Small Business and your personal privacy, how to set prices and more – SBS 53

Small Business show at BusinessShow Co Episode 53 for Wednesday, February 10, 2016 Greetings, folks, and welcome to the small Business show here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton.

And in Lafayette, California, I'm Shannon Jean. And we have music, we have music.

We promise music by this episode. And we have music by this episode.

It puts a big smile on my face and it makes me, as I'm listening to that music, highly motivated. They're motivating. Very good. I just imagine all these minions scurrying around to make the show work. And it makes me feel powerful.

There are many, many minions. Ten of them are connected to the end of my hands, but that's right.

Me too. Yeah, it's good, Stu. Yeah, Stuff. So how you doing out there?

I'm good. Yeah. Yeah. It's feeling like winter. We've had a couple of snowstorms and it's cold outside, but you know, in a way it's been welcome. And we had election craziness up through yesterday.

Yeah. Yeah.

With the New Hampshire primaries and it, it got to be. It was more this year, crazier this year than it ever has been that I remember. And we've been here through a couple of presidential elections, you know, primary seasons and elections, but man, it's. This one was nuts. And the worst part was, you know, there's a lot of canvassers that go, go around the neighborhoods here. We're in Durham, which is where the University of New Hampshire is. So there's a lot going on here. And while the canvassers were out, there were a bunch of ne' er do wells out there posing as canvassers, really just casing people's homes, figuring out who was home during the day. Yep, there were a lot of break ins that happened. And it was, ye. You know, it's just like, man, seriously, it's the worst.

It's the worst. And I have a huge faith in humanity, but I also come back and always say, God, people suck, you know, for that kind of stuff.

Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, the canvassers, I get it. Right. And it's actually being in New Hampshire especially, you know, with us here with the. Our, you know, the first primary in the nation, you really can get sort of swept up in the whole concept of wow, you know, we really are a part of democracy here. And, you know, unless you want to put on your tinfoil hat and say that the whole election thing doesn't matter. There's the shadow government and all of that. But if you take off your hat, you know, your tinfoil hat, then you can say, great. You know, this is a beautiful thing and we get to be a part of it. And. But even with that, it's like, oh, we're cooking dinner and there's canvassers, or it's just constant again. I get it. And at some level, it's kind of exciting. And now it's over.

Now it's done. That's good. You can go. Enjoy winter. Hey, and before we get to today's show, I wanted to briefly mention last week we talked about for a long time an executive summary, like an annual executive summary. And if you recall, we went back and just kind of visited that topic about what that did for you and why it's a good idea to do it for your business. And I was talking to my attorney who happened to listen to the show, and he said, hey, you know, you really should mention that. That's a great thing to have to lead into your corporate minutes, which if you're running an S corp or a C corp or anything, it's really important to have. Ann. Corporate minutes that is almost like an executive summary. What you did, what you know what, what you bought, if you lease things, if you did anything important, all kind of important stuff that happened to your business, good and bad, and then what your plan is for the. For the next year. So I thought I would. I haven't done it yet, of course, but I will create an executive summary, just a rough template, if you will, of some of the topics that I always mention, and I'll post it up to at businessshow Co. And if you're so inclined, you can download a PDF and. Or add some stuff to it. We'd love to hear your feedback at feedbackus Show Co. So I'll put that up there before the next show.

Oh, that's great, man. Yeah.

Yeah.

I actually started kind of writing a narrative that I'm going to boil down into my 2015 executive summary.

That's cool.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's already. Even just thinking about what I'm going to put in it makes me then think about, okay, well, now I've got to set some better goals for this year as opposed to just kind of seat of the pants stuff. And, you know, that's not a bad thing.

Oh, yeah, it does. I am constantly amazed when I look back and it's fun. It's like your journal, right. You look back and you realize how often how wrong I was. But then also hopefully sprinkled in there you're like, oh, we got that one right. But, you know, oh, this didn't happen at all. Or, you know, it went completely sideways from that, as things often do.

