Listener Q&A - Taking Action to Help a Slowing Business

Business Brain, the Entrepreneurs podcast, episode 407 for Wednesday, November 23, 2022. Greetings folks and welcome to or welcome back to Business Brain, the show for entrepreneurs, really for everyone. Because what we do is we talk about how we apply our business brain thinking to all aspects of life, including our businesses. Sponsors for this episode include shopify.com SBS that's where you can go to get your 14 day trial and full access to Shopify's entire suite of features. We'll talk more in depth about that and a little something more a little later in the episode here for now, you here using my business brain in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton and.

Out here in Lafayette, California, I'm using my business brain as well.

This is Shannon Jean and my, my. The, the, the Christian who takes care of our our yard needs is using his business brain and his leaf blower outside right now. So if you hear that, that's, you know, I've tried to tune it out with the thing. I am mostly soundproofed in the studio, but it's there. So, you know, whatever.

Where I live, there is not a day goes by that you don't hear a blower. And we're pretty spread out. You know, I've got like an acre and a half and I don't really see any neighbors, but you certainly hear it. So blowers are. I'm very used to that. So if I hear it.

This is probably the last blower episode of the season for us here because it's, it's just, you know, we have this season where you clear out all the leaves and then, and then the winter happens and then, you know, the leaves come down and that's a little different. Come down? Yeah, it's different. What else is different is that you folks sent in a lot of feedback after last week's episode. Thank you.

Yeah, it's great.

FeedbackusBrain show is where all of this came in. Listener Jeff starts us off. He says, I just listened to your episode on wanting feedback as to what's working and not working. I don't typically engage in this fashion, but I thought, well, that's an honest question. And I've listened to about 200 of your episodes and if I'm being honest, I'm kind of on the cusp because I think a lot of your shows for me are overly simplistic and vague, but yet you run very specific businesses. So for example, the one where you talked about what you had to do when the pandemic hit, talking to your employees Laying out the reality. This is what we're going to do. This is what we're not going to do. That was very specific, very detailed, and extremely helpful. This is great, Jeff. Thank you for this. Great. He goes on. But I just wanted to stop here and say, like, I realize that this is constructive criticism. Thank. This is what we want. Like, that's just what.

Just what we need.

Awesome.

When you. It makes the show better.

It makes the show better. Exactly. And to that end, Jeff continues. But then you sold a business, and most of what you talked about was extremely vague, like, hey, I got this buyer. We. We did our due diligence, and, you know, now I'm not a part of it anymore and how I feel about that, which is great. But the reality is, how did you find that buyer? What were the steps you actually went through? Do you have a PDF of the bullet points of the things that you got that you should look out for? You know, what I'm looking for in a buyer, These are the red flags that had me concerned, but ultimately were okay. You know, those kinds of just really pragmatic things is what Jeff, he says would be personally looking for. Okay, so I'm gonna. I'm gonna put a pin in that. Only because this is a great question. I want to answer it. We have a lot to get through in this episode. I think that is worthy of its own episode. And I don't want to miss out on all the other feedback that came in. So we're gonna do that. The plan is that we're gonna do that next week. Cause you and I both been through it very differently, but also together. So, yeah, we've got a lot to talk about there. Continuing on, though, Jeff says, like, right now, I would be looking for shows that say something like, hey, the economy's tanking, inflation is killing me. Supply chain is a problem. If it is for your business. Some businesses are more impacted by that than others. He says, that's what I'm thinking. That's what I. He's like, you know, I want to hear, what are you doing? What aren't you doing? What should you be doing? That's what I want to know. Okay, we'll talk about that. He says, I don't. I don't know if that's exactly the kind of feedback you folks are looking for. It is, Jeff, but at least that's what he says. He takes away from the show. He says, I do appreciate your show and your honest answer. And back and forth of off the cuff without censoring. Too much. I think it's super helpful. All right, so let's have this conversation. Let's answer Jeff's question about the economy, because. And I have lots of thoughts about this, and I'm probably going to be more honest, especially about the one business I never talk about here, than I've ever been on the show, because it makes sense. The economy is tanking. Right. There are a variety of reasons for it. Yep. And they are impacting my businesses negatively, hurting my businesses in measurable ways. What's that? Yeah. Okay.

