Small Business CRM + Parkinson's Law

Business brain, episode 463 for Wednesday, July 5, 2023. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, the show where together we like to tune our business brains by examining things in our businesses, in our personal lives, and really help to kind of tune things so that we can keep living that charmed life here in Durham, New Hampshire, after the long holiday weekend. I'm Dave Hamilton and here in Lafayette.

California, I'm Shannon Jean. How was your fourth?

The fourth was good. I, Yeah, I was away last week for a little bit. We took our niece to Montreal and we came back and we're home for a couple days before the holiday weekend started. But I, even with that, I wound up, I'll say, taking the weekend off. That probably means something different to me than it does to most people hearing it, so I'll explain. But what I didn't do was all the normal things that I would do on a Monday or a Tuesday. Right. We were basically home. We went to a concert on Monday night. We went and saw Robert Plant and Alison Cross, which was great.

Nice.

Yep. Um, but other than that, we were just home kind of empty nesting. Our niece was away with her boyfriend for the weekend. So we just kind of enjoyed, you know, kind of re. Re acclimating to the, the empty nest, which is sort of a yo yo for us. We have people home. We don't have people home, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah, they're in that phase, which is fine, but. So I didn't do all my normal things, which gave me freedom from my own normal constraints of like, well, it's Monday, I got to do these things, or it's Tuesday, I got to do these things. And what I wound up doing on Monday was a couple of things that I had not really had time to do. They weren't huge priorities, but they were things that were important to me, like, sort of work wise. And it was like, it was really, it was great to be able to truly spend some time on these without worrying about, oh, well, I still need to do X, Y or Z today. It was like, no, when I finish this, I'm just gonna go back to the house and chill, maybe make dinner or, you know, whatever. And I found that really valuable. I'm, I'm starting to, I'm trying to think about how I can afford myself more of that kind of time. I, I, in theory, I should be able to. I mean, I, I've, you know, divested myself of a business that took up a ton of my time. I've managed other Things. And so it's like, well, you know, I don't have my kids hockey games and dance recitals to go to anymore. Like, I have filled up the time that's available to me. And I'm thinking maybe I need to be more intentional about not doing that as much and leaving myself that what I'll call playtime. Most people probably wouldn't call it playtime. They'd say, well, you're still working. Like, yeah, sure, but. But yeah, I think it's really valuable to have a little bit of play time, a little bit of freedom, flexible time, you know.

Yeah. Where for me, it's time that there's no output required.

No output required. That's it. Yeah.

And so you can research things and, you know, look into something. And I also have this, you know, total problem where I'm thinking about the next thing I need to do while I'm doing something else.

Right.

And it. And not being able to. And maybe focus or enjoy what I'm doing because I'm thinking, okay, once I get this done, I've got to go do this.

I've got to do that other thing. And that's, for me, that's especially true if I'm doing something that's, you know, one of these sort of not highly prioritized things like, well, I'm. I'm giving myself time to do this, but I know I, you know, and I don't like the next word I'm going to say. I know I should be doing X, Y or Z, or I know I have scheduled to do X, Y or Z. I, I am expecting myself to create output for these other things. So I, Yeah, I need to, I need to give myself more of that freedom, I think, because it made me more productive in a. In a sense. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm playing with this. I don't know how I'm going to do it for myself, but, you know, I'll find a way.

Yeah, you'll figure it out.

Yeah.

Thinking about it as the first part, right?

It is. Yeah.

I think that's. I think, think that's great.

Making plans, not to plan.

Yeah, it's. It's very good. Hey, we have a. I thought a pretty good listener question to talk about CRM, if you want to jump into that.

