Business advice from Brian Friss of Digistor on the Small Business Show

Greetings, folks, and welcome to the small business podcast@businessshow.co today is October 7, 2015. Episode number 35 here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton.

And I'm Shannon Jean, coming to you from Lafayette, California. How are you, Dave?

I am well, Shannon. How are you today, my friend?

I'm doing very well. And today we are joined by Mr. Brian Frist from Digistore. How are you doing, Brian?

I'm doing great. Thanks, guys.

That's good. You know, we've had a really great run of. Of interviewees and some. Some great feedback, and we just wanted to continue to roll with it. Brian and I have known each other for years. A long time, right, Brian?

Long time. Probably 12 or 13 years.

Yeah. Yeah. We done some business together and then remained friends and kept in contact. And so we thought we'd have Brian on the show today and talk about his business and his experience. So thanks for joining us, Brian.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Yeah, you bet. So, hey, so let's start out. Let's talk a little bit about Digistore, your background, whatever you'd like to share and let our listeners know what you guys do.

Sure. So Digistore was founded back in 2001. I sort of always considered myself an entrepreneur. I guess I had had, you know, looking back since childhood, you know, the paper routes, the curb painting business, the, you know, through college, I owned a chain of hot dog car, and I sold that when I was awesome. Yeah, it was great. It was a great business. And I sold that when I was just getting out of school, about 22, 23 years old, and just went to work in the workforce from there. And I was doing technology consulting for Oracle and Sun Microsystems back in the time and working with a few different integrators and having a great time. And towards the end of the day, you know, probably 2000, 99, 2000, I just started bumping heads with, you know, the guys were in the business and felt like it was time to do something on my own. And so I literally just quit my job the day we got married. My wife and I were married in 2001 and we're on our honeymoon and said, you know what, let's just do something on our own. And we quit. And I quit and, you know, rented some office space with my brother, my business partner, and wrote a series of business plans that I quickly realized didn't make a whole lot of sense. Put a lot less stock in business plans now. But we started DigiStore back in 2001 and that eventually became a distributor for Panasonic in the optical drive space. And that's really what got us started. And that's how I started doing business with you, Shannon, kind of upgrading your, your Mac systems back in the day with Paul.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah. And that's kind of how we got started. And it's really evolved from there to, you know, a much different company. But that was, that's really how we got started.

That's awesome.

Just took a leap of faith, really.

Yeah. That's great. I love that. I got married and then we quit. You know, I quit my job and.

You did. Yeah. I mean, life's too short, right? And I guess one of the things.

That'S the entrepreneur mindset right there. You can't not do it. Right. And that's what we always tell people. If you believe that you could hold down a 40 hour week job and all of that, then being in business for yourself is actually not for you.

I agree.

Yeah.

The other big piece, and I ran this by a lot of my mentors at the time and even my father. I remember having a discussion with him about my disagreements about how to grow business with the folks in charge where I was working at the time. And everybody I really respected said the same thing. If you don't agree and you don't like what they're doing, go do it on your own.

Right.

Because there's a lot that goes into running a business and it's easy to sit back when you don't have the risk and pick apart how people are running businesses. If you really think you can do it, go do it on your own.

Yeah.

And so we took that challenge and went for it.

Yeah.

That's awesome.

Yeah. And I love the migration, you know, hot dog cart to, you know, optical drive.

Yeah.

So that's cool.

Hot dog arts were great. And you know, it was just getting me through school at the time, really. And it grew into something bigger than I thought it was. And yeah, know we saw and it kind of petered out at the end. You said, okay, let's sell it now and be done with it. So I sold my first business at 22 and, and I don't know why I just got into a regular job after that. It just seemed like the right thing to do.

Sure.

I'm glad the change.

So I'm actually curious because like many of us and many of our listeners as entrepreneurs, you quickly eschewed the concept of a business plan, at least a formal business plan. And it And. And I get it. Right? I mean, it oftentimes you can get too bogged down in that, and then you're doing business. You're just, you know, doing paperwork all day long and refining things. But you must have had a plan of some sort to figure out just how to support yourself, right? I mean, usually that's how it starts. Right. I got to get some cash in, so.

