How You Present an Idea is as important as the Idea Itself

Business Brain Episode 583 for Wednesday, September 18th Rice Krispie Treat Day 2024.

Greetings.

Folks and welcome to Business brain, the show where we take a few ideas, we crunch them, we dissect them, we use them to analyze and tune our business brains each and every time we together. Our sponsor for this episode is a new sponsor for us@keepertax.com business where you can go to track expenses, find deductions and get a bigger tax refund. We'll talk more about that in a little bit here. Yeah, it's a cool, it's a fun, it's cool service, like you were saying. But pre show you get texts and it's like guidance. It's great. For now. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And out here in NorCal, Northern California, I'm Shannon Jean. How are you, Dave?

Yeah, I'm good. I'm. I'm ready to rock today. I'm feeling good. I am too energized and yeah, yeah, I am too.

It's a great day. I have, I have this scenario I want to run by you before we get into our, Our main topic. If you.

Our main topic of idea presentation.

Yes, yes, yes. That, that, that top. Stick around. We have. It's a, it's interesting. We're going to present it in such a way that you, your ear will be glued to the screen. But.

So I have this to the screen, folks.

Yeah, that's bad. Yeah, I'm not. Yeah. So I have this idea and I just want to run it by to see if I'm thinking using my business brain correctly. Okay. And here's this idea. So we have a few houses. One of them is our primary residence. And then we have a couple of other ones that we have that are owned by our business and they, we use them as well from time to time. But primarily their rentals. Right. Vacation.

Sure. Yeah.

And at these three houses, I have a ton of stuff that I need to get done. Right. Always. There's always a deck that needs to be stained, stuff that needs to be painted out, trees that need to be cut down.

It's a vacation for everyone but you.

Yes, correct. It's a business for us. My wife always reminds us this is our job. Okay, great. So that's great and I love it. It's wonderful. But every time I call a contractor, the costs that I get quoted, especially in the last year or so, have been outrageous through the roof because their costs are, I'm sure, much higher. And this is not a Rant about contractors act. But actually it's a creative idea that I've thought about. What if I just hired someone said, hey, look, you work for me for a year, I'll pay you a salary. I don't know, maybe. Yep. Let's say I give them four grand a month and with option for a $2,000 bonus. So 50 grand. Okay. I'm gonna hire this guy or you know, woman, whoever is handy. But they have to know how to do stuff. They gotta be handy, at least as handy as me. And ideally handier, if that's a word. So they could manage and do things like stain the decks, paint the walls, replace some electrical, on and on and on. All this maintenance stuff that needs to these three properties.

Yeah. You're hiring a, a full time maintenance person.

Correct.

For your, your house. Okay. All right.

And so, but do you.

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Keep, keep on.

And I would of course buy all the materials. Yeah. So my, my question is like I got a quote for a, you know, 1400 square foot. Was it even 1400? I don't know, a very pretty small deck? I don't think it was 1400. But the quote to replace a deck was like $59,000. And when I priced the wood out, it was about $10,000. And I thought, well, shoot, what if I hired somebody for a year at 50,000, I bought the material and then they get it done. Maybe it takes them a month, I don't know.

Sure.

But because they're by themselves or whatever, it just takes a while. It's okay. But then I have them the rest of the year to do this massive list of things I need done that I believe if I were to have a contractor do everyone, I would spend hundreds of, you know, easily over $100,000, maybe 200,000. Right.

Okay, so you're, you're talking about hiring an employee versus hiring a string of contractors.

Correct.

For a series of jobs that traditionally would be done by a string of contractors. I mean, that's it. When I say hiring an employee versus a string of contractors, we start thinking about our non vacation rental type businesses and it's like, well, yeah, that happens all the time, but that doesn't happen all the time in, in a business like the one. My.

Yes.

My primary question is, where the heck are you gonna find somebody that can do all that stuff for 50 grand a year?

Okay, so let's say I can find that person, because I think I can.

