10 Years of Business Brain

Business brain, episode 624 for Wednesday, February 19th. That's National Prevent Plagiarism Day and our 10th anniversary of releasing our first episode, Woo Hoo 2025. Greetings folks and welcome to Business Brain, the show where we take some ideas, we crunch them, we dissect them, we use them to tune our business brains so that we each have better tools and are therefore better equipped to keep on living those charmed lives that we value so highly. Shopify.com BusinessBrain is our sponsor. That's where you go to get a $1 per month trial period. We'll talk more about all of that in a little bit. For now here celebrating in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

I'm celebrating out here in California. Dave.

Amazing.

Shannon Jean, congratulations on 10 years of recording this, this podcast. That's amazing.

It is amazing. Our, our bullheaded persistence has led to consistency in 10 years in the river.

Yeah, that, yeah, that brings up a good point. Like, you know, that consistency is really hard. And I don't say that just to like, we did it and it's great. But like I. Today we're recording this on, on a Monday and record both episodes here Mondays now. And like this morning has just been one barrier to another after another after another trying to get, trying to get things going, trying to get things going. And it's just like. And then I had to run down and solve a problem computer, you know, issue at the house. I was like, my gosh, I had.

To snow blow three times. And that's the second time was because our plow guy effed us sort of and then showed up right after I did it the second time so I could get my car out, which was fun. And we were getting our car out to drive to the vet to, most likely. And then of course we wound up putting our dog down today, which sucks.

It's the worst. I'm so sorry.

Thank you. And it sucks. It is the greatest, it is the greatest gift that we get to give to our pets, in my opinion.

Yes.

At the right time.

At the right time. Yeah, absolutely.

But I did that and then it's like, well, I could certainly text Shannon and like punt on the day. And here we are. It's that consistency. It's.

Yeah. And I would say we, we were starting to talk. I, I said, hey, let's talk about lessons over the 10 years. And that, that less. That is the lesson for me is consistency. And also I feel like this business, because it is a business, it, it's One of the most challenging for me to get feedback. To get like empirical feedback of success. Right. What are the indicators? Like, I know if my business is shipping products, how many products a day do I ship?

Yep.

What's my revenue look like? I know that if I'm trying to connect with people online, what's my engagement like, what's my follower ratio, all that kind of stuff. Right. Because. And this show, we do have that revenue number, which I like, which is great.

But it's not a one to one.

No, it's not. It's challenging. And so that consistency. And I don't know that if I was recording this show by myself, if I ever would have made it.

Same.

I'll just. I'm gonna be really honest here.

Oh, same.

Oh.

Because totally it. You have to. You know, I'm essentially doing a show by myself now, sort of with gig gab.

Yeah.

However, every episode, generally, there are occasional episodes that I do on my own, but. But every episode I have a guest, which means that prior to the day of release, it could be two weeks prior, it could be two hours prior, but prior to the day of release, I have an appointment with someone else that if I make that appointment and all the technology, God smile upon me, he says as he checks to make sure it's recording, then I have an episode to release. Right. And I have to look someone else straight in the face or virtually, you know, and say, I am canceling this. Just like I would have had to do that with you today. I. You know, which I didn't. It crossed my mind, but not really, you know, because it's like, well, then when am I going to.

Yes, then when am I going to do it? It's not like you can stop. You have to. Okay, now, how do I fit it into my.

But this thing.

Right.

I think that is the key to consistency. Not do. Not necessarily just the act of doing it, but the act of knowing it will be done and you need to be part of it. That's the key. This did not dawn on me until we started talking here, Shannon. But on the 10th anniversary of MacGeek Gab, which would have been in June of 2015, I was invited to speak in Boston. It just so happened that that day was a Saturday. I was invited to speak in Boston at a podcast, like whatever, meetup, conference.

Whatever you want to call it.

And So I did. 10 lessons learned from 10 years of podcasting. Oh, that's pretty forgotten about this. The. And this is in no particular order. Listen to your own show.

Oh, I have a hard time with that one. But yes, you're right.

I know. I, I, I know I, right. I, I, I do this regularly, but not consistently.

Yeah, I, I actually enjoyed one of the best times I ever had. I was driving. This is just a little segue. I was driving to go to the duck club to hunt, and I turned on our show and I turned the speed down to half volume. Half, half speed, Half speed. And it sounded really funny. It was. And I listened and it sounded like we were stoned out of our mind.

I bet.

And, and I listened. I was like, this is really good, you know, because everybody always talked about, oh, do it at 1.4, whatever, 1.2, to get things done quick. And you and I, I, like I said, I have listened to the show a lot, but that episode, I was like, you know, it was like, Dave was like, wow, man, it was, it was so great. And I, I just, I laughed my ass off in the car and I was, I maybe even have texted you at the time.

