Building a Facebook Small Business Group – Small Business Show episode 87

The Small business show episode 87 for Wednesday, October 5, 2016. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Small Business show here at Business Show Co, the show by, for and about small business owners here in Durham, New Hampshire.

I'm Dave Hamilton and in Lafayette, California, I am Shannon Jean. How are you, Dave?

I am good. A little bit crazy this week. I got a lot going on, but, But I like that. Whether I, Whether. Whether I say that I like it or not, I, I do like it. It's good. It's good for me. It feels a little crazy when it happens, but it's better than sitting around doing nothing.

Yeah, that, that's the thing I usually do when, you know, all of a sudden you're going to say, well, what else would I have been doing? You know, so that's. It's.

I saw it was. And I forget who to attribute the quote to, but it. And I won't get it right. But you can't make time, so the people that waste it are the ones that are missing out.

Yeah. And you know, what I find or what I have found over the years is if you want to get something done, you really do need to look for the busiest person because those folks are really used to managing multiple projects and, you know, they tend to have a wider bandwidth than someone who, oh, this guy or whoever, whoever has tons of time on their hands. They ought to be able to help. Oftentimes, you will not get the result you were looking for.

No, there's a reason they have time on their hands. They're okay. Well, it's often because they're okay with it. They're comfortable with that. Whereas, like me, I get, I get weird when I don't.

I'm not. Yeah, yeah.

It's not.

I don't want to be comfortable. I mean, you know, don't get me wrong, but not every day. To me, it's. It's comfortable comfort and then it's complacence, and then I have this big. Oh, that leads to failure.

Yeah, it leads to living in a box, man.

Yeah. Yeah. And so always look for the busy. And maybe it's, you know, from a business perspective, maybe, you know, you could say the same about employees or people that you're gonna try to assign tasks to or, you know, things like that, you know, you know, who can handle it and who can juggle it the best. And some people just can't do it.

Just can't do it. Yeah. Single task people. And.

Yeah. And that's fine. But you just. As a manager or, you know, business owner with limited resources. I think you need to be able to identify who that person is quickly and, you know, so.

All right, so I'm going to. I'm going to. We have an agenda, but I'm going to. Yes, we do, because this conversation is leading us directly to one thing that's actually all the way at the bottom of the agenda. We started a new Facebook group. Actually, we started it months ago. That's right. And we did a stupid thing with that. It wasn't intentional, and so therefore, it was still stupid. It just wasn't intentionally stupid. We built it and then just waited for something to happen in this Facebook group. And you might not be surprised to hear that nothing happened.

That's right.

Yeah. So recently. And when I say recently, I mean in the last, like, six days, we decided, let's do a little bit more with this. And so we invited as many. I invited any friend that I have that is a small business owner or at least has been or might be interested in it. I didn't invite everybody.

And so I did the same thing after you prompted me, which is great. Which is good.

And. And so we did that. And instantly it was like, oh, guess what? You invite people to do something and they'll do it. But. But it's not that simple, because what's involved in inviting people is taking a risk. Right. Right. I am exposing this part of myself to you and saying, I think you might like this. And what you might get is, screw you, man. I didn't want to be invited to your stupid Facebook group.

Yeah.

You know, well, we all get those.

Kind of invitations like this. Like, my new business on multilevel marketing, we get those a lot. And I often like, oh, I'm just not interested in this Kohobi juice or whatever it is. But, you know, if it is something that you're interested in, then, you know, now I'm. I always try to like it. It's, like, great, even if I hide it.

Yeah, right. But. But. So, I mean, there was a little bit of risk, which was why it was easy to not do that when we created the group months ago. But again, like I said, it wasn't intentional. It was, at best, subconscious and probably just one of those busy moments, like, all right, great. I had it on my list. I had to create the group. It's done. What's next? You know, whereas now these. Any kind of community takes care and feeding. Right. And. And you have to engage. We know that we have to engage our audience. And really, we Know that we're just the gravity that brings the community together. Like that's our biggest part here. And by not acting like we were that gravity, that community just in that sense didn't happen. So now it happened. And. Yeah.

And you can, you know what, we have over 300 members now already in a week. Yeah, yeah. And Pete, like you said, the content isn't all being generated by us. You know, get some great comments and feedback and, you know, but if you want to talk about this employee article that you posted up there.

