Child Friendly School Policies In Kenya Education Essay

Five Ways to Upsell Your Writing Services

Five Ways to Upsell Your Writing Services I’m thankful to be an independent author and getting by from something I love. Indeed, I’m so appreciative that I some of the time undercut myself and acknowledge less compensation than what my composing is worth. So how could I start to expect and get reasonable compensation and even upsell my administrations? In her Forbes article, â€Å"How to Get Paid What You’re Worth,† Liz Ryan composes â€Å"†¦you should arrange, and youll additionally need to disapprove of an inappropriate opportunities.† Saying â€Å"no† to certain tasks opens ways to all the more likely compensation. Here are a couple of tips to help you upsell your composition. 1.â â  Emphasize applicable accreditations and experience. I specifically consolidate both immediate and circuitous encounters to apply for a gig. For instance, if I’m proposing a piece on Mideast outcasts, I clarify why my past composition just as my Middle East living experience qualifies me as the best essayist for top compensation. 2.â â  Relate your question to the distributions explicit need or development potential. Your cruising mastery may appear to be withdrawn from a prepper blog, however you could clarify how planning for the surprising is a basic aptitude that can profit preppers utilizing water courses during a prophetically calamitous occasion. Art your inquiry to stress water get away from arrangements as another specialty subject for the distribution. 3.â â  Analyze customers set of working responsibilities to counter-offer administrations that better address the issue. Twice a year ago I was inquired Another customer mentioned a significant level original copy audit, however then additionally referenced remark inflatables and line alters. I clarified the distinction and prompted her that on the off chance that she needed nitty gritty criticism as opposed to a rundown, she ought to consider the line alter. She cheerfully paid a few hundred dollars more. 4.â â  Follow up for extra tasks. A few past customers showed they may have extra work not far off. I courteously held up a year or something like that, and afterward reached them to development. Most were prepared to allocate new activities, while one had deferred the thought. My drive paid off, once in a while more than once as extra activities were created. 5.â â  Ask high and acknowledge lower at a reasonable rate. A few undertakings have more dealing adaptability than others. At the point when attainable, think about facing the challenge to ask a more significant expense, and afterward settle for a lesser sum that will live up to your task desires. Notwithstanding, remember that you may hazard losing the task in these circumstances. Truth be told, that transpired as of late. I denied a secret writing book venture that was estimated a few thousand dollars lower than the work justified and lost the arrangement. No second thoughts! As an essayist, you set the bar for satisfactory compensation. Don’t settle for short of what you merit and search for chances to upsell your administrations.

Innocence free essay sample

Something wasn't right. She had been in there for a really long time. Remaining outside the restroom entryway, I envisioned what I would see and realized it would be what I never needed to occur. I gradually pushed the restroom entryway open, and there she was. Not the young lady I knew, however an absolute outsider. An all out outsider with one arm held over a sink and another arm grasping a little cutting edge. Dark red fluid trickled down the sides of the sink, making since quite a while ago, barbed lines practically like a bleak bit of conceptual workmanship. I gaze toward her face. She doesn’t look astounded, furious, or stressed. Simply quiet. She gives me a pitiful grin, and glances back at her arm. Now, I didn't have the foggiest idea how I felt. My heart sank, however I wasn’t shocked, furious, nor worriedâ€all the things I figured I would be, and ought to be. We will compose a custom exposition test on Honesty or then again any comparative subject explicitly for you Don't WasteYour Time Recruit WRITER Just 13.90/page Probably the dearest companion was cutting herself, seeping out, directly before me, and all I felt was†¦ void. I realized she cut herselfâ€I had seen the scarsâ€but I have never observed the demonstration. Obviously I needed her to stop. What sort of companion would I be in the event that I didn’t? In any case, I moronically kept my mouth shut. I serenely strolled over, took her arm, and began to assist her with purifying off the blood. She gazed at me vacantly, similar to she wasn’t even a piece of this world. Consider the possibility that soon she wasn’t. Where was the young lady I met on the absolute first day kindergarten? My recollections review a bubbly young lady with short wavy hair and a lovable grin and how thudded down on the rug close to me and posed that portentous inquiry, â€Å"Will you be my friend?† From then on, we framed an unceasing bond that would keep going for a lifetime. I never envisioned this would occur in our future. How might I be so gullible to imagine that we would remain honest until the end of time? Rather than confronting the brutal reality, I made my optimal world. I made an expound, misjudged dream of honesty. Honesty that was just a dream, a whimsical, merry legendary idea. I can't review some other time that I had been so totally close-disapproved. It was not my companion who was to blame here, it was me. She was attempting to split away from every assumption of our youth, while everything I did was aimlessly clutch our euphoric adolescence for dear life. In any case, the time has come to ack nowledge the clear issues, it has since been quite a while since we were ever really blameless. I just never permitted myself to open my eyes sufficiently wide to see it.

Oral PE History Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Oral PE History - Essay Example Cliché thoughts of True Womanhood compelled young ladies like Wendy into a firmly characterized element in which physical action was considered too vigorous an interest for a fragile female and negative meanings of the New Woman who was then undermining this Victorian idea further worked to lessen her accessible alternatives. To see how this could be thus, Wendy Strain’s educational encounters as a kid experiencing childhood in 1960s rural Detroit will be identified with these social and social ideas. Wendy Strain is a multi year elderly person who spent her adolescence in a suburb of Detroit in a white collar class family unit with desires for enormity. Sticking to the beliefs of the nobility of a century sooner, her folks unequivocally clung to the ideas of the True Woman. â€Å"The qualities of True Womanhood, by which a lady made a decision about herself and was decided by her significant other, her neighbors and society, could be separated into four cardinal temperances †devotion, immaculateness, accommodation and family life. Set up them all and they spelled mother, little girl, sister, spouse †lady. Without them, regardless of whether there was notoriety, accomplishment or riches, everything was cinders. With them, she was guaranteed bliss and power† (Welter, 1966: 152). As per Poovey (1988), it was by â€Å"linking profound quality to a figure (logically) safe to the personal responsibility and rivalry fundamental to monetary achievement, [the cult] saved goodness without repressing productivity† consequently making an ideal world in which men were allowed to seek after each material interest they wished while ladies were compelled to stay at home and ensure the good and moral estimations of the nuclear family. A lady couldn't take an interest in serious game under this belief system not just in light of the fact that it was against the idea of the True Woman to take an interest in any action that couldn't be directed inside the home, yet in addition since it would have presented this component of rivalry that was confined to the male world. Strain demonstrates

CP6 Sales Process Optimization with Velocify - Podcast with Nick Hedges

CP6 Sales Process Optimization with Velocify - Podcast with Nick Hedges INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are here with Nick from Velocify. Hi Nick, who are you and what do you do?Nick: Hi, very nice to meet you. Yes, I am Nick Hedges. I am the CEO and Head of Velocify, which is a software service company based in Los Angeles, California.BUSINESS MODEL OF VELOCIFYMartin: Great what does your business model look like? What type of value proposition are you offering?Nick: Yes, thanks for asking. We are in the sales solution category. So what does that mean? Well, our software helps salespeople. It sits in a gap that exists between marketing automation and CRM. Marketing automation is really great at helping marketers generate leads and highly qualified leads at that. The CRM is really good at recording sales information, but the missing piece is what do the sales people actually do with leads when they are generated in marketing so that they have outcomes to record in the CRM.That is where Velocify comes in. We, essentially, very simply, make sure that ever y lead that an organization generates goes to the best possible sale person who is going to have the best conversations, and the best interactions with the company they are talking with. Then we make sure that this sales person knows what they should be working on at any point in time. What is the most important activity that I can undertake right at this very moment and on which lead? So it prioritizes a sales persons day to day in a way they can be incredibly effective at what they do and sort of the optimal process from the engagement perspective of every single lead that comes in and every single company that they want to prospect in to.So that is our business model and luckily we find that there is an awful lot of sales teams whom almost every sales team needs help in this area. Its been a good place to set up a business.Martin: Great. Nick, I understand that you are helping companies (small business size) to work on their leads in an optimized way. Are you also helping them to create even more leads and how do you do that?Nick: Yes, we do that to certain extent. If you look at our client base it runs across the gamut, from some relatively small businesses to some of the biggest companies in the US. Smaller installations probably a sales team would be Im guessing around 3 to 4 people. Our largest installation is 3 to 4 thousand people on the sales team using our product. So within that, people are definitely using our product to be successful to the needs that are coming in, but they are also being successful using our product to do prospecting.A big area currently within many sales teams is sales development. A group of individuals whose role is to take accounts with the company wants to get into. Companies inspire to sell to and then find the appropriate people within that organization to influence and convince that there is value in order to getting the sales done. One of the tools that we have is a social prospecting tool that enables you to discover who the right people are within an organization by looking at data that exists online at various different places. And then, we have the ability to really orchestrate the engagement strategy with these contacts so you are sending to them the right emails, youre making the appropriate phone calls, and you have all of that data available so that you know a bit about that prospect. For instance, you know for sure what their sales manager is. You know what their telephone number is. You also know some of the things about how they have been interacting with your website, what they are doing online, whether they are tweeting on twitter, whether they are putting information on other social networks, etc. So that you got the basis of information for a productive conversation given that you are effectively cold-calling a lot of those prospects.Martin: On your website I saw that you have a tiered pricing model on a per salesperson base so to speak. Do you also have something like a modular ki nd of pricing for different modules that you are offering to your client base?Nick: We do it to a certain extent. Although