The Business of Business Podcast

How to Create the Optimal Business Infrastructure for Growth and Success with Kristen McAlister

Are you a fast-growing company that needs an executive bridge till you can afford to hire a full-time position? Will you have to fill a gap while someone is on medical or maternity leave? Maybe you have a project that needs special attention and implementation? You are in luck, look to an interim or fractional executive to fill the gap.

About Kristen 

Kristen McAlister is co-owner of Cerius Executives. Kristen has spent most of her career helping companies establish and improve their infrastructure for high growth. She has grown companies and created optimal infrastructure from both an operational and client management perspective. Kristen has spent the last ten years teaching companies how to leverage executives for transitional situations such as high growth and turnarounds. She is a national speaker and is published on topics ranging from operations and productivity to talent management and the contingent workforce. Kristen is a mother, Ironman, and Marine wife.

Here is a quiz that will help a CEO identify which area is stalling them right now – Strategy, Planning, Execution

Quiz – Is Your Company Set up for Success

Kristen is co-author of two books:

The New Executive Search: How Smart Companies are Using Interim Executives

How I Fired My Boss and Made More Money

 

 

www.ceriusinterim.com

www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com

 

Full Transcript Below

How to Create the Optimal Business Infrastructure for Growth and Success with Kristen McAlister

 

00:00:01
Roy
Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Business of Business Podcast. This is your host Roy. Of course we are the podcasts that we bring you a wide variety of guests that can talk about a lot of diverse topics sometimes because we don't know what we don't know. The other is sometimes that we do know where we're lacking. We're just looking for some help. We try to bring you a lot of professionals and experts. And, we're fortunate enough today to have another expert with us, Kristen McAlister. She is the co-owner of Cerius Executives. She has spent most of her career helping companies establish and improve their infrastructure for high growth. She has grown companies and created optimal infrastructure from both an operational and client management perspective. Kristen has spent the last 10 years teaching companies how to leverage executives for transition situations, such as high growth and turnarounds.

00:00:57
Roy
She is a national speaker and is published on topics ranging from operations and productivity to talent management and the contingent workforce. Kristen is a mother, an iron man and a Marine wife. So Kristen, welcome to the show.

00:01:13
Kristen
Thank you, Roy.

00:01:15
Roy
And, just going to mention you are the co author of two books, The New Executive Search, How Smart Companies are Using Interim Executives and also How I Fired My Boss and Made More Money. So, and, I guess that was one reason that I was interested in getting you on here. First off, before we jump into it, I've been looking forward to this conversation for a couple of weeks now, so, but kind of tell us, how did you find yourself here? I mean, you worked for some companies and just figured out where that those pain points were and just been able to help others.

00:01:52
Kristen
A lot of it was just happenstance and accidents back in 2008 from myself the same with so many individuals as laid off from companies I'd worked for 15 years and wasn't sure what to do. I started consulting and thought I would help companies in that way. The biggest problem with that was they didn't need to be told what to do. They needed help doing.

00:02:14
Roy
It. Exactly, exactly. That's where.

00:02:16
Kristen
I came across the interim executive model, where step in for a period of time and help them actually get it done.

00:02:25
Roy
Yeah. I can't tell you how many, people that, how many customers I've worked for in the past that, they just wanted the analysis and the report they'll implement it. A year or two, three later, when you end up going back to work for them again, you find that report, CA gathering dusk on a bookshelf somewhere that nobody's opened it up or looked at it. You're riding, we can have the best plan ever laid out, but if we don't execute it, then it's worthless or just like having no plan at all.

00:02:54
Kristen
Yep. And that's exactly. I had a client, we laid everything out. We came up with all these and every month I'd get a call from the CEO saying, we've got a problem. Can you help? And I say, we already solved that problem. Go open up the materials, but there was no one there to help affect the change and help guide everyone to join things the new way. Yeah.

00:03:15
Roy
Yeah. Yeah. That I was, kind of, jumped off to a fast start. I guess what I was going to say earlier is that a lot of business owners, entrepreneurs, they have the belief that the only way that you fail is by not having enough customers, but, as we've talked. What I would like to talk about more tonight is that, sometimes we can actually fail because we are very successful, but we don't have the infrastructure to actually handle the customers. If you're a local, especially you get a bad name and, I'll just use an example. There was a fairly new, a pizza joint that just opened up not too far. I was reading on next door about all the poor reviews. I mean, they had one or two bad nights and they got slammed and it's because, they were just so busy. They couldn't handle it, but, as a customer, I don't really want to hear that.

00:04:14
Roy
Not only, not only for my pizza, but if you're building me a, a piece of machinery or if you're doing work for me, your poor planning, shouldn't become my emergency.

00:04:27
Kristen
And those reviews are critical. We're finding, you look at the infrastructure, it's now not just your customers, it's the talent you want to attract. One of the first things they're doing is going to glass door and looking at what other employees are saying about the company.

00:04:42
Roy
Yeah. Yeah. Good point. An employee, I deal a lot with employee turnover and that's one of the biggest things that I always talk about is let's be an employer of choice, not an employer of last resort because people read all these troubles are when you have high turnover. The first thing they think is, wow, I don't need to get caught up in all of those problems.

00:05:06
Kristen
Yeah. It's interesting. Especially what we've seen, over the past year. In any times where we say don't hire or don't expand or don't invest until you absolutely have to, especially if you're a small growing company, you don't want to see that cash go out the door until you absolutely have to. More so nowadays we're seeing that as that'll kill a company, right. Because if they wait and tell, then it's too late and they're on the verge of imploding.

00:05:36
Roy
Yeah. I'll get you to talk just about that. The lead up to that, some things off the top of my head are, well, we have to hire talent. We have to acclimate them because just because you're a great representative sales or customer service for another company, you need to learn my ways. And that takes some time. Just talk about, what are all those things that make that lag time for us?

00:06:03
Kristen
I, first of all, it's finding the right people that you need to bring in. Especially you've got people, you've got technology and you've got your systems and tools and all of those need to work in unison. You can go higher next month, 3, 4, 10 additional individuals to help you. If they're coming in, they don't have the technology and the systems to do it. They're going to come in and do it five different ways, right. They're going to be wrong on the boat and all different directions. Now those five were really only producing really effectively to what two people would be using.

00:06:40
Roy
Yeah. And I've heard that. I've heard that before is, small company started in a very small space. All of a sudden they find themselves needing help and they didn't even have a place to put those five people. They couldn't even get them in their current offices to set them down, to get them a phone line, to get them a computer, ? And then you talk about having to expand space and moving, or either having your space and then a space with other workers, working remotely it's, it can lead to a disaster in a hurry.

00:07:13
Kristen
Yup. Right. One of the smallest, easiest steps, especially nowadays with all the technology that's, there is documenting how things should be done. Otherwise, as you add people, it's going to be done all different ways and everyone's going to figure it out. Or if you lose someone and that's what you really see in a lot of small businesses is if they lose that one person with the brain trust, they lose how everything is done. Right. We're starting to get away from that. Tell someone to sit down and type up a 10 page SOP. It's just never going to get done. And won't be kept updated. First says, if you tell someone to video how they do something or do a screen share, that's much easier training keep up, or when you bring on the next person, especially if you're training them virtually record that and recording every single training session that you do.

00:08:07
Kristen
And you'll build up that library quickly.

00:08:10
Roy
No, you make a good point about that is, the other thing is not only knowing what this person is or what you're supposed to do, if you're in the seat new seat, but, also as you go through time, you may not do everything that you have to do the very first day. Two weeks from now, you're trying to remember now, what did that guy tell me how to handle this situation? And then either you have to go get up and find somebody where if you have it written down and I'm a big fan of, like, a flow chart that coincides with some kind of a standard work or some other kind of, more detailed in steps where it's like, if the flow chart doesn't give me enough information, or it can lead me back to the place where I need to go in order, find out exactly what that, what I should be doing.

00:08:59
Kristen
That's that we call it one source of truth. Okay. You go to one place that is the starting point. All the information you have is linked to that one place. You don't have to remember 10 different locations to go to Azure. We also, we tend to want to brain dump and train everything and give you individuals everything from day one of the biggest, hiring trends we're seeing right now is new salespeople. On day one through day 30, do they need to know the sales process once they're onboarding a new client or do they need to understand the value proposition and how to go get clients.

00:09:38
Roy
Train is exactly, and the other thing would just kind of talk about onboarding for just a minute. I just happened to finish writing a piece the other day about onboarding. I found that's a lost art. It's like, because we needed to hire this guy a month ago. We don't have time to go through this, onboarding. And, one thing, I try to recommend is we don't have to tell them every piece of information, that the first morning on the job, I mean, let's acclimate, let's give them enough to get them started, but you can on board over the next two or three weeks, some things that need to be done immediately, that's for sure. Some of this it's like, and it's, you have to also put yourself in the candidates position, all the stuff about your company. It's like top of mind, but here's this guy brand new setting, in a new office, new job, new everything.

00:10:35
Roy
We just have this huge information dump on them.

00:10:39
Kristen
Okay. When you look at onboarding, let's take the legal outside of it, day one, if they walk away with nothing other than what is our company culture, because that's going to guide every other thing that they get trained on and all their interactions, right. That's possible first day.

00:10:56
Roy
Right? Exactly. So, I don't want to skip over any good information, any pertinent information if you have it, but one thing we think about during that high period of growth, and your, one of your books is talks about using interim executives. So, there are ways that we can use these fractional executives to help us through those rough periods, too. We get people in place the right per cause. That's the other thing I think too, is we get in a rush, hire the wrong person. Now we have just really messed ourselves because we got somebody in a job that either can't do it, won't do it, whatever their problem is. Now we've got to stop rehire and restart. To me, it makes, it always just looks very sketchy to me as a customer when I go to the same business. It's just different person, every time.

00:11:55
Roy
Let's talk about how the, how can we use interim executives to kind of help us over the hump.

00:12:03
Kristen
In a number of ways. Think of expertise and executive talent and leadership as a whole, it's now a puzzle piece it's you don't get have to necessarily look at the entire picture and say, I'm going to go and purchase this individual for $250,000. I can't afford that and say, I want this expertise here for the next three months, but I just need it one to two days a week. Or as you mentioned to get over this hiring, we need to hire 10 people. Why don't I bring in an HR expert, who's done that kind of ramp up and onboarding and put everything in place and bring them in for the next three months. It's no longer a one size fits all. In any way that you need at each step, and really one of the biggest things, whether you're even at $2 million, and at that size of the company, if the CEO is wearing the CFO hat and still doing all the accounting, the bookkeeping, the financials, it's not the highest and best use of time.

00:13:04
Kristen
They're really great for growth by doing that. It's a great way to step up the talent and the leadership, whether it's to bridge a gap or to take that off of you as the owner.

00:13:18
Roy
Yeah. And, a lot of times we talk about this kind of gets back to knowing yourself and your skills that if you started this company and you're an awesome salesperson, then, why do we want to take that talent away from the frontline? And have you make an entries into, a ledger or journal or typing them in a computer, however, we need you should be on the front helping train and teach our salespeople not doing the accounting.

00:13:50
Kristen
Absolutely. Right. I am, I will say, as a business owner, I am an absolute victim of doing that myself to where I love working with our clients. That's where I started. When I bought the business. I enjoy solving problems. I enjoy being here and doing things like this with you and evangelizing what we do. If I'm being the CFO or finding the COO, and I'm doing that, it's not serving the company and it's not serving our team, the banks. Being able to pull that off and ring, part-time individuals into do that for me, I, I've never heard a CEO say, I, I, I, every time they do that, it's I waited too long. I've never heard anyone say, gosh, I should have waited another six months before. Always I should've done it. It's expensive.

00:14:42
Roy
Yeah. Yeah. And, I'm going to use a three letter word here that gets in our way too, is sometimes it's our egos that we, this is our baby. We don't really want anybody touching it, or we know what's best, or there's a million reasons that we can use, but we have got to put that aside and say, for the better of this business, we need some help in specific areas. Not that we couldn't figure it out, even it's just, is it worth the time and effort? It takes to try to figure this out when we could get an, you could carry on with your job and let somebody else come in and take over that.

00:15:19
Kristen
I you're absolutely. Right. We really see it's the flip side, it's the ego. It's also the flip side of, I don't want anyone to know or realize how much I was trying to figure out that I was struggling. It's that insecurity of, I don't want anyone to know that I need the help. I will say that right now is such a great pivotal time where we're seeing leadership in companies reach out more than average saying I don't have all the answers and I don't have to have.

00:15:50
Roy
The answer yet. Yeah. Yeah. That was one reason why I started this show two years ago is because, we could talk about another third component of that is sometimes we just don't know what we don't know. Why I love this show is because I will guarantee you, I have never had a guest come on that I didn't learn something for myself. Sometimes it's simple things that you may have thought that you may have known or even practiced in the past that you got away from it. And, you're having a conversation like this and the light bulb goes off that, oh, wow. I really need to pay more attention to that. So, that also just the education of what are we doing or what could we do different? What could we do better?

00:16:36
Kristen
Exactly. It's listening to things like this and the realization and being able to, not everyone can go and talk to five other individuals. Their situation is business owners being able to listen and hear and say, gosh, I thought I was the only one that had that issue. Exactly. Yeah.

00:16:56
Roy
So let's take a step back. We've talked about a lot of good things, but, want to go back to the beginning. We'll say that if you're a one man show, and if you're a five man person, five person business, you really need to give some thought on the front end to your strategy overall strategy, we need to look, what are you going to do for Mar you shouldn't wake up tomorrow and say, I'm marketing today. Where do I want to start? What do I want to do? So, we need to have this plan or this roadmap, but we also need to, maybe extrapolate that and do a proforma for like two or three, five years, because what are the triggers? And that, we can talk I'll let you jump in there, but it's like, we need to know, okay, what is going to be our trigger that we need to hire that next salesperson or what, we need to buy a piece of equipment.

00:17:50
Roy
What triggers that? So it's already thought out it's not in the heat of the moment, or it's not a, we're so busy now that we can't give that any thought,

00:18:01
Kristen
Aye, that's always a tough one because you just don't know what you don't know. You can plan for two years down the road and that plan changed two months into it. I see. When you look at, I'm glad that you mentioned marketing's me sketching out a business plan and what does it look like? And at least starting with some kind of a compass, even if it changes in two months, we've worked with a lot of startups. I've seen a lot of business plans and performance, and it will say the number one area that is with out doubt underestimated is marketing, right. You hit the nail on the head, right. Whatever that budget is, double, triple, quadruple it, especially your one to five person company. You want to grow, never underestimate the value of marketing.

00:18:44
Roy
Yeah. I even go so far as to, it needs to be stepped out, like, what are we going to do every day? And, you're right. Some days change and we don't get it done. But, I always like to have that plan. I wake up in the morning, it's not a surprise or I don't spend half the day thinking about what do we need to do? It's like, we've got that plan already set out. It's just wake up and take a step by step through that. We can talk about, solo preneurs there in that, because, they typically get into a boom and bust cycle. It's like, I've got no business today, market. You get a couple of jobs and it's fulfill. Then, three, six months later, it's like, where'd all of our business go market. So you get this whole thing. And, we could talk about, but like automation and things that we can do to keep that pipeline full, we may have to take our attention off of it a little more, but again, we can hire interims.

00:19:52
Roy
We can outsource some of it. We can get temporary help. There's a lot of things that we can do to help ourself, even that cycle out.

00:20:00
Kristen
Yeah. From a solopreneur standpoint, I know a lot of independent individuals out there, whether they're executives, they're starting a pool service business, whatever it is, not being the one to do it all is one of the best ways to avoid that boom or bust and weather hacks that we say is Upwork.com. It's a great place to find talent. Project-based, reasonable rates for marketing, for lead gen for just about anything that you might need setting up your website, that's cost effective for you to be able to not be the one who's doing it all.

00:20:43
Roy
Yeah. Yeah. It takes of work, but, it is a great tool. I've used it myself. I've used it from writing to editing to some graphic art, even, used it for a ton of stuff, but it's worth well worth going through because the nice thing is, especially the, some people I had writing for me or editing, once you build a relationship and have of rapport, they were, a defacto employee because I could call them up and say, Hey, I've got some stuff. They would put other things aside because they knew number one, I had more work coming and number two, they knew I paid my bills and that's, you gotta take that into account when you have, when you're freelancing like that is, did the work, am I really gonna get paid? So they appreciate that when you can pay on time. And, like I said, they will, a lot of times they'll put you for at the head of the line when you call back for another job.

00:21:46
Kristen
Never underestimate, interns and not necessarily even college interns, but high school interns. How many individuals do either near you or far away with the virtual nature and things where they can do some of that, they can do build your website. They can do marketing campaign for you, or it'll take them a couple of hours to figure it out, and then they're wrong running within for some of us probably get it figured out a lot quicker than we would. It gives them an opportunity to learn and grow.

00:22:23
Roy
Exactly. Yeah. Again, I've implored that as well and has some really good young people that come through that. Again, I learned something from them, they were innovative. Maybe they learned something in school that they were able to teach me, but, sometimes just being around fresh ideas is kind of nice for the business owner as well.

00:22:45
Kristen
I, more and more where we're seeing, we talked about that ego or that, self-esteem not wanting people to know that you don't have all the answers that seems to be diminishing more and more as we're seeing, businesses bringing advisors who are working, we're working with a client 1.5 million in revenue and works with an advisor a couple hours a month. It's just helping him actually did some other research on Upwork. I think they got a new logo for $50 and quite a few different things to be able to those business growth hacks, right? Well, those to make quicker decisions and think outside the box, because we're so mired inside of our business on a day to day basis. Just having that advisor there to hold you accountable, to move the needle, it can be a tremendous benefit.

00:23:44
Roy
Surrounding ourselves with people who we trust and who have our best interest at heart, and also who are successful because, off topic but if we surround ourselves with people that just suck the life out of us, then that's kind of where we're going to end up, where if we can find these other people that really want to help us on are upbeat and positive, it can make a huge influence on the way that we carry out our days as well.

00:24:13
Kristen
Why do you think people tend into your podcast, right?

00:24:18
Roy
Yeah. Well, thank I would hope that we can for sure, another, a great tactic that I've heard more about is in, we used to have a round table of industry people. Now, were a little different, were all in different disciplines, but we would meet about once a month and, just talk about what do we see in our business? it was complimentary. If you had a customer that you couldn't fulfill their needs, then we could work together. So, there's that, but there's also even round tables of like business people that they just meet and they say, what? I've got this employee, that's doing this. I've never seen it before. Don't know how to break it. What's the best. This other guy that sat in two chairs from, he was like, what I had that happened last year, and this is how we worked it out. You can get a lot of, free advice at that way as well.

00:25:19
Roy
You have to be willing to open up about it. If you find people that you trust that trust you, and it's a tight group, it works very well.

00:25:28
Kristen
Whether it's from your industry is similar industry where we're all members of associations and similar industry, but noncompeting, you'd be surprised at picking up the phone and saying, Hey, you want to get together for an hour and talk, everyone can sign an NDA, right. You meet price, how quickly people then want to join.

00:25:49
Roy
Right. Right. Well, that's great. Do you have any other tips for, high growth either? Well, one thing we really haven't touched about is that client, the client management perspective. Let's talk about that for just a minute, if we could, what are some hacks or tips or tricks for, putting in, cause the other thing is that's, to me, it's an integral piece. That's tough because I know how I talk to my clients and I know how I want them treat enough finding somebody that can mirror that or that we can train. It may take a little bit. What are some things that we can do in the interim there?

00:26:29
Kristen
I would bring it back to culture and your value system. Right? One of the first values that we have at Sirius reteach is we treat our clients business as the, and so every day we don't have train on how do you make decisions that guides the decision-making, you make the decision that's in the best interest of the client. That will feed in through, out the organization. As you and I both know, that's probably one of the biggest areas to focus on because it is so much better to do business with clients you've already done business with, right versus, and we're seeing, at the management level and the executive level, one of the biggest growth areas is they're calling it client success and their clients, director of client success or client success managers. What they're doing is they're the steward for clients from the first moment we start meeting with them or to, I'm sorry, reaching out to them.

00:27:29
Kristen
You have marketing to when they're working with us and they finish up and then keeping in touch with them. Ongoing has the biggest opportunity for growth and easy, profitable growth is working with clients that you already do business.

00:27:45
Roy
With. Yeah. The acquisition cost of clients, depending on your business, it can be astronomical where that repeat business costs. You virtually nothing. We do need to follow up, be mindful with them, for sure. That's a, a place that I see people give away a lot of money is that if they're like a one-off purchases, the client bought and they're gone out of sight out of mind, instead of following up, staying in touch, giving them a phone call and seeing, what else you can do for them. And then kind of building on that. The other thing is I asked for referrals, we do not ask. If you're providing a good product, good service, good cost at good customer service, why wouldn't somebody want to refer you to their friends?

00:28:31
Kristen
It's sometimes it's just the way that we ask and it's not, do anyone else who could use my service or can you refer me to someone it's, I'm glad I was able to help you. Do anyone else that I can help? And it's a bit more of a soft approach to it. A lot of people just don't like to ask for business. Yeah.

00:28:52
Roy
Yep. Yeah. And it's, people want to brag too. I mean, just like me, we have, it was an old, mom and pop restaurant that had closed down. Actually my mother called me, I think she called me Friday and or yeah, she called me Friday night and said, Hey, did you see that place opened back up new management? And I said, no. We got some breakfast tank out Saturday. It was awesome. I just posted it on, next door because, I want them to succeed. They're very nice people with very good food. I said, y'all need to give them a try. Well, so today a guy posts back and said, I had a client lunch with 56 orders that I went up there for because he saw this, he saw that they were open. He's like, these guys need to advertise. You said they handled it. Food was good, everything went smooth.

00:29:45
Roy
So, that's just of a domino effect of about what happens if we can start getting the word out and everybody wants to brag about who they know. So, if you provide a good service, of course, people are going to want to refer you because they're going to want to brag about what a find that they had.

00:30:03
Kristen
That's going back to that, round tables that you mentioned and just asking, who did you use for mark and who did you use for that? This and that. We all want to feel good that we found a great person and they're so great that other people want to use them.

00:30:21
Roy
Exactly. Exactly. Well, Kristen, I want to thank you for taking time out of your day. I've got a couple things before we wrap up, but one is what is a tool that you use tool or a habit that you feel like really adds value to your life? Either professional or personal?

00:30:41
Kristen
I, for me, it's a mantra and I think that it's so valuable because it took me so long to learn. It was probably one of the hardest things to learn. So I'm that person who's guilty of. I can do what I can do at all. I can probably do it quicker than anyone else. It's that mantra highest and best use of time. What is my highest and best use of time, whether it's in business or even personally, I was complaining to my husband and I, I don't get to spend as much time with my son. He said, well, then why aren't you cleaning the house, hire a housekeeper, the highest and best use of your time. We say, go through a list of everything that you're doing and look at what's everything that I can, and maybe someone else should be doing it. What's the cost, put a line item there.

00:31:26
Kristen
What am I paying myself versus what would I pay someone else to do that? And you'd be amazed at how quickly that cost structure comes down.

00:31:34
Roy
Yeah. That's one thing, that I've done in the past is, when you hire people to do things, do chores for you, I guess, as you look at well, if I'm, I can spend an hour doing whatever this task is that I can pay $20 in order to get it done. In that same hour, I can do some marketing or do some other client work that makes me, somewhere way above the $20 an hour figure. It's really, if you sit down and put pencil to paper, it's really a no brainer.

00:32:05
Kristen
Right? The mental block that we run into is doing something new for the first time it's going out and finding that housekeeper. It's finding someone who can run a marketing campaign. Yeah. Look through the longterm one year from now, where do you want to be? And continuing on this path is not going to get you there. Sometimes you got to extend that little extra effort. Or as you mentioned, I love the referral go out to Facebook, LinkedIn, any number and ask, who do ? Who would you recommend?

00:32:35
Roy
Yeah. Yeah. I think we have to think about of pain in the short is gonna, bring us, I guess, just relieve a lot of pressure on us as we go through the long-term and, we may have some false starts hiring people. I've done it before, even as much work as I put into it. Sometimes you just, it's not a good fit for whatever reason, but if you keep trying long enough, you will find the right fit for sure. Tell us I know that you have a CEO quiz that, basically is your company set up for success and what that does? It helps CEOs identify what areas that might be stalling them,

00:33:18
Kristen
But yeah, it is. My apologies, I actually am going to need to give you the website link to put in the notes. One of those, as we're growing our business, we don't always know what do we need to work on? Is it the planning part of it is that the execution is that the strategy. We're always trying to work on all three of them at one time. Going through and just answering a few questions, this will help you pinpoint where you're getting stalled or where you need to start, because you really just want to work one at a time. Where in that process is, holding on that growth and holding up that key to success.

00:34:00
Roy
Yeah. Awesome. Well, we will put that link in the show notes so people can go over there and it'll be a, it would be a good start and, that way it puts you in touch with Kristen to, maybe help you out. Yeah. You bet. Tell us, who is your client? What can you do for them? And of course, how they can reach out and get ahold of you.

00:34:23
Kristen
Absolutely. Like our client is any small to mid-size business owner CEO. We do a lot with privately held businesses and especially family-owned businesses on a providing think of it as we help you date leadership. Rather than hiring someone on a full-time longer-term basis, you just need them in the short term, or maybe just part time. We help that matchmaking process. We ease it through it, and then we stay on and make sure that everything is accomplished. We can be reached at ceriusexecutives.com. That's C E R I U S executives.com.

00:35:01
Roy
All right, well, awesome. Well, y'all reach out, put Kristen to work for you. Let her help you. If you're going through some growing pains or even it's even better, if you just don't wait until there's pain. If you go ahead and just get out front of this, let's put a strategy together, that can help you before you actually get into some trouble. So, all right, well, that's going to do it for another episode of the business of business podcast. We appreciate all of our listeners very much. Of course, you can find us on all the major podcast platforms, iTunes, Google, Stitcher, Spotify, we're on www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com plus all the social media channels. So, until next time, take care of yourself and take care of your business.

 

www.ceriusinterim.com

www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com

 

Visualize Your Goals and Build an Action Plan to Achieve Your Dreams with Steve Gamlin

Start to think of what your goals really are and what they look like. Feel like, sound like, even smell like attach them as emotionally as you can to your senses and really get a gut feel for what you want. In my definition of success may be different from yours, somebody else's and 10 different people could be all different.

About Steve

Now in his 17th year as The Motivational Firewood™Guy, Steve Gamlin shares his back-to-basics blend of positivity and humor with corporate and conference audiences around the country. Drawing from a decade in the radio industry, 7 years of stand-up comedy and a 30+ year personal development journey, Steve teaches his clients to ‘SEE’ their desired outcomes, understand their ‘WHY’...then build Action Plans to achieve them, utilizing his Vision Board Mastery program as well as live (and virtual) events.

www.motivationalfirewood.com

www.businessofbusinesspodcast.com

Full Transcript Below

Visualize Your Goals and Build an Action Plan to Achieve Your Dreams with Steve Gamlin

00:00:08
Roy
Hello, welcome to another episode of the business of business podcast. I'm your host, Roy, of course we are the podcast that brings a wide variety of guests that talk about a whole diverse set of topics, trying to, help our businesses out there succeed. Sometimes we don't know what we don't know. So we get some really good ideas. Sometimes we know where we need some help. We just don't know where to turn. That's kind of what we hope to provide you with this. Some answers, today we is no different. We are, very blessed to have Steve Gamlin with us. Steve is now in his 17th year as the Motivational Firewood Guy. And, he shares his back to basics, blend of positivity and humor with corporate and conference audiences around the country drawn from a decade in the radio industry, seven years of standup comedy in 30 plus years, personal development journey.

00:01:07
Roy
Steve teaches his clients to see their desired outcomes, understand their why, then build action plans to achieve them, utilizing his vision board mastery program, as well as live and virtual events. Steve, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to be with us. Looking forward to this.

00:01:28
Steve
Thank you, Roy. Very happy to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me. I appreciate it. Yeah, you bet. Yeah. I, you know,

00:01:34
Roy
Your message is awesome first, before we even jump into that, though, I'm going to hit you up on the, where you got the motivational fire would get, and that's interesting, but we've talked, prior to this, a lot about, just being nice about the whys, making sure our why's are really the, what we want the why should be and kind of how we get there and how we can build that roadmap. So, anyway, let's start out with, where did the motivational fire wood got come from.

00:02:05
Steve
Very early on in my speaking career, we're talking probably 2004, 2005. I was invited to attend a national speakers association meeting in the Boston area. Cause that's where I live is in the Northeast. And so I went down there. It was my first time. I got one of those, blue name, badges of shame is what I always called it because everybody just knows your note. You're new and you're clueless. I just have, written across this blue badge and I walked in and this gentleman comes over and says, hi, my name is Don. What type of speaker are you? And of course be new. I go, I'm a motivational speaker. He goes, all right, what sets you apart? I said, I want to help people. He goes, well, you're not helping yourself set yourself apart here. He said, so many of us are what makes you different? And he was so gracious and so patient and so generous with his time.

00:02:57
Steve
And he kid gloved me big time. I, he just helped after about five minutes of me trying to say what made me different? None of which made me different. I said, well, look, if someone's paying to come hear me speak, they've got a spark of something in their heart that they want better about their lives because they've done, right. You're a speaker. If I share a story or a lesson or one of my own examples of how I survived everything I did to my life and became successful as it's I'm sharing motivational firewood. If they add it to the spark and take an action, they can make their life better. He says, all right, one more question. Do anything about trademarks? I said, none of that. He said, I really liked that concept because he goes, go write that down and then go look about trademark.

00:03:39
Steve
About $1,100 later, I've, officially been trademark or register whichever one, the motivational fire wood guy. Nice.

00:03:47
Roy
I like that concept too. Cause that's what we got to have that spark in order to, start the bigger fire. Unfortunately, if we don't have that, it's hard to, spark somebody else. So that's a very good illustration. Let's talk about seeing, what we want and the why I'll let you choose where you want to start. And, don't be concerned. We're not under attack. We just live pretty close to an air force base. They're flying of train in the train in this morning. If you hear it coming over, it's a, actually it's a comforting feeling for us when we don't hear them flying. We always question what's going on.

00:04:29
Steve
Well, the importance of seeing what you want, I mean, over the years we get the people that do their new year's resolutions and what are they right? Every year they bust out their broad brush pencil and they're right. I want to be happy. I want to be healthy. I want more money. Well, seeing people say that every year. Right during that week, between Christmas and new year's, they look in their living room and they're cleaning up and they see this little folded piece of paper, keeping the lamp from rocking. It's got some salt sustains on it and the pizza guy's number and they go along to where this is, then they'll put up, they go, oh crap. It was my resolutions for this year. Right? Exactly. What do they do? They changed the date. They just make them for next year. Right? So what I do with people, individuals, entrepreneurs, and company teams that say, look, all right, companies, stop handing down these numbers every year with the numbers and said, here's your goals? And people stop broad, brush him like he happy, healthy and more money, right.

00:05:25
Steve
Start to think of what your goals really are and what they look like. Feel like, sound like, even smell like attach them as emotionally as you can to your senses and really get a gut feel for what you want. In my definition of tests may be different from yours, somebody else's and 10 different people could be all different. If we each dial into what we want and in the case of the work teams that I work with, if you walk into work everyday or dial in or whatever it is you do now, if you're connected to why you're there, right. What that paycheck is going to help you to earn in, do it would all of you collectively bringing that energy and dedication to creating your own individual goals and achieving them what that's going to do for the company talking about engagement. Yep. That's what I do with people is break it down to what do they look like? Feel like sound like in many cases, even smell like or a goal.

00:06:15
Steve
Yeah. That's where I start with people.

00:06:17
Roy
I think that's a good point. You bring up the Y and when we set goals, it's good to, instead of me just telling you, I need you to do 80% of this, why and the how, and a, a, just a brief example is in, when I was younger, I worked for a public utility and we had these big, old, rubber gloves that, when we got around anything that was energized or we thought may be energized, we put them on, they had inner liners, the rubber glove, and then a big outer leather glove. There was a very specific way that you had to fold them to put them back in their little carrying case. And, we had safety guys that would come out and that was the first thing they'd check. And, you get deemed, if they weren't right. I'm telling you for about three years, I could not get those right.

00:07:06
Roy
Every time I took them out, I had to go back to a manual to figure out how they went in there until the guy took me aside and says, here's why you do this. And all the pieces fell into place. I'm like, okay, now I get it. I understand. I remembered it for the next 20 years. Never even had to think about it again. Yep. Yeah.

00:07:27
Steve
It just provides such a roadmap when, Y the story behind something, right. It's like, you're playing a role. All of a sudden the script becomes so natural. Right. It just becomes a part of who you are when you're connected to that. When you said he was going to show you why I thought he was going to show you some like really crispy critter, after pictures, like back in biology in college, they go, here's what a combine can do on a farm know, they show that. Yeah, yeah, no, that's what I thought. That's where that was going to go for a second. I get nervous. And, they actually,

00:08:01
Roy
Used to the power company would come out and they would take hotdogs and stick in those, fingers and poke a hole in them and, show you what you did if you didn't take care of what would happen to you. Yeah, I mean, this was just the simple of, you put the inner liners palms together, and then the outer ones went with the palms out, just in case you had any splinters in them. It wouldn't poke a hole, but, like I said, for a couple years, I just couldn't figure it out. I couldn't wrap my head around it until, somebody said, this is exactly why you do that. So I think it's important. We talk it's off track, but when we'd bring people into our workplace or on our teams, sometimes it's like, here's your chair, here's your computer, here's your task. We don't really give them the how integral part do you play in this whole operation? And I think we, as managers, as company owners, I think that we miss out on, that's our deficiency that we really don't sit down and educate these people on the wide range of where do you fall into this bigger scheme of things and just how important you are, because I don't think people realize in their job it's vital.

00:09:16
Roy
You're not just somebody that we could do without you're vital part of this team. Here's why, because, we wouldn't need you if you weren't an important.

00:09:24
Steve
Yeah. I used to tell the companies I worked with, they said, look, even if we don't do vision work project right off the bat, I'll tell you what the holidays are coming up. Best thing you can give each one of your team members is a picture frame and you ask them to put whatever's most important to them in their lives. Why they're there for that paycheck every week in that frame. Once a week, I want you to take five minutes and have a conversation with someone about what's in their frame. Just say, what story behind that, or, wow, who is that? Or what is that? Or why is that so important to you? So you're going to start seeing the why and hear it and feel it. You also get a feel for what these team members are all about and how best to communicate with them and support them and cheer them on.

00:10:05
Steve
And, just start connecting with people at that level. Yeah, you don't get the old crack, the whip, here's your numbers, here's your guests, your computer, and catch it at the end of the year and see whether or not we're going to keep you on. Yeah.

00:10:18
Roy
And, and I, I do some work with companies on employee retention. Of course that's one of the big steps is getting to know your people beyond just getting to know. I think that guy's name is Steve. He says like three chairs down, or, he shows up every now and then it comes in, I guess he's a worker. I don't know what he's doing here, but anyway, get, really get to know them, their families, you should know everything about them and it's not always easy, but you have to take that extra step to have that connection in order to, I think I feel to keep people engaged and, keep that whole team spirit going because I, I feel like if I just leave Steve over in his corner working, Steve may not be happy. And, instead of getting his job done, he may be over there looking for, he may be scrolling through a one ad or postings trying to see where he can go next.

00:11:14
Roy
So, that personal connection, it's just invaluable. And it's something that we've lost. I feel like, I, I am a show my age for a minute here, but, instead of picking up the phone and calling you is like, I'm just going to send you a text or an email, hope that you respond and hope you get the message and you take it well, instead of having that personal communication. Anyway, didn't mean to derail you there, let's talk about the vision of the vision board and that whole process. It's always very interesting to me because it, I think we can do that as a company probably, and then also can do that as individuals. I'll let you kind of take off on that one where you want to start.

00:11:58
Steve
Sure. Yeah. I first heard about vision boards back in the early two thousands when the secret came out well, the secret I've got mixed feelings on the secret. I was a big fan of it and I still am, but I think they got some of the things wrong, like putting in the genie in the magic lamp, like your wishes, my command, okay, you went a little overboard there, but two-thirds of the way through the secret DVD, there was a guy named John ass wrath, and he was talking about how he had built vision boards in the past. And he had them boxed up. One day his son was asking what's in the box and he showed him and he said, oh my gosh, we're actually living in the house that I poured on my vision board several years before. It's having, it's not a magic slate or a magic lamp, but what it is really dialing in what you want your goals to look like, and then identifying with as much detail as possible and connecting to it as best you can to plant that seed.

00:12:51
Steve
What it also does is when you put that kind of an emotion in your head, the opportunities to get there, start to pop up all around you. You're going to hear things that you'll wait a second. That might be my next step to get to. Now that I know what the X is on the treasure map, at least I can point in the right direction, right? Meet the right people, engage in the right resources, learn new skills. If I have to make connections with certain people. Yeah. That's what I try to do with the vision boards with the way I do it. Versus like at the beginning of the year, you hear people say, Hey, we're having a vision board party with wine, cheese crackers says the moon steaks. People show up to those that drink a little wine. They laugh. There's good energy in the room.

