Free Flow Friday

Business Brain, episode 574 for Casual Friday. Free Flow Friday, August 16th. That's National Roller Coaster Day. I think it's also Shannon's birthday. 2024. Greetings, folks and welcome to Business Brain. Welcome back to Business Brain. If this isn't your first episode here, we take an idea or three, we crunch them, we analyze them, we dissect them, we use them to tune each of our business brains every time we get together so that we can all keep living those charmed lives. And as usual, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton and out here.

In sunny California, I hope to be in a kayak on the water when this episode releases on Friday.

Oh, nice.

You're right. It is my birthday.

That's what I thought.

Get out of the office for a little bit. Get away from the computer and get out. I bought these amazing folding kayaks.

We have some of those.

God, you know, do you.

Are yours. The origami kayaks.

They are the origami kayaks.

We were part of the first kickstarter of those and have had them for several years.

Yeah, I love it. I love it. So we had. Maybe this will tie into the topic. We're just going to do a free flow here today, so we'll see if this how. How we relate it back to business. But I bought my wife this giant kayak, a regular kind of kayak. Two people. Awesome. Great. Once you got it on the water. But the key phrase is once you got it on the water because it's so big, so heavy. And that led us not to use it as much because we couldn't get it to places. And then I came up on this site which maybe. I don't know if you're showed or not, but.

Well, we might have different ones. It turns out there are several. Several.

I think the site you were just on is the one I have.

That's the one you have? Okay. That's not the one. I have the ORU kayak or something.

I have the Oru. Yeah.

Yeah.

These are the ones we have and they are amazing because they fold up. They fit into a kind of a backpack. Well, it's a big pack, but you. Where you can carry them and it allows you just to get anywhere. And we. I love them, man.

Yeah.

Yeah. We have the. I don't know which ones we have, but yeah. See how full holds up like that?

Yeah.

That is bad. That's badass. I mean.

Yep.

Whoever thought of that? And it's a corrugated plasticky material.

Okay.

What kind do you have Dave?

Ours are. Yeah, ours are a completely different brand. It's a, it like this looks like it's a thin shell, if you will.

Yeah, it's pretty, pretty thin.

Yep. The ones that we have are a hard plastic and you sit on top of them.

Oh, okay, great.

But it folds up and, and then you can like walk it down to the water or whatever. I mean it's, it's not light. Ours are about, I think 35 pounds or something.

So like these are kind of. Maybe these are £20.

They look, it looks like they say some of them are as low as £18. The one that you.

Yeah. You have?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the company that did ours went out of business, but I might be wrong. I don't know. Yeah, yeah. The origami paddler is the one that, that we had. And it looks, you can kind of. I don't know. That's cool if you're watching the video. Otherwise I'll put a link in the show notes to something that gets you close. But yeah, we have the Oregon.

Yeah, it's cool. I, what I, what I, I think they nailed is the simplicity of this.

Okay.

Getting you in the water as fast as possible. There's not, you know, I had like this funky two wheel trailer thing that I pulled along this other massive kayak. And now the big giant kayak. It sits in our house up in Tahoe and it just barely gets used because it's hard to get down to the water.

Yes.

So it's kind of interesting. But that's not what I want to talk about really today. Dave, are you sure I want to talk about. I'm positive. So we have this place up on the river in the Sierra foothills and I love it. Fantastic. The river, Mokalamine river runs right through this property. But I had this problem with. I bought this property last year and everything was great until about spring this year and we started having problems with the water.

Okay.

And you're on a. Well, it's a rural property. It's nowhere. And I have, I can't tell you the amount of minutes, but I can tell you the amount of frustration and effort I have put in trying to solve this problem with not enough pressure iron in the water, the filters filling up with this irony mud kind of thing. And I have gone down the rabbit hole so many times and tried to push into, figure this out, all this research, because I'm just like, oh, I can fix this. I know, I know there's got to be a way I can Figure this out.

Right.

Because I can fix almost anything.

Sure.

Finally had to call somebody. He gave me this. Oh, if you spend $15,000, I can fix your problem. It's like, oh, okay. Like, well, maybe there's a second way. Seven or eight thousand dollars. Well, I'm going to go back and keep looking. Keep looking. Finally connected with someone that said something that just blew my mind. And he says, have you all this. The main problem has been iron building up in the filters. That shuts down the pressure and everything. And he goes, oh, you know, have you checked for a leak? Because if the well is pulling so much water out due to a leak, it'll build that iron up.

Like, oh, that makes sense. Yeah. If you're drawing more water than you normally would.

Correct.

Yeah, yeah, okay.

And I said, okay. So I spent the last three days trying to find this leak, which I did not find. And the guy who recommended this family came out Monday, and we walked around for, let's say, about three minutes, and he points to the ground and goes, there's your leak right there. Right there. And I probably have walked by this space 50 times and didn't notice that it was wet. And I. And I was like, oh, you know, I don't know. But as the key I'm getting at is don't overlook the simple solutions or the simple cause of a problem.

