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• 0:00:08 Kris Murray: Welcome to Child Care Rockstar Radio. I am your host, Kris Murray. Child care leaders around the globe are breaking through challenges, leading the way in innovation, testing new best practices and impacting children and families in a much more powerful and positive way than ever before. Each week, join me for interviews with early childhood leaders and experts that will leave you inspired to become the next Childcare Rockstar.

   

• 0:00:34 Kris Murray: Now, let’s go. This is Child Care Rockstar Radio. Episode 201 featuring Zac Alcampo. Welcome back folks. Thrilled to have you here. Hope that you were able to enjoy episode 200 a couple weeks ago with Vernon Mason and we had a big celebration around the fact that we’ve made it to the 200 mark milestone. Been podcasting since 2017, so not new to the scene and thrilled that you’re along for the ride.

   

• 0:01:09 Kris Murray: Zac Alcampo is the Creative Director at Grow your center and today’s episode is called Gamification in Parenting and in Life and in Business. And Zac is a young father of a three or four year old little boy, super cute human and he lives in Belarus. I guess that’s. Is that Asia or Europe? I don’t even know what continent Belarus is on. But Zac is over there across the pond and doing very, very cool things innovatively as the Creative Director at Grow your Center. If you’re not familiar with Grow youw Center, it’s the leading digital marketing agency for the early learning industry and have over 300 clients featuring websites, recruitment and hiring services, Facebook ads, social media presence, paid media of all types and so much more. So go check them out if you need a new website or you need some digital marketing services and to grow the number of leads that you’re getting@growyourcenter.com

   

• 0:02:26 Kris Murray: little shout out there. I happen to own 50% of the company and I am the fractional CFO over there and on the leadership team. So I’m helping lead that company to new and amazing heights with my co founder, Bruce Spurr. Zac Alcampo is really a force in being a bleeding edge guy. He not only is a street dancer, which we’ll find out when he does his share of his fun fact, but he’s also a really innovative leader and has worked in the gaming industry, in video games and creating video games from the tech side.

   

• 0:03:13 Kris Murray: So he brings a ton of knowledge around gamification to our world here in ECE and bringing really cool techniques to gamify your websites to pull in parents and viewers of your website. So somebody that’s visiting your website might see a animated character going across the screen that ties into your brand might experience some new cool branding components that are interactive and might be pulled in in all new ways through gamification techniques.

   

• 0:03:51 Kris Murray: We talk about that. We talk about what gamification really means and how that can play a part in your child care marketing. And we talk a lot about AI in this episode. We talk all sorts of AI tools and this is a great one if you want to learn more and dive in deeper on AI and you’re using it. And also if you’re not using it and you might be a little bit resistant to it or fearful and that’s okay too.

   

• 0:04:18 Kris Murray: I’ve been a little bit resistant to it and recently by working with Zac and my colleagues over at GYC have really started to embrace it and it’s very, very cool what it can do to save time and help you with your messaging and with your copy. With graphic design. With so much guys, it’s you’re really missing the boat if you haven’t at least tapped into it a little bit and see what it can do for you. So this should be a very resource rich show for you in in those areas.

   

• 0:04:54 Kris Murray: As far as what’s going on. For me, I am getting ready for a summer of continued travel. I’ve recently been to Bali. I spent some time on the California coast in wine country in San Francisco, I’m going to New Mexico for a country music festival. I am going to Mexico to Tulum in early June to hang out with our Empire level members with the Child Care Success Academy. And then I’m going to the middle fork of the Salmon river to spend six days whitewater rafting overnight, staying Riverside on cots and enjoying nature to the fullest.

   

• 0:05:43 Kris Murray: And that will be in late June. So so much fun travel and definitely living my best life over here. In between, I’m working in spiritual coaching, I’m working at Child Care Success Academy & Co. And I’m working at Grow youw Center. So I basically have three hats right now, plus being the podcast host of this amazing podcast and just so glad that you’re here. Thanks for tuning in. Life is rich. Life is busy and for me right now it’s a great balance. For my next phase post CEO is is to be wearing these different hats and being able to also get a bunch of travel in and live my life dreams. So just a little bit of a share of what’s going on behind the curtain here in Chris Murray’s world. I thought it was time for me to update you and let’s dive in in this episode 201 here at Child Care Rockstar Radio and meet my friend Zac Alcampo.

   

• 0:06:50 Kris Murray: Enjoy it. Welcome back to the podcast everybody. I am very excited today. This is going to be a good one, I feel. We have Mr. Zac Alcampo with us today. Zach, how are you?

   

• 0:07:08 Zac Alcampo: I’m very, very good, thank you, Kris. Thank you for having me. I’ve heard a lot about this podcast. So pretty excited to get in front of you right now.

   

• 0:07:17 Kris Murray: Cool. I’m really excited to bring you here. Zac is our director of production and I don’t know if that’s your official title, but over at Grow your Center and he is a wizard of artistry and design elements and tech and pulling it all together to make beautiful products at Grow your Center. So where are you sitting right now, Zac?

   

• 0:07:47 Zac Alcampo: I am in Minsk, Belarus. Moscow Standard Time. Right now I’m usually between here and Dubai and Bangkok, I used to live there. So I got a lot of roots back in Bangkok. So I find myself over there. I’m just always chasing the sun. I’m not, not a big fan of the cold weather, so.

   

• 0:08:08 Kris Murray: I see. Well, when I think about Minsk in Belarus, I feel like it’s cold there. Is it chilly there right now?

   

• 0:08:15 Zac Alcampo: I gotta say it’s like A. It’s 20 plus here and not your guys measurement.

   

• 0:08:22 Kris Murray: Yeah, Celsius. 20 Celsius, which is how much Fahrenheit. Okay, well you guys, you guys can look that up. I feel like it might be 65 or 70 degrees. Like mild. Like.

   

• 0:08:36 Zac Alcampo: Yeah, it’s nice though. Yeah.

   

• 0:08:38 Kris Murray: Okay, cool.

   

• 0:08:39 Zac Alcampo: It’s a nice, it’s a nice. It’s, you know, it’s colder in Canada where I’m from than here, I gotta say so.

   

• 0:08:45 Kris Murray: Okay.

