Cutting Costs While Preserving Value

The Small business show episode 383 for Wednesday, June 8, 2022. Greetings folks and welcome to or welcome back to the Small Business show here at businessshow Co. The show where we are small businessing through the entrepreneur experience every single week. Sponsors for this episode include itrust capital at itrust capital SBS and bambi@b a m b e.com small where you can go to schedule your free trial. We'll talk more in depth about each of those shortly here. For now, back here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And in Lafayette, California, I'm Shannon Jean. I love that Bambi concept. Being able to get an HR company for an unbelievable price each month and get help.

I think it's a. I love what Bami's been doing. They've been a sponsor for a while. I'm totally into that.

Yeah.

And I trust capital. Like being able to have crypto in your IRA with all tax advantages. I wish that had existed for me 10 years ago, eight years ago, six years ago, two years ago.

Yeah, six months.

Six months ago. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

That's good.

It's good stuff.

That's great. So you're happy to be back in the States? I know you were traveling.

Yeah, yeah, we were. We were in Greece. We. We flew to Greece and spent a few days in Athens and then boarded a cruise ship to bounce through some of the Greek isles and then we made it to Montenegro and Croatia before hitting Venice and then flying home from there. But yeah, it was fantastic. I'm still processing. We haven't even been home 24 hours. But the place that really blew me away was Montenegro. I don't know how to put my finger on it. There was something about that place. Yeah.

That's cool.

Yeah, it was cool. No, it was an amazing experience. It was like great family trip, lots of good memories and all of that as well. It really was smooth travels.

That's terrific.

Yeah.

We were just having a conversation. I want to talk about cost savings and expenses and stuff today. Taking care of cutting costs with keeping the value of your business strong. But you and I were just having a conversation before we started. We both watched the Apple, you know, announcements yesterday at the Worldwide Developer Conference and I made the comment, I want one of those new MacBook Airs and how I felt that my MacBook Air should really have an expiration date on it.

Your 2 year old MacBook Air should have an expiration date. Yes.

Yeah. And we, you know, and you made. I thought it was very poignant like, well, maybe things should have that because you miss out on so much now that everything's interconnected. And, you know, it's not like you're, you buy something and it lives alone. I mean, I just bought a new car or leased a new car through one of our companies. And you know, the app, downloading the app at the dealership and getting connected to the car is, is part of the deal. Same with the refrigerator these days. So I, I wonder if, you know, maybe there's an opportunity there either the, the manufacturers coming up with something like Apple does, where it's like, hey, it's time to get a new phone and we'll give you credit for your old one. Does, you know, should other companies be modeling that or does some entrepreneur come up with something that interjects themselves between the manufacturer and the consumer to do that? Well, interesting.

Yeah, I think it's, it's a consumer mindset thing, right. And certainly there needs to be a responsibility in terms of not just filling up landfills with, with unused, unused crap. Right?

But yeah, it's got to be this circular kind of thing, right?

Yeah, there needs to be some sort recycling thing going on. But that aside, the consumer mindset of I'm gonna buy this and it's gonna last forever, I don't know that that's good for us anymore. I haven't thought about this for a long time. I've literally thought about this for 10 minutes here because it came up in our pre show conversation. So a week from now, I may feel very differently, but it's worth having this thought exercise on the idea of, okay, is it good for us in our heads to say, yes, this is gonna last forever? Or is it better for us to say, to just be realistic right out of the gate and say, okay, this thing that I just bought, I'm gonna expect it to last for 10 years, five years, three years, whatever the item is, whatever it, whatever makes sense.

Some sort of efficiency thing too, right?

Exactly. Because look at your refrigerator, right? You buy a refrigerator, it used to be that it would last forever. And the same with a washing machine or dryer, like the quote unquote, boring home appliances. The dishwasher, Right. Yeah. And we had, you know, we bought our house with our dishwasher in it, right? And then the thing went nuts. Like it got. It was one of those things that had the sort of soft touch panel on it to get it started. You know, you pick the mode or whatever, click start or whatever, and that soft touch panel went berserk. Got to the point where we felt like we had to be like spies in a James Bond movie to figure out the code to get the dishwasher to go. And it changed every day. And so finally we ripped the thing out and put a new one in. And it was like, oh, my gosh, we should have done this five years ago. How many times do you replace something and after you replace it, you say, we should have done this five years ago. Because the new dishwasher was quieter, it was more efficient, energy wise. Right.