00:13:32
Steve
Some of them bring all the pictures of things they already want, or they sit there laughing and joking, cutting up magazines and they glue them on a board. Well, they haven't done any of the work yet, right. In my opinion, to establish where they are now and assess where they are now. Right. Figure out where they want to be. So they can establish that road right. To wait. I mean, if you're just sitting there drinking your wine and hanging out with a bunch of people laughing, you're going to think a bunch of pictures are really sexy that day. And this is what I want. When a couple of days later you might look at it and go, it's not feeling it. And I'm not inspired by it. Believe me, I know this, my first two vision boards I made in 2005 or an absolute mess, they were worthless.

00:14:11
Steve
Now it, two weeks later, I just looked at it and go, well, this is all stuff I could have just busted out depending on dear Santa Claus, no one connected, except for building a recording studio. That's the one thing I, I was so connected with that. I made it happen that year.

00:14:27
Roy
Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. The, I think the roadmap concept, because you use this in strategic planning for people and it's like, everybody wants to get on board with, and I always kind of use geography, but it's like, okay. We really want to end up in Chicago this year. That's where, you know, that's our place. That's great. Okay. If we don't know where we're at, we don't know whether to turn, go to the east or we don't know where to go to the west. If we're in Utah and we said, well, maybe we'll just head out to the west. We're never going to make it. I think that's one thing I always tell people is, if financially, or, in a lot of realms of planning is you've got to know where you are and you have to do a really honest assessment either. We can't do the smoke and mirrors of where we hope that we are, where we would like to be.

00:15:21
Roy
I mean, it's like, we're really, are you in this process?

00:15:25
Steve
Yeah, yeah, exactly. You got to know. It's just like, when you plug in a GPS or you use Google maps, it will determine where you are. With like my old GPS, I had to, turn it on. It, won't figure out by satellite where I am. Even older, back in the days of the roadmaps, when you unfolded it to the size of the picnic table, you had to know where you were to be able to know how to get where you want to go. And it's the same way. I mean, there's seven steps in my vision board mastery program. I 10 steps, sorry, we don't even gather pictures till step seven or six are all assessing where you are and where you want to go. Yeah. That's, that's not serious vision board parties. Well, they may not have the depth of work. That's where I created the t-shirt line that says friends, don't let friends attend vision board parties.

00:16:14
Steve
It's all pretty good because people thought it was funny.

00:16:17
Roy
Yeah. Well, and the other thing I think that, comes out of the, that party environment like that, or if we just tell somebody to do it is, the vision is nice, but we need the, I think the meat of that project is what are those steps that we have to put in place in order to get there. I, I'm not saying that, okay, we want to get, a certain goal, we can put five steps. Those are going to be dynamic. I I'm kind of phrasing this as a question, but my opinion is, those are dynamic. That's where we start off today. As we start that journey, we may discover new information or new things that we need to add or subtract. It's, it should always be, I guess, in a way that you can update that.

00:17:04
Steve
Yeah, no, everything's a work in progress. Yeah. I've had people a month after doing events, call me up and go, Hey, Steve, I achieved this goal. I'm like, great, excellent, awesome. I'm jumping up and down and cheering and clapping and here in the studio, and then I'll say, all right, what's next? Like you wanted this, what could this lead to? And then they'll say, well, this, all right, what does that look like? And then I'll say, no, go ahead and put that picture over the other picture, but leave a quarter inch hanging out. If you have a really successful year, your vision board might look like a relief map of Dakotas, but it's always a work in progress. It, no, it's not a, it doesn't have a beginning or an end until you make another board, which is the continuation of your board. That's what I tell people.

00:17:50
Steve
Don't throw these out 10 years from now. You may have five of them or 10 of them in your office. Go back to that first one, look where you are now, it could blow your mind. Yep.

00:18:03
Roy
Which also brings us to a good point that I'd, something I've tried to become more evangelistic about is celebrating our wins. I guess that it also gives us a, something we can look back on because as people as humans, I guess we tend to be hard on ourself. I use this example all the time that, I got 10 things on my to-do list today. I get seven of them done. Instead of celebrating 75%, which if I could hit 75%, I'd be making millions of dollars in baseball. I think about those three that I missed and I spend time, why didn't I get those three? And we started out those three, instead of saying, what, I got seven done. Awesome. And move on. Anyway, just the keeping, the vision boards, I think is a good idea. So we can celebrate our accomplishments.

00:18:56
Steve
Yeah. I have people reach out to me. I, I tell all my clients is to look every time you achieve even an incremental part. I talk about it like an old wooden rollercoaster, because it has to go click, and you got to do every single quick fee to the top of that first hill, because it's all the way the mechanics of it work. Right? You can't skip you. Can't cheat. There's no hacks. There's those super secret formulas. You have to take every single one. You can go over the top and enjoy the ride. Right. I tell all my clients, I said, look, if you have a significant click that happens during the week and you share it on social media, you had better tag me on that because we have a hashtag with my clients. It's hashtag click, baby click. Oh, cool. Celebrate all the incremental.

00:19:38
Steve
I get tagged almost daily on social media. I'm in here jumping up and down, smiling, laughing, Hey, sometimes I cry with my clients. They're so overjoyed at something. I sit there and I get emotional with them. It's, it's beautiful. It's all comes down to those little clicks and you got to celebrate those seven out of 10. And, and believe me, I've been guilty of staring at the three and saying really why exactly I'm celebrating the me. I've done it too. Yep.

00:20:02
Roy
Yep. We do. I think that's the benefit of having a coach, somebody like yourself, because, I call you up and say, Steve, left three on the table today. He'd be like, yeah, but what'd you take off the table, ? And again, if we prioritize where the seven you got done where the high priorities, then it's a win. I mean, we'll take that and win every day. The, yeah know, so.

00:20:28
Steve
I work with my people too, like don't oh, I'm sorry. No, no, you're fine. Go ahead. You work with your people. It's going to say, when we look back at those first steps and we're going to be perfectly imperfect, especially at the beginning, and we're going to be clunky or we're going to be awkward. So wins are going to be ugly. I used to be so bad. I look back at my early stuff and I'd go, oh my God, how did anybody pay me to deliver that? And I would take stuff down offline over the past couple of years, I adopted a new way to look at my earliest steps and my earliest interviews, my earliest creations, I just look at it and I go, oh my gosh, that's adorable. It's soft. Blows it a little bit. It also helps me realize how far I've come.

00:21:08
Steve
So yeah. Cause some people say, well, Steven's just this like, well a week ago you wouldn't have even been done. Just that. So, all right. How, how comfortable are you going to be? Next time? One of my clients did her very first radio guest interview last week on Friday. She was nervous all week and she sent me a message Friday afternoon. She goes, oh my God. That was so amazing. I have another one Monday. I'm so excited. She goes, now I get it. Yeah. Consistency plus momentum equals competence. So she's off and rocking. Well, and.

00:21:36
Roy
A couple of other things is that w we, for some reason we think that when we're at starting 0.0, that we should be the expert and do everything right. And get everything right. Which, that's something, that's a message. I think social media has perpetuated because we only see the good things. We never see those bad things. And, just like myself, there's a lot of things out there that I'm not proud of, but I look at them as, what it was a bad day, or it was that growth phase that, you're getting over. It kind of shows you how far you come. The other part of that is, we're not going to be on our game every day. I would love to because I have awesome guests. And, this is such a fun thing to do this podcast, but I mean, I'm going to tell you, I got times that, maybe I'm just not feeling it that day.

00:22:26
Roy
It's a, a lot clunkier of a show than what some of the better ones are. We just have to say, what, that's life, what is it? Success? Doesn't look like a, a line from the bottom left to the top ride. I mean, it's like, you're all over the place as you go through there. Oh.

00:22:46
Steve
Yeah. I used to tell people, I said, look, it's like dry. It's like trying to draw something on an Etch-a-Sketch in the backseat, Ricard doing 85 miles an hour over speed bumps. That's, that's what the road looks like. Exactly. Exactly.

00:22:59
Roy
Let's talk about what do we want to put on our vision boards and how we select it? Cause we've had a lot of conversations, about happiness and what we think about happiness is, and, so let's talk about what, how would we best suited to select these items that we want to put up?

00:23:24
Steve
I think the first thing people need to understand is that we always hear the whole work-life balance thing. People think it's work in it's life. I prefer Tony Sai was the CEO of Zappos for many years. Very sadly. He passed away recently. One of the concepts that he championed was work-life integration, meaning all parts of your life because you wear so many hats all day long, right? so I work with a life wheel and it's a pretty standard thing. That's out there in personal development. It talks about, let me see if I can get them all, your career, your finances, your physical health, your emotional wellbeing, your relationships, your connection with the world in a real way. Your spirituality, your ethics, morals, integrity are in there as well. All these different parts of your life is where I start with people. I said, look, if even if you just set one goal for each of them for the entire year, right, you're going to be so much farther ahead than most other people.

00:24:16
Steve
You're going to all of a sudden find out that they all work together. Like if you would intentionally say, here are the emotions. I want to feel them on a more regular basis that may change some of your relationships. You may cancel some of them. Yeah. Because they bring you down. You may want to be around the people who put you in that mood all day. Great. If you eat well, if you get enough sleep, if you drink enough water during the day, you're going to have enough energy to do more work, to make your career better, to make more money. That's great. Connection with the real world right now where we're so virtual with a lot of things, a lot of people miss that day-to-day connection. I seen so many people out there saying, when this is all over, I'm going to hug. Like it's ugly because right.

00:24:57
Steve
Cause they want that connection again. Some people and you, and I will find that it's very hard to believe. Some people will. There are people out there whose ethics and morals are really low because they want to succeed financially. That happens as well. What I try to tell people is they go, well, look, mine are all good. I said, okay, think back to the last 10 business decisions and interactions. Were you that ethical integrity, moral person in every single one of them? Yeah. I might've fudged jumping a little. Okay. Well, let's just make sure that from now on, we try to live up to the best of what we feel is the best version of us. Now, what society tells us, what we can live with. Right. And, and all those things added together is what will, can make you happy because if I'm happy, then this must be working in this and this.

00:25:47
Steve
They all work together. Yeah. Because if we, I was a workaholic for my decade on the radio, I worked 50, 60 hours a week and I was deejaying weddings and corporate events every weekend. I absolutely fried myself. I wasn't sleeping. Well, I was eating. I was living on fast food. Yeah. At age 35, I was just falling apart physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, just falling apart. That's what led to me becoming a speaker was that whole year or two in the ashes of all of that. Yeah. That's when I started to learn what I now teach everything I teach now came out of my notes. Cause I'd take a lot of them. Yeah.

00:26:25
Roy
Yeah. It's a, it can't be a detriment, but I'll speak for myself. That when you enjoy what you like, it's like, you never work. You're having fun or that's your hobby, but you can still tend to overdo it. You still have to, I've got somebody that can tap me on shoulder and say time to turn it off and let's have a little us time and, take that time for our relationships instead of, but it's not a drudgery in that, but that can be a drawback because it's not a drudgery. It's fun. There's always like 10 other things to do. And you're always scrambling around that. It can get you in trouble if you're not careful. So, the other thing I, like you saying about drinking water, sleeping and eating. Cause I, I used to have a note over my desk that I had like six or eight things that, I needed to do every day.

00:27:18
Roy
That's it because sleep is so important to us, being happy and healthy, which kind of leads us to the next thing is our happiness. It's a tricky thing because I think on our vision boards, a lot of times we want to put the big house, the fancy car, all these, monetary gains, things like that objects. Very seldom, when I see these, do I, you see people with relationships or health or all those things. I, I guess let's just talk for a minute about that false sense of happiness. I put the big house up there and so I'm working work in, I get it. It's like, okay, now what, there's that let down, you don't get that emotional high. Like I achieved it. It's it's there it's because that's really not where that happiness is going to come from.

00:28:18
Steve
Right. I mean, you were sold a bill of goods because you probably saw some big motivational guy who in a video and he's there kneeling next to her, his Lamborghini with the yacht in the background and the mansion and all that. What most people don't know is all those videos. Most of them are all just rented anyway. Yeah. Those videos, but you were sold what somebody else's opinion was of happiness and you're not emotionally tied to it. Yeah. You were just told that. That's what it is. W you follow that and all of a sudden, if you do happen to achieve it, Hey, rock on good job. You're not emotionally connected to, which is the approach. I try to tell people and some of the people I talk to and say, Steve, all I want is a cabin in the woods with a really good wifi signal.

00:29:02
Steve
I'm happy because I can go fishing at lunchtime or I can go snowshoeing in the winter. They said that, and I, I sit there and I watched them while they're telling me the stories. That's my favorite thing is telling me the story behind that, like, why you want it when I see them light up, I go, okay. I believe you. Yeah. What can we do to get you there? Yeah.

00:29:20
Roy
I'm going to tell you my story because it ties in, it's funny you say the cabin in the woods with wifi. I mean, I've got two or three right at this moment. We're working on the wifi, but, about six years ago, I just made a decision to, sell everything and move out to a little cabin in the woods. And, it sounds counterintuitive, but I'm the happiest now because I don't have all these, all this stuff. I mean, it's just stuff to keep up with, but I get to wake up in the morning and see the deer out in the back feeding, I got woke up last night with, my, one of my cameras outside going off. It was a little family of raccoons that was running across the front porch. So, to me, those are the things that really bring me joy. Every time we get out, walk around and go walk the dogs and all that, it's like, eh, it just makes me well up that, with that happiness.

00:30:20
Roy
It's, like I said, it's counterintuitive because we took a huge step. What a lot of people would say a huge step backwards, but it's been the most awesome thing because this is what we enjoy. This is what we want. And, people talk about being on vacation. I'm like, were lucky. We were on vacation every day. You know, we live in paradise. All we have to do is step outside. I guess the point with all that is just be very selective and be very thoughtful and mindful of what we put on these boards that, what do we want to achieve? What is really going to bring us that happiness?

00:30:56
Steve
Yeah. Most definitely. I, sometimes I have people that say, well, Steve, I've got three or four different ideas. I don't know which one's going to make me happy. I said, okay, you have a mirror in your house anywhere. Yeah. All right. You get the pictures. I want you to look in that mirror and I want you to hold up the picture in the mirror and look at it and then look at yourself. Whichever one makes you smile the most start there, because that way it's really you and it's your heart and it's your mind. It's your, who you really are. Right. That you're going to be that tied to it. I mean, there are people out there and I've seen these by our vision board starter kit. We've got a picture of a house, sit, a car and all this stuff. Like, really somebody asked me to Steven should make a vision board starter kit.

00:31:40
Steve
Oh, hell no, because I don't know what you want. Right. Right. I would never do that to somebody it's all about you. If the lessons I share inspire you to dig deep in yourself and find it rock on, we win. Yeah. To tell someone what success is and have them buy into that, boy, that's going to be a hollow victory when they yeah. They scrape in their way to the top of that hill thinking that's where the happiness was. Well, it was your credit card has already been charged and you just bought somebody else's dream. Yeah, exactly.

00:32:12
Roy
Yeah. We need to really make these personable. And, I think, just give it some thought, it's not something I think you can just put together. I like your idea about holding the picture up in the mirror and saying, this is really me. Because, sometimes it's not, sometimes it's what we expect, what we think society expects of us, which it's, that's just, that leads to a lot of heartache. Yeah. And some of us are again, because.

00:32:41
Steve
Some of those victories are really all over. Yeah.

00:32:43
Roy
Yeah. Some of us, we're lucky enough to find out what we really love and what we really want and are blessed. Some people, I think, I guess you just have to do a lot of soul searching and a lot of reflection, take some time out for yourself just to be alone with your thoughts. I think that's something that we don't do enough. These days we've got so much stimulation with computers and phones and go in here and go in there that we really need to take more time to just be with our thoughts.

00:33:13
Steve
Yeah. And, and I, I recommend to people, even if you burn it after I don't care, put pen to paper, write in, just go be brutally honest with yourself about start off with what you love most about your life right now. Like what's really going well, what's making you happy. It could be the tiniest thing that you make the best pancakes of anybody you've ever met. Awesome. Start with that. I make great pancakes and just start from there about what you like, and then switch gears and say, all right, what's not perfect yet. Yeah. And then this is nothing I've created. I mean, other people may industry say this. I want people to understand that I'm sharing what has come into my circle. I then share back. That's one of the best things is I put pen to paper every day. I start everyday with three moments of gratitude, the things I'm thankful for.

00:34:00
Steve
You want to talk about fueling your fire. You write down the three weirdest cool, fun, awesome, positive things that happened to you yesterday in less than a line each five years later, you did it. Right. You're going to feel that same joy just by reading it. And I've proven it over and over. Yep.

00:34:16
Roy
Yeah. Very important. Especially, in today, I think sometimes we can get hung up in that negative, but we do have some, most of us, there are people that have tragedies and I don't want to make light of that or be little them. We do go through those periods in life, but like went on a walk this morning and it was nice and crisp. When were coming back, the base, which is quite a ways away, they were playing, the, national Anthem. I just, were just talking amongst ourselves, like how cool is that? that we can hear this national Anthem from the base where we are, it's coming across some traffic and other stuff, that you'd think would cut it off, but it's just those little bitty things. I think when you have a clear head, you can just be, thankful for other people might consider that to be corny stuff, but it's really something to be, that we are thankful for.

00:35:15
Steve
Yeah. If you can find those moments every day, I mean, gosh, at the end of 2020, I saw these things on social media, Facebook described 20 in three words and I saw like 20, 30 different versions of total crap storm just in a row. I mean, I'm not even going to say what some of the words were because I want to respect your show when I wrote, learned new ways. Yeah. Because it did, it taught me, if anything else, the isolation and happened to switch to virtual actually is inspired me to, with my digital team, create new ways to deliver my programs and products throughout the world that we hadn't even thought of prior to that. Right. Now that's the basis of the core part of what we do. I can't say it was a throwaway year and I still managed to even in 2020 even been in the pandemic and one of my business just getting a wrecking ball to it, the DJ business is just gone because there's no events.

00:36:10
Steve
Yeah. I still wrote about a thousand moments of gratitude. Wow. Last year in the midst of it all. I've got close to a thousand reasons why last year was pretty dang good. Still despite everything else not to minimize. Cause I know a lot of people, I was hit very hard by it, but I choose to just keep finding that little bit of light coming through the clouds, even though where it is, storm it out there. Yeah. I just keep trying to follow wherever that lights hit and I want to stand there and look up through. Yeah. And you.

00:36:40
Roy
Know, my, I think my priest put it the best that I've heard in a while is that our minds are grinders and they grind 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We get to choose what we grind through there, whether it's the negative stuff that we pick up or the positive. And, I think in our previous conversation, we talked about this, that as long as we're grinding positive, there's no room for that negative, to move in there that we can kind of keep it pushed out. Not that we're not going to have a bad day. Not that something's not going to upset us, but when it does, we can think about, yeah, that went really bad, not happy, but let's think about what I am happy about for about five minutes and put that smile.

00:37:24
Steve
If nothing else, it puts us in a good place to take the next step. Like we're not just taking that negativity because what a lot of people fail to remember, we are 100% responsible for how we react and respond to what happens to us. It's on us too many people forget that, negative in negative, right. Back out nag notified. Yeah. Unfortunately. Yeah.

00:37:50
Roy
Yeah. We control our joy and I think that's, I will say that I have been guilty of this and it still happens is something bad happens in the morning and it just wrecks your whole day. I mean, you have to tell the wife and the kids and the dog stay away from me cause it's bad. He, at the end of the day, you think, well, why did I let that thing wreck my whole day? Because again, so many other great things, but then it kills your productivity. It kills your creativeness. It just really can set you on a bad path to spiral out of control. Best to, be in touch with yourself, pick up on those feelings so you can, kinda redirect.

00:38:32
Steve
Yeah. Or that it happened to me. Very, very. As you're saying that you see me nodding, I'm like I'm reliving a recent experience where I was trying to do an act of kindness and help a family member. I was frustrated because I had to help somebody else I felt should have been helping. Yeah. I had a compressor in the back of my Honda CRV and it rolled in the corner and the handle went right through one of the side windows and smashed it to bits. That day nobody wanted to come hear me. I finally got myself back under control. It took about a day and a half. I realized, look, nothing good has come from this, me being this way. I threw my little tantrum, I stomped my feet. I said a couple of loud words that my mom would probably roll her eyes at and get over it and went out and earn the money to pay for the replacement of them.

00:39:24
Steve
So.

00:39:24
Roy
No, and I think that's, we have to let ourselves feel that way. We can't not feel the upset, but I think it's, like how long do we let that go on? And, it's such a such good advice to just have our little, have our moment and then pick it back up and put the smile back on and figure out how we're going to get past this.

00:39:48
Steve
I think we should actually videotape ourselves having our little tantrums. When we're better look back at it and go really? Yeah. Oh my gosh. Again, oh my gosh, that's adorable. Look at him, throwing his little fit, look at what we stomped this feet. He's giving the finger to the door and it's some of it just comes off real silly when we get back in a good head space and we got to blow off steam now, and then it happens. It just does because I can't stand the people who say every day above ground's a great day, because that is the biggest steaming pile of crap ever. They're not all good, but it's how we react and respond to what, how we choose to proceed. That's that's what makes it a good and kind of tying.

00:40:34
Roy
That back to, our eating, drinking water and, getting our sleep and our exercise because that's the other thing, I try to, if I can get out and take a few walks every day, it makes me feel so much better, but I tend to handle adversity better when I'm, doing what I need to be doing for myself. We'll put it that way. I don't know how, when I'm taking care of me, it's like adversity doesn't. If you've been up all night eaten, been through the drive through the last three meals that you had, some little bitty thing will tend to set you off versus, when we're in a good space, we can deal with it.

00:41:16
Steve
Yup. Yup. It starts right from the get go first thing in the morning. I mean, I used to be like, grab some toast or if there's some leftover bacon or what we call paper bacon, you can cook it in the microwave in like 26 seconds. One day I said, look, I'm just feeling sluggish by nine o'clock. As I got bacon grease in my blood stream. I started just this mantra in my head. I said, let's take a trip to mango swamp. I started making smoothies with, either kale or, collard greens are real good for your heart. Mango or pineapple, a banana, some yogurt, some cinnamon in there too. Cause that's good for an appetite suppressant and some coconut water. I just started making these smoothies a couple of days a week and it only takes me a couple minutes. Yeah. And it tastes so good.

00:42:07
Steve
Ours got to remember to rinse the cups cause otherwise the kale gets stuck inside the straw and then it won't come out. My wife doesn't like that word. I just, I get up in the morning and I'll just be like, I'm feeling tired. I bet to get down to mango swamp. And I just gave it that name. So, someday I'll have a smoothie stand called mango swamp. Nice. It gets me in a good spot. I got better energy all day. It's these little decisions we make in getting enough sleep. If I'm not feeling it in the morning, I'll hit snooze and go back to sleep for an hour and wake up better. I just always do.

00:42:40
Roy
Yeah. When you, when you open up your smoothie truck, if you'll, park it at Hampton beach out there, I'll be one of the first customers lining up.

00:42:49
Steve
I'm going to put it right near blinks fried dough, which is legendary out that I'm just sit there and cry because I'll actually, I learned how to make fried dough as well. So, but the mango small swamp smoothie is probably a little better for me than all that fried note. Right. Exactly.

00:43:05
Roy
All right. Steve, we appreciate you taking time out of your day to be with us for sure. Today. It's been an awesome conversation. A lot of great things to think about before I let you go. A couple of questions first off is what is something that you use in your daily life, professional, personal what's something that you do that you really feel adds value?

00:43:25
Steve
I think the greatest thing I ever learned was the lesson I got from one of my grandfather and he never actually said it, but he lived it. It was just real simple leave at least one situation a day better than you found it. It could be with a kind word, an act of kindness. You could just smile at somebody cause you never know how their day's going. Right. If you just look for that opportunity to keep your head on a swivel. If you're one of those people that says, well, I never have ideas. Next time you go grocery shopping. If you see an abandoned carriage out there in the parking lot, don't complain that people are lazy and left it there, put it back in the corral or bring it all the way back to the store. If you can even better wipe the handle down and offer it to someone else.

00:44:05
Steve
Awesome.

00:44:07
Roy
Yeah, I think once we, once you do that enough, you'll start picking up things, but there's always something we can do to help somebody out. All right. Well, great. Well, Steve, how can people reach out and get ahold of you and get started, letting you help them coach them through this process?

00:44:24
Steve
Yeah. It's nice and easy. If you go to motivationalfirewood.com. Everything I have is right there under that roof. So motivationalfirewood.com.

00:44:33
Roy
Okay. Awesome. Well, thanks again, Steve. We appreciate it. A great conversation. You can find us of course, at www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com. We're on all the major social media platforms. A, a video link of this will go up on YouTube as well when we get the, episode published. Until next time, take care of yourself and take care of your business.

www.motivationalfirewood.com

www.businessofbusinesspodcast.com

Get Happy In Life By Taking It One Thought At A Time with Joseph Costello

Is your way not working? You're always tired? You're always sick? You're all was broke? You don't believe in you. At that point of time, it was like as if there was just one little glimmer of hope. I was on the track of achievement and I was chasing achievement, but I ended up fairly own fulfilled.

About Joseph

Early in my life I found myself unfulfilled and working a job that my father & grandfather had worked before me. This lack of fulfillment led me on a journey of self-discovery.

That journey led me to work alongside some of the pioneers of personal development, giants like Bob Proctor, Tony Robbins, Dr. Joe Dispenza & Paul McKenna. Thus, I went from a €30k a year job to a million in a short time and built companies that generated income of 7 & 8 figures.

The key to my success was learning a unique set of tools which enabled me to start living internally. My passion in life is to share what I know with others and to help my clients live the life they’ve always wanted.

Global Expert In Human Mindset

Do you ever wonder if you have reached your true potential in life? What could you achieve if you identified the blocks that are holding you back from being the best version of yourself? You have seen others succeed in the same field and wondered how they do it?

Well the most successful athletes work together with their coaches to get the best out of themselves, this is exactly what I do – I work together with Business Professionals, Business Owners and Entrepreneurs who want to invest in themselves, to be a better version of themselves, and to become the best in their field.

Joseph devotes his life to helping others realize their full potential.

You may not know where to start when looking for a business mentor or what is involved when working together. You need reassurance that we are the right fit for you and your needs – have a look at some areas we highlighted as problematic and see if they resonate with you. If they do or you have any questions, book your free discovery call – where we will establish if we can work together and if I can help get you to where you want to be in life.

Start your journey today.

www.josephcostellomentor.com

www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com

Full Transcript Below

 Get Happy In Life By Taking It One Thought At A Time with Joseph Costello
00:00:08
Roy
Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Business of Business Podcast. I'm your host, Roy, of course we are the podcast that brings you a wide range of, professionals and guests at, are able to speak to a lot of diverse topics. Today we have a very timely guest, Joseph Costello. He is a performance coach. Now the interesting thing is he left school when he was 15, but he's been able to start two firms that both ran into the seven and eight figures. He works very closely with Bob Proctor and, one thing we're going to talk about in kind of his messages, one thought at a time. Joseph, thank you for taking time out of your day. Like I said, a pre-show very timely for me because, just, we're busy professionals a lot going on a lot of thoughts, a lot of things we need to do a lot of things we want to do.

00:01:01
Roy
So, welcome to the show and tell me where we start.

00:01:06
Joseph
Roy. Thanks very much for having me here today. I'm excited to speak to you and your listeners, and let's just hope they understand the Irish accent. So.

00:01:16
Roy
Yeah. Now it's good. It's great. They probably understand you better than me most times. Tell us about your story. You, you're a performance coach, but you left school when you were 15, but you were able to start these to a hugely successful company. Can you kind of walk us through that ?

00:01:37
Joseph
Yeah, so, I left school at 15 and I followed in my brother's footsteps. He left school at 15 and I went and worked in a coal yard. Where we're alike salmon and we're swimming, upstream war has gone on before us, right at the age of 18, I went and I worked with my father as a civil servant. I was the fourth generation to work as a civil servant walk. We do. Between the ages of 18 to 20 Trey, I ended up very unhappy, very unfulfilled to the point of I had a very negative attitude towards life. What are the things that I teach now is generally your attitude towards life will determine life's attitude towards you. What I was putting out was generally shown up into my lifestyle. At the age of 20 tray, I had a mental breakdown and I got introduced to Bob Proctor.

00:02:50
Joseph
It was one of these, conversations that you had and it was Joe, your way is not working. You're always tired. You're always sick. You're at all was broke. He says, you don't believe in you, but I believe in you. At that point of time, it was like as if there was just one little glimmer of hope. I remember reading one of his first books, you were born rich. From Dan, over the last that 18 years at my life has been devoted to business and personal development. The last two years, I've really talked to personal development and performance coach into a whole new level because that I had started at two seven figure companies and two eight figure companies, but it's like, we can go through life. I was on the track of achievement and I was chasing achievement, but I ended up fairly own fulfilled.

00:03:56
Joseph
It's like as if, people looked in from the outside, he has the big house, he has the big car, everybody's healthy and businesses is going well, but there was something missing within me. When I looked at that soul thing was, I believe my purpose in life was to help people wake up one Tod at a time. That's one of my favorite slogans is we are aware we are out in life and it's, our TinCan is produced in our choices. Our choices is produced in our actions. When we do actions, enough times they become behaviors and that's going to produce an experience or a result. We can generally end up like the hamster in the wheel. And, I was the hamster in the wheel on many different parts of my life. I know what it's like to be the hamster. Right.

00:04:54
Roy
Yeah, exactly. And I really liked that positive message. I was told a few years ago. My priest very insightful, but he said that our minds are like grinders and they grind all the time. So, we get to choose what we grind there though. I think that, to your point that, we have to have those positive thoughts and affirmations about ourselves because typically I guess I'm gonna, I'll put this as a question to you, but typically we are the most hardest on ourselves. Is that correct?

00:05:30
Joseph
Yeah, it's fair. It's very funny. I was listening to a fella called Neville Goddard to smart and, Neville Goddard. It was, it was all about self criticism and we are very critical of ourselves. Generally if we born into a family, that's very supportive, we're going to grow up to be a confident type of that human being. I was born into a family and my father used to be quite critical of me. I think his father was quite critical of him. Generally then at that inner critic is born. How do we make friends with that inner critic? And how do we, come to a point that we start to love and support those because how we think and how we feel inside of us is going to turn into an hour reflection of ourself. Right? So again, for years I was chasing achievement for that pat on my back, that was never going to come from my father.

00:06:32
Joseph
I was always quite critical of myself. I was successful in finance, but I wasn't successful inside of me. In the last few years now I have to really go back and look at me and make friends with me and talk nicely to me. And thank God. Now that started to show up at my outer world or my reality. Yeah.

00:06:52
Roy
Yeah. I think, you mentioned going back and continuing this process is that, it's not simple to change our mindset. It, it takes work. We have to get up every day and we really have to put some thought into it that, today we're going to be positive and chase those negative thoughts, out of our head before we let them take control.

00:07:17
Joseph
Yeah. It's like a lot of what I would work with is a thing called the paradigm. The paradigm is that multitude of habits, it's that mental program that's actually running unconsciously. So, if we're awakened and we're not, if we don't know where we're going, we can drive out our driveway to small and we can either go left or we can go, right. We can go around in circles or we can fall into other people's goals or society's goals. I believe we're goal seek and organisms and heir purpose in life is to grow. People come to me and they say a goal is to get a bigger house, to get a bigger car where I'm saying, well, if you grow as an individual inside of your house, your career, your business, as a byproduct of you growing as an individual. We need to be changed in the paradigm.

00:08:17
Joseph
That paradigm is that multitude of habits that we've inherited from of mom, of dad we've grew up in a house that speaks one language will speak one language. If you are bilingual, we'll speak two languages. We're just picking up what they have done over the years. If we're grown up and there was a lack of money, maybe we're going to have money issues if we're grown up and, generally you are eating unhealthy well, then more than likely are going to be overweight. I like to go to the point of source and find out, well, what is it that you want in life? And when we find out what we want, we can start moving towards that. 90% of people I talk to will tell me what the Dole want. By the fact of telling me what the Dole one, that's where their awareness is, that's where the focus is.

00:09:12
Joseph
That's where our energy is under create more of the same. Yeah.

00:09:16
Roy
We start to retool that thinking do, my understanding is we need to focus on self, our happiness, what makes it, and I'm not talking about, we think, the car, the house, the money, we think that makes us happy, but really, the happiness comes inside from other things. That's really, where is that where we really want to focus in the beginning is, what is it going to take to make us happy, healthy? And I assume that's eating, it's a combination of a lot of things, the eating, right, the feeling good mentally, physically, and being able to accomplish the things that we want to.

00:09:59
Joseph
I think that once we're moving towards a goal in some part of our life, and we're grown as an individual, we're tapping into where soul's purposes for us to grow, and if we're grown and that doesn't matter where we are in life, I teach a thing called a C type goal. A C type goal, it has, they're scared and excited chip. If we're not getting scared, aren't excited at the same time, we're within our comfort zone and there's no growth within our comfort zone and people go through life and, we can have these different things we aim for. Okay. I get the mortgage paid or, when I get the business to a certain turnover or profit, and we're putting our happiness dependent on that, and when that point comes, all of a sudden you will get a fairly rude awakening because it's like, well, what's next, right? So it's, again, it's sorta going within and sorted going towards something in your life.

00:11:06
Joseph
I like to think true wealth is, to have a, a good mind body and soul meaningful relationships. If you focus on you grown as that individual, the house and the characters automatically can get bigger, if that's what you want, ? Right.

00:11:25
Roy
How many goals, cause there's, we can sit down and make a list of a lot of them, but do you focus one to five or do you just, I guess, write down everything, kind of do the brainstorming activity, just let everything flow out, think about it for a day or two and then come back and prioritize those.

00:11:47
Joseph
I generally, teach that idea have a goal within finance, a goal within, so finance that could be in a career or your business you'd have a goal within your relationships. So, we start to spend more time with your loved ones. That to maybe partake in your kids' hobbies, is that to play a game of golf or is that to enjoy going for a massage more often, and then for you to be grown within your mind, your body and your soul. I like to be all was grown as an individual and tapping into different people from different walks of lives, ? So I'm only back from Cancun there. Last week I was over with Dr. Joe Dispenza, we done a week of meditation and really learning to go inside the view. It's great to make me like-minded people on the same frequency. Right?

00:12:46
Roy
Yeah. You hear that so often too, I think, is that, kind of, starting to, this is also to surround ourselves with those like-minded people, because typically we can get surrounded by people that just suck the life out of you are such a negative influence that we have to really think about the environment that we live in as well. Correct.

00:13:08
Joseph
Yeah. So Dr. Joe Dispenza says, is your environment control in your thinking or does your tink and control in your environment now? So at this minute, I know there's a lot of stuff going on with the big C word, what the, some people go and they get so caught up in that, or under some industries affected on others. And, we can get caught up to the notifications to Facebook, the news, and you will be afraid to do anything in life. I am aware of what's going on out there. I'm aware of how I should click dock myself in the safety measures, got to do with it, but I'm still moving forward in my life. I still want to grow my business. I still want to grow me. Your environment control and your tink and art is your tink and control in your environment. My thinking has gone to control my days that I can go in.

00:14:07
Joseph
I have my tank and this goal of control my business, my relationships, my mind, my body and soul, I'm conscious of what I need to do to travel safety. Or if I can go now to wear a mask and to sanitize and to isolate, I am aware of that, but it's not going to control me. Right?

00:14:28
Roy
No, that's good. It's, some of us, myself, I'll say, have, has of survivor's guilt through this fortunate. Nobody I know has been really affected, but it seems that, we've kind of thrived and flourished through this. It's given us a lot of time to reset and you said, put our focus back on some relationships and some of the basics of life, not always out running around, maybe sometimes going in directions that really aren't helping us go to the goal that we're trying to seek.

00:15:07
Joseph
It's funny. I saw something on a green card. Someone sent me the other day. It's one of the only pandemics that dealt with keeping us apart has brought us together. Right? And it was a great tagline. What keeps us apart has brought us together. When we look at things in life, I teach the law of polarity, which says everything has an opposite. We have a look, we have a down, we have an inside, we have an outside, we have a negative, we have a positive. When, so when some things are so negative, they can be so positive. There's plenty of negatives out there, but there is positives in everything in life. When we're on that frequency of trying to look at things like the glass as being half full, we can spot the positives, can we focus on the positives? And it was like, when I was at the age of 20 tree, I did want the good old beds I did want to go to work.

00:16:13
Joseph
And my attitude towards life was determined. And my average life's attitude towards me. And I could only see that negative. Again, I'm not being condescending of what's going on. It's just something that I want to choose to look at through my eyes. I encourage people to do this. Yeah,

00:16:33
Roy
Yeah. Sometimes that, and the, I guess the other converse of that is this pandemic, it seemed like, has brought to the surface a lot of anger. How can we deal when, outside things make us angry? it can take over and take control of our day, our week or whatever. That's one thing that I see is that, we can disagree. I may not like, somebody politics, I may not, I may have a different religion, but, we don't really have to be angry at that other person and lash out. To me, that's something that is one of the things that I have really seen come out. How can we deal with that if we kind of have that anger issue?

