Fraud and Detachment – DBA Small Business Show 6

Greetings, folks. Today is Wednesday, March 18, 2015 for episode six of the DBA podcast here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton.

And I'm Shannon Jean out in the San Francisco Bay Area. How you doing, Dave?

I'm doing all right, man. How are you doing?

Doing fantastic. Good, good. I'm enjoying the. Again, I'm not going to mention the weather, so. But I'm having a great day.

You know what? I've got the window. Well, I mean, I don't have the window actually open. This is my, my studio where, where I play music too. So I have these wind that block sound and so I have the insert out and I have sun streaming in through the windows. So despite the. Yeah, it's breezy and probably like 2 degrees out there, but it looks nice.

What we'll do is we'll post window shots on the website at some point of. Here's what we're looking at out the window as we're doing the show.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah. So, hey, so, you know, last show we talked a lot about credit cards, primarily from a benefit standpoint, and definitely want to hear that show because it can have a great impact on your life. One section we didn't cover was that I think it's worth circling back to a little bit is talk about fraud as it relates to you as a business owner. And, you know, the cards are super enabling to use as a consumer, obviously as a merchant, it's an absolute necessity that you've got to take them. And the big downside is you've got to be vigilant with fraud. And the primary, primary reason is, number one, you don't want to upset people calling you that someone used their card at their business without their permission, but primarily is you are, as the business owner, are liable for that fraud. So somebody spends 500 bucks with your. Your business and it turns out they used a stolen credit card number. The person that's really going to pay the price is you. They're going to suck that money out of your bank account, out of your PayPal account, whatever you're using. And so you need to put in some good controls to spot those potential fraudulent, fraudulent transactions. And I thought we'd talk about it for a couple of minutes.

Okay, so wait a minute. I got to. Now I'm the student on this one, because we do nothing. I mean, we, we do some stuff to ensure against fraud. But again, like I mentioned last week, you know, we're mostly B2B. We actually are charging people's Cards internally. Right?

Yeah.

You know your customers, and we know our customers. Right. So we've had zero incidents of fraud. I mean, it would. It would be flabbergasting if we. If we ever did. So because of that, this is all new to me. You're saying that if you do everything right, you have all the protections in place that the bank and your merchant provider and everybody says that you have to have, and you do everything right, and somebody comes in and buys, you know, 500 bucks worth of whatever from you, and you ship it to them, and then it turns out that was a fraudulent transaction. You eat that.

Absolutely.

What?

Yeah, Visa, MasterCard, American Express are not going to eat it. They're going to. You see all those commercials on TV about how you're protected, and it's this. Well, they do that on the backs of the merchant, and we as business owners are responsible for. The key is what you just said, following all the correct procedures and this. And that's. That's what the merchant, you know, the credit card companies use as their. Their hammer. And they say, hey, did you follow these things? And oftentimes, and unfortunately, if you're an Internet business, which, you know, it sounds crazy to even talk about it, but when you talk to some of these merchant processors, they actually will say, well, you've got their signature.

Correct?

And I always kind of chuckle and say, well, you know, where have you been for the last, you know, 15, 20 years?

Yeah, right.

Because, of course, we don't have their signature. But, you know, we've. We've done these kinds of things, and they typically look for a way to kind of punch and say, hey, sorry, you don't have this thing. And so, you know, what we do is we're very paranoid. And, you know, we have this mentality, especially in our kind of business where we're shipping stuff all over the world, and you may or may not know who your customer is. And if it, especially the number one thing that we always look at is if something looks too good to be true, it probably is. If, if your average, you know, sale is $50 and somebody comes in and spends $5,000, well, you really need to analyze that and look at it and say, well, that's. Who is this person? You know, and number one, like your customers that, you know, for backbeat and things, you have a history with them. Well, if it's a customer, you have history with a lot of these things that we're going to talk about, you can kind of.

Yeah, you get a. You get your own Internal litmus test too, right? Yeah, exactly.