   

• 0:08:45 Zac Alcampo: Yeah, yeah, it’s good climate. Cool.

   

• 0:08:47 Kris Murray: All right, well, I’ve never been to Minsk or Belarus or any of those places, but I would like to visit there one day. So maybe I’ll come visit.

   

• 0:08:56 Zac Alcampo: It is hidden paradise, I always like to call it.

   

• 0:09:00 Kris Murray: Nice. All right, shout out to Minsk. Let’s go. So how do you serve the childcare industry in your current role?

   

• 0:09:12 Zac Alcampo: Well, I’m Creative Director at gyc. I don’t think that’s exactly my official dealings though. I mean it’s expanded so much. I was pretty cool. I thought I’d be looking at websites, coming up with cool stuff. But I always tell people GYC is childcare centered marketing on the outside, but inside it’s this crazy cool, tech, innovative kind of machine going on inside. But for our Clients, we make sure that your ads and your websites are as high quality as possible.

   

• 0:09:50 Zac Alcampo: Since I’ve come on, we’ve made a lot of changes to the visual look of everything. We’ve always also put in a lot of, I guess, gamification tactics into a lot of the product just to make sure that websites are working properly. Ads are as best that they can be and we’re getting eyes on centers.

   

• 0:10:14 Kris Murray: Cool. For those of you guys that don’t know at Grow your Center, we’re a leading agency that is helping child care centers exclusively in their digital marketing efforts. And Zach has been a pivotal role of growth in that area of just helping us stay at the forefront of technology. And I wanted to bring him on the podcast today to talk about some of the latest and greatest evolution in tech with gamification and AI.

   

• 0:10:48 Kris Murray: And yeah, we’re digging it over at gyc. We are definitely on the bleeding edge, I would say, of a lot of that stuff that I’ve. Because some of the other tech related companies and software related companies in the space that are our friends and partners are definitely not as AI driven as we are, what I’ve recently discovered. So that’s just, just a cool thing for us to be on that bleeding edge and I wanted to bring that into the podcast today. So.

   

• 0:11:22 Zac Alcampo: Yeah, you know, coming in, I, I thought it was going to be run of the mill creative director position and I had one conversation with Bruce actually and he got me, I think it was. We ended up talking for like two hours. It was the first time we, we really dug in and he got me so excited about the future of the company, the innovation and vision that he had going forward. And I come from the video game industry, so quite honestly I was thinking why are they even interested in me over at gyc?

   

• 0:12:01 Zac Alcampo: And I guess he saw something in what I have seen and lived and breathed and allowed me to inject that into the company culture in one and the tech and what all the products are going to be in the future. And I got to say I have this huge sense of purpose with everything that I’ve learned in my career beforehand and applying it to childcare centers. I was just talking to Bruce about this yesterday and it was pretty cool to have that because I’ve been designing games, gamifying specific products, but putting it onto real life that can help people, especially young families.

   

• 0:12:46 Zac Alcampo: That’s very fulfilling and it all applies surprisingly. There’s so many things that are just completely parallel that work so well in our business.

   

• 0:12:58 Kris Murray: Yeah. So let’s dig into that and with regards to your video gaming background, just give us a little bit. Any career highlights with regard to any like experiences that you had in your prior career before joining GYC that you feel were especially pivotal or anything that the highlights of your experience before you got here?

   

• 0:13:24 Zac Alcampo: Oh man, it was been a long one. I started in 2005 in the video game industry. So I was doing a lot of AAA stuff, working with, you know, big publishers, Microsoft and Activision and all this. And then long story short, I just didn’t like the development cycle. It was, you know, it takes two and a half years to build something and you’re kind of head down, you don’t talk to anybody about it and then it comes out and I didn’t like that cycle. So I was always going after a faster development cycle and because of this I got into like Facebook games when that was a thing.

   

• 0:14:01 Zac Alcampo: We were kind of first on that and then we were at the beginning of mobile and then, you know, as I was going after faster development cycles, I actually was going after like new tech. So I was always looking for something cooler. Something cooler? What has nobody done yet? And I just kind of felt myself on bleeding edges, you say of technology and application for it. So I found myself in Thailand somewhere along the way, got into the startup world that was really crazy.

   

• 0:14:35 Zac Alcampo: I really found comfortable place there. The whole cowboy pirate mentality of that, that, that workflow and I really enjoy that. I still do. I think there’s a lot of benefit to that. You really find strong people when you’re in an environment like that. I think, you know, a players really rise and people that can’t hang, I mean they just, they just fall out of that. So find yourself around a lot of strong, smart people and just from there it pretty much gave me a very cool lifestyle of, you know, living around the world. I ended up living in Bangkok for, for eight years doing this, had a couple businesses there, couple ventures and somewhere along the way I went from being an artist in video games to a game designer to just actually gamifying platforms.

   

• 0:15:31 Zac Alcampo: So at the end of it I ended up building platforms using gamification to push behavior and monetization and all this. And I guess my game career turned into another beast. And really cool things I’ve seen in, you know, I was in Web3 for a while. I was C level over there in a very cool company and that opened a lot of doors to seeing what’s coming. And I would say, you know, we’re embracing AI now over there we were doing it, 2002, something like that. So I really saw the beginning of what was coming, and I’m really happy that I got to see the spark of it, because the trajectory didn’t change, and where we are now was very much in view.

   

• 0:16:26 Zac Alcampo: It’s faster than I thought it would be, but it’s great, and I’m glad it’s being embraced in businesses everywhere. I mean, you have to use it now more than anything. But, you know, after that, I. I went into business for myself. I founded my own thing, and that was pretty fun for a while. And right before. Right after that, I found gyc, and you guys were very, very welcoming. It’s not a. It’s not a role I thought I would go into or an industry, but the biggest thing I learned was 20 years of doing something was to go wide.

   

• 0:17:05 Zac Alcampo: Crossing Industries was the biggest thing that I learned that I should have done a lot earlier, because you have so many skills, and you can apply them into different parallels across different industries, and they’re so much stronger when you take one element. I mean, we’ll get into this with gamification, but when you take an element from completely different industry, I think I just have a different lens and everyone in childcare, I guess, and I think Bruce recognized that and definitely pointed me in the right direction for things.

