Selling is Not Enough + Year End Tasks

Business Brain, episode 606 for Wednesday, December 11, National App Day. Does your business have an app? I don't know. 2024. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, the show where we take some ideas, a few, several. We crunch them, we dissect them, we use them to tune our business brains just so we can keep on living those charmed lives. Speaking of tools that'll help us live our charmed lives, our sponsors today are incogni.com brain where you can use code brain to get 60% off an annual plan there while you take your personal data back and shopify.com businessbrain where you can go to sign up for a $1 per month trial for anyone to sell anywhere. And we've got a little more detail about each one of those that we're going to share a little bit later to explain why you want to click those links and go check it out. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And out here in Lafayette, California, I'm Shannon Jean. How you doing, man?

I'm doing good. Rocking and rolling.

Nice. Yes.

The weather's finally here. Feels like winter. It's not 80 degrees anymore.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's finally. We're getting a little chilly out here. Well, we're in the west coast, but yeah, low. You know, I had to go fix a furnace at one of our vacation rentals yesterday. When I went in the house, it was 41. Oh, that's very cold. Yeah. And it the great thing was there really wasn't any repairs needed. It had the propane company had just neglected to come out to fill the tank. Tank was at zero.

Oh, yeah. That'll result in no heat, it turns out.

So, you know, we are thermostat that's alerting us online like there's a big problem. You know, there's no. So anyway. But that's not what we're here to talk about today. We have a couple interesting topics I want to talk about one that I call and it's kind of reseller specific because I'm a reseller and I imagine there's a bunch of resellers listening. But. And I call it selling is not enough as how I kind of refer to it. And what I mean by that is it's easy or straightforward, I should say, not easy, but to list stuff on Amazon or Amazon, list stuff on ebay, list things for sale on Poshmark. You pick the marketplace, whatever it is, and you can be successful and everything else. But if you really want to get to the next level. You have to get involved. You have to become part of the community. So just listing and selling is not enough. Ebay should know your name. Poshmark should know who you are.

Yes.

And there's a few different ways to get there. And it's mainly just getting involved in the community. All those marketplaces each have, like, community sites where you can get up in the chat. If you want to sell on Poshmark or ebay or Vestiere Whatnot, there's another new app that's live selling that's super popular.

You can.

You should go on LinkedIn and you should connect with those executives and people that work at those companies. And you should say, I love whatnot and I love selling on ebay, and here's my account. Just wanted to let you know that's it. You're not asking anything of them. You're not telling them to do anything, and you want to get involved in their conversation. It elevates your account to an entirely different level, especially when you need help.

Right.

And if they know who you are, a couple things happen. One, when they need somebody like, oh, you know, Shannon sells in the technology category or luxury handbags. When I was doing that. And we have an inquiry from the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, or from Business Insider, and they want to have some questions for an account that's selling in category X. If they know you, you get those emails.

Totally.

Hey, Shannon, would you like to talk to Business Insider or, you know, New York Times dot com, whatever it is? And the answer is yes, you want to talk to those people because that drives traffic to your listings.

Of course it does. Yes.

Yes.

No, this is. This is really smart. I know I've. I've echoed my friend Tim Street's comment many times, and this is another example of it. This is a full contact sport.

Exactly right.

And yes. And by that, Tim. And, and. And therefore, I mean, you need to be connected. You need to be out there pressing the flesh. Handshake.

Yeah.

Whether that's NETWORKING, it's Networking 101. But it's so easy in today's world where you don't have to be in the same room as these people to, like, you have to go out of your way to find them.

Yes.

That gives you a competitive advantage because huge. So many people don't go out of their way to find the 99% of them. Yes. Correct.

Is people put stuff for sale. Didn't do good. That doesn't work.

Ebay, so I hear moves.

Ebay sucks. Poshmark sucks.

Whatever. No, you gotta talk to the people there, meet the people. And sometimes that's gonna feel awkward because you are coming in cold.

Of course.

But better to come in cold when like you said, all you're doing is saying, hey, I'm Dave, I use your platform and I love it. Just wanted to say hi.

Don't ask for anything, full stop. You're just. Then when you see those, you know, you go on LinkedIn. It's a great place to start. There's other ways to do this too. But when you see them posting about, oh, I got a new position on comment. Oh, I. You're in the comments. Congratulations, that's so awesome. You've helped me paying for my kids school selling at ebay or I'm a small business owner on Poshmark and it's changed my life. Be positive, be in the flow of the conversation and it will dramatically change your life.

