Employee Loans and Alternative Finance Sources

Hey there. Welcome to another edition of the Small Business Show. Today we're going to take your questions, talk about them and hopefully come up with some answers, aren't we, Dave?

That's the idea. I mean, there's never one answer to any of these questions. Right? So.

Good point.

I was going to say I like computers because there's one answer to the question, but that's not even true there. In fact, I've got some business therapy if we have time at the end that will expose that. But there you go.

That's great.

Yeah.

And both of these questions to do with money, but in a little different manner. So I'm looking forward to it. Should we start?

Yeah, here we go.

You guys always talk about creating your own reality, but what about the reality of having to pay the bills and not having enough money? Have you ever been in a position where you could not pay the rent, make payroll or pay other bills? How did you get through it and what resources did you use that I may not know about, you know? Yes, Terry, yes, totally. Totally have been there. And you know, my take on the, you know, hey, creating your own realities, making your own story. This is just part of it.

I was just gonna say this is where it actually happens the most.

Correct.

Greetings, folks. You know where we are. We know where we are. It's the Small business show. Episode 240. Wednesday, September 11, 2019. I'm always reminded of that day, man. It's. I am reminded of how much I appreciate my family on September 11, because I was absolutely. I was supposed to fly home that fateful 911 day, and thankfully I did not make it to the airport because all flights were canceled by the time I got there. But I was stuck in Austin without my family, and they were really close. They were an hour from the World Trade Center. Like, that's where we lived at the time. So, yeah, that's rough.

I saw a quote today that I really respected a lot, you know, after 18 years, and said, hey, let's, you know, in honor of September 11th, let's all act like we did on September 12th.

Yeah.

And I was like, oh, yeah, that's really good. You know, how everybody was together, this kind of thing. So I thought that was pretty powerful.

I like that. That's good. Sponsors for this episode include Go Co SBS and textexpander.com podcast. We'll go through some details about those URLs and why they're important to you in a little bit. But why don't we start. Should we start With Grace's question. Man.

Yeah, let's do that. You know, last week we asked or we talked about, hey, let's. Let's help some people out if they have some questions. So we got some good feedback, and we're going to share a couple of those today.

Absolutely. Yeah. So Grace writes, Dave and Shannon, I love the show and wanted to thank you for your weekly encouragement and motivational tips. Well, you're welcome. You're welcome. That's awesome.

That's cool.

Yeah. Have either of you ever been in a situation where an employee was in a tight spot and asked for a loan? If so, how did you handle it? If not, how did you handle turning them down? I find myself in this situation now, and I'm not sure how to proceed. I can afford to loan them the money, but I don't want it to turn into a bigger problem. Well, you know that you are identifying all the right things. I remember the first time one of my employees came to me and said, I need essentially a loan. I mean, it was. It was pitched as, hey, can you give me an advance on next month's, you know, thing? And I made a critical error at that point that stuck with me for probably five years before I sort of backtracked on it. And the critical error I made was, I mean, I was, you know, relatively young business owner. I had. It was the first time that I was in a. In a business like this. It was the first time that I was sort of the senior partner of a business. I had been like, junior partner in different businesses. But when this guy came to me for the loan, I said, he started explaining why, and I stopped him and I said, hey, look, yes. The answer is yes. Here's the details of the loan. I don't need to know anymore. You know, and it was fine. But five years later, he said to me, he's like, I know you don't like to know about what's going on in my personal life, but I need to tell you. And it was like, whoa, I really did say that. Like, that. That is exactly the message I communicated, that I don't want to know what's going on in your personal life. And at the time, I thought I didn't. Obviously, that was. In retrospect, of course, that was wrong. I do need to.

Much broader comment taken in a much broader context than you maybe meant.

Right? No, I mean, I meant it specifically, but I also would have agreed with it in that broader context. At the time, I definitely believed, no, you know what you're. You Just work for me. I. It doesn't matter to me what happens at your house. As long as you can show up and do the job, I don't care about the rest. And of course, I mean, like I said, I've since learned. Whoa, no, you sort of need to know your employees. I mean, it's a good thing because they're human beings and, like, it allows you to form a better bond with them, and that helps with loyalty and all of that good stuff. But. But just from a business standpoint, you got to know, like, if somebody, you know, if somebody is. Is going to have something going on in their life where they're going to need some off or whatever. Like. Like, you need to know what's going on with people. Are they having some health issue that's gonna, you know, maybe not be massively disruptive, but minorly disruptive? It's good to know It's. It's okay to talk about those things. And I had very much made it not okay to talk about those things, so. And it took me five years before somebody, you know, offhandedly said, you know, I know you don't like this. Like, whoa, yeah, yeah, I screwed that up. Okay.

