The Power of Personal

Business Brain, episode 576 for Casual Friday, August 23rd International Cheap Flight Day 2024. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain. Welcome back to Business Brain. If this is not your first time joining us, where we take an idea, a question, something that's happened, an event, anything that we can use as we analyze to train our business brains and make it a little bit easier for us each to lead those charmed lives. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And here in Northern California, I'm Shannon Jean.

Yep.

How's it going, man?

It goes.

This is casual Friday, right?

That's what it feels like. Yep.

That's right.

That's what it feels like.

That's awesome. Hey, before we get into our topic that I do want to talk about in detail, I want to share this thing with you. We started talking about it before the show. I'm an auction geek. I love finding great deals. I share a lot of this information on X with my followers. And I came across this. There's a company called Advance Auto Parts and they have stores all over the country, almost said all over the world. Who knows, maybe they do, but they have a liquidation site that they sell excess inventory. And I was looking at it this morning and I was just like blown away how inexpensive this stuff was selling for. And so I put up an example. This auction is over. It just ended. So if you're watching this streaming on X right now, or Facebook or LinkedIn, you'll see me talking about the screen. So check this out. So this, this is a truck. This is brand new product. They say like new, but it's brand new because they describe it down here. Never, never used. Got it.

Okay.

Truckload of. Now, I'm not excited about this particular product and I'm not telling you to buy this, but just listen to this. Truckload of brake pads and shoes, brake, hydraulics, brake hardware and more. 9,488 units. New condition extended retail $156,859. So now, first thing I tell you is retail is always a lie. So you just, let's just cut that in half. Let's say 75, $76,000 or something like that.

Got it.

Worth of. Worth of product, 77,000. Let's just. We'll all agree on that.

I'll trust you on that because you've done this plenty of times.

Retail prices, maybe not so much on auto parts, but anything else because the stores are always blowing, you know, running specials and they'll, oh, 30% off 50% off. So, so the retail price is a. That's just a. That's just a fact.

Yes.

And of course this, this truckload of 9,488 units with a retail price $156,000 sold a few minutes ago for a hundred bucks.

One C note. That's it.

Yes. Yeah. A penny. About a penny per item, right?

Yeah.

And I've just, it's not an anomaly. I've been watching these all day today and I'm thinking, look at. There's a full manifest which is crucial when you're buying anything. Don't ever buy anything without a manifest. You've got part numbers. You could have. This has been up there for, you know, three, four days. So someone who could have done some, you know, some research.

But, but even just brake pads, like, I know what I pay for brake pads in my car. And these are. These sold for, for 10 cents.

Nothing. Nothing. Yes. They're basically giving you this stuff.

So, so if you knew somebody that would want to buy these bucks. And I realized that's the. If you need to know where to sell the thing that you just are now, I mean, they won't drop ship this to whoever you sell it to next. This is going to arrive at your house.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You've got to have an account. You got to be able to accept the truckload. This is a massive, you know, 24 pallets of stuff and it's a huge project. But where I was going with this is I've been seeing more and more of this where stuff is just like, how are they giving get doing it so cheap because nobody's bidding. I don't know if it's a, it's some sort of economic indicator. I believe it is, but I don't know what type of economic indicator it is. Is it the way things are right now that, that liquidation companies are like, oh man, you know, we're, we're, we're not spending much. We're. We're paring back inventory, our purchasing. Or is it because things were. Is it a trailing indicator that six months ago when Advanced Auto Parts reported terrible earnings and they wrote off, you know, millions of dollars worth of inventory? Or is it a, is it a.

A particular leading indicator?

A leading indicator. That's the word.

I know, I know. I got you.

Yeah, yeah. Is it a leading indicator that that is. Man, we better watch out. There's something coming up. I don't have the answer. I'm not an economist. I need the Freakonomics guy to tell Me how this answer it is, but it's something and I'm fascinated.

We got to put this in the hopper with my declining prices on concert tickets and tuna fish for less than a dollar a can.

There you go.

I think they're all telling us the same thing.

Yeah, prices are coming, prices are dropping.