Yeah, I figured. Yeah, we. So there was one thing that I did post and it was an article that I found somewhere, who knows where. Tim Cook's five traits that he looks for when hiring an Apple employee. And I just thought it was an interesting list and especially given what we were just talking about, I thought we should just jump to this. So there are five characteristics that he says Apple looks for in new hires. And so this is in some way codified, you know, company wide. Which makes sense. Brilliance. He says we look for wicked smart. I'm going to read the list of five because I think it's important to look at these as a whole. Sure. And then we can talk about them. Which ones actually make sense? Because these aren't going to make sense for everyone's business. But it's an interesting thing to think about. What makes sense for yours. So brilliance. He says they look for smart people. But let's put that aside for a second because there's already a lot of smart people, so that sort of has to be a given. In addition to that determination. He says we look for grit and determination, the ability to stick with it and bounce back when you encounter obstacles. Obsessive curiosity. We look for people who are curious because many times you don't really know what you're going to do, but you're curious enough to start pulling the string to see where it takes you. He says a team focus. They want people that are collaborative. He says even somebody who has an S on their chest and a cape on their back cannot do everything alone. So we look for people that believe that working in a team will get better results. And number five, agitated idealism. We look for people who won't accept the status quo. People who aren't satisfied with the way things are, that really want to change the world and put all of themselves into doing it. And that of all of these five, and this is appropriate on the fifth anniversary of Steve Jobs death of all five of those. That number five is almost Steve Jobs words. Exactly Verbatim. Yeah. Which makes sense. I mean, that's where that company came from. Is that so they should have that as a core value. So I just thought this was interesting because not everybody wants all of these things. I mean, not that any of them are bad.

No, no, no.

Yeah.

You know, looking at it, I think it's a great list. And I, I would be interested to see, you know, do they. Does he use this list when he's hiring, you know, a certain level of employee? Or is this like, if you're, if you're hiring rank and file people as well, are you using this same, you know, rubric to. To do it? Because it is interesting to see where they fall in that, in the scale of. Okay, well, we need to hire, you know, we need to hire a designer for this. And this is the list. This guy's gotta have this or this woman has to have this. But if you're hiring. Okay, we just, we need a customer support rep. Customer support rep. Do we really? Does that person need to have obsessive curiosity?

Yeah. And do you want them to not accept the status quo? I mean, look, there's some value in that.

Right.

If you have a system that you believe works and you insert someone new into it, at some level, you want them to be able to say, hey, what if we tried things this way? But the problem is if you've got 500 people doing that same job.

That's right.

And you know. Right. And now you have 500 ideas.

And that's where I'm going with this. And I do think it's a great list. But I would like to ask, you know, Tim, that question is, you know, are your, you know, how many levels down? Maybe it is all the way down. And I'm totally wrong. But you know, from a small business perspective that just like earlier we were talking about, you know, single task people versus, you know, multitaskers, everything. Sometimes those single task folks can be critically important and to certain, you know, aspects of your business. And I would ask him, you know, do you push this all the way down through your rank and file hires, or is it just for a certain.

Level of, you know, I had a, I had a, I had a thought. Shannon. I always said, and part of this is tongue in cheek, but not entirely because I've, I've experienced it. I've always said I never really understood the value of middle management. Right. In a big corporation, it's like, wow, you got all these people that. What do they actually do? Right?

Yeah.

There's the people at the top that are making decisions and the people at the bottom that are doing the hard work or the, doing the grunt work, I should say. Everybody might be doing hard work, but then there's some people in the middle where it's like, wow, you just got lost in the corporate infrastructure there for like 30 years and, you know, did pretty well at it. But what did you do? And you can't always get that answer. But maybe, just maybe, those people in middle management are the buffer between the agitated idealism of the people down low and the people up high who are making the decisions. And they're not just the buffer, but the filter of that. And there could be a value there. Maybe. Now I understand middle management.

Maybe there is a value.

Right?

So yeah, if you're listening to this and you're looking at this list which we're going to link in the show notes, you know, and it's also up in the, in the Facebook group. So if you go to businessshow co Facebook, I believe that list will now, now take you right to the group. We'd love to have your comments on it. Um, do you think this list is applicable for all levels or any other comment that you have on it? Uh, it would be beneficial to all of us and we can learn more.

