Listener Questions: Making Cold Calls & Joint Ventures – DBA Small Business Show 21

Greetings, folks, and welcome to DBA, the Small Business Show. Episode number 21 for Tuesday, June 30, 2015, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And in Lafayette, California, I'm Shannon Gene. Welcome to the show.

How goes it, Mr. Gene?

It goes well. We are warming up out here and getting ready. Trying to wind things down a bit early this week to get out of town for a few days for the fourth holiday.

Yeah, that's right. Actually, we're recording a day early here. We'll probably release a day early. I see no reason to hold it until tomorrow. Tomorrow.

So, yeah, yeah, we'll get it going and celebrate the birthday of America. Right?

That's what we do. That's right.

Stuff.

Yeah. So we've gotten. I figured, you know, while we're. While we're coming up on this holiday weekend here, we've gotten some questions over. Over the past couple of weeks from people and thought it might be nice if we just took the time to let them drive the show and, and ask. I don't. I don't know how long it's going to take us to answer any of these questions. We've got three or four of them queued up. But I have a feeling, knowing how much you and I talk, we'll be lucky to get through more than one.

So verbose, right? Yeah, in a kind way. Yeah. I think that's great. And, you know, we welcome your questions. You can email feedbackbapodcast.com you can jump on the Facebook page, just facebook.com dbapodcast and your questions are very welcome and drive a lot of our conversations.

Indeed. Yeah, they do. They do. We. We just haven't been quite as quite as. We haven't exposed that part of it yet. But we've certainly let your questions drive what we do, like you said. All right, so Phil wrote in and he says, I'm a landscaper and I love landscaping. That's. That's a good thing, right?

Yeah. That's awesome.

Yeah, it's what I'm good at. And I have a partner who works with me to help keep things going. We want to grow our business, and that requires getting more customers. In addition to advertising and everything else, we're also just reaching out to potential prospects. This is hard. I know in theory that I just need to talk to enough people, but hearing no thanks over and over again or not having anyone take my calls can be overwhelming at times. What do you recommend I do?

Well, that's a great question.

It is. You want to Start this with this one, or shall I. Well, go ahead.

Yeah, I can comment. I actually have some background in the landscape industry. I went to college for ornamental horticulture and ran a landscape construction business all through college. So it's kind of in my wheelhouse a little bit. But, you know, I think that we've talked a little bit about this, but I think the key thing is that Phil's running up against, like, he comments is, you know, just getting people's attention, motivating yourself when you're hearing the no over and over and over again, and coming up with creative ways to put your business and your service in front of people that maybe they would be interested in hearing about. And I think a few ways, you know, one of the things is really to get involved locally, that the landscape business is, you know, certainly a localized business where you want to be the expert in your, you know, local climates and plants and all that, all that kind of stuff. And getting involved locally can. Can be everything from exhibiting at local fairs, or it could be your chamber of commerce, you know, or like, we have some festivals around here, one big one called the Walnut Festival, and there's always small businesses, and usually they do things like they have, like, poor beer or something that would, you know, naturally attract people to your booth, and then you get a chance just to have a discussion with them.

Sure.

And I think that is. It's a hard thing to do, but if you can spin it. One of the things, when I was trying to drum up business in colleges, we would drive around, and it was kind of before the whole Photoshop thing, but you could go to someone's house and you could take a picture, and you could kind of manipulate some things or even a sketch, and you could just leave it for them in their mailbox. Something like, hey, this is my vision of how great your landscape could use. And we always use the word landscape. We never use the word yard, because the yard is a place where you park trucks and big pieces of equipment. You know, landscape is where you're hanging out, you want to enjoy with your family. But creative things, you know, I don't think the. The junk mail thing really works. I think people toss them too quickly, and I think that get, you know, going back to getting involved. So when people think of it, think of, who. Who do I reach out to? Somewhere, some way, your name pops in front of them.

