MBA871 How Travel Can Improve Your Business

Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks.

When I was starting out my business.

I remember sitting at my desk late at night, not working on my business, but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life. But once I automated the admin side of things, of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with Intuit QuickBooks. QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts. So doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform. Ready to save on new tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more.

PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite.

Of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade.

Your whole setup with amazing savings.

Visit Dell.com deals.

Hey oh. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show the business lessons you need to build the business you want. With our deep dive lessons. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar MBA and webinar Ninja. And in today's lesson you will learn how travel can improve your business and make you a better entrepreneur. Now I'm not talking about traveling for business or traveling locally within your country. I'm talking about foreign travel. Traveling to new cultures, new countries, places outside your comfort zone. This is incredibly beneficial and I'm going to tell you why you should do this and try to incorporate travel as much as you can. I recommend at least taking one trip a year if you can, to a new place, a new culture. Now you might be asking why? Why is this important? For most businesses you are global. You are able to serve customers across the globe. And even if you have a local mom and pop, a small shop on a corner in a physical location, you're going to meet people from around the world that are going to come and visit you. We live in a small world right now and you need to understand the world. The better you understand the world you're trying to impact, the better entrepreneur you're going to be. There are so many life skills as well as business skills. You're going to learn simply by traveling to different countries. You're going to get ideas how to improve your products, how to improve your services, how to be more efficient, how to cater to a global economy. You're going to understand human psychology a whole lot better. And that's what sales is all about, understanding human behavior, understanding what makes people tick, what makes people buy, how to fulfill people's needs and wants. And these are lessons that are hard to learn in your own atmosphere, in your own little environment. Even if you live in a cosmopolitan area, even if you live in a city like New York or San Francisco, which is quite diverse, right? People acclimate to that culture, to the Californian culture, to the Bay Area culture, to the New York City culture. They acclimate to that mindset. It has a sense of pace and speed that you have to keep up with. And everybody's kind of singing from the same song. She in that way, even if you're dealing with different cultures, they're still New Yorkers or, you know, residents of Miami or whatever it is. When you venture out and go to a completely different culture, you're the outsider and you need to acclimate. You need to learn how people think, how people understand things, what they value, what their fears are. All these things are great lessons to build a great product and to build a business around. I'm going to give you my personal tips to how to choose great destinations to travel to and the mindset you need to have when you're going to these places. Also, how to prepare as well as what if you just can't do it right now? What if you can't travel this year for some reason? What are some alternatives that you can do that can give you the same or similar perspectives as if you were to travel? If you want to make your mark on the world, you got to get to know the world. And that's what we're going to be talking about in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. The first thing I want to say about traveling abroad and, you know, broadening your horizons or broadening your perspective and building a great base to being a great entrepreneur so you can cater to the world, is you don't have to grow, go on this round the world trip in one shot. You don't have to do this. You can do this over different periods of time, small breaks. Now, if you live in Europe, let's say, for example, you live in the uk, it doesn't have to be long. It could be a week. It can even be a few days, like four or five days. You can be part of a completely different culture. You can go to Spain, you can go to Italy, you can go to Greece, you can go to Turkey. All these are very diverse and very different from each other, and it won't cost you an arm and a leg. Now, if you live in the States, then it's a little bit more of a hike, right? So I probably recommend you take at least two weeks so you can really enjoy it. But two weeks out of the year, if you run your own business is not so hard. And if you run an online business or you run your business remotely and you have managers in place, this is not such a stretch. You can continue to work, you know, maybe for an hour or two in the morning when you go abroad. So just understand this is not like shutting down your business for two weeks. You can continue to do business and, you know, but just, you know, throttle it back a little bit and