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The $300K Mistake That Taught Him You Can’t Buy Trust · Do Small Business Like a Big Boss Podcast

• Aisha Massengill: Gonna have to figure out how to climb up this hill of nobody cares. Welcome to Do Small Business Like a Big Boss, where we explore the real stories, hard-earned lessons, and game-changing strategies of entrepreneurs who've moved beyond the side hustle and build businesses that scale with confidence. This show is proudly sponsored by Project Icon. I'm your host, Aisha Jorge Massingil, your small business legal guy. Let's dive in. Hey bosses, welcome to another episode of Do Small Business Like a Big Boss. I am your host, Aisha Jorge Massingil, and today I'm pleased to introduce Marcus Smith, the CEO of Cloud Trails, a Salesforce Support Management and Strategy firm headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Welcome, Marcus. Hey, hey. Thank you for having me. I appreciate you spending some time with me today. So because I am not techie, I'm not even gonna lie and say, That my listeners are not techie because I am not techie. Tell me a little bit about Salesforce and how Cloud Trails works with Salesforce. so Salesforce is like the, I guess, like the preeminent CRM in the United States and you know globally. In a nutshell, what we do is is we is we equip like small and medium-sized businesses with the resources to make Salesforce work. So Salesforce has three releases a year. There's a bunch of stuff going on. People have worked in a bunch of different places. They come into a business. They wanted to do things they've seen in other places. And the reality is you need you need some people who know what they're doing to make it work for you. Like they kind of present it like you don't, but you definitely need access to people who can configure it for you so that you can understand what your people are doing, understand what your best products are, understand, you know, what to do with new AI features and all that type of stuff. So we just we take companies who have it and who just can't really afford to have a full time person on staff and give them access to people who have experience doing, you know, hundreds of projects. So there already there's some things there, some parallels in my own business because I understand that you all do a subscription based model. Is that correct? Yeah. Yeah. Tell me about the decision to go that route. so it has a lot to do with what I don't like, to be honest. Okay. when you do pro So when you do a project with somebody in Salesforce, it gives the it gives the false expectation that when you're done, it's done. But the reality is it's a living breathing system. There's things that people are confused about all the time. There's things that people want changed all the time. There's people who leave your company, you need to change what was happening with their security like all the time. So it's it's not, it's just not a project. And what I noticed was what people would do is they would want to pay for projects. But then they would act like a person who wanted long-term help. They would do all this other stuff at the end of the project. And it's like, well, let's, you know, let's call a spade a spade. Like you're going to need ongoing help and you just need to budget for it. And if you have it in your budget, we can help you out. And if you don't have it in your budget, there's plenty of other people who don't operate like that. So, you know, you you can go and work with them. But for me, oddly enough, and I I you know other people start their businesses for whatever reasons, for me, I started, I became a CEO of this business and I'm modeled after one of my personal Priorities, which is peace. I just don't I got enough conflict in my life already. There's just enough stuff going on. So if I can find customers who say, Hey, I like this model. It's not a big deal to me. And I like how y'all do it. And I pay you on subscription on time. It's just a whole slew of things that I don't have to be bothered with in terms of invoices and invoicing terms and all of that. I can just say we we're gonna get this amount of money on this day. and keep it rolling. So it really just had a lot to do with I I don't want to design some business that's stressful for me. And all of the stuff that people do towards the end of projects always stresses me out because it's like, look, you just don't want the people who know what they're doing to leave. That's what all this is about. And so let's just cut that out. So that's really why we went through it. That that's awesome. How do you generate your business? Is it referral based? Do you have to market it? How do you pick the How long you got? Give you just all your threads as you need, as long as you need. So it's really been I'll say it's a been a transition. I'm about to say something that I've I hardly ever tell people because it sounds terrible. COVID-19 was awesome for us. And it was terrible for a lot of people, but it was really awesome for us. You know, people were in in home, on devices, on phones with the PPP loans, you know, spending money. So we had a person here who worked like really close with Salesforce. We did a ton of business with Salesforce that way