In this episode of the Amber Energy Podcast, we’re joined by two innovative business leaders: Brian Hardy of The Maverick and Ezra Moore of Plain English Technology Services. Discover essential tips for scaling your business with an exit strategy in mind, and learn how automation, AI, and tailored IT solutions are transforming businesses today.

🎙️ Episode Highlights:

• The importance of automation and AI in modern marketing.
• Ezra’s journey in adapting enterprise IT solutions for small businesses.
• How networking and mastermind groups have played a crucial role in their careers.
• The evolution of business operations and technology over the years.
• Key advice on selling a business and ensuring a smooth transition.

🔗 Connect with Our Guests:

• Brian Hardy – The Maverick
• Ezra Moore – Plain English Technology Services

📢 Topics Discussed:

1. The role of automation and AI in business growth.
2. Strategies for implementing effective IT solutions.
3. The power of networking and mastermind groups.
4. Personal stories of business evolution and success.
5. Practical advice on selling a business and planning an exit strategy.

🔔 Subscribe to Amber Energy Podcast for more insights on entrepreneurship, business branding, marketing, and graphic design.

#AmberEnergyPodcast #BusinessAutomation #ITSolutions #BrianHardy #EzraMoore #TheMaverick #PlainEnglishTech #Entrepreneurship #Marketing #Branding #BusinessGrowth #ExitStrategy #SellYourBusiness

       

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00:00:00:00 – 00:00:25:04

All righty, then. Welcome to an episode of Amber Energy. The podcast. A podcast where you can learn about business branding, marketing, graphic design. And so much more. Today we’re going to host Bryan Hardy and guest Ezra moore. Bryan owns a successful business called The Maverick, and Ezra owns another wonderful IT business called Clean English Technology.

00:00:25:06 – 00:00:44:06

Mr. Hardy, please take it away. Tell me about yourself. Amber Thanks for having me be here. Yeah. So we launched The Maverick beginning in 2024, and it’s just been a fun project, kind of helping companies grow through automation and AI and all the fun stuff that’s happening right now in the marketing world and excited to be here today.

00:00:44:07 – 00:01:03:17

Thank you. Also, how about you, Ezra? All right. I started playing English Technology Services in 2010. I knew that I wanted to take big enterprise I.T. solutions and, like, right. Fit them into small businesses. It took me a long time to figure it out. And, yeah, glad to be here. Louis Well, I want to tell audience a little bit.

00:01:03:19 – 00:01:29:00

Mr. Hardy how. How do we know each other? And then as are followed up? Yeah, absolutely. So we all. Well, me and you met through Taylor Rupert from Flannel Media. It was an introduction many years ago, back in my days of owning a website company called First Media. And yeah, so we connected back then and I met Taylor, gosh, back in a networking event years ago.

00:01:29:00 – 00:01:58:09

So it’s been about the Ferndale chambers. You think it was actually, I think another network event. We saw Taylor speaking at some thing me and Ezra were at in Bellingham that. Yeah. And then I think we may have invited him to the Ferndale chamber and we all became board members there. And so, yeah, and I’ve known as residents about six months after I moved to Washington State about eight or nine years ago, how to be an AI group, so forth.

00:01:58:15 – 00:02:20:16

Look, you know, networking works can work, right? Yeah. Everybody has their own AI experience. I know, don’t we all? Goodness gracious. Yeah. So let’s see, Ezra, think about you. Like, maybe with three years ago, you joined our mastermind group. Is that about right? Is it only two years? How long you been on the mastermind group? I feel like it’s probably been a couple of years.

00:02:20:16 – 00:02:41:10

I don’t keep track of those things well, and I feel like I just, like, kind of folded into it. That’s all right. And I remember one, but it feels like it’s been at least a couple of years since you’re like, rolled into the group and that’s how I met you. But I knew, like I said, Yeah, but Brian said, like I met obviously that Mr. Taylor and party probably about 27.

00:02:41:12 – 00:02:58:09

Well, I met Taylor at my wedding or because he was a videographer for my wedding and 15. So I met him at 15. And then I must admit, do to much after that. Brian And then 2017, maybe somewhere around then let me do my website. So I read my website, I redesigned it and then you developed it. You and your team.

00:02:58:09 – 00:03:17:23

Yeah. Anyhow, so that’s wonderful. And then you and I over the years have had a few different engagements where like I designed websites and then you develop them. Yeah, so we’ve had quite a few actually. I think it was like, so at least three. How many? Three or four? I don’t know. Three, four, maybe five. Something like over that area.

00:03:18:00 – 00:03:40:00

Some good projects. Yeah, we could, we could probably have a whole podcast about our client was. Yes. Yes we could. That could be a couple hours long. Well that was what the mastermind was for, I think. So. You know, it’s been a good go. I think, you know, we’ve been I’ve been attending that one for at least a month.

00:03:40:00 – 00:04:06:10

Three or four years maybe. Yeah. I think we started at kind of, what, a few months after the pandemic started. I think you are right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, yeah. So let’s. I mean, here we are. 1224. So yeah, we’ve been going for years strong in that matter. I think actually we started it because of that, because we still want to have business connections virtually, even though we were kind of like locked up and, and then in the middle of a pandemic.

00:04:06:10 – 00:04:23:18

Yeah, yeah. It was around the time I moved here, so I worked out fine that I was able to still kind of connect with you guys. Well, yeah, I’m also also so disappointed. I was like, proud of you and happy for you that you got to move to building. Not lost my buddy that you up and moved here to Idaho.

00:04:23:20 – 00:04:44:23

And then I was like, Well, fine, I’ll move to. So I go to Idaho and I’m sitting here in Washington and I’ve shared an office with Brian for five years, and he just up and leaves. Oh, forget the chickens. He’s got to go with the chickens. The chickens have to go to Maine. And I because that picture I will never forget anyways.

00:04:44:23 – 00:05:01:17

Yeah. So then you move along in the back of our truck. Yeah. And then you move them all the way even down to Florida. So they were like, they are globe not country trotting chickens. They probably seen more than most chickens off. I mean, like those chickens like, have like a happy little tick life and a little coop in one.

00:05:01:17 – 00:05:20:06

Yeah. They stay in the same yard for like four, six, seven, eight years. They’re around. And yeah, these guys have been all over the place and oh, there’s some cool chicken, man. They’ve been all, they’ve seen some things that they didn’t seen. I mean, I’m surprised you didn’t like do roadside attractions with them, you know, with like, the big things or the funny things on the side of the road, on the freeway.

00:05:20:08 – 00:05:44:11

I mean, you could have been photographed. So we did that. I’m surprised you didn’t monetize it here. Holding chicken. $5. Yeah. Picture of the chicken, $18. There’s a true entrepreneur, right? Kind of an entrepreneur podcast, right. Monopolize on those chickens. There are some people out here that would love to have a picture with that chicken 100%. All right, All right.

00:05:44:12 – 00:06:19:08

So now you so sadly, unfortunately, I heard that you recently sold your coop. We did. We had we were down to two, and one of them passed away. And chickens are like super communal and need to have a buddy. So just due to the fact that we were getting ready to sell our house, there was a lady down the street that had an awesome big, huge chicken coop and Ron and like all these other chickens, and we stopped by to see her yesterday and she’s like living her best life and her comes all glowing and she looks good.

00:06:19:08 – 00:06:43:24

So. But Daniel was totally happy to see that. Yeah, she was super stoked. We drove by her twice yesterday. Oh, good for sweet. Yeah. While celebrating while you’re where you’re moving to next, sir. Well, we’re. We’re heading to Europe next. We’re going to Portugal. We’re actually closing on our condo tomorrow, and I’ve got my visa appointment on Wednesday.

00:06:43:24 – 00:07:04:12

So we’re removing over there because of the way that I’ve got my business set up. I can kind of do it from anywhere. And so I’ve had all the places I want to live in the US and it’s time for the next one. Yeah, I think my thing. Well, I’ll speak for myself. I’m a little jealous and I think you’ll try some money someday.

00:07:04:12 – 00:07:28:09

My someday future of a lot of business and taking off. Hey, it’s doable. I just got it. This is going to be crazy, even for, like, where you guys are at. So I just got my property insurance estimate this morning. €139 a year to insure a place there where we’re not thousand and 39 year old period. Yeah, like 139 would be like $150.

00:07:28:09 – 00:07:47:11

Call it for a year to insure your place with all the same benefits. All right. Like all the same bits that you would get here in America. Oh, better. It includes like pet insurance. It includes a whole bunch other stuff, like it’s way better and we don’t need to have flood and all that kind of stuff. So it’s no, it’s crazy.

00:07:47:12 – 00:08:17:21

Much cheaper. Even our property taxes are $600 or €600 a year compared to here in Florida. I was paying between property taxes and insurance and then floods like close to $12,000 a year. Now I’m like, what, €700 a year for the same value of property. It’s like bubbly and saying everybody needs to go there. Or I guess it was just I don’t I mean, I presume like every country is a little different.

00:08:17:21 – 00:08:41:11

Yeah. Or is I just like how it’s all done sort of like loosely in Europe? No, I mean, those are like from official like big insurance companies. It’s just they don’t I don’t know. That’s it. They don’t rip you off there. That’s it. So it all worked out. I’m going to buy the candle next door. There is one for sale.

00:08:41:11 – 00:09:00:11

I saw a sign right below. Oh, don’t tease me like that. Yeah, You could live 10 minutes from the beach. All right, well, I want the listing all the same, just because I want to see the. I’m so excited just to even at the end of the thought. Sounds like a lot of fun. Yeah, it’s fun. I mean, just even, like, take the idea and play with it a little bit.

00:09:00:13 – 00:09:20:11

Well, once you have you having like a well, but you as a right, you want to, you want to sell it all and someday you know moved it next door with Portugal hundred percent I’m out of here. Yeah. I mean I grew up on a boat and spent a lot of time in Mexico and various other countries. I want to go back to Mexico, at least part of the year.

