Finding Waves to Ride

Business Brain, episode 616 for Wednesday, January 22nd. Answer your cat's questions day. They have questions. They need answers. 20, 25. Greetings, folks and welcome to welcome to Business brain, the show where we take some of your questions, sometimes some of our thoughts, some ideas that have come into the show and we dissect them, we analyze them, we use them to tune our business brains so that each and every one of us, including those of us here behind the microphones, can better our charmed lives. Speaking of bettering your charmed life, shopify.com businessbrain is where you can go to sign up for a $1 per month trial period. We will talk more about that in a little bit and how great that can be. For now here in what is very cold when we're recording Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton.

Yeah. Not hearing sunny California, but it's also very cold, at least for us Californians out here. I'm Shannon Jean. Good to have you back, man. Yeah. And. Yeah. You're getting ready. You're getting ready to leave again.

Again, man. Yep. I'm gonna be. I. It. It's been. Yeah. It's been interesting. I am. Well, when these episodes come out, I'll be at namm, the North American Music makers Conference. Music merchants, I think.

Conference merchants, yes.

But it is essentially the conference for the music industry. We'll talk a little bit more about that, I think in Friday's episode. I have some things to say about this, but. And then I'm home for a full day before I fly to Mexico for a quick little vacation with Lisa to see some concerts.

That's awesome. Oh, that's good. You're going to fish.

We are going to see fish down there again.

Good for you.

It has become an annual. Annual thing.

It is.

I am happy to publicly say this and I'll look an IRS agent straight in the face and say it. It is the Backbeat media annual meeting, of course.

Genius. Absolutely.

100% write off.

You have to meet somewhere.

You got it. And you get one per year per. Per business.

Business. That's it. That. Don't let's. You can't highlight that too much there. That, you know, taking an annual trip to meet with your team at some awesome venue.

I need the team to want to attend. So it's got. It can't be somewhere crappy, man.

Yeah, I agree. 100. Can't go to the, you know, some junky little motel in the middle of nowhere.

It's not gonna work out.

You gotta go to Mexico, go. Whatever you want. Yeah.

Yes.

I love it.

The business can afford it. It's great.

Yeah. Yeah, that's good. Hey, before we started, we were talking about age and youth versus, you know, I don't know, being older or whatever. And I want to talk about, in my head right now, I'm working through this concept of, you know, Charlie Munger, which is Warren Buffett's former partner, always talked about these people and companies that found a wave, rode a wave, something and wrote it long. You can just look at these, you know, very successful people and very successful companies that have rode waves. And whether it's the changing how retail works, how nobody, you know, the stores are gone and you buy everything on Amazon or your social media, all the. Anything you could think about.

Well, you. And I wrote an Apple wave.

Well, I've got that on my list.

I wrote that wave.

So I have a few examples. One of them is the age thing. But you mentioned Apple. When I first got into technology business with Apple, Apple was in dire straits.

Same. I mean, we got it at the same time.

At the same time.

It was so bad. My favorite way to highlight this, at the Mac observer, we had a running feature that we called the Apple Death Nail Counter. I remember that it was one of the things that kind of. We became known for. And it was. We wrote an article every time someone predicted the death of Apple. Now, yeah, the. There, they became less and less frequent. But I think we hit. I think it was the 70s, high 60s, early 70s, I think. So there were a ton of them. Yeah, like legitimate. Not just some, you know, idiot saying it, but like somebody with a, with a, with a, with an audience.

Yeah, that's right.

And it turns out they were always wrong.

They were.

But they had reason to be right early on.