Yeah. Patrick asked a very simple question. What is a good lightweight CRM tool? He says, you know, I, I think the entire audience would appreciate a discussion about this. I recently left a company that I prepared and then sold to say, oh, Wait, am I looking at the right. Yeah, I'm looking at the right thing. Okay. Yeah. And sold the private equity and am now in consulting with other small businesses, helping them build infrastructure and value. I don't need a full email marketing tool like a HubSpot, but I do need to keep track of the people I've spoken with or emailed, and I need to keep track of what was discussed so I don't repeat myself. The standard Mac applications that Patrick uses are not up to the tasks, he says, I used Busy Context in the past to do part of this, but Apple doesn't allow Busy contacts to see emails any longer. Any thoughts about this? I mean, you know, my. I think you and I are similar in this regard, Shannon, that we started doing this kind of stuff before there really were any tools that were available to small businesses. I know they were available to large businesses, but we couldn't afford them. So I used filemaker to create my own CRM. But. But it also doesn't really link with email. Right. So I wind up just before I send an email, if it's something I need to log in filemaker, I just do a command, a command C, and copy the entire, you know, select all command, copy the email, and then paste it into FileMaker. I could automate that. As I'm saying it out loud, I realize, wow, you know, something like Keyboard Maestro would automate that probably pretty quickly because filemaker's got a lot of hooks, so I could even automate that part of it, but I haven't needed to. So.

Yeah, I agree. I think it's a great question. And so many of these CRMs are very complex and, you know, do far more than perhaps, you know, a small business owner might need them to do, which I think Patrick was alluding to. I responded to Patrick. I did recommend he take a look at, like, Monday.com, which I thought you could pare it down pretty well to do what you want it to do, but it's still, you know, it still can be pretty heavy and do a lot of things. I mean, I know folks that, you know, are in that use Salesforce and that are just like, oh, I can't change because I'm so. I've taken years to build this thing out.

Yes.

And they just can't. Can't do anything. I also use FileMaker Pro. It is a little bit more reliant on you to teach it what you want it to do. But if you find a good FileMaker Pro programmer that can help you build something for yourself. It's incredibly powerful and the key is it's incredibly customizable to do exactly what you want to do with these automations and scripts. And um, it, it takes a little bit more upfront but like, I have a couple different FileMaker databases I've used for years and over time I've just continued to modify them and they work fantastic.

Yeah, I, I do like throughout my career because I'm a nerd and I'm comfortable just diving into something like filemaker, which really it, it does require a little bit of nerdiness to get in there, but it's not nearly, it's not, it's not a lot. Right. You don't have to be a programmer by any stretch to be able to.

There's a lot you can do just as if, if you have a little bit of interest in it. And, and I actually have used Chat GPT to help me with a few scripts and a few programs. Hey, tell me how to do this. I want this field to do this when I do X. And you know, it's, it's helped me take a little bit deeper dive than I normally would. And then like I said, I have a, a great FileMaker Pro programmer that I met through Fiverr and I use them when I need to do something more robust. But that's, it's rare that I do that. And buying FileMaker, you know, versus a paid subscription because I just use a standalone app. I love it.

Yeah, right. Yeah, super versatile. The one issue that I caused myself by being nerdy and willing to create my own tools or use a framework like a filemaker or something to create my own thing is that I don't spend the time to research the other tools that could replace it. Right. And that definitely has cost me in the past, like not Moving to say, WordPress as early as we could have with the Mac observer cost us. We used a content management system that I wrote from scratch, which was amazing at the time, but we held onto it, in my estimation, too long and it cost us because every feature we wanted to add we had to do 100% of the heavy lifting on. Whereas if we had moved to WordPress or even, you know, like Salesforce, you said, you know, people have plugins that they've built out. Well, those are plugins that other people have developed. You can develop your own, but you, you can also leverage the work other folks have done and that can be really valuable. So. So, you know, I recommend FileMaker in that it works for me, but, you know, take a look at some of these other tools too and you know, we'll put a link. I found a good article that links a bunch of these kinds of tools. Of course it mentions Monday and Salesforce in there, but it's got a couple others that might help for you. And of course if any of you know of good tools, let us know. Feedbackusinessbrain show in addition to being able to help out Patrick and the rest of the audience here, you also qualify yourself for the drawing that we are doing this year for a MacBook Air. So again, feedbackusbrain show send it in and let us know. All right, look, we all know when running our small businesses those unexpected costs can pop up anytime. Equipment breakdowns, payment delays, license permit fees, all kinds of stuff, right? And what we do know is if we don't address them quickly, they can make or break our businesses. 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And our thanks to Notion for sponsoring this episode. Hey, Shannon. You know, over the weekend, we saw something even I didn't predict happening over at Twitter. Um, not that I've predicted much of what's happened over there, but something I, you know, we, we saw this rate limit thing happen now. Yeah, there have been a lot of strange.