00:09:20:13 – 00:09:41:10

The Pacific Northwest weather is awesome right now. I mean, for the most part, we’re going to have some June Bloom. Right. But, you know, July, August, most of September are going to be beautiful here. And then I’m done and then I’m ready for a little break. Yeah, I wouldn’t mind. You know, 90 days out of the year in Mexico, long term goal is to get out altogether.

00:09:41:10 – 00:10:01:09

I lived abroad like I said I would. There’s a lot of other places I’d like to live. What’s on your list? Well, it’s first on my list. It was top three. Which top three countries? You’re like, Yeah, that’s the one. Let’s see. Australia is absolutely top of my list. I spent two years there. I loved it there. The people are friendly, the climate is wonderful.

00:10:01:11 – 00:10:26:17

Obviously is huge. Like what part of Australia? Yeah. So I was on the like in the kind of the middle of the East coast. I was near Brisbane about an hour, hour and a half north of Brisbane for the most part, but we sailed up and down from Cairns to Melbourne. So we did, yeah, we did a ton of the East Coast and part of the reason I want to live there is there’s so much more for me to explore there and I don’t like it super hot or super muggy.

00:10:26:17 – 00:10:44:05

So like I’m not going to go live in the Northern Territory’s, I don’t know, Florida. No, no, I did want to visit very lucky. Yeah, but I, I never made it out there. I did make it out to Maine, which I thought was very generous of me. It’ll make me come to Maine was like, I’m not. You better come here.

00:10:44:07 – 00:11:05:10

I don’t want to here. Brian doesn’t know this yet, but he’s not going to be able to get rid of me. I’m going to go stay in Portugal and then just overstay my welcome and my visa. I fully support me. Perhaps I might have to the same like that. So sounds like a great idea. I mean, who doesn’t want to be like working from a nice beach in Portugal?

00:11:05:12 – 00:11:24:19

You know, it’s cool. There is there is a like co-working and digital working is like so huge in Europe right now especially. But yeah, like all over the place there’s tons of like the co-working, like coffee shops and shares. Sure. Just that’s like that’s big over there. Right. Well in a lot of good top us. Oh my God, this doesn’t hurt, right?

00:11:24:21 – 00:11:43:01

Dude can’t go wrong with top us. And that kind of like also seafoods and lots of little plates of lots of little things like this. We thought that morning. Oh, that’s what I missed when I went and visited when I visited Spain. Yeah, it was sort of the same way. And I frickin missed it. And I missed. I loved it.

00:11:43:03 – 00:12:05:15

What’s like the what’s like the beer or the alcoholic? The drink of choice, like some countries have, like, Oh, this is the beer. Like, this is the drink of choice. Like, what is the thing in Portugal? Well, I mean, I mean, they like, they like beer. They’ve got a couple of brands there. But what they’re most famous for is Porto one port wine from Porto Portugal, which is in the north area.

00:12:05:17 – 00:12:24:04

So that’s huge there. They’ve got tons of like vineyards and I kind of stuff. It’s a very sweet wine. I’m not really a big fan of it. I don’t like sweet drinks. Oh, sure. But yeah, they’re super famous. If it’s if it’s port wine to be from Porto Portugal. So, you know, so it’s like kind of like bourbon and whiskey, like kind of idea.

00:12:24:04 – 00:12:46:20

Like if it’s if it’s from Porto Wine, it’s from Portugal. Exactly. Like, if it’s if it’s a bourbon, I think bourbon has to be from Kentucky or. Yeah, exactly. Our scotch has to be from Scotland. That whole thing. So yeah. And they’re also famous for like one of the big dishes is like these big giant sardines. I don’t know that I’m ready for that, but that’s a big use.

00:12:46:20 – 00:13:04:07

A roll. Or is it cooked? You just like. No, they cook it. No. Okay, that’s gross. I mean, it could be like. Like an oyster, like. Yeah, you just suck it up. I mean, cooked. They look gross to me, so I don’t know that I’m going to go wrong. I mean, we’re talking about, like, how long here we talk like three inches ten.

00:13:04:11 – 00:13:26:19

You the sucker. They’re probably like, I don’t know, like that long, like eight, eight, nine inches. Yeah, that’s a big fish. Yes, that’s a good. But they’re like thin to look. I don’t know about this. I think I’d have a hard time. It’s just not part of our culture, you know, that’s the thing. Like, Yeah, yeah. But then it’s like we don’t fish.

00:13:26:20 – 00:13:44:23

It’s, it’s normal for them. Like, that’s just part of their everyday cuisine. Yeah, Yeah. But the cool thing is, is like, there’s so many people with, like culture there that like just because you don’t want just the sardines, you know, there’s great Indian places and great places, like they’re so close to all those countries. And so there we’re talking about that.

00:13:45:04 – 00:14:05:04

When we get there, like every month, we’re going to set a rule where we try something completely new but never been there. And we just literally walk downtown and walk in and like because they’re like, the food is so good, like a crap meal just isn’t really a thing there. That’s fair. Yeah, that sounds like a good way of what’s how you probably going to get, you know, your feet wet in any culture, right?

00:14:05:04 – 00:14:26:15

So if you’re new to any location, you have to go meet people, get out, you know, try the things, do the things. And that’s how you make friends and meet new people, right? Exactly. Yeah. Because. Because that’s where you have how long you should be in washing out, what, seven, eight years now. No, I’ve been I was born in Port Townsend, so not very far from my mistake.

00:14:26:17 – 00:14:47:04

Yeah. And then I so I grew up here, it’s almost ten. And then when I was ten, we left and sailed from here eventually to Australia and came back when I was about 16. And so I’ve been back in Washington since then. I haven’t lived anywhere else in the US except on our boat trip. We did some time in Oregon, California.

00:14:47:06 – 00:15:08:06

Yeah, but I, I will probably stay here until I’m ready to, to leave the country. Yeah, because you got kids in the area so you probably raise kids there. Yeah. I mean, yeah. To, to whatever degree we have to. I’m both kids are my stepkids so we don’t have ultimate say over where we go. Well, our minors. Yep.

00:15:08:08 – 00:15:25:14

Fair enough. You know, I get that life. I, I totally understand what that’s what that’s all about for sure. So yeah, you are around the hopeful hopefully that area for a little while. Obviously until your kids are out of the house doing their own amazing things. And that’s cool. So. Right, mom? So you know so I don’t know.

00:15:25:15 – 00:15:40:18

You grew up in Port Townsend. I grew up in Port Orchard. Oh, no kidding. Yeah. So I grew up in Port Archer, which is actually not too far away from Port Townsend. Of course, out on the Peninsula Times, people will I will say, hey, a group of closure and they’ll say, like something, a letter to the dad. I’m like, No, no, no.

00:15:40:18 – 00:16:05:03

You mean Port Townsend. That’s Port report. Angelus or whatever it is, because they get confused with Beau. What’s that one movie that was hopping about years ago, one of four of Twilight. Twilight? I think you always confuses like that area with, like I say, Port Orchard. Like, oh, like, like Twilight or did that. I’m like, No, seriously, tell me parts.

00:16:05:05 – 00:16:25:05

It’s on the plaza, right? It’s frickin massive. So. Well, wrong peninsula because I’m on the port orchard on the kids that peninsula right Yeah you’re on the gets up and then and then there’s the really big part of Washington that’s the Olympic Peninsula. And people confuse them all the time. They don’t realize that the small little like Arrowhead triangle looking thing in the middle of the state that it’s own little mini peninsula.

00:16:25:09 – 00:16:49:21

And then you take we take credit for your peninsula. I don’t know that you know what it is. Yeah. We think you’re all on the Olympic Peninsula. Oh, we fucked up. Yeah, I hate when that happens. Yeah, Sorry. Oh, man. So, Olympic Peninsula tickets take credit for the kids. That peninsula as the. We are much, much bigger. I mean, Port Townsend is on its own little dinky peninsula, too, but we don’t count that either.

00:16:49:21 – 00:17:05:10

Well, the words like maybe like the Olympic discos and they just squish us. Yeah, It’s like, well, it’s kind of like when you use, like, clay to pick up other clay, you know? Oh, you’ve got this big snowball called the bigger glob who’s getting sucked up in the bigger glob. Then after that, you’re just a part of our glob.

00:17:05:12 – 00:17:23:11

I see. Oh, that’s cool. That’s cool. So you don’t make the rules, man. Well, you know, honestly, Olympic Peninsula is pretty gorgeous. I don’t know. It’s me. It’s all super pretty. That part of Washington state is incredible. One of my favorite things about living here is you can do all that. You can have the, like the coastal rainforest kind of scenario and then jump across the map.

00:17:23:11 – 00:17:50:08

All right. It’s totally different. Like my family did a lot of time, obviously, on Olympic Peninsula because it’s not too far away from Port Orchard. And we did like, you know, Hurricane Ridge and we did all like this. My dad’s a big halibut fishery, so we would see Cuneo Bay and then also and then I was on Little League and whenever we did Little League All-Stars, we would go up like Port Angeles, Port Townsend, you know, those types of places, you know, throughout like middle school and like primary school for that.

00:17:50:08 – 00:18:09:05

So like all All-Stars, it’s kind of a humblebrag. I don’t want to go back to that. Oh, I mean, I mean, I was little. I was in a boy’s Little League baseball team. I’d be like one of just a couple of girls in the league anyhow. So I would spend some time, obviously, like like I said, I spent some time in those areas for those reasons.

00:18:09:05 – 00:18:31:00

I was also on Select Fastpitch. So some of our team games would also be up in the Olympic or Olympic Peninsula area like Port Angeles and bits. So we had some time in that area and plus it’s just stinking gorgeous. So between still Staircase Mountain and Hurricane Ridge and we used to do like we used to get like a tree permit as kids and we get a tree permit and then go hunt for Christmas trees up in there.

00:18:31:00 – 00:18:50:04

And it was some of our favorite family traditions and memories that we have of going up to that area. It’s just a beautiful place. Yeah, Yeah. Super, super special. And you know, as much as I want to go live somewhere warmer, like this place has a special part of my heart. It’s a special world. I had traveled to New Zealand when we were little, and my dad was.