   

• 0:17:45 Kris Murray: Cool.

   

• 0:17:46 Zac Alcampo: Yeah, it’s been really great.

   

• 0:17:49 Kris Murray: Yeah. And you have a young child at home, so you’re a dad, and so you also have a connection or an affinity with the niche of early childhood education, preschool. Tell us about what you got going on at home. Your. Your son, and you share anything about your interests or hobbies or what. What you like to do in your personal time.

   

• 0:18:13 Zac Alcampo: Oh, man, that’s. How much time do we have here?

   

• 0:18:19 Kris Murray: Come on, Zac. You can do that in a couple minutes.

   

• 0:18:21 Zac Alcampo: Just kidding. We were. We were just talking when I jumped in to the zoom here about splitting our days. So I’m on a different time zone. I’m on Moscow Standard Time, and I have. I essentially have two days in each of my days, and I treat it as such. So when I wake up, it’s, you know, pretty late for you guys, and I spend my whole morning with my kid or to myself if he’s busy. And. And then I have, you know, I take a nap, and then I get to.

   

• 0:18:58 Zac Alcampo: I get to my work day. So. But mentally, I frame it as two different days, and it gives me a lot of time to relax. So on that time, I have a. I’ve got a. He’ll be four soon. July 10th. His name’s Raiden. I named him after a video game character his mom did not know. Two days later, she showed me a screenshot of the character, and she’s like, is this what we’re naming our son? And I said, yeah, sorry. And she said, it’s too late. I love the name.

   

• 0:19:31 Zac Alcampo: Good. Can’t believe I got away with that. But I did.

   

• 0:19:35 Kris Murray: That’s funny.

   

• 0:19:36 Zac Alcampo: But I am co parenting with his mom, so that comes with its experience on its own. But it’s great. We’re kind of, like, really good friends with a kid, so technically, I guess, single dad. We have our own parenting styles, which I’ve actually grown to appreciate. You know, she does her thing, I do my thing, and very different cultures. I come from a North American background and also, you know, a Filipino upbringing, so it’s a crazy mix.

   

• 0:20:05 Zac Alcampo: And then she. Her mentality is from Russia, so it’s very, very different. But I can see it in my son, and it’s very beneficial. He’s bilingual out of the box. He’s very strong in both English and Russian already.

   

• 0:20:25 Kris Murray: That’s cool. Yeah.

   

• 0:20:26 Zac Alcampo: Yeah, it’s super cool. But, you know, having such a nerdy game design dad, he gets a lot of runoff, I guess, from whatever I’m thinking about. I gamify everything. Everything turns into a game, and it’s quickly become, you know, having a little best friend. And I know he feels the same way because he can. Every day he’ll, like, run up to me. He might even run in here now and just be like, hey, I want to play with you. I’m like, all right, are you ready for this?

   

• 0:20:58 Zac Alcampo: And we’ll have, you know, object A, object B, and I will always turn it into some wacky game that we end up playing for a couple hours. And then I watch him do the same. So I like to problem solve. I think that’s the biggest thing I’ve learned from my career, like, creatively problem solving whatever we may need at work. And I just noticed that I’ve been doing that all the time. And when you have a kid, I can just apply it on a very, I would say, basic kind of a sandbox. Like, we just have all these toys or whatever’s around the house, and anything can turn into a game, and he loves it. And I’m really putting that spirit into him. And I see him doing it all the time, so I’m just. I’m very happy for that. It’s great. It’s such a fun, such a Fun time over here.

   

• 0:21:49 Kris Murray: Cool. Is there actually a preschool industry over there? Like, are there early learning programs in schools that people put their children in or is not culturally not really done as much?

   

• 0:22:01 Zac Alcampo: I don’t know how much I can say about that. There are like, governments schools, which he was in for a while. Then we did this big trip. And I will say I shouldn’t say this, but, you know, there was a lot of very good early childhood education centers, but somewhere along the way they didn’t get outlawed, but they were looked down upon, so they actually had to take a step back. They can’t advertise things like this, but they’re here.

   

• 0:22:32 Zac Alcampo: But what I have done is found a lot of local kind of activities for him. He’s in two different gymnastics programs right now, which is pretty cool. And I really believe in digging into what’s around in your city. So there’s a strong culture for that here in Belarus. So I want him to be in that because you can get the best of the best here. So. So I have a track of him doing. He’s in swimming and gymnastics, and I want to put him in wrestling because it’s very good here.

   

• 0:23:07 Zac Alcampo: And then we’ll get into combat sports later. But that’s my dream for him. Let’s see if he likes it.

   

• 0:23:16 Kris Murray: Yeah. I was just in Bali and I didn’t fully research the childcare scene over there, but I did notice as we were driving around, there were lots of children’s activities centers, like places where you could go with your child and they would do different activities and you could kind of. It was kind of like more of a parent accompanied, I think, family. Family activity center type situation. More so than a classic preschool model.

   

• 0:23:43 Zac Alcampo: 100%, actually. That’s a. That’s a very good point. This place, Minsk, is very family friendly. There’s. There’s a park, like every couple blocks. I think it’s very much set up for that. And in every mall or little plaza, there is actually a pretty cool play place. More so than I would say where I was in Canada. It was more accessible here than actually I had it when we were staying over there. So, yeah, actually a couple times a week he’s at.

   

• 0:24:15 Zac Alcampo: We go to this Legoland place every weekend. I don’t know if that’s more for him or more for me, but we go nonetheless. Yeah, yeah, it’s a lot of that. And there’s a cool robotics program. I’m just waiting for him to be old enough. That’s also probably for me, but can’t get in without a kid, so.

   

• 0:24:36 Kris Murray: Well, I see on the right hand side of your screen you’ve got some action figures there. So I bet you’re a pretty fun dad. Like I can even imagine when he’s a little older, the shenanigans that you guys are going to get into together because yeah, you’ve got that whole play and. And gamification side and everything’s a game. And I think his, his journey with you as his dad is going to be pretty darn fun.

   

• 0:25:00 Zac Alcampo: I’m guessing there is thousands and thousands of dollars of LEGO in this house.

