The Lonely Entrepreneur

Business Brain, the show for entrepreneurs, episode 545 for Wednesday, May 1st, Frequent Flyer Day 2024. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain. Man, I almost said welcome to a different podcast because I've been knee deep in the recording studio today. But this is Business Brain, the show with where we take a few ideas, we dissect them, we analyze them, we use them to tune our business brains each and every episode. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave.

Hamilton and I'm back up in the Sierra foothills working on this project. I'm Shannon Jean. Glad to be here. You know, it's frequent flyer day or whatever it is.

I did say that. Yeah.

We got the intro topic that I wanted to talk about today was have to do with language, but we can do that next week. I want to talk about points and credit car and all that stuff just for a few minutes. I'll try not to go overboard.

Yeah.

And there's, you know, people to get really passionate about. What's the best card to use, should you be using. If you're in business and you're racking up all kinds of expenses, an absolute prerequisite is you got to go to your vendors and say you want to. The best way to get my business is to take my credit card as payment. And they oftentimes they say, no, we can't do that. That's probably not true. If they really want your business. You know, we are shipping bills for UPS and FedEx and Tech Restore was about 250 grand a month.

Yep.

And we every time I'd say I'd love for. To give you the business. I love these discounts. I want to put the. I need to pay with my American Express. And at first they're like, nope, we can't do it. And I said, okay, I'm going to go to UPS because they're going to do it. And then FedEx did, you know, so as long as you have a couple of options, you can push back.

Yeah. Fig out where the leverage is. And if, if, if you can find the leverage, then you can go and scavenge for those rewards points. You want to gobble those up like a crazy person. Yeah.

Yes. You know, as many point. I mean, ideally millions and millions of points that you want to capture and everything, every expense you're, you're putting on or that you're running through your business, you want to try to put it on that card. Of course, you have to have the cash flow to pay it off. You know, you can't Carry a balance, the whole purpose.

Right. Yeah. Because your vendor is paying for those rewards points. Right. And if, and, and similarly, if you are allowing people to pay in your business with a credit card, the fees that you pay and it depends on who your merchant provider is and all of that stuff, but you may wind up paying more in fees for the people who use rewards cards versus the people who use non rewards cards. But check.

Dig deep.

Dig deep. Check. Yeah, exactly.

Look at your statements. See how stripe, if you're using Stripe, how they break it down and all this kind of stuff. But it's a life changer and not just for you. We used to give it out awards to employees and even an employee of the year that everybody voted on. And it was like, hey, you and your family, you can take a trip anywhere in the world. You pick. You want to go to Bali, you want to go to Europe, you know, and maybe trips that some of these folks wouldn't normally take. And so the, the payoff is huge for them. For everybody else in your organization that sees that gift seem, you know, very generous and for yourself, because you feel awesome giving those things away. And it'll just lift up your entire lifestyle without having an impact on your personal bottom line. So definitely want to get those in. If you have questions about what's the best card, how to do it. Feedbackusbrain show. Dave and I have been doing this for decades.

Yeah, I have started. I'm a big Starwood. Well, it was Starwood for a while.

Same.

Yeah, it turned into Marriott Bonvoy, which was a great expansion in my opinion. So I gather up Marriott points still. Prior to that, I gathered up American Airlines points, which actually got me to be a lifetime gold flyer with American just from my credit card points.

That's awesome.

Yeah, it is awesome. It's nice. You get upgrades and things like that. And you get upgrades at hotels when you earn points through that too. Just. But do run the numbers for your scenario because there's. You might be better off using a cashback card or something like that. Just, just run the numbers. The card that's right for me, the card that's right for Shannon, and it's not necessarily the one that's right for you.

So yeah, it depends on what you want. And I like to have both. You know, when I had a new, when I had a new house, the card that offered the biggest kickbacks to like Lowe's and Home Depot, that was great for us. My daughter moved to New York and was going to college. We started leaning heavily into our JetBlue credit card because they offered a great route back and forth from SFO to jfk. And we were out there all the time, and so we wanted to build up tons of JetBlue points. So it just depends on your unique situation. And like most generalized advice, it's generally not great. So you want to get specialized advice, you know, tips on what that, that should be the first question. What do you want to achieve? What do you want to achieve? What's your definition of success with those cards? That'll help you choose, you know, the one to. Good for you.

Love it. Yep.

Yeah. Yeah, that's great. Okay, so I want to talk about a study that came out, and we're going to share this graphic. Can you, do you have that graphic? Can you share that?

Well, I can share it live, but most people aren't going to see it live. But no, you're right. We'll put it on the. I'll find it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Y.

It'll be up at Businessbrain show in the show notes, and the heading is lacking social connection is as dangerous as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. Now, maybe that's a little hyperbole, but it's one of the top things that can cause premature mortality, Alzheimer's, you know, let's just call it general unhappiness.

Yeah.

