Business Built Freedom

Use password managers to create a strong password: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/254-how-to-make-a-good-password

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ZArTp7MY2z8

I've just told everyone your password. Yup. They are the most common passwords that people have.

Yep. Had to think about that for a moment. If you have any of those passwords, any of the ones that are flicking on the right side of your screen, you're in trouble mister.

Your password is going to be cracked like that. There's no point even having a password. Just leave your car unlocked with the keys in the ignition and cross your fingers it doesn't get stolen. There are so many stupid passwords that we see time and time again, it's ridiculous. If your password is "password", that's not a very good password, is it?

Use Tools To Protect Your Password

The idea of a password is to have a locked way of getting into something. So, people can't just jump in there. You don't just have your key sitting on the front door and say please don't take me down to Bunnings and copy me. You need to make sure you're diligent with your password. Use tools such as Last Pass or Key Pass or one of the other password management tools that allow for you to store your passwords in an encrypted way. Don't have the same password for everything. That's a big no no. Don't have the same passwordmate. I get one of your passwords, I get all of your passwords. It doesn't make any sense.

Have Different Passwords

Make sure you've got different passwords for everything. Half of the people that we come across before they are onboarded have the passwordpassword0! Or just the word password. How are they not just sensible with what they're doing? People don't want to get hacked and they don't have the downtime, but they don't want to commit a password to their memory.

You Don't Need to Have a Great Memory

If you aren't very good with committing something to memory and you're a bit of a goldfish, use Last Pass or Key Pass or find a passwordmanager. You can have it on your phone. You grab out your phone and you go into it and you can look at the list of all your passwords. Then you can click on it and then you can type your password in.

Make Them Difficult

You can save your password in a browser, but make sure that you've got a good password for the account you're saving it with. So, say for instance if you've got a Google account and you're using Chrome and you're saving the password in there, have a really super, duper difficult password. It doesn't have to be difficult for you. It has to be difficult for everyone else. A great example would be your mother's birthdate or the date your parents were engaged or something like that. Something no one else is really going to know and if someone asks you the question be like, "Oh that's a bit suspicious isn't it?"

This Really Happened!

We went through and did a test. I rang up pretending to be a woman. Now, I had permission to do this by the person. But rang up a large Australian bank and pretended starting with the letter N, yep, pretended to be this woman. Now she is a woman in her late 60s.

I rang up and I said that I was the woman in the same voice you're hearing right now. I told them my maiden name and I told them my address and I told them my full name and I changed around the mortgage she was on. I don't sound like a woman in her late 60s. I think. I hope I don't sound like a woman in her late 60s. But they went, "Alright." Then I answered the questions right and that was it. They let me in. That's so ridiculous. Have difficult questions. Make sure that you're using a difficult password.

Social Hacking Is Going to Be a Problem

Passwords are easy to break into if they're easy passwords. Social hacking is the biggest problem that we're going to be facing over the next 5 to 10 years. If I can call up and pretend to be you using my voice and transfer money out of your bank account or change your annual mortgage, it was a white head thing i did. I found a better rate. It was a nice thing. You got to start wondering. You got to protect yourself.

The Final Word

Being negligent is not a reason to be turning a blind eye to this. You need to make sure you're on top of it. Have good passwords. 123456, password0! Remove all these passwords from your life. Make it so that you do something. Maybe it's your wife's name. Maybe it's something else, but just make it something and then chuck a couple of special characters, a question mark, an exclamation mark, a hash. Something. Something different. Put a capital letter in there. Spoil yourself.

Get a good password. Stay good.

The Best Way to Spend 50 Dollars to Improve Productivity

So you've got yourself 50 dollary-dos, and you're trying to work out what you can do with it to improve your productivity. So, there is so many things that you can do, and we're going to discuss some of those. Shelve the 50 bucks, shuck it back in your wallet just for a moment, and then we'll get to whatever you think you should be spending that money on to start with. So, productivity, so important. Productivity comes down to three different main pillars, and whenever I'm writing a task list, I write which one of these three out of 10 are most impacted.

Learn more on how to improve productivity at dorksdelivered.com.au

What Do You Want to Improve?

You have, "Does the task that you're doing save money, save time, or create money?" So, you can have something that saves heap of time, which boosts your productivity, you have something that saves you money, which ultimately boosts your bottom line. You have something that creates money that boosts your bottom line, and sometimes you're lucky to get a pearl of an idea that you're going to implement that does two of the above, sometimes saves money and creates money, but most of the time it can save time and create money.

Write a List

So, to work out how and what tasks do what, write down a big list of all the things that happen in your business, and once you've done that, you can then work out what ones you should be focusing on more andwhat ones you should be trimming back. If you don't know what tasks to focus on, you need to employ a tool such as manic time, rescue time, observe it, or any of the other time tracking tools that show you where your day goes.

Go to https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/361-the-best-way-to-spend-50-dollars-to-improve-productivity for links to some of the best time tracking tools. 

They're cool utilities, and when you jump in there, they all have trials available that you can use tohave a look and see how much time you spend on things. One of the most productive things you do, is recording analytically what you spend your time on where.

Record Every Task

I am an absolute Nazi when it comes to recording things. I record how many keystrokes I make per day, how many words I type, the average length of the word, the average length of the email, the shortest email, the longest email, how many emails I send per hour, per day, per month, per year, and who my top 10 recipients are, who my top 10 receiving emails are from. I know all these different stats and I can pull them up in a couple of minutes. I've got everything analysed. I can bring it down to the basic numbers, and that is good information. When you've got this information in front of you, and yeah sure it might take a little while to start off with to implement, but once you've got this information in front of you, then you can start working with it, and if you look and you go, "Oh, I don't spend that much time on Facebook," then you have a look and you go, "Oh, my goodness, I'm spending 10 hours a week," it's pretty standard on Facebook.