Not what I'm. Not what I meant. In retrospect, it's. I did.

I. I met. That was a mistake, is really what it was. Yeah, it was what I meant, but it was a mistake. Yeah.

Yeah. And, you know, I think to your point, like you mentioned Dave Grace, you're asking all the right questions. You know, number one, do you want to do it? And if. If you don't want to, there's repercussions about that as well. I. I've been in this situation a number of times, and I've. I've, you know, loaned employees money over time. I think that. I think what you have to do is, is just like anything else is you got to be really clear in how it's going to work.

Right.

If somebody, let's say you're going to loan somebody 500 bucks, you know, how are they going to pay it back? Are you taking it out of their check on this certain payback rate or whatever it is? This is not like loaning a friend money. That where I always say, hey, if you're going to loan somebody money, you know, you better be willing just to give it to them.

Right? Right.

Because if they're your friend or family member, it's not really a loan because it could never come back, and you.

Don'T want to have that.

And.

Yeah. Are you Going to sacrifice the friendship or the relationship over getting paid back? Oh, yeah. No. Do you have to? Yeah. I always think of loans to friends as I'm giving you this money, and someday in the future, you may choose to give me money, but, you know, and the two might even be related, but I am. I cannot expect to get this back. That's right. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. But with an employee, it's different.

Right.

Because you need to. It needs to happen all the time, you know, happen very clearly. How it's going to come back into the. The company. Because really, it's. I mean, unless you're giving them a personal loan, I would. I would suggest against that. I would say the company should loan them the money if it's in a position to do so.

Yes.

And I think it should come out of their check, and there should be a really clear payback schedule. And I also think it. It depends on the individual. If this is the fifth time this year that this person has asked you for an advance, there's more going on here than, I just need a one time my car broke down, and I need, you know, 500 bucks to get it fixed or something like that. So I think you need to look at it like that. But, you know, I think if. If you write it out, have the details like you said, Dave, you don't really need to know what's going on. But usually people say, hey, my car broke down, or, hey, I have to do this. That's fine. But. But it's got to be basically written up so they know what to expect. And then you kind of have to monitor it and see if it's happening over and over again. But, you know, as a business owner, I think it's something that's nice to do for your people when they find themselves in a. In a pinch, you know?

Yeah, absolutely.

I think. I think it's good. And. And I think you're. Like I said, Grace, you're asking all the right questions so you're prepared that, hey, this could be problematic, and I want to be sure that it's not. And you can have that discussion. And I would encourage you to have that discussion with the person you're loaning the money to.

Very. Yeah.

Ye. I don't want this to turn into an issue. I've written up this payback schedule, and here's this contract that. The one thing that I have found in the past having a problem with this is I just can't help but start to think, like, well, what are these guys spending their money on, you know, and I don't know if it's. But like, if I see if I, you know, somebody loaned somebody money, whatever, and then they show up to work with a new car or they go on a nice vacation and they haven't gotten everything paid back, I started to think, wow, you know, was that the right thing to do?

Am I, Am I funding that? I mean, the answer is yes.

Yeah, the answer is yes. Right. It might be taken advantage of. What happens if they quit? You know, I think you should put that in, in your, Your written. Your agreement is that, you know, if you're terminated or. Because I've had it before where, oh, we can't let them go because they still owe, you know, a thousand dollars and they need another whatever month to pay it off. Well, that's a nightmare, right?

Y.

So you have to be able to collect in full upon termination or if they quit. And that's, I think, a very important thing to put in your. In your whatever agreement that you work out. And I think you have to use the agreement. The same agreement with every employee.

Oh, absolutely.

You know, you don't want to go down that route. And I think, I think it's important.