Same.

Yeah.

Yes.

With Backbeat Media, we're probably going to end Q4 down about 20% over Q4 for the past two years. But that said, the past two years were anomalies in the other direction. Right. Everybody was trapped at home with nothing else to do other than spend money online. And so we, in the podcast business, which is what, you know, Backbeat Media does, we have these shows that we produce, but most. Well, I have shows that I produce. Backbeat technically doesn't produce any shows. We keep that part separate. But, you know, we manage sponsorships for lots of shows, and some of those are mine, but, you know, lots more that are not. Uh, so we were in the perfect position to capitalize on the pandemic lockdowns. And I, I, I. For a long time, I hesitated from saying anything but financially, the pandemic lockdowns were spectacular for our businesses. Spectacular. It was amazing.

I would say many, many companies would have a similar experience. And now they're coming down off the high.

Right? That's exactly it. Right. Folks are leaving their homes, more money's being spread out, and, and on top of that, so, so there's. There is that very much that. But on top of that, the podcast industry is becoming more and more obsessed with tracking listeners. And that's not something we've ever been comfortable doing, is letting people track all of you. So we've been turning down more and more business because we don't let advertisers track our listeners. Lazy marketers are the bane of my existence. They've always been the bane of my existence. It's, I think it's just part of, part and parcel of, like, having a conscience and, and wanting to run a decent business here. And, and, yeah, I'm probably calling out some of my friends and competitors, but what the hell, it doesn't matter. It's true. So, you know, so we're addressing that. So that's like those two things are, are negatively impacting Backbeat. Right. Business is still. Okay. Part of the reason we get vague sometimes is, is because of confidentiality. Another part of the reason that we get vague sometimes is because our, our teammates and partners listen to this show. And so it like, and I would.

I would also say sometimes I get vague because I just don't know. And, and I will say, like, my experience is similar to yours. Several businesses are, our vacation rental business, you know, certain properties are way down versus the, you know, last year.

Yeah.

But other ones, some of the higher end properties are, are just killing it and way up and doing well. So I'm trying to figure out why are, you know, certain areas slow, why are certain areas not. And I really can't put my finger on it. And then with my handbag, you know, experiment business that I'm still running, I lost a major supplier this year, so the product mix is different. And I'm, I also got heavily involved in a political school board campaign. So I kind of took my eye off the ball a little bit. So that business is down dramatically, you know, maybe 30, 35%. But I'm not sure. Is it all because of the economy or is it because my product mix changed or because I didn't spend as much time on the business in the last, you know, quarter. Yeah, so, so sometimes that vagueness is just, I don't know. So I, I can talk and, you know, BS my way through it, but I don't think that serves anybody any good either. Right.

