Dennis: If you’re not aware of personality management, if you’re not aware of the incredible change it can make in a business, and that’s not just a pie-in-the-sky, blue-sky claim. Personality management is essential. If you’re not acquainted with it, test out our program. See if they become a believer real quick. Because literally, they could purchase the most expensive package we’ve got, which is the PEP Advanced package, which is $495, and pay for that program five times over in the very first employee they can keep from leaving their employment. Now when you’re looking at figures like that, you can’t hardly use by using the program. And the harmony of the business, once this program is used and installed and used on a regular basis, businesses tell me their harmony increases. One business had their turn over, had it drop by 50% in the first year. Even in the home there was one couple, one particular thing that really, I appreciated over the years. This is probably my favorite example of PEP being an assistance. A man wrote me and he hadn’t even purchased a registered version. He just used the freeware version. He said, “I’ve been married to the same woman for 30-35 years. I didn’t realize that I didn’t know who she was. We both took the PEP evaluation and I realized for the first time, who she actually was. We were thinking of getting a divorce.” [Music plays]

Michael: Where are you originally from?

Dennis: Well I was born in California, in a town called Fairfield. But I’ve lived here in Missouri most of my life.

Michael: What led you to Drew Software and the personality profiling?

Dennis: When I went to college, I actually started out to be an art teacher. And about two years into college, the state decided to start cutting school funding, and of course, when that happens, the first thing to go is art and music. So I realized quickly there was no future in that, and at the time I had taken a math class. This was back in 1977. And one small tiny part of that math class introduced computers. Well that was the day when home computers didn’t quite exist yet. I think the only home computer on the market was the Commodore Pit, and the very earliest of the Apples. And people didn’t really know much about them. There weren’t any computer stores, you couldn’t go down and find a computer magazine on the rack. But that one little section peeked my interest, and it came just about the time when I was trying to figure a new career to go into. So I decided to go into computers. I thought there would be a future in it.

Michael: How old were you then?

Dennis: I was 22.

Michael: And you were in college at that time?

Dennis: Yes, I was in college.

Michael: What was your first job out of college?

Dennis: Well, I actually started working while I was still in college. By then computers were starting to get known. The first of the radio shack models were on the market and a new computer store had opened up, and they were looking for someone to teach their corporate computer classes. And by that time, I had pretty much taught myself computers. The things I learned in college were just totally out of date because the whole market had changed. I had bought myself a home computer at that time. I taught myself computer programming, and had already written a few programs. So they hired me to teach their corporate classes.

Michael: And then what happened after that?

Dennis: Well, over a period of time, I started working more and more in my own direction. In 1985 I came across the basis of what later came to be my personality evaluation packages. I was one of those people, instead of just taking college right out of high school, I went out into the work sector to start with, and then four years later went back to college and continued in college for several years. So by the time I was done, I had three majors. One in psychology, one in computers, and one in business management. So all those things together, culminated in 1985 to me developing the first of my personality evaluation programs.

Michael: And what gave you the idea?

Dennis: Without giving away my trade secrets, what actually happened was I came across a psychology database that was several years old, but it was amazingly accurate. It was one of those things that would just blow you away. It was done by hand at the time on a sheet of paper, and used a method that was kind of quirky. I looked at this system and I started asking people about it. And come to find out nobody had been able to computerize it. It was such a strange method of evaluating personalities in psychology that nobody could computerize the thing.

Michael: So it was a manual one. It wasn’t computerized. It was a personality profiler, but on paper. Was it used for anything specific at that time?

Dennis: Well, at the time it was basically used in the corporate sector in a very limited basis. I was introduced to it, in fact, from a person who worked in the HR field. I always had knack for being able to see things that people in general don’t see, which is why I work well in the business consulting area. As I looked at this, patterns started to form, and I started seeing things about it, and over a period of time I figured out how to computerize it. So, I computerized it, I altered some things to it and made some updates, because of course, like I said, it was several years old, so there were some things that were out of date. There were ways to make it work better in the computer field so as time progressed, I honed and refined it and added new information and updated it according to modern psychology and societal methods and wound up with what I have today.

Michael: At that time in your mind, were you thinking that this would become the business that it has become for you, or were you more interested in it as a project, and a challenge?