during COVID nineteen. I think we did like two hundred or something, two hundred like two hundred and fifty projects during COVID nineteen because of how we're structured. we're flat price, we're gonna get it done quick. That's just not something that's super common in the ecosystem. So we got a lot of business that way. one of the things that happened during that time was Salesforce was based on like territories. So you could be terrible and live in New York and make a ton of money. You could be awesome and live in Ohio and just have fewer opportunities. So that started to kind of travel around and people were saying, look, people who are not even good at this make a ton of money because of where they live. Well we kind of figured it out in the middle, like you need to be working with people in New York and Chicago and Atlanta because they're getting the opportunities. Well, Salesforce figured that out too because people were quitting. So they changed it from like this location thing to like a round robin thing. And it was really disruptive to our business because it's basically like kind of starting over. at that time, I realized how fragile it was to have all my stuff coming from them. So all of it was coming from them at first. And then I realized they they click a button and changed my whole life. And they did click a button and changed my whole life. So after that, we went on our own like personal journey. We worked with a marketing firm, ran some ads, found out that ads are just like super expensive in our space because of who's in the space. So, you know. can't pay for $30, $40 for somebody to browse around on your webpage. Like that's you know, not not at that point yet where I I'm not a century. I don't have 40 bucks for you to look around here and walk off. Right. So had some I was having pretty rough times with with just the ads and stuff like that for a while. And then we started it had to be like four months ago now, just kind of focusing on organic search. I oddly enough have a background in it doing some stuff in my wife's business. So I understand it and I'm a dork and I can dork out on it and all of that. And that's just where we are now is gonna take our time and b build up organic traffic because it compounds and it's so friendly once you get it right. So we just just started with Salesforce, had a little transition there with ads and stuff that didn't really work. And now we're on a compound growth journey with SEO. So I'm gonna take you off the hook about the COVID thing, because COVID COVID was good for a lot of folks' business because they were captive, right? They were captive at home. And my daughter is she does hair dressing, she's a hairdresser on the side. And those PPP loan people were spending that money, getting their hair done, like all kinds of like after we're having this conversation with her. and then there were a lot of people whose businesses flourished because of the captive audio, like the literally the captive audiences they had. So I would I would reframe that because you're a man that enjoys peace, I would reframe that. You know, it's just like the the environment, the virus ripe for a healthier business. But you also talked about the challenge of having that one heavy duty client, right? Like that your business can sway one way. When it's good, it's good, right? But what are the things that you've thought about doing to kind of insulate your business from those large swings that might come from the potential loss of that anchor client? it's also they weren't a client. Salesforce was a channel. but it was so even worse. Like it wasn't like the client. It was like if you go look at our deals, you know, ninety-five percent of them had something to do with them. the the the thing we're doing now is SEO because we own it. You know, no one can take our videos down, no one can take our articles down, even if it takes, you know, six to twelve months to mature, right? Well We gotta think about it. You know, what do you want your business to be doing in a year, two years, three years? You want it to be dependent on something that you own and that you can share and that you can distribute? Or do you want it to be built on basically renting off somebody else's land? So that's really it now. As we do five articles a week, six videos a week based on like customer questions that we get. And that's that's really the foundation for the next step is is bringing people in through them being able to see kind of behind the curtain who we are and understand how we address problems. So for the folks who maybe are not familiar with the search engine optimization, can you just give them a couple of lines on what SEO is and why it's important to your business? SEO is the match between someone's intent and their content on your site. You know, it's it's not a bunch of tricks to get to the top of Google and all of that. there there are three different like search intents. So I think it's like commercial, which is I'm trying to buy something, informational, I'm trying to learn something, and transactional, which is like I'm I forget what it is, but it's no, there's three like kind of ways that people are going out into the internet and trying to do things. And in a in a very condensed way, the