Cool.

That's awesome.

So, you know, go ahead. No, I think we're both going to the same place. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, another thing I really loved about the group this week is how it quickly, you know, helped out one of its members who wanted, you know, their website and their app, you know, reviewed by fellow small business owners. And you know, Rob Lewis posted, you know, a quick hey, here's the link to my site. And it was@facilitatorapp.com which will also link in. That way you can just jump up in the group and see it. And he asked for feedback on if we understood what it was and what it did. And you know, quickly got some, I thought, great comments. Not just because I, one of them was from me, but, you know, other folks that did they understand what it did and, and how it worked. And I, you know, went back to Rob and said, hey, I'm not in, you know, not in your field, so make sure you take that into consideration when, you know, looking at my comments. But I did not quickly understand what it did and I suggested maybe some kind of explainer video which is, gave him a link to Fiverr, which are really inexpensive to have a 30 second video put together that kind of breaks down exactly what you're trying to do and made that suggestion. Then we had some other guys jump in. Julie, who's a web designer, made some comments and Adam, who's a business consultant I believe, also came in. So I thought it was really helpful and really got me energized in the group and hopefully helped rob out a bit as well.

Yeah, it was great to see. And I've experienced this in our Matt Geek Gab Facebook group, which we've had going for a couple of years now, where it gets to the. I mean, this wasn't. We're not quite at this point here, but it gets to the point where I could like not post anything, comments or anything, and this exact thing happens. But it's where the members of the group all are able to help each other. And that's one of the things. That's why I wanted to create this Facebook group. Because on the Facebook page we have, you're able to just. It's one way communication, really. That's right. From us to you. You can communicate with us, but you can't communicate with everyone else. And that's the benefit of the group is it's this hive mind. Again, we're just the gravity. We can bring everybody together, but there's more to it than us. And frankly, there's people that are better equipped to answer your questions sometimes.

Of course. Of course, yeah, absolutely. Most of the time.

Most. Right, yeah.

Which is fine with me.

But yeah, it was great to see. See Julie and Adam especially jumping in. I mean, Adam gave some really concise feedback. Like holy cow.

I thought that was great.

In another venue, you'd have paid good money for this. Sure. But we're all just helping each other out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a great resource. And another thing I really enjoyed up there was we kind of had some political discourse and communication, which I thought was awesome.

Well, I tried not to make it political, but that's impossible in this day and age. And I knew that. Yeah, My post was sort of related to our show last week, but over the weekend the New York Times was published. We're not gonna talk about how they got it, but they published what is a state tax return from one of our presidential candidates here. And it talked about how it was Donald Trump. Right. And how he had a loss. Right. A huge, almost billion dollar loss back in what, 95, I think.

Right.

And that he could have. They don't know. In fact, they were a little sensationalist about the headline.

I would agree.

It was very clickbaity. And I say that not with any political leanings more that's coming from me, the web publisher. It was awful what they did with the headline. But anyway they, they said it's possible that for the next 15 to 18 years. I think they stretched it to 18, but realistically it probably would have been 15. He could have used that to offset any gains or any income and not paid any income taxes. So of course that was the headline is he didn't pay income tax or may not have paid income taxes, but whatever. But it brought up the question of our tax code and legality versus morality. And it was really, the discussion still goes on, but it's, you know, would he, okay, so he incurred this loss, right? To me that's like stuff happens man, you know, you're going to lose money sometimes and is it not smart to write that down and take advantage of a carry forward loss? If that's legally allowed.

Right.

You know, to me the tax code is one of those things where it's like not my rules, man, I didn't write them. I'm just finding my path through them as best I can.

Of course. And it's not even that your fault. Your accountant, right, who's you know, educated and certified to work within the tax code is telling you oh this is what you need to do. And so we had some great comments up there, you know, whether you know, versus morally and legally and, and but it was all done in a great environment. You know, when I made a comment I was like, man, this is such a great discussion here. Some really thoughtful, constructive comments. And despite whether you agree or disagree and, and the thing that, that about that I think when people, at least business owners, when they hear maybe folks that don't understand how some of you.

