Latest / Big Talk About Small Business / Ep. 15 - Journeying through the Challenges of Growing a Business

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Ep. 15 - Journeying through the Challenges of Growing a Business · Big Talk About Small Business

0:04
Speaker 1: Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Big Talk about small business.
0:13
Speaker 1: I don't know why we do it like that, do you?
0:16
Speaker 2: Let's just start it.
0:16
Speaker 2: We're just like we can't stop because we're creatures of old habits or I'm creatures of habits.
0:21
Speaker 2: I think we're freaking all weirdos?
0:23
Speaker 3: I don't know, it's a little flair.
0:25
Speaker 3: I always enjoy it every time.
0:26
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's just, I'm born.
0:27
Speaker 2: We'll take it yeah.
0:29
Speaker 1: Parker, we've got a guest.
0:30
Speaker 1: We've got a guest in the studio today with us.
0:33
Speaker 1: It's Parker Dodson of podcastvideoscom, and normally Parker is back behind the scenes manipulating all these dials and things.
0:47
Speaker 1: Does anybody really know what all this stuff does?
0:50
Speaker 1: Parker knows?
0:51
Speaker 1: I only see it when it's just me.
0:54
Speaker 1: I was just thought it was just like some kind of an act or something like you know, like you're on the command and you're at the command bridge of the USS Enterprise.
1:04
Speaker 1: You know, like Mr Sulu, you know he's moving the dials around.
1:10
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know what those things, if you see how the flatter closest to you just like a warp speed type thing could just bumps us all the way up.
1:15
Speaker 3: Really, whoa, what's it doing?
1:19
Speaker 3: So that's just your soundboard controls, all those fancy colors that have voice changers and sensor buttons and all that kind of stuff.
1:25
Speaker 3: So let us slide that up.
1:26
Speaker 3: Let's just activating the soundpad buttons.
1:28
Speaker 3: I have it turned down in case somebody in here DJ's over there, yep, yep, yep.
1:32
Speaker 1: So could I make myself sound better like I have a really great video.
1:36
Speaker 3: DJ.
1:36
Speaker 3: Yeah, we've got a disguise voice.
1:37
Speaker 3: We have a disguise, a high pitch, a robot, a microphone, everything and they're like yep.
1:42
Speaker 1: I guess if we ever kidnap somebody you need like an artificial voice, we could come over here to make our ransom.
1:48
Speaker 3: I'll just put the light behind him and then we're going to decide.
1:50
Speaker 3: So you're just a shadowy figure, just a little wet.
1:53
Speaker 2: I don't know, I don't want to recognize you with a hat.
1:55
Speaker 1: No, I have it.
1:56
Speaker 1: You have my hat.
1:57
Speaker 1: No, I always wondered what you do with all that stuff.
2:00
Speaker 1: Anyway, we're here with Parker Dodson Parker.
2:03
Speaker 1: Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?
2:06
Speaker 3: Oh man, that's a long story.
2:07
Speaker 3: I won't go all the way into that Fully all the way.
2:10
Speaker 3: I moved up to Northwest Arkansas about 12 years ago for school to go to the U of A and just love the area.
2:16
Speaker 3: I'm from the River Valley originally, so not too far away.
2:18
Speaker 3: I was about 45 minutes, not bad, but just came up here to love the area.
2:22
Speaker 3: It's amazing how much it's changed in the last 12 years.
2:25
Speaker 3: I mean, just remember coming up here to go to Cabela's when it first opened and there was nothing, even on this side of the interstate hardly.
2:31
Speaker 3: And so you see, everything that's changed is pretty nuts.
2:36
Speaker 2: Bet you wish you would have bought a piece of property over there now, don't you?
2:40
Speaker 1: Mark, yeah, I wish I'd bought everything in downtown bed and pillow.
2:44
Speaker 3: Fight us.
2:45
Speaker 3: Dahlia, remember every time I said, oh man, I wish I own that piece of property right here along the interstate.
2:49
Speaker 3: Every time I've had a dollar, for every time I said that I could probably have bought, you could have passed an acre, yeah.
2:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, no doubt about it.
2:57
Speaker 3: But yeah.
2:58
Speaker 3: So I kind of started out after school.
3:00
Speaker 3: My first job that I had was selling office furniture of all things.
3:04
Speaker 3: Basically it's a long story short.
3:07
Speaker 3: I worked at a golf course through college because I figured why not love being outside free golf, get a tan in the process, so it sounds great, a little part time gig.
3:13
Speaker 3: I met a gentleman there who later on became my boss at that company and really kind of gave me an opportunity because I exercised major in exercise science, so I said nothing to do with business or any of that kind of stuff and so really did that and did that for about six, seven years and then, if that furniture, yep, and then really wasn't looking for anything else and had another opportunity kind of come my way.
3:38
Speaker 3: And here I am at podcast.
3:40
Speaker 3: Videos now run marketing and all the knobs and dials on the back end type stuff.
3:45
Speaker 3: So what is podcastvideoscom?
3:47
Speaker 3: do so podcastvideoscom is Northwest Arkansas's premier podcast recording studio, so really podcasting is the hot thing.
3:55
Speaker 3: Everybody loves having a show.
3:56
Speaker 3: There's millions of shows out there.
3:57
Speaker 3: Yeah, there are a lot of them, but it's incredible when you dig into it how poor a lot of them really are.
4:02
Speaker 3: I mean people just don't have the knowledge or the expertise to really learn the time.
4:06
Speaker 3: That's the biggest thing.
4:07
Speaker 3: I mean you start looking at it's like okay, a long record, an hour podcast, that's great.
4:11
Speaker 3: But you don't think about okay, that's another hour of reviewing it, the editing process, that anything else you want to plug in, plus your all your extra equalizing you have to do on the back end.
4:21
Speaker 3: Then you get that done.
4:23
Speaker 3: Say, three, four hours later you've invested five hours on one episode.
4:26
Speaker 3: Now you're like well, not what I do with all this.
4:28
Speaker 3: I've gotten footage right, so it up on YouTube, cool.
4:30
Speaker 3: But I mean, is that going to be enough?
4:32
Speaker 3: How do I get on Spotify, apple, all those podcast platforms?
4:35
Speaker 3: So we're really here to streamline that process, just like much like with you guys.
4:40
Speaker 3: You know we, you guys are on our diamond package.
4:42
Speaker 3: You come in record.
4:44
Speaker 3: What we do is we distribute you for you, your social media, your marketing, put it on all the platforms, create your assets, kind of like the logo that you see here.
4:51
Speaker 3: We help design all that, design the website.
4:53
Speaker 3: So we're really there to help people, because that's usually the kicker for all of her people they just don't have the knowledge or the investment to really dig into that Right, and you're just not going to be successful being on just YouTube or just Instagram or whatever.
5:06
Speaker 3: Maybe you really have to be on all these platforms and being diligent around a building your site with SEO optimization on the back end, so you can find it, because there are a million and a half shows out there.
5:15
Speaker 3: So how do I progress up?
5:17
Speaker 3: And so our goal is to get these individuals or companies or whoever wants to come in and do it, to be successful, to help them take a lot of that learning and everything off the back ends, although they don't have to, because it is overwhelming.
5:29
Speaker 3: I mean, remember when I first started it was like we're going to do this podcast business.
5:33
Speaker 3: Cool, Sounds awesome.
5:34
Speaker 3: What do you know about it?
5:36
Speaker 3: Absolutely nothing.
5:37
Speaker 3: It's kind of been a very interesting learning curve for me as far as just learning how the business operates.
5:43
Speaker 3: I also came from selling furniture.
5:44
Speaker 3: I was just saying genuine account manager.
5:46
Speaker 3: So I didn't even know how business operates are run.
5:49
Speaker 3: I don't know that there's processes on the back end, because I'm already an established company.
5:52
Speaker 3: I already know that those exist.
5:54
Speaker 3: With a new company, nothing's there Right.
5:57
Speaker 3: We started podcastvideoscom, it was.
5:59
Speaker 3: We got the domain podcastvideoscom, let's make it a studio.
6:02
Speaker 3: It's like now, what do we do, you know, and so it's kind of one of those things where it's a full on learning curve.