Dennis: When I first got into computers, there wasn’t anything available to explain how computers work. If you talked with a programmer, or with a technician, they didn’t’ know how to speak English. So the motto of my company right from the start was I speak plain English. Whenever I wrote a computer program, it was designed to be easy to use above all, very easy to understand, simple to figure it out. The use of the program would be very user friendly. It would be easy to figure out how to make the program work, all menuized, and understand back then, that was not a popular thought among programmers. So I took the tech out of my programs and put in instead common business sense. When I first started in the personality area, I used this same approach. At the time of course there were other personality evaluation packages on the market. There were other psychology packages, but most of them were very lengthy to use, they were very complex to use, they were hard to figure out, they produced questionable results, and so from the very start, because of the way my business is already set up, I was determined to overcome those problems.

Michael: We’ll get into this a little later. I took it and I compared it to some other things out there and by far, with your one word descriptions or adjectives, it is very easy to use, very quick, and people wouldn’t hesitate doing it. I think that is a key to your success.

Dennis: I’m glad to hear you say that. You’re kind of echoing what most of my clients say too. And that’s been consistently the case every since I produced the program, so as long as people tell me that, I know I’m on the right track.

Michael: How long has Drew Software been in business?

Dennis: I initially opened the business in 1985, which was back when Windows was just in infancy stage, just getting started. DOS was still very strong. I had a few computer programs that I had written and I thought they would be of interest to the public, so I opened up the business.

Michael: And what exactly is a personal evaluation program?

Dennis: Its kind of what the name says. It’s a computer program, which is designed to accurately evaluate a personal natural personality. The way mine basically works is people fill out a form which contains forty terms. I think you’ve seen this form already and tried it out. They respond to each of those terms as to whether that term applies to them as a person, or whether it doesn’t apply to varying degrees. And when they are through they feed the information into the computer and the computer produces a five-page report, which typically nails them on the head as far as who they are.

Michael: Why is personality evaluation valued in a business environment?

Dennis: Every job that a business may have open or available has a personality that works best with that job. Now its kind of blatant example, if you have a bookkeeping job open where a person is going to be sitting behind a desk 8 hours a day, the last person in the world you’d want to put in that job is an outgoing, go-getter, or a mover and a shaker, who likes people who likes changes in environment, who likes to be on the move all the time. If you were to sit that person behind a desk, not only would he not do the job well, but also it would de-motivate him to the point that he would eventually leave the job. He just couldn’t stand to be there. And on the same basis, you wouldn’t want to put a quiet, conservative person who loves to work with numbers, out in the field talking to people all day long. That would drive them crazy. So since every job has an ideal personality that would fill that job, the idea is to find out what personality that specific job requires, and also what personality your applicants and employees have so you can match the two together. When you get a good match, then you significantly reduce employee turn-over, you wind up with more motivated employees who are more productive, you reduce your absenteeism, you reduce your health and stress related problems, it’s a win-win situation all the way around. So that’s where my program comes in. It helps an employer to identify both the requirements of the job, and the personality of the people that they want to fill that job.

Michael: From your experience in the marketplace, out of a thousand companies; small businesses, or medium sized businesses, how many of them even know about this and are even using this? Do you know?

Dennis: I’m finding that over the years, more and more businesses are becoming aware of personality management as a concept, but as far as the general marketplace goes, I would say the vast majority of the businesses are still unaware of the idea of personality management. Or how important it is to the work environment. If I were to take just a rough guess, off the top of my head, I would say 90-95% of the businesses are totally unacquainted with the concept.

Michael: And they’re just winging it. They put an ad in the paper, and they take resumes, and they make appointments, and they have the person sitting across from them, or they’re on the phone, and most of these people are making a decision from the gut.

Dennis: Yes. They are filling a position based on possibly work experience, which is always a good guideline, technical experience or education, and they’re trying to decided whether this person will fit in well with their company by the impression that they get during the interview. That’s the very worst time to form an impression from somebody because a person almost hardly ever appears in the interview as they do on a day-to-day basis.

Michael: They’re acting. They’re auditioning.

Dennis: In fact they’re putting up what we call a façade. A false front of what they feel the employer is looking for. That’s what they provide.

Michael: Are there a lot of other personality evaluation programs out there on the market?

Dennis: Dozens, if not hundreds. If you go to the Internet and you enter personality test, personality analysis, personality evaluation, you’ll get page after page after page of these programs. And if you go to the site and download a copy, if they have a copy that is downloadable, many don’t. But if you try them out, you’re going to spend probably a couple of hours in extreme frustration.

Michael: Well, I can say from my experience. I’ve downloaded the software, I took it, and it probably took me only five or six minutes. I printed out the report, and I sat there and read it, just shaking my head, “Yep, that’s me.” I thought, "This is pretty accurate." I was really impressed, as I think anyone would be. How accurate is it though. Can it be fooled?