   

• 0:25:05 Kris Murray: Wow. Oh my God.

   

• 0:25:08 Zac Alcampo: It is so bad. I have a really big problem. I just like buying it and building it and then I would just usually leave. And this is before I had a son and now I have excuse to buy more and buy different things. But he’s reaping the benefits of it. He loves it. There’s just, you know, his imagination is so. It’s boundless because he just has the toys to kind of put it onto which I. Which I love to see. So. Yeah, you know, these toys were here before, before I had him. So he’s just. He’s inheriting all of it, so.

   

• 0:25:42 Kris Murray: Right, cool. Well, I love it. So we’re gonna dig in. Oh, I forgot to ask you about your fun fact. What is one thing that hardly anybody.

   

• 0:25:49 Zac Alcampo: Knows about you that you want to share a gyc? I. I’m a. I’m a street dancer.

   

• 0:25:58 Kris Murray: Really?

   

• 0:25:58 Zac Alcampo: I don’t think anyone at work knows that. Yeah, I usually don’t tell people where I work and it usually comes out. But yeah, I started. Started before I was. I was in my video game career, I think in the. When I was around like 19 or 20. But I started hanging out with these guys and you know, b boys and poppers and lockers. So I study funk styles, which is from the west coast. I do popping and locking.

   

• 0:26:25 Zac Alcampo: I used to do events and travel and battle and all that stuff. When I was living in Thailand, I branded it. We used to have a session. It was actually three times a week. I bought a huge speaker and I kind of brought the North American way of how we used to gather and session and share to Bangkok and it really went over really well. All I did was bring music to a spot where I opened up in some lot and you know, it was for dancers, but poets came out, martial arts people. It was just huge. And then I branded it into a thing called Street Strength because I was meeting these guys that did tricking. I don’t know if you heard of tricking. I hadn’t before that. But it’s a. It’s a Red Bull event now. Essentially, it’s like gymnasts and like taekwondo enthusiasts.

   

• 0:27:22 Kris Murray: Okay.

   

• 0:27:23 Zac Alcampo: Together. And they run and they flip and kick as many times in the air and they just do crazy gymnastic tricks. Yeah. So super cool. So I did this for like a year and a half now. One of the guys, I. I founded a video game company in Bangkok. It was called Sandbox Global. We had a startup, and then he went on to do another startup and it was a crowdfunding platform for artists. And then at the same time, I branched off and I was doing all this community stuff.

   

• 0:27:52 Zac Alcampo: So we came together and we crowdfunded an event called Street Strength Bangkok. And I brought all the calisthenics people out. I brought out parkour people, all the different dance communities, all the trickers. And it was just like street culture everywhere. We had street food. It was amazing. And we had an event, big day, all crowdfunded. And we did free workshops until noon. And then we had a huge jam, which was like different styles of battles.

   

• 0:28:20 Zac Alcampo: All the. The whole community came out. So it was really fun. Cool. But, you know, you get older and your knees don’t work anymore and. But I still practice to be, if I’m honest, every day I’ll find some time. And here in Belarus, there’s a strong but small community. And sometimes I. I judge events or just hang out and you just got to keep it going. You take a lot. You learn a lot from that street culture and dancing and what it is, where it’s from, and it gives you so much. So at one point you always have to give back.

   

• 0:28:54 Kris Murray: And I’m in that phase of it that’s amazing. And I’m wondering if your knees are good enough that you could come and perform at the Summit on stage. What do you think?

   

• 0:29:05 Zac Alcampo: Oh, my goodness. Yeah. I’m not cheap though, Chris.

   

• 0:29:09 Kris Murray: Okay, that’s fine. We can. We can talk turkey offline. We’ll talk. We’ll talk about it.

   

• 0:29:16 Zac Alcampo: We’ll talk about that.

   

• 0:29:17 Kris Murray: All right, cool. I love it. We have had people. We pull people from the audience when we find talent.

   

• 0:29:25 Zac Alcampo: Oh, really?

   

• 0:29:25 Kris Murray: Yeah. So we’ve had somebody who’s a director at a pro in a program in Georgia that’s a GYC client and she’s. She sings like. Basically she’s like a Whitney Houston type talent. So we’ve had her saying, we’ve had other people come up and sing and dance and do. Do sort you know, Bruce is actually a former fire dancer. Did you know that?

   

• 0:29:50 Zac Alcampo: Yeah.

   

• 0:29:52 Kris Murray: I think maybe you guys need to put together a show. We’re going to have to figure that out. All right, cool.

   

• 0:30:00 Zac Alcampo: You know what I would love. Sorry to keep going. You know, I like to go long on things as we do on the LTN meetings, but there was a time before I got into video games where I was just kind of like this. You know, I was trying to figure out what I was going to do after high school, and I was doing art. I was just learning how to dance, and I was actually drawing my friends dancing. So I’d make this cool art, put some graffiti on it, color it up, and then package it up into a nice product.

   

• 0:30:29 Zac Alcampo: And I was hitting all these shows and Comic Con, I would have an art table and all that stuff. This is when I was really young and what I used to do, actually, I thought, why not just combine these things? And I used to bring speakers, and I would bring my friends out, and we would session, which is standing in a circle, you dance one by one, and you watch each other, and then the next person builds off what you did. So it’s kind of a nice conversation of skills and creativity, and that would just attract the biggest crowd. And then after the show, I would just, you know, deal out my art, and I would always.

   

• 0:31:05 Zac Alcampo: I would sell out every. Every time I did that. So it’d be cool to do. I mean, I’d love to organize, like, an event at Summit or something like that.

   

• 0:31:13 Kris Murray: Yeah.

   

• 0:31:14 Zac Alcampo: And every city has its street dance community. They’re in every single city. So you could get something really cool, get a lot of attention there. Great for kids. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

   

• 0:31:26 Kris Murray: Cool. Love it. This is a whole new world that we’re uncovering here on the podcast right now.

   

• 0:31:32 Zac Alcampo: Don’t tell anyone. Is this gonna come online or anything?