6:07
Speaker 3: I mean, you don't think about processes and all that stuff, and you guys I've actually alluded to this on another episode of how do you advance yourself and then get these processes off, and that's the biggest thing that I didn't understand and still learning even to this day.
6:21
Speaker 3: As a matter of fact, when you guys came in, I was running on processes for the new studio that we're going to be moving into here in about a month and a half or so.
6:28
Speaker 1: That's exciting yeah.
6:29
Speaker 3: Yeah, we're looking forward to that.
6:31
Speaker 3: We'll be right up here by Hero's Coffee and that one uptown Rogers, and how many individual podcasts recording studios will you have in there?
6:38
Speaker 3: So there'll be eight studios in that location we come.
6:41
Speaker 3: Yeah, we'll have three large ones like this.
6:43
Speaker 3: You'll have a setup similar to what we have here.
6:44
Speaker 3: As you can see on the wide angle We've got the table chairs, tv, all that good stuff.
6:48
Speaker 3: We have a lounge room setup which will actually have shotgun mics in the ceiling, so it's real clean.
6:53
Speaker 3: It'll be all lit properly for each individual setting.
6:56
Speaker 3: We'll have a nice year shaped desk and then we have five what I'm calling solo slash battle pods.
7:01
Speaker 3: And I call them battle pods because you could actually fit.
7:05
Speaker 3: There's the size you can fit two people in them, but it's going to be a very intimate Me and you are across the table from one another, just right at each other's faces Kind of what I call a battle dueling pod in there.
7:14
Speaker 2: But it's really I mean like for just like interview, I mean yeah, it's just you and Mark would have a conversation.
7:18
Speaker 3: That's having debates.
7:19
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly yeah.
7:21
Speaker 2: I mean it doesn't have to be a big.
7:23
Speaker 2: You'd be like Mark and I just having a conversation across the table.
7:25
Speaker 3: Yep, and without having the extra table and microphones in the background.
7:28
Speaker 3: So it's just real clean for each, just the two of you.
7:30
Speaker 3: But it's going to be really nice and you can see, here we've kind of made due in the space that we have.
7:34
Speaker 3: But lighting will be all new.
7:35
Speaker 3: The entire room is designed around mounting the cameras, mounting lighting.
7:39
Speaker 3: We'll have LED lighting on all the walls you can.
7:41
Speaker 3: So when big talk shows up, the room will be green when you guys sit down to talk.
7:45
Speaker 3: So it'll be.
7:46
Speaker 3: It's cool, it's really sharp.
7:47
Speaker 3: I like that, yeah, yeah, we're looking forward to it.
7:49
Speaker 3: It's just so.
7:50
Speaker 3: It's learning a lot of that and it's with that becomes the business growth.
7:53
Speaker 3: I mean the goal is to expand this and because it helps people, so it's learning the processes.
7:58
Speaker 3: For me, once I learned it all, it's easy Cool.
8:00
Speaker 3: Well, now we have six diamond package memberships.
8:04
Speaker 3: We have a bunch of individual users that are using the studio at least twice a day and we get into a situation where it's like I'm getting 15 recordings a week.
8:11
Speaker 3: I don't have the capacity to continue to grow the business.
8:14
Speaker 3: We're not to edit all of those on my own.
8:16
Speaker 3: There's just not enough time in the day for it and then continue on with other enterprises that you may have going, and so learning the processes and, for me, letting go of that creativeness is a challenge that I struggle with every day, because I just I know how it looks.
8:32
Speaker 1: I'm just going to say creativeness, you like to do the actual work.
8:35
Speaker 3: I like to do the work of the business.
8:37
Speaker 3: I like to do the work of it.
8:38
Speaker 3: Yeah, probably To say how much.
8:39
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's just one of those things of I'm very meticulous on.
8:43
Speaker 3: That transition was.02 seconds slower than it should have been.
8:47
Speaker 3: 95, 98% of users are never going to notice that.
8:51
Speaker 3: So how do I yeah, I understand.
8:53
Speaker 3: So put that switch to where it's like it's okay.
8:55
Speaker 3: It's not going to be the end of the world, because if I worry about that, I'll never move on to other things.
9:00
Speaker 2: Tell a story on that Mark, I bet you, because you you definitely have done that in your career.
9:04
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I mean, how do you?
9:05
Speaker 1: flip the switch.
9:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the craftsman mentality.
9:09
Speaker 1: Not everybody can flip that switch.
9:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think the way I flipped it is that I'm inherently lazy.
9:17
Speaker 1: Okay, so if I can get out of doing something, I wouldn't do it.
9:22
Speaker 1: Now you know.
9:25
Speaker 1: Here's the other truth of it.
9:26
Speaker 1: Though you may think you know what you just said, I'm going to take that millisecond out of there that the other guy wouldn't take out, and that may be true, but my experience is a lot of times other people actually do things better than I do.
9:42
Speaker 1: I don't necessarily think they will at first, but you know, if you get the right person in the job who's got the right orientation, and you can part with it and you can tell them what's important to you, you may be surprised.
9:57
Speaker 1: They may actually innovate and do something better than you would do, and I think I've had enough experiences like that that it gets easier to part with.
10:06
Speaker 1: You know, feeling like you have to be the one to do everything, yeah, yeah.
10:14
Speaker 1: That said, I mean I do think it's sort of an inevitable outcome of growth in any business that if you're good I mean a lot of businesses revolve around people who are good at doing something yeah, that's how you sort of start it, yeah, but you know you've got to get past that.
10:31
Speaker 1: It may not be as good.
10:33
Speaker 1: That's the other thing.
10:34
Speaker 1: Yes, sure, you know you have to live with it.
10:36
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean right, and then you figure I'll go back and find other ways to improve it later.
10:41
Speaker 1: That can be difficult.
10:44
Speaker 1: I mean, I certainly went through that in my construction design, build construction business.
10:50
Speaker 2: Well, I feel like that, like even you know whether it's a really small business you're starting.
10:54
Speaker 2: I mean, you're even talking about like, if you're an entrepreneur like a lot of times entrepreneurs cannot let go of their skill set, you know.
11:03
Speaker 2: But at the same time, you don't have to let go, like I remember you give me a piece of advice a long time ago.
11:08
Speaker 2: You go, I was telling you about something in business this was a long time ago and I was like man, I gotta quit designing and or doing something like that.
11:16
Speaker 2: And you're like man, let me give you a piece of advice Never stop designing if you're good at that.
11:22
Speaker 2: And so I actually kind of took that to heart.
11:25
Speaker 2: And but what it did was it morphed into like, where I was designing, like these big publications and all this big out, big blown out graphics and you know spending hours behind there.
11:37
Speaker 2: But I just followed all that back into okay, I can actually design a really great sales presentation if I want to.
11:43
Speaker 2: But I angled it to something that where I could communicate, that's going to drive revenue for me, right, and so that was critical for me.
11:54
Speaker 2: Like I was like oh, I was like no shit, man I'm actually, you know and then whenever I would work with other companies and people, they're like.
12:02
Speaker 2: They're always like, really impressed, like I can't, like.
12:06
Speaker 2: I mean, if we were both in sales, you would tell me, if I was you I'd be like I might be a good salesperson, but I cannot do what you just did with that sales presentation to communicate visually A point, a complex point, to sell a gig and to get more people behind an idea and buying influence and then to close the deal.
12:25
Speaker 2: So it's significant, so I think it's a lot of it was just channeling that talent.
12:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good point to where it's the most useful to you, drives revenue, yeah.
12:34
Speaker 1: But I do think also, you know you can periodically inject yourself.
12:39
Speaker 1: You know you don't have to do everything, but periodically you get dissolved and do something from A to Z, just so it keeps you sensitive to what other people are going through and it you know.
12:53
Speaker 1: So you know the whole process.
12:55
Speaker 1: I think that is important too, don't you to just like periodic injection, sporadic injection of yourself into the process?
13:04
Speaker 2: Well, all the processes and the people following the process.
13:07
Speaker 2: I mean they need leadership, like everybody's looking for someone to guide, and that's really what you can do.
