Small Business Tools for Success – Small Business Show 196

The Small business show episode 196 for Wednesday, November 7, 2018. Greetings folks and welcome back to the Small Business Show. The show BFA by, for and about small business. Sponsors for this episode include Care of where@takecareof.com Coupon code SPS saves you 25% off your first month of this personalized vitamin service that has a really cool business model that we're going to talk about a little bit later in the episode. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton and out on the.

West Coast, I'm Shannon. Gene. How are you, man?

I'm good. I'm good. Crazy. Actually, I'm on the west coast when this episode releases too. Yeah, I've got to be in LA for several things, so. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Very cool. I was just looking at the calendar. We're coming up. We're going to be in our 200th episode this month.

I know it's crazy to figure out.

Something to do something.

Yeah, yeah. We'll dance. We'll dance a jig for everyone maybe.

Yeah, it'll be nice. Very good. But hey, today I thought, you know, last week, as we've mentioned here before, we always do a pre. Talk. I mean, we talk for half an hour before we start recording and maybe sometimes a half hour after. But we always talk about the tools and new things that we use. And we did an episode, episode earlier this year about the tools that you and I both can't live without. And we, as we were talking about them last week, I thought, well, hey, let's do, let's do part two and come up with the lists of things that we really use each day for our businesses, our small businesses. And so let's, I thought we'd talk about that today.

Let's do it. I, I do. We should. Well, we'll link to that show because it was show 172.

There we go.

Yep, yep. And it's, it's worth. Even if you don't listen to that episode, although I would encourage you to do so indeed. Go back and at least look at the show notes where you can see a list of all of the tools that we're not going to talk about today. So that's, yeah.

These are by no means the most important ones.

No, in fact, I would say these are. Yeah, they're important, but they're not the ones that come top of mind. So.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, they were, they were a little, little in a. In some of mine are kind of in a little different Realm than one of the, you know, than some of the other stuff that I use every day. So yeah, listen. Listen to both of them. It's only half hour. What else you have to do?

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, do something else. So let's start. Let's talk about an app that I just started using recently. But I think you, you're much deeper into it than I am. Dave, is Trello T R E L L O?

Yes.

And you know Trello is based on the. If you've ever heard of the Kanban system that was invented by a smart Japanese guy, I believe that was card based and really helps you manage. It can be used for lots of different things. But I never thought about using almost like a to do and a. And a project management versus we used to use it for inventory.

Okay.

The Kanbans, the cards would be in the back of the inventory slots and as you got to a certain point you yank the card and dump it on somebody's desk to reorder. You know, this was before we were using software. But Trello allows you to manage unlimited projects, share, collaborate, but in a much different way than like let's say Slack would, you know, manages communication.

Yeah, that's right. I would say Slack manages communication. Trello. So we use Trello at Mac observer for managing the flow of an article from idea to published. Right. So we have the ideas and in Trello everything is visually represented by cards. Right. So you know, we'll add a card for an article and you can then from there and it might just be the title of an article. Like it doesn't have to be fully fleshed out. In fact that's sort of the point is we just capture it. Okay, great. Now we look. What, what do we have in the queue here? Great. Yep. We should assign this one to Andrew and this one to Brian and this one to Kelly. Okay, cool. And, and then like if I have an idea but I'm not going to write it up, I might have an idea for a tip because I have, I do that a lot that, you know, these things come to mind. It's like, oh, that'd be great. Andrew would, would kill that if he wrote that. I'll put it in and I can assign it to Andrew and then I can start adding some notes in there and you can even have like a little conversation inside the card. So it's related only to that article and I might add some screenshots or whatever, you know, so that he's got these assets and other related things that sort of go along then it'll be moved from the idea column to the in progress column and then it gets moved to the published column. And then after an editor looks at it or ready to publish or whatever. And then, and then it moves. We've got four different columns that we, that we run it through, but we also use it at. You know, I mentioned we started a different business that I don't talk about here yet on this show, but we do a lot of development for this engine that we created with this other business. And we use Trello to track our feature requests, our bugs internally and all of that, again, for all the same reasons, because I can, you know, say, oh, this thing's broken or whatever. Here's a screenshot of the way it looks, looks, and it, you know, encapsulates the whole thing and it can move through and if I gotta have, you know, somebody else do a bid on it or whatever, it really makes projects and the pieces of projects very collaborative while still keeping the things sane, which I really like.

