Small Business Payroll and Creating Impactful Presentations

The Small business show, episode 340 for Wednesday, August 11, 2021. Greetings, folks, and welcome to or welcome back to the Small Business show here at BusinessShow Co, where we are small businessing every week. Sponsors for this episode include SaneBox, where if you visit sanebox.com small you get $25 credit and 14 days free. And HelloFresh, where@hellofresh.com SBS 14 and use code SBS 14 for up to 14 free meals and free shipping. We'll talk more in depth about each of those shortly here. Small Businessing In Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And in Lafayette, California, doing my share of small businessing as well, I'm Shannon Jean.

How goes it, Mr. Shannon Jean?

I'm doing good, man. I'm doing great. I love talking. This is my favorite day of the week. We always get a chance to sit down and talk about small business because we think it's a verb, you know, the action that you have to take to be successful.

All the action, you know, I, I had a, I treated myself. I say I treated myself. My wife treated us. She, she went and got us a bunch of lobsters the other night that we cooked up here at the house. We live in New England, so this is a thing that we do here in the summer. And what, what's in we all. I always make this joke when we, when we get them. And it hit me that there was a lesson here for us small business owners. I live in New Hampshire, about 10 minutes from the Maine border. And there is a river that splits New Hampshire and Maine here on the seacoast called the Piscataqua River. You can take a boat up it. And what's cool is when you take your boat up, if you're in the middle of the river, you'll see lobster pots, lobster traps, buoys, you know, that, that go down to the traps that are sitting at the, you know, bottom of the river.

Oh, yeah, right.

Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah. You know, and, and you'll see these on both sides of the river. Now, you'll generally see more of them on the main side than the New Hampshire side. And that the pots on the main side of the river catch the delectable and desirable Maine lobsters, whereas the pots on the New Hampshire side of the river catch the more bland and blase Atlantic lobsters. You see, I love it, of course. And so I always, every time we have lobster, I joke with my wife. I'm like, you know, these things are pretty tasty. I think we got some Lobsters that are scabs that came across from the main side and got into some New Hampshire traps. And of course, they're all the same lobsters, folks. You know, everybody knows about champagne. Region of France is the only place that you can actually have something that's called champagne. I think you've got wines.

Yeah. Napa Valley wine. Right, of course.

Of course. Right. But most people don't think about Maine lobster being this thing that is a name that is governmentally protected by the Maine state government. And it is. It very much is. Because obviously, this same lobsters, it's literally the same river. But because they're caught on one half or the other, that defines what they can be called and cannot be called. Mainers could call those Atlantic lobsters, but they don't. They call them Maine lobsters. That's right, because they've marketed that term. And it's just a fascinating thing, especially when you've got the government helping you. Naming your business like. Or naming your product like that. It's. It's an interesting thing. So I, I, you know, as a business owner, I always get a chuckle out of. Out of that, because we all have to market our stuff, and it's just always interesting to me.

Well, we have. There's always a. From time to time, you'll read about a, you know, a situation out here where some wine, winery, owner, winemaker will get caught, they call it seeding the grapes. Where they'll walk by a truckload of grapes from some outlying area, and they'll toss a few bunches of Napa Valley grapes in there so they can then call it, you know. So. Yeah, of course.

Yeah, I guess that's true. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's true.

Location is everything, right?

Location is everything. That. Yes, right. Well, in that. In that regard, for sure. We got a question about payroll. What do we do with payroll here? How do we take care of our payroll? Shannon, you don't have to do payroll anymore, do you?

Anymore? Thankful. You know, I love working with people, love employees, but payroll is one of those things.

Nightmare, man.

The most important advice I could give you about small business payroll is never to try to do it yourself. There are companies, you know, out there, it's relatively inexpensive, that are experts at managing and staying in compliance. I mean, there's so many speed bumps you can hit and little hiccups of trying to do payroll. You think you're saving money, but you're not.

Um.

And there's a million different. Well, there's just a lot of complexities that you have to manage when dealing with these things. Everything from, you know, salaries that get hit with, you know, collection stuff and you have to, you know, oh yeah, set things aside to, you know, you've got to manage, you know, contributions to retirement, 401k, cafeteria plans, medical plans. So to do it right, you just need to have someone that's an expert that focuses on it and can help you manage it.

