Small Business Planning for the Worst and Scott Adams Book – SBS 65

The Small Business show, episode number 65 for Wednesday, May 4, 2016. Greetings, folks and welcome to the Small business show at BusinessShow Co the Business for by and about small business owners here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton.

And in Lafayette, California, I'm Shannon Jean. How are you, sir?

I'm good, man. It's been, yeah, it's been a productive week. And actually day, I know it's only Wednesday, but I've gotten all kinds of stuff done all over the map. But it makes me hyper when I'm productive.

Yeah, that's good. That's that flexibility stuff. We always talk about being able to jump from task to task. It can really energize you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I love it and sort of, I guess I didn't consciously think of this, but taking my own advice from what we talked about last week, just cramming extra stuff into my day forces me to get all these other things done. So it's actually been really good. So I guess I learned from myself by osmosis.

Yeah, that's good. You say it enough and it's like that affirmation type thing, right?

Yeah.

You get it over time.

That's right. That's right.

Yeah, that's cool. And you know, talking about this flexibility, one thing I love about the show is that, you know, we always have this kind of quasi agenda to start and then we'll have like a 30 second conversation and go, hey, let's talk about that and not, and not about everything else we said we're going to talk about.

That's right.

Yeah. So I think it's great. I think it's leaving yourself that wiggle room is awesome and it can energize you. Like you.

Yeah.

To your comment.

Yeah, that's cool.

So we decided, we were talking about, I don't know how we started the conversation about what to do when you're no longer able, when you're no longer here, you know, if you're either incapacited or you know, something terrible happens to you in a bungee jumping accident.

Yeah, they're hit by a bus scenario. That's right.

Yeah, hit by bus.

Where this started, I think it is important or good. I don't know if it's important to note where it started. We were talking about all the things that we have going on in our lives, not just necessarily business but you know, is saying, man, you know, would my family figure out like.

That's right.

How to use my, like our Internet connection at home and I've actually tried because I've been conscious of this. Like someday it's possible I can't come home because the bus hit me, you know, and maybe I'm still alive.

I hate to laugh at that.

Sorry. No, but it's true, you know, maybe I'm still alive, but I'm in a hospital for three weeks because I can't move my legs or, you know, I mean, like these things can happen and you don't want to obsess over them, but you sort of need to. Just the way I look at all this stuff is very matter of factly it could happen. I'm not going to spend my life obsessing over what's going to go on and all these terrible things. But any one of these things could happen. And if it doesn't take a whole lot of effort to sort of begin to mitigate any other impacts of that, well, that's a good thing. And with like the network at home, I've tried. My son sort of understands he would be able to get through it, especially like with help from other friends of mine. Like he knows enough to fill in the gaps in their knowledge. You know what I mean?

Reboot the router. Yeah, yeah, that kind of stuff.

Well, it's more than one router. We have like four routers at home. That's the problem because we're geek similar here.

We've got them all over the house and power line and outside antennas and that kind of thing.

Yeah, right. It's crazy, but you know, and really I should do a network diagram of it. But you know that that day will come or not, I don't know. But that's what we're talking about here.

Yeah, and kind of like contingency plan. Right. And we've talked about formal versions of that for your business. You know, like disability, you know, policies with your insurance to help cover, you know, cash as well as like key man insurance if you have a partner that you may need to buy out their spouse or some other situation. But you'd have. Those are. And those are great for provid much needed capital when something goes wrong. But the little things. And like when you mentioned that earlier, you know about how that would happen. First thing I think is all the, you know, stuff you're logging into throughout the day and the services that we use to manage both our businesses as well as my personal stuff, you know, we've got all kinds of things that we deal with. And one of the things that we've done with, with my wife who I would, you know, Renee, I would, she would step in and. Okay, this is, we've got to continue. This is what's going on, you know, and it's, and it's very basic and non techie, but we each keep a document that's, you know, password protected, however secure that may be.

Yep.

But we keep all of our, you know, stuff in there in this document. This kind of, you know, archive, if you will, of what to do, you know, or account number, and maybe not the number, but a login for this or that and some passwords and different things. If we're not using a password management program or how to get in the password.

I was just going to say. Yeah, well, go ahead, finish your story.