And what I like about it is I don't spend a lot of time managing the actual. Like, I'm not a fan of to do lists because I find myself managing the list too much where this I can pop up. You know, there's an app on your phone, of course, and website and so you can just throw stuff up there real quick and dive, dip in and out of different topics during the day as they, as they come to you, which I, I really like. Yeah, that visual. So. So T r l l o.com to learn more about that.

I love it. Yep, yep, yep. It's great. All right.

What about you, man? You got the next one?

Yeah. So, you know, video conferencing is a thing and there are so many different tools to use for video conferencing, but I find just the act of video conferencing super valuable because it, you know, it FaceTime, if you got to talk to somebody, FaceTime is better than anything else. I really believe that. But in the absence of being able to be in the same spot, you know, being able to just see each other's faces. So now any meetings that I do, I try to do as video conferences. I don't always succeed. You know, sometimes it falls back to the phone, but otherwise I do. And you know, nine times out of 10, I find that Google Hangouts are fantastic for all of that. They really, really work. Well, that's great. Yeah. But I. But I've also used Zoom and I've used Citrix. Go to meeting and all of that stuff. So. But I. But Google Hangouts tends to work really well. It's free. Everybody usually is able to just make it work and it supports, I don't know how many, what the maximum number of users is, but you can do screen sharing and all of the powerful stuff that you get with all of the tools that you'd have to pay for are just right there in Google Hangouts. So.

And that video, that visual of being able to see the other person that took completely changes the dynamic of the.

It does. It keeps everybody engaged. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's very cool. That's excellent.

Yeah. Do you, do you use Hangouts or anything?

I have not, no. I mean I've done the FaceTime. You know, I've faced certain FaceTime. I use Skype all the time. But I'm definitely. Check it out. I think that's a great, you know, great resource. Like you said, doesn't cost anything and it's easy. The ease of use is really important. So you can have anybody jump on.

Yes, yes, that's important.

Awesome. All right, so me the next one is. As people know who've listened to the show, I'm a huge proponent of ebay. I love it. Great group of people over there trying to really be unique now and be who they. I think ebay has always been, which is different kind of platform than a standard E commerce. And I've done massive amounts of volume on ebay over the years with my businesses and use some pretty sophisticated software, Channel Advisor, some stuff that's, you know, the, the ramp up is incredibly difficult, but once you get there, it's incredibly powerful. But now that I'm, you know, kind of on my own again and starting some new businesses and managing things, I love being on ebay. I always sell on ebay. I recommend that everybody have something for sale on ebay because the it. It helps your business. Even if you're selling services, you can sell them on ebay and put them up there.

Yeah.

But it's great for search engine optimization. It's great for your name. Great. Just way to do it. Even if you don't sell anything, you're going to come up in search results when people find it. Because ebay is doing such an incredible job now of, you know, their SEO work. And so now that I'm doing not, not big, big volumes but I'm up there, I use an app called Garage Sale. I came to kind of came full circle to it and it's, it's by a company called I was coding.

Oh, I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Great guys in Germany.

Yep.

And it's just a great app that is so easy, quick and easy to list products or whatever else you want on ebay and manage them. And it's not something that you're going to do huge volumes, thousands and thousands of items. You'll need something more sophisticated and much more expensive than this. But for an app that you want to list 0 to 100 items at a time and manage the flow and all the media that you need to go with it, it's fantastic. The templates are great, and I use it every single day. I love it. Wow.

I love hearing, you know, you come across a lot of these apps where it's like, you know, somebody builds something, clearly it starts as something to scratch their own itch. Right. Like, I do this and I need a thing, and then they build it. And because they have talent and skills in that department, they then polish it up and build, you know, make it ready for the world's use. Right? Yeah, but I never. I mean, so often you hear about those things or you come across them, but you don't. You. You hear about the developer using them. That's it. But, you know, hearing your testimonial to this thing, it's like, oh, this is like a really valuable app for you. That's awesome.

My kids, you know, two of my kids, how to use it. They want to list. My son wants to sell tennis shoes. Great. Here you go. Put this on your Mac. You manage it, do it all, you know, works really good.

I like it. That's pretty good, man. That's pretty good, huh? Good deal you have. I'm gonna, I'm gonna let you go twice here because you have another one from the same software vendor.