00:17:24
Joseph
Well, one of the things that I would teach a lot of the time and I would actually do, myself, when you go off track is gratitude. We can sit down and be grateful for the body, that we're in, be grateful for the chair that I'm sitting in, be grateful for the computer and the microphone and talk and to, be, start to be grateful for your family, for your business, for the experience Julie, and no two things kind of exist within the same space. If you're starting to be grateful and you start feeling that well, you can feel angry at the same time. I, you find that, we go through life and sometimes we veer off to the right. I would say that's like the rumble strips on the road. When you hit the rumble strips, where, when we're veering off to the right, what I tried to do, or maybe it's the left in American steroid, and I try and be grateful and center myself now, does that always work? No.

00:18:33
Joseph
Do I get angry? Yes. With generally it's a coping mechanism back now to bring you back on track and your consult to say, okay, well, I might have to take control and it's nearly like a learned behavior. If you can spare to learn how to be grateful in times like this, it becomes a bit easier. I'm not saying it's a light switch, we just do it and it turns off, but it does become.

00:19:01
Roy
Yeah. I think that's great advices that we have to examine our life every day, sometimes two or three times a day. But, we have to stop and think about those things that we are even in some of our worst moments, there are things that are blessings. If you, if you have health issues, if you've got your family and they're supportive, there are, you can go through all the different scenarios, but basically they're usually we can always find something that we can focus on that went ride and it kind of gets into the next thing I was going to ask you about is, so when we set a goal, just like myself, I'm always, I want to get healthy. I can set on the couch and eat some chips and watch some TV and think I w I really want to get healthy and probably not going to happen.

00:19:54
Roy
But, so when we set goals, do we need to sit down and define those steps that we need to take that are going to lead us to success with that goal?

00:20:06
Joseph
Well, one of the first things that, well, the first two things that are you sorta teachers, number one, is we need to make the decision on what we want. A lot of people will make a preference at that point of time. They say, I want to get healthy, and I want to do this. Generally what happens is their memories of the past that failed, that the dire fails that the gym is going to meet your future predictable. We need to create a new model, a new vision of the future, and we need to make a decision, not a preference. Decision comes from the Latin word to put off. We to actually caught ourselves off and raise the frequency, raise the level of energy, raise the level of the motion to be stronger than what has gone on before. What we experienced then is does a ting called that dyno and dune factor.

00:21:05
Joseph
So, someone that smokes probably knows they shouldn't smoke and they know it's healthy people. They still deal with someone that's on a diet, knows the shotgun have that slice of cake at put, they still have it. And it's about the intention. It's about it. Desire. It's about sat and soaked in place and actually born in the boats and going after it. What I mean? What a higher level of intensity, what's good for maybe someone that has failed so many times is having accountability partners too, that could be down to joined and some program having a personal trainer, maybe, a nutritionist that's there that just going to give you that little bit better, that person to make you accountable. That just gives you that little bit of confidence until you gain a better momentum. If a car on a stock, the hardest part to get that car move and is that actually forest step or two, but when that car gets moved and it starts to accelerate and builds a bit of momentum, so we're looking what can help you build that momentum? And I work with a lot of that entrepreneurs, small, medium enterprises CEOs.

00:22:27
Joseph
That's something I do is just to make that person accountable. Sometimes it's tough. Love is what you need to get that car move and, ,

00:22:38
Roy
No, exactly. I, I really like what you said about raising the intensity, because I'm just thinking of my own life. That that is some things that, if we really feel like that, and we really believe in, and we really want it, we need to increase that intensity and not just think about it. So that's great advice. I think the other thing, another thing I find or have found in the past with myself and others is, it has to do with gratitude, but it also has to do with our, being kind to ourself that if we have a list of, tend to dues today, and so we get seven of them completed, w we can usually spend a lot of our time beating ourself up over those three that we didn't get completed instead of rejoicing in the seven that we did. Then, just saying, we do the, we got to, we did the best we can do if we did the best we can do, we have to realize that and be able to move on to the next day and not because what I've found in the past is those three today carry over tomorrow.

00:23:44
Roy
You're not quite as up tomorrow. It just, it can take you down a steep staircase if you let it.

00:23:53
Joseph
Yeah. I suppose that's going to be down to that inner self-talk of you making a choice of either being grateful for getting your seven things done today, or focusing on the treatings you didn't get done. Right. And everything in the universe is energy. We live in an ocean of motion. And, when you can learn to be grateful for the things that you don't today, one of the things that I, ask people as you can be grateful for this bottle of water, I can be grateful for this microphone, but can you be grateful for the things that haven't came to you yet? So there's an element of fate there. Fate, like all they would say is to see the invisible, to believe in the incredible and to achieve what the masses think is the impossible. Can you be grateful for seeing you with the fit and healthy body that you want to see yourself in?

00:24:54
Joseph
Because Buddha said there's no such thing as the future. There's only now because how you think and how you feel now is going to create your future interests. That conversation, it had five seconds ago was gone already. So accurate toll allow, will say now. He says now interrupting now, right? So it's, can you see ourselves so we can all be grateful for the things we have to, I'm asking you, can you be grateful for the things that you want and see, hear, feel, taste, touch, and smell it in the now, because by you do that, you're starting to program your mind in the now. Okay.

00:25:42
Roy
That's interesting. Can we touch on the one thought at a time? Yeah. Yeah.

00:25:51
Joseph
We get up in the day, a lot of us is just going to go on to an automatic program. We get off at the age of 35, 90 5% of what we do is an unconscious habit program. We get up to, we check the phone and the morning did we check the WatsApp? Do we check the telegram? Did we check the Facebook? Do we check the notifications? Do we have a shower? We go downstairs. We probably eat the same cereal in the same bowl, have the cup of tea or the cup of coffee and the same cop looking out the window in the same direction. This goes along during the day, you answer the same emails. You see the same people, the push, the same buttons at the same time. And we're on a program. Now, if you can get up in the morning and you can start asking your self, the question, well, what is it that I actually want?

00:26:58
Joseph
A lot of people tink by doing mental activity. If you could open them on, and then you answer the emails and you do the same thing every day, that's mental activity, doing the same things over and over tink, and has actually taken you off the hamster on the wheel. I'm actually saying, well, Roy, what do you want in life? And whether that's within your business, that's within your mind, your body, your soul, your relationships, or your career, and to actually ting. Bob Proctor says 2% of people think at 3% tink detained and 95%, the driver died on 10 because if they actually talk about it, they wouldn't be doing what they're doing. So I like to take time out. My, every morning I spent two hours, I do an hour and 15 minutes meditation or Dr. Joe Dispenza meditation. I would sit down and I would read some chapter from some like Neville Goddard, Bob Proctor, Dr.

00:28:06
Joseph
Joe Dispenza. I would do of journal. I like to create my destiny, rod or Don beam, rather than let my environment, create my tink. Tinkering is the highest function of creation and people get caught up in the mental activity thinking extinct. One Tod at a time is, are you actually tinkered? Is that long-winded? But I think that no,

00:28:37
Roy
No, no. I think that's good. We actually have to put some thought into things, not just go through those motions that we've been, I guess it's the same as that, we can't continue to do the same thing and expect something different to happen. We have to actually give some thought into where we're going to go. W and you brought up journaling. I hear a lot of that. I journal myself, but I like to ask, how people journal, just to get a sense of, like, a lot of times, it's just more my thoughts about what is happening at that moment. Maybe something that's happened in the past, but, as you've been talking, it's like, it makes me think of, maybe I should be thoughtful about what, where I'm going, what I want, journaling about what that next step is or how I'm feeling about that. Can you give us some insight into, to journaling how you do it?

00:29:33
Joseph
How do I do my journaling is, if I do a meditation, sometimes I might get some sort talk within the meditation or intuition, and I'll write down what came to me, because generally when you close your eyes and your clothes off the outside world, you're not getting influence from the outside world. You're actually more connected to what it is you want. So I might write down that. The second part of my journaling will be me working on a thing called self image. In the 1960s, there was a doctor called Dr. Maxwell Maltz. He wrote a book called Psycho-Cybernetics and he was a plastic surgeon. What do you realize this? He was doing a lot of surgery on different people, and someone might come in for the nose job. Although there was a physical change, in some cases, there was a psychological change, but in other things there wasn't.

00:30:34
Joseph
We realized we had two images and the first image is the way we walked away. We talked the way we brush her hair. The second image is that inner image inside of you. All you do, right? My image of who I want to be calm in the neck. I see myself as a calm, confident, capable, relaxed presenter, speak in front of thousands of people being a good father, being kind to my wife and my kids being kind to me. That's the hardest part of being kind to me. I see everything in the now because the past is gone and the future is only getting created now. By you doing this every day, constant space, repetition changes the paradigm, which is that multitude of habits. Your change in your programming to be combat Paris, and then the now and there, no two things can exist within the same place.

00:31:42
Joseph
If you think our, of our conscious mind is like a well till failed, and it can only accept what you plant in it. If you do this on a daily basis, all of a sudden you're going to change, how will you tink, how you fail, how will you act and the results that you have. Okay.

00:32:04
Roy
That's awesome. Joseph, thank you so much for sharing that. And, it's, you've given us a lot to think about today. Before we kinda wrap up, I do have one question, cause you've talked about a lot of things, but what is something that you do during your day that you feel adds the most value, either professional personal, and I know we've talked about journaling and meditation, so, if it's those or if you want to choose something else, that's good too.

00:32:37
Joseph
Sometimes it's just bringing yourself back to the here and now and being aware of where you are of what's going on around you. Rod are done being in your head and being in your phone or being in your drive and being in the meat and then being in your email sometimes to actually listen to what's going on around you. How many times is the board singing, but we don't even hear them singing. Correct. How many times is there a nice flower in front of us, but we don't, smell it. Be in the now and be more in the now I know the now is your future. Okay.

00:33:20
Roy
Well, great. Well, Joseph, I want everybody to reach out. I think you can have a positive influence, on the audience. If somebody is seeking help, tell them, kind of who is your client, how you can help them. Of course, how they can reach out and get ahold of you.

00:33:38
Joseph
I deal with anyone that's in a nine to five job to SME small, medium businesses, to big corporations, to CEOs. It's just, people has gone to listen to me. They might like me some won't. If you do like me, jump on it's Joseph Costello mentor I'm on Facebook. I'm on Instagram, Joseph Costlow mentor, send me a DM. I'll jump on a call, which I am, who knows, maybe I can wake you up one time at the time who knows where the future brings us. Yep.

00:34:15
Roy
All right. That's awesome. Great information. Appreciate you taking time out of your day. Again, it's been a real pleasure. That's going to do it for another episode of The Business of Business Podcast. You can of course find us on all major podcast platforms, iTunes, Google, Stitcher, Spotify. If we're not one that you use, please reach out. I'd be glad to get you added. Be glad to add that to our, group that we put out to now. Also there will be a video of this interview, go up on YouTube. When the episode goes live, you can find us at www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com and all social media. And, again, we appreciate it. Until next time, take care of yourself and take care of your business.

www.josephcostellomentor.com

www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com

 

Use LinkedIn To Your Advantage, A Step By Step Guide - Commenting On Others Posts

If you aren't already using LinkedIn there is no time like the present to start. In the first episode of this series I go over how to fill out you profile completely. In the second episode I cover adding new connections. In this episode I go over liking and commenting on other post and why this is a good way to build followers and reciprocated.

About Podcast

The Business of Business Podcast approaches a range of different topics pertaining to business. Host, Roy Barker, will be interviewing guest speakers to talk about a wide range of subjects from employee retention, to sales, content creation, processes and procedures, documentation, and much more.

The podcast is also available for download on iTunes, GooglePlay, Spotify, Stitcher, and more. Search Roy Barker, or The Business of Business Podcast.

You can find out more about Roy Barker at www.roybarker.com 

www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com

Full Transcript Below

Use LinkedIn To Your Advantage, A Step By Step Guide - Commenting On Others Posts

00:00:09
Roy
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the business of business podcast. I'm your host, Roy. I do bring you a wide variety of guests, a CRO talk about a diverse set of topics today. We're going to continue a series that I'd started a few weeks ago. The, it's the kind of LinkedIn for beginners. I guess we talked the, in the first episode, talked about the, filling out your profile, kind of walked through it, how to do it and making sure that we get it filled out completely. In the second episode, we talked about just making connections, how you go through and look for people that you can connect with. And, anyway, if you haven't heard those, give those listen today, we're going to talk about actually commenting, liking, and commenting on other people's work. It's, in the day of, Facebook, most people know how to do it, but there's some that still unsure.

00:01:06
Roy
We thought we'd just take a look and, go through and at least start that process. Probably in the next episode, what we'll do is look at making some of our own original post and maybe touch on long form content, but a good way to, if you're just now building up your followers and your contacts, one thing you want to do is you want to go through and see what they're posting and you don't, I wouldn't do it for things that you really don't like, or, but if you find things that people are posting that speak to you or that you agree with, it's always nice just to give them a little, see here, just give them a little, like, there's all kinds of thing, emoji things there that I don't really use all that, but at least we just reach out and say, Hey, we liked that.

00:02:02
Roy
Even make a little comment if we need to, or want to, I'm going to go over to somebody that hosts quite a bit of good material. Monique's been on the show, so I know her, I know how, I know what she posts about, so let's go over here. She had a great, she had a really good collage of things that I wanted to look at, but we'll see what she's been posting. See if we can find one. Yeah, that's a little more difficult looking down through somebody else's posts while we're on the, where you're taping, but it just is what it is. We can look down through there without, to, yeah. Another big thing on, LinkedIn these days or the surveys, which I don't mind taking. I've done a few and I think that they're interesting. It may be, it's not always the intended audience.

00:03:26
Roy
You may get comments or people that take participate that really aren't in the group that you would love to be targeting, but it can give you general idea. Yeah. She's asking about, what functionality would we like LinkedIn to add or enable let's just go with our prescheduled videos. That would be pretty good. Here's one that she's done breaking down the digital strategies, a seven step framework. We're going to put a comment. Okay. Just as simple as great info.

00:04:16
Speaker 1
Oops. Nope. If we spelled info, right.

00:04:22
Roy
We'll spell it out. So we just comment on her. Let's go over here to another contact that we just had. We just aired her episode. You go, well, Rico was talking about, intellectual property. We'll see what she's got, what she's yeah. The thing that this will do it, a lot of times people reciprocate like Monique. I know she con she will comment and like a bunch of stuff that I have done. It that's one reason it's important to reach out to people either that you follow people that you, connected with is just to, show them that you're here and you're still, watching their stuff. It just, it will lead to them reciprocating that. Because a lot of times when they post, when they comment or like your stuff, it puts it out in front of their audience too. It's a, a great way to reach an extended audience.

00:05:47
Speaker 1
Let me see what she's got. L what else she's got, we just commented on that one,

00:05:55
Roy
But this is important. We, to, I, I feel it's important, especially marketing and sales, we want to disseminate information and even if we are in human resources and wanting to attract workers, this is a great way to put out, what's the company about what are their beliefs? what about our, what about the, products services that we have, without just constantly be just, sending emails or cold calling people. This is a great way to put information out there. If you get in front of a big enough audience, you will always find people that are interested. It's a great way to educate and attract, track people to your profile as well. So let's see.

00:06:51
Speaker 1
This is one talking about a career, so we'll just And we just general would just be general at this one and just put thanks for sharing.

00:07:14
Roy
That's the way that you want to go through and comment on your connections. Now, once you start building up a lot of connections, then when you go to log on and go to the home, you'll see your feed. You can look down through, and, I know some of it's very informational, some of it's motivational, but it's always good to look down through here and see what others have going on.

00:07:45
Speaker 1
There's one positive, mine's positive vibes, so we can just like that.

00:07:48
Roy
Anyway, that's really the, that's the, just of how that goes. Just challenge you this week to get out there and, take some time during the day, either at lunch or in the evening, just to scroll through some of your connections or look through your feed, find things that you like, comment, just get used to commenting on it, because, it can really be helpful not only to build your audience, but put a lot of great information out there. So, like I said, we, the two previous episodes we're showing you talking through, making sure that you have your profile filled out completely also how to start building your connections, reaching out to people that, or I've worked with, it's important to, be sure to reach out to only people that and are connected with not just to be spamming a lot of people, they definitely frown on that.

00:08:48
Roy
I guess if they get a, if they get enough complaints, they might put you in LinkedIn jail and nature, if that's a thing, but, it's always better to reach out because the other part, I always feel like how I feel if people that I don't know are reaching out to me, it's usually because the very next thing they're going to do is hit me with some kind of a sales pitch. Just be careful, who you reach out to connect with and also who you connect with, you can go in and, kind of resend that connection. So, anyway, next time, what I want to talk about will be let's make some of our own posts and, talk about the difference between posting like on this wall feed, versus the long form posting and what you may want to do over there. That's going to do it for this episode of the business of business podcast.

00:09:40
Roy
I appreciate your attention. You can find us, of course, at www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com. We are on all the major social media networks as well. A video of this will go up on YouTube when this episode goes live. You can find us at www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com, YouTube channel. If you have any suggestions, if you'd like to be a guest, if you'd like to see a topic talked about on the show, please reach out, it's [email protected] and be glad to entertain having you on. We'd just like to get people that speak to businesses, give them some actionable items, some things to think about that they can take home and, actually put into practice to help themselves. Until next time that's going to do it. Take care of yourself, take care of your business.

www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com

Your Career Toolkit to Help Navigate A Forever Changed Job Market with Mark Herschberg

Roy talks to Mark Herschberg the author of The Career Toolkit, Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You. Drawing on nearly twenty years of teaching at MIT’s “career success accelerator” program and a career spanning half a dozen industries, Mark distills the key skills for a twenty-first-century career.

About Mark

From tracking criminals and terrorists on the dark web to creating marketplaces and new authentication systems, Mark has spent his career launching and developing new ventures at startups and Fortune 500s and in academia. He helped to start the Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program, dubbed MIT’s “career success accelerator,” where he teaches annually. At MIT, he received a B.S. in physics, a B.S. in electrical engineering & computer science, and a M.Eng. in electrical engineering & computer science, focusing on cryptography. At Harvard Business School, Mark helped create a platform used to teach finance at prominent business schools. He also works with many non-profits, including Techie Youth and Plant A Million Corals. He was one of the top-ranked ballroom dancers in the country and now lives in New York City, where he is known for his social gatherings, including his annual Halloween party, as well as his diverse cufflink collection.

www.thecareertoolkitbook.com

www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com

The Career Toolkit

Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You

By Mark A. Herschberg

Drawing on nearly twenty years of teaching at MIT’s “career success accelerator” program and a career spanning half a dozen industries, Mark distills the key skills for a twenty-first-century career into The Career Toolkit, Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You.

Section one, Career, lays out a process for constructing an actionable career plan, then guides the reader to success both in interviews and on the job to advance along the career plan.

Section two, Leadership and Management, focuses on the fundamentals of managing and leading, applicable to managers and individual contributors alike. It details the essentials of a high-performing team, how to foster a learning organization, how to reduce meetings by making them more effective, and much more. Unlike typical management books, these tools apply no matter what project management approach an organization uses.

Section three, Interpersonal Dynamics, describes how to successfully negotiate, efficiently build a network, and effectively communicate with people from any background. A final chapter on ethics in the workplace provides guidance through common challenges every employee is sure to face at some point.

The importance of these skills is well established, yet they are rarely taught in school or corporate training, leaving most people to learn only from experience. The Career Toolkit, Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You fills these gaps.

 

Full Transcript Below

Your Job Tool Kit to Help Navigate A Forever Changed Job Market with Mark Herschberg
 

00:00:01
Roy
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the business of business podcast. I'm your host, Roy, of course we are the podcast that brings a wide variety of guests to help us talk about a lot of diverse topics that are out there. And so today is no different. We have an awesome guest. Mark Herschberg is with us. He is drawn. He is the author of the career toolkit, essential skills for success that no one taught you. He's drawn on nearly 20 years of teaching at MIT's career success accelerator program and a career spanning half a dozen industries, mark distills the key skills for a 21st century career into the career toolkit, essential skills for success that no one taught you a book that he is, I think it was released in January if I'm correct, January of 2021.

00:00:57
Mark
So started this year.

00:01:00
Roy
Well, Mark, welcome to the show. I certainly appreciate you taking time out of your day to be with us because it's going to be a timely topic. I saw this week, we're recording, into February of 2021 and the jobless claims were down. With, I guess, more and more people, getting the sh the COVID shots and, maybe people, actually figuring out how to open up safely where we can, start doing business again. I think this is a very timely topic because there's going to be, I would say, I would think that there's a lot of unemployed people that we'll be able to put this to good use, but then there also probably a lot of people that have been hanging on to their job for this last year, not knowing, what's going to happen and not really any place to move. We may see a huge burst of movement.

00:01:56
Mark
Well, thank you for having me on the show. Pleasure to be here. You're right there is after an event like this, there's going to be a sea change in terms of the job market. We are getting more people going back to work. There's been estimation that the unemployment rate, the actual rate is closer to 10%, and we know that it certainly hasn't been uniform, right? A lot of people in entertainment, a lot of people in, hospitality services, they've been a lot more hard head than my peers of technology, who haven't really felt a recession, plexus, a boom move of some. We're also going to see a change in the type of jobs. We've heard about how offices may not ever fully come back, right? We're going to shift how we're being in offices that may change the demand for certain types of jobs related to that.

00:02:45
Mark
Right? The number of receptionists we need may go down overall, right? The number of people doing things within an office, administrators, these might also decline, but we're also going to see more new jobs coming up. There's a great opportunity for people who are trying to shift their job, trying to pivot, or even go out on their own and start their own type of entrepreneurial efforts.

00:03:10
Roy
Yeah, exactly. That's what, we've seen a lot of people with their side hustle that all of a sudden it became the main hustle as we go through this. And, not that they chose to be entrepreneurs, they were, kind of squeezed into it. We may see some of them, going back to the, workforce, well, going back to a unemployment type situation as well, but you bring up a good point about this whole, what does, what are jobs going to look like in the next year or two? Because, I wish I could recall. There's a big company I saw yesterday that they just came out and said, they're going to allow their workforce to work from anywhere in the world where they are, as long as they can have a secure connection. And it was a big company. I don't know if you read that or not, but it's neither here nor there, but I think speaking to your point that, yeah, we are going to see a lot of changes and I assume technology, trying to keep everybody communicating at their home and keep, PCs working and, Internet's up and all that.

00:04:17
Roy
That'll probably be way in demand.

00:04:21
Mark
Now, a lot of companies are talking about this shift to remote workforces, and I've certainly worked at remote first companies in the past prior to the pandemic and obviously have been remote for the past year. I'm not sure companies have fully thought through what the secondary implications are now, the primary implication. Okay. We know we can work remotely, right? You've seen it. And there are some great benefits. You're no longer recruiting just from a Metro area. Now you're recruiting Watson. We are globally, there are still some questions about what happens to salaries, where I live in New York and other cities like San Francisco. We obviously pay more because of our higher cost of living. What happens if I moved to Tennessee, you adjust my salary, but then there are some secondary effects. I don't think companies have thought through this. We might be able to work remotely for a while, but what happens there is some advantage to being in the office at least some of the time.

00:05:19
Mark
That might be as simple as we're going to be in the office three days a week or one week a month. Sure, I can now live further away from that office, from that Metro area, because I'm going to commuting every day. What happens if I'm on the beach in Thailand? And I know some people who work from there, great place to be great lifestyle, but you can't come into the office as much. Will that impact job prospects. I can contribute the same way. Right? Think about our networking. Where do you go after work? You grab a drink with someone there's some embed in your city and you go get coffee with someone. Can you do that when you're in a different time zone are away and that's getting proper careers.

00:06:00
Roy
Yeah. You know that, of course we're a little off topic I promise. We'll get, yeah, we'll get back to the book in a second, but it's interesting because that whole networking aspect, I've worked at home for probably the last 20 years and, have a lot of external contacts that, talking on the phone every day that are scattered all over the U S but, I would suspect for somebody that lives in a local area, trying to find a job or make a career change that this whole pandemic has made that worse because a lot of people get the jobs through the job boards and stuff. I, I suspect that there still a lot that get it through networking and a friend of a friend, or, I heard this or just happened to run into at the restaurant today and thinking, Hey, I've got a position for you.

00:06:57
Roy
I guess that's going to probably impact, career seekers going forward as well.

00:07:05
Mark
That serendipity is definitely going to be more challenging if we live in a distributed environment. Now when we talk about networking in the book, networking is about relationship building. It's not just collecting cards for people so we can build that relationship even remote, but that initial meeting of people is much easier when you go to some industry event after work in your city.

00:07:26
Roy
Exactly. Exactly. Well, so let's get back to the book, sorry. I just kinda got off track cause it's just, there's just so much going on and there's still, I think there's still a lot of unknown, but so you wrote it, came out in January of 2021, I suppose, that you were still riding some of this when we ride in the midst of the pandemic, is that correct?

00:07:50
Mark
I actually finished the book. I finished the final proofreading second week of March, 2020. I was going to originally target, late spring. Of course, a bunch of things hit including the pandemic. I was looking at the summer, the pandemic threw everything into chaos, so we just delayed the release.

00:08:11
Roy
Okay. What inspired you to write this? I know that you've been, kind of in the industry for quite some time.

00:08:21
Mark
My primary job, my day job has been as a CTO, chief technology officer, building different startups at small traditional startups at fortune 500 playing startup. Along the way, something happened to me when I started to hire people, I noticed when I would ask them a technical question and ask them about software. That gives me the answer. I'd ask a market or some marketing question. They'd give me the answer. I would ask a general question, like what makes an effective leader? What do you look for in a teammate? How do you think about building your network and I'd get these blank stares, right? No one has thought about. The only reason I thought about it was I realized that my own career development to become a CTO. It wasn't simply being a really good programmer. I had to develop these other skills. I set out to learn them, but people don't teach them to us consider we've all heard networking is important, right? Every one of us, since we've been kids, everyone's telling us it's important.

00:09:17
Mark
When has someone actually sat you down and said, let me tell you how to do this important thing. Right? You've had more training how to tie your shoes than how to network. Right. Right. That seems crazy. Right. I started to put together materials to train up my own team. At the same time, MIT was looking to develop a similar class. I heard about this, reached out, said, oh, I've been working on this. Can I help? They said, please help us develop it and then said, please help us teach it. I've been teaching for a past 20 years and I took a lot of what I've done in that class. I and other people, as well as things I've done elsewhere, I put into a book because this is not just for MIT students. Right. This is for everyone.

00:09:59
Roy
Right. And, you know, yeah. You're so right about that on, especially, were talking about on the networking side is that there's a way to do it and there's a way not to do it. I think that's the other thing we have to be cautious about is, sometimes we can do more damage in what we think is the correct networking process. I think that's even become a lot more sensitive in this time when everything is, kind of an outreach through the internet or through other apps or programs. It seems that, and I'll just kind of say, LinkedIn, people want to network. Instead of going through these proper channels, it's a, Hey mark. I'd like to connect and you say, okay, let's connect. It's like, Hey, I've got 25 units of this. I'd really like to sell you at a discounted price today. It's like, but then it's, and it's kind of soured.

00:10:57
Roy
A lot of people I've talked to you lately, they just, it's gotten kinda like email and telephones, they screen out everything and if they don't know you, they just don't let you in which, it kind of damages that the ability, the cool thing about LinkedIn, for everybody is we connect in, connect with anybody across the globe. It's not just local anymore, but there's still a right way and a wrong way to do that.

00:11:24
Mark
I probably take a more restrictive view than most people. I talk about this in the book. I will not connect with someone unless it's someone who I know and about whom I can say something positive. Now there are people I've known for 50 years. Well, not quite 50, but for decades where I can really recommend them. Some are maybe students of mine, but I can say, Hey, yeah, they're smart. They're hard working. No, that little. Everyone's someone where I can make a positive referral because the people who just say connected to 10,000 people, what's the value of that. The value of our network is that we can open doors for each other. Exactly. Right. If I'm just taking any random person who knew how to click connect on LinkedIn, then I'm sending you garbage. I'm sending you spam. You no longer trust me to make referrals.

00:12:10
Mark
Now the good people in my network, I'm going to refer to you. You're not going to take them either. I think of your network, like your home. Now I have strangers in my home all the time. Other than pandemics, I host parties. I have people over entertain at home. They're friends of mine and they'll bring other people and okay, stranger, you're referred in, you're welcome in my home. I'm kind of trusting. You're not going to smash things. That's a reasonable assumption. I'm not going to let a random person off the street into my home unless it's a random person I met on the street I got to know is, Hey, you're a nice guy. Yeah. Listen, why don't you come over next week?

00:12:47
Roy
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And, no, I think that's a good practice, to have of control because the other thing too, it's like it, for, even if you're not looking for the career, it's like, it can eat up a big chunk of your day trying to answer or try and, be, do the responsible thing, trying to interact with people only to find out that their motives may not be as totally pure as trying to get to know us. The other thing I always talk about too, is in this networking businesses, it can't, I don't think, and I'll ask your opinion is that this is it's give and take. It's just not about, Hey, I'm connecting with mark or I know mark. What can I get from him? And try to extract everything I can from you without having any reciprocation.

00:13:39
Mark
Absolutely networking is about building a relationship. No one wants to meet someone to say, Hey, Roy, nice to meet you. Here's what I need. Right? Selling you something. Give me a job. Whenever I meet someone, I think what can I do to help you? Right. Right. We build a relationship. It takes time. I think of it like karma I give before I get. For people like the example you gave where they're just trying to cold call on sell, look, if your job is cold calling, no one likes it, but I get if that's what you need to do fine. You say, hi, I'm reaching out to sell you this. When you are pretending it's networking, that is not networking. That's, as you point out, it's sours it for all of us. You waste my time and yours be upfront and say, look, I want to sell you these twenty-five units.

00:14:26
Mark
I'll probably say no, but I'll respect that you were.

00:14:28
Roy
Yeah, exactly. So, over 20 years in the career accelerator, in course MIT is an awesome school. Imagine you've seen a lot and you've probably seen a lot of changes over those 20 years as well. What are some new and unique things that you feel like you've put out in the book?

00:14:50
Mark
Well, would say one of the more innovative things in the book, I'm going to talk about, kind of a med the book itself, and then we'll get to the content is actually the fact that there's a companion app. Okay. I do not want to build this app. I thought this existed and I can just license it. One of the challenges with any type of book like this or any, we'll say self-help books in general, you read the book, you say, wow, those are some great tips. And then you just forget it. Right? Cause three, four weeks later, you're busy with something else. The other launch, of course you read it were sitting on the couch. Where do you actually lead? Not sitting on your couch, maybe during a pandemic, but the rest of the time it's in the office, the book's not with you. What I did is I took the content from the book.

00:15:35
Mark
If you went through a book with a highlighter, where are the key points, right? What are the memorable quotes? Put that into an app free app from the Android and apple stores. You can go get the app. Now each day it's going to pop up like a daily affirmation, right? It's just going to pop it up automatically. You go, oh, right. That was a good point. Swipe it away and nothing else to do until tomorrow. It's going to help reinforce the lessons. It can also be used. If you're about to go into a networking event, you're not going to carry my book with you and say, I got to reread the chapter. You can search for a tip, or you can quickly swipe through just tips for that particular type of event to brush up on it. And I really shocked. This did not exist before.

00:16:16
Mark
I think more books in the future will have things like this.

00:16:20
Roy
Yeah. That's, those steps because we hear the same thing at, the podcast level two is like, well, that was a great talk, action packed, information pack. Then it's like, my head's still spinning. I didn't know really where to get started. That's great that you can provide that affirmation that people need to, actually put it into use, I guess would be the best thing. Cause like you said, we're generally, I lay down in bed and read it and think, oh, that was good. Hope to remember it, in the morning when I wake up.

00:16:53
Mark
You also asked for, let's get to, what's an actual new idea that they haven't heard before. Not just, you can read more about the book, let's take communication. Okay. I'm going to give a simple example. Now there's lots of books in communication. They're all great. One challenge for us is as we communicate changing our communication style to match that over audience. Okay. We've probably heard this before generally, but let me break it down into a very concrete model. Okay. Let's just take left-brain and right-brain people. And we knew a left-brain people. They are very analytical. They are very organized. If I'm trying to pitch to someone who's an extreme left brain person, my approach might be, I'm going to have a 20 point PowerPoint slide and I'm going to go point by point and point, to be subsection I, right. Here's the point I'm going to lay it out logically and they're going to, okay.

00:17:47
Mark
Yeah. This makes sense. If I was to take someone in an extreme right-brain person and I said, I want you to sit through 20 PowerPoint slides. We're going to have this big detailed outline. They're going to go two slides in. This is, this is nuts. I can't focus. Right. How would I pitch them? I'm going to pitch them with a story. I'm going to pitch them with envision what we can do here. Right. And sell them on the idea. Okay. That's not going to work for a left-brained person. Now this is a simple example, how I will convey the message, same message, but I'm going to pitch it in very different ways, different imagery, different language, even different methodology, right. PowerPoint versus, you know, sell them. Maybe I even do like a video, right. Showing what it could be like. Yeah. This is a simple model in the book.

00:18:36
Mark
I talk about more complex versions of this, but it's important to understand how each of us communicates. We have a preferential communication style. When I want to communicate with you, it behooves me to change my style, to match yours, to make as easy as possible for you to receive that message and focus on the message and not trying to understand the message in your own language.

00:18:58
Roy
Okay. Interesting. That like matching, I've heard something about like this before community like matching the cadence and the speed and not necessarily trying to mirror it, but like for myself, very slow talk and lot of people are like, come on, man, let's get on with it, spit it out. I've worked around some people that, more amped up and talk a little faster. I kind of have to pick up my pace to be is that generally what you're talking about as well?

00:19:31
Mark
That approach is I believe this is not my area of expertise, an NLP neuro-linguistic programming approach and matching styles. Certainly if one person speaks we'll take our own backgrounds, right. A slow kind of Southern pace versus I've got a very quick New York pace and I can talk at this pace with other new Yorkers. It's certainly just going to be weird for the two of us to converse. Right. It's a similar idea, but not so much with the pacing and the tone, but about how you convey that message, right. How you want to present it. Okay.

00:20:05
Roy
Yeah. The, one thing I was thinking about too, was the, how, I guess this kind of gets back to the networking and keeping up is that if there was a message that I could put out to younger people, and I've tried to tell them this is capture as much information as you can, you need to have a notebook and write down everybody's name and, a little jot down about them as you go through life, because it's amazing how sometimes things come in full circle that we either run into them or maybe they work at a company that we're trying to get into. Have you got any thoughts on that?

00:20:53
Mark
Yes. I mentioned this in the book. There's a great list called the Mackey 60 students. It was created by a man named Harvey Mackie. He's got some great books like, how to swim with sharks without getting eaten alive and dig your well before you're thirsty and what he had. He ran, I believe it was a paper business. He had all his salespeople who said, here are the 66 things you need to know about your customers. This is true, not just for salespeople. All of us should know this about the people in our lives that you're not going to all 66 things. What does it include? Well, some basic information, contact information, their job title, but also things like if they're married the date of their anniversary, where they went to school, do they have any food allergies? What are their hobbies? What are their kids' names?

00:21:41
Mark
This is helpful because it helps us connect. If I knew that you were an alcoholics anonymous, I'm not going to say, let's go meet for a drink after work. Let's meet for coffee. Right? If I know you're a vegetarian, I'm going to make sure I pick a restaurant where there are vegetarian options. If I want to get back in touch with you, I haven't spoken to you for a while. Well, knowing what university or college you went to, I can easily reach out and say, Hey, I just saw an article about your football team. It made me think of you, right. I can find things relevant to you because I paid attention to you. All of us need to, as you said, learn about the other person, right?

00:22:22
Roy
Yeah. And that's the difficult part. And, that's where I struggle is, taking the time there's different segments in life that you have different people. It's just, you really have to change your mindset to set down and make that happen. It's not going to happen easy. I can guarantee you that it's something that you do have to work. Another thing of this is kinda talking to, I guess, about resumes and experience. I had a guest on not long ago that he had some pretty good jobs, took off some time in the middle to, went. I think he was backpacking around Africa or Indonesia, somewhere down there. And, everybody said, man, this is going to kill you when you come back and try to get a job, but this gap and, whatever. And he said just the opposite. He said that when he came back and rewrote his resume, that he just, put that in there that time.

00:23:20
Roy
There was no gap, but he said when he would go, to do interviews and I think he was in marketing at the time. It'd be like, he's sitting there waiting for them to ask him a marketing question. They're like, so tell me about this trip. What did you do here and there? So I guess the point there, the question and all that is that the external things we do outside of our job can be very beneficial in conversation starters, but also kind of intriguing the, I guess, the hiring managers as well.

00:23:58
Mark
Let me ask what was the age of this person?

00:24:02
Roy
I think he was in his mid thirties, maybe young 30 ish, somewhere in there when he took off. Yes.

