The Only Constant is Change

Business Brain, episode 620 for Wednesday, February 5th, National Shower with a Friend Day 2025. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, the show where we. Well, we take some ideas, we crunch them, we dissect them, we use them to help tune our business brain so that every single one of us can enhance our abilities to lead our charmed lives. And here, back here in Durham, New Hampshire, on National Shower With a Friend Day, I think that means you could just take, like, the show and play it while you're in the shower and we're all friends together.

Yeah, we're friendly.

That's all fine.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I like that idea. Yeah.

Back here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm.

Dave Hamilton, and I'm still out here in Northern California. I'm Shannon Jean. Correct me if I'm wrong, don't we have an anniversary coming up?

We do. It's the 19th of February. Of course.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. Okay, great. I wanted to just make sure I had that date in my head.

Yeah, I think it's like. It's like a week, two weeks from. From the day this episode gets released.

Oh, great. That's awesome. You know, one of the things I want to talk about, I had on my list.

It's our 10th to bring it it.

Yeah, 10th. So after that will be in our 11th year. Correct. Because I always. I always want to upsell it.

Just always upsell. That's it.

Always. I've been talking 10th year the whole. The whole year.

Yeah, but 10th year. Does 10th year sound better than 11th? And if so, decade. See that thing?

It does sound better.

There's a way to spin it, because I've been saying that, okay, we're in our 10th year of this show, and I'm in my 20th year of Mac Geek Gab. But once we hit 20, which for that show will be in June, then I get to say we've been podcasting for more than 20 years.

Yeah, I like that. For more than a decade. We're gonna have to come up with some imageries, graphics and marketing, some swag, you know? So, yeah, I think we should give something away, too. I think, you know, we gave away a MacBook. Yeah. Not last year, maybe the year before. And the way you got it was you. You got entered every time you. Excuse me. Every time you sent in a question that we read on the air. But I think this time we also should give you another entry if you leave a review.

Oh, yeah, but you got to tell us you read the review because.

Yeah. And we'll Read it on, on, on there.

Well, that's it. So leave us. We're going to do this. We, we're not quite sure what we're giving away, but it'll be something this year and it'll be something significant.

It will be.

Leave us a review and if you've already left us a review, you can go and revise that review. Right. So you go to businessbrain show, review, revise or leave us a new review and then you gotta email us because we don't know how to get in touch with you. But we will read your review on the air and if you've. On the air on the show, if you forgot to email us, that's okay. You'll hear us read it on the show and then you can email us again and at feedbackusinessbrain show and then we'll, we'll add your name to the list. I mean, we're going to add your name to the list anyway, but it's easier if you email us so that we know how to get in touch.

That's cool. I'm excited. Yeah. Give some. I love, I love giveaway. One of the things that this show has been constant right. In my life for almost a decade.

That's right.

Almost 10 years. And. But I always, when I think back on the show, we have made a ton of changes and I, I often say this phrase and I want to dig into it because it just came back to me with a, with a client that I have now. Is that change is the only constant, right? Oh, yeah, it's, it's in your business, your life, whatever. But let's keep it focused on business because this is a, a business show, right? Sure. Entrepreneur, entrepreneurs, side hustlers, business business owners. But I have a client that has had great success selling one category of product.

Okay.

I'm not going to mention what that product is. I don't want to call it, call them out. But they, they've been very successful. Quickly. They ramped up and hired people and they rented some space and built out this whole infrastructure and the, and created systems.

Okay.

That to be successful. Everything was going great couple of years and one day something happened where that product in that category was no longer available. Matter of fact, it became, well, it, it's, I think it may be banned or some kind of, some kind of thing like that.

It really doesn't matter. It's inevitable.

Yes. This is it. Everything if you're in the product, if you're selling a product, everything you're selling is on its way to being obsolete.

Yeah, I mean, I would say even with what we do here, I mean, things have evolved. Things are always evolving. And here's the deal. If you are not, if you cannot articulate what has changed in your business, at least on an annual basis, it means you are on your way to being extinct.