Yeah, well, yeah, right. So as we were kind of prepping this stuff, I came at it from a little bit of a different angle, but. But to your Point, you know, you want to have it. The best thing you can do is have people know who you are before you talk to them. Right. If you are going to cold call someone, you want it to be as lukewarm a cold call as possible, right? Yes. And so doing a lot of the things that you're talking about, getting your name out there in the community, even if people aren't yet calling you, at least when you approach them, they've heard your name before, right? There's. There's that old adage and I, I've heard the number be varied anywhere from like 5 to 25, but people need to hear your name X number of times before they're gonna buy from you. Right? So if you call them and that's the first time, chances are it's a no. You know, just. Just the law of averages says that's how it is. So you want to have a. You want to have a decent name for your business. You want to have a memorable name, and you want it to. You want to get it out there somehow to these people. Sales, though, you know, I manage a team of salespeople here at Backbeat Media, and sales is a numbers game, right? So you have to somehow and you have to make it a game when you're doing cold calls. Because in reality, if you make 20 calls and you get 19 no's, that's success.

Yeah, you're doing pretty good.

You're doing pretty good. That's one out of 20. Whoa. You know, how long does it take you to make 20 phone calls? It might even be just 20 minutes, but it's certainly an hour or less. Right. You know, you call up, I'd like to talk to who's making. Oh, okay, you're not interested. Great. Moving on. And it's hard, like you, like, like you said, man, to, To. To keep yourself up, but, you know, coming up with, with creative ways. I, I'm not necessarily going to advocate for using something like Salesforce. That might be overkill, but some sort of software to track the, The. And it could just be a spreadsheet, right. You know, keep it in Excel or something, but something to track that you've called these people, um, and do just on a kind of a broad scale. Okay. I made, you know, 35 phone calls today, and I got two appointments out of it where I can go and quote these people. Okay, that's great. You know, now you're actually the next day. Right? That's. Or even that day. That's great. So you need to track that. So you can see, because you're. If you just do it in your head. I know tracking 35 calls isn't a lot, but what you need is to convince yourself that what you're doing is successful. And when you hear no 33 times, the two yeses are hard to remember unless you're looking at it in front of you and you say, hey, that percentage is pretty good, right? You know, I've got a 6% success rate. Awesome. This is great. You know, I want to bump it up to an 8. So you target your pitch. You, you know, you, you attract people or like you said, you do something even I, I know you said those mailers don't, don't typically work, but they do help get people in the, in the zone. Right?

Yeah. Yeah, that's true. And I think the key point that we're kind of getting around is focusing on the positive. We all know it's very easy to focus on the negative and go, man, I got 19 people said no. But it's those small successes that you want to build on. And the other point, I think in the beginning you were talking about this kind of referral or getting other people to mention your name. That's huge. You know, if you're in business, you have some existing customers and you really want to lean on those folks to ask for referrals and ask for reviews and especially for a localized business like that, you know, something like Angie's List, Yelp, you know, Nextdoor.com is another one that's, you know, kind of making a lot of moves out there right now, getting involved in neighborhoods. And, you know, I'm a member of the next door community around my neighborhood, and every day I see people asking, hey, does anybody know a contractor for this? Does anybody know a good accountant? You know, this kind of thing. So everyone likes to lean on those things. And I think with, you know, mobile is so critical to every business now. People are, while they're thinking about it, they're like, you know, I need to do something. Especially here in California. We're right in the middle of this massive drought. You know, last week I came home and our. The guy that does our gardening here, you know, super nice guy. And I could see he was kind of just kind of down in the dumps. I said, hey, you know, how's it going, Murdado? What's going on? And. And I really like the guy. And he says, oh, you know, I'm. I'm having a lot of customers tell me they don't need My maintenance, because they're letting their lawns go, go brown.

Oh yeah.

And I was like, oh yeah. You know, and this is a guy that, you know, I've known for a long time and his kids help him out and everything. I said, wow, you know, and I said, I was just reading an article about a service that is painting brown dried up lawns green.

Huh.

