Survival Entrepreneurship

Business brain, episode 652 for Wednesday, May 28, National Hamburger Day 2025. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain. Welcome back to Business Brain, the show where we take some ideas, we crunch them, we dissect them, we use them to tune our business brains so that each and every one of us can keep on living that charmed life we love so much. Speaking of charmed lives, our sponsors this week are Nord Layer. We're@nordlayer.com brain and CodeBrain gets you 22% off with the URL and another 10% off with the code. So you got to check that out and shopify.com businessbrain where you can sign up for your $1 per month trial period. We'll talk more in depth about those in little bit. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And back in Lafayette, California, I'm Shannon Jean.

That's right. Welcome back to Business Brain, Shannon.

Thanks, man.

You weren't. You weren't ever gone from the show, obviously, because we recorded before you left.

Two weeks of. Yeah. Two weeks of no recording. It's kind of weird.

It is weird.

This is the. Yeah. This was the first trip I think I've taken in about a decade where even though I was posting online, I really did disconnect and had.

There's a whole thing where we could dissect what you just said. I was posting online, but I disconnected.

But we're gonna let.

I'm gonna let it go.

But I. But I only really posted about the trip.

Oh, okay. All right. I see what you're saying. I see it sort of.

Yeah. Only shared my, you know, that kind of stuff and things that I was enjoying, all that kind of stuff. But there were times where I was not sure what day it was. So I think it's.

Love a good thing. I love when that happens.

Yeah. And I had a lot of observations on this. Yeah, it is very me. I had a number of observations on this trip. I'm gonna. I'm still putting them all together, but a couple of things that stood out that I thought would be interesting to talk about with our viewers, and one of which was this concept of the dichotomy between. So I went first time going to a Caribbean country, St. Lucia. St. Lucia. It was beautiful. People are awesome, wonderful, super friendly. Everything else. But I don't know if other Caribbean countries are like this. Maybe they are. Some are, probably some aren't. But there is that. A lot of poverty.

Yes.

And then a lot of wealth.

Yes.

Right. Yes. And as you're cruising through these tiny little towns, which you can see people live very simple lives. Right. Not a lot of money, and you're cruising to this fancy resort. I had a. I kind of had a hard time with it, and not a hard time, but it was. It was definitely. I felt like, oh, wow. And then we had a day where we. We took ATVs all over the island, which was awesome and wonderful, and we had great guides. And we're buzzing through these little towns, and there's people, like, looking at us like, who the hell are these guys? You know? And I just thought it was. It was fascinating. I was helping the economy by being there.

Right.

They all told me I was helping the economy to be there. I met a banana farmer who I talked to, and he could be a guest on Business Brand. He had so many interesting things to say.

Yep.

I'm gonna. I'm gonna. We're gonna talk more about that in the future.

Yep.

But there's just. It's just a different world. The. The other thing that really stood out is this concept. Entrepreneurship as a survival tool. Right.

And let me. Let me. Before we get into that, I'm curious, because I've been to quite a few Caribbean islands. We've taken cruises that bring us to them. And sometimes you are completely sheltered from the dichotomy you mentioned, and sometimes you are not at all sheltered from it. And when we went to Haiti, we went to the island of Labadee, which is Royal Caribbean's. They have a private beach on that island. They had a zip line there, like one of the longest zip lines in the world. It's really cool. It's like a half mile over water. It's freaking amazing.

Never doing that.

Yeah, it was awesome. Awesome. But to get up to the top, you landed on the beach, but to get up to the top of it, you had to go out of the sort of secure area and take a little. You know, you were on a little bus, but there were people with machine guns along the entire path. And then we also noticed people with machine guns at the edge of the resort, kind of ensuring that. And, like, you know, there were, like, kids from the neighboring communities that would come closer or whatever, and. And then. And then they had, like a. A bazaar, a market, if you will.

Yeah, sure.

Where, like, these people would come and. And bring the things that they made or got or whatever to sell to us, the tourists. And that was one of the most intense experiences of my life. It was. It was like a feeding frenzy almost but they. They were very thankful for us being there. We. I. In that. I never felt unsafe. I really didn't feel unsafe with the driving up the hill with the machine guns because I figured, you know, if there was ever a problem, Royal Caribbean would be out of business. So, yeah, like, this is just not going to happen. They. They pay off everybody that needs to be paid off so that this can keep happening. You know, it's fine.

It was similar in St. Lucia, where.

Yeah.