Occam's razor, man. That's Occam's razor. We had a very similar thing when we moved into this house. We built the. The structure that my office and studio are in was here, but the studio was not. It was barely framed out. That was it.

Okay.

And. And so we. We finished it all off and I soundproofed it and all, like all these crazy things. And one of the things I did was I put mini splits in for air conditioning. Oh, yeah, we already had heat here. In retrospect, I wish I had done mini splits with heat and air conditioning, but that's a whole different story. It's fine. So the guy that did it, it's a two zone system. And the zone in the office was always fine. And the one for the studio, he would come over and charge it up. And then within about a day, day and a half, it would not get cold anymore. And I had this guy come back, I don't know, six, eight times, and it was like, dude, couldn't fix it. There's clearly a problem. He's like, well, it must be in the wall or here and that. And the other thing, I'm like, oh, okay, well, then let's open the wall. Like, how do we fix this?

Gotta fix it, dude.

It's never worked. And finally I got frustrated enough that I called someone else. Now, I'd already paid this one guy to install it, and he. It never worked. So, you know, he kept coming back for free. And finally I just called somebody else, and the guy's like, you have a leak? I'm like, well, I would agree with that. Like, obviously, yes. And he told me how to search for a leak, because he's like, you and I are both gonna hunt for these leaks. And he's like. He described. He's like. With this type of. It's not Freon, but it's whatever the stuff is that they used 18 years ago. And. And he's like, it'll feel greasy. I'm like, okay, great. And so I just go. And he's like, look for the joints first, because that's where leaks would normally happen. I mean, you might have a hole.

In a pipe, but that's where my link. My link was at a joint.

And he's like, check the. And so he's like, great, I'm gonna start outside, you start inside, and we'll wind our way. If we meet in the mid, middle, we have to go back, you know, and I don't know, within 10 seconds, I found the leak, and we searched the rest of the line to make sure it was the only one. But finding the right service. So then he tightened up the leak, filled it, and I haven't seen him since. And it's been 18 years or something.

That's awesome.

It's finding the right service provider. And, you know, you said something you the. I can fix almost any everything, right?

My mentality, same.

But I have learned to temper that because I know that I can learn to fix almost anything if I don't already know how to do it. I probably am not going to get it right or even know how to find it the first time. And I'm going to spend a lot of my time, energy, focus, distraction, all of that, becoming the service provider that I should have just hired in the first place. Most of the time, I have skills. I have. I can be valuable when I'm doing the things that I know how to be valuable with. Now, there's some things around the house, like, if you said, well, it's going to cost ten grand to fix this, okay, that's a number that gets my attention. And I'm like, all right, that's worth me spending an hour seeing if I'm the right person to try and fix this on my own, you know, and if. Or at least understanding it. And then beyond that, it's like, okay, great, we got to spend the ten grand, or I get multiple quotes just to make sure that, you know, it's not ten grand or one grand or something.

Yes, yes.

But, yeah, yeah, it's challenging.

And it's even like. Like, we had Joe Benson on the show for Wednesday and talking about. And I'm switching from my WordPress, which I've used forever, and I like the flexibility and everything, but I realized I need to do something beyond the realm of my capability for what I'm trying to build next for my. For my business. And I. I'm super. I wouldn't say I'm. I'm cheap. I love spending money, actually. I really enjoy it. It's fun. But I'm. I can't pay retail. I'm just not that guy. I'm always looking. I'm always looking for the deal. And sometimes I, I, you know, it comes around and bites me in the rear because I. I spend so much time trying to get the deal, you know?

Yes.

But when. When I started to reach and, like, Joe did this roast of my site, I'm like, oh, yeah, that's so true. I'm missing out here. Yeah, I'm so true. It's very amateurish, what I put together and this. And even though I use, like, Divi and these things that help me do WYSIWYG and all that stuff, it's like, I really have to have somebody do it, and I have to give up this idea that I need to control every little thing. And, you know, I calculated out. I'm like, I think I'm spending close to what I would spend to have somebody else do it anyway. And including my time that I'm always jumping there. And what got pushed me over the top was just. I just got hammered with a bunch of, you know, attacks on the site and everything else, and they installed a bunch of garbage, and then I had to buy this other software to protect me from those people and all this crap. Yeah. It was nuts.

And I would. I would say calculate your opportunity cost that.

Yeah.

Because, like, for me, one of the hardest. While the hardest hire I ever made was the first person I hired. That's just. That goes without saying. That's how it works. The second hardest was when I hired a programmer to create something that I know how to create. Right. But it was, well, do I want to spend my time doing that or do I want to spend my time doing whatever else I was doing? I was like, nope, yeah, I want to spend my time doing this. And the person I hired was a better programmer than me. And that, you know, there's a little ego swallowing to do there because I. Decent programmer. And it's like, oh, yeah. But like, they're going to be better than me and they're going to be focused 100% on this. And that's kind of the key is, as the business owner, we rarely get the luxury of being able to focus 100% on anything for a long stretch of time. And when you have a project that needs to get done, that's usually what it takes, is that dedicated focus. And I find it way easier to hire someone and control their focus than I do to control my own.