Explain what that is.

Well, I want to. Okay, so Twitter over the weekend decided to start limiting the number of tweets you could read per day. I believe is what they were doing. Not number of tweets that you could post, not that would be a normal rate limit kind of thing. Not the number of replies, not even the number of likes that you can do, but literally the number of tweets that you as a consumer, as a customer, as a visitor of Twitter could read now.

And you had to be logged in. Well, it was no more visitors.

Oh, right. That's right. You had to be logged in to do it. That's right. Yeah. So Twitter went from being this very open thing where you could, you know, see it and read it and all of that stuff to being essentially a version of a walled garden. Now, a lot of people complained about this. This is the first time I've seen complaints that, that made. That were not. That were related to Twitter, the service as, as the, the sort of the, the foundational, fundamental technological parts of the service. There's a lot, been a lot of complaints since Elon took over. Most of those, to me, can Be interpreted as well. I think he sides more with the other political team than I. Ideological. Ideological, right. Where it's like, okay, but what about Twitter? You could still. If you ignore all of those people that are posting about their other ideological stuff that you don't want to. That doesn't interest you, or you don't.

Want to say, don't follow them, don't.

Follow them, and then you'll be fine. Right. But, but this was the first one where it was like, oh, man, this is really. This might be the end of Twitter because it has, it is a fundamental change to what Twitter is. And as someone who had published a website for decades, that was in a sense the same idea as Twitter at the core, which is, I want as many people who care to read what we have to, to, to share, to be able to read it. Right. Like that. That was Twitter's whole thing that obviously very different dynamic to the sites, you know, comparing Twitter or Mac Observer. But in, in essence, it's on the web. Come read it if you want. Right. Like that. That was sort of the, the gist. Yeah, yeah.

Now I. He did. They did say it was temporary. And they're. Yeah. And their explanation, which I don't think they did very well. See, this is, I think the, the takeaway for me is how you communicate with your customers.

Okay.

Because this, it, it was kind of just Musk posting, hey, we're doing this, you know, like, immediately, and I think already happened. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's ongoing right now. So everybody starts. Kind of. Not everybody, but. But people heavily into it start, you know, what, what's going on? This is crazy. I can't remember most people's, you know.

Most people's first awareness of it was that they would get a rate limit message saying, you've read too many tweets for the day. And then that was that.

And that sounds crazy. And.

Yeah, what I don't understand is, like, from a technical standpoint, why didn't they just like we ran into this at Mac Observer. Apple would have an event and we would start posting live updates about the event. And the first time we did that, man, we got way more traffic than we ever imagined. And we had a, like, we had an issue with the servers. And I'm assuming that's what's going on here with Twitter. They're having an issue with their servers trying to limit the load, I would guess, perhaps.

I don't know. And that's a good.

But there's caching like, you can.

I get it. I get it.

You can. Like, you could use Cloudflare to cache your site now, where the requests aren't even hitting you but once an hour or something. Now, certainly people aren't going to get the latest and greatest, but isn't that better than nothing? I don't know.

A couple of caveats. One is, from the outside, we don't really know what's going on. What's. You know, they're. They're. If you go up to the Twitter support thing and search rate limit, you'll see that they say, hey, we're battling spam and bots. Okay, same.

Maybe we all are on the web.

Yes.

Welcome to the club, man.

Yeah. Yeah. And so the other part is, you know, and I want to talk about this on an upcoming episode, this concept of Parkinson's Law, about how the work expands to fill up how many people and resources you have.

It's kind of what I was talking about at the beginning, carving out time. And I still had time. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. And Twitter's done this massive cutback to where from almost 7000 employees down to, I don't know, 1500 or something. And I wonder if they've. This weekend or over this holiday, they started to feel the pinch of some of this stuff and the server issues and. And that's.

Right. I like.

Yeah, yeah, but they don't. It's. And I. I have a lot of respect for Elon, certainly, but I don't think he puts a lot of time into explanations of how things or why things are. Hard charges.

No, I think. I think that is part of his. Like, what has led him to so much success is he sees so many things are obvious to him that are not obvious to most of the rest of us. Right.