That's right. That's right. And you know, there used to be a number of things that, that the fraudsters using stolen credit cards or things would use. Like they would place very large orders and everything would be overnight. And it was very easy to identify those kinds of things. But they've gotten more sophisticated and now oftentimes they will place smaller orders just to kind of slip through, see if you'll ship them. And then if you do, it looks like you have a little bit of history with them. Maybe it's one of your shipping people or another salesperson that's not maybe as diligent. They will come back then and steadily increase those orders until they get caught. And we just had that happen probably about 10, 11 months ago with a customer on our wholesale site that came in. The person who's in charge of checking out each dealer and approving them was a little lax and they slowly migrated up and within a couple of weeks had a few thousand dollars worth of orders. And then we found out. And so again you're, you're responsible sometimes you can catch those shipments. If you ship your product. You can often get with UPS or FedEx and catch those orders before they get delivered if you find them or find out they, they get it. And so there's some very simple things. The number one thing is, does the billing address and the shipping address match? Are you shipping it to the customer's billing address? And Most services like Authorize.net or PayPal, most of those services have, have built in fraud protection where you can identify that information. And that look, okay, this guy's from Durham, New Hampshire. Yep, here's the address. That's where his bill goes, that's where we're going to ship it. And we've always had a policy for years is that okay, we're only going to ship to the billing address of the card. And that has saved us over and over and over. It definitely can, can get some people angry that want things shipped to their office or shipped to their kids dorm or this kind of thing. And you know, but we've just said no because we've been burned before when we haven't done that. And an easy answer to tell your customers if they complained about that policy is that they can add as many addresses to their credit card as they want.

And that's, that's actually a tip for all of us as consumers is you can do that?

Absolutely.

If you've got a vacation home somewhere that you know you're constantly shipping things to, you don't have to replace your existing address, just add it to it.

Yep, works great. That's right. And, and that's a real easy thing to do. And if your customers are reasonable and they're going to have a long term relationship with you, no problem. It's always the people that are in a rush. I have to have it quickly, have to have it tomorrow, those kinds of things again, you know, go with your gut. And you know, it's much better to say no than it is to lose, you know, a large order of stuff that you're going to ship. And typically if you're with a, a traditional merchant, they're going to send you a letter and they're going to say a customer has done a chargeback because they don't, they didn't authorize this charge. You're going to get that letter maybe a week or ten days after you ship and by then it's too late, the product is gone. They're sending you a letter saying, we've debited this amount from your bank. If you can prove otherwise, please let.

Us know it's guilty until proven innocent. When there's a dispute. We've been through disputes. Thankfully I can count them all on one hand again because we know our customers. But yeah, totally, it's, you know, I mean, even if, when we had everything lock, stock and barrel, it was like, yeah, okay, well prove it.

That's right. That's right. And so, you know, you, you, you, if you use a company like, you know, PayPal, which we love, I've mentioned before, it's much more real time. I mean, usually people are getting an email when their credit card is used via PayPal or some kind of thing or the PayPal gets an alert sooner, you'll get an email, you'll get, you know, they're on your side, they'll help you out a little bit more. You know, I love them for that because they, they truly, they understand, they would never ask you if you had gotten a signature. They just, they get it.

You know, they've never seen a signature from anyone.

That's right, that's right, that's right.

So anyway, so, so what do you do? I mean, you know, is there, I mean, other than just being diligent and trusting your gut, is there anything else you can, you can do?

Sure. So like I said, authorize.net, payPal, they have some built in kind of rudimentary fraud and they have some other level that you, fraud detection that you can subscribe to and pay a fee, a monthly fee. One company that we use that we really like, their service is called Fraud Labs Pro and they're@fraud labspro.com and they have an unbelievable amount of information that they will glean for you when that customer comes to your site and pays with a credit card. And one of the, the best little data points that we found is being able to geolocate the IP address of where the customer is, is placing the order. And so they'll grab that IP address and you'll be able to go number one, you'll set up the rules that you want to flag. You know, is it a free email service? That's a red flag. So maybe that's a point. And you set up all these, these rules that, that add or subtract points to each transaction and then you say okay, anything over points I want you to hold. And they will, you know, they tie into your site with an API and they will, they will hold the order and send you an alert to say this order is in manual review. Take a look at it.

And so it still appears to the customer that it still appears to go through. They just tell you don't ship yet.

You got it. And, and then they present you this report that it's, you know, it's, it's fantastic. I mean, tons of information. Again, is it a free email service that they're using? What's the IP address?

What were the, what were the flags? And then you get to decide.