Correct? Yes, that's exactly right. It's the same argument with. Okay, oh, you know, I'm not gonna get. We're gonna talk about AI more on the Friday show. But it's like, oh, I'm not gonna pay much attention to AI I don't like it's gonna replace this. I'm not happy with that. Whatever. Well, either you do it yourself or someone will do it to you. Right?

Yes.

You have to put yourself out of, out of business by evolving into something different with yourself. Yeah. Compete with yourself. Apple has been great at this. Right. They create new products and it makes their old product obsolete. But I can remember Steve Jobs saying, hey, if we don't do it, someone else is just going to do it. Right. And, and they've had an incredible run. I, I don't think it's been super creative lately, but it for decades. They've had an amazing run and created life changing products for all of us. So I think you have to just get comfortable. You print it out, I have it on my desk. It's like change is the only constant. It will creep up on you. Just when you start to get comfortable. It's something. And if you get used to this, you'll be actually looking for it and you start to see little signs and you can adapt quickly before and it actually keeps you sharp, it keeps you fresh, it keeps you from getting complacent.

It can keep you excited too.

Yes, yes.

It. Because if you're the one driving the change in your business, that's exciting. If some external force is driving the change in your business, that can be terrifying.

Exactly. Yeah. You want to be on the offense, not on defense.

I mean, you're going to, you're going to be on your heels some of the time. It happens. If you find yourself there, I totally had it happen. Oh my gosh. I would say it's probably more the norm to be on your heels than not. Because you can't be aware and plan for everything. However, it's a whole lot more fun if you can at least occasionally be on the offense and pushing forward. So do that. And if you don't know what that is for your business, ask ChatGPT. It might not get It. Right. But it will give you ideas that you'll say, well, that's wrong. But it could be this. Well, that's all you needed it for. That's all you need it for. Spark ideas. That's it.

Yeah. Can give you a framework to kind of hang your. Your specific situation on. That would help you. Help you discover what. That's what's changing in your industry or whatever. And, and I, you know, a good example is this show. When we first started showing, I wanted to call this show, I think we even had in our logo DBA Doing Business as.

Oh, that's. That was the name of the show.

Yeah, DBA. Because I, you know, I was like, oh, you're DBA. You're doing business. And. But people don't get DBAs anymore. You know, they get. They start LLC or, you know, whatever.

Most people were upset that we were not doing a show for database. Database administrators. That's what happened. Okay.

I mean, when. Yeah, when you launched a business back then, you had to put your name in the newspaper to. I'm not making this up. I have more gray hair than you. But you have to put your name in the newspaper for a week to get the DBA to go to the bank to get them to give you a bank account in that name.

That's right. That was the only way.

Yeah, that was the only way. Yeah. So once that kind of became pretty quickly, actually, we're like, you know what? We're really talking about small business. We're going to call it Small Business Show. And then we did an interview format for years.

Yeah.

Way before a lot of other people that did interviews with business owners, all that kind of stuff. And then that became kind of the norm, and we talked, said, you know what? Let's really limit the interviews. And now maybe we do one once a month at once, every six weeks. Whoever we're interested in having, whenever it.

Can be valuable, in our opinion, for the show. That's it.

Yeah. Because what happens is if all you have is the interview show, you're constantly looking for people to interview. And I would say sometimes the bar can get lower because you're like, wow, we got to have a guest. And, you know, I was like, nah, we got to do something different here.

The best thing I have, and I obviously learned it from what we are doing here, but with the changes that happened with one of my other shows with Gig Gab this past year, I often will have guests on, because I am the only constant in that show now. Now that my C.O. left the show. And so at first I was like, okay, wait a minute. Do I always have to have. You know, how am I going to do this where I always have a guest? And I'm like, no, no. The first episode after he leaves is going to be a solo episode. And this way, I set myself up for that as an okay thing to do. I set my audience up as this being an, oh, look, now it's just us. I'm okay with it. Therefore, you are right. You teach your audience. And I just did. I was just at NAMM right before I went to Mexico.