00:18:50:06 – 00:19:10:11

He traveled a lot when he was younger as well. So you’re going to love New Zealand. It’s beautiful. It’s this is that. And I get there and I’m like, It’s okay. You know, like, it’s fine. We drove like the entire length of the country while we lived there, and it didn’t hit me until I was quite a bit older that it was only okay for me because I was born in the Pacific Northwest.

00:19:10:11 – 00:19:30:17

And a lot of the things that you have to see, you know that trees, the evergreens, the just the green, verdant kind of natural things, it’s all here already. And I’m totally spoiled. One trip driving through Indiana will tell you what’s special about Washington State. You’re totally correct in saying that because like, for example, you know, I was born and raised in Port Orchard, Washington.

00:19:30:19 – 00:19:50:17

You know, I went and applied for colleges. I went I applied for Central U Dub and was and Western Washington University. Well, I went check out those campuses and I was like, well, I’m not going to go live in Ellensburg. I’m not going to go live in the city of Seattle. And by golly, who Yeah, might be a ticket.

00:19:50:17 – 00:20:11:23

Maybe it had all the same things that were still familiar to me from living on the kids up peninsula, right? So, like, it had the waterways, the mountains, the water was right there. The rivers were right. There are mountains. You know, I was a kind of like a sporty kid. I liked water ski. And I like snowboarding, I like sports and all these other things.

00:20:11:23 – 00:20:31:00

And so it seemed like like, wow, I can get an education and I can still do all the fun things I like to do on Mount Baker’s an hour away and go snowboarding. The lakes are right there, you know, I can go water skiing, I can go to the to the bay, Bellingham Bay if I want to see all the different lakes and and bays and all the different things.

00:20:31:00 – 00:20:50:23

We’re all like, right there, like, I don’t know, 30 minutes max. Our Max, you know, could be at was that was that means Larrabee State Park, right? Larrabee State Park is right there. I saw you studying at Larrabee State Park. I go down to the Bellingham Bay. I’d go to Woods coffee shop and go do studying there, or I’d go up to Mount Baker to go go snowboarding.

00:20:50:23 – 00:21:19:07

If I really got a wild hair, I go to Canada. If I wanted to go up to Blackcomb Whistler. Yeah, to go snowboarding or, you know, UPS to wherever. Well, Vancouver for a fun night out with my friends so I to film a lot with Bellingham. So I went to Bellingham was also Western Washington University for four years and I loved it for all of the pricing reasons that maybe perhaps you both love it.

00:21:19:09 – 00:21:44:19

Yeah, I think we all ended up here largely for the same reasons, right? Yeah, because you all we all live we have all lived in Bellingham, but. But I didn’t live there when you guys lived there, so I lived there in Bellingham from 2004 to 2008. Yeah, I got there in 2000 like 13. I think the Bellingham from California.

00:21:44:21 – 00:22:05:10

I’ve been here since 2010. Yeah, I spent a year up here right after high school as well. Oh, funny. Yeah. So I was yeah, I lived by Bellingham in my very young years, so I was only like, what, 18 to 22 living in Bellingham. So maybe perhaps quite a different experience than what you guys are living. Bellingham You and I have a little Sun Valley.

00:22:05:12 – 00:22:27:20

Go ahead. As where you go first? Oh, Amber, you and I had a little bit overlap because I was here from 0607. Oh, yeah, yeah. I got my high school. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, we were so those years I would spent a lot of time in the art department because I was getting ready for a graphic design major.

00:22:27:22 – 00:22:48:12

So when you’re doing that kind of concentration, tend to have to take a lot of art history classes and art classes, figure drawing classes, graphic design classes, technology classes. So I spent quite a bit of time in the art department annex. And then if I wasn’t there, then I was probably at the calm building for communication minor And if I wasn’t that I don’t want those places.

00:22:48:12 – 00:23:22:09

I was either at the rec center. I worked at the rec center and I worked out of the rec center, and I wasn’t at any of those places. I was on the water. I was working. Yes. Yeah. Fun. So, yeah, Bellingham is beautiful. I mean, I don’t know what there’s nothing to love. I mean, obviously the great times, like from like, I don’t know, late October, November to April, May or May, late, late May, June, maybe it’s more like all right or something like, you know, a good portion of the year.

00:23:22:09 – 00:23:50:09

It’s not amazing. Amazing because it’s, you know, kind of gray sky and perhaps a lot of rain and some snow because you’re pretty north of there could pretty north all. You’re only for our audience. It’s only 30 miles south of the Canadian border. So you’re you’re pretty far up on on the latitude. But those like from like what you said like June, July, August, September, October man the kind of like when I first got there, it was like the nicest winter on record.

00:23:50:09 – 00:24:05:14

And I remember saying to Azra, like, this place isn’t so bad. I know, I know. This is great. It’s mild. Like I could totally do this. And for the next seven years it was like the shittiest winters I think we ever had it got going forward. He was off, you know. So three almost have to do winter sports just to survive it.

00:24:05:14 – 00:24:26:04

So that’s why, you know, I snowboard a lot, you know, when I lived in Bellingham because I was like probably don’t survive the winters. Yeah, that’s a that’s a solid thing to do like a solid way to get your energy out. If you don’t do that, you just sit in the gray, in the gloom and in the wet, or you just choose to put your finger on and go for a hike anyways.

00:24:26:04 – 00:24:41:14

You know, you almost have to like, go do a thing and just get used to the rain because otherwise you’d be sick and miserable in your house. Little time. Yeah, that’s true. You got to you’ve got to push through some days to get out there and enjoy it. It’s the truth. Like, okay, okay, okay. I don’t care if it’s raining.

00:24:41:16 – 00:25:00:04

I don’t care. That’s thinking cold outside. I don’t care that it’s not sunshiny. It’s going to be okay, baby. We’re going to put our stuff on and we’re going to go do it anyways. And it’s going to be fine. We fabulous. Don’t worry about it. There’s a there’s a business allegory in there somewhere. Fine. Fabulous. And you know, just having to push.

00:25:00:04 – 00:25:18:14

Just having to push through. Oh, perseverance. Right. Make it. Well, yeah, that’s that grit, right? That I think that’s, you know, grit as a business owner that you have to have in order to be, you know, even just somewhat successful. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Perseverance, I think. I mean, not that anybody else, but I think perseverance is the key to small business ownership.

00:25:18:16 – 00:25:45:12

You know, and then secondary that learning to pivot and things like that, you know, that you come, they come more with experience, but grit and perseverance pretty much the same thing. I, I promise you that’s probably two main things and then probably some patience. Probably the toughest in a business is patience. Yeah, Yeah. Patience, pivoting, perseverance. I like alliteration.

00:25:45:12 – 00:26:05:14

That’s pretty good. Now on to something. We’re on to something. I’m all about the alliteration. No, I think. I think as we all know, as business owners, I think those are very key in having a, you know, have an accessible agency. I mean, it’s a small business. If you don’t have those three, you’re kind of fresh out of luck.

00:26:05:14 – 00:26:22:09

I think. Is it is it the target or is it the bare minimum? I think I think it’s the bare minimum. I’m honestly like obviously, as you both all know, it’s like you got you got the ebbs and flows of business, right? You’ve got like you were happy times, you got good money. Things are happening. This is wonderful.

00:26:22:09 – 00:26:37:24

Yeah, this is exactly why I chose to be in business for myself. When you have those oh shit moments, it’s going down. Oh, no. I’m going to have to sell it all off. I want to make it. Oh, shit. You know, so you have these, like, high highs and lows. Lows? And you’re like, I don’t know sometimes where our money is going to come next month, next week?

00:26:37:24 – 00:26:57:09

Next year. But if I keep doing a good job, I keep persevering. We’re going to do it. We’re going to be okay. Yeah, well, I’m also like, Oh, there’s something wrong with us. We love it so much that like all of it, like I would never change a thing even through all the shitty times, right? Like, it’s still all worth it.

00:26:57:11 – 00:27:21:12

Like, yeah, And that probably makes us. Yeah, you got to trust the process. And, I don’t know, maybe there’s some excitement in some of those down times because it makes you more creative and more, you know, that grit comes out and that sort of thing. Well, that’s what comes out in a pivot, right? So you kind of have an ebb, you have a low, and those ebbs sort of force you to pivot and make changes.

00:27:21:14 – 00:27:39:12

That’s formative, I think like constraints and like I have ADHD. And so for me, constraint, it’s really helped me build routines and structure better in my life. And it happens all the time for me in business where I’m like, Oh, you know, this thing that I’ve been pursuing, I know that it’s not going to work now and I have to pivot or I know that it only works under these circumstances.

00:27:39:12 – 00:28:11:11

So now what do I do? And it’s frankly clarifying. Yeah, I think that’s one thing you know. Yeah, you have sometimes many you call them, you call them failures, but you know, you experience many failures in business. All the time and you feel like you constantly have to, like, evolve and kind of keep pushing to to keep making it because the alternative to us as business owners, entrepreneurial spirit, there is no other option.

00:28:11:13 – 00:28:46:21

Like I think the three of us, it’s safe to say that perhaps we would not be good employees somewhere else now. It would be hard to be an employee, you know, doing the W-2 thing. I’d be a horrible employee. I feel like I’ve been horrible. So now that you’ve been in business for yourself, it’s like, I think I’ve been a horrible employee, you know, like, there’s no way I could probably, you know, go into clock and clock out butts in a chair, do the 9 to 5 and think it’s because it’s just a different mentality, you know, like to have all these things like you got to be you know you’re more mindset is like

00:28:46:23 – 00:29:05:13

let’s get all these things done so we can like play a little bit and like all these things where that’s the opposite. An employer wants you to be set in your ass and your seat doing whatever, even if it’s not efficient. Whereas as a business owner, like you want to be efficient so that you can either have time to enjoy your life or time to do other more creative things for your business.