Well, yeah, and that's sort of the thing is. And when you said that last week, that's really what resonated with me was, you know, I'm good at making plans, but I'm also very good at just seat of the pants stuff. Right. When I get into a situation, I need to have the freedom to ad lib and just trust my gut. No, this is what we're doing right here. This is the right thing and all of that. And so things like setting up goals and all of that never really resonated with me because it's like, well, I don't want to be trapped into that. But the reality is, just because you write them down doesn't mean you're any more trapped than you are. If you don't write them down.

Oh, yeah. And you can roll them over to the next year.

Well, that's the other thing is it's. Yeah, it's your business to do list on an annual basis as opposed to a daily basis. That's right. Yeah.

Yeah. So it's good. And. And, you know, hopefully folks will get some use out of it. We'll put it up there.

And I look forward to seeing that. Man, that's great.

We'll see. We'll see how we.

We'll see what happens.

Yeah, we'll see what happens. So cool. And this week we have some listener. I almost said reader, but they're listeners.

It probably took me five years of doing macgeekab before I stopped calling it viewer mail or listener or reader mail.

Yeah, exactly. But we have some listener questions that come in, and we really love getting these questions. If you have some question, general criticism about the show or stuff you love, stuff you don't. We certainly would like to. To hear from me@feedbackusinessshow.co.

You want to. You want me to take the first question here, Shannon?

Yeah, why don't you do that?

All right. Shelly writes, I listen to you guys all the time. Thanks for doing the show. You're welcome. Yeah, no, we have fun doing it. I hear. She says, I think it's. I don't know if Shelly's man or woman. I hear everyone talking about sharing their personal stories and being more open to grow their business. I'm more of a private person and not really comfortable being so public about my personal life. Any tips for me when trying to grow my Company without helping, having to share all of my information. Yeah, that's. You and I talk a little bit about this, isn't it? You have to draw lines. You have to have boundaries. And, you know, if we kind of look at Shannon and I, I'm far more public than Shannon is. And I think that's just a. I don't want to say it's a natural thing, because it's certainly not. It didn't start as a natural thing for me at all. But certainly today that's true. And we can talk about how we got here, and that's important. Even with that, there are things I don't talk about in social media. There are things that, you know, I just keep to myself. And I mean, they can be business things. They can be very personal things. I mean it. But. But there's. There's a box. And, you know, you have to remember when you're looking at other people's social media feeds and you're like, wow, how can I stack up to that? You know, you don't have to because you know everything about your life, whereas all you know about other people is their highlight reel that they're posting on Facebook. Right. Or what? And so it's okay. In fact, it's not just okay. I would say it's mandatory to run a filter and say, only post the greatest stuff. And it's okay if that paints an incomplete picture. I don't want to say it's the wrong picture, but it's an incomplete picture. They don't know that one of your customers isn't paying their bills. Right. That's fine. Or you could be like, Scott Jordan of scottevest and post everything. Well, seriously, that's. I mean, there's a gap here. And it's weird because he'll, like, he'll post stuff that says, oh, I got an email today from Costco, and they're. They're interested in carrying our stuff, you know, and it's like, wow, you want to. I mean, there's. There's, like, negotiation tactics that say you should never, like, let people know how excited you are about, you know.

Yeah, sure, right.

But he's like, he doesn't care. It's. This is who he is, and you can follow him and, you know, it's all good. So he's, you know, he's one extreme. For sure. I don't go that far, but you just need to sort of decide. And maybe it's. It depends on what your business is, Shelly. But, you know, at some level, it you do need to make it about you. You do need to have a personality. And what's, what's fascinating, Shannon, is when we started Mac Observer, I was intent on it not being about the people and we had to have this, you know, this brand of the business and it's, it's, it's faceless, you know, like the New York Times is faceless. Right. And it was you with Tech Restore and doing your newsletter. I was like, huh, you know, he's really pulling the veil aside and just kind of being Shannon. And I was like, that's, you know, there's some benefit there. And we actually started to adopt a lot of that. And now Mac observer is a collection of people and you know who those people are and that's how it should be. And obviously being a podcaster for 10 years has certainly been, that was the catalyst for me being far more out in the open. You know, people are like, wow, I can't believe you post that. You're traveling. Aren't you worried about somebody robbing your. Or like, yeah, I'm sort of worried about that. But they know I'm traveling any. If they really want to follow me, I'm going to mention it in the show because I'm going to talk about, you know, what SIM card I'm going to use while I'm traveling and that's content in the show and it's going to come up, so it's fine. I just sort of punt on that. There's people, there's people that stay at my house when I travel anyway.

