Adjusting Your Sleep Schedule, Recognizing Your Expertise and Planned Obsolescence – Small Business Show 82

The Small business show at businessshow.co episode number 82 for Wednesday, August 31st. 31st. Something like that. 2016. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Small Business Show. The show by, for and about small business owners here today in, well, New York, New York. I'm Dave Hamilton.

And I'm Shannon Jean. I'm in Concord, California today. Both of us are away from our usual recording spots.

That's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's good. You're in New York on business and I'm at my office because I couldn't get out of here today, so.

Your office on business?

Yeah, that's it. Can you imagine that? Yeah, that's great. It happens.

That's right.

It does. It does happen. So trip has gone well so far.

Yeah, it's been kind of a whirlwind. I was actually out your way this past weekend playing a couple of gigs with Paul Kent, who is the. He was. He was the general manager of Macworld Expo. But he's got a great band out there in the Bay Area called the House Rockers. And so I was playing with them. What about, I think, 15 minutes from you over there in Pleasanton at the Alameda County Fairgrounds. So.

Yeah, that's right. Right down the street. Of course, that same weekend, I was in New York City, in New York dropping daughter off and getting her settled in the dorms there for. For college. So it's been a. It's been a busy few days for both of us.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's cool. That's cool. Hey, so we've got a free show. We have an interview next week. And so I thought we would jump in and answer a question from one of our listeners regarding our show last week.

Sure.

And then. And then go on to a couple other items that I've been itching to talk about.

I'm in.

Yeah, that's cool. Let me jump over to these questions here and I'll go read. Elias. Yeah, you read.

Yeah, yeah, do it.

Do it.

All right. So, Elias, he said, I enjoyed your show last week about health and keeping your energy level up. My problem is with sleep. I can't shut my brain down to sleep when I want to. And I often wake up in the middle of the night, start thinking about business, and can't get back to sleep. My question is, have either of you had this problem? Any tips for managing it? Yeah, well, I think. I don't know that I call it a problem, but I have experienced this and continue to experience this. Yeah. And I think you do too, Shannon.

Yeah, yeah, I do. And I like your point of whether it's not a problem because sometimes it can be an opportunity. And maybe, you know, Elias, we talked on the show and I have some ideas on how you can kind of clear your head and everything. But I also want to recognize maybe you don't need to clear your head. Maybe you need to shift your sleep schedule like we talked about, to, you know, maybe your brain or your body's telling you that, hey, you know, this next hour could be really productive. Don't go to sleep and maybe try to work something out where you can. Of course, if you have to go in real early or get to the office or to a client's place, that may be not possible. But I would suggest it's definitely worth looking at your sleep schedule. And if you're constantly having this thing where, hey, I'm going to bed at 11:00 or 11:30 and I'm, I'm just jacked up and my brain is kicking, those are really good times to sit down and try to get some work done.

Really good times. Yeah. And, and if, yeah, if your brain is, is moving, because I'll have that problem where I wake up at like 4 in the morning sometimes. And you know, this is after going to sleep at like one. So.

Right.

You know, not a lot of sleep has happened and certainly not what I would consider enough for an average night. But. But yeah, you know, if I wake up and I give myself 30 minutes, I will roll around in bed and try and get back to sleep or whatever. And if after 30 minutes I have not, I get up, there's no point in being stressed and frustrated about not sleeping when I'm clearly, maybe stressed isn't the right word, but certainly actively thinking about something else and I might as well just go deal with that something else. And like you said, that can be super productive time because you've probably been dreaming about whatever this thing is, so you've got some moment and you just go and deal with it. And I think, I mean, maybe this doesn't sound all that glamorous, or maybe it does, but as a small business owner, you have to accept that there will be times when you don't get the exact amount of sleep that you would prefer all at one stretch. You're gonna have to survive some days on short sleep. And I think that's just part of the deal.

I agree.