better you are at Responding to the majority of your prospects requests, you know, that the the further they are drawn to you as a business. Hmm. So it it's interesting. You mentioned something earlier about the clicks and everything. And I I I have a business where I'm a B2B, I'm business to business, but I recognized very quickly that it was the consumers that like playing around on my site. And I've never bought, I've never done pay per click for that very reason that like it would be a very expensive endeavor not to get the clients that are my clients. because they're just playing around in my site, clicking around. Like I was just like, no, bro. We're not do we're not doing that. You have a lot of the looky loss, you know, and I I think for small business owners as they go down this path and they think about you know, do I want to advertise? How do I get my get people's interest up and views, et cetera. I mean, I I think that you made a really important point in terms of ownership, right? making sure that you're owning your own stuff. But the the kinds of activity that drive good SEO results is really critically important. Anything else you wanted to add about that point? I would say this too, and like that this is a sucker punch that everybody has to deal with and figure out. And these statistics are kind of all over the place, but they're directional. Something like what three percent of the market is buying right now. 95% of the people are browsing. Well, most people who hear that go, I only care about the three percent that are buying. But the problem is everybody you compete with only cares about the three percent that are buying. So they're all like they're all ignoring the rest of the activity and all saying, buy for me, buy for me, buy for me. But if you think about how people operate now, they get a ton of information that they can get their hands on before they get to you. There's a lot of stuff that people can do. They they can figure out to do it on their own if they want to. They can watch videos, you, they could watch videos of your competitors. They could do a ton of research and just do a ton of things before they get to you. And I think one of the things that even I struggle with that I've seen other small business owners struggle with is like just not understanding that your presence can't be. A storefront with a cash register and nothing in it. And I and a lot of people try to do that. It's go, Hey, I'm ready for you if you're ready to buy. And it's like you haven't fulfilled any of my other needs along the way to buy from you. So I'm not gonna buy from you. That's that's very interesting. all right, I wanna dial it back a little bit because we kind of skipped to the middle. Sorry. Tell me tell me the moment that you said I'm gonna build something of my own because you've already mentioned like the importance of ownership and your So what were some of the drivers of saying, you know, yeah, I want to do my own thing? so I had I had this really, I had a really weird experience when I was working as a product manager as G edgy. I was a product manager and it was one of those things where I realized I was getting groomed to go from like, do you want to be a director? Da-da-da-da-da. And I don't know how I ended up in this meeting, but I was in the meeting with like my boss's boss and he made this joke about him making seven dollars an hour. And I went, wait, wait, what'd you just say? But he was like, Yeah, I make seven dollars an hour because of all the time I spend and da-da-da-da, right? And I just remember going, that's that I don't that doesn't seem like the point to me. Like I I don't want to do that. And then I was in some other meeting with him and some other people and I just started looking around and they just all looked like miserable. Like they all looked like, you know, they're there because they have to be, because their life is kind of centered around. the bonuses and the salary and all of that. And it was, it was very weird to me. I just I looked around and went, yeah, that's just not that's not what I want. Like I don't want to be like higher paid at 97 hours a week for the rest of my life. So it it just kind of it changed my relationship with a lot of things because I went, look, if if I set my lifestyle up to match this, I'll never be able to do anything. I'll I'll never be able to live at a lower level to build anything up. Because n now I'm a senior director and I got the senior director house and a senior director car and da-da-da. So it was very much like it was like I was just looking at who I would be in ten years and I was like, I don't think I'll be happy doing that. Hmm. That is a really grounded way of thinking about it. Because I I I do a lot of speaking and I talk about The validation trap that we all find ourselves in where we like chase these titles and things because it makes us feel good. But when you look at what you get when it's done, and like you said, how much you give, sometimes it it's not a fair exchange, but it looks wonderful and it sounds wonderful, but what you sacrifice is not worth it. So that being said, you've you fit figured out, hey, you know, the value proposition is not it. How did you decide? what it would be, what that it would