you could focus on a country or a country or two in those two weeks, then plan your next trip. Maybe it could be next year, it could be six months from now. Whatever. The point is, is that you don't have to put the pressure on yourself to see everything in one go. I've been blessed enough, I've been fortunate enough. I really feel lucky that I've had the chance to travel and see countries, but I haven't seen everything. And when I did see the countries I saw, there were short stints, some were longer. You know, I spent a month in Spain twice, and that really gave me a chance to understand their culture, understand the history of Spain, understand how their history influences our modern society and the way we think today. And before you start thinking, what does this have to do with business? It has everything to do with business. Why? Because these people that you're visiting, the Spanish, the French, the Germans, the Thai people, the Chinese people, whatever you go, these people are your customers. Even if you only cater to a local community, there is going to be Chinese immigrants in your community, there's going to be Indian immigrants in your community. And even if they're first generation, they're born in their country, they still have the cultural influences from their parents. So when you're going to visit these countries, you're basically doing research on the human psychology on the culture of these people so you can understand how to best serve them. It's very dangerous to think that everybody thinks the same. And I say dangerous because it's bad for your business. Different cultures, different people, value different things more than other things. Now, I'm not talking about personalities or traits. I'm talking about the way they view the world. Some cultures don't really like to rush. For example, I spent some time in Dubai, which is a very traditional Bedouin Arab culture, very different from other Arabs like Egyptians or Jordanians, which they live in a little bit more of a modern culture. And yes, Dubai is a modern city, but culturally, they're very traditional. They want to take their time. They want to get to know you before they do business. So if you're trying to lock up a client from Dubai, you can't do business the same way when with them as you would do with somebody who is a native New Yorker. Time is not money for them. In fact, they use time to make money. They want to do business with people they trust, and trust is a huge value for them. So if you neglect that, they're not going to want to do business with you. So again, we're going to circle back. Travel is important for these reasons. You need to understand human behavior, understand different cultures, different ways of life, different filters of the world. This also applies the way you communicate your products and services, their benefits to different types of cultures and people. So, so, all right, so you're gonna pencil in maybe two weeks out of the year to see a new culture. Now, I highly encourage you go to somewhere with a new language, new culture, something that's gonna put you out of your element somewhere. He's gonna force you to learn some phrases and get to know the people a little bit. I recently discovered Rick Steves. Now, this guy is amazing. I love Rick Steves. He runs a YouTube channel and a whole business on travel, and he focuses on Europe, but he has other destinations as well. You. Now, Rick is a wholesome and traditional travel expert. I would probably equate him to the opposite of Anthony Bourdain. But the point is, is that, you know, I love watching his channel because he really shows you how to embrace new cultures, how to interact with new people, how to enjoy and appreciate their history. Like if you go to a museum in Italy, for example, there's so much to appreciate and apply to your own business. Look at the art, look at the craftsmanship. How did that art and those movements influence your aesthetics today when it comes to designing your website, you can get motivation through the resilience of these artists. That took you years and years, decades, centuries sometimes, to build a structure. Point is that Rick Steves is a great resource for you to get prepared and get into the mindset of appreciating people's cultures. I want you to ask yourself, how can I take what I learned from this experience, improve my business when I go to Morocco and break bread with Moroccans? Well, what did I learn? What did I learn from that experience? And how could that improve me as an entrepreneur and a business owner? And it's not specific to how am I going to deal with Moroccans in my business, but more about how do I actually work with different types of people? And one of the ways to make sure that you are getting takeaways, that you are learning throughout the process of travel is to journal. I highly recommend you get a journal, a notebook and journal throughout your trip, even if it's just a week or even five days. Even. Even if you just take five to ten minutes every day or every other day and write what you experience, even if you just document, today we did this. This is what I learned. This is what I experienced. If you want to take it a step further, when I go home, this is how I want to apply what I've learned. So it's simply just answering three questions. What did I do? What did I learn? How would I apply it? Put that in your journal and you can spend the time when you're on a train ride, going