Essential Tools for Small Business Owners – Small Business Show 172

The Small business show episode 172 for Wednesday, May 23, 2018. Greetings, folks. Welcome back to the Small Business show here at BusinessShow Co, the show where we are BFA by, for and about small business. Sponsors for this episode include Textexpander. We're@textexpander.com podcast you get 20% off your first year here in Durham, New Hampshire.

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

I am good. It's been crazy couple of weeks, busy. And I'm really happy that we're talking about the tools that we use to make our lives, make our businesses run as efficiently as we can, even when we're busy. Especially when we're busy.

And I think that, yeah, and that's a, to expand on your point about your life being busy, we're gonna talk about these tools today. And I think they make your personal life better as well. Right, Because a lot of it's automation or stuff and there's definitely this bleed through into your crossover into your personal stuff.

Bleed through, man. We're entrepreneurs. There's a difference between business and personal life.

That's true. I posted in the small business support group recently at BusinessShow Co and I did this post on Friday, on a Friday. And it was, you know, the average person's like, it's Friday with the big exclamation point, you know, but the entrepreneur, the business owner is like, it's Friday with a question mark.

You know what? That actually happened to me this morning. I had a back and forth email chain going with a customer and we were, you know, back and forth quickly doing stuff and we sort of got to the end of the questions, you know, like I was asking some questions and she was answering me and I almost wrote her and said, awesome, Well, I hope you have a great Friday and a great weekend. And then I, before I sent the email, I realized, yeah, it's Wednesday. And so I, I wrote her that, you know, and I said, wow. And then I said, yeah, I need sleep. And she wrote me back, it said, so happy Wednesday, you know, and she wrote me back, she said, yeah, that would have been an awful trick. Like, yeah, but it wasn't a trick.

Yeah, it's great.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yep. Have no idea. No idea.

And so, yeah, so as we, as we talk about these, these are, you know, I, I notes here. Tools that we can't live without to manage our businesses and our lives. Really, I think that's a really good point. That and also, you know, we always say here on the small business show that owning a small business or multiple small businesses, you don't have any freedom, but what you have is flexibility. And I think that as I went down my list of things I, I just saw that trend is like, well, that, that really gives me flexibility to do X or allows me to do my stuff anywhere, you know, all that kind of stuff. So I think that's a part of the theme today.

It's the.

Why don't we jump right in?

Okay, yeah, let's go, let's talk.

Let's talk about it. You want to start?

I will start. I'll start us and I'm going to start us pretty deep in the pool with something that I've been using. Yeah, it's okay. For 20 years, called Filemaker. Filemaker. You know, and it's, here's the thing, it's the last thing I put on my list because I almost forgot about it. And yet I use filemaker every single day. We. So filemaker is at its core a database program. Right. But you can build your own databases. They have, and they're up to version 17 now, which just came out. And it's fantastic. They've got some templates or pre built kind of starting points that are fantastic. But the great part about filemaker is you can customize it and it is built to be customized. In fact, the databases that we use we built out of whole cloth because there were no, you know, 20 years ago it was just like, okay, download Filemaker and figure it out from there. And it wasn't quite like that, but they didn't have the starting points. And that's the thing. So we have our, like for Backbeat media, we have our contacts database, our advertisers database, and then connected to that, we have the people that work for those companies and notes connected to that and, and all of our insertion orders, every single insertion order we've ever sent out. So contracts for people to buy ads are called insertion orders, but that's just contracts for people to buy ads. Every one of them is in that database. And then hung off of that are the billing records for each of those. So we track the entirety of our business there and, and then actually I, I export the data to QuickBooks so that I can, you know, manipulate the accounting and sync with the bank accounts and stuff. But, but it all happens in Filemaker, including our credit card billing and our PayPal billing, all that stuff. And it really isn't that difficult to put it all together. In fact it's super easy. And we do bulk mailings from filemaker and targeted like you know, we can say all right, we want to find people that have these criteria and you know, it comes out and does it and then we can send out our mailings and things like that. So it's just like it. We would have had, we would have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe even millions, you know, on CRM systems if we hadn't just gone with FileMaker from the beginning.