Yeah, yeah. So if you. And again, I. I talked about this ad nauseam. PayPal, you know, I'm a, I'm a big fan, you know, especially. They really helped me early in my career and have always been along, worked along with me. And I, you know, I get to speak at some of their events. And, you know, we had Bill ready on the.

Yeah.

You know, chief operating officer, and it a great organization and they continue to be disruptive even as a giant company, which I love, like with Venmo, which I know Venmo is going to make it on my list eventually, but because I do so much with PayPal and just about every business I'm involved in, so I have like six different PayPal accounts that I manage, and the guys that I was Coding. They make an app called GaragePay, and it does one thing only, and it's manage data in and out of PayPal and on your local machine so you don't have to go to the PayPal website. It sucks data down. You link it through an API and you just put in some credentials for each account, and you can have as many accounts listed as you want. And it's just a dashboard for all your PayPal accounts. And you can just click, click, click, and it's instant. There's no reloading of webpages.

Oh, dude, I need this.

It's phenomenal. It's phenomenal. And it's an inexpensive little app, but I find myself using it, you know, again every day. And another huge benefit to it is reporting. If you've ever had to suck down reports from. From.

Yes, suck is the right word from PayPal. Yeah, yeah.

It's not that great. It's not that intuitive. But. But with you've got all this data already on your local machine because it's constantly sucking it down or pulling it down. Garage Pay does. So when I want to search for things, or if I need to search for particular transactions or if I want to. You know, I was just running some reports the other day. Hey, show me everything that debited this particular account in the last 45 days.

Boom.

And then you could just. It'll just export into and, you know, dot CSV file for. To open an Excel, little tiny app. You know, I don't even know what it costs now.

Maybe it's 10 bucks.

10 bucks?

10 bucks. It's not even. It's 9.99 US. Yep.

It's ridiculous. You know, they probably wouldn't listen, but I pay 10 bucks a month for it, you know, you know, subscript description to it because I just lean on it so much.

I'll let Ilya know. He might. He might change your billing structure, man.

Yeah, hey, that's okay. As long as maybe I could help him and I'd be involved on the back end.

There you go. But those.

You know, it's just one of those useful little tidbits that just sits over there on the side of my machine.

Oh, I'm gonna over it. So, yeah, this show just cost me 10 bucks because I'm definitely gonna go buy this. I like. I can't believe I didn't know about this.

Yeah, yeah.

Managing stuff on PayPal, on the website is. It's. It like. Like you said, it's fine if you want to see what your balance is. And what happened. But when you're trying to pull reports, it's not great. No, no.

Well. And then you could just glance to the right side of your whatever screen and go, oh, my balance is right here. Yeah, always. It's constantly up to you. Set the preferences like, oh, update every 10 minutes, update every 15 minutes. And. And it probably is my number one on this list today of, you know, of tools that I. That I rely on, and I forget about it. It's one of those kind of tools where, oh, this is just the way it works.

Yeah.

You know, and when other. When I see other people, like, logging in to access multiple PayPal accounts, that's the killer for me because. Okay, now I log into one with Chrome, one with Safari, run with Firefox. It's ridiculous. So these guys have, again, probably built this tool for themselves and then put it out there and it's. It's fantastic.

It's awesome. That's awesome. All right. I have. Well, I have several actually left on my list, but I want to take a minute and talk about our first sponsor, which is Care of. Care of is a. It's a monthly subscription vitamin service that delivers personalized vitamins and supplements to you. Here's the cool thing. You and I both went through this, Shannon. We did the onboarding process. This isn't just logging in and saying, yes, send me, you know, a generic mix of vitamins that, you know, one size fits. Fits. All right. Not even close. You go through and it. This onboarding process, it's so smart and it's so. I. It's weird to talk about a website as friendly, but this felt really friendly to me. It was asking me questions about, like, lifestyle choices, but in. Not in judgmental or even uncomfortable ways. Just, you know, what. What do you eat? What do you drink? Do you have milk? Do you have this? Do you not have this? You know, really simple questions and not too many of them. And. And then it says, okay, and oh. And then it asks, what are your goals? Right? Like, what do you want? Do you need energy? Do you want, you know, more brain power? Do you want, you know, whatever? And you go through all this stuff and then it says, okay, here's what we recommend in your, you know, in your first pack. And, you know, then it. It puts it all together. And the cool part that I found about it was that, like, and it's. It's. For me, I mean, it picks some, you know, what I would call stuff I've heard of, and then some stuff I've never Heard of. And it shows you all of these things and give you. Gives you sort of a brief little synopsis about each. But if you're like a data geek and you want to drill in, you can get so much information about why it was picked, what it is, who uses it, all of that stuff. But this data isn't barfed at you. It's right there at your fingertips. But again, very friendly. Is sort of the way I think about it that you went through it too, right, Shannon? I did.