Dennis: Your experience really is the common place. First of all to address your question whether it can be fooled, of course I wouldn’t be being totally honest if I said it absolutely could not be fooled. There are some brilliant people out there. But I would say that in most of the cases, no, simply because from the very first, I designed the program to resist being fooled. About the only people that I know of that could accurately fool a program like that would be maybe a professional psychologist, a person who is well acquainted with psychology. But there’s a drawback to it in that when an employer uses our system, they have a specific thing that they are looking for in the use of personality evaluation. Well, it’s very hard to know what the employer is looking for, so if you try to fool our system, nine out of ten times you’re going to accomplish exactly the opposite of what you’re striving to accomplish. That’s the way we’ve written the program. The program has a couple of fail safe devices built into it to actually alert the interviewer when the program feels that somebody’s trying to manipulate the report. But also, the report that it produces is very concise, like in the case of your own report. It described who you are. Now if that report came out traits differently than you would ordinarily exhibit, that’s going to come out during the interview process as well. So I’ve built in several fail safe things in the program to prevent people from fooling it. But to answer your question as far as how accurate it is, your reaction to the program, is by far the typical reaction that we get. People’s jaws hit the floor. They just read the thing in astonishment. They can’t believe it is so accurate. In fact, people read things in there that they never thought about before, and when they read it, it just astonishes them because they say, “That’s why I do that.”

Michael: Right. So they learn something about themselves.

Dennis: Of course, often my clients will send me emails or respond when they take the report. Even if they don’t purchase the program. If they just have taken an evaluation somewhere, they’ll contact me and say, “Man, this is the most accurate system I’ve ever seen. I can’t believe it.” In evaluations that we’ve taken over the years, both from our customer’s responses and also from feedback we’ve received and calculated, our report has an accuracy in excess of 90%. And in most cases, over 95%, which is astonishing in a field in which 50-70% is considered a well acceptable norm.

Michael: It’s pretty amazing. If someone wants to know, how did you accomplish this? How is it so accurate? Is there a science behind it? How many hours did you put into this? What are some reasons why it’s so accurate without giving away any kind of trade secrets?

Dennis: Well, I couldn’t even begin to estimate how many hours we spent in making it accurate, but basically, and again without giving out trade secrets because my competition would love to know how I do this, what the system does in just a general layman’s concept, is when somebody responds to the terms, the system looks for patterns in those responses. It looks for consistencies, it looks for inconsistencies. Basically, what it does is that it sorts this information in what we call “general personality” categories. Despite the fact that people are all individuals, which we all certainly are, most people fit into categories of personality. Those who don’t we often label either insane or eccentric. Those are few and far between, but the general person fits into general personality categories. Once the program determines which general personality category they fit into, then other areas can be examined to determine the finer points, the individual nuances of this person. So the point of all this information is combined together and by the time every thing is cross-referenced and double checked, the program has a really good idea of who this person is. Since it does cross-reference things and double-check things, it tends to be extremely accurate.

Michael: Let’s talk about the other guys. The competition. The hundreds of them out there. Are they just throwing stuff together so they can have something to hustle?

Dennis: You know there are such a wide number of answers to that. There are guys out there that just throw something together to make a buck, just like in any other field. There are some instances in which you have, again what we call the computer technician syndrome, a guy is either a computer programmer, or maybe he’s a psychologist or a doctor in psychology, and they know the field really well, but what they don’t know is how to translate that to computers and to the business field. Maybe they know how to write a computer program real well, but they don’t know how to relate to the every day businessman. Or maybe they know the field of psychology really well, or psychiatry really well, but they don’t know how to translate that to the every day business environment. So what you wind up with is a large number of these companies that have a product that simply does not work at all. That has very questionable methods that result in a very questionable output of people saying, “I’m not sure if that’s really me or not. It doesn’t sound like me.” To other products that actually do work, but they’re kind of confusing to use or they take a long time to use. I remember seeing one product that it actually took an hour and half for the respondent to fill out the form and then produced a 150-page report. Well, what business that has 500 people applying for a job wants to go through that? Although the report worked very well, and it was very accurate, there was an obvious lack of understanding about the business market and what the human resource management market requires. It’s like any other field. There are some good products out there. There are some very bad products out there. But for the most part, just about everything I’ve seen on the market fails to meet the mark in one category or another. They’re either too complex to use, they’re too expensive, they consume too much time, or they don’t work. All four of those things are things that the Personality Evaluation Program totally overcomes.