   

• 0:31:35 Kris Murray: Oh, my God, stop it. We’ve got thousands of people that listen to this podcast. You’re funny. Okay, so everybody that comes to the summit in the fall, assuming that Zach is there, which isn’t. Isn’t certain yet. But if you are there, we have to fly you in from Belarus. But if we do, you guys have to go up to Zach and then insist that he performs when we’re at Summit. We’re going to be in Atlanta this year, so that’s.

   

• 0:32:00 Zac Alcampo: All right. Practice up, people. Come for us.

   

• 0:32:06 Kris Murray: I love it. Well, let’s dive into the world of AI. I want to talk about AI and gamification today with you. And, you know, here we are this will release in May of 2025. This episode so here as we sit, what are some of the trends that you’re seeing in AI? There’s so much coming so fast at us, we can barely keep up and grow youw center is actively embracing AI. Every single person on the team is talking about how they’re using it and sharing how they’re using it and growing together in the usage of it.

   

• 0:32:46 Kris Murray: So just talk a little bit about how you’re using it and how you see it helping teams be more productive and also just do things that are more innovative, save time and potentially be more creative or whatever you think its best uses are right now.

   

• 0:33:07 Zac Alcampo: First thing I gotta say, the gig that I had before gyc, it was labeled as kind of an AI company at one point. And what we’re doing now is way more integrated than anything we ever had over there. And it comes down to the people and the leaders that we have. We got a great group and everyone’s using it in different ways. And I’m very surprised every time I hear something shout out to Courtney and Todd.

   

• 0:33:38 Zac Alcampo: The way Courtney’s using it is incredible. She’s producing so many things on the conversion and growth and marketing side. And then Todd with the sales team, they’re really using it to enhance the human side of things and the connections and the efficiencies that they can have with their clients. I really love that. And for production and art, of course, we’re very much on the visual side. Audio even, and video.

   

• 0:34:11 Zac Alcampo: I gotta say, the stuff that’s coming out with the new Runway model image to video is. It’s so good now. Whereas last year it was okay, you had to do a lot of things. But I mean, now you’re seeing taking a single image and turning that into, you know, 10 to 15 seconds of pretty good video. And this is going to change the way, you know, content is put out. It already has. But I got to say, you know, shout out to hey, Gen. I think this is one of the most powerful things that we have.

   

• 0:34:46 Zac Alcampo: You can completely clone somebody in your organization and they no longer have to sit in front of a camera, learn a script, make mistakes. You can just take them high quality, give them any subject matter, and then turn that into endless content. We. We’ve done it with Bruce. We now have characteristics. He’s immortal in the AI world. But we took it one step further. I saw the tech and, you know, when we were.

   

• 0:35:15 Zac Alcampo: We all met in Michigan. We did, I don’t know, a couple hours of a Photo shoot where we recorded him in different settings and in different clothing. And now we have, you know, an infinite amount of Bruce to do whatever we want to do. So for any, any content creator out there, I think it’s very good for someone with a personal brand to look into. Hey, Gen. And we just. Bruce hasn’t seen this yet because we’re still tinkering with it. They just released an interactive version of that so you could slap on an AI version of yourself onto Zoom and talk to it and it’s like it’s in the meeting with you.

   

• 0:35:59 Zac Alcampo: Then of course you can fill that with any knowledge you’d like and then it’s an expert in whatever that field is. So it’s really changing the game. I gotta call out Perplexity AI. It’s a search engine. If anyone’s used ChatGPT, it looks like that, but it takes a bunch of different language models. I think Claude’s in there. Gemini as well. But it combines everything and really, you can really learn. Yeah, Perplexity AI, that’s a really.

   

• 0:36:29 Zac Alcampo: If anyone’s going to start anywhere, start there because it has everything and it cites everything as well. So, you know, especially ChatGPT, it makes a lot of mistakes. So this cross references things and it’s tries to make, tries to mitigate the hallucinations as much as possible. But I find it to be one of the best, the best tools right now.

   

• 0:36:52 Kris Murray: Is that something that you would download as an app on your phone or is it a browser based.

   

• 0:36:56 Zac Alcampo: It’s just on browser. You can just go to. It’s right there.

   

• 0:37:00 Kris Murray: Okay.

   

• 0:37:00 Zac Alcampo: All right then of course, Notebook lm, I think for any business owner it’s really, really good to ingest information. So what it is, it’s a clean AI where you get out whatever you put in. So it doesn’t, it’s not, it’s not sourcing from huge data models. If you put in a transcript or like even a podcast or any PDF, you can have that information spit back at you in any format that you would like. It’s really great.

   

• 0:37:34 Kris Murray: Okay, Notebook lm.

   

• 0:37:36 Zac Alcampo: Yeah, yeah, really cool.

   

• 0:37:38 Kris Murray: Okay, cool. In your team, those are the kinds of things that resources that you’re using in your creative and production teams.

   

• 0:37:48 Zac Alcampo: Yeah, we actually use those quite a bit in different ways. But we’re also using things like Leonardo for image generation. We use Heygen quite a bit. 11 labs for voice cloning and voice AI. And of course midjourney, still really good. I do a thing, I try to push it as much as possible. But midjourney runs in discord and you can open a channel and have the mid journey AI and then you can have as many people in there as possible as you want and you can prompt with them. So if you and I were doing it, we would make a picture and then you would see it and then you can take it and do iterations off of it and add to the prompt. So you’re kind of jamming or sessioning with each other artistically. Right, right. And you know, it’s of course it takes a good eye but to generate an idea and to get to a single point, it can be so fast if you have the right people in there. I’ve seen these channels move, you know, by the second and wow, it’s so much content. Yeah, it’s super fun. It’s a, it’s a cool. You’re tired after as well. You’re satisfied and you’re tired after doing it. You can just, you can end up going for a very long time and, and. But you come up with so many things.

   

• 0:39:09 Zac Alcampo: I use this method to rebrand gyc, so and the website’s coming out soon. I think it should be this week. Should be pretty cool. But it’s a great starting point for any artist and for people. I mean a lot of people still don’t like it on that side. I would say to that, that it doesn’t take away your artistic ability or your eye for design or anything like that. It just allows you to see things faster.

   

• 0:39:43 Zac Alcampo: So you still have to art direct it. That’s the biggest thing. The mentality shift in the team. Instead of like a doer or just like, you know, a run of the mill worker, really put into their heads to just act like the art director of what you’re doing and use the AI as, as, as a, as a pencil, a really, really fast pencil. And you still have to know what looks good. You still have to have your design principles and your theory in there.

