Marc Joseph, An Accomplished Entrepreneur & Business Leader | Biz To Biz Podcast

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Hey everybody, welcome to today's episode of B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz Podcast, and I'm your host, Allen Kopelman. B2B Vault is sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems, and we power payments for businesses all over the United States, and we are experts in the payments industry. And our podcast, B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz Podcast. We talk about business, fintech, and all kinds of cool stuff. And today I have a special guest, Mark— Mark Joseph from babyboomer.org. And I met Mark because he contacted me on LinkedIn and invited me to share my blog to his website. And we're here to talk to Mark today and find out more about his organization, and he wrote a book, and it's a really interesting subject matter. So let's dive in. Mark, welcome to the podcast.

Well, thanks for inviting me. I appreciate it.

All right, tell us a little bit about yourself and why you started the website.

Oh, we have a site called babyboomer.org, and, you know, the reason that we started the website is that the baby boomer generation is as diverse as any generation before or after it. You know, we've got the division in politics. We got our division into diversity, religion, everything that's different about our generation. But the one thing that baby boomers have in common is a shared connected experience. When you think about it, when we were growing up, uh, we were there for the Kennedy assassinations, Martin Luther King, landing on the moon. Birth control became big during the baby boomer generation. We had to go through Vietnam, you know, we had riots in the street, but, you know, Things that brought us together were music. Elvis, the Beach Boys, Beatles, Three Dog Night, Association, Supreme. All this great music kept our generation together. You know, we, uh, we do have the best music. Oh yeah, we do. I mean, you know, think about it, the Cherish My Association, on and on and on. But, you know, also, we— there, the movies brought us together. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Jaws. Pretty much any of Spielberg movies, uh, you know, Animal House, Star Wars, Godfather, all these are shared experience. And we wanted to bring them together and put them in a place where baby boomers could just find everything. So we now have this site where we have pulled the best experts in the country and you're one of them, you know, you're, you're a B2B expert. So we wanted to make sure that you were on our site. Uh, and in fact, you're on the front page today. So that's pretty cool. But, uh, thank you. Yeah, so we've got over 800 experts who are contributing to the site. You know, we have over 450 different departments, everything from aging to pickleball, you know, to movies and retirement and travel. All these things place for us to come and get information. Site changes every single day because it's all the new information that our contributors are putting into the site every single day. So we have created the site as a gathering place so that our generation can really find information very quickly. You know, what's interesting is where we— when we built the site, we thought it was going to be for baby boomers, but what's happening is we're getting the baby boomer kids and the grandkids trying to understand our generation coming onto the site. So that's why we have created babyboomer.org.

Wow, that's really cool. It's a really cool site. I was, you know, you know, I'm getting You don't always get invited to, you know, share your blogs and your videos and things on sites, so it's always nice to get an invitation. And you also wrote a children's book, so let's— let me— let's hear about that.

Oh yeah, my children's book is I Don't Want to Turn 3, and I've done it under my pen name Gramps Jeffrey. And the reason my pen name's Gramps Jeffrey is my middle name is Jeffrey.. But my wife has spelled it wrong for 30 years. So I figured if I put it on the book, J-E-F-F-R-E-Y, she'd remember how to spell my name. And my kids, my 6 grandkids call me Gramps, obviously. But it's a true story of my 6 grandkids. It all happened, you know, when we're all together for COVID. And it's what happened and how we reacted and, you know, what it's like turning 3 and how a family reacts together. So that was my book. And so, Interestingly enough, that really was the start of babyboomer.org, because what happened was, as I was promoting the book and going out there and talking to, you know, all kinds of people about the book, it became very apparent that the baby boomer generation, 30% of us, that means 1 out of every 3 of us, are not involved in the raising of our grandkids. I mean, we may show up for birthdays or maybe a holiday, but we really have said to our kids, "Hey, you take care of the kids." I raised you, you'll be great parents. I'm going to go play pickleball. And so a third of us are not involved. And that's one of the reasons that we started. I've got 3 other partners who are baby boomers, and we all saw this as we were— that our generation wasn't involved. So we wanted to make sure we gave all the information and steps to help continue our legacy and let our legacy of baby boomers go to the next generation and the following generation. So that was one of the motivators of Baby Boomer Knockout. .org was to make sure the grandparents stayed involved and help influence the younger generations.