what we try and do is we package our product in editions within bundles of functionality that we think people should have together. What we use to do probably for the first ten years of our existence that has only changed a year ago, we had pricing that was highly modular. In other words, it was a menu of things that you could add. We found that lead to a lot of dissatisfaction amongst our customers because every time they wanted a new feature there was an additional cost that they had to justify within their organization. We decided to go away from that to a more bundled product offering. What we found is that has increased customer satisfaction quite a lot, because they are not initially having to go back to whoever makes decisions about what the company spends to add new features. It also means that they use more of our products. The things that they wont sig n up for on day one that we know will be valuable to people. They are bundled into editions.So, today we have simplified pricing. We have two product lines and within the product lines, there are free editions for each one of those. You have six options basically.Martin: Okay, Nick with Velocify you are trying to help other sales organizations to close more leads. How is your sales pipeline working and what role is Velocify playing in this as well?Nick: Yes, we obviously use our own products. What we try and do is be the archetypal sales organization that we can sight to our customers when we are recommending best practices. Everything we learn about sales in our thousands of consulting engagements when we increment our system at our clients we try and bring back to our sales organization.We have a pretty sophisticated sales organization structure and we have a pretty sophisticated sales process. All of it relies on Velocify being the kind of glue between all the other systems. We h ave a field sales team that works on the biggest enterprise opportunities that we go after. We have a big inside sales team that works on slightly smaller deals and also goes sales development. The sales development department is fairly big as well which has folks to do cold-calling, prospecting, or whatever you want it to describe it as and lead response. In other words, making sure they call leads when they are generated as quickly as possible and in order to have a human qualifier whether that is going to be a good opportunity for a sales person to work or not.As a consequence of having those things and having an optimized process, we have pretty outstanding conversion rates now within our sales team. What we also try to do within our sales organization is use what we call a sales laboratory. What I mean by that is there are huge numbers of different sale technologies that are being founded at the moment. What we try and do is have Velocify connected to as many of those different capabilities as possible, so that we can see how effective they are. So that way we can make appropriate recommendations to our customers as we are often being trusted by the sales leader about how they should put up their entire sales process that automatically what other technologies they should be using.Martin: Nick, what do you think, what are the more efficient and effective customer acquisition channels?Nick: The most efficient for sure is a referral. What I think is that a lot of people dont realize is how important customer happiness is. If I was to give someone one tip about how to run a great company it would look after your customers. It sounds obvious, but if you really, really delight your customers and that is something we are very focused on at Velocify in a very deep way. Everyone will tell you: Yes, we look after our customer, but it is something that is deeply ingrained in the culture here. If you do that your revenue impact is really significant.One, because it b ecomes easier to expand within your existing customer base.Two, but probably more importantly, you will get referrals from your customer base of people that they know.Those will be the best form of leads that you will ever get, because A, your customers probably already sold the person they are introducing to you. Two, it is going to be an appropriately use case because the customer understands the product well and they will affect that particular lead for you.So referrals without a doubt are something we treat like gold at Velocify, because its just very high converting and it can be a great fit, loyal, and stay with us for a long time which is the perfect customer. I would say those are the best channels.Martin: Nick, what would you say is the competitive advantage of Velocify over its competitors?Nick: There are a couple of things and there is a lot of sales technologies out there. What the majority of them do is something very specific so they focus on just emailing for just sen ding contracts, or just being a dialer. As a consequence, a lot of sales leaders are left with this belief that they need a stack of technologies in order to undertake the job of sales and that is just not true.Velocify and maybe one or two other companies are universal solutions. In other words, we have telephony, we have email, we have text, we also have all the components required to do things like sales process optimization. We also have the capabilities to reward and incent people in the appropriate way to get the right behaviors. Some people call it gamification, we actually call it rewardification at Velocify, because we approach gamification in a differentiated way than any other player out there.I would say that the major benefit from our perspective is the universal solution where you dont need a whole set of other capabilities.Martin: When you think about scaling the company do you perceive some specific type of advantage of having economies of scale? For example, when I am thinking about really having most of the data and really putting some kind of machine learning on it so your recommendations for who should work a lead are becoming much more valuable. Do you think about your business like that?Nick: For sure, as I said one of the key things that we do is to optimize the sales process for our customers. We have the benefit of having implemented our solution with over 5,000 sales organizations. We have seen not only how those sale organizations have approached the optimization of their sales process, but we have seen the outcomes. We have seen what works and what doesnt work at a very kind of data granular way. We are able to use those learnings to re-optimize the sales process of every customer that comes to us. That makes us incredibly effective in its just knowledge that you cant gain overnight. There is billions and billions of transactions that have gone through our systems. So it is a very rich set of data.I think we also have the benefit th at unlike a lot of other companies were genuinely a platform that works extremely well for customers that sell to consumers and also for businesses that sell to businesses where really no one has the expertise and the knowledge of what the valuable learnings for either side are. For instance, we know what is the most effective sales process for a company selling to consumers, but we also know aspect that businesses sell to businesses can learn from it and vice versa. A lot of proprietary knowledge and data that we have picked up over the years that seemed helpful.I think there are other significant economies of scale as well, practically when you are selling to large businesses. Large businesses are typically looking at how robust your technology infrastructure is, how big the company is and how likely it will be in business for the next several years. Now that we have been around for 10 or 11 years that is something that is a lot easier when the company was 2 years old. That is som ething that entrepreneurs have to be very clever at navigating around if their ambition is to sell to large enterprises.Martin: If there is something like a lock-in effect once an organization buys into your product and you learn where to send the lead to then there is something like a lock-in effect. Does this imply that in your sales process that in the beginning maybe you are offering 3 month free trial period to get this kind of knowledge and get more customers on board? Only start the pricing then or does you pricing from the first day onwards?Nick: Though it is interesting, you are definitely very perceptive about our product in the stickiness of it. Some of the ways we think about it. However, we are not big fans off doing pilots for periods of time. The reason is this, our product is pretty transformational to a sales organization provided that they take it seriously up front. It is not a huge implementation, but it does require thought and effort from a sales organization t hat is putting it in place for us to bring the appropriate dates and technique, but for the sales organization think about the nuances of their organization that mean certain things within the sales process that should be different from any other company.What we found is that if we offer free pilots there is no value in free. It means that the cooperation and interest level of the sale leaders that are implementing the solution as a lot less. They tend to be less effective than they should be during that pilot. We dont really do that.But what we do is what I call land and expand. It is a key part of our strategy. We know that we can get a team of five people within a large organization using our product and taking it seriously they will see huge gains and very quickly we will expand. An example of that is I met with a client last week. About a year ago they had just over a hundred people on our platform, which is not a big implementation, but its not a small one either. As it stands right now, they have been so successful with those folks that they have expanded to a contract to over 2,000 sales people on our platform. That has been say every month that we are adding another 100 sales people as they see the results with another third. Rather than doing pilots we love to do kind of prove our value and then expand out within an organization if we can do.What you say about the stickiness of the product or lock-in as you put it is absolutely right. Once you have optimized your sales process and seen the results that the platform like Velocify gives you its something that you are not going to get rid of typically.Martin: Great, one thing that I was wondering is about your pricing strategy. When I look at it on your website and your pitch on why a customer should sign up you stated something like, you will do twice the amount of leads or 188% more call time, or something like this. You only charge like higher double digit dollars, per month, per user. If I would be having a sales person and he was getting me twice as much revenue with your software I would expect a much higher monthly fee. The question from me would be, is your pricing really value based, is it based more like competitors in the market, or something like a cost approach?Nick: Its not cost approach really, but it is definitely market-based. When we tell and demonstrate the results that we anticipate our clients will get from our product based on what every other client achieves. There is a little bit of reluctance to fully believe that is going to be the case for our customers. The pricing that we offer is more based on how much they are paying for the CRM, the marketing automation system and so on. What we know typical budgets look like. When they implement our system and they get those results, the return on their investments as our pricing is astronomically positive for our clients. They tend to be very happy, but they have to see the results before they get there.What we us e to do interestingly enough, is a guarantee. We use to say if you dont get X percent improvement in conversion and Y percent improvement in qualification we will give you your money back after 3 months. Now we still believe as we did then that there is no question they will get those results. The problem we found with the money back guarantee was not that we ever had to pay it back. There was not one instance of us paying it back, but trying to assess the baseline of information became very difficult. It slowed down the sales and led to a lot of time delay from getting customers on our platform in the first