And I could kind of see this look and say like, wow, that's interesting. I said, yeah, so maybe what you need to do is your existing customer base reach out and say, hey, I know we're not mowing your lawns, but what we'd like to do is come by and spray. And it's just a water based paint that typically only lasts about a month anyway. Recurring revenue. Yeah, recurring revenue. And, and in his case, he was just trying to keep, you know, people on his, his route. And so I said, you know, get your tank and water and get some of that dye and just go do it. Don't even say anything. And when they come home, you know, they're going, wow, how did you get the lawn so green? You know, and because it looks pretty good. So, you know, coming up with creative ways, you know, to do things. A great name is, I think, really important, like you said, Dave, a very good logo, some kind of catchy logo. And you can use a service like Fiverr, you know, F I v e r r.com or there's a bunch of them out there. But those kind of things where, you know, people remember what your logo looks like, they see it whether you advertise, you know, locally around town or you, you know, do something else, you know, you do the card in the mailer, if that works for you, you know, for you. They see that thing over and over again. And like, like you said, I, you know, I don't know how many times it takes, but you need that.

Well, and sometimes it only takes once, right? I have, I was in, in college, I was a, I'll use the term landscaper, but really I just mowed people's lawns. And one summer I started late. Have I told this story yet? I don't think so. Okay. All right. So I thought, well, maybe I'll just get a temp job this summer and I'm not going to mow lawns. Or I guess what it was was I came home from college and I hadn't marketed right yet. So it's already middle end of May and I've missed everybody's mowed their lawn once already. So if you were Going to hire some. And this was in New England, where you don't mow in the winter, but, you know, you start mowing maybe mid April or something, certainly by the middle of May, you've mowed once, which means that you have. If you're going to hire someone for the summer, you've already done that. So, you know, so I'm talking to people and they're like, oh, no, I've already. I do it myself. Or I've already. I'm like, wow, this sucks. So I made up this flyer and it said, it, it said, hate mowing your lawn. Let Dave do it. Right? Because I figure the only people I can market to are the ones that thought they didn't want to hire someone, right?

Ah, yeah, sure. Yeah.

You know, and so I, I put this thing together. Would you rather enjoy your family, your Saturdays with your family? You know, kind of targeting. Not only, you know, I kind of figured, well, maybe there's this traditional role of a, you know, a husband and a wife, and the husband has to lose half the Saturday. So maybe if the wife sees the flyer, she might be incentivized, even though the husband. Because that's, that's happened to me since then, you know, where it was like, oh, I like mowing the lawn. And my wife's like, yeah, but we like having you around. So I, you know, I targeted it that way and I just made up a one pager and then I did something illegal. So I can't advise you to do this. I made up 50 flyers, you know, I printed up 50 of them. I went to a coffee shop or whatever, and I put them in a bunch of mailboxes. You're not supposed to do that. Right? That's, that's illegal.

As a kid. As a kid, right. You can get away with that, but not as adults.

So maybe here's the thing. I, I got a phone call that night, or I guess it was that night, you know, or my, My stepmom got a phone call because our, I put our phone number on it and the phone number was in, in her name, in the, you know, in the phone book or whatever. And so I got a phone call from the, I guess it was from the police. It might have been from the, the, the post office, but it doesn't matter. Some, you know, official government agency. And they're like, hey, look, you can't, you know, we've got a bunch of these flyers that are. Our mail carrier picked up on, on, on their route today. And, and so you can't you know, you, you can't, you can't do that. It's like, oh, okay, fine. And. But I got, I got a bunch of phone calls out of it, and I got 20 lawns out of this. Now. 20 lawns out of 50 flyers is awesome. Yeah, I mean, it's killer. I got 20 flyers back from the post office, which. I got 20 lawns out of 30 flyers.

Yeah, that's, that's impressive.

But I targeted my people. I looked, I could tell if somebody was like, if. If their lawn was meticulously done. I didn't leave them a flyer because I only had 50. You know, I, I was on a limited budget. I figure if somebody's lawn is meticulous, either they're crazy, but then they're not going to hire me to do it because I'm not going to make it look that good. You know, I'm not that good. Or they've already got a service, so you don't get a flyer. But the one where the grass is a little long or, you know, things are a little ragged, that's the one I targeted. And so, you know, it worked.

