Small Business Technology – Hardware and Software For your Small Business – SBS 71

The Small Business show. Episode number 71 for Wednesday, June 15, 2016. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Small Business show at businessshow Co. The show by, for and about small businesses here in Lafayette, California.

That's right.

Dave Hamilton.

And I'm Shannon Jean, also in Lafayette. Welcome to Lafayette, Dave.

Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to record in the Shannon Jean Studios.

There we go, up here on the hill. I'm glad that you could come out. You're out here for the worldwide developer conference for Apple.

Yeah.

Nice. The show's going well for you?

It's been. Yeah, it's been interesting. A lot of announcements really geared toward developers. So, yeah, my guess is if you were like detached from the industry and watched this, you might say, okay. I mean, they announced some new features that you might care about. You know, for. I think of they announced things for every OS. So TVOs, WatchOS, iOS and iOS, which.

Is now the new kind of try unifying the OS type thing.

Yeah. And I think of all the features they announced, I feel like the WatchOS features are the ones that would be immediately most immediately obvious to consumers to being like, wow, that's an improvement if it delivers.

Yeah. It seems like almost a complete rewrite of how the OS works and stuff. So it should be interesting.

Yeah. Right. Well, I mean, I haven't tested that yet, so I'm recording the show with the developer build of Mac os.

Hopefully we're recording the show.

That's correct. It seems like we're recording the show.

Yeah. That's cool.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's nice. So that's awesome. So you're in San Francisco and then we brought you out here to the suburbs to hang out.

It's gorgeous out here.

Going to do a little barbecue after this and have some refreshments. It'll be nice. It's perfect. Yeah. And today I thought we would talk about. Since you're out here for a technology conference, we talk about technology and your small business.

You know, when you mentioned that topic, I can't believe we've never done an episode where we've intentionally talked about this.

Yeah, you know, we've done like, okay, here's accounting ideas, here's web ideas. But I don't think we've done one that just encompasses, hey, what do you need to get started? You know, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah.

And. And it's. I mean, it's fast, you know, here we are. So, I mean, this is a business. We haven't brought in any revenue yet, but I actually talked to somebody last night.

That's good.

Who wants to sponsor the show.

Oh, nice.

That's perfect. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. So we will. But. But here we are sitting in your. A room at your house here, and we've got a couple of computers on the table, which is exactly one more than we need.

Yeah.

Two microphones, which could be argued is maybe 2 more than we need.

Yeah. By some people.

By some. Hopefully not the folks that are listening, but. And you know, that's it. We could run everything. And I don't just mean recording the show. We could do our accounting here.

Sure.

Could everything, you know.

Yeah, absolutely. And I. And I think that, you know, over time, one of the great things about technology and, you know, running a small business is everything. I mean, everything has gotten easier when it comes to how to set things up, what to do, what you need to do it with. I mean, I can remember struggling, you know, with massive problems of how to just handle payments on. On your website and how to get all that going, and now there's so many alternatives and, and it's. There's just a tremendous amount of freedom and, and many, many choices it.

There are. That's the thing. Yeah. You. You. And you have to make the right choices. Yeah, I think.

Yeah. And. And I guess, you know, like, the first thing is, okay, obviously you're going to need a computer. Right. Yeah.

I don't know what business you could run today.

Yeah.

Where a computer isn't going. I mean, you could run a business with pen and paper and a cash drawer.

Just not a big business. Or, Or.

Yeah.

I mean, there's no way to get any, you know, very much data other than your gut instinct. And, you know, for thousands of years, very, very successful people use that and their. Their paper to. To run business. But.

Well, in their. Their instinct and their memory.

Yeah, their memory.

Right. And. And where the computer helps is enhancing one's memory.

Sure.

Seriously?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

You can. And you can be exact about it sometimes, though, that leads you to the. Down the wrong path. I've had a lot of conversations with people this week about podcasting and what's happening in the space here, because there's been some consolidation.

Sure.

Stitcher was picked up by the same company Scripts that bought Midroll.

Yep. And those are both aggregators of podcasts and advertising.

Yeah. So Stitcher is the aggregator. Mid Roll is an ad sales rep firm like we are at Backbeat Media.

And. And just so I understand. Right. Because I'm certainly not an expert, these folks are Will take your podcast, put it on their network, serve their ads. Yes, correct. And manage that thing for you and take a cut of the ads. Yeah, I see.