There you go. That's right.

You know, it's like, like.

And I think, you know, Shelly, I think that the, the way you have to look at it, there's a couple different ways is that there's your personal story, but there's also your story as it relates to your business. And if you want to, you know, if you're concerned about privacy and all that kind of stuff, which, you know, we all are to some level, I think that creating a narrative about your personal story as it relates to your business is an important thing to do. Whether or not you want to go to the other stream and have this narrative about your day to day life and what you're doing, that's certainly up to you. And some people have been, like we just talked about, been very successful at it, but I don't believe that that is a critical part. But I do believe the first thing I mentioned, having that narrative around your business, what was it that inspired you to start your Company. And I don't know what type of business you have, like, as Dave mentioned, but it really doesn't matter. I met a great lady at the PayPal Asia Pacific Conference. I was speaking on a panel there a week or so ago, and this woman, really great small business and she had a great story and I could see that she was kind of struggling with this kind of thing too. And we talked a lot about, well, why did you start it? And how powerful. And she kind of has a beauty product business and we're hoping to have her on the show in the near future. So I won't spill it all out, but I mentioned like, wow, that was such an empowering thing to get involved. And it really is something that can change people's life. And after chatting back and forth for 15 minutes or so, I could kind of see the light bulb going off. It's like, oh, well, that's what I can share about why I got into it. What my daily involvement in the stories of the business. But also your personality. I think that's very powerful. You know, Dave, your comment about the newsletter that, you know, we've done over the years, you know, back in the day before everybody's inbox was just, you know, inundated with information, that email newsletter was the most powerful thing that we had and it would generate just a ton of responses and connectivity. This was, it was before social media when we were sending that.

Right.

I'm dating myself here, but, you know, we had 10, 15,000 subscribers, you know, various Google and down. But we really connected because I'm, I love to tell stories. You know, if you go up and look at my bio up at, you know, BusinessShow Co, that's really what I'm doing is telling you a story about my business career. And when I was doing that newsletter and as my kids were growing up, well, that was what I had to talk about was, you know, being up all night. You know, one of our, the best newsletters we had. The biggest response we ever sent out or got the most response was when I talked about my son was like, I don't know, three or four years old. And I started it with my son won't stop eating his boogers. You know, just something crazy like that. And I think we got a lot of laughs at it, a lot of connectivity. And then, you know, we use that in various ways to have that connection with people far above commerce. And I think that's what everybody tries to do now. Right, right. You can't just inundate people, buy Buy, buy. And you know, especially like Tech Restore's business, we think of our business as really, at least our repair business as event driven, no matter you, no matter what. Great deal. I give you. You're not going to.

I'm not going to break my phone just so I need your deal.

That's right. Is your iPad or Mac or my iPad, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You're not going to do it. So, you know, we just want to have some sort of relationship, however tenuous it may be, that when you do break it, which you will, you can think back and go, you know, there was that guy that did this and what's the name of that company? And then, you know, you find it. And that's what I would encourage you to do, Shelley, is to think about how you kind of couch it. But you could just make it more about your story as it relates to your business, not your day to day stuff.