00:29:05:13 – 00:29:32:16

And, you know, being more efficient with your time, I think is is, you know, something that we all probably share as far as small business owners for those reasons. And maybe there’s an a caveat. I think a follow up to that is like I used to like, you know, I think perhaps are all similar in age is that I was a kid of the nineties and being a kid and being a kid of the nineties, you know, we all remember the analog days and this new technology, digital age.

00:29:32:18 – 00:29:51:13

And so being a kid the nineties I you know, discovered computers. And as I got a little bit older in high school I discovered art on the computer, which was coined as the term graphic design. Right. And so, you know, I went to school for graphic design and did my thing. And then computers are becoming the new thing that’s going to happen.

00:29:51:13 – 00:30:11:20

Right? And then I graduated college and I was like, I just don’t get this. How is it? And then I got, you know, had got jobs and then Microsoft is always a client of anybody in the greater Seattle area. Well, they’re how are we doing back then? Skype? You know, we’re touting this product. That’s amazing. Here’s Skype work from anywhere.

00:30:11:20 – 00:30:31:23

We have Microsoft Office and all the bits where how are we touting this program and and Skype work anywhere. But yet we’re not working anywhere. Why aren’t we working wherever we want to work? So here I am, a new graduate. I graduated in oh eight. I age myself a little bit, but here we are graduating. I’m like, Why are we still doing butts in chairs?

00:30:31:23 – 00:30:50:14

Like, I just don’t understand this. Why do you care from two doors down or working in a in a lawn chair in Tahiti? Like, why do you care where I want to get my work done? And it’s well on it’s good and quality. What the fuck do you care where I’m at? Totally. I just don’t You trust me?

00:30:50:14 – 00:31:19:02

You hired me. Yeah. Don’t you trust me to do a good job and do it? Well, things should be based upon you getting a job done, not just sitting around, you know, doing stupid shit. And I think a lot of companies, they have that problem where their expectation is it’s going to be there and do these things. But whereas like, you know, it’s much more efficient for you to go work on a beach and just knock out like 9 hours of work and 3 hours and enjoy the rest of the time and kind of probably have a much better product.

00:31:19:04 – 00:31:34:21

There’s kind of two schools of thought, right? One is like, if you have butts in chairs, you know, great. You can expect to get a certain amount of nominal work done. Great. Whatever. That’s fine. And then the other idea is, you know, hey, if we hire really efficient people, they can do whatever they want kind of whenever they want.

00:31:34:21 – 00:31:59:11

As long as, you know, they’re good at maintaining the project, you know, managing it, whatever they need to do. As somebody who has regular employees, I’ve struggled with that. You know, we hired our first offshore employee last year, maybe at the end of the year before that. So end of end of 2022, I hired my first offshore employee and it was illuminate, to say the least.

00:31:59:11 – 00:32:35:23

You know, at first he was very hardworking and motivated and got things done. And as as time went on, you know, I found out that the rest of my staff were kind of managing his projects and managing his time for him by assigning him tasks all the time. So it’s brutal, I think. Yeah, it is brutal. And I think what you what I learned, at least, and I think what I suspect is problematic for some of these other businesses is if you have a management team or a group of people that understand project management and timelines and deadlines and things like that, and they can manage those things for themselves, it’s kind of a problem.

00:32:35:23 – 00:32:57:23

People can go work wherever they want, however they want, but if you can’t screen for that and frankly, I haven’t found a way necessarily to screen for it, you know, other than ask if they have experience managing those things, you know, ask them to discuss it so that you kind of can get a sense that they do they do have that experience and they’re not just saying so, you know, if you can do that, then wonderful.

00:32:57:23 – 00:33:17:12

But otherwise you end up with people who are butts in chairs. And there’s you know, I have people we run a helpdesk at 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day. We need butts in chairs. I would prefer that they be good at managing their own time, but at the end of the day, I really need somebody there to take that call and help that person on the phone.

00:33:17:12 – 00:33:40:22

So if they’re capable of doing those two things, they don’t have to be the most self-motivated human being. But I, I think there’s two substitute just different types of people in the world. And perhaps we need all types, right? So like, there’s types that we mean perhaps not everybody does well working from home, there was many people, for example, in this pandemic that proved that many people are just not good at working from home.

00:33:40:22 – 00:33:57:17

They can’t self-monitor, they can’t be, you know, they get distracted too easily with a house chore or thing or that end of the day that they need to go to an office place in order to not be distracted from bits at home. I need to go to an office place because that’s where they find that to be the most efficient and the most effective in their jobs.

00:33:57:19 – 00:34:22:18

They like the water cooler conversations, they like the coffee chats. You know, you go to the coffee pot and grab your bits. They like having a lunchtime hangout in the office space with these people because they find camaraderie around it. They enjoy the experience of going to work and making friends and, you know, whatever at work. You know, some people like that, some people perhaps we are some of them don’t like that.

00:34:22:18 – 00:34:40:24

I would prefer to not clock in and clock. I would prefer to work from home or wherever. I feel like I feel like I’d be more successful if that means my home office here or a coffee shop or on vacation somewhere and a beach over there in a mountain somewhere in a cabin somewhere. It doesn’t matter where that is.

00:34:41:01 – 00:34:55:06

As long as I hit my deadlines and due dates and get my projects done, I feel like I should be wherever that is. And not everybody can do that. But we’ve we’ve hit the full circle now for why do you want to be an entrepreneur? You know, we’re back right there. I don’t I don’t want to work at a desk.

00:34:55:07 – 00:35:17:20

I’m at home right now. Right. So, like, I’m in my home office today, but some days I find myself at the coffee shop. I find myself back, you know, visiting family or friends. And I’ll work from there maybe, you know, Thursday or Friday or on Monday or Tuesday, you know. So I want my work as long as I got electricity and a while, like, why the hell does it matter where I am?

00:35:17:22 – 00:35:34:23

I took a sales meeting from Brian’s house last time I saw him in Maine. Yeah, Yeah. But I mean, that’s how I am. Like, again, like it goes back to that story that I was telling about. Here I am working as a contractor for Microsoft, and one of their products at the time was Skype. And and here they are.

00:35:34:24 – 00:35:55:20

Usually I work for me or his the benefits and features of having, you know, Skype for your business or Skype for, you know, your whatever reasons you can be in and anywhere in the world and still connect on a business level, you know, virtually through through, you know, as the new kind of new concept then to be able to have telecommunications through through wi fi, through the Internet, too, but to have do what we’re doing even today.

00:35:56:01 – 00:36:16:14

You know, that idea was born through that product. You know, here we are. Oh, my gosh. 18 years ago, I mean, I was a that was a product back then. That’s a very old product. And it’s been matured over time. Right. So it was Skype and then it turned into to what was then teams. I mean, now it’s teams, but it wasn’t always teams.

00:36:16:14 – 00:36:36:19

It was something else. Doesn’t matter. We had Skype and then Skype for business and now we have teams and Skype was or maybe still has the kind of last vestiges of being its own, its own thing. One of my favorite people look it up. One of my favorite Skype trivia is that, you know, Microsoft bought Skype. It was, you know, developed by a third party initially.

00:36:36:21 – 00:37:10:24

And when they bought it, it ran exclusively on Linux nodes. So that’s what it was. And they maintain their own their own Linux nodes for a while at a time where Microsoft was aggressively anti Linux anti other operating systems. Yeah, I remember when they bought Skype and I remember when they bought another company called Razorfish. It was like part of like a whole group of cluster of like acquisitions that they kind of bought as a group when they purchased some of those different agencies and then they sold off all the bits they didn’t want anyway.

00:37:11:03 – 00:37:30:19

So fun fact that I have a like maybe like, I don’t know, I’d say if I had to guess, I’ll wager like 2000, nine or ten, something like that. Yeah. If I had to guess, I’d wager this is like going back into my way. Archives of my brain to pull that one out to be like, I’m pretty sure this happened in like 910 ish was when Microsoft was doing the Skype thing.

00:37:30:19 – 00:37:51:02

And then that was educational to me because then I was like, Huh, Skype. I want to learn more about this. And that’s what led me to go travel the world, because in 2010 I went travels to Costa Rica for two weeks and I traveled to Europe for a month and my dad was like freaking out because here we are, 12 and ten.

00:37:51:05 – 00:38:10:02

And that woman, that movie taken Yeah, that movie had just come out. My dad was like, freaking out that I was going to go travel the world and and lose communication with my dad. My dad’s like, I’m not as bad as is that guy. I can’t come get you, sweetheart. Like, if they take you, I can’t come get you.

00:38:10:04 – 00:38:30:10

And so they know Dada. I’ll be in contact. There’s this thing called Skype. I’ll message you. It’s going to be great. I can see you. Don’t worry. It’s going to be wonderful. I’ll Skype you when I get places. Anyways, he’s like, okay, I guess that’ll have to do. You’re going to have to check in though. Not like okay, that.

00:38:30:10 – 00:38:59:24

Okay, okay. Because you know, I’m like, Mummy, only 23 years old and I’m going to go to Costa Rica for a couple of weeks with some girlfriends and I’m to go travel Europe for a month with my other best girlfriend. We did like Holland, France and Spain. Yeah. With like ten days of each loosely. Yeah. So anyhow, Skype is was really great because you could do that really easily with like connecting with people, you know, in the United States, for example, from one of those countries.

00:39:00:01 – 00:39:22:13

So here I am, you know, fresh out of college and I’m like, why do I need to be a button? The chair Like, why I don’t understand why find electricity in my programs to do my job? Why do you care where I’m at? And back then you had to store all your files on your zip desk and your jazz drives so you know that maybe you should see my external hard drive collection.

00:39:22:15 – 00:39:43:05

I have so many, like, thumb drives and like, those, like. But like this big are huge. They’re huge external hard drives. I have an external hard drive, personal. And then for each contract that I had because they also didn’t have a lot of storage space. So I have like external hard drive. This is just for this agency, this one’s just for this contract, This is for personal.

00:39:43:05 – 00:39:59:00

Like I had an external hard drive for, like, stinking everything. Yeah, yeah, they were so small. And then this is back in the day also when you have a CD. So then you would burn and burn your stuff. You burn your stuff. It was the CD to archive. It is such a pain in the ass story about back then.