Review How You Spend Your Time

If you're spending 10 hours a week on Facebook and you think, "Oh, what could I do with that 10 hours?" If you're like me, I could crack out a whole book in 10 hours, I could easy finish a book. I could be doing anything in the yard. I could be hanging out with friends. I could be doing a bunch of other things that aren't just scrolling through depressing pictures of a small portion of people's lives, and I use Facebook very loosely when I'm talking about Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and all the other things that I want you to jump on, watch, follow andlike.

Using 50 Dollars for Time Management

So, if you are on these platforms quite a bit, they suck some time away, but it might not just be those. You might look and think, "Wow, I spend 20 minutes a day going through junk emails," so cheap. You could get a virtual assistant and pay them 10 bucks an hour, and have them jump in on your computer beforehand, before you get to work and clean through all that spam. We all want to be more effective and more efficient. If you're more effective and more efficient than your competitors, then you'll be having a business that's running better than your competitor's. The ultimate goal is to turn that $50 into more than $50. Manic Time and Rescue Time are both tools that you can use that will increase the amount of visibility that you have on where you spend your time. If you're able to save two hours a week using this tool, you're already in front in only a couple of weeks by spending a bit of money.

How to Improve Productivity

The next verse in productivity, if you've decided that your time's already a lean mean time machine, is quite simple. No distractions. Spend $50 grab your laptop, jump on the train, while driving to your local city, and sit in the parkland and just listen to the birds, smell the fragrances, and become one with nature if you do that, you'll find that you feel a bit better, and that can make you more productive. Stepping away from everything, and just writing a list can make you more productive. Just being relaxed and able to see things from a different perspective does wonders for business. Stepping away is the best thing that you can do in a business as a business owner. Getting away from the tools and the hustle and bustle of day to day just is magic. So, maybe you spend that $50 just to go cruise and check out what's going on in the local parks, but maybe you're already relaxed and maybe you've already got your time under wraps.

Use Your Money to Hire Someone to Look At Your Productivity

You're an efficient lean mean machine. You're cracking out a bunch of words and you're really, really productive. Whatever you're doing in business, you're doing at 10 fold and going gang busters. So, you're still sitting there going, "Well, Josh, what do I do with this 50 bucks? This is terrible. I need to get this spent. I want to become more productive." What I suggest is to contact a company that makes your business more productive and more optimised. If you're already feeling like you're at the pentacle of success, and everything is really lean and optimised, you probably need some new eyes on the problem. There's always ways to make your business more productive. There's plenty of businesses out there. I run one of them, Business Efficiency Experts, but there's plenty of businesses out there that you can jump onto. They'll do an analysis of your business and once they've analysed everything, they can go in and say, "Yeah, okay, look. This is a huge expense." Maybe they'll cost more than 50 bucks, maybe they won't. A lot of the time they won't, and they'll come through on the door report and they'll give you a figure back and say, "I've noticed that the accounting package that you're using is costing you this much time, it's costing you this much per month, let's get rid of it."Although they may cost more than $50 initially, the amount of money saved could be significantly more than the $50. So, it's a different approach, but definitely worth doing, and although it may cost more than 50 initially, overall it's going to be a better investment, and you'll have saved significantly more time and money in the long run.

The Final Word

I'd love to hear from you guys on this one. If you could definitely jump onto Podcasts at Dorks.com.au and let us know what you use to become productive. What would you like us to talk about and how could we help you guys become more productive? Let us know and stay good. 

How to Appeal to Your Target Market

Marketing, marketing, marketing, marketing, marketing. That's what we're going to be talking about today. How to market yourself. We all have to be amazing marketeers and salespeople. Yuck. No one wants to be a salesperson, it's slimy and gross. But if you're passionate about your product, you have to be able to market it and you have to be able to sell it. If you're passionate about it and enjoy talking about it, you are now the salesperson. If you're a mother and you love your children, you just want to share them with the world and you want to look at how fantastic they are. A, they're an addictive hobby and B, you are the salesperson to the world when you're talking about them. That that's kind of what it is with your business. You can't sort of look at being a sales person as a bad thing.

Learn more about marketing dorksdelivered.com.au

Don’t Advertise In a Slimy Way

It's a good thing. It means you're passionate about it. Just don't do any weird, slimy tactics. I strongly believe if you want to sell ice to an Eskimo, you shouldn't be in the business that you're in. You should be trying to sell ice to someone who needs ice. There's always enough people out there that need ice. You want to try and make sure that you find your target client. If you're able to find your target market, it makes it easier to market to them and you know that you're doing the right things. If all of your advertising said ice now available extra hard ice and you're an Eskimo, they'll be like, I already got pretty good ice and it makes the sale incredibly difficult and bridges on how ethical is that as well? I guess it's a bit funny. I wouldn't do it. There's so many people out there that need ice. Don't just sell ice to an Eskimo. That doesn't mean you're a good sales person. It means you're a terrible person. Try to find your target market and market it to them.

How Are You Different?

You might think, oh, but my service is exactly like everyone else's, or you might be the opposite and be like, my service is so much better than everyone else's, but I just don't know how to tell everyone. Either way, think about what your ideal client would look like. How would they act? What would be the thing that they want from you? So many places, let's take a fish and chip shop as an example. A fish and chip shop, your local, looks just like my fish and chip shop, my local. Your mates, fish and chip shop, their local. Every fish and chip shop looks about the same. There's no real differentiator between them. If they created a differentiator, all of a sudden they become stratospherically successful and they no longer have a fish and chip shop. They have this fantastic boutique whatever. Let's take that same comparison and look at places such as fast food joints. We've got as options for fast food places, you've got the clown, the king and the colonel. They all sell the same shit. They all sell chicken, they all sell burgers, they all sell heart attacks. But you need to try and work out what one you want. How are they marketing themselves different? You've got this clown that makes kids happy. Then you've got this fat chicken dude that makes fat chicken people happy. Then you've got this burger king dude who makes amazing burgers at Hungry Jack's for some reason. So these, they've identified themselves differently. They all sell the same stuff, but we always associate chicken with KFC. We associate faster food with McDonald's and we think the burgers are better at Hungry Jack's. So there's a differentiator they've created.