Yeah, we just had to move. I think it's the same service, but it changed. We bank with the companies that we have that do payroll. We bank with bank of America and they partnered with QuickBooks Payroll or Intuit Online payroll or whatever it's called. And having it linked to the bank has been helpful from a customer service point of view. I know we could use another service, right? And we've talked about it when anytime there's like a headache, it's like, well, you know, we don't have to use the one that the bank recommends. We can use anything. But it is helpful to have, you know, everybody linked together and the bank knows how to do this and the people know how to work with our bank and all of that stuff. Again, it's not that big of a deal. But wind up using QuickBooks Payroll or.

Intuit payroll, whatever it is, any of those fantastic.

Sort of, I mean, we, you know, we have employees in multiple states, which is another reason to use a third party service to do this because they, they will sort of manage it. But you know, one, we have employees in Michigan and we've cut a deal with Michigan that we don't have to with, we don't have to withhold anymore. It was, I guess we weren't withholding enough because we only have the one employee there that they kept canceling our account. And it was a pain in the neck because the bank would withhold, the bank would try to send, it would get sent back, it would be stuck in limbo. This went on ad nauseam for over a year until we finally talked to Michigan. They're like, oh, you know, it's optional here. Like, aha. Find out if it's optional, folks. If it's optional, maybe don't do it. It does put the onus on your employee. So make sure you have a conversation like we did with, with the employee that we have that lives in Michigan. Like, look, this is, you know, we've tried. Do you mind just, we give you the money, you send it to Michigan. He's like, no, that's fine. Like, okay, cool, great, we're out. But moving Today, I think it was that Lisa was going through the process of getting things set up in the new, new, old system, whatever it was. And they mandated that, you know, we put in all our data for Michigan. It's like, well, we have these numbers, but we really don't want to use. Like, we don't want you to send anything to Michigan. So he had to do some end arounds. Their system mandated that we had numbers in there. So we put them in and then we pulled them out after we got it set up. But, but yeah, using a third party, it makes life so much easier. Yeah. What, what service did you use when you were doing payroll? Do you remember?

I mean, we used a few different ones. I actually found a couple of local companies that we use from time to time that I really liked because I could get a, I could drive over there. You know, I had, you know, everything was connected to our bank, all the compliance, everything was. But it was a local representative. And we've used big Companies, too, used ADP, we've done the QuickBooks thing, but eventually wound up with a local company around here in the Bay Area. And I met the person walked through. So if you had some problem, we could meet and figure out a solution. And I also felt really good about supporting another small business. Right.

Yeah. Well, they know you're not a jerk even though you're calling with a problem. I mean, like. And you know, they're not a jerk even though they don't have the instant answer for you. Right.

Well, and they know your, they know your business. So I, I. It's almost, you know, we talk a lot about having this board of advisors. Well, if you get a really good payroll, you know, and some of it goes into hr, if you get somebody like that that can, you know, you can befriend and talk to them about, yeah, you know, we want to hire two, three more people. You may get a tip like, well, you know, maybe you ought to wait until second quarter of this or. But when you do hire, do it this way. And they can be a real knowledge base for you. And I just like the concept of keeping it small.

I like that. No, that idea of considering a local payroll service. I'm going to make that suggestion internally here that the next time we have a problem, we look at.

Yeah, as long as they have technology and it's online and everything's connected. Even now my wife is on. We use a payroll company for Renee that works for our business. It's a local company, but we manage our. What is it? The self directed 401k, I forget. Solo 401k they call it. And we also manage our healthcare through there. So Renee works for one of our companies and then the company provides her healthcare and I get that healthcare through there. So it allows you to get that write off on your taxes at the end of the year. Perfectly legal. Always.

Yeah.

Recommended by.

Not your rules. You're just following the rules.

Following the rules.

That's right.

Yeah. And then also we manage our solo 401k through the payroll company where most of that, you know, I'm doing air quotes here, payroll is put in, you know, goes into our retirement account.

Yes.

It's tax deferred and stuff. So a lot you can do and.

Tax deferred, Shannon, as I'm learning the hard way right now, not. Not deferred from the income level that colleges look at.

Yeah, some. Right, some colleges.