When someone came to pick you up at the hotel, at the resort to go. It was not just, oh, yeah, grab the guy, whatever. It was like, hey, who are you? We don't recognize you. Are you on the official thing? Where are you going? We want to check. Wait, don't get in that car. We need to check this guy. You know, it was. It was. I. It was. It was interesting. But one night we went to a street party downtown. They had. They do this every Friday night, apparently. And there's a ton of people down there, lots of tourists, but. But mainly locals.

Yeah.

It seemed like. And, man, I gotta tell you, I respect the hustle. And these guys and women were doing everything from selling single cigarettes out of a pack to, you know, I got this conch out of the ocean today, and here it is. It's five bucks or.

Yeah.

What kind of drink you're drinking? My rum punch is the best. And here's, you know, this kind of thing. Or I can get you a better deal over here. Hire me for a VIP thing. It was just on and on and on.

That's what it was like in the. In that bazaar. Yeah. Remember, they would come up to our kids and they would ask, like, I remember them asking my son, what's your name? And he told them it was fine, you know, and they're like, great. And they. They took out some wooden toy. Like, I couldn't remember. I can't remember what the toy was, but they're like, great, I'll carve your name on this. And they literally started carving his name on it as a way to perhaps inspire us to buy it for him.

The hook.

That's the hook. Right. But you're right, it's entrepreneurship as a survival skill, for sure.

Yeah. And yes. And I. Like I said, I was talking to all these people because I'm interested in that. Right. Tell me about your. What do you do in your business? Oh, you drive. You're the driver, and you do this. And we spent a day, went out with the guide all day and went to mud baths and all Kinds of crazy stuff, waterfalls, everything. And so I met a lot of people. Everything from like I said, someone selling a guide service, someone selling shots of rum on the side of the road, people selling chocolate bars and everything. So the thing I would say as someone who really just the start of my life, I won the genetic roll of the dice by being born, born here in the United States, no doubt about it. Born to parents that thought it was important for me to get educated and to learn new things. No problem. I nothing that I had anything to do with it. So just a massive, massive, huge leg up start.

Huge head start.

Huge.

Correct.

Like inconceivable to folks living on this tiny island that are trying to make money to, you know, buy food and.

Toast different foods, not just food in general.

That's correct.

Two very different concepts. Yes. Right.

So when you start thinking in your head that everything is hard, think again. Go take a trip to one of these places. That's hard. And it just really helped reset some of my perspectives of how I even posted it. I showed a picture, a map of the US I'm like, I'm headed back to this opportunity zone on the way home. And that's really what it is is there is so much opportunity in front of us, so many free or low cost tools at our fingertips to make life changing. Not even just money, but opportunities. Yeah, life changing opportunities.

Life changing. Yes, right there.

Everything. Yeah. Experiences, people that you could call that, you know the concept of calling someone and asking for help that you have just over and over and so it was, it set me back a bit and but I, as I was doing it I realized well, these people like one guy, the banana farmer, I'm like man, you're living my vacation.

Well, that's the whole Mexican fisherman concept to. Right. Like yes, there is, there is a version of that happening. But there is, but it's not, not binary in by any stretch of the imagination.

He was grinding and making, you know, it takes 10 months to grind.