So go with the momentum on it is what I really think. Now, if this is, like you said, if this is happening on a daily basis, then yes, you know, maybe you need to stop and just think about why is it that you're waking up at this time and maybe you need to alter your sleep schedule or just, you know, be very thoughtful about, you know, what's, what's happening that's triggering me to wake up at 4:00am That, I mean, that, you know, if that's happening every day. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I agree. You know, first I would try to look at it as, am I missing an opportunity here by just trying to shut down at the wrong time. But if, if it is every night, I mean, you do have to sleep. And you know, for me, you know, reading is my release. And, you know, when I go to bed or, you know, go to tune out, you know, getting, getting a book in front of me is critical. And I will just read until my eyes absolutely are done, you know, and fall asleep. And it usually allows me to disconnect. And I'm talking about fiction. I don't read a business book before I go to bed because then I get even more jacked up.

Yeah.

Going, I could do that, you know, and. But I would say more times than not, when I'm feeling that way, there's a reason. And it's your mind or your body telling you, hey, get up and you know, take some notes, write down a few things. You know, getting it out of your head, I think is the most important or one of the best ways to get past this kind of thing and, and eliminate it and to where you're not. You don't have to worry about it. You've. You've put it down somewhere. And for me, I, you know, I use my phone and the Notes app and just, just dictate something to it and throw a few things out there that are, that are kind of niggling away at your ability to fall asleep and that, and that might help, but it's kind of like, you know, you know, Ryan Holiday wrote this book called the Obstacle is the Way. Well, I look at it as, that's, that's telling you something. It's pushing you in a certain direction, and I would really encourage you to exploit that. And see, before I started focusing on just solving it, it's like, am I, am I, should I just change my habit? And maybe that's an opportunity.

Yeah, no, that's. Writing something down is a great stress reliever. I am, I am someone that if I, if I'm trying to juggle all the tasks that I know that I need to do in My head, I find my stress level rises and as soon as I put them on a to do list and it can be a very, very simple to do list. Like you said, just jotting it down frees me because I know I'm not going to forget.

Yeah, that's right.

Great idea. Or that whatever it is. And it might just be, oh, yeah, I got to remember to mail that, that check tomorrow. Otherwise, yeah, whatever it is. But it could also be, holy crap, I just realized, you know, the end all. Be all of what's going to happen to the business next. You may forget that too. Right? I mean, just because it's an amazing idea doesn't mean you're going to remember it. And you will experience that enough that you will know that and you'll be stressed about, oh, crap, I got to like, I can't sleep now. Write it down. Maybe then you can go to sleep. Yeah, yeah.

For me it's, you know, in the reminders. Being able to set reminders really quickly, it just, it's a huge, huge thing being able to tell your phone, hey, remind me tomorrow at, you know, 8:00am to do X, remind me to do this. You know, remind me when I get to the office to do whatever. To me, I'm just offloading those requirements that, you know, are keeping me up or even, even during the day. And then I can focus because, you know, as a small business owner, kind of like, like your point, Dave, there's a requirement that eventually you're going to have times when you don't get enough sleep. Well, as a small business owner, you need to have a wide bandwidth of dealing with things all day long. And if you don't have some repository to kind of put things that you don't need to deal with right now, you drive yourself nuts. So, you know, I know it sounds simple, not, not glamorous like you said, but it, for me, it works great.