Some colleges. Yeah. No, you're right. Yeah. Private schools. Add whatever you put into retirement Back to your AGI. Public schools, it defers. Just like they follow the IRS's policy on that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's crazy. Yeah, so that's it. So, yeah. So, you know, if you've got a payroll solution, we'd love to hear hear about it. We can talk about on the show. Feedback. One of the topics that I also wanted to talk about today came up in our Simplicity episode that we did a couple of weeks ago, was about making presentations, because that was part of our. Hey, let's, let's keep it simple. And if it's okay with you, Dave, I'd love to take a little deeper, dive into how to make an impactful presentation and keep everybody awake at the same time.

Well, yeah, we'll do that. The first presentation I want to make is to present our sponsors to you. Our first sponsor today is sanebox look, and this is a service that I have been using. I've talked about it on this show. I've been using it for years. If for some reason I couldn't use it anymore, the most important thing for me would be to find a way to replace its functionality, even if that meant rebuilding it. And that's because Inbox zero is a thing of the past. Right. We're also inundated with our email that it's no longer about responding to everything. It's about responding only to the important things, the messages that truly matter. Well, SaneBox's artificial intelligence monitors your inbox and then automatically all that knucklehead email is moved into a folder they call Sane later, all that's left is the important stuff and your smiles. And if you know how email folders work, then you know how SaneBox works. If you find an email in the wrong folder, like if it moves something to sanelater that you want to be in your inbox, you just move it to your inbox. It learns from there. The next email that looks like that gets moved to your inbox or it stays in your inbox. If there's something that makes it to your inbox that you want to be in the sanelater folder, no problem. You just put it in your Sane later folder. It learns from that and it does the same thing to the next one. And what's cool is you can create other folders that SaneBox will watch and organize things. Like, I have a sane shipped folder where all of my shipment notifications go. It's super. It's so efficient to be able to look at things like newsletters all at once. It's efficient to be able to look at shipment notifications all at once. As opposed to, you know, we talk about spotlighting on this show. SaneBox epitomizes spotlighting for your email so that when you're doing a thing, you're doing all of that thing at once and you get into it, you do it, and you get out of it. And then you're not just going back and forth with things. The things that wind up in my email box are the. Or my inbox are the things that I want in my inbox. It's fantastic. And what's even better, like I said earlier, is you can visit sanebox s a n e b o x.com small business for 14 days free and a $25 credit. So go check it out. Sanebox.com small business 14 days free and a $25 Credit. And our thanks to sanebox for sponsoring this episode. Next up is HelloFresh. We're@hellofresh.com SBS 14. Use code SBS 14 for up to 14 meals for free and free shipping. HelloFresh is fantastic. I've been using it for a little while here at home. Shannon, I think you've been using it too.

I love it.

It's fantastic because they offer this convenient contact free delivery right to your door. And then it's easy home cooking with the entire family. And the recipes that they send are super easy to follow and quick to make. And they have steps and pictures to guide you along the way. And what this means is no longer is one person in charge of cooking dinner, unless you have an amazing delegator at home. It's really difficult to create a scenario where everybody is able to participate at the same level. You've got one person that's doing most of it in most cases, and then other people that, you know, oh, can you chop this for me or can you do this for me? But somebody's got to manage it. Well, with hellofresh, that goes away. Everybody can look at the same instruction sheet, and it's just like, okay, you're on step one. Yeah. Okay, great. I'll take step two. And then, boom, dinner's getting made, everybody's involved, and the food is tasty. It's really great. They've been doing a great job with this. I. I've been. I've been super impressed, Shannon. I. You. You've. You've been. You just cooked with it the other night, I think, right? Yeah.

It's what I love about it is it gets you to eat things that maybe you wouldn't ordinarily put together and eat. And I love the sauces, the flavors. Unbelievable. And, you know, I think it's just a great solution. My wife and I love it, especially now. You know, we. We're a little different. Our kids are. Are. Are gone their way at school, so it's like, oh, what's coming in? And you get like, I love that. Cooking together is fantastic as well. It's great.

Things on the menu for next week are pork and pepper enchiladas, juicy Lucy burgers, harissa chicken bowls, chicken taco salad, firecracker meatballs. Okay, look, dude, if I keep going with this, we're going to have to cancel the show because I got to go eat. It's fantastic. It really is. And they do a great job with it. Again, visit HelloFresh.com SBS14 and use code SBS14 for up to 14 meals and free shipping. Again, go to HelloFresh.com SBS14. Use code SBS14 for up to fourteen free meals plus free shipping. Our thanks to HelloFresh for sponsoring this episode. All right, man. What's up with this presentation?

