Plan Reserves, Communicate Value, And Grow With Authentic Outreach

If year-end has you juggling payroll, bonuses, renewals, and rising costs, you’re not alone—and you’re not stuck. We unpack a simple, durable system for calm cash flow: turn every predictable annual cost into a monthly reserve, assign small percentages to taxes, payroll, bonuses, and maintenance, and stop relying on lucky windfalls or high-APR “quick cash.” You’ll feel the difference the first time payroll lands without panic.

From there, we dig into pricing with integrity. If your rates haven’t moved since 2021, you’re quietly discounting your work. The fix isn’t a blunt hike; it’s a clear message about outcomes clients already value—faster response, better reporting, added support—delivered via the right channel with enough notice to plan. We share scripts, timing, and why a 5x automated increase is a masterclass in what not to do.

Growth doesn’t require spammy outreach. It requires multi-channel, human touchpoints: concise LinkedIn notes, thoughtful comments, short emails, occasional calls, and pattern-breaking voice notes. Ditch “just circling back.” Be specific, helpful, and a little funny when it fits. And when you create content, optimize for interest, not vanity metrics. Authentic, short-form clips that solve real problems for your ideal buyer will outperform glossy reels that chase empty views.

We also spotlight Repurpose.io, a lean tool that automates cross-posting and scheduling from a single upload, so you can focus on substance and consistency. That consistency matters more than a one-off spike; it’s how you earn attention, trust, and qualified conversations.

Want a calmer 2026? Start small. Open the reserve accounts, assign starter percentages, review expenses monthly, and map your price updates with empathy and proof of value. Then show up where your audience already pays attention—consistently and authentically. If this helped, subscribe, share it with a friend who needs a financial reset, and leave a review to tell us what you’ll implement first.

Visit www.triumphbusinesssolutions.pro to learn more about our services and our Profit First Cash Clarity Programs.

Learn more about Triumph Business Solutions www.triumphbusinesssolution.pro

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Chapters

• 0:00 Friday Kickoff & Holiday Scramble
• 2:20 13th Month Pay Pressure In The Philippines
• 4:10 Building Reserve Accounts The Smart Way
• 7:25 Pricing Right To Protect Margins
• 10:20 Cost Calculators And Monthly Set-Asides
• 13:10 Cash Stress, Payroll Delays, And Float
• 16:20 Avoiding Expensive Quick Money Traps
• 19:10 Monthly Expense Audits And Waste Cutting
• 22:10 Communicating Price Increases With Value
• 28:18 When Price Hikes Fail And Why
• 32:42 StreamYard’s 5x Hike Lesson
• 35:52 Tool Of The Week: Repurpose.io
• 40:42 Multi-Channel Outreach That Actually Lands
• 46:51 Voice Notes, Pattern Breaks, And Humor
• 51:31 Authenticity Over Overproduction
• 56:21 Interest Media: Engagement Beats Views
• 1:00:41 Consistency, Systems, And Sanity
• 1:04:31 Final Takeaways And Holiday Sign-Off

Transcript

Dave: 0:22

Well, well, well, it's another Friday. And if you are a guy like me, that means this weekend, it is time to do your Christmas shopping. Here we go. It is another Friday morning episode of the Business Unscripted Podcast. And if you are a business owner and you are, or maybe you're just aspiring to be a business owner, you're just looking for someplace to learn and to grow, maybe have a few laughs, you're in the right spot. Because every Friday, every week, we give you guys tips, strategies, lessons that we've learned in our business journey and we're continuing to do because we are still business owners at heart and at in reality. So grab your favorite cup of Joe and let's let's jump into the show. So, Dwarne Brother, welcome to another episode, another week. And like I said in the intro, I still got to do a little bit of Christmas shopping because Christmas is in less than a week. So are you done? Do you have all your your fun shopping done yet or no? Is that a joke?

Duarne: 1:19

Um, I didn't even realize what the date was until I looked at the clock just now and went, shit. Yeah, I better do something about this. My weekend was meant to be out hardware shopping for materials for a little reno that we're working on, but uh yeah, I think I need to fit in a little bit of Christmas shopping in there too.

Dave: 1:40

I think you need to change your your agenda there.

Duarne: 1:44

Yeah, well, I'm gonna have to mix it up. Might have to get it up a little bit earlier, start that shopping a little bit earlier, might make a trip to SNR, which is our equivalent of Costco. Okay, um, so yeah, see what deals they're running, maybe get some bits and pieces for Christmas, lunch and dinner and all that other wonderful stuff as well while I'm there.

Dave: 2:07

Nice. Well, good, sir. Good. So any any uh big, exciting maybe projects or challengings that you're uh that you're working on right now?

Duarne: 2:17

Look, there's a couple of really good opportunities that we're sitting on at the moment that we've just waiting on some go signals for. Okay. But no, honestly, I think uh for me, the biggest thing for me this month is normally this time of year is a very stressful period of the year due to finances being stretched a little bit. You know, here we've got something called 13th month, which is an extra month's salary you have to pay your employees based on government mandate. I mean, the Philippines is designed to help them get you know a little bit extra money in their pocket ready for Christmas and have a good time, right? And they it's obviously they spend it back in the economy, giving a little bit of a spike in the spending of the country as a whole. So that's always a bit of a stressful one, especially when you're running 20 plus staff. Like make sure you got that ready. You know, we've got a Christmas party that's pushed off in from this month to next month because of a client coming across next month. So we decided good to involve the client in the meeting. Uh sorry, in that Christmas party, which means one less thing I have to worry about organizing this month, which is great. And we just let out and we've decided to let the bulk of our team take a week and a bit off during this period so they can recharge, reset, ready for the new year. Right. So that's pretty much what we're working on.