Yeah. I found two links here, and I, I have not vetted either one of these, so I, you know, no promises, folks, but there. The first is a. Just a generic loan agreement from Rocket Lawyer, which, you know, is a good place to go. And I mean, you can search the Internet and find boilerplate loan agreements. Right. But. But here's one. And then that way at least you're starting with something that's got some basis in. In reality and has been embedded a little bit. And then I found this other1@shrm.org and I'm not even sure who that is, but anyway, they. Pay advances policy. Yeah. And it, you know, I mean, again, you know, please don't take this stuff as just gospel and ship it off to your employees tomorrow. But, you know, there's. There's some good things in here. Like, you know, this particular pay advances policy is pretty strict. It's, you know, it starts with the company discourages any advancement of pay not yet earned. And exceptions will require extraordinary situations. And then they even have like an eligibility thing. Employees will be limited to two pay advances per year.

Oh, yes. Yes, I like that.

Right? Like that I would never have thought of.

Yeah, that's sort of cool.

This is actually why you often want to have an attorney for your company, just in general, because they. It. It. You're not just Paying them because they know how to dot the eyes and cross the T's. Legally, you're paying them because they've been through it before and they've. They. They know a few things and. Yeah, but. But Google can be your friend. And I, you know, I'm. I'm no stranger to using. You know, I'll go. I'll go search out six loan agreements and read through them all and be like, okay, I'm taking. Now I got a picture. Ah. Never thought about this before. So. So I would definitely. And I agree with you, come up with that agreement, sleep on it, then present it to your employee, because that is the agreement you'll be using with the next one. Yep.

Yeah, that's right. You don't want to get in a position. And I, I do like the concept of making it part of your employee manual, if you will.

Yeah.

Because then it just. It's just really transparent. It's out there. Guess you could think, am I encouraging them to borrow?

That's the thing is, you might want to leave that out of the manual.

I guess so, because.

Because if it's in there, you may actually be obligated at some. I don't know.

Yeah, maybe.

But maybe that's the kind of thing where it's like, yeah, I think you'd leave it out. But then, you know, just have it in a drawer or a virtual drawer and be like, yeah, here's our policy. Here's how we do that. Yeah. We have chosen to grant you a loan. Right. That needs to be the beginning of it, and then you can sort of go from there. But you need to make it your explicit policy and also just your form that this is not something that's guaranteed. Right. That this is, at our discretion, we may choose at certain times to grant loans to employees who ask for them. Right.

Yeah. It's tricky because I get. I'm famous for, you know, doing things and. And thinking everything's going to be cool and then getting blindsided with, like, what? I didn't mean that. Or, you know, how someone took this the wrong way, Kind of like you're. Hey, I don't. I'm not interested in your personal, you know, stuff type comment. So I. I think you ought to have maybe, you know, two people are going to look at it or something. You don't want to. I. I'm reminded, used to have interns at Tech Restore for years and years, and at the end of each internship, they would work like, 120 hours. And this was unpaid, and it was there to learn. And this kind of thing, we taught them and everybody did great. They loved it. It was a real win, win situation. And when people were great, we gave them a reward, right? We earned some cash, few hundred bucks. Give them an whatever, an iPad or, you know, this kind of. Whatever we had laying around, this kind of thing. Hey, you know, here, thanks for that. We had one person that didn't do that great of a job, and we didn't give him anything.

Right.

And I guess word had gotten out on this campus of this technical school that we were getting interns from, that you would get rewarded at the end. And this guy wrote, he just raised a huge stink. And we were told in no uncertain terms by the school, you can't give him anything.

Wow.

No more. Nothing. No more. And I thought, gosh, you know, what a drag here. Your people that do really well, they get, get, you know, you get screwed, right? Because that, you know, because of one person that didn't do a good job and was upset that they didn't get treated the same way. So I, I want to. That's my cautionary tale. And I, I just, you know, you don't want to be in that position because you loan someone some money, they're going to talk about it, and then someone else is going to come and ask you for money and you're going to say, you know what? I'm just not comfortable. Yeah, you're not. You're not that same employee. We're not sure how long you're going to work here, so be prepared that there are some nuances to perhaps having two people and you could put that even on the thing. You know, we have a. I hate the word committee, but we have a team that reviews these and we decide together whether or not the company can.

To grant them.

Yeah. And it just may be a certain time, your cash flow may be such that you're like, hey, you know what? We just can't afford right now to give you a thousand bucks. Try again in 90 days. I mean, so you want to just document that stuff so you protect yourself, Grace. And if any of those kind of questions come up, people think weird things that you didn't mean. Believe me.

Oh, yeah.

It's always. It's always interesting. So. But I think it's great that you're thinking about it, and I think it's awesome. I love that generosity. I think it's a wonderful thing to implement. You just got to protect yourself.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Yes.