Think Outside the Box

For your industry, if you have a fish and chip shop, maybe the differentiator is that you make homemade potato scallops and the homemade potato scallops that you make are made in some oil that's better for your body. Whatever the case is, try to work out, even if you sell exactly the same stuff as your competitor, how you can be different to your competitor and how you can make their clients, your clients and it not be competition.

Try to Be in Competition With No Other Business

While KFC and McDonald's and Hungry Jack's are all competing. They're not really. They all offer something slightly different. Everyone goes there for a different reason. Hungry Jacks have onion rings, McDonald's have happy meals. And yeah, Hungry Jack's has something similar and KFC has something similar, but they're all there for a different reason and they all serve a different purpose depending on what they're going for. If you're selling pies and there's a fish and chip shop, the fish and chip shop is your competitor, but if you're selling pies, you have something different. If you have a fish and chip shop and down the road there's another fish and chip shop, think about how you can make yourself different.

Talk to Your Client

Ask your clients, ask your clientele. If you don't know yourself, you don't have to go into the research and try and nut it out. Just see who comes to your business. If people that are coming in there seem to be local businesses or local people, market to local businesses or the local people. Make sure that you're just working out where the people are coming from and have every effort that you do resonate with that client because they will go from being the person that's just coming in there for a quick feed, to the person that only goes there for a feed. That is a big difference, cause they'll tell all their friends and everyone else and you'll become the known place to go. I know I've used food a lot in this example and it may be because it's coming up to lunchtime and I haven't eaten yet, but it could be 'cause it's just an easy universal way to explain for all businesses. If you're selling internet plans and there's another person selling internet plans, maybe the plans that you're selling and more appropriate for an older community. And the older community is enjoying the internet plans that you sell because they have Australian speaking, very clear speaking people on the phone and they don't have to stay on hold for ages. Maybe the internet plans that you're selling are super fast, low ping, low latency, low jitter, and you're more targeting the game that's around the place. They're both selling internet connections, but now all of a sudden you are able to specialise in the service that you're giving and make sure that you're focusing on the right client.

Advertise Your Speciality

This goes with every industry. If you're a smash repair place, just start selling. You can obviously fix any car. There's very few differences between the cars when it comes to a crumble, but if you're able to say you specialise in fixing Porsche vehicles and you're their preferred supplier and here's all the awards that you've got around a Porsche. You can be sure that people that have a Porsche will feel like they're going to get a better service going to you. If you're a plumber and you can obviously replace a tap washer, put in a hot water system or anything in between. If you say you're the hot water specialist, people go oh, that sounds good, let's do that. I'm going to go to that person. And it gives them a feeling that you are the expert in the field, the experts in the trade as it would be.

The Final Word

Have a think about how you can separate yourself out. If you want ideas and you want us to do an audit on your business, email through and I’m happy to give you a call personally and I'll help you out with it. Take that up and we'll see where we go. Stay good.

Learn more about marketing: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/360-how-to-appeal-to-your-target-market

Today we're going to talk about mental health. In business, a lot of the time you jump into business to be the go-getter thing, person that really made a difference, and you did this thing that was cool with this product, and you're great at the technical stuff, but you're shit at marketing. Or you're great at marketing, but you don't really have a product. A lot of the time there isn't a good balance between what it is that you do with your voodoo, you know?

Read more about getting the balance you need: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/258-how-to-have-great-mental-health-and-succeed-in-business

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/OBRxQf8__Ug

So we're going to just sort of combat that. You need to make sure that you have a balance in your life. Your body is your mind's instrument, and your mind is all we have at the end of the day. Your mind, needs to be in tip-top condition along with your body to be able to make great decisions, and be informative with what you're going to be teaching, and telling your clients on how you're going to be implementing your expertise. If your mind is not in tip-top condition, or your mind's tool; your body isn't in tip-top condition, you're going to run into problems.

If your overweight, obese and not healthy, you're not going to be doing your body any favours. You’re not going to be doing your mind any favours. If you're smashing down energy drinks, and you're eating from the pie shop all the time you're not going to be doing your body any favours, you're not going to be doing your mind any favours and ultimately, you're not going to be doing your clients and your bottom line any favours. Overworking and under sleeping is just as bad as bad eating. If you are overworking and under sleeping, you're not making the right informative decisions and things are making you take too much time, things are taking too long for you to really become engaged in result and finish.

If you were in that boat, you're just as bad as someone who's obese and lethargic and doesn't do any work or exercise. You need to make sure you're keeping your body in tip-top condition. I went through a process where I lost 38 kilos, I'll sure a photo over here; a reference of what I used to look like and here's the sexy one over here now that I'm a bit more brushed up. No shirt on for the ladies. But it was a long, hard stretch and it didn't come overnight and it had to be a mental shift in the food that I was putting into my body as Nutrigrain says, "You only get out what you put in." And if you're putting in the garbage, you're going to get out the garbage.

I've changed around my whole habit, what I was eating, what I was drinking, how I was sleeping. I started scheduling in the sleeping block, I was originally a standard night sleep and now I'm what they call a polyphasic sleeper which means I sleep twice. It's a nice way of I'm an adult who has a nano nap. It sounds nicer when I say I'm a polyphasic sleeper, doesn't it? Yep.

