Using Slack to manage your Small Business Team and More – SBS 57

Small business show at BusinessShow Co episode number 57 for Wednesday, March 9, 2016 greetings, folks, and welcome to the Small business show. The show where we talk about things of interest to small business owners everywhere each and every week when we come together, answering your questions, talking to people just like you, perhaps even talking to you. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And in Lafayette, California, I'm Shannon Jean. How are you, Dave?

I am well. How's Lafayette, man?

It's, it's, it's beautiful. It's a great time of year out here. It's, you know, the, we're kind of the opposite. I think of you, where, you know, the winter, or what we call winter, everything is green and the hills and everything. But soon after spring hits, you know, everything turns, it doesn't turn brown, it turns golden. And that's very, very important.

This is an important distinction that someone from afar like me might not notice that it's golden. I might think it's brown.

No, it's the Golden State. So that because everything's brown most of the time, at least the grass on the hills. So. But it's good. You mentioned a really important comment in the intro there is that we are always looking for small business owners to chat with. And if you'd like to share your story, whether you've been in business for a long, long time or even if you're just getting started, we would love to talk with you, ask you a few questions and maybe even have you on the show to promote your business and talk about what you've done that's worked and what you've done that hasn't. And you can reach us by sending an email to Feedback Business Show Co. That's a great opportunity. I wish somebody had asked me to talk about my business years ago.

Yeah.

Come on the show.

Yeah, I, I, I really feel like doing this show has helped me get better at running a business.

Yeah, Yeah.

I mean, of course it has.

Sure.

Right.

I, I, I learned all the time, you know, I always say, hey, I, I've learned the most on this show and yeah, you know, and I've, the interviews are awesome because you get little tidbits of people. You know, we, we just, you know, last week talked to Paul Goodman from Pura Vita Bracelets and his comment at the end, I think that he said what he would have told himself, you know, if he could go back to when they were first getting started is, you know, not to be so serious. Yeah, don't take it, Don't Take it so serious.

And I was like, ah, Sergeant Hulk has been telling us that for years. Lighten up, Francis.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. That is, that is for sure. So. But yeah, so, you know, today we thought we would talk about some communication, some tools that, that we use. And one of the first and foremost ones that we both use is called Slack.

Yeah, I'd like to actually rewind a little bit because I think it'll put some perspective on, at least for me, on, on how we use Slack. Because, you know, at Mac observer and Backbeat Media, we have always, at various levels, been a virtual company. Right. Or virtual companies. Two separate companies. Joined it at the hip. If I'm the hip.

Joined at the Dave.

Joined at the Dave. Yeah, exactly. That's. See, there you go. So that's my new talking. I'm stealing that.

Y.

So, but, you know, so we had to have a way of communicating with each other. And obviously the phone was there. Right. You know, and we use the phone plenty, but because the VoIP communications 15, 16 years ago didn't really exist in a way that, you know, you could do. We couldn't do this. Right.

Sure.

Not easily. So I guess 17 years ago when we started TMO, but so we, we had to come up with something and we create. We started using AOL Instant messenger because it was it. Because it existed. And they let you create rooms and they weren't private rooms, but you could, but they weren't published either. So if, if you knew the name of the room, you could get in. And our room was called TMO Towers. Right. And then we had the. Yeah, and, and, and, and that was our room. And the staff would chat in there. And it worked really well. Other companies that, that we knew of at the time were using irc, which is Internet Relay Chat, which has been used for years and years and years and also works. It's a little geekier to kind of interact with, but it's fine and it works and it does this same sort of thing. But AOL Instant messenger was kind of weird and if you weren't logged in, you would miss messages and that sort of thing. So after a few years of that, we bounced over to Skype and we created a Skype group which does the same thing, except it can be private and you can sort of, you know, kind of keep the reins held down a little bit tighter. And we ran with Skype for a long time until Slack came along and somebody kind of convinced me, you should check this out. And so for Us, we've always had the electric water cooler. I call it where the digital water cooler where you're able to see everyone in this way. Is that true? Because I know we both use Slack in. Well, we have a shared Slack thing that we use for this show. But you obviously use it for other businesses too. Did it replace something similar?