Michael: I know privacy is important to you, and I don’t want you to give away any of your clients or anything, but can you give me some examples, maybe some cases over the years, just one or two, or maybe a testimony or some success stories, of how a company saved money using your system? Any thing that sticks out in your mind? Any customers or clients that have had a tremendous success with it?

Dennis: There are a couple of customers that come to mind, of course. As my website indicates, all of my clients are guaranteed anonymity, all the way from email on up, we respect the privacy of our clients, so we never mention them by name, just as a matter of business policy. But I did have one particular client that wrote me an email and he said that he had tried dozens of different personality programs over the years and that he found ours by far to be easier to use, faster to use, and more accurate than anything else he’d ever used. When we have somebody that is already acquainted with the field, that’s already acquainted with the concept of personality management, who has tried other products and is blown away by ours, that’s exactly what I like to achieve. On a general basis, the basic bottom-line dollar thing is that every time a company loses an employee, they spend about $2,500 or more rehiring someone else. In the advertising and the interviewing process, in training this person to do the job and acclimating them to the company. $2,500 is a minimum of what they will spend over the next year, getting the person in to the position. And that’s for unskilled labor. For skilled labor it can be much higher. So basically when a business puts our product into their business, if they can save the turnover of just one employee over the next year, they have paid for our product many times over. I often have people that will write, or call and tell me, “Man your program saved us a bundle this last year. It was the best purchase we ever made.” Our typical client tells us that 95% or better accuracy is what they achieve. To be frank with you, that’s far better than I ever expected or hoped to achieve. I knew the system was accurate, and I knew that the tweaks and the upgrades that I’ve done to it over the years improved the product, but when I started having clients regularly tell me that they thought it was 95% accurate, or in many cases 100% accurate, when everybody else is doing 50, 60, 70 percent accuracy, and 70-75. One thing that surprised me, I got a hold one time of a system that was one of the most widely known and widely used systems on the market. They were exuberant that they had a 75% accuracy rate. That was considered high in the industry. Well, me, being the nitpicker that I am, the way that struck me was they failed 25% of the time. So when my clients are telling me that they were achieving 95% or greater accuracy, I was very pleased to hear that.

Michael: That’s exciting. How about in the home? What value does it have in the home, from your experience?

Dennis: Well, there’s two area really where it has value. One is helping people to know themselves better, and to know their loved ones better. When you know who you are as a person, then you can figure out your strengths and how to build on them. You can find other areas which maybe you want to work on that a little bit. Or if you have a personality trait or a thing that you do and you’re not really sure why you do it, sometimes seeing it in black and white, the personality area that this comes from helps a person to cope with difficulties that they’re having in their life. That’s a very positive thing. That really encourages people, they say, “Hey, this is why I act this way. Or here’s why I lose my temper once in a while”, or something like that. The other area it helps, of course, is in the job match area. Since every job does have a personality that works best, if they’re thinking about getting a new job, or if they have a current job and they want to know if they actually fit that job or not, then they can, in one of the registered versions, they can perform a job analysis, which tells them what type of a personality that job requires, and often determine which job field would be best for them to work in.

Michael: Anyone listening to this is probably excited to know where they can at least download this and maybe while they’re listening to us talk, they can take the test and at least print it out. Here’s how you download a version of the software. In the description on this web page, under it you’ll see a place for your name and your email address. Fill your name out and your email address, and you’ll be taken to a download page where you can download this amazing free software. It downloads pretty quickly?

Dennis: Yes, it downloads really fast. Just a little bit over a megabyte.

Michael: Does it open up automatically, or do you have to go into that file and execute it?

Dennis: Basically once they download it, they’re ordinarily under Windows, a little box comes up and says, do you want to open it, or save it, or whatever. Just open it up, it installs automatically to their system. Everything is very straightforward.

Michael: And when they open the software, what are they basically going to see?

Dennis: Basically they’re going to be presented with a menu, which will allow them to do a personality evaluation. When they go to that menu, there will be an option in the upper right hand corner. It’s a little button that says, “Print the Response Form”. I always recommend that people do that, although they can take the response right there on the screen, if they print the response form and fill that out, then they have that one hand as a record if they want to use that late.

Michael: Your response form is the report that evaluates you after you take the test?

Dennis: No, actually the response form is what they fill out prior to the report coming out. It’s the 40 terms they respond to.

Michael: Okay, the response form shows you 40 terms, or 40 one-word or two-word terms, and it asks you to do what?

Dennis: Basically it asks you to respond to those on a level of one to five. Is this term not like me at all? Or is it very much like me? And then once they fill out all of those responses, feed it into the computer, the computer very quickly performs the analysis, prints out the report. Basically, on an average basis, from the time that they’re starting to fill out the form to the time of final printout, rarely takes over 5 or 6 minutes.