00:24:11
Mark
One thing when we look at this is of course we have to look at supply and demand in my field of technology for a senior technical leader to take time off and then come back after lips. I mean, to make it a little bigger, two or three years away, they're going to look and say, are you up to date on this technology? Yeah. Right. And, but, on the other hand, they're also going to say, what, I have trouble finding senior technical leaders. If you line up enough, beggars can't be choosers. Right. It kind of depends on where you are in the supply and demand. I can tell you as a, when I was a college senior, one of the best things I had on my resume was in addition to, okay, I'm a candidate for these degrees at MIT. I went to the new England school of professional bartending.

00:25:01
Mark
I took a class for two weeks every night and got my bartending certification. Now here's the thing about college recruiting. And I've done this. I've been on campus recruiting. All the students look the same because every one of them at this university, oh, you're a computer science major. Like everyone else I'm interviewing. You've all taken basically the same classes. Right, right. Oh, you took this one. They took that one. You play lacrosse. She does a glee club. Right. You're otherwise all the same. Right. Even other schools, you look the same. I was the only person probably they've ever seen who had new England school of professional bartending on my resume. Every person asked me about it. Everyone remembered me. This is in the days before the web. They only had the, oh, you're the bartender. They remembered my resume when you are a common candidate.

00:25:54
Mark
I'm guessing from when I've hired people in their mid thirties, that level of experience in marketing, I can get hundreds of resumes. This is going to help you stand out. This is going to help you suddenly, oh, look, I have literally scores of people look alike. Huh? This guy's a little different. I want to meet him.

00:26:15
Roy
Yeah. That kind of leads into the next question is, how the importance of career planning, the sides I graduated, from school yesterday. Now I think I'm going to send out a couple resumes and see if I can get a job. Can you just kind of go into, the importance of, and I guess it's not only for just new graduates, but if, even if you're in an industry and you want to make a change, there still needs to be some planning and preparation for that.

00:26:49
Mark
This is true for all of us throughout our careers. This is something that I haven't seen really addressed much elsewhere. You asked about new things in the book, and certainly I talk about negotiations. There's other books on negotiations. I'm not going to say I have some secret. No one else knows, but the way I approach career planning, I haven't seen it done elsewhere. All of us need a career plan. If you think about anything you've ever done, right? Any project at work, you've always had some plan. You can never say to your boss, Hey, listen, I know you want me to work on this over the next six months. I'm not going to waste time building a plan. I'm just going to, I'm going to wing it. I'm just going to go week by week. And just trust me. If I was going to say no way, get me a plan, get me an outline.

00:27:32
Mark
Right? Right now your career, it's a lot more than six months. So you want to create that plan. The key thing, what people don't understand to say, well, you can't plan for life. What? You can't stick to your plan for life. You can plan. You want to create a plan and then you're going to revise as you go. Well, how do we create a plan? Think about that future goal. Think about that ideal job, not just your next job, but that job 5, 10, 20 years down the road, or think about the company that you want to start recognize that you probably don't have all the skills today to start that company or take that job. Look at that skills gap, look at where you want to be, where you are, and now you have this gap. You have to overcome, how are you going to do it?

00:28:19
Mark
Well, you're going to say, I'm not going for that job. Next year, I'm going to take a different job next year. I'm going to find that path that gets me there. You can learn about this by talking to people in that role or in other roles and understand if I want to be here, what skills do I need? What jobs will set me up for that? And you say, okay, for that next job, that first job I'm going to take. I still have this skills gap, but over the next 6, 12, 24 months, I'm going to work on those skills, qualify me for this job. Repeat step-by-step to get you where you want to go. Of course, adjusting as you go, right? Revise your plan at least once annually.

00:28:57
Roy
Yeah. And talking about skills. If you're fortunate enough to work for, a major corporation that sends you to a lot of training, another something I've told some younger people is be sure and get you, either something electronic or a binder, keep those certificates because it may not matter much today. You may forget about it, but in six months, a year, two years, five years, that certificate that you have may mean a whole lot when your job hunting,

00:29:27
Mark
Certainly she'd do like to keep track of this stuff. Even keep track of the notes, because you never know this training. You might say, I don't know this isn't relevant for my job. Well, not today, but down the road, it might be just like someone you meet today in your network, you went to, well, I don't really see, he doesn't do what I do today. That's okay. You never know where you're going to be in five years. Right?

00:29:48
Roy
Exactly. Skills gaps is gonna lead to the obvious question of ethics. I know that I know you, and I know you cover ethics in here, but, I, and I don't even know how to phrase the question. I'm just going to throw it out there and say, so many people, I guess they bulk up their resume with skills. They may or may not have to try to get hired, but that's kinda most of the time you're going to get caught with that. I guess maybe we could just cover generally in ethics when you're career hunting, some things that we need to do and some lines that we definitely don't need to cross.

00:30:35
Mark
I'll first mention why I covered ethics. I'll give an example, to what you raised ethics. The skills I have in the book, these aren't just marks thought this was good. It comes from not only my experience from hiring, mentoring people, but feedback. We've got that in my team and similar feedback I've seen at other universities of corporate America saying these are the skills we want. We want people who are leaders. We want people to know how to negotiate for a good teammates. They also list ethics. Unfortunately, ethics is just never invested in by companies. I think that's a real shortcoming. I hope that started to change. Now let's look at a concrete example. This was, this was a question raised me if through a different media channel and a hiring manager was there's a candidate looking for a job and gave as a reference, his former manager.

00:31:33
Mark
The hiring manager, Paul, this person and the former manager had this equity issue because he looked at this guy's LinkedIn and said, yeah, I, what, the way he describes the job, the things he said he did, that's not right. Like this isn't, this is just kind of spinning it. Well, this process outline, right, but he was hesitant to call this out. I don't think I should pull it out because this candidate, we all know what it's tough right now. Right? We've had the pandemic. I feel really bad for this candidate. Maybe that candidate had a spouse and children. They didn't want to hurt that candidate. While that is noble in thought, the mistake was thinking, it's too common, ethical mistakes. One is we confuse the known, I know this person for the unknown, right? All these other candidates. I didn't even think about them. I don't know who they are and the specific for the general, because yes, if you call out this person, you hurt his or her chances.

00:32:32
Mark
What happens if you don't, you're hurting the chances of everyone else, everyone who was honest, everyone who might be Barrack bald by the job, you PERT, all those candidates. You heard the hiring company who now has an unethical, possibly unqualified person for the role. Really we need to think of in this larger context, and while this former manager was meaning, well, if you put in a larger context, you can still mean well and realize you need to do the right thing. Yeah.

00:33:02
Roy
Yeah. I guess that the other thing I thought about when you talked about this, looking at LinkedIn is it's important to have everything that looks, not, inflated, but have the truth across all your media channels. Because sometimes I've looked at, applicants and it's like, well, LinkedIn says one thing, their, resume says, one thing, I talked to somebody that said maybe even something else. If they have a Facebook page, it's like, it says something totally different. It's a need to make sure I I'll let you speak to that. Again, social media is, I don't think, I'm not sure that some of these, like the Facebook thing, some people use it like it was 10 years ago, but I know that you just have to be careful what you put on there. Not only, the Rez speaking to the resume side, but also just your personal content as well.

00:34:03
Mark
Very true. Now certainly if their Facebook job title doesn't match, why see on LinkedIn or elsewhere, I'm going to assume Facebook's out of date. If everything else lines up and oh, I verify their employment hooks. I find Facebook who thinks about, oh, it changed jobs, update Facebook, right? So take that with a grain of salt, but you're right. That look, you get evaluated. We all have a personal brand. I briefly mentioned this in the book, other Dorie Clark's book, I think it's reinventing you. Or the title might be, you as a brand, Dorie Clark's book really gets into this further. All of us have a brand. All of us have a reputation. All right. If I look for a job, even if I don't know, the people I'm interviewing is interviewing, even if we don't know each other, we know people in common and they're going to ask those people about bidding.

00:34:56
Mark
I mentioned the book, we are actually all interviewing all the time. Right now. I am interviewing, I have no idea what job it's for, but someone out there is listening and they're thinking, oh, mark, he makes really good points or mark, oh, this guy is boring as hell. If our paths ever cross, you're going to have a preconceived notion about me. This is a type of interviewing just in a very big way. All of us are doing this quite a lot of the time. Yeah.

00:35:24
Roy
Yeah. Not, I had a very specific incident that I'll kind of relate about. That is, I was hiring for, it was a Jack of all trades position marketing and doing some other things around the office. So, I'd been interviewing and weeding through resumes for about a week and it was like Thursday night. I said, okay, I finally made a decision. This is the person I want. I get a call out of the blue from somebody that knew somebody. She's like, I heard you were looking for some, this position and I've got these skills. I look, she sent me the resume, like, wow, that's awesome. It's just the person I want enthusiastic. I mean, so, she's like, I'm really desperate for the job. I'll do whatever we need to do. I said, well, I've kind of made a decision. She's like, please just give me a chance.

00:36:16
Roy
We met one evening, like at seven o'clock at a Starbucks talk to her things seemed great, but I went back home that night and I started, kind of trolling through her or, social media accounts. Wow, there were some things that porn sites, my outlaw on her, on these, right out in the open for anybody to find. Anyway, I was like, saved me from making a huge mistake because I was about two minutes from, given her phone call and given her the job. It, I think you have to look at that both ways. It's not, it's not just what she does in her personal life. That's her business. That's true. If you work for me, then all of a sudden my image is, you and you're putting whatever you're putting out there is kind of coming back on me. Maybe I'll let you speak to that just and how that, how employees are.

00:37:17
Roy
Well, people think I'm just an employee. That's my personal life. It doesn't matter. Especially if you're a smaller professional, it can really hurt the person you're working for.

00:37:28
Mark
If you're a solopreneur, if you are a small company, this really does reflect back on you and on load at MIT, the policy has been when we interview students, right? As, for admissions, the rule is actually, you're explicitly told not to look at their social media because we recognize a 16 year old is going to make bad jokes and pres right. And not to hold it against them. For phragmites, you said, look, students, and teenagers, we're looking at admitting. We're not thinking about that against do. We've all done dumb things at that age. As an adult, it very much does count against you. And you have to recognize this. And this is your brand. If you get super drunk one night and that makes it in the papers, people are going to see this about you. Well, it's not the newspaper, but Facebook and social media, it's showing something about you and people will judge you for that.

00:38:21
Mark
Yeah.

00:38:23
Roy
Yeah. Just be careful on both sides, be careful what you put out there. If you're hiring, especially the smaller businesses where your reputation is really what you trade on, just be careful and make sure that you cover all the areas there. For sure. So, with our career plan, if you're fortunate enough to get into a bigger company that actually has some training, what are some recommendations for taking advantage of whatever training and skills that accompany can get? And, again, I'm going to relate something back to me that, when I was young, I worked for at and They had training anything. I mean, they had training all over the place and I was young and eager. So, anytime I could sign up for something or anytime they asked me if I wanted to, I beat like, yeah, because I wanted to gather all this knowledge in, but some of the, older guys at the time were like, I'm not going to train in.

00:39:26
Roy
I'm not going to sit in there and do all this. I, I guess we can touch on a couple of things is, how can we take advantage of it, but also the importance of taking advantage of that?

00:39:39
Mark
Yeah. Let me, let me address that. Although training by companies, even big ones is came fewer and fewer these days. Let me offer a simple example, why you want to take advantage of this, and then we'll talk about how you can create this yourself, even outside a big company. Okay. What's an example why this is important. Let's take negotiated. This is the easiest skill to demonstrate with. Imagine you go, we're going to be an employee. Now you go and get a job offer for $70,000 and have some negotiation training. You say, damn, I know how to negotiate in this job. I'm getting negotiate. I'm going to get 71,000, right? That's a pretty small negotiation. This wasn't, you were some master, right? It's going to be, it's only 1000. If you sit in that job for 30 years, you never take another job. You sit there for 30 years.

00:40:27
Mark
What happened? Well, you just made a thousand dollars more because of that negotiation for 30 years, you made $30,000. One, five minute negotiation just earn you $30,000. Now, of course, this is not realistic. You're not going to sit in a job for 30 years. You're going to take other jobs for motions, negotiate raises, and you're going to negotiate more than just once. You're probably going to learn how to negotiate for more than just a thousand dollars. Learning to negotiate, not to be the world's greatest negotiator, just learning to be a little better than where you are. It's going to yield tens of thousands, potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars to your lifetime earnings. Of course, as a small business owner, you're going to be dealing with suppliers and customers and partners and lots of other people. It might not be a salary, but you're going to go to Kate over and over.

00:41:20
Mark
This is an additive skill. Now negotiation is the most obvious example, because you can say, Ooh, I negotiate. And literally got more money. When you work on your leadership. When you work on your communications, it's not someone says, Ooh, you're a better leader. Here's another thousand dollars. When you are a better leader, people see that you're given more opportunities, more chances to succeed, more chance to be promoted or to leave for better paying jobs, right? So it is additive. All of this builds upon itself. You want to invest today, whether you are 22, right out of school or 42, and you're still looking at years ahead. It is additive. Now I mentioned that a lot of big companies don't have these training programs, not as much as they used to, but you don't need them. Here is the secret to how to learn these skills.

00:42:13
Mark
Most training is done through knowledge transfer. Most training is we're going to teach you how to do Excel, macros, useful skill. If they have a class, maybe you should take it and learn how to do Excel. Macros. If you take that class, you're going to sit there. They're going to say, here are the macros. Here are the keystrokes. Here's what to do. You're going to memorize it and go forward. And now you have that knowledge. You're going to be very clear about when you need to use an Excel macro or not. That's very different than skills like communication or leadership. It's not immediately obvious when there's a communication challenge. It's not like you're going to be taught communication in the next week. This is where to apply it. It's more subtle. The other thing is there's no do these three things and you communicate, there are lots of different aspects to it.

00:43:01
Mark
There's lots of different approaches. No one is best. The way to learn this, the way we teach at MIT, it's the way business schools have taught this for decades is you want to create a peer learning group. You want to get different people to come together. We talk about communication issue and we talk about a situation and Roy, how would you approach this? Oh, that's interesting. I never would've thought of that. I would've done it differently. Even if I don't like how your approach, it doesn't fit for me, even just understanding that, knowing that it helps me have a better, deeper understanding of the issue helps me recognize how other people might be approaching an issue. If you're in a big company, you can create this peer learning group through HR, just on your own with other people. If you are on your own, you can just create a group through peers through maybe a local business group.

00:43:52
Mark
You can create a local meetup group and you can download this free kit on how to do it from my website, who explain how to set up a group, how to think about you can use my book for it, but I don't want you to think this is just a ploy to sell books. You can use any other book you want. You can use great podcasts like this one. You can say each week, we're going to listen to Roy's podcast and discuss it as a group because it's like group discussion. That's where the learning comes from. Interesting.

00:44:18
Roy
That's a great concept. I've heard that before. I've been a part of like, entrepreneurs, CEO groups, where people sat around and, it's basically the same thing. That's a great idea. I never really thought about applying it, just in general, but these guys, it was awesome because between all of us, we had all had some the same. We'd all had a problem come up. Somebody could give us some advice on the best way to handle it or the converse. They could tell you what, this is, what I did. It did not turn out very well to you so, well, one more topic, try to cover right quick. I know we're long on time, but, such, a lot of great material here. I mean, we could probably talk for days and cover this and never scratched the surface, but, let's talk about negotiations for a minute and I mean, it's important.

00:45:13
Roy
It's important again, to know where is the line? I just got offered a job for 50,000 and now I'm going to counter offer with 85. There's a, I guess we have to know when is that, kind of where's that line that somebody, the person on the other side of the table is like, I'll just, again, I can use myself as an example, like when you're house hunting, if you go out and you find, a house that's $300,000 and you look at it and you're like, I would offer them about 175 for it. My thing is there's always so, such a big difference is I wouldn't even make that offer because they would say no. And, on the other hand, I guess, if you never, if you don't ever ask, you never know, but the reality is that when you're so far apart, the other party just doesn't even bother to counter.

00:46:09
Roy
How do we, how do you handle that when we're talking about our careers?

00:46:14
Mark
Sure. When you're in this situation, there was a great book. I read where the author said your opening offer should be the biggest number or smallest, depending on your side, the biggest number you can make with a straight face. Right? So you say, well, look, if you really think you're worth 85,000, I think it's fine to say 5,000. Now what comes out of this? Well first, why do they think it's 50? Why do you think you're 85? Maybe you have very different expectations about the role or about your skillset. That might uncover the other key thing is you never just say, I want 85. I'm going to offer 50. You want to give your reasoning, right? You don't just say, I want, frankly, I don't care what you want. I only care what I want. Right. If you can justify, if you can say, this is why I deserve 85, I have these skills, these abilities, these things that make me stand out.

00:47:11
Mark
So, I hadn't thought of that. Okay. Maybe I can't do 85, but I definitely see you're worth more than 50. There, it's not simply the number it's about how we approach the number and in the book, I break down each stage of negotiation and how to approach it.

00:47:27
Roy
Okay. Yeah, because that be delicate. Some you look at, if you just look out over the salaries, the same position in different industries can pay wide ranging, wide range. Anyway, just, and that's always, to me, it's very tricky being on both sides of that. If I'm trying to, ask for more as the, trying to get a job, or if I'm trying to, if you're working for me and you're trying to negotiate more as trying to, stay where we can stay on good terms, if you do a good job or, I really feel like you'd be an asset, but not, I don't know if that's kind of a tricky part for me. I never know really, w w when did jump on that one.

00:48:20
Mark
Yeah. It is. It comes from some experience in threading the needle. This is exactly why if you have that peer learning group, to your point, getting that advice, saying, look, I have this tricky negotiation, and you can say, well, I had a similar one. To your point, we learned so much more from failures than successes. It's great that you're going to bring in those stories. Right?

00:48:41
Roy
Yeah. The other thing I, I saw that you mentioned too, I think we always have to keep in mind and I, this goes to the explaining of our skills and why we think we're worth more, but we truly have to set this up. It's a win situation, not a, never a win loss, because that's always going to, you may win at the moment, but eventually things go south and that whole relationship sour. I think that's important to keep your eye on that ball to very true. Yes. Well, mark, well, I certainly do appreciate, like I said, we are running, you're gracious enough to give me a lot more time than what we had allotted. I appreciate that. There's just so much good information. I'm going to challenge everybody to run out and get the book. What is the app that goes along with the book?

00:49:36
Mark
The app called the career toolkit now of course contains all this information that I mentioned earlier. If you go to my website, thecareertoolkitbook.com, you can learn more about the book. You can follow links to go to Amazon Barnes and Nobles, even local bookstores to buy it again with me, or go to one of the stores to get the app, which is free. You can also download all these free resources, like talked about or links to other books and resources that will help you in your development. Okay, great.

00:50:06
Roy
Will, y'all be sharing reach out before I let you go. What is a tool are, a habit that you have every, that you use every day that really adds value could be professional, could be personal, but just, what is that thing that really, does it for you every day?

00:50:26
Mark
I, there are these great people successful. So this is my daily habit. I don't think I have a daily one other than to recognize when I am in stressful situations. This has gotten easier as I've gotten older, to have the wisdom and perspective to get out of the moment, get out of that stress and say, I've been stressful situation before I'm going to overcome this and just not let that drag me down and pull down the rest of my day or the rest of my thinking. Being able to do that. Mental reframing is so important for your mental health and efficiency. Yeah,

00:51:05
Roy
No, you're exactly right about that because it's a, if you get hit in the morning and you can't get over it just tends to run your whole day and your, my productivity goes away. So, that is a definite challenge for me as well, just to be able to shake it off and reset and move forward. So that's great advice. All right, mark. Well, again, thanks a lot. We certainly appreciate you being here. That's going to do it for another episode of The Business of Business Podcast. Of course, you can find us at www.the businessofbusinesspodcast.com We are on all the major social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and a, the video will go of this interview. We'll go live when the episode goes live as well. Of course, you can find us on iTunes, Google, Stitcher, Spotify, all the major platforms. Anyway, until next time, take care of yourself and take care of your business.

www.thecareertoolkitbook.com

www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com

Reducing the Emotional Element Will Lead to Better Financial Decision Making with Bob Wheeler

Typically our financial decisions can be emotionally charged. Unfortunately, emotions can lead us to make poor financial decisions. We should try to shift to reduce the emotion surround financial decisions and look at them from a logical perspective. It sometimes helps to take a step back, especially for larger decisions and take time to process them.

About Bob

As a man of true integrity with infectious energy, Bob Wheeler’s crusade for personal growth has cross-pollinated with his accounting practice to create a new approach to personal finances. His passion is to help others gain insights about how their emotions trigger financial decisions. Combining finances with behaviors, Bob explores his personal concept of creating a healthy relationship with money in his book, The Money Nerve: Navigating The Emotions Of Money, his online course, Mastering The Emotions Of Money and his podcast, Money You Should Ask.

While strengthening his accounting practice, Bob has simultaneously pursued his love of satire and ventured into the realm of standup comedy. From his thirty years of helping clients, Bob has distilled a concoction of warmth, humor, information, motivation and budgeting directives that he offers to anyone with financial concerns. He is also currently the CFO for The World Famous Comedy Store.

Bob’s world travels have led him to high altitudes. He has climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, ascended to the Mount Everest Base Camp, and hiked several smaller mountains in between. With charm and humor, his experiences on the road, in the office, or running a Greek marathon, feed his wit as a stand-up comic and financial motivator.

www.themoneynerve.com

www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com

Full Transcript Below

 Reducing the Emotional Element Will Lead to Better Financial Decision Making with Bob Wheeler

00:00:02
Roy
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the business of business podcast. I'm your host, Roy, of course we are the podcasts that bring you a wide variety of guests to talk about a bunch of diverse topics to help you in business. And, we want to see you succeed sometimes as small business people, we don't really know what we don't know, or if we do know that we have a, a shortfall somewhere, trying to find somebody that can help us, that can be a trick too. So, today is no different. We have an awesome guest with us, Bob Wheeler, he's a financial expert and motivator. He is the book author and founder of The Money Nerve, and he is also the CFO of the World Famous Comedy Store. We may dive into that just more as well, but Bob, welcome to the show. Thanks for taking time out of your day to be with us.

00:00:55
Roy
We certainly appreciate it.

00:00:58
Bob
Well, thank you, Roy. It's great to be here. I always love having these conversations. Yeah.

00:01:02
Roy
Great. Tell us about, what inspired you to write the book. I think that, I think it's a little deeper than just the book. It looks like that, you actually have, kind of, a website or some stuff to go along with the book. Kind of tell us more about that.

00:01:22
Bob
Yeah, absolutely. So, I went into accounting after, deciding I didn't want to be a lawyer. I was all set for law school. I was taking accounting as a, to get my grades up cause it was a pretty easy way. I got into accounting, but I had my own financial struggles that I wasn't really aware of. I struggled between having lots of money and following my creativity. I settled initially on money because, that seemed to give me more choice. As I was working, I was doing comedy. I was I'm CFO at the comedy store and one of my friends came in and she was upset because her parents and her siblings who are all doctors were giving her grief because she had chosen to be a comic and she was crying and saying, oh my God, I'm the only one who doesn't understand finance. I said, you're not the only one.

00:02:19
Bob
There's so many people out there and they present well, but they're struggling. Most of us have made financial mistakes. I realized, and having gone through my own journey and seeing how clients were making, decisions that were in exact opposition to what seems like really sound financial advice. I realized I wanted to write this book to help people start to understand that there was a connection between our emotions, our money beliefs and our money blocks and our financial success.

00:02:50
Roy
Yeah. That was one thing that really, caught my interest about yourself and the book is that, the emotional part, we all are that. The, I guess unfortunately we can let that control us instead of thinking things through being logical. The other thing too, to, whether we have money sense or not sometimes, we are guilted or goated into following that path that will make us more money, but then we end up being very unhappy. Sometimes that whole, follow your heart and everything else works itself out. Anyway, so what are, well then the other thing is that you, so, you became the CFO of the comedy store, which that's awesome. I guess you get to see a whole lot from that seat, correct?

00:03:47
Bob
Yeah, absolutely. And, even that came to me through following my passion, I was doing stand-up comedy and, to supplement my income. And, so I was running a show and Mitzi, who owned the comedy store called me up and said, Bob, I know you're a CPA and you got to come help the store, we're having trouble. For me initially, it was really about making sure that myself and my friends had a stage to perform on it. Wasn't about like, oh, this is some longterm thing. It was really selfish for my friends and I, and, I jumped in and there were a lot of issues and I really loved working with Mitzi. And, my, a lot of friends of mine are comics and I, I love being in that creative world. And, and so I do get to see a lot of amazing comics, people that make it big or people that you think are super big, who are actually broke, and others that you would think aren't making that much are making millions.

00:04:44
Bob
It's not all as it seems, but it's definitely been a fun, interesting ride. Yeah,

00:04:50
Roy
I bet. Yeah. And, so talk about the emotions, what is that, how does that impact our decision making when we start talking about finances, because so many people think that, well, we can emotionally overeat and we can do, we can get angry out of emotion. So, you know, I'm sure that, and I'm not even going to bring my girlfriend on to talk about her emotional shopping, but anyway, I'll let you know, let you pick it up.

00:05:20
Bob
Well, the best example that I can give that I think is a great illustration, was when I was working with my editor on the book, she said to me, Hey, Bob, this is great. You're doing this thing about money and emotions, but I don't make any of my decisions financially around money. Like there's no emotion involved. And I said, okay, that's cool. Let me ask you this. When you go out to lunch with your, dad who pays for it, and she goes, well, he does, I'm his princess. He has to pay. I said, okay, well, who pays when you go out with your mom? She said, well, I do, because I feel so bad that my mom w my dad left her. And so I feel really for it. I said, okay, well, who pays for lunch? When you go out with your sister, she goes, oh, we split it, Dutch we're equal.

00:06:02
Speaker 2
Oh, I get it. I get it. So.

00:06:06
Bob
Even something like that, like splitting the bill at a restaurant with a group of friends, watch the emotions, go crazy. When somebody is paying for the wine, they didn't pay for it. Yeah.

00:06:18
Roy
Yeah. I've got the, I've got a daughter like that too. She starts out at the top, the cheap stuff on the menu until she figures out I'm paying for it. It's like, or her hands, you can see it slide down the middle to that till the expensive items I'll have the lobster. Yeah. It's, finances, a funny thing. I'm of an age that, when I came through high school even, I think they taught you how to write a check, maybe how to even how to balance your checkbook. We, we turn people loose in, and even if you went to college, I happened to be a finance major. So, I kinda got more deep into that, but, if you happen to do some other tracks where they don't require you to take finances, it's like, we turn people out into the world and we've really given them no understanding of finance.

00:07:13
Roy
It's not something, there are some families I know that work together, but, it's just an interesting concept that finance is such an important part of our life. Being able to maintain housing, utilities, eat all of that stuff, but we just, we pay very little attention to teaching people about it.

00:07:37
Bob
Yeah, absolutely. I have to say, my parents were not great talking about money. They didn't handle money. Well, and I got out of college and, I was given probably 40 or $50,000 worth of credit cards. And I thought it was free money. I was like, cool. I got 50,000 bucks. Boom, boom. Spend, spend, oh, this is not good. Yeah.

00:08:02
Roy
Yeah. I mean, that's the thing isn't, it's easy. I think it's easy to get caught up in that cycle as well. We think, well, we've got to have this now. Certainly things are going to better, next week, next month, and we'll be able to pay it back. All of a sudden, we're just, we collapse under so much debt. Again, I can't even imagine these kids coming out of college today and the debt that some of them have had to rack up. And, unfortunately they're not able to come out into the, I think everybody has the dream. You go to college, you graduate and, there's $125,000 job offer on the table when you walk out and life is just a smooth and easy after that. Unfortunately, that's just not the way, you end up starting at the bottom. The income is low and all of a sudden it's like, we are just, you're starting out life under this crushing debt.

00:09:01
Roy
And, hopefully they're doing some things about that to help us out. But, I just, you really have to worry about that. Many kids are even having to go back home to live that it's anyway, it's having a huge impact. We'll just say that.

00:09:20
Bob
It's having a huge impact. I think if were started to teach this in high schools and younger, if parents would start to feel more comfortable having conversations about money, even when they don't know, and starting early with teaching children about delayed gratification, that we don't have to have everything right this minute.

00:09:41
Roy
Yeah. There's a great book about that called the marshmallow theory, I think is basically, a study over time, the guy gave people a chance. You can have a candy bar now, or you can wait till tomorrow and get to, and there was some correlation between the impulsiveness that I'm taking my candy bar now and success later in life. I guess, a lot of it has to do with this. I'll take the money on my credit card today. Not thinking about the impacts in the future.

00:10:14
Bob
Yeah, absolutely. That's the Stanford marshmallow study and it's a fascinating study, in the impact of learning delayed gratification, which is hard in this culture. We've got social media, we've got everybody on, Facebook, Instagram, Tik TOK now. Yeah.

00:10:32
Roy
Yeah. That's something that we need to guard against not only as just humans, but as businesses as well. We only see the, we only see what people want us to see. We don't see the negative, the nobody ever takes a picture of the overdrawn bank account and waves it on Instagram showing what dire straits that they're in. We only present the awesome stuff and it can be, I'm old enough to where it really doesn't matter. I get it. But, sometimes, the younger people that haven't been around a long time, they think that is life and that these people are, that much more successful. And, again, it creates an emotional burden on them.

00:11:18
Bob
Yeah, absolutely. We do want to present ourselves as having success. We're not out there. Yeah. I filed six bankruptcies. I I've had all my cars repossessed, come hang out with me. I'm a written Spiration. Right, exactly.

00:11:34
Roy
That the other thing there are tricks and stuff. I know one thing we used to do, we probably weren't as good as we could have been about it. When kids, when the kids would get money for birthdays or whatever, we would try to, we bought a, it was like a Tupperware plastic bowl that was divided into three sections. What we would have them do is, they could take a third of it to spend today a third of it to save. If they chose to do the tithing, their third of it for that as well. And, you know, it was pretty good. I don't know the long lasting effects of it. I wish we would've started earlier and been more staunch about it. But, those are the kinds of things that I think we can teach our kids, that we have to be able to put money back.

00:12:26
Roy
And we translate this into businesses. Especially when you're, self-employed solo preneur entrepreneur, that, you have to put money back every time you get a check in order to pay your quarterly taxes. I mean, I'm just, I'm not even talking about the savings component. I'm just talking about future expenses that we know, because it's unfortunate. We have the same, the mindset of that is, income is coming in today. A lot of times they don't really think about the implications of the future. Don't put the money back and then we don't make a quarterly tax payment. On, April 15, now we're trying to come up with this whole ton of money that we just don't have.

00:13:14
Bob
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, it's funny. I'll tell this story, but, my mom used to have an art store years ago, she had an art store and she thought that all the money in the cash register was her profit. Right. Every night she'd empty out the cash register and spend all the money and didn't understand, that my dad had to pay for the supplies that she was selling. And, you don't get to keep it all. She's like, it's there it's mine. Right?

00:13:43
Roy
Exactly. Yeah. We'll compound that effect if you actually have, employees that work for you too, because you're going to have to pay, your payroll tax on them. I know the reason that's kind of fresh. We had a, it was a really good restaurant here in town, not long ago that, they'd been in business for years, but they finally went out of business because they evidently hadn't been keeping up on their payroll tax. And, and, those are things that you just can't skirt. The, that bill comes due and you might can push it down the road for but you can, without going through a whole bunch of legal, I guess, legal maneuvers, there's really no way you're ever going to get out from under that. They're going to get you to the detriment of your business.

00:14:30
Bob
Absolutely. It's so important, especially as an entrepreneur start having a business, paying attention to the finances, I've seen more than I wish I had seen a place cases where the bookkeeper was embezzling money, where a salesperson was taking money. Because the owner was so busy, like, oh, I love everybody. Everything's good. I don't really want to look at that stuff. They ended up self-sabotaging because they weren't actually paying attention. Right.

00:14:59
Roy
Yeah. Just one more note on the savings component before we move one of the, well, of course the compounding effect is, in the time value of money, probably the two biggest theories in finance that just, they change the way you look at things as you go through it. There was an example they used to use with two sisters that, saved money. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but one of the sisters, right out of college, she started putting so much money back. The other sister, she was out traveling, having a good time spending it. Basically what happened is the sister that saved save for about 15 years, had a baby and never saved another dime, which kids will do that to you. But that's another podcast issue.

00:15:51
Speaker 2
But anyway,

00:15:53
Roy
The other sister, she lived her life free spending for 15 years. She started saving, from, for the next 30 years. Basically when both of these sisters get to age 65, they had the exact same amount of money. The sister who put it off, she had to save, I think twice as much, twice as long. Anyway, it just, yeah, I guess what I'm trying to get across is just the time value of money, especially when you're young, there's just, it's hard to catch up from if you don't take advantage of it.

00:16:31
Bob
Absolutely. The biggest thing a lot of my clients say to me is I wished I had started putting money in a row, in an IRA or a Roth or in a savings account when I was younger, I wished I'd understood it. Right. And, and it's not too late. People always are waiting for that big windfall. I'll start a savings when I get the big bonus, I'll start it when I win the lottery. No start now 50 bucks start doing it. Yeah,

00:16:55
Roy
Yeah, no, I used to, I was a financial advisor many years ago and, my favorite story to tell is, I had a guy that w were pretty close and, I was always trying to get him to start something for your kids, start something for you, whatever. Okay. You know, well, we're struggling along. As soon as we get, kind of get ahead of things, I'm going to give you a call. We'll set something up. I'm like, we need to do this sooner rather than later, went through this conversation for, six months. I guess when, June rolled around, he gave, I got a phone calls like, Hey, we're going to the lake and our new boat. You want to go with us? And I'm like, where'd you find money to buy it?

00:17:35
Speaker 2
Where'd you find why you buy a boat? but unfortunately,

00:17:39
Roy
That's just the way things are. We would rather the instant gratification of having the boat today versus, having that money in a savings account for, well, not only for our future, our retirement, but in case of disaster, like this COVID, I think it, the pandemic kind of shined a light on people's savings habits, and it's not pointing fingers, or I don't, I'm not trying to be literal anybody. That's not what this is about. It's more about the realization that we never know what can happen. Sometimes luckily that they put some, programs in place to, help the masses. What I will say is that if this had happened to me or you as an individual, the government's not going to be there to write us a check and to help us out. I think it just really amplifies the importance of why we need to put money back, no matter how much it hurts, quit, cut down on that, Starbucks coffee, and maybe, have one brewed at home or, however you can do it.

00:18:48
Roy
That's the other thing I think we always think is, I have to put this massive sum of money back and I'll let you speak to that for a minute, but sometimes that $5, $10 here, that adds up over the years.

00:19:03
Bob
Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that I, one of my tips to my clients and people I work with is on Friday afternoons, take out all the $5 bills out of your wallet and put them away. He can't spend them for the weekend. A bunch of $5 bills adds up pretty quickly. If you do that every week, it doesn't have to be a huge amount, but you need to cultivate the habit. Right. That as you're doing stuff, you go, wow, do I really want the Starbucks, or do I really want to have an amazing retirement? I think I'll put the five bucks back in my pocket.

00:19:36
Roy
Yeah. If you're, if you happen to be an employee where you can have the payroll deduction, I'll tell you the best thing for me as a young person was I had some good advice, surrounding me when I was young. When I started, when I signed up for the 401k, you could do a percentage of your pay. Some guy told me, you're going to get a raise in six months, but he said, set that at the highest you can, I think it was 6% at the time set it for that. You're going to hurt for six months. You know, it wasn't hurting. Like weren't going to eat. We weren't going to be able to go have as much fun. Anyway, you're going to be kind of throttled back, but he said, when you get your raise, then you won't notice the 6% of that incremental raise you got, because it's already gone.

00:20:25
Roy
There was so much truth to that from that point on that, the initial, that initial time period between then, and when you get your next raise, it can be painful, but once you get past that, then it's kind of HomeFree.

00:20:41
Bob
Absolutely. Even if you can't put in the 6%, if your company matches take the match, but it's free money. Yeah.

00:20:51
Roy
Yeah. That's for sure. A lot of people don't realize that you're just giving that away. Yeah. So, one thing that you do point out is that, we may or may not need financial therapy. Can you tell me about what financial therapy might include?

00:21:08
Bob
Yeah. Financial therapy is really starting to get aware of your family history, your financial journey. Most of us make financial decisions and a lot of other decisions. When we're 5, 6, 7 years old, and we observed the world, we make decisions. We go forward as dif a five-year-old should be making these financial decisions. What happens is we get into our adult life and we start making decisions back to, oh, I'm not good enough. People are gonna judge me. People are gonna think I am greedy. We start with these stories and we really bring them into our current lives. Doing therapy helps us to go back and say, oh my gosh, I remember when I was six and I lost the milk money. I remember my dad saying that's really selfish or whatever it might be. We made a story and made it a lifelong commitment.