   

• 0:40:14 Zac Alcampo: But you can just produce so much more content with that.

   

• 0:40:19 Kris Murray: Right. So I’m thinking about the application to a child care center. And I’m actually thinking about there’s a type of school called a Regio inspired school. And those schools for the older children, usually 4 and older, they really focus on channeling children’s creative energies. They have like the old school style is to have a table, a big art table called an atelier. And the kids are all creators, they’re all driven, they’re, you know, basically inspired by the teacher, but then they’re put Into a situation where they’re all just working together and jamming off of each other in this.

   

• 0:41:07 Kris Murray: It’s. It’s based on an Italian model in Reggio Emilia, Italy. So the kids are basically then starting to produce and create and inspire each other around the atelier. So I’m like thinking about this where you could take the AI tech and so and then pull it into the classroom and you know, use that and then start having the kids jamming with each other in that way, which is a whole new. Yeah, a whole new world. It’s very, very cool.

   

• 0:41:40 Zac Alcampo: And you know this mid journey in Discord format that I was saying, it’s exactly like that. It’s essentially a linear log of you having an idea, someone else taking that idea, adding to it. It’s actually very easy to implement that. This is something we should do. It’s very easy. As I even said to you guys in the last or the big L10 we had, we’ve started implementing models like this into our slack.

   

• 0:42:09 Zac Alcampo: So we have, you know, we’ve got a production AI that tells things about production and SOPs. We’re doing one for S3 for the FAQ. So that I would say collaboration model. We’re already putting it into. Into our workflow to get it on a creative sense. It’d be cool to get it closer to because you got to download Discord and all this stuff. But to get it right into our slack might be a good idea. But yeah, for these types of schools, it’s very easy to set that up, I gotta say.

   

• 0:42:46 Zac Alcampo: It’s not hard. And you’ll get the spirit of it. And the results can be. It’s so fast. So you’ll get such a high volume of product at the end of the day.

   

• 0:42:59 Kris Murray: Well, I think that the application for teacher teams, teams of educators as well. So you guys heard it here on the podcast first. But using these models for collaboration, for teachers to create lesson plans together, projects of different creative pursuits inside of the school, things that you guys can do at your staff meetings, things that you can. I mean, it’s just boundless. What the application could be, basically what we’re looking for is ways to get teachers to collaborate at a higher level together to build a stronger, more engaged team of teachers and enhance collaboration and empower the teachers to jam off of each other and be inspired to basically to inspire each other. So it takes the load off of the leader to have to try to constantly motivate and inspire teachers. But in an early childhood education environment, it would completely change the Game in terms of the energy of the school. Like I think parents, when they walk into the school and they’re thinking about whether they want to choose the school for their child, it’s definitely energy oriented. Like you can tell when you walk into a school and it’s not, and there’s not an engaged staff because it just has this low energy.

   

• 0:44:27 Kris Murray: And when you walk into a school that is like this high, vibrating, the kids are all alive, the teachers are on fire. It’s just like a completely different. I’ve been in those schools, I’ve been in completely different, you know, a level A versus a level F or a level 10 versus a level 1 in terms of energy. And so that’s what you guys want to develop. For those of you listening in the audience, you want to use these tools and don’t be afraid of them, but stay on the forefront because parents are going to be, today’s parents are going to be attracted to, to that energy.

   

• 0:44:59 Kris Murray: So however you can use what Zach’s talking about to drive your school forward, especially when it comes to empowering and collaborating in terms of teacher teams. So it’s exciting.

   

• 0:45:11 Zac Alcampo: I see a motif here in terms of, you know, you dug it out of me that I was a street dancer and all this stuff. Super confidential.

   

• 0:45:22 Kris Murray: Well, yeah, and that’s a session like you’re jamming on the street sessions and now you’re doing it in your teams as a leader.

   

• 0:45:29 Zac Alcampo: So there’s, you know, we’re talking about Reggio and how these things happen and methods you could use also. Let’s dig into gamification after that. But I just want to explain like the mentality of a session and a street dancer. So you have like minded people doing something that they love. And in the case of street dance, it’s, you know, you love the music of that period and that music spawns a dance style and we all have our own spin on what it is. And even, you know, I just, I’m like 40 plus and I went back to Canada to see my old friends and you know, that spirit is still there. We’re all older guys and we get together and we’re so excited and it’s no nonsense. We get together, put on music, nobody even says anything to each other and we just go and you watch one person dance, they bring something to the table and then you jump in after him, you know, you’re polite and you let him dance and you watch and that sparks ideas for you and you jump in and you add to what that person did with Your own spin on it, and it becomes a conversation.

   

• 0:46:41 Zac Alcampo: And, you know, three, four, five people, you’re all talking to each other, and there is an order there that just happens. Usually all go in the same order, and it’s respected. And at the end of it, you feel so energized and you have new ideas on what the songs you listen to are and what your body can do. And I think that’s what we’ve been talking about, actually, in every question here on the. On the workplace forefront, very much. You know, I’m always saying to you guys, let’s jam, let’s jam, let’s jam. And it’s very much that.

   

• 0:47:16 Zac Alcampo: I think in schools, this mentality should be used especially for kids. I mean, just talking about my son, we do that all the time. It’s give and take all day. I come up with something cool, he comes up with something cool, we run with it. I would say it’s a conversational vibe, and it’s a very strong form of communication towards creative goal, I would say. I think it’s. It’s very powerful. We need to implement this thing. I wrote it down.

   

• 0:47:49 Zac Alcampo: Okay, cool. For this. For this jamming. Yeah, we’ll build that in a couple months.

   

• 0:47:55 Kris Murray: So let’s talk about gamification. You recently presented a session to the GYC clients in the S3 program on gamification, and they went crazy for it. So what exactly is gamification? You brought it over from your experience in the gaming world, and now you’re applying it to websites and maybe in other places for the childcare industry. So just talk more about what it looks like and what you’re doing.