Probably used less water, uses less water.

Right. All of those things. And the same thing is True. I have two refrigerators in my house right now that are 25 years old each. I guarantee you I would save money if I replaced both of them pretty quickly in energy alone. Right. Not to mention the convenience of a better design and all of those things, because these things wear out. But not necessarily in a way that would make you decide, I have to replace it today, even though I know I'm sitting here telling you I should be replacing both of my refrigerators, like, without question. I guarantee within five years, I'd be saving money. Probably two years, I'd be saving money because those things are, like, they're 20 plus years old. They're not efficient anymore. The technology has leapfrogged them. And I just think we need to change our mindsets. Perhaps again, just for the thought exercise, I'll argue this side and I might argue the other side in a week, But I think we need to approach things from a disposable or a recyclable mindset as opposed to. And I'm gonna keep this forever mindset.

Yes. I like it. I mean, there's definitely something there.

Right? There's something. I don't know what it is.

There's some pitfalls to it that have to be some issues that have to be addressed. I get that.

Yep.

But, you know, there's something, like, I mentioned my shotgun. I joke around. I, you know, I tell my wife. I'm like, you know, I've had this shotgun for 10 years. I've hunted. I probably shot, I don't know, a few thousand shells through it. Maybe more, you know, could be dangerous. Maybe I need. Maybe I should get a new shotgun. You know, jokingly, but maybe that's true. Maybe, you know, manufacturers should put something and say, hey, you know, there's a. There's a. In the case of a shotgun, look, you've shot, I don't know, 20 or 3,500 shells, and we recommend you replacing it. Or whatever. It's kind of an interesting, and I think it's an opportunity.

Yeah, well, there's that too. Right. But, you know, I mean, I'm looking here in my studio, I have my podcast machine and all that, and then right next to it is my, my drum set, one of my drum sets. And I think about, okay, so should these be replaced? Well, I mean, they're pretty stand. They're. They're static things, right? To a point. It's a shell with lugs on it that the rims screw into, and the rims hold the head in place. Like that's it. Right. Okay. But the mounts that they use change over time, and the newer mounts are better and hold better and the positioning is better. Right. They don't fall while you're trying to play them and all this stuff. So parts of the drum set do become obsolete over time. Now the question is, do you want to replace those parts and put new hardware on, or do you just replace the drums? There is something to be said about the sound of a specific instrument. As a player, you get used to it. You learn how to work with it. It evolves over time, especially if it's wood, right? Because there's glue in there, and the wood's going to settle and preserve in a different way, and the glue is going to settle and preserve. And so you get this sound that is, over time, truly becomes unique to that one instrument, and you learn how to play it.

It's seasoned, if you will.

It's seasoned, right? Yeah, seasoned. So there are some things where it might make sense to keep it, but again, I'm changing the heads on these things fairly regularly because you have to, you know, I'm fixing different pieces of them because different pieces that may or may not be related to the sound. Although it's arguable that everything that's screwed onto the drum is related to the sound, because that's how physics works. Right. And the same would be true if we guitar or a piano or anything like you're, you are doing things to these that they do change over time. They evolve and, and so, like, yeah, thinking about things as being replaceable. It's interesting. I, I, yeah. Yes. Yeah. There's.

There's something to it.

There is something to it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, it's fascinating. But, you know, what are your ideas on it? Are you in an industry that, that could take advantage of this, or is this something that, you know, are we just, you know, there's nothing to it? Feedback atbusinessshow.co we'd love to hear from you.

Yeah, yeah. Should everything have an expiration date? And I think that expiration date, if the answer is yes, it's something that needs to be in the consumer's head like the day you buy it. You know that this is a five year item.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Yeah. And it's some kind of cycle. Maybe, maybe like, you know, I like Samsung appliances, maybe they have it built in. Hey, you know what, we're going to reach out to you in this time and we're going to give you this much credit to go buy a new one and we're going to do this and you're going to get this new feature and I don't know, it's kind of interesting.