Right. And I mean, the same is true with, with Backbeat. There, there might be other reasons that, that things are down a little bit. Although I do know that in general also, like, in general, the podcast industry is down a little bit right now. Few people are willing to talk about it. Veritone came out and said that, you know, they were down year over year, which makes sense. You know, they, well, they're public, publicly traded companies, so they kind of have to be a little more forthcoming with that information. The private companies like ours don't generally share bad news when they, you know, unless, unless they have to. But I, I, I appreciate Jeff calling us out now to answer his question. What are we doing to address it? Well, with Backbeat, we're addressing it by, by growing wide. And I'll say that it sounds like you've essentially done the same thing, Shannon, in that you are, you are hedging your bets, if you will, across multiple. Like you don't have just one rental property, you have multiples. Right. And so we are taking some of the, you know, surplus that we have earned over the last couple of years and allowing that to help us grow wide. Now with backbeat, growing wide means adding more shows, doing a little. Doing a lot more business development time. Not just in reaching out to shows, but reaching out to more sponsors and, and being a little more creative. Quite candidly, the last couple of years, we got to be order takers, which was amazing, right? You know, but yeah, we had set ourselves up for that, but that has now changed. We can't be order takers. And so we're devoting even more of our time into our customer service aspect of our business, spending time on zoom calls or in person or whatever with our, you know, our sponsors, our key sponsors, even some of what I would call our not key sponsors, the ones that are in growth mode, like development mode, and just letting them know, here's who we are, we're here. Our job is to make your job easier. We see you as partners, not as people we sell to. Like all of this stuff, but really, I gloss over it or I mention it quickly, but like, all each of those things I just said is super important to us because it's true about how we perceive our business. But the idea is making sure our partners and our customers perceive our business the same way that we do. And that means spending some time with them and putting the proof in the pudding, if you will. So that's backbeat. The other business that my partners have asked me not to name, that I rarely, rarely talk about, but I will share specifically, more specifically what it is. It's an engine that helps people legitimately earn cryptocurrency. Now, I will say don't worry about us. We don't. We don't hold any crypto. We are not in business with ftx. We just buy essentially when, when some people have ways of earning and then when they want to cash out, we buy crypto and send it to, is how that works. So, like, we're fairly insulated from that. And I will say that was a decision that was made before my partners even brought me into this business. And I thank them for it all the time, because it's like being pegged to the US dollar instead of being pegged to the value of bitcoin. Is amazing.

However.

That business too benefited greatly, even more so than backbeat, from folks being trapped at home during COVID lockdowns at the same time, you know, sort of the perfect storm, the interest in the value of all crypto, Bitcoin specifically, but all crypto was, was at a feverish peak during, during the COVID Lockdown. So combine those two things together and I mean, we had like, gangbuster years. It was amazing, right? That that edge has been taken off for two reasons. At least two reasons. To your point, Shannon, there might be others I don't know about. You know, there's, there's. It's likely the business is being mismanaged because, you know, I'm in charge. No, it's. But, you know, like, there are mistakes that we make that we realize after the fact. Right. And so I'm, I'm aware that that might be part. That I'm, that there are things I might not be aware of. Uh, but, you know, people are no longer locked down, and crypto is not as sexy as it was, you know, last year or two years ago. So those two things very much have, have negatively impacted that business. Now. It's still very profitable. And the engine of that business is super solid. In fact, the, the, the, the, the, the crypto interest and lockdowns proved that the engine is super solid because we just suddenly saw all kinds of new users. And when I say the engine, I mean, yes, the software that runs the site, for sure, but also all of our relationships with partners that, that allow us these opportunities to, to earn. You know, we work with various different partners that have different things they need. We bring the users in, we put them all together. We're really in the fraud prevention business to make sure that the users that come in are real and that we're handing to our partners are real and they don't hate us for it. And that, that's, that's how that business works. But also, you know, things are down a little bit, and so we are getting less users, but we know that we haven't tapped out on the supply side. So all we need to do is bring in more users and there's more money on the other side of it, as long as we can bring them in economically. So two, in that business, we're also going wide. We are increasing the ways people can find us online. And, and those specific ways are more apps in the app stores. So that when people are searching for how to do specific things online, instead of just finding one app, they will find multiples that allow them to do, you know, instead of one app that does everything, we segmented out. We've, we've seen our, our competitors have success with this. So it's like, okay, we should do that and go wide. We've also partnered with a firm called the Hoth to do some SEO work for us to really Help us sort of go wider there. And, and so for our businesses, to answer your question, Jeff, going wide is what we're doing now. It means different things for your business than it does for mine. In fact, it means different things for each of my businesses that I just talked about. But that's what we're doing is, is spreading wider so that we have more stable base. And yeah, I mean, that's, you know, so hopefully that's a more specific answer. That's the most specific I've ever been on this show. But it's a, like, I want to be more specific for all of you. I, I get it, Jeff. You make, you, you, you make a fantastic point. So I, I'm sure you have more to add to that. I just talked for a long time, Shannon.

