Risk is a Competitive Advantage

Business brain episode 590 for Wednesday, October 16th global cat day 2024. Greetings folks and welcome to Business Brain the show where we take a few topics, we mix them up, we dissect them, we analyze them, we use them to tune our business br every single time we get together. This episode is sponsored by shopify.com businessbrain. That's where you get to go and sign up for your $1 per month trial. We'll talk more about that in a little bit, including how Shopify is helping me for now here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton and I'm still out.

Here in Lafayette, California. I'm Shannon Jean. I'm happy to announce the wedding season is over for you. Yeah, for me, after my daughter got married a couple weeks ago out in New York and then we had the west coast wedding reception this weekend and it was awesome, wonderful, magical, but also exhausting at the same time.

Yeah, as you can imagine, weddings are crazy. I, I wind up, yeah, I was, I played in a band for a long time and played in a wedding band for a while and they're, they're exhausting for everyone involved. It like I think so it's, you know, a lot like if I play a club gig, I'll get there two hours before we start playing and that's just so I can like chill and have a beer and maybe a burger or something. With a wedding, if we play at eight, I usually have to be there by about one o' clock in the afternoon.

Is that right?

Well, because we need to be set up, sound checked and out of that room before any. And then usually one of the, or more, maybe two of the band members play like the, the, the actual, like the wedding itself. They might play, you know, whatever somebody's walking down the aisle. Then there's cocktail music which is like, you know, low volume stuff that maybe one or two band members do and the rest of us just kind of sitting around waiting to play. Invariably for those of you scheduling weddings, I will tell you this. If you plan for the band to play after your, after dinner is finished.

Yes, when the dancing usually starts.

Right, Dancing after dinner. They always book us for two sets and they say start at 8:45 and the venue has a hard cut off at 11. So. Okay, this is going to be great. Invariably we start playing at about 20 of 10 and we play one set for the same amount of money that you played us to pay. Paid us to play two because everything runs late and you run against dinner. It's Always late. I worked with one wedding planner, and the way she did things was as soon as people entered the reception hall, the band was playing pre dinner. One or two of the speeches happened during this, and what it also meant was the band played until dinner was served. So dinner was never late.

Ah, that's pretty good.

It was a great flow to the evening. You had like a little bit of this party vibe going on. Then people sat down and ate. And then after dinner, the band played another full set. And it. It was like I. I said to her, the first time I. I saw this was I was a guest at a wedding. And I'm like, wait a minute, what's going on? I ran down the wedding planner. I'm like, we need to talk. And she's like, oh, yeah, this is the way I've been doing it because it's so much better. Nothing ever feels like we're waiting for anything.

Yeah, that's perfect. I like it, I like it. But this is not a wedding show, believe it or not. And so we're talking what you. So you have a tool, Dave, that you've talked about before, and you use it. You can't live without it. I don't use it. I've talked about maybe using it. But give me the. Give me the rundown on this tool.

So it's a tool called sanebox.s a n E B O X. And its primary sort of advertised purpose is that it will monitor your inbox. And it does. And take things in it that are not supposed to be like your priority and put them in other sort of sub mailboxes. Right. So the one. And you get to tune all of this 100% to your liking. So. So out of the box you can turn on, say, a what it'll call a SANE News box, where it'll take newsletters and move them out of your inbox into this newsletters box. And that's an amazing thing because being able to filter through newsletters when you're in newsletter mindset mode makes a huge. It's like I actually read newsletters now.

Whereas if they're just in my inbox, I delete them.

