Failure as Education + Knowledge is Reusable

Business Brain, episode 492 for Casual Friday, October Friday the 13th, 2023. Greetings, folks, and indeed, welcome to Business Brain, the scariest of all business brains. Casual Friday the 13th. I don't know, man. Sponsors for this episode include shopify.com businessbrain. That's where you can go to sign up for a $1 per month trial period. We'll talk more in depth about that in a little bit. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire on Casual Friday, I'm Dave Hamilton and.

I'm out here in Northern California still. Dave, this is Shannon Jean and happy to be here. Happy to talk about some great things and keep tuning our business brain so we can keep learning. Yeah, always important to point out that we're not the business brains. We are focusing on our collective business brain so we can just get better, all of us. Because I always say I learned the most on these shows and I hope.

That everybody, everybody feels that way. Yeah, like that's, that's. Yeah, that's the goal. So. And share things with us. We'd love hearing from you. In fact, we got a note from Jeffrey who says, I happened upon an article that immediately made me think of you guys. You know what? I'm going to. I want to go. I want to rewind back before the beginning here. The subject of his email was brilliant because it got my attention because I'm a very shallow egomaniac. I'm a podcast host, so obviously I'm a shallow egomaniac. Jeffrey's subject line for his email was, sounds like Dave Clark listens to you guys. So immediately I stopped everything I was doing and I read Jeff Jeffrey's email which says, I happened upon an article that immediately made me think of you guys and Business Brain. That also great, like double good, double whammy on the start. Thanks, Jeffrey. It had to do with a guy named Dave Clark who went from CEO of Amazon building their logistics to something called Flexport. The long and short of it is that after he was removed from his CEO position at Flexport, he updated his LinkedIn profile and. And moved Flexport from the experience section to the education section. Much like Business Brain listeners have heard about lost money or shuttering that business or any other mistake is the tuition for the education that propels you to the next level. Dave Clark did the same thing. Do you agree? I totally agree. And what a brilliant move on his part to show some humility. But. But also reframe a quote unquote mistake into I've learned from this. Gosh, so like what? Smart guy. Really, really smart. And nice catch, Jeff. Like this is.

Yeah, yeah. And the exposure behind this because it's, it's. A lot of people are talking about it on LinkedIn and like this article and that kind of thing and it, it is just so true. And I never even thought of doing that. And you know, so many mistakes that I've made over my business life that you're like, oh, wow, boy, I really learned that, that lesson, you know, and whether it's getting into the wrong business or doing it the wrong way, like, you know, I think this, this guy might have misstepped on the way he handled things, but he certainly learned a lot. And just being self aware that, well, you know, that's. Yes, I failed. Okay. There's, there's no doubt about it. But I'm shifting this over to the education column because like Nelson Mandela said, you know, I never lose. I either win or learn. And this is a great example of it.

Yeah, it's brilliant. Brilliant. So thanks for sharing that with us, Jeff. As Always, feedback@businessbrain.show is the place where you are going to be able to send in emails like that and then like, Jeff, you're going to be entered in to win that MacBook Air. We've got what, eight episodes left before we're going to do this drawing and then eight episodes before we got to spend some money. Shannon. But that's okay. That's actually a really good okay with me. I agree. Yeah. So Feedback at businessbrain Show. Send them in. We want to hear from you. All right. So I have this business where we're publishing stuff for all the users that come in and we've been running it for a couple years. And one morning at a staff meeting, one of my partners says, hey, wouldn't it be great if we could offer merch to our partners? And it was like, oh, wow. Like I hadn't even been thinking about it. But it, it was clear based on the way the things were organized in this business that it was on me to make this happen. By the end of the day we were able to have T shirts and hats and all that stuff. And it's so easy. And it's all because I use Shopify. That's the sound that I get to hear every time there is a new sale on Shopify. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business, from the launch your shop online stage to the first real life store stage, all the way to the. Did we just hit A million orders stage Shopify is there to help you grow. And it's because it doesn't matter what you're selling, Shop. Shopify helps you sell everywhere. From their all in one e commerce platform to their in person point of sale system. Whatever you want, it just is there. Because Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers. With the Internet's best converting checkout, it's up to 36% better compared to other leading commerce platforms. This is why Shopify powers 10% of all E commerce in the US plus Shopify's award winning support is there to help you and ensure your success every step of the way. Because businesses that grow grow with Shopify. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com businessbrain all lowercase go to shopify.com businessbrain now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in. Shopify.com businessbrain and our thanks to Shopify for sponsoring this episode. Hey Shannon, what do you know?