13:14
Speaker 2: If you're a high growth manager, right, in a small business or big, it doesn't matter, but you're somebody that can start putting together the full roadmap.
13:23
Speaker 2: But to Mark's point, you're checking in at certain map points, right, like you know, to go, you know, back to this little city in the process and then you travel down the road and come back to the other one and then sometimes you come back down and you remap it, but you and then you corral all the people together so everybody can follow it.
13:42
Speaker 2: I mean, like you know, it's definitely like it's not something that I particularly do anymore and I mean I imagine you don't either, mark, like build those processes but I would map absolutely 100% can attest that there was a time period in my career where that was like what I was doing for a number of years and the thing is is like I had to flip a switch.
14:03
Speaker 2: Like my story was is I had a small business back in the day that was a photography studio and a design studio creative design and I found myself like I was the photographer in there and I was a designer and I found myself going.
14:22
Speaker 2: I just remember it hit me one day as, like if I'm the more I'm behind that camera, the less money I'm gonna make, like I wanna have this ceiling that I'm gonna hit and I'm gonna make that six.
14:34
Speaker 2: I like so much time, always so much time.
14:36
Speaker 2: If I'm the right and it's selling, I'm the one that's shooting, I'm the one that's editing, I'm one that's do all these processes.
14:41
Speaker 2: But hey, don't get me wrong, I knew every one of the process, but I literally had to make a decision one day, and I remember being in that studio deciding I'm gonna sell every bit of this shit Because if I keep it, I'm gonna stay behind that camera.
14:55
Speaker 2: And I literally put it all in the eBay, made about 12,000 bucks off all my equipment and it cost me probably 22 to begin with.
15:03
Speaker 2: But I mean, I got rid of all of it in a week and what I wanted to do is I wanted to just force myself to go on.
15:09
Speaker 2: Okay, now where's my?
15:11
Speaker 2: All that creative energy is now going to?
15:15
Speaker 2: What A scope of work, which is a Word document.
15:17
Speaker 2: And so I just started very meticulously building this process within this Word document that had underwines and bold, it was outlined correctly with the proper Roman numerals and the ABCs and all this stuff.
15:31
Speaker 2: And I mean it was super organized and every bullet point was well thought out and I was thinking on behalf of my client.
15:36
Speaker 2: And then I go back to the client after I met with them, I would listen to them, I would shut up, write notes if that's a word, not getting an opinion.
15:44
Speaker 2: I'd be like I can get back with you a couple of days, I go and I build that scope of work and write down everything and rehash everything.
15:50
Speaker 2: So they knew I was listening to them.
15:52
Speaker 2: And then I put my thinking cap on with all my understanding and processes before and I knew how it was all gonna work together and I could build a timeout because I knew how much time it was gonna take.
16:01
Speaker 2: Then I go back and take work Because you had done the work, because I'd done the work and the processes, and then I go back and I would show up to this person and they would most likely buy it because they knew that I was on the right track and I knew what I was talking about.
16:17
Speaker 2: And then, when I had sold it, I would go out and I'd find my contractors and I'd say I need you to do this, I need you to do that, I need you to do this.
16:24
Speaker 2: Got it Good, go around.
16:26
Speaker 2: Another scope of work.
16:27
Speaker 2: Yep.
16:28
Speaker 2: And that changed the picture.
16:31
Speaker 1: Vantage picture yeah, turn it into an organization instead of just a way to make a living.
16:36
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely.
16:36
Speaker 3: I think that's one of the things that I've kind of had to learn through the process is not that I've kind of got a mentor in this.
16:43
Speaker 3: It's kind of helping me with this journey Because, again, I've never really attempted any of this stuff before, so it's one of those things where it's natural that's got to learn.
16:52
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly One of the things that pieces of advice that he gave me was you have to kind of kill that creativeness and it's killing the creativeness, but it's also not killing it, it's transitioning it to a new role.
17:02
Speaker 3: You're not getting rid of the creative abilities that you have.
17:04
Speaker 3: You're focusing the power behind those Right From what does the video look like to how do I enable this video to look the same way or better, while working on the back end of it?
17:15
Speaker 3: It's still getting done.
17:16
Speaker 3: You're still using those creative processes to figure out that creative energy of how is this all getting solved?
17:21
Speaker 3: It's just you're not, I'm not telling my creativeness, I'm transitioning the way it operates and what it's directed towards, and so that's kind of been a struggle a little bit.
17:30
Speaker 3: For me is just learning that, because that's kind of my background is photography, videography, creative background, and so to transition that, from what I know to kind of what this is now, is very complex.
17:44
Speaker 3: Not only that, but it's outside the comfort zone.
17:46
Speaker 3: We get so stuck as humans being in that, what we're comfortable, what we're familiar with.
17:50
Speaker 3: And for me, getting a podcast done and shooting behind a computer and editing is not a risk for me.
17:55
Speaker 3: I know how to do it, it doesn't take me any time at all, it's easy.
17:58
Speaker 3: But figuring out and reaching out to these individuals and contractors and everybody else is kind of outside my comfort zone from what I'm used to, because I'm never visually yeah, there's always risk that they won't perform.
18:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh yeah.
18:10
Speaker 1: So it's bound to make you a little bit uncomfortable, until you develop your faith in any of the providers.
18:17
Speaker 2: When you say I'm blue, I'm either say I try to just point.
18:20
Speaker 2: Is strikes me as a I'm always trying to figure out, like what's the difference between entrepreneur and not filter?
18:27
Speaker 1: But that point, that's a good point Like that is definitely a point of departure.
18:32
Speaker 1: If it is, I'll just say that's what you're saying.
18:34
Speaker 2: You're usually not too worried about being uncomfortable and right, taking risks, whether it's financial or reputational risk, and right, they're always going to pause the reputation.
18:44
Speaker 2: But I mean, like I mean, dude, and we talked about the it's okay to fail.
18:48
Speaker 2: No, it's really not okay to fail.
18:50
Speaker 2: An entrepreneur will not fail, but they will step out into uncomfortable territories Because if they don't do that, they will fail.
18:57
Speaker 2: That's a big difference.
19:00
Speaker 1: I like the way you brought that into this, because it's always interesting to me to try to characterize the difference in a small business out there and an entrepreneur.
19:09
Speaker 1: But definitely grow this part of it, and you won't have growth unless you can part with some of the stuff that you do.
19:16
Speaker 1: I mean that we can now agree on, right, yeah, I think the problem, though, when I look at a lot of companies like you know, small companies like this, or many of the other ones I was either involved in or observed or worked with, the tendency is to, when you start trying to get better organized and develop these systems that you can bring people into, the tendency is to become very bureaucratic, too early, too bureaucratic and too early, and it kind of baffles me.
19:49
Speaker 1: I don't know why that's the case.
19:51
Speaker 1: It's like I worked with engineers my whole career.
19:54
Speaker 1: If you ask engineers what they hate, they'll say bureaucracy.
19:57
Speaker 1: If you ask them to solve a problem, they'll create bureaucracy every damn time.
20:02
Speaker 1: It's meetings, it's checklists, it's processes that people can't follow because the job's too small and you couldn't go through all those processes.
20:11
Speaker 1: It's always something, but it's bureaucratic, yeah, and I think you got to fight that, okay, because for two reasons.
20:21
Speaker 1: One, it makes you less efficient, not more efficient.
20:23
Speaker 1: And secondly, it makes it'll create an environment that people don't really want to work in.
20:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, like, what's nice about your situation is you get to invent all this stuff, right?
20:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's good.
20:37
Speaker 1: You know, I remember when I started my business primary business that was Mark Swig and associates in 1988, the thing I was struck by was how much time I had on my hands because I wasn't in a corporate structure, I wasn't going to meetings that didn't make any difference to me, I wasn't having to spend so much time providing information to people.
21:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know what I mean.
21:03
Speaker 1: I had all this time.
21:04
Speaker 1: Suddenly I felt the other way, like I was like holy cow, I've got all this, this.
21:09
Speaker 1: I can spend 85% of my time doing what this business is supposed to do for clients, instead of 85% of my time in bureaucracy and 15% of my time doing my actual job.
21:23
Speaker 2: So true, isn't it so true?