I think I remember this. Yeah.

How many years ago I did it. But, but yeah, listening to your own show is good. It's, I have the same problem with it as watching myself record here on the live stream. Like, I, I don't, you know, it's like, well, whatever. And sometimes I'm just, like, I just put something over it. I don'. Now I'm used to it. I don't really care anymore, but you just get used to it. And I agree. You should listen to your own stuff.

Listen, I'm going to read through all of these and we can do it. We can pick apart any of them. We can come back to any that we want. So listen to your own shows. Number one, schedules matter. Number two, know your roles. Number three. Number four is communicate with your co hosts and guests. Learn how to interact with each other and notify each other. The systems. Get some of that down. Sound quality matters. It does. One that I didn't put in there but actually comes back around was respect your audience, but that was not number six. Number six was refine your advertising reads, which of course we've done. I don't know if you folks. Well, I'll circle back, but we use ChatGPT to write our ad scripts. Master your own domain. This is something we did here from day one, and that is do not host your podcast or your feed on a domain that you do not own. If your feed is even. And I love the folks at Libsyn, but if you are letting Libsyn Manage your feed. If something happens to Libsyn, something happens to your show. Yeah, right. And I love. Like I said, I love them. They're. They're a great example. They're a terrible example. Because I don't want to tell people to move away. You shouldn't move your hosting away from them necessarily. Just let them generate your feed. But hosted at your domain.

I agree.

Another thing that I did not put in there was two minutes is a long time.

Yeah, of course, dude. Yeah.

Number eight was shout from the rooftops. Tell everyone about your show. It's not natural for most of us to be predisposed to, you know, talking into a microphone, let alone talking about ourselves talking into a microphone. But you got it. And this is one I need to remind myself of all the time. And then number nine was love the haters. If somebody doesn't like your show and tells you they don't like your show, that's flattering.

It's good feedback.

Yeah. And then, of course, because it was 10 years of Mac geek lesson number 10 was don't get caught. Because that's our catchphrase. Over there. We talked about the charmed life here. Over there, it's don't get caught, but don't get caught in a rut. Reinvent yourself and your show as often as you want to.

I love it.

Stay with the times.

So, yeah, we've done that here. We've. We've changed the name, we've changed the format. We've changed over and over and over and over and over, and it keeps it engaging for us, which is really important. I would add one thing to that list that, for me, is that to shut up, to be quiet. I had a hard time in the beginning being quiet. Even. Especially when. Even. Even when we had guests. You know, I would want to interject and talk because it. Like in a conversation, you're, oh, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. But here I need to just close my mouth. And I think I've gotten much better at it and just listening.

I think you have, too. I think I have too, But I'm not. I fail at it all the time.

Oh, so do I. Of course. Of course. Of course. Yeah. But I would add. And that is. That is definitely a learned skill, not feeling the urge to fill silence.

Silence is okay.

Yeah. And it, you know, especially if you're making a point or you have a guest on that's making a point, you know, that kind of thing, or your co host is making a point. So. But yeah, it's definitely the consistency and the grind. And I'd, I would say it's helped me in all my other business ventures as well, because I understand better the like. This show has deep, a deep foundation of like value. If somebody were to go data mine the 623 episodes we already have recorded and I would love to do that.

I want to be the one to do that. Right? Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. I would love to have, you know, the AI do it for us and create a, you know, this massive volume of value. It's amazing. And it's, like I said, it's helped me tremendously in all other aspects.

All right, folks, if you're grinding to build your business, you need our sponsor, Shopify in your corner. I. I use Shopify for my other businesses and one of my other podcasts. And candidly, it's the MVP of selling online. I'm talking seamless setup, built in payment processing, and the kind of automation that lets you focus on growing, not just managing. It doesn't matter if you're selling merch memberships or a revolutionary new product, Shopify handles it all from checkout to shipping with the best conversion tools in the game and shop pay. It's like a secret weapon, turning window shoppers into paying customers up to 50% more often. That means more Ka Ching moments. You got that right. If Shopify could do my taxes, I'd probably let it. But for now, it just runs my businesses flawlessly. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout that I use. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com businessbrain all lowercase go to shopify.com businessbrain to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com businessbrain and our thanks to Shopify for sponsoring this episode. Shannon, I want to talk. I know you want to talk about reviews. You have some things to talk about. The first thing I'm going to do, though, is talk about the reviews that came in for our show in the last week. We got two of them. I love that. Which is double what I think we've ever gotten in any other week.

So, yeah, reviews are tough to get. It's tough to get folks to stop for 25 or 28 seconds and leave a review.

