Messaging You Can't Ignore

Business Brain, episode 519 for Friday Casual Friday, January 26, 2024. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, the show where we take a few concepts, a few ideas, a few things. We find, we analyze them, we dissect them, we dig into them so that every single one of us here are able to tune our business brains together each and every episode. Sponsors include gosquaredaway.com where you're going to go to find out about highly educated military spouses who can become your remote executive assistants. And gusto.com businessbrain, where you get three months of payroll, benefits, admin, and more. Totally free. More details on those in a bit. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And here in Lafayette, California, I'm Shannon Jean. It's, you know, January 26th. You know what that means, Dave?

I don't.

There's only a few more days left to hunt ducks and geese in California.

I.

And so, you know, we're wrapping things up out here. Gonna have to tuck away the camouflage, even though I'm wearing it today.

Sure.

And get everything ready. But I just thought you'd like to be aware of that important. That important fact.

Well, you don't want to. You don't want to run a foul of the law. You don't want be a criminal. Smart and. Well, yes, but I meant that as a triple entendre because I am not a criminal, Shannon. It turns out I am not a criminal. Yeah, well.

And you file for that crime thing?

I did. I did it this morning, so I.

Got to do it.

We talked about this on the first episode of the year where the Financial Crimes Enforcement center or whatever is requiring that every business that exists in the United States identifies its beneficial owners in a database. And the reason they're doing this is to be able to track the actual ownership of companies so that, you know, basically for financial crimes like terrorism and money laundering and all that stuff. Yeah. And of course, when you file a tax return, you put the beneficial owners in, like the partners of the business are in there, but you can put another business as one of the partners, and then that business can have several beneficial owners, which could be other businesses. And so it could be a very lengthy investigative process to figure out who the actual owner is. With this, everything gets tied together. So if you put a business in, that's fine. That business is also in the database and its beneficial owners are there. And the same for those beneficial owners, if it's companies, if it's an individual, that's what they actually want to know is who are the individuals behind this. So I don't have corporate structures that are overly complex. It took me all of about eight minutes to do one of my companies. Now it's a company where my wife is an owner of the company just so we can file as a partnership. But I am 99% owner of this and she is not, she does not qualify as a beneficial owner. Beneficial owners by their definition are people who have control over the entity. All right? And anyone with 25% or more ownership in the entity. So either of those things makes you a beneficial owner. Fine.

I saw the government propaganda. I mean the news that a cup, you know, a million or some odd businesses had already signed up for this last week and everything.

And, and it was easy. I chose because I have so many different. I have like four or five different LLCs or whatever. I chose to create what's called a FinCEN ID. And really. And I would request that you do the same thing. And the reason is if you do that, what, what you do. What I did was I went in and, and essentially created an account for myself and I'll put a link in the show notes for everybody to do it. And it, you, you, you just log in and give them your, your name. And I used my driver's license to sort of authenticate myself. And that was it. Like that. That's the end of that process. But where it gets really easy is when I went then to do my, the first company that I was going to do with this, I went in and it said, list all the details about this beneficial owner or give me their FinCEN ID.

It's like a single sign on ID.

And it's just an ID number. It's not your Social Security number. It's not a tax ID number. It's got, it means nothing other than identifying you for this.

It's one more number I have to remember.

It is well, or you put it in database somewhere. But like I did, but I just put in the number and then all the fields went away. It was like, great. And they were like, are there any others? And I'm like, not for this business. It was like, click, okay, you're done. That's it. So that's why I asked that you do it because you're going to need to do it for, you know, your own stuff and then I'm going to be on the hook for doing it for our, our entity.

So yeah, you're the guy that does.

This and you don't want to have to send me a copy of your driver's license or your passport. Which you would if I were doing this on your behalf. Right.

But knowing me, I will probably wait till the last possible day because I'm not a huge fan of getting myself. Getting this government stuff done. But I will do it. I'm going to put a note.

It's right there in the show notes. So you could just do that and then just give that to me, and then I'll get it done, and then we don't have to think about it anymore.

Okay.

Yeah. I'll be the proactive one. I'll be the responsible one. Shannon, that's.

I always need responsible people around me.