And, and, and it makes sense. I mean, you're targeting, you know, who should you be focusing on? And, and maybe that's a, a good lesson here, too. For, for these guys are trying to grow this landscape. Business is. Okay, where are you focusing on? Are you making random calls? Where are you getting this list? Or how are you really marketing? And out there, you need to find service.

That's.

It may not know. They may not know it yet, but if you present it in such a way, and like Dave, I think that great example of that, and even using, you know, using humor and trying to, trying to get out that that's the key. And, and typically, I think you'll have far greater success using that method.

Yeah. Like you said, you know, if they don't know they need your service, that's even better, because if you can convince them they need a service like yours and you're standing right there, the moment they make that decision, then they're not going to shop other people. Right. You've convinced them they need you, and you're the only one they know of at that moment in time. So it's a, it's a much better, you know, success rate.

So, yeah, it makes a lot of sense.

And if you can. And so, I mean, obviously we're giving some landscaping specific examples here, because that's the path Phil headed us down. But I mean, all of these things are can be used very generically. And, and if you are in such a business where you can use an email list, right, you know, and it don't buy an email list, but if you have addresses of people that you know are the right people potentially for your service, even if it's existing customers or prior customers, right, if you've been in business for a while, you've probably got this list build. If you don't have it, start building it, right? You know, of all the people that have used your service, if you, if you send them an email telling them, hey, I've got something going on, here's the right thing, here's the way to do it. Use a mail service that lets you track when people have opened an email and send out an email to all, you know, let's say you have a hundred people on the list and then look the next day. Because that's all it takes for people to either throw away your email or open it up, look the next day and you, you can see not only that 10 of those hundred people opened it, or 20, but which 10 or 20 have opened it and then pick up the phone and call those people because they've now, right, by opening your email, they've expressed at least a mild interest in learning about what it was you sent to them. It didn't go to spam, they didn't just delete it right out of the way, you know, they've opened it up, call them up. And that's something. We've actually been doing it at Backbeat, you know, because we have, you know, customers that come around and you know, maybe aren't with us now, but have been in the past and when they open the email, that's like, okay, now you're on the list. Now you, you either get another email as a follow up. And it's funny, you know, the open rate on those follow ups, a good open rate is about 20% on an email and we actually usually average about 30. But on the follow up where we send to the people that opened within the last 48 hours, or even if it was, you know, we sent them an email last week and we haven't heard back from them or whatever, if we send it to them, it's like 85 or 90% that open it and then we get business out of it, you know.

Yeah, that makes sense. And you just kind of, you're narrowing this funnel, you know, and you know, and maybe I don't want to beat this one too much, but the other thing I, you know, Thinking along the lines of asking for referrals or those things. You know, all these big companies, you know, these Comcast and, you know, DirecTV, they all give referral credits, so to speak. You know, hey, you refer a friend, we'll give you 50 bucks. I mean, off your service. I mean, if you were in the service business, if you're doing things that have a recurring fee, you know, offering some sort of discount, if people refer and, you know, mention their name, that. I think that's a good thing, too, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. All right, good.

Thanks for the question, Phil. We appreciate it.

Yep. We'll change gears a little bit. Jack writes, one of my customers wants to do a joint venture with me instead of just paying for my time. It sounds intriguing, but I've never done anything like this before. What should I be careful of when trying to set something like this up? Should I engage an attorney? Well, that's a. This is a big one.

Good question. Yeah. Show will be over by the time we get done with this. Yeah, sure. Yeah. That's cool. I mean, Dave, have you. Have you done a joint venture before?

Well, I mean, I've done partnerships before. I don't know that I've ever done a joint venture in. In this way.

Yeah, it's kind of. It's not very super specific about how to do it, but it is kind of like a partnership.

Yeah.

In probably some of the. Or many of the same things that you have to look out for in a partnership you would look out for in a joint venture.