Yeah. So if that was weird, remember, if your review is read on the show, which there are about to be two, send us an email the feedback@businessbrain show to let us know that your review was read on the show. We don't get information about your email address or anything like that. But we want to enter you into a contest for a MacBook this year. So the first one comes from Derek Kolstad in the United States. Five stars. Smart and funny. One of the best business podcasts. Both hosts are super funny, relatable and insightful with business. Glad I discovered this gem.

Oh, that's awesome.

That is the second one. Go ahead. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Derek. The second one comes from Greg Church, Ph.D. also in the United States. Five stars. Must listen for business owners. This podcast is a must listen for every small business owner. It helps provide business therapy to overcome challenges and help motivate us to improve. I like the variety of topics that are covered and look forward to listening twice per week. As a listener, you feel like you get to know the host, Shannon and Dave personally and I appreciate their laid back, informal conversations. I like the occasional guest and appreciate the responsiveness to feedback. I look forward to listening for many years to come. Keep up the great work. Thank you. Greg Church, Ph.D. this is amazing.

Thank you very much.

That's amazing.

That's sweet.

Yeah, that's amazing.

Yeah. Make sure you, both of you guys email feedbackusbrain show so we can get you into running for that MacBook. That's great.

Everybody else, make sure to visit BusinessBrain show review. That is where you can go to review the show. If you have reviewed the show in the past but want to be part of this competition, you can go and update your review if it's more than six months old and it will be treated as a new one and we will get notifications and all of those things so you get to double dip. In fact, if you haven't reviewed the show, there is still time to be able to do that twice this year and get yourself two tickets on the list.

Pretty good. And I guarantee you this will be the odds of winning.

Oh, it's you.

You can, you know, are going to be great.

One in one in what? Maybe 100 at this point is what it's on track to be.

Let's say 1 in 100. Yeah. So that's, that's pretty darn good.

Pretty good for. But I would say I would like to get 200 reviews this year.

I would like to get 200 as well.

So maybe you could be one of 200 folks.

Yeah, that's a great idea. Love it. That is a. Is a good idea. But Dave. Okay, so speaking of reviews, if you. I can't. You can't really see this card, but I have posted it on X. If you go to at Channa Jean. We'll put the link in the show notes as well.

Sure.

But I had a. Well, let me. Let me set this up. I'm a big fan of home warranties. Okay.

Okay.

Lots of people. Lots of people hate them. I love them. My wife is really good at managing it. She manages our real estate, and we have warranties on all of our vacation rentals and our personal house. It's fantastic.

We're getting into the. I believe Lisa and I are getting into the vacation rental business. So I may. There might be some episodes where I pick your brain on things. And this reminds me that you need to be a resource for that anyway.

Yeah. So there's pros and cons with everything else, but in the. In the overall scheme of things, we are way, way up on the cost and. And everything of having a home warranty at each of these houses.

Great.

So at my house, where I live, we had our washing machine or. Yeah, washing machine died. Very common. And guys came out. He said, oh, you know, I don't think it's repairable. Well, whatever. Okay. So turns it into the home warranty place. They come out.

They.

Yep. We're going to give you a replacement if you approve this replacement. It's okay. It was a little different than the model we had, but okay, no problem. Fine. Set it up through Lowe's. And Lowe's delivered it. They would have delivered it the next day, which is amazing.

Wow.

That was impressed.

Lowe's is pretty good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we couldn't do it. So we had. They came out on Monday. They do the setup, the gate. I live on a very, very steep driveway up at the hill.

Yeah, they wouldn't want to shovel snow on that.

No, no. Thanks for. Don't sn. Deliveries are always an issue here. These guys had to manually bring this washing machine up my driveway because they could not get the giant honkin truck up the steep driveway. It won't come the. The. When you go up like this, it grinds or anything. So no matter how many times you tell them to bring the small truck, they never do it. So these guys hand truck this thing up my driveway and do the install. Take this thing back down the driveway, everything, you know, really great. Tipped them really well because they just. They literally busted their back coming up the hill. They hand me this card and says, hey, yeah, here it is on the live stream. You can see it. Give the Delivery Team A10, it says. And on one side, there's a rectangle that says to us, these are a Zero. And that's in the numbers zero through eight. It says to us, these are a zero. And on the right of that, the small box, square box that says positive nine or 10. And two things. I immediately went and gave the guys a 10 because they did a great.

Job, which you probably would have anyway. Anyway, you didn't need to be led down this path.

Yes. And I get the whole idea that, like, I really like the customer service card or thing. On one side it says, hey, if you had a positive experience, you're happy, go here, leave a review. And on the other side, it shows us, if you're not happy, go here. And it takes you right to their customer service place. Right. Which I thought, that's clever. And I like that this thing. I was like, so this is the world we live in where anything below a nine, or let's just say anything below five stars. Like if you're a, if you're a super host on Airbnb or whatever. Anything below five stars. Failure. Failure.