Yeah, yeah. And I would add it's on my list too. And you know, it is a database program but it's kind of built for non database people.

Thank you.

In the sense that as a. Yeah. As a business owner there is a tremendous amount of modification that you can do to it. So that is what separates in my opinion filemaker from other relational databases that you can do online or download or whatever.

It's all graphical. You can drag things around and configure things without being a programmer.

Yeah, yeah. Most applications force you to modify your behavior but you can easily modify FileMakers behavior to just do anything. I mean anything you want to track and you want to deal with, you want to sell, you want to collect data. I mean you can manage it in FileMaker. And there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of example databases that you can find online. Some of them free, some of them very, you know, inexpensive and then bring into FileMaker and then modify to fit your needs. Even the solutions that come with the FileMaker are easily modified. So if you want to add a button or add a field or stuff that's. I mean there is just nothing like it and as well I've used it for 30 plus years and I've run businesses that shipped, you know, thousands of items per month all through filemaker. You know, your website.

I don't know that you and I have ever had the filemaker discussion before. This is fascinating to me.

I don't think so.

I didn't know you used filemaker. That's which is crazy.

I mean yeah, we bought a company one time and I use FileMaker a little bit. When I was getting started, sure. It was an Apple product, right? Yeah, I believe they still own.

It's a wholly owned subsidiary of Apple but it works. They have Windows apps and, and of course Mac apps. And while we're talking about apps they also now, and I say now but it's been in existence for a number of years have mobile apps so you can like tap like it's great. We keep our, our Mac observer contacts database in there, Right. So people that we talk to about, you know, we talk about, you know, in fact, filemaker is in there, right. And anytime we do an article or anything about filemaker, we want to let them know. So we have like all the contacts. Anytime somebody, you know, a new person starts working there or whatever, we just log them in our database. And what's great is I can be at a trade show or, you know, press events or something and start walking up to, you know, a group of filemaker people and be like, oh, crap, I can't remember that person's name. I know it used to be so and so, but he left. Who is it? I can look on my phone very, very quickly and be like, oh, that's right, it's Tim now. Or whatever. It's not Tim, but you know that, like, there you go. And you're just right there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You keep your data right where you need it. It's. It's fantastic. Can you tell I'm excited about that?

Killer. Yeah, I would agree. I mean, we could talk the whole show about it. And those guys should be sponsoring this show because. Yeah, because it's. It. It is phenomenal. All right, so I'm going to go now and I'm going to combine these two things because I have a feeling this show could run really long. But the Mac changed my life. I had no interest in getting into the computer business or anything like it. My background is in landscape architecture. But the Mac changed my life when I was in college. And I cannot put too fine a point on it. And it enabled me to represent myself and my fledgling, you know, landscape architect and construction business in an entirely different way and maybe look way smarter than I, than I ever was or ever will be, and allowed me to charge a lot more money as I was just a kid. And, you know, I was shocked that people would write us these checks because everything, once everything looked professional and everything. And I did that on my Mac.

Yeah.

So, you know, one of the most important, the most important tool I would say for me is my MacBook Pro. And it's been all kinds of various iterations over the years of whatever Mac I've been running. But having this computer next to me and enabling me to do all this stuff, I mean, it is mind boggling. And then I would add my iPhone to that. Those two pieces of hardware from Apple have really changed my life. If you've listened to the show a long time, about a year and a half ago, or about a year ago, I Gu. I want to do an experiment to start a business that I could just run from my phone because I always have my phone with me. Remember that?

I do. Yeah.

And so I did it and it's worked and it's great. And now it's another revenue stream for me and I do the whole thing on my phone and we'll talk about that again. But those two pieces of hardware, I cannot stress enough. And of course, I run filemaker on both of those, but you just can't. I can't stress enough how important those two things have been in my business, even in my personal life.

Cool.

Dramatic.