Yeah, exactly. Allows me to compartmentalize and spotlight my time. And you can do this with anything. You don't have to use their prefabs. I have one that I call Sane Shipt, where everything from FedEx and UPS and DHL and USPS all goes into that. And then I can look. And it's not just in the normal flow of my day. So that part's great. And that's a feature that I like, but I probably could live without. The feature that I can't live without is what they call Sane Reminders. And what Sane Reminders lets me do is when I'm sending an email to someone like, I just, we have to reschedule someone on an interview that's coming up in a couple of weeks or three weeks or whatever. And I sent the email to this person and said, hey, can we reschedule? And then in the BCC, I put one W for one week@sanebox.com and what that's going to do is SaneBox is going to watch and see if this person replies to me. If they do, we're all good. If a week goes by and they have not replied, I get a note in my inbox at 3am on the morning of whatever it is a week from today, whatever that's going to be.

Yeah.

Reminding me that I'm waiting to hear from this person and you can follow up. So I can choose to follow up or I can say, yeah, you know what, this thing's still two weeks out. I can snooze that for three days or I can snooze it for a week. And I have these reminders now. They show up every morning in my box. If you're in sales, which I think everybody is at some level, even if you think you're not, you probably still are, send out a proposal. Okay, great. Or you know, with the podcast, if somebody's interested in something like we're way down the path we're about, they're like, I want these three dates. I say, great, I've held those dates for you. I send them that email, but I mark it with a three day reminder. And I can set the reminders, as I said, with this other one, to monitor whether someone has replied and if they have the reminder expires. Or I can, I could say like three days dot keep. And then no matter how many responses, I still get it because I want to know, I reserve those dates for you. I don't want to keep them held if you're not going to buy them, that kind of thing.

Yeah. And now they, they've. Am I right? They've sponsored the show before, haven't they? Sponsored.

I think so. I think they sponsored us in the past.

It's been a while, but yeah. Okay. So does it work with any email? Does it work with Gmail? It works with Apple, whatever you're doing.

Yeah.

Okay.

It'll just log in as another Client like you're. You have to give them access to your inbox. So that's a huge caveat for some people, obviously. But for me, it. It's. Yeah, I trust them. I choose to trust.

And what's the. Yeah, and what's the price? What's the annual cost?

I think it's about a couple hundred bucks a year is what it cost me. But I mean, without. So my question is, I know that everyone who is in sales or running a business, which is sales, needs to have some way of remind, reminding yourself to follow up. I use SaneBox to do it. I'm curious, what do you use? Shannon? Folks out. And I want Shannon to answer, but I want to ask everyone, what do you use? FeedbackUsBrain show.

Yeah, I mean, I, I do snooze messages a lot, but I also, I, I will. If I'm. If I'm in email mode, I'm gonna. I typically deal with it right then. But if I sent out an invite, I would. What did I do? I'd put it on my calendar. Okay. And I set an alert and I'd handle it that way.

Got it.

Yeah, I think I'd handle it that way. And, And I use my reminders, you know, app all the time. Remind me to follow up with this person. Remind me to follow up with that person. But I mean, I like this, this concept.

It's low friction because having to set a reminder or it's another event. I won't do it for every single thing that I would want to. Whereas with sane, Sane reminders, it's like I'm right there in the email. I just add it to a BCC and I'm done.

Yeah, I like that. I think it's great. It's a good idea. I'm curious about it. I'll have to dig in a little deeper.

I'm curious how others solve this problem if you're not using SaneBox. But I'll put a link to SaneBox in the show notes in case you heard this and you're like, oh, oh, my God, I have to use that.

Please do. So I want to do it. I'm going to take a look at it right now.

All right, well, I want to talk about our sponsor for today, which is Shopify. I use Shopify with one of my other businesses, Shannon. And, you know, before we started using Shopify, we weren't effective at selling all the stuff that we sell. We were trying to do it piecemeal. And it just. Then we brought in Shopify and it Made life so much easier. I can sell to anyone, anywhere. It like they took all of the headache away. And I can't imagine doing what we do. We're selling merch mostly at this other business with Shopify, fans of the business and this sort of thing. And it makes it so easy. We can sell anywhere in the world to people and it just works. We had tried some other things and it's just not the same. You've used Shopify too, right?