be. so I became the CEO of this company. I didn't start this company. I became a CEO of this company basically like I was telling a joke. So the previous owner was a very technical guy. And he just was not he was not interested in the stuff that it takes to run a company. He really wanted to do Salesforce configuration and kinda go on. But people around him kind of made it bigger and then just ended up with these people in it or whatever. And he was complaining to me one day and I jokingly was like, yo, I'll do it. And I was what Hunt, I was literally joking. And he took it really serious. so he kind of went on this little hiatus thing and then he came back and he was like, Look, will will you run it? And I'm like, sure, if I run it, we're going to do it the way I want to do it. Like I'd been in consulting a while. So all of that flat fee subscription, put the prices on the website, get it done fast. It was all stuff that I was trying to get people to do at my previous jobs and they wouldn't do it. So I said, Well, if I'm gonna do this and deal with all of it, that's that's what I'm gonna do. So it really was just like me being around somebody who had started something who didn't really want to deal with doing it. And then I was very legitimately making a joke. They said I would do it. But then he was like, Yeah, because I don't really want to deal with this. So then I I I like I like if the company was just handed to me. He was like, Yeah, here, take my baby. I'm like, all right, cool. Do you ever get resistance from potential clients to the idea of the subscription that they'd rather just pay you when once they've broken it? And if so, how do you overcome that? yeah. I don't tend to try to overcome it because if you have an idea in your head about how you want to pay, you should there's plenty of people in this ecosystem. You should go pay somebody based on how you want to pay. You know, our whole business is set up around the subscriptions. So if you come in and you go, I only want to pay you when you have I have a problem, it in a like it interrupts everything about how the business is set up because we don't even have mechanisms to go, you you bought like an hour or something. And to be frank, that kind of person just like isn't really our ICP because what they're trying to do is go, I gave you 400 bucks and they're trying to squeeze the juice out of a turn up when they give you 400 bucks. And it's just like, man, this isn't even really worth it. Like this is depth, this engagement is not worth it because it doesn't fit the structure of the rest of the company. That that's so brilliant. I used to work for a very big insurance company and we would joke that people would pay for a coach ticket and then want to sit in first class from time to you know handle the claim. They want to have all the bells and whistles, but you bought a coach ticket. No, you quick coach. You're right there. Yeah. That's where you gonna sit. You go and sit at 37c in the center. Like I that's what you purchased. So I I really yeah, I really appreciate appreciate that perspective. because I I would say to the folks listening, part of it is being willing to like let those people go by like a cloud almost, no pun intended. when you have someone that's not your ideal client, you know, profile, avatar, whatever, if you reach too hard for them, it becomes a mismatch and they drain you. so you have to be really careful. I so, you know, I do a lot of outreach to get people on the show. And this one guy, he responded to me and he said, Is there a cost for this? Well, in the outreach, it says it's free. And I said, Did you see the note above? It says it's free. And he came back, he said, Yeah, I saw that, but are there any other costs? And I was like, I'm a woman of high integrity. I understand that it may be a little unsettling because people are in your DMs, whatever. But I just said to him, I don't think our energy is aligned. And he didn't get that because I was saying it nicely. And so he's like, okay, well, I'll go check out the thing and I'll sign up. And I said, No, no. No, don't worry about Don't worry about it. I said, No, we're not a match. And and you have to do that in your business sometimes. It's like you have to see that the person is not a match, because to your point about peace, it will wreck your peace. Right. It will wreck your peace when take people that are not aligned with you. but you know, you made a joke, you fell into this business as a joke. What were some of the things that maybe you struggled with in the beginning? Because it wasn't like you said, This is my plan, this was always my plan. Now I'm gonna go do it. So what were some of those first steps and hurdles that you had to overcome as you're building out your accidental business? I think one of That is right. It's actually very accidental. One of the bigger things for me was like realizing how much people don't care about your business. Like just I have a soft spot for when I see somebody start a business and they go make a post on LinkedIn and they put a post on Facebook and everybody likes it and all of that. And I'm like, yeah, that's cool, man. But like it's you don't want to tell them that that's there's just way more stuff that you have to do. And