Yeah. You know my LG TV, it's two years old now. I think WebOS will only update for two years before that stops.

Yeah.

And then should it be replaced? Maybe. I mean, you know, look at the prices on TVs are way different today than they were five years ago, ten years ago. Right. So you know, it's not, not unrealistic to say, okay, yeah, we, we're gonna have to fork out that money every, whatever it is, two, three, four, five years. But should you keep the same TV for 20 years now? Probably not, you know, not in this, not in today's world. Not with all the tech that changes in your television.

Yeah, I have like a 72 inch big Samsung.

Yeah.

In, in my kind of down, you know, our living area if you will. We watch movies and stuff and I started looking, I go, wow, there's a lot of shadows in there. And I walk in Costco and I see these big OLED 80 inch that are cheaper than when I bought this, you know, the 72 and this is almost nine years ago that I bought that one.

OLED. So much better than the LED that you've got. Yeah, for sure.

Yes, exactly. So you're telling me I'm going to mention to my wife when we're done with this today, I think we need a new tv.

You know, you definitely need a new tv. Yeah, we skipped right over led. We held onto plasma as long. My plan was it worked. I loved plasma. Well, the way our living room is, is, it's, it's a very, we have a wide viewing angle. So LED never would have worked for me because it, it, you know, you get to the edges and it looks like crap. And so we had plasma and my plan was to hold on to plasma as long as I could until I could afford OLED in the room and it worked out so, you know, there you go. But yeah, the OLED screens are amazing. Hey, I do want to have this conversation about how to cut costs while preserving value. The next thing that I want to do, if it's all the same to you, Mr. Shannon Jean, is to talk to everyone about our two sponsors for today.

Yeah, let's do it.

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Yeah, that's true.

So what is valuable? And I think you can ask the question two different ways. One is what's valuable to your customers, right. And then the other thing is what's valuable to your business because you know where you want to get your business in the future and that may or may not be valuable to your customers today. Hopefully it'll be valuable to future customers or your current customers and in the future. But you want to, you want to look at the question both ways as you head down this path so that you know what, you know what's the non negotiable part of this? What has to be preserved because that's, that's baked into this, right? For preserving value, let's define value. And it's going to be different for every business, right?

It is, and it's a good point. Like for me, I, you know, I have this big list and I'll tell you that the, the last thing I cut, I'll tell you what it is first, and that's employees. I always fight to protect the people that work for me. They've always been my most valuable asset. And I'm all for things like, hey, let's not Hire for a few months or six months. Let's see where I'm. As listeners to this show know I'm, you know, a crazy optimist. I always think our best years are ahead of us. I still do. But I think the immediate future is far less uncertain. Uncertain. I think there's a very good chance that we're rolling into a recession here. That's to let off some of the steam. If you've looked at the markets and you look at housing and interest rates and there's a lot of things going on with fuel prices. I'm in California and average cost of gas is over $6 a gallon right now. It impacts every single thing you could imagine. So looking at what you cut costs and things, the last thing for me is employees. But I have a question for you, Dave. I wanted to ask you because I'm always shy. I hesitate to talk about bad news. It's one of my weakest points when I talk to employees because I have this optimistic thing. I don't want to talk about bad news. But should you have a conversation with them about what's going on? I mean, they know, they see it. Right. But, hey, we're going to have a recession. We may have a recession or a slowdown in the economy in the next year. How could that impact our business? And you have to talk with them, Right. They have to know what's going on. Mindset is right.