place. What I mean by this, that is, that they sent so many of the organizations that we dealt with simply didnt know exactly what their qualification rate and conversion rate were on their leads. Without that, you cant really demonstrate that you have improved things. It becomes much more of an intuitive. We will bring in more revenue than we have ever had, rather than specific percentage and improvement.That probably dropped the guarantee, but philosophically I will tell people often, I guarantee that you will get these results. If you dont give me a call and we will talk about it and I am willing to let you out of your contract, because I know that you are going to get the results that we have talked about.Martin: What do you think while we are currently the biggest threats for Velocify?Nick: Well, I think there is always a threat to the company that you dont know about that is being built by some clever ambitious guys in someones back room right? I know there is always the threat that someone is going to innovate faster than we can. My challenge there is to make sure that we keep a startup mindset, however large, we grow. Anyway, that part requires continuously hiring new people with new ideas. Its about structuring teams so they have autonomy. Its about encouraging and rewarding new ideas even when they fail. It is tough to compete with early stage st art-ups from an innovation perspective. That is something as an entrepreneur when eventually you come to do something new I will be more thoughtful about how I use that as my competitive advantage. How I really beat people by continuously being innovative rather than trying to beat them on the things that you cant win on when you are a tiny company.I would say that is one thing, Id say the other threats are we sit between some big technologies. We sit in between marketing automation and customer relationship management, and generate a huge amount of value between the two. Given that we sit between two systems, it is not conceivable that marketing automation will become much more sophisticated about how they approach. What we do with CRM is trying to come up and do what we do. We feel that we have significant knowledge and significant data that neither of those two sides has. It would take them a long time to build it, but its not inconceivable that they could being single minded abo ut trying to go after our market and that would be a threat.I think one of the threats is that we are continuously thinking about what people refer to as the war for talent. We know that we have to be an incredibly employee friendly company somewhere people can really make a fantastic impact on their careers because at the end of the day a technology company dies the moment they are unable to hire the best people and retain them as well. A threat is always that there are technology companies out there with a lot of competition for the best people. Not continuing to be one of the best places to work would be a threat. It is something we invest a lot of time in. We were recognized by GlassDoor or we were recognized last year by GlassDoor as one of the top 25 companies in the country to work for etc. It would be a threat if we stopped being that because this business is all about people nothing else.Martin: Nick, Velocify is based in Los Angeles and you have briefly touched on start-up s mainly coming from Silicon Valley. Do you perceive your location to be an advantage or a disadvantage and in what type of sense?Nick: Both actually. I think its, first of all, Los Angeles isnt in the middle of nowhere. Right, so its a big city and have a vibrant technology industry and people call it Silicon Beach. A lot of big technology companies and there is a lot of start-ups here. It is really quite different from what it used to be when I turned up 12 years ago when I turned up to Los Angeles.Its a good ecosystem. Its not as expensive as Silicon Valley to live in, which is very appealing to people. We have a better lifestyle in terms of the weather is better, for sure. I will never tell people that Los Angles is a place that you get a lot more work balance because the reality is the fast growing technology companies do require an immense amount of effort and you are competing with companies from all around the world. You cant come to a successful technology company expecting to be able to work a low number of hours etc. It is a wonderful place to live in Los Angeles when you are not at work. So we think we have those advantages in terms of attracting people. Its close enough to Silicon Valley that raising money and those kind of things isnt an issue.But Id say that the disadvantage of being here is that a lot of the very best engineers are based in Silicon Valley. Particularly when it comes to software as a service and enterprise software. Although we are changing that its still for a company that aspires to have the very best people in the industry working for them, we continuously trying to pull people down from Silicon Valley, which is more of a challenge than if we were based in Silicon Valley.Id say the final thing is Silicon Valley can be a bit of a communication bubble. If you want to be covered by certain technology graphs and so on, it is sometimes more of a challenge if you are not based in San Francisco or Silicon Valley, because those parti cular journalists tend to be a little bit more focused on their doorstep than anywhere else. That can be a little bit of a challenge with being a Los Angeles based company, but only at margins. We get quite a lot of interest in this because of what we are achieving despite our location.ADVICE FROM NICK HEDGESMartin: Nick, before you joined Velocify you started your own company. Now I would be very interested in your major learnings over the years so what are the dos and donts of starting and growing a company.Nick: Yes, the first company that I founded was back at the end of the 90s, December 99 I think when I started my first start-up. That was right at the peak of dot-com, literally at the peak. A couple of months later we had the dot com crash. But we persevered through it and 3 years later the company went public. The company is based in the UK so it worked out.The things that I learned back then were hugely valuable for my role now at Velocify, because I knew very little when I first started.The first thing that I found was that was you dont need to be the most knowledgeable person about every aspect of business to be a successful entrepreneur. A lot of people that I met over the years, particularly, when I went to Harvard business school to do my MBA in between founding my first company and working at where I am now. A lot of people felt like they had to build up this long career of various different accomplishments and understand business inside out to be a successful entrepreneur. I founded my first endeavor when I was, I think I founded the company when I was like 25, that is really not the case. The most important thing is that you are determined and passionate about what you do. In fact in some ways the more you learn in business, the less effective you become as an entrepreneur because you see more obstacles. The beauty of being an entrepreneur is you have the passion and the determination that you dont even see the obstacles. As a consequence, you run straight through them when other people would stop and ponder about them. That is something that I have taken with me throughout my career journey is -everything is possible. If someone is telling you there is an obstacle, just ignore it and run through because you will probably get to the other side.I think the other thing I learned in my earliest tech start-up is to listen to my customer really carefully. So carefully that you are listening to the things that they are not saying. What I mean by that is, my first start-up would have been much more successful had we have sold one particular company. There was a multinational massive company that if we had signed up we would have really transformed the business. It was part of the business plan that we would sell this company and we never ended up doing that. We never ended up getting this particular organization as a customer of ours. Although I think we did a very good job of listening and meeting with that customer we didnt q uite listen carefully enough. We didnt ask all the right question whether they would really do somethings because there were certain things they couldnt disclose. To be more specific what my company did we were a platform for soft commodities. What we allowed was big companies and small companies to acquire things like tea, coffee, sugar, etc. at lower prices than they could get by going directly out into the market and using brokers and so on, which is what they had to do. What we found was we didnt listen carefully. What we hadnt really thought through was that the very biggest company in that market didnt necessarily want to buy at the cheapest price. They wanted that they possibly could if that meant that everyone else could buy at that low price. The game for them was being able to buy at a price that was lower than anyone else could buy because when their economies of scale. We just didnt think it through, because we didnt ask the right questions. Nowadays, when we have the st rategic initiative to go off to certain clients, I am incredibly focused on and spending time, really, truly, understanding where the value is for the customer. Brainstorming the things that they cannot tell us because it is inappropriate to tell us, but that we can figure out by other things that they told us. That was a big learning for us or a big learning for me in my first start-up.Martin: Great, very interesting, Nick. Yes, thank you so much for sharing your insights and learnings. Thank you very much for helping other sales organizations in becoming more effective. Thank you so much.Nick: Your welcome. Very nice talking with you.Martin: ThanksTHANKS FOR LISTENING! Welcome to the sixth episode of our podcast!You can download the podcast to your computer or listen to it here on the blog. Click here to subscribe in iTunes. INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are here with Nick from Velocify. Hi Nick, who are you and what do you do?Nick: Hi, very nice to meet you. Yes, I am Nick Hedges. I am the CEO and Head of Velocify, which is a software service company based in Los Angeles, California.BUSINESS MODEL OF VELOCIFYMartin: Great what does your business model look like? What type of value proposition are you offering?Nick: Yes, thanks for asking. We are in the sales solution category. So what does that mean? Well, our software helps salespeople. It sits in a gap that exists between marketing automation and CRM. Marketing automation is really great at helping marketers generate leads and highly qualified leads at that. The CRM is really good at recording sales information, but the missing piece is what do the sales people actually do with leads when they are generated in marketing so that they have outcomes to record in the CRM.That is where Velocify comes in. We, essentially, very simply, make sure that ever y lead that an organization generates goes to the best possible sale person who is going to have the best conversations, and the best interactions with the company they are talking with. Then we make sure that this sales person knows what they should be working on at any point in time. What is the most important activity that I can undertake right at this very moment and on which lead? So it prioritizes a sales persons day to day in a way they can be incredibly effective at what they do and sort of the optimal process from the engagement perspective of every single lead that comes in and every single company that they want to prospect in to.So that is our business model and luckily we find that there is an awful lot of sales teams whom almost every sales team needs help in this area. Its been a good place to set up a business.Martin: Great. Nick, I understand that you are helping companies (small business size) to work on their leads in an optimized way. Are you also helping them to create even more leads and how do you do that?Nick: Yes, we do that to certain extent. If you look at our client base it runs across the gamut, from some relatively small businesses to some of the biggest companies in the US. Smaller installations