Yeah.

That conference I talked about. And I did a solo episode on Saturday night right before I went to sleep and woke up early to go fly home. And as I sat down to do it, I'm like, this is ill advised. I'm exhausted.

Right.

I've been here for five days. I'm toast.

Oh, yeah.

But I knew what to do. I sat down, I spent 30 minutes building an agenda. I mean, I'd sort of been building it in my head all week.

Yeah.

But I built the agenda. And then I sat down and did the show. And I gave myself permission. I was like, look, this doesn't have to come out until Monday. I can redo this if it's a disaster. And I. I mean, I got 20% in. It was like, this is fantastic.

Great.

And I have had so many positive comments about that episode, but if I had just ham fistedly shoved a guest in there for the sake of having a guest, it would have been a disaster. I know who it would have been.

Yeah.

And it would have been a disaster.

Yeah. And I. Yeah, and I bet you, you were pretty kind of loose and relaxed and you could talk about what you were going doing in Mexico and the mute. The maybe some of the business side of things or this or that. And so. Yeah, I'll bet you that was. It'll be one of your most popular shows.

It was great. Yeah, it went really well. I mean, I had just seen so many products at namm, like you said, I was about to head off to Mexico and it was like, nope, I'm just going to talk about all the things that. The things that excited me about my first time at a conference like this because I know I got a ton of listeners who, like me, have been interested in this conference for decades, but never went. So let me give you. I get one shot at giving you that perspective.

That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. And so that. It's just constantly thinking of new ways to do things. And I Think you hit on it keeps things excit. Interesting and exciting for you.

Yes.

I, I like doing it with employees as well. Although you have to be careful because some people really dislike, let's face it, most people hate change.

Yes.

So there's a way, like one of the things that you introduced to me a couple years ago was this concept of this two week experiment.

Yeah.

So when you have something you want to change in your organization or you're shifting and it's hey, we're going to do this two week experiment. Even if in your head you're like, oh, this is, we're doing it, you know, this is happening. But you introduce it as this two week experiment or 30 day experiment and you kind of ease your way into it and I love it. I do it all the time. That's great.

Yeah, it's great. Yeah. And it is nice. Even if with that two week experiment, even if you know this is going to be permanent, when you say and present it as a two week experiment, you also are giving yourself permission to bail.

Yes.

I mean, you always could have anyway, or adapt.

Adapt. Yeah.

Tweet. Yeah. Yep.

Yeah. Yeah. I like it. So, yeah, if, you know, embracing change has been one of the big factors in my career that helped me adapt and keep building. And you know, when, when one thing rug got pulled out from underneath me, I was able to shift into the thing when I mean, I could list. I mean I, I've had parts, you know, repair parts, electronics repair parts businesses my whole life and the customers that I had, some of the biggest in the industry, Circuit City, Radio Shack, the good guys, all these companies spent millions of dollars with me. Yep. And they all went out of business one after another after another. And so you're just like, oh, how am I going to, you know, what do I do? How do I replace that? So you, you, you have to be agile and start to project. When you're reading about, you know, hey, Circuit City's, you know, you know, earnings are 50% down or whatever, I was like, okay, how are we going to, you know, what do we do? How do we support them as best we can, but how do we start looking for, down the road for the next thing? And it's always help, help guide you.

So smart.

I love it, love it.

One thing, an additional thing, in fact that you can do to ensure that your business keeps moving forward and I dare say puts you ahead of 99% of your competition, is to always, always be following up. Believe it or not, this is something I saw Scott Jordan Our recent guest from Scotteves. I saw him post about this years ago, and he would use it as a litmus test with people. He if, like, if a new vendor was coming on board or a new employee potentially, you know, whatever, he would create a scenario where he would be like, yeah, I can't talk about that today, but follow up with me in a week. And if they didn't, he knew they weren't the type of people he wanted to work with. And if they did, then of course it would move forward. But most people aren't doing that litmus test intentionally. Most people are doing that litmus test as a default because most people don't have it in their calendars to follow up. Especially with vendors. Right. A lot of times you follow up with your customers, the people who pay you.

