Customization is personal, and for enterprises it is a reflection of identity. We have been amazed by the stories of Citrix customers and partners and the lengths they’ve gone to personalize their Storefront or Workspace user interface. They love that they can tailor their workspace experience to align it with their organization’s needs. In fact, customization-related requests are among the most-asked-for enhancements for our teams at Citrix.
We’ve been listening, and thanks to your feedback and requests, we have now launched the App Personalization service for all our customers and partners. This enables you to extend your customization to Citrix clients for a truly end-to-end, personalized experience. Also, we have new enhanced capabilities so you can do even more with your in-app experience.
Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Bill Sutton
Co-host: Geremy Meyers
Co-host: Todd Smith
Customization is personal, and for enterprises it is a reflection of identity. We have been amazed by the stories of Citrix customers and partners and the lengths they’ve gone to personalize their Storefront or Workspace user interface. They love that they can tailor their workspace experience to align it with their organization’s needs. In fact, customization-related requests are among the most-asked-for enhancements for our teams at Citrix.
We’ve been listening, and thanks to your feedback and requests, we have now launched the App Personalization service for all our customers and partners. This enables you to extend your customization to Citrix clients for a truly end-to-end, personalized experience. Also, we have new enhanced capabilities so you can do even more with your in-app experience.
Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Bill Sutton
Co-host: Geremy Meyers
Co-host: Todd Smith
WEBVTT
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Bill Sutton: Hello, everyone! And welcome to episode 1, 27 of the Citrix Session. I'm your host Andy White side I've got Bill Sutton with us, as always, almost always. Bill, how's it going going? Well, Andy, how about you?
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Andy Whiteside: It's good. It's good. I'm. Back from our India trip, where we launched our business over there, super humbling to go and meet a bunch of customers and
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Andy Whiteside: vendors over there and realize how much opportunity there is to go build a business there and partner with the Indian people.
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Andy Whiteside: They are. They're just nice. They're super welcoming. And
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Andy Whiteside: I was.
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Andy Whiteside: I was shocked how polite they were to us, and
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Andy Whiteside: what the opportunity is to work with them, and that's great. I saw some of the pictures that look like a a very productive time.
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Andy Whiteside: We have
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Andy Whiteside: you saying the word potential. We have so much opportunity to to help our vendors and customers there in market, build a business there, represent those folks in territory in their market.
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Andy Whiteside: basically do what we do here, but do it there, and they are excited about it.
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Bill Sutton: It's great.
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Andy Whiteside: So I saw while I was over there building community building a business through community. You were over here. You had a You made a couple of appearances last week.
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Bill Sutton: Yeah. I went to Birmingham for a a lunch meeting with a a bunch of customers and partners. We had a lot of good dialogue.
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Bill Sutton: It was a full house, so that was very, very well attended, and very lot of fun to be honest with you, to interact with partners and vendors get to know people face to face. So, Bill, that was our lunch series where we go, and we explain how we manage our own
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Andy Whiteside: customer, us and other, and which technologies we use. What was
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Bill Sutton: what resonates the most. When we go tell our story to people. I I think a lot of people are surprised that we, they, to use the term that you you have mentioned before we eat our own dog food
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Bill Sutton: that we we use the technology that we that we sell, we we sell and implement. I think that was. That was kind of surprising to some customers when we, when I showed them pictures of the data centers and said, Look, this is what we
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Bill Sutton: this is what we do. This is we run our business on. That was a certainly a big part of what I think resonated with a lot of folks there in Birmingham.
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Andy Whiteside: Yeah, how did you get a picture of the the cloud data centers?
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Bill Sutton: How did I get a picture of the cloud data centers. Well, what I'm joking about was your reference is now the fact that we host our own. We have our own data centers as well as the cloud. Right?
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Bill Sutton: Right? This graphics.
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Bill Sutton: Yeah, I have a picture of the inside of Azure's data center, so I can probably find one on the web somewhere, but you can never go hug this integral servers. That's right.
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Bill Sutton: And and sometimes you don't need to. But sometimes you do need to right
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Bill Sutton: exactly, and you were gonna to say you were also one of the also in Orlando for a magic game, and that was we had about 60 or 65 people people there, and there was a lot of interest in service now, as well as you know, other technologies. We had representations from a number of vendors and a bunch of customers.