Yeah. I mean, you know, figure out. I mean, it's. What you did specify is that somebody wants your time in exchange for an interest in the outcome as opposed to just, you know, cash or even trade for your time? Right. So you've got to be careful. You got to look at this and say, okay, why, you know, how much do you trust this customer? It sounds like you do. If you're. If you're at least exploring this path. It's hard to say what. What exactly you're doing with this particular thing, but as long as you feel. You have to feel like this is a business you want to go into. Right. It's. It's a. Either a new business or perhaps an extension of. Of what you do. Look at the outcome and say, you know, look at what. What you believe the outcome of this to be. How much value is your partner adding to this? Right. You know, is this company going to be able to do something, maybe market whatever product or whatever you're creating in a. In A better way, you know, is there, is there something in it for you or is it the kind of thing where it's like, well, they're just trying to get my work for free? That. That's the first question to answer, I think.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think his, the comment, you know, should I get an attorney? I think it probably depends. Certainly talking to your attorney is a good idea, and it probably depends on how much risk, you know, you're talking about. You know, the first thing I always think about on a joint venture is, okay, well, what is the, what is it? Like you said, what's the outcome? But, you know, what can you achieve on your own versus what can you achieve with this? Really, it's a new partner and whether, you know, it's a joint venture, whether you're starting a new business or service or something, how could you do it on your own? And what's going to happen if you do the joint venture? Is it going to speed things up? Is it, you know, going to be, does this person have another skill set that you don't have? You know, is that, do they, what are they bringing to the table?

Right.

And it, and is it equitable or, you know, because I would say, I mean, I've done a few joint ventures and some of them have worked great and I've done some marketing agreements where we cross marketed and did some things and some worked good. The ones that didn't turn out very well in my experience, have been ones where someone was approaching you because of what you could offer, but they may not have had as much on their end to bring to the table.

Yep.

And so that's what you really have to ask yourself, because you're going to have this new entity here or this person or other company, and they're going to kind of be representing you, you know, and your reputation may be on the line. And so you really want to think about that is, okay, this is a great idea. It's a great opportunity. What if I did it myself? Would it just take longer? Would it not be possible? Or, you know, boy, this is a huge, you know, opportunity and I need to grab it. That's, you know, you got to ask yourself those questions.

Yeah, yeah, I guess, you know, now that I think about it, I have been involved in a joint venture when we, I guess I can tell this story. When we started Backbeat, when we started Mac observer, we needed an ad server. Right. And so we bought this thing and it was, we might have spent a thousand dollars on it. I want to say I wanted to say 100, but I actually, I think we spent a thousand. So we spent.

It was a piece of. A piece of software.

Piece of software that we ran on our own server. And so it was a thousand bucks. And it was called I'll keep the name out of it. Let's. I don't know because, because it's not going to be good, what I say next. And, and, and it worked fine, but it only. It was for one website at a time. And then when we started Backbeat Media, we needed software that would work across a bunch of websites and we could have kind of hacked, you know, the way to do this inside this one website version. But it would have been weird. And I didn't just want to buy a separate copy for every website because I wanted one management interface. Right. You know, to be able to do it. Like if you came to us and bought a campaign on three different sites, I didn't want to have to go set it up and report on it in three different ways. And so I just asked the people at this company, I said, hey, you know, we're heading down this path. Have you thought about, you know, are you doing anything? And they said, actually, we're about to start developing something exactly like what you want. And so we said, well, great, you know, and they said, if you'll be, you know, if you'll agree. And they knew that we were. We had worked with them long enough that, and asked enough support questions and worked with them. They knew that we were technically savvy and, and so they proposed. They said, well, here's the deal. If you, if you're willing to, to beta test it, really alpha test and then beta test the software for us, you know, we'll give you a free license to it, a free unlimited lifetime license. That's what the email said. And that became very important in the lawsuit that ensued years and years later. And we said, well, great, perfect. You know, that. That sounds great. And then really we became like the project managers on this thing. You know, we were dealing directly with the programmers and all came that. We put in more and more effort, which. But it was fine because we were getting something we wanted out of it. And frankly, we didn't have to pay the programmers, you know, so this was.

That's nice.