of course your friends and your mom are gonna like the post and give you the heart emojis and all of that. But after that, you know, once that post, you know, half life of the post is ten hours or whatever, once that post is gone, you know, what now what is the sustainable activity that's gonna drive people to your just very new one in three billion businesses in the US or whatever that's happening. And that was that was such a wake up call for me because you know A student in school, go to engineering school, you know, do pretty good, get a job, you know, do do a good job at the job, stuff like that. The response time is so short and everybody k like everybody cares what you're doing, right? And then once you start a business, it's like, nobody cares. because people are living their lives and you have to do all these things to to get your customers' attention and get them on your website and watch them leave and all of this stuff. Like there's all of this, all of this stuff that you do to to realize, my God, like this this is a totally different ball game that I'm playing. And up front really nobody cares. You see how much people care about them. And then you go, whoa, this is this is I'm I'm gonna have to figure out how to climb up this hill of nobody cares. And it's just like it's it's almost like like I thought when when I had a kid, I just have like a little buddy beside me and I'll just continue all my life. And then it was like, my life revolves around this kid now. And I had no idea this was gonna happen. I think that's kind of the same thing with the business. It's like no one can prepare you for how much and nobody cares about this thing that you made. And then you have to kind of sit with it and get over it and then decide, okay, this is what I have to do. And it's just like to me, it's been like a complete mental flip of like how my life was before this, because it was like, you know, I'm kind of big and loud and all that. I'm kind of center of attention and a lot of stuff. And then start a business and you go, Hey, I do this. And people go, Okay. That's cool. That's cute. Thank you for that. Good luck with that. Right. How so how did you get them to care? a lot of it has to do, frankly, it with is is due like the way we do the content. Our content is very customer centric. And a lot of the stuff that we do once you become a customer. has to do with the idea that we're not going to make this difficult for you. So a lot of what people do when they do what I do is they expect the customer to be this technical genius. And I walk right up to you and go, man, I know you don't know what this stuff is. Like you ain't got to pretend like you ain't got to pretend, tell us what you're trying to get to. We'll go do all of this other stuff. and if if there's a reason why people stay with us, it's it's literally because of that. Like when you get on the phone with our folks, We don't make you feel like you gotta draw up some schema or whatever. Right. Go, just tell me what you're trying to do. you know, really our worst customers are people who try to kind of be us and it's like, hey, no, no, no. Go sit back over there. Sit over there. Out of my head. Yeah. Just tell me what you need to happen so we can do it. So I I would say like honestly, a lot of it is researching people, looking at what they say in the service tickets, listening to what they talk about on the calls, because If it's gonna grow at all. Anybody is gonna grow at all. It's only gonna grow because people look at your business and go, this is for me. Yeah, that that that thing of like people trying to flex, right? That that's why I said, Look, I'm not technical. I'm don't just tell me, just help me. Talk I would say like talk talk to like I'm a fifth grader. Yeah. And I said, Well, then you should follow your Like why why are we talking? Like you didn't need two hours. That's why I don't do free consultations anymore. People ask do I do nope, don't do them? Because people pay pay attention. And if you can do all that research, then you should go ahead and do it. Like you don't need me. Yeah. Yeah. You don't need me. But you said, or at least I've I've read that you've helped more than 250 businesses at this point. is there a particular project or client transformation? that you achieve that you're most proud of? I would say probably there's something we stopped the company from doing that I'm really proud of. So we have a company that is a pretty a pretty decent sized company. I'm not gonna say their name on here because they might get mad at me. But sometimes what people will do is they will They will try to make sure that their setup for the system makes sure that end users can't mess it up. So what they'll do is they'll go, I'm I'm gonna make it so that by the time you get through with this, you have done what I want you to do. But like the reality is people use tools like this for work. so you gotta be really careful about how you set it up because if you interrupt somebody's work, They may just they're likely just won't do it. They'll do a workaround or they'll just find something else. Like they're not going to fight this computer because you want them to. So we had a customer who was trying to design something for people that are out