If you’ve been following my Escape the Castle posts as of late, you’ll know that I’m taking a course in how to build an RPG Chatbot with James Burchill. If you’ve been following me longer than that, you’ll know that I love his stuff and he has been a big supporter of mine since I met him in 2012. I wrote a Follow Friday post on him a few years ago and I figured it was time to update it. He has done a lot for me, especially when I started my company and wanted to show my support for him. He has always taken my calls and has always listened to my ramblings. For those that have heard some of these ramblings, you must know then that he must be a saint to sit through those conversations.
I met James just over nine years ago at his first Social Fusion Network meetup in Burlington, only a week after I moved to Hamilton. Since then he has been helping small businesses with networking, marketing and doing it all for free. His Social Fusion Network events were all over Southern Ontario and not only helped the small businesses meet each other but also gave the venues a full house when they weren’t busy.
He also gave of his time to help our students at Sheridan College, coming to speak to them and spreading the word when we needed clients for our Capstone Course. He didn’t hold back, usually giving our students his entire plan for his marketing funnel and deep discounts for his courses, which range from teaching Evernote and Scrivener to building your own course.
Lately, James has developed a number of courses on Chatbots and is a co-founder of ChatBot Forge. He’s been running a workshop on building an RPG using chatbots (FOR FREE) and I’ve been absolutely loving it. It has revived my love of coding, even though there is no coding involved. It’s making me think in containers and variables again while giving it the creative edge that I really enjoy. I’ve wanted to build a text-based game for quite a while but hadn’t considered writing it in a chatbot. This not only helps me understand how chatbots work but gives me a portfolio piece that I can use to show potential clients.
His YouTube segment, SmartCar Coffee Confidential, became very popular before the pandemic started and was even picked up by the local television station. In it, he interviews small business owners about their business while driving around in his Smartcar and drinking coffee. He even interviewed candidates in the last municipal election.
But as many of us know, no good deed goes unpunished.
He has recently been named in a lawsuit and has to mount a defence. I have personally donated to his campaign and wanted to share it in the hopes that he will make his goal. These types of ridiculous lawsuits should never be allowed in court, but unfortunately, if it goes unanswered, there will be a default judgement against him.
While the purpose of this post is to increase the donations to his campaign, you could also go and purchase one of his courses so that he has the money to mount a defence. I’m sure that he could come up with the money, but he has done so much for the community that I felt that I needed to do something about it. Please donate if you can or buy one of James’s Courses
And of course, you can always follow him on Twitter @jamesburchill.
I had a great pleasure of attending Tweetstock 2016 with the winning of a ticket from James Burchill who was one of the speakers at this great event. I’ve heard James speak many times and know that if he’s on the bill that it’s bound to be a good line up all around. I’ve been meaning to actually go to this event for the last few years it but it’s always conflicted on my schedule. Fortunately, this time I was able to attend. I had met Trevor about what was the main organizer for the event an event to backing April and so I was glad to see him again of course and see what the event was all about.
James presenting at Tweetstock ’16 on Online Courses
I’ve never been a great storyteller, unless it’s in person. Writing it down, not so much. Telling my own story in bits and pieces is great. Telling my story of how things came to be as a business goes, never. I’m constantly told that what people want to hear is your story and unfortunately mine is never been a very interesting one when it comes to business, to teaching, to doing whatever it is that I do. The only thing that I find that I do well at is telling small anecdotes or funny stories that relate to the conversation that is going on at the moment, but whether or not they actually do my meal bottom line is a whole other matter.
I was hoping that I would learn something at this event that would tell me about how to better tell my business story and about teaching and about what my next steps are maybe help me focus as well. Overall they did not disappoint on that front because it is true that “Those Who Tell the Stories Rule the World”. I was invited by James Burchill, and I also knew Paul Copcutt who I had never heard speak but I was always interested in what he had to say whenever I’ve met him at various events that we’ve gone to.
The day started out with John Michael Morgan, who I’d never heard of before but I have to admit his talk was inspiring. I took a couple of shots more for my notes and as you can see they are quite inspiring pieces. One thing that this event gave me on the whole, mostly from his presentations, is some inspiration on how to do my speaking positions better, especially around the idea of my slides. I get very technical talks usually, so putting facts and pieces that people can refer to later on his notes are usually my modus operandi mainly from having taught my students for long as I have. Very rarely do I get a chance to write something inspiring and creative. I think that is about to change…
Paul wanting to tell us a story at Tweetstock ’16
Next up was James Burchill who gave us an overview of how he tells his story and how he helps others by telling their story which is usually around Udemy and other online courses even though this is sort of the teaser. He did tell a story of how he spent part of last year when he was probably at one of the low points in his life and was able to benefit from it, telling the story of triumph over that position. I was absolutely enthralled because he shared his story and it made the case more believable. Later that day on he ran one of the breakout sessions in which we got a chance to see how he runs his courses.