Yeah, it's a similar story. Right. Where you're. Even though we were in the same building, we do lots of communicating with people outside as well. And we want to. Even across the room. Not only do you want to be able to ping somebody and have it waiting there when they get back to their desk and that kind of stuff, but beyond your walls as well. And we used a few different things. We also used AOL Instant messenger and you know, that worked out well. And there was also during a time a pretty long window. There was lots of our. One of your peers, I guess if you say and other business people, suppliers, customers, all on AOL Instant messenger. And you know, we would have this, you know, list of buddies. Right? Yeah, buddy list. And. And you'd be. And there's still a few people that I. That I connect with and you would buy and sell and you know, it kind of reminded me of. I don't know if you've ever been to a junkyard.

Yes.

They don't call them junkyards anymore. I think it's far more sophisticated.

Salvage lots or something.

Yeah, something. When, when. But when I was a kid.

It's a junkyard.

Yeah. When I was a kid and didn't have any money and you know we scranging parts to fix a car. I'm 16 or 17. You'd go into the junkyard and they would radio kind of blaring out information parts and this and that. And it was. Everybody was connected to this thing that was. I need this part. And it would go out to whoever had the, the radio on.

Yep.

And subscribe to some kind of channel. I guess. I imagine it came probably at that time probably came over telephone and that's kind of. AOL has done the same thing. And now I, I deal with lots of folks in, in Asia and they, they do it with, with WeChat or you know. And so it kind of came along and then, you know, like you, like you said, it started to get a little wonky. I used to forward everything to my phone. You know, if I wasn't there, AOL could forward it to your text and send you an sms. But after a while, once imessage came around, it kind of it would conflict with that.

Yeah.

So you'd wind up, some stuff would go to your phone, some stuff would go to your desktop and it became problematic.

Wow. So you stayed with AOL a lot longer than we did.

Yeah, a long time. Because it just worked.

Yeah, sure.

We've talked about before here, you know, if it works, you know, maybe you don't have to.

Yeah, it costs you a fortune. If not money, certainly in time. Just shifting everyone.

Yeah, yeah. To train. So. Yeah, and we use Skype as well. And I use Skype, you know, primarily for international folks that I chat with all the time. And then we tried using Asana and I think you and I might have used.

I've tried it, I've tried it. I failed to start using that with several different ventures.

Well, that's right. And to me there's this tools that use for your business. You know, there's this 30 day test. I always ask about people, oh, are you still using it? You know, somebody shows me this new app and oh, it changed my life. So I always check, oh, I'm going to set myself a reminder in next time I see you. Are you still using that? And more times than not it's like, no, I didn't, you know, I don't use that to do app. I don't use this, I don't use that. And Asana was kind of that way for me. After a while it was a bit complicated. And also the, the onboarding, if you weren't into it, if you didn't kind of have a geek tech type thing, it was really hard to onboard someone else to into a project. I found.

Yeah.

And so we stopped using Asana and then somebody mentioned Slack and we jumped into it and have been using it for maybe a year, maybe 18 months. And over time we've expanded what we do with it, what I do with it and we've brought more people on board. And so in a nutshell, I'll do what I describe Slack as and you can tell me what.

Yeah, yeah, no, I'm sure. Well, we may see it the same way, but maybe. Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

I mean it's number one, it's a communication tool. It's a, you know, it takes the place of something like instant messaging and imessage. You know, it's a chat, you have direct messages with your team. It's also has, you know, groups or you create channels and you can invite certain people to channels or you can leave them open for your team. And one of the most powerful things like for me is you can have as many different teams as you want and we do that. But you know, we have a team for the small business show that you and I communicate with. It also is incredibly open and connecting to just about anything is possible. And when, I mean anything like, you know, Google Drive, Dropbox, all that stuff. And like Evernote, if you drag and drop files up into Slack, you know, everything in the file becomes searchable and it's, it's phenomenal. It's, it's a life changer, I think it is.