in the field. So all these sales guys are out in the field. And as they run into things in the field, they see ideas that they could, you know, submit to the CEO. And if the idea gets approved, it becomes essentially like a global product. Like this company has they have global product placement. So let's just say I'm a sales guy and I'm out and I see a competitor has this spray. Well, this is a gap in our deal. I need to submit this idea. because it's because it's like chemicals, there's a bunch of steps. There's steps that you have to go through to make sure that it's just not gonna blow up on the shelves or whatever, right? So when we get in there, actually I was they called the people internally called me in because the design was crazy. When the design was put was proposed, it was just like it was something like. 60 something actions that would need to be taken to submit this idea. very proud of it. And you know, we're gonna make sure people do their jobs or whatever. And and you know, I sat down and I just went, look, what is the likelihood that you think these guys are gonna fill this out based on the idea that they already don't like the system? Well, everybody has to do their job, da-da-da-da-da. and then in the middle of it, the person who proposed the design goes because they have to propose it to the CEO. And I said, Well, don't you think if I'm a person that's proposing an idea, I want to have my stuff buttoned up when I'm in front of the CEO. Like if the incentive is, if you if the system has to make me do this, we got a serious problem. Because if I'm proposing a global product, I'm I'm gonna have my act together before I come in here anyway. You ain't got to do it in you ain't got to you ain't got to do it in Salesforce. Like I'll I'll do she laughed. She was like, No, I haven't really thought about that. And I'm like, Yeah, I'm like you guys can you can design it this way and virtually nobody will do it, or you can design it in such a way that it's like gonna capture what you need, but you already have the undercurrent of people who are trying to talk to the CEO at the end, which will make them do this right. And when she came back and thanked me later, she's like, you know, we get probably twenty, twenty-five like genuine ideas now because we didn't put all that other stuff in there. And that that to me, I was just like, It was just me looking at it going, if I'm out in the field and I have an idea and I open up my phone and this thing has seven red tabs in it, what would I do? It's like I would close my phone and get back in my car. You know what I love about that answer? It didn't have anything to do with money. Didn't have anything to do with you know, I closed this deal worth blah, blah, blah. It was like I I added value. I I, you know, I was helpful. Excuse me, I was helpful and I added value. The customer was appreciative. I felt good about what I did. And I think when we they always say use I statements for me. When I am providing value, I find that to be very fulfilling in the context of my business and in and in my life. Right. so thank you for that. All right, we're gonna pivot a little bit because one of the challenges that I have as an entrepreneur is managing my calendar. you have a really unique way that you and your team work, as I understand it, with this like demo week structure. read a little bit about that where you have kind of Part of it is client, customer face, and part of it is execution. Can you tell, tell the people about how you all structure that? So that actually, that actually came about because of my business partner. once we st we started picking up business, and what most people do in this industry is they bul they just blend up all the stuff. So you got the customer meetings and work and all the stuff, like kind of all in the at the same time. But the reality is all the customer pays for is work. know customers don't pay if you have this spaghetti monsters calendar but people end up with it. so we got to the end of the day and the person who's supposed to be doing the work that he just hadn't really got to the work. And I was kind of like, yo man, what's up? Like, did we not work we're not working today? And he's like and he goes, you do it. And I'm and I know enough about the stuff to be like, what did that I'll do it? Yeah, don't talk to me like that. I'll do it, big and I remember the next day came and we just we had all these meetings and all this stuff. And then like two o'clock came and it was like, okay, I need to do this work. And I just very legitimately did not want to do it. Like I was tired, my kids just got home from school. Whatever I was about to do was about to be terrible. And I was like, look, yeah, we we can't do this. And and everybody in the industry works like that. Like they're just bouncing back and forth on all this stuff and then doing this super critical work. So I turned to him and I said, Yo, so what you think we should do? And I remember what he said to me was so I was I was so surprised by it that I called my accountant and I'm like, hey, didn't see if this sounds crazy. I need to run this by you. And he was like, We need a week where we don't talk to customers at all and we just work. And then we need a week where we demo. And