Yeah, that's interesting because I see, you know, I, you know, a lot of times it's, you know, you know, everybody, everybody becomes more like— when I was younger, it was a lot easier to like pick up and move from one city to another. Now it's not so easy for families to do that. But that did like kind of like in that period of time of the '80s when people like really could move around a lot, it kind of dispersed people across the US. So parents don't necessarily live in the city where their kids live. They go off to college and not everybody comes home and lives in the same city, you know.

Oh, absolutely. You know, in my case, I've got kids in Florida and I live in the— in Arizona. So, so I know exactly what you're talking about.

So the— so what kind of other, other, like, so like all the subject matter, what's the most popular subject matter on the website?

The number one article last week was Dating After 60.

I'm gonna have to mark that down. Dating After 60. Okay. All right. Yeah, well, that's also a difficult subject. I'm 65. I just had to sign up for Medicare. That was like an adventure. And I had— I ended up like, okay, what do I do? Who do I ask? I asked my insurance agent what to do, my mom who just turned 90, and then I asked my doctor.

Yeah, I mean, those are all the kinds of questions we've got that are on our site that our experts are talking about. So, you know, we feel that we're very relevant to, to what is going on in the world. And the baby boomers is our niche and we love it.

And I know you also, so like, you know, reading, you know, and also writing is definitely like lost its Like, kids today, children today, like, don't do a lot of reading. Everybody's like on a device, right? I mean, probably if you would have told my dad we'd all be walking around with a phone, or my mom when she was our— when she— when my mom was 20, she'd probably think you were— we were all crazy. Um, you know, so read— reading— I know you wrote about— you talk about like reading. Why, why do you think it's— my, my daughter has— she's a stepmom to 3 young children, and one of the things like that she really gets them involved with is reading, reading a lot of books. So what's the importance behind that?

Well, you know, the— and that's one of the reasons I wrote this book also, is I want to make sure that my kids started reading early. Now think about the, the benefits of reading to children, right? And so let's, let's assume you're a grandparent and you've got your 6-year-old and it's— and they're staying at your house and so forth, you know. Why do you want to make sure that you are reading books to them every single night? You know, whether you're a parent or grandparent, you should be reading with your kids every single night. Well, the first thing, the reason you should do it is because of the bonding it creates. You know, it's just a nice way to spend some time together. You take a book like mine or some of the other books, it takes 20 minutes to read. It's not, not a big deal. But if you can have that 20 minutes with your grandchild, it just gives you a chance to bond. And, you know, again, going back to what you're talking about with the cell phones and the Internet and all that, you've got to pull that time to bond in today's world. You know, another reason that we all should be reading to our grandkids and our kids should be reading to the grandkids too is it supports listening skills. Now, you and I both know that, you know, when somebody has to read a book, they have to listen to it to understand it. But you and I both know that listening skills, all the skills we've learned over these generations, Listening skills are the best skill that we have. I mean, you need to have great listening skills as you're doing your podcast. You have to understand and hear what people are saying so you ask the right questions. I have to have great listening skills so that I can make sure that we've got the best content on our site. So listening skills is like the number one thing that you can teach your grandchildren, and reading a book to them helps support listening skills. You know, another thing is it creates cognitive and language development. I mean, when you sit and read a book to a child, there are words in there that I don't understand. I gotta go look them up, you know. And so obviously they're gonna be words in there that they don't understand. That gives you a chance to really explain it to them. So help, you know, reading to the kids helps expand the variety and the number of words that they're able to use at a very young age. And then, you know, another reason is attention span. You know, these 2, 3, 4-year-olds, they're bouncing off the wall all day long. Again, you get them in your lap, you have them sit down with you, you get a key concentration and self-discipline, and it helps with their attention span. And then, you know, as we get older, we need to have attention span. So that's why I would encourage everyone to be reading to their kids and their grandkids every single night. Just because these skills, which aren't, you know, they're not written down, but these are the kinds of skills we want to make sure that this next generation has. Because this generation, these kids, you know, 1 to 10 years old, are going to be the greatest generation this country has ever produced. So when you think about it, as soon as they come out of the womb, you know, they're on the internet, they got their cell phone, you know, these little kids, it's a 2, 3, 4-year-old, you know, they know so much more than I ever knew. Uh, and so we have—

they have access to so much information in the palm of their hand, whether it's an iPad, a Kindle, you know, whatever, the internet.

Exactly. And so, so we as the older generation need to make sure that they balance all this. Yeah, it's great for them to have— be so much— they're so much smarter than we are, we got to admit that. Um, but, but then to be able to, to balance, you know, we as grandparents got to make sure they get outside and play and play ball. Play, you know, play games, do things besides the internet. And so with this generation being the greatest generation that we're ever going to see, you know, we have to just make sure that we interact with them and teach them how to read, teach them how to listen, and teach them how to concentrate so that— so these other great skills they're learning on the internet, uh, they can combine them all.