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Oh, that's cool.

Both hosts have years of experience running many successful small businesses. I have found that they have a wealth of knowledge expressed in a very entertaining way. The only correction I would make is that both hosts have years of running many small, small businesses, including lots of failures. But. But I think that actually helps.

Yeah, it helps a lot.

The successes are. You're not wrong. There's. There's some successes in there. But, yeah, you know, you gotta have the failures. So. Yeah, it's good.

That's great. That's cool.

Yeah.

All right, so let me. Let me read this question. This question really hit home to me because lately I've been on this kick. I know you've, you know, everybody's heard it. I've talked about creating your own reality, writing your own story, and it's great. And it's. And it's a. It comes from a. A real place of authenticity for me. But, you know, Terry, he writes in and says, you guys always talk about creating your own reality, but what about the reality of having to pay the bills and not having enough money? Have you ever been in a position where you could not pay the rent, make payroll, or pay other bills? How did you get through it and what resources did you use that I may not know about? You know, I. Yes, Terry, yes. Totally, totally have been there. And, you know, my take on the, you know, hey, creating your own realities, making your own story. This is just part of it.

I was just gonna say this is where it actually happens the most.

Correct? Yeah, correct. And I'll tell you a quick story. When I was a, you know, much younger businessman, and I was trying to get going, and nobody wanted to, you know, give me any money, you know, I was an unknown commodity, right? And I met a. A person who I later knew, you know, wound up knowing for years and. And started a company with him. But I was kind of following the auction circuit around the country, buying up technology stuff to. To resell. But I always ran out of money, didn't have enough money. And I met this guy, his name was Jay. And I was at a sale in Texas, and we went out, you know, get a drink or something afterwards. And he says, and I was lamenting the fact that I was always running out of money, and I, you know, I couldn't pay the bills, and I was always stretched. And this guy pulled out a stack of credit cards. And this was, you know, 20 years ago and maybe 25. And, you know, it was probably 2 or 3 inches thick. And he said, hey, here's, you know, $500,000. And, you know, feel free to use it if you need it, but you should also get this. So you have that $500,000 available to you. Not to mention all the other benefits that we've talked about on the. To, you know, frequent flyer miles, affinity points, this kind of thing, just access to the capital. And I really took that to heart. And when I came back, one of the. And this is one of the things I'm going to tell you is you really should have a good depth of access to credit, whether it's your credit cards, whether you have a line of credit on. If you own a home, having a heloc, a home equity line of credit is always a smart thing. And get it when you don't need it.

I was just gonna say that's the key. When you need it, they will not talk to you. That's right.

Yeah, that's right. So you want to get it, I think for two reasons. One, for, you know, when you can't pay the bills, can't pay the rent, you can borrow from it, pay it back. And the other thing is when you have opportunities, because things will happen over time, and somebody say, boy, you know, in my case, it was, oh, we want to dump this product, and if somebody could take it all, we'd really cut the price. Or, you know, this kind of thing. So those opportunities, when you have access to that capital, if you haven't accumulated the cash, the HELOC is great. Or, you know, those credit cards, I mean, we used those credit cards like you. I mean, we, we burned the plastic up on those things. The key is, is having the cash flow to make the payments.

Right. That.

That's a different discussion. If, if you don't want to use those cards, if you don't, if you're not going to have the cash flow to make those payments and hopefully not pay any interest.

Right, right.

If your business is struggling for other reasons, you know, your market isn't good, or maybe, you know, the concept or your product, whatever it is, you have to be able to look at that and go, wow, okay, if I go borrow this money, how am I going to pay it back? What's happening? Do I have, you know, in our case, we would have purchase orders and open invoices that hadn't been paid yet.

Yet.

And so you knew that, okay, well, I've got, what are my receivables? You know, I've got whatever $100,000 in receivables. I can go, you know, borrow 100 grand because I know I've got that cash coming in or whatever percentage of that. So you want to look at that very carefully. Other ways I have used, you know, PayPal has a really interesting product where they will give you a small business loan with, like, I mean, instantly just based history with them. That's why one of the things I like to use, PayPal, in addition to a regular merchant processor. PayPal's really creative. And so if you've used them over the years, and it's never too late to start as at least one option when people pay, you'll build up some history and you'll eventually start to get these offers, and they'll say, okay, hey, we'll loan you $20,000. Here's what it costs. They don't charge you interest, or they'll call it interest, but they charge you a fee. And maybe, you know, you may consider it high. I mean, to borrow 20 grand, you may cost you 500 bucks, I don't know. And, but they'll just take it from your PayPal. As your money comes in, you know, you're going to pay it back as you receive payments. And that's how they kind of calculate. Okay. Based on the payments we've received, we will loan you X. And it's great. And I've used it. And if you use Amazon Payments, which I Know, is a little more obscure. They do a similar thing too, too, if you, you know, so it's, and I think those are good things.