   

• 0:48:25 Zac Alcampo: Sure. So I don’t want to get it confused with coming from games and then gamification. And you got to play something. It’s not that at all. It’s taking the mindset and game elements, video game, game, even board game, anything, Game elements, and putting them into a different industry and putting them in a very smart, strategic way, I’d say. And the biggest thing to using this is if there is a pitfall or something that’s not happening, something that you need to happen, or if there’s a behavior you either want to attain or get rid of, then use gamification because it is, at its heart, constant reinforcement of progress for an individual.

   

• 0:49:18 Zac Alcampo: And then it can go up to a group setting. So things like giving rewards or visual reinforcement of progress. You see it in video games all the time. When something’s leveling up, you’re essentially just giving Quantified metrics to behavior. That’s all it is to go run and do this thing and then it just gives you a score on that and that goes up and up and up and up. And the dopamine response that we have to, that is so strong.

   

• 0:49:58 Zac Alcampo: There’s so much human behavior tied into that where you see a lot of these. Any productivity app that may have come out or you downloaded or that you’re using, that’s just gamification actually. It’s tracking your progress, rewarding you for behavior and then keeping you going with that. In a word, that’s what it is. Now how we’re applying it is pretty cool. At gyc, we’re rolling out these new gamified websites where we want to push behavior once, you know, a family or a client gets to your website and of course this is for them to get to learn about your center as best as possible.

   

• 0:50:45 Zac Alcampo: And then of course book a tour so that you can get them, you can get them in the door. So we’ve got some pretty cool tricks. We’ve got some progress bars there, very simple things as well. We’ve got some, we’ve mixed a bit of social media things elements in there with gamification but the idea is to not overwhelm people with it. I think that’s the failing of gamification. People put too much into it and it’s too complicated and people don’t want to have the headspace for that at all.

   

• 0:51:16 Zac Alcampo: So if you put in simple tactics then it, you know, nine times out of ten it’s going to hook people in a different way. They’re going to up their engagement because they don’t know why they’re enjoying what they’re doing. But. But it works. Yeah, it’s, it’s really fun. So we’re applying that, you know, across the board. A lot of things going into S3 in the coming year and of course when M3 comes out, it’s going to be chalked full of that stuff.

   

• 0:51:47 Zac Alcampo: But I’m a big, big believer in it. I mean, it’s how I parent and how I kind of, you know, run myself. Someone said to me along the way, I heard this, it’s that, you know, people that get addicted to video games, they’re just substituting it for a career. And, and you know, with that said, I love games but you shouldn’t waste your time on it when you could be productive. But I mean, gamification can still give you that feeling in your everyday life.

   

• 0:52:20 Zac Alcampo: And you know, I think in our industry, it just, it fits so well, I think, with young families, especially in centers. I would love to start implementing that, you know, because engagement is everything. I think that’s. I was trying to push learning games into the startup that I had. We built one for accounting, we built one for colors, and all this stuff, and all my random knowledge growing up came from games. And I think these programs and even events could be very powerful in a childcare center.

   

• 0:53:01 Zac Alcampo: And kids will play and have fun and they won’t even know that they’ve learned color theory all of a sudden, or they’ve learned a multiplication table. It’s so powerful in sneaking in knowledge because you, through games and in theory, through gamification, you’re getting a user to ask a question without asking it by, By. By doing something. Right, whatever it may be, by playing, by, you know, going through certain steps, but you’re making them ask questions within and you’re giving them the answers to that. So it’s, It’s a really good osmosis, I think, for, For.

   

• 0:53:43 Zac Alcampo: For knowledge.

   

• 0:53:45 Kris Murray: Yeah. So one of the ways that we used it, we used it for. At the virtual summit that we did during COVID And so it’s great with events like that because I’m sure that people in the audience are like, well, how can I actually apply that to my business or to my life? So you can. If you’re doing a parent event, like, we did it with a leaderboard. So the engagement thing was like, every time somebody did an activity or took an action that we wanted them to take, they get. They got points.

   

• 0:54:15 Kris Murray: And so then we had the leaderboard, and then the people that were the top three people on the leaderboard got prize. Got pretty nice juicy prizes at the end of the event. So. Yeah, so you could use it if you have a parent event like a Dad’s Day or a Mom’s Day or a parent appreciation Carnival, you could create a series of games or a series of activities that you want people to do, to engage during the carnival.

   

• 0:54:43 Kris Murray: And then you can have a leaderboard and then you can give prizes in that way. You could do it with teams. You could do it at a staff meeting, you could do it at a leadership retreat, you could do it at a training day, professional development days. So just be thinking about that kind of application to keep people engaged in your communities. And that’s. And with children, of course, you could be using it in the classroom as well.

   

• 0:55:08 Zac Alcampo: Oh, yeah, yeah. You know, if it’s like cleaning up or showing up or reading or anything. Like that? Yeah, I would say track it. And if anyone’s thinking about ideas for that, what I would say is divide up your leaderboards. Right? Because if you just have a single one towards like all the behavior and it’s just a total score, you’re going to alienate a lot of people. The top performers will always be the top performers. Great for them, but everyone else will feel left out. So you can do different streams of things. So in this way you can have kids just excel in what they’re good at and then have their own lane. And I think as they grow up, they’ll need that confidence to understand what they’re good at and what they love and go into a career or whatever.

   

• 0:55:58 Zac Alcampo: But yeah, divide up your leaderboards. You can do it in a different way, whether it be reading or cleaning or anything. Anything that you have, but split it up so that everyone has a chance.

   

• 0:56:11 Kris Murray: Cool. Love that. The S3 is superstar staffing system. And I’m wondering how you are using gamification to juice up S3. What are some of the things that you’re working on there?

   

• 0:56:28 Zac Alcampo: Oh, man. We talked about so many good ideas and of course there are certain behaviors that we want to push with the clients there and a lot of it’s around engagement. So we want the community that we built in S3 to be talking more and engaging with our things. Like you and I have done talks with them. Those are great. And I think expanding off of that, the vibe of that. I’m working with the team to build out certain systems within the platforms that will get people moving around. So that’s notion and that’s slack. We’re actually building an AI.

