Stopping a Coup

Business Brain, episode 566 for Casual Friday, July 12, National Simplicity Day 2024. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, the show where we take a few ideas, we crunch them, we dissect them, we analyze them, we use them to tune our business brains. Each and every episod episode that we get together, which is usually twice a week. Our sponsor for this week is shopify.com businessbrain. That's where you can go to sign up for a $1 per month trial period. It's amazing. We'll talk more about this in a little bit. I've used it. I'm currently using it with one business. I'm about to add it to another. I know Shannon and I have both used it in the past. It's amazing. We'll talk more about it in a little bit. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, on this National Simplicity Day, I'm Dave Hamilton.

Simple. I love it here out in Northern California, in Lafayette, California, I'm Shannon Jean. Happy Friday, Dave.

Happy Friday. I hope I will have we record this on Tuesdays. On Thursday, assuming the weather is permitting, which at this point I think it will have been, I think that's the right way to talk about the future. I will have flown from New Hampshire to about an hour north of Chicago, where I am presenting@max.conference. we're taking pilot Pete's little Grumman Tiger out.

Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah, it's nice.

This conference is in a weird. No, no, I'm super excited. I love small planes.

Yeah.

This conference is, like I said, it's an hour north of Chicago and it's a pain in the neck to get there. I've got, you know, you fly into Chicago, then you either have to get an Uber or rent a car for four days that you don't need for the four days. You just need it to get out and back or beg, borrow, you know, steal a ride from someone, whatever that works out to be. And they move the location slightly. For this one, it's still in the same general area. And when they did, I realized that a mile and a half away was a general aviation, you know, municipal airport. And Pete was like, you know, we could. And we did the math on both the cost of the fuel, which is essentially all we have to pay for to get out there and back. There might be a landing fee, but a lot of municipal airports there isn't. But if it is, It'd be like 30 bucks or something.

Yeah.

And we're going to buy fuel from them anyway. So they'll probably waive it. But the cost of fuel and whatever was basically the same as parking at Boston, Logan to round trip, you know, tickets and coach class and then whatever we would have to pay on the other end to get out and back to, you know, to this place from Chicago. So it was like, oh, this will be more fun. As it's come closer, the weather, it's still a little like, iffy, so we might wind up buying plane tickets tomorrow morning. But the good news is nobody needs to be a hero. We're only doing this for fun. So if the weather dictates that it would not be fun, we will not do it. We'll just grab a, you know, we'll, we'll let somebody else fly and we can have a cocktail in the plane. Like, it's fine.

I love it. Yeah. Speaking of, speaking of smart.

Yes.

Before we get into our main topic, I wanted to share a tactic that I've been using with, with Chat GPT that I've, you know, sound or that has worked great for some of my clients that I'm, I'm working with. And, and what I've, it's related to your ideal customer profile.

Oh yeah.

What, Chet, what ChatGPT is good at is taking data that you give it, analyzing it and creating, you know, something else from that to help expand what you're doing. So what I asked this, this client made a comment to me, wow, you know, we have 10 customers that are basically like our platinum. They, we love these customers and they generate 80% of our net revenue. These 10 customers, how, and we, what we don't know how to do is get more of those types of customers. So I had them give me their information about the 10 or the names of the 10 companies. I uploaded those to ChatGPT and I said, hey, go ahead and research these companies. Tell me what their, identify their common traits, what do they all, what things do they share? And once you find this information, give me all that information back. But then I want you to build a target list of 50 other companies that share these same traits and tell me about them and what traits they all have. And once you've developed that list of 50, I want you to develop a marketing plan to go and reach out and start proposing, you know, get to getting your product mix and services and service business. Get out there and get the word out to these people. And dude, it nailed it. I mean, dude, it even if it.

Didn'T nail it and, and I believe you that it nailed it. But even if it didn't nail it. You would know that it didn't nail it. And you would tweak that even if the list was wrong and be like, well, 30 of these are right, but 20 of these, no, yes, they're missing. And then suddenly you'd fill in 15 companies. But ChatGPT as the catalyst to this. And then if the marketing plan was wrong, you'd be like, well, this part of it's good, but this part. And you would flesh it out, but it lets you start from somewhere. The report it created, I gotta do this. We need to end the episode right now.

What I will do is I will anonymize this or create another sample with some sample companies to show you how to do it. And the prompt I used was not bad, you know, I, I, yep. I mean it wasn't too detailed. I told, hey, you're a marketing expert with experience in this industry.

Yeah.

Here's a list of our top clients. I want you to research the companies in the list, come up with a marketing plan that includes providing a list of 50 companies that share the same traits as these businesses. Once we have the list of 50, I want a detailed marketing plan with action items to introduce them to our services.