So it's life changing for me, but, but in a different way. So I hear a lot of people talk about Slack and I hear a lot of people moan about it, but what I hear is people say, oh, Slack is going to replace interoffice email. And that's something that, that's a foreign concept to me because I've never used interoffice email. Right, right. I mean, you know, you just heard my history. We, I mean, the day we started the company, we started using AOL Instant messenger because it would be insane to have these like little snippets of conversation happening via email. And, and we've all had it where, you know, you get this forward re CC chain subject line going, you try to figure out where things are. It's just a disaster. So the fact that people are still like the fact that that's a sales pitch for Slack tells me that people have just had their eyes closed for a long time. I don't know. But so for me it wasn't. Slack replaces email. It's like, why can, why is it that I would want to switch from Skype, which worked nearly perfectly for us, to Slack? And for a while Skype was absolutely perfect for us. And the problem with Skype is that Skype sucks on mobile, you know, and they're working on this because they know it. But the problem is Skype's foundational technology is this peer to peer thing where it's a very, what they call what I call a thick client, meaning when you launch Skype on your desktop and most of the time, even when you launch it on your phone, although it's changing, it makes connections to like 30 other people. It's all peer to peer. That's how Skype started. Well, that doesn't work on mobile. You have battery problems. You can't have this always on thing. You know, it needs to be kind of a push pull sort of system that's not just connected full time and you know, you don't need your phone to be a Skype node, but that's what it was. It certainly at first it's getting better, but it's still kind of a battery hog and all that. So the real pull for me to convert us to Slack was the mobile experience. And I mean, you talked about Slack being a life changer for me and for us here at TMO and Backbeat, that was the big part was finally I don't have to feel like if I'm away from my desk, I'm forced to be disconnected from that. You know, there's times when it's okay to be disconnected from that, but you know, there's also times when it's like, no, I'd actually like to, you know, just poke something in and to the, you know, to the group chat and I would have to do it via email or you know, I'd text somebody or something. It's like, no, I want it all in one place. So for me it was the mobile experience and functionality of Slack and it even works well on the Apple Watch. I mean, it's just, you know, it's a modern platform that was built with these things in mind as opposed to Skype which was, you know, nobody was talking about smartphones when Skype came around, you know.

Right. Yeah. And that's, you know, mobile is, that's a critical thing for me. It's like this dashboard now and I will say that we hung on to email far, far too long and even because, oh, be out of the office, better send them an email, do this, do that. It's very troublesome and not, I mean it's disjointed and it's just a mess for this kind of communication and having this dashboard on your, your laptop, on your iPad or on your phone that allows you to jump back and forth and you know, it's not that like, you know, you made the comment of being connected and didn't even when you're away but you know, you can set do not disturb if you want there for certain hours. But it's, you can have everybody feeding into this central repository with files, with, you know, links with anything you can really think of. Yeah. And it's incredibly searchable, which is tremendously powerful and I, I highly recommend it. And I, I, to me it really will allows you to be anywhere and managing your communication with your, with your team, whether it's your employees, contractors, whatever.

I, I agree. The, the one thing and I, and I, I'm not eager to give up Slack at any time, you know, anytime soon, but What I miss is the openness that Skype has. So I still have to have Skype open because with, with Slack, I can invite people to my team if I pay for that team. And I've got some teams I pay for and some. Some that I don't. But I don't. I. Just because you're on Slack with your company doesn't mean that you and I can communicate on Slack.

Why not? Well, can't we. Why can't you invite me to any team that you've created and have a public channel?

Well, because if I invite you, if. Well, if I pay for Slack, then that's one of the paid features. Right. So if I pay for Slack, I can invite you to a specific public channel or group of public channels. But if you don't pay for Slack, then everyone that's on your team sees all public channels.

That's okay. Yeah, so everyone sees public channels, but you could create a private channel and only invite people and. Yeah, there's.

I mean, but only if you pay for it. Yeah.

No, yeah, you can create. I think maybe I'm wrong.

No, not a private channel because I've been through this. Okay. Yeah.

And if you create a private channel and invite others to join Bill at. Let me see. Sgnet. Yeah, I'm doing it right now. Okay.

Yeah, we can do it with our small business show channel. So this has happened in real time here, folks.

Yeah, we're doing it right now. So I'm going to ask my. That and we're going to create this channel and we're going to call it Test.

Private.

Private. Okay. Constricted to invited members. Yeah, I got that. Okay. So I've created the channel and. Okay. Invite others and I believe when I go here I'm going to have an invite. I don't see it yet. Where is this?

Yeah, see, we can't add people to our private channel that don't exist in our.

In your team. Yeah, but don't you think it would tell me that when I went to create that, when I entered that email, it did not give me any message about.

Oh, so I have a. I created a private channel in our small business show thing. Yeah, right. And I go to invite others to this private channel and then I can pick you and. Or I can start typing. But if I type in like an email address, there's nothing like it only shows me people that are in our organization.

Oh yeah, that's interesting. Invite a new person.

But I. Even without anyway inviting us in, like it. I, you know, with Skype. I was using Skype. We had our backbeat media room, we had our Mac observer room. But then I have just all of my Skype contacts. Right. My buddy, my, my sort of generic Skype buddy list and that doesn't exist in Slack and I, I grok why. Right. Slack is built for teams.

Yeah.

But it means that I have to then also have this other thing open to communicate with people that aren't on imessage. Right.