No, no, no. So we keep this document. Each of us has one, and we've kind of synchronized on the naming of it, and we know where it is, and each of it, we have the same password. And from time to time I will just give her a copy. We have backups, you know, obviously we keep time machine backups and everything, but I' sure how fluent she would be in digging through a time machine backup.

Sure.

But you could at least grab my computer. And there is this kind of one central repository of, you know, whatever it is from the tax information of when the certain things are filed. And this, and this is the contact here. And I just kind of. I just kind of keep it updated as we, you know, as things come up throughout the day or, you know, anytime. And it works pretty well for us.

Yeah. And I do the same thing. I have, I store a lot of stuff. In fact, I use one password for the majority of that stuff because you can store what they call secure notes in there, which are exactly what you're talking about. They're basically text files.

Yeah.

That you can just put whatever you want in, but they're encrypted with the rest of the vault. You know what I mean?

Yep.

And when we. The first time, maybe it wasn't the first time, but we went away on a cruise or something, and I know Lisa would, would be able to get into this vault, but I started thinking, man, you know, what happens if something happens to both of us?

Oh, yeah.

You know, and so I thought, well, here's what I'm going to do. And I, I uploaded a copy of that vault to our server. Now there's only like three people on the planet that can even get into the server. And it's. And it's an encrypted vault, right?

Sure. Okay.

And then for Adam Christensen, who works for us and who I trust implicitly. But it wouldn't necessarily just give him all this information. I left that password for him. Not in an obvious way that it's the password, but in an obvious enough way that I know if he were digging around and realized, oh, wait, here's Dave's 1Password vault, you know, it would be on his mind and within a few days he would have found where that password was and he would know what it was. If he stumbled across it any other time, he wouldn't have found the vault any other time. Right. Because it was in my home folder and there's no reason for him to look there.

Sure.

But the password was sort of somewhere else that he would stumble on it and may have already stumbled on it, but just doesn't know.

Yeah, yeah, right, right.

That's what it is. And it was like, yeah, I don't necessarily need to give him all this, but if something were to happen, I'm just gonna leave these little breadcrumbs behind. He's smart enough. He'll figure it out, you know.

Yeah, that's good. That's a good way. And those are, you know, and I think those informal, you know, that informal stuff is really important. And often, you know, we get so busy in a day to day that you need to leave those for someone. Whether it's your, you know, if you work with your spouse or your partner, or if it's, you know, a key person in your organization, you need to give them some of the keys to the kingdom to keep things going. And hopefully you have someone that you trust.

Yeah.

You know, if you don't, that's an entirely different show that we would have to talk about trust issues. But, you know, by the time you have a bunch of stuff that you need to be worried about like this, you want to be sure you've surrounded yourself and maybe it's your attorney, you know, if you're worried about giving up stuff but somewhere that you can have a repository of that because it really. You may not be around to deal with the headaches, but certainly the people that you care about are.

Yeah.

And you want to deal with that.

Yeah. And it's going to be a rough time for them anyway. You know, like, let's. Let's not make them reinvent too much of the wheel here, folks. Yeah.

Yeah. We had, you know, a tragic event, you know, I guess maybe five or six years ago with one of my companies and a partner that I had, I can remember. Yeah. Flying out to the. To the funeral, and then going back with his wife to their building and looking at everything and just looking around going, oh, wow. And, you know, he was running his own company, you know, with his wife as well, that I didn't. I wasn't involved in at all. But similar to your comment about the breadcrumbs, you know, I jumped in and he kept everything in filemaker, and I was actually, you know, able to kind of see those breadcrumbs and go and find, oh, look, here's where this is. And, and. And he had left enough information, you know, around where Paula, his wife, was able to really just, you know, hit the ground running and kind of pick up and. And continue relationships that they had that he had, and all these kinds of things. And it's critically, critically important, even if you just do it, you know, on an informal basis.

Yeah. Yeah. You got to have. Right. There needs to be something. And. And it. You know, it's not a bad idea to have that stuff for yourself either, because.

Sure. You know, I refer to it almost daily.

Yeah, well, that's the thing. Yeah. Especially as time goes on. I guess I don't blame that on anything other than there's just more information and so we need to store it somewhere. It has nothing to do with age or anything like that, Shannon.