Yeah, it does. It's come up a couple times. So I want to, I want to dig in a little bit here. And we're both Apple ecosystem guys. We use Macs and we use iPhones. But I do want to give a special highlight to Apple's Notes app as it exists now. When it first launched on iOS, it was very, very rudimentary and almost useless. You could type things in, and that was that. I am someone who works very well with paper notes because sometimes I want to write something and sometimes I want to scribble something and I need that flexibility. And especially, and it happens in all areas of business but this gig that I had to prep for this past weekend, I had to learn a bunch of tunes. And I thought, God, I really don't want to have to do that with paper again. So I re explored Apple's notes. Apple and you know, you can put little scribbles inside the note now, so you can type words and you can have little drawings and things that you've scribbled on your iPhone. So, you know, for my gigs this weekend, those scribbles were little rhythmic figures. I can read music. And so it was very helpful to say, all right, you know, at this point in the tune, I need to play whatever this, you know, this rhythm is along with the horn section or whatever. Sure. But, you know, previously, like a year ago, Apple's Notes app was not capable of doing that. I would have had to use something else or just reverted to paper and maybe scanned it in so that I could have it on stage on an iPad. But Apple's Notes app now is very, very flexible with that kind of stuff. And of course, it syncs to all of your devices, including your Mac, as long as you're using Apple devices. Yeah, I want to give a shout out to it because it's a really handy app.

It is. And the syncing, I think, is incredible. And how quick it is moving data back and forth between your phone and, or your Mac, your laptop, vice versa. You know, if you're an Android user, you know, on a PC or Windows user, we'd love to hear what, what is the equivalent that you found to be useful? You know, send us a text to 401-472-4249 and let us know. That would, that would be cool because I use that app every single day and especially on my phone. You can dump. You can take pictures from within the, you know, the app and really store a lot of data in there for retrie evil. You can set reminders. You can do to dos. It is really a great, a great app. I agree.

Yeah, it's come. It's come a long way. The only reason I haven't moved to it for everything is because you can't share a notebook. You can sync your notebooks, as we said, but, like, you and I couldn't share a notebook inside it. And I do that with a lot of different things. But that's the only thing that keeps me on. Unlike Evernote, which is not quite as flexible in terms of the note taking, at least not for me. But, you know, yeah, yeah, we, we.

Yeah, we use Evernote as Well, I mean, it is incredible. I mean, and it's a. It's coming up with creative ways to use things. Like we use Evernote actually with photographs more than anything else. Because for tech, restore everything that comes in the door, well, we take a picture of it, the back of it, then it has a serial number on it. So, and used to be you, you know, those labels had barcode scanners and you could quickly scan them, but now they don't on the back of an iPad or a phone or whatever. So, you know, you've get four or five thousand pieces coming in the door. You know, you can quickly have a photo station set up and just roll them right through and automatically take those photos and then convert all those photos, you know, it does automatically to text. So when you want to search on those serial numbers, you've got a record of them forever. And it works fantastic. I love it looks really good.

I've heard people, especially when Evernote changed their pricing earlier this year, I've heard a lot of people are very happy with Microsoft's OneNote. But for, you know, I mean, it's. I mean, it's a Microsoft product, so obviously it runs on Windows, but it runs very, very well on. On. It runs very well on iOS, it runs well on, on Mac OS, but it looks a lot like a Windows app on Mac os. So it's a little weird.

Yeah, it is. Well, you know, it's interesting. You know, you bring up the Notes app and, you know, your expertise, especially on the Mac, the depth of it is, you know, tremendous. And I think that one of the things that I wanted to chat a little bit about today as well was, you know, all of us are experts at something and I think it's important. Just like our, you know, we always talk about this success list, and if you don't know what that is, go up on the website at BusinessShow Co and you'll see a page up there. We talk about what, what your success list is and what you should put on it. Similar to that, you know, I would suggest that you sit down and write out what your expertise really is, what are you really good at? And, and what is your knowledge? You know, what depth of it and, and really be. I would say be critical. You know, what do you. What are you good at? Because, because of course, where I'm headed here is the flip side is, you know, what are you just lousy at? And, you know, I'm lousy at a ton of stuff. But one of the things I have developed over the years is identifying what I'm not good at and trying to either find people or tools to jump in. And it's like just talking about this reminders app or the notes app, you know, that. That fills a hole in, you know, I'm not very good. Like, I'm not good at paper at all. And used to frustrate the heck of me, I would make all these great lists, and then I just, you know, I wouldn't. Couldn't deal with it as well. But now that I could have it in my pocket on my. On my phone or on my computer all the time, it's fantastic. And you know, that expertise, the list of what your expertise is, well, can help guide you along with your business. It's like, okay, well, I'm really good. Let's say you're in the, I don't know, the auto detail business and you're really good at whatever. Why did you get in it? Because you like cars. I know all about this. I'm an expert at this. I know the history, I know the stats, whatever it is. I don't know anything about that business. But, you know, that's the point. Right, but that's the point. Yeah. It's a guy that knows tons about cars. You know, my son, who's 14, is a crazy sports fan and knows a thousand times more than I do about any sport you'd want to talk about. The kid has got it in his head. So, you know, I tell him, hey, you know, it's kind of interesting that you're. You have. You're so adept at this. You might want to consider, you know, careers in something related to sports. You know, not necessarily being a, you know, professional athlete, but even just involved in sports marketing or gaming or whatever it is. But.