probably a sales team would be Im guessing around 3 to 4 people. Our largest installation is 3 to 4 thousand people on the sales team using our product. So within that, people are definitely using our product to be successful to the needs that are coming in, but they are also being successful using our product to do prospecting.A big area currently within many sales teams is sales development. A group of individuals whose role is to take accounts with the company wants to get into. Companies inspire to sell to and then find the appropriate people within that organization to influence and convince that there is value in order to getting the sales done. One of the tools that we have is a social prospecting tool that enables you to discover who the right people are within an organization by looking at data that exists online at various different places. And then, we have the ability to really orchestrate the engagement strategy with these contacts so you are sending to them the right emails, youre making the appropriate phone calls, and you have all of that data available so that you know a bit about that prospect. For instance, you know for sure what their sales manager is. You know what their telephone number is. You also know some of the things about how they have been interacting with your website, what they are doing online, whether they are tweeting on twitter, whether they are putting information on other social networks, etc. So that you got the basis of information for a productive conversation given that you are effectively cold-calling a lot of those prospects.Martin: On your website I saw that you have a tiered pricing model on a per salesperson base so to speak. Do you also have something like a modular ki nd of pricing for different modules that you are offering to your client base?Nick: We do it to a certain extent. Although what we try and do is we package our product in editions within bundles of functionality that we think people should have together. What we use to do probably for the first ten years of our existence that has only changed a year ago, we had pricing that was highly modular. In other words, it was a menu of things that you could add. We found that lead to a lot of dissatisfaction amongst our customers because every time they wanted a new feature there was an additional cost that they had to justify within their organization. We decided to go away from that to a more bundled product offering. What we found is that has increased customer satisfaction quite a lot, because they are not initially having to go back to whoever makes decisions about what the company spends to add new features. It also means that they use more of our products. The things that they wont sig n up for on day one that we know will be valuable to people. They are bundled into editions.So, today we have simplified pricing. We have two product lines and within the product lines, there are free editions for each one of those. You have six options basically.Martin: Okay, Nick with Velocify you are trying to help other sales organizations to close more leads. How is your sales pipeline working and what role is Velocify playing in this as well?Nick: Yes, we obviously use our own products. What we try and do is be the archetypal sales organization that we can sight to our customers when we are recommending best practices. Everything we learn about sales in our thousands of consulting engagements when we increment our system at our clients we try and bring back to our sales organization.We have a pretty sophisticated sales organization structure and we have a pretty sophisticated sales process. All of it relies on Velocify being the kind of glue between all the other systems. We h ave a field sales team that works on the biggest enterprise opportunities that we go after. We have a big inside sales team that works on slightly smaller deals and also goes sales development. The sales development department is fairly big as well which has folks to do cold-calling, prospecting, or whatever you want it to describe it as and lead response. In other words, making sure they call leads when they are generated as quickly as possible and in order to have a human qualifier whether that is going to be a good opportunity for a sales person to work or not.As a consequence of having those things and having an optimized process, we have pretty outstanding conversion rates now within our sales team. What we also try to do within our sales organization is use what we call a sales laboratory. What I mean by that is there are huge numbers of different sale technologies that are being founded at the moment. What we try and do is have Velocify connected to as many of those different capabilities as possible, so that we can see how effective they are. So that way we can make appropriate recommendations to our customers as we are often being trusted by the sales leader about how they should put up their entire sales process that automatically what other technologies they should be using.Martin: Nick, what do you think, what are the more efficient and effective customer acquisition channels?Nick: The most efficient for sure is a referral. What I think is that a lot of people dont realize is how important customer happiness is. If I was to give someone one tip about how to run a great company it would look after your customers. It sounds obvious, but if you really, really delight your customers and that is something we are very focused on at Velocify in a very deep way. Everyone will tell you: Yes, we look after our customer, but it is something that is deeply ingrained in the culture here. If you do that your revenue impact is really significant.One, because it b ecomes easier to expand within your existing customer base.Two, but probably more importantly, you will get referrals from your customer base of people that they know.Those will be the best form of leads that you will ever get, because A, your customers probably already sold the person they are introducing to you. Two, it is going to be an appropriately use case because the customer understands the product well and they will affect that particular lead for you.So referrals without a doubt are something we treat like gold at Velocify, because its just very high converting and it can be a great fit, loyal, and stay with us for a long time which is the perfect customer. I would say those are the best channels.Martin: Nick, what would you say is the competitive advantage of Velocify over its competitors?Nick: There are a couple of things and there is a lot of sales technologies out there. What the majority of them do is something very specific so they focus on just emailing for just sen ding contracts, or just being a dialer. As a consequence, a lot of sales leaders are left with this belief that they need a stack of technologies in order to undertake the job of sales and that is just not true.Velocify and maybe one or two other companies are universal solutions. In other words, we have telephony, we have email, we have text, we also have all the components required to do things like sales process optimization. We also have the capabilities to reward and incent people in the appropriate way to get the right behaviors. Some people call it gamification, we actually call it rewardification at Velocify, because we approach gamification in a differentiated way than any other player out there.I would say that the major benefit from our perspective is the universal solution where you dont need a whole set of other capabilities.Martin: When you think about scaling the company do you perceive some specific type of advantage of having economies of scale? For example, when I am thinking about really having most of the data and really putting some kind of machine learning on it so your recommendations for who should work a lead are becoming much more valuable. Do you think about your business like that?Nick: For sure, as I said one of the key things that we do is to optimize the sales process for our customers. We have the benefit of having implemented our solution with over 5,000 sales organizations. We have seen not only how those sale organizations have approached the optimization of their sales process, but we have seen the outcomes. We have seen what works and what doesnt work at a very kind of data granular way. We are able to use those learnings to re-optimize the sales process of every customer that comes to us. That makes us incredibly effective in its just knowledge that you cant gain overnight. There is billions and billions of transactions that have gone through our systems. So it is a very rich set of data.I think we also have the benefit th at unlike a lot of other companies were genuinely a platform that works extremely well for customers that sell to consumers and also for businesses that sell to businesses where really no one has the expertise and the knowledge of what the valuable learnings for either side are. For instance, we know what is the most effective sales process for a company selling to consumers, but we also know aspect that businesses sell to businesses can learn from it and vice versa. A lot of proprietary knowledge and data that we have picked up over the years that seemed helpful.I think there are other significant economies of scale as well, practically when you are selling to large businesses. Large businesses are typically looking at how robust your technology infrastructure is, how big the company is and how likely it will be in business for the next several years. Now that we have been around for 10 or 11 years that is something that is a lot easier when the company was 2 years old. That is som ething that entrepreneurs have to be very clever at navigating around if their ambition is to sell to large enterprises.Martin: If there is something like a lock-in effect once an organization buys into your product and you learn where to send the lead to then there is something like a lock-in effect. Does this imply that in your sales process that in the beginning maybe you are offering 3 month free trial period to get this kind of knowledge and get more customers on board? Only start the pricing then or does you pricing from the first day onwards?Nick: Though it is interesting, you are definitely very perceptive about our product in the stickiness of it. Some of the ways we think about it. However, we are not big fans off doing pilots for periods of time. The reason is this, our product is pretty transformational to a sales organization provided that they take it seriously up front. It is not a huge implementation, but it does require thought and effort from a sales organization t hat is putting it in place for us to bring the appropriate dates and technique, but for the sales organization think about the nuances of their organization that mean certain things within the sales process that should be different from any other company.What we found is that if we offer free pilots there is no value in free. It means that the cooperation and interest level of the sale leaders that are implementing the solution as a lot less. They tend to be less effective than they should be during that pilot. We dont really do that.But what we do is what I call land and expand. It is a key part of our strategy. We know that we can get a team of five people within a large organization using our product and taking it seriously they will see huge gains and very quickly we will expand. An example of that is I met with a client last week. About a year ago they had just over a hundred people on our platform, which is not a big implementation, but its not a small one either. As it stands right now, they have been so successful with those folks that they have expanded to a contract to over 2,000 sales people on our platform. That has been say every month that we are adding another 100 sales people as they see the results with another third. Rather than doing pilots we love to do kind of prove our value and then expand out within an organization if we can do.What you say about the stickiness of the product or lock-in as you put it is absolutely right. Once you have optimized your sales process and seen the results that the platform like Velocify gives you its something that you are not going to get rid of typically.Martin: Great, one thing that I was wondering is about your pricing strategy. When I look at it on your