They did. And one of the things about being successful riding waves or trends is that learning how to ride them up and down or down and up, whatever way you look at it. So when, when sticking with this Apple, you know, concept here, the, the, that company, when I got involved with them, the, the way that we rode that wave is they were so inefficient at the time that they were. There was so many problems with their supply chain and logistics and the, the companies that they had let sell their products, I mean, they were, they were. You could buy them at Staples, Sears, I mean, all these vendors that could have cared less what they sold. And it was just like another appliance, like a toaster, which was a huge mistake. And as the. All those problems were going on. There was just tremendous opportunities in the market to go buy that product and get deals on that product. Otherwise you couldn't get. And then on the flip side, when they got their act together, we rode all the way up as Apple developed the products that people could not live without. Right. Every the phone in your pocket, the ipod was like one of the first ones. I can remember going, well, we got to figure these ipods out. How do I get into this business? And I went and bought like 500 iPods from a company that was dealing with returns. And I think it's the same with age. Dave, you mentioned when you're young you don't really know, but for me, so when I was young, I still explain.

Explain what you mean because you said something. If we're going to, if we're going to relay our pre show conversation, let's do it. You said there are benefits to being old and there are benefits to being young.

Correct.

And the comment I made in response to that was when you're old, it's great because you know that there are benefits to being old and you can intentionally take advantage of them. But when you're young, you don't quite have the wisdom that you have when you're old. So you don't necessarily know how best to leverage those traits that are beneficial being young.

That's right. And I disagreed. There's nuance to it, of course. That's why we're talking. That's why we're talking. So yeah, for me, when I was just getting out of college or during, even during college, I was super ambitious. I still think I'm super ambitious. But I was young and I was around older people that were impressed with that ambition and it would be like, man, look at that kid go. Because I just was grinding non stop and was. I don't know what it was, but it attracted attention and it kind of thrust me into roles that were definitely beyond my capacity at that time. But it forced me to learn how to do things. It forced me to learn how to manage people twice my age. It forced me to learn how to hire people twice my age. Needed experts because like you said, I did not know.

You don't know. Yeah.

But I did understand that this was a unique time and I did learn how to use or exploit exploits a negative word, but to take advantage of capitalize on. Capitalize. That's the word. I learned how to capitalize on how young I was and especially because I looked very young, even though I was in my early 20s. I probably looked like I was 17.

It helps to look young. Says the guy who. Nobody believes me when I tell them how old I am. And it's beneficial, right?

Yeah, it is beneficial. It is beneficial. On the flip side, now that, and.

If you shaved your beard, you'd look younger, by the way.

Even younger. I know that.

I know you.

I always, I was growing in the wintertime, but in the, in the, on the flip side, now that I'm older, I also have another benefit, is that I have more credibility and I have more experience and I have gray hair. And so people listen to me a little bit more. And it's, it's just a different way to ride the wave of how old you are or, or age, youth versus being experienced or something like that. They're actually having some wisdom from, you know, experience. So I think that. And it's, again, I don't want to say like I'm trending down, but, you know, my age is trending down.

Right, and so your age is trending up, Shannon. It's kind of how it works. This is not a bad thing.

That's true. No, no, no, you're right. You're right.

It's interesting. I, I've, as I'm sure many of us have, I've thought a lot about this, and there are common traits to young people and old people, you know, and, and when you're young, the, the, the, the, the benefits of your brain, right? Your brain changes, right?

It does.

The young brain, generally speaking. And of course, there's, there's exceptions to all of this, but generally speaking, the young brain is very good at remembering lots of things accurately, fairly accurately, and is not so good at seeing the big picture. Now, that is a good, that can be leveraged in a good way. If you're not seeing the big picture, you might wind up taking risks that a wiser person would, would say that that's not going to pay off.

But you.

At, at, at worst, you learn something from that, right? Mistakes are our tuition, and at best that the risk pays off and you get some benefit as we get older. Our ability to remember things as accurately diminishes as our brains change and allow us to see much bigger pictures as we get older. And what I love about that is that we have devices that are really good at the former, at the things we're good at when we're young, remembering things. Our devices are better than even the perfect, the most. Not perfect, but the best young person. Right. If you've got all this stuff in your phone, you don't have to remember. And yet now, as older people, we get the benefit of our brains evolving and. Or adapting and seeing the big picture.