Or maybe he'll take after his dad and become a sports announcer now that you're a famous podcast.

That's right. That's right. Well, we're headed. That's where we're headed. That's right. Yeah. But that expertise is critical to identify. And it probably goes back to, you know, I constantly have this thing, you know, I think small business owners are. I always refer to them as unsung heroes, you know, because they're often vilified and not often celebrated and so true. And I really have a problem with it, of course, because I am one. But when I read all this stuff about, you know, the people, poor employees being taken advantage of and this and that, and the evil business owner, well, you know, I know it from the flip side. Of not being able to take a paycheck because you got to pay all your employees. There's. There's two sides to every story. And just like anything else in life, when you make broad generalizations, you really do a disservice to whoever you're generalizing about.

Yeah. And there are certainly are some business owners that are going to be evil. I mean, that's just how it. That's how the world works.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So I'm going to, you know, post an article up on the site in the coming days here about that expert expertise list and just kind of expand on what I'm talking about. And if you get a chance, go up and take a look at it, give us some feedback. And I think it could help you out in identifying, you know, your strengths, your weaknesses, and then maybe even delegating those weaknesses to either a person or a tool of some sort, whether it's software, hardware, whatever it is.

So now I'm curious, have you ever made an expertise list for one of your employees, whether you've shown it to them or not? You know, something where you just, like you do to yourself, you take inventory of what am I good at, what am I not good at? That person, what is he or she good at? What are. What are they not good at? Or do you have them make that list about themselves?

Yeah, and I, I think that that's a good question. Probably the closest I would say would be during the review process. And, and I've done it different ways the years, trying to come up with a way to, you know, give someone an honest review of things. And I've had them fill them out themselves, then give them to me. Right now. We basically, I use the same form we've developed over the years, and I give the employee a copy and I say, hey, here's what we're going to chat about it to review. I'd like you to fill out and answer these questions, and I'm going to do the same thing. And then we'll just compare them to be think if we're on the same page. So in that doing those reviews, I often. Somebody else coined this word, but. But it's. It's like the compliment sandwich, right? Yeah. In the beginning of the review, we talk about what you're just kicking ass at. This is what you're doing. It's great, man. You know, I'm really happy with this. You're doing this. Well, which, which is in essence, a list of their. What they're experts at. Right. And what they do very well. And then in the middle, we talk about, here's where your weaknesses are. You know, this is where I think you need to improve or. And now that you bring it up, which is probably a better way to think about it, some of the things are, maybe you don't need to improve here, but we need to discuss dealing with them another way. So you don't have the, you know, the Peter principle, right, where you're just promoting up until they're just terrible at their job. Right, right. And then. And then at the end of the review, you're kind of revisiting what they're good at to try to get everybody feeling good about things and looking at opportunities. But that would be the closest, I would say, I've come to doing that. And it is quite helpful. And we separate. One of the things we do on review. We should do a show on reviews or performance analysis, whatever you want to call it for your employees. But we've. A long time ago, we separated out salary reviews from performance reviews. So we split them up and we do the salary. Salary review at, you know, usually like in the spring, but then we do performance reviews towards the end of the year. And to. And we meet. You have to meet more often than that. Either you can't. You can't wait a year and then hit somebody with a surprise where they say, what, I didn't know this. You know, so you have to chat. And it can be formal or informal. I'm a very informal, you know, boss, and I. And I like to just call somebody aside and, you know, that kind of stuff versus sitting down and having a real formal meeting. But. But it's a good point. We should. We should chat about reviews and good ways and bad ways and. And things. I think that's a good. That'd be a good topic for a future.