True.

But you kind of leave it on the vendor to do your work for you. And I always say with a lot of our customers, it's our job to make your job as easy as possible. And that means we need to shoulder the load of kind of the grunt work, if we can, for you like that. It's an easy way to endear yourself to people. But always following up is something that I have found to be one of the most valuable practices that I have employed.

I like that. What tools can you share with us that help you keep track of that? Because I'm not the most organized person in the world.

Right.

And, you know, so how do you, you know, how do you. How do you prompt yourself to keep. To keep following up like that?

I. One of the things that I use is a service I've mentioned many times called SaneBox. And SaneBox is a. It's an email inbox management tool.

Okay.

It's. If you were to go to SaneBox and start looking at it, I'll put a link in the show notes. Actually, I have a link that gets me something and gets you something, too. It gets credits for both of those. But if you. Yeah, if you go to sanebox, the primary thing they lead with is we will help reduce clutter in your inbox. And it does that. And without that, I'd also be sunk. However, the. One of the features that's kind of buried in there is something called Sane Reminders. So if you and I are emailing about something and I say, all right, great, here's this proposal. And I know that I want to give you four days to review that proposal before I come back and knock on your door and say, hey, man, like, you know, is there anything else you need from me, then what I do is I send you that email. But I bcc a special address at sanebox. Now that address would be something like 4daysainbox.com and if I were to bcc that and you didn't reply to me four days later, I would get an email from sanebox that reminded me to send you a follow up.

Follow up? Yeah.

If you did reply, I wouldn't get it because it would, it would know. Now there is a way I can say four days dot keep and then regardless of whether you reply, I'm still going to get it.

Right.

And so it's life changing. I could also use my to do list and I do.

Sure, sure.

The email thing is key for that.

And, and that those email addresses that you bcc, do you have them set up like as a text expander thing.

Or you just remember, you know, I don't, I don't have to because my email client like yours, like all email clients, remember it's auto.

Yeah. Okay.

So once you start using them and you can do one week, you can do six months, you can do. There's all kinds of things and I could even do. All right, I have one where there's a certain type of follow up that I do every Wednesday and I highly recommend that you pick a day and even a time of a day, a block out, just an hour a week. I mean you don't need a lot of time but block out time every week to do your follow ups. And this way I like it, you're not gonna be like, ah, I know I gotta get back to that person. But I don't have time here. It's like, no, I've created time. I don't need to worry about it. So I have a thing where I can say I do it on Wednesdays. So I'll say I'll BCC Wednesday plus two weeks@sanebox.com and then that will remind me two weeks from Wednesday to follow up with you. So I'll get it when I want to get them at the pacing that I want it to come in at.

Okay, I'm gonna try it. You've been talking about this for a while. I'm gonna, I'm gonna use link and I'm gonna do it.

Yeah, you can use my link.

Yeah, that's awesome. Of course. That's great.

Yeah, it's killer.

I like that. Yeah.

The other thing I use is yes, the reminders feature in Slack for the same. I use it the same way if I have interactions in Slack and then you get reminders at 9am or whatever time you set, you know.

Yes.

On the day that you.

I like that. Yeah, I like it. No, that's great. Yeah. If you have productivity tools like this that you'd like us to share. Feedbackusbrain show. We're all here trying to help each other be successful. We'd love to hear. Love to hear them and share them with everybody here.

I. Yeah. Couldn't agree more, man.

Yeah. And go leave us a review because we're going to start capturing that information to give away something awesome. Last. Last time we did this, we gave away a MacBook. Yeah. BusinessBrain show reviews. Let us know what you think. I know there's a lot of folks that always tell me how much they love the show. And my answer, my responses always like, thank you so much. Go leave us a review.

Please leave us a review. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Thanks so much for hanging out. Like he said, BusinessBrain Show. BusinessBrain show review or slash reviews, it doesn't matter. Or FeedbackUsBrain Show. And we'll see you on Friday. Keep living that charm life.