website and your pitch on why a customer should sign up you stated something like, you will do twice the amount of leads or 188% more call time, or something like this. You only charge like higher double digit dollars, per month, per user. If I would be having a sales person and he was getting me twice as much revenue with your software I would expect a much higher monthly fee. The question from me would be, is your pricing really value based, is it based more like competitors in the market, or something like a cost approach?Nick: Its not cost approach really, but it is definitely market-based. When we tell and demonstrate the results that we anticipate our clients will get from our product based on what every other client achieves. There is a little bit of reluctance to fully believe that is going to be the case for our customers. The pricing that we offer is more based on how much they are paying for the CRM, the marketing automation system and so on. What we know typical budgets look like. When they implement our system and they get those results, the return on their investments as our pricing is astronomically positive for our clients. They tend to be very happy, but they have to see the results before they get there.What we us e to do interestingly enough, is a guarantee. We use to say if you dont get X percent improvement in conversion and Y percent improvement in qualification we will give you your money back after 3 months. Now we still believe as we did then that there is no question they will get those results. The problem we found with the money back guarantee was not that we ever had to pay it back. There was not one instance of us paying it back, but trying to assess the baseline of information became very difficult. It slowed down the sales and led to a lot of time delay from getting customers on our platform in the first place. What I mean by this, that is, that they sent so many of the organizations that we dealt with simply didnt know exactly what their qualification rate and conversion rate were on their leads. Without that, you cant really demonstrate that you have improved things. It becomes much more of an intuitive. We will bring in more revenue than we have ever had, rather than specific percentage and improvement.That probably dropped the guarantee, but philosophically I will tell people often, I guarantee that you will get these results. If you dont give me a call and we will talk about it and I am willing to let you out of your contract, because I know that you are going to get the results that we have talked about.Martin: What do you think while we are currently the biggest threats for Velocify?Nick: Well, I think there is always a threat to the company that you dont know about that is being built by some clever ambitious guys in someones back room right? I know there is always the threat that someone is going to innovate faster than we can. My challenge there is to make sure that we keep a startup mindset, however large, we grow. Anyway, that part requires continuously hiring new people with new ideas. Its about structuring teams so they have autonomy. Its about encouraging and rewarding new ideas even when they fail. It is tough to compete with early stage st art-ups from an innovation perspective. That is something as an entrepreneur when eventually you come to do something new I will be more thoughtful about how I use that as my competitive advantage. How I really beat people by continuously being innovative rather than trying to beat them on the things that you cant win on when you are a tiny company.I would say that is one thing, Id say the other threats are we sit between some big technologies. We sit in between marketing automation and customer relationship management, and generate a huge amount of value between the two. Given that we sit between two systems, it is not conceivable that marketing automation will become much more sophisticated about how they approach. What we do with CRM is trying to come up and do what we do. We feel that we have significant knowledge and significant data that neither of those two sides has. It would take them a long time to build it, but its not inconceivable that they could being single minded abo ut trying to go after our market and that would be a threat.I think one of the threats is that we are continuously thinking about what people refer to as the war for talent. We know that we have to be an incredibly employee friendly company somewhere people can really make a fantastic impact on their careers because at the end of the day a technology company dies the moment they are unable to hire the best people and retain them as well. A threat is always that there are technology companies out there with a lot of competition for the best people. Not continuing to be one of the best places to work would be a threat. It is something we invest a lot of time in. We were recognized by GlassDoor or we were recognized last year by GlassDoor as one of the top 25 companies in the country to work for etc. It would be a threat if we stopped being that because this business is all about people nothing else.Martin: Nick, Velocify is based in Los Angeles and you have briefly touched on start-up s mainly coming from Silicon Valley. Do you perceive your location to be an advantage or a disadvantage and in what type of sense?Nick: Both actually. I think its, first of all, Los Angeles isnt in the middle of nowhere. Right, so its a big city and have a vibrant technology industry and people call it Silicon Beach. A lot of big technology companies and there is a lot of start-ups here. It is really quite different from what it used to be when I turned up 12 years ago when I turned up to Los Angeles.Its a good ecosystem. Its not as expensive as Silicon Valley to live in, which is very appealing to people. We have a better lifestyle in terms of the weather is better, for sure. I will never tell people that Los Angles is a place that you get a lot more work balance because the reality is the fast growing technology companies do require an immense amount of effort and you are competing with companies from all around the world. You cant come to a successful technology company expecting to be able to work a low number of hours etc. It is a wonderful place to live in Los Angeles when you are not at work. So we think we have those advantages in terms of attracting people. Its close enough to Silicon Valley that raising money and those kind of things isnt an issue.But Id say that the disadvantage of being here is that a lot of the very best engineers are based in Silicon Valley. Particularly when it comes to software as a service and enterprise software. Although we are changing that its still for a company that aspires to have the very best people in the industry working for them, we continuously trying to pull people down from Silicon Valley, which is more of a challenge than if we were based in Silicon Valley.Id say the final thing is Silicon Valley can be a bit of a communication bubble. If you want to be covered by certain technology graphs and so on, it is sometimes more of a challenge if you are not based in San Francisco or Silicon Valley, because those parti cular journalists tend to be a little bit more focused on their doorstep than anywhere else. That can be a little bit of a challenge with being a Los Angeles based company, but only at margins. We get quite a lot of interest in this because of what we are achieving despite our location.ADVICE FROM NICK HEDGESMartin: Nick, before you joined Velocify you started your own company. Now I would be very interested in your major learnings over the years so what are the dos and donts of starting and growing a company.Nick: Yes, the first company that I founded was back at the end of the 90s, December 99 I think when I started my first start-up. That was right at the peak of dot-com, literally at the peak. A couple of months later we had the dot com crash. But we persevered through it and 3 years later the company went public. The company is based in the UK so it worked out.The things that I learned back then were hugely valuable for my role now at Velocify, because I knew very little when I first started.The first thing that I found was that was you dont need to be the most knowledgeable person about every aspect of business to be a successful entrepreneur. A lot of people that I met over the years, particularly, when I went to Harvard business school to do my MBA in between founding my first company and working at where I am now. A lot of people felt like they had to build up this long career of various different accomplishments and understand business inside out to be a successful entrepreneur. I founded my first endeavor when I was, I think I founded the company when I was like 25, that is really not the case. The most important thing is that you are determined and passionate about what you do. In fact in some ways the more you learn in business, the less effective you become as an entrepreneur because you see more obstacles. The beauty of being an entrepreneur is you have the passion and the determination that you dont even see the obstacles. As a consequence, you run straight through them when other people would stop and ponder about them. That is something that I have taken with me throughout my career journey is -everything is possible. If someone is telling you there is an obstacle, just ignore it and run through because you will probably get to the other side.I think the other thing I learned in my earliest tech start-up is to listen to my customer really carefully. So carefully that you are listening to the things that they are not saying. What I mean by that is, my first start-up would have been much more successful had we have sold one particular company. There was a multinational massive company that if we had signed up we would have really transformed the business. It was part of the business plan that we would sell this company and we never ended up doing that. We never ended up getting this particular organization as a customer of ours. Although I think we did a very good job of listening and meeting with that customer we didnt q uite listen carefully enough. We didnt ask all the right question whether they would really do somethings because there were certain things they couldnt disclose. To be more specific what my company did we were a platform for soft commodities. What we allowed was big companies and small companies to acquire things like tea, coffee, sugar, etc. at lower prices than they could get by going directly out into the market and using brokers and so on, which is what they had to do. What we found was we didnt listen carefully. What we hadnt really thought through was that the very biggest company in that market didnt necessarily want to buy at the cheapest price. They wanted that they possibly could if that meant that everyone else could buy at that low price. The game for them was being able to buy at a price that was lower than anyone else could buy because when their economies of scale. We just didnt think it through, because we didnt ask the right questions. Nowadays, when we have the st rategic initiative to go off to certain clients, I am incredibly focused on and spending time, really, truly, understanding where the value is for the customer. Brainstorming the things that they cannot tell us because it is inappropriate to tell us, but that we can figure out by other things that they told us. That was a big learning for us or a big learning for me in my first start-up.Martin: Great, very interesting, Nick. Yes, thank you so much for sharing your insights and learnings. Thank you very much for helping other sales organizations in becoming more effective. Thank you so much.Nick: Your welcome. Very nice talking with you.Martin: ThanksTHANKS FOR LISTENING!Thanks so much for joining our sixth podcast episode!Have some feedback you’d like to share?  Leave  a note in the comment section below! If you enjoyed this episode, please  share  it using the social media buttons you see at the bottom of the post.Also,  please leave an honest review for The Cleverism Podcast on iTunes or on SoundCloud. Ratings and reviews  are  extremely  helpful  and greatly appreciated! They do matter in the rankings of the show, and we read each and every one of them.Special thanks  to Nick for joining me this week. Until  next time!