Yeah, we love it. And again for if you're someone that has less than 500 transactions a month, their service is free. They have a little mini, you know, micro program they call it. If you're doing 1500 or so, it's 30 bucks a month and up to 5000 is 100 bucks a month. And so, you know, it's, and they have larger enterprise level ones as well. But sure, these are one of the guys too. At some point in the future we should probably have on and we can chat about things. It's a great service and, and, and we love it. So just. You want to keep, you want to be diligent, you don't. Everybody takes a hit at some point and it doesn't take long before you, you know, unfortunately it can make you not trusting, but you have to just be diligent and you have to know what's going on with your customers and, and wearing this product is otherwise, you know, your bank account is going to feel it if it comes back to.

Bite you, well yeah, that's it. And, I mean, you get the wrong order or the sizable enough order to do this, you could start. I mean, you might wipe out your margins for the month.

Well, I will tell you a quick story back in. When we first started one of my first Mac companies, Mac Rescue. And we had what we thought was a great order. And back then, COD was king. And you could do COD cash on delivery, and you could request a cashier's check. And so you could ship at FedEx. COD and FedEx would take a look at the cashier's check, and they would overnight it to you back in a FedEx envelope. And I was doing this. We were working out of her bedroom, and we had a large order. It was about, I think it was seven or $8,000. Big, huge order for us back then. This was 20 some odd years ago. And we shipped the order and got the cashier's check put in the bank. And again, having not a great bank relationship because we're just getting started, didn't really even have a bank person. Sure. We got a letter about two weeks later that says, oh, this cashier's check is counterfeit. So we've deducted the amount out of your bank. Which, you know, that's like all the working capital we had.

Right? Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah. So we're freaking out. And, you know, I immediately get on the phone with FedEx and start screaming in this. And they tell me, no, we know. Sorry, we're not liable. We're not liable. But, you know, it was one of those cases where not taking no for an answer really paid off for us because we just kept moving up the ladder at FedEx and finally saying, you know, you took the cashier's check. You're. You're handling the entire transaction. And we went through this for a couple of weeks and wrote a couple letters. And one day we got a check from FedEx for the full amount and got paid out. And it was unbelievable. And I've always had a soft spot in my heart for FedEx since then because, you know, these guys, you know, they came through for us, right? And then, strangely enough, they. We actually got interviewed by the Secret Service because they were on this case. FedEx turned it, you know, much more powerful than two little, you know, guys working in a bedroom and kept both. My partner and I got interviewed by the Secret Service guys. I still remember the guy's name, Malcolm Wiley. I don't know why that's in my head, but.

If you've ever interacted with the Secret Service. I don't care what the circumstances are. You never forget the agency you're gonna remember.

That's right.

Yes, sir.

And so they caught this guy, it was some young kid, and put him in jail. And for years, about every three, four months, we'd get a little check because apparently he was, you know, pressing license plates or whatever it is they do in prison, making 35 cents an hour a day. I don't know what it is, but we'd get a little check that we never, you know, complete restitution. But I'd say we probably got a few hundred dollars out of it over the years. And every time a check would show up, it would just, you know, we'd be like, gosh, man, remember that, that nightmare? You know, it was. So it pays to be diligent. Don't get caught. Especially when your capital is, you know, is. Is at stake. Like that. Yeah.

Huh. That's interesting. That's, it's fascinating.

Yeah, it's, it's pretty wild. So, but anyway, we'll, we'll post links to fraud labs up on the site, up on the @PD or DBA podcast. It's definitely highly recommend checking them out and keeping, keeping yourself safe.

Yeah. All right. So we've, we've wrapped up. Well, we haven't wrapped up credit cards. We will define credit cards as having. Being wrapped up. For now.

Yes. Okay. Beautiful. Beautiful. So then I wanted to stop. We talked a little bit a few weeks ago about the transition from being a self employed person, the person doing all the work, to becoming a business owner where you had your employees doing things and you made a comment, which I thought was very poignant, about learning to let go and let your employees doing things do things their way.

Well, that's the trick, right, is it's so hard, you know, like you said, I mean, you started that business in your bedroom, right? So there were, there were two of you and no one else on the planet was trusted to run your business for you. Now, part of that was. That's right. You didn't have anybody else that wanted to for free, right?