And one of the things I, I hear a lot. I, I, I've been coaching more and more business owners over the last, you know, this last six, eight months. Sure. I, I just hear it over and over. It's really lonely. And I, that when, and then I saw this cut this, you know, come up on X in, in a post from Sahi Boom, whose guy's got like a million followers. And yeah, that's it right there. If you're watching the live stream, you can see it. Or if you, you know, watch on YouTube, you can see that. And I thought, this looks really important and we ought to be talking about it because, you know, we're serial entrepreneurs, patently unemployable. And I would say one of the reasons that I was interested in starting this podcast was so to help overcome being, I guess, lonely or isolated.

Yeah.

Yeah. And even, even if you're an entrepreneur surrounded by a bunch of employees, they don't know, you can't share everything with them. At least I hope you're not. You know, you can be friendly, but you're not. You can't be friends with them.

It's difficult and even.

Yeah, yeah, very difficult. Maybe there's stuff you don't want to share with your spouse about the business that's stressing you out. And you think, wow, this will stress them out even more. So a lot of it is on our shoulders, and I think it's worth taking some time here to talk about ways to.

I think it's interesting to look at this chart because. And again, all charts are made in their own way, but this comes from the office of the U.S. surgeon General, and it shows that, again, of the six things on this chart, lacking social connection is the worst. Your odds of premature mortality are at, like, a 0.65. Smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day is a 0.55. Drinking six alcoholic drinks, 0.3. Ish. Physical inactivity, 0.2. Obesity, 0.15. And then air pollution is like a 0.5. Because it's possible as an entrepreneur, you might wind up checking more than one of these boxes. Right. You know, the lacking of social connection, that's very easy. And especially, you know, the COVID lockdowns forced us to certainly be isolated, but it also gave us permission to be isolated. And for a lot of us entrepreneurs, myself, certainly, it was like, okay, great, now I don't have to worry about, like, going and, like, seeing people. I can just, like, buckle down and get to work and, like, do the things. And there was some. I didn't enjoy the lockdowns in a general sense, but there were parts of them where there was like, oh, there's a silver lining here. Like, okay, great. And part of that silver lining, I've said on the show before, I'm an introvert, you know, and so my. My default is to not go and hang out with people. I'm. I've learned how to not be shy when I'm around people, but.

Right.

You know, it was easy to revert to that default when literally, you know, everybody was saying, you're not allowed.

So it's like, It's a really good point.

No problem.

Yes.

But then you've got physical inactivity, depending on how much you drink. You know that. You know, and of course, those things can lead to obesity. So you start stacking these things. It's not so good.

No. And. And you do have to. You ha. It's a skill that you have to practice that being, connecting, it doesn't come natural to everybody. And it is easy to kind of burrow in, like, a tick and focus on forget. That's a bad analogy. But I like that. Yeah. Because you're just like, I'm Going to get this done. I'm building this thing, I'm doing this project. I've got all these digital tools which are wonderful, allow you to work from everywhere, but is it, you know, can you connect with people on that level? So I think you have to work at it, whether it's, you know, family and friends getting out, but also, you know, joining peer groups for your business like that sounds like a nightmare to me. I'm not a joiner, but I will tell you, having been involved with my peer groups and business groups on X since I've been putting a lot of time in there, that feels great, man. I love it. And they're pushing me as well, you know, to do certain things and holding me accountable on certain things and just that interaction, you know.

Oh, Shannon's on, on his Starlink connection today, so we're going to have him back in about 10 seconds would be my guess based on it. But, you know, a cloud flew over, maybe it was frequent flyer day, so an airplane flew over and blocked Shannon's view of the satellite. All right, did the airplane pass by and we got you back. All right, great.

One, satel on. Anyway, I, I, I'm talking about the groups that, that, that I'm in on X. It's very powerful to get that back and forth and that engagement. So forcing yourself. That's a bad word. And getting yourself to get out, whether you're doing it online and connecting with people, but you got to connect the right groups. The, the whole concept here is lifting each other up, you know, not, don't go on. This will sound bad, but if you're in business, I would say Reddit is not a great place to hang out because it's full of neg. It's way more full of negativity, in my opinion. And there's a much bigger victim mentality. And maybe that's in certain corners of X as well.

Oh, it's definitely in certain corners of.

X. Yeah, I'm sure there is. But in my corner, it's very encouraging helping you out, offering suggestions, you know, but you have to put the effort into it. We started with the ground, a group of about 10 people, and only about five of them really engaged.

Okay.

So we split, we split off with our group and then we started bringing in other people that we thought, hey, this is a good fit. This person taught, you know, they're, they're, they're going, they're, they're, they want to help, they want to add to something.

Yeah.

I think now we have nine People in this group. And we. And not only do we talk every day, the chat, but we do a call once a week, which I'm going to start recording so we can publish a podcast. Because it's basically like. Like this conversation.