I will combine, well, sort of. Email is really important to me. Okay. And there are two things that I use that make my life so much better. One of them, because I'll start with this because we're on the Apple train here, is a Mac product and it's a product for the Mac. It's not from Apple, but because I use a Mac. That's how it works. And it's a plugin for mail called Mail Acton. And it does lots of different things, but the things that I use it for are twofold. Number one, it allows me to sort my mail with keystrokes. So you can assign keystrokes to rules, which means if I want to file things or do things with messages, like if I know I want to move this to say we get an email from one of you folks@ feedbackusinessshow.co I want to put it in my business show to follow up folder or whatever. I can actually, if it comes into feedbackusinessshow.co it automatically goes to that folder for me. But sometimes people email me directly and it's a question for the show. So I want to put it in that folder and I want it to be unread. Well, you know, I hit Control B because that's the keystroke I've assigned and boom, it marks the messages unread and puts it in that folder for me. So that when I am going to look at business show, you know, small business show emails, boom, there they are. And they're organized by unread. And everything is exactly as I want. So that's one. And it just being able to do that from the keyboard without having to click, you know, the mouse three times to do it saves a lot of time. So that's one, one thing MailActon does. Another one that I use it for is delaying the sending of an email. How many times have you hit send and thought, oh crap, you know, and you don't think it right away, you think it ten seconds later. Right. It's like, oh, I could have said this or I could have said that. So I have all of my email with this plugin set to send one minute after I click send. You could set it to go 10 minutes after.

That's great.

And sometimes I do.

That's brilliant.

Yeah, sometimes I will. Like with a certain email, it'll be like, I think I'm done with this. I'm okay with sending it, but I'm going to set it to 10 minutes and that way if, you know, inspiration strikes, I can come back and revisit it. So that is a huge one for me is being able to do that. Similarly, with email, the. The next thing on my list is sanebox. Now sanebox is a cloud service that actually logs into your email for you so that you have to trust them because you're giving them access to your email box. So like, that's, you know, right up front. If you're not going to trust some companies, automated servers to log into your email box, you don't use this. I've been trusting them for, I think five years now, but a long time. And so much so that if they went away, I would, if no one else was doing what they were doing, I would, I would stop and build a product that does this. Because not, not that I could do it as well as they could, but I need something like this. So they look at every message that comes into your inbox and if it's a mailing list, it automatically moves it to your, you know, to a folder that they call Sane News. Right. Because it's a newsletter. Right. And if it's like receipts and things like that that are not overly urgent, it moves it into a folder called Sane Later. But the cool part is you can create your own folders and in an automated sense create your own rules. So I can take like, if it moves something into my Sane News folder and I'm like, oh, no, no, no, no, no. Everything that, like that one I want in my inbox. All I do is move it from the news folder to my inbox. It's watching what I do. It sees that I've done that. The next one of those that comes in, it leaves it in my inbox. It auto trains itself.

That's awesome.

And I can create other folders too. So I have folders that didn't come with it. Like I have one called Sane Watched, which is just me, sort of like a second priority thing. This way, my Inbox is really clean and only there with messages that are sent to me. And then I've got these other mess, these other mailboxes that are kind of tiered. And I'll tell you, it's way more efficient to go through your email, you know, to go through like a bunch of newsletters when that's all you're doing. They're not intermingled with these other things. You can do it much more efficiently. So that's one thing I use SaneBox for. The other is reminders. When I send an email out, and I know that I want to, like, come back around to it. Like, I've organized. Every Wednesday morning is when I come in and I go through all of my, like, all the pending sales that we have and things like that and just follow up on them. So anytime I'm sending an email out, doesn't matter what day it is, what time it is, I BCC Wednesday9amainbox.com and that then resurfaces that email in my inbox on Wednesday at 9:00am Obviously, if it's already been dealt with, great, no problem. And if it hasn't, boom, there it is. It reminds me I don't have to create any other system. I don't have to, you know, ask filemaker to remind me. Sanebox just does it and puts it right back in my inbox. It's pretty cool. So I.

