since, as I said, it does take a good six to 12 months to plan and market your retreat. Now is actually the perfect time to be thinking about this. So here's my, for everyone. I love you to mark your calendars right now for June 22nd to the 24th, because we have a crazy awesome three-day virtual live event planned called of course, rubbing up for the post pandemic retreat.

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Rebound. John is going to have the link for you in the show notes. And the reason we're doing this now, John is because our retreat community has suffered so much from the pandemic, not just our retreat leaders, but our retreat planners or travel professionals and retreat venues. And normally we do our three-day events at 2 97 USD, but because we want to see everyone planning a retreat and getting back to work, they can name their price as long as they pay a dollar and we're doing this because we want our retreat leaders to be committed to coming to the event and getting their retreat planned.

1 (27m 40s):
So it's going to be awesome. It's going to be a ton of content. They're going to learn so much. It's perfect for our newbies and our experience retreat leaders. And also our chief planners and venues are invited to, we're going to be talking everything retreats like had to design them, do them safely. We galleys facilitating issues, pricing, creating killer sales pages, monetizing your retreat, all the good stuff so they can join us wanderbiz.c/fire. And I'm so excited about this because I'm dying to get back to retreats. And I have one book actually in Morocco.

1 (28m 21s):
So I can't wait

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And fire nation. This is what I call the ripple effect. I mean, Dr. Sheri is so fired up because she knows she's going to have a ripple effect of people who attend this because she's now going to be arming them with the knowledge, with the ability and with the fire to go off and create amazing retreats of their own. They're going to be experiential mindset, shifting life transformational and so much more. So this is why this is such exciting stuff. When you can arm people with your zone of genius to go and create amazing ripple effects in this world. So one more time, Dr. Sheri, what is that URL

1 (28m 57s):
Wanderbiz W A N D E R B I Z.co/fire

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Wander biz.co/fire for you fire nation, head on over there, learn more about this opportunity and start transforming lives because you know, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with and think about your retreat, having 5, 15, 50 amazing people around you. And you've been hanging out today with Sr and J L D today. So keep up that heat. And if you head over to EOFire.com and just type Sheri, S H E R I, the search bar, the show notes page will pop up with everything that we've been talking about here today. Best to show notes in the biz.

0 (29m 47s):
But of course, head directly over to that URL. We mentioned previously to learn more about your opportunity to join Dr. Sheri and Sheri. Thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with fire nation today, for that we salute you and we will catch you on the flips.

1 (30m 6s):
Thank you, John. You're awesome. And I so appreciate everything you share with the world.

0 (30m 12s):
Hey, fire nation today's value bomb content was brought to you by Sheri and fire nation. I've created a treasure trove of free courses for you. I teach you how to podcast run a mastermind, create funnels that convert in so much more. All you need to do is visit EOFire.com/resources to start learning today. And I will catch you there, or I'll catch you on the flip side. The HubSpot podcast network is the audio destination for business professionals who seek the best education and inspiration on how to grow a business. Whether you're looking for marketing sales, service, or operational guidance, the HubSpot podcast network hosts have your back, listen, learn and grow with the HubSpot podcast network at hubspot.com/podcastnetwork.