Well, yeah, and most people, most entrepreneurs go into business because, number one, they think they can do it better. Right? And over time, you have to kind of go, okay, yeah, maybe it's better. But as we talk about this, Dave, I'll come, I'll swing back around you, I'll give you a few minutes. But if you can think of an example of how you had to let go, you know, that would be great to share with Everybody, I think that the key is you have to give up to grow. And if, if you're not willing to accept the fact that your employees are going to do things differently than you might do them, not necessarily worse or hopefully not worse, but, but certainly they will do them in a different manner that, that you would do. And, and I. It's very hard.

It's hard, right, because you watch them do it. And, you know, the trick is learning how much leeway to give someone. Right. You know, how much do you trust, how much trust do you impart to them to say, okay, you understand the end result here. Now, you know, I'll tell you what my process is or was for doing that, but you got to come up with your own. It's really hard because if you, if you let too much go, you just cratered your business.

That's right.

Right. And you know that.

My always concern is the message or the message that you're getting out to your customers about your business, your philosophy, the press and all those kinds of things. I'm always very, very paranoid about what one of your employees may say or do that would impact that message and your, your mission, if you will. That's really tough for me, you know, and what I've tried to do is coach them all in the philosophy of the business. If you find somebody that you're working for, you that's going to move into that kind of position. I spent a lot of time coaching, talking about why I'm, why I'm doing this, why am I here? And I've always made the comment that I, hey, you know, I think I could probably make more, more money working out of my garage. But I love being here and I want to create this great place for our customers as well as our employees and, you know, create a great place to work. At Tech Restore, we have a. Our philosophy is, you know, it's people first, product second, and profits third. And what happens is if you take care of the first two, the third one usually takes care of itself as well.

That's right.

And if you have unhappy employees or you're micromanaging to death, which is again, a very hard thing to let go. I try to get the philosophy out there, tell them what you're, you know, teach them what your beliefs are about how to take care of customers, what the goals of your business are. And then I try to get out of the way and, and then just inspire them to run their, either even just their own position or their department, if they have one, if they're A supervisor, manager, run it like it was their own business, but they have to share my philosophy, my goals, you know, that. That type of thing.

That's right. That's right. Yeah. And I think having that frank conversation with people, that's how I deal with it. Right. Is I just have that conversation, very frankly. And that does not work for everyone. Right. Which is fine. Then you're not the right person to work here. Is. Is how that. That goes. You know, we need. Yep. But yeah. Which is okay. You know, it's.

Sure it's right. And I think it is. You want to give them that ownership. You know, if you have that expectation, like you have that frank conversation you're talking about, and you say, my expectation is you're going to run this like it was your own business or. And, you know, usually if you get the right person in there, they'll do it. You know, again, it'll be different than you might have done, but hopefully it will achieve the same goals.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. Well, and that's the trick is setting the expectation that you're going to review goals and review. Review the outcome and. Okay. Did it match? Yes, now. But. But it's not just, did I get this, you know, part fixed or did I get this. This ad sold? Right. It's. It's more than that. It's. How did I treat the customer during that process? Right. You know, how. How did that all come about? How long did it take? Right. I mean, there's. There's all kinds of things, but. But there's some of those that, I mean, I call them intangibles, but they're not. Right. How does the customer feel? That is not intangible at all.

It's not. But it is very hard to teach that.

Y.

You know, they have to have it inside of them that, oh, I'm going to make this person happy, or I'm, you know, this customer is very upset, so it's my job to, you know, thrill them. Maybe they. We screwed up on some end, but here's how we can really take care of them.

Yeah.

And learning that and learning how to deal with upset people, which, because, you know, it's.98% of your customers are going to love you, typically, if you're running a good business. But the 2% make an enormous impact on the rest of your organization that you have problems with.

They do.

And you just have to come up with procedures and policies that, you know, usually work. But you also have to give your employees the freedom. And I forget the name of the hotel chain where everybody, from the, you know, the lowest employee up to the CEO has the authority to solve problems, and they all have up to a certain dollar amount that they can spend to solve a customer's problem, whether it's the custodian or something like that. And it's a great idea. And that's true. Procedures and policies are great and they work most of the time, but sometimes you really have to make somebody happy and you have to do something different.