Yeah. When, you know, I'm the easy example is to rewind about two years, maybe two years and two months to when lockdown started with the pandemic. And, you know, all of that stuff, businesses were closing or, you know, long before PPP or any of that stuff saw the light of day. Everybody knew that we were having a problem. Right? That's right. So the elephant was in the room. And we were talking about it already, but it hit me about a month into things. And it might not have been a month, it might have been just a few weeks, but it seemed like things had been going on a while. It wasn't days into this. It was, okay, here we are. Now, of course, me as the business owner, I get to see everything. I get to know everything about the health of the business. Right. I have to know that whether I want to admit some of those things or not at the time is different. Right. But I know it. I'm aware of these things. Whether I choose to ignore them or pay attention to them or whatever, I know them. And it hit me one day, I. I knew that our companies at that Point in time were all solid. Like we were going to be able to keep everybody employed for six months while we figured out what was going on in the world. And I knew this, okay? And then suddenly it hit me one morning, I'm like, wait a minute, I've known this and I've been fully aware of this for like a week, you know, because I dug in, I'm like, all right, if revenue slows and this happens and that happens, you know, what are my options and what, what, what bad, like, what difficult decisions might I need to make? And so I went through and I did it all. So I had done this exercise and realized, okay, we're going to be fine for a little while. Like, who knows how long this is going to go, what impacts it's going to have? We don't know, but we can do six months, no problem. And then it hit me about a week after I did all that. Wait a minute. My employees have no idea. They don't have access to the same information that I do, so they can't do this exercise for themselves.

Yeah. And you want their help, right? And their buy in on what's going on.

Yeah. I called the staff meeting and I said, hey, I want to let you know. And it was not acknowledging that things in the market were bad and it might negatively impact the business long term. But we don't know. I hate having those kinds of conversations because like you said, I'm an optimist like you. I like to just deliver good news. I did have good news, but it was good news in a crummy situation. It was like, yeah, we don't need to, to do this and we don't need to fire anyone and we don't need to make any changes right now, but we are not going to be hiring anyone at that point either, you know, and they all, every single one of them had already been thinking about it. And you're right. And they all said, oh, yeah, we talked about this. Which is an interesting thing to hear, right? That your employees talked about the business without you present. Like, oh, that's interesting. There's a back channel I'm not privy to. And they said, we talked about this and we all would have been willing to accept like a, you know, a 20% pay cut in order to keep everybody on board and all of this stuff. And it's like, wow, that's fascinating. I said, I'm going to keep that in the back of my mind, but we don't have to do anything like that now. And they were all very thankful to just have that transparent conversation. So I think you're right right now with this recession looming or some change, some correction looming, whether it's going to be actually a recession or not, we'll find out. But, you know, there's, there's some correction looming. I think it is realistic to have that conversation with your employees.

Yeah, I agree.

Yeah.

Get, get them on board. There's no shock later like, oh, we're insulated from it. Talk about it, don't be doom and gloom, but have a conversation just like we are right now.

Yeah. And just a matter of fact, conversation, that's really what it needs to be, is just being honest, being transparent.

Yeah, I like it.

Yeah.

And I have this thing, and I've heard this before, I listen to a lot of podcasts and they're just this 10% rule, this rule that you can always cut 10% from budgets, your expenses without even feeling it.

Sure.

So you giving your managers, your supervisors and anyone involved in managing costs, asking them, hey, come up with a plan to cut 10% of your budget. Not saying that, you know, we may need to do it right now, but we want to have this plan in place if we start seeing certain things on the horizon that we could go through and make those cuts. So, you know, and I do kind of agree with that. I think there's fat in every organization. Right. And as you grow, it gets harder and harder to be lean. And, you know, so I do like that 10% rule. And I think you should ask your people or yourself, you know, looking at things, how would we cut 10%? Because I think it just happens and people just pick up the slack and you don't even notice it.

I like it. Yeah. And like you said, that way you have buy in in addition to just getting buy in, which is one byproduct of hopefully byproduct of this conversation. The other part is you get ideas that you're not going to come up with, that your employees are going to come up with that are going to potentially help the health of the business. And that's also a good thing. Yeah.

To your point, they're having conversations without you.

Yes.

So let you know, get and have them educate you. Hopefully you've hired some really smart people that are, you know, much better at you than, you know, doing certain things. And it's important. Yeah, yeah, I think that's great. And I think that, you know, this 10 thing, that's real easy. But I also think it's, you should do this on a regular Basis, depending upon how often is up to you. But auditing your expenses, and when I say auditing all of them, because the small ones, and I made this mistake, I still make it, you're like, oh, that's only 10 bucks, that's only 50 bucks a month. And look at all this. But the small ones really add up and they're often ignored because you're not auditing these expenses.

