Why You Should Be Using Loom

Business brain, episode 547 for Casual Wednesday. No Causal Wednesday, May 8th. National Coconut Cream Pie Day 2024. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, the show where we take a few ideas, we crunch them, we're. We dissect them, we use them to analyze and tune our collective business brains together here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm.

Dave Hamilton and out here in sunny California, finally, I'm Shannon Jean.

Yeah, it's sunny here today too. It's good. We're in the mid-70s. I noticed you, you scowled a little bit at coconut cream pie. That's not your thing, is it?

No, I can't handle coconut.

Got it, got it.

The cream, the pie, great. But no coconut for me.

So I mentioned. I started doing this intention where at the beginning of every podcast episode that I do now, be it this show, Giggab Mac Geek Gab. I talk about whatever the national day of the day is. Yeah, yeah, it's a thing. And it. It has led to some conversations in this show, certainly. We had a. You know, when it was like tax, like report tax offender day or whatever, we wound up talking about.

That scared me.

I recorded this week an episode of Gig Gab that's coming out on Monday, actually, with a guy named Robert Scoville. He is like the front of house sound engineer for that everybody in the industry wants. Right now he's on tour doing stadiums with Kenny Chesney. Right. I mean, he's done Prince and Tom Petty and all these people. Nice, great conversation. Super articulate guy. Like, I was. I was definitely. I went into this a little apprehensive. Like, am I going to be able to hang with this guy for. You know, we had a great. It was great. It was awesome. Oh, that's really great guy. But it. His episode comes out on National Cherry National Apple Pie Day, and that I can handle well. And he said, you know, I. He immediately caught onto it and he was like, well, I hope it's okay that I'm more of a cherry pie guy than an apple pie guy. And I was like, of course, you know, whatever. We had a little conversation about it and we went on and. And then I thought, well, wait a minute, you know, this is a. This is somebody I've just met. Like, literally, we do these shows with. Some of these people were like, we get to know each other during the recording, as we do with a lot of stuff, which is cool. And I thought this morning, I'm like, well, wait a minute. When is National Cherry Pie Day? And I went and looked it up and it's February 25th of next year or something. And so I put it on my calendar and I'm like, make sure to text Robert on the 25th. Right.

Very good.

Why not?

Yeah, that's great.

What a nice little thing that I can do. And we keep in touch and like, all these things. Yep.

Yeah.

Those little.

Little things that you remember and reach out to people and stuff. That's powerful.

It is. It is powerful. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's definitely powerful.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So anyway, I share that because it's the, the. That practice is a good thing to just keep in mind. And I say it as much for myself as anybody else. I'm not great at remembering these kinds. To even think about these kinds of things. And so I figured talking.

It is good. Good. Yeah, it is.

Yeah.

That's cool. So I'm coming off of. So I do this fundraiser once a year for a cause I near and dear to my heart, all about conservation, conserving wetlands.

Okay.

Where I'm a. I'm a hunter, so I like to hunt waterfowl. And we don't have enough wetlands for them. So this fundraiser.

Sure.

Basically for an organization called Ducks Unlimited. They use the money to buy land preserve, that kind of stuff. That's great. So. And, you know, I think we. We raised about $92,000 on Saturday night.

Congrats. That's awesome.

Yeah, it's great. Yeah, it's good. And I've been doing it. It's my 10th, 10th or 11th year, and it's a lot of work leading up to that. We have a great group of people, volunteers that do it. And the thing I've realized or that, you know, when I joined and I was recruited, I introduced a bunch of, I would say, best practices stuff I've done for my businesses over the years and allowed us to scale up to a much higher level. And now we have a whole new generation of people coming in that we're recruiting to delegate and help take over stuff. And I see the same thing happening. So we have a young guy who's an engineer who's just, you know, spreadsheeting every aspect of the event and comparing, you know, what perform, what game performs the best, what, what guns get the best. Because we, you know, it's a. It's a hunting type conservation thing. So we do that. What. What products sell the best at during the auction, all this stuff. And it just got me thinking that, you know, the business people are very. Are usually the busiest people, but they're often the best to recruit to help you with these types of events. Yes. They bring a whole nother skill set. And, um, we have other volunteers that are awesome, but they just don't think that way. And it's. We need all kinds of manpower, which is great. And they have great personalities and they connect with the people and that's their, that's what they bring. Just like the sales and marketing team. Right?