Yeah, that's right. But you know, that, that 2%, those people, they can shatter your confidence and your ability to keep the other 98% happy if you're not careful.

Yeah, that's true.

Right.

So I guess it would be not focusing on them as, as the only.

You'Re not obsessing over. I mean, when the time comes to focus on the unhappy customer, you focus on the unhappy customer. And hopefully you're doing it with, you know, the goal of over pleasing that person. However, we've all seen it where there's someone that no matter what you're going to do, it doesn't matter. They're going to be unhappy with you.

That's correct.

And that's. And some. But even then, sometimes, you know, I mean, I'm sure you're like me. Right. You know, you started out, every customer has to be happy, and so you go out of your way even for those people, to please them. At some point, you got to draw the line and walk away, and that hurts. It's not easy.

Yeah, we talk about it all the time. We actually fire some of our customers.

Yeah.

And, and it's difficult. But there's certain people, we, we have a very nice conversation, very polite. We just say, you know, I always want to ask them, if you're so unhappy with us, why are you. Why do you want to do more business with us? I mean, you think about it, you're coming back. But supposedly we've screwed up so bad, you know, and I will just have a conversation or one of our managers say, you know, it just doesn't sound like we have a win win here. With all due respect, let's give you a full refund and we'll just agree to disagree and move on. But to your point, oftentimes that does not make people happy. It can actually make them more upset.

So we're going to see this right? As our podcast grows here, we will get emails from, from people that tell us that they, they like what we're doing. And we've gotten a little bit of that but we will get. The longer emails that we get are going to be from the people that think we're doing something wrong. And I, and I've gotten them with, you know, with the other podcasts I've done, especially with Matt Geek Gab, and we've just been doing it longer.

Sure.

And those are the emails that actually humble me more, even more than the ones where someone takes the time to write and say, you're doing a great job because, you know, you, you don't have to listen. Right. And, you know, I hope you would like that. For those of you listening, I hope you continue listening and I hope you tell us what you like and we're going to help shape this show. But, you know, if you really hate what we're doing, and this is true of any podcast. Right. You don't have to listen. Nobody's got a gun to your head. In fact, you have to go out of your way to find the show, subscribe and press play. Right. It's not on automatically for your morning drive or whatever, so you got it. But we', get, you know, I guarantee you we'll get five paragraph emails telling us all the things that we should do wrong and essentially they'll read like a business plan for a different podcast, which is great. And I always, I, and I, I hope, I'm sure some of the people that I've replied to over the years think that it's a snarky reply, but it, I, I guarantee you none. I've never replied snarkly to any of these. I've wanted to, but every reply is sincere and it's, you know, it starts with thank you. Right. Thank you so much for caring enough about my show to do this. But, you know, the reality is clear. You've just detailed why this isn't the right show. Or like you said about your customer, you know, it's not, this is the wrong fit.

So, yeah, it's the wrong fit.

It's okay to part ways, you know, Correct.

Yeah, yeah, I agree. And you need to, you know, have that discussion once in a while or tell those people and move on and say, okay, we're not going to please everybody and you'll go nuts. You'll go out of business trying to please everybody.

Right.

You know, and we're gonna have a topic in an upcoming episode, talks about being on the knit, you know, being on the edges and being, being the niche and doing things that other people aren't doing. Well, you know, that's, that comes down to the same, same Thing.

Same thing.

You don't want to please. You want to please a very narrow section of people or the population that are going to become your biggest. Your big fans. And those people, you want to focus on that you. You know. You know you can please them.

That's it, Right? Yeah. And just keep doing everything you can for them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The one thing kind of to tie these two things together that I noticed when I was. Whenever I've run a business where it's just me or, you know, me and maybe one other person, the focus on customer service from me is automatic. Right. You know, they're the ones paying the bills. They're the customer I dealt with. I'm emotionally invested, and so it's super easy for me. My default in that situation is whatever I can do to make you happy. Right?

Yep.

Once I detached a little bit and started putting people between me and customers, and the only things I would hear about were, hey, I'm having a problem with this customer. Can you, you know, what do you think I should do? And of course, it's always relayed to me by the. My sales rep is. Sometimes I hear about it from a customer. Right. But I always. But it always comes back to, okay, what's going on? And I found that I was less. My gut reaction started to become the customer's wrong.