Two Different Portrayals of Orphans in Dickens - Literature Essay Samples

Victorian literature is over-populated with orphans. The Bronte sisters, Trollope, George Elliot, Thackeray and Gaskell all positioned orphans as leading characters in their novels. This trend continued into the Edwardian period, as Frances Hodgson Burnett created the orphaned protagonists Colin, Mary, and Sara. While it can be argued that the use of orphans reflects the enormous number of orphaned children and a different definition of orphan than is commonly used today (a Victorian orphan could have one parent), the number of orphans in nineteenth century English literature remains disproportionately high – and nowhere is it higher than in the works of Charles Dickens. Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations and David Copperfield all include a plethora of orphans. Dickens’ treatment of these individual characters, however, varies widely. For example, while both protagonists of Great Expectations and David Copperfield are missing mother and f ather, their paths in life differ markedly. Whereas David Copperfield is portrayed as the stereotypical plucky orphan who charts his own way in the world, Pip remains trapped in situations in which he has little agency. Despite David’s â€Å"undisciplined heart,† youth, and gullibility, he remains free from the taint of criminality that so doggedly follows Pip throughout Great Expectations. The two different approaches illustrated in Great Expectations and David Copperfield are consistent with the contradictory Victorian attitudes to orphaned children and the curious blend of fascination and fear with which they approached this social issue. Auerbach discusses Victorian attitudes to orphans at length. She notes that the â€Å"orphan is born to himself and establishes his own social penumbra† (Auerbach 395). Victorians viewed orphans as unencumbered by family histories or the other societal expectations that bind as much as they support. Thus, the orphan is a free agent, potentially capable of writing his own life story in ways that regular children, burdened as they are with parental and social expectations, are not free to attempt. The literary orphan’s â€Å"appearance of winsome fragility† is deceiving because it masks an enormous â€Å"power of survival† (Auerbach 395) necessary for creating a position in the world. This view is consistent with how Dickens portrays David. The â€Å"winsome fragility† of David is repeatedly emphasized in the early chapters of the novel. David is first seen as an infant, and then as a small child chattering about crocodiles. Dickens creates an endearing picture as the reader sees the young David frolicking on the beach with little Emly. David himself comments on the fragility of this time, noting â€Å"as to any sense of inequality, or youthfulness, or other difficulty in our way, little Em’ly and I had no such trouble because we had no future. We made no more provision for growing older, than we did for growing younger† (DC 39). This sense of winsome fragility is underscored by the pleasure with which Mrs. Gummidge, Peggotty and Mr. Peggoty take in the children, â€Å"as if they might have had in a pretty town, or a pocket model of the Colosseum† (39-40). The heros winsome nature only makes the cruelty of the Murdstones all the more devastating. Lest there be any doubt as to David’s size and strength, the illustrations by Hablà ´t Knight Browne emphasize David’s smallness. We first see him sitting in a church pew, very much alone among the adults that tower above him. His small size is emphasized in the subsequent illustrations, in which David is seen in a largely adult world, entirely dwarfed by the chair in which he is seated. While it can be argued that all children are winsomely frail, Victorians held that the orphans possessed this trait in spades, given their uncertain status in the world. Th e winsome fragility of the infant David soon gives way to surprising strength as David begins to react against his lot in life. After the death of his mother, David starts to take on the roles associated with independent adults. He is conscious that other children behave differently from him. He wonders whether his â€Å"precocious self-dependence† confused Mrs. Macawber with respect to his age (GE 140). Similarly, he wonders â€Å"what the waiter thought of such a strange little apparition coming in all alone† (DC 142). He demonstrates a surprising maturity and avoids getting entangled in the Macawbers’ financial ruin. After Mr. Macawber’s arrest, he notes that he lived â€Å"the same secretly unhappy life; but I led it in the same lonely, self-reliant manner† (DC 148). This singular â€Å"otherness† allows David to interact with adults as an adult without the diminished expectations of intelligent discourse that are frequently plac ed upon children. Unlike other children, he makes his own place in the world as an adult. His secret uphappiness merely serves as fuel for further self-development.This transformation from being dependent upon adults to becoming a singularly self-reliant child in London reaches a new level when he resolves to run away from Murdstone and Grinby’s in the hope that his Aunt Clara can provide him with a better situation. While it can be argued that David is regressing back to a parental situation, the better view is that he has realized what he needs and has formulated a plan to meet those needs. David’s execution of his â€Å"resolution† illustrates the enormous power of survival of which Auerbach speaks. The reader sees David struggling with the logistics of getting from London to Dover, having his money stolen, pawning clothing for food, cooling his blistered feet, confronting the ruffians, and persevering throughout the twenty-three mile trip to Aunt Betsyâ €™s. This trip transforms Pip; never again will we see him as dependent upon others as he was upon the Murdstones and others who hijacked his childhood. This transformation went to the heart of the Victorian fascination with the orphan, whom they invested with enormous personal strength and fortitude. No longer bound by ties to father and mother, his job at Murdstone and Grinby, or the cruel Murdstones, David can make his own path in the world. While David may seem immature, gullible, or undisciplined, he is never again completely at the mercy of others. It is little surprise that this transformation coincides with a name change – from David to Trotwood. The Victorian fascination with the orphan as a free agent also dovetails with their belief in the Protestant work ethic. The abhorrence of idleness and a belief in the redeeming power of labor allowed Victorians to believe it conceivable for a orphan to pull himself up by his bootstraps – and perhaps be far more successful than one who is burdened with family and other obligations. David’s rise from the bottle shop where he begins â€Å"the world on your own account† (DC 136) to a successful writer makes him very much an English Horatio Algers. Curiously, Algers was writing at roughly the same time in the United States. Literary orphans were routinely used as examples of the Protestant work ethic – and in this regard, David is no exception. The Victorian belief in the singular strengths of the orphan that is operative in David Copperfield is barely present in Great Expectations. In its place are other, far darker notions. As much as the Victorians were fascinated with the ability of the orphan to negotiate his own place in the world, they also viewed orphans as â€Å"faintly disreputable, of â€Å"uncertain parentage,† and â€Å"always threatening to lose focus and definition† (Auerbach 395). The same freedom from binding social ties that allow ed orphans to succeed also permitted them to violate the social contract in other more damaging ways. Because of this belief, Great Expectations is a far darker novel, that plays to Victorian fears of crime and uncleanness. While also a bildungsroman, the life story of its orphaned protagonist follows a very different trajectory as Pip becomes ever more mired in conflicted emotion and criminality. The orphan’s violation of the social contract plays straight into the Victorian fear of crime. As much as the Victorians were enamored by the idea of the orphan as a free agent, they were also wary of the orphan’s aura of criminality. This belief was not entirely fanciful. After the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, aid for orphans was sharply curtailed. Relief (such as it was) was no longer provided by the local parish, but rather by a union of parishes. The only public relief was the workhouse – which was intentionally redesigned to be as harsh as possible to prevent freeloaders. Taken together, these changes had the effect of driving the poor into the cities where crime became rampant. Although the inception of the London Metropolitan Police was no doubt inevitable, a strong argument can be made that the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 was responsible for the crime wave that necessitated the inception of the police in 1868. Citizens were preyed upon by roving tribes of child criminals much like Fagan’s gang. Since orphans had no means of support, they were suspected of harboring enormous, untapped criminal potential. This contradictory attitude toward orphans was recognized by the Victorians themselves. Laura Peters relates that the Inspector of Parochial Union Schools had difficulty reconciling the fact that many orphans â€Å"took the highest honours in teaching examinations, yet simultaneously orphans furnished 60 percent of the criminal population† (Peters 7). As of January, 1854, 50-60% of those attending paupe r schools or housed in reformatory prisons were orphans. Peters goes on to describe what she calls â€Å"the penal narrative,† which she argues arises from â€Å"the sense of social failure†¦within the middle class psyche† that is occasioned by the existence of orphan criminals (Peters 38). Such penal narratives typically involve the arc of a criminal scheme actuated by or upon orphans. Very little of this Victorian fear of crime is seen in David Copperfield. While the forgery and frauds committed by the orphan Uriah Heep provide a subplot, these acts do not subsume the entire novel. Likewise, the Macawber’s brush with debtor’s prison is hardly criminal. In comparison, Great Expectations is saturated with crime. Although Peters holds out Oliver Twist as a penal narrative, Great Expectations would be an equally applicable example. As the novel begins, Pip steals brandy, a pie and a file after being threatened by a convict on the marshes. While a modern reader may become impatient with Pip’s apprehension of being unmasked, such feelings would make far more sense to the Victorian reader who associates orphans with criminal ventures and anticipates further unfolding of the criminal schema. Having been told that Pip is capable of crime and has associated with escaped convicts, the Victorian reader would keep a watchful eye for further such developments. Pip shares this feeling – and as much as he tries to rise above his station in life, he is perpetually reminded of his criminal taint. The appearance of the second convict in the Three Jolly Bargemen reaffirms the dubious social legitimacy of orphans. After establishing that Pip is sent to the bar by his sister (and thus is not there by choice), the second convict reappears. His surprise appearance affirms the Victorian suspicion of the inexplicable link between criminality and orphans that transcends the rational mind. Although the second convict is â₠¬Å"a secret-looking man who I had never seen before† (GE 292), there is little doubt that he is related to the convicts Pip met on the marsh. The convict establishes the identity of Joe and Pip, and pries out of Joe his relation to Pip, thereby establishing for himself that Pip is an orphan. Even the images of the gravestones with which the novel opened appear again, as the convict fixes Joe’s residence near â€Å"the lonely church, right out in the marshes, with the graves around it!