I have. I have some things for both of those lists.

I can imagine. That's great. That's good. Yeah. And so another thing I thought we would touch on today, unless you have any more chat about your expertise. I know it's. No, no. Deep.

Well, yeah, I mean, we could go deep.

No, one of the things I'm seeing with one of my businesses is there are some areas that have generated revenue for a very, very long time that have been really good, solid earners for us that I've starting to feel there's, you know, my spider sense is telling me those revenue streams are going away. I'm not sure how soon they are going away, but I know they are Going to disappear. And so I wanted to bring up this idea of, you know, planned obsolescence, you know, identifying which parts of your business are going to eventually stop generating revenue, and then at the same time, during that exercise, start identifying, you know, what you have planned to take the place of that. That business that is going to disappear. Because everything changes, you know, and you want to be in the driver's seat with that change. You don't want to be surprised by it where all of a sudden you say, wow, we were making 10 grand a month or whatever. The number is 100 grand a month in this area, and now it's gone in six months. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In six months it's down to 50%. And then, you know, or whatever. And that's very common. You know, it's.

It's. I don't think it's. Well, I was going to say it's. It's not guaranteed, but it's guaranteed. It's not guaranteed for everything, but it's guaranteed for at least something that your business does.

Yeah. I would argue that it, you know, if you look at your business, okay, when the. Back in the heyday, maybe it was. I don't know. I don't know anything about advertising, but maybe it was banner ads.

Okay. Oh, yeah.

And that. Yeah. And that was it. And it was great. And everybody was doing it. And the people that are still here talking on this show, you know, and around, still in business, recognized the trend of eventually those things being driven to the bottom and the revenue disappearing from banner ads and shifting their resources. Resources to other areas, maybe podcasts or text, whatever it is.

Yeah, exactly.

And. And looking at it that way, and I think that a good analysis of your. You know, we've talked in the past about doing an executive summary of your business, how things went the year before, what's going on. You know, I do. I do it every year and give it to whoever I can force to read it.

Yeah, whoever.

Yeah, yeah, whoever. Look at it. But, but thinking about it now, and I don't include this in it, but I'm going to add a section of it. It's like, okay. And probably the reason I don't include it because it's not very fun to think about. Oh, I've got this quite possibly large area of my business that's paying all these employees and covering all these costs that it eventually is going to be gone. And it's easy to not think about it.

It's the easiest thing not to think about.

Yeah. And so, yeah, especially if you're an.

Optimist, which you probably are at level as a business owner. Right. I mean you have to be. It rarely does somebody start a business because it's like, well, the world's falling apart, might as well start a bit. Nobody says that. Right. You start a business because you believe it can be successful and then that can hurt you if you're too optimistic.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. Well, I always say, you know, on this show I'm the one that learns the most. So this is kind of self medicating for me. Every show I sit there and go, oh, I really need to do this. And I do that and you know, and I make my notes and I'm.

Talking about the fact that we drink while we record. That's sort of self medication. This is just me. That's right. Yeah.

That'll also help you get to sleep too, if we revisit that one.

Doesn't help you get good sleep though.