Yeah, reading, reading and writing is super important. Like you said, listening, you know, listening comes into play because I always tell people, like, if you want to own a business you're going to be— you have to do— you're going to wear a lot of hats. The bookkeeper, you're going to be the salesperson, the greeter, whatever it is, right? The creator of content. You have to be able to do— wear many hats. And, you know, if you're going to own a business, you have to do sales. And if you're going to make sales, you've got to be a good listener and you've got to detect from your— the person, the people that you talk to, are they auditory listeners? Or sometimes they can be visual where you need to show them some visuals about what you're talking about. And you have to be able to recognize that. And it's super important. My mom was really big on Scrabble. So me and my kids are really big on like word games. So we play Scrabble, Bananagrams, you know, crossword puzzles. You know, I play a bunch of games on my phone. I still play Scrabble with my mom, with Words With Friends. She's 90. She cheats though, and she looks it up in the dictionary. I'll send her this podcast. She has a dictionary. I know she looks up words, but she— I taught her tricks on Words with Friends. I go, because you can't sound like Scrabble, we're in front of each other, right? And you could try out a bunch of words on there. You could put letters everywhere, and then it'll tell you, oh, that's a word. You don't even know what it means, but you can click on it and see what it means.

And I said Yeah, because my wife, my wife plays Words with Friends with son-in-law, with the mother-in-law. I mean, it's just a great way to communicate.

Yeah, it's awesome. You know, even like, you know, the kids, I play with them. I don't try to give them a crazy word, but, you know, we'll sit down like when I go visit my daughter and we'll play Bananagrams. And, you know, they have to make words like really fast, so they want to see how fast I can go. And I'll show them. But, you know, you just have to— it's like, I saw a puzzle one day a guy posted on the internet, and it said, to know a word, the letters don't have to be in order. They can be jumbled up, but as long as you see like 2 or 3 letters in the word, you can make out the word, which is pretty interesting. And, you know, spelling and reading, these are super, super important skills that come in with everything, because you can't just depend on, you know, Today, ChatGPT— it's like, I was talking to somebody the other day and they were like, oh, you know, some people just sit there all day and talk to ChatGPT, which that's a little bit nuts, but you know, if they're— it's a— it's like crazy how much information is like in that program today. I don't know if you mess with it at all.

Oh yeah, you bring up a couple very interesting points. One is, as we are aging We need to keep our brain active, and what you are doing is exactly it. We need to be playing these games. We need to be challenging ourselves because, and that's part of one part of the site is aging. But the other interesting thing you brought up earlier is entrepreneurs and businesses. I'm sure you're aware that there are 12 million businesses that are still owned by baby boomers. And so it's a major when you come onto our site, it's a major part of our site because you got 12 million entrepreneurs out there. In fact, my first book that I wrote was called The Secrets of Retailing: How to Beat Walmart. And I wrote that book because before I got into Baby Boomer, I was in the internet business where we had a company that small— that serviced small businesses in all 50 states, around 44 countries. Our customer base were the moms and pops who are surviving and thriving as the chains. And so we were selling general merchandise product to them by the case. And I became very aware that being an entrepreneur is hard. It's very difficult. When you think about it, that if you're an entrepreneur, you know, 20% of the businesses fail in the first year, 50% fail within 5 years. So they're becoming an entrepreneur and a small business owner in Today's world, you know, you're taking a chance. You really have got to have that gumption to make it work. So, you know, that's one of the reasons we have on the site a whole area for entrepreneurs, small businesses, because so many of us are still involved in that.

Yeah, one of the big subjects that, you know, I hear people talking about is, you know, succession of businesses, you know, and as business owners, and we see it, you know, Like I've been in business for 25 years doing merchant processing, and we've had a couple of businesses where one, the business owner decided, their kids decided they didn't want to continue the business. So they ended up having to sell the business or close the business. And in another case, the owner, you know, slowly handed it over to his children. You know, and then, you know, they, you know, trying to run the business today. And it's, you know, those are things that people have to be prepared for, is, you know, how are you gonna take your business and then what are you going to do with it? And are your children going to be involved in it or not be involved in it?