Michael: Can you give us a sneak peek, and give us two of the terms it will ask us to evaluate?

Dennis: One term is “Outgoing”.

Michael: Outgoing?

Dennis: Are you an “outgoing” person? Another term is “Shy”. Another one might be “Dead Liner”. Typically are you a person that works better when you’re under a deadline, or do you not work well when you’re under a dead line? Under the term “Dead Liner” that’s where you would answer that.

Michael: This free version has how many terms?

Dennis: There’s forty terms on the freeware version.

Michael: Forty terms on this freeware version. Now let’s say I’m impressed with the free one. Then where would I go from there? What other products and services do you have after the free one? How much do they cost? What benefits would I get from a more extension personality evaluation program? If you want to download a free copy of the PEP, you can go to DrewSoftware.com. That’s DrewSoftware.com. This is the end of part one. Please continue to part two.

Dennis: Because it really is free. It’s one of those things, you can go to my website, you can download it; you can see your personality right there. It really works. But there are, of course, the way this market works is that there are other things that I offer in addition to the freeware version. Advanced reports, all-inclusive information, things that are valuable to businesses in particular. As I mentioned before, the job evaluation, which can be of benefit to households. All of those things are included in the advanced version, so if people try the freeware version, once they find out how accurate it is, once they pick their jaws up off the floor, they’re often motivated then to order one of the advanced versions in order to gain the extra benefits there from.

Michael: What will the advanced version look like? Will it be the similar style but more terms?

Dennis: Actually, that’s the interesting thing. The whole system pretty much works the same way. For example, in the job evaluation system, there is another response for that is filled out, it has forty terms on it, but those terms apply to the job market.

Michael: This is to evaluate what kind of job I should look for to go into?

Dennis: Yes. More accurately, what it does is it evaluates the specific type of personality a specific job would require. Which is kind of a different way of approaching it. Our most powerful package does have a package in it that actually does recommend to people what types of jobs might be best for them to go to. However, that’s kind of a misunderstanding in the job market. For example, let’s say that I told you that you’d do well as a secretary. Well, what kind of a secretary? Do you want to work as a secretary in an office in which the boss leaves every thing in your hands and pretty much relies on you to run the whole office? Or are you going to be a secretary in an office where the boss is the boss and basically he just wants you to do the filing and the typing and the dictation and all that type of thing.

Michael: There’s a big difference.

Dennis: A big difference. You’re talking about the same job position as far as title goes, but totally different personalities involved in those jobs. You can’t really say you would be a good secretary, or you’d be a good salesman, or you’d be a good doctor. What you can do, however, is evaluate a specific job. Well, here’s this secretary, here’s the things this boss is looking for. So you fill out the form, which asks you questions about the job, and once that form is filled out, the computer then will tell you what type of a personality that job requires, and you’ll know whether that job matches your personality or not.

Michael: This is a totally separate download?

Dennis: Yes. Actually, it’s not a separate download, what it is, is it’s all within the program, it’s just when you order the advanced version, then a code is sent to you which lets you open up the extra features of the program.

Michael: Does that download that I have, the free download, have everything but it’s just not accessed?

Dennis: It’s already to go, all you need is the code to access it.

Michael: Can you give me some specific prices on the advanced stuff, aside from the free one?

Dennis: Our basic home version is $95. We tried to put it at a price that just about anybody could afford for something of this caliber.

Michael: So, for $95 I’m going to get the code from you, and it’s going to open up, and it’s going to allow me to do…?

Dennis: It will allow you to access the job evaluation function.

Michael: And that’s for me if I’m thinking about getting a job, I can put in information that will describe the type of job that I’m interested in and considering to work for. I’ll take the evaluation and it will give me a report on if I may fit that job.

Dennis: Right.

Michael: That’s for me personally. Now, how about the more advanced package. If I’m the company, and I’m interviewing, what do you have for me there?

Dennis: Any of these packages can be used in business, except for the freeware version of course. Any of the licensed registered packages can be used in a business environment. But the minimum package that I recommend for businesses is he business version, which is $195. That includes the job evaluation package, which helps them to match their applicants to a job they have open.

Michael: Excuse me for interrupting, but is this different from what we just described, or…?

Dennis: Same package.

Michael: Same package, but you’d use it from an employer’s perspective?

