Listener Red Flag Stories – Business Brain 451

Business brain episode 451 for Wednesday, May 24, 2023. Greetings folks and welcome to Business Brain, the show where we run everything through the filter of our business brains, hoping to get some additional perspective, some better knowledge and maybe, maybe, just maybe increase our Charmed lives sponsors for this episode, both of which will help you increase your charmed lives. Found.combrain where you can sign up for free for business banking that tracks your expenses and helps you find write offs and all this great stuff. And notion.combusinessbrain where you can sign up and try notion AI for free. We will talk more in depth about each of those in a little bit here. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire.

I'm Dave Hamilton and Lafayette, California, I'm Shannon Jean. Coming coast to coast, right? Almost pretty much.

I mean, pretty much. You know, I'm everything in between. Yeah, I'm maybe five miles from the coast here, so.

So I'm a little bit further but not much.

Not much. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, pretty much coast to coast. That's right.

And I'm here to learn, hopefully teach a little bit. But also, you know, it's a two way conversation that we try to have here and love your feedback and emails at feedbackusinessbrain show because I always, I always say I learned the most and hopefully drop a good tidbit once in a while. But yeah, I love it, I love it. It's great.

Well, we got a note in from Jeff into feedbackusbrain show in reaction to our Red Flags episode. In fact, we have a couple that was good to talk about. I agree. Jeff shared a red flag. He says, I was listening to the podcast on Red Flags one day after I had a meeting where I left going, maybe this is not a good idea. It had to do with legal issues. He says, I deal with personal data in some cases and this potential client had data subject to GDPR and the new Brexit data laws. When I brought up that the response from the com from the client was the sadly common what are they gonna do, sue us? We don't care about that. Well, as unlikely as it is that they can sue you, Jeff continues, more importantly, what does that tell me about the client? Am I willing to skirt the law to save money? He says this is the same reason that I made the decision years ago to no longer work with attorneys. First, it irritates them when niche specialist IT guys can charge more per hour than they can. But I have also heard more than once, what are you going to do? Sue me for the bill, I can keep you in court for years and it won't cost me a thing, he says. So I automatically turn down lawyers. I want to address that part first because the red flags are really interesting. I used to do a lot of that kind of specialist IT work on site and, and I probably had more attorneys as clients than any other single profession. And a big part of that probably is that I was practicing this in Austin, Texas, where there's tons of lobbyists and attorneys and all that stuff. And they were my best clients, bar none. Like, I loved my attorney clients. I'm still friends with most of them, but I never thought about the risk of. Yeah, they could just choose not to pay the bill. I, they also knew I knew how to market, so maybe they didn't want to, like, I don't, I don't know that anybody. It never got to that point, I guess is, yeah. Is where it. But I can see that being a, like if somebody communicates that to you, that in and of itself is a red flag. Right.

Like that for that particular client. That now you know.

Yes.

Yeah. So making the. I, I get it. I, I understand that and I'm, you know, I always make comments about attorneys and stuff as well. But when they're either good customers, good friends or good resources.

Yes.

You want them on your side.

Oh yeah. And I wound up using many of those attorneys over the years, both for sort of friendly advice that's super valuable and paid advice. And I had a couple of them, you know, represent me through lawsuits. And it's a really nice thing where you can go to hire an attorney and already have a trust relationship established there. So. Yeah, it's good.

Yeah, absolutely.

And always.

First part is, is always give your.

Attorney clients like the, at least the illusion, if not the actual reality of a little bit of a deal because someday you might want that favor returned. So I just share that. But like it. Yeah. But yeah, this, this thing with, with a, a non attorney client or it doesn't matter whether they're an attorney or not, like showing, let's call it legal flexibility in their, in their, in their practices. That's, that's a good red flag, man. It is.

And you know, I'm not a huge fan of regulations and laws, but you certainly need to assess, you know, if you're not going to follow them and what the bad repercussions are and when you have a client that talks like that and you're providing services for them, you need to assess. Wow. Could I. Not only is it Just the ethical stuff. But could I be held liable for based on my involvement here? Because, you know, when attorneys go to sue people, they'd like to, they like to throw a wide net. Definitely.