You know, yeah, the great wealth transfer is what you're kind of referring to, is right It's the biggest wealth transfer ever, these baby boomers to the younger ones. But, but, you know, looking at giving your business to your child or your grandchild, what's going to make them successful, you know, unless they understand or have the passion to run your business? I mean, some of the, some of the common reasons why businesses fail can easily fail on the second generation. I mean, when you think about it, you know, 42% of businesses fail because they don't have the right product or service. So you may think you've got the greatest thing since sliced bread, but if you got no customers out there for them, you know, your business is going to fail. So, you know, if, if you're going to be passing on the business to your child, you got to make sure they understand that. They got to keep that up. You know, 29% of, uh, small businesses fail because they don't have enough capital or cash. To keep going. You know, if you're an entrepreneur and starting a business, you got to make sure that you got at least 6 months, uh, of cash in there if you get no sales. You know, that, that causes it. You know, and 23% of businesses fail, and this happens a lot on the second generation, is because they have poor teamwork and communications. You know, Dad or Mom may have been the greatest communicators there are, but if you're not Yeah, this is going to go down. So taking a chance or passing on a business to the next generation is taking a real chance.

Yeah. One of the things that a lot of people really discount today is we, we became very focused on technology in our company. The article, which I think is on the website today, is about B2B and technology. And so it's super important, you know, Like I'll talk to a business owner and they'll be like, okay, I have a restaurant and like, oh, I want to do, I want to control like how much food that we're using in the restaurant. And then when you start talking to them about it, you know, we go, you have this very powerful point of sale system, you know, so if you have your recipes and then you take all your inventory and you, you, you do real, you know, you keep inventory and you have your recipes and then at the end of the week or the end of the month, you can review like, okay, this is how much food I used. And according to the recipes, this is how much food I should have used. And you're going to know whether you're— the cooks or the chefs are heavy-handed on the pasta sauce, the cheese, the chicken, whatever, whatever it is that you're trying to track in your, in your business. And, you know, but people have to understand, you know, you have to put technology to use. And even young people like that will put, you know, technology to use, like the most popular businesses today. If you look at, you know, the, you know, I go back, you know, to 2001 when I started, you know, everybody wanted to open a brick-and-mortar retail store. Today, you know, everybody's trying to do an internet business. So it's an internet business, it's a service as a software product, it's some kind of digital product. These are the most popular products today. And, you know, to— and, you know, 25 years ago it wasn't very popular to have a home-based business. Today a lot of people have home-based businesses. They don't even have— they don't even have an office anymore. Their office is in their house. They don't— they don't even rent any kind of office space, you know. But sometimes having office space makes your business look bigger than it actually is because you actually have an office. Maybe you're competitors are working out of their home. So, you know, you have to kind of weigh all of those things together when you're putting together— you know, I always say people don't plan to fail, but they fail to plan. So, you know, you have to have a plan.

You know, we are going through the biggest upheaval of our lives right now. This AI is the most important shift in how to do business that we've seen in generations. And so any of your listeners, if they're afraid to embrace AI or they're concerned about it, they got to do it. You, you will be left way behind if you are not involved in understanding AI. I mean, you know, when the internet came out, that was a major shift for all of us. Definitely. And, but this is the greatest shift ever. And so I just encourage anyone listening to you, make sure that you are studying AI and you bring AI into your business because it will help. It'll make you better than your competitors who are afraid to use AI. So, so if you get anything else out of this, this interview, embrace AI and make sure you part of what you do.

Yeah, one of the things I tell— I've written a couple of articles about AI, I've done a couple of podcasts. One of the things I recommend is, you know, get a paid account, you know, or at least sign up for an account so that you're— because the AI actually learns from what you do. So if you ask it questions or you say, oh, I'm writing a blog about, you know, whatever it is you're writing— I'm writing a blog about payment systems And the more you work with it, the more you can do with it. Another friend of mine told me that owns an AI company, he said, "Oh," he goes, he said, "A lot of older people are using AI because they can converse with the AI. They can ask it questions and they don't have to search the internet." I mean, the amount of, if you have a paid account on OpenAI, which is the ChatGPT, it's literally amazing. It can do deep research, it can search the internet, you can ask it a question. And then hit the internet and it'll search the internet to find the answer. Otherwise it'll give you a generative AI answer, but it also do research. So I wanted to test it out and I said, okay, I want to compare these 3 point-of-sale systems for restaurants, and it actually spit out a whole giant research report on it.

Oh, absolutely.

You know, it's amazing like what kind of information you can get.