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Bill Sutton: also a real good time. I spent very little time watching the game, except for the last 30 s, in which they squeaked out a win right at the buzzer. That's always good. Yeah.
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Bill Sutton: So what i'm hearing you say is the idea of bringing vendors and customers together. The meaningful way works in Orlando, Florida, and Moon by India all the same time, Orlando, Florida, Birmingham, Alabama.
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Bill Sutton: India, and points in between.
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Andy Whiteside: I mean, I know.
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Andy Whiteside: if you were standing right here, you would see I have cold chills because it is the same concept everywhere. Right? You just take good vendor solutions and good customers that need help. Apply the 2 together. Let them talk to each other, enable it to happen.
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Andy Whiteside: It's magic.
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Bill Sutton: Yep.
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Andy Whiteside: Well, we also have a Todd. Smith with us, Todd, how you're enjoying your new role.
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Todd Smith: loving it. Act absolutely. It's thrilled by by the the opportunity I've been been given to to get directly face to face with customers.
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Todd Smith: And you know, like you just said when you're talking with Bill is that you know that sense of community really matters, and it matters more and more nowadays, because.
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Todd Smith: you know.
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Todd Smith: I I think a lot of people have lived through the exact same scenarios of
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Todd Smith: being remote being hybrid being on-prem. and it kind of it. It. It transcends all of the different technologies it transcends to different businesses that are out there.
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Todd Smith: and really people want to share what they've learned and they are. They're thirsting for
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Todd Smith: information they can get from their peers, and what better sense of community, and then being able to bring folks together
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Todd Smith: that have solved problems in the problem solved.
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Andy Whiteside: Yeah.
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Andy Whiteside: that I tell you all the time like Bill was talking to the number. One reason why we drink our own champagne year on dog food is so that we can find the problems first, so that our customers don't have to.
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Todd Smith: and when we stand up in front of them and talk about.
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Andy Whiteside: You know the the pros and cons of doing something. We can mean it because we do it.
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Andy Whiteside: I was with a potential
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Andy Whiteside: employee basically, interview this morning, and they worked for another partner. And basically
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Andy Whiteside: we're tying that partner to us, and what we do to what they do and basically calling us equals. And I mean it's all I can do. Not I. Just. I just want to go off on them. But I just say, okay, yeah, a little different. But yeah, okay, fine. You are part of the year. At 1.2, I get it.
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Andy Whiteside: Not the same. But that's fine. I'm not going to argue.
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Andy Whiteside: and the actions back it up.
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Todd Smith: Yeah. And and I think that's you know you just hit on something that makes an integral unique in the in the partner community is that that you do take that approach of
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Todd Smith: building communities, building a true partnership not only with the vendors you that you represent, but also the customers that you work with.
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Todd Smith: Yeah, and it it really is. It's a it's a multi-directional partnership.
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Andy Whiteside: Well, I I appreciate you saying that, and I know you realize it, and you know we just keep doing it, and
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Andy Whiteside: some people get it, and some people never will. And one of the examples is this podcast. So we we we talked earlier, and we came up with the idea that we'll cover this blog from i'm gonna try to do the name pre shunt.
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Todd Smith: Yeah, we think that close. That's how I've heard and presented Pronounce it for shop.
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Andy Whiteside: So the the title of this one is how customers and partners can apply custom branding to citrix client apps, and
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Andy Whiteside: you know, as we discussed earlier, this is a common topic.
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Andy Whiteside: and it's often a discussion between. Am I going to use the gateway as a service, or I'm gonna to buy net scalars and implement net scalars and do the custom branding that I want for my portal. But this is specifically around
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Andy Whiteside: the citrix. App. So, Todd, we really talking about the the workspace app here.
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Todd Smith: Yes, primarily the workspace app, and everything that can be delivered within the workspace app you want to. You know this this applies towards
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Todd Smith: being able to reduce the amount of change that you have to throw at the users, and you want things to look common and look the same as it has in the past.
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Todd Smith: but still be able to inject a different technology into the mix.
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Todd Smith: Yeah. So that that that gives us the ability. This this gives
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Todd Smith: not only us the ability to deliver something unique to the marketplace, but also it it allows the customers to really kind of phase in some new technology changes.