Okay. I think that's fair. If, if you think you can, then like that's talked to my garden.

My guy that does my gardening and different stuff. And they have some guys that are handy. Doesn't have to be.

But you don't need a general contractor. You will be the general contractor. You will manage them.

I'll manage the whole thing. I'll be active. So I just was trying to basically toss this out there. Does it, you know, does that sound crazy? Does anybody else ever done this feedback at businessbrain show, Tell me if I've got it right.

Yeah, I have. I have a friend, drummer friend down in Connecticut where this is actually his job. Like he is hired by it, but it's not somebody's vacation property. It's somebody's like the house that they live in.

He's like the caretaker kind of guy.

He's their caretaker of the house. Correct.

Kind of thing.

It's exactly what you're talking about. Yeah. The guy that, you know, it's a husband and wife. They're. They're empty nesters. The guy works on Wall Street. He works long hours and makes enough, more than enough money to pay the contractor. He likes to come home and like put on his slippers and read the newspaper and he wants the rest of it taken care of.

That's it.

And so this guy takes care of it. There's nothing wrong with it.

Yeah, this would be an experiment. So I would try it for a year. I would hire this person and say, hey, here's. This is what we're going to do. You know, make sure I think it's.

A good idea, man, whatever.

Yeah, yeah, okay. I'm gonna. I have another person in my household I have to convince that it's a good idea.

But if I can, turns out it's not me.

Yeah, no, Dave said it was fine. Let's go. So we'll try that out. But if you've ever done anything like that, I'd love your feedback. You can, you know, just. I put the email up there, but send us a message. But that's not what we're really going to talk about today. Here's, here's.

All right, folks. Have you ever felt like you're leaving money on the table? You know, like forgetting where you put the last piece of cake in the fridge? Well, we've got something even better than cake. Our sponsor, Keeper. As an entrepreneur, I've used Keeper and let me tell you, it's like having a financial wizard on my team. Minus the robes and wands. Keeper is a tax app that automatically scans my expenses. Finds me those sweet tax deductions and categorizes everything for my taxes. No more tea stained receipts or juggling janky spreadsheets. Just pure organized brilliance. One of my favorite things about Keeper, I can see my tax savings in real time. It's like watching my refund grow with every purchase. And on average, Keeper users get an extra $1200 back. It's fricking amazing and I'm looking forward to using it as now I've become a Keeper user. Right? So if you want to automate your expense tracking and make tax season feel like a walk in the park, you can now utilize the power of AI to automate your expense tracking, find tax deductions and get a way bigger tax refund next year. For a limited time only listeners here of Business Brain, you can try Keeper for free with our exclusive link@keepertax.com business and get 10% off your subscription. If you love it, that's a free trial plus 10% off your subscription@keepertax.com business this thing's awesome. And our thanks to Keeper for sponsoring this episode. All right Shannon, you, we talked about it in the intro here that we always say that ideas on their own aren't valuable. You need to take action with the idea, you need to implement something with it. Great, fine. But sometimes you're not just the only one that needs buy in on your idea, are you? And you gotta get, you gotta get other people on board and. Yeah, and so presenting the ideas becomes important.

Exactly, exactly. So this how you, the thesis here is how you present the idea is often, is just as important as the idea yourself, the idea itself.

Oh, and yes.

Yeah. And so I just want to break down some kind of. I've been, I've been looking at this and trying to figure out, you know, what are the, what are the ins and outs of how you make these presentations or discussions. Whether you're doing it on zoom, whether you're doing it, you know, whatever in person, whether it's one on one, whether it's a big group of people, how you get the idea across. Like one of the things that I use all the time is your two week experiment trick, right. Is getting people on board with what may sound like, you know, change is scary to a lot of people. So you know, when you're, when you're pitching something, this con, this concept that Dave, you know, we've done a show or so about it is that rather than say, hey, this is going to be the way it is and it's my way or the highway, it's like, look, even though you've decided that it's your way or the highway, you don't.

