Negotiating as a Nice Guy. Plus an AI Update You Don't Want to Miss

Business Brain, the show for entrepreneurs, episode 444 for Friday, April 28, 2023. Greetings, folks and welcome to Business Brain, the show where we take all kinds of scenarios, we run them through our business brains. We or your business brains, the business brain, the collective business brain to try and get the right perspective or a different perspective, sometimes a better perspective to help us with our lives, our businesses and more. Sponsors for this episode include thinkific.com businessbrain where you can go to get one month of Thinkific plus for free. We'll talk about what that means in a few minutes here. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire on Casual Friday, it's Dave Hamilton.

Hey. And this is Shannon Jean out sunny California.

I love that.

Think, Think Rific.

Think if.

Yeah, is, you know, it's really an interesting concept. We probably do a, a big chunk of a show maybe in the coming weeks. Just talking about this, this idea of taking the knowledge that you've acquired in your small business over time and monetizing it in an entirely different way than perhaps you thought.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm going to put that in our notes to talk about just listening to you and looking at it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, awesome. All right. So Shannon, sometimes this becomes business therapy here. Yes. And I have a little, I have a story to share that hopefully is a, a lesson for all of us. I like to go to the flotation tank frequently. I actually have a membership at a place near me where I go once a month to the tank. And I love it because it's that downtime. Right. It's an hour of no input and I have no idea what I'm going to think about while I'm in the tank. And sometimes, but a lot of it is I just have to let the thoughts go. If I try to, if I, if, you know, a thought comes to my brain and I don't like it and I try to push it out. Oh, man. That's what the next hour is about. Right. I have to just sort of let it flow and let it process. I can, I cannot engage with it, but I just kind of have to let it, you know, flow out completely. And then the next one comes and hopefully by, you know, the 45 minute mark or so, no more thoughts come into my head. And then I get like 15 minutes of what I call clear headedness, which is wonderful. Right. But you have to kind of let all the thoughts come in order, in order to get there. It's. Yeah, it's a, it's definitely a, a, a something to practice and. And I like it. It's good. The last time I was in the tank, a thought came to me. And it was, at the moment it came to me, it was so obvious that I should do this and yet also so, so painfully obvious why I had not. And the thought was, hey, you know, you, I sold the Mac observer last year to, to another company. The guy I dealt with at this company, his name was Sir Hot. Is Sir Hot? Still is.

Yeah. We talked about on the show.

Exactly. Cool. Yep. And I was the one that handled all the negotiations and all of that stuff. And I thought, wait a minute now. And he then wound up selling it. It was not his plan to sell it so quickly. There were some things that happened in his life and an offer, like someone who was very interested in it showed up, I don't know, about 10 months after he, he bought it from us. Somebody that had wanted it from us 10 years ago but didn't have the money now did, and he wound up selling it. And so I thought, man, I negotiated with this guy for months, you know, putting this deal together. It wasn't a months long negotiation, but that was part of it. And the rest was just structuring the deal and doing the handoff and all of that stuff. Like, he knows some of the mistakes I made and I already paid for those. You know, we call mistakes our tuition here. Right. So. Because that's how we learn. And also, as I always joke, but it's 100 true. I like calling them my tuition because that's how I justify having paid for them. And I thought any mistakes I made, I already paid for them. Prepaid tuition. However, I, I have not gotten the lessons yet. I don't. I know some of the mistakes I made. He knows more. You know, how was, how was it negotiating with me? Did. Would he have given up more? Would you know what, like, what, what was that? And I thought, man, the. And he. And I maintain a fantastic relationship to this day. There is the only. I was going to say there's no reason for me not to call him and ask him that question. The only reason for me not to call him and ask him that question is, of course, my very, very, very fragile ego.

Yeah, that's right.

You're right. Right. And so I thought, well, that's a stupid reason. I've literally already paid the tuition on this. Nothing's going to change. I need to call him. And so I did. And he's a, he's a nice guy. He's always been very respectful. And, and, and it took a while. We. We probably chatted for like an hour. And it wasn't just about this. We chatted about a lot of different things. And, and, you know, I asked him, I said, so, you know, what mistakes did I make? So, I don't know. You were perfect. I'm like, okay, well, that's really nice. I didn't call you to have my ego inflated.