It ups your stock.

It ups your stock. I love it.

It's huge. No, it is simultaneously so much easier to do right now because of all the online connected connectivity that we have.

Yeah.

But also very difficult to do because you don't have to. You're not forced to be on LinkedIn interacting with these people like you would be if in the old days if you had a vendor, you met them so they knew everybody and your stock was like just by nature of you knowing them personally, your stock was not any higher than anybody else's because they knew everybody, one of their customers personally.

And you can meet these people in person too. The ebay has trade shows, Poshmark has events, they do conferences, they do things in different cities. Ebay has meetups that you should be involved in. You know, if you're going to be serious about this and you want it to generate a six figure income for you. Whatever your definition of success is, you just have to make yourself stand out a little bit more and it's not that difficult. And you know, selling is not enough.

No, selling is not enough. And you are relying on these companies to, for your business. Like if you're selling on Poshmark, that is a fundamental part of your business's success stack. And if Poshmark were to go away or change in, in a, in a change enough that it no longer does what you need it to do. That's a major problem for you. So make sure you have a path to talk to these very important vendors. I know you're. Yeah, you're essentially paying them because they're taking a commission of your Sales. That's fine. That's okay. It's part of the deal. It's fine.

Yeah, it's part of this philosophy, too, that I talk about a lot is treat your suppliers, who I would call, let's say a vendor supplier, you treat them like a customer and you, you invert the relationship and it changes the whole perspective. And there's. If you do for them, they'll come back and do for you. I met a woman at ebay a number of years ago. They asked me to be in this marketing promotional thing they were doing for their 20th anniversary. No problem. Great. I drove to, you know, about 45 minutes was in this video that they were doing, and she said, oh, excuse me. She says, I'm going to upgrade your account. I'm going to give you concierge. Concierge level service for life. And I can't tell you how that. Well, I can it. The value of that phone number that I can call is. Is insane. And I wrote about this recently in my newsletter. They also increased my selling limits, you know, that they have to 500 billion. Meaning they're unlimited. Unlimited, right. So that was just because I did a favor for them and.

Well, because they know you are not some number in their system. You are Shannon. And that. Yeah. That's the goal. That's what you want to make sure.

Absolutely.

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And that is a great lead into my first end of your task topic. Should your year end be in December? Most people just, oh, yeah. When you get your set your books up, it's like, oh, sure, yeah. Calendar year. I'm a reseller. I'm always looking for deals.

Yes.

When is the greatest time of the year to find deals?

December. The end of the year when everybody's trying to get stuff off their books.

They want inventory off their books. They're going to report their earnings, all this kind of stuff. I don't want my year to end in December. So for my reselling businesses they end in the spring. Some different things. So talk to your accountant, look at your past purchases if you're a buyer and ask yourself should we be ending things in December or should we have a fiscal year that ends in March or whatever works for your, you know, for your particular, you know, business.

Sure.

Ask yourself that question.

Yeah.

Number one. Number one. You know, we haven't we. Every year I think about doing these end of year shows but when I search we. We haven't done one in like four years.

So it's been a little while. Yeah.

Has. Has been a little while. I think that. What, what about. We're getting ready to make contributions to our SEP IRAs or our solo 401ks.

Yep.

If you're, if you have employees. We used to have a bunch of employees so I never to take advantage of the Solo 401K. But now that you know, things have changed. We sold those businesses. My wife is my only employee and.

That doesn't count as it's not the same as having a non spouse as an employee and specifically obviously consult with your tax pro. But yes, what, what I know to be true is that two spouses can, can work together at a business and each draw a salary and still participate as though you are a solopreneur in terms of the Solo 401K and those sorts of things. That's SAP, all that stuff.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's great. I mean if you have the cash flow, the amount of money that you can tax defer is substantial. Very substantial. So if you're a smaller business or a solopreneur or you know, my wife's on my payroll and then we provide her healthcare and I'm on her plan and then the company takes that right off for the healthcare which is good benefits. So ask your accountants, your accountant about or your financial planners. Do you qualify for a solo 401k or some kind of sep IRA? And you know, the way I look at it, you either pay the IRS or you pay yourself and push those liabilities down the road. When you're older, if your annual income drops and you're living on your assets at that time, you'll be in a different tax bracket.