And the problem that I see is that if they put it together one way, it could be that Google AdSense of podcasting.

Yeah.

And I watched it happen to the web, and I mean, the web. I think podcasting is a better advertising medium than Google.

Sure.

Then. Sorry. Than the web. The web was. Is a good one. Google really kind of devalued it.

The race to the bottom.

Race to the bottom. You got it. And. And so, you know, stats, I've had this conversation with several people this week because, you know, a bunch of podcasts come to this thing, and we wind up talking to each other, and I feel like there's the right amount of stats. The problem is we need to bring over all the dollars that exist in radio. Radio has, I think, two orders of magnitude more ad dollars than the podcast industry. And they want to spend money on podcasts because they know the engagement's better, the targeting is better. Right. I mean.

Yeah.

But what they also know is that no one counts their numbers the same.

Ah, yeah.

So they don't want to.

Sure.

You know, they. But the thing is, in radio, it's all done with panels and surveys, and it's all bs, but it's the same BS They've all agreed to. All agree to the methodology.

Yeah.

Flawed as it may be. And it is flawed. It's the same. So they know. Okay, well, if this station says they have 20,000 people that listen to this show and that station says they have 50,000, I don't really know if it's 20 or 50, but I know I can compare them equally.

Sure.

And with podcasts, that doesn't exist. It's been attempted. And my concern is that this stitcher thing could. Could ruin that.

Well, and what's a great. You know, so we don't segue just totally into that. We should. We need to do a total episode on podcasting as a small business and. And what, you know, expectations and that kind of thing. So we should definitely put that on the. On the agenda.

Data. Data is. Is good.

It's critical.

I mean, you have to use it. You have to know how you're going to use it.

Correct, Correct. So, you know, you get a computer, you get. You know, you got to have output, you're going to get printers. All that stuff is real. You know, whatever you want, Mac or PC. I'm not sure it matters anymore.

Right.

Most of or certainly a lot of what you'll be doing is going to be online. It's not going to matter whatever you're, you're. I mean, clearly, if you know our businesses and our background, you know, we totally think you should buy a Mac. Yes. And there's many, many reasons to do that and we don't have enough time to talk about that today.

Well, but, but I would say my advice to people is always, especially in this, it kind of in this context where we're saying you need a computer to run your business, it's not critical which one you get.

Yeah.

So buy the computer that you are most comfortable using.

It makes sense. Yeah. You don't want to be learning something new when you're trying to launch your business or, you know, that kind of thing. So, you know, you get, you know, printers, the nightmare, you know, often most headache inducing part of your network, you know, and laser printers, inkjet printers, whatever you prefer. And I think increasingly important is your phone and what you're going to use for your business, whether it's an iPhone or an Android phone. You need to get something again you're comfortable with and you're familiar with using because there's so many apps that are going to be related to either services that you're using online and you need to have that stuff in your pocket. You definitely want to pick something that you're comfortable with.

Yeah. And, and I think in that sense it is worth thinking about the relationship between your phone and your computer.

Yeah.

And, and so if there is a phone that you want to get one brand or another, I, I would let that influence your computer decision.

Yeah. Because you're going to be doing so. I mean, I'll give you an example. I, I do a lot of stuff on ebay and as ebay has developed their, their iOS app for the iPhone.

That's awesome.

Yeah, we, we've just leaned more and more and interaction with the computer and with the Mac works fantastic. I have no experience on the Android side or the Windows side, but it may just be as good or better. So whatever you're comfortable with and looking at the apps that you may wind up using, I mean, we do everything and we'll talk about that in a few minutes, from customer service to managing your money and your banking, all that stuff is in your pocket and can allow you to be much leaner than traditional organization.

It's true.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Much, much, much better. And, and so talking about phones, let's say you have a physical presence and you know, you're you have office or offices or stores and multiple stores. What kind of phone system do you put in these things?

And do you even put a phone?

Do you need it? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'd say if you're working out of your house.

No, you don't. Yeah, I would agree.

And that was. I, I, you know, 10 years ago I would have given exactly the opposite advice.