In fact, I would argue that in the time it takes me to tell everyone about our today, you could do it. I would think you could even do it right now. All right, folks, you know what's less fun than a surprise tax audit? Well, probably nothing but close second managing payroll and hr. Cue the groans. Right? But wait. What if I told you that there's a superhero in the world of payroll and hr? Enter our sponsor, Gusto. Picture this. Payroll that's actually painless, benefits that don't break the bank, and HR that doesn't make you hit the snooze button. Imagine, my fellow business brains, a world where payroll runs smoother than your morning coffee, where W2s and 1099s are less intimidating than your morning crossword and health benefits don't sound like rocket science. That's right. Gusto is like that friend who knows all about taxes and doesn't make you feel bad about not knowing what a W4 form is. It's an all in one, remote, friendly platform where you can hire onboard pay and support your team across the globe. And guess what? It's easy peasy to use, even from your beach hammock or your mountain cabin. Three out of four customers say they run payroll in 10 minutes or less. With Gusto, the fourth customer, well, they were probably just too busy enjoying how much time they save to respond. And here's the kicker. For listeners of Business Brain, Gusto is offering three months free when you run your first payroll. That's more savings than finding a forgotten 20 in your winter coat. And I'm wearing my winter coat a lot, so I think there's going to be a lot of twenties in there. So wave goodbye to payroll and HR headaches and say hello to Gusto. Visit gusto.com businessbrain and give your business the gift of time savings and peace of mind. That's gusto.com businessbrain. Now let's get back to tuning those business brains of ours. And our thanks to Gusto for sponsoring this episode. All right, now, though, let's talk about the entrepreneur's universal challenge. Time management. You know, like, when managing your inbox feels like playing whack a mole with a rubber hammer, or when balancing your professional and personal life feels like juggling flaming torches underwater. Anyway, here's the good news. I found our time traveling superhero, minus the cape. Squared Away. Picture this. Highly educated, driven, and dedicated military spouses turning into your remote executive assistants. It's like finding a unicorn that can do your taxes. Absolutely adore this concept, folks. Military spouses are like Swiss army knives. Versatile, resilient, and always handy in a pinch. Squared Away assistants are the ninjas you need. They sneak in, tackle your admin, work, manage projects, and handle those pesky little tasks that nibble away at your time. They're like professional plate spinners, keeping everything aloft while you focus on, well, being the business wizard that you need to be. And the best part, they're in every US time zone and work as W2 employees, not contractors. It's like having a personal productivity army, but without the need to feed and house them. So if you're ready to stop feeling like a circus ringmaster and more like a CEO, I highly recommend checking out Squared Away today. See how they can help you. Just go to go squared away.com contact. That's go squared away.com contact. Say goodbye to task terrors and hello to your new secret weapon. And our thanks to Squared Away for sponsoring this episode. All right, time's up, Shannon, you got to.

I didn't get it done, Dave.

Okay, I have.

Oh, wait, I'm right here. Your FinCEN identifier. Okay, there it is. I'll do it when we're done.

Great. Perfect. Amazing. That's great.

I do have a problem trying to do two things at once, even while I'm doing this show. It's not.

It's. We're terrible at awful. We are not multitaskers. No, we. We.

It's a myth. It's a myth.

It is a myth. Absolutely. Absolutely.

What's not a myth is. Is email. Email still rules the business world. You know, newsletters, email communication with your customers, with your employees.

And so hopefully you're not doing too much email with your employees. Like, hopefully you're using Slack or something.

I hope so.

Like, I, I managing teams these days. Yeah, like, and I say these days. We did away with Email for our teams, probably 10, 15 years. But I would say that the but for every stuff.

But we're going to talk about here now about impactful email or maybe I should change this to impactful messaging is.

Applicable to, to all of it.

Slack.

Sure.

Using teams, whatever you're using email. And I, I'm, I'm going to mention the X platform again and I apologize. But I do spend a lot of time up there because I think it's a wealth of information and a masterclass at just about any topic you want. I learned from you, Dave, how to curate my stream of data to be super useful. And there's no garbage in there, which I love it. And I stayed away from Twitter X for years because of that and now it's like perfect. It's like a perfect fire hose of information.

That's great.

This guy up there, Moses Kagan, who's got a gazillion followers, he posted something that got me thinking about messaging an email. And what he said was business emails should contain no more than two sentences per paragraph.

Yep.

Let's start, let's start with that. Because people don't read. You know, if, if you're digging down and you've got one thing after another after another, people are like, what, what are we, what are we getting here? And they just. You won't get the response you're going to get.

No. Unless you know that your recipient is a prolific communicator. Right. Like if they're gonna read every word you write them, even if it's a five page opus. Great. But unless you know that and you are certain that you're willing to, to, to. To go on that, then you gotta follow this role for sure.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And the second part, which I, I think is really great, which I don't do. I do the first part because I've learned, I actually try to keep it to one topic per message.

Oh for sure.