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Andy Whiteside: So.
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Bill Sutton: Bill, how often does this come up in a project? Very, very frequently we are dealing. We've been dealing with one lately that a large customer that that needed
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Bill Sutton: a a large level of customization, and we we've been working with them to get that implemented on their net scalars. But I think what this does.
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Bill Sutton: We, we really always been able to to do some level of customization of the login page on storefront, the login page on that scalar. But I think what they, what they've done. Here is extended that down to to Todd's Point to the workspace app itself.
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Bill Sutton: which you know when you click on an app, and then the bar pops up, and it says Citrix, and then it shows the connecting bar that it looks like you. You'll have the ability for what I gather from this article you have the ability to change that icon, and so it says, whatever you want it to say, it could be your company logo it could be
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Bill Sutton: whatever branding you put on the the remote access or the app access. So we don't get requests for that as much, but definitely for the front end.
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Bill Sutton: Well, is that just because they just assume they can't do it? I think that's exactly what it is. Yes, I have been asked for it a couple of times in in the past, but not recently. But obviously, you know, back. Then we couldn't really deliver on that short of doing some sort of special
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Bill Sutton: searching and cutting and pasting and manipulating. You know, source files which most customers didn't want to do. Obviously
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Andy Whiteside: so, Todd, in your new role. Do you think your customers are aware that there are? Well, let me let me ask this first. Are there the way I understand it? There's 2 elements that we would need to be considering. One is
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Andy Whiteside: branding of our storefront web pages or our workspace landing pages. And then the other aspect of that is branding the the citrix apps that are used to access this environment? Specifically workspace app.
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Andy Whiteside: Do customers understand
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Andy Whiteside: that these are their options these days? Do they understand that making this look and feel like something their company is, you know, personally responsible for is something that should be a big deal with them.
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Todd Smith: So so it's a it's a great question, and you know it's a multi bark question. I guess I guess would be the best way to look at it.
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Todd Smith: First of all, I I think a lot of it depends on the individual customer themselves, and what they have to do to introduce change into their environment.
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Todd Smith: I'll. I'll use health care as an example, right
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Todd Smith: if you're expecting icons to be arranged on your on your screen in a certain way.
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Todd Smith: You don't want to have your doctor having to go search for the right icon, or search the right menu
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Todd Smith: for the information there. They want to be able to to find that information, and find that icon very quickly. So oftentimes you have a lockdown desktop you have. You can't change the look and feel
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Todd Smith: because it it breaks up the workflow. It requires some additional training. If you're in a highly regulated environment. you can't really change that without going through without forcing everyone to go through some additional training
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Todd Smith: time to to learn that
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Todd Smith: it also kind of inhibits the ability to
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Todd Smith: to perform back end updates on systems. When the icon is going to change, or how you're going to launch that application changes right. So as an example, we we were working with a large university here in England.
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Todd Smith: and they built out an intranet page. and the students would go and click on the Internet page. That was their landing page. They would go to all of their course. Information.
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Todd Smith: the the hours for you know, upcoming sporting events, the what's being served in the cafeteria is what's available, and things like that.
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Todd Smith: We're all presented through there.
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Todd Smith: included in there, where links to their virtual desktop, their virtual desktop was being provided by a competitor to Citrix.
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Todd Smith: and they wanted to the University, wanted to swap out
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Todd Smith: that solution with a citrix and desktop solution. Right?
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Todd Smith: So instead of having to go and launch
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Todd Smith: the workspace, or actually launch the Citrix receiver at the time they wanted to be hidden from the user that they were switching from
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Todd Smith: the old solution to the to the centric solution. So we were able to work with some scripting to make it
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Todd Smith: provide and look seamlessly through there. The problem with that is, it required some scripting.
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Todd Smith: You're required couple of 100 h worth of work
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Todd Smith: to rebuild that Internet page for
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Todd Smith: to change
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Todd Smith: one single thing on that Internet page.
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Todd Smith: we we knew we needed to to make some changes that we knew that there it needs to be a little bit easier to do.
