What Have We Learned in 500 Episodes?

Business Brain Episode 500 for Casual Friday, November 10, 2023 Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, the show where we get together, we bring up a topic or three. Some of them you send in to us at feedbackusinessbrain show. Some of them we come up with, we analyze the topic or topics, we crunch through them together, we tune our collective business brains so that we can each keep on living that charmed life. Sponsors for this episode include shopify.com, businessbrain. That's where you get to go and sign up for your $1 per month trial of my favorite way to sell merch and all that stuff online. And also miro.com podcast where you can go and. And your first three Miro boards are free forever when you sign up. We'll talk more in depth about each of those in a minute. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And in Lafayette, California, I'm Shannon Jean. Happy 500.

Happy 500, man. Yeah. That's no small feat to have the bullheaded persistence to get to 500.

Yeah, exactly.

And then we're, you know, we've figured a lot of things out along the way and we're going to talk about some of those things here. But, you know, there were periods where we were not. We were getting something out of having a conversation with each other every week. We knew that many of you were listening, but we weren't getting a lot of engagement from you. That has changed, but it's changed because of things we learned. And we'll talk a little bit about that. But where I wanted to start today, Shannon, is I started looking at the first few episodes. So episodes one and two never saw the light of day. I know that I have them archived somewhere here, but they were just.

I didn't know what I was doing and I needed some practice.

We needed practice together, right? Yeah, exactly. And. And so we just, instead of practicing without any structure, we practiced with structure by recording episodes. And it was just like, we'll just get to where we're comfortable enough with what we've just done, and then we'll release that. And. And so episode three was the. The first episode that was released. Now, up until moments ago, there was a mistake there. No great surprise because episode three was marked as episode four. So was episode four. So that's changed. Now they're all episode three, which is great. But I was looking and there's an interesting thing that happened episode. I want to make sure I have this right. Episode four, one of the things we Talked about in that episode was sacred Cows. The idea that there are things that you learn in your business and then things change. But if you hold on to what you know to be true, which really is what you know to have been true, you might miss that things have changed. And that's an important lesson in and of itself. But what's really fascinating is if I then look ahead two episodes from there. So from episode four all the way fast forwarded to episode six just two weeks later, I see that we were talking about taking credit cards with your business.

Yep, that's right.

And we mentioned a company that we've mentioned several times on the show, authorizenet. And if you were to ask me about Authorized Net today or if you were to listen back even four years ago, you would hear me ranting about how Authorized Net are a bunch of criminals and they try to steal your money and they don't treat you well and they, at least as of a couple years ago, this also may have changed. Right. Like I have not looked into authorized. Net since about four years ago because they really, really tried to screw me. And thankfully I was able to get out of my, my deal with them. But they were, you know, just beating us up on fees and not being upfront about it and not being honest about it and all that stuff. And, and we've left them and you know, now we use Stripe or PayPal or whatever and the fees are still high, but not anything. At least we know what they are and they're nothing like what, what, what Authorized Net is. Here's what I wrote on March 18, 2015 in episode six, Authorized Net, Great Merchant provider for small and medium businesses. If PayPal won't work for your business. I was bullish on authorized net in 2015, but also in probably 2003 when I started using them. We used them for over a decade and they were the only company that would do merchant processing for, for Internet based businesses way back in.

We used them. We used them as well.

Yeah. And so I loved them because they opened up a door for me. But then they didn't change. When the market changed and other options showed up, they got greedy. Their old model was really nice for them, but once you have some competition, you got to open up your eyes a little bit and look at what's around you and maybe that's happened again. Like I said, I haven't looked at authorized. Net because they, well, they pissed me off. But you know.

Yeah. And then PayPal came around and changed that whole thing up as well. And they didn't, maybe authorized.net didn't change. And then PayPal became, you know, awesome enabler for small businesses and everything else. But then they've kind of corporatized themselves over the years too. And I give a similar rant and have had run ins with them where they've arbitrarily decided to keep your funds or say, well, we're going to keep it for 180 days. And you know, when you're a small business that is, you know, you live and die by your, your cash flow. It's, it's tough. And so I'm glad to see other companies come along like Stripe.

Yeah.

And other processors. And you know, I always mention this to people.

Don't, don't get like those might change too.

Yes, yes, I guarantee you they will.

And like, like I'm saying now, like I, I had a fury for authorized. Net but if they were the right processor for me to use now, I would use them. You gotta let that stuff go. And I think that, you know, that's one of the lessons I've learned doing this show.

Yeah, yeah.

And sorry, adapting.

Yeah, no, no, you have to keep adapting because nothing stays the same even. And that's where you started this conversation as everything changes. And you know, I'd love to do the rest of this show just about the stuff we've learned by, you know, doing 500 episodes over eight years. I think it would be valuable to share.

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Ah.

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I do. I have a few persistence. There's been many times where, you know, I'm a huge feedback systems guy where I want to do something and then look and see how did that work and what's can we Do AB testing in this. And my. I love doing this show every week. And that's what's kept me involved and engaged and why I'm still here after 500 episodes. But the podcast has been one of the more difficult things to, you know, get those results. And one of the, you know, we kept going, kept tweaking things, trying new things, and I'm really happy that now we get. Our engagement is, you know, so much higher, exponentially than it used to be. I'm happy with trying new things, doing the show twice a week for smaller chunks of data that are probably easier to absorb, people that are running around. So being persistent, trying new things, critically important.