21:25
Speaker 2: I've completely had that same experience, like in bigger organizations and then even like so, and if you're not only, you only have to work there, but you can be selling to bigger organizations which I've done a lot of as well to where you cannot get a decision to be made because and then no work really gets done because everybody's just talking and talking.
21:46
Speaker 2: And I actually had a good conversation this morning that's kind of related to this point, that they have analyzed the circumstance so much because of all the risks that are associated with it and how all the ways are that can fail, right To the point that they get paralysis, yeah.
22:06
Speaker 2: And the bureaucracy comes in.
22:07
Speaker 2: And that's what bureaucracy is doing is like, oh, I don't know.
22:10
Speaker 2: And then they'll say you know, I had this.
22:13
Speaker 2: I had this happen to me one time about 20 years ago.
22:15
Speaker 2: It wasn't exactly the same, but it didn't work out and we lost $2 million, right.
22:20
Speaker 2: And then you get the decision maker going whoa, I don't want to lose $2 million, right, I'll use $2 million.
22:26
Speaker 2: I don't have a job and I won't be able to wear my tube socks on the golf courses Friday.
22:30
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know what I'm saying.
22:32
Speaker 1: Make the payments of my new Denali sitting out there and driving a lot, right, yeah?
22:37
Speaker 2: No, yeah, you're right, but it's, but it's so like I think, though that, but the freedom, I mean like it sounds like you're in right now you have this freedom.
22:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, that we enjoyed.
22:49
Speaker 2: I mean, that's true.
22:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was getting some really cool stuff done.
22:54
Speaker 1: I so was I.
22:55
Speaker 1: I just had this time that I never enjoyed before.
22:58
Speaker 2: Yeah, my kids, my kids kind of like that these days, that where I work right now.
23:03
Speaker 2: They've been good.
23:05
Speaker 2: They've been good for me too, because it's kind of put me back in that position to where I can focus on a lot of that stuff and have fun with it and you know and do the right thing.
23:15
Speaker 1: And that gets sucked in every yeah.
23:17
Speaker 2: And then you got to at some point.
23:18
Speaker 2: You're going to be like you're going to work through this stage, then you're going to get into a bureaucracy stage because it's growing, and then you're going to fight your way out of that bureaucracy stage.
23:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, the stages of development are interesting, Like you know.
23:31
Speaker 1: It's like grow, grow, grow, invest in the overhead, invest in the overhead infrastructure.
23:36
Speaker 1: That takes a lot of different forms right.
23:38
Speaker 1: Grow, grow, grow, invest in the overhead infrastructure.
23:42
Speaker 1: It's definitely, I think, a normal sort of evolutionary path.
23:49
Speaker 2: So the coming back to the, to the first part of the question, though, right, and I think that what you're kind of talking about, that transitioning of your creative ability, but how important, mark, do you think it is that a small business starts developing processes for scale?
24:11
Speaker 1: I think it's their sport.
24:12
Speaker 1: Honestly, I think it's the difference.
24:16
Speaker 1: Again if you do too much of it and not enough work, that's bad for the growing business.
24:22
Speaker 1: If you don't do any of it and you just keep doing the work, that's bad for a growing business.
24:28
Speaker 1: There's got to be like there's some kind of a mental ground of investment in what makes the business more efficient, more sustainable and more replicatable, at the same time as not becoming so enamored with the internal focus that you forget what you're really supposed to do, which is whatever the business does like create podcasts and videos, right yeah.
24:56
Speaker 2: Yeah.
24:57
Speaker 1: I mean it pulls at you.
25:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so how does somebody like far for like navigate that?
25:05
Speaker 1: I think I mean a normal sort of development and we used to actually talk about this in my small enterprise management class is the first person you hire is somebody who can do some of what you do the way you want it done.
25:19
Speaker 1: Okay, that's the honest truth of it.
25:22
Speaker 1: I'm not looking for somebody to come in here and innovate on what I do.
25:26
Speaker 1: I'm not looking for somebody who takes over my job entirely.
25:30
Speaker 1: All I want is people who can do some of what I do the way I want it done, so I can put that out of my mind and free up my time.
25:40
Speaker 1: You know you need probably two or three of those before you go to the next level, which is now.
25:45
Speaker 1: I need somebody who can actually deal with those three people out there and make sure they keep doing what they need to do, so I don't even have to be bothered with that part of the job.
25:56
Speaker 1: Does that make sense though?
25:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely.
25:58
Speaker 1: At first, it's just carving off some of the things you do.
26:02
Speaker 1: Whatever, you think your here is the least favorite activity or the least value add activity is that you can carve off.
26:14
Speaker 1: So what?
26:16
Speaker 2: you know, what are you, what's your barriers right now?
26:19
Speaker 2: Like I mean, like is there a way to be really direct on that?
26:24
Speaker 3: So I mean, like what are you from a time stance?
26:26
Speaker 3: It's 100% just the editing side of things.
26:29
Speaker 3: So I've actually have two contractors now that I work with on a regular basis that are really good, that are doing a great job of learning kind of these processes and how they look, because I think that's a whole other side to it is, these shows have their own styles, so it's not just as cookie cutter for everybody.
26:46
Speaker 3: That's true.
26:46
Speaker 3: Yeah, you don't want them all to be the same Exactly, and that would be terrible.
26:49
Speaker 3: Yeah, so some people it's like they you know I don't want to they're very slow, very structured.
26:54
Speaker 3: So that's a totally different kind of editing style of.
26:57
Speaker 3: There's a lot of long pauses, so it's cutting that down.
26:59
Speaker 3: And for me, I kind of know, you know, I'm in this studio, literally upstairs of where we sit every day and listening to all, listening to all of them, yeah, people, yeah.
27:06
Speaker 3: So I know their tendencies and hey, I know whatever this guest comes in, he's really thoughtful on what he's going to say and he takes those pauses to think about it.
27:14
Speaker 3: So that's fine.
27:16
Speaker 3: But in post, if I have a eight second pause in a video, it's not a big deal because I can see what's going on.
27:21
Speaker 3: But if I'm listening to my car and you listen to a podcast and all of a sudden there's an eight second dead space, you're going to think you think it's stopped.
27:26
Speaker 3: The first thing you're doing is going am I still playing?
27:29
Speaker 3: Like we said yeah, exactly, so interesting.
27:33
Speaker 3: It's interesting Killing that dead space.
27:35
Speaker 3: But then you get to show like big talk, for example, you all just roll with it.
27:38
Speaker 2: There's almost never it's the best podcast ever.
27:41
Speaker 2: It was at least fun for us.
27:43
Speaker 1: Oh, it's a great time.
27:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, I hope the viewers are less to these benefits.
27:47
Speaker 3: But, I mean to kind of go back to your question.
27:50
Speaker 3: It's kind of letting go of that realm because again we are looted to earlier a little bit.
27:54
Speaker 3: It's the.
27:55
Speaker 3: You already have the amount of time that the podcast is recorded, so, like big talk, it's usually about an hour and 15 minutes.
28:01
Speaker 3: That's an hour and 15 minutes of just going through the air without the come.
28:04
Speaker 2: Usually, yes, but today you put a limit on us.
28:06
Speaker 3: Well, we do have one hour session times with big talk.
28:10
Speaker 3: We usually let that ride a little more, but we actually again.
28:13
Speaker 3: It kind of comes back to the whole processes thing.
28:15
Speaker 3: It's very easy to say this is working just fine, I'm not stressed about it, I'm not overloaded, it's fine.
28:21
Speaker 3: But whenever you sit down and think, multiply that by 10, now you're behind that ball.
28:26
Speaker 3: And we've kind of had that success a bit here where it started out and we would get one or two recordings a week.
28:32
Speaker 3: I can handle that and no problem whatsoever.
28:34
Speaker 3: And then all by myself, no issues at all.
28:36
Speaker 3: And then you add another aspect of it into where we now have 15 recordings in a week and you go crap and you got to think about the fact we have a 72 hour turnaround.
28:46
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of work that goes in addition to the 15 chord?
28:49
Speaker 1: Absolutely it's.