No, and. No, no, no. You have to write. And. And I. Yes. And I also have this. And I don't know where I read it or heard it or learned it, but, you know, one of the things that's important for me that keep. Is to keep as much minutia out of my head as possible so where I don't have to keep thinking about it. So if you know it, I mean, it's an old concept. It's like having a to do list, you know, once you put it on your list. Okay, I can forget about this for a while and focus on this other stuff and that using this file, this encrypted file that we have is. Is same thing. You know, I don't need to know how to log into the Bureau of Equalization, you know, when I need to do it once a month. But I know where to go get that data with our, you know, all this kind of stuff that you have. So it works out good.

It's good, Good stuff.

Yeah. So go ahead.

No, you know, and we've talked about this in other. Other episodes, but it is good, you know, to make sure you cover all the bases, not just the. The formal stuff is important, too. Right. The. I don't want to We've glossed over it only because we've covered it before, but the key man, insurance and that kind of thing. You should talk to your accountant or your attorney or both of them about this.

Yeah. And the informal stuff, you probably want to start, like, on day one when you're signing up for accounts, and here's my employee identification number when you get that, and my reseller number, all those kinds of things. But then once you've had some success and you start moving forward, you want to definitely formalize those. Those things.

That's a good point. Yeah, they. We talked about them in reverse order. The informal stuff is what happens first. No, you're totally right. Yeah.

Yeah. And we'd love to hear how you do it. You know, what works for you, what. What have you, you know, what's your fallback plan, you know, and. And you reach us@feedbackusinessshow.co and, you know, tell us your story, and if it's, you know, something that's interesting or you have a question, we'd be glad to share it on the show or maybe even have you on the show and we could do that and. And talk to you for a while.

Sounds good.

Yeah, that'd be cool. So, hey, I'm reading this new book, Dave. I'm a big book hound. I love reading business books or whatever it is all the time. And I've been following Scott Adams, the creator. Dilbert.

Dilbert guy. Yeah, sure.

Yeah, the Dilbert guy. I follow his blog because I find it fascinating, and in this whole political cycle, he's been commenting not so much on Left Right, what he believes, or anything, but more on the process and how one side may be more persuasive than another. And it's been fascinating. He wrote a recent book that he's written. He's written more than one.

I read a bunch of his books years ago, but I haven't read any of his stuff in a long time.

Yeah, the title of the book really grabbed me is like, you know, how to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. And, you know, we talk about failure here all the time and, you know, how it leads to so many different opportunities and all this kind of stuff. And so I. I picked it up and I'm only, you know, I don't know, maybe a third of the way through it. But it reminds me, I've mentioned it here before, a book called Rework, and the author eludes me at the moment, but we'll put it in the show notes. It reminds me a lot of that. Because it's a different take on, really, entrepreneurship. And, you know, Scott is a serial entrepreneur. He's failed at a ton of different things, tried a bunch of different things. You know, he's kind of an accidental cartoonist, if you will, and he shares a lot of those things. And one of the things that I thought I'd love to get your feedback on is he makes a statement, is that goals are for losers. And I was. I was like, wow, that's powerful.

That is powerful.

Yeah, that's powerful. Okay, what's. What's the story behind that? So, you know, and I just read. Got through that. The chapter last night about how he talks about this and his, His. This concept that he really promotes is that, you know, goals are often. You often find yourself in a constant state of failure with a goal where.

You never exactly get there.

Yeah, you either. You're either, you know, down on yourself all the time because you're not at. You're not reaching your goal, or you just fail at the goal, you know. And so on the flip side, he really promotes the use of a system instead of a goal. And what he means by that, for an analogy, you know, if you want to lose ten pounds, well, that's a goal. And that's often, you know, easy to miss. But a system is, hey, I'm going to just. I'm going to exercise every day and. Or I'm not going to eat this kind of food. And he, you know, he uses a bunch of different examples of folks that are very successful that rely on systems instead of goals and Is what he's done. And it really hit home with me because I am not one of those people that, you know, sits down with this big plan of, you know, hey, this is what I'm going to achieve, and I'm going to build this, you know, very detailed process of how I'm going to get there. It just doesn't work like that for me.

No, no, that's. That's it. Well, my guess is you don't do that because, you know, that's not how life works. Yeah, I guess so.

And it certainly doesn't work that way for me.

Well, that's. That's what I mean for you. And I should have said for you. It doesn't work that way for me either. Perhaps for some people it does, but.

Yeah, some people it doesn't.

Maybe not.