Dennis: It was designed to work from both directions. It also includes a history system in which every one that they evaluate, and all their employees are tracked in a history file, so if they have a job open up, they know that they want a particular personality for that job, they can go into the history search engine, and it will pull up the applicants and employees that match that job. Sometimes it saves them a lot of time that way in the interview process. It also includes a stress evaluation system.

Michael: Tell me about that.

Dennis: This is a very important package.

Michael: This is in the business one, for $195?

Dennis: Yes. Stress is the number one job killer. It’s recognized across the board in industries throughout the world, that stress will lose employees, it will cause them health problems, heart attacks, psychosomatic illnesses, upset stomachs, ulcers, loss in work time, absenteeism, lack of motivation, anger, what’s commonly referred to as “going postal”. All this is stress related. So the stress evaluation package is designed basically to locate key areas of stress before they become a job liability. Basically what it’s designed to do is help the employer to say, “Man, this employee is getting stressed out, let’s find out why, so that we can correct the situation before it hurts their job.”

Michael: How many questions are there, or how many words are in that part of it?

Dennis: Again, forty terms. The reason we settled on forty terms is because that is enough terms for our system to do the evaluation properly. But the more terms you get the more difficult the report gets to be filled out, the more fatigued people become, and the more that fatigue results in errors on the form. You don’t want to give them too many terms, or make it too difficult to fill out the form.

Michael: How long are the reports with the stress evaluator, and the job evaluator compared to the original personality profile, the free version?

Dennis: The job report is two pages long. That’s all that’s necessary for that particular report. The stress report is one page long. The stress report, the whole purpose of it is to identify how much stress the person is under, and where this stress is coming from. It does that very effectively in a one-page report.

Michael: Is that everything in that package?

Dennis: Yes. That’s the business package.

Michael: And that’s $195?

Dennis: Yes.

Michael: What else do you offer?

Dennis: Our high-end package, the next step up, is what we call PEP Advanced. The Personality Evaluation Program Advanced package. Now that’s designed for the powerhouse business user. The HR manager that wants everything at his finger tips. It contains basically two more reports. One is what we call the “Expanded Report System”. It produces a nine-page report, which covers a variety of areas that are valuable, especially in the business human resource situation. It presents information such as what is this persons basic motivational methods? Which is touched a little bit on in the basic report, but it expands on it in the expanded report. It tells what type of recreation does this employee enjoy? Is this employee going to enjoy company picnics? Would he rather have social groups or card clubs? Part of what business is recognizing is that if you make an employee feel part of a family, they are more loyal to the business. So, what type of recreation methods? What type of reward methods does this employee like? What may reward one employee may be totally de-motivational to another employee. So, it tells what type of rewards this employee prefers. Does he prefer bonuses on his paycheck; does he prefer long-term benefits, fringe benefits? Does he prefer company outings? Does he prefer recognition? Awards? Trophies? Plaques? Different people like different things. So there are a number of reports contained in the expanded reports system. Nine pages worth that really help the HR manager to know better who they’re dealing with, how to motivate that person. A couple of areas the report has to do with team function. How will this person react to people of other personality types? What type of things will de-motivate this person in the extreme? There’s even one interesting part of it, which shows trigger areas of this employee. Things you do not want to do because it will set this employee off. But also ways to recognize that by using those trigger areas in a positive basis, you can actually turn those danger trigger areas into assets of your business. Very important, and very interesting part of the report.

Michael: Let me ask you a question. Let’s say I have the PEP Advanced package and I’m an employer and I have 50 employees. Can I run, for that one price, can I run all fifty through the advanced system?

Dennis: Absolutely. There’s no count limit on our program. There’s no time limit, there’s no date expiration. When you purchase the registered packages, you have license to use them for your life. There are a number of our competitors in this field that when they sell their package, that package will have a countdown feature. Every time they run a report, it subtracts one from the countdown feature, so they may buy 100 reports and pay a fee for that. And when it gets down to zero, they have to pay another fee to use that package. Other reports are licensed for one year. They can use this package for one year and at the end of that year they have to pay a new license fee. That’s not the way I work, and as far as I’m concerned once a person purchases this package, they should be able to use it. That’s what they bought it for.

Michael: Absolutely, and that’s a lot of value. If you’re in business for many years, that’s great. Tell me, has the package been updated since you started?

Dennis: The package is updated constantly for several reasons. One, as time goes by, society changes, so the terms occasionally have to be updated to reflect current societal ***, current concepts, current phraseologies. One of the things that has happened in recent years is people’s stress levels in general have increased, right across the board. So naturally we had to update our program to reflect and take that into consideration. So on an average, I would say that probably I produce one update every two months.