00:39:59:02 – 00:40:23:18

Oh my gosh. So I was I was a snot nosed junior. I worked for a draft FCB then like a pretty big design agency in Seattle at the time. And I remember having to archive a bunch of stuff for like HP and Kaiser Permanente. I think that the client was having an archive like all this design work, and as you remember, design files are massive, massive.

00:40:23:20 – 00:40:46:17

It took forever to like, yeah, to like, oh, you only had Max copy max capacity on these disks. So you had like, okay, this folder, this folder, this folder. Too many folders back to this folder. Ms. For it was all you could do on like a little silly CD Yeah. And the other thing, the burn in that we’re having to burn and you finally archive a darn thing.

00:40:46:19 – 00:41:11:08

Yeah. And then all the time. All the time. So we only had that backup, the external hard drive and that a backup CD. So that way, you know, you could actually get it and it went Crash of you. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I remember that because like external hard drives like thumb drives my what’s it called. What’s it called when they like the frag.

00:41:11:10 – 00:41:32:12

Well they got like not fried, they would like you’d plug them in and they’d be like at hey I mean it’s just a, it’s a disk failure or a controller. Yeah. There were lots of reasons that it, it’s, it’s just a disk on the inside and it’s so annoying and CDs sucked because, you know, Rewritable CDs are basically an ink that’s written by the laser and so they fade over time and can’t be read anymore.

00:41:32:16 – 00:41:49:07

And then heaven forbid, they get scratched right? Well, and I think a lot of people don’t know this, but like the disk that you buy for Rewritable CDs was like the clear disk basically with a printed label on top of it. And so if you scratch the top of it, so an area that a lot of people think, you say totally not safe.

00:41:49:09 – 00:42:17:09

No, you’re right. That happened to us. So that agency once, then I got a client and then an art file. We lost it. Gone, baby, gone. That’s a rough oops. That was. That was. That was the ridge. That was it called the dawn of the now digital era. Now we’ve got was at OneDrive and Dropbox and Box and you know Google Drive and they’ve all got their own drive.

00:42:17:09 – 00:42:37:02

Apple was a cloud. Apple got the cloud and it’s now they all have to work remotely now with all these digital storage solutions service authority forget your desk, you’re screwed and you got to go back home and get it. Yeah. Or who? Disk or your external hard drive. Yeah. Your ass is going home. Yeah. Or reliable or reliable internet like back then, you know, like I thought would be, like 18 years ago.

00:42:37:08 – 00:42:57:05

Is that really ten years ago? You know, So, no, not that many. 16 should take 16 years like that. You know, the Internet also wasn’t very reliable, so maybe didn’t have a very great connection. Right. Or or something like that. So you’re also only as good as like the life connection or back then it was the Ethernet connection.

00:42:57:07 – 00:43:15:21

Mm hmm. Oh, man. We just dated ourselves. Okay, so now we don’t have any of that. Now we’ve got great wi fi, high speed Internet, great electricity. Now we can now, especially with the pandemic, you know, it kind of made it a very easy for us to all work remote. One might say. And worldwide, there’s great infrastructure all over the place.

00:43:15:21 – 00:43:31:18

Now, even if you want to go live on a boat, you can get StarLink. Heck yeah, man. I did a record for my mom. She like, Oh, did you? Oh, Peninsula still? Yep. Yeah. And I somebody mentioned it. They were like, Oh, I’m surprised she doesn’t have StarLink. And I was like, Man, as a 90%, I’m surprised I didn’t think about that.

00:43:31:20 – 00:43:53:23

Hmm. Brilliant Actually, yeah. So I got there and yeah, she’s had when we moved back from Australia, we were back in 2003 and we had dial up Internet, same as when we left a couple of years after that 3005, we finally got DSL. Just incredibly slow. Oh, you know, and we all remember the AOL days. It’s okay, she laughs.

00:43:53:23 – 00:44:16:13

She’s still on that DSL. It has gotten a little bit faster over time, but yep, she’s still on the Disney wave cable. So. No, no, no, it’s CenturyLink. Oh, CenturyLink now. Sorry. It was it was used to be like, yeah, it wasn’t like wave wave cable on the peninsula for a while. Well before wave, yes. But she doesn’t there’s no Kodiak service to her.

00:44:16:13 – 00:44:35:06

Okay. So before it was wave, it was broad stripe and before that it was Millennium Digital Media. When everything was millennium, all those. Yeah. I’ll bet cable that was another one. Oh yeah. Kids up and fly the same things. Yep. Because you’re part of our peninsula. Yes, you. You’re right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was voting for it. I was waiting for it.

00:44:35:06 – 00:45:00:23

I was like, all up a I’m up to you. Good. Yeah, well, I need them the peninsula or just the peninsula. There’s a real difference. That’s right. Just. It’s all one body of peninsula. It’s just one peninsula. There’s no there’s no kids up versus Olympic. No, no number. No, no, no. Because it’s all Olympic three. You’re right. I un.

00:45:01:00 – 00:45:39:06

Oh, my goodness. All right, So party, I think we’re all very impressed and eagerly to know sort of some of those fun tips that perhaps you might have to for us all to have to be able to sell our bits in and in the States and sell a business and and move to an exotic country. What what maybe like a couple tips might you have for the for us and for the audience to like maybe just a few little little little snippets too like yeah he’s us of what we might need to do in order to sell our businesses so we can have some money to be to go to go live in a different

00:45:39:06 – 00:46:19:15

country. So I learned a lot in the process. So things that I learned and I’m sure that you guys can both relate to this is the more stuff in your business that you do, the smaller the buyer’s pool becomes because your business is based on you more. Right? And so some of the biggest things that I learned is if you can create document and processes and I learned this back in the day listening to Ezra because he’s really good at doing this for his business, but like creating like a process to where when you do sell, you can easily hand off your entire business and say, Here’s how to do everything, here’s where everything is,

00:46:19:15 – 00:46:46:07

as opposed to, you know, spending a month trying to document what you can and find this and that. And you think you got everything in your head as the owner. And, you know, when it comes down to putting it all out, that can be a long process to try to document it at once. So I’d say documentation, I would say figuring out quickly the things you’re good at and the things that you’re okay and find somebody else to do the things you’re okay at.

00:46:46:09 – 00:47:22:20

And those are usually going to be maybe support things. You know, back in my case with the with the web design company, probably doing the web design would have been better for me to hire that out more than I did here and there. But I never really found like a good solution that and then, you know, thinking of thinking of that exit strategy, kind of having things in place like, you know, building up more customers and having those things in place because, you know, the more that you can get in place, especially with reoccurring revenue, that’s going to I’ll just say that that’s the best thing.

00:47:22:20 – 00:47:45:05

If you can think of a way to create reoccurring revenue, that would be the most valuable thing you can sell, you know, because there’s a multiple in place. When you’re selling one off services, your business is worth that one off when you’re selling multiple reoccurring revenues depending on the industry, everybody’s industry is a little different, but your multiple can go from 2 to 3.

00:47:45:07 – 00:48:18:13

In some industries ten, 20 times your revenue depending on what it is. So that that’s probably the biggest tip was finding that. And then, you know, if you if you do get to the point where you want to sell, like I ended up just going and listing it on Best Buy, sell on that was a great resource that a friend told me about and I got got probably close to 30, 40 people reaching out to me with interest and that was a really cool learning process to of finding out who is the best person to buy your business based on how you set it up.

00:48:18:13 – 00:48:40:00

So like me, I was heavily involved, so it needed to be buyers that would be heavily involved. It couldn’t just be like an investment firm That said, we want to buy this already running oil thing and if you leave, nothing changes. And so that that obviously when you don’t have those things in place can kind of limit who your buyer is.

00:48:40:00 – 00:48:57:12

But I learned a lot in that process too, as to the different buyers. And then also, you know, the company I saw, they cared a lot about the people that I worked with. And so that was a big part of it too. Being able to find the right people that would take it over and make sure that all those people would get taken care of.

00:48:57:12 – 00:49:24:08

You know, this level of service that I gave up for several years. But it’s a big responsibility. You know, you’ve worked really hard to build a business in your baby. Yeah. You want to make sure that it kind of gets handed off to the right person. So perhaps there’s a slight, you know, interview process there. Oh, 100%. I mean, I spent probably three or four weeks interviewing people until I finally felt like I felt that found the right people for it.

00:49:24:10 – 00:49:44:16

The people that you ended up selling to had like technical jobs, kind of similar to yours, right? They had a background in graphic design and develop web development. Yeah. And that’s what made it perfect because they could come in and take over the business and be able to do all of the stuff that I found myself doing. Yeah, they backed you out of it.

00:49:44:16 – 00:50:06:08

They can slot into that spot and kind of do the same same sort of work anyways. Yeah. And there was two of them too, so it worked out even better. You know, two people that have similar but different areas that they I think they run in the business. And so you know, it was a good situation where I felt everybody was was going to take care of, get taken care of, and I could kind of step away from it.

00:50:06:08 – 00:50:25:01

And, you know, know what I built was good hands. Yeah, I think that’s really cool. So what I heard from you is that, you know, loosely remove yourself from the business. What triggers that create processes and procedures to where you don’t got to run it. You can hand off a document and you don’t got to be there. That’s kind of what I heard from there.

00:50:25:01 – 00:50:58:15

And then I heard to hire the right people, delegate out the things you don’t like doing. Maybe like probably like number two. Number three, build and recurring revenue, have sustainable revenue on the books, have a be sustainable and reliable that will be built valuable to your future prospect buyer. And then finally, number four would be sure, I guess it’s not number four, but anyways, part of the buying the selling processes and making sure you interview the right buyer to and after baby.

00:50:58:17 – 00:51:13:17

Yeah, the interview process is very interesting. Like I’ve met on people, some people in the calls where I’m like, Oh God, there’s no way in hell I would sell you this. And then I met other people that were like, Oh, you guys could be a good fit. Like we, we had a good vibe together. Just I’d really more spent more time.