Right. I hate it when I have to spend 30 minutes or even an hour dealing with cutting out a $50 a month expense. It feels like a waste of my time because. But I know that A, it's not when you multiply it by 12, right. Over the course of a year, and B, that doing that exercise and preserving that mindset of, let's make sure we're aware of all of these expenses that, like you said, one by one, aren't going to change the nature of your business, but in aggregate, absolutely will change the nature of your business. And just being aware of those and having a practice of thinking about them not every day, not every minute of every day, because then you'll never get anything done. But having this practice of not ignoring them, I think is really helpful. I like that idea. I do. Yeah.

And things like we've talked about that I. I forget the name. You're going to remind me, though, because, you know, it. The credit card fee.

Rate tracker.

Rate tracker.

Oh, yeah, man. You want to use that? It's free. Yeah.

So.

Yeah, right.

And so you're looking at, okay, what's the exchange rate that we're paying to take American Express and all these other, you know, affinity credit cards. And what's that costing you? Very easy to do it. You know, check that stuff. You know, and bank fees. You shouldn't be paying any bank fees. You just shouldn't you. If you are, you need to talk to your banker or find another bank. And, you know, and maybe if you've got debt or a credit line, maybe it's time to renegotiate those things. Right?

Oh, that's a good idea. Yeah.

Yeah. Either maybe getting a better rate or maybe an increase, because it's going to be, if things go south, it's going to be harder to get money next year. It's already getting tougher right now. But if you can get your bank to say, oh, yeah, you have a, whatever, $500,000 line of credit, yeah, we'll give you an increase based on, you know, your assets or whatever to 750, it's going to be easier to do that. I believe now, now than next Q1 or Q2 of 2023. I think things are going to be a little more dismal for getting money.

I think that's right. Yeah. Well, it's always easier to get money when you don't need it, so.

That's right.

Get those loans in place now. Increase them if you can so that you've got those cushions in place for whatever might happen down the road. Yeah, yeah. This is. I want to talk more about these specifics because I like specifics and actionable things. But I also, I want to zoom out a little bit and ask these questions like look at your contractor, your third party expenses, the things that you're outsourcing. Right. What are you good at internally that you could do either in place of those instead of those, you know, things that you can cut a cost while, while still preserving the value of whatever that brings to your business. Right.

So maybe, maybe saving an employee too.

Right, exactly.

Like, hey, yeah, it's going to slow down. You're going to have time to do this. Yeah, that's a really good.

Yeah, you're going to. Right there's going to. We're going to preserve. If the goal is to preserve everybody that's working here now, great. Let's look at all of these things who thinks they can do that. Right. And if they can do it 90% as good as a contractor and they have the time in their schedule, it's worth looking at that. Right. Thinking about your business and your processes from that standpoint. What are you spending cash on? Okay. Can we not spend cash on that? And if we don't spend cash on that, what does it change about our business? I think that's a good question to ask. And then the other question, and this one, I'll tell you. We started BackbeatMedia before the dot com bubble burst and we had no fricking idea how to run our business. But we didn't need to know for those first 18 months because there was so much money being poured at Internet ads that we were just order takers. We were idiot order takers. That's really what we were. We were nice guys, don't get me wrong, like, you know, making connections. Yeah, we went to work every day. But. But in retrospect, we did not understand our business, but we certainly collected a lot of money in those first 18, 24 months, whatever it was. I will give you a metric that should help explain what happened to our business. We were charging anywhere between, let's say 12 and $20 cost per thousand for an Internet ad. Every time you view an ad, every thousand of those views is worth somewhere between 12 and $20 in that particular market. In those days, that's what we were charging after the bubble burst. Within a period of a month, it went from, let's say, 12 to 20 down to 1 to 3.

Wow.