Yeah, right.

They're out there talking, so it's very, very important. But the back end logistics part, that business experience, and maybe it's not even business, could be just your logistical experience. Maybe you had working for somebody else. But it's crucial for success. And I see it more and more and it's allowing me to give up. You know, we talked about that 80 or 75 or 80% rule.

Yeah.

Oh, man, I'm totally right there. I'm just like, you, yeah, do it. Go ahead. You do the newsletter and you, you can handle this part. And, you know, I'll take this part on. But giving up more and more has freed me up to enjoy the event more and more because I'm not just buried in it for, you know, a month or two before.

Yeah, right. Well. And what you're saying here is very much the epitome or a prime example of using our business brains, right. And tuning our business brains. It's like we think about things because we actively do this regularly. It. It causes us to approach everything with a business brain in all aspects of our lives. And that really can help level things up. It can be to our detriment sometimes if it's supposed to be just an enjoyable thing. And it's like, well, hey, you know, I was, I was talking about that with, with Scoville on, on Gigab. He's a sound engineer and he and his wife like to go to see theater shows. And she will tell him, don't say anything to me about the sound. I want to watch the story. It's like, I've had this problem. I get that.

I've had this problem too. Like when I joined, I'm like, okay, we're raising 30 grand next year. How do we get 20% more and then 20% more? And for a while, I was really driven by the numbers. But then, you know, you have up and down years. And in this case, I, I always remind, I was reminding myself because this year was a bit of a struggle.

Okay.

And I, I was reminding the team. I said, hey, anything over zero that we bring in is a positive.

Oh, that's Fair.

Yes. It's not our business. We're not paying our bills with it. Yeah. We're here volunteering. So you're right about not getting so focused from a business level.

Yes.

That you don't enjoy it as much.

Yes. Yeah. You just got to. You got to temper it and apply it.

Yeah.

Be thoughtful about when and how we apply our business brains, but yeah. Yes, absolutely.

Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. If you're involved in anything like that, let us know. Feedback at BusinessBrain show. I'd be interested in your take on, you know, the most effective way to run an organization like that.

Yeah, absolutely. Very cool.

Definitely.

Hey, back in episode 537, we wound up talking about Loom and I shared how Dallas Taylor, who I had interviewed on giggab, used Loom to buy back his time by. By. By creating essentially training videos for his staff, showing them. Here's how I do a thing. Now, you can refer to this anytime you want because it's now your job to do that thing, whatever it is.

Powerful.

Yeah, super powerful. We got a note from Todd, says to follow up on that discussion. Slack also has the capability to record your screen with a live thumbnail of you in the lower right corner. Interesting. Okay, good to know. I love this. And then he says, on the Mac, the cleanshot app has a ton of features, one of which is also recording your screen with a live thumbnail. Great developer, great updates coming very often with YouTube videos highlighting new features. So they're using. I'm sure he's using cleanshot to teach you how to use Clean Shot. Why wouldn't he? Yep. So I'll put those links in the show notes.

Yeah, do it.

But the thing I. I brought it up because I. Because you were talking about Loom pre show.

Yeah, yeah. I. The thing I love about Loom is, you know, you get the video and everything, but it does a transcript along the side as it creates it. When you share that link, people can comment, ask questions right in there and you can get this asynchronous dialogue going. If you're trying to describe something to somebod, you can edit the basically via the transcript, which is really powerful.

Yeah.

And I think you can. That a good example how I use it just before the show. So I have a guy that reached out and said, hey, I want you to come on my podcast, talk about your business experience.

Amazing, yada. Yeah.