00:51:13:17 – 00:51:32:03

You know, obviously there’s technical questions we had to get into, but really it was an interview interview of character of seeing like, what are these people like? Are they going to be, you know, good people to take it over and all this? And so and so there’s more of a character interview in the beginning. And then we get into the more technical parts of who is the right buyer.

00:51:32:05 – 00:51:52:19

And that’s really because that shows a lot about your who you are as a business owner. You know who you are as a character, your business, who you are as a business owner, and you’re going to take everything you learn from this pop media and onwards to your next bit. Yeah, so I’ve implemented so many things that I didn’t want to learn again.

00:51:52:21 – 00:52:17:20

And so the new business and so like we’ve got a really good support system in there and we’ve got different aspects that so that I don’t find myself in the same position before where I’m like doing everything and then you get thrown out and you know, it’s good to have that so you can focus on the parts that you like and not get stuck in all the nonsense that there’s no reason you should be doing as a business owner.

00:52:17:22 – 00:52:33:14

I think that’s just the naturally this, though. I think, you know, it’s every every decade or so as humans, we have to go through like a moment of, like evolution. Yeah, for sure. Like you learn a thing, you do it, then you’re like, I had to reflect on a thing and then, you know, choose to do something different.

00:52:33:16 – 00:52:57:10

And so whether that is, you know, you build a thing, you do a thing, you reflect on a thing and you sell a thing in your case, or you build a thing, do the thing, and then you decide to evolve the thing, right? So evolve your business. I think that’s a constant thing that entrepreneurs and business owners are constantly doing, and I think that’s a really good message, you know, to our audience is sort of like that never ending bits of like evolving your business.

00:52:57:14 – 00:53:20:15

What we said earlier, that grit and character, you know, we said perseverance, patience and pivot. And I think that sort of like sums up a lot about what we just said in the beginning of like, it took a lot of patience and perseverance in order to build a business and then thanks a lot. What do you do with it when you have a lull?

00:53:20:21 – 00:53:41:04

Well, you can choose to build it and sell it, or you can choose to build it and evolve it and grow it. And I think that’s pretty valuable lessons to learn in business. I try to look forward to the lulls in my business because for me, a lull means, oh, we’re not quite as busy, or maybe we don’t have as many customers or we lost a customer.

00:53:41:06 – 00:54:03:02

Great. Now if I’m smart, I’ll take that time and use it to work on the business instead of in the business. Because I think I think that’s something that all entrepreneurs run into especially much later on. Yeah, In your first business or your first couple businesses, you work in your business and you don’t know any better, you know, and I’ll give the same advice that I think has been given a hundred thousand times to every entrepreneur that ever existed.

00:54:03:02 – 00:54:24:07

But, you know, read The E-Myth by Michael Gerber, you know, and learn the difference between working on your business and working in your business and, you know, being the technician or the business owner. They’re two different roles. But yeah, every time, every time we get along, like, okay, great, let’s clean up some of this mess that we made while we were working in it, optimize it, you know?

00:54:24:09 – 00:54:43:19

Yeah, yeah. I think it’s a great, great tip, you know, And that’s something I think as business owners we’re constantly trying to do. If you’re a solopreneur or an entrepreneur, you’re juggling three things all the time. You’re juggling this business and marketing, you’re juggling, doing the work, and you’re juggling like sort of like the post operations cleanup of the work.

00:54:43:21 – 00:55:01:24

So I think you’re constantly doing these three disks at all times. And it’s like when you’re busy, you don’t got time to clean up like you just said earlier, clean and like organize and and evolve the business or like, take other ideas, right? And like, move around with them because you’re still in the business working in the business.

00:55:01:24 – 00:55:24:07

Like, okay, well, here we go, you’re crazy. And then you’re like, That was crazy. And I got a law. What needs to get done? How can we put it back together so we can do that again? Absolutely. We need that tape. We need this. We need that. Okay, What do we learn? Oh, okay. We need to do this so that way we don’t run into that problem again or we need to do this or that doesn’t happen again.

00:55:24:07 – 00:55:54:22

Or we’re constantly sort of like reflecting and resolving problems. If if you’re an enthusiastic business owner, you are constantly working to eliminate your own downtime. Like you’re just like, Now I’m too excited to do this. Yeah, I could take a break, but I’m going to go work on this, right? Yeah, I get it. It’s relatable. I working in the same office as Brian for as long as I did and being friends with Brian, you know, I would come in and have, you know, an off day for whatever reason, and he’d be like, Hey, what do you think about this idea?

00:55:54:22 – 00:56:21:20

And then we’re right back at it over a cup of coffee, talking about how we could make it bigger, make it faster, whatever. Yeah, constantly improving. Was that was the Home Depot always home improving or something like that, I guess. Never. It’s never was a goal constant. It never ending improvement can I think I mean there there’s a line is like never stop on improving you know whatever kind of tagline it’s kind of for a business I feel it’s like you’re your job is never done.

00:56:21:23 – 00:56:40:02

Like just because you buy the home and just because you have a business doesn’t mean that everything is peaches and peaches and cream and sunshine and rainbows. It’s like Milestone is a new era, dude There’s like always something to clean up after. There’s always something, there’s always yard work, there’s always something to improve on. There’s always an inefficiency to to solve.

00:56:40:04 – 00:57:06:15

Like I swear. Like if I look around my office too much or look around my computers too much, I’m like, there’s a to do list a mile high and a mountain long or I’ll what the phrases. But anyway, there’s always something to do like whether it be marketing in my business or cleaning up my files or doing I have a mountain right here next to me of like receipts and stuff that I have to like orcus size and like put into QuickBooks and stuff, you know?

00:57:06:15 – 00:57:19:08

So there’s always something to do and or talk to whatever So obvious. I mean, as a business, I got remedied some of this. I got to I’m, I just hired a busy dev person, help the cold calls and I probably will hire someone to do my bookkeeping because this mountain keeps growing here of receipts and that’s not in my QuickBooks.

00:57:19:08 – 00:57:42:20

And this is a problem. You got something simple a bookkeeper. It’s such a great example of what Brian said earlier, too, which is, you know, apportion the jobs to the right people or give the give the job to the right person. You know, for me, I in in anticipation of needing to know how to do things for my business, I went and took three quarters of accounting at a community college because I just I wanted to know how to do it for myself.

00:57:42:22 – 00:57:57:21

People love to tell stories about, you know, Oh, I hired this person and they embezzled a bunch of money from me because I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t want that to be me. So I went and learned to do it quickly, learned that it was a deeper well than I wanted to be involved in.

00:57:57:23 – 00:58:16:14

I understand how to do it. I was drowning. Yeah. Thank you for the visual effects. Yes, it was more of a puppy battle, really, you know. But it taught me like, Hey, I don’t want to be doing this. I’m not good at this. Like, that’s two reasons is plenty enough to to send this out to somebody who really knows what they’re doing.

00:58:16:16 – 00:58:36:08

And it took me a while to find somebody that I like, but man, I won’t go back to doing the accounting. Personally. We’re pretty close to hiring another offshore person to do a bunch of the bookkeeping, essentially the data entry and reconciliation stuff. But by not having to do things that I’m not good at was a huge milestone for me.

00:58:36:08 – 00:58:58:00

And I think as a business owner, I think we tend to have to learn how to do a lot of things like that. I sort of wish and maybe I wouldn’t have done it as a younger person going to school for like business. I went to school for a trade. The trade was graphic design, and somewhere along the lines I discovered I had an entrepreneurial spirit that I didn’t actually know was there still, you know, maybe a few years in the business or doing that, doing the trade.

00:58:58:02 – 00:59:11:14

And I discovered that I was an entrepreneurial spirit. And I was like, Well, how the heck can we get these contracts with X business development? What the heck retainer do we got going on here? And what the hell is accounts payable? I’m sending my invoices somewhere. But wait, there’s an accounts payable person that pays a thing that day to day.

00:59:11:16 – 00:59:36:01

I was like, What? I need to learn more about business. So then obviously you get curious and you learn the bits. But I didn’t go to school for this. I didn’t know how to do contracts or proposals. I didn’t know how to do invoicing or accounts payable or bookkeeping or taxes like those little shit that learn to fly, you know, on the side of like working a full time gig somewhere and then, you know, thinking I wanted to do MBA design on the side.

00:59:36:01 – 00:59:57:13

And then eventually I did enough of it that I was like, Oh, well, can we go full time in my business? You know, I did that in like 2016, but, you know, it took me eight years of learning our 68 years of learning, you know, working for other people and doing a side hustle before I could launch a thing that was full time and or design, you know.

00:59:57:15 – 01:00:11:10

So, yeah, it’s just such a learning. Yeah. You discover that entrepreneurial spirit, you discover how to do all the things and then then you’re in the business. Oh my gosh, you go full time. You still got more to learn. Okay, how do I get a better contract? How do I write a better proposal? How do I deal with people better?

01:00:11:14 – 01:00:26:14

You know, and the learning you’re just starting on the learning when when you decided to finally commit and quit my learning and start doing it for yourself. Holy shit. You’re just. You just cracked the surface many times. I got burnt on contracts where I just had to suck it up and do it because I didn’t write a good enough ironclad contract.

01:00:26:16 – 01:00:46:10

And there’s and there’s so many opportunities to spend money that you don’t have. Like, you know, you write, we do, we do stuff. You know, it it would be easy. It would be easy. We carry a lot of liability as an I.T. company. You know, we have our hands and everything. We have access to everything, you know. So I’m constantly thinking, you know, how do I how do I protect myself?

01:00:46:10 – 01:01:06:09

And one I mean, Brian hit on this earlier. You know, integrity is critical, right? And I only hire people whose integrity I trust, you know, as much as I trust my own. And I think you can’t oversell that. Like, that’s critical. But the second component of that is, you know, good fences make good neighbors, good contracts make good customers.