I put a, I logged an idea in my, in my. To speak about on business brain note in Apple notes which already like talking about the privilege that, that you. We were sort of born into like that. The fact that I can say that I, I did that offhandedly when it came to mind is it already comes with. Is a loaded thing to say but it is exactly related to what you're talking about here. So I want to, I'm going to share that. But next what I'm going to do is talk about our two sponsors for today. Because look, if your business is growing fast and your tech stack looks like it was built during a caffeine fueled weekend hackathon, congrats, you're doing it right. But now you need Nordlayer, our sponsor, to keep it all secure without pulling you into it purgatory. NORD Layer is the network security platform built for modern businesses. It's your vpn, your access control, your compliance assistant, your threat shield all wrapped into one neat toggle ready package. You can deploy it in minutes, scale it with your team and and monitor who's doing what and from where. And it's based on zero trust. Meaning you're not handing out skeleton keys to your entire castle. It's just enough access for the right people at the right time. Oh, and if you ever wanted to feel like you have a security operations center hidden inside your laptop bag, NORD Layer's built in threat detection and dark web monitoring kind of makes that happen. No cape required. Protect your business the smart way. You get up to 22% off Nord Layer's annual plans at nordlayer.com brain/10% more with Code Brain. So that's Nord layer.com brain Code Brain. Stay fast, stay safe, stay charmed. And our thanks to NORD Layer for sponsoring this episode. And you know that question that lives rent free in every entrepreneur's brain, what if it actually works? Right, that's the wild part. Because it can. But you need the right foundation. You need our sponsor, Shopify. Maybe you're thinking, what if I don't know how to build a website? Well, Shopify gives you gorgeous templates, no coding required. What if I need to help writing product descriptions? Well, Shopify has got AI tools that'll do that with you. What if I launch and no one buys? Well, Shopify's built in email and social marketing tools help you find customers wherever they are scrolling. Shopify powers 10% of all E commerce in the US that's amazing. Not just side hustles and startups, right? But brands that you know and trust. And if Shopify can help a team launch a burrito themed sneaker line, yes, that happened, then it can definitely help you. So stop with the what ifs and start building your charmed life. Turn your big business idea into Ka Ching. With Shopify on your side, sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com businessbrain. Go to shopify.com businessbrain again, shopify.com businessbrain right, and our thanks to Shopify for sponsoring this episode. All right, Shannon, so The, the thing that I wrote down was this, applying blue collar attitudes to white collar businesses. And I think that describes what you and I have both done and certainly for myself, learned to do over the years, because that's the hustle. That's the part of this. And I think that gives each one of us a leg up. We're willing to do the work, we're willing to grind it out. It just so happens that the businesses we do would be classified as white collar businesses. Right. Like, you know, we're, we're not mowing lawns, we're doing podcasts. Right. And I've done both. Like, there's, there's zero, zero judgment here. In fact, no, there's respect all the way around. Mowing lawns, really good money and, and generally speaking, less stress than I've experienced on this side of the, the, the on with this particular collar on. But it's that mentality of what, what I call the blue collar mentality we've, which we've talked about on the show before. The. I'm willing to like, go do the work. That's the.

Get your hands dirty.

Get your hands dirty. Do the work. And I think that is something that gives us both a leg up. And even to say it gives us a leg up. I think it is the thing that we've both done to be able to do what we do is, is that mentality applies here. Even though we're not mowing lawns, we're doing podcasts and various other businesses, obviously it's, you know, it's not the only thing we do.

Yeah. And I, I would also say I had a conversation about this earlier today about like, automation, delegation. And I'm all for automation. Sure. And delegation and all that kind of stuff, but there's some power in doing it manually by yourself. First.

First, right. Yes.

Yeah.

Yes.

Because if, if you just like, oh, I'm gonna AI it or I'm gonna automate it, I'm gonna do it. Great. But I don't think you'll understand it as much. And like when I was having discussion, I use this, this observation. Like when I was selling handbags on Poshmark, I don't know anything about bags, but I know about sales. So I'm, I'm trying to learn this platform. And yes, there's all kinds of automation tools, but I was like, okay, I guess I gotta follow tons of people. That's just kind of that thing up there. So following, following, following. I'm using my thumb. I have fast thumbs and, and I'm sitting on the couch at night, chilling out with my wife. Oh, follow. But then I start to realize, well, who am I following and what's the important part and what makes it different and who's more valuable to follow than, you know, someone else? And so I learned this whole concept of following the right type of accounts that would ultimately become customers instead of just blatant, you know, following following for the sake of following, just to get numbers up. And then I automated it. Right. And.

But you knew what you were automating. We don't.

That's it. We don't know what you're automating.

Yeah. Here at Backbeat, but really, every business I've ever run, we don't. We never start by automating anything. I am. I. And I'm a programmer, right. So I. I love to build systems that will do things, and we do build systems that will do things for the business. I've talked about it a lot on here, about the various things, but the first thing I do generally is start with a shared Google sheet or a shared synology drive sheet, you know, But a spreadsheet, because a spreadsheet, I can start while I'm talking with you about something. I don't need to go and, like, engineer how I'm going to code it and spend three days writing it or have somebody else spend three days writing the thing, you know, the spreadsheet. We can just all start dumping data into it. Calculations, managing. It's a date. A spreadsheet's a database. Right. That's really what it is. It's bad at being a database, but it's a database nonetheless.

But it is. Yeah, but it's a good place to start.