No, not at all. But yeah. So think about, you know, and I would challenge, you know, everyone listening is to think about your business, however big or however small. And look at, okay, next year, is there anything that we do now that we're not going to do? How about the year after or whatever it is. And you know, I can tell you with, you know, some of our, my companies right now, we do, you know, 85% of the revenue that comes in we were not doing two years ago in different channels. And you have to really hang on, but you got to try to look ahead a little bit and it could be very helpful for you.

So I'm curious, how aggressively do you plan for this obsolescence? Like do you try to get ahead of the curve and say, you know what, my spidey sense says that this thing is not going to be making us money in two years, so let's kill it. Now do you, have you ever done that? Or do you let it start to slide and then let it go?

So the way we've done it is we, we just start to allocate less resources for it.

Okay. So you let it slowly.

Yeah. Because you might as well milk out the revenue as long as you can. So you know, if you already have.

The infrastructure in place.

Yeah, ye, yeah. And I can tell you, you know, I have, we have different verticals that, that, that we work in now. I'm sounding way too corporate using that word, but different channels anyway.

You use buzzwords like that.

Yeah, I know. In the vertical anyway, so. But this, you know, different channels that we operate in that used to generate, you know, 10 grand a week, that maybe now they generate a thousand bucks a week, but it's still a thousand bucks, you know, it's still $52,000 margin in it. But we don't advertise for it anymore.

Right.

We don't hire for it, we don't spend anything on it. And at some point, what's kind of funny is that you can often reach an equilibrium. So if you have this business just generating 10 grand a week, but maybe you're spending X on advertising or allocating whatever resources to get that 10 grand, as you start to cut back, there is a sweet spot that often can last quite a while. And if you're aware of it, it's pretty cool because maybe as you start pulling back those resources, maybe you only do seven or eight thousand a week or maybe six, whatever the number is. But if your resources have dropped enough, it could be far more profitable for you to capture that 6 or 7,000 than it cost you to capture that 10.

Yeah.

You know, and you want to ride that as long as you can and really think about it and even. See, Mike, our case, it's not even that something went obsolete is that it got so competitive. Every other, you know, because of course every, everybody else is an idiot. So everybody, every other, you know, guy or whoever company decided to get into this market that we had to ourselves for a while.

And that's usually how it goes.

Yeah, of course. So like everybody looks at and goes, oh, let's take the low hanging fruit. Well, once that is gone, you know, you have to really start thinking about it. And it's tough because, you know, you always, I want to be number one or I want to be this, but if you chase that, you can, I mean, you can bankrupt yourself. And so identifying, you know, what areas of your business are going away because there are, I guarantee it. And then thinking about, okay, we need to start talking about what else we could do using maybe using the same resources or maybe bringing in other resources that to new, to new areas of business that you need to be chasing. I think it's really, really important for all of us.

Yeah. Now it makes sense. Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah, Good stuff.

That's good. That's good. Hey, so I know we're running, getting a little towards the end here, but I wanted to mention a couple things. You know, we, we talk about one thing, we talk about perseverance here all the time and you know, powering through adversity and this kind of thing. Well, next week we're having a guest on the show, Paul Downs, and he is small business blogger for the New York Times, and he wrote an awesome book. I talked about it last week. It's called Boss Life. And I have a lot to say on the show next week, but you definitely want to listen in and listen and hear Paul's story. He's a great guy that has just powered through massive amounts of adversity and still kept a sense of humor and still kept his business after all these years. And I think it'd be. It's going to be a great show. I'm really looking forward to it.

It. That's awesome. I think it's great. Yeah, man. That's a. That's. He's going to be a fun guest.

Yeah, I think so.

I think it's good. All right. What else do we have to say?

Have a great trip home.

Thanks, man. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, it'll be nice to get home. I've been kind of bouncing all over the place, so. Yeah, good stuff. Visit us on facebook@facebook.combusinessshow.co and send us a message. Say hello.

Awesome.

Thanks for listening, folks. We'll see you next week.

Take care, everybody.