Sure, sure.

In fact, it was kind of the opposite, but, you know, that's really nice of you to say. I'm like, are you sure? He's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I could hear there was some hesitation because he's a nice guy. He doesn't want to insult me, you know, And I'm like, right. Most people don't. Wait. I'm like, no, no, no. This is actually. And I said to him, I'm like, this is actually why I called you. Like, we'd already been talking for maybe 30 or 40 minutes at this point. This is the real reason. Like, this is it. I want to know. I'm like, it's not going to change anything, but, you know, but it might help me down the road. Might help you, too. I don't know. And. And he hemmed and hard, and I could tell he still didn't want to insult me any. What he said was, you know, there was one thing, and I'm like, yeah, great. He says, you're a nice guy. And I let that sink for a second, and I'm like, okay, I know exactly what he's saying, you know, and, and, and, and it was. I could have pushed harder on him. I, you know, I could have negotiated harder with him. He probably feels like, and perhaps correctly so, that he was the better negotiator in that. In that scenario. Like, okay, good to know. Good to know. Thank you. And I, I did. I thanked him for it. He's like, but I don't know that that's a bad thing. I'm like, no, no, I don't. I don't know that that's a bad thing either. I. Yeah, yeah. But it's good to know.

It is good to know. But there's also a value in the relationship that you kept.

Absolutely.

And being able to revisit that. And so, of course, I'm rationalizing it, because I think I'm a nice guy as well, and I know that I. But I have made more money leaving money on the table for other people more in my life, I think, than anything else.

Yep. Yep. And I, I same like my, my whole focus in business has been at least the successful businesses I've had has been in helping other people with whatever they need. And if I prioritize them, you know, there's always a little something left over for me and come back.

Yeah. And they come back to you.

Yes.

It's, it's, it's. I find it's much. It's more difficult now to, to do some of that relationship management because the Internet has just kind of depersonalized much of the transactions that I've been involved in buying and selling and things. But when you can have a direct relationship with someone like you have with Sirhat, it's valuable. And you never know what's gonna come back to help you down the road. You just have no idea.

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But yeah, that's huge.

Huge, right? I'd never seen it before and, and evidently it's a thing, you know, Otter has a, it's Otter AI. Zoom is where you can go and, and, and you know, see how it works and all that stuff.

But yeah, I love it, you know, yeah, we're going to be talking about AI all the time because as solopreneurs and small business owners, having these kind of tools at your fingertips are, are it's going to change everything. So the more you learn about this now, as things are really ramping up, the better off your business is going to be that. I, I use an app called Rewind AI. It only works on the Mac right now, but they're coming out with other ones, but it tracks everything on my computer keeps everything local. When I say track, it takes screenshots of what I'm working on during the day. It tracks meetings like your just discussed with the otter. And the beauty of it, everything is searchable. So whether it's something in a photo, something on the web, if I'm like, gosh, where did I hear that conversation from? And I search it, it'll go back. And it's almost. If you have a Mac, if you're familiar with Time Machine, it uses a similar interface where it goes back and finds that I love it, you know, getting that like if you get that audio in Even just an MP3 file. We use for here at Business Brain, we use a service called Swell AI and it converts that to articles, searchable databases, chat bots, all kinds of stuff. It's amazing. I mean the future is bright with this stuff. It's going to be incredible.