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Todd Smith: We've since upgraded a lot of the front-end and back end technologies to allow this to happen. And that's how that's where this customization component and this branding concept really came about right? What if I could go and brand my entire
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Todd Smith: a site
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Todd Smith: without having to go and spend hundreds of hours updating code on my Internet page.
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Andy Whiteside: right and Todd, historically, when you went, did all that custom scripting
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Andy Whiteside: as these page pages were to load and be delivered, and all of a sudden you have a support issue going forward, don't you?
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Todd Smith: Yeah, you have. You got a support issue? Oftentimes it was done by, you know. putting the Ica file out as a link.
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Todd Smith: and you would have to. You'd have to make sure you put in the correct switches on that link to to to suppress or hide
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Todd Smith: some of the other activities that were going on. It became very inclusion, and, like you said, very hard to maintain, very hard to support.
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Bill Sutton: Bill, you ever find yourself in that conundrum where a customer wanted that. And you're like, okay, we can do this. But yeah, we Several years ago we had a a higher education customer that wanted to do pretty extensive level of customization on the front end.
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Bill Sutton: that scalar and and storefront. and we there at the time, and they may still exist. There was actually a a guy that had a company that did nothing but customize the front end pages. I can't remember his name or the name of the site, but they did it for
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Bill Sutton: all the technologies, I mean all the you see, vendors as well as sharepoint and all kinds of other things. They would customize, and so it wasn't cheap. But they went to him, and basically they had to pay for it, and then they had to pay an annual small annual fee to help with updates and changes.
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Bill Sutton: So they they carried that for several years, and I think eventually decided to go back to the native.
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Bill Sutton: The native page with a few customizations that they could manage on their own. But we do run into this frequently with customers wanting to do customization, but, like I said earlier, very rarely, if I had customers want to do it down at the workspace app level
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Andy Whiteside: and and I think it's just because
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Andy Whiteside: partners like us, Aren't. Tell them they can. In fact, I guess you couldn't until now. But now we need to make sure. People know that whether they're coming through the the gateway service, or whether they're coming in a storefront, or whether they're using the app, it's, they should have all of it look
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Andy Whiteside: as if their company is represented there, and it's their companies what workspace they're connecting to, and not the citrix workspace that. That's one of my favorite conversations to have with customers is to make sure they're making this
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Andy Whiteside: representative of their company, not
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Andy Whiteside: Citrix, providing apps for their company, because all of a sudden the passion and the long-term viability of it becomes more real
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Andy Whiteside: when it's my company's workspace, not
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Bill Sutton: Citrix workspace yeah. I I agree with that. I think it's a lot of there's a sense of ownership, and and you know affiliation, if you will with it with a solution.
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Bill Sutton: so people are probably more likely to be drawn to it than than some third party, and and the flip side of that is, you know, if they come from an environment, or they
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Bill Sutton: they talk to friends who've had a bad experience. Then this doesn't basically bring the name in front of them where they'll automatically assume that it's not going to work well out of the box, which we all know is sometimes perception is reality, but by not having the name out there they they they have a sense of ownership of that, and then
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Bill Sutton: are more or less or less likely to, you know, to come with preconceived notions.
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Andy Whiteside: You know a lot of times, I say, in front of people. That citrix is a four-letter word for some people, and it never should have been. And then it comes from company to company. And they look at it like i'm crazy. It's like No, it's
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Todd Smith: you, didn't you didn't get the bad code. You got a bad implementation. That's right.
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Bill Sutton: We see that we don't seen as much now as we used to, but we do still see it.
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Todd Smith: I think the other. The other thing is, if you can brand it to your companies
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Todd Smith: branding scheme.
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Todd Smith: It eliminates exposing what technologies you're using
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Todd Smith: in the back end. Which could be a it could be an in ingress path, for you know.
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Todd Smith: potentially bad active that are out there. Hey? If I know if I know this company uses an Xyz technology.
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Todd Smith: and there's an exploit out there that I can leverage. That could certainly be a way to do that.
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Todd Smith: It also prevents someone from doing just the social engineering aspect of it, and saying, hey, i'm from your Xyz technology provider. Can you give me access using a password which.
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Todd Smith: by the way. still happens? You know where you can leverage that social engineering to get in.