So, yeah, makes sense. I also love, as you get older, you're. You kind of. There's kind of a softness, softening of memories of trauma, let's say, let's call it that, especially in business, the ups and downs. And you look back with this kind of fondness of something that maybe happened 10 years ago or 20 years ago, and you say, oh, that wasn't that bad. Let's do it again, you know, or let's try it again, or let's take another risk. And my, My wife will always point out, she's like, that was horrible. You had a.

You hated that.

I'm like, yeah, but maybe not. So the key is, I think, the, the. The. For me, the up and down one. Another quick example of growing up as the dot com boom took off in the early 2000s. Yeah, man, I was in the right place, the right time. Technology was great. We were selling everything we could. And then when the dot com crash came along, that's how I learned to buy liquidation products.

Because what else were you going to do?

Yeah, I was flying around the country when Sprint and MCI and pets.com and Webvan. I think I'm sitting in a chair that I bought at a webvan auction right now.

Nice.

And Herman Miller chair. And so learning to ride up and learning to ride down is the way you make it in the waves.

All right, folks, look, it's a new year, and let's be honest with each other like we always are. How many of us spent the holidays daydreaming about launching our next big idea? Right? Maybe you've been stuck on the what ifs, what if it doesn't work? But better yet, what if it does? That's where our sponsor, Shopify, comes in. I use Shopify for merch with two of my businesses. And let me tell you, it's so easy to. It feels like cheating. In minutes. You can create your store with customizable templates, no coding required. Shopify handles everything. Shipping, taxes, payments, and even connects all your social channels so you can sell everywhere your customers are scrolling. And here's a wild part. If Shopify were a person, I'd put it in charge of my calendar because it's that efficient. Don't wait another year to act on your idea. Established in 2025. Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com businessbrain all lowercase go to shopify.com businessbrain to start selling with Shopify today. Shopify.com businessbrain and our thanks to Shopify for sponsoring this episode. Shannon I mentioned I'm going to be taking some trips these next couple of weeks and I talked about how I am making one of them. They're both very tax advantaged. They're both business trips. And even though one of them on the surface might not look like it, it is. You said you've got a trip coming up that you're also leveraging to lead the charmed life. What's that about?

Yeah, so we've talked about this a lot on the show but like, so I, I came down from my office down to the house the other night and Renee goes, hey, you know, it's your, it's a big, big birthday this year because like we just talked about, time marches on. And so she says let's do you want a big party or do you want to go on a big go on a trip? I said let's go on a trip. So she booked this trip. I It's about 12 nights. We're going to St. Lucia I guess is how you pronounce it. Yeah. And staying at this like five star resort.

Nice.

And yeah, a couple days, few days in New York City on the backside totals about 12 days. And the total cost for us for the all in on this trip is $281.34.

Yeah, it is.

Yeah. And so 705,000 Bonvoy Marriott points. Yep. And about 185 or so or 120,000 JetBlue points to cover the, the FL down there.

And wait and how much cash. I want to put this in the show notes just so we have it.

2,281.34 is what we're spending.

That's and I think.

Yeah. And it would have cost about ten grand. Yeah, I think the total.

Yeah, I, I, I was it when you said cash, I knew where you were going with it. But I was thinking, doing the math in my head and it's like, yeah, this is a, you know, 10 to $12,000, something like that. I mean you're gonna spend cash on meals and things like that.

Obviously this place is all inclusive, but I know we will buy. Yeah. All inclusive. Yes.

So we'll figure it out. So maybe, yeah.

New York, New York.

You'll spend a couple grand. What are you there three days, that's about three grand.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. But you know, all of it is because we figured out long ago how to put every single business expense or personal expense we can on these cards, these affinity cards that have points or whether it's flights. And I mean, I like to use the Bonvoy Amex because we, I think the hotels, the flights you can really master and get down in price a lot better. But the hotels are crazy expensive.

Yep.

And the, and the points are, are terrific.

And I use, I use Bonvoy points. I, I really try not to use my Bonvoy points for business trips because, like, why bother?

Yeah.

That said, it's not terribly difficult to make most trips into a business trip, at least as far as the hotel expense goes.

That's right.