And I'm dumbfounded. I'm dumbfounded only because I know it will work.

It seems so simple.

Yes, it is the answer today.

Yes. So I uploaded this list and it did this research and analysis of current clients. It gave me their industry location, their size, how many employees, what their services are. And here was very important. What they report is their, like, their noble cause, their, their most. What if you go on their website of this company X here's why we do this. And I didn't really think about it that but when you get that, you can fine tune your mark, your whole message to what they believe in. And, and ChatGPT did it, it was, it was amazing. And I mean, yeah, it was great. And you know, and I can't, I can't take credit for other than, you know, coming up with the prompt and realizing it could do it.

No, you can take credit for that. That's okay to take credit for. That's fine. That's genius.

So I will play around with this so we have something to share in a week or so and I'll put it on the site and, but that prompt alone, so identify who your top clients are. If you said, man, if we had one more of those, that company or 10 more of those companies go up to chat and this is the 4 version omni version. I don't know what it would do with 3.5, but it may do the same thing. But go up there, upload that list of clients and say tell me what all the same what their traits are, what are the most important aspects of the business, what do they believe in? And then tell it to go find you 50 other companies that share those same traits and and how to go market to those companies. And in the marketing side of it, put your constraints. Like I knew this company was using the companies that were located or employees located in India that were doing like email marketing and outbound calling. And so I said, okay, these are the way. These are our constraints.

Yep.

How do we max or minimize the the negative of that? Maximize positive. And it came up with a whole marketing program. So check it out. It'd be interesting to hear the prompts and stuff that you guys have been doing.

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I want to hear this is. This topic has me intrigued. Yeah. How to. How to stop a coup at your company.

I don't know about how to stop it, but I know how to prevent the next one.

Got it.

Yeah. So this happened to me at a company that I ran years ago, a company called Computer Nerds. And. And then it happened again recently. The company that a friend of mine runs that, let's say I consult for in. In, you know, unofficial capacity. Right.

Yeah.

So we had a bunch of people working, you know, at this company, and with Computer Nerds specifically, I can share the detail, the gory details, because a, it was decade and a half or more ago, and B, who cares? It was mine. I'm not going to share the details of my friend's company, because that's not a story to tell. But we Computer Nerds was a business where it was like, pre Geek Squad, but that basic concept. We would go out to people's homes and offices and fix their problems or install their printers or, you know, do whatever we needed to do. And at one point, you know, we built the business up. We had, like, 30 nerds out in the field, and it was all going well. I was the junior partner in this business, and that's fine. Like, I knew that going in. Like, it was fine. I got a piece of the action, but didn't really. I had influence, but not final say over what happened. All good. No problem. About a year and a half into me being involved in this business, my partner, the senior partner, hired, wanted to hire my wife to do all our dispatch. She was, like, in between jobs. He's like, I think that would be great. I'm like, you know, I don't know. And. And we were not husband and wife. We were living together, but. But not yet married. And I was like, well, if we do this, she's got a report to you. He's like, okay, great. No problem.

Yeah, that's smart. Yeah, I like that.

Yeah, I. I needed to learn about, you know.

Yeah, sure.

Yeah. And so that all goes on at that point in time. This is the mid-90s in Austin. People's perception of, like, a long drive and traffic in general in Austin was, in my estimation, ridiculous. There was the same grocery store every four blocks, because traveling more than two blocks was preposterous. Nobody. Yeah. And so everybody that lived there, at least those people that didn't come from, like, a suburb of Manhattan where we actually understood what traffic was like, just lived that world. And you know, we would get calls from various people and businesses and then we would have to assign them out to our nerds each day and build a route that they would have to drive going from place to place. And sure, oftentimes it was non optimal because we don't get to pick who makes the phone ring. It's just how it works.

That's right, Yep.

And, and there was a, there was one person that wanted the job of dispatcher and, and understood that there was always going to be some rumblings about like, hey, there's like nothing's ever perfect with management or whatever. And so they led a coup and went to other people and sort of riled people up and wound up creating a scenario where the right solution for the business, everybody was so upset about how things were routing that we had to let our dispatcher go, which was my wife. Yeah. So I stepped in at that. My partner and I talked about it and I was like, no, I'll be the one to tell her, it's fine, I get it. And so I, this is the story where I fired my wife and then, and then a year later we got married. So it all worked out.

Yeah.

But what I did not realize at the time and the advice that I have since given to my friend and will give to all of you is sometimes that happens and you, if you don't manage it as it's developing, you might not even know it's developing. Then you have to sort of go with momentum. Otherwise it was lose one person or lose 20. Right. At that point.