Hopefully more by the end of the show than I did at the beginning.

All right.

But I know one thing is that we have a new course coming out, actually a set of courses. And one of the things we've been talking about over time, repeatedly over the years, is how do we reuse some of that knowledge and that content and this idea that knowledge is reusable and every time you do something, you hit a small subset of your customers, your employees, whoever, and you want to get comfortable with reusing what you've done before.

You know, we were talking before the episode of what, what word to use. Right. Knowledge is. You said knowledge is not linear. And I knew what you meant. Right. Because you meant we, we can use it more than once. Right. It's not just if we talked about something two years ago, like, is there a rule that says we can't talk about it again? No. I mean, we don't want to talk about the same thing all the time because that would get boring for all of you and you would leave. But knowledge is reusable. I think there's another word as we're having this conversation that might even be better. Knowledge is valuable and it's valuable forever. Or at least while it's relevant, as long as it's relevant, it remains valuable. It doesn't matter when you came up with the idea or when you first shared the idea or any of that. And I think there's a, like, certainly this is true for us with these courses that we're creating here and this, this series of courses that we've, we're almost done. We're going to roll them out. I'm going to say in two weeks we're going to roll them out.

Yeah, I'd say within two weeks we're going to have something exciting to talk about here that I think it's going to be.

But I think this is true for all of our businesses, right?

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, taking that to, in a different venue, one thing I love to do is look how other things work and see if you can apply that concept to your business even though it's completely different.

Right? Yeah.

And I got this and I started thinking about this being up on the X platform more and learning from people up there where they say, hey, you should always repost your content because if you post at 8 in the morning, well, at 5pm There's a different set of people that are online following and going to. Because your stuff gets buried because there's so much content. And I was like, wow, that's really true. And then as I had the absolute pleasure of going through this, these seven and nine day courses that we've, that we're building out, I was like, man, this is so great because so many of these topics that we talked about in the past, they're super relevant. And so getting them to hear them in a different venue, but to be reminded of them and getting them exposed to another audience, really important. So for your business, it may be talking about, you know, what you work on. If you're in the H vac business, you know, posting articles about keeping your house cool, keeping your house warm, whatever, you know, cleaning filters, whatever's relevant to your company, sharing that content with your customers repeatedly over time is important. So maybe in the spring you're always sharing certain topics that are relevant.

Right.

Maybe you start talking about like if you're in the pressure washing business. And now as you roll in the holidays, you're like, hey yo, did you know that we hang Christmas lights? Yeah, you're going to do that every year and start talking about it. And then after Christmas you start talking about, you know, how happy your customers are and now you're taking things down and spring is here, now it's time to clean. And you know, I think it's natural to say, well, I've already said that, I don't want to repeat that. You do want to repeat that because you're not talking to the same people over time or even if you are.

Talking to the same person. Advertising works because of its repetition, right? You'll notice, like Shopify here, right? They don't just come and sponsor one episode. Yeah, yeah, right. They come and sponsor multiple because they know we, as humans, we need to hear about these things a few times before it sinks in, before it catches our attention at the right moment. And that is true for your business, too. It's, it's, it's true because we're all marketing to humans. And so. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

It's a really good concept. And I just think it just hit home with me how there's so much of your knowledge that again, it's not linear. You just get to, you can step back into it. It may be changing the context, it may be changing the location where you're sharing it. And that point you have is really true. You know, advertising works when people see it over and over. So yeah, I'd love to hear how you do this or if you think we're right or wrong. Feedback at Business show feedbackusinessbrain show we.

Do have a domain that goes businessshow something, but I'm not going to say it. It's feedbackusinessbrain Show. Yeah, that's the right place to get us. Thanks for hanging out with us this week as usual, folks. I hope you have a great weekend. Make sure to check out our sponsor, Shopify. See, I'm repeating it for you. I know you already heard it, but it's important. This is good. Thanks for hanging out. Keep living that charmed life, huh?

Hey, before you go, I have a quick suggestion for you about a previous episode of Business Brain. For this one, we go all the way back to 2016 for a discussion about some of our best interviews from that year. You'll find links to interviews with incredible business owners who have shared their successes and their failures with us. And these are people just like you that have powered through adversity to build their companies. And this is episode 99 with links to eight of our favorite business owner interviews. There's some real gold here for you to mine. You can search for the number 2016 at BusinessBrain show or check the show notes for a link to this episode.