Yeah, well, yeah. Persistence is key, Right? Yeah. I have found there are a lot of parts about running a business, and especially the way I am predisposed to run a business, that keep me in the trenches more than is probably good for the business. Right. Because we talk about working in your business versus working on your business. And there have been long stretches of time where doing this show was the one thing each week that sort of pulled me out of the trenches and into working on your business mode. Even just the mindset of it, you know, even if we weren't talking about my businesses specifically or even in general, or even something that would relate to them, just the idea of saying, no, let's talk about what it's like to run a business. And sometimes that's just venting a little bit. Other times it's being productive about other things. But I have to say that these have been, you know, these last, what, almost nine years have been some of the most productive and lucrative of my career. And I really believe this show is. Is no small part of that. I think it's, you know, just forcing myself to take that moment back every week on a regular basis. Yeah.

So I love that and I thank you, by the way. Yeah. Oh, yeah, of course. Thank you, too. Same. It's the. Another takeaway of that is we. When we've done episodes about this is, every business should have something like this, where you stop for half an hour, 45 minutes an hour a week and talk about the problems and the issues that you're facing. Because that's really what we've done here. I mean, that's how I get my topics. What am I facing? What problems am I dealing with? Oh, let's talk about that. And I mean, it's. It all starts just with those kinds of things. You can do the same thing. And I highly recommend it because, like Dave said, it Gets you out of your business, allows you to talk and whether you're sitting across the table, you know, talking to someone. But you know, we usually pick a few topics and try to, you know, dive into those things. It's super helpful to get other feedback. And if you're lucky, you know, especially now, we talked about AI in the Wednesday episode. You can get that, transcribe. There's a great app called Guru that'll listen to your meetings and create action items and do all that kind of stuff automatically so you don't have to worry about writing anything down. Try it, get out and talk about it and sit and it might be the most productive half hour, 45 minutes that you've ever had.

Yeah, just force yourself to do it. I think it's great and it's been great for us and you know, engaging with all of you has been a big part of that because it, you know, we're a community here. We, we're here for each other. Just, you know, we say, you know, send in your stuff to feedback at BusinessBrain show and of course we want you to, but it, it, it really is a two way conversation. Like we're, we're all here for each other and I've worked with several of you out there on things for my businesses too. Like, it's. Yeah, yeah, very.

The connections. Collaboration, yeah. And the connections have been invaluable. And you know, people want to engage with your business in all different ways. Like I think, you know, people want to engage with Dave and I, and you might be surprised if you started the podcast and posted up on your website, had your employees talk. It's just a great way to do it. You know, it's funny, when I talk about this podcast business to other business owners or other people that are in the podcasting business, the number one question I get, how do you get sponsors? The number one thing. Yeah, and I, and I would thank Backbeat Media, your other business, Dave, for bringing those sponsors in. And I love when we have, and all of the sponsors that we've had, I think are very useful to our listeners and that's what I think is great. Like, you know, Miro and Shopify this week. Those are, you know, apps and services that you can put right to use and I love having them here. I think they're great partners. It really is worth it.

I agree, I agree. Yeah, it's, it's been fantastic. So, yeah, thank you folks. But really, you know, thank you all for listening, for engaging with the show. Because as Shannon said, Earlier. That's the fuel that keeps us interested. Certainly it. The money we get from sponsors, the money we get from selling our courses, which we will be selling. You know this. That's right. We haven't had a sale yet, but it's going to happen. We're going to figure it out and we're going to get it out there. It's going to be. It's going to happen. You could be the first sale, folks, but you don't have to be, but you could be. All of that stuff is great, but really the thing that is the foundation of it is the engagement with all of you. So thank you for that and thanks for 500. Yeah, here we go.

Yeah. Yeah. And reach out. And we really want to hear from you. If you've never sent us an email to feedbackusinessbrain show, now is the time. 500 episodes. Let us know what you think, what you. What you love about it, what, you know, what, what we could do to make it better. And today's the last day for you to send in an entry to win that MacBook Air that we're giving away.

Okay. I was going to say, are we. Are we doing the. Are we doing the drawing live here on the show or are we going to do it and then we'll announce it on 501? So we'll announce it on 501.

Yeah, let's. Let's do it and we'll. We'll announce it on 501. All right, folks, this last Friday to. To get their question stuff comments in.

Absolutely. All right.

But thank you, Dave. Happy 500.

Thank you, Shannon. Happy 500. Thanks. Seriously, thank you. And thank everybody out there like, this is. It's been great. So here's the next 500 for sure. You know, now we're moving at twice the pace we were too. It's great. We're cranking, man. We're going to beat my other show that's 18 years old. We just hit a thousand. So, you know, that's amazing. I know. It's crazy. Thanks for hanging out with us folks today and for the last almost nine years. Thanks for supporting our sponsors. Miro.com podcast shopify.com businessbrain and thanks for sending in your stuff to feedbackusinessbrain. Cho, keep living that charmed life. Have a great weekend. See you next week.