I'm kind of a skeptic about a lot of this stuff, but the way they ask you that, they address that. Oh, are you skeptical of this? Are you open to this? So I was kind of in the middle about certain things. And some of it, they're like, well, fish oil. Hey, omega 3s have been studied and known to help you. Hear, hear, hear. Okay, great. And then some of the other ones, they're like, well, these are emerging. And there's some emerging studies that talk about this and, you know, for your heart or for your brain. And so they do, I think, a great job of walking you through it. And then the app on your phone is totally cool, too, because they reward you. So if you're consistent, because I think consistency with some of these things are really important.

They.

They give you these carrots, if you will. Hey, you. You know, you took these every day for two weeks. Here, here's a $5 coupon for whatever, or here's this or that. And it's, you know, it's. It's a way that they do. It is different. And I. And I really like it. I think it's pretty cool. It's a unique business model, which I'm always fascinated with, taking something that's been around for a long, long time, but presenting it in a much more informed way, in a much more intuitive way to manage. So it's not just like, open this bottle up and do this. You know, you get, here's your packet.

Take this, and that's it.

Pretty cool.

Yeah, it's pretty cool. All right, so for 25% off your first month of personalized care of vitamins, Visit Take care of.com Again, take care of T A K E C A r e o f.com and enter our promo code, which you should know is SBS for small business show. So that's take care of.com and enter our promo code, SBS so that you can get 25% off your first month and enjoy going through this online quiz and all that stuff. Our thanks to care ofakecareof.com for sponsoring this episode. All right, so speaking. Speaking of taking care of things, you kind of. If you have. Even if you have an office in your home, but especially if you have a storefront, especially if you have people that are managing things, it's good to keep an eye on stuff. And, you know, we've had surveillance cameras and things like that available for a long time, but now the tech, the wireless tech, and the battery technology has gotten to the point where you can place a camera somewhere without having to plug it in at all and not worry about the battery for months at a time. And to me, that's when, you know, it made it really simple to. I mean, you can monitor the outside of your home. You can monitor the inside of your business if you have an inventory room. Right. You know, you can. You can. And the cool thing is, with. Now, with this tech, you can place things anywhere. And I've been using the Arlo cameras from Netgear, and. And they do all of this. That's exactly what I've just described is. Is, you know, you can see everything. Like, I don't know how they get the batteries in these little cameras to last as long as they do when they are streaming video and they. The Arlo service keeps your video. I forget if it's like. I think it's like a week or something, and you can pay to sign up for more, but, you know, with the camera, you get like a week of retention, which is generally enough. And of course, it can, you know, notify you and all. You know, there's movement in. In this area. You know, do you want to see it? And you can just view it from your phone anywhere, Like. And I. And it's interesting now that I have these Arlo cameras, I go into different businesses and I see them everywhere because. And they've got this cool mount, man. It's a magnetic dome, okay? So you screw the dome or whatever, you mount the dome somewhere, right? You can mount it outside or inside, it doesn't matter. And then the camera has, like, a convex dome that you stick onto this magnetic dome, and it means you can angle the camera infinitely. Like, there's not notches or anything, right? You're just putting it and aim it and done. And it's a really strong magnet. So you're not, you know, it doesn't move. Like, even the ones outside, they don't move. And it's great. Like, I. I love it.

Cool.

Yeah. You know, it notifies you when you. When you need to do to, to go like charge the battery or whatever. You can plug it in if you want. But yeah, obviously, you know, but, but the battery in there lasts forever. It's not for killer, you know, three or four months. Yeah, yeah, that's pretty good alert.

I imagine it alerts you when the battery.

Of course it does. Yes. Yeah, of course.

That's cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's.