Yeah, no, it's fine. It's good. And I appreciate that, that to me there's two, two ends of the spectrum and you know, going wide and all these things that you're talking about too are opportunities. And you know, hardship can make your company much stronger and create all kinds of opportunities. Excuse me. And I think that there on the spectrum for my businesses, I'm thinking on two, two ends of it. One is value. Okay, how do I sell products and offer what people want, but at a, maybe at a better value? And so like on that, you know, handbag business, I'm like, well, we're gonna go the vintage route and, and go into other channels and vertical markets that I've never been in before, but people that can get things that they otherwise couldn't afford, that's great. And that, and that that's working out pretty well. But on the flip side, on the vacation rental business, it seems like the luxury properties are doing better and they're stronger and where the mid to kind of lower end standard properties, those have slowed down the most. And our speculation is that, well, in the big luxury house and places people are coming together, it's multiple families because they're larger, so it's less impact on their pocketbook perhaps, and they want to get together with people. And so, you know, it's not just one thing or another and it's continually experimenting. Is there a value if you're in product business, is there some sort of value proposition? You know, can you bundle things together? Can you talk about. We know times are tough, so we're doing this for you, for our customers and adding value and you know, try to, try to get closer to your customers so they can appreciate that. But don't ignore if there's a luxury base of your customers that are just like, hey, we're not going to be impacted by this, you know, economic slowdown. So we want X and we want to distinguish ourselves by having X and show it off and, you know, that kind of thing. So I think you need to look at it both ways. But all of it comes down to opportunities if you think about it. And we've got a show in the works for a few weeks from now that we're going to talk about kind of embracing the oncoming recession to find opportunities. I'm looking forward to talking about those things.