Paul Copcutt is a Personal Brand Architect who helps people figure out their brand and they were able to he was able to show how a brand can be very powerful and that regardless of which company you work for that you always have a brand whether you have a personal brand versus a company brand whether they are one and the same thing will depend on the type of business that you run it started to make me wonder about the brands that I present and whether or not that is in fact where I want to be making me wonder about some the changes that I want to make very soon.
There were a couple of other speakers before lunch that did not resonate as much with me as some of the others did, but they were good nonetheless.
After lunch we began with the breakout sessions. I went to one of the sessions which was more about how to recuperate from failure or at least use failure as an opportunity. While I didn’t take too many notes, it was absolutely a good discussion around why we fail in and why we perceive failure to be what it is. One of the points I was brought up was about seeing the failure in others and that we project those failures on others and the fault is seen to be theirs. However, I argue that it is not because we necessarily see that failure in others but we see it in ourselves.
The next breakout session courses with James Burchill where, as I mentioned earlier, he laid out his overall plan and strategy for deploying courses. There were a lot of questions from the crowd on this so you can tell that this is a growing business, despite all of the latest discussions around it being in decline and this isn’t going away anytime soon. The biggest question that is still left on people’s minds is which one to go with, (Teachable, Udemy, your own hosting) but I think James at least gave a very good way of looking at what might work better for you things like Udemy. For example, there is a big structure on Udemy, where you will have certain courses that are only available now in a certain price range, certain audio quality, etc. It is a marketplace so anyone who searches for whatever that thing is can then decide what that topic is from you and any other instructor. However, Teachable will do the same but they don’t have as big of a platform and you can also use that with your own domain as well. The only other thing I thought about was which James did not answer (and I didn’t ask) but I would consider is you know doing a learning management system of sorts on your own WordPress installation. Maybe will he and I can have a chat about that at some point. Who knows? Maybe we’ll do a podcast or something on the subject!
After that was a session with Greg McMillan. He was kind of ambushed in his talk by a lot of people who were asking about the different strategies of SEO and things like which website to use like whether to put stuff on Medium.com versus their own website. Unfortunately he didn’t have that kind of knowledge and his expertise was around editing and being able to edit your story which I also found very helpful. I’m not sure whether or not I agree with the blog post being 200 to 300 words because it depends on the content. I might even go as high as 500. God knows this will probably be about 1000 by the time I’m done even then I might even edit this afterwards to even show like I took of the stuff that wasn’t that important enough to cover every single little item. See? I did actually listen to what you had to say.
One of my favourite slides from John’s talk at Tweetstock ’16: If you were waiting for a sign, this is it.
The day ended off with John Michael Morgan doing another talk and again I’ve shown some of those slides here and then of course a panel discussion that led to very things about back down the bottom it ended off with that one of the questions I asked the panel of course was if you had one source to read then these would be those points so here are the pieces of literature or readings that the panel recommended insert the list here that I will need to type up from my own notes and make sure to ask Paul Kopp cut about the art of something by one particular author that he mention I couldn’t quite recall all in all it was in a wonderful day in the action got a chance to have a beverage afterwards at the counting gavels in Hess Village very pleasant place that was easy to sit on the patio with even our numbers so congratulations to Trevor and his crew for putting on such a great show and I look forward to coming back next year provided doesn’t conflict with my schedule.
And let the record show, that this post was originally 1616 words, so Greg’s session did help me. Even though I did a lot of editing. 😉
Trevor moderating the panel at the end of Tweetstock ’16
James Burchill is a great source of knowledge. The other night at Social Fusion Networking Oakville (#sfnOAKV), we had a great discussion about email marketing and some of the new rules around your email marketing lists. He has built an amazing community around free networking; great venue, great incentives, great networking and great people.
I attended James’s first “Business in Burlington” in January, 2012 on the suggestion of David Hills. I had just moved to Hamilton and was still finding my way around. At this first meetup, he had close to 100 people, and it didn’t stop there. A short time later, he launched the Oakville branch and then the Niagara one, all of which are extremely successful, pulling in over 100 people at each meeting. These latter two chapters have had some challenges with venues, but that hasn’t stopped them. James keeps everyone informed and asks for assistance through numerous channels including Twitter, LinkedIn and Meetup, which he uses for getting discussions going and informing people of the events.
Since attending the first one, I’ve tried to make every Social Fusion event (the new branding name from Business in…) that I can get my hands on. I always meet great people and make great connections. In January, one of the members, Mason, knowing I enjoy doing Origami gave me some wonderful washi paper and never asked for anything in return. I made him a crane in appreciation that he carefully put in his car after I gave it to him in Oakville this week. Just good atmosphere and great friendships.
Follow James Burchill on Twitter and join us at one of the Social Fusion events!