I was like, That sounds stupid, man. Let me hold on, man. Like, wait a minute. And I remember I called my accountant and he was like, Yeah, I know about But then I went, you know what, man? There's no rule saying that we can't do this. Like there's there's no governing body that says we can't do this. And all I need you to do is if we're gonna do this, you have to do it. So we I can't go out here telling people we ain't gonna meet with them for a week. And then when we meet with them, we ain't got our stuff together. So that that's I'm like, that's the deal. If we block out the calendar and you're supposed to be building, then we build and we ain't we ain't on you t we we ain't playing, we build it. And I remember the first week we did it, we got to the end and be kind of hadn't done some stuff. And I'm like, hey man, no, we we we had a one-line agreement and you kind of nah, you're not holding up to it. So he went ahead and did all the stuff or whatever. But what we realized was it actually is aligned with it's it's aligned very well with productivity principles. and people who come in and work like that love it because they they get a whole week of Like client requests come the week before if they're big enough, right? So they so you you you you got all your requests like the Friday of the week before. You know what you're doing the next week. We got one girl who do all stuff on Saturday, but like you know what you need to do and you can just do it and you can check it. So by the time you put it in front of the customer, it's really like your highest quality of work because you had a whole week to say, Here's all the stuff I'm doing, here's all the QA, here's all the tests, you know, I'm ready to go. And it it It surprises the customer because customers don't tend to get stuff like that. Customers very rarely get in the Salesforce project, talk to you once, and then nine days later see like ninety-five percent of the stuff they need done on the screen. So it's it's it's like, hey, you pay attention. And they're like, to what? It was like to the whole thing you asked for. And it's like, it's in there now. Like I I can't tell you how many times we've heard people say, What do you mean it's in there now? Yeah. And that's really because a person had forty uninterrupted hours to just work. It sounds like such a beautiful dream. I I as I aspire to to that. I think for me this the switching costs, like that task switching costs that we all endure, especially as a service provider, and for lawyers, like there's an added pressure on us to be responsive. Like they people want the answer and and sometimes it can be hard to to establish boundaries. So for me, for example, Mondays I don't take client meetings. Unless like an absolute emergency. And I'm still working on that muscle of like saying with my whole chest when I get a request for meeting, like, yeah, no, I can meet with you Tuesday, right? Or meet I can meet with you Tuesday or Wednesday. But like I need to be 'cause my my least favorite thing that people say to me is like, I have a quick question, it shouldn't take you that long. And I'm like how you how you know? How you know how long? Do you do it? Have you Have you been practicing for 30 years? Like, how do you know how long it's gonna take me to like read it, analyze it, unravel the junk that you've given me? And so that switching cost is so high a toll to pay. And I am trying to get to where you are. I don't think I could ever have a week where it's like, hey, I ain't talking to you this week. But like I'm on travel in the week after next, and I want to be able to say to people, like, hey. I am on travel. I can't take your calls. No, we can't get a quick meeting. Da-da-da-da-da. So I would just say for the listeners out there, this is a practice. If you can adopt it early in your business, that it really can can increase your productivity and get you to a place where you're like really humming. so that's my my PSA for that. Because when you get to just be heads down on like that one task, you know, like I even try to do I don't know if you've ever heard of the Pomodoro technique. Yeah. Where it's just like you just go in the tunnel, like that mental tunnel to focus, it really helps you knock things out. So I did ask you, you know, kind of like what was something that you were really proud of? What was something that maybe knocked you on your rear end and that was just really like a hurdle that you had to overcome? Or how how did you overcome it? we lost 300k last year. and we lost 300K because I was trying to I was trying to buy the future version of the business. we didn't have so in COVID, which is kind of my introduction to running a business, I had all of this ready-made, quick demand. So my introduction the first two years was ready-made, quick demand. I breathe, I get a customer. Right. So my brain is all distorted, like, I gotta figure it out. This is how this works. Yes. And then Once it was over, I was like, okay, we have excess cash. I'll just pay for this to keep happening. and you know, what I realized was you can't buy trust from people. You can't buy trust from strangers. You can't make strangers trust you. They are going to go through their own discovery process to decide if they'll