Yeah, right. And in the book, Scott uses some examples of how when, you know, there's lots of. There's a significant amount of the population, obviously that uses these goals and achieves them. And when those folks are successful at that goal, like an Olympic athlete or something, they're celebrated. And we look at that, it's like, oh, look, they set that goal and they achieved it and everything. He's like, but that actually happens far less than we're kind of told to believe. And so the premise of developing this system that you kind of use every day, I mean, I guess you could kind of look at it as maybe these are mini goals or something like that, but, you know, building a process that works for you. Like, he says, hey, you know, and we've talked about this in different ways, but both of us have lived our life like, hey, you know, yes, we want to be successful financially on some level, of course, of course. But you don't start out saying, hey, my goal is I want to be a millionaire. No, you know, what I'm going to do is develop a system to become a serial entrepreneur that ultimately we want to lead to that. But by having a system in place, you have lots of mini successes, some failures along the way. But the main point is you're continually developing this system over time, and you kind of build this foundation, and that leads to your ultimate success, Rather than this thing out there where I hear it all the time, People are like, oh, I got to figure out a way to do this and make $100,000 or whatever it is. 50,000 DOL. And we comment here. Hey, figure out something that you can make. 500 bucks. That's it. 100 bucks, that's it. And if you can make a hundred, well, then you can tweak it and figure out how to make a thousand. And once you make a thousand bucks, then you can go a little further. And that's a system. And you may not be thinking of this goal. Well, I don't think of it like that because it's just too far out. It's too kind of generic. And when I read this chapter, I was like, wow, man, I've been doing this forever. And I think it's the first time I've really read where someone has put it in words in such a way that really grabbed me, and I highly recommend it. And there's a few other things I really like, and I'll probably be dipping in and out of the book here over the next few weeks, and we can talk about a few other things that are pretty interesting.

Well, yeah, you know, when I said you don't set goals because that doesn't work, and then we added for you and I. And I still feel like if we weren't so worried about offending people, we'd take out the. For you.

Well, no, I don't. I don't.

But no, I mean, you know, the. The. The system that you describe, that that's the reason that big goals don't work, because, you know, you found that you have to continually tweak whatever it is you're doing to maximize the value out of it. Now, the value might be dollars. The value might be time versus whatever. Whatever it is. You know that that's important to you. You're gonna keep modifying whatever it is you're doing. There's never an end to that. Right? Yeah, that's right. But along the way, there are some successes, and you might hit that number where you're like, hey, look, this year with my business, you know, I made 20 grand. And then the next year, wow, I made 100 grand. Okay, right. You know, there's those things along the way, but they don't happen because you said, I'm gonna make 100 grand. They happen because you said, I'm gonna tweak this, and I'm just gonna figure out the next thing to do tomorrow, and I'm gonna tweak that, too. It works better because it's how it's more realistic.

Well, and like, I had a friend in high school, and I can remember his dad was an engineer and really just super smart guy, nice guy. And he would always talk with us and, you know, basically tell us we didn't know anything, which at the time was true, but we didn't.

Of course, you didn't know enough to know that that was true.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. And I can remember him saying, you know, he said, wow, you know, I set a goal when I was in college that I was going to make a million dollars. And I don't know how old he was, but he came back one time, we were sitting there barbecuing at my buddy's house, and my friend says, dad, did you reach that goal? And he said, I did. And I realized I made a terrible mistake. And I'm like, wow, what was the mistake? He says, well, I should have said it much higher. And Scott Adams, his premise is like, well, you achieve your goal, you celebrate it, you feel great, but then you've lost the thing that gave you purpose and direction. So you either have to. You can enjoy it, of course, and then you can set some new goals, but then you're in this constant struggle again. But if rather you develop a system over time. Well, you're going to blow right past that if, you know we're talking about financial stuff right now, but you just, along the way you're perfecting over your lifetime a system, whether it's for your personal happiness, relationships, whatever financial, your business, whatever your measure of success is. And you keep refining that over time, not beating yourself up because you didn't make some specific goal. And I think it's really a powerful, you know, if you're a system person, and I'm quoting right from the book, you succeed every time you put that system in place. That's what you intended to do. Who knows how successful it's going to be. And you keep tweaking that system and I think, wow, man, that's just a great concept. It's almost like permission to really look at it from a different perspective and not beat yourself up because, oh, I set a goal by the end of the year that I was going to do X or hire five employees or move to a bigger space. You know, it, they're a little more open ended and I think that's okay.