That is cool.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Highly recommended.

That's. Yeah, that's good. And both those products I don't use, so I'm very excited about hearing about them. And. And, you know, I think that that's really great. Yeah, that's very cool. Okay. So another one I think might be on both of our lists that we've talked about a lot on the show is textexpander. And the fact that textexpander has become a sponsor has nothing to do with. This is a product that I've used and I think Dave has used for decades or however long they've been around. The automation that textexpander brings to not only you personally, but your business, your employees, all your communication, your customer service. I can't understate how powerful it is when, you know, I'm a control freak, especially when it comes to messaging to the customer and the tone we set with the customer and I guess the voice that we use as a company, I want that to be the same. I want the customer experience to be the same whether they talk to me or whether they talk to somebody we've just hired and only been with the company for a month. And one of the ways that I've been able to ensure that has happened over the years is with textexpander because I'm involved in creating how these email responses in this case are going to be used or you know, how the customer is going to be handled. And you can script that and create these responses and put them at the fingertips of everyone in your company so you know that when A happens, B is going to be the follow up. And there should not be too much variation there, just enough to personalize a little bit. And I love it. And it. Save. It is such a time saver if you're constantly writing the same things over and over and over again, dumping them into textexpander and putting a keystroke next to it. It's fantastic.

It's fantastic. So as I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, they are the sponsor of this episode. They. It is serendipitous that this happened, that, that it worked out this way. It was really not planned. In fact, you, you built the schedule for the, the, the topics of the show and, and then I said, oh, as it turns out, textexpander is the sponsor of that one. That's, that's, you know, that's perfect. That's right. Yeah. So I, I do want to talk through a couple of things. They gave us a great list of ideas for snippets that you might send regularly and that textexpander would help you with. They include directions, right? How many times have you done driving directions? Oh, yeah, I don't know. How come I don't already have a snippet for this? To be perfectly honest, I don't. I will, I'll fix this now. Mailing addresses, meeting agendas, website URLs. Like you said, Shannon, common sales responses, common support replies, reference requests. How many times have you asked somebody for a reference request and you, you pore over how you're going to word that email because frankly, it's really important. You know, it's like you want to get that right. Well, once you get it right the first time, save it as a snippet, you know, and then. Yeah, and then the one that, that we all should do, but I don't and I will start is names that you find difficult to spell. So really, really great stuff.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Like Shannon said, you know, you can share the snippets with your team and keep them all up to date together. And that's the power and the magic of snippets. And just a couple of examples of what you can do. So check them out. As I said at the beginning of the episode, textexpander.com podcast is where you can go. You sign up there and you will save 20% off your first year because you're a listener here to the Small Business show. And make sure you let them know that you heard about it here. We'd really appreciate that and they would too. Our thanks to textexpander for sponsoring this episode. Very serendipitously.

Yes, it is.

All right, man.

Yeah, you're up.

Oh, I'm up. Okay.

I think. Yeah, because I pulled that one out.

Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. Synology, the Synology Disk Station. I have found this thing to be crucial, integral to what we do here. So the Disk Station is at its core a network attached storage device. Which is to say that, that it's a device with a bunch of hard drives in it, therefore has lots of storage, but is also a computer. And it sits on your network. It's got, you know, you plug it in via Ethernet and it's got hard drives, but there's a computer in there because it has to be able to share the data that's on the, on those drives with the rest of the network. And what, what's really cool is. And they've really like taken this to another level. They've got some services that, that they offer packages, they call them. But it's like you're installing apps on this box. And remember, this is a box that's on your network. It's turned on all the time. And so it's a server is really what it becomes. And two of them that I have started using like all the time. Number one, they call it. Well, it's the name. It's the name is changing. The service used to be called CloudStation, now it's called Synology Drive. And what it is is it's your own private Dropbox. So if you've used Dropbox, you have a little app on your Mac or your Windows machine and there's a folder that's synced to the cloud and all your other computers and then you can share data with other people, but it's just synced and everything works magically. But you have to pay Dropbox for, you know, more than whatever, two gigs of storage, whatever you use with them. Yeah, exactly the same user experience, except there's no Dropbox cloud. You run your own cloud. It's a private cloud and it's on your Synology Disk Station. You can access it locally on your network. It's smart enough that you can access it when you're not local on your network, because it just comes in through your router and lets you talk. And you can have multiple team members using it or multiple family members, however you want to configure it and all that stuff. And it's awesome. And of course, you're not paying monthly for storage because you own the drives, you own the box where all of this stuff is stored and it's private. No one has access to your data. Yep. So that's one of them. And then the other app that I use is, they call it Office. And if you've ever used like Google, Google Docs or Google Sheets or any of that stuff online, it's that. But again, you're not hosting it with Google, you're hosting it on your own thing. And actually the new business that we started, we decided, you know what, we don't want Google to have any of this stuff, so why don't we just host it on my disk station? And it's been stellar. We have all these spreadsheets that we're tracking things on and we know we're the only ones that can get to it. It's fantastic. So that's my, you know, it's just one of those things. Do you use Synology stuff, Shannon? Is that.

No, I don't. Nope. It's great. I have. I mean, I've got a home server sitting here on a Mac Mini that we sync and do all kinds of stuff with, but. No, this sounds great. It sounds very useful.

Yeah, that's cool.

Yeah, that's the great thing about these kind of lists because you always find new things. You think, oh, I got this and it's great. And at that. But, you know, finding out new resources like. That's fantastic. Yeah, yeah, very cool. You know, I'm going to bring it out and so we can both talk about. I think it's both on our, on our list and let's talk about Slack for a couple of minutes.

Definitely.

We've, we've talked about it here a lot on the show because we use it to manage the show and to manage communication with our other team members and things. And on my path to Slack was, you know, I got in business when we didn't even have a website, you know, and then we got a website and the earn emails and then we had our own mail server in house. And I'm gonna stop you right there.

If you're con. If you are running A business or if you're starting a business and you're considering running your own mail server that you manage in house as opposed to your own mail server that you pay someone you know, like a cloud service to manage. Do not do that. Do not run your own mail server in your house. Correct. I am a geek. I love things like that. Even the geeky part of me wants no part of that. It's an awful, awful experience. Anyway, I didn't mean to interrupt, but.

Back then it wasn't as many. But now there's tons of different options to manage your email off site and it's great, you can use Google if you want them to manage your domain, all that kind of stuff. There's all kinds of different places. Yeah, fast mail. So then you know, we, we, as things grew, you know, we started using Instant Messenger, AOL Instant messenger back in the day and, and used that for years for intercompany communication. You know, it wasn't secure, but it was easy and it, it replaced email within our, our building, if you will. And it was, it was great and it was instant in responses and it was more fluid than emailing. You know, the office next door or the guy in the warehouse when you needed a fast response and you couldn't talk to him. But Slack is at a whole nother level of those things together and a combination of things that includes, you know, instant messaging, team communication, file hosting, just, and plugins to just anything you could, you can think of customer service you can use. There's chat apps you can run on your website that connect into Slack. I mean, on and on and on. There's just hundreds of different integrations with Slack and for a lot of small businesses you can use it for free. There's a very powerful free version that doesn't cost anything per month. And I think the limitation is 10,000 messages and then you, you know, you don't get access to those anymore. Yeah, but, but the beauty of it for me is it's one centralized hub for all my business communication. I have different companies listed on, I even run a non profit through it as well. And I, I got all these folks on Slack, it's like, look, we're not going to text groups. If you're using texting to send out group messages, let me tell you, this is so much better, so much more reliable and it's a better communication system than sending out bulk text because you know, especially if you're a bunch of iPhone users and then you have a, that one or two dreaded Android Users that are not on, you know, Apple's messaging thing.

Right?

Yeah. It can really mess things up and communicating and you know, receipts and this and that. So getting everybody the Slack, it's powerful. It's powerful. You need to use it to really see it.