Yeah, same thing with. I have the same. I still have AOL Instant messenger open on my, on my laptop.

I finally got rid of that. I mean I sometimes open it but. But I finally was able to like let go of it. But it took a long time. Yeah, yeah.

I still have, you know, deals running on there and people asking for things and requests and I have Skype open as well. So we've got, you know, multiple, you know, things on there. It's, it's, it's interesting. I'm going to research this a little bit more because I, I just don't get why it would let me make that. And it's not the cost. I mean it's like, I think, you know, it's 675amonth for a team, per person, per user, if, if for the paid version. It does give you some other benefits as well.

It does. And my guess is, you know, Slack is the kind of the, the big hole currently in Slack is that it doesn't have audio or video chat. Right. I mean it can link to Google Hangouts and it can link to Skype.

Yeah.

But it doesn't happen. It, and it's, it's not a, it's not the best link, let's say. But Slack purchased, and I can't remember the name of the company, but they purchased a company that, that does audio and video chat and they say that audio chat is coming like it's imminent and yeah, sure, video chat, it will be later this year. So I'm, Yeah, I'm curious to see how that works. My guess is the, the implementation will be good. I'm curious about the pricing. You know, is our audio and video chat going to be premium only features? Right. You know, because it feels like it could be. Right. You know. Yeah. So, but I'm eager to see that because we do, you know, video calls with both companies every day of the week and it would be nice to just have that in, in Slack.

So, so, so let's talk about that. The video calls.

So.

And I imagine you're, you're trying to just Connect and see how everybody's doing or specific things that you want to see everybody's face to, you know, make that connection, that human part of it. Every day.

It's. Yeah, it started as just audio calls. In fact, the video part of it is something we only started doing very recently, in the last year, maybe year and a half. But we do an audio call with both companies every day just to sync up the team. It. You know, they might be short. Sometimes they're five minutes and sometimes they're an hour. Right?

Yeah.

You know, but we're all sort of mindful of the fact that, you know, there's. There might be five or six people on the call. And so, you know, don't waste everybody's time, that kind of thing. Right. It's like a meeting, you know, but it's this daily sort of war room kind of. Let's just, you know, kick off the day and here we go. And it works really well. The video aspect definitely adds that human element, although we'd all become very comfortable with just the audio element, too. But the video thing keeps you more engaged and all of that. But, yeah, it's just to sync everybody up, just to kind of remind us all that we're not alone in our little caves.

Yeah, that's great. I like that. I think it's important.

Oh, yeah, yeah. You know, there are a lot of benefits to running a virtual company, and there are some really perilous pitfalls as well that you and people. Employees feeling like they are alone. Team members, whether they're employees or contractors, whatever. But, you know, making them feel like they have an office that they can come into every day.

That's nice.

You have to. I think. Yeah, I have.

I have a guy that we've recently brought on for our educational sales, and I just sent him a message in Slack. Hey, we need to do a video call tomorrow.

Yeah.

You know, to touc base. Because especially on. On a job like that where they're making cold calls, it can get. They call them cold calls for a reason because it can be, you know, rough and, you know, after you get, you know, told no. 50 times or so over a few days, it's good to touch base with home and. And get some. Get some reinforcement.

Yeah. Smiling face is not a bad thing. Yeah. Just somebody to vent to.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

So our meetings become that. Especially with Backbeat, where it's, you know, sales is what we do. So a lot of times it's. No. Okay, we'll strategize about. Okay, you Know, we should go after this type of client or look, this property has some openings. Let's do this. You know, but other times it's just, you know, dad, stupid guy that I talked to yesterday, he doesn't know, you know, it's like I just let it out, man, because you can't tell the stupid guy that. No, no, no, that's right, you know, so tell me. And we tell each other and we share our war stories and then, you know, and then we got smiles on our faces and we're off for our day.

Yeah, that's very cool. I think that's. That's an important thing. And, you know, it's all about communication, you know, especially when things are challenging. It's, you know, it's human nature to kind of want to shut down and like, I don't want to go talk. I need to. I'm just going to close my door, put my head down and figure this out. But what I found, and it's still difficult for me, and I have to remind myself is that, you know, get away from your desk, open the door, walk around, you know, and make sure everybody sees. Make sure at the end of the day you're saying goodnight to everybody. Make sure you walk around saying good morning. And it helps me get out of my head when I, you know. You know, you got to solve problems, but everybody needs to connect, you know, each day.

Yeah, really important. Yeah, it's important. You just. It's good. I mean, you know, otherwise you're just on your own. So.