Yeah, it was actually pretty good. Yeah, up until the day that the CEO, I think the CEO passed away. No, he didn't pass away. He did eventually, but he hired a new CEO and kind of stepped out of it. And this new guy, you know, I called up, actually, I sent an email to one of the developers and said, hey, can you make this change? And they said, no, you have to talk to so and so to get approval for that. We've been doing this two years. Okay. You know, and there was this new guy, and he said, nope, sorry. You know, you don't, you don't get to use the software anymore. You certainly don't get to talk to the developers anymore. This is a bad deal for us. Like, oh. I was like, whoa, we're screwed.

You're relying on it. By that time, right?

Totally. We were all in. Yeah, exactly. And, and I said, and I said, well, you know, we have this agreement. And he said, it's a free country. Sue me. And I, up until that moment, I never thought of filing a lawsuit. It wasn't until he told me to sue him that I thought, well, yeah, I mean, that's. That's what we have to do. And so I called our attorney and, you know, we buried him in, in years of. We printed out so many emails of, you know, all the communication back and forth. This. But the one email that mattered was the very original one that said, if you'll agree to do this, we'll give you a free unlimited lifetime license. It didn't say that they would give us free development or anything, you know.

Okay.

But at least it said that we could continue to use the software, you know. Right. And, and so lawyers made a ton of money on this. We, you know, it cost us whatever it cost us in legal fees. It cost them whatever it cost them in legal fees. And in the end, we got our unlimited lifetime license.

Wow.

Yeah.

And you still use the software?

Yeah, yeah, for some of the things that we do. That's right, sure. Yeah.

That's. That's interesting. And, you know, it brings up a great question about lawsuits and, and legal stuff that we could. We certainly could talk about on a future show and, and discuss the pros and cons of being on either side of those things. I think that's, that's great.

And it answers the question, should you get a lawyer? And, you know, on that one, it was so smooth how things happened with this, you know, effectively. What really was it? I mean, it was a joint venture. It was to develop this product. Right. Joint venture is. I mean, if we're going to stick to that definition, it's like a finite thing. Right. We're going to do this together and then we're done. Well, make sure you define at the outset, you know, what the. What's going on. And yeah, it probably isn't a bad idea. Maybe you don't need an attorney, but you do want to do something where that causes both sides to say, ah, yes, let's look at this list of things that we're both agreeing to and come up with a contract. You know, probably should have an attorney, but you don't necessarily need one. I mean, an attorney would say you need one and certainly if you get into a lawsuit, you will wish that you had one initially. But sometimes just having the conversation of, hey, look, I know we're going to do this thing together, I put together this thing that I believe outlines what we're doing here and what we've both agreed to, does this match with what you said? And even if you've got an email trail coming up to it, just by having the conversation of saying, here's this list, are you good with it? It can avoid all those problems down the road where you would need an attorney and a judge and all that other stuff, right?

Yeah, yeah, I think that's a great idea. And I think your comment earlier where you said it just kind of naturally happened, well, that's, I think, very common in the small business world is you start doing things with something, someone or another entity or a person, and you find yourself in a joint venture or some kind of partnership kind of before you even know it. And it's usually to mutual benefit and it works great. But you know, those things are like, I mean, they're like marriages, you know, they, they work, but it's all about communication. And the first thing you want to do or along when you think it's getting, you know, serious is you want to talk about what everybody's intentions are.

That's it.

And, and who's going to be responsible for what. And I mentioned this a couple shows back about, you know, we use a thing called a working agreement. And you know, when we think we, you know, having an attorney write up a contract is great, but you know, it slows everything down. And, and, but, but it can be very important. But, you know, we, we have this working agreement that just simply says, here's the purpose of this, whatever you want to call it, and this joint venture, this partnership, whatever, here's the outcome we hope to achieve. Here's what company A is going to do, here's what company B is going to do, here's how we're going to both be compensated. And perhaps the most important thing that my attorney ever told me to always include is how does it end?

Yes, What? Define what divorce means.

Yes. And when one party wants to leave, how do you wind it down so that way, by the time, if something goes wrong and there's some animosity built up or one person doesn't communicate, or another person takes their company over, whatever happens, you don't want to be working out the details at that point. You want to be working out the details while you're still dating.