I have gotten very close to moving all of my family's communication to Slack as opposed to, you know, the group message chats and all that stuff. It's. I don't know why we haven't done it yet to be perfectly honest, because every single one of us uses Slack. Like my, my wife obviously does a bunch of work with, with me. She works with us. So she has Slack for the businesses. My daughter uses Slack at her high school for. She's the editor of their school magazine and so they use Slack all the time. So y. We should just have another Slack group. That's the family. It would be good.

Yeah. It is one of these life changing apps that we will be talking about for years. If you're not using it now, you really owe it to yourself to download it and get yourself familiar with it. We talked on the show last week about using it to interact with customers or vendors and I think it's a great idea. If you're a consultant, you can use Slack to communicate with your customers or just there's a myriad of ways that you can use it. And there's a desktop, you know, application as well as of course on your phones and the notifications. And I think it's right up there with like filemaker as far as how robust and flexible it is and how easy, easy it is to use for non technical or non program type people to gain access to some really great technical capabilities.

Yeah, for sure, for sure. Yeah, it's fantastic. I don't disagree. I have one more on my list that actually wasn't on my list, but it's Trello. And Trello allows you to track tasks is really the best way that I can describe it. We use it and it's really interesting I thought about it because I mentioned my daughter and she's the editor of her school paper, School magazine and we weren't using anything here at Mac observer to sort of manage articles that people were working on. We had no official centralized way of doing it. I was talking to Skyler and she was like, oh yeah, we use Trello. It's great because you build, what you do is you build these little cards for tasks. For us, it's articles. But I also now use it with another business where we're doing some programming stuff and so it's like, okay, well you know, there's this feature we want, this feature we want and you can then take these cards and move them around from like ideas to being worked on to you know, published and, or whatever, you know, and you can have all kinds of different statuses and things and it's really easy to move these cards around and just get not only a visual at a glance, you know, idea of how are we doing but, but also really easy to manage and get. Dig right in. And just like Slack, the free service is very powerful and you could like we're able to use the free service at Mac observer for, if that's any indication. Yeah, I mean like the way they limit it is by how many things you can add to it. So like you said, Slack has add ons for, you know, all kinds of different things. So does Trello and it's even got a Slack add on and it's got a calendar add on and these other things. So there's a limited number of those that you can do on the free version. And then if you want to do more, well now you pay and that's, I mean everybody needs to have a business model. There's nothing wrong with it. But yeah, Trello's pretty cool. You got to check it out. So yeah, I like it.

That's great. Yep, definitely do that.

That's very cool.

You know, my next one is pretty basic but, but it is right up there and I don't think it should be overshadowed and that's Excel or Google Sheets. I really kind of use them interchangeably now depending upon if I'm collaborating with other people I always do it in Google Docs or Google Sheets. And if I'm just doing on my own I typically use Excel but I do so much with large lists of whatever typically products and manifests and different things and being able to put data into Excel and you know, manipulate it and then present it to other people to show what you want to do or how something happened and things. The impact on your day to day business is dramatic and you know, it's been there forever and it's just a basic, okay, it's just a spreadsheet, but I'm in it every day. Every single day I'm in Excel. I hardly ever use Word anymore. You know, I don't do much of that but I use, you know, I like Pages on the Mac but Excel really Excels putting all your stuff together and just tracking things and I use it, you know, either online, you know, I Use it for everything from, like I say, nonprofit fundraising stuff to business deals with manifests and all that kind of stuff. So it's. It's on my list.

That's great. Yeah. I'm the same way. I often say that. I think with Excel or. And like you, I use Excel sort of as a blanket term. I think with a spreadsheet is really what it is. And a lot of it these days is Google Docs or, sorry, Google Sheets or Synology's Office, because it has the same thing in it. But. But yeah, it, like, it allows me to just format numbers and throw things out really quickly and see what they look like and see how they all interact. And. Yeah, it's. It's. And. And you're right, it's not just numbers. I. I use it for lists and things like that too. Yeah.