Sure, sure. I mean, at the time, costs were very low. No children, small house, wife. That worked. So it wasn't. I didn't need to go out there and really do a huge revenue. But, yeah, we consulted. I consulted for old companies I worked with. I did technology, sales, consulting, integration, consult, and that was really the first few contracts that helped Digistore just keep alive. I call that our venture funding.

Right.

Yeah, that was our venture fund. Right. I hit a pretty decent deal consulting deal early on, and that just gave us the ability to write different plans and figure out what would work.

Yeah, that's cool. And it sounds like multiple revenue streams from the beginning, you know, was. Was an important part of your development.

It was. I mean, we needed to. We needed to survive, Right. We needed to show that we could. We could grow some business. I mean, interestingly enough, we. The. The way we got into Panasonic and really working with those guys as a distributor was really just, you know, an old friend that we went out with to a baseball game, we were talking about, and I was listening to him on his phone take calls about, you know, product requests and integration requests and, like, customization. He must have taken 10 calls throughout the day. And I said, what are you doing with all those calls? And what are you doing with all those customers? He goes, I don't know. We don't have a distributor. You know, there's nobody to work with. And I was right there. Light just went off and said, hey, well, you know, we'll do that. We'll do it for the short term and see what happens. And, you know, we grew from, you know, literally my first consulting deal was a million dollars. We went from that to about, you know, 12 million in sales in the first six years. So it was a big ramp. And so we did real well with those guys, and it really gave us a platform to figure out again what we want to do. Because that business plan, as a small business owner, in my mind anyway, is always pivoting. It's always changing, and you can't set it in stone.

Right?

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah. That's a great lesson. So let's talk about your product Mix. And I've probably mentioned this to you in the past, I always am. Well, I'm always impressed by people that can make money and grow business. And I look at it from the outside and go, man, how do they, you know, how do they even make this work? And I would say with optical drives, as we've seen this, you know, kind of development over time and streaming and different things, you know, some folks would look at your and I'm not sure if it's your core product anymore or if it still is and say, wow, that's kind of an obsolete product. And I'm wondering if you know, or how you handle that and if it's impacted your business or if it's actually done the opposite and kind of created a good niche for you as other people have ignored it. And can you, can you talk to that a little bit?

Absolutely. I mean, it's a great point. And yeah, this product's been dead, you know, for seven years now. I mean, it's been going extinct. You know, it was both, Shannon. I mean, what happened was, let's call it what, 2009, 2010, when economy started going down a bit, factories just started closing for the optical drive business. And we dropped our revenue. I think within a three month time frame, we dropped revenue close to 70%.

Yeah, you weren't alone.

Yeah, it was crushing. You know, we had three offices at the time, one in Hong Kong, one here, one back in New York. And so we closed two of those and we had over 30 employees. We had to lay off, unfortunately a good portion of those employees and kind of reset ourselves and said the same thing. Hey, we have to get out of optical, we have to go to the next thing, we have to move. It doesn't happen that quickly. Although it was very bad for us, it also is very good because we did niche out this space. There are still a lot of industrial companies, medical companies, security companies, folks that really, really need optical. They need to have a long term supply on a bomb protected product, bill of materials that is always going to be the same. We really took advantage of that and took advantage of that niche market. And so from that sense, it's been very good for us. With that said, it's a niche, it's not a gap. It's tough to scale a niche. It just can be very profitable. But they're very challenging to scale. So we have constantly tried to pivot our business into a different direction. I really feel like we're in a good spot now. But it was a real challenge. Optical is probably at this point, 30% of our business.

Okay, I see you moved into SSD and some software stuff, that kind of thing.

Sure, sure. Our website probably isn't truly indicative today of where we're at. We're doing a lot of work on it that will be relaunched before the end of the year. We've made a big pivot into flash based memory, SD. We do a lot with the law enforcement on body wearables, embedded sd. Yeah. We've come up with our partners to create an algorithm that allows for video recording onto without killing the flash as quick as it typically does. And so that's been very, very successful for us. And so we're working a lot with that market. And right now what we're really focused on is how you manage that back end data as it comes in. The easy part is getting all that video on body in the car. Where do they take it from there? How do they manage that? How do they manage that data flow? And so that's something that we've been working on for a long time.