It's crazy. Yeah. We also use a service called Whisper that generates a transcript. This is the transcript that you would see if your podcast player supports the new podcasting 2.0 transcripts. I know quite a few of you are listening using the Fountain app and that's one of them that supports that. And it essentially just pops the transcript up like closed captions, which can be really handy for a variety of reasons. But that's on every episode that we do too. So yeah, it's fascinating all the tech that's available if you're not yet learning, if you haven't yet started to use AI, go play my. The thing. The best advice I can give you is go sign up for an account@chat GPT. We'll put a link in the show notes. You could, you could use Google Bard or Microsoft Bing's AI, but sign up for one of these chat bots. They are free. Chat GPT is probably the simplest one and probably the best one to play with. And literally just play with it. You know, I had it right of response to my wife. She had made orange juice for us. And so I said, please write a response that thanks my wife for making orange juice. And then I said get as sappy as, you know, get really sappy with it. And it did. It wrote me this like 4 paragraph super sappy thing. And then I said, all right, you know, rewrite that as a limerick. And it did. It's cool, right? But just, just play, literally playing with it because you will learn. There's the, especially the chatbots. You know, there's the, the G. I always forget what the P stands for, but the G and the T are the important parts and I'm not just talking about the gin and tonic. The G is the generative part where it's not just going on the Internet and finding something somebody else had already written, it's generating this on the fly. And then the T is where it really gets better. The T stands for transformative. But that's me saying, okay, you've created this thing, now transform it into a limerick, transform it into this ad threaded. Right.

You could.

Yeah, you get to tweak the results, which is something you don't get to do with a search engine. Right. So experimenting and just learning how to use that, super valuable because you're going to use it in your business.

Yeah, it's, it's absolutely. You're going to use it. I mean, I've been experimenting with it for product titles and product descriptions and I would have been going back and forth on the best way to what prompts to use. And that's a key thing, is learning how to use a prompt. It's almost like asking a question in Google, but it's different. You know, I say, you're an SEO expert, Search engine optimization. Create a product title for this item and, and create a description 500 words or less. And then I would ask it, I would say, are you just copying this from the manufacturer's website and, and chat GPT said, no, no, this is based on search terms and this and that. So, you know, I have to think that things like this are going to be tremendously helpful to get your, you know, products surfaced higher in search and other areas like that. I think the sky's the limit.

I, I want to highlight something you just said there in your example. A perfect use of the transformative nature of these things where you said, act like you are an SEO expert.

Yes.

That's literally what you type into this. First say, act like you're an SEO expert, press return and then put in your query. It will remember that you told it to act like that and the results that you get will be based on that. It doesn't hurt to remind it eight to 10 queries later. Yes, you said that at the beginning, but it, it prioritizes the most recent things you've asked for over the first thing you asked for. So you can even say, remember you're an SEO expert. Answer this question that way. And it will, it'll.

Incredible.

It's incredible.

Think about this. Yeah. This, this audio aspects. What about recording meetings that you're having with your team or your staff or whatever? And then being able to turn that meeting content into a searchable or a chat bot for your internal use. So somebody who missed the meeting could say, what did I learn? What did I miss?

Yeah.

And have, have the AI come and say, well, here's, here's the top five points.

The summary.

Yeah, Dave said this, Shannon suggested that, and, and give you a complete summary of what happened and went on. That's the future. I don't think when your customers find you and come to your e commerce platform or your stores, if you have one, they're going to want to ask some questions and you need to be to intelligently direct and answer those questions to present the product that they want because they, maybe they know what they want, but they're going to have a dialogue about it.

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. All right, folks, let us know how you're using AI feedback at BusinessBrain show could be your personal life, could be examples of how you've played with it. Because just seeding that idea in our brains helps our business brains. But yeah, send in your ideas, send in how you've used it, how it succeeded for you, how it has failed for you. We really want to know. Feedbackusbrain Show. And as always, if your email is featured in an episode, you are entered to win a MacBook Air that we're giving away this year here in 2023. Make sure to check out thinkific.com businessbrain and get your one month of Thinkific plus for free. Keep living that charmed life and see you next week.

Hey, I have one more tip for you today before you go. If you want to learn about the most powerful customer service concept on the planet, the next podcast you listen to should be episode 118 of Business Brain, where we first introduce the concept of two tokens. Two tokens will turn your customer service department upside down and change how you solve problems. It's simple, easy to implement and teach, and it will thrill your customers. So have a listen. Search for the number 118 at BusinessBrain show or click the link in the show notes of this week's episode and cheers to your success.