Yeah. Hey, I have a, I have a question for you.

Yeah.

Have you ever set a financial goal for your business?

Nope.

Me neither.

No. Because it's always up and it's always up and down.

I know. Well, there's that.

Yeah, right. Yeah. You can't control it.

I was just curious because it, it's easy to say all this stuff, but I wanted to show I think I didn't know the answer to the question that I asked you. I thought I did and it turns out I was right. But yeah, I just was curious.

Yeah. And we've always tried to. I'll be really honest here. The main reason I started my first company is because I've never wanted to go on a job interview. And I really was like, how am I going to go talk? And this, I don't want to go do this. Maybe I could just do something on my own.

Little did you know, one of these things was much easier than the other.

Of course, of course, of course. So, you know, when I think about that and then I was just down. I was doing some consulting for a company down in the South Bay and I spent the whole time talking about culture and they were asking me questions about what's your rubric? What's your measure of success? And I kept coming back to, well, you know, once I started my first company, I just really wanted to create a great place to work for myself. And over time that Just kind of by osmosis, to use your term, goes out to the rest of the employees that you eventually hire to create a great place to work for them as well. And so that's the system that I put in place over time. And we've had awesome years and we've had horrible years and up and down, but over time I often have to remind myself, because I do get stuck in that, wow, you know, we're not, it's not working at this particular moment, so I'm beating myself up. But I always have to remind myself, you know, we've employed hundreds of people, we've done all these kinds of things. Little bits of success that you have to kind of keep in your pocket and pull out when you're struggling over some, you know, aspect or, you know, whatever you do can boost your energy level back up to say, wow, look at this, we've already had all these successes, we just have to power through and now we'll have maybe some different kinds of successes.

Yeah. Yeah. The only goal, now that I'm thinking about it, the only goal I've ever set for myself, and I really believe this is the only one, but it's definitely a goal that I've set for myself. So I'm guilty of this. I set a goal when I was in college to wake up laughing every day.

That's pretty good.

I know. Yeah. And you know what? It doesn't happen every day. Yeah, there are some days. And here's the funniest part, the first day that I woke up laughing was not too much longer after I set this goal. Maybe, I don't know, six months I was playing in a band, an original band in college. We were a five piece band. You know, we actually had some good success on the campus. Right. I mean, we, we would play gigs. I think the biggest gig we played was for about 5,000 people. But we played a lot of gigs that were just for us, for a thousand people to come and hear us play our songs, which was pretty cool. Right? But the first day up laughing. We were hired to play on the campus of. I don't remember. I think it was Boston College. It was some. Oh no, no, no. It was Northeastern University. No, but it was, you know, some, some university. We were in Connecticut, but it was in Massachusetts. And I remember we were going to get, we had to play at lunchtime for one hour and we were going to get paid 800 bucks.

It's a lot of money.

Oh yeah. It was like, whoa, look at that.

Yeah, that's Cool.

We've made it, you know.

Yeah, of course.

Yeah. Yeah. But that was. That was. That was the first. Yeah. So that is the one goal that I've set, and I have to. Still okay with it. Yeah.

I would argue that that's really the goal is to lead a charmed life, which you've said you do.

Yeah.

And a system you put in place when you were back in college was to wake up laughing or with a smile on your face every day.

Yeah, yeah. Happy about what I was about to go do.

Yeah, yeah, you got it. And of course it's not gonna happen every day, but, you know, for the most part. And I think if it did, it.

Would only be because I had medicated myself to the point where that's, you know, all I knew. I mean, I think you need the balance to appreciate it. Yeah, yeah, of course.

Yeah. That's awesome, though. I love it. That's great.

You know, along those lines, one of my life philosophies. I have a quick story to tell here, and then we actually have a comment from last week that we want to play. But I always say in this show, it never hurts to ask. Right. You're definitely not going to get something if you don't ask for it. I mean, sometimes you do. Sometimes out of the goodness of someone's heart, they do something for you. But, you know, it really, you have to ask. And my favorite recent story about this was, you know, I broke my wrist in the fall. I think we talked about that.

That's right.