Michael: Let me ask you this. I have 50 employees, and let’s say I run the PEP Advanced on all 50 employees. How do I organize and manage all this data?

Dennis: That’s really where the history package comes in. Of course you do have the printed reports, and one thing that’s interesting about out reports, as you’ve seen, the first page of the report in the registered package uses what’s called a “stat sheet”. Now a stat sheet is basically a synopsis of the entire rest of the report. When you print out the basic five-page personality report, the first of those five pages is just the stat sheet that summarizes the other four pages. Once you’re used to using the personality evaluation program, you can just glance at that stat sheet and instantly know who you’re talking to.

Michael: For someone who hasn’t seen it, and I’ve seen those funny looking letters, explain what that is, if it’s a code and what it does for somebody.

Dennis: You’re referring to the CLEP chart.

Michael: Maybe I am. Is this something different?

Dennis: Yes. The CLEP chart is a code that is presented in great big letters on the first page, and if a person knows how the CLEP chart works, and it’s very easy to understand, they can read that 8-character code and know the basic personality of whomever they’re talking to instantly. It’s kind of like a doctor walking into a patient’s room, and looking at the graph chart and knowing what that graph chart says. The CLEP chart is basically an 8-character code, consists of 4 letters and 4 numbers, which identify different key areas of the personality. Is the person a leader? Are they an out-going friendly person? Are they patient or are they urgent? Are they conformists or are they a non-conformist? That’s what the CLEP chart deals with. And it really saves a lot of time for the HR manager to be able to just glance at that chart and say, “Oh, that’s who this is.”

Michael: Okay, then that kind of answers my question on that end of it. At a glance I can look at this code, it’s like secret writing, which tells me exactly who I’m in front of.

Dennis: Right. And it’s so easy to understand and once you learn how to read the CLEP chart, it’s so easy that just anybody can use it. There’s nothing difficult to it at all.

Michael: Now let’s talk about the stat sheet.

Dennis: The stat sheet is basically the first sheet and it condenses and summarizes the entire personality of the person. Everything that’s contained in the rest of the report is summarized on that stat sheet. What you do as an HR manager is you produce the five-page report, you keep the first page yourself and you hand the other four pages to the applicant or employee. They’re looking through this, and while their jaw is hitting the floor reading this stuff about themselves, you’re going over the stat sheet and you know instantly whom you’re talking to. Thirty seconds later you’re relating to this person like you’ve known them for 20 years.

Michael: And tell me, do you recommend you hand them the report and let them read that?

Dennis: Absolutely. In fact we even recommend to employers that when they first start using this program that they run a report on themselves, photocopy the report and hand a copy of the report to every employee the have.

Michael: That’s a great idea. So the employees can relate to the owner.

Dennis: They know who the owner is, the way that he prefers to work, the things that he will appreciate, the things that he won’t appreciate. But not only that, it accomplishes something else. When they see the personality report of the owner of the business, or the manager of the business, or their supervisor, that makes them totally comfortable in taking the evaluation themselves. Because they’ve already seen the positive results of it, they see that this isn’t something management is asking us to do that they’re not willing to do in return, and it makes everyone enthusiastic to cooperate with management.

Michael: You know what this is like? This is like a short cut to building relationships within the business.

Dennis: That’s exactly what it is.

Michael: Instead of taking time, it’s like when you’re dating and stuff. You’re dating someone, you have no idea what they’re like, you have to go out with them 10 times, and a year later you finally get to know them.

Dennis: You know, there’s even an old joke about that and you’ve probably heard it. When you wake up on your wedding morning, you always wake up to a different person than you married the night before. It’s well known that people do put up walls around themselves as a natural defensive gesture. So you can even be around somebody for years and not really know who they are. Our program identifies who the person is, right up front, and does so in a non-threatening, non-evasive manner.

Michael: Let me ask you this. Are people ever hesitant about taking this because they think it’s going to pull skeletons out of the closet?