Yeah. So I guess then the question is, once you start getting employees and adding extensions, if you will, because everybody need a phone, which way do you go? Do you get, you know, the traditional phone system or you're already a larger business and you need, you know, a phone system? You get a traditional phone system that's got lots of flexibility but is also can be very expensive, like a PBX system from Avaya, those kinds of things. Or, you know, in the beginning you may just be able to just plug in a standard two or three line phone and take calls that way. My advice would be to pick whatever offers the most value and I specifically don't say the least expensive because they do different things for different. Whatever your needs are. And you may be able to say, look, we're going to add five mobile phones to our Verizon account and we're going to give everybody in the office a phone and we're going to go sign up for one of the cloud phone providers like Ringcentral or Grasshopper, and we're going to push the phones that way. And that's very inexpensive, tremendously flexible.

We use phone.com.

Yeah.

For backbeat media. It's awesome.

Yeah, yeah.

You dial a number, it goes. It seems like a.

Select an extension.

Selects an extension. It rings either the right person or right people's phones simultaneously. So if you've got, you know, I need to talk to somebody right away, press this. Great. Now everybody's phone rings. The first person that answers grabs it, owns it.

Yeah, yeah. So I, you know, you really need to look at what serves your business the most. You know, I have both. I have a, you know, one of our businesses has a, you know, big massive PBX that, you know, is unbelievably expensive.

Would you buy that today, though?

No. Okay. But I've had it for, you know, I had it so long. But at the time it was like a $30,000 phone system.

Yeah.

But it did everything.

Sure.

It's massive. And you had to have this massive, you know, know service contract and all that kind of stuff. And I'm, I'm knocking on wood here to make, you know, it keeps going and that kind of stuff.

But.

But now, setting it up, I wouldn't do it that way. I. I would definitely go with either a voiceover IP system, like a Vonage, or, you know, there's a number of them out there that you buy. You can. You can either use regular phones or you can buy, you know, voiceover IP phones, or I would just go the mobile route because, you know, with a cloud provider.

Yeah.

So flexible.

It's so. Well, that's the thing is, you know, using something like we do with phone.com, we're able. We could all be in the same office.

Yeah.

But we don't have to be.

Yep.

You know, and one per. I mean, we could have two of us in the office and one somewhere else. And it's just, you know, and I.

Used to, you know, when Google Voice first came out, and that was Grand Central. That's right. I remember that.

And you can still find Grand Central buried in, like, the URL.

Oh, you can.

Yeah, it's in the metadata. Yeah.

And I can remember things thinking, oh, this is great. And. And I think I was, you know, it was probably maybe four or five years early.

Yeah.

Because I hated how it did it and, you know, made the person wait and then it would connect and try all these different things. I mean, but you could see the potential, which I think is here now and definitely worth looking into. You know, what's the easiest path to go? Gives you the best value for your dollar for. For what you need to do.

Yep.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just.

Just so folks know, we have. It doesn't actually. I don't think it matters, but we've got, you know, whatever, 1012 extensions on our phone.com account, but none of them are real lines as far as phone.com is concerned. They're just forwarding to other phones, mostly cell phones. Sure, whatever. But I think we pay. It's less than $500 a year.

Yeah, that's really good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can, you know, the cost of entry is very, very low.

Again, come back to how easy it is to.

And it's probably lower than that. It might be less than $200 a year. I don't remember.

Yeah, but yeah, says the guy that's in charge. See the bill.

Well, yeah, I know what the number is, but we add some things to it that most people might not need and things like that.

Yeah. It brings up a good point, though, is I often have this problem where you get, you know, you're involved in the beginning of kind of setting things up. And then it doesn't take long for you to become, as the founder, to become disconnected, no pun intended. We're talking about phones, but disconnected from the bills that come in the door. And that can be really problematic and something to, you know, you want to step into your accounting department or your. Even if it's just even. Well, if you're not doing it, I guess is what it comes down to. You have someone doing it for you. You want to take a look at those bills from time to time, whether it's FedEx, the phone, the garbage company, because you will often that the bill does not match what your memory thinks it should.

That's true.

Yeah. And I've had that over and over. And, you know, you want to look at those.

You know, a trick that I have for that is moving things, things that you can move away from this, from moving it from monthly billing to either quarterly or annual.

Oh, yeah, that's good.

Because monthly billing always happens at an inopportune time to think about it.

Sure.

Right. You've got it. Can I approve this? Yeah, again, sure. Right, right. Whereas quarterly billing, you can stop for a second and say, well, that's new. Or, you know, that's not something that, that. It's just part of the grind. And, you know, like this phone.com thing, it's a. I have it on annual, and the number is actually339 that we pay, or at least what we paid the last time. Yeah, but I, I think you could get away with what we do for less if you didn't need a couple of these things.