Yeah.

Because everybody, everybody's in a great mood and it's going to be great and we're all going to do well and help each other. So that's when you want to go. Well, if things go sour. Ah, they're never going to go sour. But just in case they do, here's how. You know, one party can give notice 30 days, whatever. 180 days.

Yeah, whatever it is. Yeah. And what happens to the work product? You get to define all that. You won't get it all up front.

No, that's right.

But again, I, I've found that just the, the process of even just having that conversation makes that eventual end a much smoother thing, because everybody's sort of, you know, you got yourself on the same page, even if it was years ago about what divorce looks like. And it. I think it's important. Yeah. In that one, in that one thing, the guy that, that promised that to us, the first argument they made was, well, he didn't have the authority.

It doesn't matter.

Well, that's the thing is. Okay, well, he didn't have the authority, but he promised this. And then magically, for two years, all this stuff happened. If he didn't have the authority, how in the world did all this stuff happen? As it turns out, he did have the authority. You just didn't want him to have had the authority.

Yes, yes, yes. And the thing is, I mean, I just recently went through this last year, someone came to me this great idea. You guys have these skills, we have these skills. Let's do it. Okay, great. Let's, let's, let's start the dialogue. And we, we didn't even make it through the development of this working agreement, which is just a, you know, simple word document. And so it's really a great exercise in how you can communicate together, if you can, and how reliable they are. In this case, I just felt like, gosh, you know, I'm the one. These guys came to me, but I'm the one always beating the bush going, hey, guys, where are we at? Where are we at? Are we. At this point, we finally got where I Didn't hear from for a few weeks and I said, you know, guys, I'm just not interested. And you know, I now I think, you know, very happy that I learned that about this organization early on. And we didn't even go into that agreement because I could imagine being spent money to launch this thing and then wound up, oh, oh, these guys are flaky and they don't respond and they're not, their customer service isn't the same level as ours is. So I, I, you know, getting that communication up front I think is, you know, quite possibly the most critical thing you can do.

Yep, totally. Oh, it's, this is great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but that, that, that's right. Like, like you said, you, it becomes, creating that agreement becomes part of the dating process. And if, if you, if you're, if it's a good process, well, then, you know that the next part's probably going to be good too. Yep.

Yeah, that's right. And, and I think our, our businesses that we've done and you know, when we started deals on the web, it was the same thing. You know, we didn't know each other. We started talking what our, our, each of our goals were and we were kind of like minded and we, we started a little bit and I don't think we had a formal document, but we certainly had emails.

We had the dialogue. Right. Email and conversations of. Okay, well, wait a minute. Yeah, this is a good idea that we're going to create here. You have this interest in these skills. I have this interest in these skills. Hey, you know what? This, this is going to work. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's good stuff. So we, you know, really look into it, certainly maybe get some feedback from your attorney. But you know, also go with your gut instinct when you're trying to develop things how you, how you feel about this other entity.

Yeah. Unless you've learned that you can't trust your gut. But I, I mean.

Oh, yeah, well, that's a whole other show, Dave.

It is, but. Right. And that's actually something we should talk about is, you know, learn when you, because we're all our guts will tell us things, but there's times when they're totally right and times when they're wrong and you kind of have to learn. Oh, wait a minute. You know, am I really listening to myself or, or not? Yeah, yeah, it's good. So we, yeah, we've got a couple more questions, but we'll save those for another time. This has been a good, a good show here with these with these couple of questions. Thank you so much for sending these in, folks. Keep them coming. Feedbackbapodcast.com if you keep the questions coming in, we'll, we'll dedicate at least, you know, one show every month or one every six weeks to making sure we answer your questions. But, but really, it's you that keeps the show going in terms of, you know, you get to guide where the show goes. So you, you tell us, and we're right here for you.

Got it. Sounds great.

See you next week, folks. See you next week, Shannon. Have a happy fourth.

Yeah, have a great fourth, everyone. We'll talk soon.