Oh, yeah, yeah, it's great. Yeah, it's true. It's tremendous. I love it.

Cool.

Any more on your list? I. I have a few more, but I could. I could, you know, cut it down.

No time is an issue for us. I have another sort of category, and that's image manipulation. I use. Like, I am not a designer. Right. I'm really happy that even though they're not a sponsor of this episode, I'm happy to know that Go Designer Go exists for that reason. But I do, like, mess with pictures a lot, you know, for sure. You know, for like article images or whatever. I'm always doing things and there's an. And Photoshop was always A, really expensive and B, far too complex. Like, it didn't work with my brain. Photoshop didn't. Pixelmator, however, is both a Mac and iPhone app that does. And I can really make people think that I'm a wizard with pictures with Pixelmator. And it's inexpensive. I think it's 39 bucks or something for the Mac and yeah, I think so. Less than that for the iPhone. I mean, it's just like, yeah, short money and super easy to use and just works. You can just do the things you want to do. So that's on my list. And then a companion app service that I use, but it's an app that you download is called Image Optim O P T I M And what it's built to do is if you do anything with the web, you want your images to be as lightweight and lean as possible. When you create an image with, you know, an app like even pixelmator or whatever, it puts things like a thumbnail preview in and all this other stuff. And some metadata so that you can know when you created it and all that stuff. And all of that adds to the size of that image. And when someone visits your website, they have to download all that stuff, even though they're never gonna see the thumbnail, they're never gonna look at the, you know, metadata or anything like that. And Image Optim strips all that crap out and will also, if you set it, compress the image down. And everything that I do, I just drop it on Image Optim and it crunches through, and it's usually saving somewhere between 10 and, like, 60% of the size of an image. And it just takes care of it right away. So those are my two. The two things that I use almost every day for manipulating images.

So that's great. Yeah, that's awesome. So I'll combine a couple of these. These are a little more. A little fuzzy, but no less important. One thing that's been really important to me over the years for my business career, my sanity, and my productivity is music and being able to integrate or give yourself the ability to listen to music while you work and while you. Yeah, while you work. I think it's a game changer in the fact that if you're jacked up and you got to get a lot done, you can pump yourself up and get going. It's just like with workout music, you're going to the gym, you're going to be hustling this kind of thing. Same thing with this. Or if you really need to be contemplative and creative, there's a different soundtrack to each of those tasks, but there is a soundtrack. And being able to listen, even just on a low level in the background, I really believe important and allows it unleashes something inside, certainly me. But I think all of us, that makes us better people, better business people. And it may sound kind of cheesy, but it's really been an important thing for my business career.

I will agree. If I'm not listening to music while I'm doing, and I'll call it busy work, but I don't do anything for the sake of doing. I mean, there's always a goal, but there's a lot of stuff where you're just at your desk. Like, if I have to go through my inbox, right, And I've got, like, a lot of things to do, if I don't have music going, I get way too easily distracted. Whereas if I do have music going, like, I can focus. I forget that, like, hours will go by. I mean, not I don't lose myself or anything, but, you know, I'm able to focus and lose those distractions, and it's because the music sort of fills that void in my brain. Anyway, it sounds like yours too, Shannon, where it's enough engagement to kind of keep me from losing my focus. And so it really helps immensely. So. And I catch myself like, oh, yeah, crap, I gotta turn on itunes, you know, and get something going. And usually it's like, for me, it serves double purpose. Cause I'll always have some show or some songs I need to learn for something, so I just have that going in the background.

Oh, yeah, for sure.

Really helps. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it doesn't matter. I just need something going. Yep. So, yeah, and.

And I would argue that you need to expand. Extend that benefit throughout your organization, whether you're in a building or whatever, or, you know, somehow integrate some music. It. It. You know, it's. It's powerful and even in your lobby. And I mean, help set the tone, help set your culture, you know, and, you know, we used to design playlists that, hey, it's Monday, man. We gotta get rolling to get everybody going and, you know, pumping it throughout the, you know, your warehouse or, you know, and letting your team listen to the music that they want to, not your favorite music or, you know, whatever. It's really important, as long as it's appropriate, you know, whatever. And some offending anybody, you know that. But it. I think it's a real big benefit. And music is really powerful in work, in a workplace.