So. No, it's great. And, you know, of course we would recommend that you set up, you know, auto pay with a credit card. You know, we did a. Make sure. You want to go back and listen to the show we did all about affinity cards, SBG card or the, you know, whatever card it is, you're using a cashback card. You know, you want to take advantage of those. I mean, one of the biggest impacts on, you know, me and our family was when we were able to put our shipping bills on the credit card. And, you know, that's a huge part of your operating. 20 grand a month. Oh, right. And that. And so you build up those points very, very quickly. That is otherwise tough to do. Yeah. So whenever you can, you know, you want to ask, like, sometimes for a long time, FedEx wouldn't take credit cards. You know, they wanted a debit, you know, an ACH transfer from your bank. And we wouldn't do it. We said, now, we're just, you know, UPS has taken it here. And, yeah, maybe it's. You're telling me you can do it for a little less, but we want to use credit card. And then they came around, said, hey, we can take your card. And then they got our business. Sure. You know, so you want to ask those questions. You want to be looking at all the other things that can help you build your charmed life, Like. Like we talked about here. Yeah. You don't want to neglect those, you know, little things on the outskirts, whether it's, you know, we've talked about vehicles here. We've talked about how you do your accounting and expenses and, you know, getting a good accountant in. A big part of it is, you know, what credit card you're using and how you're paying these bills.

Yeah, it's true. You got to. You do need to. Or maybe you don't, because I don't do this. I don't know if you do. Do you ever stop and. And look at how much cash or how much money your business would save if you moved? Like, would FedEx give you a bigger discount if you stopped paying with a credit card because they're paying a fee?

Yeah. In my experience, the larger the company, the less impact it has. They're just going to eat it. The smaller the company, they will say, well, I don't want to take your card, or I want you to pay the points, which is very common when we're buying inventory. So if I'm working, negotiating a deal for a Large quantity of iPads or Macs or something like that, and I'll say, okay, those deals look good. The numbers look good to me, but I want to put it on our corporate Amex. And oftentimes you hear this, whoa, we're not going to make any money. So we'll go back and say, okay, first thing, we'll say, well, how about we split the points? You know, let's do that. And then you really look at it and say, okay, it's going to cost me, you know, 1.5%, but what am I going to gain personally?

Yes.

Not as taxable income.

That's right.

Right. That's going to come into your account. Your. Your personal account that you can use to enrich your life.

Yep.

So, yeah, it's true.

Yeah, yeah, I. I'm aware of it. But I don't obsess over it because I like the benefit, even though I know. I mean, I know I'm paying for it.

You are? Yeah.

I mean, well, the money's coming from me.

Yeah, it comes from the merchant, right?

Yeah.

I mean, that's really where it comes from. Whoever is, is taking that card, is paying those fees are going to.

So their prices are up.

Absolutely.

Just like your prices are and just like mine are.

Yeah. And, and you know, we'll. That leads us into credit card processing. So as a small business, you know, you want to get your customers, many of them are going to want to pay with credit card and you want to get set up. And I would really caution you against going with any traditional merchant processor from your bank. I would just really put the brakes on that and think about it first and get involved and talk to PayPal, talk to Square, Talk to the, you know, think about Stripe and all these different, newer. You know, it's kind of like the phone system. You know, a traditional merchant service is in my eyes, you can liken them to like a Comcast or, you know, the most hated customer service wise anyway company in the country, they're not going to provide you real time data. You know, it's just not their forte. But these other companies that are just leaner, meaner, you can plug yourself right in and get yourself going instantly and build up trust over time. I mean, you're not going to get a square account or a PayPal account and charge 30, $40,000 the next day.

Nope.

They're gonna, you can charge it, but they're gonna call you and say, hey, we're not gonna give you that money. You know, so they're gonna hang on to it for probably 30 days because they don't know who you are.

Yeah, right.

So you have to build up. So the sooner you get set up with these accounts, the better. So you can get a $500 charge, $1,000 charge, you know, repetitive stuff. And I would suggest that it is better to leave money in that account for as long as you possibly can in the beginning.

Yeah.

Because you want to show them that you don't really need it. You know, you want to show PayPal that you can leave five grand in the account for 30 days and you're not just draining it every 24 hours.

That's interesting. We've had a lot of money come into our PayPal account, so we don't follow your advice.

But you have history, right?

Of course, yes. Yeah. But we've had a PayPal account forever, so.

Have we. Yeah, multiple, you know.