Right? So like a. Right. A 90% reduction in the value of our entire product base. Now, thankfully, we weren't, though. We were idiots. We made the excellent mistake of not spending all the money that we had made. So we had a cushion. Right. It was a great mistake to make. Yeah. And so we sat and we looked and we said, okay, we now understand what our business is, and we have a minute to breathe because we're not taking nearly as many orders as we were in the past. So let's look at what we do here and the question that we asked ourselves, because Greg, my. My partner at the time, Greg Snyder, and I are both efficiency maniacs. And we looked at this and said, what can we automate so that it. We don't need to hire more people to service more customers? Because if we have a. If we have a 90% reduction in the value of our product, well, then it means that we need 10 times as many customers to earn the same amount of money. Now, we never quite got to that point, at least not in that phase of the business, but that was. The mindset was, okay, what can we automate so that we can service the same amount of dollars without adding staff? And we were able to. We built this huge filemaker database that the business still runs on today. We automated a bunch of things, but the one thing we didn't automate, we automated a piece of it. But by and large, the one thing we did not automate was customer service. That was the sacred cow for us. It was okay, because we know we need to be able to go be those nice guys that are making connections and people want to work with us and people trust us, because now the trust has been sapped from the market. Right. Like it went from. Yeah, that's good. Smart, you know, and so that was. That was the. That was the task that we assigned ourselves, was, okay, what can we do? And we had time to build these systems and lay these foundations, and we had some capital to do that as well, and we were able to make it work. And the business obviously survived. It's still here today. But if we did not do those things, it would not have survived, I think.

Yeah, it's a great story, and I Think one of the things that to tease out of that is automation. Automation and technology is just a great place to look at how you could save costs. Not necessarily eliminating someone, but, you know, automating and systems that you use in your business that, that could save you some money. I think that's important.

Yeah, for sure.

Definitely.

Yeah.

I, I, you know, I talked about fuel. Yeah, Fuel prices are impacting everything. So if your business, you know, ships things, it's time to talk to the, to the carriers because, you know, UPS, FedEx, DHL, whoever. You're using USPS, if you're doing enough volume and you have a rep, they're, they're already doing fuel surcharges. But the way you can offset that and your, your reps will do this is they can give you better rates and sneak it in. So if you're seeing a 10% increase in fuel surcharges, you know, go push for a, you know, equivalent percentage discount in your shipping rate. Especially if you're, you know, using overnight. Ground's a little tougher because they have a harder time discounting it because it's just a bloodbath in a commodity business. But overnight and priority shipments, time to talk to them. And it's also time to look at what your incoming freight is costing you and are vendors that will cut you deals on shipping. Can you buy local? That's one thing to really look at is, oh, we used to buy our boxes from this huge box company and had a guy walk in years and years ago one day and said, hey, I'm right down the road, you know, you can come get your boxes anytime. And I was like, ah, you're not gonna be able to meet these prices. And he said, let me see. And funny enough, and this is another indicator that we live in a simulation. This guy's name was Bill Warehouse and he was in the box business. So I said, okay, Bill Warehouse. And maybe it was an alias just to get his name in the door, I don't know. But it worked. And so he's like, yeah, I can meet these prices. And he was smart because, sure, over time, you know, you increase a little bit. But not only did we save on fuel costs and delivery, but we didn't have to stock as many boxes and I could send guys down the street literally to go get a shipment. And he just like, yeah, tell me what you want me to keep in stock and I'll do it. So looking local for suppliers can really save you money.

Interesting, huh? Yeah, no, that makes sense because they don't have to ship to you, so there's not that cost. They don't have to absorb that cost. So, yeah, it can be split down. How about taking a look at your business from the standpoint of what else. We have these assets, and I don't know what the assets are because every business has different assets. But are you utilizing all of the assets that you have? And almost certainly the answer is going to be no. So what could you do with those unused portions of your assets? Is there a new income stream that can be generated there? Right.

Yeah, you're totally right. Whether it's, I don't know, web services, you've got extra server something or this or that. And I have a story about this you might be surprised to hear. We had a bunch of warehouse space and we were using the space, but I had a guy down the road that said, hey, we're parking our trucks outside and we're having some theft problems. How much would you pay me for at the end of the day, if I could just pull all my trucks in your. In your warehouse? And, you know, immediately I was like, well, you know, I don't know. I was just a young guy and he's like, look, he's like, I want to pull 10 trucks in there. Let me pay you 500 bucks a month, because that's going to save me. And I was, yeah, absolutely.

Sure.