† (292). After the convict establishes his identity by surreptitiously flashing Joe’s file at Pip, the men discuss turnips. However, even this innocuous subject is a mere cover, as the reader later learns that the Magwitch’s earliest memories are of stealing turnips. Upon returning home, Mrs. Joe is quick to correctly characterize the stranger saying â€Å"A bad un, I’ll be bound† (GE 55). The entire incident sits uneasily with Pip, who sleeps poor ly, thinking â€Å"of the strange man taking aim at me with his invisible gun, and of the guiltily coarse and common thing it was, to be on secret terms of conspiracy with convicts – a feature in my low career that I had previously forgotten† (GE 55). Pip is aware of his origins and is understandably uneasy that his one-time random association will uncontrollably develop into further criminal proclivities. Having established Pip as tainted by criminality, it comes as no surprise when the convict reappears and reveals a past that matches Pip’s darkest fears. Magwitch relays I’m not a going fur to tell you my life. But to give it to you short and handy, I’ll put it into a mouthful of English. In jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail. There, you’ve got it. That’s my life pretty much, down to such times as I got shipped off†¦ I’ve done everything pretty well – except been hanged . I’ve been locked up, as much as a silver tea kettle. I’ve been carted here and carted there, and put out of this town and put out of that town. I’ve no more a notion of where I was born than you have – if so much. I first became aware of myself down in Essex, a thieving turnips for my living (GE 236). This association between criminality and orphanhood is exactly what the Victorians – and Pip feared. In Great Expectations, this association becomes more tortured when Pip learns that Magwitch was his anonymous benefactor. Magwitch destroys Pip’s fantasies of social advancement when he tells Pip, â€Å"I’ve made a gentleman on you. It’s me wot has done it. I swore that time, sure as ever I earned a guinea, that guinea should go to you. I swore arterward, sure as every I spec’lated and got rich, you should get rich. I lived rough, that you should live smooth. I worked hard, that you should be above work† (GE 220). Predictably, Pip is absolutely horrified; he relays that â€Å"the abhorrence in which I held the man, the dread I had of him, the repugnance with which I shrank from him, could not have been exceeded if he had been some terrible beast† (GE 220). Although unstated, Pip’s sense of horror is directed as much at himself as at the convict. By providing Pip’s fortune, the convict has contaminated Pip’s fundamental being. His flight from the commonness of the blacksmith shop was in vain. The success and domestic bliss in which David invested so much time and work will never be Pip’s because he has based his â€Å"expectations† on what turned out to be a criminal scheme. Even the dubious object of his dreams, the orphan Estella, is tainted when Pip learns that she is Magwitch’s daughter. The long-ago criminal association in the marshes festered over the years so that it now undermines everything important in Pip’s lif e. Other criminal characters reveal further insights into the contradictory Victorian attitudes toward orphans. Such insights can be gleaned by comparing Uriah Heep and Orlick. On the surface, these characters have much in common. In addition to being Dicken’s most unqualifiedly revolting creations, both engage in criminal acts for which they have no remorse. Dickens uses both of them as doubles for the protagonists. However, these surface similarities fail. The differences between Heep and Orlick reveal as much about their respective doubles as they do about Victorian notions about what it meant to be an orphan. The inescapability of criminal contamination is illustrated by Orlick. Pip has absolutely no control over Orlick, as Orlick inevitably appears wherever Pip is found. Initially a fellow worker at the forge, he appears later as a gatekeeper at Satis House. He crouches in the darkness in Pip’s London lodging and finally ambushes Pip on the marsh. No mat ter where Pip goes, Orlick eventually appears. The very inescapability of Orlick corresponds to the impossibility of Pip’s divesting himself of the criminal taint that is part and parcel of being an orphan. Like Orlick, Uriah is frequently in close proximity to David. For example, Uriah and his mother fix themselves upon David in an attempt to prevent him from speaking freely with Agnes or Mr. Wickfield. Even the object of Uriah’s mother’s knitting which â€Å"looked like a net; and as she worked away with those Chinese chopsticks of knitting-needlles†¦getting ready for a cast of her net by-and-by† is seen as an snare for David as she stubbornly refuses to leave the room (DC 482). However, despite this proximity, the association between Uriah and David is not as relentless as the association between Orlick and Pip. There are numerous subplots in which Uriah does not figure at all, such as David’s marriage to Dora, his relationship to the Peggotty family, his friendship with Steerforth, and his educational and professional achievements. Unlike Orlick, Uriah is ultimately escapable because his sliminess is external to David. David has overcome the taint of the orphan, while Pip has internalized it. This difference is further is further established by an examination of the individual culpability of David and Pip. Uriah’s crimes are wholly independent of David. David’s role is merely to â€Å"assist at an explosion† (DC 623) in which Uriah is confronted by Mr. Macawber, Traddles, Agnes, and Aunt Betsy. While Uriah blames David for the revelation of his crimes, saying â€Å"†You’ve always been an upstart, you’ve always been against me† (DC 638), this is distinctly different from shifting the blame to David. Indeed, Uriah wholly takes responsibility as he threatens his confronters saying â€Å"Miss Trotwood, you had better stop this or I’ll stop your husband sho rter than will be pleasant to you†¦Miss Wickfield, if you have any love for your father, you had better not join that gang. I’ll ruin him, if you do†¦I have got some of you under the harrow. Think twice before it goes over you† (DC 629) . In comparison to Uriah’s sole culpability, Orlick’s criminality adheres to Pip at every step of the way. Falling back upon English common law, Orlick provides the actus reus, while Pip provides the mens rea. Pip â€Å"was always in Old Orlicks way†; he â€Å"cost him that place†, and he â€Å"come betwixt me and a young woman I liked†. Orlick attempts to kill Mrs. Joe because Pip â€Å"was favored,† while â€Å"Old Orlick [was] bullied and beat† (GE 292). If the point were not made sufficiently, he says â€Å"but it warn’t Old Orlick as did it; it was you† (GE 292). This wholesale transfer of culpability to the orphan was sufficiently believable to the V ictorian mind. While Orlick’s assertions are far-fetched, they contain just enough merit to cause the Victorians to view Pip with suspicion. The reversal of roles and shifting of blame is not enough to obviate Orlick’s guilt, but it does serve to unquestionably contaminate Pip. It is noteworthy that Uriah is punished for his offenses, while Orlick remains uncharged. Uriah bears the sole responsibility for his crimes, whereas since Orlick has shared culpability, he is punished only for his subsequent attack on Mr. Pumblechook. The uncharged offense remains part of the tainted penumbra surrounding Pip, not Orlick. In conclusion, a comparison of Great Expectations and David Copperfield reveals that unlike some other Victorian writers, Dickens does not seem to have a single defining view of the orphan. (Reed 251) Rather, Dickens takes numerous contradictory positions – as indeed the Victorians themselves did. On one hand, Dickens sees the orphan as evidence that the social contract has been broken. According to this view, the orphan becomes an untrustworthy, a potential â€Å"bad seed,† and the cause of much of the criminality that afflicted London. No matter how well situated the orphan may become, he is still viewed with suspicion. His tainted background means he is never completely redeemable. In writing about Jude the Obscure, John Reed remarks that there is â€Å"no way for these orphans, emblems of man’s isolated, disinherited condition, to place themselves in harmony with a higher authority† (251). This view is just as applicable to the orphan Pip. On other hand, this is not the sole view. The Victorians could not limit themselves to such a narrow view of the orphan problem without attacking the throne itself. After all, Queen Victoria was fatherless; Albert was motherless. Moreover, the very number of orphaned children was so huge (various estimates suggest that 10% of all children were missing a f ather and 13% of children were missing a mother), that this narrow view lacked complete versimilitude. Dickens’ use of the orphan also suggests that while â€Å"partial and genuine orphans may go bad for lack of guidance†¦they may also make of their isolated condition a basis for solid growth (Reed 252). This view is applicable to the orphaned David. As noted supra, Davids rise to success is a confirmation of the tenets of the Protestant work ethic. His hard work and persistence enable him to rise above his dubious beginnings. This contradictory view of orphans stems in part from how the Victorians viewed the poor. While the adult poor were seen as suffering from a moral failing, Victorians were reluctant to extend this view to orphaned children of the poor. Properly raised, the orphan is seen as a tabula rasa. Insofar as David fits this categorization, he is never tainted by poverty in the same way Pip is – and consequently avoids being mired in complex intrigue that prevents Pip from achieving his great expectations. Works CitedAuerbach, Nina. Incarnations of the Orphan. ELH 42.4 (1975): 395-419.Byrd, Max. â€Å"Reading† in Great Expectations. PMLA 92.2 (1976): 259-265.Dessner, Lawrence Jay. Great Expectations: â€Å"The Ghost of a Man’s Own Father†. PMLA 91.3 (1976): 436-449.Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield. New York: W.W. Norton Company, 1990.Dickens, Charles. Four Complete Novels. New York: Random House, 1982.Engel, Monroe. The Politics of Dickens’ Novels. PMLA 71.5 (1956:) 945-974Finkel, Robert J. Another Boy Brought up â€Å"by Hand†. Nineteenth Century Fiction 20.4 (1966): 389-390.Hara, Eiichi. Stories Present and Absent in Great Expectations. ELH 53.3 (1986): 593-614.Needham, Gwendolyn B. The Undisciplined Heart of David Copperfield. Nineteenth Century Fiction 9.2 (1954) 81-107Peters, Laura. Orphan Texts: Victorian Orphans, Culture and Empire. New York: Manchester Univer sity Press, 2000.Reed, John. R. Victorian Conventions. New York: Ohio University Press, 1975.