That's. Yeah, no, that's. I hadn't even thought about that. Right. Like, they're potentially asking you to be complicit in this. But, but even if they're not, like the whole idea of working for a client who just has that mentality of legal flexibility, I mean, look, you have to pick your. In order to be a successful entrepreneur, you do have to pick your shortcuts. Right. And sometimes that means, you know, taking a gray area of accounting law and saying, yeah, okay, like I understand that this is like you definitely don't want to go across the line, you know, but there's a lot of things in the tax code, for example, that are nebulously interpreted and it's like, all right, well, I'm going to choose the path that I think fits it, but I can see where somebody could make the argument that maybe they don't. Right. And you choose your risk level there and there's no right or wrong answer. I mean, there are some wrong answers, like, for sure, but you got to find shortcuts at times and you have to be comfortable with those, whatever the ones that you choose are. But you also need to be comfortable with the shortcuts that your clients are choosing. And if you are not, then, you know, walk away or perhaps run. All right, Business Brain listeners here at Business Brain, we know that our brain power is best spent on running our businesses, right? Not on the annoying details of saving receipts, calculating our taxes, categorizing expenses. All of that stuff that we know we have to do, but isn't really what we got into business to do. What if there was something which could take care of all of that for you and free up more of your time? There is. It's our sponsor called Found. Found is a business banking app built specifically for the self employed. It's all in one banking, meaning it comes with the smart tools you need to run your business. You manage your income, your expenses, your taxes and invoicing all from the Found app. Even sign up is easy. It's free and takes just minutes. Plus if you spend $100 with your found card, within the first 30 days, you'll get a 25 bonus in your account. There's no commitment. Try Found and see what a difference it can make. Head to found.com brain or use promo code Brain to try Found today. Terms and conditions apply. And Found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Found's banking services are provided by Piermont bank member FDIC. Remember, head to found.com brain or use promo code brain to try found today. And our thanks to Found for sponsoring this episode. So obviously we've been talking a ton about how to leverage all the new AI tools here in our businesses, right? They're great for helping us flesh out language that we've written, or taking a well crafted prompt and turning that into maybe our rough draft that we can edit. 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You can save time and write faster by letting Notion AI handle the brainstorm in the first draft or turn your messy notes into something polished. And for a limited time, you can try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com businessbrain that's all lowercase letters. Notion.com businessbrain to try out the incredible power of Notion AI today. And when you use our link, you're supporting our show and that's a good thing. We appreciate it. It works out for you too. This is a limited time offer. Try Notion AI for free right now at notion.com businessbrain and our thanks to Notion for sponsoring this episode. So Shannon, as we were know prepping the show and I was reading Jeff's email about red flags and you know, we've, we've heard from a few others about different red flags. I was reminded of one that I encountered a couple of years ago, a few years ago now when we were hiring some people and this was 2021, so it was two years ago and you know, everything was still in some version of COVID lockdowns. You know, it was like winter of 2021. So, you know, everything was being done remotely. People were rethinking their, you know, how they wanted to work and, and what they wanted to do. And, you know, was it more important to just be able to stay remote? Which, of course is something that we offered because we've been remote for 25 years. So good chance we weren't going to be changing that just because COVID lockdowns were going to eventually end, you know, and we interviewed quite a few people for the job that we eventually hired Sadie to do. And there was one guy, he was, I think he was out in L. A. It doesn't matter, because it was all going to be remote. And he told us that, you know, we, we're always very upfront when we are doing a job, posting about salary range and what we can, you know, what we're going to offer for this, if we know, but we, even if we don't necessarily put it in the listing, it's one of the first things that we'll talk about. Because if, if it's not a match, I don't want to waste any of our time moving.

Yeah, it's smart. Yeah, we've talked about that on the hiring episodes before.