01:01:06:11 – 01:01:25:00

How can we how can we build a business relationship? You know, because ideally your contract spells out the parameters of the relationship and that’s it. And it’s things that people already know or already should know and they’re agreed upon. But when you’re sitting there, as I was in your underwear at 22 years old, getting ready to launch your business, and you go, I don’t I don’t have a services agreement.

01:01:25:02 – 01:01:42:11

Can I afford to hire an attorney for this? Let’s see what it costs. Oh, it’s, you know, it’s like two or 3000 bucks to get started. No, I didn’t have the money for that. So you know, sometimes you fake it till you make it. You might have. I Googled the interwebs to try to figure out how to do a thing like, I guess is grit.

01:01:42:13 – 01:02:07:01

As a business owner. Just do a thing like I don’t how many times probably from 2008 to 2013 or 12 that I was like, Oh yeah, sure, I can do that I’m doing and I would Google how to do a thing and I would learn or ask how to do a thing that I didn’t know how to do because by golly, the recession was hard and nobody had jobs and I needed money.

01:02:07:03 – 01:02:26:24

So perhaps, you know, I might affect it to make it so that way I got, you know, got a contractor to know from 2008 to 2012 because that was a rough time to get jobs. It’s not as junior. So I did a lot of that. Like, I think that’s true for like a lot of business owners, like all the fuck I’m doing, but by golly, I’m going to figure it out.

01:02:27:01 – 01:02:42:12

I’m going to learn out well, and then I’m going to persevere. And the key is to learn as you go and to adapt what you do as you go. I mean, I can can’t count the number of times that Brian and I sat there and talked about our respective service agreements. And I go, you know, hey, maybe, maybe we should add something.

01:02:42:12 – 01:03:02:03

You know, maybe maybe the customer needs to get those things to me before I start the job. You know, And and then it evolves as we go. And all of a sudden, you know, we have a much more workable agreement. Yeah, I mean, I do the same thing with Brian. Remember when we got burned a few times on websites and this and that, and I was like, Man, we’d have our woes about client bits.

01:03:02:05 – 01:03:21:10

Now I’m like, I’ll put that in to the contractor. Yeah. If you put it in the contract. Yeah. And you just an expensive lesson. But I think about learned, right. Yeah. Think about yeah. Think about the it’s I say thing to myself all the time and it’s like, you know, I know that I’m going to make mistakes, right.

01:03:21:10 – 01:03:40:05

And that’s kind of like paying the price to learn the lesson. But by God, I am going to learn that fucking lesson the first time I paid the price and certainly haven’t always been that way, but it is always my goal to go, Yep, what’s fucked up? What can I learn from it? How can I prevented in the future and not just keep making that same mistake?

01:03:40:07 – 01:03:57:00

I think that’s the key thing with being a successful business owner is learning how to learning your lesson. You know, once, maybe twice, and never more than twice. How to prevent to never do that again. You’re like, What am I going to do to not go through that experience again? That was terrible. Holy shit, No way, No how.

01:03:57:05 – 01:04:18:10

I’m gonna write a better contract. I’m going to put a process in place, I’m going to do a thing, and I’m going to remedy that, that situation. And it’s never gonna happen again. As far as sums up sort of like the processes and procedures, right? So documentation, like what processes and procedures can I put in place as a business owner so we don’t got to go through that mishap ever again.

01:04:18:12 – 01:04:35:04

And it’s so interconnected. I mean, you know, like Brian was saying earlier, if you want to sell your business, if you want to train somebody new to work in your business, any of those things, you have to have a strategy for doing it. You know, And a lot of the time, you know, in my head, I know that I can figure it out as I go.

01:04:35:04 – 01:04:57:16

I’ve done it so many times. It’s a well-worn path communicating that to somebody new. You know, the first few times you do it, it’s it’s daunting. Oh, my God. I can’t believe, like, there’s so much to know about this. This one little thing. You know, something we do all the time. The staff member exits the business and we need to decommission their accounts and preserve their data and redirect their email.

01:04:57:18 – 01:05:19:10

You know, there’s like a 40 point checklist for the checklist wanted to do. Like one What we think is simple task is like 20 tasks. Yeah, you know, even just this podcast, we’ll just do an easy sample, right? Like, yeah, we’re going to shoot today, we’re going to record today, but then we got this, you know, 20 things I got to do post production and then 20 things I do in social media and on my website and this that the next.

01:05:19:10 – 01:05:43:00

And you know, finally before you launch the darn thing and I mean, just to do one little what we find out one little thing takes like 20 steps to get there. I think that’s a good like line in the sand though, for people. If you want to own a business, to me that means like if if you have a if you’re a technician, right, you have some skill graphic design i.t, machinist, whatever you are, The line in the sand for me is do I want to do all those other things?

01:05:43:00 – 01:05:59:20

You know, Do I want to be responsible for the accounting, even though in my case, I’m just responsible for the people that are responsible for it? Do i want to be responsible for the h.r. And the invoicing in the contract stuff? Because if you do great, you know those. But that is the the barrier to entry, kind of the minimum.

01:05:59:20 – 01:06:30:14

You know, the you have to accomplish that in order to ride. I think you’re right. You know. Do you want you said you want to learn and be responsible for the things do you want to learn all the things or do you want clock in and clock out and do your thing now? Do you want to learn how to do all parts of the business or do you want to be a button a chair and do the thing and just do the one thing 9 to 5 and get a paycheck, a gig and do the thing that’s that’s your job, that your voice is in the world.

01:06:30:16 – 01:06:50:14

You’re required to go work for somebody else, and you’d go 95 and you think, there’s nothing wrong with that. But no, I mean, my parents did that. A lot of people do that. It’s a good thing to do. It’s okay. We need both people like you. You need the visionary risk taker, business owners, and you need the doers.

01:06:50:16 – 01:07:16:10

You need both. It doesn’t matter who you are, truly. You know, everybody needs everybody. You know, we as business owners need people to show up and be available and do the work. But we also you know, those same people need visionaries and business owners and people willing do and be responsible for all the things or they wouldn’t have a fucking job and didn’t, you know.

01:07:16:10 – 01:07:44:19

So we need both types of people or none of us would make it Turns out it’s a collaborative effort. It really is. You need both types. You need everybody know what’s like. I’ll just sum it up with this is like you need the right tool for the right job, You know, like as I do that agency, you know, I hire good i.t people, I hire a good developer, I hire a good photographer, a a copywriter, a marketing strategist, a whatever, a videographer.

01:07:44:22 – 01:08:05:21

I hire the right people to make my business successful. Call it the critical up. Yeah, I need vendors and partners to be a successful business. And if I don’t have them, I’m sort of dead on arrival. And it takes great partnerships and great business integrity in order to have a successful business. You aren’t doing the shit alone. You got to get out of your can.

01:08:05:23 – 01:08:26:06

You can’t do it alone. Now. You need friends, you need college, you need a mastermind, you need a you need a book, you need a thing in order to be successful. Well, you got to get out of your own echo chamber. You know, when you are a solopreneur or you’re running the show, it’s easy to get I don’t want to say a God complex, but a God complex where like, yeah, this is my job, this is my baby.

01:08:26:06 – 01:08:46:24

I’m responsible for all these things. Like, Yeah, but you can still ask for help, you know, you can still go out and seek the opinion of somebody else who does what you do, who might do it in a different way and find out why, you know, remaining. And the. Neal I mean, you might have been doing good enough or it was it was functional but perhaps there’s out there someone who could do it better.

01:08:46:24 – 01:09:03:23

It might be different, but it might be better. It could be better for you, too. And I think you can’t be a solopreneur forever away. You’re going to get burnt out. You got to ask for help. You’re going to burn yourself out and you’re going to have to either go work for the man or you better build a team to do it.

01:09:03:24 – 01:09:28:10

To keep doing the thing, to make being a solopreneur forever worth it, you have to earn a lot more than I think people are are aware of. You know, you have to cover all of the taxes, all of us subcontractors, all of the services and things you need and still walk away with more because let’s face it, you have a lot more responsibility than if you worked for somebody else.

01:09:28:12 – 01:09:44:01

So solopreneur is great, but you if you want to walk away, I mean, if you don’t just value the freedom and like, you know, the freedom is a little oversold in my book when it comes to entrepreneurship. You know, like I like to tell people when they say, oh, you own your own business, you get to pick what hours you work.

01:09:44:01 – 01:10:02:16

I go, Yeah, I get to pick which 13 hours a day I work. Yeah, Yes, I’m still 13 hours. Yeah, yeah, I’m still beholden my hours clients. Guess what? Everybody else works 9 to 5. Guess what? You have to be available for 9 to 5. That’s when business hours are done. That’s when business meetings are typically done. Right.

01:10:02:16 – 01:10:18:00

But if you go to if you go to work to do graphic design for a big agency and all your job is to just do the design, you know, you can spend 8 hours a day doing the design. That’s awesome. If you own your own business, you can spend 8 hours a day doing the design and then at least a couple more hours a day doing other things.

01:10:18:00 – 01:10:41:24

Yeah, operations or whatever, or biz dev marketing or something else. Are you busy your time with a millionaire to do lists? So I think that’s, you know, I think after a while, you know, solopreneur, you know, I think you can’t micromanage, you’re going to have to learn to delegate. And I think a lot of people that are solopreneur have a hard time with relinquishing control.

01:10:42:01 – 01:11:06:02

Yeah. And getting over the hump is hard. I mean, getting it’s hard to relinquish control and power and a certain way of doing in a process and empower another person to do that thing. Yeah. And to know that the person that you just hired to do this thing, whether or not they have experience, is almost certainly going to fuck it up at some point and treat it well.

01:11:06:04 – 01:11:23:23

Yeah, and you have to look at that fuck up as, you know, for what it is, which is, you know, a stepping stone on the path to that person being really great, really awesome. Yeah. So it’s like, here’s my baby, don’t fuck it up. But You can’t go like that. Because, I mean, they’re going to like you just said, they’re going to mess up because that’s going to take time.