Know, business taxes work, that's the thing, right?

If they cringe, going well wait, you know, I invested a bunch of money and so you know, and I use these if I don't make any money and it lowers my taxable income. Well, and if I didn't make enough income to use that loss in a given year, yes, you can, you can carry it forward. And I've, in most cases you gotta.

Check with your account.

Most cases, of course, of course in most cases. And every, every situation is different. But I've spent, you know, the last week or so kind of educating non business people about how it works because I would, I said, oh well we've done the same thing. And they kind of looked at us shocked. And I said, well certainly not at that level, you know, and, and I added oh, you know, the New York Times uses the same method, too. So does every business. Because that's the law.

It's how it works.

Yeah, it's how it works. It was great to have, you know, fellow business owners or people associated with small business have this educated discussion in the comments of the, you know, the post that you made up in the group. I thought it was fantastic. Just a great, great way to use it.

Yeah, it warmed my heart to see how, how thoughtful all the comments were. And it did switch. I mean, there were a couple people that brought the morality question of it into it. And it's like, you know, personally, I think trying to relate morality to the tax code is. It just doesn't work. I mean, there's nothing morally sound about the tax code.

I would agree.

Right. It's a freaking mess is what it is.

I would agree with that as well, you know, so.

But, but that's just me and that my experience betrays me there or I betray my experience when I say that I've had to deal with the tax code, good and bad, in a very intimate way for a long time. And as anybody that's a business owner, which is most of you that are listening know that's just how it goes. You have to find like many times your profit margin exists in finding the right path through the tax code.

Sure, that's right. And there's all kinds of laws like that. From a personal standpoint, you know, if you buy a house and you pay $200,000 and, you know, five years later you sell it and it sells for 400,000, well, you know, there's a tax law that says, well, you've owned that for more than two years, so you don't owe any tax on that, on that increase. But if you sell it in 18 months, they're considering you an investor and you're selling to gain, so you're going to pay capital gains. So from a. And that's how I phrased it when I was talking to some of these individuals, because I think they got that.

It'S a great way to look at it. Yeah, yeah.

And I said, we all take advantage of that, you know, and you'd be.

A fool not to.

You'd be a fool not. You know, and so where there was some folks in the group making some of those morality statements, there were. I thought the comments and the replies to them were just really well done and kept in a. In a, just a great way, in a considerate way, but which made them even more powerful. And it was great. And I saw people liking the comments, and you could just see it. And. And I. What. What struck me was that these are people that know how to communicate and are not trying to stick a flag in the ground about who or what or this or that, but are trying to, you know, have a good discourse. And, you know, I. I really respect that, and I want to commend everybody for, you know, weaving away through what could have been a muddy, you know, sticky situation. And really, you know. Yeah, amping up. Amping up my energy for the group.

Even when. When it started to get a little heated, like, people took the wind out of those sails.

Yeah.

Very effectively. Yeah.

But then you see the guy who.

Who.

They took the wind out, he would like the comment like, oh, I see that. And I was like, that's cool, man. You know, because so many other. I mean, I don't know about you, but in my personal Facebook feed, you know, I just don't want to hear about your, you know, folks who you support and your politics and this and that. It's just not interesting to me because it doesn't impact what I believe. And so, you know, I've had to hide a number of people during the. This, you know, the political theater that we've gone through this last year, and I can't wait to unhide them, because I want to hear about their kids and what's going on and their vacations and all the kind of things that are interesting to me.

So thanks for keeping the group. Keeping the group, like, not just civil, just engaged. It's good.

Engaged. Yeah. And we're going to be posting lots more content, and we'll put the links to the show up there and really appreciate having you part of the community.

Yeah. All right, do we want to wrap up here? Do we want to leave this as an episode focused on the group, or do we want to.

What are we on time, Dave?

We're at about 21 and a half minutes, which I think is.