Yeah, you know, as small business owners, we're always presenting to someone, right? Whether it's, you know, your employees, when you're having meetings, talking to your bankers, investors, you name it, customers. So I thought it'd be worthwhile if we spend some time today talking about how to keep things simple and how to. How to connect with people making those presentations.

I like it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's start before you were even making that presentation. One of the tricks that I Used to love. After I spent many, many meetings asking for input and getting stared at with kind of stony silence. Right. And you're waiting for someone to ask a question. So I like to stack the deck, you know, find one or more people that'll be at that meeting and talk to them before the meeting and let them know you're going to ask them a question. You can even tell them what question you're going to ask them so they can prepare how to answer it, you know, or if it's not a question, something that will help to increase engagement. Because when everyone else sees that person engaging, they're not going to know that you've prepped them and you know, they're part of the presentation, if you will. But it really helps to get everybody involved and it works like a charm.

That's a great idea. You know, I've. Now that you're saying, I've never intentionally done this, but now that you're saying it, the best presentations I've ever given are the ones where I've had just a random conversation with someone that I know is going to be in attendance and sort of prep them. Or they've told me what question they're going to ask. And so I set it up early on. Because you want to start that engagement as quickly as you can. I always start a presentation by getting people to answer questions about themselves, raising their hand, you know, if I'm giving a question. Yep. For an Apple user group, it's, you know, how long have you been using Macs or, you know, whatever it is, we get people's hands in the air. We get people engaging. Because the worst thing is if I'm just standing there talking for 20 minutes before I ask a question. No, no, no, no.

Yeah. On my. I have a heading here to talk about the opening of your. Of your talk. Your presentation is getting the audience to do something, anything. I told, I told that Scott Adams story about how he used to hand out tic tacs. He would give the. The tic tac little package to the first person, say, here, take a mint and pass it around. And it would get everybody to do something that he asked them to do. It's a powerful persuasion technique. It kind of cuts the ice. They get, like you said when I mentioned it, Dave, you're like, yeah, they get a little sugar, you know, kind of perks them up. And I love that. So passing something around is really good. It could be a product sample. It could be a little one sheet with some very simple thing on it. Talking about what you're going to cover. You can do like you do. Get, you know, get their hands up, get them on their feet.

Get them on their feet. Get them doing something. Yeah. And I always tell them I do that, and then I. And then I have a slide. All it says is question policy. It doesn't explain the question policy. It just announces that I'm about to talk about the question policy. And almost every time what I say is, you know, I take a minute and I survey the room. I mean, I already know what the room's going to be like before I get there, but I take a minute and I survey the room like I'm doing this in real time. And I say, yeah, you know what? This group, I think we're going to be fine if you just ask questions whenever you want all the way through, I'll manage it. And if you get unruly, I reserve the right to change the policy halfway through. But I think that would be the best way to go here. And that gives them permission, right? It also makes it. And the unruly part of it is perhaps the most important part, because it's a little bit of a joke. Of course, these people aren't gonna get obnoxious and rush the stage or anything, but occasionally, we've all been there when there's somebody that's asking too many questions, and it's like, okay, I gotta go put you in your place for a little bit. Oh, you're the unruly one. I get to say that later. It sets me up so that it's not awkward when I have to shut somebody down.

You know, you have to ask that. Are you going to make a comment, or do you have a question?

Yeah, that's right. Well, and I saw. When I saw Dave Grohl, singer from the Foo Fighters, speaking, it was. It was at south by Southwest. It must have been, like, before, or I think it was before they premiered some movie or something, and somebody asked him a question, and he took the question, and then I asked him another one. And then when they asked him the third one, he did something that was brilliant. I mean, he is brilliant on stage. He is a master at handling massively large crowds. This was, you know, maybe 700 people, which is small for Foo Fighters. Right? But. But he. He turned to the guy and he's like, hey, man, maybe we should talk about this later, because I don't know if you noticed, but I'm in the middle of this other thing that I'm doing here, and I got to get Back to that.

Yeah.

You know, and. But just being, you know, he. He didn't talk down to the guy. It was like very much on the same level, like, hey, we should do this later, because I'm doing this other thing right now. Now, obviously, the guy knows he's doing another thing right now.