Yeah. Okay.

And so it's like, okay, the business has to do this. Fine, fine. Not optimal. Not how this should have developed, not how I would have liked it to develop, but it developed. And here's where we are today. What I did not do and then had to do six months later, what I did not do was also fire the coup leader. I should have, I, I needed to fire my wife. Fine, understood. Yep. It's how it works. She got it, like, eventually. It wasn't the easiest conversation the two.

Of us have ever had, but we're gonna have her on the show next week.

Yeah. Oh, I can't. That's right. Actually, that'd be really interesting. I, I, I, she and I haven't talked about that in a while, but, but I have hired her since then for other businesses. So, you know, anyway. But what I should have also done in that moment was said, okay, I, it's a. I'm aware you have, you know, all of you have this concern. This person's not doing the job the way they needed to do it. I need to fix this. So we've let that person go. We are going to install someone else in this position. Maybe in the short term it's me, but like, you know, whatever that needs to be. Some emergency thing while we find the right person. But I also need to make it clear that this is not the way to do things here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

And so I am also letting that person go. The rest of you are totally fine, but that person created this scenario, went to all of you and did this, and that's not okay. So when you have a couple, you sometimes have to go along with it, but you also fire the coup leader as close to, if not simultaneously with whatever else, you know, in. In terms of damage control needs to happen.

Yeah, I. Yeah, that's a tough situation.

Oh, I know. Oh, trust me, I know.

Very, very tough. And I've had things similar things like that happen where people, you know, you get a group of people together.

Yeah.

And they come forward and this is the way it should be. Or this person. And I agree, it isn't the way that if you're aware of it and maybe you hear grumblings and don't do anything about it, that's one thing. But if they come drop this bomb on you, we've all decided. My oldest is like, hey, this is not a democracy.

Nope.

It's not even a republic.

But they could all leave.

Like, I get that.

You gotta protect that.

Yeah.

Yep.

Yeah. You don't want them to leave, but at the same time, you're like, hey, great, I appreciate your feedback. And let's talk about, you know, what controls can we put in place to.

Yes.

Maybe address this in versus such a drastic way of. Is it really the fault of an individual or is it the fault of the system that we're using the procedures that we have, the policies? You know, you got to really look at it. I hate firing people, but it's a fail. You know, I always say if. When you have to fire someone, it's a total failure of management.

Absolutely.

You've hired the wrong person or you didn't train them the right way, or you have the wrong systems or policies, procedures, and.

Oh, and it was. It was the latter with this. I was aware that people were unhappy at times with the routing, but it was like, well, this is how it be. Like, this is the nature of the job.

Yes.

So we do our best and we understand that it's not great to have somebody go north, south, north, south all day.

Sure.

Certainly try not to do that. But to have you stay in the same neighborhood where you could park your car once and walk from call to call, that ain't the gig, buddy.

Yeah, that's not the gig.

You know, and my problem was I was also coming from a suburb of Manhattan where you're used to it.

Yeah.

It was like, you people don't know from traffic nowadays. Austin actually has some traffic, but back then, no way. No way. Yeah, yeah.

So it, it is interesting. And I think that as business owners, we're, we're conditioned to constantly be solving problems and becoming more comfortable doing that over time. Where you're just like, well, this is just the job. I'm solving problems all day. No problems, no business. Where perhaps from, you know, an employee perspective, it's more of this, this is not my problem. We have to, you know, somebody, we have to solve this and pushing it out there rather than thinking this is a problem for our business, maybe we could come up with that's a different way this is handled and propose it as a problem solution versus let's get rid of that person because they're, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

That kind of thing.

So. Yeah. Yeah. I was young. I mean, it was, you know, the first time I'd ever dealt with anything like this. I mean, whatever, you know, it's all, everybody survived. Like, it's fine.

Yeah, yeah, it's good. But there is a, I, I, I loved having big teams of people working for us, and sometimes it just drove me nuts. Yeah. You know? Yeah, it's, it's, you get, it's people. I used to joke and say, if we didn't have employees and customers, man, this would be an amazingly easy job. Yeah.

But you'd have to do all the work yourself. And that's also not feasible.

No. So not, not optimal. Yeah. Well, that's great. Well, thanks for sharing that story.

Yeah, you bet.

Awesome.

Tell my wife to listen the weekend.

Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

She might have a different perspective on her departure would be my guess.

Oh, I guarantee it.

Thanks for hanging out, everybody. Thanks for sending in all your feedback to feedbackusinessbrain show. We love that. Thanks to our sponsor, shopify.com businessbrain. Keep on living at charmed life. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week.