That's nice. It sounds like you could also have a service, you know, part of your business as well that you're, you know, providing that. That's great.

Yeah, there's definitely a cloud, you know, potential cloud offering for us. We're trying to enable that offering. Right. We work more with the oem. What we've learned about ourselves, what I've learned more about our company in our direction is we're a lot better at enabling folks to get their product out there than taking your product, trying to brand it in a retail space and push it out. I mean, it's, it's just, it's a challenge for a small business to do that. So I think we found our niche, we certainly found a niche. But again, what we've been looking for is that gap that we can really explode on.

Yeah, no, that's great. And you know, you mentioned earlier that, you know, you work with your brother and you know, I think all of us have, at least, you know, three of us here talking today have had experience working with family members and everything and there's, you know, their course, it's awesome, has a lot of good benefits and you know, talk about that relationship a little bit and you guys have a clear separation of duties and do you leave, you know, everything at the office or how does that, how does that work out for you?

Yeah, holidays can be tough sometimes, man. No, it's good, you know, and he is my brother. He's my business partner. He's probably my best friend. And, you know, at the end of the day, it's no different than if it was you. Shannon, we want to have your role very clear. My role very clear. You know, I'm on the sales and business development side. I'm heavy into marketing. My brother is very strong organizational, very strong operational. And so we have a very clear separation, and it works really well for us. You know, I'm really pleased with that. It could have been, you know, it could have ended badly, and it didn't. And we've been through some tough times. And with that comes challenges. I always say, you know, just like in sports, winning is a great deodorant, you know, but when you're losing, how do you handle that? I mean, everybody does well when things are great. That's right.

That split. And, I mean, Shannon and I have been business partners, actually, and are again in this venture, but I think we both had separate business partners, family and not family. I'm curious with you, Brian. Did you. The delineation of tasks and responsibilities between you and your brother, was that something you knew was the right mix from the outset, or did you have to learn that kind of the hard way?

No, we knew from the beginning.

Good.

We definitely knew from the beginning. You know, I've always been, you know, driving sales and, like I said, starting businesses I've always been into. That's always been my role.

Yep.

And. And so it was very easy.

Yeah, that's good. Yeah, that's good.

That's a.

That's a good. A good point for anybody listening is when you've got a business partner or someone, it is nice to have that safety net when you're starting a business that somebody else that's equally at risk and equally committed, but make sure you both don't want to do the same thing to the business. Right. Because that can be a real disaster.

Yeah, absolutely. And you know what? I give a ton of credit. I probably never told him this, but I give him a ton of credit because for me, it's very easy to find my role. Go generate sales. Right. Go generate partnerships. It's very simple. It's easy. Every day I wake up with the same goal for him, especially when there's not a lot of business. He has to go create infrastructure, create resources, create what this could be without, you know, spending a ton of money. So I do give him a lot of credit for, you know, really niching out his own role. Even though we knew it was organizational flow, it's still, you know, it Starts from nothing.

Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And, and for, yeah, and for some people that can be that, you know, your comment starts from nothing. It can be incredibly empowering, but it also can be terrifying. You know, you do have to, you know, kind of reinvent what you do or, you know, well, you know, while you're out messing around on the golf course making, you know, connections, he's got to make it work back in the exact facility.

Let's get him on here. Let him make sure he knows. That's right. Go play golf.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, so you're the marketing guy. I mean, talk, talk a little bit about how, you know, you've marketed in, you know, your business and what's been the most effective methods, maybe different things you tried that have worked or maybe some that haven't.

You know, it's all over the map for us and it's really product specific. So when I say that you look at optical drives, you know, it wouldn't make sense to have somebody on the phone calling, cold calling for optical drives. Right. It's a needle in a haystack. So that doesn't work. But for, you know, maybe for our law enforcement application, a cold caller still is a good technique. You know, we've come up through the age now with all the social marketing, social media, we've, you know, taken our clicks at that too and have done okay. It's just really been a mix depending upon the product, a mix of social mix of even some of our more what we call prosumer products, pay per click and things of that nature. But it's really product specific and it's really all over the map. I don't know that I have one clear cut answer for that.