Yeah, multiple.

Yeah, yeah.

So, yeah, we've never, I mean, when money comes in, the only time for backbeat Anyway, the only time that money comes into the PayPal account is if someone wants to pay us with PayPal.

Okay, got it.

Which happens.

Sure.

Yeah. And we take that money out immediately.

Yeah. Well, we typically do now, too.

Okay.

So. But the trick is when you're opening a new account.

Yeah.

You're trying to build trust and you're trying to get a. Get history.

Do you think, does PayPal pay attention to that stuff?

Absolutely.

Okay.

Absolutely. Having talked to them, sat on panels, they want to know who you are.

Okay.

And so the sooner you can do it, the better. And if you have a purse, everyone should have a personal PayPal account or, you know, or a square account that you can start doing little things with and building up this track record. It's just like your bank. I mean, if you go to the bank and you open an account one day, and the next day you get, you know, $100,000 in. Well, they're going to want to make a phone call and talk to you.

Yeah. They're going to talk to you and.

They'Re going to say, hey, what's going on? And, yeah. Whatever it is. Because their risk assessment things are going to go off the charts.

Yeah.

And that's one thing. All these credit, these merchant. And your traditional Merchant provider, Visa, MasterCard, Amex, they're going to, they're even worse.

Right.

Because they won't even tell you. They'll just send you a letter and you'll think you're getting this money and then you'll, you know, you'll get a letter a week later and they'll call our 800 number. So at least with, you know, and I can speak, you know, the most to PayPal because we use them so much. You can make a phone call and talk to them in a minute, in a heartbeat, and explain what's going on. And they'll work with you to. And you probably should call them before you make a big. Before there's a charge and let them know, say, hey, you know, I'm going to get this large charge. And most people have about a $10,000 transaction limit with those places anyway. And so you just want to build up that over time. You want to talk to them about rates. You know, the great thing about PAYP and like Square is most of the time they're going to give you a flat rate, so you're going to know exactly what it is.

Well, and there's a benefit here.

Yep.

And that's, that's. This is where PayPal can really help you or Any of these. Because that rate that they're going to give you is the aggregate of all of their customers there. They have a deal with MasterCard and Visa and Amex, as opposed to you getting your own deals with each of those companies. And so they can negotiate that rate down even though they're making money on top of it.

Sure.

You're Saving often with PayPal. Saving a ton.

Yeah. And at least you know what it is where in a traditional merchant processor, you're going to get a statement at the end of the month that's going to look something like your cell phone bill, and it's going to have all kinds of charges that you weren't aware of, and it's going to be okay. When you take a United Airlines card, you're going to pay X. Excuse me, X number of more basis points because someone is paying for that ticket and it's the business that's taking that credit card. And to the layman, the average person that doesn't deal with. They're upset.

This is a headache that most small businesses don't need to have. You may get to a point or may not with your business where you want more control over that, and maybe you can negotiate a better rate and. But PayPal's probably going to negotiate that rate with.

You can have that same discussion with them.

That's right.

As your volume increases and your needs change, they will work with you and, you know, make it better for you.

Yeah. My problem is we, because we're so much B2B, we get people's credit cards, and so we have to key them in ourselves. And that's what I can't do with PayPal.

You can do with the virtual terminal.

Can you now? I guess we had this conversation.

Yeah, yeah. Yes. Yes, that's right. Now you pay a higher rate because it's more risk. Right. There's no swipe.

But I think actually Lisa looked into it, because we did. Since we had this conversation, we've changed processors and we looked at PayPal and we actually were able to get a better rate.

That's cool.

Yeah, yeah.

And you got to look at that. And of course, on your volume and everything. And maybe your bank is aggressive. And then. And I could be totally wrong because I've been out of the loop on a traditional merchant thing forever. But, you know, you definitely want to look into it. And again, it's coming back just like the phone thing. What works the best for your business? I mean, if you're. If your people are out and it's you know, the best thing is to have them have the little square nodule hanging off their phone after they do some work at a customer's house. Use that and work with them and build up your rapport and your history and your trust with that company. Yeah, you can certainly spread it out. And I know if you, if you look online, you can read, you can find all kinds of horror stories about PayPal in particular, you know, holding on to people's money for extended periods of time. In my days, yes. In my experience, it is often because of what we're just talking about. Some charge that goes way off the charts, some charge that doesn't quite fall into what they, they approve of on their merchant thing, that kind of thing. So you want to learn about it, what you can charge, what you can't do, that kind of stuff, and find the partner that works really well for you.