Stripe. I, I, we wind up using stripe more than PayPal. And so I looked and Stripe has their, they call it their Stripe funding circle, but it seems to be exactly this. And they're like, look, you can apply with Stripe, we will pre fill information. So they're obviously using your, you know, your history with them as part of that. So that's pretty cool.

And I think another good one is, is Kabbage K A B B A G E. You know, they're going to base the loan off of your credit history and this kind of stuff. But there's, you know, access. They do up to a quarter million dollars.

Yeah.

Again, if, if you think you're going to need to borrow them, borrow money, you should do it before you need it if you have that luxury.

Right.

Sometimes you don't.

Well, like you said, get the HELOC in place. Get, you know, get, go to your bank and just get a line of credit.

Yeah, get a line of credit. If they won't give you one on your business, the HELOC is great. People always, look, I, I talk to people like, wow, you know, you put that at risk. I, yeah, I mean that, that's, you're in business, it is risk. And maybe you just do a small heloc. You know, my, our first line of credit, you know, that I got was like $50,000, you know, and then slowly over time, you know, you build it up. But, but you've kind of diversified these things. Maybe you've got a couple hundred thousand dollars in credit card, you know, financing that you could use in a pinch.

I mean, I've made use of all of these things and I treat, I mean, mean, I like to have one. Especially when you do start to get into those cash pinches. Right. There is one that I, and it doesn't matter which one it is. You know, I've got credit cards and I've got a, I've got a heloc, of course, and then I've got a, you know, actually two lines of credit with two different banks with the, with the business just to kind of diversify a little bit.

Yeah, that's smart.

The HELOC at this point is really the emergency. Right. Like I can tap these lines of credit because I've been able to establish them, but there is one line of credit that I have designated as the last resort. Now, I know I've got the HELOC past it. But that line of credit, if I touch that or even if I'm thinking about touching it, that means that I need to make significant and immediate changes to my cash flow picture.

That's good. Yeah.

You know, and I did. I ran into that actually it's just about a year ago. It was like, oh, wait a minute, I'm, I'm doing something wrong. Actually, it was more. It was a couple of years ago. I, how time flies. But, but yeah, I ran into a problem a couple of years ago where we had a short term cash crunch and it was like, wait a minute, sure. This is more than short term. Because if it was short term, I wouldn't.

Yeah, that's correct.

Thinking about that, this has been going on longer. I, you know, it's been a slow burn. I need to make some changes. I need like wholesale, big, immediate changes to pave, like you said, the path for the future so that I can pay it off. As it turned out, I didn't even need to tap that. But the fact that I was thinking about it was enough of, you know, that, that, that I, I always set like, like, you know, mental reminders like, oh, you know, I'm leaving the house. I'll put my keys with my jacket so I don't forget my raincoat because I know it's going to rain today or, you know, whatever that is. This is one of those things. It's like, oh, if you're thinking about that, this means other things. Go ahead and, and, and you know, there might be some hard decisions you got to make today. And Right. And it was like, okay, yeah, all right, that's fine.

Yeah, yeah, that, that is so. That's such good advice. And it goes back to that, you know, look at your business. Don't borrow money. If, if there is no light at the end of the table, don't go deeper in if you can avoid it. Now, you know, I've, I've, I've done this, of course, a number of times when I, I mean, I'm an eternal optimist. So I always think, okay, well, I'm going to figure it out. And you know, nine times out of 10 I've been able to figure it out, but there are times when I haven't. And I could tell you, you from having, you know, a bunch of different lines of credit, a great thing to discuss with your bank is a future plan to convert the line of credit to a term loan. If you're having problems getting that line of credit paid back down for example, if your line of credit is, you know, quarter million dollars, $250,000, then you want to, you're using it and everything else. And, and most of those lines want you to be paid down 30 days out of the year. And one of the old tricks is, you know, you get approved, they fund it and you just don't touch it for the first month. Right?