28:51
Speaker 1: Every one of them has five hours of work, and so it's a good thing.
28:54
Speaker 2: I would say that way that Parker's talking in all honesty is like is a whether you're employed or you're a startup, you're either making changes to grow when you're trying to grow and accelerate.
29:10
Speaker 2: But I think that, just by the way he's talking, is that there's some optimism there, because at least these chatties, there's this process of how do I?
29:19
Speaker 2: I mean, like I may not know how I'm going to uncharted territories, I don't know where I'm going, but I'm going to go ahead and go and get on the boat and go with it.
29:27
Speaker 2: I think that's step one, right?
29:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely.
29:30
Speaker 1: You got to fight it and that's say well, we will no longer take any more than 12 clients a week or without.
29:35
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, Okay.
29:37
Speaker 2: Get on that.
29:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe hold on.
29:38
Speaker 2: Maybe what you should do, parker, is run back to the investors or the owners, yeah, and your team, and say, actually, we can only do 10 videos per week, forever more, yeah.
29:52
Speaker 1: What would you say to them, mark, I would say you're screwed because you're never going to be in fact you won't even be doing as good as you're doing now.
30:00
Speaker 1: Every year that goes by, your costs are going to ratchet up.
30:03
Speaker 1: You'll become less and less profitable.
30:05
Speaker 1: Be hard to have good people that want to work there.
30:07
Speaker 1: Your attitude is going to go down the shitter because you're not making any money.
30:12
Speaker 1: I mean, I could go on and on.
30:14
Speaker 1: Keep going.
30:14
Speaker 1: It just doesn't work is the problem.
30:17
Speaker 1: So I it just does not work.
30:19
Speaker 2: You can, would you say that you cannot be in business without?
30:23
Speaker 1: growing.
30:24
Speaker 1: I think they have any kind of real business.
30:27
Speaker 1: I sure you can have a one or two or three person, something service company.
30:35
Speaker 1: I mean you know what I'm saying and it's just a way to make a living and you know, and you can do that, and then 40 years later you die or you close it down or whatever.
30:46
Speaker 2: It just goes away, and I would say it's even harder to do these days with the way that the industry works like a competitiveness.
30:53
Speaker 1: If you're hard to get a, getting employees who want to stay in that.
30:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, but if you're a business owner and you started a business like that, like today's time, and I saw you have a decent business right and you're making a living, but you have zero intention of growing and I want in on that, why would you want in on that?
31:13
Speaker 2: Well, no, I'm just saying because I can take your, I can basically go get your business and build and I'm a business owner that I want to go in and grow in that business.
31:20
Speaker 2: Okay, oh yeah, I mean like you, like sure, the barrier of injury is minimal right, there's a million opportunities like that out there.
31:29
Speaker 1: Okay, there really are.
31:30
Speaker 1: There's just so many of them.
31:32
Speaker 1: What do you think construction space would be like?
31:34
Speaker 1: Oh my God, don't even get me started, don't please.
31:39
Speaker 2: Is the construction business good at processes and organization?
31:43
Speaker 1: No, no no, no, no, no, no.
31:45
Speaker 1: They're not good at almost anything.
31:47
Speaker 1: The only thing they're good at is making money for the owners of the construction companies.
31:52
Speaker 1: Gotcha, okay, it's an outlaw industry, all right it's.
31:58
Speaker 1: I mean especially at the residential contractor.
32:02
Speaker 1: And there's just so much bad and so much criminal, downright criminality, it's true.
32:09
Speaker 1: You got him doing one.
32:11
Speaker 1: They don't have insurance, they don't follow the safety guidelines, they steal materials, they overbill clients.
32:21
Speaker 2: Well, that, might be true, but where do I see I don't need there.
32:23
Speaker 2: You need a project done.
32:25
Speaker 2: They do know what they're doing, right, and they some will get it done.
32:31
Speaker 1: I'll tell you, some do, some many don't, many don't, many don't know what they're doing and many and many don't get it done on time.
32:39
Speaker 1: Really, yeah, I'd say today in the environment, we're in in the lower end for general contractors and some contractors, particularly in this area, which is what I'm the most familiar with today, I'd say the norm is non-performance.
32:54
Speaker 1: I'd say the norm is the budget's blown.
32:57
Speaker 1: The norm is there are quality, significant quality problems.
33:01
Speaker 1: The norm is the schedule is blown.
33:06
Speaker 2: But I thought I kind of hard to believe the schedule would blow them, because they usually provide you with like Gantt charts and timelines, right, if you started a project with them.
33:16
Speaker 1: Not most.
33:16
Speaker 1: I'm actually talking about some very sophisticated contractors.
33:21
Speaker 1: If they're doing that, maybe the ones that are doing commercial work.
33:24
Speaker 2: That's what I was gonna say is like yeah, man, is this is like you realize real quick like there are like some big contractors out there.
33:31
Speaker 2: They're doing the right, the big jobs.
33:32
Speaker 2: It's because they're the ones doing it really right, it's true, yeah, because they're running a business, right, they're not.
33:40
Speaker 1: And not just trying to make a living.
33:42
Speaker 2: Yep and try to yeah.
33:42
Speaker 2: So I would say back on our topic, I would put the sorry.
33:49
Speaker 2: That's saying a little.
33:51
Speaker 1: it's saying a little bespoke to them.
33:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just sound just like you.
33:54
Speaker 1: Go on, bring it home, bring it home, bring it back around.
33:58
Speaker 2: So back on our topic, to what you were talking about earlier.
34:01
Speaker 2: Right, the people that these big companies at one point in their history had someone in people that made the flip and switch to go into processes to scale that business and to provide a platform so that it could grow faster and get bigger and you can be more efficient, in effect, with what the worker doing, whereas these other, the outlaws, they don't want to spend the time in processes.
34:32
Speaker 2: They know their trade, they stick with their trade.
34:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, they just pack on top of.
34:38
Speaker 2: They want somebody else, like if I'm, if I'm well, go ahead.
34:42
Speaker 2: No, no, go on.
34:43
Speaker 2: No, I was gonna say, if I'm a landscaper, instead of adding the process to my services and doing the sales riding, all these things that we do in business and getting the terms in contract, let's do another job.
34:55
Speaker 2: Just do another.
34:56
Speaker 2: I don't do that and oh, if you, I'll refer you to a friend, yep.
35:00
Speaker 2: So they just stayed.
35:01
Speaker 2: They have a very low ceiling and they can't get out of their own box, right, because they don't want to work a little bit extra.
35:08
Speaker 3: Well, they're comfortable, it's good enough.
35:10
Speaker 3: What they have is good enough to get by.
35:12
Speaker 1: Or does they're both very valid, but the other one is that they just want to maximize their take from the company and there's no business that I'm aware of where you can maximize your take and still grow the business at the rate that it should grow, because they're just in direct conflict.
35:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, profit versus revenue, right, yeah, you can.
35:36
Speaker 1: So it costs money to invest in these things.
35:39
Speaker 1: It takes time away from your production that people are paying for to do these things, or you have to hire new people to sustain the revenue.
35:48
Speaker 1: You have to do these things right.
35:51
Speaker 2: Or some people have to take extra responsibilities on.
35:55
Speaker 2: That might be a little distracting in the day to day to build those processes.
35:58
Speaker 1: Right.
35:58
Speaker 1: It takes their time away from whatever their client facing or customer facing duties are.
36:05
Speaker 2: So this, I got a quick question for you yeah, so if I'm starting a new business, yeah, and I'm, and I want to grow this business like I should as a business entrepreneur.
36:16
Speaker 2: Are you more concerned with profit or revenue right out of the gate?
36:20
Speaker 1: I'm more concerned with cash flow and growth rate.
36:24
Speaker 1: Okay, that's what I'm more concerned with.
36:27
Speaker 1: I don't.
36:27
Speaker 1: Obviously, if it's under capitalized, you can't afford big losses either.
36:31
Speaker 1: Sure Doesn't mean I'm just happy with losses, but I'm just not trying to necessarily maximize the profitability.
36:39
Speaker 2: And how are you calculating growth rate?
36:40
Speaker 2: Like, what is that?
36:41
Speaker 2: What is that?