Well, I think that your comment that it's product specific is really good in that one method isn't going to work for every different channel that you're selling into. And.

I can give you an example. On our pro video line, we have a solid state media device that is certified with blackmagic, who's a pro video camera manufacturer. So we went through the process of getting certified with them and getting us out to directors. I mean, one of the ways we've marketed with them is going directly out to directors using their products, giving them free media to use, making sure they're testing it, they like it, and then they'll come back and they'll do like a after the fact shoot of the equipment they used and the media they used and why they liked it, and they'll reference us and then that's a small community. So we've really picked up a lot of business in that area just for reaching out to directors.

Got it. That's very interesting. That's cool. Excellent. Excellent. Well, we're big fans of stories and storytelling in business, and we talk about marketing and, you know, you're pitching your story, you're talking about, you know, what makes you guys different and that kind of thing. And, you know, thinking about your business, or even it could be, doesn't have to even be digital. It could be that you're the hot dog business. You know, do you have a, you know, a favorite story or something that motivates you or, you know, that may have happened at one time that you can, you know, share with our listeners?

Oh, well.

Put you on the spot.

You know, I was thinking about that if I have a story, it's not a funny story, but it's kind of a sad story, but it's also somewhat inspiring. And I use this with my reps that are going out and making calls. There's an account that we were trying to get into for years and years and finally had our shot, and it was out back east and had a meeting with the right director. And I get out there and everybody's kind of floating around in a weird way. Everything seems just a weird vibe there. And come to find out, the gentleman I was meeting with literally passed away that morning, had a heart attack and passed away. I know not to bring your show down here, but.

No, no, no, it's important.

It was very important to us at the time. And, you know, I was all the way back east and they, you know, accommodated me and they brought me in and, you know, I was obviously, my condolences and was very sorry, but they brought me into a different group, and we ended up having, you know, three or four meetings that day, throughout the day with different groups. I liked what we were saying. Ended up being one of our biggest accounts for many, many years. And I guess, you know, the moral story to my reps is, you know, there's never going to be anything worse than that.

Hopeful, hopefully.

Yeah, there shouldn't be. It shouldn't be. And, you know, to get through that and not just quit on it, you know, I don't want to hear excuses about quitting because there's, you know, you got to keep powering through.

That's a great start. You know, I. The guy I met, you know, went to show up to. To pitch, literally passed away. I mean, they talk about working your way through that.

I mean, I don't know what to do. Right. And we're pretty early on in our business at the time we needed, you know, we need a business you take, you know, as a small business owner, you go spend $1000 or $1500 to travel back east and take meetings. You need to make every meeting count. Yeah, right. Especially early on when you're just getting started. And that was certainly, you know, the case for us at the time.

Yeah, that's a great story. I'm definitely going to share. Going to steal that. And my sales guys, you know, there's.

No excuses when they come back, like, come on, if you didn't die, you can go see him.

Yeah, yeah, that's great.

I mean, he's not available.

Yeah, that's awesome.

Yeah, I'm sure they appreciate it when you, when you share that. An anecdote with him too, Brian. Yep. Yeah. Well, did he died?

No.

Well, where's the, where's the order? Oh, yeah, exactly. Give me the P.O. give me the P.O. that's great.

So let me ask you this is your. Now your wife runs another business as well, right?

Yeah, she does. She, she started a healthy vending business a few years ago.

Did you help her get that going? I mean, were you involved in, in that on the side kind of thing?

Definitely pressed her that direction. She was, you know, it was new for her to kind of go out on her own and do something. She had always, you know, worked. She was a financial advisor for a few years. And then we have kids. Right. We have two boys now, 9 and 11. And at the time, you know, they were just getting to that school age where she had a little bit more time. And what I tried to express to her is, you know, you don't want to go get a 40 hour, you know, a week job. Let's do something where you can have fun, you can use your skills and something you believe in. And she's also does some health and fitness training. She's a martial artist. So she's really into that lifestyle. So the healthy vending was really a good opportunity for her to get what she liked, you know, to be able to focus on what she likes and what she believes in and, you know, really replace, you know, like our kids community center. They took out the candy machine and put a healthy vending machine in and all the parents were very happy. And so she has, you know, 20 or 25 locations now and she's, you know, slowly scaling it up and she's doing well with it.