There is a reality here and it's one that I have tried and continue to try and we'll try again to dispel, but it keeps coming back. It is a truth. We talk a lot about the differences between, or we refer to the differences between employees and employers on this show because it's a, it is a different mindset and, and it's okay, right? And that's actually a topic in and of itself is it's okay that other people don't want the same things that you do. In fact, that's not just okay. It's sort of necessary for the way. Yeah, it's important. But as a business owner, as an entrepreneur, as a self starter, no one is going to do PR for your business better than you. In fact, that is your most important job. I don't care. You know, I mean, you're going to do whatever it is you do, the service you provide, all of that, but you could do that service for someone else. What differentiates you so that you're doing it for yourself and it's that you're the one that can go and attract business. Right. Or, you know, what needs to be done to attract business. Maybe it's not you, but certainly in the beginning it probably was. Unless you started your company with 10 people. You know, most folks that listen to this show, in fact, most folks in general tend to start their companies much smaller than 10 people, you know, and you have to own that. No one is going to do PR for you better than you. You might hire people, and I certainly have at times, we've talked about this to do PR for you. But if you don't know what you want them to do, chances are they're not going to come in and have a magic bullet for you. You can't just write a check and have that stuff happen. You might be able to write a check to have people execute, but to have them truly embrace your business and understand everything it is that exists about your business and then go out and do it, it's not going to happen. It might. And I realize there's exceptions to this rule, but you can't expect to find that lightning in any bottle that you're going to look in. You. It's. It's you. And I. And I say that I say this reluctantly because it's also, you know, more of a confessional. I. I would much rather just write a check and have somebody do all the magic PR work to make my business look great. It doesn't. I've tried. I've written many of those checks, and again, in very targeted ways. It can work wonders, you know, if I know I want to get, you know, more mainstream media exposure for this. Well, well, okay. But now I've already got the goal, and I'm also kind of driving what it is. We're gonna, what, you know, what we're gonna use to get that mainstream media coverage. And then maybe the person that I'm, I'm pitching this to, that I'm hiring to do this, will say, all right, you've given me these three things. This one is the best of those three. I'm gonna run with that one. Okay, great. But I didn't just write a check and have them just tell me what to do. That doesn't work. It's up to you.

Yeah. And. And I think those. And I've written those checks, too. What I think your. Your point is, is really well, well made. And you. You've got to do it. Now, those people that you hire can certainly connect you with the sources that you want to tell your story to correct or pitch your business, your passion, why you're so, you know, passionate about it. And. But, you know, it reminds you, and we were talking earlier about, like, Robert Scoble, right? On. On Facebook, and he posts these pictures all the time. And he's a futurist for Rackspace, and he. The other night, he posted pictures. I was at this meeting, this business, and the picture he posted was somebody standing there, and in each frame, you could just see their hands out, and they're just passionate about the story of probably the product that they're Telling. Telling Scoville. And that's what. What a successful business needs, somebody that can tell it and help refine the story and build your. I mean, I use the word myth, but it's true. But you do have to develop this myth over time. Of. It's like the ebay Pierre Odemeyer wanted to sell PEZ dispenser kind of thing. Well, yeah, that kind of stuff. But that's a great myth that helps connect the story to all kinds of people and build the multibillion dollar company. So. So that's where I would focus your energy is refining that story as you relate to your business. And it could be anything from, you know, I wanted to empower people this or I believe so strongly in this product. I mean, it's just wide open. And people love that. They love that authenticity and that. Some level of transparency. They don't need to know. Like you said, Dave, you know, who's not paying the bills and rents late or this or that.

That doesn't res. I mean, I was gonna say it doesn't reson it. You could spin it so that it does. Right. But you can't just do it and hope people feel sorry for you.

No, that's right.

It needs to be part of your highlight reel. Right. So if you can somehow take. So this guy wasn't paying the bills. So what we did was we retooled this and yada yada, you know, and we solved the problem. Oh, okay. Wow. Look, they're rock stars. That's the image that you need to do. And. And it does. You are, you know, as the. The founder or. Or the CEO of. Of a business, especially a small business, you do need to give up a little bit of. Of privacy to make that happen. I. I think I agree. I don't. You know, I mean, certainly again, there's always exceptions to these rules, but I think in general, that's what you got to do. Yeah, yeah. If you're a business serving the public, certainly, you know, they. They want to connect with you. You think about it, you know, who do you. Who do you hire? Right? You hire people that. For services. You know, if you want somebody to, I don't know, fix your garage door. Actually, I have a great story about. Tell another time about this business doing garage door stuff. But, you know, how do you do that? You get a word of mouth referral. Okay, well, why did somebody give you a word of mouth referral? Well, they had a good experience with this company. Why did they have a good experience? Because somebody came to their house, fixed their garage door and let them feel like they had a human connection. Right. That's what it is. And it makes a huge difference.