36:41
Speaker 2: Just revenue growth rate?
36:44
Speaker 2: Okay, so it's growing.
36:44
Speaker 2: Just your, not the one you're here, right?
36:47
Speaker 1: Revenue growth rate.
36:48
Speaker 2: So you are more concerned with revenue than versus profit.
36:52
Speaker 1: Absolutely Okay, because I'm going to invest in the business I any business can be more profitable.
36:58
Speaker 1: Don't do anything that includes the the infrastructure.
37:03
Speaker 1: Make no hire, no one, invest in no systems.
37:06
Speaker 1: You'll be spending nothing on marketing.
37:09
Speaker 3: Don't, don't, don't.
37:10
Speaker 3: Bolognate studio part.
37:11
Speaker 3: I do not.
37:12
Speaker 3: I don't rent a room studio Right Stick to one studio Right, just stick.
37:16
Speaker 1: It.
37:17
Speaker 1: Do it well, it'd be good enough.
37:18
Speaker 1: I mean, that's the way you'll have the highest percentage of profitability.
37:22
Speaker 1: But that's the other thing People get confused about percentage of profitability versus actual profitability in dollars.
37:30
Speaker 1: Dollars to dollars, that's a big differ.
37:33
Speaker 1: I mean, would you rather like 5% on a hundred million dollars, or would you rather make 20% on a million dollars?
37:39
Speaker 1: Right, okay, right, I'll take the 5% on a hundred All day.
37:43
Speaker 1: Then it comes down to how much capital that I have invested in doing each one of those things.
37:47
Speaker 2: So that's where you get bigger checks.
37:49
Speaker 2: If you have a hundred million dollars and you get bought out, you're going to have a bigger check than a than a one million dollar.
37:54
Speaker 1: Well, you're sure going to be worth a lot more, okay, as a company we all know that Right which would give you a bigger check, even bought, exactly.
38:02
Speaker 1: So that's why the orientation I mean to me any business owner has to have at least what I call sort of a medium term orientation, and ideally it's a long term orientation, because if it's too short you won't invest in anything.
38:19
Speaker 1: I mean, and there's a lot of companies out there that operate like that and all kinds of industries.
38:24
Speaker 1: They get to a certain size.
38:26
Speaker 1: They've been in business 20, 30 years.
38:28
Speaker 1: They sort of camp out there, okay, and they're not investing in the stuff that's going to take them to the next level, and then after a period of time they become less profitable and then they either get sold or they fall apart or something.
38:42
Speaker 1: But they can go on like that indefinitely.
38:45
Speaker 1: Complacency, comfortable, secure.
38:48
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's gonna be such thing as security.
38:52
Speaker 1: Or comfort, when it comes down to it, I mean listen, I'm a lot more comfortable and a lot more secure if my revenue is growing by 30 or 40% a year.
38:59
Speaker 1: I don't know about you.
39:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, comfort to me is not just having cash in the bank and, no, a lot of company.
39:07
Speaker 1: Dude, that's a cloud I like her ideals.
39:10
Speaker 2: I like sounding contracts, I agree, you know.
39:13
Speaker 2: I mean I don't even have to have.
39:15
Speaker 2: But you did mention cash flow, which is important.
39:17
Speaker 2: But I'm not even my mind doesn't even go to necessarily cash.
39:21
Speaker 2: I just like to see the contracts and have AR.
39:23
Speaker 2: I love me some accounts receivable, Not after 60 days, Right, you know what I'm saying.
39:30
Speaker 1: Of course, because it represents cash that's coming in.
39:32
Speaker 1: Exactly that's what my beacon is.
39:35
Speaker 1: The reason I say cash is not that I'm just greedier, I want to suck the cash out, it's just I don't want to have to go to the outside to get capital.
39:45
Speaker 1: I got to be generating my capital internally through operations, yeah, and so that's why and I mean that's why the cash is critical, because if it's not, then I could find myself in a situation where I got a gift part of my company away.
40:00
Speaker 1: It becomes more and more expensive, right, and debts get more expensive.
40:05
Speaker 1: Now that it used to be right, yeah, but it's still cheaper.
40:08
Speaker 1: I mean, I still a million companies.
40:11
Speaker 1: If you look at the retail on an invested capital, that is always the real number that matters.
40:17
Speaker 1: In other words, if I could start this business with 20 grand and never reach into my pocket again and grow it into a multi-million dollar business, okay, my return on invested capital.
40:29
Speaker 1: I don't even need to be that profitable.
40:31
Speaker 1: If I made 20 grand, I made 100% return on invested capital.
40:36
Speaker 1: Right, right, right.
40:37
Speaker 1: So that's the way I always look at it.
40:39
Speaker 1: It's like how much capital do I have to put into this, the more I can grow it if I can do it with my cash flow.
40:46
Speaker 1: Good cash flow, the better, the more valuable it's going to be and the higher the return is going to be on invested capital.
40:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree, and I like to think too is like how much can you scale this out?
40:59
Speaker 2: Like how big of a market can you get this puppy to you know?
41:05
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people don't actually calculate, that, they don't really feel, they don't really figure out what the real capacity of the business is.
41:13
Speaker 1: I agree with you.
41:14
Speaker 1: Like they don't think about the size of the market that it serves.
41:17
Speaker 2: They don't and they also don't, and I think that's a bad thing.
41:22
Speaker 2: That's what keeps people in those positions too.
41:24
Speaker 2: So if my approach would be if I started a landscape company, I would think about how absolutely big could I get this landscape company in a specific niche where I had a narrow target audience, and how much could I replicate that across the country and dominate and build that business to be Sure, whereas somebody else and when you think that way, you have to think about processes, you have to think about the efficiency, like to the T, about what you can do.
41:56
Speaker 2: But but I'll also have the same opinion, though when you start that thing out, you don't fail.
42:01
Speaker 2: That means like you're going to be inefficient.
42:04
Speaker 2: It means you're going to have bus of processes.
42:06
Speaker 2: It means you're going to work a little bit longer and harder and sure, and all those things are sweat through it.
42:11
Speaker 2: So I have an.
42:14
Speaker 2: I certainly wouldn't go out and raise a bunch of capitals so that my equity was down to 5% in the company.
42:19
Speaker 2: Right, because I'm not a, I don't want to be a pitch deck puppet, yeah.
42:22
Speaker 1: Well, not only that.
42:23
Speaker 1: Then I say pitch deck puppet.
42:24
Speaker 1: Oh very well, that's pretty good, that's pretty good.
42:25
Speaker 1: Let me look at this Highest time to get a pitch deck puppet.
42:30
Speaker 3: It's that mild Look at this that I heard a guy once.
42:31
Speaker 3: I mean so he's been on the show before.
42:33
Speaker 3: I remember exactly what his name was, what his name was.
42:35
Speaker 3: I see him on occasion.
42:37
Speaker 3: It's a.
42:38
Speaker 3: Was it an inch wide and a mile deep?
42:40
Speaker 3: He started some software companies across the street.
42:44
Speaker 3: It's got some kind of weird bug as the mascot for.
42:46
Speaker 3: But I've heard him say that multiple times on the show.
42:48
Speaker 3: Is I found or something that's an inch wide and when a mile deep with it?
42:52
Speaker 3: And that's kind of what you heard.
42:54
Speaker 1: We there is that crazy.
42:55
Speaker 1: I think it's you.
42:56
Speaker 1: I think he's trying to get back to you.
42:57
Speaker 1: The guy can't spell white and can't spell sprite.
43:03
Speaker 2: Hey, let's know what, or do I remember this?
43:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I think spider, I'm used to that because the Italians call their convertible spiders sd y.
43:13
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I'm totally comfortable with them, the white with a y.
43:18
Speaker 1: But I mean, do they hear this?
43:19
Speaker 2: spell it like that, and it would look silly as hell if you had it.
43:22
Speaker 2: I'm sorry to spit all over you.
43:25
Speaker 3: You spit all over my mic though.
43:28
Speaker 1: No, I get it.
43:29
Speaker 1: You had to make it match it up.
43:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, it looks cool that all lined out Parker of that Eric is when it comes to graphic design.