Yeah, yeah, that's Awesome. I love that because I think it really speaks to, you know, being an entrepreneur and then encouraging other people, whether it's a friend or your spouse or whatever, to go out on their own. And I think it's awesome.

Absolutely. And, you know, you have kids, too. I mean, for me, it's really good for the kids to see, you know, I think they realize I have my own business and they know what's going on to a degree, but they don't see it day to day. But to see their mom out there and to have her have them help with, you know, inventory and do these different things, and for them both to know that that's how they're going to college, right? Oh, yeah. That's going right to there. That's all for them. And they know that. And I really. I think maybe it doesn't make a huge difference today, but maybe in 10 years, they'll look back and say, oh, man, you know, our parents did that for us.

Yeah. Well, Dave and I, we always talk about kind of the, I guess the intangible benefits of running, you know, your own companies and things. And I think having your kids see what you do and how you create something from nothing, it's priceless.

I agree. I agree completely.

Yeah. And it will change their life.

My kids give me a hard time about it. I mean, they get it, but they love to give me a hard time. They're like, you go and, like, say things and rant on about stuff, and then we have a house over our head. I'm like, yeah, pretty much. That's how it works. That's right.

Yeah.

That's all I do. It's that simple. That's right.

That's right. Yep.

Easy, right? Everyone should.

Easy.

Everybody can do it. You talk on the phone. You talk on the phone for a living. That's what my kids always say. Oh, you just talk all day. I'm like, oh, yeah, that's it.

That's it.

You know, that's all I do do all day there. You and your. You and my uncle. What do you guys do?

Yeah, my kids for a long time thought I just came over to the office and played games all day. I mean, they tell. They tell me that they realize that's not what I do, but. But they're like, yeah, we just. We never really understood. We just thought you kind of played games all day, like, oh, that's cool.

Yeah, I love it.

Only. Only days ending in y. I told.

Him.

Oh, I think we lost Shannon. Yep.

Yep. I think I'm back. Am I back, guys?

I think you're back. It's good to have you back, man.

It is good to be back.

I'm not even gonna cut the. The silence was awkward enough that we noticed it was there, we acknowledged it and now you're back.

So I thought guys didn't like my answer.

That's right.

This is what we do. We just cut you off right there.

That's enough. I've had enough of him.

That's right.

Well, I have a few more questions here before I lose my connection here. So we talked about stories and making mistakes and different things and we're big fans of mistakes here. I think they're really with the small business show because they teach you so much, even the small little things that you do and you look back as a business owner, do you have something that you could look back at and say, wow, that was at the time, you know, was maybe miserable or whatever. But now you look back on saying, man, I really learned a valuable lesson that's helped me move forward.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean there's, there's, we could have a whole show just on that. There's been plenty over the last 14 years. But you know, I guess easy way to look at for me is when I look back at decisions I've made or the direction we've gone and it hasn't worked out, you kind of look at the mindset that you had at the time. I look at our biggest mistakes and they're all fear based decisions. They weren't data driven, they weren't in a way that was a little bit more tangible. It was fear based. One that really sticks out to me is back when 2009, 2010, when this economy dropped and we had a really tough time, we were looking for that pivot, we were looking for that next direction. Instead of really extending on to where we've seen success, we took a different turn and we decided we were going to create some retail products, create some software that would be easy archiving software for Blu Ray. It was a really subset of a niche market and went and worked with a consulting firm and spent a ton of money on a horrible website and just a horrible direction and we lost hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars on it. We quickly realized we were wrong. We pivoted again and like I said, now we're doing better now than we've ever done. I love our direct, love what we're doing. But I look back at that and I go, well, how the heck did I do that? Why did I Make such a stupid decision. And every time I think about it, it's always because you're scared. You make a fear based decision instead of really following the data or following where you've been successful and trying to extend from those success points.

Yeah, I think that's a fantastic comment and I could certainly attest to making those same kind of decisions over time. You look back and you go, man, you make some quick decision that you think is going to fix everything and you realize, wow, that, you know, I didn't have enough data to back it up.

Absolutely. I mean, there's no quick fix. Right. And everybody's scared. I mean, you're a small business, it's scary.