Prices have to come down. Yeah, and they are coming down. It was interesting, actually. I think listener Patrick wrote in the day after we released the episode about the tuna fish and concert tickets that it was like, you know, the announcement came out that the consumer price indirects had dropped for the first time in however many weeks or months or whatever. And it was like, ah, see tuna fish, man. I'm telling you.

The tuna price index.

Yeah, it's the tuna price index, dude. This is a big one in our house and it has not led me wrong. The other, the other indicator, and it is a leading indicator in both directions, is the quality of wait staff service that you get at a restaurant. When the economy is rocking, quality goes down. The quality goes down because generally speaking, the people who would work in restaurants can get jobs somewhere else. And when the economy is going to, you know, kind of to take a turn for the worse, quality service at restaurants goes up.

Fascinating. Yeah, it's cool. So if you want this list, if you want to get, find out where to get this, this auto parts deals. Just, just feedbackusbrain show or you can DM me on X.

Can we put a link in the show notes?

Yeah, not to this. No, you have to. But yeah, whatever it is. Because they have to go register and I have to tell them how to register.

Oh, I see. All right, so just email us.

It's not. Yeah, yeah, it's not like an ope. Anybody can just jump. Stumble into it.

You got, you don't want 24 pallets at your house by accident anyway.

No, no, no, no. Trust you, this stuff. I, I always tell people, I'm not telling you to buy this. I'm telling you to get in the game, right? To learn the system, to, you know, create unconventional, unconventional ways to create wealth. So. But that's my personality and you know, I. The real topic I want to talk about today is connecting with people on another level than just your business name. You know, Bob's H Vac or not, but that's personal. You know, H Vac Masters or whatever some business name is using your, your personality and your brand. I mean, you think about it like, I mean, you know, very. An extreme example, like Crazy Eddie or whatever. Crazy. Yeah, I think he went to prison, but he definitely went to.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

For. But. Or the guy that. Who's the guy that makes the bets, big sports bets every year and gets a ton of promotion. He's like a mattress seller or something. I don't know. But it's just. Sharing more of yourself is a way to connect with your customers and clients on a much deeper level and a way to build credibility, especially if maybe you don't have a lot of credibility yet, because you're just getting started. Yeah. But when you can let out some of your personality and talk about stuff you've gone through and the mistakes you've made or what you learned and. And there's some. You. It helps you build rapport with your. With your prospective clients.

Yeah, right. Yeah, of course. Because you're. You're showing vulnerability and you're showing a humanness. Right. Like, we. I know I've told this story on this show before. I'll tell it again. But when we started the Mac observer, and this was 25, eight years ago, whatever it was.

Yes.

We decided that we didn't want our personalities in the site. Like, we wanted to. We wanted to be like the New York Times, and it was going to be a faceless thing.

I've been there. I've done that kind of thing before.

You know, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. And what we realized was any time even just a little bit of someone's personality or something came out, it was like, that's what people were drawn to. That was the thing that brought more people to the site or brought people back. It was like. And we got comments like, oh, I like. When we started doing these things, which I really liked. I don't know why we stopped. It doesn't matter. We sold the business. But we. We would put like, a news article out, a very, you know, straight. The just the facts news article. And then at the end of the article, we would put the Mac observer spin, and that's where we would kind of explain our take on the article. And I think we started doing it because we weren't very good at. We, like, we didn't have the skills that. To do that all as one. Right. So it was like, well, let's just do it as two separate things. Like, who cares?

Yeah.

And people loved the spin. Like, that's what brought people to the Mac Observer. Again, I don't know why we stuck on it, but. But, but that. And it was at that point that we realized, oh, wait, wait, wait, Nope. I think we were wrong. I think we do want to put, like, you know, lead with the bylines and. And make a big deal out of the different personalities that we have here. And obviously, anybody. Any kind of news nowadays knows that that's what happened everywhere.

Yeah, everywhere.

Including the New York Times, which was sort of a model of, like, this very faceless kind of thing. And it's. Because that's what. That's attractive to people.

Yeah, the connection. And the connection. Yeah, yeah.

The perceived connection. Whether there's actually a connection. There is a whole other conversation, but it's that.

But.

But letting people.