Like this, right? Yeah, of course. Yeah, Yeah, I will say something about that. And I noticed this when we. At. When we ran Mac Observer. Of course, we were doing podcasts and we. I also was running Backbeat Media and knew the value of a daily podcast. Okay. So all of these things swimming in my head. We used to do daily staff meetings to sync everybody up. And I started thinking, well, wait a minute. These conversations that we're having in the staff meeting, we would talk about the content. I'm like, this would be a great thing to publish. Now, I knew that there were things we were talking about that we didn't want to make public, so it was, all right, great. Let's have our normal conversation, and then let's go have a conversation about whatever these news topics are. And it was a more organized thing. And the show did amazingly well, in fact. But I noticed that as soon as the red light was on, there was. There was what we call red light syndrome, where everybody in performance mode sit.

Up a little more.

Yeah. And it became, even though it was like coming out of this staff meeting where it was more relaxed, it was like, very. Stiff is the wrong word, but it was performative. You know, it became.

It's natural.

Yes. And so just be aware of what might happen when you tell people, I'm going to record this and release it as a podcast. You get somebody doing like I'm doing right now, going on a soapbox, not talking to you. I mean, I am talking to you, but you get what I'm saying?

No, I get it.

Yeah.

So. But I think that, you know, I had a call this morning with a young guy who was asking, like, should I bring a partner on? Because it'll make it, you know, it'll make it better. It'll make. That's an interesting illustration.

I have the business tick up on the screen.

See, there it is.

Made by ChatGPT.

Yeah, I like it. Yeah. Dug in like a tip. What? This person actually was interesting. They were moving because they were out on some, I don't know, more vacationy type location that didn't have a lot of activity, especially in the winter. And they were moving back to the city so they could be around people their age. Person's in their 20s.

Sure.

Have a little bit more dynamic environment. And I, I, you know, I was like, yes, great. I'm glad you're taking that action because it's going to help you, you know, connect with other people, build your network out. I think that's. That's terrific. Could you put that. Show that, that picture in.

I put it in Slack for you so that you could.

I'm going to do it.

You could. You could use it for the. The business, the episode image, if you want.

That's perfect. Burrowed in like a tick.

Burrowed in like a tick. I will say, you know, again, something we learned during the COVID lockdowns, but it applies regardless, is be aware of if your employees are leading lonely, antisocial lives, too.

You've mentioned that to me before. That's a good point.

Like, make sure that they are not doing that because that it may. Again, in, in. In small doses, it can be really good for your business. It's like, oh, well, they don't do anything at night, so they wind up working extra hours for me. And that can be awesome. Until it's not.

How do you. How do you tell when you should say something? You do. You just encourage connection all around.

I think it's more just the encouraging connection. Like, hey, you know, what'd you do last night? You know, that kind of thing, having those conversations and then just. I find, I say often that I am a better leader than I am a manager. And fine. And I've learned things about management that I've. I'm working on it, still getting better at it, but as a leader, that comes naturally, more naturally to me. And so in that knowing that, it's like, well, if I just go and talk about the things I am doing after hours, it will normalize this and maybe they will start to do things, more things after hours. And it doesn't always work, but it's something, you know?

Yeah, it's something.

And then that also forces me to do things after hours, which is good because I might just want to, like, burrow into my couch like a tick. So.

Yeah. Yes. And I, like, you know, I've mentioned it a lot. One of the things I used to love to do is cook for everybody on Fridays, you know, rain or shine on the barbecue, if you're in person. So thinking about that was great because it's kind of like having a secret meeting. They don't know you're actually having a meeting, but you are. And you're feeding them and so everybody's relaxed and you're talking, hey, what are you doing? What's going on? How are your kids? You know, it allows you to become a better leader because you can connect with them on those issues or not issues, but topics that you may have in common. So if you're. If you're running a digital company or a remote company, what, you know, and I think you're good at it. Dave, I. In the. I know you do a backbeat get together just to hang out and stuff. I think that's. That's terrific.

We actually started doing a hangout recently with the old crew from the Mac Observer. I call it the TMO Refugees. Actually, I changed it because it's. It's the TMO family, you know, because we were a family when we were together as a team. And that is something where I can now be more myself with them when I was running the company. Like you said, you could be friendly but not friends. Now these people don't work for me anymore. They haven't worked for me for two years. And in a sense, in some of these people's minds, certainly at the moment, they were kind of upset with me when we sold the company because it meant that we broke the family up. And I get it. It's fine. But that has allowed that. That also broke the, you know, manager, leader, boss, the boss, employee thing.

Like, you could be friends now.

I can now be friends. And we, you know, we. We severed that right in the right and two. So. So it can be a little more laid back and. And I can be a little. A little more free with things like that.

So. Yeah, that's cool.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, so if you're looking for a group and you can't do it with your current team, did you have another team before? Start a text message trail and then let that kind of percolate and then say, hey, you want to get together for a zoom call? Sure, let's do that. And then, boom, there you go.

I like it. Yeah. So if you've got ways that you want to share with us. Feedbackusinessbrain Show. You know the goal here? We're all trying to grow our business brains together, and I'd love to get your take on it. Whether you're a solopreneur on your own or you have a team spread across the world, or you're all working in the same building.

Yeah.

What are some tips?

Let us know. Feedback at BusinessBrain show. Like he said, we'd love to hear from you. We love doing this show and keep living that charmed life. We'll see you on Friday.