Oh man, another notification. Wait, I like that notification. That's actually one of the ones I'd like to leave on because that's the sound of another sale on Shopify, the All in one Commerce Platform to start, run and grow your business Shopify makes it simple to sell to anyone from anywhere. Whether your thing is vintage teas or recipes for ghee. Start selling with our sponsor Shopify and join the platform, simplifying commerce for millions of your favorite businesses worldwide. With Shopify, you'll create an online store in your vibe. You discover new customers and grow the following that keeps those customers coming back. Because Shopify has all the sales channels sorted. So your business keeps growing from an in person point of sale to an all in one e commerce platform, even across social media platforms. And thanks to 247 support and free libraries full of educational content, Shopify's got you every step of the way. It's how every minute new sellers around the world make their first sales with Shopify. And you will too. Shannon and I, we've done it. We've heard that sound because we've used Shopify with other businesses, businesses we've had. It's fantastic. They just make it so easy. When you're ready to launch your thing into the spotlight, do it with Shopify, the commerce platform, backing millions of businesses down the street and around the globe. Go on. Try Shopify for free and start selling anywhere. Sign up for a free trial@shopify.com SBS all lowercase go to shopify.com SBS to start selling online today. That's shopify.com SBS and our thanks to Shopify for sponsoring this episode. Hey, you know, as business brainiacs, I love that term. Entrepreneurship has its ups and downs. It's how we deal with those obstacles that makes the difference between success and and failure. And we've found a new podcast that helps you navigate that path. It's called Entrepreneur's Enigma. It's hosted by Former journalist Seth Goldstein. Every week, Seth interviews entrepreneurs from all walks of life about their journeys through entrepreneurship, the ups, the downs, and how to deal with them. Entrepreneurs Enigma episodes drop every Tuesday at 8am Eastern. Check out entrepreneurs enigma.com or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for doing this swap with us, Seth. All right, I, I, I gotta say I really, I mean at first I really love the noise of that, that leaf blower outside. But beyond that, second only to that, I love, I really love helping people I like. I've built my career to help people do different things and, and anytime I've lost focus of that, I lose money. When I gain focus, when I regain focus on that, that's when I'm successful because I'm helping other people be successful. And I love doing this show focusing on all of you. And quite frankly, the less the show is about you and me, Shannon, and the more the show is about everyone else, the better off, the better I feel. And I think, correct me if I'm wrong, the better the show is. Jim sends in the next question to feedbackusbrain Show. He says, here's your feedback loop from a single listener. I love your show. I doubt I'll ever email you again, but you get this one. For all your effort on Business Brain 406, the last episode, here's my thinking. You're doing great. For folks like me, my business is fledgling. I feel swamped. I don't have time to send you an email because I'm a guilt ridden workaholic. I wonder how many of your listeners are also busy trying to figure out how to make their 1, 2, 5, even 10 year old business work and go to the next level. Learning from you but not giving you feedback. You'll never know, I guess. Sorry. Not very helpful, am I? Maybe more helpful. I love your tangents. The show's about 15 minutes longer than I have time to listen to most of the time. But on days that I can let my mind stick with you for a full show, I'm happy when I do it. I find the relevancy mixed for my type of business. I run a creamery on a farm. It's my parents farm. I learned how to meet food regulations and construction equipment, process paperwork and bottle milk, chocolate milk kefir. I don't even know what that is. Make curds, cheddar, camembert, cottage cheese. Camembert. Sorry. Some of the products are a terrible business proposition the way I'm doing them. But I'm stubborn. Others keep the business going. I'M terrible at marketing, great at systems design. When I listen to you, it's mostly the way you think that I'm learning from, not necessarily the specifics. Yeah, I'm trying to understand my blind spots and take away all kinds of random learning depending on whatever my deficit happens to be. I find you sound far better at business than myself, so I don't have much to offer. I'm running one business or two if you count the farm that I will soon be responsible for. While you guys talk about running multiple businesses, how many of your listeners are running one business for life? How many are rolling out startups and selling them? Anyway, your time is up for my feedback. Thanks says Jim. Keep up the great show. Thanks for your candid talk and your tenacity. Well, bullheaded persistence is the key to my success. I say I guess I have two keys to my success. Be bullheadedly persistent about helping other people. So maybe I've learned a thing here today. But yeah, you're right, Jim. My thought in doing this is that even if the specific doesn't apply to you, I'm always looking for ways of trying to. Trying to sort of teach the meta lesson. And, and maybe that's why, you know, listener Jeff says we aren't specific enough so we can be more specific. But still keeping in mind that you.

Gotta go back and forth.

A meta lesson. Yeah, yeah, no, it's important.

I think, I think it's a mix because there are some overarching techniques and systems that, that are important to absorb and to continually talk about so you can experiment with them while offering specific examples in our, from our business life and maybe even our personal life is, is also very, you know, very important.

Yes. Yeah.

You, you talk about bullheaded persistence and I love that. And you know, for me, I think it's also good to recognize, like, my thing is completely different. Is. And I always talk about story. And my driving force in, in my business life has been thinking about what story do I want to tell about my life and when am I going to tell it? Now. Okay. You know, after I've done it for 25, 30 years or when I was younger and I was worried about being perceived as a flake because I was trying all this different stuff and I was just bound and determined that I was going to be successful. But the story has dragged me along and I just tell it backwards. Right?

Yeah.

How I want, how I want the story to be is what I'm working towards. And when I share that technique with people, sometimes you Know, I get. I just did some consulting for, you know, a friend's family business, and they kind of looked at me funny, and I just said, well, that's what works for me. And I just. What story do I want to tell? So whatever it is that you can find to turn the gears in your head that is going to force you to do these things, because you. I sound maybe like a highly motivated, super productivity, you know, type of person, but I'm actually not. But I cannot tell a story that doesn't have part of that in it, so I make myself do it.