So, I found that that worked better for me and the people that I've trailed and tested with also worked better for them, eating healthy I have three to five times the amount of vegetables of what I have fruit and I have five to six times the amount of fruit and vegetables to what I have meat. So, I have very little meat in my diet, it's all up to everyone else as to how you want to take that but I just found that meat was taking away a lot of energy from me and clarity. I don't have a whole bunch of wheat; my life sounds boring because I'm about to say I don't drink beer that much either. What do I do? I don't even know, what am I even here for? 

But seriously, hanging these things and having things in quantities that you can digest, small amount and small changes make for big changes as long as you're doing it over a long period of time. I found eating less meat, eating less wheat both had an accumulative effect of me being able to sleep fewer hours at night and still feeling super pumped for work and very, very clear of mind. It was amazing and I suggest anyone who is having eating problems, sleeping problems or anything like that to try it. I don't have caffeine, I do drink beer occasionally but I did stop drinking beer for six months while I was on this body transformation and it's not a diet, it's a lifestyle choice.

Macrobiotic lifestyle choice is what I went for and that is what I've been living with for now two, three years. And it's going really well so I suggest anyone trying that out, your diet is important and your body is your mind's instrument. Remember that. Stay good.

How to Spot a Phony Employee and Save Some Coin

Oh, stock counts out, your competitors are doing better than you, something seems amiss. Maybe it's something as simple as you're having a bad day, or it could be something as terrible as one of your employees are smuggling away paths or clients. We're going to talk about that today and what you can do about it, what measures you can put in place, how you can sort of work out what it is that's going on. We've been pretty lucky in our business in where we haven't had anyone knock off anything from us, at least not anyone that we've employed, but we do deal with a lot of companies that need to have some investigations put in place to try and work out what is going on. Why have they had this sudden decline in stock counts being right or a decline in income.

Read more about leadership and management dorksdelivered.com.au

Build a Friendly Environment With Your Employees

There's many ways that you can go about fixing this problem and the best way is to make sure it's not introduced to start off with. Having a great level of trust and a relationship where you can be friends, but still business friends, is a good start, making sure you're on first name basis with everyone in the office. You've had a beer and a one-on-one conversation with everyone in the office and they know your hobbies, you know theirs, and you can engage in some level of conversation. It's less likely for someone to be stealing from you if they know you a bit more and there's a face to the business and it's not just you verse them as you're all in it together, they're less likely to steal and do things like that. And I say less likely because there's shit people everywhere really.

Look Into Monitoring Technology

If you happen to have a situation where you think something is amiss, what I'd suggest you do is look into technology where you can monitor and pull up data on all of their activities. It's things such as screenshots which are recorded consistently every second that they're actually doing something on the machine. It gives you all of the different auditing information so you can see if they're opening up Google Chrome, what websites they're going to, when they went there, how often they went there, what they're authentic into and all that good stuff. The programme that we use for this is called ObserveIT and it's an amazing product. It's actually used by the Queensland police to make sure they can see who's accessing what records and when, so they're able to make some diagnosis if anyone is abusing the systems, which is cool stuff. ObserveIT is a really cool tool and definitely gives you a good insight into what they're doing on the computers.

Real Case Study

We had that put in place in a business just around the southeast Queensland area and they're able to find one of their employees that was actually employed by one of their competitors as well, and they would be dishing their clients off. That resulted in a court case, and although I don't like being the bearer of bad news and be like, hey, look what I found, but you got to be that person some days, and it was better for the business and that person obviously was rewarded successfully for his misconduct.

What Systems Do You Have In Place?

One of the more interesting ways that I've found you can find out if someone is actually stealing from you is putting in systems that you wouldn't have otherwise thought of in any way, shape or form ever related to stealing. Another different client that we've got was having a lot of time taken away by doing all the time sheets and data entry for payroll. What we did is, instead of having them having all this time taken away is we put in fingerprint readers. So when the staff got there they just dropped their thumb on this machine and once the thumb is gone on the machine it signs them in and when they leave it signs them out, and if there's a window in between the day and they press it, it takes them out for lunch and pops them and back in. So that way they know from an insurance perspective or if there's any fire drills or anything like that, what is the situation, how many people are we accounting for, what is where and who is what. That was something we thought was going to be amazing, it went from two days to do all the payroll down to about two hours. It was interesting because five of the different staff members out of a crew of 140 were absolutely against the idea and they are all people that worked with expensive equipment in inventory are. They were like no, not going to do it, no, you don't have any right to take my fingerprints. They didn't want to have their thumb on record because they thought that could result in somehow that coming back, they were knocking off stuff. So those staff members were more closely watched through tracking CCTV surveillance that was put in place and we were able to ascertain that in fact they were stealing items and that resulted in their dismissal.

Access Their Body Language

The last and final way that I would suggest to try and work out if someone is pulling a barney is, if you're sitting down and you're talking to someone, look at their eye movements and their body language and see if that is consistent with someone who you trust. Hopefully all of my listeners have never gone through a situation where they're talking to someone who they trusted and no longer trusted after finding out they were lying to them but as it happens, shit happens and people lie.

The Final Word

They are just a few hints and tips if you're dealing with someone that you're a bit suss on, but hopefully you'll live in the most best trusted industry in the world and that's never going to be a problem. Hopefully they're not stealing your intellectual property and dishing it off to competitors or knocking off your clients and dishing them out as well. But anyway, hope you've enjoyed this and if you have, make sure to jump across the iTunes and leave us some feedback. Stay good.

Read more about leadership and management: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/354-spot-a-phony-employee-save-some-coin

How to Be Faithful With Your Customers

So I'm here with Ange. Hello. And she is he looking at the Old Faithful. Have you ever seen this before No. Have you ever been with any old geezers before? Yes. Yeah. You have? Well I'm an old geezer myself, given I'm 35. And do they reliably go off? Yes, sometimes. That's good. That's good. How reliably?