Yeah, I love it. I love the fact that they build you one account that you can use across all kinds of multiple vendors, which saves me time when I'm buying and helps my customers buy more from me because they don't have to create a different account at every store that uses Shopify. It's huge. It's simple to set up, it's fast, and I love it as an alternative. It's great to have an alternative for your business than just selling on one marketplace.

I love it. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout that we use with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period@shopify.com businessbrain. And that's all lowercase. So go to shopify.com businessbrain to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com businessbrain and our thanks to Shopify for sponsoring this episode. All right, Shannon, So awesome. You want to talk about risk aversion?

Yeah, you know, I. I read a lot. I see a lot of entrepreneurs, you know, people want to grow businesses, look for outside funding. And, And I recently, or I've. I've seen a lot of. I don't want to call them excuses, but comments that I think are masking one thing and it's being it. It's. It's risk aversion in a sense. Like, for example, I. I can't. I don't have enough money to go start and do this. But that's, you know, money is pretty easy to come by using different methods. You can. I mean, if you want to sell on ebay, ebay will give you funding. If you want to use PayPal, they will help you with funding. If you want to use your credit cards, you can do that. You can get a HELOC on your house. You can also on and on and on and on and on.

Money is available. It's not always cheap. It's. It's slowly getting cheaper right now, right? Yeah.

Yeah, it is getting cheaper. You know, Cabbage is another service that you can borrow funds from. Yes, they're expensive, but to get started, you May just have to pay. The key is get getting started. Not so focused on, okay, I got to be profitable on day one. You got to build a system. So I also hear like, well, I don't want to do that because I don't want to sign a personal guarantee. Well, I'm here to tell you that if you don't want to sign a personal guarantee, why does the bank or why do these companies want to loan you money if you're not willing to take a risk and have your skin in the game? The personal guarantee is what I've used my whole life to get companies and banks to loan me money and finance deals.

Yeah. If you don't think that you're giving your business a personal guarantee, what do you think's happening with your time that you're spending in your business? Right. I mean, you're investing your time in your business when you could otherwise be, you know, earning a paycheck or dollars per hour, doing something for someone else. You're investing in it, too. It's already happening.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And it. It. You could continue to take this down. It's like people that don't want to hire help, right? Oh, I can't afford to hire someone. Well, what's your time worth? Are you really think about that framework? Is it that you can't afford it, or is that you don't want to take the risk, you don't want to put the effort and get someone, whether it's a person locally or globally that you're going to hire? All of it is, I think, based on your risk and what your risk profile is. And if you have an aversion to really taking risk, I think there's some steps to. To get over that. And much of it is just starting small and taking those small risks. And, you know, it was a risk for me to want to do this show when we first started.

Sure.

Because I was so nervous about talking. It was a risk when we started doing video because I was like, no, I don't want to sit there and do that. And this is that. Because really, it wasn't that I didn't want to do it is I was uncomfortable doing it. Right.

So you were. It. It was. It was different. You had no experience with it. Right. And so I think there's a lot of that risk aversion manifests as well. I'm afraid of failing.

Fear, yes.

Because I've never tried it before. And it's like, well, of course. But, you know, there was a point in time where you didn't know how to walk either.

And most people are able to do.

That, you know, I mean, obviously there's some people who can't, but like all of these things talking, just simply talking, we couldn't do that either. We learn by doing things and failing at them.

That's right. I heard a quote was, have the courage to suck at something new. It's huge because you're not going to be good at it in the beginning, but you'll figure it out. And stacking up these little small wins, small successes that'll help get you get over this risk aversion problem, which I think is inherent in so many decisions that we make. One of the questions I get a lot from people that are learning about buying liquidation products, which, you know, stuff I've done for my whole career is, well, where do you store it all? I said, well, you get a space, you know, and you, you rent a warehouse.

Start, start with your basement, your garage and your spare bedroom.

Yeah, start there. Yeah. And it's like, okay, well, that stuff's too big. It's like, okay, well then maybe you have to get a storage unit. It's like, oh, wow, that's. That could be expensive. Well, o. Okay, well all.