Yep.

For sure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's ironic that you're the one that put music on the list, not me. There you go.

Yeah, that's pretty funny. Yeah. Yeah. So. And then the last thing, I have more stuff on my list, but I don't want to take the whole, we'll do another show, you know, maybe every six months or so. But the last thing that I think we often miss, and it is a tool, and I've tried to use it more and more. The older I've got is free time. And what I mean by that is giving yourself permission to stop and just screw around for a few minutes, 15 minutes, whatever it is, during the day. And what I do is I set, you know, I set myself a task list. Okay. And when I get done with this, I'm going to give myself five minutes and I'm either going to go, whatever, I get outside and do whatever, you know, and I typically take the dog out at some point, but I set some bars and Once I achieve those, great. I've been an adult long enough now I can go mess around whether you want to check social media, whether you want to go read the news, whatever it is. But that permission to disconnect for a small period of time, whatever time you want, half hour, hour, has been really important for me because I'm a big fan of carrots out in front of you. Things to achieve and so I can. Oh great. I'm going to be able to take a break here and go down and get something to eat or whatever it is. So I think giving yourself those pockets of free time is a great way to manage your day because you just, you know, if you just grind it out and you can't stop, I mean, you become less creative, you know, less flexible in your thought process and maybe not as approachable as a manager. And I think that free time can also include getting up out of your office and walking around, you know, and talking to your people. People. So make sure that's part of your day, you know, especially when you, you're a manager or business owner, you've got to get out and, and give yourself that free time.

Yeah, I, I find for, for me, it's, it's like, you know, I'll, I'll be whatever at my desk or doing whatever I'm doing and just, you know, crunch, crunch, crunch, and you sort of pack your brain full. Like this is how I think of it. You pack your brain full and you're fully engaged. Right. And then when you finally, when I finally disengage and just do something mindless like you said, going for a walk, taking a shower, driving, any of those things where you're not actively engaged, that's when my brain gets to go. And the ideas that were sort of suppressed by this influx of data that you're just kind of packing in there now are free and they can come out. And that's why I'll say get, you know, on some emails, a 10 or sometimes even a 30 minute timer, it's like, okay, I've, I've worked on it, I've focused on it, I've created it, I think it's good. And now I just kind of need to let that go and sometimes, you know, percolate. Percolate. Yeah, exactly. It's, you got to give your brain time to percolate. Yeah, that's. And, and you can't, you know, and meditation can, isn't is an intentional way of doing that. Right. But, but, but it's not the only way. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah.

Yeah. And for years, you know, I always felt like, yeah, for years, I used to just kind of, oh, you know, you weren't as productive today. This you didn't get. But as I became, you know, a more mature business owner, I think a better manager, not always worried about what my coworkers or employees thought I was doing, you know? Cause I always felt, oh, I want to be as productive as them, or I want to be able to do this, but. But it's different. And so when you give yourself, the first part is giving yourself permission to do it and then actually doing it and feeling good about it, it really can open things up for you. And it has helped my success immensely. So we'd love to hear what you guys do. I mean, what are some of the tools that you use? Reach out. Let us know@feedbackusinessshow co. Or start a conversation in the small business support group at. @businessshow co. Facebook. Yeah, it's been a fun show.

This has been really fun. Yeah. I'm very eager to hear what ideas percolate out of your heads now that Shannon and I have kind of, you know, barfed all our ideas at you, so. And I. And hopefully you've picked some. Some advice up here, too. There's a lot of things we mentioned this episode. Yeah, there is. Very cool. Very cool, folks. All right, well, we will. That's all we got for today, but we will see you. We'll see you next time.

Next week.

Next week.

Take it easy, everybody.

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