Yeah, and it's easy to miss, but anything else about Slack that you think we should talk about?

I don't think so. I mean, I think we've covered it, but I'd love to hear. I'd love to hear how other people are using it because, you know, the. The integration can make or break your Slack experience, and maybe not make or break, but it certainly can enhance it in ways. And for a long time, we weren't using Dropbox with ours in the right way. And then just sort of the light turned on and, you know, I was just. As we were doing the show, I'm thinking, and I know that my band members won't go for it, but we're doing a recording project where we're recording a bunch of songs and we're passing a lot of files back and forth and talking about these songs, and it's these really long email trails that happen. And it's like, wait a minute. What if we had a Slack group for the band and we had a separate channel for each song that we're recording. That's awesome, right? Because, you know, I might have an idea about this song, and Russ might have an idea about that song. And now our email trail gets this really convoluted thing, whereas I could just say, nope, I want to go to the thing about, you know, Jagged Edges. And now all I see is the discussion about that song, you know, and the files. And if somebody's recorded a little snippet at home that they want to incorporate into the project, boom, you put it right there. That's. That's where Slack gets really beneficial, is, you know, you. You have to use it. You have to be smart about it because you, you know, it allows you to compartmentalize.

So you.

You have to learn what compartments make sense for your business and what would be, you know, totally overkill.

So, yeah, you can, you know, one of the things that you can do is restrict who gets to make channels. And so that often helps, I think, because then you can talk about it. It's like, hey, we need a channel for this. And you go, okay, do we really need a channel for that? Or, you know, a separate group? Can we do it in the general channel? You know, to keep yourself from, you know, just building up channel after channel after channel and. And making sure everybody keeps notified when someone types in there and, you know, they get an update.

Yeah, yeah.

So let me ask you a quick question before we go. What was the. The Dropbox issue that you had that allowed you. Because we use Dropbox with it, too, and that you changed it, that made it much more useful for you, do you remember?

Well, it was more just use. You know, Slack is unclear about things it'll say, like with Google Docs and with Dropbox, when you drag a file in, it asks you, do you want me to pull this into Slack or not? And it's not clear what that means. And so I had always resisted. No, I don't want two copies of the same document.

Yeah, right.

That's like, you know, you cannot do that because it's just. It's like database design, right? You don't store the same data in two separate fields, because if you change it in one place, you're going to forget to change it in another, and you're doomed. So I always said no. And what I realized was, oh, wait a minute. This is a live link is what it's doing. It's not actually storing a copy. But I get why they use that terminology, because if they didn't, people would be people wouldn't understand what they were saying. But unfortunately for me, being a database guy, I was thinking I was overthinking it. I thought they were actually, you know, we were forking this particular document, but we're not. It's a live link, and when you store it in Slack, what it does is it indexes it so any of the contents can be searched and all of that stuff. So it was just kind of letting Slack do what Slack does. That's all it was.

And then when you click on that link, it opens up the document and it's still. It's always going to be updated to the. To the latest version of the late.

Yeah, it's not. You're not opening it in Slack. You're opening it from Slack.

From Slack. I got it.

And that. That was the thing that was sort of lost on me at first. It was like, whoa, you know, no way. I don't want. You know, the whole point with the whole reason we use Google Drive or Dropbox is to maintain one copy.

Yes.

You know, otherwise.

Of course.

Otherwise we're back to the email thing where we're passing around a Word document. It's like, holy crap. You know?

Yeah, that's a nightmare.

I just rewound 20 years.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. Okay, that's cool.

Yeah.

Awesome.

Yeah. So. So there you go. So there's your Slack tip, right? Yeah, that's.

I like it.

Yeah, it's important. Yeah, it's an important thing to know because. Because if you came to Slack to avoid that, you know, heaven forbid you think Slack's going to drag you back there. It's not. It's. It's actually much better than that. So. Yeah, always click yes. Let it. Let it flow in. It'. Very cool.

Yeah, that's good. That's awesome. Well, yeah, and like you said, I would love to hear how folks are using Slack and what they've found that works great or what they don't like about it. And, you know, feedbackusinessshow.co is the best way to get a hold of us.

Yeah. Yeah, that's great. Absolutely.

Good stuff today, man.

It has been a pleasure. I love talking about this stuff.

Yeah, me too.

Because it's how we go, right? It's how we do it, folks. Go ahead.

Yeah, no, I was just gonna say enjoy the rest of your week.

Thanks. Yep. There you go.

Got it.

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