Oh, okay, sure. Yeah. I could see it, you know, because.

I was detached from the situation. It was like, well, who is this guy to say that you did this? Right. This is what, you know, we. This is our product.

I know what we do.

I know what we do. Right. There's no way we did this. Right. And it's. And I had to learn to kind of check that defensiveness and say, wait a minute, wait a minute. And my. And my sales reps and I mean, different reps that I've had and, you know, different customer interfacing people that have had over.

Over.

Over time will always say, oh, wait a minute. You know, they're usually. They're there to kind of, you know, hold me at bay, but I am the one that signs their check. So, you know, that only goes so far. And then it's like, well, I better agree with my boss, because otherwise, you know.

Sure.

So it's something I had to learn to be. To be aware of, which was kind of surprising when I realized it, just because of how my nature is when I'm interacting with the customer to just be like, whatever you need, you know, whatever I can do for you.

Yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah. And it is you do have to be careful because you often, you kind of get jaded in dealing with problems because they're the ones that bubble up and you need a way to, you know, get that to be able to jump into all that positive feedback once in a while, whether you're reading your reviews on Yelp, whether you look, looking through emails or people are sending it to you, looking at your ebay feedback, whatever it is. And, and I encourage our, our customer service people. I'm like, hey, go look at all that great feedback. You guys are awesome. Just because you, you hear from, you know, the small percentage of problems that we have all the time doesn't mean you're not doing a good job. Actually, you're doing a great job.

Right, right. Yeah, that's a good, yeah, that's right. That's good.

Dive back in. So anyway, so, you know, again, moving that from, from, you know, we kind of went off on a little tangent talking about customers, you know, different things. But going from self employed to business owner, I, I, you know, I always ask myself, you know, does your business work if you're not there and for how long? Because if I think if you're moving in the right direction of where you want to go over time with your one company or another, your employees, your consultants, your interns should really need less and less of your input to run your company, freeing up your time to be thinking about, you know, what is the next thing we're going to do or how do we do what we're doing now? Better.

Right.

And that's made all the difference, you know, for me is I can drown in the minutiae of running things every day. But thankfully, you know, I've surrounded myself with very good people that take ownership, that know how to do the job and they don't need my input to do it. Certainly like you, you said from time to time they come, hey, what would you do in this situation? How do we handle, handle this? Right. But, but, you know, I wouldn't be sitting here on this, you know, be able to do our podcast when we need to do it if I had to be answering emails and checking little things. So I, I think that is a measure of your success if you're headed in the right direction.

Yeah, no, that's totally right. Yeah. Can you. One thing. Yeah. Can you detach even? Can you detach for a week? Right. I mean, you know, start small, right?

Yeah, a week is a big deal.

A week is a huge. I'll never forget, it was probably eight or nine Years ago now, we took our first real vacation, you know, as a family since the time I had started the businesses. And I remember, you know, thinking about, okay, yeah, this is going to be good, because it's going to force me out of the day to day. And I had one sales rep who's actually still with me now, and Jeff. And I remember he said to me, he's like, so you're not going to be reachable this whole week. We were going on a cruise and we had decided to just, you know, put the wall up. And I mean, there was a phone number. If, you know, everything came crashing down, call, right, fine. But I even told the guys, I'm like, chances are there's not going to be anything I can do until I get back. So if you don't mind, wait until I get off the ship to call because that way at least I get to enjoy three extra days before I learn the world's cratering. Right. You know, yes, that's. But, you know, he said, he said to me, he said, well, you know, but what if I run into this situation or what if I run into that situation? And I said to him, okay, well, what happens now when you run into that situation? He says, well, I call you and I explain it to you. I'm like, okay, great. And he says, I said, then what happens? He said, well, usually you ask me what I would do. I said, right. And then, and you tell me. And then he tells, he says, I tell you what I would do. And then what do I usually say? He says, well, you usually say, do that. I say, great. I said, so I, I joking, he started to get it, you know, and, and I jokingly said to him, would you like me to record my half of that conversation?

That's right. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's. That's brilliant. Yeah, it's great. And, and you, we, we do the same thing. It's like, okay, well, you're, you, you're the one that deals. Is dealing with the problem or handling the customer, what do you want to do? And most of the time, you know, comes back just like you. Okay, great. Yeah. And, and that, that's a sign here that you've gotten across. This is how we want things handled. This is our philosophy. This is our mission. What I want to achieve with the business, what the customers want and they get it and they don't need you there to do it. That's awesome.