Yeah. And I think that, you know, not to hammer this too hard, but I think it brings up a good point too, of telling your story and, you know, this myth you're creating. I think it's equally important that you share that story with your employees and they, you know, really get behind it as well, because as your business grows, you're going to ask them, you know, to spread that story out. So the guy who comes out to fix your garage door may not be the founder of the company that's passionate about everything, but he's going to tell the story at some level and he's going to connect with people and that's where you get the referral. So. But thanks for, you know, sending that in, Shelly. We love and have some follow. Here's some follow up from me. That'd be awesome. So good. So let's roll into another question, Dave. John C. Writes, I really have no idea how to price things. I love that I can't figure out how my competitors are making any money with their low prices. And I'm worried about being competitive in my market, but I do actually want to make a profit on the products that I sell. Brilliant. Any tips for pricing? I love pricing questions because it is always so challenging. And I'm one of those guys too that walks around, goes, how do they make any money? All the time. You know, John, pricing is, it's really, there's so many different schools of thought and you often, you know, it sounds like you may be up against some competitors that believe in the low price, low margin, high volume, which is extremely prevalent. And it's kind of the flattening of so many industries have gone that route.

Race to the bottom.

Yeah, race to the bottom. And, and I have always tried. It's very, very hard to offer a higher level of service that doesn't always focus on price and to pick and choose your customers. And you may do less volume, but your margins will be better. And I guarantee you your relationships with your customer, you'll have a relationship with your customer. In my experience, the folks that are really always interested in price are the first ones to just flip you over for the next guy that's selling it for a buck less.

Yeah, yeah. If you commoditized yourself, that's where you have a problem. Yeah, yeah. And it may be, I mean, you know, some of this is the harsh reality. Right. It may Be that whatever business you're in and the stuff you're selling has already been commoditized. Right. So then the question is, can this be, can I offer a better service while selling this thing that's being sold everywhere? What can I do to differentiate? That's the question.

That's right. How do you differentiate yourself? Like we were talking about our repair business earlier and we try not to compete on price. We want to be competitive. But some of the things that we do is all of our technicians are Apple certified and hopefully somebody has, they value that and you know, we do a much longer warranty than someone else and you know, that kind of thing. So hopefully somebody values that. So think about those add ons that you can do and try if you can or you know, or if you're in a commodity business in general, you got to get comfortable like with you know, price being everything. But if you have something you can do to differentiate it, think about that and how you can. It's okay to not be the lowest price.

Yeah. You know, there, there's. If you are in a business that you're, I mean if, if what you're selling is, is pre commoditized. Right. And is out of your control, there's that whole concept of being a value added reseller. Right. You know, and what, what can you do? And maybe it's add some service to your business and, and all of that. But in terms of, I kind of, to go back to his, his question, you know, how do you, how do you price stuff? You gotta look at your business and figure it out. And like Shannon said, you pick your.

Customers and you know, I'll recommend a book to you that I happen I read recently. It's called Priceless the Myth of Fair Value and How to Take Advantage of It. And William Poundstone wrote it and it's a fascinating book about how to use pricing in your business as well as how it's used to get you to spend money whether you go to a supermarket or restaurants or that kind of thing. And we'll put a link up to it in the show notes this week. And it's a great book. The first part of the book is a little dry, a lot of kind of case studies and stuff. But then it really gets into how we are all manipulated by price. You know, things like anchor pricing and contrast pricing. They talk a lot about how to make the customer focus on the products or services you really want them to buy versus there's lots of products and they use some restaurant examples and Supermarket examples with these. That things they don't really want you to order or buy from the shelf. So you're kind of manipulated based on price to move towards the area that typically can be the most profitable for the. For these businesses.

I had a sales guy. I had a sales guy come in and worked with us for a while here, and he had this whole concept of bronze, silver, and gold. And that's how he sold everything before he was here. I'm sure. I'm sure it's how he still sells things. And it was always silver that that was the best thing for him to have you buy.

Yeah.

Yep. You don't want. Nobody wants to buy bronze. Gold is the expensive one. I can afford silver, you know, every time.