So six o', clock, this guy, they would roll in and they would just park right in our aisles. And, you know, we opened, we were early, they came. I didn't give anybody a key. I had a warehouse person that. There were a couple of them that, you know, came in, and one came in early, one stayed late, and it was 500 bucks, you know, it was awesome.

That's great. That's extra. 500 free dollars a month. Yeah.

So look at your.

Yeah, super smart.

You know, I. Yeah, look at your storage. Could you condense part of your warehouse and let somebody store things there? You know, do you have extra capacity in one of your employees? Administrative people? Can you have. Do you have enough? Like, we had a pretty big, like, call center of people taking, you know, orders coming in. And as we. I'm really going to date myself here. But as we shifted to more and more people comfortable placing repair orders online and doing this kind of thing, I didn't need them. All right. And so we were constantly looking for new ways to do it. Well, you know, coming up with a ways to share those or work, share, job, share with those people would be really smart.

Yeah. That. Well, yeah, that makes me think, looking at your business, what are the things that you are good at for yourself? Right. Forget about your customers. Not don't forget about your customers. But for the moment, focus on you. What have you needed to figure out how to do internally so that you can run your business, whatever that might be. Right. And I'll call this the Dave Hamilton mistake, because I've done this and ignored the benefits so many times. I just don't want to count. But my favorite example is that, you know, back in 1999. Yeah. It would be 99. December of 99, I wrote a content management system.

Oh, yeah, right.

Because WordPress didn't exist. Like, there was no. There was one, but it was like 100 grand. And so I met with these people. The stupidest part, Shannon, I went and I met with this company, and I was like, look, you know, we're publishing a news website. You have this content management system that's built for this. Like, it's perfect. We should work together. Like, yeah, it's $100,000.

I'm like, that was how they wanted to work with you.

I'm like, I don't think you want to work with. Do you understand? I'll show you my books if you want, but I don't know that this business will ever gross 100 grand. Thankfully, it did in time. But at that point in time, it was like, well, we're getting a couple hundred bucks a month here and there for stuff. And we were just getting started. But I'm like, this is. And I remember sitting there, they just happened to be based in Austin, so they were like, five miles from me. So I went and sat with them, and I remember saying to them, you know, there's a lot more people out there just like me. If you were able to cut your cost down to $1,000 instead of $100,000, I bet you'd get 1,000 times the number of customers and you'd make more money in the end. You've already built the system. Right. The hard work is done. You're marketing it the wrong way. And I remember saying that to him because I was frustrated. And they were like, yeah, well, pound sand, buddy. So I did, and then I went home and I wrote my own content management system. And I didn't listen to the advice that I had given to them. Yeah, but it happens to me so often, Shannon, because I'm that guy, right? I get frustrated. I say, I'm gonna fix it. I'm gonna do it myself. Right? But I Know that a lot of us entrepreneurs do the same thing. Right. So I didn't. I knew how to program, certainly, but the languages that I used to build that System, which was PHP and MySQL, I didn't know those languages the day that I started with a blank page. And a week later I had our content management system built. And we ran on that for probably 10 years before we moved to third party stuff. If I had been smart enough to take a look, to listen to the advice that I had literally given two days before to someone else, we might have had a whole different trajectory for our business. Yeah. So thinking about those things, like, what problems have you solved for yourself? And if you think you're the only one that needs that solution, you're silly. And you're even sillier if you think, well, this gives me a leg up over my competition, so I'm not going to share it with them. No, you're not going to share it with them for free. You're going to share it with them for a profit and it's totally fine.

Oh, well, well. And this is. And again, I'll jump ahead a bit. I have a couple more things I want to talk about.

But you're not jumping ahead for anybody but yourself. I'll just remind you of that. We're all here real time for this conversation.

Yeah, that's true. A great way to cut cost is actually to create new revenue streams, right?

Yes.

With your existing infrastructure. So all the stuff you're talking about, now's the time to get creative. Even to the point where, as I was taking these notes, I was like, you know, if you're really good at cost cutting, why don't you offer that expertise to other companies?

Yes.

Hey, we'll come in. Because one of the things you talked about. Sacred cows a little bit.

Yeah.