Need to say that.

No, no, what you say is, hey, let's do a two week experiment and let's see how this works. And then it gives you some wiggle room to really look at it and go, well, this is what worked. Maybe that, maybe we could tweak it a little bit, but that is, you know, I love that concept. And another part of this, you know, just a few things that I wanted to talk about is how to use your body when you're making these presentations. Right. Really, really important. And that is whether you're doing it on zoom, whether you're doing it in person, whatever it is. And some of that stuff can be just as simple as leaning forward when you want to make your point, using silence when you want to put the exclamation point on something very important and being self aware of it and doing things like you're being expressive with your face, you know, your eyebrows are huge, right? Well, not, not literally, no.

But yes, being, being. And with your voice too. It's fascinating. This morning, before I, before we came to record the, this episode, I started telling a lot of our ad agency partners about that private pixel thing that I created.

Oh, yeah? Yep.

And there are things about it that the industry's not, that it doesn't solve all the problems for everybody. Right. It keeps the listeners data private, but that means you can't track them. It means you can confirm that they listened or that they downloaded the ad. But that's about as far as it goes. We get some demographic, there's some geographic data, I should say. And everybody, everybody that I have presented it to, I've presented it to a lot of people so far, including like the podcast team at Apple.

Okay.

One ad agency was, was sort of, they're a nerdy ad agency. So I wanted to run a biome. I've showed it to three or four sort of nerdy enough podcasters that would understand what's going on. Because I want people to poke holes in this.

Yeah, sure.

But I also want to get them on board. And a nice way to get them on board is to ask them, will you poke some holes in this thing? If they can't find holes, then they're going to be more apt to, they're going to be more receptive to it. But now I've started just telling our ad agency partners, hey, we have this thing. I want to tell you about it. I want to get On a, like, get on a call and show it to you. Here's the gist of what it does, but that's it. And I, several people are like, this is great. I want to introduce you to our, you know, the, the tech people here that, that work on this stuff. And awesome, you know, so I've, I'm getting all these calls set up, which is amazing. It's exactly what I wanted. One of the people was like, it started asking very specific questions that made it clear that even from my very loose description, he understood at least a good portion of what this does and what it doesn't do. And he was like, well, but if you're doing this, how could you still do this? Or maybe you can't do this. I want to know more. And I'm like, great, let's set up a call. And like, certainly I said in the email and maybe this was a mistake. I said, certainly I could type it all out, but it's way better if we have an interactive conversation so I can answer your questions. And his response was, let's do both. I'm a visual person. I like to read. And so I will do both. But we're going to have the conversation first because that's smart. I know how to pitch this thing. I've done it enough now, this show being one of the places. But you are going to be receptive to it anyway. I've done it to people that might not have been so receptive to it. And I've learned how to kind of pace the introduction of it and describe the problem and then show the solution and be efficient about it, all those things. And there's no way in the world that I'm going to try and do that via an email. No way.

It's super smart to do the in or the live discussion beforehand. That. That's one of the reasons I use loom all the time.

Yes, yes.

I can go through it and I can. Even if it's a document, there's something that I've created. Like, typically I'm jumping on some website or whatever, but even if it's something that I've written and I want to go through it with, you know, someone, I'll just create a quick loom video. I'm down in the corner, my face in a little circle and I can walk through, give the inflections, do, you know, use hand gestures, all that kind of stuff. And it, the, you know, you don't want to.

It's not as inter. I would say interactive is, is the Best.

Yes.

Loom would be, you know, not as good as that, but certainly way better than an email.

Just an email?

Yeah, for sure. Like, way better. Yeah, yeah, that's right.

Yeah. And you know, one of the things, like when you're listening someone, you don't, you can't have no boring faces. Right. You just can't. No, you have to emote, I mean.