Exactly. And so there was this one guy, and he was like, yeah, well, I, I wanted to do the interview. I, I, I, I, I guess I should tell you, I am coming from a job where I was making double what you're offering, and I know that you can. In fact, now that I'm saying this, I think there were three people that brought this same thing, basically said the same thing. I was making double this. But, you know, I really, I love the kind of work that you're looking at, you know, having someone do for you, and I think it would be a good person to do that work. And I like the idea of working remotely. I also like what you're doing with your company. I think it would be really interesting. And like, they were selling us on hiring them even though they were willing to take a pay cut. But what I heard them doing was trying to sell themselves on taking this pay cut. And it was like, man, there are so few people and even fewer opportunities for those specific people where that would work out long term. I know, like, in their heart of hearts, while they were telling me this, they were eager to do this and eager to take the pay cut to do it. But I just know that six months in, like, once you start living with the reality of A paycheck that is half of what you had previously gotten used to. Unless you only had, had that, you know, double paycheck for two months and you hadn't really adapted your lifestyle to that income level. Once your lifestyle is adapted to that income level, even if you've got, you know, a ton of savings or whatever, and you could, you don't need the money because you could live off of your savings. Nobody. I don't know, man. Like, to me, that was a huge red flag when hiring and, you know, it was a too good to be true scenario for a couple of these people. They weren't the perfect fits either for the job. Right. But like, yeah, somebody was that. Yeah.

It is a big red flag because they're either going to be fighting this battle, like, long after you hire them.

Yes.

Or they're BSing you to try to show you how good they are or something. That's not sincere.

Yeah.

And, you know, it, it reminds me, we had a lot of people after 2008, I guess, 2009, when the mortgage industry blew up. And, you know, it seemed like for a while, every job opening we posted, we had a bunch of mortgage brokers applying for, and it was a similar statement. And it really didn't fly with me. I think you're right to, to move on.

Yeah. It just, it, it, there was no world where I felt like that was actually going to work out. Like, not at all. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I, I, I agree. I agree. Well, I have one, one more for you, then I'll ask you a question.

Okay.

Okay. So I recently had a friend of mine ask me about hiring someone and, and the person let them know that they, they were in the process of suing their former employee.

Oh, I already know the answer. Red flag, Red flag, Red flag. Wait. They were suing an employee or employer?

No employer.

Okay. Either way, red flag. I thought, I thought you were saying that they were suing like, an employee at their former job, but they were either ones. Either one's a red flag. It doesn't matter. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I don't think it matters now. Maybe it matters what they're suing that person over. But, or that company about maybe in this maybe. But you also have to, if you've ever been involved in any kind of legal proceedings, you know how incredibly distracting it can be.

Yeah. The best case scenario is that that person is like the, the, the, they come to work for you and they are regularly distracted by this lawsuit that's still going on. That's the Best case scenario. Because the worst case is that they come in, they're distracted by that, but they finish that lawsuit, and then they find some reason to sue you or an employee at your company. It's like, yeah, neither. Neither way do I want that in my world. Yeah.

Red flag. And these are great. And, and I, I. You can learn a lot from these. And, you know, trusting your gut instinct, really watching how people respond. One of my favorites is yours, Dave, is watching how people treat service. You know, folks, whether it's wait staff and all that, those are. Could be big red flags. And I'm glad we talked about it. And it just brings it front to mind. And we'd love to Hear your stories. FeedbackUsBrain Show Share with us so we can learn and then we can share with you.

Yeah, absolutely. Again, that's feedbackusinessbrain Show. And if you send in an email that we read on the show and engage with here, we will enter you. In fact, we don't even have to engage with it. If we just read it and it becomes part of the show, then boom, you get entered into a drawing for a MacBook Air this year. And I think you're gonna probably like that. So. Feedback. BusinessBrain show keep, keep living that charmed life and we'll, we'll see you next time.

Hey, before you go, this is Shannon with Business Brain, and I want to mention a previous episode that I think you'll find useful. It's episode 376, the superpower of compartmentalizing your thoughts as business owners. You know, we all have a ton of stuff going on each day, and compartmentalization is a learned skill that can help you keep focused on what's important at that particular moment and not just at work. It can also help you in your personal life by teaching you to leave problems, tasks and projects at work while you spend time with your family and friends. So check it out. You can search for the number 376 at BusinessBrain show or click the link in the show notes for the episode you just heard today.