from city to city or in a taxi cab or whatever it is, to journal takes 10 minutes, and you're gonna thank yourself for doing it. You give yourself a chance to reflect and ask yourself some great questions. And when you get back home, you can review your journal and have an action plan on how to implement what you learned into your business. Now, when you travel, don't be afraid to share what you do with the people you meet. You're gonna have opportunities to meet people within the culture, within the country, Sit down and talk to them and say, hey, this is what I do. This is my business. This is my podcast. This is my YouTube show. And show it to them, get some feedback. Hey, this is what I do. Is this something that is popular here in this country? You. You may not want to lead with this, but throughout the conversation, you may want to ask them these questions, and you want to ask them what they do. Learn about their life, their daily life. What time do you get to work? What do you do at work? How's your relationship with your employees? How much time off do you have? Things like that. Ask some questions to give you an understanding of their life, because that's going to give you understanding of how you can fit your business, your service into their life. Now, I talked about you can work when you're traveling so you don't feel like you're neglecting your business or anything like that. You want to check in your team, you could do that, but definitely assign some time for that. I think it's a good idea to wake up a little earlier. Let's say you wake up at 6:30, have yourself a quick breakfast and from 7 to 9 you just get really focused and work on your business. Answer emails, communicate with the team. Now, if you're living in the States and you're going east to Europe or the Far east, you're in luck because you're going to be a little bit ahead of everybody else. So you can easily reply to yesterday's emails and all that stuff. Get really focused. You're done. Close that laptop now. Enjoy the culture, enjoy your travels. And that's still working, right? You're still learning and you're still gonna be applying and journaling the things that is gonna benefit you and your business. But it's good to have separation. So. And I like to do it first because that way it's out of the way and you don't feel guilty throughout the day and you know you've taken care of things. Also, let your team know that you're gonna be away, let them know that you're gonna have limited access to your email, that you're gonna be answering email only once a day, and that's it. And this is a great test. We talked about this before in other episodes, but this is a great test to see if your business can run without you. And it should. You want people to be able to be autonomous and make decisions and be able to run things without you, so you can be a little bit more hands off and you don't have to be all over things. You don't have to stress out. And one of the things I love about traveling and learning about new cultures and new languages and new ways of life is learning the benefits of those people, the strengths of those people. So say, for example, I visit Russia. I want to get to know the people a little bit, get inside their head, understand what their strengths are, what they're good at. Some cultures are just better at certain things. They're influenced by their way of life and what they're exposed to. Now, the reason why I want to do this is that, hey, I run a remote team. We have people from all over the world and I want to keep an eye out on, hey, maybe I should look into Russia when I'm hiring for this position and I note these things down in my journal and I take some notes down, like, what's the time zone difference? What's the average salary here for that position? What are the expected hours? What kind of hours do they normally work? All that kind of stuff. It's good to know. Also, it's good to ask people around about what's popular. What are some big businesses here or companies or products or services that people use every day? For example, in China, WeChat is huge. It's an app that basically is Amazon and ebay and Facebook all wrapped into one. And it's the app. So wherever you're going, ask them, what do they use every day, what services do they use? It might be a global company like Airbnb, it might be a company like Uber, but it might be something local to them. Find out, oh, what is this thing? Download it. Or check their website out and learn about this company. Why are they successful? How are they catering to this society? You know, we only see the examples around us in our communities, in our culture. But there's so many great business opportunities or business examples out there and you want to learn from these examples. Especially if they're doing so well in that culture, why study them? This is a great opportunity because this is hard to find out when you're in your own country. Unfortunately, it's hard to find local country media. Yes, you can dig into the Internet, but it's hard because sometimes it's in a different language. And Google Translate, it's not perfect yet. So talking to people, finding out about what they use every day, learning about the products and services they love, this is a great way for you to learn about what works and you can start to see patterns and start to see, hey, this is a really great idea. How can I implement this way of doing business into my business?