give you a chance to trust to to to provide a service or whatever. and my staffing levels were too high. my commissions were too high, my investment in almost everything around. keeping the previous version of the company was like literally just too high. So we lost 300K. so when I know when people ask me questions now, I was like, yeah, I know, I know I know how exactly how much I paid for like what I didn't know. And I think the good thing about it is, you know, I I can I I could never live without having lost that. And now I go, look, anybody who I talk to about small business, I tell them you can't buy trust. You may as well start to do the things that will, that will ultimately make people trust you because you cannot buy it. People click your ad, don't mean they trust you. They click your ad and you pay ten dollars for it. But, you know, if you got some freebies or if you're talking to people, your reputation is growing, or people are seeing you give out information, then they will trust you. Especially if you're small. There's just there's no way for you to buy the trust that's going to make people come up to you and go, Hey, I want to do business with you. That's that's very real. That I Used to be a partner in the very first law firm that I worked at, he was a big time litigator. And he said, You're not truly a litigator until you've lost like a multi-million dollar case. Now you're in it. You're in the game now, right? You have to take the L eventually. You gotta you gotta take the L. But one of the things that I read about you is that you said, or at least that's what the interweb said, that you the systems beat heroics. Everything. So what do you if you're talking to small business owners? Who are always in this hustle mode, right? Trying to do everything themselves. What's one of the first systems that you would tell them to get into place to help their business? I would never have called this a system before you said this to me. But I would say find a way to get you need to find some people that care enough to be on the start of the journey with you. It's not possible to do all this stuff. It's just, it's not. Businesses doesn't work like that. if you can find a way, and I'm I'm I feel like I'm kind of not answering your question, but like if you can find a way. Get some other people invested in the business early on that care about you or about the growth of the business, a lot of stuff will change. my wife is in this business and she kind of hates that people know she's my wife. I'm like, your last name is Smith, my last name is Smith. They know. I put those pieces together in the website. Yeah, like few people know who you are. You're the fool of nobody. and just the the idea that she cares about certain stuff changes my relationship with it because she's gonna do it well. she's she's gonna put her heart into it. You know, she'll look at me sometimes and go, Hey, you tripping, you need to go lay down because you you you don't you don't have it together today, right? And there's just so much stuff that like I wouldn't be able to do her and that guy, Chris, the other guy on the site. Those are two people that care a lot about the early stage of the business. There's plenty of stuff I don't have to worry about, be bothered with, touch because the first handful of people are not these transient people who on their way out, they're looking at it going, Hey, no, we're we're here's here this is my job, this your job, this your job. This let's get this stuff done. so if I if I described it in any way, I would take that first system that's like probably some people that really care about the the zero to the like they care about the zero to the seven hundred in a way that like other people just are not. Yeah. No, that's that's that's deep. All right, I asked this question of all my guests. When you hear the phrase do small business like a big boss, what does that mean to you? I think to me It means understanding what it takes to go where you need to go. And I'm not going to use the word I use internally, but understanding where it what it takes to go where you need to go and and don't don't BS yourself about what you need to do. Because you're your own boss, you can you can make up whatever you want. You do whatever you want. And a lot of times you can find yourself avoiding the hard things that you need to do because they are very uncomfortable and they are very nebulous and you can't do it and get a result. You do it and watch it. so to me, I think that's that's the thing that I see that kind of separates people is that like one day they wake up and go, and here's a list of stuff that I hate and I'm just about to start. I'm just about to start doing it. Cause if you don't, you know, you you you stuck. Thank you for that. And thank you for your time today. Where can the people find you out there on the interwebs? www.cloudtrails with azcom. All right. Well, that's all we have for today, bosses. Just remember when drill build that dream messy. You can build it scared, but just don't build it small. If you've got any value out of this episode, please make sure that you like, subscribe, follow, and all the places. This has been awesome. Thank you so much, Marcus, and we will see you next time. Thank you.