00:22:03
Roy
Okay. Yeah. That kind of leads into also, what does a healthy relationship with money look like? I know that, we, I think we see a lot of extremes either. There are people that are so focused on money that they actually miss out on life, or they treat people poorly because they, want to get more money. There's kind of the opposite of that is that there are some people that, they want to help everybody to the detriment of themself.

00:22:32
Bob
Yeah, absolutely. I think having a healthy relationship with money is about being able to set boundaries, to make sure that you do take care of yourself. It means being able to live within your means. It means being able to have a choice of saying, yes, I could spend on this in the moment and feel really good for 10 minutes, or I could save this and know that it's going to help me in the long run. I'm going to have a much more happy life overall. It means learning to be appreciative for what you have, not what you don't have. I think that gratitude, is a big part of that learning to cultivate gratitude and realizing that we're pretty abundant, especially if you're growing up in the U S have a, you have it pretty good. Even the people that seem like they have it the worst.

00:23:21
Bob
Yeah.

00:23:22
Roy
Yeah. And there's all kinds. There's all ways, little tricks. For me, one of my tricks was always trying to get rid of, not get rid of, but move money from a spendable account to an account where it was kind of out of sight out of mind. I'll tell a story on me back in the day I worked, when I was younger, I worked for at and T and were at this, there was a local, it was a chip. They manufacture chips for their restaurants, but they sold them to the public too. This cable gets cut behind this building and we're out there working. This guy I'm working with like, Hey, we ought to go get some chips and hot sauce here. Went around there and said, we'll just take a, can you give us one ship in a hot sauce? They're sure, well, she mainly grabbed the mic and said, Joe, get the forklift and get these, get some chips and hot sauce around here.

00:24:14
Roy
And we're like, whoa, wait a minute. They ended up bringing out a whole case of chips and a whole case of hot sauce. Luckily between the two of us, we had enough money to pay for it. We just, we ended up paying for it, a life lesson, I quit carrying cash after that. Like, I, I used to have, and this has been a long time ago, but, I would have like a $5 allowance for the week that would get me, buy me some coffee break, or Coke break or whatever. But, I just find myself, if I have money in my pocket, it tends to go much faster today. We can equate that, I guess, with the bank account, a debit card, it can go easy. So, there are a lot of, the paycheck, we talked about that the auto deduction, but in your bank account, you can also get other accounts that will draft that account.

00:25:03
Roy
You get paid, you can move money out of there to the savings account. It just won't show up in your checking account or, your spendable account, I guess. Yeah,

00:25:14
Bob
Absolutely. I think it's even better to have a separate bank for your savings so that it can't automatically cover overdraft because otherwise it's just really a slush fund. Right.

00:25:25
Roy
Exactly. No, that's a good point. That's a good point. Yeah. What kind of get back to the business for just a minute that was, I didn't do the separate banks. That would have been good, but what I did was, early on opened up a, I had a tax account and I had a, SEP account, well, not only the accounts, but I had bank accounts. Whenever I would get client money that would come in, I would just automatically take whatever my percentage was, through, I had my accountant worked out the percentage and said, look, you got to pull out 20% for taxes and you need 10, 15% for yourself. Every time I had a client check come in, I would segregate it and put it back immediately, and then the discipline of not to try to reach out, to use those accounts. I think, for me, fortunately, it was just a way to get it away from the regular bank account, know that it wasn't mine to spend.

00:26:22
Roy
So, I guess we have to find all the little tricks that we have to help our, to do that we can do to help ourselves to be able to, not only, like I said, save for what our future expense is going to be, but also save for our future.

00:26:38
Bob
Well, absolutely. For me, myself, when I set up my corporation and had my bank accounts, I was much more focused on protecting my business. When I was a schedule C and I was sorta, co-mingling it, when I finally went, this is a business. Yeah, this is separate and I need to nurture and protect it. I gave it a lot more attention and a lot more, like just really focus.

00:27:03
Roy
Exactly. That's, you know, that's another good point. I know that, we think about, accounting and things like that at the end of the year where we just have somebody plugin numbers into a, to our tax return or whatever, but there's also, there's so many strategies that, our CPA, our tax experts can help us with through the year in order to, well, keep us on track. Are we actually making money? What does this product look like if you have multiple product lines, but also you said, that protection that we can give, protect ourself from our business, protect our business from ourselves. However you want to look at that. There are a lot of different things that we can do.

00:27:54
Bob
Absolutely. One of the things that's interesting is, and this happens a lot with my clients. I'll send them a draft of their tax return and they'll write back and they'll go, this is wrong. And I'm like, what's wrong. I didn't make $300,000. Okay. Well, did you make this deposit? Yeah. Did you make this deposit? Yeah. Did you make this deposit? Yeah. Did you make that equals three 50? Well, where did it go? Well, I don't know. That's a separate question, but you made the money and that happens all the time,

00:28:23
Roy
Right? Yeah. I guess the message is, also too is to reach out and,

00:28:32
Speaker 3
Your,

00:28:34
Roy
Your financial professional, whether you have a fractional CFO or it's your CPA or accounting person, whatever is, you need to have a relationship with them through the year. It's not a once a year check in and, you'll be okay because there's a lot of strategies and, the bulletins that come out, that's another thing, I'm a finance guy. I could probably find my way through putting numbers in turbo tax, but there's so many rules that come out through the year that I don't keep up with that, professionals like yourself, you keep up on all these taxable changes and tweaks some for the better, some for the worse, but at least, We're not, stepping into a bear trap.

00:29:18
Bob
Well, absolutely. I just was saying to a new client the other day, when I, I said, well, this is what we charge for a tax return with a schedule C and I could hear of like, well, that's a little high. I said, what? I could probably do your tax return in five minutes. You're not paying me for the speed at which I input your taxes. You're actually paying me for the knowledge and for the education and saving you hundreds of thousands of potentially over time. It might be worth that extra two or 300 bucks.

00:29:46
Roy
Yeah. Yeah. And also the, potential prison time that.

00:29:50
Speaker 2
You can help people avoid.

00:29:53
Bob
Exactly.

00:29:56
Roy
I know that you went on a trip, I guess you had a pivotal moment. You were on a trip to Africa. What happened while you were in Africa that changed some of your beliefs around money?

00:30:09
Bob
Yeah, so, before that trip, I really believed that, I was socialized to believe that I am my accomplishments. I got to make a lot of money. You got to have nice things, material things to be happy. And, and that was sorta my, those were my goals. When I went to Africa, I was in Tanzania and the average income there was annual income was $100 a year, and, not a lot of money. And, and this was back in the nineties, but still, not a lot of money. And these people were incredibly happy. They were like, tell everybody to come and visit us if you liked it. They would give me the shirt off their back. I was throwing away jars and they were like, can I have that jar? And I'm like, it's trash. They're like, no, I can use this. I just kept saying to myself, what's wrong with these people.

00:31:00
Bob
They're too happy. They don't have nice things and they don't have hot water and they don't, there's something wrong. It really had took me some self reflection to realize that they were all about community. They were all about living an experienced life with good experience, good family, good community, and that they could be incredibly happy and learn to work with what they had instead of running around in this hamster wheel of trying to get somewhere when they were actually already there.

00:31:33
Roy
Exactly. That's a huge point in, I had an experience it's been a few years ago when my grandmother passed away. She lived in an older home that had the detached garage that had some storage in and so we're in there cleaning it out. And, we just ran across hundreds of Mason, jars, hundreds of, like pot pie and, tins that you get at the store with the cakes in it. She saved everything, and it was it's interesting because she had come through the depression. That really set her on this path of what was important. The scarcity, I guess, is the best way to say it. Foil, she would get foil and try to wash it off as good as she could and save it. We just don't realize, well, I think we've learned through the pandemic and of course, us here in Texas this last week have learned with the storms is that, scarcity can come upon us in heartbeat.

00:32:40
Roy
Yeah,

00:32:43
Bob
Absolutely. I, I, for me, I also have of that scarcity mindset. I've got six months of food in my pantry. I've got all those things and, I'll probably always have that. I just don't let myself go crazy with it. I, I, I can be compulsive, but I have to go, whoa, slow it down life is okay. Right, right.

00:33:04
Roy
So, you also, an interesting story that, you went to Nepal and you were tracking to the base camp of Everest, which that's amazing in itself. What, again, we could probably do a whole podcast, but tell us about surrounding that trip. I mean, that must have been incredible.

00:33:24
Bob
Yeah. So, Nepal is an amazing place. I love it. I been there a couple of times. Okay. On the second trip, I really, I had some friends, we all wanted to get to base camp. That was our goal. And, some people were experienced some weren't and we hyped the first day just to get into the park and you go down the steep hill to go back up the steep hill. At the end of the first day, all of my friends, everybody on the team said, this is really hard. Let's quit. Let's just go back in town and get massages. I'm like, no, wait, I just spent a lot of money. We got to finish this trip. You know, I'd be practical. I spent money. And, nobody wanted to take the, everybody was ready to quit. And so I said, what? I gotta do something I'm S I'm the team leader here.

00:34:11
Bob
I said, how about this? Why don't we negotiate? Let's agree to hike an hour. At the end of the hour, let's see if we want to continue. What we did was every hour I set my watch and we would stop and we would decide, are we going to hike another hour? Or are we going to go back? And what happened was after the first couple of days, we started saying, let's see if we can hike two hours and then last hike, four hours. What I found was that when we took it in baby steps, when we took it incrementally, instead of trying to look at, we've got to get from here to the top of the base camp, let's just get from here to that next little mountain, let's get to this next little goalie. And, and that's how we got to the top was really negotiating it, hour by hour instead of, oh my God, we've got 15 days to get there.

00:35:00
Roy
Yeah. That's, I was having a conversation with a client prior to our call. That was something that we got to talking about is just, sometimes it's a good life lesson because sometimes tasks can just be daunting or overwhelming that we just can't even get started. We can't find the motivation to get started. It's like, it's so big. We'll never accomplish it. Let's just, and I guess we can talk about saving for retirement in that, in a vein, is that, it seems like, oh my gosh, how can we ever amass the amount of money we need, but going back to the steps, the $5 a week, taken out all the $5 it adds up, and that's a great way to approach, money management and savings for sure.

00:35:47
Bob
Yeah, absolutely. I think the other important thing for a lot of people out there that feel like it's overwhelming or struggle is asked for help. It's okay to ask people, how did you do it? Right. What can I do? What would you recommend? What are your tips so that you can do it? Yeah.

00:36:05
Roy
Let's touch on retirement for just a minute. I think, this is a lesson that we, as financial advisors that we tried to talk to people about is that, well, not only are you going to need a lot of money and not only are we living much longer past our working retirement age, but the other part of this is that when, there's some, misnomer that when you retire, all of a sudden, you only need 25% of your current income. I guess for some people, if you're making a ton of money, maybe that may.

00:36:41
Speaker 2
Be right. But, you know, for,

00:36:44
Roy
Excuse me, for the normal person, it's like, when you retire life, doesn't quit. I mean, you still have the same bills. Actually you find in the short term, your expenses can probably go up because now you've got time to travel. You got time to go out to eat. You got time to catch up with friends. It's like, I think recent retirees can be very shocked about the burden, the financial burden that may be on them still.

00:37:15
Bob
Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting, the old model used to say, put away all your money and you'll be in a lower tax bracket when you retire and that's not true. Most of my retirees are still in the same tax bracket, if not higher tax brackets, as they're pulling money, getting their pensions, pulling out RMDs, from their IRAs and stuff. What I work with a lot of clients is now trying to get money when they have lows in their income is to convert it to Roth or it converted to a post-tax so that we're not getting in those higher brackets. But, I tell people, look, when I get to retirement, I don't want to be eating beans, sitting in a little, not turning on the heat because I want to save every penny. I want to be carried around on a carriage. I want like rapes served to me.

00:38:06
Bob
I want to be making income. I have to plan accordingly that I'm going to be in a high bracket when I'm in retirement.

00:38:12
Roy
Yeah. The, the other part of that too, is, something that's come to mind a lot lately is, outliving our wellness. We have to also take into account that, we may not be able to work into our seventies, if were healthy and everything may be so, but a lot of times whether it's physical or, other ailments that get us, that we maybe would be not able to produce an income or go get up and go to work. We have to think about those things as well.

00:38:45
Bob
Yeah. I think it's important for a lot of people to look at their social security. When am I going to take it, do I take it early and take less, or do I wait and take it later where I'm going to get a larger amount for some of my clients. For many of my clients taking it earlier means I'm getting it. I'm getting money for five years more than if I waited until I was, 72 or something like that. It's really important to actually do the math right. See where you are because I have clients right now that are struggling. If they didn't have that social security taken early, they wouldn't be paying the rent.

00:39:20
Roy
Yeah. Well, and I think that times have changed, from back in the time when I did my financial advising is, most people were still on defined pension plans. I don't think we, people don't fully grasp the, I guess the enormity of that change or what I see as that, and for those that are, don't know what that is. Basically, in the old days you worked, you retired and your company said, if you were fortunate enough to work for a company that had retirement, they said, we're going to pay you X number of dollars for the rest of your life. Or, you could take less and your spouse could keep up, there are variables, but basically they said, this is what you're going to get. I guess maybe around the two thousands, somewhere in there, we kind of switched over and I think most people now are on the, what is it, defined contribution where it's mainly the company is going to throw some money in.

00:40:17
Roy
You're going to throw some money in at the end of time, there's going to be a pile of money. It's up to you to manage it, to get, to make it last long enough to match your lifespan.

00:40:30
Bob
Yeah, absolutely. Most people, it's interesting, most people that are doing that don't even realize what their money sitting in. I've had clients that we go in and look at their funds and realize they've been sitting in a savings account, even though it's in a, and I'm like, of course it's not making any money for you. You're not investing it. Right. Oh, I just thought if it was a retirement account, it's automatically doing that. Yeah.

00:40:54
Roy
Yeah. That's another thing we could talk just quickly about is that an investment cycle, the advantages to getting in when you're in your twenties and thirties, is if you look at the markets over time, what is it, I mean, there's all kinds of saying it's like time in the market, not timing the market. I had a finance professor that his favorite saying was, bears make money, bulls bait, make money and hogs get slaughtered. And, that's trying to, buy in at the bottom and cash out at the top. It just doesn't work that way. If you look at the markets over time and I haven't a while, but I'm sure it still probably runs true that if you're in this for 30 years, you are going to make a good return. As long as you have appropriate investment, not highly aggressive and not a highly safe, but if you're in the middle of the road and have good portfolio mix, you are going to make a decent return over a 30, 40 year period.

00:41:58
Bob
Absolutely. Again, that's where emotions are so important. Don't get emotional and panic when the market drops. Right. If you cash out, that is a loss you've lost the money. Yeah.

00:42:12
Roy
Yeah. So, so many things. But, so before we start wrapping up, I'm going to ask you, who is the, who was the favorite or the most famous most, your favorite, most famous comic that you've seen come through the comedy store?

00:42:32
Bob
That would, even though they came before me, I would probably say the most famous comic that I really love and appreciate was, Richard Pryor. Okay. His, what was humorous to us was also his life story and a lot of his pain. If you actually, read his biographies, if you read about them and stuff, an amazing person, but incredibly talented, right?

00:43:02
Roy
Yeah. He was a good one. That was back in the days when they used to release a lot of albums. I don't know that they still do that. Back in the, I guess the mid, late seventies, these comedians, they would release a full length albums with just the shows and material that they had. Yeah.

00:43:19
Bob
No, totally. It's a whole, it's a whole different world, but they've all got podcasts now. All right, Bob. Well, what is a tool that you.

00:43:28
Roy
Use in your life? And it could be personal or it could be professional, but, what is a tool or a habit or ritual something that you do every day that really adds value?

00:43:41
Bob
The thing that I do every day, and I purposely have a dog to make me do this. I get up every morning, around six or six 30, and I walk for an hour with my dog. While I'm walking, I express my gratitude and I do affirmations of welcoming in all that I want. Again, just going back to just reaffirming my gratitude for everything. That really puts me in a good frame of mind when I start my day to remember that even when I think it's terrible or something, I didn't get my favorite coffee. Right. Like I can go back and say, what? Life's actually pretty amazing. And I'm actually grateful.

00:44:21
Roy
Yeah, you're right about that. We have so many things to be thankful for and I've got the doll, I guess it's not really a blessing, but we've got the dogs too. They help us get up because after all, it's either like get up or get eaten, it makes you jump out of bed and start the day. Yep.

00:44:39
Bob
Absolutely.

00:44:42
Roy
Well, tell us about, who is your client? How can you help them? And then of course, how they can get ahold of you, but then also tell us about, the money nerve as well.

00:44:56
Bob
Yeah, absolutely. In my accounting practice, we work with everybody. I've got kids that we have now become adults from their parents. We work with a range of people. I work with a lot of entrepreneurs. I learned, I love working with people that are out there trying to create their own, impact in the world, work with a lot of retirees. And, in The Money Nerve arena, we work again with all walks of life because we all have emotions around money, depending on what stage we're at for getting older. We might be a little panicked if we're younger, we're trying to figure out what we need to do. So, anybody that has any kind of relationship with money we're going to work with? yeah. Okay. You don't have to be super rich to work with us. You just have to be nice.

00:45:46
Roy
Right? Exactly. All right. Well, how can they reach out and get ahold of you.

00:45:52
Bob
They can reach out to me at info at The Money Nerve and that's nerve, n e r v e, not nerd, I am a nerd, but it's The Money Nerve info it, The Money Nerve. They could shop, check out our website. We have a lot of resources. We've got articles, we've got tools. We've got an honest budget, quit, program. They can use, we've got a money quiz they can do just to get a sense of where their money nerves are. And, people can reach out. We, we interact with our clients and people that reach out to us.

00:46:22
Roy
I like that. The money nerd. That's a good one. All right, Bob. Well, thanks again for taking time out of your day, y'all reach out, check out Bob, go over to the money nerve and, see this good material he's got. It's never like we've talked about in this show, never too late to get started, but the earlier you can get in this and get involved the better off you're going to be. So, check it out. That's going to do it for another episode of the business of business podcast. I'm Roy, and you can find us atwww.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com. We're also on all the major social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, a LA the, video of this will go up on YouTube as well. When this episode goes live. So check us out. We're also in all the major podcast platforms, iTunes, Google, Stitcher, Spotify. If we're not one that you use, reach out, we'll be glad to get it added on.

00:47:19
Roy
Until next time, take care of yourself and take care of your business.

www.themoneynerve.com

www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com

Intellectual Property, What You Should Protect and How To Do It with Yoriko Morita

There's an old song that goes like this "you don't know what you've got till it's gone". Originally about the environment by Joni Mitchell before most even knew what the environment was, but the same thing can be said for your intellectual property. It needs protecting before someone else makes a play for it or claims it as their own. Don't wait.

About Yoriko

I started working in patent prosecution in 1996, and I have been a U.S. Registered Patent Agent since 2001. I hold a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (Optics emphasis), an M.B.A., and a B.A. in Physics. I’m also a Certified Licensing Professional, recognized by the Licensing Executives Society, and have been part of the IAM Strategy 300, which recognizes the top IP professionals as nominated by their peers. I have native fluency in both English and Japanese, as well as extensive experience working and negotiating in Asia.

At Patents Integrated, we aren’t patent attorneys. We aren’t business consultants. We aren’t product developers. We’re more than that, pulling from multiple disciplines to create IP strategies that not only protect our clients’ innovations but fully support their long-term business growth plans.

Intellectual property isn’t one-size-fits-all. Every business is different, with different needs, challenges and goals. Our team has deep experience across the entire innovation lifecycle – from product development, to IP portfolio management, patent monetization and beyond – because we’ve been there ourselves, working with everything from startups, to public companies, to government entities, law firms and more.

We bridge the gaps between business leaders, technologists and legal professionals

We ensure that your company’s patent strategy is fully supporting your corporate growth plans through a variety of service offerings including:

In-house IP training seminars

Negotiation assistance in discussions involving IP, especially in Asia (native fluency in Japanese and English)

“Patent Troll” defense strategies

www.patentsintegrated.com

www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com

Full Transcript Below

Intellectual Property, What You Should Protect and How To Do It with Yoriko Morita

00:00:01
Roy
Hello, and welcome to the business of business podcast. I'm your host, Roy, of course we are the podcast that brings you a wide range of guests that can speak to a lot of diverse topics. And, today is no different. We have an awesome guest. I've been waiting for this interview for a while. We're going to talk about some complicated or complicated for me subjects, and I know that she's going to be able to put them in layman's terms for us, but, I want to welcome Yoriko Morita . She is the founder and president of Patents Integrated. She started working as a patent, prosecute in patent prosecution in 1996. She's been a us Registered Patent Agent since 2001. She holds a PhD in electrical engineering, with an optics emphasis, an MBA, and a B.A. in Physics. She is also a certified licensing professional recognized by the licensing executive society and has been part of the a M strategy 300, which recognizes the top IP professionals as nominated by their peers.

00:01:11
Roy
She's also fluent in both English and Japanese and has extensive experience working in negotiating in Asia. Yoriko welcome to the show. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to be here with us.

00:01:25
Yoriko
Thanks for having me here.

00:01:26
Roy
Yeah. So, we're going to talk about, intellectual property, mostly today. I guess the easiest place to start is just at the beginning is can you tell us actually, what is intellectual property?

00:01:41
Yoriko
Sure. Intellectual property in general is essentially any information that are give you a unique business advantage. So, I mean, of course there is innovations. You would think of companies like apple and Google that have a lot of innovations. They file for a lot of things like patents and trademarks and copyrights. It also includes a category of what we call trade secrets and trade secrets are pretty broad, so I can cover everything from the way you run your business. Maybe some inside knowledge that you have about your particular industry. It can be customer lists, it can be all sorts of things. It can be, if you have the secret recipe of Coke, that's a trade secret, those sorts of things. Essentially anything that would give your business an advantage over anybody else who doesn't have that intellectual property.

00:02:40
Roy
Okay. Awesome. So that covers a very wide spectrum. Like a founder, if I'm gonna do a startup, I guess it can be, yeah. It could be manufacturing, something I could have even invented a, I guess, a whole new process or, maybe a piece equipment. Those are the things that we're going to be talking about. Is that correct? Right. Yeah. Okay. As a business owner, as a startup, why should I be concerned about, what are the terms that I may face or should I rush out and, get this intellectual property protected upfront? Do we need to see if the, with this ideal actually take off can kind of, what is that process?

00:03:30
Yoriko
Sure. The way that I like to approach intellectual property is to make sure that it's tied to your business. Your, the way that you want to develop your own business. Okay. It's very different depending on what type of business you're in, as well as what your product is. If your product is a service, like my firm is a service firm. My intellectual property is really my experience. The way that, as well as my connections in the industry, those are things, as well as some of the processes that I use and working with my clients, so that those are things that I consider my intellectual property. Like, for example, if they, if another, if a law firm wants to acquire my business, then one of the things that I will be negotiating will be how they would value my intellectual property, which would include things like my book of business.

00:04:34
Yoriko
Okay. That's, that's a very valuable asset towards my company. If somebody else wants to acquire it, then no, they're going to have to pay me some money for it. It's a similar thing with any other service industry. Like for example, I have a friend that just bought a plumbing business, for example, and for him, the intellectual property that he really wanted to get ahold of. This happens to be apparently it's the, it's a plumbing business in Maine and apparently it's the only, plumbing business in Maine, which actually consistently has been making money for over 20 years or something like that. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It's a hard business to be in, and it's hard to have longevity, especially during these crazy times. He, but he identified this particular business as being something that he wanted to be a part of because it had a long history of success.

00:05:34
Yoriko
It had a lot of trust. Brand equity is part of intellectual property. Having that Goodwill associated with your name, that's certainly considered intellectual property, their book of business, as well as their human assets. Who they hire, if they hire contractors, how they do business, that's all part of intellectual property. That's how IP can influence, even as a service company. When you get to a lot of my clients are in the hardware space. These are, everything from, I have clients that do medical devices, for example, all the way up to satellites. In satellite inner sandal, like communications, so different communication protocol between satellites and states, for example. So these are really complex things. Yeah. There, we're talking more about patents and how we specifically file for, patent protection so that other people can't copy their product, their technologies, as well as we also look at things like, if there's software involved.

00:06:50
Yoriko
There is software code that needs to be written in order to operate these complex machinery, then that can also be protected in various ways. Another way that intellectual property applies to pretty much any business is with trademarks. The main one that people run into all the time is your company name, like, for example, like when you were starting your, this podcast, the business of business now, is that something that you looked around and you just decided, oh yeah, that sounds like a good name, or did what were the thoughts that went into deciding on your name?

00:07:33
Roy
Yeah. It was just research into, was there another one that was already out there and of course, for podcast, our, I guess our Mecca is always iTunes or has been in the past. So, you do the search of iTunes and if it's not there, then it probably doesn't exist. But, it's funny that you bring that up because I, I, I think that I have looked into this somewhat and, to try to get a trademark on the name, but the one thing as I was reading through, which I have written down for a question for you later, but I'll go ahead and ask you now, is that, there, you have to don't, you have to be able to staunchly defend your patent or your trademark every so often, or they will come back and say, well, obviously it's not that critical because nobody's even trying to infringe on your property.

00:08:29
Roy
There were some weird twist to the language that I read about that. Maybe you could elaborate on that just .

00:08:36
Yoriko
Okay. Sure. What are the things that, especially with, expensive types of IP alike, patents, there, you do have to weigh how so, I mean, this goes back to your business again. If, whether you have, so whether that expense, that investment that you are making in protecting your IP, is that going to be bring you value in the long run? Right. Then, it sounds like one of the things that you've may have heard is that, don't bother filing for patent or trademark protection, unless you're willing to defend it. Yeah. Well, and defending defendant means probably, either suing somebody for infringing on your, what, on your IP, or not. If that involves litigation, that gets even more expensive. With that, though, there are ways that I think IP can bring your company value that goes beyond having to go out and defend it. I like, for example, if you are in a, an industry where a lot of the players in the industry tend to Sue each other, a lot one is, and an interesting one is actually the beer industry, the craft beer industry.

00:10:12
Yoriko
With that, there are a lot of really creative names out there that are, that brewers use for their new products. Well, sometimes though you can get a little too clever with your beer naming. There have been instances of, like for example, there was a beer that was put out that was called, there was an initially named, guns and roses. It was supposed to be like a Rosie infused kind of, a beer. Those beer, wine combinations are pretty popular these days. Well, of course the folks that are in charge of the band guns and roses came after them and sent them a cease and desist. So they had to change their name. There are things like that happened often in the beer industry. The other one, the other example is, so I'm in Colorado. One of the bigger local breweries here, is left-hand brewing. One of their trademarks is they managed to put, essentially like a nitrous oxide cartridge in their beer, either bottles or bottles of cans, I think in the bottles is what they managed to do and what there is a, so they have a brand, a line of beers called nitro beers, and they have all sorts of cute things about the, that line of beers that makes it taste smoother and all of those things.

00:11:58
Yoriko
One of the things that really ticked off the rest of the beer industry is they try to trademark the word nitro in reference to anything beer related. Well, they're not the only ones that have ever put, Nigel, nitro beers and, in the world. I mean, it's just, nitro is just another alternative to carbonation. They ticked off a lot of other folks in the beer industry. There was a lot of legal trouble around it, that kind of things, if you're in an industry like that, and you wanted to pick a new name for your beat, your product or your brewery or whatever, you would want to be a little careful with what you use as your name. That they're, it's more of a, it's a bit more of a preventative measure. You're looking at, you're picking in that case, you're picking a name based on the reducing the risk of getting sued later.

00:13:08
Yoriko
Okay. In that case, you're not so worried about other people infringing on your intellectual property and having to go Sue them. It's more that you don't want to get sued. That's one way that we can, that IP can be a valuable asset to you, even if you're never going to Sue somebody over it. Okay.

00:13:32
Roy
Yeah. The other thing I think talking about names is I've heard of these court cases before where, somebody tries to, trademark, grass, or, some very commonly used name and, people are coming kind of, like you said, with the beer people come back and say, well, this is used in a lot of products or, this name is, it's a common usage name. I guess there's all kinds of variations that go along with that as well. Correct?

00:14:05
Yoriko
Yes, there is.

00:14:07
Roy
The, so what is the value in it? And, we can speak to me because now that you've brought it up, it's got me to thinking about it again, but what is there, I guess the value to somebody like myself to do the podcast, the other thing that I've thought about, and I've actually got it written down on my to-do list is, a couple of, more taglines is to, are those trademarked or service marked, or there's something that you can do to kind of protect that tagline. So everybody else can't use it.

00:14:40
Yoriko
Yup. That's correct. You can, you can, register a trademark on taglines names, shapes, logos, that thing. You certainly can. There are limitations, like you're saying, it can't be a common name. It can't be a common usage kind of a thing. There are. Then, definitely get guidance from a trademark specialist. There's, but there, what are the things about a registering your trademark is that you do need to be using it in commerce. You need to be using that trademark associated with a sale of a product or some kind of a business transaction. You do it, there are, it's not just a matter of filing paperwork. There is you do have to use it.

00:15:37
Roy
Okay. Okay. Yeah. The, so that I was just thinking about like, for the exit strategy and I guess that's one reason that, probably, well, let me hang on. I wanna hold that thought for a minute. I had one more question back on products and services. So like how different, okay. Like I use a pretty nice microphone here, and this is the extreme I know, but, I could take this apart, turn the wires around and say, okay, I've got a different, combination of wiring. What's this, what is that differentiator between an existing product and an upgrade or, I guess, how do you go about proving that whatever I did to this microphone really added a value enough more than just, kind of ripping off the original manufacturer.

00:16:31
Yoriko
I'm sure you don't want to be considered a copycat. Right. So, whatever, so you can protect the improvements. So now we're talking patents. Okay. You can file for a patent protection on an improvement over an existing product. Now that improvement does have to be, have to provide, sufficient improvement. So that it's different enough. Like for example, if you're, if it's just like, if you have, if you purchased like your microphone, if you purchased the product a and you Decided, what, I have this other product B, and if I were to stick these two things together, they work so much better. Right. If you're not aware of on the market of anybody else combining a plus B, then that could be productive. Now you'd have to convince the examiners over at the patent office that it's an improvement enough. Or if, what will be even better is say, go back to the plumbing business again.

00:17:42
Yoriko
So your pot. Say you're a podcaster, but you have a background in plumbing. It so happens that, with your microphone, if you take this piece of, plumbing equipment from your day job truck, right. You were sticking on your microphone, then that just creates a whole better resonance. It's something that you've never seen in the microphone industry before. Right. Of course, it's something that, plumbers don't think about improving microphone sounds. Right. These are, it's an unexpected combination of two completely diverse products to produce an unexpected result. Yeah. Having that, having something like that would improve your chances of getting, being able to get patent protection on it.

00:18:35
Roy
Okay. I guess that investigation part, like with mine, the podcast name, it was fairly easy and, I've been doing it for a few years. No, nobody's come after me yet. I'm probably pretty good there, but, let's just say this combination of, product a and product B that maybe we think that we're, unique about. But, we don't know that, I mean, we, you never know in this big old world, somebody else may have, came out of the store with the, a Hershey bar and ran into the guy with the peanut butter. Now, they've got the Reese's peanut butter cup, but, so is that a function that the, I guess the founder and the person that thinks that they have the intellectual property, is that something that they need to do? Is that an investigation that would be part of the work that you do? Or how w how does that work?

00:19:28
Yoriko
Okay. That's a really complicated question to answer actually, because there are a lot of implications about it. Say like about that, let's start with the name. Okay. Yeah. With your name. That's something that, it's finding for a trademark registration is not that expensive, but still, usually if you were to go and talk with a trademark attorney about it, then the first thing that they're going to tell you is have you done a search, like, have you done a Google search on that name? there are very specific, databases that you can look at the us patent and trademark office has a trademark search database, which is really easy to use, at least do some of your own due diligence that way you don't want to spend a lot of money. I think even if, so, a trademark filing, depending on your, the attorney that you choose will likely cost you somewhere between five, $500 and a thousand dollars for that initial filing.

00:20:30
Yoriko
Overall the, in order for you to actually get the registered trademark, it'll probably cost, two or $3,000. If you don't want to spend that money on a name that someone else might have used, just do a Google search, do a domain search, because now looking a web domains can give you an idea of who's thinking about those ideas, whether that, of those names, regardless of whether they've actually started a business on it, you can do that, their trademark, the registered trademark search, just a plain old Google search, or like you did with your were looking on iTunes. If you have a very specific, database or something that can be used as a database for your industry use that. That's something quick and easy for patents, for things that you're considering filing for patent protection, that gets more complicated because of a legal statute called duty of disclosure.

00:21:33
Yoriko
It means that, if you are, if you wanted to file for a patent application on an innovation that you came up with, but you knew that someone else has a very similar idea, yours is different, but that other person has a very similar idea. You're still gonna fire your patent application. The patent office says that if of this other person's, product, then you have the duty that you have the duty of disclosure to cite that person's product to bring that person's product to the patent office is attention. Whether it's, you know, sending in a copy of their product brochure, even if you have, even if you know that your product is different, if you don't cite that other person's product, then even if you were to get a patent on your idea, eventually it can be invalidated because you then insight that other person's product.

00:22:37
Yoriko
So it gets complicated. If you are thinking of filing for patent protection, then before you go and do a bunch of searches, or like, do a bunch of research, then I will talk with an IP professional first, just so that you don't get into that potential trap.

00:22:55
Roy
No. Okay. In our worlds become, the world has become smaller, but it's also become a very big place for businesses. So, in my corner of the world, maybe it's a great idea and nobody's ever thought about it, but, across the world, they may have been using it or been doing it. What are the, I guess, what are the borders? Is this like, in the us type of thing, is it a global thing? Or how does, how do you translate that?

00:23:31
Yoriko
Okay, so there are two different questions here, actually. The first part is whether or not you'll be able to get patent protection for your product. Patents are that it's split by jurisdiction. A us patent can only be enforced in the United States. If you're, if you know that you have a competitor in Europe, then that you're going to want to go after eventually, then you should also file in Europe. Now, the flip side is if you're pro, if you're say your competitor is in Europe and they have a product out there and they want to bring their product into the United States, but you already have a patent in the United States, then they won't be able to compete against your product in the us. So those are different things. What I was talking about earlier, as far as the searches and being aware of other people that are doing similar things, that's worldwide.

00:24:30
Yoriko
If it's a publication, if it's a publicly known, product, then it could be anywhere. So, so in that sense with the search that you would want to do, for patents you would want, no. You, you would want to know whether, somebody in a foreign country or we're using, w w had created a similar product before. Now that having, going back through the whole, the jurisdiction thing, though, for trademarks, it can be an advantage because if you are, if, so you might know somebody using a name and say standing somewhere in Scandinavia. Say in Sweden, there is a, there's a website that's using a similar name to what you want to use it. Maybe they have a registered in soybean, but it's a Swedish company. They have no intention of doing business in the United States. So they never registered in the us. You might still be able to get that name in the United States.

00:25:40
Roy
Okay. Okay. Yeah. The other thing I was kind of thinking about too, is excuse me, that, for a guy just operating a business out of his garage, or, something simple, this may be a very complex procedure that turns people off, but I think we have to keep in mind as well, that if, as we grow and as we want to seek outside investors, I think that's probably going to be one of the first questions they're going to ask is your product per if we're selling it based because it's a unique product, is this product protected in some way?

00:26:22
Yoriko
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. What are the questions that you're definitely, and investor will ask you as well? So this might not sound like an IP question, but it actually is. The question that you will likely get is what is your competitive advantage and how can you, and how are you protecting it? So if you are a product company and you don't have some kind of IP protection around your product, and there is nothing preventing someone else from outright copying your product, then that's a problem for the investor. The investor is not going to want to give you money because someone else didn't come in, we'd come in, copy it, copy your product. And it's a similar thing. I, I've heard more, in talking with, investors and some of the people that do due diligence for investments. Due diligence essentially just means, how legit is your business that we are, that we want to give money to, and that covers intellectual property.

00:27:25
Yoriko
If one of the things that they have is one of the problems that they find is that, well, maybe you haven't filed for a trademark on your company name and you, or even worse, you had tried to file for a trademark registration, but you got rejected because someone else already had a registered trademark on it. You continued to use that name anyway, just because, all your marketing materials are already printed and like you've got your website and all of that. Maybe that comes up during your investor due diligence. That's a problem. You don't want to run into that.

00:28:04
Roy
Okay. Yeah. Cause I I'd see similar names across states and I guess that maybe somebody just didn't go, file for that name. They may be if their business is, contained in a state or a local area and you're off in another area, I guess that they just kind of let that go. Cause it's really not worth either one of them trying to make a fuss because they're not infringing upon each other. The one thing too though, is the, I think why you need to do this also is the protection for the exit strategy because you've built up this business, spent a lot, a lifetime doing it. You think that you have a unique, competitive advantage, maybe a product or, you know, and I'll let you know, you can pick which one that you want to talk about, but, you know, when it comes down to the end, we want to sell the business and somebody takes a look at what you've got.

00:29:00
Roy
If you're not protected, I guess they could walk away and copy it and just kind of leave you in the cold.