Yeah, that's probably pretty good. Let's take a couple of minutes and talk. Since we're on the Facebook thing, I'll post a link to this up in the group, but I'd love to hear what people think about this new Facebook Marketplace announcement that came out this week. And this is going to replace the center on your mobile device. There's the center button at the bottom of your Facebook app that takes you to Messenger. And over this next week, they're going to be updating the app. And the center device, or center button, is Going to have what kind of looks like the small business show logo a little bit. So, you know, that's kind of nice. Yeah, sure. I see a picture of here. So you're going to be able to go and, you know, kind of a quasi Craigslist type thing. And I guess they're pitching it as selling locally, but I'm sure that will expand. And I for one think it's a really interesting concept that I would love to get everyone's feedback to see how it might impact their business. And even though they're showing in these examples, you know, kind of Craigslist, oh, I'm selling one of this, or, you know, my personal stuff, you know, you know, you know, businesses are going to jump on this quickly. I for one, I will do that not only for, like tech Restore, but our rebound trading business, our social selling business that we started, you know, earlier this year. And so I'm going to post some links to it. We don't need to go into it too much today, but it's just going to be. They're going to expand it out and they're not handling any sort of payment transactions yet. But, you know, that's, you know, they haven't tied it to the payments you can accept in messenger.

Right.

But I'm sure that's going to be coming down the line as well.

Of course. Yeah.

Taking, taking a little piece and it's free right now. But I think Craigslist and ebay will be looking at this very closely to see how, how it works. And it's going to be interesting. I'm excited about it.

Yeah. I'm curious about it. To see where the money's made. I mean, Facebook. It's so funny. When the Internet started being available to the general populace, it was all about dial up. Right. And all you had was you dialed up and then you kind of had to figure it out on your own. Sure. And then AOL took over all of the cd. Well, first all the floppy manufacturing. But when they shifted from floppies to CDs, you know, for I think it was like six weeks, they owned all of the CD duplication that was happening worldwide.

It's incredible.

Yeah. But then AOL became the homepage of the Internet for people.

Right.

It was in most people's minds. And there's nothing wrong with this. It makes sense. The Internet and AOL were ubiquitous. Right. It was one in the same. And. And then, of course, everybody started to hate that. For some reason, they lost favor. But not until they had enough money to buy Time Warner. Yeah, yeah. Which was just really backwards disaster.

But anyway.

Yeah, but, you know, it was like, to watch that happen. And I actually made a ton of money on the AOL stock because, you know, I, I, it was easy back then to make money on tech stocks because I knew stuff. I felt like it was insider trading, but it wasn't. It was just no one was paying attention. Like, oh, well, if I put my money here, it's bound to grow. Like, oh, yeah, sure enough.

Oh, yeah, that's great.

But. And then Google started, like Google had. And for a lot of people, I guess Google is the homepage of the Internet.

Yeah. Start page. But you know, the start page, but it doesn't.

Like their. Google's whole goal is to get you to leave. Right. You search and leave and go somewhere else.

Yeah.

And other than Gmail and things like that. But Facebook, man, that's becoming the homepage of the Internet. You don't have to leave Facebook. Right. You get your news there, you get, I don't want to call it email, but you get your communications there. You see what your family's up to. Like, you have your blog there. There's no reason, arguably no reason to have a personal blog anymore. You just post to Facebook. I'm not saying that's definite, but there's an argument.

It's happening. Yeah, it's happening.

Right. It's happening now. Marketplace. So you don't need to go to Craigslist. It's very, very interesting, what it is. You know, we've got AOL all over again, is what it is.

Yeah, it's very similar. Yeah. In maybe one form or another. I mean, I know there's still a large, maybe millions that still are using dial up and connecting through aol. It's gotta be. I mean, it's just gotta.

You're right. It's insane to think about that.

It is. So, yeah, so we'll dip into this.

They're not listening to this show.

No, no, no, no.

They don't have the bandwidth to download it. That's right.

That's right. Yeah. So we'll dip into this, this top and see how folks are using it or if they're using it. And I'm going to jump in and use it and experiment around with it and we'll see where it goes. And in the meantime, we'll see you in the group.

We'll see you in the group. Yeah. I'm looking forward to it. It's fun. It's actually a lot of fun being able to just see what happens out there.

Yeah.

And we'll do our part to keep it interesting. And you folks do it too.

Yeah, Absolutely. Quickest way to get there, just go to BusinessShow Co Facebook. It'll redirect you right to. To the group.

See you there and then we'll see you here next week.

Take care, everybody.

Keep working on living that charmed life.