Right. A little humor in there.

Put a little humor in. That's right.

And also, but, but making the person feel important, like, hey, come up and see me after, or something like that. I think that, I think it's a great idea.

I saw him after, by the way. I was in the bathroom when he came in. After that particular speech, the security guard nearly took me off the urinal until Dave said, whoa, leave him alone. He was in here before me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the guy wasn't going to be allowed to come up to him after is what I'm saying. Yes, Dave knew this, but that's fine. It doesn't matter in the moment. He looks like a nice guy. Yeah.

And so I want to, while you, you mentioned this, the slide that came up and says Question Policy. And I want to. You can't put too fine a point on this when we're talking slides, PowerPoint, keynote, visual aids. You put Question Policy up on the slide, but you didn't describe the policy on the slide. You talked.

Right.

Those things are, you know, to be just little helpers to guide you along, not to put a ton of words on those slides. You know, four to six words per slide. Less is more. Think about our simplicity concept where we're starting with zero and only adding what we need, not making some big thing and taking it down, going at it the other way.

Yeah. Make your own notes, very verbose or whatever you need, but don't share those with the audience. There are a few exceptions to this, but by and large, you don't want to give the audience very much to read or see, because if you give them something to read, they will read it.

Yeah. And if you do have some big, juicy thing you want to do, well, make that your pinnacle slide and lead them into it. Dump it, you know, push it up on the stage, and then just shut up and step aside and let them read it to have a big. Have a big impact.

Nothing wrong with that. Yeah.

So, yeah, I'm gonna. There's. We'll put a link in the show notes, you know, all about how Steve Jobs, his take on using keynote and slides and the less is more concept. And I would definitely encourage you to go through that. One of the things I Love, too, at the beginning, when you're doing a talk or making a presentation is to show some vulnerability and also make an ask. Ask something of your audience. And an example of this is saying something like, hey, I'm going to share a story with you, but I'd like you to keep it within this room or keep it to yourself. Don't share this with anybody else. And you know, you're going to share a story that if they share, it's not going to matter. But it's something that's unique to this group. I'm going to share a story with you, and you're kind of letting them in on this secret. And it really can help build your trust with your audience a lot. I mean, you could. You could be like. It could be something as simple as, you know, I'm running. I ran late this morning. I had this whole prepared. I'm going to do it this way instead of this way. It could be anything. I always.

I always. Yeah, I always. If I find myself thinking of an anecdote to share, the way I preface it is, I really shouldn't be sharing this. And I share. And then it. Off it comes. And now this is a thing that we're doing for us. Just us here. That's right.

Yes.

Yeah.

I like to share the story of how I had to go home and tell my wife I lost a million dollars. And it's amazing how it perks everybody up when you start with, you know, I'm giving some talk about success at this, success at that. And I said, but, you know, really what I want to bring it down here is, let me. Let me share this with you. But I would appreciate if you didn't share with anybody else. It's a little. It's embarrassing. And one of the best ones I had that I've ever been involved in is I was in Chicago at a PayPal conference, and Marcus Lemonis is the prophet on TV as a bunch of stuff. Right. He's a CEO of Camping World and all this RV stuff. He came out and told a story, which I'm not going to share here, because he didn't.

He.

Because he asked me not to.

And.

And it showed a tremendous amount of vulnerability, what he shared. And that was his. His point is the most important to him, the most important part of being successful in business is vulnerability and sharing that vulnerability with people because it connects you on an entirely different level.

Absolutely, absolutely. So I. I've always been a fan of Guy Kawasaki's 10 20, 30 rule of presentations. His 10 rule. 10 is 10 is the optimal number of slides in a presentation because a normal human can't comprehend more than 10 concepts in a meeting. 20 minutes for your 10 slides. Sure, you have an hour time slot, he says, but it'll, you know, you're going to waste time. Don't worry about it. 20 minutes. And then my favorite one is 30 point font. Now he goes on, that's really good. Well, he has a better way of explaining this 30 point font. I like the 10, 20, 30 rule, but the 30 point font comes from. You take the age of the oldest person in the room, you divide it in half, and that is the smallest font you get to use.

That's fantastic, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's really good.

Yeah, you don't get to cram all kinds of crap onto your slide. No, no, no.

That's right.