Today, too many patients aren't getting the care they need. That's why UnitedHealth Group is innovating how healthcare is delivered, offering creative solutions that focus on patient outcomes, preventing disease before it starts, making care easier to get and less expensive. Reshaping care to help more people live healthier lives. Learn what UnitedHealth Group is doing to help people get the care they need. @uhg.com Mission.

America. America, you used to be so fun but now you go to bed at night scrolling on your phone well listen up America Carnival is here with world class brew and ropes course too. And comedy and snorkeling and dining. Like everything from sea to shining sea.

Find your fun again@the carnival.com Carnival is calling ships registry Bahamas in Panama.

Guys, to wrap up today's lesson, I have a few more points when it comes to traveling and how it can improve your business and improve you as an entrepreneur. I highly recommend you try to make friends when you travel. Make friends, serious friends. Exchange contact, exchange emails and try to stay in touch with them when you get back home. Even if it just means an email once every couple months. It's good to have good friends across the world. You might have somebody in your industry you really respect. Send something out on Facebook or on email and say, hey, I'm going to Germany. Does anybody know anybody in Germany that can help me out? I'm going to be in Berlin. And you made a friend in Berlin. You can make an introduction, say, hey, this is my friend. He can help you out. He can tell you where the best place is to stay. I met him when I was in Germany. I'll let you guys take it from there. It's a small little favor, but it helps that person out and it's a great way to connect with other entrepreneurs or somebody that maybe you look up to. It's also good just to have a diverse. It's also good to have diverse friends, people that will challenge the way you think and challenge the way you see things. Now. One of the things I have to say personally, growing up as an American, when I traveled, I had to re evaluate what I thought of the world. You know, America is kind of far removed. We were in a bubble and it's a great country and I love America. But it's incorrect to think that everything is better there. No, there's a lot of great things in different countries, in different cultures. They do things better in a lot of ways, and we do things better in some ways as well. The point is, is that it allows you to see that, hey, there's different ways of doing things. I can do things differently and maybe get a better result. So go with an open mind. Go with, I want to learn, I want to change. I want this culture or this experience to challenge what I think. And even if you don't change your opinions on certain things, that's okay. The challenge at least confirms the way you feel. And lastly, I know a lot of people say, you know, it's a dangerous world now and all this stuff in the news, I don't know if I want to travel. The world has become safer. Statistically, this is just math. It's facts talking here, right? Statistically, the world is safer than ever. But because of mass media, we're seeing everything happening at the same time. We get to see news instantly, things we would never heard of before. And when you say the world is dangerous, that means where you live is dangerous. You live in the world right now. I'm not saying put yourself in harm's way, but don't cut off travel simply because you think that everything now is chaotic. No, everything is not chaotic. Be safe, be mindful, be smart about things. But understand that there's so much reward in travel that you shouldn't stop yourself from going because of a couple bad apples that show up on the news. All right, guys, that wraps up today's lesson. I hope that motivates you to think, hey, where should I go next? What can I learn? What can I embrace myself in? I hope I gave a different type of episode, different type of lesson today than you were expecting. I like to change it up a little bit and keep you on your toes. All right, before I go, I want to leave you with this. When you travel, one of the things I like to remind myself is that I'm a guest in that country. It's good to be humble. It's good to be a learner. It's good to be asking questions and apologizing. Maybe if those questions are a little bit personal or inappropriate, you don't know, maybe. So apologize in advance. Hey, I'm really sorry if this is inappropriate. I want to ask this question. Is that okay? When you frame it that way, it's hard for them to get upset and say, oh, no, no, that's quite all right. I know that you might worry about that, but that's okay. Here's the answer. When you go and travel with that frame of mind that I'm a guest in these people's homes, in their country, in their culture, and I want to tread lightly and make sure that everybody feels respected, you're going to get a better response. People are going to say, this person's making an effort. They're trying to say a few words in my language, and I'll help them out. I'll try to use my English, and they'll help you with the English they know. But if you go in arrogantly and expect everybody to speak English and understand what you're saying, and you're screaming on the top of your lungs thinking that they're hard of hearing, you're not going to get a good result. You're not going to have a good experience, and you're not going to get the things you want to learn from them. I'm sure I'm preaching to the converted here, but just a quick reminder from what I've learned throughout the years, go in as a guest, go in with an open mind and open heart, and you're really going to learn a whole lot. And you can take it home and improve yourself as an entrepreneur and a business with these skills. All right. I'll check you in the next episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With usaa, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a'@usaa.com bundle restrictions apply.