It's just a cost of doing business.

It's just a cost. It's just a cost. And if you're like, well, they want me to sign a year lease, well, are you not willing to put a year into this? Ask yourself that. That is the real question. Because everything takes a year. I'm sorry.

Yes.

Just the way it works. If you think you're going to get something going in two months or three, four months and that's all you want to risk, I'm here to tell you it's not going to happen. You have to put in the time and the effort and build up the systems over time that will make you successful, take the risk and you'll be the better for it. There's no doubt about it.

Well, and being willing to take risks is a competitive advantage. Think about this, right? In the example you just described, and this could be any business, but the person noticed in themselves, right? Or you noticed in them that which is this fictitious example, although I'm sure there's real world examples of it, that they didn't want to sign this one year lease. Right? Well, the person who is willing to sign that one year lease now has a competitive advantage over the people who weren't willing to sign that lease because they now have the space to store more things than the Person who's only limiting themselves to the garage. And this is one of those things, you know, I say it all the time, mostly about myself, that the only person that stands in between me and more success is me. I do not worry about competition. In fact, I like sitting down and talking with my competition because I learn things from them and I get inspired when I'm talking to somebody and they're like, oh, yeah, well, we're doing this and this and this. It's like, I need to be doing this and this and this, and it frees me up. I'm like, okay, great, I'll go do this and this and this, like the only. But I could have done it before I talked to them. It's not like I didn't know about these things. I just. You sometimes need a little push. Let. Let that be your push and your. Your business will grow.

That's absolutely. That's a better title for this episode. Risk is a competitive advantage. Because it is.

Oh, it is.

Yes, it is. And if you know it, think about it in all aspects of your life, you know it. You could flip it on the other. Let's flip it another way.

Okay.

Think about breaking rules. Like, if you're a rule follower, I think it's much harder to be an entrepreneur. Okay. Because you're constantly going to be pushed to kind of break the, quote rules.

Yeah, we're not talking about breaking the law.

No.

We're talking about breaking just the, the, the society rules of. These are the things that you do. The norm. Yes, yes.

Pushing some boundaries, getting comfortable asking for forgiveness instead of permission. We've done shows, we've done, I think.

Really just getting comfortable asking.

Yeah, that's right. And so, you know, think about the people, these companies that didn't. That. That broke rules. Think about, like Airbnb.

Right?

Who ever would think you would just rent out a room in your house to some stranger? Right. Think about Uber. Who would think that you would just wrench your own car out and show up and pick people up, or you'd get some, you know, stranger at your house to go. So, you know, companies and industries are founded on breaking rules. So think about. I mean, I think it's an opportunity. What rules can you break to create your business? And how is it different than what everyone else is doing? You know, there's a great follow and I have to. I'll have to dig the link up for the show notes on X that her name's Lessa and she focuses on using GIFs to be successful either on social media or is it GIFs? I don't know. Social media or in your market. Yeah. In your marketing material. All this stuff, just to stand out and be different. So what rules can you break? How can you get over risk aversion and learn how, you know, taking risks is a competitive advantage? I think it's huge. I think it's worth studying and researching and figuring it out because I think it holds a lot of people back.

Yeah. Yeah. Steve White, who created the graphics interchange format at CompuServe in 1987, says it's pronounced jiffy.

There you go. So, like. Like the peanut butter.

Like the peanut butter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not awesome.

Yeah. I'd love to hear your take on risk. And, you know, I know it's easy for me to say since I've been through it. I'm a little older and I've done it, but what. What holds you back? Am I. Are we right here? Is it risk or is it. Are there just rules you can't break to get ahead? Feedback at BusinessBrain Show. Let us know what you think. We'd love to talk with you.

Feedback at BusinessBrain show. Like he said. And let us know what you're using to track your reminders and that sort of thing. I really want to know. I want to know. Keep living that charmed life. We'll see you on Friday.