Yep. And I went to my doctor, and I have these weird lumps on my arm. They're not cancerous. You don't have to worry, folks. But they're these little lipomas, whatever they are. I've got them all over the place. And I had one on my arm that killed when they put this cast on me the first time because it just. It crushed this thing. And, you know, they didn't deal with it. Right. So when they. Yeah, it sucked. Yeah. So when they went to put the second cast on, I said, can we do something about the. You know, can you, like, build it so that it's not totally, you know, crushing this. This lip home? And they're like, well, you know, casts are compression instruments, too. And. Yeah. They said, but if you want, you know, downstairs is the rehab clinic, you can go down there and get a. Like a custom splint. And I'm like, would a splint be enough? They're like, yeah. At this stage of your recovery? Yeah. You know, okay. So I went downstairs and I asked him, I said, you know, I pay for my own healthcare. I mean, we have a high deductible policy, so, you know, we're covered, but not really for that kind of stuff. I knew it was all gonna come out of my pocket, and so I said, what's this gonna cost? And the woman at the desk, of course, because the way our healthcare system works in the US didn't know the answer.

That's right.

I'm like, I can't walk into an auto mechanic. And you and I can't have people walk into our business.

No way.

We'll say, we'll tell you in a month what the service you got today cost. No, but there. That's how it works. So she said, but I know these custom splints are really expensive. And I said, okay, well, I mean, I can walk across the street to Walgreens and get a splint for like, 30 bucks, but it's not going to protect me quite the way I want to be protected. And I've talked about that with my doctor, so I'm willing to pay a little bit extra. I said, are we talking like, 10 times that? Like, is it going to be $300? And she's like, yeah, it could be. And I said, all right, that's worth it to me. Fine. So I go in, I get the splint, you know, and it was great. And then I get the bill. And this little clinic was part of a hospital, so I get the bill from the hospital. $1,600 for the splint.

Nice.

Yeah. And it was one of these things. It was like, okay, wait a minute. So I called the clinic. They're like, well, yeah, that's what that costs. But you didn't tell me, like, if they had told me 16, I would have said, I'll go.

You wouldn't have done it. That's correct.

You know. Come on. You know.

Of course.

Yeah. That's why I asked the question. Like, well, you'll have to call the billing department at the hospital. So I call the building department at the hospital. These people are not empowered to do anything. So it's a very frustrating conversation for both sides, right? They. They can just tell me you have to pay. And I'll say, but I'm not going to pay. And they can't. They could. They could feel compassion for you. It's irrelevant. They. They don't have the authority to make any changes. They're like, well, we can spread it out over 12 months. You can spread it out as long as you want them. You're never gonna get 1600 do for this particular splint. You can have the thing back if you want, you know? And so I realized that this was gonna be a frustrating conversation. I thanked them for their time, and I hung up and I called the CFO of the hospital. So there's two lessons here. Never hurts to ask, and it's a lot. I knew there was someone in between, the person in the billing department who had no authority and the CFO who presumably has ultimate authority. I know there's someone in between there that can make a decision. Now, I have two choices. I can either ask their underling to escalate this upwards through the chain, or I can go to their boss, the cfo, and have them. It escalates the wrong word, but pass it down through the chain. Now, if you're someone in the middle and you get two emails, one from someone that works for you and one from your boss, which one are you going to address first?

Correct.

Right. So it's much easier to go to the top. And. And also, hey, here's something that will seem obvious when you hear it. People at the top know how to delegate better than people at the bottom.

Yeah.

Yep. So that when I called the cfo, he actually took this on his own, But I just figured he would delegate it down. He's like, I don't have time for this, and so I'm just gonna pass it down. He took it on his own, he researched it, and it was 300 bucks, and we were done.

And how did you break through? Was there any barriers to getting to him?

Well, yeah, you know, he. I knew his name because it's in kind of the filings of the local hospital. So I just called and asked, and I got his assistant at his office, and I just left a couple of messages with his assistant and said, yeah, it's Dave Hamilton. I need to talk. I didn't tell him why I was calling.

Sure.

I mean, of course.

Yeah, that's smart. Well, that's what I was trying to get to. Yeah, you need to get through the. To the. The person that you're gonna get to listen to you first.

Yeah.

That's a gatekeeper.