And you know, multiple people in your business or your family can, can see all these things. So. Yeah, yeah, nice. I, I'm finding them helpful around the house and I can, you know, you know, if, if you have a business where there's, there's a, A, a physical location that you need to be concerned about and you're not there all the time, this is the way to do it, I think. I mean it just makes life super easy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If, if you are a. In. In our, in episode 172 when we talked about tools, we talked about Synology and disk stations and things, which is a network attached storage unit that also does lots of other things. One of the things we did not talk about that it does is it runs. There's an app you can run on it called Surveillance Station. And you can do all of this with your own cloud. Right. So with the Arlo cameras, it's, you know, Netgears cloud and you get seven days of retention if you connect cameras to your Synology Surveillance Station. Well, it's storing all the data there. You can retain it as long as you care and it supports multiple cameras and all that stuff. And you can get cool cameras. Like I've got some of these, you know, I test a lot of stuff, folks. I got some of these foscam cameras that with. From my phone I can like, they've got motors in them and so you can, you know, tell them, oh, turn right what's over there, Go up what's over there? And you can even put them on what they call patrol mode where it, you know, sweep back and forth between, you know, different points or whatever. So if that's great. Yeah. If you're into, if you're into sort of the self management part of it, Surveillance Station is the way to go.

So very cool. Yeah, awesome. All right, so my next one's a little different. I'm going to talk about mini breaks, not mini donuts, but although I like mini donuts. Too many mini breaks. Just getting yourself up and moving around. And I mean your business different than mine. Of course, everybody's is. But I find myself behind the computer all all the time. And I'm either, you know, recording a podcast or I'm, you know, interacting or doing stuff with Excel. So just stopping what you're doing and getting up and walking around, especially if you have employees, I think it's critically important. You know, there's that old adage, managing by walking around.

Yeah.

Just a small tour through your office, even if you're the only one there. Or walk outside. I used to love, you know, if I need to talk to an employee, hey, come on, let's go for a walk and walk around the building, get you out. Gives you a little more privacy and stuff. But I would suggest that those mini breaks, just for a couple of minutes, help to kind of reset your, your, your head a bit. And you could do it in between tasks or if you find yourself getting frustrated with a task, getting up, walking around really, really can help you. And then I'll jump into the next one. That's kind of another weird one. It's, you know, big manila envelopes. I'm hugely a huge fan of the, you know, the biggest you can get. And for stuffing things. It's kind of like your, I'm sure, certainly have file cabinets. But what I don't like about file cabinets is you put stuff away and you never see it. But with big manila envelopes that you can simply take a Sharpie and label stuff. Like, a good example of what I do is tax related stuff. So throughout the year, there's seems to be all this documentation that kind of rolls in that may, you know, be related to the tax stuff you're going to have to file next year. Sure. And you know, it's very easy to toss it in a drawer or do whatever and then you're like, oh, where it is? But this is, I found the system to work really well over many years of practice on losing documents because I don't like paper at all. I always want to digitize everything and that's certainly another option. And I, I do a lot of that too. But stuff that just needs to get forwarded to your accountant. For example, like right now, over on my, I have two big desks that I sit, sit at. I have a 2018 tax full giant manila envelope and anything that comes in that looks closely, you know, or even the slightest related to, hey, I may need that piece of paper, that letter. I toss it in there and it has saved my butt, you know, over and over and over again. I'm like, oh, that came in in May of last year. What happened to that? And I've those big manila envelopes are, it's, it's definitely old school, but it really works for me. For me anyway.

Yeah. You know, so I have thoughts about your, your two quote unquote weird ones. And I'll go in reverse order with, with anything tactile, there is something to be said for it. I am, you know, the poster child of the, you know, the modern digital age, Right. I try to do everything with my technology. And a large part of why I do that is because it's captured, right. If I take notes on my phone, I know that even if I lose my phone, they're still captured. And I'm going to talk about that in a minute, right? Yeah. But there is something to be said about, you know, a piece of paper and a pen or a notebook and a pen and logging things down. Like, I find that the things that I write down that way make it into my mental flow far more than the things that I just capture in, you know, on my phone or whatever. Now there are, there are benefits to capturing things on my phone, but if I want, if I want it to be something that I think about, then I want to capture it with pen and paper so that it really starts to kind of sink into my head. And going to your mini breaks. Well, I find those mini breaks really valuable for exactly that time. The processing, you know, when I'm working, I think about it like you're in a pressure cooker, right? You know, you just keep squeezing and squeezing and squeezing while you're working. And it's great, right? You can get really focused and really get something done. And then when you let go of that and take that mini break, that's when your brain gets to do whatever it wants, right? Like you're in control while you're, you know, you're working and doing your stuff. And then, you know, the idle thoughts need to percolate a little bit now that you've pressured them up. And good stuff comes out for me that way, you know, driving or even just walking and, you know, I'll take a walk and go outside or whatever. It really makes like I don't smoke cigarettes. But I, I, I go outside as though, you know, it's not a smoke.