00:29:08
Yoriko
Yeah. And that happens. And, for example, I have a, I was just talking with a friend the other day. He has a company that he's built a pretty, it's small, but very locally respected brand. Now he's starting to talk with some national people, national corporations that are looking to either acquire his company or to help him franchise his business outside of my little local jurisdiction. One of the issues that he's finding is that when he does start looking national, then they really, they have a lot higher expectations on how they can protect the brand. Then, other people can just come in and just like you said to copy, right. Yes, if you want, if you have aspirations of growing your business to beyond just your local jurisdiction. Yeah. That's something that you definitely want to think about. One of the things that I do tell people is that, with an IP strategy that, an IP strategy should be complimentary to your business strategy so that, maybe part of your IP strategy is that, what, I'm a software company, software patents have a really hard time in the courts and I'm repping my product all the time anyway.

00:30:44
Yoriko
Patents take, three to five years and tens of thousands of dollars. Yeah. I don't want to do that. I just want to protect my product. I want to sell my product or sell my software partner. Maybe it's in the app. I want to sell my app on the apple store and then maybe pivot and do something else six months later, maybe that product's not going to work out, but I have all of these ideas that I want to move forward with my company. My IP strategy is that I will not file for patent production. I'm just going to be sure to turn out these products that are going to sell really quick, you might die really quick, but I've already got the idea for the next thing. That's how I'm going to run my business in my IP strategy is to keep that idea flowing, not necessarily to stop and try to protect every single step on my way to big success.

00:31:44
Yoriko
So that's a perfectly valid IP strategy. Yeah. It's just that you need to be able to articulate that you need to have thought about it. Even with investors, no going to go back to your question about investor questions. When an investor asks you, Nope, what is your IP strategy? Do you have an IP strategy? The, one of the things that they're looking for is just that you have put thought into it. Like when you put your w when you're putting chose your product name and you chose your company name and your chose, your product features, you did think about it. You did think about how you're going to protect those, what you consider are your product, competitive advantage, having thought about it and to be able to articulate it, that's really what your investor is looking for. Not, how many patents patent applications apply all day that how much money you've spent on it.

00:32:37
Yoriko
That's, so that's how you can talk about your IP, tie it all to your exit strategy and to think about. In order for me to get from where I am now, to where I'm getting acquired by the big guys, what do I need to build with my product? So, no, obviously there needs to be a product development plan. There an IP strategy that goes along with the product development plan to be able to protect your cons, your idea every step of the way, or simply to move faster than your competition? Yeah. These are all things that you can think about as you have your exit in mind.

00:33:25
Roy
Yeah. That's a good reason to seek out professionals such as yourself, because well, that time horizon that it takes, but also, there's a difference in something that's a fad product that's going to burn itself off within, probably before you could even get to the filing office with it versus something that's very capital intense that may take years and years of development and a lot of money that would be definitely some things that you would want to consider, but again, seeking out professionals like yourself. So, one other question I had while you're talking about that was the expiration, like we always hear with drugs that, their patents burn off after a certain period of time. I guess that's when the, can you think of the name of it, but that's when the, yeah. That's when the generics come in. What about, what about hardware software? The, do those patents burn off eventually as well?

00:34:28
Yoriko
Yep. Patents all expired 20 years from filing. You have a very, you have a limited monopoly. That's where you do have to keep in mind that once you file a patent application, it's going to take you, it's going to take at least three to five years for you to get an issued patent, assuming everything goes well. Okay. If your business, like the app business that I was talking about earlier, if you're a business as an app business and your product isn't going to be around in three to five years, you're going to be doing something else. Right. And don't bother with mountains. Yeah. If you are known for some of these complex electronics companies, if your product development cycle is on the order of years, and it's going to take your competitors years to ramp up their product development in order to catch up to you, then maybe filing for patents is going to be worthwhile for your endeavor.

00:35:29
Roy
Yeah. Because that's generally when you're going to need, maybe a, a larger boost of money is when you finally bring your product, you get it developed, bring it to market. That is really not the time that you want to find out. Somebody has beat you to the patent office. What is the procedure? I'm going to go out later on and try to cook something up in my garage. And, I'm going to call you up and say, okay, I'm ready to, seek a patent or a trademark on this. How does that, after you received the phone call from someone, what does that process look like going forward?

00:36:05
Yoriko
Sure. I have a bit of a unique, approach, so to contrast, and if you were to go to tell exactly what you said to a patent attorney, then at a law firm, then they're usually going to say, sure, I can get you a patent on that. And then what they'll take down. So they'll listen to your ideas. Don't ask you a bunch of questions about your ideas, how it's different from any other solution that's out there. They're right. A down, they put together, they'll put together a and application, and then they'll go away for a couple of years waiting for the USPTA to respond to you. I do, I like to do things more differently, because partly because of my MBA, I think about patents in terms of business value. So it's an investment. You want to get a return on investment on things like Penton costs.

00:37:07
Yoriko
If you were to think about it in terms of what is having a patent or a registered pattern or a registered trademark or anything else for that matter, how is this IP going to help your company? So is this, how is this going to help you distinguish yourselves over the competition? Is this is having IP protection around your product know, is that going to help you raise, raising, increase the valuation of your company and help you raise money? is maybe, putting together a trade secret policy, is that going to help you even more? so it might cost less to do that, but there are implications of things, what you have to do. Where is the best place for you to spend your business money in order for the IP to work for you? That's, that's what I would ask you. I may, so I asked a lot of business questions, and then after that, if we determined that, for example, if you are in a, an industry where a lot of people Sue each other over IP, like for example, if you are in, yeah, for example, I have a friend that's an accident that used to do a lot with action figures.

00:38:30
Yoriko
One of his big things, other than trying to get the best manufacturing deals in China was to get the best licensing deals from Marvel or Disney or whatever. There for him, IP was really important for him because he needed to make sure that the products that he is creating is sufficiently well-protected. So that these are my action figures. Aren't that hard to copy. Right? Right. You want to make sure that your brand and your products are protected now. That w if something were to happen, if this Disney won't come after him yeah. You know, those sorts of things. It, it comes out in kind of unexpected ways. They're in his business, it was really important for him to have very strong IP policies, licensing deals, that kind of things. Okay. In those cases, it, or if it's a really innovative product then, and you want to get, eventually get acquired by apple, then you would want to have good patent protection around your innovation.

00:39:41
Yoriko
Okay. Then, so then what I'll do is I'll do a similar thing as a patent attorney, I'll ask you lots of questions about your innovation, and then we'll, we will put together a patent application that at a price point, especially that w that's that will bring you value in the long run. That's what I would, try to do for you. After you get the filing, and like I said, the patent office has a backlog. You don't take, you it'll likely take at least two years for you to hear back from them, unfortunately. You ha you start the negotiation with an examiner at the patent office, whether you file in the us or you'll file anywhere else, there's an examiner. That's going to look at your patent application, look for other, what we call prior art, which is essentially other people's publications that describe innovative inventions that are similar to yours.

00:40:40
Yoriko
You'll start that negotiations with the examiner, who is going to come back here and say, I don't think you should get a patent on this, on your idea because this other person has a similar idea, how is yours different? So then you go, you argue back and forth. If you are able to convince the examiner that, yes, my idea actually is unique. It's not, it's very different from that other guys for these reasons. If you can convince the examiner that then you're get an issue.

00:41:10
Roy
This may be out of your wheelhouse, but I'm sure that you deal with it. If you're a big manufacturer and you come up with a new product and it's all in-house, or if you're a software developer, you can keep a pretty tight leash on that. Maybe it's you on your computer, or maybe two or three other people, but let's just take, the guy, I guess, the success story of he's out in his garage, tinker and around comes up with something, but he's got to take it to a manufacturer, so, okay. We've got two or three years before we could even see protection on this thing. How do you protect yourself in order to get prototypes made, or even start the process when you can't protect it?

00:42:04
Yoriko
Sure. Two words, strong contracts. That's where you start throwing the legal language around it. There, yes, it's, there are lots of people that don't necessarily respect things like non-disclosure agreements or, consulting agreements, or meant, or, IP agreements within, like per even purchase agreements. There, there are contracts, there are ways that you can tighten those things up in contract. Like for your software example, one of the things that a lot of people do is to hire out, hire other developers, to actually bring your product to fruition. What are the things that you definitely want to do is to have an IP clause in whatever contract that you use to hire the developer, to make sure that he or she has explicitly assigned any rights to what they write over to your company so that your company outright owns that make sure that it is in writing and make sure that it's like, okay, anytime you use a consultant for anything like, whether it's generating your new logo or, even anything creative like that, make sure that there is language in the contract that you use to hire them, that the rights are assigned to you, and that you act you explicitly own anything that is created to make sure that's strong contracts.

00:43:40
Roy
All right. Great. Well, well, Rico, I certainly appreciate you taking time to be with us today. Before we get away a couple of questions, first is, what is a, a habit or a tool or app, or what is something that you use in your daily life could be professional, personal that you feel like adds a lot of value.

00:44:01
Yoriko
Okay. In my world, because I, I do client work time-tracking is like the bane of my existence. And, one thing can, I can actually name a product. Okay. I use this thing called time Mueller. It is a it's this cube thing. It's a, it's a term. What it has is it has marks that you can use. That, for example, this one says, biz ops, this one says marketing, this one says client non-billable. It says client hourly, those sorts of things. All I have to do is, so this just reminds me by just having this here, it reminds me, so, okay. Now I'm going to go from, I'm not even talking to Roy, so I'll call this marketing. So that's what I'm doing. I'll put that marketing side up on top, automatically starts tracking something like my time alert just started. My app just started tracking.

00:45:09
Yoriko
When I say, okay, now I'm done talking with talking to Roy and I'm going to do client work. I switched to client hourly, and then I'll hit all them. Magically starts tracking. Interesting. This has been the best thing ever.

00:45:22
Roy
And it's called Tom Mueller.

00:45:25
Yoriko
Yes. Okay. So kind of U L a R. Okay. Awesome. There are some, there are tiny little, I think they're in Austria, tiny little startup app. There's an app that goes with it. It's great. Having that physical thing has been great for me. That's been a, that's been a time changer or a game changer.

00:45:49
Roy
So you learn something every day. That's, that's why I asked that question. Cause man, I tell you what I have had some great ideas, but that's a good one. I'm gonna check that out because that's always, it's always a problem, especially if you have multiple clients, because you just get so focused on what you're doing, that, making that change to do something else. It just escapes me a lot of times. So. Awesome. Well, appreciate that. Well, so if you don't also tell us, who's your client, what you can do for them. Of course, how can they reach out and get ahold of you?

00:46:19
Yoriko
Of course, the, my specialty. Like you said, at the beginnings of my background is in electrical engineering. So I'm a hardware girl. I like hands-on product things. Lbs work really well to protect hardware innovations. Most of my clients are in the hardware space. It's like I said earlier, in software products are really hard to protect with them. Yeah. I, I don't work with a lot of software clients. I like hardware clients that have really interesting innovations that can be very complicated. Like, I've got a couple of clients that work in quantum computing. It's dealing with cubits, like who knew about cubits, those kinds of things. I like those sorts of cutting edge hardware innovations. Those are the kinds of clients that I think get the most value of working with me. The easiest way to get ahold of me is through my website it's patentsintegrated.com.

00:47:28
Roy
Okay, awesome. Well, thanks again for being with us, we appreciate it. A lot of great information for us to think about. So, this is going to be it for another episode of the business of business podcast. Of course, you can find us at www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com. We're on all the major social media and a, the video version of this will come out on YouTube once this episode is released. Until next time, take care of yourself and take care of your business.

www.patentsintegrated.com

www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com

Business and Tax Advice is an Important Strategy Year Round, Not Just April with Greg Reed

April may be the time for filing your taxes, but it shouldn't be the only time you to speak with your tax and business advisor. Its advisable to be in communication with your professional all year round to take full advantage of appropriate strategies for your individual situation to reduce taxes and increase profits.

About Greg

My name is Greg, I work with a company called SmartBooks and I help my clients save money on taxes. As a company, we provide bookkeeping, accounting, tax, h/r and payroll services to small businesses and individuals. Basically, we do all the back-office finance stuff so our clients can focus on building their business and doing what they love! I like to think of working with my clients as like building a house

Tax Planning Tips:
1. Foundation - Books and Records
a. Tracking
b. Capturing all the expenses
c. Bank accounts setup correctly
d. Reconciling

2. Framing - Entity Structure (LLC, S Corp, C Corp) -

3. Electric/plumbing (essential items) Back to Basics:
a. Meals and entertainment
b. Home Office
c. Accelerated Depreciation (Bonus/Section 179)
d. Section 199A Deduction (Qualified Business Income Deduction)
e. Travel Expenses
f. Software and Equipment

4. The fancy finishing touches - Getting specific:
a. Retirement planning
b. Cash vs Accrual basis of Accounting
c. Augusta Rule - Rent your home to your business!
d. Adding Children to Payroll

5. Maintenence
a. Compliance
i. Tax Returns
ii. Estimated Tax Payments
iii. Sales Tax
iv. State and Local Taxes
v. Payroll
b. COVID
i. NOL carrybacks
ii. PPP
iii. Employee Retention Credit
c. KPI’s
i. What needs to change in the record-keeping
ii. What should be tracked
iii. What shouldn’t be tracked

6. Open House
a. Build a team of experts to help reach new goals
i. CFO
ii. Financial Planner
iii. Estate Planning
iv. Business Succession

[email protected]

www.smartbooks.com

www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com

Full Transcript Below

Business and Tax Advice is an Important Strategy Year Round, Not Just April with Greg Reed

00:00:01
Roy
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the business of business podcast. I'm your host, Roy, of course we are the show that we bring a wide range of guests that talk about a lot of diverse topics, that have to do with business situations. And, today we have, awesome guests and not only a timely guests, but Greg Reed, he is a CPA and he is with SmartBooks, they're. They have a very entrepreneurial culture at their company. His roots are working with large and international business. Greg is no stranger to complex tax laws, which is what led him to work with small businesses because they often don't have access to someone who can help them navigate tax law. So, Greg, thanks so much and welcome to the show. We appreciate it.

00:00:53
Greg
Yeah. Thanks for having me, excited to be here.

00:00:56
Roy
Well, unfortunately, and I'll throw my, be the first one to throw myself under the bus and say that, in my personal life and in business, we think about taxes on a, April 1st, April 7th or eighth, and rushing around trying to gather everything up and, throw it in the shoe box to take it over to the accountant and get everything put in. But, really, and that's comical there. I'd try to do a little better, but tax prep, there's more to taxes, than just dropping numbers into some boxes. I think it's a year long process and we need to really be, in contact with our professionals, our CPAs lawyers and other professionals that we work with every year, because, while you can help guide us know where we're at, but anyway, that's kind of what I would like to talk more about today is, just kind of that the, all the other stuff that you can help small businesses with as well.

00:02:02
Roy
Even though the other thing I want to make clear too, is even though that you're located in Massachusetts, you do work with, clients all over the United States as well.

00:02:13
Greg
Yes, yes we do. Or we're all virtual. And, now in this COVID era, I guess a lot more people are, but we've been like this for about 10 years. We're pretty accustomed to working like this. Back to your comment about the shoe box, you'd be surprised there's still a lot of shoe boxes running around there. We try to and try to get people away from that.

00:02:40
Roy
Yeah. It happens, sometimes we don't want to know what we don't want to know, but then again, and that's, again, this is kind of the importance of having a professional like yourself, maybe we don't have you on staff, but I kinda, I look at you as more of a, a fractional, accountant for the company where that, we can consult during the year to make sure that we're on track and that we're doing things and you can also provide that guidance and advice as we go through, because it is so complex even for smaller businesses. It's just, it's not that simple anymore.

00:03:19
Greg
Yeah. The, the best way to utilize me and think about me is as more of a advisor role than just the tax guy. That's, I offer a lot more value than just the tax guy and in April. Exactly.

00:03:35
Roy
Yeah. It just, it depends on the businesses. Of course, COVID, I guess that, it's pre it's not only presented challenges for the businesses, but I think there a lot of these programs and things that have happened throughout the year, that's going to take some preparation and thought and planning to make sure that well, we capture what we're supposed to capture, but we also are able to take advantage of the different breaks and areas that have come out in 2020.

00:04:06
Greg
Absolutely. Our, our whole team has actually done a ton of research. We've done a ton of reading. We've worked with, a lot of our clients and help them through, there's PPP loans or Eid LL or, whatever, all the other incentives that they have out there right now, just to make sure that, we're taking advantage of all that for all of our clients. One thing that we did that, I'm very proud of and really helped our clients in my opinion, is when the whole PPP loan came out, we started right from day one. We started tracking, all the expenses, how they're used. We had all the receipts, documented and bookmarked. When it came time to forgiveness, it was just like we had the summary, we had, all the, receipts, all that stuff. And, it was nice and neat and made the whole forgiveness piece a really easy right.

00:05:07
Greg
For, for our clients.

00:05:09
Roy
Yeah. I know tax season is right upon us. We'll what we'll say is, let's get through this tax season and then have a fresh start, with, reaching out to professionals like yourself because, we need to build that good foundation. I think that, and I'll let you speak more to this, but it's also talking a lot of things through, so you understand me, my business, my needs, it helps you more, the more knowledge you have about my operations.

00:05:40
Greg
Yeah. So, high level, I really think about working with my clients, like building a house, and, we can kind of get into some more of the details of what that means, but, high level, it starts with, building a nice foundation. So, are you books and records in good order? can we take that shoe box and put it into, QuickBooks online and make sure that we're capturing all the expenses the right way? and then are we structured the right way? you might be an LLC, but how does, how are you taxed? and that's a key piece. You can save a lot of money, making sure that you're structured the right way. Then, you kind of get into the high level stuff, right. Or so, like electrical and plumbing, right. Like the essential stuff. We get into, I think of these as kind of the essential deductions, I guess, making sure that you're taking the meals and entertainment and home office, you're taking the, what we call accelerated depreciation, in the tax world, which is, either what we call a bonus or section one 79 depreciation basically allows you to write off assets faster for tax purposes than for book purposes.

00:07:05
Greg
Yeah. Yeah, I was just going to a few other things in there.

00:07:09
Roy
Stop you a minute because talking about the structure, that's an important piece that a lot of times we don't think about sometimes we fall into businesses and we operate under, kind of that sole proprietor of doing business. As we, that's how we can do it here in Texas. You go down and get a certificate and for $7 or something like that, you get your assumed name. The, and so it makes a difference, in our tax planning, but there's also that the liability protection is once you grow and start having assets, the, being able to segregate and protect is very important, but then the more that you do that, then you have to start keeping up with expenses and you have to start worrying, pay more attention to what you can classify as the business expenses. I'll let you, I know enough about that to be dangerous, but I do know that it's an important factor.

00:08:08
Roy
Yeah.

00:08:09
Greg
The, the entity structure is key. And, and, I tell my clients all the time, if they're just starting out, maybe those sole proprietorship is the best structure, right? It's the cheapest structure. You can start up, close it down really easily. As they continue to grow, it does usually make sense to, convert over to an LLC. It's, it's relatively cheap money. Then, how you get taxes and LLC like that's kinda like the next step in that. Right. A lot of it also depends on your goals. Right, right. Do you wanna bring on investors? Do you want to keep it closely held? Do you want to have more flexibility? stuff like that. These are all conversations that I have my clients, so that we can set them up and, I have a phrase it's called, never let the tax tail wag the dog. What that means is that you can't base everything on paying the least amount of tax.

00:09:09
Greg
You gotta, you gotta set stuff up. It makes economical sense for you, right?

00:09:15
Roy
Yeah. I think the further we go down the road, the more complex it becomes. That, again, that's why we need to reach out to professionals in the beginning, even though maybe we don't change our designation, maybe we do, work under the assumed name for a period of time. We have triggers of when we know when it's time to take that next step. I think the other part of this, and I think that's just where you were going is, with our retirement planning, but also succession planning. We have to think about, as a sole business person, you're, even if you have four or five employees, you typically have all the knowledge of everything in your head. We have to plan for, unfortunately, what if were to pass suddenly, because we need to think about our families as well, but about that succession planning we need, maybe at some point we're going to want to sell, or we might get made an offer.

00:10:14
Roy
If we don't have things, in cleaned up and we don't have the back of our house cleaned up, that makes it much more difficult as well.

00:10:24
Greg
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, setting all this stuff up so that, like you said, succession planning, do you want to pass the business on who do you want to pass the business on to, making sure that, if you have a partner that, you have a nice, buy, sell agreement in there, this is where I, I'm a big believer in building a team around you. As you continue to grow, you build that team. You have me, you have an attorney, maybe you have, an estate attorney to, help with the succession of wealth. My plan is that we all work together to come up with the best plan for you. I'm a big believer that I don't know it all. I have no problem saying that. And I believe, and in utilizing experts,

00:11:18
Roy
No, I agree. I agree in, and it, this it's complex and there's a lot of moving parts, but it's also, that succession plan. It's also that, it's some people, the business is their retirement plan. So, we need to think about how does that work. We don't want to get to the end of the line. I've seen this with small businesses, they get to the end of the line and there's really no business there to sell. It's, it's all the information is they are the assets. Basically. They, the person is the asset. They step away, there's really nothing anybody to sell. So that's, something to think about. Also there are a lot of retirement vehicles that are, available to, business owners, small business owners that are really good vehicles in order to set some money aside just as a kind of a backup plan too.

00:12:14
Greg
Oh, absolutely. Not only, from, obviously it's, it makes good financial sense to, save for retirement, but also from a tax planning perspective, if you are generating a lot of income, there are ways that we can, minimize or reduce that tax liability by, effectively, doing some retirement planning, whether it's a set plan or a 401k, or, and again, that all comes down to structure size goals, stuff like that. Right. There's really is no like one size fits all plan. And, and that's why, again, getting back to looking at me as more of an advisor role than a, just the tax guy is in my opinion, very crucial.

00:13:09
Roy
Yeah. We need to think about this as a year long process, because, if our hiring, if I hire a new guy in June, because when we're talking about retirement plans, there are a lot of rules and regulations. I don't, we don't want to get that minute into all of them, but some have to do with used to anyway, contributions that I can make to myself as the business owner or some plans you have to make the same contribution to employees. Some you don't, but these are all great things to talk about with you in June. When I add my employee, not April 7th, like, oh yeah, by the way, I added some guy, this last time and then, kind of get jammed up at the last minute. So again, this is where.

00:13:53
Greg
April, I'm just a historian January to April. I'm a historian. I, I can't do much, but yeah,

00:14:00
Roy
That's a great way to put it. I kinda liked that because, we need that. You need to be an active participant. In June or July, when I've hired this person, we can make adjustments and things that we're doing at that specific point in time.

00:14:17
Speaker 2
Yeah,

00:14:17
Greg
No absolutely. I, I do a lot of tax planning with my clients, especially at year end, just to at least at the very least figure out, what are your liabilities look like, make sure that you have enough cash available to pay the taxes. Right. You know, plan accordingly for that. Some even going back to the retirement, right? Some plans you have to fund before year ends, and some you can fund up until, you have up until you, submit your tax returns. So, depending on what you're, and that has huge implication. Yep.

00:14:55
Roy
Which kind of leads us into, well, a couple of things you had, on the, our talking points that we probably want to talk about too, is, the you're working out of your home for your business is a big one. From things I've read in the past, that's probably the number one flag for audits, with smaller businesses too, when they show some God awful amount of, I don't used to, we take the square footage and wrap, you could wrap some other costs into that, but when you start overdoing it, cause there's percentages that you work off of. Anyway, again, I'll let you talk about that, but those are things that while they're legal, he just have to be careful at how they're presented. It's all.

00:15:42
Greg
About documentation. Making sure that you are able to build a strong case in the event that you do, get audited. And, as far as the home office goes, your kitchen table, that's not going to qualify. Yeah. If you have a place that's used exclusively for business, then there's a few other, this is very high level, but, if you have a place that's used exclusively for business, then the home office is a great deduction. People are often surprised at like what you can take, right. Again, as long as you're not being aggressive, if you're within the rules that the IRS have laid out for you.

00:16:28
Roy
Exactly. Exactly. So, what about adding children to the payroll? There's a lot of advantages to that. Of course, again, we could probably do a whole entire episode, but if we could kind of go over the high level detail of that.

00:16:46
Greg
Yeah. I, I love this one. I did this with a couple of clients this year. You have kids, maybe they're, maybe you have like a, a 13, 14 year old that, you can pay it, to stop envelopes, sweep the floors, just stuff around the business to help out. You can pay them up to a $12,000 and they eat, they don't have to pay they don't have to pick up the income on their tax return. That's earned income to them. Why you sit in that to a joint bank account and that way, you're pulling money out of the business. The business gets the deduction. It's a, and they're not paying the tax on it. So it's a great incentive. Now some states, again, you have to be careful about, child labor laws, but typically if it's your child, they kind of let you do whatever you want.

00:17:43
Speaker 3
What's the statute of limitations on that one. I may have to go, I may.

00:17:46
Roy
Get to go back and see them about parents, wild lady, that whole.

00:17:51
Speaker 3
Child labor laws.

00:17:53
Greg
Yeah, I know. Right. But, yeah, that's a fun one. I love presenting that one to two people. They love that.

00:18:01
Roy
We didn't talk about this. Don't mean to put you on the spot, but the other thing is, like once they get into college, is there still some advantages too, if they can perform the work w they have to actually do the work. We have to be able to prove that they're doing something, but they're at one point there was also some really good advantages. If you had children in college, if you could work this out for them in order to, make sure that they had some money.

00:18:33
Greg
Yeah, absolutely. And, you can put them on payroll in college and, the rules do start changing once they hit 18 years old. But, you can certainly, there are, believe it or not, there are tax planning, ways that we can, save for college and, depending on the size of the business, the type of business and stuff like that, there's opportunities there as well. So, again, it's one of those situations where, it's very specific to the business, but if you qualify for it, then yeah. Yeah, you can, we can save up to about 36,000 a year. Yeah.

00:19:14
Roy
So, yeah, that's amazing. Again, I hate to belabor the point about, getting with professionals to talk about this, because there's so many things out there that people just don't think about. Then, I don't know how many tax bulletins do you estimate that you get per year? That, cause that's another reason why I was like, I have, my degree is in finance and I'm pretty decent with numbers, but I still use a CPA because she is up on everything, all the latest information and changes through the year that I don't get all the tax bulletins. And, they may not be as much as they were, but when I was coming through school, they used to, sometimes there may be two or three a month that would come out. Again, it's staying up on the latest of like this, payroll for your kids and things like that.

00:20:06
Greg
I'll be honest with you. I, I subscribe to a daily bolt and I get daily updates on things that change. And, it's not just the federal level, you gotta think about state level and then you have the various taxes, right. You have income tax, sales, tax, franchise tax, you name it and there's always something happening in some area there. Yeah, I have a daily update diary, more than others. Yeah. Yup. And we had.

00:20:38
Roy
A kind of on our list of to talk about it. This would be more, I think, geared to people that are thinking about starting a business or people that may be very new in the business is the estimated taxes, because I will tell you that I've known some people that has really come back to haunt them, even though they had some success in a business, they just got so far behind that. It killed them. Might talk, touch on that for just a minute.

00:21:09
Greg
Oh yeah. Absolutely. Estimated taxes are our key and, you definitely want to avoid the, any underpayment penalties and you also want to be able to, make sure that it's a great way to budget for the taxes due at the end of the year. Right. I think that some people, especially new business owners, maybe they're really successful. Then, they sit down with me and in April and all of a sudden, we have this $20,000 tax bill due and they don't have any money set aside to pay it. That's where the estimated tax is really coming into play. And again, there's planning opportunities around that. Right. So, yeah.

00:21:51
Roy
Yeah, one thing I got into a habit, luckily, I got some very good advice at a very early age on this, but, whenever I collect money from a client, I just have a separate bank account for my, tax. For also my, for my SEP contribution. So, I can, again, talking to my professional, I know about what those percentages are every year. What I can do is immediately pull that out and segregated and it doesn't get commingled and accidentally get spent or invested in, believe me, it sure helps me sleep better at night. Number one, knowing when I have to make my estimated tax payments, I have something in there to actually send. At the end of the year, w we may be off by four or $500, but we're not off by tens of thousands of dollars. Yeah.

00:22:45
Greg
That's a, that's a great point. It's definitely a smart idea to kind of pull the taxes out as we go. That's why we kinda, quarterly estimated tax payments do the same thing, but, if you can kind of hold onto that money and it makes sense, and, you can, limit the underpayment penalty then, keeping in maybe a savings account where it's working for you, is, definitely a good option.

00:23:13
Roy
Yeah, no, I went ahead and I just had the money there where I could make those estimated payments because it, again, I don't, it's not that I don't trust the system. I didn't trust myself if that money was already gone, then I knew it would be there. So, I'm gonna use it for something else. Exactly, exactly. So, again, these are all strategies that, we seek out from our professionals because they can give, especially just starting out, we can have a laundry list of things that we need to do and things that we need to watch as we go through year to save us from, well, just having a big wreck here at, April 15th and then trying to figure all this stuff out, at least as we worked through this through the year, we can handle, the smaller situations and not lead up to a big one.

00:24:01
Roy
Kind of along those lines is our payroll, because if you are a business that employs people, you hold out withholding and FICA and all that, you have to send that money in at designated times, I guess, at the, I'm not sure if it's the end of the month end of the payroll, but, back in the old days, what we had to do was you actually had to call woman key it in, through a system. It was very difficult. And, the other thing is, I don't know, I ha I know some people that used to have a whole bunch of trouble with that, estimating it, and there are a lot of good services out there now that, I mean, you can be down to the penny, with your withholding and things, what you are sending you. Oh yeah.

00:24:52
Greg
I'm a big believer in outsourcing payroll. Just let a company that focuses on payroll, do the payroll. We utilize, vendors like ADP, Gusto and a few others. And, depending on which ones are really good fit for our client, is the one that we'll go with. But, the fact that a lot of these payroll providers will file the returns for you. They'll they'll do the W2's, they'll kind of, take care of all the stuff that can often be forgotten. Right. And, payroll is one of those things that you don't want to get behind. Right, right.

00:25:39
Roy
Yeah. Yeah, because I know there's been, and this is prior to COVID, but there was a, a really successful restaurant here in town where I live that, they ended up getting in a lot of hot water over their payroll or their payroll taxes and eventually put them out of business. Again, I, everything in business is serious, but when you're dealing with the government federal or state, they take this very serious. We need to make sure that we've got our ducks in a row, when we get, when we start talking about that. Absolutely. The different rules, I guess there's different rules for states, with payroll as well.

00:26:24
Greg
Yeah. It's, states all have their own rules. It's like 50 different countries. So you gotta be up on that. Again, going back to my point of utilizing, people who are well versed in this stuff and live it, payroll is definitely part of that. Yeah.

00:26:50
Roy
Yeah. Then, which kind of also leads to, 10 99 employees. I know they've made some changes in 10 90 nines this year, but I think the other distinction where you can provide some guidance on is, there, a lot of times people think that they can avoid the whole, with holding that mayor, if we just 10 99 people, but there are very specific rules around who is eligible for 10 99. I guess what I'm trying to say is that you can get yourself in some trouble by doing that, if things come back on you as well. So,

00:27:30
Greg
Yeah, and I think it was California that just recently passed a rule that it makes it pretty hard to be a 10 99 contract there. At the individual level at least, yeah, you really gotta be careful with the 10 99 and crossing that line into employee because, they can, they'll hit you pretty hard for.

00:27:53
Roy
That. Yeah. And are specific rules. I know that. Again, I don't want to get off into that, but this is why, you need to seek out professional help because there are like four or five key things that you have to meet in order to be considered 10 99. I think that they've gotten more and more difficult as we've gone through time. So, but let's just say for a minute that, we have a domestic help, somebody that helps with children or cleaning the house, maybe the yard God. What, w what are the rules on that? Is it still like five or $600 if you pay somebody more than that?

00:28:36
Greg
Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, $600 per, if you pay someone more and then, the child care is different. You actually have to put, if you pay over, I think the amounts $2,000, don't quote me on that, but, you gotta, you actually put them on payroll. It's, I believe it's schedule H and Z. You have to set them up on payroll and withhold taxes, and that's like a whole, it's called the nanny payroll there. Care.com and, they'll the bigger websites, like, they'll kind of administer that for you. A lot of people don't either do that or know that. Yeah. That's definitely something that, you could get dinged on. Yeah.

00:29:36
Roy
Okay. Always good to reach out on that. Let's talk about KPIs for a minute. What are some things that, I guess we can be looking at as far as our key performance index is either, jointly or what I need to be watching throughout the year.

00:29:56
Greg
This comes down to, and this gets back into, really understanding your client, understanding their goals and helping them identify the key performance indicators, the KPIs that are going to be meaningful to them. It also, it gets back to record keeping, if you're running, several different business lines through one account, we want to make sure that we're separating those out so that, we know, okay, this side of the businesses maybe doing really well, but this side of the business and not so much, and really setting the key performance indicators that are going to beneficial to you, and then tracking them over time so that we can utilize that data to continue to get better as in the future. Okay. These are all things that, like when I meet with my clients on say like a quarterly basis, we'll sit down and, go through, what the numbers look like, figure out what, how we're doing compared to, budget to actual, figure out, how are we doing with the KPIs?

00:31:13
Greg
What do we need to do to maybe get to, back on track or, maybe we need to adjust our goals. At this point we're not even in like to tax world anymore where we're more in like that advisor role, but, my benefit or my advantage is that, I, I understand, financial statements, and not to say that our clients don't, but, I think I look at things differently than, maybe say like, a typical business owner. Yeah.

00:31:51
Roy
Well, and I think we fall into a trap of, we're so busy running our business that we, it's not that we don't pay attention. It's just, we don't really know what that is telling us because I've, unfortunately, I've dealt with some clients in the past that get down, to, they get well through, a year to find out that maybe they are taking a loss on some different segments, products or services that they have the business overall. Like you said, this is a good reason to, try to segment as much as we can, because they had, one particular service that was dragging down the whole operation. Instead of waiting, till the end of the year, or going through your four years by tracking that were able to catch it, make some changes and put them back in profitability. Again, that's important that we just don't let this stuff go longer than it actually needs to go before we realize it.

00:32:48
Roy
Yeah.

00:32:48
Greg
And, it's all about, building that healthy business that, like when COVID hit, a lot of businesses were doing okay, but then they realized, well, maybe weren't doing as good as we thought were. Right. And, having it, tracking those KPIs and, the budget to actual and all that, planning is helpful in that. I mean, I've had clients who come to me and say that they've had a great year, and then we start looking into the books and diving into it. And, it turns out to be not such a great year. So, the customers might be there, but maybe the pricing isn't. Right, right. So.

00:33:36
Roy
Yeah, yeah, definitely. And, again, don't want to get too far off track, but this is another area where, I've seen with clients in the past is that it was pricing. When you really start breaking down this pricing, they didn't understand the components of what made that there's an arbitrary, we're charging this much for this service. Unfortunately it wasn't enough to cover the expenses for them actually providing that service. So, those are things that, professionals can help you with to look at your, think about looking at the market, the competition, a whole lot of things that you need to look at.

00:34:16
Greg
It goes the other way too. Right. Maybe use your thinking that maybe we didn't have that great of a year. Yeah. Once you look at the numbers and you figure out what's deductible and what's not deductible, and, kind of get into that, you figure out why I might have this big tax bill. Right. Yeah, so it's good to keep those that tracking on.

00:34:42
Roy
Track, right? Yeah, exactly. So, yeah. We mentioned, you mentioned this a little earlier, but the CPA financial advice is, part of a greater team that we need to look at building, and, you talk about the team that we need to try to put together to help us reach these new goals.

00:35:05
Greg
Yeah, absolutely. I like to say that you gotta start with a good CPA, and they're kind of beat gonna kind of be the, I, I, if you want to say a sports analogy, I'm the quarterback of the whole stage of the whole process. Right. Even from day one, right, you just, you say, I want to start a business. Now, you reach out to a CPA. Okay. Let's talk, what does this mean? What do you have to do? Do you have to, with the state, do you need any specific licenses? and then, let me introduce you to this attorney and they can be set up the business from a legal standpoint. Okay, great. Now, let me set you up with a bookkeeper, and now you can get set up with a bookkeeper and, let me get you on a payroll platform that works for you, if you need payroll.

00:35:58
Greg
I'm, I, I view my role as more of like, a quarterback type role where I can, kind of oversee the whole operation from the finance side. Yeah.

00:36:14
Roy
Yeah. The other thing key for that is that communication between all of those people, there needs to be good Oak because it can kind of derail the whole process if all of these professionals operate in their own silo where they don't really talk to each other, there needs to be a good team with good communication and get that set up from the beginning. Yeah.

00:36:39
Greg
Abs absolutely. The communication factor is key and, making those introductions to, if you already have an attorney in place, just making sure that, where we're all on the same page. And yeah, exactly. I think that's probably one of the factors that causes the whole house to come crashing down. Right. Is communication. Exactly.