You'll be all set. Right? Yeah. You're paying that money, you're paying taxes on that money at a lower rate hopefully. Hey, I have a little bit of a detour to take with you here. Now that it is just you and your wife, are you buying health insurance as like a corporate plan, a business plan, or do you buy it as an individual on either the marketplace or direct with a thing? But do you have an individual plan or a corporate plan?

We have an individual plan, but it does qualify as a business expense.

Oh, yes, right, right. Okay. Yes.

I just, I just wanted to buy in a marketplace.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So you. Well, so here's something interesting. I am a nut about this because I have never. Well, that's not entirely true. Let's go with it anyway. I have never had company health insurance at any of my businesses, and there was one business where that wasn't true. But by and large, I have always bought individual plans for myself because back when, before ACA and all that, certainly it was cheaper by half to buy an individual plan than it was to buy company plans. And there were a lot of reasons for that. And it doesn't matter. It just was the case. So I had become kind of an expert on negotiating my way through these, these healthcare plans. And I know this week is the final week here in the US for you to choose if you're, if you're doing that through either the marketplace or direct with the insurer. And I have a spreadsheet where I plug in the plan and the various costs associated with it and then also our predicted use of medical services in the upcoming year. And I easily within now that I have built the spreadsheet and I'm happy to share it with anybody feedback at businessrental show. But it's fairly easy to just kind of go through and figure out, all right, this plan's going to save us money, even though it looks like it's more expensive or whatever. Sure, if you are buying that way, and I know most of us are, don't only look at the marketplace. If you can get a subsidy, then the marketplace is where you must go. However, save if you don't qualify for a subsidy because your income is too high, find the plans on the marketplace that are in that are available in your area and then go to the websites of those insurers and look at the exact same plans every year. The difference between them and sometimes the marketplace is lower, sometimes the insurer is lower. The difference between them for us is often greater than $100 per month.

Oh, that's cool.

Yeah. And I have an insurance agent and I asked him a couple years ago when, when I first noticed this, I'm like, what the heck's going on. They're like, no, that's just how it works.

It's like, wow.

Oh, okay, great. Like, I'll, I'll take the less expensive one, please. You know, so just, just to be aware of that, I figured I'd share the tip. Yeah.

Yeah. That's good to know.

Yeah.

Another thing I really like doing is I, I always, I love this one page a day concept where you encourage people just to write one page a day about anything. What's going on. I only have one rule about it, is you must share it with someone that makes it accountable. You can share it with your followers. You could share it with your wife, your kids. I have clients that I do, and they share it with me. So that makes it, oh, I'm writing this and someone's going to read it. It makes it different. And I think that's powerful. And as we wind up the end of the years. We've talked about this on the show before, this executive summary. If you're a corporate entity, it could be your minutes because that's very, very important to do annually to keep your status.

Yep.

You know, legal and I just started with a monologue. You know, what happened this year? What did we do right? What did we, what mistakes did we learn from? We hired new people, we. We moved our building. And what are the opportunities that we're going to be doing next year? I think that's, that's really. And just start this draft of what's going on. And if you're, if you can use part of it for the business. But I would encourage you to do personally as well.

Yeah.

As my life has changed, like in the last five or six years as a solopreneur, I include a lot more personal things that have gone on. You know, my daughter got married, my son got out of college.

Sure.

All these kinds of things. I think it's just a great document to have. I think, I think it's powerful. It helps make you think you can tease certain things out of it. That if you want to expand on it, but I do like that rule, is that you must share it with someone.

So now I'm wondering if you took each of those pages or certainly your executive summaries over the years and fed them all into ChatGPT and asked it to tell you the top five things you're doing right and the top five things you're doing wrong.

That's a great idea, right? Yeah, I love it, man. Yeah. That's one of the greatest uses of the AI is summarizing and teasing out.

Data that you wouldn't see because you're, you're too in it. Yeah.

It just takes so long. And giving it, having it work on your content is Right.

That's where. Yeah, that's where it does a great.

Just huge. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I, I think that's, you know, working on this. If, if you want some more info, you know, feedback at BusinessBrain show or at Shannon Gene, at Davehamilton, at us and, you know, let us know those.

Questions, we'd be glad. Please do. @ us.

Us.

We want to hear from you. Thanks for hanging out. Thanks for another Fun palindromic episode 606. Love that number. Yes. And keep on living that charmed life. We will see you on Friday.