Yeah. Yeah, I'm. That makes sense. You're telling the story to hack your brain so that you convince yourself to, on the outside, look like a super productive person that never procrastinates a damn thing. Yeah.

And when I talk about it, I want to tell that story to other people. I want them to get that impression that, wow, this is cool. And, you know, and. And maybe it sounds simple when you're like, oh, it must. You just have that skill. No, no, no. I don't have a lot of skills other than some of that bullheaded persistence and overarching optimism that has kept me going, because I just can't fathom any other choice. And talking. We talk about our mistakes and our failures here a lot. Right. But if you listen to us, you'll. You'll get the. The spin on that.

Yeah.

Is we talk about it as tuition and how we turned it, and, you know, I'm making mistakes today that I probably are too raw to talk about on the show, but a year from now, I'll be able to go back and say, wow, I really screwed up. I should have sold this company off sooner or whatever, you know, different things. So finding that whatever that thing is that you can, you know, that. Or that can squeeze you to. To motivate you is really important.

No, I. Like, I. And I'm definitely projecting here. So, in fact, I won't say that this is what you're doing. I'll say that this is how I interpret what you're doing and apply it to my life. I am someone who is prone to procrastination. However.

Me too.

Yeah. Well, okay, so I can tell this about you, but I can also tell it about me. Maybe this is why we get along so well, is I don't want to be seen as the person who is the procrastinator. And so I will do things and be productive so that I am not seen as a procrastinator by me or anyone. Else. Right. But it's very much a proactively reactive thing to do. It's like, oh, wait, if I don't get this done crap, I'm gonna be a procrastinator. No, no, no, no. I gotta be the productive guy. I need to be the one. And a lot of that is fueled by me being petrified of having to work for someone else again.

Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Couldn't do it.

Yeah. You know, when in music circles, the general answer to a question, and this answer will come from, well, anyone experienced, but it doesn't mean pro musicians, Although it definitely includes almost every pro musician, like top level, a list musician I've ever talked to. And I haven't talked to too many of them, but I've talked to enough of them. But it's also anybody who is committed to playing music as their primary career. Right. I have done it as my primary career. I've also done other things as my primary career. But when you ask people, well, what do I need to know about being a full time musician? And I think this applies to what do I need to know about being a full time entrepreneur of any kind? Is the answer I get from all the pros is if you can imagine yourself doing something else, do that. But if you can't, then you need to be a musician. And I would say the exact same thing about being an entrepreneur. If you can imagine yourself leading your life and being happy working for someone else and having them take that level of responsibility, you know, for whatever the business is and all of that, if you can do that, do that. But if you can't, then, well, join a club. We've got jackets, you know, we're majorly flawed people that are just driven. And I have worked for other people, so I know what that's like. And I'm sure most musicians, before they become pro musicians, they've done other things. And so they can imagine what that's like too, because they've done it. And I've always been. The people that I've worked for have loved having me work for them, but it always drove me crazy to not be in charge of making the obvious decisions that, you know, to avoid the red tape. I mean, I worked at bank, I worked at Citibank for a while. I worked at GE Capital, which is essentially a bank, sort of, but, you know, big companies. And it was like, God, why does it take so freaking long to get anything done? Like, the answer is obvious, guys. And they would, they would, you know, sit me down and be like, dude, you gotta chill for a little bit, you know, like, you know, your ideas are right, but that's not how things work here. It's okay, you know, but just. That's not how things work. I'm like, why the frick don't they work that way? If we all know this is how it should work, why doesn't it work that way? Drove me crazy, so that. But that helped convince me that I needed to be on my own at any time. The businesses have been, you know, I've talked about. 2017 was a rough year financially for our businesses. I had taken my eye off the ball for a while, and when I say a while, I mean, you know, a five to eight year period where we were raising our kids. And I loved the flexibility that I gave myself to do that and be, you know, at all their concerts and dance recitals and hockey games and like, it was frigging amazing. And I would do it exactly the same way, but it cost me. You know, business sort of slowly declined and we got to a point where we had like, you know, a month's worth of payroll left in one of the businesses, and it was like, crap. Okay, I got to. It's time to put my eye on the ball again. Got it, got to do it. And I had to make some really tough decisions. We restaffed things in that we, we let some people go. We rejiggered the way the staffing worked. But I had to make it cash flow positive again. I had to, you know, dig in. And I couldn't just let other people do stuff. I had to get in and do stuff and fix some things that I had sort of let go unfixed and all of that, and it worked out spectacularly well. It like, amazing. The business is healthier today than it's ever been. But there was that, that moment. And in that moment, you know, I had to sort of face the reality of, well, this might not work. Like, this business might die. And if it does, you know, do I want to let it die and, and, and then go work for somebody else, or would I be willing to invest more of, you know, my personal capital? Which, of course, some of it came from the profits of the business over the years. You know, would I be willing to invest something in that to. To keep it alive? And how much would I be willing to invest to keep it alive? Thankfully, it never got to that point. I didn't have to put any more money. And although I stopped taking a paycheck for a little while, so it might be Argued that, that, you know, I mean, I made that financial investment there.