It's a great place to start because immediately we learn what data is valuable, in what format is it valuable, how do we want to see it, how do we use this data? Where are. And then slowly we start building up, you know, a system. And like, the thing that. That we call Podman, that. That uses. That sort of manages the schedules for all of our podcast ads, not just for our show, but for all the shows we rep. That started as a series of Google sheets shared with each podcaster. And it was awful, but it got it done and it taught us what we needed so that when we went and build the system, we weren't building something that we had to throw away two months later because we didn't know what we wanted in the first place.

And it was no friction of, oh, wait, we got to build this database. And I'm not sure how to do it. I don't know what fields to add and who should we hire. And this, it's just like, oh, we need to keep track of this. Open Google sheets, new start typing.

That's it.

So it is definitely anything you can do to increase the action items that you're taking to get this stuff done. And then, sure, once you know it and you got it, delegate somebody who can do 75% as good as you can, which we always say here. And automation, I'm all for it, but I can tell when people have over automated and they don't really know how it works or like I was talking to your.

Oh, go ahead.

Well, back to your point about the blue collar thing. I want to elaborate a little bit more on that because we always talk about simplicity here.

Yes.

Like the way I make money, the way I've made money for 30 years. It's very simple.

Very simple.

I can explain it to you in two sentences, maybe three. But you know, that's one business. Now I have multiple businesses that do things maybe a little different, but the concept is the same. So when I ask somebody what they do, I often, I find that the more complicated it is, I figure immediately the less money they make because I just feel. And maybe because I'm a simple man, no problem. I like to spend a dollar and turn it into 100. It's very simple.

That's it.

That's it. That's it. Maybe I have to spend 10 turn.

Yeah. But spend less than you make. Yes, yes.

And I've changed and I've chased. I always tell clients, Chase $100 bills because you can stack that up no problem. But when it's really complicated and you're telling me all this sophisticated stuff, man, I'm just like, that's great, I'm happy for you. But I, you know, how long does.

This, who are your customers? Yeah.

And how long. How much of that hundred dollar bill gets into your pocket?

Yep.

Right. I, I want, If I pay 10 and I sold it for 100, you know, I'm not going to get 90 in my pocket, but I'm hoping to get 70.

Right. Yeah. You want to have big margins. Yeah, big margins. Give you, give you opportunity to make mistakes. I, I had somebody the other day. There's a, there's this concept called vibe coding and.

Oh, yes.

Okay. So for those of you who don't know, it's very simple. It's the idea of not writing any code yourself, but going into some AI engine Maybe it's Chat GPT or Claude or Perplexity, whatever, telling it what's what. You want the software that has yet to be written to do, explain it and then let it write the code. And you go take the code, you roll it out wherever you're going to do it. Maybe it Vibe coded you a website, or maybe it Vibe coded you something else. You roll it out, test it. This didn't work. Okay, great. And now you're essentially treating it like you're a programmer and, you know, you're the manager and it's the programmer. And I had somebody the other day saying, Vibe coding is stupid. It doesn't work at all. I'm like, I disagree. And I am living proof of this because I've written many engines in the last year that I, I wrote things with Vibe coding before it was a term, like I was already doing it. And I said, but here's the difference between you and me. I, prior to doing any Vibe coding, spent decades writing software coding. I know how to code. So when I see I a. When I look at the code it built, I can understand it and I can see if there's a huge flaw in the logic, you know? And I know what it's like to have somebody tell me what they want built and then be the coder that builds it. So I know how to talk, I know how to be on the other side of that equation and tell Chat GPT, here's what I want you to build and here's how I want you to structure this framework so that it does the thing we want it to do. And like that. So, no, it's. Having done it first makes this much simpler and far more productive. But. But I digress.

Yeah, no, you're right. And. And so I think you should embrace automation. Embrace AI we talk about all the time, but you first need to understand how it works. And, you know, you need to do the work. You need to get your hands 30 at even. I don't care what level you are, if you're the CEO, you should go down in the warehouse and say, how does this. How do you ship this? And so you can see what, what the people that work for you have to do.

Yes.

If you, I mean, every example you. You can think of, you need to get your hands dirty.

Yeah, I think so. That's that. Yeah, I know there's people that have had wild success without doing that. I don't know how to be that person.

Yeah, me neither. That's okay. We're right and they're wrong.

That's right. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. Feedback Businessbrain Show. Share your thoughts on this. Wait. Tell us we're wrong. I. I know we're wrong, but I also know we're right. So let us know. Feedback Businessbrain show. Keep living that charmed life, and we'll. We'll see you for Friday. A Friday I. Friday I.

See ya.