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Todd Smith: Get in there. So if you can reduce those threat vectors and reduce that attack surface considerably, just doing small things like hiding what technologies you're using in the back end
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Todd Smith: makes a lot of sense.
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Andy Whiteside: So, Todd, we we had this conversation mostly around the Citrix workspace, App Citrix mobile. Is that also
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Andy Whiteside: part of this story?
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Todd Smith: Yeah, because the the workspace app is applies towards the mobile devices as well.
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Andy Whiteside: Okay.
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Todd Smith: it's really the whatever platform the app runs on can be branded.
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Andy Whiteside: So I think we've covered this in the conversation. But, Todd, you want to walk us through the this fictional acme pharmaceutical. And
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Todd Smith: yeah. So so, instead of you know, when you're on boarding a a a customer when you're on boarding an employee or contractor, you don't want to have to send them to, You know a as simple as creating a customer, URL.
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Todd Smith: It could be the first step. The second step would be. you know, branding the branding the workspace. so that it appears
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Todd Smith: that you're using. You know, a. We pharmaceuticals
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Todd Smith: environment instead of
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Todd Smith: a citrix environment that happens to be utilized by acting.
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Todd Smith: It really helps. you know.
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Todd Smith: Improve that onboarding experience. Reduce the security threats.
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Todd Smith: and also, you know, be able to provide something that is that is unique to that. It that customer or that that employee?
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Andy Whiteside: Right?
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Andy Whiteside: Yeah, it's how Todd. How long has this been around?
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Todd Smith: I think conceptually it's been around for a couple of years.
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Todd Smith: you know, we continue to add on
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Todd Smith: capabilities into our branding, into our toolkit
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Todd Smith: what used to be require you to to develop through an SDK or or
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Todd Smith: rewrite web pages and things like that can now be included in the in the administrative functionality of the products.
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Andy Whiteside: And then I say that because I don't
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Andy Whiteside: I have custom branding in our landing pages through the HTML, but I don't have it through our own apps, and you know now, i'm jealous. I I want this to.
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Todd Smith: Yeah.
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Andy Whiteside: So you want to walk us through
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Bill Sutton: how people go about doing this. Yeah, it looks like there's some development tools that are leveraged. Todd might be able to speak more to the the specifics of it based on what I've been able to see at their
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Bill Sutton: there's some developer tools that are needed, particularly if you're going to be delivering the Android and Ios device, or an Android and I as clients, I think you have to have apple business manager. Yeah, it's listed there
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Bill Sutton: in order to deliver custom. Ios apps to your users. That would be branded accordingly. But as far as the workspace app itself, or windows, Mac, and so forth.
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Bill Sutton: I believe that. particularly for windows, anyways you can leverage the app development tools that are available from Citrix to build this out for yourself for your business.
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Todd Smith: Yeah, it really kind of goes goes back to. You know, the size of the organization that is going to be using this right if you're if you're publishing something special up on the Google Marketplace or the
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Todd Smith: azure marketplace or the apple store.
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Todd Smith: you know that requires those extra steps that are out there.
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Bill Sutton: Yup.
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Andy Whiteside: Well, guys, I think we've covered it todd anything we haven't brought up, as it relates to branding in general. Why you do it, how you do it in the citric, for
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Todd Smith: I I think it gives gives customers a great opportunity here to to make things look
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Todd Smith: kind of unique for the for the for themselves, as customers
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Todd Smith: in it maintain a level of consistency right? So there's other applications out there that you can change icons and tiles and things like that.
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Todd Smith: This really does it across the entire
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Todd Smith: board, right? You can actually do it from the entire site. You can do it for the entire citrix instance.
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Todd Smith: you know. So it really helps out that way.
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Bill Sutton: There, anything else related to this specific topic? No, I would agree with Todd. I mean, I think this is just another example of Citrix trying to help customers, you know, to meet customer needs and be able to to provide this level of branding. That, perhaps, is not as as robust as it has been in the past. I think it's a.
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Bill Sutton: This is a key thing for them is to be to allow the customer to take the the technology that they have purchased
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Bill Sutton: or subscribe to, and, you know, make it their own, and I think it. I think it's a definitely a good thing, and and I suspect that we'll need to ramp up on this a little bit to help customers implement it going forward.