Now, I was going to say my big problem, and it still exists to this day in Less of a degree, but is with the technology side of things. I've always been really good with computers. And so for me to hire someone that I could teach everything, including all the tiny little nuances of what we've done, just from a technology standpoint, to build up all the servers and everything over the last 15 years, it would cost me a fortune. Right? That's right. It's part of why I get to make the money that I make. Right? Yeah, that's right.

That's right.

But there are those few things that if something really went wrong, I feel like. And it's true that, you know, I'm the only person on the planet that would come into solving that problem, knowing where all the, you know, where all the bodies are buried, right where. Where this particular settings file is and how that's linked up. Other people could figure it out. This is not rocket surgery. Right? But.

Yeah, yeah, but.

And I've tried to document a lot of it and I've tried to pass it off, but probably three times a year something comes up and it's like, oh, yeah, well, you gotta look over here for that. It's like, oh, yeah. Who else would have known that?

That's correct. Well, that's not on that server. That's over here.

What are you talking about?

Right? Yeah, yeah, exactly.

That's just this little file. And you know, somebody would be like, dude, I spent the last eight hours looking for that. Like, yeah, sorry.

Yeah.

You know, yeah, it is.

It is tough. And. And there will. There will probably always be things like that. And, you know, I don't know that there's any way to get. Get away from it, but. But you're right. Yeah.

Yeah. Those are the things that I. I just. I don't know. I mean, I don't know how big I would have to grow the company. At what point it would make sense for really. What would need to happen is I would need to hire somebody and say, rebuild everything that we have. Don't try to learn what we have. Learn what it does now. Create it over there. And you're not allowed to. You can take whatever you want with you, but I don't want to know anything about it.

And that's the hard part. Then you don't know anything about it. And then you become dependent on a consultant or a programmer.

Now I have the same problem in reverse. Yeah, that's right.

I don't know what's worse. I don't. We could, you know, we could probably over drinks, have that discussion for hours.

Eat A lot of drinks.

Yeah. Which is better, you know, knowing where all the bodies are buried. So you're the one that knows how to solve the problem quickly or totally disconnecting and, you know, paying someone that's going to have to fix it and what happens when they're gone?

Yeah, there's. I. I'll tell you, for those of us that understand, like, specifically with technology stuff, I. I look at. At other. Actually, people that are far more successful than me that. That have no clue about or very little clue about technology, and. And they just outsource it all, and they do great because they don't have to worry about it. But when they tell me, you know, they'll say, oh, yeah, you know, our. Our tech team is. Is doing this or that. I sit and I think, wow. Either, wow, they're idiots and they're doing it wrong, or, man, they're overcharging you for that, you know?

Yeah, yeah. That stuff.

And there's no way I can unlearn that, right?

No, no, that's just the way. That's the problem, the way it is. Yeah.

But it's not a bad thing. Like I said, it's what, you know, it's what allowed me to get here, so.

Yes. Yeah, that's that skill set.

Yeah.

Well, cool. Well, you know, I mentioned interns, and I want to spend some more time with them. I think we might be coming up against the clock here today, but I do want to talk about interns and what a huge benefit they can be to your company and how to go about setting them up and getting involved with someplace that can provide them for you. So we'll chat about that on the next show.

I want to learn about that because I'm terrible with that. I should do a whole lot more. I have a university three minutes from my house, so I should be taking advantage of this.

We'll jump right in there next time because we've been doing it for over a decade, and it's a dramatic, dramatic program that can really help you out.

Yeah. All right, well, I look forward to hearing about that, man. Yeah.

Very good.

Good stuff. Thanks for listening. Feedbackbapodcast.com is the email address that we would love to have you send stuff through to. We have a Facebook group, too. Do you know the Facebook URL for it?

Yep, it's just facebook.com dba podcast.

Brilliant. That makes it easy. Perfect.

Got it.

Thanks for listening, everybody. Thanks for all the information today. Shannon, you were. Hey, this is awesome.

Yeah. Enjoy talking. We'll chat next week.

See you next week.