43:37
Speaker 1: I'm glad he's gotten away from the Jack and Chrome look that he was so wedded to from the early 90s.
43:45
Speaker 1: Okay there, bro, he just I can't get out of it.
43:48
Speaker 1: He loves that black and chrome.
43:51
Speaker 1: It was over a like glass, it's.
43:54
Speaker 2: Yeah.
43:54
Speaker 2: I was talking to my wife last night.
43:56
Speaker 2: I was so early to play into this idea that I have from the shop and she just was like, oh boy, this is.
44:00
Speaker 2: Yeah.
44:01
Speaker 2: It didn't go well.
44:02
Speaker 2: I had to put her in her place.
44:04
Speaker 2: I've been on this show before and I was like you did that.
44:07
Speaker 2: Yeah Well, I mean, we got to record about how I run that that relationship.
44:12
Speaker 2: So anyway, we were able to order that, but I'll let you sort out.
44:16
Speaker 2: She didn't like what I had drawn up and she's like this is so far.
44:20
Speaker 2: I'm like I was like I was thinking about you in this one actually, because if it was up me, I would have a building made of all glass, like the ceilings, the walls.
44:31
Speaker 2: I'm with the fact I do like glass.
44:32
Speaker 2: I like go like glad to want to walk into a building in the light shine down upon.
44:38
Speaker 2: My dream is to be laying in a bed when it's rainy and I can watch the rain hit the tom of ceiling off the trees, though I do.
44:47
Speaker 3: I love that.
44:48
Speaker 1: No, hit the glass ceiling, yeah, but you got trees up there too.
44:51
Speaker 2: You see the trees, you know the wood, and your sun comes out and it's little, radiates and shines upon there there's a.
44:56
Speaker 1: There are a couple of famous architects.
44:59
Speaker 1: I think Philip Johnson had a house that was all glass of distaken in the woods.
45:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, and those are glass in the woods.
45:06
Speaker 1: People were as beautiful, but anyway, we got to get back on on track here.
45:13
Speaker 2: So, yeah, I mean I had to let go of my chrome and black disown.
45:16
Speaker 2: Let it go, you've let it go.
45:18
Speaker 2: He moved on and I quit designing stuff like that and I went into other things.
45:22
Speaker 1: Right, you got in.
45:23
Speaker 1: You got him in the big building, bigger businesses, yeah, so I'm creative gratification.
45:30
Speaker 3: Actually I ask you guys because I've heard a lot of these conversations every, actually every conversation that you've had in the studio, and so what I kind of ask you is like an advice piece, so I mean, as we kind of wrap up, it's actually kind of nice being in the show and kind of, I think, as we got to you know, wrap this up.
45:44
Speaker 3: But, um boy, my question is, after kind of hearing where we're at and learning kind of podcast videos a little bit as we grow, we have myself, we have Nathan, our web developer, we have Chris who kind of does our sales and intake, and another gentleman who kind of does the back end finance stuff that he's.
46:02
Speaker 3: Every time he speaks nobody knows what he's talking about.
46:05
Speaker 1: It's accounting, accountants, you know maybe I should be the part time CFO for this.
46:10
Speaker 1: We'd let that.
46:11
Speaker 3: go on, go on.
46:12
Speaker 3: My question is what advice?
46:16
Speaker 3: So we're in that stage of getting ready for the new studio.
46:17
Speaker 3: So obviously, with that it's, you know, we're still building these processes on all of our ends, not just my own, but everybody, everybody, from sales decks to web dev, to everything.
46:26
Speaker 3: We're going to experience a big jump when moving to that new space.
46:30
Speaker 3: Well, we get big jump in overhead.
46:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's it.
46:31
Speaker 1: The business doesn't necessarily jump along with it.
46:35
Speaker 1: Sure, you promote it right?
46:36
Speaker 1: Yes, so what do you ask?
46:39
Speaker 3: So the question really how do you market it?
46:41
Speaker 3: Me personally, not from.
46:41
Speaker 3: How do I market it?
46:42
Speaker 3: Just, you've been through the steps of learning starting something out of the Taikir baby.
46:47
Speaker 3: Now, wow, this isn't my company idea or having the ownership in it.
46:49
Speaker 3: It's one of the things you know about small businesses versus large corporations is, I feel, a personal tie to help making this successful, because there is formus versus a employee number 1574.
47:03
Speaker 3: So that's good, as you do that, how do you?
47:07
Speaker 3: I guess probably the question is, how do you release that?
47:10
Speaker 3: This is my baby, I want it to be successful.
47:13
Speaker 3: How do you relax that?
47:14
Speaker 3: Because, again, it's not that I don't want to let it go, it's that my fear is that if I let it go, it's going to start losing its quality.
47:21
Speaker 3: So how do you?
47:22
Speaker 3: Just from a mental.
47:23
Speaker 1: Again, my first question is why do you want to let it go, True?
47:27
Speaker 1: Why let it go?
47:28
Speaker 1: I mean to me, if I'm going to let it go, I'm going to get out, if I'm in, I'm in, I mean.
47:34
Speaker 1: That's my reaction to that statement.
47:37
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think I'm actually getting worried.
47:39
Speaker 3: You're wrong.
47:39
Speaker 3: So what I'm more or less asking, I guess, is how do I become more comfortable with bringing more people on to assist with this?
47:46
Speaker 3: Because what if it's just me?
47:48
Speaker 3: How do I have that mindset to continue growing and not be afraid of, and still retain the culture that?
47:56
Speaker 1: it's in.
47:57
Speaker 3: Yes, absolutely.
47:59
Speaker 1: Well, it may not be exactly the same, let's face it.
48:01
Speaker 1: I think just the best thing is you got to keep telling yourself, parker, that you're not good at everything and you don't like to do everything.
48:10
Speaker 1: You want to get to where you're doing more of what you're good at, which is probably the stuff that you like.
48:16
Speaker 1: The way to get into the position where you do more of what you like and less of what you don't like, and where you do more of what you're good at and less of what you don't not good at, is to be able to grow the business so you can afford to hire the people who bring those skills in.
48:30
Speaker 1: I don't know what else you can say, because if you don't grow, you are everything.
48:36
Speaker 1: You take the trash out, you cook up the strategy to get a new client, you figure out how to actually use all this shit in here with these lights and slides on it.
48:46
Speaker 1: It's just you know you're going to be stuck doing everything.
48:51
Speaker 1: So that to me it's not a hard internal sell, at least for me, because I know I'm not good at everything and I know I don't like to do everything.
49:03
Speaker 1: My whole goal in life, every day when I get up, is to do what I want to do all day with the people I want to do it with.
49:10
Speaker 1: Anything that takes away from that is a negative, I mean.
49:16
Speaker 1: So if you're in a business and I just can't imagine you love every single last act of it, because nobody would you know I mean, you're human Just keep telling yourself it's going to get you more into the position that you want to be in terms of how you spend your day, not to mention the fact that everybody, whether you're an owner of a business or you're an employee, that depends on the business.
49:44
Speaker 1: It's really not much different.
49:46
Speaker 1: I mean, anybody thinks well, I'm the owner, I rule with impunity.
49:50
Speaker 1: You're crazy.
49:51
Speaker 1: Okay, because you can't.
49:53
Speaker 1: You got to have your good people.
49:55
Speaker 1: You better be taken into consideration.
49:57
Speaker 1: What their thoughts and needs are right, or they will be there and got nothing.
50:02
Speaker 1: So you know, that's the first thing.
50:04
Speaker 1: But the second thing is growing business.
50:08
Speaker 1: A bigger business is going to give you more rewards.
50:11
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, if this business does $2 million a year, there's a certain amount of money that it's going to be able to pay its people.
50:21
Speaker 1: If this business does $10 million a year, that is probably the truth.
50:27
Speaker 1: I mean, it's just honest.
50:28
Speaker 1: The truth is the prop, the cap for everybody is probably two or three times higher.
50:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it's just, you know.
50:36
Speaker 1: I think sometimes people have to just come to grips with that reality that there's only so much money you can take out of a small revenue.
50:45
Speaker 1: If you want to do better, you got to grow it.