So I backed off from my hard and fast rule and it years ago and it was south by Southwest that did it because the price, the hotel that I stay at is literally across the street from the convention center. It's right where you want to be. It's one of those residence inns. I'm usually there for seven or eight days. So it's really nice to have a kitchen as opposed to just a hotel room.

Yep.

But I think they want 500 bucks a night for it. Yeah. And I can do it usually for, you know, 200,000 Marriott points.

Yeah.

I have to check every week though, because it's a limited window when they are open. But it's fine like, so I'm fine using it for that because what I look at is points per dollar. Like what am I exactly what you should look at. Yes. What is it costing? What would I spend in cash? Vers am I getting out of these points? And if you keep a spreadsheet on that, you will find that sometimes it is 100% worth paying the cash for the hotel room.

Yes, it is. Yeah. And there's lots of promos they have like, we're getting one night free. After you stay a week, you get a. Whatever four or five days, you get a night for free and, and lots of upgrades and different things. But. Right. The, the key is this stuff is just money on the table that you can walk by and pick up. It costs it, literally. Right.

Yeah.

And it's a, it does take some effort in managing it and figuring out the best way. Spreadsheets, everybody. I posted about this and people talk about the Chase card this and the ink card this, that and their thing and it. All the cards are different. Some people love cash back. It depends on the stage of your life that you're at. I think, and I think you can have, you know, multiple of these cards, some that give you cash back, some that are travel, some that are airlines, or some that are hotel. The, the key is, is figuring out the system that brings you the most benefit. Like, yes, I, I love this amex card for earning these points, but like, I also have a Amex Plum card that gives you the option of you can get. Because we're grandfathered in now, it's only 2%, but we can get 3% cash back on our purchases or, or 60 days interest free. And there's no limit on this card. So if I'm buying inventory and I want to buy $500,000 in inventory and carry it for 60 days, well, I can often flip it in that 60 days. If I pay, if I flip it in 30 days, I can pay it off and get my 3.3% back.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Or, or they'll carry this deal for me for 60 days. So there's.

Oh, that's short money. Yeah, I mean that is huge. Yeah, it's huge.

And I've done it over and over and over. And we've again, we'll have to look up. If you just Go up to BusinessBrain show and Search for credit cards or whatever you'll find.

I'll put a couple links in the show notes before we wrap up. I have a quick question for you folks. Feedbackusbrain Show I want to know, do you. Is it in your personality? And any answer is okay, I'm just really curious about, I want as many of you to answer as you can because I'm curious how many of us. And are you one of those people that likes spreadsheets or do you shy away? Do you push away from them? And because I've always said, I think with spreadsheets, like as soon as I start one of these things, if I can't do the math in my head, if there's too many things to too many balls to hold in the air, I immediately go and create a spreadsheet for it and start relating all the numbers together. And that's how I find, like I said before, whether it's worth to pay for, you know, use points or not for a hotel room, I do it every year for our health insurance to figure out, okay, what. And then I can regression test it against previous years. Okay, here's what we actually spent. Here's what we did. Did it pay off? Did it not? And it takes me five minutes because I've built this spreadsheet over the course of 10 years. Right. So I'm curious. I know I'm not alone, but amongst us business brain folks here, I'm curious how many of us think in spreadsheets? So let us know feedback@businessbrain.show. i, I think, I think there's, I think there's something about that. I don't know what it, I don't know what's there, but your answers are going to help teach us.

Yeah, I don't know how you couldn't be in love with a spreadsheet when it gives you. We're all different answers.

We are all different. And that's why, that's why I'm asking the question. Like, I can't imagine not being in like it. I don't have to spend any discipline points to put it, put a spreadsheet together. I love it. No, and that's my question is, do you love them? Folks, let us Know feedback at BusinessBrain Show. Thanks for hanging out. Also, please review the show. BusinessBrain show slash review. We love to, we love to get those and they really do help kind of build up the show and bring the, bring more audience in and grow the business brain family. So thanks for hanging out with us and we'll see you Friday.