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Andy Whiteside: Yeah, for me that you know the new Citrix where they're really going back to the roots and
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Andy Whiteside: virtual app and desktop
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Andy Whiteside: solutions, whether it's from the cloud or on premises. Really, Citrix never stopped listening to customers. It's just there was so much going on in Big Citrix
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Andy Whiteside: that things like this would get overlooked. And I think now, in
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Andy Whiteside: the much more focused citrix, we have a chance to
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Andy Whiteside: take these technologies, these solutions, these evolutions that we're happening all along and spotlight them more.
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Bill Sutton: Yeah, absolutely.
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Andy Whiteside: So while I got you 2 smart guys.
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Andy Whiteside: what to help us understand the difference between
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Andy Whiteside: Citrix
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Andy Whiteside: Workspace and Citrix Ds. Including the gateway as a service piece of custom branding versus what you could do
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Andy Whiteside: with a storefront server and a net scalar front in your environment, Todd you? Wanna
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Andy Whiteside: How do you have that conversation when people bring it up these days?
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Todd Smith: So so really it's it. Do you want to? You know, Update your
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Todd Smith: You know the workspace storefront, you know, knowing that there's 2 separate things right. There's the workspace app itself.
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Todd Smith: And then there's also the the storefront. So think about changing the landing page which impacts everyone, whereas if you change the app itself, you can.
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Todd Smith: That really only implements or impacts the individual user or group of users.
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Andy Whiteside: Sorry as we're as we're talking through that i'm doing mine so we can show.
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Andy Whiteside: Let's show it to Todd.
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Andy Whiteside: So I think I don't think I know we're using the gateway as a service lots of on stuff which you see me doing here single single identity coming out of Microsoft as your AD multi-factor challenge with a push notification with some user feedback
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Andy Whiteside: which I think everybody should have at this point just a simple hitting. Yes, is not good enough.
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Andy Whiteside: And yeah, I mean, this is what ours looks like. We got this integral logo in the left hand corner still have the citrix logo in the bottom left hand corner.
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Andy Whiteside: But this is all we're currently doing is, what what could I do, Todd? To make this more integral centric.
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Andy Whiteside: if at all.
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Todd Smith: So so you could do things like Adjust what other information you want to include in this panel? Right? So, hey, you want to make a company announce, Make sure that pops up on there that's always visible. You want to remove some of the branding
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Todd Smith: that's out there.
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Todd Smith: You know, think about it is being able to really deliver the content in the style that you feel is appropriate for your employees
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Todd Smith: to see and understand right. So being able to kind of adjusted to the way they're used to working.
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Todd Smith: which helps get past that whole change management, challenge. It's out there
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Todd Smith: when you implement changes out there, it can be very disruptive to the individual employee can require a lot of additional
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Todd Smith: training or recertifications or adjustments in their daily routines, and this allows you to kind of
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Todd Smith: either kind of
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Todd Smith: force, a change to the employees, or allow them to continue to work in the way that they've they've always for.
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Todd Smith: Yeah. So it does give you a lot more flexibility here.
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Bill Sutton: Bill, based on what you're seeing within customer environments. Is this pretty typical when they're using the workspace service. Yeah, it's pretty typical. A lot of times they'll you can change the colors, obviously, because we've got all white there, and you can modify the cause colors, and a relatively, I think it's a relatively new features. The ability to use themes.
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Bill Sutton: which is obviously something we could do on the on the netscaler for a while, but that's now available within within the workspace. Configuration or workspace experience configuration within Citrix Cloud. So there are some options there for for being able to leverage themes, and and even allow
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Bill Sutton: different policies with different themes and assign users to those policies. So you can have one user that gets, you know, one logo and maybe another user gets a departmental logo. What have you? So it looks like you can do that now as well.
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Andy Whiteside: Here's one of my favorite little things, the highlight about how Citrix uses Citrix, and that is just to go to the Citrix. You know Home landing page, and then somewhere down here on the bottom is the employee login, which is how they get to their workspace.
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Todd Smith: and if you notice it goes to.
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Todd Smith: You know it'll prompt you to go through a netscal or gateway for a additional authentication. It will pop up the
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Todd Smith: it'll pop up your authentication. You know where you enter your credentials.