Break, it's a thought break.

It's a thought break. Yeah, exactly. And I'll just go out and, and sort of, you know, stare at the trees or whatever for, not for very long. You know, sometimes it's 30 seconds, sometimes it's three or four minutes. But that is when, you know, ideas start to percolate. It's like, oh, I could do this or that. And it's always related to whatever work I was doing, either most recently or, you know, maybe the day before or something like that. And it's. It's a result of that pressure cooker. You know, I'm just packing so much in, thinking about so much focusing and then letting go. So. Yeah, I'm with you on those schools breaks. Yeah.

Yeah. And the one last comment I'll make about the manila envelope thing is especially for things where you need to keep the original document. Yeah, that's really important because, like, my accountant doesn't want to see scans and that kind of stuff of certain documents. Like, no, no, I need the orig. Original.

Yeah.

And then at the end of the year, just keeping on that tax thing, then I take the entire. When I don't need it anymore, then I drop the whole middle envelope into the file folder or into the file cabinet, and then I can forget about it, you know, so, you know, there's. It's. It's just what works for, you know, what works for me on that.

Yeah. Cool. I like it.

So.

But I will say, you know, my next thing on my list was Evernote because for storing notes on your, you know, in general, just capturing information and keeping it. Evernote's awesome. And then, like, you and I, we have a shared Evernote library that we use for the podcast. So if we have notes or if, like, when your emails come in, we save those as PDFs in Evernote so we can both see them. They're captured, they're not lost. You know, it's. It really. It makes sense. So.

Oh, it's an incredible app.

It's great. And it's that freemium model. So you can, you can start for free, and if you need more features or. Or bandwidth, you can. You can just, you know, upgrade. I think it's like 60 bucks a year, 50 bucks a year or whatever.

And we all want Evernote to be successful because if you use it, you know, I worry, like. I'll give an example if you're done talking about it. Oh, yeah, it wasn't on my list. I think I might have mentioned. Anyway, but I thought.

Yeah, I thought we had mentioned it in the past, but I didn't see it. It in the, in the notes. So.

Yeah, well, we had a project. We had to process about 18,000 iPads, and every iPad that would come in, we're like, well, you know, iPads don't have a barcode scan on the back that you have to scan the serial number, but I had to. We had to record the serial number, and you had to keep that data, have it accessible and searchable. So rather than paying somebody, you know, the chunk it out on the keyboard, we just had a, you know, photo station and every iPad, the back that had the little serial number on there got photographed. Got photographed automatically, dumped into Evernote, automatically became searchable because you had that, you know, it converts everything as text on it to searchable stuff. And created this massive database that we could share with anybody in the office and. And the client, you know, because they wanted to ensure that we had done all this work. It's super versatile, and you can think about it. If you really broaden the concept of how it could work. It's a powerful, life changing thing. And again, we. I want them to be successful.

Yeah, yeah. I want them. I need them to be successful. Yeah. Yeah, me too.

Me too.

Yeah.

All right, so the next one for me is a couple of podcasts that I really love. And the first one is. It's called How I Built this and it's an NPR podcast. We'll link it in the show notes. And if you're listening to this podcast and you like to hear small business stories, well, How I Built this is kind of a different type of story. It's typically larger companies, but that were small businesses at one time. Everything you can imagine, from Howard Schultz and Starbucks to the guys that, you know, started Instagram to WeWork. I mean, some really great stories, but in a way that makes it very accessible where. And they talk a lot about, hey, look, you know, a common theme is often we look much smarter than we really were. We were in the right place at the right time. These things happened, you know, that kind of stuff. And it's a great. If I'm doing tasks where I can, you know, listen to something in the background, I always listen to this. It's really good. I really. I recommend it. The other one I listen to that kind of grounds me each day. It's also on Periscope, but you can pick it up. You know, podcast app, as well as Coffee with Scott Adams. We talk about Scott all the time on the show from a business standpoint and persuasion and how to kind of program yourself and what. What I love. And Scott keeps with that theme. Excuse me, but it's often he will talk about news, what's going on, but from a different perspective than we're used to, and politics as well. And there's so much drama and political theater out there, that it kind of drives me crazy sometimes. And I can get grounded with Scott because he's looking at it at a very different, In a different way and discussing it in a different way, how it impacts, not on a partisan level, really at all, but from a persuasion level and who's, what's work and what works for this. That he's big on branding. He's like, did that help, you know, this brand? Did that hurt this brand? You know, whether it's a certain demographic or a political party or a newscaster, that kind of stuff. And I really enjoy it, listening to it. I have to drive today. I'm going up to our place on the river, and I know I'm going to enjoy listening to it for a while. So those are both highly recommended.