Yeah, you know, it makes sense.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. And, you know, a couple of, couple of software packages that I really feel compelled to mention. You know, one is FileMaker Pro. Anything you're doing. We talked about data earlier and if you're doing, I mean, anything, if you're selling products, if you're measuring anything, if you have to enter any kind of data and you don't not you don't really know how quite to collect it and then present it back in an organized manner. Yeah, you can do it on a spreadsheet, but if you really.

Most people are going to start with a spreadsheet.

Most people can start.

So this is. Yeah. The indicator.

Yes.

Is it. How much of this are you storing on a spreadsheet? And more importantly, how old is that spreadsheet?

Yeah.

Did you start it just today to mock something up or have you been using it for three years to track something? Yeah, major aspect. Then I, I think that's. Yeah, that's the indicator.

Even just projects, I mean, we do, we use FileMaker in so many different ways. We have. It's very easy to build a FileMaker database, to do whatever you want with it, or to hire someone very inexpensively to help you build it. And it's unbelievably modifiable. I love it.

The entire core of Backbeat media, our CRM and our invoicing, starts and ends with filemaker.

Yeah, I love it. We have a receiving database. Everything that comes in the door, every single thing that comes in gets put in the receiving database. It's FileMaker. And it's not like, hey, I want to easy to do and, and modify And I'm not a programming guy. I mean, I, I, I hack my way through it, but, you know, now.

It'S frustrating for programmers. File Maker is.

I'm sure it is.

Yeah. Because it has, because it's so graphical and easy to do. There are literal, what I call brick walls, I'm sure. And it's like you get to a point and now, you know, well, there's a database here and I want to query it this way. It's like.

And it doesn't work that way. That's right.

That's not how.

It's not built for that guy.

No.

Yeah, it's not. Yeah.

But for the, that, that's, I mean, to me, that's a plus.

It is most days. Yeah. For a small, you know, business owner. And that, you know, capturing data might be the most important thing that we are talking about here today. Because you will get, you're going to get so busy. Your business is going to start growing very fast, especially in the beginning, that there's going to be times where you need to go back and look, look for something. And the worst place they have to look for it is in some stack of paper or even using the search feature on your computer. But if you have some centralized repositories for that data, whether it's a database like FileMaker, an accounting software like QuickBooks. FreshBooks.

FreshBooks also would solve your credit card problem.

Yeah, they do it too.

Right. They handle 100% of it. So you don't even have to think about it. You just go Sign up for FreshBooks and you automatically are.

Now it seems like most of those accounting places are doing, doing that, you know, QuickBooks Online, that you said Account Edge does the merchant processing. And a lot of them actually do payroll now too.

Yeah.

So they're expanding in. So there's so many full service, you know, things that are, you know, applications that are going to work with you. But look at filemaker. You know, one of the things, you know, we fell in love with years and years ago was an app. If you ship products and you sell in multiple channels, you owe it to yourself to look at shipworks. There's another app out there, you know, shipstation. But Ship Works is, is just killing it. They just sold to stamps.com. hopefully it'll just keep getting better right now. But, you know, Shipworks pulls data from virtually any channel, any marketplace, from your own website, from ebay, from Amazon, from, you know, you name it. They've got a plugin that can pull an order to where you have one central repository of where you're shipping your product from, where you're creating your shipping labels from. Whether you ship with USPS, FedEx, UPS, DHL, or all of the above, you can print out that label from one application. It's powerful and it will save you time and time again. And it's got a very powerful database that it keeps all that data forever.

So I would. I would say use filemaker last. Look at all these services that exist.

Yeah.

And let them do for you.

That's right.

What they do.

Yeah. Filemaker should be something that you uniquely.

Yes.

Make that no one else addresses. Totally. That's totally unique for your business.

Yeah. If we started Backbeat Media today, we would use salesforce.com not filemaker. And it could be argued that we should abandon Filemaker and migrate to Salesforce. And we actually may do that.

Right.

But when we started, it didn't exist. So we had to. But it was our last resort.

Yeah.

You know, because we wanted Macs we couldn't use.

Yeah. I was the same way.

Well, because, you know, ACT existed on the Windows side and it would have been great for this, but.

Nope, we're the same way. I mean, we use shipworks, I hate to say it. It is a Windows program.

Okay.