Uber ratings, all of it. Five stars. Podcast ratings, definitely. Anything less than five stars, folks.

And that's. That's crazy. And that. That is crazy.

It is a by. I've watched this happen. I remember at Mac observer when we were doing reviews, it. It. And we watched it happen to ourselves, we had a five star rating and suddenly we were like, well, why would we bother to put, you know, to. To waste an article slot? Like, we had a fixed number of articles that we could write as, as a staff. Like, all those things. Why would we waste an article slot on something that's not a 5? It was like, oh, that's interesting. So now, now, like, and it. And I joked in that time, and I joked about it today too, that, you know, the, the value of each number on the scale is not equal. Right. Which is what you're saying. Like, we've gone from a linear scale where it gets from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 to 5, to it's logarithmic. Right. Where it's, it's exponential. So, you know, it's 1, 2, 3, and then suddenly.

Yes.

Sharpens up and goes 4 and 5. And no one cares about anything that's 1, 2, or 3. And I get it because we're all reviewing things with this idea in mind. And, and at Mac observer, we rewrote our reviews scale to kind of get away from this.

We.

We had, we wrote our own levels of things. And so it wasn't smart. Yeah. Because we wanted to be able to review things that were amazing. But Also things that were like functional pieces of gear or software that's good, like A3. There's software that I use that I wouldn't give a five to, but I would give. But I. It is like, like text expander. Right. Great piece of software. I rely on that functionality every. So the functionality of it I would give a 5. It is installed on every computer I have and I don't want to live in a world without it. But there's things I would fix about it. So I would. I would say it's like a three and a half, you know, like, it's not great. It's a little quirky sometimes, but. But I don't want to not run it. Like, and if I tell people, if I post it on, you know, we don't have the site anymore. But if I said, oh, that's a. That's a three, people be like, oh, Dave says it's a three. Don't buy it.

Yeah, don't. Yes.

Wait, that's what I.

Yes. I use. I use Grammarly. I love it. I like you. I don't know that I would want to ever live without it. It's freed me from worrying about issues and writing, but there's things about it that drive me nuts. I would not give it a five star or a ten. Or whatever. Right.

Or whatever.

Right.

It's not going to get the top mark.

Yeah. This is pros and cons. That makes the review better. Because if as a somebody who's looking at it, you're like, oh, okay, it's not perfect. It's got these things which they love, and these things are little things that you can be prepared to feel, oh, okay, it's going to have this thing quirks.

But it works anyway.

Yes. Because I couldn't.

Nothing very, very few things should rate a five.

Yes. Correct.

And in fact, when we, when we were doing the five. I haven't thought about this in a long time. When we were doing the five star system at tmo, if you wanted to rate something a five, you needed a. You needed to convince a majority of the staff to agree with you. Oh, that's the only way we would give a five. Right.

Perfection. Perfection.

Thing is, if you, if you're doing a hundred reviews of the year over the course of a year and 50% of them are fives, what worth is that scale? And I'll tell you what the scale is worth. It's worth zero.

Yeah, that's it. It's like grade inflation. If you have kids and you're like, oh, I want to go to that school because everybody, every kid gets A's. Well, there's a reason why every kid gets A's is because they're, they're in business, basically, and they want to attract more students. Yeah. You know, we. And so it's the same thing. It's like, well, if every review has to be perfect, what happens is people are like, well, I'm just not going to leave a review.

Right, right, right.

And then you don't, you don't get that good feedback. And it's, you know, like, I think Amazon has done a good job. At least you, like, you look at it and it's like, oh, three and a half stars. What is it? Or four stars. Okay, that's interesting. So at least you still drill down and look at it now. But if you're a small business owner selling somewhere or in service somewhere, you know, if you're getting started and you get a three or even a four star review, it's problematic. Yeah, right.

Yeah, that's the problem. Yeah, I know.

So I'd love to know, you know, how do you do it with your business? You're getting Google reviews. Are you asking for five stars? How do you do it? How do you figure it out? I mean, I want the review, obviously, I want the five stars, you know, but how do you, how do you work it back at BusinessBrain show? I'd love to hear.

And how do we fix that? This, can we fix this? Like, there is a problem here.

I agree.

You know, Yep. Maybe we have 5.1, 5.2, 5.3. And then we just get, then we get rid of the five point and we just.

Six, six stars. Clearly that's the answer.

Add another star feedback at BusinessBrain Show. Come up with a better idea than us. Or maybe it just needs to be an additional idea. We'll talk about that Friday. Have a good week. Until then, we'll see you keep living that charmed life.