Cool. Wow. I like that. I, I had, I'm embarrassed to admit I had no idea that Scott Adams was doing a podcast, and he's already up to episode 280 or something. So there you go.

There's some, there's some absolute gems, you know, up, up there. And, and he's, he's really honest and transparent, which I really like about him.

Yeah, yeah, he is that. He is crazy like that, but, like, in a good way. Yeah, yeah.

Way.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Fascinating, man.

Yep, yep. All right, man, you're up.

You know, I, I'm not sure that I, I, I am at the end of my list. The only thing. Well, no, you know what? Go ahead. Yeah, you do the next one. That's fine.

Well, okay. I, you know, I jump back to this physical, tangible thing, and on my list is a good pocket knife. And it sounds kind of weird, but I never carried a pocket knife for years. And then I don't know when it, when I started, but then I got a knife and I put a pocket. And I use pocket knife. If you're in the business of handling. I mean, I have, I use this knife and it's, I use a little paraframe from Gerber, and it clips in my pocket so it doesn't weight way down your pocket, which doesn't sound important.

Oh, nice. No, I can see that it's critically.

Important, especially if you're a guy like me who lives in California and I wear shorts, like, eight months out of the year. You know, it's kind of a sad time of the year because I start having to wear pants right now, and. But having that knife on me, man, makes me a superhero, and I can do anything with that. And I'm always like, oh, I got it got it. And what's funny in my personal life is when I'm out to eat, I carry it everywhere now. And I'm out somewhere and I'm at an event or a party and that kind of stuff. And when there's an opportunity, you pull your knife out, people are like, oh, that's totally cool, you know, And I'm thinking the lost art of carrying a pocket knife. You know, when my kids were in scouts, we had to, they had to get a thing called their, their whittling chip, which is kind of like a little certification that you were checked out to use a pocket knife and you know, and all that kind of stuff. And I can remember carrying that knife and teaching my son to carry the knife. And I've kind of come full circle and it is a tremendously valuable tool from opening a letter to cutting open a box, to fixing something. And anyway, I just thought it was kind of an interesting thing and it's a tool I use every day.

Oh, what a great thing. It's tiny too. The one that you've got a link for?

Yeah, yeah, it's like 10 bucks, 13 bucks. But it's big enough to be very useful in cutting things and doing things. And one of my goals over the last few years since I've been in such a digital realm for most of my life, was to go analog and getting involved and doing lots of hands on work out in nature and houses and this kind of thing. And man, it is, it's a, it's a rock star.

That's awesome. Okay, that's it. See, every year I look for like a, a good handy gift to give, you know, to, to people at, at the holidays. Right?

Yeah.

Yep. Yep.

I think I sent you an ax.

You did send me an ax. Yeah. That I can't keep in my pocket, but yes.

No, no you can't. It's a massive, big German hatchet that works phenomenal. I'm in my analog phase and I bought that from Kyle Bacchus@kctool.com who's been on the show a couple times and you know, he's got all these awesome tools and if you're a tool, I've become a tool geek and that's the place to go. Man, it's so funny. But anyway, those are all great stuff. I mean, I'm going to keep the last couple ones I have on my list for the next time we do a show because I think we've talked enough and everything. But you know, we'd love to hear about what you use each day. Tell us something that'll change our life. Feedbackus show co or come share it with the three or four hundred other business owners that hang out at the small business support group at BusinessShow Co Facebook.

Yeah, Very cool.

Great place.

This is fun.

Listening.

I like this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's good. More. More keys to the charmed life. So.

Yeah, you got it.

I gotta go buy a pocket knife and, and, and that garage.

Some hill envelopes.

Yeah, there you go. Take it easy. See you next time.