Parenting Styles Authoritarian, Authoritative,...

With over three hundred million Americans and over six billion people worldwide parenting skills are essential to maintain a healthy society. Parenting involves many aspects and requires many skills. It is a time to nurture, instruct, and correct in order to develop fundamental skills children will need to be mature, responsible, and contributing adults to a society. There are four commonly identified parenting styles; authoritarian, authoritative, permissive, and uninvolved parenting. Of the four parenting styles, two remain on opposite ends of the parenting spectrum. These two styles; authoritarian, and permissive both have deleterious results that are often visible throughout different developmental stages, such as rebellious†¦show more content†¦Unlike the authoritarian style of parenting, the permissive style does not place such strong emphasis on adherence to manners. Manners may be encouraged but are not viewed as a sign of a child’s obedience. Not holding the door for the next person or giving up a seat to an elderly person is seldom noticed or mentioned by the parent. Permissive parents allow and often even encourage casual verbiage rather than formal conversations with their child. Permissive parents fail to enforce some of the simplest expressions of manners. Correction and punishment is seldom given to a child for lack of manners. Children are commonly faced with setting their own boundaries, and making their own decisions according to their beliefs of what is right and wrong. From infancy to adult, people are making decisions all day long. How long to study for the upcoming test? What sport to play? What college to attend? As choices are made, often goals are set to ensure maximum potential are achieved. This process of decision-making and goal setting is overbearing shadowed by the authoritarian style of parenting. Children rarely have an opportunity for open dialogue when and goals are made. As children strive to achie ve the targeted goals set by their parents, they are well aware that nothing less than perfect is acceptable. Failure to achieve goals results in parental disapproval and reprimand. In some circumstances, parents withdraw support as a means of rebuke. This support mayShow MoreRelatedParenting Styles, Authoritarian, Authoritative, Permissive And Uninvolved981 Words   |  4 PagesParenting style has a big impact on how children develop into adults, and there are important implications for their future success. (Ronald Riggio, 2014) How a parent treated their child will follow the child for the rest of its life. Different parenting styles and their punishments that follow can affect the child mentally (psychological disorders) and physically (obesity). While we all know some forms of punishment is uncalled for such as persistence spanking is not typically just punishment butRead MoreParenting Styles : Authoritarian, Permissive, Uninvolved, And Authoritative982 Words   |  4 PagesG ood parenting is essential for a child’s educational and behavioral success and is a stressed trait throughout the world; however, in different cultures, good parenting can be defined and measured in many contrasting ways. In the United States, parenting and discipline methods have become controversial in the past fifty years, and the methods for raising children have drastically changed in some households. According to psychologist Diana Baumrind, there are four different parenting styles: authoritarianRead MoreDifferent Parenting Styles, Authoritative, Authoritarian, Permissive, And Uninvolved Essay1538 Words   |  7 PagesThis essay explores the four different types of parenting styles, authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, and uninvolved. The exploration of each parenting style is examined, and the outcomes of each parenting style for the child is learned. Each parenting style has positives and negatives, but overall this essay informs the reader about which parenting style is best linked to success in their child’s education. Information for this essay has been gathered from three sources, the sources beingRead MoreParenting Styles And Its Effect On Children Essay1382 Words   |  6 Pagesthat parenting styles and their effectiveness vary. In research, parenting styles have been split into four categories the authoritarian, authoritative, permissive, and the uninv olved. Within these categories, researches have attempted to map the effectiveness of parenting styles and the positive and negative outcomes of each. 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Authoritative Parenting Style The Authoritative Style of Parenting, children are expected to follow the rules and guidelines that a parent with this style of parenting has put into place. ThisRead MoreDiana Baumrind s Effect Of Parenting Styles On Children Essay1312 Words   |  6 PagesDiana Baumrind’s effect of parenting styles on children Baumrind was born into a Jewish community in the New York’s Jewish enclaves. She was the first two daughters of Hyman and Mollie Blumberg. Diana, the eldest in an extended family of female cousins, inherited the role of eldest son, which allowed her to participate in serious conversations about philosophy, ethics, literature, and politics. She completed her B.A. in Psychology and Philosophy at Hunter College in 1948, and her M.A. and Ph.D. inRead MoreChild Development Is An Inevitable Process For All Children1033 Words   |  5 Pagessame time. Child development is contingent on (but not solely) the way in which a parent decides to raise his/her child. A parent can decide to raise a child using one of the following parenting style techniques: authoritarian, authoritative, permissive-indulgent and permissive-uninvolved. With the four parenting style techniques aforementioned, a parent has the power to impact the process of child development. Child development is an inevitable process for all children. A â€Å"successful† child is determinedRead MoreEssay on An Effective Parenting Style993 Words   |  4 PagesWikipedia, â€Å"Parenting style is a psychological construct representing standard strategies that parents use in their child rearing.† As parents use the technique to raise their children, they also shaped their value and personality. â€Å"Parenting style considers the balance between two aspects of parenting, namely, control, and warmth† (Ginsburg, Durbin, Garcias-Espana, Kalicka, and Winston, p. 1041). The most commonly heard parenting styles are authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, and uninvolved. Authoritative

A Brief Note On Criminology And Criminal Justice Essay

1. Scholars in criminology and criminal justice have suggested the following: â€Å"Any criminology worthy of its name should contain a comparative dimension. The contents of cultural meaning that are loaded into a subject are too variable for it to be otherwise.† Explain this statement. Use examples in the explanation. Criminology and criminal justice are multidimensional studies that require numerous perspectives in order to create well-rounded findings. Crime is largely intertwined with culture. In order to understand why crime and more specifically, why certain crimes occur in a region, one must understand the cultural dimensions at play. Additionally, one cannot analyze how crime should be dealt with applying only one culture’s model for criminal justice. Simply put, different countries have different criminal justice systems. It would be unconscious to analyze the methods of adjudicating crime without factoring in the widely diverse cultural and political dimensions associated with each region or country and their crime. No one single criminal justice system is entirely flawless. Therefore it is dangerous to approach criminal justice with an ethnocentric approach. ADD EXAMPLES. 2. To what extent can one rely on crime data from other nations? How can one evaluate this data in relation to the nature and prevalence of crime? The reliability and credibility of other nation’s crime data largely depend on the developmental status and the political stability of the state.Show MoreRelatedEssay about Decision Making by Criminals3039 Words   |  13 PagesDecision Making by Criminals The issue of whether decision making by criminals is a rational process is a heated topic of discussion when one asserts that crime is the role of choice. 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