Yes. Well, I knew once I got this guy on the phone, I'd have a decent chance at pleading my case in a way that I thought would be heard. And as it turns out, it was. But, yeah, he wound up. You know, I left him two or three voicemails, and I said, yeah, it's Dave Hamilton calling again. I've just been trying to get in touch with him. And, and, and then finally his assistant passed the message along and he called. And I said, thanks for calling. I gotta fess up. Here's what I'm calling about, you know, and once I got him on the phone and it was just 100% honesty, you know, at that point, I obscured. I didn't mislead anyone. Well, I didn't tell anyone an untruth. I may have misled someone by simply not sharing why I was calling. But it got to that point, you know, and then it was like, okay, man, here's why I got you. I'm sorry if you're the wrong guy, but there's no one else that I can call at your hospital that at least not obviously has the power. Yeah. To pass the power. And he's like, no, I get it. You're totally right. Those people that you can call have no authority. And it sounds like you've got a legitimate situation here. And I said, I think so. Nice. Yeah.

That's cool. Yeah, that's right. And it's a great lesson. Well, it's two things. You know that they're billing 1600 bucks because if they know it goes to insurance company, they're going to pay 300. Right. When it goes to the guys, you know, that pay cash, you get kind of run through the ringer there. So you have to speak up. And I agree with you, you know, asking, you know, you, you, you're not going to be any worse off when you. By not, you know, by not doing anything, you're going to be exactly in the place you want to be.

They weren't going to raise the bill above 16 just because I called the CFO.

That guy really made me mad.

Yeah, yeah. Bill of 32 school.

Yeah, it's not going to happen. Yeah, Right on.

Awesome. Never hurts to ask.

Yeah, for sure, for sure.

And then finally last week, we talked about my crazy idea, which I'm still pursuing, to become an expert witness. And we had a listener call in, even though we don't have a call in number. But he'll explain that and we will solve this problem. So, Scott, take it away.

Well, I'm about to get caught right here at the beginning, Dave, because this technically is not for the Mac Geek gap. You didn't give a telephone number at the end of the Business, the Small Business show podcast. Because I would have called that immediately, but I want to. To get a voice message to you while I'm Thinking about it after listening to the show and I'm driving around. So you got this one. In short, if you want to be an expert witness, you've got to be prepared not only for the arguments, but to keep your cool. And you've got to be open and willing and able to answer questions no matter how dumb and dull they are. Yes, I have been an expert witness. I stopped doing that a couple years ago mainly because I just, I just got tired of it, that it, there's a lot of. You may think it sounds cool and you may look, look good on the, on the television, but in actuality. And there's good money into it, but naturality. There's a lot of problems also in dealing with just the general stupidity of many of the lawyers and the judges and things like that. We're not talking about trying to explain tech basics to the uninformed. You're basically teaching children using adult language. Witnessed not only in courts, in congressional hearings. I made a little bit of money for a while talking with agency heads and preparing them for testimonies. There's a lot more to it than just meets the eye. If you want to talk about it, you could, you know, we could talk. If you want to give me a.

A call and we'll stop it there. But thank you so much, Scott. Yeah, this is, I mean, I love it when we get stuff like this. I really appreciate Scott's persistence. He found. He's a listener to another podcast I do called Matt Keycab. And, and so obviously he, he left the voicemail there, which, which I got. But, but thank you so much for, for this. And that adds some color and context to, to where, to where I think I'm going with this. And I, I, I, I was. None of this surprises me. It's great to hear it, but, you.

Know, you're going to be dealing with general stupidity. That's my favorite line. I love that. That's great.

You're teaching children using the language of adults. I love it.

That's really good.

I couldn't not play the comment. We needed to get that out there. So thank you.

That's awesome.

Good stuff. Yeah, man.

Very cool. Very good. Well, good deal, man.

That's all I have for today. You got anything else?

Okay. No, I've, you know, we've got some stuff we bump to next week. Next week we're going to talk a little bit about this consulting gig that we, that we've mentioned before. Talk about some Facebook and hopefully by then we're going to have a voicemail or a text line up and running for you and maybe even talk about some T shirts.

Oh, sounds like a plan, man.

Yeah.

All right, awesome, folks. You can, as Shannon mentioned earlier in the show, feedbackusinessshow.co. next week, we will have a number that you can not only call and leave voicemails like Scott did, but you will also be able to text us. So more on that as we as we progress through our process here. Hope you have a good week. Hope hope business goes well. Have a good one, Shannon.

Yeah, you too, Dave. Take it easy, everybody.