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Todd Smith: It'll then force you to go through. You can use a combination of either Octo or Ub. Key or some other tech type of technology. Here you force multi-factor authentication. It can do
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Todd Smith: EPA scans
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Todd Smith: on the endpoint to make sure you're coming in from a a a secure enough location.
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Todd Smith: and then, before that, ever even let you into your workspace.
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Andy Whiteside: So, Todd, is this a netsc, or is this a workspace service?
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Todd Smith: So it's leveraging the net scalar to start off with.
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Todd Smith: but it's going through the gate next to our gateway service.
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Andy Whiteside: Okay, so it's front aated by. But then ultimately using the service.
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Awesome.
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Andy Whiteside: Well, guys, hopefully, we covered enough for the customers listening and happy to have conversations, either. Bill, myself, Todd, love to have these talks with people. And
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Andy Whiteside: yeah, that that user experience from the moment they hit that page or open that app.
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Andy Whiteside: That's when it starts to count that the viability that one of my mind share. I always slept 2 h last night, still trying to catch up from my India trip that
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Andy Whiteside: the the user acceptance of the environment they're hitting starts the moment that first page launches whether it's the app for the landing page.
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Andy Whiteside: and that's why it's super important to get our your brand not our brand your brand, Mr. Customer's brand in front of the Mr. Customers, user
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Andy Whiteside: because it does make a difference when they see their company logo, they're less likely
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Andy Whiteside: throw it under the bus if it's their company that they're talking negatively about.
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Yeah. no.
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Andy Whiteside: All right, todd what you got going on outside of
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Andy Whiteside: this this podcast
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Todd Smith: the
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Todd Smith: so let's see. I bought a farm up in Maine.
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Todd Smith: I thought you were gonna say like
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Andy Whiteside: I got dinner with a client tomorrow night or something. I bought a farm in Maine. All right. Go
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Todd Smith: Yeah. About a 100 acre farm, mostly trees. So
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Todd Smith: got an old abandoned apple orchard on it. It's got a house that was built in 1,900.
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Todd Smith: So been been planning out and figuring out how i'm going to turn that into a an investment property and potentially retirement proper.
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Andy Whiteside: Okay.
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Todd Smith: yeah, your goal is to get get out somewhere.
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Todd Smith: It's made.
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Todd Smith: They don't. They don't have a good way of creating a new land.
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Andy Whiteside: Yeah, you have to send some pictures that that'd be beautiful, I bet. How far from the nearest, how far is it from an airport. We'll start there.
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Todd Smith: So I am about an hour 10 min away from Portland, Maine airport.
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Andy Whiteside: Okay.
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Todd Smith: it's a couple of small regional airports which are basically landing strips. But yeah, it's a
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Andy Whiteside: yeah looking forward to it.
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Andy Whiteside: Well, Todd, it sounds like a great place to visit when I get invited.
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Todd Smith: Absolutely the the invitations there for the both of you.
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Andy Whiteside: Doesn't doesn't sound like something I want to be responsible for, but something i'd like to go see.
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Bill Sutton: So what's going on your world. Well, I bought a tank of gas yesterday. It didn't cost quite as much as 100 acre farm, but you know, maybe close, nevertheless. No, I'm i'm trying to catch up from last week, being out so much, even though I was able to work on the plane and
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Bill Sutton: work from the hotel and that sort of thing. I've still got lots of catch up going on this week
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Bill Sutton: early this week, especially
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Todd Smith: what I love about those conversations, because assuming Todd has some Internet connectivity from that phone.
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Bill Sutton: Oh, yeah, Works going to get done in both cases.
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Andy Whiteside: That's a that is the story we've all lived for the last 20 years. But the rest of the world is catching on whether it's because of the pandemic, or whether because you just want to go live on a farm somewhere
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Andy Whiteside: as long as your employer is okay with it. That's the whole. Another conversation. The technology is there.
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Todd Smith: Yeah. Absolutely.
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Andy Whiteside: All right, gentlemen. Well, until next time. Hopefully, Jeremy can join us next week. But we'll have another conversation next week, and hopefully bring some more goodness to these communities. We're building
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Bill Sutton: sounds good.
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Todd Smith: great. Thank you.
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Todd Smith: Thank you. Every week. Thanks. You, too.