Learn more about these ideas that go hand in hand at dorksdelivered.com.au

Watch this episode on YouTube

If we're lucky. If you're lucky? And the help of medicinal issues and products. Well that's good, that's good. But would you say it's every 44 to 120 minutes or is it less regular? Probably less regular, man. Less regular, but you still, do you go off regularly? No. No. You just sort of keep yourself? Yes, yes. I'm a bit like those other little tar pits.

You sort of bubble occasionally. It looks good when it's happening, but not all the time. This is true, this is very true. It's very unique I guess. It's very true. I really appreciate your time there Ange and I hope you enjoy Old Faithful. No worries. And hope he brings a smile to your face at least. Thank you, thank you, thank you for having me. Absolutely. Thank you.

Offer Consistent Service

Look at this geyser. Sorry, I mean this one. That's Old Faithful, It's one of the most famous sites at Yellowstone national park and do you know why it's called Old Faithful? It's because it's reliable. Other geological events are hard to predict, but this geyser has been erupting every 44 to 125 minutes. It's not an exact timetable, but still, you know you're going to get to see it when you come to the park because it's reliable. In business, these two ideas have often gone hand in hand. Reliability and faithfulness. You're faithful to your customers when you offer consistent service. It's very easy to focus all your energy on getting new customers, but it's almost always cheaper to keep a customer you have, than getting a new one. So make sure that you keep your current customers faithful.

Stay In Touch

Now, there's a few ways that you can do this and the things that you should be considering to look at, are these. Number one, make sure to stay in touch. This doesn't mean spamming them with newsletters or trying to sell them new products. Instead, just check in with them and see how you can help. Offering a bit of free advice or a good resource is a perfect way to achieve this relationship with your customers.

Reward Loyalty

Make sure you're always rewarding loyalty. This is anything from a stamp card and the coffee shop to a free service after a number of years. And here's a quick tip. It's an established piece of psychology that you should start your customers with a few steps into the loyalty program, not at zero, always stamp the loyalty card a few times at the beginning to keep them motivated. Pay attention to their problems. Customer service is always vital, but if you can help them when they have a problem, this is one of the best ways to guarantee loyalty. I've seen businesses lose a customer they've had for decades over just one sure bad thing they've had. As a loose rule one negative interaction should be forgiven, after seven great ones. So help them out on bad days and you'll be good for many, many more good days.

Show Your Flaws

Bring visibility to your flaws. Now this is a big one. There's a great book that I've read by Ryan McDonald-Smith called 'Flawsome'. It's about embracing your flaws in business. You might have had some bad press over the years, but counteracting them by making it public knowledge and putting a positive twist on it goes to show the you're aware of it and not pushing it under the rugs. Embracing your flaws is a powerful message that shows there are humans behind the scene that care for its family of clients and mistakes don't fall on deaf ears. Right. I've waited 44 minutes now, so hopefully Old Faithful will be living up to his name shortly.

And here I am at Old Faithful. Yep. Nothing much older than old, reliable, Old Faithful.

Get Developing Your Idea Before Someone Else Steals It

So, you've got this cool, wicked-awesome idea or service that you want to see come into fruition and actually help change people's lives. For the sake of the conversation, regardless if it's a product or a service, let's just call it a product or an idea, just for now. So, you've got this cool idea, you know it's going to be amazing and you've written everything down. You've got your SWOT analysis done. You've gone, "This is going to go gangbusters. It's going to go nuts." Super-exciting stuff. Now, you're really worried that someone's going to steal your idea. This is something so many people stress about. Some of you don't even talk about their idea, because they think someone's going to steal it. They're too worried. They want people to sign documents, and they're generally people who don't have any money to go and patent it or do anything like that. And they don't want someone to steal the idea.

Read what to do and what not to do when you have a business idea dorksdelivered.com.au

Bad News

I've got some bad news for you. If you've gone through the process, and you've done all the analysis, and you can see that, yes, this can be developed, it's within your capacity. It's most likely going to be developed before someone else develops something similar. You get it out to market, and you've got your patent, and everything is all sweet. There's a very real possibility that someone will pick up what you've done, and develop it again, and create the Lyft to what is Uber. Lyft does very well for itself; they're more profitable than Uber. They weren't the first that's out there, and the technology has no way near that needs to be reinvested, because their end goals aren't like Uber's; Uber's end goal is to have autonomous vehicles. Lyft's aren't. Lyfts use Google Maps, and don't record any of the useless, or not as of this recording, record any of the useless crap, such as the acceleration, stop times, and everything else, because their end goal is the product they've created, for now at least. That means that they're able to make super-duper, crazy cash. But, they just ripped off another app. They're the Hungry Jack's to what is McDonald's, yet they're still doing really well. If you're wanting to be Uber or McDonald's in this story, know that people will rip off your idea; it's inevitable. No matter how much red tape, patents, legal mumbo jumbo and stuff you try and write into a document, and have it shown that this is yours and only yours forever, I can guarantee it won't hold up in a court of law if their solicitor is more expensive than yours. Unless you've got a huge legal team behind you, you're up shit creek. So, what I suggest is, look at the adoption curve for new elements and new things that come in.

Innovators and Early Adopters

There's the early adopters, and they're great people to test whatever it is you've developed. They're the people that go out and they buy all the latest gizmos and gadgets. The early adopters get all their ideas, and take that on from the innovators. So, if you're one of the innovators, or you're one of these core people that have created this, or this core product and you've got a group of other innovators, your innovators are probably going to be your first test network. Once you've gone through the innovators, it's then the earlier adopters. The innovators take up about 2.5%, generally speaking, of any market. The early adopters, on the other hand, sit more around the 13.5%.