Dennis: Only initially and that is if they haven’t seen a prior report run. Which is why we encourage management to run their own report first and share it. Once they see what the report does, they are very enthusiastic and they just about crawl all over each other to have their report done. They want to see what their report produces. And the reason for that is because right from the very beginning, from the inception of PEP, I knew that you never accomplish anything by focusing on people’s negative traits. You have negative traits, I have negative traits, everybody has skeletons in the closet, things they don’t want other people to know about. It does no good to pull those skeletons out of the closet. It’s possible to do, but what benefit is that in the work place? If you pull people’s bad traits out, you de-motivate them, you make them paranoid, you make people suspicious of one another. But if you find out what their positive traits are, you find out what their strengths are, then you build on the strengths. If you pat somebody on the back instead of kicking them the tail, so that’s the whole concept of the way the personality evaluation program approaches it. If you locate the strengths of those people and work to build those strengths up, you’re going to wind up with a beneficial harmonious, profitable business. We all want to hear things about ourselves that are flattering, or beneficial, or upbeat. None of us wants to hear what’s going wrong with us. So when you have a program that approaches everything from a positive basis… now mind you, not that PEP doesn’t talk about negative aspects of the personality, because it does. You can’t have positive without negative, but when PEP presents a negative aspect, it is presented in a positive manner. In other words, this is an aspect of your personality, which may be a little strong, here’s how to use it to your benefit. So it always approaches things on a positive basis.

Michael: Is there anything else? Are there any other services you offer besides the PEP software?

Dennis: Right now PEP is the sole product that we focus on.

Michael: Do you have any joint venture relationships with other people who want to take this product and create niche markets for it? Are you open to any of that?

Dennis: I’ve just opened up that possibility recently. Up until now PEP has been kind of an exclusive thing. But we started recently what I call the REP program because I start having a lot of people ask, “Hey, I really like this product, I’d like to make a living at it.” And for that, I have a very unique situation, if somebody wants to be a PEP representative, they want to do so on their own time, they want to be their own boss, they don’t want to have any specific hours that they follow, but they do want to present the Personality Evaluation Program to people. They want to sell it; they want to make money off of that. I have a method of doing it in which they don’t have to buy any stock up front. They don’t have to buy any retail packages; they don’t have to invest any money whatsoever. All they need to do is invest their time. We compensate them on what I consider to be a very equitable basis. There are some things we’re approaching from a business standpoint that would allow individuals, or even companies, if they want to pursue marketing the package on a massive basis, we have things available for that too, even down to obtaining source code levels, if they want to.

Michael: Anyone can get in touch with your, through your email, which is up on your website, and discuss any of those opportunities. Well, Dennis, I think this is definitely a fascinating interview, a fascinating subject. You’ve shown me how; I think every business should have this. Everyone should use it in their personal life too. It’s an incredible product, saving a huge amount of time. It shortcuts that process of getting to know somebody. Thank you very much for sharing all of this. Is there anything else that you want to mention that we didn’t talk about that you can think of?

Dennis: No, the only thing that I really point out to businesses is that if you’re not aware of personality management, if you’re not aware of the incredible change that it can make in a business, and that’s not just a pie-in- the-sky, blue-sky claim. Personality management is essential. If they’re not acquainted with it, test out our program and see if they become a believer real quick, because literally they could purchase the most expensive package we’ve got, which is the PEP Advanced package, $495, and pay for that program 5 times over in the very first employee that they keep from leaving their employment. Now when you’re looking at figures like that, you can’t hardly lose by using the program and the harmony of the business, once this program is used, has been installed and used on a regular basis, businesses tell me their harmony increases. One business had their turnover drop by 50% in the first year. It’s turnover before then had been killing them. Even in the home there was one couple, one particular thing that really, I appreciated over the years. This is probably my favorite example of PEP being an assistance. A man wrote me and he hadn’t even purchased a registered version. He just used the freeware version. He said, “I’ve been married to the same woman for 30-35 years. I didn’t realize that I didn’t know who she was. We both took the PEP evaluation and I realized for the first time, who she actually was. We were thinking of getting a divorce. Our marriage was on the rocks and when we found out who each other were, it fixed our marriage.” He told me that straight out.

Michael: I believe it.

Dennis: And I’m floored there. And he says, “Not only that, we ran a report on our seventeen year old son, and it bridged the generative gap.” So that one insistence just about floored me. And let me know I was on the right track. That’s what I really want to achieve. Making a living is one thing, but when you have a product that actually helps people both in their home and their business area, then that really puts the shine on the star.

Michael: Absolutely, that’s what it’s all about. I mean, the money, big deal, but when you change someone’s life… That’s kind of like what I do with my interviews. I give away a free CD-Rom to anyone, and I’ll ship it to anywhere in the world, pay for the shipping, and you should see the… If you go back to my site, just look at these testimonials and what these people say. It’s like the “Wow” factor. Some of them are life changing.

Dennis: That’s how I became acquainted with your company because one of the people who had received your CDs said this is phenomenal. So, you’re right, I was rather impressed by the concept myself. You don’t see people doing that everyday.

Michael: I love what I do, and I like doing different things, and I like making a difference. I can tell you do too.