That's it.

Then you, then you draw it down and you've got, you know, 11 months of use or whatever if you have to. But it's really common to get out, especially if you're an inventory based business, which is what I, for the most part, I've always had in one form or another, another, you tie up a lot of that cash in your inventory and if it comes a point where you're like, man, I'm having a hard time getting this line paid down. But if you've already had that discussion with your banker and said, hey, if we run into this issue, you know, a couple years down the line or whatever, instead of, or maybe when we go to renewal, maybe, you know, we should plan on converting that into a term loan. Easy to make a, you know, standard monthly payment over maybe five years and you get that paid off. Banks love that because they want to expand their relationship, relationship with you, Right? Yeah, they want to get there. You know, it's not that I don't like banks, but they want to get their hooks into you deeper and have a broader portfolio. So if you're already talking about, yeah, you know, when we get there and, and they'll see that you've made some payments on that credit line, but maybe you haven't been able to knock it down below 200 grand. Maybe every time you pay 50,000 off, you know, a couple weeks later you're like, wow, I gotta tap that 50, I need that money again. And especially if your business is growing, growth is very expensive and it used to really mess with me. I'd be like, how come we never have any money but the business is doing so great?

Right.

But it was the cash flow that was always getting killed, profits be damned. Right, We've talked about that here on the show and I often have made the mistake of trying to just, you know, prop up the business with profits when you really have to build your business up with cash, cash flow, and the profits usually will follow. So anyway, that's my, my take on it and, you know, great questions. Anyone else has some feedback, we'd love to, you know, hear from you. FeedbackusinessShow Co and Terry and Grace, thank you so much for sending in your questions.

Yeah, yeah, it's great. It's freaking awesome. I love the interaction.

Yeah, me too.

Makes a, makes a huge difference. I have like one little. I don't even. It's just business venting, but I'll, but I'll share it. Yeah. So you know, we've been, we are a technology company. We host our websites and all this and we manage our own servers. We have, I mean it used to be co located servers, now they're virtualized but it's the same kind of thing. Right. And I have a team. There's the facility that we have our server with. It's a company called Servant. Actually it's now Lease Web. We migrated to some new hardware. It took forever for them to get the new hardware spun up. It was in the acquisition of Lease Web and Servant. So it took forever and it kind of got screwed up a couple times. Times. But what that did was it allowed us, it bought us some time where we could have two servers up and running simultaneously. And I thought, wait a minute. And the initial plan was they were just going to clone us over to a new server. I was like, wait, if you don't care that we're going to have two up and running in your data center for a little while, like a few months, we're just going to migrate over slowly and rebuild our stuff instead of just this five year old installation full. Actually it's more than five full of cruft and everything. It's like we'll start with a new operating system and get the stuff over there and, and that'll pave us a nice path for the future. And it was like, yeah, okay, great. They were totally fine with it. They, they were like, yeah, we screwed you on this other thing too many times. Like you're fine. Great. Awesome. Good customer service. You know, in the end. And now we're at the, we're, we're not at their end, we're at my end of this period. Right. And so, so the issue is this is a one time every five year thing. Right. And it's not something that's going to happen next month. It's not something that's going to happen next year. It may not ever even happen again. Right. Like I have. Who knows where the business is going to be in five years? Right? Right. Yeah. Right. It's impossible to say. I am the one that knows more about the way this is configured than anyone else. Else. I have our admins, I have a Team of admins are actually offshore. They're in, in Russia. They are great, but they are not like they are great for me to say go do this, I need to be the manager of this project. And they've done a lot. I would say that they probably did 60, maybe 70% of it, but now this final 30%. I could train them how to do this and walk through it with them and you know, sit around waiting to test things and figuring, you know, trying to figure out what they're doing and it would take me way longer than it's taking me to just do it myself. But you know, I like, I hate that I'm, I'm the one, I don't mind doing it. I actually quite enjoy this kind of stuff, but it takes me away from all the other stuff and it's, you know, it's not ten dollar versus thousand dollar an hour work. But you know, these offshore or folks like, I mean, I do, I mean I think we only pay him like 30 or 40 bucks an hour. So you know, like I'm doing this work that other people could do, but I would have to spend a lot of time teaching them exactly what they need to do and then they could go do it. And I don't think it's worth my time to, you know, because I'm spending my time one way or the other. It's like if I'm going to teach you and this is a non repeatable task, I'm just going to do it, it's fine. So.