No. 30 points.

Yeah, I love that.

I know.

Yeah, that's good. And so that, that vulnerability or asking them to keep something private is just a powerful way to connect with people. Just like humor.

I think humor is great, but you can deliver it. You got to deliver whatever it is, whether it's, it's, it's privacy or humor. And if that humor can be a little bit self deprecating, that's a good thing. Right? But, but if you're, if you're a funny person and you can deliver humor, then by all means do that. But don't, don't assume you're a funny person.

Yeah, don't force it. It's better to say something like, oh, you know, I was told to open with something funny, but I'm just not that funny. So let's just skip that part and get right into our talk and you will still get a laugh.

You could put, you know, funny slide, put like literally those two words on a slide and just say, this is, this is where I was supposed to be funny, but I'm not really that good at that. So is it okay if we skip this? You know, and boom, you've, like you said you've got to laugh and you.

Know, at the end of these tips, I'm going to talk about this again. But you know, you want to be relaxed, calm, you're talking about this stuff, you know, and the more you know it, the better it's going to be. So practice and present to someone that's going to offer you some good criticism and tips. You're going to need to practice the content, you're going to need to practice the timing, and the more comfortable you are just with talk, talking about it, the better presentation it's going to be. And because if, if you people are not going to believe you if you're not comfortable with the topic.

No.

And, and the big. But, you know, you may be talking about your life's work and you could just ramble it off, you know, no problem. But, you know, if it's something that you're focusing on specific, you're gonna need to, you got to put some practice in. You know, it's, it's, it's. It comes with the territory. I'm making presentations.

Yeah. No quick meetings. I, Yeah, I, I certainly have practiced in front of people before. I've practiced in front of my family. If I'm doing a presentation for a large group, what I try to do is go practice in front of a small group beforehand.

Like a comedian, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Because I practice a lot in my office. I set up my computer. I have a desk that adjusts between standing and sitting, so I make sure I put it in standing mode, and then I walk around my office as though I'm delivering the presentation, even though it's an audience of none. Right. And I get the timing of it. I get all of that. But there's something about presenting it to an audience where I learn. And if I can do that before the stakes are higher, that's even better. So user groups, you know, for me, I do a lot of presenting, teaching, presenting, you know, about various topics. If I, you know, technical topics. If I can do that in front of a user group of, you know, whatever, 15 to 30 people, that's. It puts me in a much better situation when I'm up in front of 300 to 500 people and I can just go and crush it because I know, ah, this is how this feels to deliver this. And I'll tweak things afterwards, like, oh, wow, I really stumbled there. Why? Oh, well, because this is sort of awkward. All right, great. Don't do it that way. Do it a different way or skip it or whatever. So. Yeah.

Like it.

Yeah.

Yeah. And another tip when you're practicing this stuff is to slow down. You know, most of us, me especially, you know, often try to fill in awkward silences, but I think we, you know, constantly think about changing your thought process and use silence to accentuate your presentation.

Yes.

Give people some time to think. Especially when you make an impactful statement. You don't want to just go quick and right into the next topic. You know, we need to kind of slow down. And you can remind me of that feedbackusinessshow. Co. Because I often get ramped up on things here and start talking about it quickly. Another one of the things that I love the most is if you can walk around. Walk around. Yeah. I always have nervous energy when I'm talking, speaking, making presentations. Movement really helps me burn. Burn it off. If I can take a couple of people for a walk and have. And talk this presentation through, it's way better for me than to sit them in a conference room. You know, if it's a group of people, for sure.

Oh, yeah.

Way better.

Yeah, I. I hated it this semester when I was doing that. That, unh class, you know, Covid required us to be masked and all of that, and everybody had to sit in their assigned seats. But there were a few weeks there when attendance became very fungible and there would be a handful at most of people in the room. There was one week where there were three of us in the room, and that included me. And it was like, man, I wish we could just go somewhere else or just sit at a table and just have a conversation, as opposed to me having to be up here and them having to be down there. And if it weren't for Covid, I definitely would have done that. Of course, if it weren't for Covid, I probably would have had more people in the classroom anyway. So, you know, I'm not sure it. I'm not sure that world exists where those Venn diagrams, you know, intersect. But, yeah, it was like, oh, yeah, this is not the right thing.