Yeah.

And things change quickly and the environment changes and you have, you know, guys getting venture funding and all the hot startups and we work in San Jose, California which is, you know, Silicon Valley. You have Apple, you know, three blocks from where we're at. I mean, so things move fast and you can get scared if you let it get to you. If you don't trust yourself and you don't have faith in what your, your ideas are and you know, you start doubting yourself, then you can find some real trouble.

Yeah, man, I love that term fear based decisions because I mean, we've all experienced it, but that encapsulates it and also shines a perfectly negative light on it too, which is what it should be.

Yeah, yeah. You have to take a step back. I mean, things are, you know, you're not going out of business tomorrow. You have time.

Right.

You'll get through it. You got this far because you were smart enough and had enough courage to do it. You have to keep that faith.

Yeah. And I think you, you know, as a small business owner there most of the time you don't have people telling you you're doing a great job. You know, the results really show how it's working out for you. And so you have to, you know, to your point, really step back and tell yourself, okay, I've been in business for X number of years, look at these successes I've had and use that to kind of, you know, bulk yourself up to power through those times that are tough.

It's true.

Absolutely, absolutely. I. Go ahead. Sorry.

No, I was going to say, I mean, it's so easy to get to a point where compared to the day you started, you are wildly successful. Right. You know, and you've had years of profitability and all of that stuff. And it's easy even at that point to say, man, I really Got to hustle. This is not, you know, it's not working the way it's supposed to. Like, wait, slow down. You got this far, you're going to get that. You're going to get to the next level?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look at it this way. We had 36 quarters of profitability in a row, and if you're looking for a pat in the back, that's never going to happen. But I tell you what, that 37th quarter, we lost a couple hundred thousand dollars. It didn't matter about those 36 quarters before you had to go after it. Right. And so you're never going to get the pat on the back. And there's plenty of 40 hour a week jobs that will do that for you. But there's nothing more gratifying than creating something from nothing in my. I look, we have this business here and I look at the employees, you know, the average one has been here, you know, 12 years. You know, we have people here that have, you know, they're part of the family now and it's great. We really are happy with what we created.

That's awesome. How many employees do you have now? And I know you said you had to cut way back a number of years ago. What do you. If you don't mind sharing, I think.

We'Re at 13 right now.

Oh, nice.

Yeah, that's great.

And then we have a couple sales consultants that do independent sales, just kind of let they own a few accounts, they rent for us. I think we're comfortable with that. We grew revenue last three years in a row. Last year was our most profitable year by far. This year is looking great. Next year. The forecast is already. We just closed one of our bigger contracts ever that will hit next year. We're really excited about all of it. It's that conservative growth where you want to grow the revenue. But I don't want to grow so big to where I have to have 30 employees again. It's just I want to make sure that I have a home for these 13 and they can retire here instead of trying to grow so much where they're going to, you know, 30 people and have to go through that again. So trying to keep overhead low is, is, is critical for us.

That's, I mean, it's, it's great to hear you say that. It's, it's, you know, for a lot of people, you get to a point and you. Whatever the metric is, it could be gross sales, it could be the number of employees you have. Right. I mean, it could be all kinds of things. And to, to accept that it's okay to scale back from any one of those metrics because that's the right thing for the business and for the people that are there. I mean, that's very wise. And not always easy.

No, it's not easy. I remember I worked with an old friend from Oracle that works in the apps division and I was telling him, oh, we're really growing. We're going to do 6 million this year. 7. He goes, I said we should look at our ERP, what should we do? And he says, it's not how many millions you do, it's how many people you have and where are you going to grow to and where are you going to be? Ultimately, we end up going with a, you know, a web based solution. Actually, we do web based for all of our it. We don't have any IT in house other than a print server. And so everybody that works here is either engineering something that we're trying to sell, supporting something that we're selling, or selling something. So everybody has a core job here. So it's good.

Yeah, that's great. Yeah, it's a great story. And I think that's like you say, growth for the sake of the. Of growth is just something to try to avoid. It's easy to get caught in that trap.

But very cool the way you said that, Shannon. I love that. I love what you just said. It's true.