Early Majority

Now, the next step, this is the important one, the early majority. Now, the early majority is anyone from the early adopters, all the way up to the half point. It's half of everyone that's ever going to be interested in your product. The early majority hold 34%. Now, the early majority is normally when you get these people that mirror your product. They love you so much, they see what you've done is so cool, that they've jumped in and they've mirrored it. Normally if this happens they will contact you and offer to give you a bit of coin to get the product developed and created. Now, sometimes they're silent and they just go ahead. But, what you need to know is, that's 34% of the first 50%. If you can make the money on the first 16% of people that use your product, and you can make enough money on the first 16%, by the time the other people start developing it and go to market, you're already worlds ahead of them, and they're not going to blow you out of the water.

Sell or Keep Going?

You don't want to be MySpace when Facebook comes along; that's terrible. But, if you made enough money to either consider selling it and cashing out, or to reinvest it back into the business and create that next step in the agile development process, then the other company's always going to be chasing their tail. You're always going to be in front, at the cost of reinvesting and not pulling the money out. So, you need to think about what it is that you want to achieve, and how you're going to get there, why you're going there. What is the driving motivator? Do you want to just have money, make something bit, cash out? Maybe someone comes along and buys it. Maybe you made Siri in your garage, and Apple comes along and says, "This is pretty cool. Can we grab that?" "Yeah. No worries." Or maybe you made Siri with the intention of making something else even bigger and better. But, you need to think about what your focus is, keep the end in mind, and then work out all the steps from the end back to the start.

Patents Just Aren’t Worth It

If you do that when you go through and develop, at least you'll know where you're going with it all. Patents aren't worth the material they're written on. I hope that was clear with this whole conversation. You can go out and comfortably spend $20 thousand to protect yourself in one country, and then someone comes along and releases it in another country, changes the name slightly, and you're stuffed. So, I would strongly suggest that money would be better off being spend in the development and the release and marketing of the product, and have that up your sleeve. Just know that people will steal your idea. But, most people will have an idea, and they won't do anything with it anyway. If you've got a great idea and it's just sitting in your head, just give it to someone who's going to do something with it. Don't stress. Don't be like, "Oh, I need 50% of that. You got my idea and you ran with it."

The Final Word

An idea is an idea; it only becomes something useful when it's written down and you start working out if it's going to be something that's profitable and beneficial to the country, the world, and yourself. I hope you've enjoyed this, and it's given you a bit of insight into what to do and what not to do when it comes to telling people about your idea. Stay good.

Time For a Business Brainstorm

You've decided to start a business, well, let's sit down together and have a business brainstorm. You might have an idea or you might have something that you want to do to change the world. It could be a service or a way to do something differently. Whatever it is, you need to make sure you sit down and note it down, right? How it's going to be a different product to what's already out there. How are you going to make money out of it and how you're going to be reaching your target audience.

Read more about generating business ideas dorksdelivered.com.au

How We Brainstorm

We have businesses come to us all the time and ask us questions about how they can launch a new product. There was somebody who came to us who wanted to make a website that allowed for you to compare different wedding packages. So I'll give you an example of how that was going to work. You have a bunch of suppliers and then you have a bunch of people that you're advertising the site to. Let's say we're focused on the jewellery part of it. They're looking at engagement rings. So you've got Michael Hill in there, you've got Prouds or whoever it is, and you've got them all in there and they put up all their stock and you put up your stock and everyone puts up all their stuff and that all goes into the website. Then as the end user, you jump on there to look for a ring. The site then says that's available at these three suppliers. You may have already picked up what the problem is here. It looks at these three suppliers and it says we can get it from a Michael Hill cheaper. But the problem is the quality of the ring that you're going to get, even if it looks the same between the three suppliers, may differ. The quality of the diamonds might differ. It's not a black and white business model and a lot of things to do with weddings are not black and white. They're very emotionally subjective.

Identifying Issues is So Important

I went through the business plan with her and said, this sounds good, but we need to work at how we overcome this. She said, all I want it to be like is a parts comparison website. You go on and you can see this part and this is the OEM manufacturer of that part and this is where you can get it cheaper. I said, that's fine, but, how are we going to do this? Where's the money going to be made here? Because the suppliers would be now having to cut themselves down to making sure that every product looked the same. The florists would have to make sure every product look the same and that makes it a hard ask. It's very difficult to have your business then have to line up with everyone else's and you've commodified the whole business, ideally I guess is what is what the end goal was. Making the whole wedding experience a commodity. But it doesn't always work like that. In this instance, she wanted the end users to get the whole experience for free. So if the end users are getting the experience for free, that means that the suppliers have to be paying to be on this website. If the suppliers are paying to be on the website and be up against all of their competitors, that then means that they need to make sure they're more competitive than else and they have the same stock as everyone else. And it became all too hard to work out where finance can come from.

Cost Analysis is Key

I'll give you another example. It was a website, well before Airtasker's time. We developed this site which allowed for tradies to jump onto the website and look through jobs and it allowed the people to jump onto the site and then pick out these jobs and say, yup, this is what I want to do. I said, okay, this sounds like a cool model. So we've got two different groups of people that we need to be able to attract for this thing to work. But we also need to have money come in from one of the groups or both of the groups to be able to have the business profitable or through advertising and other marketing chains.

We went through and looked at the cost analysis and this one did come out positive. But the amount of capital that was required to allow for the initial burst to really get the word known was outside of the budget. But brainstorming, let us come to that conclusion. Making sure you have a great idea is awesome. But the important thing is you might have an idea but you didn't brainstorm it and didn't deliver it or actually conceptualise it in a way that allowed for it to become a born and delivered. Having an idea is useless until you put pen to paper. Having a dream is one thing. But having it written down into achievable chunks, pop size pieces let's that dream become a reality. If it's to become a reality, sometimes it doesn't need to be a reality, but knowing that you've gone through the maths allows you to get there.