Well, I've had this problem where people just, oh, no, we cannot cut that. Cannot cut that. So having my bookkeeper and then eventually my accountant do this audit for us, an outside person, that would be like, hey, how do you justify this? How do you justify that? It really helped me so you could possibly sell that service to somebody else. So think about it.

Or at the very least, even if you can't sell it to somebody else, even if you're. I know you could, folks. But even if you're not confident selling it to somebody else, find another small business that maybe is, you know, either a friend of yours or someone that's not a direct competitor, just so everybody feels comfortable and do it for Each other look at each other's businesses and ask those questions. Because you're right, we won't look at our own sacred cows, whatever those might be, but somebody else doesn't. Not sacred to them. It's only you. And they have the ability to be more objective, just like you do for them. And you can really maybe help each other out in that regard.

Yeah, absolutely.

I can't tell you how many times. I mean, you and I do it for each other all the time. It's like, why are you doing that, man? Well, it's because I. Because it's important to me. Okay, well, why? Well, I have an emotional attachment to it. And as soon as I hear myself say those words, it's like, okay, yeah, thanks, man. I'm good. Yeah, yeah.

You know, you gotta do your thing. That. That's part of it.

Yeah.

You can justify it that way.

Yeah.

Better to have an outside pair of eyes sometimes.

For sure. I think so. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

One thing, you know, a couple little things.

Yeah. If you've got two or three more good pieces of advice for people. Let's. Let's do a rapid round here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep.

Here we go. You know, one of the things is don't buy new, buy refurbished.

Right.

You always look for the deal. I haven't bought a new computer in decades and I always buy refurbished. I get it. You know, with Apple Care or whatever, some deal, there's always deals out there for stuff you want. You need to run your business, whether it's warehouse equipment, a forklift you can buy used with a warranty, computers, whatever it is. Buying new, in my opinion, especially for business stuff, is just a waste of money because it immediately loses a tremendous amount of value when you get it. The other thing I would say is if you're good, your cash flow is really good and you're paying your bills on time, you need to start asking for discounts if you can pay those invoices earlier. Because as cash tightens up in the, in the economy here and people are struggling a little more, they're going to want to give you something to get your cash. So you might get a, A significant. Any bit. Say if I pay that net 30 invoice in 10 days, is there an incentive to do that if you're not already getting those things? Ask for it.

I like that. And if someone says no, then ask. Okay, cool. Well, can I Pay this net 90 or can I pay it net 12 months with no interest? If you don't want the cash up front, are you good with that price as long as I pay you, you know, 12 installments, one. One per month. Because I've actually found myself in that position where somebody was like, no, I won't give you a cash upfront discount. I was like, okay, well, you know, can I have terms? Can I do 24 months with no interest? They're like, yeah, like that seems insane to me, but well, sure.

It depends on your cash position. Right?

It's exactly right. Yep. They were in the position where they wanted to book that revenue at that level.

Level.

And so it was better for them to take the cash slowly so they could book the revenue at the full price instead of saying 80% or something like that.

Yeah, definitely. On the same type of thing, we're talking about being transparent and talking to your employees. You want to be transparent with your suppliers, your contractors and let them know it's kind of a warning shot. Yeah, things are going kind of nuts. How are you guys doing? And at the same time you kind of interject like, yeah, this is tight, or we're going to be looking to cut costs here and cut this, that and the other. And you'd be surprised at how that can really wake up a supplier or contract. Say, hey, let me look at your account and see what I can do. Same, you know, all your people, whether it's from an insurance, you're paying all kinds of insurance. Get that looked at. Everybody you need to start assessing and looking for discounts. And I'd love to hear your ideas. What did we miss? You know, go to the small business support group, BusinessShow Co Facebook. Come on over there and talk to us there. We'd love to hear from you.

Yeah, absolutely. This is great. I like this. I liked our little lightning round at the end. This is good.

Me too.

Feedbackusinessshow Co folks, is where we want to hear from you. Or like Shannon said over at BusinessShow Co Facebook. And yeah, check out out our sponsors, would you? Make sure itrustcapital. Com so that you can start investing in cryptocurrencies in a tax advantaged way. Bambi. Com Small to avoid all those HR headaches. Keep living that charmed life. I'll see you next week.