And he. Yeah, and he's super analytical, super smart guy, very successful. So he sends me like this pre interview questionnaire and it's you know, two or three. Two or three pages in a Google Doc. And I'm thinking, I'm not typing answers to this. I mean, it's just not the best use of my time.

Sure, sure.

And, and so I told them, I said, hey, I'll just record a loom video a loom. And I'll just go over the questionnaire and I'll talk my answers out. Because it's going to create a transcript if you need it in writing.

Yeah, you can, right? You can paste it in wherever you want. Yep.

Yeah. So what. What would have taken me 45 minutes to break out? I was able to just walk through, scroll through his, answer his questions, give, you know, feedback like, well, that question's not applicable here. This is different. And, and gives a lot of nuance to it that I wouldn't want to. It would take me a long time to type out. And then I just sent him the link. Well, here you go.

This is brilliant. No, because like loom in and of itself, like the whole idea, like Dallas explained, you know, using it to train and buy back your time. Brilliant use case of it. I never thought about using it to reply. Changing the medium. Right. Which is exactly what you did. You went from a written medium, which is very. Allows you to be articulate but can be cold. Right.

To time time consuming. Yep.

And potentially time consuming. It depends on how you work. But I know you. And so for you, like looming, it is way more efficient than writing it. And I would be the same way. And I think a lot of us would be the same way. But what I like about this is you showed him your personality.

Yeah, that's right.

Right.

I liked it too.

And, and this may not have been intentional, but. But I'm thinking about places where I would definitely do this intentionally now that you've kind of opened my eyes to it. Because there's times where you get a note and it's like somebody's like, well, can you explain why this is or why that is? Like, you know, I've mentioned we're. We're selling this other company and there's a lot of back and forth. They're asking a lot of questions, which absolutely makes sense. And it gets cold with the. Just the back and forth. Cause it's becomes this very. Like, everybody wants to be as efficient as they can be. And so we're just typing and yada yada, and it's like, wait, we forget that we're humans. And so using something like loom or something like it to sort of be that, hey, I thought this one would be easier to answer if I just talked it out. And now you're getting me with my hands moving like a maniac and my inflection and you can see the things I'm excited about and you can see the things where I'm like, yeah, you know, you're asking this question that's not really relevant as opposed to just putting n a right. Like that was the thing as you were describing it. It was like, wait a minute, this is so much better because now you get to hear a little bit from me about, well, this isn't relevant because of the way this business runs and okay, we'll move on and you can apply this. That's the nuance.

Yeah, yeah, there's. I have a colleague up on X that uses it to do website roasts. He's a, you know, it's a web hosting and design company and so he gets on there and walks through websites and say, oh, here's this, here's that. You know, there's just so many uses. I love the SOP use case that you mentioned up front.

Yep.

And just going over like, here, look, this is what I want done, this is why and this is how I do it. And it even back to like, I'm talking about this fundraising thing. One of the biggest time consuming things that I do is handle the ticket sales online, the pay the payments, the whole thing. Yards. Well, I gotta, I have to teach somebody to do that if I'm going to step away and I want to replace myself.

Right.

It's just like, just like business. So I'm going to walk through, do the whole loom thing. Like, look, this is how I do it. This is how you set up stripe. This is how you do this, this is how you do that. And yeah, I think it's great. And I think that there's a lot more uses for a screen recording product than we're thinking of.

Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I agree.

Yeah. So if, you know, if you've used Loom or Slack or whatever to make these kinds of recording, what are we missing on the ways that you're using it? Reach out. Feedbackusbrain show. We'd love to hear it.

Yeah, like he said, feedbackusinessbrain show there and yeah, let us know. We love to, we love. If you can't tell, first of all, I don't know how this would be possible, but if you can't tell, we love digging into this stuff. We love hearing from you. Feedback at BusinessBrain. Show and stick around. Play the next episode if you're listening on Wednesday or Thursday it'll come out on Friday. If it's already past Friday, Just play the next episode and we'll see you on Friday. And keep living that charmed life.