   

• 0:57:16 Zac Alcampo: It’s not necessarily a channel, but we’re integrating AI into certain channels into S3 that you’ll be able to get knowledge from right off the bat. So that’s pretty cool. And then through notion, I actually think we’re going to build something further than that. But we’re going to have a scoring system. So to say. Or. Sorry, a badge system. Reward system. I don’t want to call it scoring in there. That’s going to.

   

• 0:57:45 Zac Alcampo: Or a badge system that’s going to lead to rewards. I would say into the system. I don’t want to say too much because.

   

• 0:57:51 Kris Murray: Yeah, yeah, no. And that is a great sneak peek because we are in the middle of a promotional just period for S3. We’re trying to get more folks in the child care industry to come in because we’re helping people that use S3, which is helping you Hire better and recruit better talent and more A players for your center. People that actually use it fully are having huge, huge, huge wins and results in staffing and in hiring and also in team retention. So there’s all sorts of goodness that’s helping people build their cultures of a team, players and teachers.

   

• 0:58:33 Kris Murray: But people that are overwhelmed or kind of aren’t using it fully, they’re kind of missing the boat. And so what we’re trying to do is get people excited again and getting back in and getting engaged with using all the tools and the resources that are inside of S3 and, and using gamification to get them excited again is a beautiful thing. So thanks for giving us a sneak peek on it.

   

• 0:59:00 Zac Alcampo: I’ll spill some beans if that’s what the people want. So we have identified that people aren’t engaging with it to the fullest and the people that are using it are winning.

   

• 0:59:12 Kris Murray: Yes.

   

• 0:59:13 Zac Alcampo: So the features that we’re putting in is to get you through that sequence of steps that needs to happen, the onboarding per se and getting to you hiring a players. So the tracking system will make sure you are getting to that point. And that’s a linear progression that everybody should get to. Right. That is visually reinforced so that you’re kind of sheepdog into getting there with the system and with each other.

   

• 0:59:45 Zac Alcampo: Now we are going to also measure what the size of your center is versus your hires. So that will go into, I don’t want to call it a leaderboard. It’s going to be of a different nature because I don’t want it to be a competition, but I do want to be, I do want it to be, you know, a call out kind of in nature. So you’re going to be able to see the progress of what people are doing and then there will be different types of reward. As I said, you need to spread it out. Right. Because someone that’s hiring like crazy is always going to be, you know, doing well.

   

• 1:00:19 Zac Alcampo: So you need to give other people a chance and we’ll have different, different buckets for that. But it’s going to. So again, that’s the linear progression to, to where everyone should be like the base level. And then we’ll start calling out and rewarding and badging the progress that you’re doing for your individual center. And that’s nice for everyone to see. And again, all going back to the communication channels. Right now it’s slack.

   

• 1:00:46 Zac Alcampo: We may move to something else, something more powerful that we’re going to be building. But all of that will be called out, you’ll be able to see what everyone’s doing, ask questions, have AI driven kind of answers and guidance through the platform.

   

• 1:01:02 Kris Murray: Nice. I love it. Well, I hate to tell you this, and I know you’re going to be bummed out, but we are actually out of time on this. I know, but I have a hard stop in eight minutes, so I’m going to. I’m going to shut it down, Zach, but we will bring you back, I’m sure, for another conversation diving in as we continue to develop these things. My final question for you is just what are you most excited about for the year ahead and into 2026? What’s on the horizon for you personally and or professionally?

   

• 1:01:32 Zac Alcampo: Yeah, M3. You know, I know the, the name has changed. My Marketing Made Easy Maverick Marketing method, but this is all in one service package that we’re. We’re building out and, you know, taking all the expertise of, of what GYC does and allowing people to come in at a lower price and get just all the fixings. The email. At first, it will be rolled out as its own platform. You’ll have a login. You’ll be able to communicate with us very quickly.

   

• 1:02:07 Zac Alcampo: We will be able to deliver assets to you through the platform, which will make it way easier for your organization. And then, of course, we’ll be folding over automation and AI elements as it goes along. I would say by 2026, we’ll have that fully automated. The development of it is going so fast. We’re going to have it in the next couple months, actually, and I think everyone’s really, really going to love it. And I’m most excited about that.

   

• 1:02:36 Kris Murray: Awesome. I’m very excited about it as well. I can’t wait.

   

• 1:02:40 Zac Alcampo: It’s going to be awesome.

   

• 1:02:41 Kris Murray: Yeah. And when it’s. When it’s out and launched, we’ll have you back and we’ll dive in and talk more about that and all the other cool stuff that we’re working on over at Grow youw Center. And so, Zach El Campo, I just wanted to say thank you for being here and taking the time to be with me on this podcast. It’s been awesome. It’s been kind of mind blowing. So thank you, man.

   

• 1:03:06 Zac Alcampo: Thank you very much. Kris Murray, the legendary podcast. I’m very happy to be on and I love all you guys at gyc. It’s a pleasure to work there with the leadership team and everyone else. So I better be on again on this podcast or I will be insulted.

   

• 1:03:26 Kris Murray: Okay. It’s happening. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you so much and maybe we’ll have you and Courtney come.

   

• 1:03:34 Zac Alcampo: Oh, that would be fun.

   

• 1:03:35 Kris Murray: Next time. That would be fun. So, yeah, because I’m sure if I have you on twice and don’t have her on at all, she’s going to be very butthurt at me. So. Okay, that can’t happen. So thanks everybody for tuning in to this episode, Child Care Rockstar Radio. This was an awesome one and hopefully get your mind, expand it a little bit about what’s possible in the world of ECE and beyond as we continue on in this incredible world that we’re in right now. So thanks for tuning in and take care and God bless everybody and we’ll talk to you next time.

   

• 1:04:10 Kris Murray: Bye. Bye. I hope you liked this episode of Child Care Rockstar Radio. If you did, please leave a review and share it with someone you know to help spread the word to friends in our industry and on social media. Child care business success is my passion and I’m honored to be on this journey with you. As a thank you for listening, I’ve got a new video training that shows you how to add six figures or more of new revenue to your program in the next 60 days by improving your hiring and your enrollment systems.

   

• 1:04:43 Kris Murray: To watch my new video, just go to www.fixmyschool. com. That’s FixMySchool. Com. Thanks. Take care and God bless.