50:48
Speaker 1: Whether you're the owner or the employee, it doesn't even matter, it's just we're all on the same team, you know, and I think, especially when you work with somebody who's good and who's it has a more long-term orientation to business building, I mean, all they can supply is the owner, is capital, a means of getting credit and maybe some insight and experience that helps keep you on track.
51:16
Speaker 1: But you gotta do it.
51:18
Speaker 1: If that makes sense.
51:20
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, because it's not all defined and you don't have somebody cracking the whip and you don't have somebody telling you exactly what to do every day.
51:27
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think.
51:30
Speaker 2: Just only thing I gotta add is brilliant, by the way, loved it.
51:33
Speaker 2: The only thing I'd have to add would be on the culture piece, because in the baby piece, like when I figured out that it's really not my baby, like in my own businesses that I owned and that happened at White Spider pretty early on, because I'd already been through three businesses that kind of sucked a little bit as far as like from a cash standpoint.
51:59
Speaker 2: But there was an epiphany I had earlier on in White Spider where I'm like you know what, this isn't my company, it's our company and it's not necessarily a company and I like literally visualized my mind it's a living, breathing human being, in a way on its own that's composed of a bunch of other people that are just making up this one personality.
52:25
Speaker 2: I had that vision on that, you know.
52:27
Speaker 2: It wasn't like you know, some shining star up in the sky kind of a vision, you know, but literally like I had it was interesting, I was like and every company's like that, and but I did recognize that, did turn back around and mean so okay, I have a big part to play in that personality, not because of my status but because I believe in the company, and so that's one of the biggest things is like if every I tell you the most perfect company in the world would be, if everybody in that company believes in that company's vision, it comes to work, wakes up in the morning and believes that it's gonna do what it's gonna do is to help it and determine and is excited and exhilarated to achieve and grow that business.
53:12
Speaker 2: And then, as you add people on, they get into the vision, Like you, that's the best company on the planet Earth.
53:20
Speaker 2: But the problem is is that you start out a lot of times and it just grows so fast that you start hiring based upon competencies and capabilities, not upon values and ambitions and personalities, like it's.
53:34
Speaker 1: Like we're all humans, man and you have those other things are really the most important ones.
53:40
Speaker 2: What's with the values?
53:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, you know.
53:43
Speaker 2: Are they emotionally intelligent people that are joining your family?
53:46
Speaker 2: It's like great if my daughter marries some really smart doctor that makes millions of bucks, but he's a total ass.
53:53
Speaker 2: I don't want them in my family.
53:55
Speaker 2: I will hate to see him and he comes around.
53:58
Speaker 2: But if she marries some guy, that's just a really freaking awesome person good to her, good to the family will pick up a freaking chainsaw and cut down a tree if need be.
54:10
Speaker 1: for the family I like that when it fell across the driveway, out there cave springs After the tournée to.
54:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly yeah.
54:18
Speaker 2: So I think that you can.
54:19
Speaker 2: The culture is gonna change and grow, but you have an opportunity to help that culture grow and you're gonna look back and every year can be good times with it and the bigger you get, it just gets better.
54:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, we go to the park.
54:38
Speaker 2: You look at your watch like, well, now you're starting to move the wheel.
54:41
Speaker 1: He's the producer man and he keeps them Dude.
54:44
Speaker 1: I know, man, hey, I'm okay, but yeah, we've lost time blocks for next time, so we're good, we got about two more minutes.
54:51
Speaker 1: I just wanna say one other thing about this.
54:53
Speaker 1: Okay, you may think it's tangential, but it's really directly related.
54:57
Speaker 1: The most important thing in my mind is to make sure that you do enough marketing, that you drive demand beyond your ability to supply it.
55:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, that's the goal.
55:08
Speaker 1: The goal is not to drive enough demand to supply what you got, it's to drive it beyond.
55:14
Speaker 1: When you go beyond what demand is beyond, you will not take on bad clients.
55:19
Speaker 1: The ones who are paid in the ass nope, sorry, we don't need you.
55:23
Speaker 1: The ones who mistreat your people nope, sorry, we don't need you.
55:27
Speaker 1: The ones who will pay their bills properly nope, sorry, we don't need you.
55:31
Speaker 1: I'm telling you, you gotta be absolutely relentless and it's all about continuous contact generation and unbelievably fast response.
55:43
Speaker 1: Those two things will ensure that this thing will grow In my mind.
55:49
Speaker 1: Touch you, zach.
55:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think you're probably the most beautiful person I've ever met in my entire life.
55:54
Speaker 2: That's what I think, man, that was not like, but it's true.
55:58
Speaker 2: I'm gonna have that, I'm gonna.
56:00
Speaker 2: Can you take what he just said and put it on a video on its own and have it repeat over and over and over again?
56:07
Speaker 2: Yeah, and put some nice music behind it so I can sleep with that shit every night.
56:11
Speaker 2: It's like it built it into my subconscious being.
56:15
Speaker 1: Well, we need everybody to understand it.
56:17
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's true, though, but I mean just like, how much content is enough to promote this business, such that demand exceeds your ability to supply it?
56:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, is that like five things a day?
56:29
Speaker 1: Is there original research that we have to do?
56:32
Speaker 1: Are we gonna be telling clients success stories, one after another after another?
56:36
Speaker 1: We're gonna be sharing content that was created by the business for other people.
56:41
Speaker 1: Of course, we're gonna be promoting our people.
56:45
Speaker 1: I mean, there's so many different ways that we can promote it.
56:48
Speaker 1: We need to just educate people that this resource is available.
56:53
Speaker 1: I mean, I said somebody over here recently, I can't remember who.
56:56
Speaker 1: I think I've sent a couple of them over here.
56:57
Speaker 1: They're like I wanna do it, but I don't know where.
56:59
Speaker 1: I'm like here's the answer.
57:01
Speaker 1: It's turnkey.
57:02
Speaker 1: They'll do every single thing for you.
57:03
Speaker 1: They get.
57:04
Speaker 1: All you gotta do is go in there and do your thing and they'll make it all into a product and do your website and put it on all the platforms and everything else.
57:12
Speaker 1: I think you need to get that word out, and it takes repetition.
57:17
Speaker 1: You could say well, I put that on LinkedIn last week.
57:20
Speaker 1: Shit, not everybody saw that.
57:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I can do this.
57:24
Speaker 2: I'm not a weird, it's a content 20 times.
57:25
Speaker 1: Oh yeah.
57:26
Speaker 1: Yeah.
57:26
Speaker 1: It just it takes repetition.
57:29
Speaker 1: Why?
57:29
Speaker 2: won't you?
57:30
Speaker 2: What about what if they did a podcast about podcasting?
57:32
Speaker 2: Wouldn't that be?
57:33
Speaker 2: Would that be a voice to?
57:34
Speaker 1: mine.
57:34
Speaker 1: No, I think you should do it because it's all part of this collection that you're curating yeah, absolutely Of bespoke information and resources.
57:44
Speaker 1: See, this dude has to go for podcasts.
57:46
Speaker 1: I've been watching him for a long time and it's like you're looking at your watching and we were the ones drinking the iced tea.
57:51
Speaker 1: We should have to go Different form.
57:54
Speaker 1: Just kidding, just kidding, all right.
57:56
Speaker 1: Sorry I had to slide that out.
57:57
Speaker 1: Hey, all right.
57:58
Speaker 1: Well, we're going to say goodbye to you, parker.
58:00
Speaker 1: Good luck with your new enterprise, and I have high hopes and faith that you will be successful, because I've enjoyed working with you through this podcast and I know you're a good guy.
58:12
Speaker 1: So, eric, I guess it's time we say goodbye once again.
58:18
Speaker 1: Yes, sir, it is.
58:19
Speaker 1: It's been an honor, always fun, being with you.
58:22
Speaker 1: It is Thanks, parker.
58:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks, enjoyed your question.
58:25
Speaker 2: Thanks for having stuff for us.
58:26
Speaker 2: It is Thanks, parker, it does indeed, and we like being young.
58:37
Speaker 4: Thanks for tuning into this episode of Big Talk about small business and click on the Ask the Host button for the chance to have your questions answered on the show.
58:54
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