This show is full of great quotes. I feel like I'm gonna have to go back and listen.

Yeah, it's really good. That was a good one, honestly, because that's true. I mean, that was the only way I could justify myself. Oh, that's all I knew. I was a sales guy and consultant before. Right. All I know is sales. We got to go higher, we got to go bigger. And that doesn't help for me.

I realized that when, you know, here we were adding employees, we were, you know, bigger space, bigger building more products. And at the end of the, you know, end of the year, you look and go, okay, well, what did it do for me personally as a business owner? And I started realizing, well, man, really what it did, it just stressed me out more. And so you have that kind of. Yeah, kind of, you know, vision of man, if I keep going, I'm going to have. It's just going to be incredibly, you know, could get really, really difficult. And I commend you for, you know, realizing that.

I think everybody has to figure that one out on their own because, you know, really that's the way that you start justifying to, you know, friends and family and what you're doing. Oh, look at this huge building I have now. I'm really success. You know, we're doing well. You know, we did this much in revenue and we have this many employees. And I quickly realized, I don't care how many. It's okay, we have 13 employees. I don't need to have 30. We're making more money now.

That's right. That's right. Yeah. And the things, those metrics that you come up with. And for me, I eventually got to be like, okay, well how much time do I have? And that to me became the most important metric. And how can I offload as much of my duties as possible and train people to do my job so I can go do other things like this show that is interesting to me and keeps myself motivated. And so I think that's. So it's a good thing.

That's great. I've been working on trying to do that more and more too is, you know, me doing everything doesn't lead to a successful business.

Yeah, no, that's for sure.

Other people to do it for sure.

And you know, I think, Brian, I think you might have already answered this question. You know, we always ask at the end, you know, if you could go back and tell yourself, you know, something when you were just getting starting in business, you know, that, you know now. And I don't know if it's the, you know, don't make fear based decision, which is powerful, but, you know, is there another bit of a critical piece of advice that you would tell yourself as a new business owner?

Yeah, you know, for me, I think, you know, no finish line, I mean, there's really not a finish line on this thing. It just keeps going. And I think when you're just getting started out, especially me, I was pretty young, you know, you just kind of think, oh, you got there, you made it right. That never happened. I mean, it's fine, we're established, things are great, I have a family, everything's wonderful. But there's no finish line. This thing just keeps going. And I think that, you know, I wish I would have, I would have felt that way when I was a little bit younger. Because you make decisions a little bit differently. I mean, obviously, you know, you know, just what we talked about, you don't, you're not justified by having this huge organization, more employees, and you don't have to be so big, keep your costs low. And I think the biggest one for Me, honestly, and it's very easy to do is just don't tout yourself. You got this far, you know you can do it. And it's easy to doubt yourself, especially in this valley here, when you see guys at Apple and Google and, you know, people doing really, really well, it's easier to doubt yourself and wonder why you didn't just go get a job in the first place when things are bad. And so to be able to break through that area and not doubt yourself is so super important.

No, that's great. That's awesome. Brian, where can people go to learn more about your company?

Digistore.com/I G I S T-O-R.com Like I said, our business probably isn't truly indicative. Today we'll be relaunching our site and in December. And honestly, it's secure data storage products from SD all the way to optical drives and data archiving. And we're pretty happy with the pivot we've made and we're really excited about the future. Yeah.

Well, we really appreciate you having being on the show. If you have questions for Brian, you can send an email to feedbackusinessshow. Co or you want to comment on the show. We would certainly love to hear from you.

Please do. Or feel free to find me on LinkedIn as well. And I certainly appreciate the opportunity to share my experiences with you guys. And I'm super fired up for what you guys are doing. I think it's great.

Cool. Well, we're really, we're excited for your success. It's a great story. From hot dog cart to, you know, I just love that, you know, problem.

Is I can't eat a hot dog anymore, man. Right.

Well, you know, there are, there are those costs. That's right. That's right. It. Thanks so much, man. This has been a blast. This has been a really fun show to be here for. And like I said, I'm going to go back and listen, there were some great quotes I want to pull out of this that are awesome. Thanks so much, guys.

I appreciate it. Thanks, Dave. Thanks, Shannon.

Folks, we'll see you next week.

Take care.