You can. Yeah. You can create it, and. And it can be. I mean, you can use hyperbole and. And you can lean into your stories. And, you know, I tell stories on X all the time, and my daughter always says, dad, that story's been workshopped. You know, and so I'll go, hey. I go, you know, my life is based on a true story. And so, you know, it's okay. It's. They make people. You're trying to slim down what may be a really long and complicated story, and you're trying to connect with people along the way. You're buying their. Their attention from one sentence to the next. So, of course you have to workshop it.

It's got to be workshop. My. My kids gotta be. My kids have never used that word, which I'm surprised about, because it's. It's definitely like a word in my daughter's lexicon.

Yeah, yeah.

But. But I. I get accused of the same thing, and it's like, well, of course, you know, I curate. I have to. Yeah. I am an excellent curator, you know.

Exactly.

And not every story has to be mine either. I'll just tell you the story. It's interesting because it's a story. That's the thing.

It's a story. That's right. So, you know, when you're. When you're creating your website, you know, what's your story? Yes. Your company's the best, of course. And we. Our product is the most unique, and it's this and it's that, and we're the fastest. That's like table stakes. Everybody expects that. Why are you in business? Yeah. Why are you here? What is your credo? You know, what is your. Your. This is what we do. What's your culture like? And what are your people like? Who's the employee of the month? And what do you guys do on a Friday in a barbecue? And, you know, bring the personality to the upper levels of Your business, it. It will make you stand out. You want to be different. It. Differentiate yourself, differentiate yourself from your competitors, especially if you're a small business. Maybe you, you know, don't want to fight. I don't. I don't think you should fight on price and you want to keep your margins up. People will pay more money if they feel like they're connecting with a person.

Yes.

And, you know, if they're buying from Dave or Shannon instead of, you know, XYZ Corp, it's just. You just talk to people, you see how they feel about.

But you can also raise the personality of XYZ Corp. Too, by doing what you're talking about. And like, here's, you know, here's a couple of pictures from our company retreat or whatever. You know, that. Keeping that going. And I'm not. I'm not great at that. I need to be better at that. Yeah, it's.

Yeah, it is. It is good. So, you know, just think about that. Think of ways that you can insert your. Your personality. And now, now more than ever, you can automate this kind of stuff with, you know, text expansion, you know, emails. You don't have to rewrite the same things over again. You know, you've got all kinds of ways that you can template for your customer service departments and bring some of that personality into your business. I think you'll find it really will help you connect with people.

I have one more piece of advice for you, Shan, which I'll share with everybody. I'm going to ruin a lot of you right now because you'll never be able to hear this word used again without judging the people that use it. Most of the people that use it. That is, you said as you were talking about, you know, businesses say, oh, we have the best product or we're the most unique. Unique requires and also cannot have any qualifiers. Ah, it is a binary. It is a binary term. You are either unique or you are not unique. There's no degrees of uniqueness there. You can be rare, but you're either unique or you're not.

It's kind of like being specialized in, like, 50 different things.

Yeah, right.

We specialize in specialization, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, that's a good point.

The term very unique is used all the time. And I understand that language evolves like I've watched language evolve as we all have during our lives, and it will continue to evolve. I feel like there is. It is important that we have a word that means unique, and we. We don't anymore. Have a word that means literally because that word has, the definition of that word has officially changed. And, and, and that's unfortunate. I, I suppose we have verbatim, right, that that might be the, the, the, the closest that we have in the English language now to what literally used to mean. But I think it's important that we have a word that continues to mean what unique means. And so I love it. I share. And now it's just going to ruin you because your ears are going to go up every time somebody says unique because more often than not they're going to use a qualifier with it and it doesn't.

So, yeah, if you have ideas on connecting personally with your clients or what you do for your business, love to hear it. You can find business Brain up on X at bizbrain show or feedbackusinessbrain Show. We would love to hear from you. And thanks for hanging out with us again on this Friday. Hope you have a great weekend.

Yeah, shoot us a note. Feedbackusinessbrain Show. We like to hear from you. You can even say that your email is very unique and we're going to be very happy to receive it. We won't even judge you for it. At least we won't tell you. Have a great weekend. Keep living that charmed life. We'll see you next week.