Over Engineering

I over engineer and over complicate any decision I ever need to make and I am fully aware that I do it but I enjoy the journey and that's okay. I was looking the other day at getting water tanks for the house and when I went through the process and decided, okay, let's get water tanks, only 40,000 litres of stored capacity, I'll need to be able to look at the roof sizes, the rainfall. So I looked at the weather station on the roof and looked at the rainfall that had been delivered over the last 12 months and then looked at the bureau of Meteorology website and saw that it was coming through and my ratings were accurate but 10% higher. Either there was an issue with my device or I just get more rainfall in the area that I'm in. Either way I use all those numbers and worked out I could get 150,000 litres of water falling on my roof every year. The 40,000 litre capacity would mean that'd be more than enough to fill it. But you then look at when you had the really rainy months and then the really dry mounts and for me it meant that with the usage of 260,000 litres a year, it wouldn't really save much of my bill at all. In fact, the total buyback period was 10 years. The lesson here is water tanks are a bad investment for me and it could be different if you go to larger roof area or a different weather pattern or more rain or whatever the situation is. That is what brainstorming a business is all about.

Try Agile Development

You could already be in business, you just want to get this new idea and see if this is going to work. Working on it and seeing how long you think it's going to take and using a process, that's called agile development is really handy to do that. Looking at bite sized chunks, what's the smallest thing that you have to do to get this idea to market? A great example with Uber would be they want or wanted autonomous vehicles, but they couldn't afford the tech behind getting that created. So instead they had an app that they made that used people and their phones to look at the acceleration, braking speeds, and all the other nifty data about every corner and every street around the globe where Uber is available. They can then use that information to allow for the cars that they're going to be creating autonomous vehicles to drive, slow down and speed up and mimic that of human behaviour. This is fantastic because roads where there's black spots and people that are just falling off for no reason and having issues can now be seen with data and decisions be made about the exact way a vehicle can drive in those conditions and in that area. It's really cool stuff, but they couldn't have started to develop an autonomous vehicle without first developing a smaller app, a smaller structure to then build upon from that. So those same elements need to be applied when you're looking to be building a business, creating a business, changing a product, inventing a product, introducing a product or doing anything and everything around your business.

The Final Word

Remember, having a dream is the first step and that's the most important one. Having that aspiration and drive to dream and dream big. The next step is writing it down on paper, brainstorming all the positives, the negatives, doing a SWOT analysis, making sure you're able to see how this is going to fit. Who is your ideal person that's going to be buying this? Who's the avatar that owns this product or employs you guys for this service? When you know all that information and then you can go through and deep data, analyse everything and all the things go onto census, pull out any information you can find on census to see if you're creating a product that applies to the masses. Who are the masses that the product applies for? Who are your competitors? Does it exist? Is there any government grants out there that are going to save you a bit of coin and help you develop this product? Is it revolutionary enough that this product is going to be able to make it to the news? And if it is, how long is it going to be until someone is going to steal your idea and change it all around? And everyone is scared of that. No one wants someone to steal their idea! I hope you've enjoyed this stay good.

Do you think Elon Musk is a maker or a taker? Do you think Bill Gates is a maker or a taker? And do you think Steve Jobs was a maker or a taker?

This is my opinion based on my research. Don't judge me. 

Read more: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/275-are-you-a-maker-or-a-taker-2

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/VOBA8ie1Hhk

In my opinion, Bill Gates is a maker and a taker but also a massive manipulator. He's done a great job in what he does and he does give back to people, but I feel a lot of people would give back if they're having that amount of money he has. Like it's not noble. I think it’s just a nice thing when you have that much money.

Is he a maker or a taker? I think, honestly, he is a fantastic maker. He's making all of these cool stuff, and a lot of it he's giving away—the information, the patents—for free for everyone to copy and do whatever they want with. He's genuinely changing the world and he's doing a great job, so I strongly believe he is a maker. Sure, everyone has small little things that happen around a place to make them less of a great person, but he's still in my eyes the modern-day maker, and he's doing a great job.

A hard one: is he a maker or a taker? In my opinion, it’s not really hard one (I just said that because I thought you guys would have thought it was), he is 100% a taker. A taker to the end of the earth—took everything. He took a free operating system and then he charged money for it and made a few modifications. He took a mobile phone, and he said that this is the newest and greatest in technology, check out the camera and it plays music. He manipulated everyone, he had like four or five phones at his first conference for the iPhone, and he picked up different ones and there was a guy out there on the videoing equipment changing between the different interfaces because none of the devices could do all of the functions at that stage. But that did create an environment for his work where they had to get things ready in time.

He is a taker because the idea of kettle cords that they have on their laptops, which are magnetic, was taken from companies that have been doing it over in China for years or decades. The magnetic connectors on kettles as opposed on the laptops, he just took it.

The only reason I know all this stuff that I know is because I've been researching, so in a sense the person that wrote that, who had done that research, I've now taken that, but I've also put my own spin on it and I'm not charging anyone for it.

When Steve Jobs took things, when Apple take things, they take them from Samsung, they take them from these big companies and then they put them through hell in lawsuits, litigations, and patents to try and prove that they had it first. Whether theirs is more unique or whatever the situation is, it's all bullshit. All they're doing it for is to stop the other companies coming out with products. Apple is slowing down the progress of technology, but everyone loves Apple. They just love Apple. I can't talk enough about how much people love Apple. They make their entire environment ecosystem so that you can't use anything but Apple devices. You jump into your car and you want to read the onboard diagnostics of your computer in the car, and if you want to do that on Android, youcan do that for 20 bucks. We'll have it on an Apple, as at the time, this was being presented $180 to $220 because they charged a licensing cost per piece of hardware that's very close to exactly the same, the readout is identical.