Done that.

You're right. Right. Yeah. But that's like these are so here you go. Here's some specific raw, honest stuff. And I'm glad to be, I'm happy to be sharing it. I mean, sort of not happy that I lived through it, but I am because it taught me that I could do it. But it was that very, very strong desire to not have to go get a job with someone else that fueled me through that process. And the difficult, like I hate letting people go, but it was like, well, I got it. I mean, here's what it is, here's what's going to happen. Yeah, I got to do this. And, and, and I, you know, I didn't want to have to reinvest my time in the business and basically take on yet another full time job to do that. But, but it was like, well, I'm going to take on a full time job with somebody else if I don't. I'm not going to let that happen. So it's that, that fuel of, of knowing that I don't want to do X. Like I don't want to be a procrastinator, so I seem like a productive person. I don't want to work for somebody else. So I figure out how to make the business survive. Those things are what fuel me. And we're all different. But look at what you don't want and let that be your fuel.

Yeah, that's good. I like that. And you know, we, we mentioned this a gazillion times on the show. Don't make fear based decisions. But sometimes I think that, oh yeah, fear, because it's such a motivator for so many, for all, for everyone, that it can be a powerful deterrent that you think about, oh, I don't want this to happen. I'm, I'm afraid of, you know, being beholden to someone else and working and stuff, working for them. But you know, finding that motivator whether it's being, being afraid of something else happening or oh, you know, like in my case, I want to be able to tell the story and sound like I at least have some of my act together. And yeah, the way it works now I can, you know, it does work. It has worked for me.

It's because you, you desired to tell this story as opposed to the other story and you desired. The difference in that desire was so, was strong enough. I don't want to say it was so strong, but it was strong enough that it drove you to stay on this path. And that's, I think, the key. We have a ton more of your questions to answer. Thank you.

We do.

We are going to answer them. But to Jim's point, this episode's probably gone on 15 minutes too long for Jim. And so we will do this next week, folks, though we're recording this the week of Thanksgiving. Thank you for all of your feedback. This. I couldn't have asked for anything more. I know we asked for this, but. But this, it really means a lot. So keep it coming.

And keep it. Yeah, keep it coming. It makes the show more useful for all of us, especially me, which is who I'm most concerned for.

So I.

Because I always learn the most when we have these conversations. So I want to learn from, you know, Jeff and. And, you know, all these guys and Jim and.

And we've got Lyman and David and another one from Jeff coming up next. Yeah. So, yeah, it's great. It's good. Yeah. Yeah.

Thank you very much. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving. Remember, feedback businessbrain show. Tell us what you want to hear about, and let's solve these problems together.

Yeah. Thanks. Thanks a lot, folks. Keep living that charm life. See you next week.