Yeah, I like that. And, and I, I would say I'm kind of going through the same thing with, I have just content manager that I recently hired.

Yeah.

And I'm letting her, you know, not letting her, but she's learned to go out and do stuff with my content that I normally would do.

Yes.

Like, but I just, I, I don't have. I have too many other things going on that I can't. Like, I can't go spend time on LinkedIn. I, I just can't do it. And so take the content that I created and go up and push it out to LinkedIn and adjust it as needed and do different things, and it's having a positive impact. And. But you, you have to give up. You know, you have to give up.

That's what it is. Yeah, you got to give up.

You have to give up.

So, yeah, that I can fix almost anything. When you hear, when I hear myself say that, that's like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Wait a minute. Who's the hero here? I don't need to have that problem.

Yeah, I totally, I totally have that problem. Yeah. Yeah. And so, okay, and then one more, one more quick topic. I don't want to keep everybody too late today, but so I have a client that I'm working with and guy, awesome, super smart, very successful, but he wants to get out and go on his own. He works for another company. And so we came up with some things and he said, great, I'm going to produce some data. And I said, great, come up with 10 things. And he came back and just with a plethora of information, just a ton of stuff. I was like, oh. And. And I was thinking, and I haven't followed up with him on this yet, but I'm going to. But I think from a corporate perspective, what he produced back for me would have been like, wow, that's great. Look at all this data. It's massive. But I looked at it and I was like, oh, dude, this is, this is so much.

It's over the top.

Yeah, it's over the top. And so I'm trying to teach him that, looking at it from an entrepreneurial aspect. And I said, he said, oh, I'm going to go now. I'm going to go have some other people help me fine tune this. And I said, stop. Just now, now you should stop and pick ten of those things. And now start taking action and don't do any more planning. The planning phase is over.

You're done with that now? Yes.

You're done with that. You've done a great job. Like I said, the guy's really good. He's going to be wildly successful, I can tell you. But it's almost like breaking habits that you're. Now, I'm not a corporate person, so I could totally be wrong, but it just seemed like the volume of information, which was all really good data and.

The like, I'm not seeing the data, so I don't. It's hard. I know I'm wrong. However, I also know that I am right because you say something often and it's a phrase that I have adopted as my own, which is always have a bias towards action. And data collection can feel a whole lot like action, except nothing.

Shake him out of it. Like, stop, stop it.

Yes, right. But in corporate America, you know, especially middle management and very large companies, that data collection is considered the desired action. You are trained that, oh, just correct. Collect data and do your thing and then other people will process your data. And maybe they will, maybe they won't. I mean, eventually somewhere someone processes data, but probably what they do is they're like, all right, well, we gotta make a change to the business, so we're gonna do this. A lot of it is certainly it's data driven and data informed, I will say. But a lot of times the people that are just executing on things, the executive staff, the people that are actually the executive staff, not necessarily in name but in role, it's just like, okay, let's do it and you do it and you just get it done. And that bias towards action in my book wins 90% of the time. There are some things I would agree. Having. Collecting data first is important. The first one that comes to mind, of course, is I have A interest in aviation. And when you're in the plane and you're flying and there's a problem, you do not take action first.

Ah, yeah, that makes sense.

You stop and think because what you currently have is altitude and speed. Now, your problem may cause you to lose one or both of those things. That's fine. But altitude and speed buy you time. And so if you change anything about your altitude or speed, you might have cost yourself valuable time. So stop and think first. All right, what are all my options? And you can't spend forever coming up with your options. But it is good to breathe, think, decide, you know, measure twice, cut once, that whole thing that. That type of. And maybe. Maybe measure twice, cut once is. Is the right way to think about it. Like, is this one of those scenarios where it is good to measure twice before we cut? Not every scenario is, but some are 90% aren't. 90%. Yeah, yeah.

The action. Because I. And again, it's coming back to the simplification thing. There's just no better way to learn than just to start doing it and start messing around and start. Like, if you go back to Businessbrain show, you'll see that there is no first episode.

Right?

That's because I sucked. You know what I mean? And I didn't know what I was doing and you were guiding me to learn. And there is no second episode. And so finally, when we got to the third or maybe even the fourth episode, Dave, who's in charge of the knobs and the sound, it's like, okay, let's go now. We'll go ahead. So it's that. It's like a muscle. You just got to start putting in the reps and you're not going to be good at the beginning, but that's how you're going to get better and over and over. And don't let that planning in data collection get in the way of taking that action.

Yes. So action, Action. Love it.

That's it.

Love it.

That's my free flow for Friday. I hope you have a great day. I hope somewhere Friday. Yeah. So if you're celebrating my birthday somewhere, lift a drink, have a beer for me. Cheers. And we'll see you next week. Thanks for hanging out with us today.

Thank you so much, folks. And it's always businessbrain Show. That's where you can sign up for the mailing list. You always get the show notes and all the little details that we put into the show. You get them delivered right to you so you'll never miss anything. We promise. We don't spam. You go sign up now. Have a great weekend. Keep living that charmed life, and we'll see you next week. Later.

See you.