It's tough. You can't. If you start to go, go, go down, it just falls apart. But the second recommendation, if the sender you expects an action from the recipient, the ask should be bold and underlined. I thought that was pretty interesting. I mean that, that I guess again it's reading the room, figuring out.

Yeah.

Who's going to.

Right. He's got it. He makes a good point. I have a problem and I've softened on this in recent years because I understand where the world is and I'm a realist. But I have a fundamental issue with emails not being sent as plain text. And the reason is.

Oh, I see.

If you. Unless you're really good at. And you know what your formatting is going to look like on the recipient's end. I prefer to send email that is going to look like my recipient intends for it to look right.

Aren't most people using modern email clients that that formatting is standardized or not?

No, that's the thing is if I choose a different font for my email and different sizing, which as soon as you start adding formatting, all of your stuff goes along with it. It's not like, here, send this to Shannon and underline this, but keep the rest of it looking like he wants email to look at size and all this, as soon as you start formatting it, you sort of take over.

Maybe it's asterisk at the beginning, asterisk at the end.

I'll do asterisk. I will. Yeah, I'll do things like that. And again, you can use. A lot of people use underline and bold communicating with me. And it is effective. So you just need. But I guess my. My advice here is test, test, test. Send this email to some trusted friends, send it to yourself so you can read it on your phone. Like you don't know where someone's gonna be when they're reading a message. And you gotta make sure you're communicating effectively because we've all gotten those emails where the font size is either 10 size, 10 sizes too big or 10 sizes too small. And you're like, this looks like a cartoon. This is stupid. And it converts. It communicates, perhaps unintentionally, a lack of attention to the recipients. Right. And that I don't know. If I get an email where the font and the formatting is all screwed up, it's like, I don't have time for this right now. And then I'm frustrated about it, even if it's something I know I need or want to pay attention to. So, yeah, no, that's good.

Yep, that makes sense. His last tip is if the email must contain more than four paragraphs, it should begin with a summary, end the ask. So what's the action I'm requesting with the additional info posted below that I'm into that. So kind of a. Too long. Didn't read. Right. So, okay, here's a quick summary. Here's the ask, and then this. And I, when I think that's a great idea, if you're doing newsletters as well, is to have. I used to call it the monologue. You had a brief monologue of. Okay, we're going to talk about this stuff today. Here's the key points. That way, if somebody wants it, because you got. You're trying to respect time. Right. It's the most important commodity we have. So somebody looks through there and says, ah, you know, this week, I'm not really interested. I'm going to be gone. But I love that tldr.

Yeah.

You know, well, here's the gist of it.

There's a thing that existed, has existed for years called five sentences. And it is, you know, essentially this same thing, the policy that all email responses, regardless of recipient or subject, will be five sentences or less. And then there's also the two sentences, three sentences and four sentences rules too. But the idea is exactly this. And the gist is treat all email responses like text messages. Right. Which of course, back in the SMS days actually had a limited number of. You know, that's where Twitter's initial 120 characters came from. Was. Was that. Then they doubled it. But, but, you know, it was because it was built to be texted around and so it had to fit in that. But that there is. There is efficiency in limitations like that. So. Love it. Yeah.

And. And all good writing is, you know, strip it down, strip it down, strip it down. And yeah, yeah, it's hard to do, but less is more. And I have found, you know, I'm. I'm working on this new book, Escaping Employment, and I found that writing on Twitter has actually helped me in that regard.

Sure.

Because it's just, you can't have that superfluous stuff in there. And even if it goes against a grammar rule, sometimes it's very effective just to be like, boom, here it is.

Yeah, here's the. Here's the thought. And this is it, people. You get away with it on Twitter because people understand that you need to be efficient on that platform.

Yeah, yeah. So. But it's definitely helped my writing. I think the biggest thing is just to do it often and especially with, like, emails or messaging. If you're not doing it often, these are great rules to follow. I love this five dot sentence dot es. I think that's fantastic.

That's brilliant.

Yeah, yeah, I'm definitely gonna. Gonna share that with my people. But anyway, we'd love to hear your tips. It's Casual Friday. We wanted to talk about email messaging. Share your thoughts with us so we can share them with everybody else. Come find us everywhere. Go to the show notes at BusinessBrain Show. You'll see all our links and all that good stuff. We'd love to hear from you.

Absolutely. Check out our sponsors, Gusto.com BusinessBrain and Go Squared Away. Of course. Go sign up for our mailing list so you get all the show notes and everything in your inbox at BusinessBrain Show. Keep living that charmed life and we'll see you next week.