00:37:07
Roy
Yeah. In most things in life that's for sure. All right. Well, Greg, thanks so much. I know it's a busy time of year for you. I just want to again, say thanks for taking time out of your day to be with us and talk this through. Because like I said, we view sometimes people view their, CPA is just the guy they see in April and, just go take that beating. But, I think the bigger message is that we need to look at our CPA as part of our team and we need to have contact throughout the year so we can get that advice. And, it will definitely help us when the end of the year rolls around. We will be in a much better position in order to, get everything taken care of as well as be more profitable. Yeah. So, so what is a tool that you use either in your professional life or your personal life? It could be a tool, an app, some kind of a habit, a ritual, something that you do every day that adds value to your operation?

00:38:15
Greg
Honestly, from a more of a personal level, it's just making sure that, I'm taking care of myself. That just makes me, a better person, a better, CPA and a much clearer mind. Yeah, you can't work a hundred hours a week, especially doing what we're doing. I always make a joke that you probably don't want me doing your taxes on April 14. At that point I've looked at so many tax returns. It's, it's all starting to blur together, but, all right. Yeah. And that's, self-care, we've got.

00:39:00
Roy
To take care of ourselves that's for sure. The other thing I might advise people is just, call Greg, get him to linear hand, but don't take your first meeting on a golf course with him. As you can see in the background here, he's got his golf clubs there, and if I'm not wrong, you're about a two and a half handicap.

00:39:21
Greg
Yeah. Maybe two and a half three, but.

00:39:28
Speaker 3
We can do all right. Lee,

00:39:30
Roy
If you do go to the golf course with them, leave your wallet at home. All right. Well, it's a lot of fun. Greg tell everybody how they can, tell them like, who is your client, who your client is, what you can do for them. Of course, how they can reach out and get ahold of you. Yeah,

00:39:50
Greg
Absolutely. So, we work with small businesses ranging from, pre-revenue startup to, anywhere, five to 10 million in revenue. We're just looking to, like I said, be that kind of the advisor role that they might be missing. Again, we focus more on the tax planning for me, the tax return, which obviously we do is kind of the end result. Right. It's like the presentation of the business plan, and working with me throughout the year. That's, that's where for me, that's where I'm going to provide you value. Yeah, small business owners, we, I'm a big proponent of keeping the businesses and the individual returns together. I often do the individual tax returns for, the businesses as well, all the owners. We do, individual returns as well. So, if you just need to get something filed, we handle that too. Okay. The best way to reach me, you can check us out at smartbooks.com.

00:41:00
Greg
We have a whole team, and you can always email me. This is my, this is my claim to fame. My, my email address, G Reed, G R E D. It's spells greed. It's a good one for an accountant. So [email protected]. All our marketing clients. They hate that they tell me I gotta change that, but I feel like it's easy to remember. Right. Yeah,

00:41:29
Roy
I must say I did get a snicker out of that when we first started emailing back and forth, I, my girlfriend I'm like, oh, I wonder if he's ever really looked at C1.

00:41:38
Greg
Yeah. All our, all our marketing clients, they tell me, you got to change that now it's a good conversation starter. Yeah, just definitely shoot me an email. We'll, we can put it in the show notes too. We put the links up. Yeah, we'd love to talk to anybody. I, I don't, I'm not a salesman. I actually have a, a Calendly link and we can add that to the show notes too, if you don't mind, it's a virtual coffee, you make 20 minutes, sit down, we can chat, ask a couple of questions if it makes sense that we work together. I, we can talk about that. If nothing else. It's 20 minutes of, free advice and get to hang out with me. Maybe I'll maybe I'll throw in a tip or two about the golf.

00:42:31
Roy
Okay, great. I may, I may set an appointment just for that. I'm having a little trouble. All right. Good deal. All right, Greg. Well, thanks so much, everybody y'all reach out to Greg, see what he can do to, be a critical advisor for your business and, just help you to be more successful and be more prepared. That's going to do it for this episode of the business of business podcast. We do appreciate your listenership and appreciate our guests like drag. We always have awesome guests that I can never think enough. Again, just kudos to all of them for taking time out of their day, to help the audience out. You can find.

00:43:12
Speaker 3
Us, of course, in me on, Hey. Yeah, you can find.

00:43:14
Roy
Us at www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com. We're on all the major social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and of course, a video of the once this episode is released, the video will go up on YouTube. Until next time y'all take care of yourself and take care of your business.

[email protected]

www.smartbooks.com

www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com

Is Your Email Marketing Strategy Spray and Pray? Learn to Craft Emails That Get Opened with Keith Monaghan

Everyone has email these days, especially company email. Email has become the preferred method of business communication. No one uses a phone much anymore. This is why email continues to be a great form of prospecting with both new contacts and existing customers. To be successful, they have to open them!

About Keith

Keith’s mission is to simplify marketing and help businesses of all sizes reach their customers with good, solid marketing that gets results.

His work as a Market Researcher helps creative teams with projects for Nike, The CW Network, Lucasfilm, Upworthy, Specialized Bicycles, Trek, and other companies you've probably heard of (and many you probably haven't).

Previously, Keith created and managed email marketing campaigns to millions of subscribers for companies like NBC Television and Lucasfilm (yep, the Star Wars people). 

To his surprise, help with email marketing is still a common request from clients and friends. So he wrote 'Easy Email Marketing: 10 Simple Steps For Creating And Sending Email Your Customers Will Love'.

www.readeasyemail.com

www.keithmonaghan.com

www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.

Full Transcript Below

Is Your Email Marketing Strategy Spray and Pray? Learn to Craft Emails That Get Opened with Keith Monaghan

Sat, 5/29 9:05AM • 54:04

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

email, people, email marketing, image, marketing, customers, product, buy, business, stock photos, talk, template, work, book, keith, put, step, simple, computer, subject line

SPEAKERS

Keith, Roy Barker

Roy Barker  00:03

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the business of business podcast. I'm Roy, your host. We are the podcast that brings a wide variety of guests that talks about a diverse group of topics related to businesses, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, small and large businesses alike. And today, we've got an awesome guest lined up. I've been waiting for the last couple of weeks to get to talk to Keith Monahan. He's the author of easy email marketing 10 simple steps for creating and sending email your customers will love. Also, he previously he created and managed email marketing campaigns to millions of subscribers for companies like NBC television lucasfilms Yep, those are the Star Wars people and many technology companies. To his surprise, help with email marketing is still a common request he gets from his clients and friends. That's why he wrote the this latest ebook. Also, he has previously to that he wrote an E book called 15, cost free marketing ideas how to engage customers and spread the word for free. So, Keith, thanks so much for taking time out of your day to be with us. We certainly do appreciate it.

Keith  01:24

I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Roy Barker  01:26

Yeah, you know, email marketing, I think that's one place. It, it's difficult. We want to write good, you know, concise emails, but I don't know that we always structure them. And so that's one reason why, you know, excited to have you on as a guest. And I think it's also it's become an overlooked art of how to grab people's attention and get them to actually open those emails up.

Keith  01:49

I think you're right. And, you know, that's, that's why I wrote the book again, that's why I'm getting the word out on it. So maybe I'll back up and start about why, why I think email is so valuable, why maybe you want to consider it before social media, which is also valuable. But you know, consider the fact that the research shows that approximately 58% of adults open email first thing in the morning before social media. Before were stuff before they open the news, they check email. That's pretty profound. You know, I can't think of another medium that people are checking first thing in the morning, you know, other than maybe their alarm clock, right? Secondly, we all have it. Everyone has email, even my kids who are young and in college and hate email, they live with it day by day, because their instructors insists they do. They're always in the inbox. And thirdly, it is really effective. Right? So so there's the old adage in business, it's easier to sell more to your existing customer than it is to get new customers, right? Well, email marketing is really, really effective for that. You know, there are various papers out there showing the return on investment, what you get, for every dollar you spend in email marketing, it's roughly between 30 and $40. back for every dollar you spend. And now that's that's probably the ideal case, you know, it's not going to happen every time. But on average, over the course of a quarter or a year, you're probably going to look at a pretty good return on that. And I'm here to show people that it can be done very easily 10 simple steps that are super easy to understand. Each step in my book is, is like talking to a friend who knows marketing, that's me. And you can read the steps in the in the less time that it takes drink your favorite beverage, so you'll be up and running, you'll have better email than your competitors, your customers are gonna like it, it's going to be valuable to them. And most of all, I'm going to show you how to do it for free without paying anything. And I think in a time like this, where businesses are really challenged to reach customers email, this ideal way to do that. Yeah,

Roy Barker  04:02

I think you're right. You know, I think we well speak for myself, I've become kind of desensitized to the social media emails, because it's typically some kind of a scam or funny, you know, cat video where, you know, it's it's more personal than professional but with emails, you know, I'm always more attentive to them. Let me put it that way. So, you know, speaking for myself, I'm much more much more apt to open an email from you then, if you sent me that same message through social media some way?

Keith  04:38

Yeah, you know, I think you bring up a really good point. And that's that's something else that research has shown since Gosh, since I got into this way back in the late 90s. When the internet was new and shiny. People people take their inbox personally, we take it very seriously. We take it personally. It's a reflection of who we are. We're very specific about what we let in who we let in Brent, and if someone lets you into their inbox, my feeling is that they're willing to have a relationship with you and your company and what you do. Yeah. And that is that is so valuable.

Roy Barker  05:11

Yep. No, and I think that's a good point that you make, because the next step, you know, that kind of leads us into is that you've given me that opening. And so we need to have respect for that as well, we, you know, as as the sender of those emails, we need to respect that somebody has led us in, and we really need to take care, and nurture that relationship, because it's just about as easy for me to, if if you don't, when I see your name roll up, you just get the Delete without even looking at the body of the email, or worse yet, get on the block list where I don't see them at all.

Keith  05:48

Right, right. And that's, that's another great point that you bring up is, you know, a lot of people think marketing and especially email marketing is kind of a spray and pray strategy, right, I'm gonna blast this out. Millions of people, they're all gonna love me, they're gonna buy all my stuff, I know that people will hate people block you, they will delete you, they will mark you as spam. And then you are in deep trouble because you can't get past the spam filters. Like we talked about before, like you brought up before an inbox, someone's inbox is very personal, I want to invite you and you need to think about it that way. in it. It's no different. I believe in a customer's mind and you sitting across the table from them. And saying, here's how I can help you. Right, providing value. Here's my thing helping What can I do for you? I'm listening. Yeah, spray and pray is never never the way to go with email. And related to that you never want to send emails to people who have not explicitly opted into your email. Yeah. And your existing customers have, they've already indicated they like you maybe even love you and want to spread the words that well, your marketing email is a perfect chance to give them something to spread and talk about about how great you are.

Roy Barker  06:57

Yeah. Yeah, the the other part, and I think, too, is thoughtfulness, not only on the, the sheer volume that we send people, but the message and I just, this was a jumping off point on one of my pet peeves is the message goes similar to this. Well, you know, besides the ham, you know, Captain, so and so from England, and you've got a ton of money, I'd like for you to come claim ready? Yeah, we'll just put that one aside for a minute. But we don't mark. The, but the one that gets me is that, you know, we mean, you, we had a conversation about my product a week or two ago. And so I, you know, the email is reached out said, Hey, Keith, this is Roy circling back with you, you're ready to buy yet? And, and yeah, you know, those are the ones that, you know, they get the instant delete, and unfortunately, I really don't pay. I may not block them, but I don't pay attention to them with anything coming forward. And so that's the other thing, you know, we have to, we have to think that message out. And, you know, I'm a, I feel like I'm an educator. And so that's one thing. And you know, I'll let you tell some tips, I don't want to, I don't want to even pretend to be the expert here. But you know, one thing I like to do is deliver value is not always and we have to sell at some point, we have to ask for the buy, I get that. But I think we have to educate. And we I guess in the the old agrarian society, we planted, we cultivated, and then we read. And in the, the internet age, I think we've gone from sometimes we don't even plant sometimes we throw a seed out somewhere, and then we're trying to reap a harvest. And it's not that easy. And so instead of coming at me, you know, initially with Let's buy, let's buy, let's buy, educate me, why do I want to buy from you what why do I want your product? You know, there's a lot of ways that we can go with a kind of let you talk about that, if you don't mind?

Keith  09:08

Well, you know, that's if I'm if I'm an expert, in any sense, it's because I spent the last 20 years learning the hard way. Yeah, right banging my head against the property. So I'm here to help you and your listeners gain the benefit of that without having to hurt their hand like I did, or not going to get rocks and certain things out. You know, so as far as your example goes with the salesperson, so coming back around, and to push the hard sell, I would just offer real quick off the top of my head. But solution to that if you're a salesperson or you're you're following up is to not mention the product at all. Maybe send a link to an article that's kind of related to what your customers going through. Hey, if you'd like to see this, keep providing valuable information. Maybe it's related to the sale you want or not. But I truly think that's worth a few minutes every week over time. Yeah, far more than circling back around and pushing for the hardest save. And your excuse me. Your, your agrarian metaphor is great, because I think you're right in that social media tends to be the strategy tends to be kind of like a. Here's the point. Yeah. Like a dandelion right grows in your yard, the wind blows, the seeds dispersed everywhere, and the daily land hopes that maybe one or two land and plant and brand new produce. Whereas email is cultivating a relationship, right? You're sowing you're planting individual seeds, you're being thoughtful about where you put them. You're taking care of them, and you're nurturing that list your list of customers along the way. And, yeah, there's a little more work upfront. If you're lazy and want to just throw your seeds out there, your message marketing messages out there and hope for the best Well, great, you're playing people who take your money to do that, right. But don't expect a lot of good results. Yeah, once it's not going to result in a magic, sales, achievement. It's not going to happen, but but cultivating all your marketing, social media, but especially email. And the rewards just multiply exponentially when it comes around to harvest time to push the metaphor even further. When people decide to buy, either implicitly or explicitly, they're gonna remember the way you treated them and then nurturing and you providing value, maybe they don't read every email you send out. But you've got startup, that's all going to add up to a positive experience a positive impression of you being helpful. And at some point, one of those coupons or sales or how to emails you send about your products is going to click, and the people will literally click over and make the purchase.

Roy Barker  11:49

Yeah, because the other part of that equation is that we don't really, sometimes we don't really know where the people that receive our email are in that buying process. And it's not that I have anything against you and your product. I just don't need it today. And so if we burn that relationship today, because you had to have the sale, you've lost me in three months from now, when I do have a need. And I'm and I'm going to be a purchaser and you know, I say that exactly, you know, it's Go ahead. No, no, no, you're fine. Go ahead.

Keith  12:26

I, you know, it's a scary proposition, right, especially if you're a small business or side hustler, and you're you're you're sending out social media posts, and marketing email, and you're making phone calls, the thought of seeing one wrong thing or kind of pushing too hard. And losing a sale is terrifying. Your numbers aren't big enough, your audience isn't big enough to lose that many sales. Yeah, I would counter that and encourage people to feel positive about what they're doing. If the focus is friendly, and helpful, and encouraging, and no pressure at all, the companies that I follow the newsletters that I read every day that I can't wait to meet are the ones that offer me valuable information on whatever topic they're about. And they don't push me for anything, they offer the rough. And I often have to look for the pitch at the end, hey, you know, if you like what we're doing, or something that sort of 20% off rate, right? It's not a hard sell. And I think that's just as much indicative of email in the end that personal nature of the inbox as it is some cultural shift that we're going through, that they use car salesmen is out the soft touch, hey, how can I help person is in Yeah, if you can do that, in any of your marketing, especially even?

Roy Barker  13:44

Yeah, and so what about the theory that some of this is also based on the complexity of our product or service or, and or the cost? I think that if if sometimes, if you're pushing a $5 item that people use all the time, you can be probably a little more aggressive than if you're selling a complex system, you know, where people need to be educated, I want, I need to know more about what this does what it is. So again, it kind of kind of helps us develop our time horizon, and our messaging that we want to structure and how we send that out.

Keith  14:24

There's a there's a real value in, in educating people and doing it selflessly. Right? You know, I mean, who are you to buy, buy a complex product from the guy who gives you the hard sell and says, You got to buy it before the price goes up? Or the guy who says, Well, look, let's see if an option or have you bought your problem. And let me show you what we do and show you how the complex product works. And take it from there. Well, me I'm a sucker for the ladder. I wouldn't. I would go for it. Yeah.

Roy Barker  14:53

Well, it's funny. The note I'd written down before the complexity was scarcity. And so I think I think that there's a there's an angle to be had there is that, hey, you know what Keith is my product may not be for you. And then it's like, why are you talking about? Yeah,

Keith  15:10

yeah, well, scarcity, you know, to get out of the email marketing Arena in some way, you know, marketing in general man, I love scarcity. It works. It works wonders Exactly. If you can make something desirable if you have a desirable product, putting an artificial limit on it. And not not cynically, but saying, well, this is series one, you know, we only have so many. When they're gone, they're gone, you'll have to wait until next month for series two or six months for seriously whatever. Man that there's no denying human beings love that. And you know, limited edition stuff. There's a there's a practice in marketing called bookending, which is very similar. If you're noticed, we had gone to a restaurant and looked at, say, the venue where the wine list is a really cheap bottle of wine. And there's a medium price bottle of wine. And then there's an outrageously priced high bottle of wine, right? Well, the idea of that is to drive you to the middle one, right? They want to drive you to the median price, because we make most of the money. But there's also an exclusivity kind of things going on there. Right? There are a lot of people who will see that crazy, expensive bottle of wine. And especially if there's some kind of messaging that it's limited. The winemaker only sold his five, that kind of thing, it tends to drive people up to that more expensive iPhone. Correct. So it's, it's it's a really powerful marketing tool. You can't abuse it, because people will get wise, you know, in short, I did pretty quick. But if you're, if you're honest about it, and upfront about it, I think it's a truly valuable technique for marketing. So

Roy Barker  16:59

yeah, it's a little off the email subject, but you know, kind of on the marketing is that's, I think it's the same way when you see on people's web pages. Typically, what I've heard in the past is you have three offers, you've got the this is the cheap one, do it yourself one, at the far right, you put the crazy expensive one where you know, I'm going to engage more with you and spend more time, then you have that one in the middle. That's just right priced. And you know, typically, they say, you know, he tend to drive that traffic to the middle. So interesting concept for sure.

Keith  17:33

Yeah, yeah. All right, dad, or the countdown clock, right? You've only got so much time to get this right. Or even just putting a limited time limited date on your product. Yeah. can really, really drive sales? Even if it's artificial?

Roy Barker  17:50

Yeah. So can you give us a couple samplings of your 10 simple steps for the email marketing?

Keith  17:57

Sure. Sure. Let's see here. I'm going to focus on step number four, which is keep your message simple. Okay. You know, often often, when people who don't market a lot, start marketing for their business, is that desire, an understandable desire, a tendency to want to cram as much information as possible, right into my Instagram, post, my tweet, and my email, and it becomes overwhelming, right? I know, you're excited about it, you've got a great product and getting great service. That's wonderful. But we have, you know, most of us don't have the time or the desire, or the ability to read your 400 word, email, we're not going to do it, we're going to see a block of text and we're like, oh, man, I got I got a delete. So keeping your message simple, keeping it highly focused on one of the great things about you and your product is going to get you far more results than dumping everything in one email. And what you can do is, is over time break all those amazing things that you wanted to include in the forerunner weren't enough in the individual email. That's going to give you a week, a month, five months worth of marketing emails, and you don't have to do much thinking about it. You've got point a point B point C point, you know, and once a week you send an email doing that. If you have a call to action below that simple message, one or two sentences, maybe a picture one or two sentences of why we're great. And then a button that says click here to find out more. Yeah, that's it. That's it.

Roy Barker  19:35

Yeah. I'm gonna I'm gonna, this is a this is stated as a question. It's not a statement. So I'm gonna look for your feedback on it is that you know, part of the part of the, the messaging is we are not trying to explain every minute detail about our product or service. I think the bigger thing is to its generate the interest But then have them reach back out to us in order to make that connection where we can have a one on one conversation is that? Is that kind of correct?

Keith  20:11

Absolutely. And I'll get a little nerdy in the book here. And I explained this a little bit that even the subject line aid or email is important, right? That's the thing we see first, and it can't be higher there, or Hey, or something vague like that. It has to tell me what's inside the email, right? Otherwise, I'm gonna delete it. I'm gonna live an old old copywriting trick, which I learned from a book about copywriting for newspapers. When I first started in the.com. World, that's how, what a weird late overlap that was, is that if you think about your ad, or your I say, marketing email, as you know, a column on a post, or a newspaper article, your subject line is the headline. That's what's going to grab attention. If you look at headlines in newspapers or on articles online, they tell you in very few words, exactly what's happening in the article. And they do it in a way that makes you want to read the article. And then when you read the article, it's an intro. What I want to tell you, I remind you what I just told you. The end.

Roy Barker  21:15

Yep, that's it. Yeah. I think there's even a regression article be can be can be compressed down. Yeah. Yeah. And I think there's even I don't know how good they are. But I think there's even some services out there that you can plug your headline in. And it'll return a score, not based on your subject, but more based on the words that you use in that language for that headline.

Keith  21:38

Yeah, yeah. And I wish I could remember some off the top of my head, the basically keyword generators, and they they analyze your headline and your email, or in your article, and compare that to Google searches of what's popular based on that topic when we I haven't used them, but I know people who have and love them. And that's a great day, usually free, you can google around and find them. Yeah. Yeah, and also, you know, we're kind of getting into a nerdier area of email marketing. And that's a, it's a good thing to bring up. Because I want your listeners to know that easy email marketing doesn't get into the nerdy stuff. Right? I know that you as a small business owner, or a side hustler, or someone who's making something to sell, you're a jack of all trades, you're super busy, right? You can worry about everywhere in your subject line, or you can get most of it right? And send an email that's gonna do pretty darn well, right. And that's the focus of the book is 10 steps, you can read in just a few minutes, get you up and running. And if you want to know more about subject line optimization, again, my website at the end, you can people can email me and I'll send some links to some some resources there. And there's all kinds of articles online, if you want to get really nerdy. My book is to encourage people to start simple. And that's the old 8020 rule. Yeah, right. If I put in 20% of the effort, I can get 80% of the result. And for most small businesses, and myself included, that is perfect, right. So

Roy Barker  23:13

yeah, because I think it can lead us to the analysis paralysis, sometimes we can get so bogged down in trying to figure out if this is perfect or not that we never end up taking any action, which is more detrimental than

Keith  23:26

having a story about that. Sorry, interrupt. I had a client years ago software company, they had a good security software. And I would design their emails went out to their customers, which were all corporations and fortune 500 companies, that kind of thing. The founder of this company, really nice guy next wanted all of his emails to have red, white and blue in them really patriotic guy. That's great. But he paid me more money to fuss over switching text from blue to red to white to make it look the way he wanted. And I would tell him flat out big. I know it's important to you. And it does look kind of neat. But I sincerely believe that anyone reading this email is not going to matter which order the conference room. They're not right, get it 20% right. Just do it at all read do it all black, it doesn't matter. Get the words right. And let's send it out. And so it took me quite a while to educate him on that but but he finally saw the light and you can have a lot of fancy ideas about things but I like to tell my clients clear is better than clever. Right? Always be clear. If you can't think of something clever to say just say hey, we're having a sale and 10% off. Here's your vacation. Goodbye, right that'll get you huge results. Topic my rant a little

Roy Barker  24:52

Yeah, no, no, no, no, I think you're right that you know sometimes we can't make up for the quality of content with gimmicks. And so we have to be sure that I work on that, you know, just getting our message out there. That's what we really want to do.

Keith  25:06

Right. And it goes back to what you were saying earlier, you know, you've got a full inbox. I just want to know what the darn email is about, right? I want to know what you're asking me? Or if you're helping me and I want to know what I'm going to do with it. And then I'm done. Brett, right, keep it simple. Yep.

Roy Barker  25:20

So that was number four, have you got another another step four, I

Keith  25:24

do I do. Let's go with number five, Step five, use a hero image. So that's kind of a nerdy insider term. But you'll notice, any time you get an email from a company, not always, but most of the time, there's only one image in the product. Okay. Or if there are more images, there's one big image at the top, that's the hero image, and then maybe a couple small ones down at the bottom. And that's a long time practice, from the print world. And the idea is that, you know, along what we talked about earlier, keeping the message simple, you want to keep your images simple, right, you don't need, you don't need a shot of every angle, you know, for your new tool, on a desk, and then on a workbench and then on the car that you know that that takes bandwidth, it's hard to download. Now you need the one hero image the best looking at the pictures you have. Start with that, put that at the top of the email, maybe if you're you're able to explain how to win the book, you can put some wording on the on the image, you know, our new hamburger or buy one, get one free over the tool, put that image at the top of your email, it is the hero that's the thing, when people open the email, they don't even have to read your email, boom, visually, they see what it is they can they make up their mind right there, right. And make that image linkable, and your email service, we'll show you how to do that it's super simple. You just copy and paste the image into the software, or the link into the software. And as soon as people open an email and see a big, beautiful image, and they're not bombarded with, you know, your social media badges and all the other images and stuff, they see the hero image with a simple message and a call to action link. That's the Holy Trinity right there. And so in the book, I show you how to a couple resources online, there's one called Canva ca NVA. It's absolutely free. You've been there, you know, you know how great it is. It is I mean, there are other services like you upload your image, you can edit the size, you can add all kinds of bells and whistles and numbers and fonts and make it look really professional. And you can download it again for free. Drop it in your email in a week ago, your your hero image and your email are looking better than 90% of the ones that are out there. Instead of dying. Yeah,

Roy Barker  27:51

yeah, I definitely use that for some email marketing or not email, but for some social media posts, and also for a YouTube cover for some of my videos, and it's it's very simple, very simple to use, and you can make a really good quality image, you'd be surprised at what you can do with that.

Keith  28:09

It's shocking, it's really shocking how good it is. So I highly encourage even if no one is going to go through the email marketing is listening to this, go to Canva sign up for free, use the free account and and mess around with your the images you already have and see if you can do with surprise.

Roy Barker  28:24

So a another thing that I talk a lot about that there's some sometimes there's a little disagreement, but it's a I'm not a big fan of stock images, if we can take a real image of me my product, something in real life, but to me, I think that always portrays a much better image. And it's also part of that building that relationship of getting you know, if if I see Keith on that picture instead of a crazy, you know, stock image of something then, you know, it kind of lets me know who's behind this personable or, you know, we talk about sometimes too, if you if you're a big dog fan, if you dog you know you have a nice to be relatable for certain but you know, I guess you know, I'm an old timer. I don't mind admitting that but you know, back in the day it was button up su ta Don't ever let your personal life seep into this internet thing. You know, this is a really controlled and I think luckily I think we've gotten away from that because if we're going to build relationships with people through the internet through email, and that are you know, that's where the seed or the Colonel's planted for that relationship. They need to know who we are and they need to know more about us when you know when it's relevant. We don't want to go overboard But anyway, I'll just get your take on you know, stock versus taking

Keith  29:50

actual. Absolutely, absolutely. So for anybody who's listening and doesn't know stock photos are photos you can buy or you can get for free online that are uncertain time. thinks that you can use an Ole or your marketing media. So, odds are, if you've looked online at a website, you've probably seen some stock photos, anyone can buy them, anyone can use them. And you may have noticed some used over and over and over again to keep wrapping around. And what you're seeing right is right on. I would, you know, rarely do stock photos as good as they can look, or as bad, some of them are pretty bad. Rarely do they directly relate to who you are and what you're doing. Right? If If I'm having a conference, to educate people on how to use a particular piece of software, I mean, find a stock flooded with some beautiful people in a perfect corporate conference, setting all the nice suits and a man on the stage and be like, perfect. But you know, is that you are, it's not you, it's not your audience. It's not where the venue is the venue that you're going to be using. I totally agree. There are plenty of quick YouTube videos online to show you how to take a decent picture with your phone and tweak it to make it look good. And use those Yeah, you know, personally, in my philosophy is when I'm buying something, I'm buying it from you, right? I'm not buying it from some big corporate image, I'm buying it from you, right. You know, I want to know, I know ROI. I know, that's his dog. And I know his dog isn't a lot of pictures. And I love it. Because I'm a dog guy to Brett. And I know boy, look what he's doing, oh, Roy's got a new, you know, new truck at the shop, whatever. Right, I can see that in the in the photos. So real, is much more important than perfect. I totally agree. Yeah.

Roy Barker  31:46

And the other will just relate that back to Canva for just a minute. Because the perfect thing is you can upload your own images, to Canva, like you said, you can put your company name, website phone number, you know, we don't want to clutter it up. But you know, because like, for some images I use, I'm able to just put the www down on the bottom, very clean. So the nice thing is you can manipulate these personal shots of yourself to, again, come out with a great message and

Keith  32:15

to put anybody who's listening at ease, sorry about this. But um, you know, Canva has templates, they're pre done templates. So you don't have to know Photoshop, you have to you don't have to have any graphic knowledge whatsoever. If you want to have, you know, a beautiful Instagram post and your product, they've got the template there for you. And some of them have filters on them make it look even better. Upload it make it look great, it's going to look better than you know, again, I keep saying this, but better than 90% of your competitors, because they're not doing this right. And you took five minutes to do it. And it's great.

Roy Barker  32:46

Yeah, the other thing, just as a side note on the whole image thing is, typically somebody owns pretty much all the images that are on the internet. And so some are free, some are not. And the only reason I bring this up is because I have a friend that ran into this problem. She had a website, she just been pulling down all these images off of, you know, wherever she found a cool image and pulled it down and then been doing it for years. And then all of a sudden one day she got a bill for seven or $800. From from Getty Images saying, Hey, thanks for using our images. Now. Here's the the bill. That's you know, that's, that's a really good point. Getty Images and a lot of the other ones have got. I don't know how to turn this. But But basically, there's a little something in those pictures. They can call back to the Getty computers and say, Hey, this, this image has been put on this website. Right. And they track how it's done. Yeah. So you're far better off taking your own pictures. There is I'm going to try to look it up here real quick theory. I've just spent all this time saying don't use stock photos. But there is a great website and maybe you know the name of it. I can't remember off the top of my head. Let me look here. It has great free stock photos. Yeah, there's some while you're looking it up as to say that you get it.

Keith  34:26

I got it. It's called unsplash. Okay. u n SP, la SH. They're, they're just beautiful, beautiful pictures. They're very particular about who they let the pictures on there. But they're all free. And they say explicitly on them, you're free to use them. So if you if you have a newsletter going out and it's a product for tats, and you don't own a cat, yeah, yeah, you can probably find a beautiful picture of a cat on unsplash and use it trouble free.

Roy Barker  34:54

Yeah, yeah. And I think there are excellent arguments to use stock photos and don't want to ever Put that message out because there are they do have their use. I just always more of, you know if we can do something more personable about a certain

Keith  35:08

product and much of istockphoto is not going to get you that personal connection. Yeah. And we're talking about here, with email and your social media, it's all about the personal connection

Roy Barker  35:18

brand. Exactly. The perfect picture. Yeah, right, right. So do you want to share before we transition, because I just want to ask you, the floor, we have to wrap it up, I wanted to ask you about a couple of your cost free marketing ideas. But before we transition, is there any another step or two, you want to mention off of the email?

Keith  35:41

No, I'll just make one more. Okay. And that is, you know, when you're on the email software, MailChimp, or any of the ones that I recommend the book, and there are many more, you're going to be hit with a lot of different templates that you can use for your email, double columns, triple columns, fancy stuff, just like you wouldn't when you open up a Word document or a Google Doc. In the spirit of the 8020 rule, I will tell you in that book, and I'll tell you now just use one of them, there's only one you need for all of your emails. And it's the mobile friendly one gets a single column is mobile friendly on all phones, only use that for a couple of reasons. One, it saves you a lot of time and headache, because when you get in these fancy your templates, you're going to things are going to break you're going to you know, it's not gonna look good, right? The mobile friendly, one will always look good on computer on a tablet on any phone. And most people these days look at email on their phone, right? Or if they don't, at some point in the day, they look at their email and that phone. Mobile is where it's at, right? I mean, worldwide, there are, I think there are 2 billion people in developing countries who have skipped the entire computer generation that we had then gone straight to mobile phone, right. And we're gonna find that and that trend is increasing in the in the United States and other Western countries. More and more, we're going to find people who will straight to mobile devices or who give up the computers or limit their daily computer usage. So that step is simply stick to the in the spirit of easiness. And having a simple step, choose the mobile phone template, it'll look great on your computer, it look great in Outlook in Gmail, you don't have to do anything, and look great on my phone. simple and effective.

Roy Barker  37:34

And I'm not sure if the if they provide these stats of who's looking at it and where on all of them are for that's a step up package. But what I can tell you is that on one, on one of my platforms that I've used to do a little bit of, of advertising, you will be surprised that 80% are open from a cell phone, it floored me. But you know, I mean, again, I'm the old guy that needs to be in front of a computer because it's got the bigger size screen, and I can actually put my fingers on some keys, I don't type well. But if we think about society, and how mobile we are, and when we do things like if I'm at the tire shop waiting on my linemen or tire to get fixed, that's when I'm on the phone, taking care of a lot of business. So even, we just had to think about where people are, even though some people still do have the computers at home. We do a lot of stuff like that, while we're out in between other activities.

Keith  38:36

Absolutely right. How often do we grab your phone and look at stuff in the course of the day? I'm sure it's hundreds of times a day, at least mine is I'm constantly looking at it. And you know, that's a good way to look at it. There's definitely I think a lot of people are hybrid users, both the computer and the mobile device. Here we are talking about computers, I spend a good deal my day in front my large screen computer because I have bad eyesight and I need to see things. But at the same time, like when I'm out and about and things happen, and I need to get back to somebody, I'm checking my email on my phone, and I'm taking care of business. So kind of like the Canva tip, your email marketing service provider is going to have a mobile template that will get you 80% of the way there, it's gonna look good on any device. It's never going to break is you're never gonna have formatting issues because it's maximized to look good on mobile devices. It'll look great. No matter where it's like and that's part of the game. You're busy running a business. Yeah. Focus on that template. Be Done. Yep. Good.

Roy Barker  39:43

Well, you bring up a good point about things break in is that you know, we're not going to break anything if we don't do this right. And most of those email services, they have a way that you can send a test email to yourself and so, you know, it's kind of like the analysis Alice's thing is just get on there and do it, you may have to tweak it two or three times to get it the way you want it, but you got to start somewhere. So just get on there create one, send it to yourself, and then you can work on, you know, optimizing it as you go.

Keith  40:15

Absolutely, you know, those, the email marketing services are very good at educating you and onboarding someone who's a new user, right? And you hit upon and I think it's step number eight, test your email, send yourself one. So that's, that's in the book, too. I tried to do that. Super simple. Send yourself a test, you can do it multiple times, click everything, make sure it works with your friend, Hey, does this work? missing anything? and away you go? Once you do it once, it's like anything else, I think, you know, as a small business user, you're probably overwhelmed for thought of doing this. But once you do it, and realize how simple the steps can be, we've read nor all the advanced stuff, you're going to be looked at and see how quickly you can probably literally do it standing in line with your mobile phone. Yeah, you're done.

Roy Barker  41:01

Yeah. And we have to realize, too, it's like anything else. If you go back and look, after you've done this for 10 years, if you go back and look at some of those earlier emails, you will, you know, totally be embarrassed and like, oh, gosh, I can't ever send that out. I can't believe I ever sent that out. But it's just a practice. And what I will say for us, for I'm a non writer, you know, I'm a spreadsheet guy. So I'd rather do numbers in a spreadsheet. And I have this, I have the my expectations of myself as I can, I can sit down at a computer and write out a message the way I want it the very first time and one thing, I've tried to be more aware of myself. And I've realized that I know I can't do that. And so the other thing is, you know, do it and let these things set, send it to yourself. And then you know, take some time, maybe an hour, maybe a day, whatever. And then go back and look at it. And you will be able to make those adjustments more easy. We just shouldn't put the pressure on yourself that you're going to sit down, write this out and be done and have it run the way you want it. Yeah,

Keith  42:05

yeah. You know, my favorite quote, as a writer is someone for whom writing is very difficult. It is right. It's not easy for anybody. My this this book, easy marketing has probably been through five drafts, I had it professionally edited by a guy from the New York Times. He's with New York Times as an editor. And even after editing it myself five times in a day in all kinds of embarrassing. Yeah, it's just human nature, it's hard. So I totally agree, set it Do what you can massage it. And then you know, don't don't overthink it. And I would also add that don't be too self conscious about the marketing emails, or any marketing you're sending out there. As far as your writing skills go. Most people think what you're doing by running a small business is magic. We already look up to that a lot of your customers already look into that and think that what you do providing them the service they can't do or knowledge, they don't know. That's magic to them, right? They're not going to take your copyright brat anxiety at all. Unless it's really long and meandering, then they're gonna nitpick. But other than that, if it's simple and short, nobody's going to get it. Right. Get it out there.

Roy Barker  43:17

All right, if you don't mind before we, before we start wrapping this up, if you could, would you mind giving us two or three of your cost free marketing ideas?