You, you mentioned people working from their home now. They're running internet companies and so forth. There's one AI, if anyone is a retailer out there, that I recommend that you jump on right away. It's called prophecy.com, P-R-O-F-A-S-E-E dot com, and it's an AI that fixes pricing. If you have mispricing, it fixes it automatically. Adjusts it daily. It looks at all your competitors. If you're a seller on Amazon, it'll quickly look at everybody else's pricing and so forth. I mean, you can't do that. We couldn't have done this a couple years ago. You know, we'd have to be spending all day looking at everybody on the internet. This goes in and tells you what you need to know, and you just tell— you, you tell it what kind of margins you want, you tell it what you want to do. So, uh, if anyone's in listening that's a retailer and wants to, to make sure that they're priced right and positioned right, I recommend they do that. And like you said, ChatGPT, you know, you may want to get the Pro model. Pro model does it all. It gives you right, you know, you got that, you know, you've got, uh, one called Grammarly Pro, which, uh, you know, helps you with blog posts and newsletters and things like that. Yeah, again, it just helps you in a business that, that you would normally spend days figuring out. You know, Canva is a— it helps you with images. So if you've got an internet site, you want to make sure you got the greatest images, you run it through there. And then if you saw—

I actually saw an AI that a guy just produced, and they, they want to use it for like restaurants. And one of the things it'll tell you is, is you could put your menu in there, and then it'll look up all your competitors in your general area and tell you how those are— your items are priced versus how their items are priced.

Yeah. I mean, think about it. If we had to do that ourselves, it would take all day long. Yeah. So we got to embrace all the—

you have to drive around to all the restaurants and get their menus, or you'd have to look them all up online and then print them out and look at them and take all day. But I was amazed at the guy's product. He's like, yeah, we want to sell this to restaurants. I was like, that's insane. You know, the amount of information you can get with AI is just— it amazes me. We work with it every day in the office. Everybody in my office is using AI to do part of their job, helping them with writing, you know, oh, I need it. We need a suggestion on a blog title, whatever it is. And it will do that.

Absolutely.

Really cool. Like we use a product called Search Atlas for SEO and it literally goes in, organizes, looks at your website and then starts telling you what type of changes you need to make, what kind of mistakes. So we had tons of mistakes with on the, in our Google console and that software program solved all those problems and told us how to fix them. And save thousands of hours of work. I mean, it was— it's, it's literally crazy what, what these different AI programs can do for, for a small business, because that program, let's say, costs like $199 a month. You couldn't pay somebody $199 to do all the stuff that it does.

Yeah, you know, we thought we were all so smart, but AI has taught us that we really are not.

No, the thing is that it's the— one of the things that I've read about with AI is the amount of electricity these computers are using. And that's something that they're gonna have to, you know, the gov— the U.S. government, the world is gonna have to figure out. Like, okay, you're gonna have these giant supercomputers where I read Elon Musk is building one like over in some area in Kentucky, in Tennessee somewhere. And he's building some power plant that's going to be connected to a dam and then some small nuke, a mini nuclear reactor and all this stuff so he can have the most powerful AI computer, which is crazy. You know, these people are just, you know, these can, you know, you put in a question, it gives you an answer. It's really great. So tell us, where can people find— you know, they can go to your website. Oh, we got a frozen— Mark froze up. Okay. So, Mark, tell us, they can go to your website, babyboomer.org, and they can find your— they can get their— they can check out the website. Where do they find your book?

Or they can find either books on Amazon. So you can find there or go to my site, grantsjeffrey.com. So there's all kinds of places.

Okay, great. So any last parting words for the audience today?

Yeah, the, the, the world of business has changed so much over the last 20 years. So just make sure that you keep your eyes open, look for the most modern things that you can do, you know, all the different ways with all these tariffs coming in and all the the cost we're going to be looking at, we've got to come up with ways to save money. And I do recommend definitely that everyone revisit on how they can use AI.

All right. Well, thank you for joining us on the podcast today. Wise words from Mark about AI and business today, and also about being a grandparent and reading to your children and grandchildren. That was some really great advice, and I appreciate you being a guest on the podcast. And thank you for having me as a guest blogger on your site, and thank you for being on the pod. And we'll share it to you, and hopefully I'll get on the front page of the babyboomer.org with Mark on the podcast and expose the podcast to more listeners. So thank you for listening today. Carpe diem, seize the day. You can follow B2B Vault at our website, b2bvault.info. We're on LinkedIn, we're on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. You can watch the podcast on YouTube, B2B Vault Biz to Biz Podcast. We're on Spotify, Apple, anywhere else you listen to podcasts. Thank you very much. Peace out, everybody. Have a great day.

Thank you.

Thank you again, Mark.