Yeah.

And. But he and I certainly, in a. At a very different level, have been guilty of this, too, where it's like, what do you mean? You don't understand this? Like, I don't have time to explain this to you. And I think that's how he lives most of his life, is he sees these things painfully obvious to him. He's flabbergasted at best, frustrated at worst that other people aren't seeing the same thing. And occasionally with those things, it turns into a fantastic idea. Like, you know, x.com with paper, like, it's like, holy crap, that's an amazing idea. When he first presented that to the world, I thought, how stupid. Like, why would we use the Internet for commerce? We. The Internet's not for that. Obviously, I was wrong. He was right. But.

Right.

You know, but that was his thing. He was like, no, duh, it's. Of course it's going to be used for commerce. Dummy. And. And he was right. And I think you're right that some of that is here too, to him. Yeah, this was the most obvious answer for this. But. But he didn't explain it well. He is the worst person he is to run a social media site. I truly believe that, because he is. He is not good with fame. Like, he's good with a lot of things. Fame is not one of them. And running a site where fame is part and parcel of how the site works and his, his presence on it. I mean, I think it's because of his fame on Twitter is the reason that he bought it. Right. Like, I. Like, yeah. It's the wrong business. He is the wrong one to have bought that business. And I think it's bad for him and for the business.

I'm hoping that if, as. As this evolves. It's been less than a year.

Right.

I'm hoping that as it evolves, he finds a role that. That works. And he hired a CEO, but he did.

And I'm letting that person do their job yet.

Yeah, that's right. So he needs to hopefully learn from this. And he, you know, getting some advice and like, hey, again, it comes down to how you communicate it. If you came out and said, look, folks, we're having an issue here.

Yeah.

And so we're going to make some temporary changes. You may see some of this, but don't worry, it's just going to be for a few days as we kind of get this figured out. Well, that's one thing. And you're kind of sharing your weakness, so maybe you get some empathy. But when you just hard charge, blast it out there, it, you know, you can't assume that your customers are going to understand what they don't understand.

Right, right, right. It's. It's like, yes, you definitely cannot assume that. Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So you need to assume the opposite of that. Correct?

Yeah, correct. And. And how you really simplify it. And I'm not sure we're. Well, actually, I am sure we're not getting all of the story, of course. And so.

Yeah, because so much of this is obvious to, like, if the, if the problem is what we've described it as and only that, then I'm suffering from the same thing. There are solutions that are painfully obvious to me. And why aren't they obvious to that guy? Well, they either aren't. I think they are because I'm pretty sure he's smarter than me, but maybe not. But I'm pretty sure he is and. Or I don't have all the right information because there's so many. Like, if the problem is bots and all of that, this is a solved problem. Everybody on the Internet deals with this and it's really not that hard.

Yeah. And that's where I think when you leave all this space open for people to speculate and, you know, it's very bad timing. You know, you have your competitors coming out with other products. I think Facebook's going to release Threads this week.

Instagram is releasing threads.

Instagram, it's not Facebook.

Yeah, yeah, I know they're. I know they're all part of the same company, but be very careful about how they're marketing that. Yeah.

And, and so, you know, you're gonna, you have people that, they don't like the instability they don't like. You know, maybe some of his more, you know, bold statements or whatever. But I agree, I think he needs to step back and focus on product and just be quiet a little bit. But you know, when you're. I always go back to say when, look, all the positive feedback he's got received by being the way he is, it's got to be very difficult to change.

Yes.

But again, key takeaway. How you. Yeah. How you communicate with your customers. Lead times on changes instead of just dropping things instantly. We're not doing this anymore. Being so reactive, critically important and let us know what you think. Feedbackusinessbrain Show Share your thoughts. Do you. How do you use Twitter with your business? We'd love to hear about it and let us know.

Yeah. In the meantime, you can find me on Mastodon or Blue sky because those have remained up. So I'll put links up at links in the show, notes for both of those and. And we'll see where, we'll see where we are next week once Threads launches and all of that good stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thanks for hanging out, folks. Make sure to check out our sponsors financing this. That works. Where Zinch is going to waive their $250 application fee. Notion.com business brain feedback at BusinessBrain show keep living that charmed life. We'll see you next time.