And keep it short, too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's. Everybody thinks it needs to be, you know, you just need to get it out and then be quiet and answer questions, go back and forth. I love this, you know, using your hands. It's one of the issues I have with Zoom is a lot of times if it's just your face, you can't get, you know, you're crossed. Of course you're listening in your car or whatever it is, but on their live stream you can see us gesturing more. Yeah, yeah. The, one of the other things I think it's really important is to learn to take up space because everybody's looking at you. I, I, I listened to a speaking coach one time talk about there's a measurement between your ears and your shoulders. Right. Between the bottom of your ears and the tops of your shoulders. And the farther away you can get them when you're speaking, the better.

Long neck, you mean?

Yes, long neck. I like that. Okay, let's check out this guy's long neck. So because if you're hunched up and you're tense.

Yes.

You want to be relaxed. You want to drop your shoulders, put your shoulders back, take up more space. It gives you more credibility. People feel more comfortable watching you. Right.

I like it.

If, if your body is uncomfortable, they're going to be, people are uncomfortable for.

Your voice is going to be uncomfortable. No, you need, you're on stage. Like, any time I do one of these things, I'm on stage. And what I also have learned, and with this, it's fairly easy because I can send along a piece of JavaScript code. I'm happy to share the thing that I wrote, like the whole point of it eventually is to share it. I want to, I want to nitpick it first before we start publishing it. But, but at this point, I'm happy to show it as an aside. It's been a long time, Shannon, since I've had a code review done. That's when some other programmer looks at your work. I have never had a code review done by Apple before. And so while this is not officially a code review, my code is in the hands of Apple engineers. So essentially, is it a little bit intimidating but also. Yeah, you know, like.

Yeah, it's great. Yeah.

But have a, a way to wrap the presentation even with Q and A. Right. Like so, you know, you do your thing, people are going to have questions about your idea. Great, great. Yes. I've put something, whatever it is, together. I'd love to send that to you and end it before they get bored with the discussion about your idea. Keep, you know, end it when everybody's still. Oh, yes, I'd love to learn more. Great. You know, I'll answer some of your questions here, but I think it's. You're better off looking at this now. Now that you understand the gist. Go.

Look at this wanting more.

You got to leave them. Always leave.

That's the two hour cocktail trick. Right. I don't know if you know this guy. Yeah. Nick somebody or other, but his whole thing is to bring people together. You have a two hour party. Yes. But it, it starts and ends and, and you, that's it. You kick them out after two hours. Because it leaves everybody wanting to connect more. Yes. You know, so I think that's good. So obviously, lastly, one of the things that, you know, everybody kind of wants to be funny at some point and connect with your audience. And some people are good at it, some people are not. So the, the way I think. Do you think about it is you want to laugh and smile with your audience, so you want to pick up on their cues. If you say something and people kind of start laughing or smiling, maybe, maybe you slow down a little bit and, and, and lean into that a little bit more of what you just talked.

About, you know, don't blow past them.

Yeah, yeah. Don't play. You know, recognize those moments to connect with people in, in, you know, instead of just tossing some joke out there that you have no idea that's gonna, gonna fly, you know, and, and then obviously the last one is very obvious. It's eye contact. I have a hard time with this on being on zoom all the time.

Everybody stares at themselves on zoom it. That's, that's all people do.

Yeah. And, and it's like, okay, if I'm really looking at the camera right now, is that how you're seeing my eyes? And you know, so it's, it's a challenge. So you have to practice how, you know, do. Do some practice calls or whatever because you're. If, you know, this is just the world we live in. Yes. You got to get, get, get comfortable.

With that, record yourself and then watch that back. Record yourself as though very difficult. I know, but that's how you get. That's how you get better. Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, that's. That's my take on. On the. This concept that the way you present ideas is equally as important as the idea itself. I'd love to hear your tips that we could share with everybody else. Feedbackusbrain Show. Or come up, find us on X at Dave Hamilton or at Shannon Jean. Come connect with us.

Absolutely. Like he said, Feedback at businessbrain Show. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. Keep them easy for me to say. Keep living that charm life. We'll see you Friday.