And I see a lot of that, you know, if even in commodity products. Like if you look at Amazon and especially the marketplace where smaller sellers maybe are selling things, commodity items, whether it's cameras and Use cameras as example. There are thousands of companies selling cameras, but all a little different. Different bundles, you know, different packages of this product and these accessories and, you know, and I guess you could say the same thing about the mattress business. Right. And I don't know about out in your area, but it's like we hear mattress commercials all. All day long on the radio. It's like there must be tons of money in mattresses, you know, and something I don't. I'm missing, apparently. But when you go to the mattress place, it's hard to compare across different vendors because everybody has their little tweak and that kind of thing. And I would encourage you, it comes back to that different. Help me out here, Dave. Differentiation.

You got it.

Okay. All right. Ring the bell. So not being just, oh, we offer the exact same thing that guy does, and we're 20 bucks more or whatever. And you need to be able to explain that in a quick way that the customer can grasp, not the customer wants to grasp. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I would argue that if you can't do that, you really shouldn't be in that market or you shouldn't be selling that product. I bring this up to our teams all the time because we're constantly looking at new things and get this, get that. And I say, well, what is our ad value? What is the reason for us to offer this or to go pay this amount of money and, you know, this kind of. For this product or whatever, you really have to come up with it. So I would encourage you to read this book. It's a, you know, it's not a Huge read. And it's interesting. One of the things I found really fascinating was why the path through your supermarket is counterclockwise and pick up the book and you'll. It's pretty fascinating.

I never thought. I pay attention to all kinds of stuff like that, and it never hit me that that path is counterclockwise everywhere.

Yeah, it's interesting and I won't give it away here. I'll let you read the book. But there's tons of stuff and anecdotal stuff like that in the book. Priceless. And I think it could be helpful for you when trying to figure out how to price things or to come up. Maybe you don't just offer, like you're saying, Dave, one product A. Maybe it's, oh, we have A, B and C. And it comes up with these things. So we got to switch it up a little bit.

Hey, so you and I, this is as good a segue as we'll ever have. You and I are going to have start pricing some things here, Shannon, for. For our business. And one of them will be advertisements on this podcast. Sure. You know, then. And that's one. But that's not the one that I wanted to bring up here. The one I wanted to bring up is something we haven't started yet. So this is the beginning of it. We're talking about writing and then probably selling, probably not giving away, but probably selling a book.

That's right.

Kind of pulling together a lot of the advice that we've shared in the last year. Don't worry, we're not going to stop doing the show. The show is here, but there's a lot of content there that I think, actually, we kind of both thought of it. The interesting thing was in the past week, we both had the same idea. Actually, it was in the span of about 24 hours. We both kind of came up with this. We haven't really talked about what this book would look like. It wouldn't surprise me if we're thinking of it pretty much being the same thing. I mean, I think there's some obvious paths to take here, but we're gonna have to price that, too, and we're gonna have to decide how we sell it. Do we, you know, try and talk to an agent, or do we take the advice that we got from David Sparks when we did that interview with him and self published, man, you'll make a whole lot more money in the end.

Yeah, yeah. It's fascinating. I was driving down the, you know, the road, speaking, you know, telling siri to send this text. Send that text as I was on the freeway and I sent that to him. Hey, man, I've been really thinking about this. We ought to write a book. And your immediate response was, I was thinking that last night, you know, so those are. It's great to be on the same, you know, wavelength about this. And I do think when I talk to people that listen to the show and there is something there they really connect with, especially the interviews and the stories from the gracious folks that have given us some time and come on and. And we have some great upcoming interviews that we'll talk about in future episodes. But that real experience and what I learned, what mistakes I made, all that stuff is really helpful, and I think it would be great to get that in some format. I agree with you. We're not sure quite what it is, but just like we talked about when we were just starting the show, what the show was going to be, what the name. We're going to do it here on the show, and we're going to develop it over time, and we make.

We're not going to write while we're recording the show. That'd be really boring to listen to.

That's right.

But short of that, we'll talk about most of the process here. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We'll chat it up and then maybe post some excerpts and get your feedback so you can be a part of it. And I'm sure we'll wind up distributing it maybe in many different formats, and I think there's some definite opportunities there. And I love the fact that I wanted the whole reason why we started the show and why I connected with you today to get back in the saddle.

Yeah. The show was not a mutual idea. I'm on board with it, obviously, but the show, for anybody that hasn't been here from the beginning, was Shannon's idea. That was you.

Yeah. And I love talking about this stuff.

Yeah, me too.