But we run it on a Mac, of course. And it's. We have one machine and it sits in the warehouse. It's connected to all these labels and you go up and there's, you know, 70 or 80 orders in. You select them all and it does its magic.

And because you could build that with filemaker, you could.

Yeah.

But you don't need to. And that's the thing is don't ship.

Or is 15 bucks a month per channel you sell in? It's very.

My issue being, you know, coming from a programming background is I see these solutions and I say, okay, well that's great what they built, but I don't want to pay them 15 bucks a month.

Yeah.

I want to spend 50 hours building something that's going to save me 15 bucks a month. And it's stupid. I have to stop myself.

I make that same mistake. I absolutely. I look at, you know, one of the things, you know, and I don't want to run too long here, but we didn't. We haven't talked about small business websites, you know, what software and apps to use. But that often can happen. As you look at these, you know, off the shelf. None of these off the shelf products are going to do exactly what you want to do. No, just not Going to do it?

No, and that's the, that's the issue.

You're going to need to say, okay, you know, eight out of the ten things I want, you know, and, and we'll go into the whole website thing on another show. We've talked about it in the past, but we'll hit it on again. But the, one of the last piece of software I want to mention is an app called Help Scout. And you know, there's other ones out there. Zendesk is kind of similar community, tech support, customer service. And we run all multiple companies, we run all of our customer service through Help Scout apps on our phones as well as web based service. Very inexpensive.

So this isn't outsourcing to someone else. This is just a system to manage your own internal.

Correct. So you basically route your customer service emails through Help Scout.

Okay.

Wherever they come from. Sure. And in our case, you know, just, we'll do a tech restore here. You know, we get emails from Amazon, ebay, our own website, all kinds of other email campaigns we're running through mailchimp. Everything comes into one central repository. And the beauty of it is kind of like you talked about before, when there's an emergency and a message comes in, everyone can attack it, but once one person grabs it, they own it and everyone else knows about it. Yeah. So there's no duplication here. You know, if, if there's somebody that's, that's, you know, on call for weekend customer service, they're going to get pinged on their phone and they're going to look at that and go, okay, I can deal with this. Let me tell the customer what to do. Let me send them a label. Let me, you know, instantly make a decision and resolve it.

And if that same, and I imagine the whole exchange remains in the system, of course. And when, when the problem happens again.

Yeah, you see, you're building, you, you build this knowledge base over time.

So this is what we should have started 11 years ago with Matt Geek Gab.

There you go.

Yeah, because, yeah, you know, we, and we do this because we share an email box so we know who's answered the question. I mean it's only two of us.

Yes, well, we've done that too. We used to route them through Gmail and that's like a hack you can do. And you know, you can, you can route whatever email you want through there. 11 years, but yeah, yeah, you know.

But in the two years, 609 episodes.

Yes, two with just two is not bad. But when you have an apartment it's a nightmare.

The problem is if I. I have to remember that we've solved this problem before and then go and search my own email. Yeah. To find it. And, I mean, it's functional, but it's not. You know, I could. I title every one of the questions we answer. Imagine if those titles were actually attached.

Yeah. Be fantastic.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, the beauty with Help Scout as well, is when that customer, you know, you're solving the problem inevitably when they respond. Well, you. You're assigned to that, so you're going to get that response, not anybody else as well. I can look in and assign tickets, if you will, to various people in.

Your organization that you know would be best.

Here's the guy that needs to deal with this. Yeah. Nobody else needs to do that. So. So look at Help Scout. Look at Shipworks. You know, go look at filemaker. And, you know, it's very inexpensive, and there's things that you can do with it that you just may not be able to do with other stuff. But, yeah, there's a lot of good stuff out there. You know, we didn't hit everything. I don't want to drag on too long. We'll talk about it again. We'll do a part.

Well, send us. Send us your. Send us your stuff.

Yeah. What do you use?

What do you use?

What do you love that's better than whatever we mentioned. Yeah. What did you get burned on?

Yeah.

How did they get a hold of us, Dave?

Feedback at BusinessShow Co is one way.

Awesome. You can also send us a text at 401-472-4249. We would love to hear from you. You can also also post to our Facebook page@facebook.com business show.

Facebook.com yeah.

Awesome.

Yeah, I don't have anything else. That's it.

We're gonna go like the barbecue.

Oh, man, this is great. I love doing this in person. It's really a blast.

That's it. Have a great week, everybody.

Thanks, folks. Protect those charmed lives.