Sure.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's much better to be casual. And also, it holds people's attention at a different level. I mean, one time, our sales team. This was years and years ago, and they just weren't bringing it together. They're trying to do the same old stuff, which just wasn't working. And so I took them outside, and we took the ladder up to the roof, and I had chairs and everything set up on there. And I said, look, we're going to meet up here. And it was cold. It might have been a little windy. And we sat on the roof of this building, and I said, hey, let's. Let's implement new things. What new things can we think of? Think, you know, change the way we're focusing on. On certain things, and we'll get our. Ourselves back into that warm building once we, you know. You know, embrace this. So that's good. So, yeah, a couple more things real quick before we go. I. I really believe that if you can speak to one person in the crowd, you'll connect with many more.

What I mean, that's good advice. Yeah. Pick somebody to talk to. Talk to.

Yeah. And you can switch it up. So like, I like to move my field of view over the crowd, make eye contact with kind of one person. But, you know, as you make your points. But what's going to happen is people all around that person, they're all going to think you are making eye contact with them and making that point with them, and they'll kind of perk up instead of, instead of just looking out over the back and, you know, that kind of, of thing. And one of my favorite things is to be specific. And I learned this a long time ago. And what I mean by that is, like, if you're talking about percentages or numbers, don't round them. You know, like saying 63% of something is more powerful if you round it to 60% because everybody just kind of, well, 60%, whatever. And I could. One of the biggest, well, I guess successful ways people that I found connected with that is I was speaking to the top 1,000 executives at eBay. They'd come into this worldwide conference in San Jose and I was on a panel with about five other sellers. And it was at a time where they were just having some real problems. They weren't representing sellers very well. And I said, you know, they asked me something about my business and I just said, you know, I've been trying to do more business with you, but it's almost impossible. And I said, you have 34% of my business right now. Don't you want 50%? And then I just stopped and I just shut up and, you know, everybody clapped and it was like, thing. And the guy later was like, is that right where you have. We have 34%? And I'm like, I don't know, somewhere around there, you know, it wasn't exact, but those specifics, item specifics, numbers, especially powerful when you use them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I like this. This is good.

Yeah. So the last thing is, like I mentioned earlier, try to relax and have fun. People are there to hear you for a reason. You're the expert, so to speak. You know, they're there to learn from you. And the more you practice and prepare, the more you're going to be able to relax and connect with your audience and, you know, be yourself. That's what they're there for. Don't try to make yourself sound more professional. If you're super casual person or whatever, that's fine too. Be you.

And I to that point, you're right. People are there to see you. You are. I always think of myself as the expert du jour on a given topic, but it doesn't mean I'm the most knowledgeable in the room on something because I have had it proven to me time and again by somebody that'll ask a question like, oh, crap, that person knows more than me about this, at least this particular part of what I'm teaching. And that's okay. Like, let it be a conversation. You, you are the facilitator. You get to control how much that person or any other person speaks. Right. But, you know, if somebody's got a tidbit that is worth sharing, have them share it or echo it for them. If the, you know, if the acoustics in the room are such that that's the right way to do it, say, oh, yeah, you know, this gentleman over here adds some context to what we're going through here. I didn't realize this, but what he says is A, B and C. And it's totally okay to say everybody is there to learn. And if you show them that you are also there to learn, it makes the fact that they are there to learn okay. And there's nothing wrong with that.

What do we say on this show all the time? I'm always learning the most. I.

That's right. Yeah, exactly.

No doubt about it.

No doubt about it. That's right.

Whether we're doing research for a topic that we're going to discuss and like we got prompted to, to do a show on trademarks and we're. I'm going to dig up my old trademark stuff and it's a great way to continually be learning when we have guests on the show that are teaching us all new things. It's fantastic. It's one of the highlights of my week.

Yeah, we're learning together here. We are the stewards. That's it. And when you're presenting, you are the steward. And that's it. That, you know, you've got to do some prep, but that's it. So, yeah, it's great stuff.

So, you know, you have tips on making presentations or what did we get wrong? What do we got right? Feedback, business, show co. Reach out and let us know what you think.

Let us know what you think. Yeah, absolutely. Make sure you take a moment and Visit our sponsors. Sanebox.com Small Business HelloFresh.com SBS 14 it's SBS 1 4. You know, that's kind of how it works. And we'll see you next week. Keep living that charmed life, huh?