Right.

I don't, I think that's partially a character flaw for sure. It's, you know, it's rooted in impatience, but it's also rooted in my perfectionism. Like this is kind of important and I want it right. And I, if it, you know, and I've, I've sort of litmus tested each of these. I've sort of broken the migration up into modules and, and with some of them it was like I would ask their opinion, how would you recommend I do this? And when they would tell me something it's like, okay, great, you do it. Awesome. And then there was the part where it's like actually migrating all the site files over and those sort of things. I'm like, how would you do do this? And they had terrible answers. It was like, oh, okay, so you are not the right person to do this. Okay, no problem. No, it's fine. You know, I could teach you the right way, but you don't like. No, no, I'm not going to.

So how about that. How about using that 80% rule that, you know, Gary Von Meyer from Tech Defenders, you know how he mentioned that, which, you know, he. Once they can do 80% of what he's doing, he turns it over. Even that last 20, which may be what you're talking about.

Yeah.

Can be a little painful. He, you know, brought up that concept of freeing himself to then move on to the next thing, knowing that, you know, I'm going to get 80 out of it, or they're going to be able to do 80. Maybe that last 20, I'm gonna have to. Or it's not going to be quite as good. Or they don't know how to do it. You know, maybe. Maybe try that concept.

That's the concept I need for the next time. I'm too deep, like, no, I'm too deep in right now. This is like, we are days away. Hopefully by the next time we record together. This is now behind me. Right. So we are. We are days away. I'm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's. But, but you're right there is that the thing is, I don't know what 80% perfect looks like with this. Like. And I'm not sure, like, this would have been. This is good advice because this is why we do this. This would have been the right time to test this out. Because. Because I'm not in a time crunch. Right. I could have had them do this and then say, okay, no, no, no, no, no. Fine. But part of the problem is, you know, they're not right here in my office. I'm not. They're not. You know, I don't get to hear when they start grumbling about a problem that they're having, they just buckle down and try and solve it. And what might happen is, you know, I say, okay, do a dry run, migrate this stuff over, see what it looks like. But don't cut over the world yet. You know, leave the world on the old server. Server. Let's test, see what it looks like on the new server. They might well just be like, ah, you know what? It looked like it was working fine. I cut everything over like that. That has happened before.

Sure. Yeah.

I think it's partially because in. In Russia, the concept of quality control is not the same as what we have here.

Yeah.

And it's fine. Like, I've. I don't say that in a derogatory way. It's just. That's a lesson I've learned the hard way over the last two decades, employing, you know, offshore folks over there. So it's like, sure. I mean, but I'm. I'm only paying them 20 to 40 bucks an hour, so, yeah, I think.

That, yeah, getting that. Those people, those folks are awesome, but getting the business processes across is. Can be very challenging.

Yeah, it's. If I can tell them, do this compartmentalized thing. It's freaking awesome. Yeah.

Yes, it is.

And. And so I don't have anyone else that I can just go, you know, go do this. And when I hear you start to grumble and when I hear the pots start to, you know, start to whistle, I can step in and say, hey, where are you? What's going on? Yeah, tell me what's happening. You know? So there you go.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, we should do a show about outsourcing and offshoring. We haven't done one of those in a long time, but we should do that. I think that's great.

All right, well, thanks. This actually was really good advice that it teaches me for the next time before I just dive in. It's like, wait, is 80% okay on this? You know, if it is, then that's the answer.

And. And maybe for mission critical stuff, you can't do that. You know, maybe it has to be higher than that. I don't know. But worth looking at.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I like it. I like it.

Well, thanks for listening again, folks. Dave, thanks for hanging out this week again.

Thank you. This is talking about small business.

Yeah. I enjoy answering these questions. We'd love for you to review the small business show if you're. You've enjoyed it. BusinessShow Co review will get you there, and it does really help. We really appreciate it.

Yeah. And feedback at businessshow Co. Just to send in all your stuff, because that's what we. That's how. That's how we were able to do the show today. So thank you so much to everybody. There were a few other questions that came in. We'll. We'll. We're keeping them in the queue.

Don't worry. Some good ones. Some good ones that we're going to talk about soon.

Yep. Yep. All right. Well, that's it. Thanks so much for everything. Thanks, Shannon.

Thank you.

Charmed life, folks.