Keith  43:27

Sure. And I'll add that at the end of email marketing is a link to a free copy of the 15 cost free marketing ideas. Okay, okay, great. It's in there, you can grab it. Or, you know, maybe you'll have the link in the description of the podcast, too. Okay. So I'm going to go with one of my favorites. It's number eight in the list, and it's let customers know you appreciate them. Right. I mean, yes. So often, after we make the sale, we're done. Yeah, hands off. You know, maybe they'll come back. Maybe they won't. But I'm a firm believer that customers who feel appreciated give the love right back in the form of loyalty. Right? Right. They because they're happy, they're happy and notice that have you followed up? We always need happy customer. Yeah, right. I mean, that's the bottom line. I couldn't tell you off the top of my head. Any companies that Call me after me to purchase even small ones, right? We have a really good wine shop here. Maybe half mile down the road. Provide the only beer and she's amazing. Amazing. And I love her because when we go in she has a lot of things we're talking about. She has all the information she can't you know those would be want she helps you super helpful. We're not pressured at all make it by a bottle of wine. But every once in a while at will buy something. So send an email afterwards. Maybe a week later. Hey, did your your guests at the dinner party like that wine was a good one. Even If my friends hated the wine, I would still be thrilled that Aaron took the time to email me and asked how it was right. But that's just that's just builds Willy.

Roy Barker  45:11

Yeah, I think those, that's a nugget of gold that we often overlook is the follow up, even if it's a one, even if it's just a one time purchase, that they're not going to be purchasing over and over the referral, the referral aspect of our customers, we just can't overlook that. And so, absolutely keeping in touch with them following up and, you know, it's funny, you mentioned that because I made a hadn't, we bought some little backpacks for my grandkids off of Amazon not long ago for a birthday. And the, it wasn't through Amazon, it was through their platform, but it was another seller. And the guy actually reached out to me a couple days later and said, Hey, I'm just checking in to see, you know, did you get it? How was it and I sent him back an email. I'm like, Well, thanks so much for checking in. I said, he made two little girls extremely happy, they love them. And he was like, Oh, I'm so glad to hear stories like that. But it like you said it was so surprising that he took the time, but I will definitely be a repeat customer for him because of that.

Keith  46:20

And here you are telling me about it. You've probably told other people, you probably continue to read a few of them are gonna want to know who this guy is and want to buy it back.

Roy Barker  46:29

Exactly.

Keith  46:30

It's, it's an it's a no brainer. It really is. And related to that, I'll go back to step number 13, which is go back to old customers, customers who stopped buying from you. Yeah, it sounds hard. And it is it can be. But I truly think by emailing or calling customers who used to do business with you, but don't anymore, alright. And under friendly, unfriendly way saying, Hey, can we get you back? What can we do to get you back? If not, tell me why you left. And you know, what can we do differently? It may be uncomfortable. I've had a few clients in the past that I've had to, you know, it was initially agreed to separate but boy, you know, you'll learn some stuff. And five minutes of discomfort on the phone with an old customer is going to give you insight that will make your business and your marketing soar for the next few years.

Roy Barker  47:26

Yeah, especially if we've got employees under us. We you know, we can't monitor and don't want everybody to be under our thumb all the time. But we may find a process or something that was going wrong that we have no idea about. So it can help us improve our processes.

Keith  47:44

Yeah, yeah. Let's see. Here's another one. I'll say number 14 is a good you can cost free marketing technique is put your good reviews front and center, on your website, in your shop. Everywhere you can, right? Because they're social proof. You know, we're all we're all monkeys. And we'd like to deal with the monkey see, monkey do. And if we, if we see other monkeys who love your service, and love what you do, it sounds simple. But I talked to so many people so many businesses who are embarrassed to put their positive reviews on their website, or, you know, they they're a little self conscious about it. I want to tell people how great I am. Well, you're not Yeah, your customers are telling people how great you are. And if you can get one person to do that is absolutely worth its weight in gold is social proof. And working, you know, mouth to mouth marketing is the best. Everything we talked about is good email, social media. It's word of mouth. Social media, by far the best marketing out there. And your your good reviews, whether they're you put them at the foot of an email, right you've got your marketing email, maybe at the bottom you put or maybe you highlight some of them, right maybe you've got a sale on a product and you put a quote right right over here it says this is the best gosh darn. window cleaner I've ever bought. Yeah, such and such customer and then you've got your, your picture one or two sentences, and then I click this link, it's a click to buy in a way you go. Don't be ashamed of or embarrassed by people singing your praises. It can be much believe me? I'm an introvert. And you know having any attention call to me in a crowded room is the last thing I want. Right? But, but there's no denying how much people are influenced by that. Yeah. And how far can take your business in your company?

Roy Barker  49:41

Ratan run? Well, Keith, thanks so much. Again, appreciate you taking time out of your day to be with us. And before I let you go a couple things. Number one, what is a tool, a habit or ritual? What is something that you do in your daily life it could be professional personal that you use Feel adds a lot of value?

Keith  50:02

Well, I'm going to tell you, I just started this last week. I've got this post and stuck to my computer monitor. And it says I make one unreasonable request every day. Okay, interesting. And I'm not sure where I saw that. But I tell you it is it is really made a difference for me. And and the key to this is they're not saying be a jerk, rather than be demanding. They're saying ask for something that you feel uncomfortable asking for. Yeah, right. Hey, can I be on your podcast? is an example. Yep. You know, is there? Is there a discount for the service? I'm a new business just starting out? Yep. Whatever it is, Hey, can I talk to you about your product? Hey, can I? Can you ask to ask you a few questions about something? Whatever, whatever it is, that makes you a little uncomfortable, and sounds unreasonable to ask about for you. force yourself to do it. Because if you're okay with people saying no, and not taking it personally, then at some point, when you do this enough, someone's going to say yes to something pretty amazing, that you otherwise would not have asked for. And I'm finding that slowly to be true. It's a challenge. I won't deny there. There are days when I want to sit here and drink coffee and work and right now. But every time I've done it, it's paid off, you know, and that's the tool I've been using every day.

Roy Barker  51:37

Okay, that's interesting. You know, it's the old adage, we never know, unless we ask. So yeah, that's a good one. I like that. I'm gonna mark my mark one of those down myself. So why don't you tell us who's your customer? What can you do for them? And of course, how people can reach out and get a hold of you.

Keith  51:54

Yeah, so So my main work these days is I do market research for companies like Nike and banks, and I'm doing stuff like trek bikes for a lot of their creative projects. And they're doing stuff like that. I'm commercials, new buildings, that kind of thing. I'm doing a lot of market research for that. But my other half is marketing, and writing about it, and doing stuff to help people like this book. So you can read Easy Email Marketing, email marketing for free online at readeasyemail.com. You can download it for free. It's also an apple books and Amazon Kindle. And you can find a link there to 15 cost free marketing ideas, which I'm working into a book at some point, too. And you can always find me at my website, Keithmonaghan.com. And the www.readeasyemail.com link will get you right to my website. So you don't have to try to spell my last name.

Roy Barker  52:52

Okay. All right, great. Well, y'all reach out to Keith, he can be a great asset on your email marketing campaigns on your regular marketing. Go, at least go check out the list. They are very helpful. And

Keith  53:05

I'm happy to answer questions about any of this stuff anybody might have and just say hi. And if you read it, if you're reading the email marketing, let me know what you think. You know, give a review to give. I'm more than happy to, like I said, put it on the website. And

Roy Barker  53:20

yeah, and we'll be sure to put all the links in the show notes as well. So All right, thanks a lot. All right, Keith. Thank you. Alright, that's gonna do it for another episode of the business of business podcast. Of course, you can find us at www.thebusinessabusinesspodcast.com we own our own our major podcast platforms, iTunes, Google, Stitcher, Spotify, and many more. If we're not on the one that's your favorite, don't hesitate to reach out I'll see about getting us added. So we are also on all the major social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and a video of this interview will go up on YouTube once it gets posted. So until next time, please take care of yourself and take care of your business.

www.readeasymail.com

www.keithmonaghan.com

www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com

Entrepreneurs Need Infrastructure and Strategies to Grow Successfully with Ann Holm

There are many things we need as entrepreneurs. These include mental fitness, a good mindset, self-awareness, and a good strategy. The idea of mental fitness is resilience and positive intelligence. The idea of strategy is to have the necessary infrastructure in place in order to allow for ease of growth and a higher percentage of success.

About Ann

Ann has been in the people development business since 1984. Currently, she is a Professional Certified Coach, specializing in executive, and organizational development coaching. Ann is a certified Master Practitioner of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and a world expert on how to use type effectively for personal and team development.

Ann is also a skilled mental fitness coach.  Just like physical fitness, you can deliberately build focus and resilience to help you reach your goals. The stronger your mental muscle, the more likely you are to hold onto your gains over time. Ann uses Positive Intelligence which is an up and coming framework to achieve mental resilience.

Prior to coaching, Ann had 25 years of experience in Applied Brain Science, and she also use this hands-on experiences to help her clients understand how to stay focused, be engaged, and energized given the demands of the 21st century workplace.

www.annholm.net

www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com

Full Transcript Below

Entrepreneurs Need Infrastructure and Strategies to Grow Successfully with Ann Holm

Sat, 5/29 9:01AM • 38:54

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

people, business, assessment, self awareness, idea, delegate, mental, strengths, meatloaf, person, find, good, dynamic tension, life, book, talk, day, interpret, run, mental resilience

SPEAKERS

Ann, Roy Barker

Roy Barker  00:01

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the business of business podcast. I'm your host, Roy, we are the podcast that brings a lot of a wide variety of guests that are able to speak to a lot of diverse topics. We just want to give you something to think about. Sometimes we don't know what we don't know. But then also if you do know that is something that you're struggling with or need help, we want to give you some industry experts in order in which to reach out so without further avail. We're going to jump right in today. We have an awesome guest I've been waiting for this for we've kind of kick this can down the roads. I've been waiting for this interview for a long time Ann Holm. She has been in the people development business since 1994. Currently, she's a professional certified coach specializing in executive and organizational development coaching. She is a certified master practitioner of the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, and a world expert on how to use type effectively for personal and team development. She is also a scalar skill, and this is a good one I we're gonna go into this a little bit if she is also a skilled mental fitness coach. And just like physical fitness, you can deliberately build focus and resilience. To help you reach your goals. The stronger your mental muscle, the more likely you are to hold on to your gains over time, she uses positive intelligence, which is an up and coming framework to achieve mental resilience. Prior to coaching, she has 25 years of experience in applied brain science and use this hands on experience to help her clients understand how they stay can stay focused, be engaged and energized, given the demands of the 21st century workplace. Ann thanks so much for taking time out of your day to be with us. I certainly do appreciate it for sure.

Ann  01:56

Happy to be here. So I do. We've got other stuff to talk about. I did want to just touch on this mental fitness coach, I really liked that. And I think it's, you know, it's something that we all need to keep in mind is that we kind of have to keep our mind and I'm sure there are exercises and things we can do. But we have to exercise our mind in order to make it stronger. Yep. Yep, yep, absolutely. Yeah, the idea of mental fitness is one of resiliency. So we all go through life with various challenges and stretcher stressors. What I like to the term I like to use is dynamic tension. So anytime we encounter something that's stressful, I call that dynamic tension. And so you engage with that, and then that creates the, you know, the personal growth. But the idea of the mental fitness is, is if every day you practice making your mental muscle just a little bit stronger, when you actually encounter some of those challenges, you're able to meet them yeah, more readily. So it would be like saying, you know, you You're, you're lifting 20 pound weights at the gym. But if you encounter 100 pound problem, that might be a little bit of a challenge, right? So, you know, we want to continue to build our ability to handle the 100 pound problems. And in the meanwhile, it just makes those 20 pound problems a little bit easier. So goodness knows, we can all use that for sure.

Roy Barker  03:31

Yeah, yeah. It's a wonderful, it's a it's a very, very much everybody available to anybody, but you do have to work on it like you go to the gym. Yeah. All right, awesome. Well, actually, you know, the topic that we had talked about discussing the day is that entrepreneurial edge. And, you know, I think probably the best jumping off point is that big idea that people have sometimes that's just the beginning. And you know, one thing we talk a lot about this show, and I think the pandemic has amplified This is that sometimes people fall into work, either, you know, maybe they're a good plumber, they get out on their own or, you know, electrician in a trade, and then all of a sudden, they, you know, they're doing stuff on their own. And then they wake up one day, and they got five employees, and they're a business all of a sudden, or, you know, and I think what I've heard a lot with the pandemic are people being forced out. And so maybe they've picked up this side hustle, and all of a sudden, you know, it's turned into a little a nice going concern. And then it's like, oh, you know, sometimes success can lead you to the point of, Okay, now what? Where do we go from here? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, and there's, there's a lot to think about in what you just talked about. So

Ann  04:47

the first thing I want to talk about is a lot of times when people have an idea and they're going to start a business or something like that, they kind of sketch it out on the back of a napkin, and if they have a collaborator or two, you know, they get a pizza in a couple of years, and they talk about it and things like that. And the what happens, though, as the business starts to grow, which is your greatest hope is your business is going to grow. A lot of times you haven't put the structures in place to support that growth. Right. So yeah, yeah. So you know, you could say, well, I, you know, I have a business, let's say, I've got a trucking business. And it's, you know, I have one or two trucks and a couple of drivers. And you know, Okay, good, we got this going on. But now all of a sudden, you've got 1020, whatever to track. And if you don't have strategies in place to take on that extra load, or whatever, that's when you can start to run into trouble. Yeah,

Roy Barker  05:51

yeah. And it's a it's counterintuitive, but sometimes success can be the beginning of the end for a lot of businesses, if they don't plan ahead and have those structures in place. It can be, you know, it can be almost as bad as not having any customers.

Ann  06:07

Yeah, yeah, very much. So. I don't know if you remember. Have you ever had this down in Dallas? Did you ever have a chain called Boston Market? Oh, yes.

Roy Barker  06:17

Yes.

Ann  06:18

Okay. Yes. And you can see they don't exist anymore? Yeah, I haven't seen one in a long time. Yeah. And they were the classic case of the business that grew without the, you know, structural underpinnings to, you know, make it successful. on a large scale.

Roy Barker  06:37

Yeah. And it's funny, you bring them up, because, you know, it's been, Oh, my gosh, it's been 20 years ago, I had such a bad experience with them is, you know, there are people that Yeah, for people that don't know is that they had, like, at this time, they had like four entrees a day. I mean, it was like a meatloaf or a chicken or this. So, you know, after church one day we rolled in there, you know, it's like 130 in the afternoon, and Hey, could we, you know, the kids wanted this and that. And so I was like, well, we don't have any, or we've got meatloaf. So okay, well, we'll just take, you know, four meatloaf plates. So I'm sitting there watching a piece of meatloaf comes out of the back to the lady and she picks it up and takes it over to the window and hands it to the car. And then they promptly come and tell us I'm sorry, we're out of meatloaf. Okay.

Ann  07:26

Like, it's 130 in the afternoon, y'all only got four things to serve, and you're already out of everything, you're just gonna close anyway. It's just funny, you bring them up, because it was such a, it was such a crazy story that I just couldn't believe that they could stay in it. And obviously, they weren't able to sustain staying in business. Yeah, they just, yeah, they, it's the one that comes to my mind all the time when I think about you know, because I remember when they get started, like Ali, I go to boss Mart, you get chicken, and they get really good sides and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then, you know, then you'd see another one pop, and then another one pop up another, you know, franchise, or whoever they would open these stores, and my gosh, it just collapsed. And and that's what can happen when you're, you're successful, but you don't have the structures in place, you know, to support it. Yeah. And I think, you know, I don't want to jump ahead of ourself, maybe you're gonna mention this. But I think it's sometimes in these cases like that, when you grow so much. It's not only the physical infrastructure, the computers, the network, and all that. But sometimes we outgrow that people structure that we're not able to educate and bring people online where they can make these crucial decisions. And you know, I hate to pick on it, but let's just go back to my example is like, we're getting low meatloaf is noon on a Sunday, maybe we should just throw some more in the oven. I mean, that but there wasn't anybody, you know, that felt like they had that authority to make that decision. So anyway, I just want to bring up that, you know, sometimes that people element is an important part of the equation. It's It's so huge, it says it's as huge as any of those other structures. And in fact, being in the people development business. That's, that's the stuff I see all the time, which is, you know, you're getting bigger and bigger, but you don't have, you know, the leadership to to move people in the same direction, or to foresee what might need to be addressed or changed. You don't have the managerial protocols. I mean, it's just the bigger you are, the more you have to have your act together with your staff. Right. And what you know, what starts out on the back of a napkin, which is a great idea can often you know, end up, you know, just falling apart. Yeah, like a paper napkin. Yeah. And I look at some of these pitfalls we run into, because, you know, it's easy to lash out at the poor customer service girl who, you know, she just came in there to serve up some food today. She you know, she's not in charge of all these things. And so

Roy Barker  10:00

You know, the approach that I've kind of taken with some companies that I've worked for is, it's a total management breakdown, because people only know what we tell them, or they can only do what we allow them to do. So, if we're not training, if we're not giving people the correct authority, and trust, I mean, you know, to me back in unsolo, back in my day, you know, they were all small businesses, but it was the owner and a couple trusted people, and the trusted people they could make in just, you know, pretty much any decision, customer service was, but now we've grown to these huge organization, and it just seems like that, you know, that did not follow where we've given anybody the authority to make their customer happy.

Ann  10:47

That's absolutely, absolutely true. You know, and so, you see this a lot in multiple, you know, multiple businesses. And so it's something that as if an individual or, you know, a small business is expecting to grow, that they need to put that on their plate, the strategies of growth and the structures you're going to need, in order, you know, to to satisfy that growth. So

Roy Barker  11:19

you're having How do you feel about processes and procedures? Because there's two thoughts is some people like, well, we want to be loose and flexible, but I look at processes and procedures, not as, not as stop signs, but more of guard rails, you know, they kind of keep us between where we need to be. But we can still allow some flexibility. And that's something that I see a lot with people I work with, is that just, there's no documentation. So I mean, and knows that, you know, when you come in, you know exactly what you're supposed to do. But when you leave, and Judy comes in behind you, it's like, yeah, who knows what Ann was doing every day? You got the job done is not that you were you weren't doing it, but I don't know, what system do I need to log to? What report do I pull down. And so you know, to me, those are the things that it just takes a little time to have a flowchart and a process. And then the other thing, the other great thing about that is you take the time, typically, you will find gaps in this already to you know, either and can speak up and say, here's a trouble I have or, you know, you find that big hole. So kind of get your take on that.

Ann  12:31

Yeah, no, it's a matter of fact, you know, this is a great segue into what the entrepreneur edge assessment, which I use, will do, which is it will identify the places where you're likely to be very strong in your entrepreneurial adventure. So let's say you're really really good at your, you know, your people skills. So you, you know, you're good at communication, and coaching your, your, your employees and things like that, let's just say that for an example. But you're short on paying attention to things like details, you know, the procedures that you were speaking about, you know, how do you let the next person know, what is expected of them as they take over for you, for instance. And so, you know, when you do have something like an entrepreneurial edge, you can start to fess out what it is that you are, is going to be a natural strength for you. And what it is that you might not pay a lot of attention to. And the thing is, you can go along for a little while with just you know, leveraging your strengths. But at some point, you've got to address the stuff that you kind of, you know, you're a little blind to right. And, and so that's what this does. And it'll also help a person develop some specific activities where they can develop those skills. So you don't, you don't ever want to look at any of the things that you're doing and say, you know, oh, you know, I'm just not good at details, so that, you know, I'm doomed. But you can work on that and understand how important it is to your business. Yeah. Yeah. And,

Roy Barker  14:19

you know, sometimes, again, this is this is my theory, I'll get you to weigh in on it is that we don't always have to be the boss of everything. And, and not only is it teaches how to delegate, but I mean, if I'm good at sales, then I don't need to hire salesmen and meet me be the back office runner. I mean, hire hire for those skills that you need help with, and then do your own thing. And, you know, that goes for HR. Maybe you have the last say on who we hire, but you shouldn't be wrapped up in this entire process and get, you know, we need to hire talent that can really excel in these other areas that were maybe not our field.

Ann  14:58

Yeah, and you know, I'll I love what you're bringing up here, you're bringing up the idea of delegating, yes, you know, identifying very specific things that need to be done, and then delegating. And that is, I think, theoretically everybody would say, yeah, yeah, let's, you know, delegate. But in reality, we can get in our own way, by trying to control too many things, or, you know, not empower somebody else, to take on some of those tasks that need to be done. So you know, what, the key to all of this is, you know, is to really enhance your self awareness, you know, to know what, what your tendencies are to know, what you what you need help with what you need to delegate, but also, you know, to what degree do you feel like you always have to be in control? You know, to what degree are you a stickler about various things, to the point where people can't work with you? Right? There's a lot to consider in this pile.

Roy Barker  16:02

Yeah, yeah. And that's the other thing we can run. You know, if we, if we don't learn how to share responsibility and delegate, we can run good talent off, because, you know, we know that the people that we hire for key positions, they don't need to be micromanaged. Like, you know, like a child, right? You know, we need to give them right, I set the responsibility, and then let them do their thing. And don't, I guess, Think positive that if we make the right hires, we give them the right tools are gonna do the right job, not the other way around? Like, I can't trust anybody, you know, to do these tasks, because I don't know, one thing I found in life is there's always somebody better than you at whatever you're good at. And there's still somebody better than you. So we can always, you know, we may have to look a little harder, but we can always find, you know, somebody that can handle that position.

Ann  16:52

Absolutely, absolutely. So yeah, so it's a it's a, it's a, it's a big deal with small businesses. And then if you are not at the level of a business idea, so you're a true entrepreneur, you're just, you're just starting out with a particular business idea. An enormous number of ideas never come to fruition. I believe it's as high as 90% 90% of these ideas die on the vine and never go anywhere. Now, if you were going to if that was true, if it was 90%, what do you think is happening with that? 90%? What do you what do you think's happening? Why it's not going from idea to fruition?

Roy Barker  17:35

I would say because they want to try to tackle it themselves and not get others involved to help them. get it going.

Ann  17:41

Yep. Yep. What else do you think comes into play?

Roy Barker  17:48

I would say I was just thinking money, the backing you know, maybe it's a really ambitious idea. But you know, we've got to have capital and sometimes the you can't start every business on a shoestring.

Ann  18:02

Yes, that's another thing too. Exactly. It's It's It's how good are you with finances? You know, how good are you with tracking where your money is? How good are you with, you know, getting, you know, funding? Yeah. So that's, that's another possibility. What else do you think might stand in their way?

Roy Barker  18:22

I think maybe even people may be looking for just not justification, but looking for others to give them looking for approval from others. Or having a naysayer say, you know, what, that'll never work. And, you know, it's, it's funny, because I just just this morning, um, I don't know if you've seen the news. But you know, they announced Jeff Bezos is stepping down from right, right in day to day and just going to be a bridge chair. But in 1994, I'm sure. Can you imagine what his friends and family were saying? You want to start a bookstore in your garage with some kind of internet thing? I mean, you know, can you imagine the ridicule that he must have endured when he wrote that idea down?

Ann  19:11

Yeah, yeah, exactly. What and that's exactly right. So yeah, so can you sell your idea? Can you can you see it enough where you can sell it to others, so that they will jump on board with you? Can you know, do you have the patience to wait it out? Because a lot of times somebody great idea is, you know, is the great Aha, and it's like into the future, but then they don't know how to, you know, step it back so that they can take the steps to make it really happen. So you know, the networking, the selling of the idea that finances you know, the the stick to itiveness you know, are you a person who jumps from idea to idea before you test, drive an idea, all of those things, really get In the way of people who are, you know, trying to make a business idea floats. Yeah.

Roy Barker  20:04

And we talk about this in sales a lot. But you know, I go back to the agrarian model is that, you know, we have to sow the seed, we have to cultivate, and then we reap our harvest. And, you know, in sales, a lot of times, it's a one call, hey, I'm selling my seat, and I'm reaping the harvest day, if I'm not, you know, I'm moving on. It's no relationship building. But that can happen in businesses too. And, and, you know, I kind of, I love social media, I love electronics, I think, you know, there's a lot of positive, but I will say on the negative side is, you know, I see the guy with the big boat, and he's in the business, amen. And it's like, Why? Why can't I have my picture in front of the big boat, we have these maybe unrealistic ideas and expectations set off of what we get in these social media feeds, whereas, you know, the, the, the guy that was an overnight success, yeah, we just heard about him overnight. But you didn't hear about the last 10 years while he's been toiling away, or, you know, struggling behind the scenes that, you know, the, the graph of success is not just this linear line, it's all, you know, and it's like, you know, some lady podcast I was on recently, you know, she said, Have? I don't remember the question, but she posed, it was like, Hey, have you ever wanted to quit? And I said, in the last hour, yeah, three times, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, travel every day. And it's so there's so many times that we could just fold it up and say, I'm not doing this anymore. But I guess I kind of get back to that, you know, you have to have that passion and really believe in your mission and what you're doing, too.

Ann  21:48

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think, uh, you know, all of these, all of these variables that we've been talking about, we've talked about a number of them already, all of these variables have to come into a sphere of self awareness. Oftentimes, we are unaware of some of our tendencies. So you know, you might be vaguely aware that you jump from thing to thing, you know, for instance, I got this idea, I got that idea. And you abandon it before you actually give it a good test drive. And what you can need to telling yourself is, you know, that that just wasn't a very good idea. And instead of saying, maybe it's me, maybe it's because I tend to jump from thing to thing, and it actually has a consequence, because nothing ever has the opportunity to take root. Yeah. And so, you know, you can you have to have an enormous amount of self awareness to, to to make a, you know, a business would go that way.

Roy Barker  22:55

Yeah, and one thing I was just writing down while you're talking, it kind of goes along with that is ego check, because if I'm struggling, whether is the business or component, sometimes, yep, we don't want that to seep out like somebody thinks I can't handle it, or they think there's a flaw in me or the business when it's like, you know, yep, yep. I judge people and managers, not on what they know. But do they know how to go seek the answer for what they don't know, that's the most important part of all this? So asking help from others? There's nothing wrong with that. Nothing at all.

Ann  23:29

Right. Absolutely. And, and honestly, this is something you know, I mentioned, Whitley, you mentioned at the beginning of the of the broadcast here, that I've been in the people development business for a long time. Now, here's one of the things I know to be very true. And that is, your level of self awareness comes apart comes along in layers. So let's say you're an individual who's very, very, very talkative. And if somebody says, You know what, you talk a lot, and you nod your head. Yeah, yeah, I know, I talk a lot. But you don't get to the layers of Well, what does that mean, as far as somebody who has to listen to you? Or what impact is that having on people with being willing to come into your office and ask you a question? Because, you know, you might be there for 20 minutes? Because you're so targeted? I mean, in other words, it just appeals back in layers, right. And so it's sort of a kind of a life lifelong quest to really understand the impact of both our strengths and our blind spots. Yeah. And that falls into the category of self awareness.

Roy Barker  24:36

Yeah. And it's important in the creative part for me, because, you know, when I get stuck on something, if I'm very self aware, in the moment, I can see, hey, I'm been sitting here for an hour, two hours, you know, digging and trying to look around and find this and sometimes it's just as easy as stepping up, taking a walk, getting outside breathe in fresh air, it just clears your head but Yep, I will tell you that, you know, in my youth, I would have sat there for two or three more hours banging my head against the table instead of, you know, just trying to be aware of what's going on around me was this become a problem all of a sudden?

Ann  25:14

Yeah, you learn something, you spent a lot of time on planet. And ironically, that's so glad you brought that up, because there's a book by Adam Grant called originals. And basically, it talks about individuals who've had original ideas, etc. And they talk about, like the Warby Parker glasses, and you know, a number of other things. But one of the things that was articulated in that book is the most successful entrepreneurs have actually spent time somewhere else first. So they didn't jump out of college and boom, you know, there they go. I mean, there's a few that have I mean, but but it's such a small amount, the vast majority of successful entrepreneurs, have spent some time on the planet have been doing other kinds of work that will inform their choices with entrepreneurship.

Roy Barker  26:11

on their mind, or going off now. Oh, yeah. love that about that. Yeah.

Ann  26:16

I'm sorry. I can't hear because I've got the earphones on. Yeah, they're laying there, like, perfect. Gentlemen, gentlemen, so far.

26:25

so far.

Roy Barker  26:26

So, you know, is there after you do the entrepreneurial edge is there? I mean, I know it, it's probably looks at a wide range of things. But are there some typical, like a checklist of things that you go down through and say, you know, these are some things that we need to do to avoid, you know, certain pitfalls as we start this journey? Or as we are in the journey?

Ann  26:51

Yes, yep. That's exactly what it does is it takes you through a number of, excuse me, a number of areas that are known to, to to create successful entrepreneurship, okay. And you, you know, effectively you, you rate yourself on these various areas, and you see where the holes are and where the strengths are. So, you know, you might be an excess, you know, really good manager, people, you might be a really good networker, you might be really good with money, you know, but there might be some other areas that are not quite as strong. Yeah. And so there'll be some suggestions on things you can do specifically to strengthen that part of your endeavor. So, you know, and it might be as simple as find somebody who can help you with this, because it doesn't look like it's a strength of yours.

Roy Barker  27:50

Yeah. And which brings up a good point. So when, when is too early to take this? I mean, should I, I've got a kernel of an idea. I haven't even written it on the napkin yet. But I'm thinking is that a go ahead? Good time, let's go ahead and take that. And then we kind of know, as we start through that planning phase, versus getting started and getting, you know, waist deep in something, and then trying to figure out where our shortcomings are?

Ann  28:15

Well, I you know, to me, it is useful to do it, as you're getting started to do it, you know, as you've you know, made a little bit of progress with the idea. So read, redo it, revisit it and see where you are. And just, you know, use that because the the nature of any of these kinds of assessments is they're not like diagnostics, like you go to get your blood test and all that. But there are guidelines and check ins, right. And so that's, that's the value of them. It's a structured way to appraise the whole process of entrepreneurship, and what you need to do to make it more likely, likely that you'll be successful. Yeah. So

Roy Barker  28:59

yeah, I think we change as we, you know, as we start down any road in life, maybe we thought we were going to be the awesome salesperson, but now we're the you know, whatever you're doing the awesome inventory person or, you know, stamping out the license plate or whatever we do. And, you know, so I guess that's a good another good reason to kind of keep keep a monitor on that just in case things change, we can change as well before we get into trouble.

Ann  29:28

Yeah, exactly. And again, it's just it's a way for a person to in a, in an organized way, kind of it's almost like do your scorecard. Strong here that's so strong here. really got to watch for here. And, you know, and because you're answering the questions, it's your, your perception of how things are going and what you need to pay attention to. You know, when I went from my work in the hospital, my the work I did with brains, and then When I started my business for coaching, you know, there was a lot of stuff that I just wasn't aware of. And it was, you know, can I define what what it is what I'm actually doing? You know, how are my finances set up? It's, I mean, there were so much for that itty bitty little business of one guy, right? It's incredible. Now, imagine that you're trying to make an idea float with multiple people, or even, you know, just a few, it takes a lot of self awareness.

Roy Barker  30:33

Yeah, and that's another good reason, I think, to surround ourselves with, you know, a team of advisors. And you know, my mother would love to be one. But I'd say, look, I need somebody that's gonna tell me that I'm wrong every day, you need somebody that can give you that honest feedback and can't because especially starting things, we don't know what we don't know, unfortunately. And so that's another reason. And sometimes even competitors may be across town or in a different city, they will, they are more than, more than glad to help you you reach out, they can tell you some pitfalls that they ran it, or maybe you need to have a certificate or this license, things like that, you know, to keep you from getting in trouble. So always surround yourself with and there's a great, you know, there's a great new line out that if you're the smartest person in the room, you need to find a new room.

Ann  31:28

Yeah, no kidding. No kidding. No. Yeah, no, as a matter of fact, I was talking to my friend of mine this week. And I said, my favorite TED Talk is the TED talk that talks about how wrong we are all the time, right? It's the free, most freeing thing in the world to not have to think you got to be right all the time. Exactly.

Roy Barker  31:48

So how long would it take to go through this? If and I guess that you can find this online? I mean, we'll talk about how people can get in contact with you in a minute. But is this something that you just go online and can get through?

Ann  32:02

Yep, yeah, it's a it's about 20 minutes. And so you, you know, you'd want to heal, but you can't just find it online, you have to go through somebody who can interpret it for you. So they'd have to say, Okay, I'm interested in hearing let you know, entrepreneur edge has to say, and so you know, if they wanted to think about that, or pursue that, the first thing that they would do is probably book just a basic initial consultation with you, which is free, okay, and just, you know, talk to me about what it is that you're trying to accomplish, and even to find out if this particular assessment is going to be helpful to you. So it probably will be but I always like to talk to somebody first to make sure I understand what their goals right

Roy Barker  32:49

now, and that's good. I think you bring up another good point about any kind of a an assessment, whether it's, there's a lot out there, I'm not gonna try to name all of them. But yeah, it's not taken it that is the hardest part. I mean, we have to be open and self aware. It's the interpretation of the results. Yeah. Is that where we can get in trouble. And again, that's why, you know, going through a professional such as yourself is well worth it to make sure that we interpret, you know, what we're doing in the correct manner.

Ann  33:21

Absolutely. It's, it's huge. It's, it's, it's, it makes a difference between a thing being somewhat useful and extremely useful or game changing, you know, somebody can help you understand it from the interpretations standpoint, because sometimes some of these online assessments aren't even correct, because you haven't even interpret that or interpreted their question in the way that that that is supposed to lead to the way it's supposed to be interpreted. So for instance, if you're talking about like, extraversion, if you say, No, I don't need to be the life of the party. In your mind, you could say, Alright, well, therefore I'm introverted. But that's not that's not true. That's not the that's they're not a you know, so you need somebody to kind of help walk you through the possibility that you're extroverted, but you don't need to be the life of the party.

Roy Barker  34:15

Yeah. And that's because that's just seems like the sidebar is like, you take these tests, and you get the results. But to me, the questions, a lot of them are situational is like, you know, there are times Yep, to be an introvert and that you're the extrovert. And so it's not always one answer fits all situations. But anyway, I think that the other the other part of this is you've seen enough of these tests to know how I answer it, to maybe also give a little extra insight into, you know, some challenges or some, you know, positive points.

Ann  34:53

Yeah, yeah, there's, there's a couple of assessments like you know, I do the emotional intelligence assessment, the gold standard that you ui 2.0 where you can actually go back and talk about how that person answered it. And so you can say, what you rated yourself in this way. Tell me more about what you were thinking when you rated yourself. And you may find through that simple discussion, that it really is a little bit different for you. Yeah, you know, so it's, it's, you know, a good and good conversation around any assessment you take is going to be the game changer part of it.

Roy Barker  35:28

Yeah. Well, and I want to thank you for taking time, if we've got anything else you want to add quickly, that we know we're gonna wrap it up here, though, you know, one of my wrap up questions is, so what is a tool that you use in your life, it can be a, you know, an app, or maybe it's a habit or process, but what's something you do personally or professionally, that just adds a lot of value to your day.

Ann  35:52

So actually, and I'm glad we'll be having a chance to talk about it, but the positive intelligence, a program, which is a daily opportunity to build my mental muscle, okay, is most of you know that along with of course, my physical walking every day, and you know, making sure my body is physically healthy. The, the other is the, the mental. The mental strength is super, super important. And it's, you really just have to build it like you would build a muscle at the gym. So that when you need to call on it, you got it. Right.

Roy Barker  36:30

Okay, awesome. Yeah, I won't have to I'm on a course get with you. After the show. We've got a lot of topics, we'd like to talk about someone to see if I can talk you into coming back. And we can delve more into the the positive intelligence that sounds very interesting. So anyway, well, tell everybody you know, who is your client, what you can do for them, and of course, how they can reach out and get a hold of you.

Ann  36:54

Okay, so I am an individual who works with emerging leaders, emerging entrepreneurs, people who are looking to level up as the term that a lot is being used a lot today, but but to uncover your potential so that whatever endeavor that you're taking on, you know, what your strengths are, you know, what your blind spots are, you have the mental resilience and strength to push through to those higher goals. anybody who is interested in talking to me could go to my website, annholm.net, and can book a free consultation, and I'll talk to you about what I can do for you. And and if I can't give you what you're actually looking for, I could probably refer you somewhere else. So I get a, I get a number of, you know, inquiries, and if I don't feel like I'm the person who you need right now. Well, I'll refer you on. Okay, so

Roy Barker  37:54

Well, that's great. Well, y'all reach out to and no matter where you are in the journey, if you're just starting, or if you've gone down the road a little bit, reach out, see how she can be a help and make your life easier. And then maybe we can make your venture more successful as well. So thanks a lot, and I certainly do appreciate it. Until next time, that's going to be it for the business of business podcast. Of course, you can find us at the www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com, where you're also on all the major social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and the recording of this episode, when it goes live will be up on YouTube as well. So we ask that you check it out. We are on all the major platforms like iTunes, Google, Stitcher, Spotify, if we're not on one that you listen to please reach out I'd be glad to see if we can get added to that. So until next time, take care of yourself and take care of your business. Thank you.

www.annholm.net

www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com