01:11:23:23 – 01:11:47:20

If that 3 to 6 month up ramp to, you know, get them used to the processes and procedures of your business and how you operate your business. Yeah. Yeah. We had a we had a freak accident in the office probably a year ago that like almost $4,000 a laptop sitting on a bench that where we prepare all the, all the laptops in customer equipment and somebody walked by and bumped the bench and that was the day that the bench decided to give up.

01:11:47:22 – 01:12:02:09

Yeah. Yeah. As well as right there at expense you weren’t expecting. Yeah. And you know the guy who, the guy who did it, who sat it there on the edge of the bench. Maybe just a little too close to the edge, who a bumped to the bench looks over at me and he goes and I go, Yeah, you know what?

01:12:02:09 – 01:12:25:07

It happens. You know, like you’ve you’ve done a million things in your career here. Well, that one, maybe there’s something to learn from it. And then we just keep going. I mean, we’re all human and we’re going to make mistakes. That’s the kicker. And I think that’s hard sometimes as business owners, entrepreneurs, you know, you sort of expect a lot of that yourself and you expect a lot of other people.

01:12:25:09 – 01:12:45:09

But, you know, humans, you know, we’re all going to make mistakes and we will make mistakes. And it’s like really what it comes down to. What are you going to do about it, Right, to keep driving. Well, and you know, the Rocky in there. Right there in it. Is it? Yeah. There’s totally Rocky Balboa in there. You could take that your what are you going to do when you take the hit?

01:12:45:09 – 01:13:00:17

You know, you get back up and you keep going. We should tag him in this podcast when it goes live like that. What are you going to do about it? You know, you’re going to get your ass beat. And it’s really, you know, when you’re down your knees and you’re getting your ass kicked, what the fuck are you going to do about it?

01:13:00:19 – 01:13:22:00

You get back and you keep fighting. Are you going to fucking sit there and take it and die? Well, I want to hear a story from Ryan about when he was down on his knees. Did you just take it, Brian, or did you get up 100%? Oh, always. They always say, We’ve all been there. We’ve all been down on my knees.

01:13:22:01 – 01:13:43:22

I think that’s called owning a business. There’s so many ways I could take that comment. I’m going to keep moving along this part. This podcast is on the precipice of going this is professional to keep everybody know this is the unprofessional part, right? This is how we get professional conversation now for the podcast. Stay tuned. This is about to become the mastermind party.

01:13:44:03 – 01:13:59:17

Is the table inside the hour party. I have the part. Guys will have the real afterparty where we’re actually having cocktails. And for a decompressing from this podcast after this, I have to go to therapy because. I’m fucked up because I own a small office. You’re all right there. You’re all right. All right. So this part behind a paywall.

01:13:59:19 – 01:14:25:00

I know, right? We’ll have the what’s it called? A subscription app. Subscription for the afterparty stage to buy. Now for the subscription to to listen to the news apps. You want to see the rest subscribe. So you can’t that yet anyway I got to make that there’s the entrepreneur and it’s we can’t even help ourselves Well people had a paywall oh you want to join us for cocktails after the podcast going paywall.

01:14:25:02 – 01:14:46:13

All right. So I always like to end it with like a sort of like sign off. Is there anything that you want to promote, talk about your business, anything you got going on? Big things, the calm, big things happening. You know what, what sort of fun thing, you know, do you want to share with the audience about your business and about you or something cool, You’re onboarding better feature or whatever you got going on.

01:14:46:13 – 01:15:04:08

Tell me tell us what you got going on there. Who do you want to go first? I don’t know. Thumb. Thumb work for that thing. I mean, you’re ready for that? Oh, no. You’re not going to put a door for you to rock, paper, scissors. Oh, there we go. Okay. Ready to rock, Brian? Cheating up here. Up here.

01:15:04:10 – 01:15:36:10

Rock, paper, scissors. Okay, do it. Rock, paper, scissors. Shoot. Rock, paper, scissors, shoot. This is bullshit. One more time. One more time. Okay, As. There you go. Okay. Other got different. Well, what was the question? What was the shooting? Look, this is. This is what I will say. My. My passion for what I do stems from taking things that people find difficult or confusing and making them simpler.

01:15:36:10 – 01:15:59:08

So the name of the business is Plain English Technology Services, because I like to take things that are important to your business, but maybe too complicated to understand in the way that they’re presented and have been so many times. And I’ve given examples here how it’s been valuable to me to find someone that can kind of walk me through something that I’m sitting here with two people that have taught me at least one thing each about marketing, you know, which is important to any business.

01:15:59:08 – 01:16:26:06

So with that in mind, you know, we see people all the time now going, Oh, you know, cyber liability is a big thing. What can we do to protect ourselves? You know, you can protect yourself in two big ways. It’s kind of the same thing I was saying about my business earlier. You can protect yourself by, training your staff, building good policies and practices, you know, for security, continuity, knowledge, all of those things.

01:16:26:08 – 01:16:57:03

And You can also go out and buy cyber liability insurance. You should do both of those things. And if you don’t know where to start, we can help you with that. I get probably 25 surveys that we do every year that come to my desk and some some are taken care of by the staff where the cyber liability insurance Hey, you know what, EDR are you using or using multi-factor authentication when logging in remotely and people don’t know they know how they do their work, but they don’t necessarily know whether or not they’re doing that.

01:16:57:03 – 01:17:20:08

Did they meet the criteria? Is that an approved software? Yeah. We want to help walk you through that so that you have confidence that the answers you’re giving to those surveys are honest and accurate and a good reflection of what you’re doing internally. And then the flipside of that is we can use that survey to direct out, you know, maybe some things that you should be doing that you’re not already.

01:17:20:10 – 01:17:44:13

So that’s proving your business and helping you stay compliant. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, zooming out, that’s that’s what we do from an AI perspective. You know, one of the things that I’ve always said is we’re business consultants with an IT focus. We want to help you optimize, improve, secure your whole organization so you can go back to being, you know, the technician that does graphic design or baked bread or whatever it is, right?

01:17:44:15 – 01:18:07:13

That’s super good. All right, Brian, your turn. All right. So, yeah, like I created the Maverick last year and the last year, we kind of soft launch them this January. And I really wanted to create something that can just kind of help people with their communication and their automation and kind of bring some AI into it. And so I created the Maverick and we do a couple of things.

01:18:07:13 – 01:18:28:02

So we help people with missed calls. And so anybody in the service business is always missing phone calls. And if you think about the lifetime value of a client and what that means to you by missing that simple phone call, I mean, for some people that can mean you just lost thousands of dollars. And so I created a toll to kind of bridge that gap.

01:18:28:02 – 01:18:46:01

And then one of the big things that we’ve been offering people lately is our client reactivation. So anybody that’s been in business for a little bit, you know, we’ve all got data lying around people. We’ve done estimates for proposals, even our current customers. Everybody is always focused on new and that should absolutely a part of your your outreach.

01:18:46:01 – 01:19:03:13

But lots of times you have a ton of customers you could just reach out to. And we’ve created a whole automation to help reengage with them and get people some good wins. You know, there’s a lot of there’s a goldmine in our leads out there. And so this is a great way of kind of reengaging with people and keeping them engaged, too.

01:19:03:13 – 01:19:24:16

We want to we want to create automation to also make sure that those people don’t fall away in the wayside like they did before and kind of keep them engaged going forward. So lots of really great communication tools and some really cool stuff as well. Yeah, I’m really excited. I am a new customer. Yeah, really excited that we’re going to be doing your activation.

01:19:24:19 – 01:19:57:03

Yeah. So I’m really excited about the CRM system that you’ve created, learning more about your product, you know, even about the you call it client reactivation, but one could argue it’s client re-engagement 100%. You know, because I’ve been in business now, I’ve been I’ve been a graphic designer now for you know, 16 years. And, you know, whether I did business for other people or business for myself or past clients, colleagues previously, you know, whatever, I’ve got 16 years of leads in data.

01:19:57:05 – 01:20:20:04

So Exactly. Call it reactivation, perhaps of old leads or old clients, but perhaps a re-engagement perhaps is a good name for it as well of reengaging previous clients or reengaging old colleagues or or people because there’s, you know, there’s the musical chairs every few years and maybe they were a junior over here, but now they’re a senior over here and maybe they’re a management other, another C-level.

01:20:20:04 – 01:20:35:17

Now the business owner, you just don’t know where people are going to end up. And so, you know, people that I might have have contact with 16 years ago, they might own their own business. Now, I don’t know. I can’t keep contact with all the persons in my list right? So I’m really excited about to learn more about the maverick in the CRM system.

01:20:35:19 – 01:20:59:16

Your missed calls, your listings. I love what you’ve got going on, making sure listings are good and your CRM system. So I’m really excited on board that as part of ember design and and Mr.. Mr. Moore of Plain English I’m really excited to be working with you again. You’ve been a a blessing as you’ve fixed my email debacle that has been over the last while.

01:20:59:16 – 01:21:19:15

It’s only been bought to my knowledge at, the last couple of weeks, but perhaps it’s been happening for several months so I could not be more grateful and thankful for your effort in planning this technology to be saving my email snafu. So I am grateful and thankful for you and your business and I’m excited to be doing business with you again.

01:21:19:15 – 01:21:48:16

Mr. Hardy, you know, was with his pop media and now again with the Maverick, so I could not be more excited to support my colleagues and friends in business together as we all get to do this crazy choice that we have of being these absolutely visionary entrepreneurs because we just can’t help ourselves. So anyways, thank you so very much for your time, your conversation.

01:21:48:16 – 01:22:15:14

I think our audience perhaps has learned a little bit or too about business and tips and tricks and ideas and perhaps, you know, they’ll both take a couple and put it in their pockets from later. I don’t know, hopefully. But I’m grateful and thankful for you and our mastermind classes over the last four years and I know I think this was a pretty stinkin awesome episode and I really appreciate you.

01:22:15:16 – 01:22:39:21

Yeah. So thanks so much for having us. That was great. Stay tuned for the after because this girl needs I need a margarita. I don’t know about you. I wish I had a margarita right now. Anyhow, stay tuned. Thank you for your time. And please enjoy the next episode of Amber and do the podcast. Thanks a lot. Cheers.