Why Apple? Why are you doing this?

They charge up to $0.60 to use the connectors they've got a patent on, but they've just changed away from the standard USB-C, which is meant to be the global standard. What Apple does is create these new plugs andstuffs that don't offer any advantage and then they just include the lid to say, “Oh yeah, we conform to the standard. Now you have this lid in the box you'll forget about and lose and then, you'll swap of all the other accessories and everything else.”

I don't like Apple's business model, but they are great at lawsuits and marketing. That's where going to be talking about in the next episode: marketing. Stay tuned. Don't be Apple but take their advice. Stay good.

Doing It Yourself Could Be Killing Your Business

I come from a family of teachers and engineers. The only people that aren't teachers or engineers are business owners, so it goes without saying that we love learning. All of us love learning and problem-solving, and we're going to be talking today about why doing something yourself is not always the best idea. As I said, with teachers, engineers, and business owners, you've generally walked a path where you've learned lots of stuff and you've decided, "Yeah, I can do this. I want to learn that. That's exciting. Let's do this. Let's do that," and you overextend yourself.

Learn more about business efficiency dorksdelivered.com.au

Think About Your Choices

As a business owner that has been in business for a number of years, I know myself to be like, "Ah, just learn how to do the bookkeeping. Ah, just learn how to do this." I'll read up the 68-page document on the basics of GST, and then continue on from that. Before you know it, you are the person that knows bits of everything, but you don't know a lot of anything, and that's not good. If you're in business, presumably, you're there to make some coin, and if you're too busy doing things that other people could be doing for you, you're probably wasting money and you're definitely wasting time.

My Experience

I know myself. I used to take great pride in mowing my lawn. I'd go out in the backyard, and I would mow the lawn. I'll be like, "Yeah, look at that." I would have a beer, and I'd look out. I'm so excited that I've mowed a quarter of an acre with a hand-mower, and it got to a spot where I was looking how many hours it's taking me to mow the lawn, take care of the gardens, and how much money I was earning relatively per hour by doing what I enjoy doing in the business. I decided it is a lot cheaper for me to get a gardener in and have him or her, do the mowing, and when they get through and finish the whole lot, A, it didn't take two to three hours. Instead, he has it done in 40 minutes. B, it's costing me about a third of what it would have cost me in my time, so I'm getting it done faster, and it's a task that I don't have to do where my time can be devoted towards something else.

Saving Time = Saving Money

Having a guy come in and mow the lawn for me is a task that is saving me money and saving me time, and that's what you need to look at in business when you start to take on a task. Sometimes, you'll get in a professional, and they'll give you some ridiculous quote, and you go, "Ah, I can do that," and you probably can, and you start to do it. You go through all the different motions, and before you know it, technologies have changed, the way that you'd otherwise have done it is no longer available, and you've spent more than a day or two doing something that the technician or the new person could have done in moments because they've got the better tools, the expertise, and they're still in the game of doing it. Meanwhile, that freed up a lot of your time, it removed the stress from your life, and it's given them 100% accountability and responsibility for the problem, so if something does go wrong, you know exactly who to point the gun at.

Adapt Over Time

Getting back to the early days when I was a business owner, I had a lot of available time, but I didn't have a lot of available expertise or money, so I had to learn lots and lots about all things to do with business. Whether it'd be bookkeeping and accounting, sales and marketing, or making sure that I'm using the right tools and reinvesting, looking at what I was wanting to have my projections, being able to get all that data out of the business, there is so much going on. Having all that as someone who just started his own business was daunting, but because I had all the time available, I was able to take on all those tasks because I didn't have the money. It was well worth use of my time, and so my business started to grow.

Bring On Someone to Help

One of the best things that I did was bringing on someone to do things that I would have otherwise had to have done myself. Having a bookkeeper there to make sure that they are doing the day-to-day reconciliation, having an accountant to make sure that everything is looking hunky-dory, bringing on technicians to be able to be there for the times when you have huge amounts of work, and when I say technicians, I don't mean from the technical sense of someone who is doing something technical with computers, or whatnot, or technology. More so just whoever is technical at their craft. If you've got the available time to be able to do the tasks and you're not earning money otherwise, do them for now, but know that while you're doing them, you should be documenting them so that you're able to bring someone on and they can do them the way that you'd like them to be done. When you get your first employee as nearly everyone will agree, they don't do a job anywhere near as good as you did.

Remember This...

When you get your first employee, nearly every business owner will agree, they don't do the job nearly as well as you did, and that's what you've got to remember. No one will because that's how you did it, and how you did it isn't necessarily the right way or the wrong way, but it's the way that you did it and the way that you got comfortable doing it. Knowing that they won't do it exactly your way, they might do it their way with their own herbs, and spices, and twist on it isn't a bad problem. They've come a different walk of life, and they have different light to shed on the problem or the way that you're doing something, the process.

Document Everything!

If you have the ability to have them do that, great. The best that you can do though is make sure you document down the way that you do it so at least they can refine and distil that into something even more beautiful. If you don't have that documented, you can't really give them anything. It's all up in your head, and then that time that you're wasting is taking time away from you to train them up at a cost, where while you have that available time in the early years, document everything. The best you can hope for is they will be able to do 80% of whatever you did. The great news is that's 20% skill that they are bringing that you didn't have, 20% that you weren't able to do that they can shed a new twist on in the way that things are done.

The Final Word

I hope this has been useful and gave you a bit of information as to why you should consider outsourcing some of the bits that you're doing and freeing up your time to earn more money. If you have enjoyed it, make sure to jump over to iTunes and leave us a review. Stay good.