And we always talk about it. So Dave and I, we would connect and, oh, we got to do this task and get this done. And then you wind up spending another half hour talking about business. And I said, well, we're already doing that. Why don't we share it? And it's really a labor of love for, I think, both of us, and giving back to the small business community and sharing whatever we can and also connecting with. There's nobody that's learned more on this show than me.

And I always want to argue that point because I think it's me that's fine.

That's perfect. So even if nobody listens, I'm really happy to be here every week and connecting with some great people. So this will be a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to this project and we'll check in from time to time. We won't bore you with it, but, you know, and ask for some of your feedback and develop it and we'll see how long it takes, but hopefully we'll have something put together fairly soon.

Yeah, you know, I just, I feel like there's. If we take the format that we have with the show, where there's lessons, there's the how tos, but then there's the stories behind it, you know, because you and I have a lot of anecdotes and frankly, I think we can probably assemble some anecdotes from others too to kind of fill that stuff in where we don't have those, you know, real hands on experiences. But I think we can tell a compelling story that teaches people about business and hopefully they can do better with their businesses than we have even.

Oh yeah, for sure.

That's the idea. Yeah.

Yeah. My, you know, this constant, you know, when you're a writer, you have the constant reader in your head, right? Who am I writing this for? And when I do this show, I have this vision in my mind, this constant listener, you know, this, this person that's either getting started or midway or whatever, whatever portion part of your business development you're in, but is maybe they're struggling with something and they're listening and they, oh, that's a great idea. Why don't I try that? Or maybe they don't have a partner to bounce things off of, which we've talked about here so many times, and they need some feedback and that kind of stuff. If we can help one person out that does that, this will be a success. And I think we can even connect with more people with getting some content written down and spreading it out. And I don't know that there's one set way to do it. I've seen it. I love, you know, the Max Sparky stuff. I think it's a great way to read and to discover. I think the way that they, they surface their topics is really fascinating and it works well. I've read his markdown book not too long ago and I think we can do, you know, a few different ways.

I agree. Yeah, no, there's. Yeah, I look forward to the end result, but I look forward to the process even more because I think we'll Have a good time with it.

I think so too. And one of the other guys I follow is Seth Godin. I can remember buying a book from him, and it came to me in a purple milk carton, and I was like, wow, this is great. And actually, this book. He was writing a book called Purple Cows. And he talked about writing it he was gonna do. And so I followed him. So I sent him, hey, here's our story. Here's the purple cowboy story. This was a business I owned before Tech Restore. And our concept, you know, for this repair service was very different. So we were featured in that book and I got a copy, and it came in this purple milk cart. And I was like, man, that's brilliant. And then I saw him giving the book away and doing all these different things, so different methods to spread the word and get it out there. So I'm excited about trying those things. Things probably just as much as I am about writing and putting it together.

Yeah, for sure. Huh. I had no idea that you were in that book. Now. I. Huh. That's cool.

Dig in there somewhere. We're in there. It's a small little book, but it was our laptop. You know, we. We put a box in every DHL truck.

Right. Actually, you've told. You've told me this story before. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's cool.

That's cool, man.

It's awesome. So we'll, you know, we'll check in with you from time to time and see how it goes along.

Thank you so much for listening. We'd really love to hear from you. Feedbackusinessshow.co is. Is one way to find us. You can also find us on Facebook. We gotta sort out our Facebook thing too, Shannon. That's. I agree.

Yeah, let's. Let's. Let's do that.

This week, as we. As we were talking here, I feel like a Facebook group. We have our Facebook page, which we probably need to change the name of, but a Facebook group. Group to allow everybody, you know, the page. To me, I think that. Not to me, but the way I would describe a page versus a group on Facebook is the page is one to many. Right? It's us broadcasting to you. You can post there, but no one else sees it. We do. Right. But, you know, it's one to many, essentially. Whereas a group is many to many. And, you know, with what we're doing here, everybody helping each other, I think could be a good thing.

That's awesome. Sounds great.

Okay, cool folks. Come and visit us on Facebook. I think it's Facebook. DBA podcast is where we are, but feedback business show co. And we'll. We'll sort all that out and we'll. We'll see you next week.

Take care, everybody.

It.