Dave: 3:39

That's interesting. And so, like, this is a good kind of topic. I guess we could start quickly with like a profit first or reserve account, right? And and kind of figure out how how you focus on it. Because this is what you know, we mentioned drip accounts on the income side, but this is an expense like reserve account that you guys do you build instead essentially every month, are you depositing into that 13-month account so that you know that the money's there and that you're not essentially stressing over it. You know you got to pay it, but you're not stressing over it at that point.

Duarne: 4:09

Yeah, well, typically that's what I'd love to say I do because that's just such a great idea and it's a very responsible thing to do. Next year, that is my intent. But typically, what happened is this year, I started about five months ago putting into that account. So we put an account, we put an account aside and started dropping funding in there five months ago, ready for this. Just what we could afford at the time each month. And we've had a couple of really good bumper months, which has been great with some projects that fell that we weren't expecting to fall. They're unexpected, and you know, it's been great. So it really helped out as well.

Dave: 4:45

But I feel like, and and so if you're listening to this, and you probably can relate right to Warren's situation here, is that you you are you know you have to pay this expense, whether it's tax, whether it's you know, a you know, year-end expense or whatever it ends up being, wherever you are, but you're like, I'll just get to it, or maybe I'll, you know, maybe I'll I'll pay it. And you had a couple things come in this year, whether it was a project or whether it was like an influx of money, where you're like, oh, great, I have the money, but you can't rely on that, right? And so as Juan mentioned, he's going to develop and starting January, any one of his revenue that comes in related to his employees, he's going to put it aside. And that's exactly what like a cash management system is, whether it's profit first or whether it's your own that you develop for yourself. Ultimately, you have to decide where is everything, right? What needs to get paid. And if you're not able to put that money aside, it's because you're probably not pricing your services appropriately enough, right? Because that's part of your cost. And if you don't have the money in your in your income, then you haven't priced it correctly. And so it's something that you need to review and and kind of maybe increase, which is another discussion we're going to have in this conversation today, too.

Duarne: 6:02

That's very true, Dave. So, like one of the things that we've talked about previously this year was I now run a spreadsheet which actually has this wonderful calculation, which takes into consideration every contribution required by law for us to make on an employee based on the amount that we pay them as their base salary. And on top of that, we factored in their taxable income, we factored in 13th month amortized over 12 months, all that sort of thing. And what that does is allow me to see what I have to bill out to a client or the maximum I can bill out to a client while maintaining the minimum profit margin I require to basically keep the doors open and pay the administration team and myself and rent and internet times three and all that other wonderful stuff that goes on. So what I had done with this time is I actually set up a secondary, or you know, it's not secondary, it's another account within my one of my banks. And I started transferring the funds over five months ago. So it slowly built up, got it to the point where it needed to be. And next year, we'll do the same thing. We'll just start a little bit earlier, smaller amounts to get us up to where we need to be. And by the end of the year, we'll have built it up to where it needs to be. And hopefully, this time, what I'll do is I'll have a surplus where I'll actually use that for Christmas party, Christmas gifts for the team as well.

Dave: 7:27

So this is where, and this is again where when you when you develop where you implement something like profit first and you have an understanding of all the expenses that go into your business throughout the year, like you're not just looking at this one month, like and what I've seen with other business owners is that they're like, okay, this is what the monthly charges are, this is what my monthly expenses are. Okay, here's what I want to charge based on that. And they forget about these things that they want to do, right? So they forget about like a Christmas party, they forget about you know the 13th month, or they forget about Christmas bonuses or year-end bonuses, whatever it ends up being, and they misprice their service or their package. And so when you implement something like Profit First and you look at a 12-month expense summary, and then that's where you develop your percentages off of, you're then able one, to price appropriately, but then two, every month you know, okay, 5% of the income it goes to this 13 month because that's what it is based on that service. 5% is going to a repairs and maintenance account, you know, maybe one or two percent is going to your your Christmas year-end party that you want to do, right? Or maybe it's half a percent, depending on what your revenue is. But you're actually giving it the purpose, you're building up the reserves, and then when that time comes, same with taxes, you don't think about it. You know, another one that we just implemented in in one of our other clients who's you know hasn't has cash flow-related kind of issues was payroll. You know, we always stressed around payroll time when the money was going to get in the account, and he had to worry about like having a trans turnover on the right time, and then if there's a delay, maybe it bounced back. And so now it's like we look at every single week, we look at what was deposited, the wasn't report, and we transfer into the payroll the appropriate percentage. And then now he's got us, so he doesn't think about it anymore, it's automatically there, right? And so that's the beauty of having and it frees up that stress. That's the big thing. It's there's no stress done around it. You're not wondering, like, oh my god, I know I have to do a year and party, but I have no money, right? It's there, it's a reserve account.

Duarne: 9:30

It becomes and and that's right. Like, actually, it's interesting. I had a conversation over during a meeting this week with another agency, pair of agency owners. They're in an agency here in the Philippines focused just on insurance broke virtual assistants, and they were talking about how though their partner in the US was looking to change banks because there was up to a five-day delay from sending funds from their US account to hitting the Philippine account, and for payroll, that was proven to be a really big problem. So they're like, Well, we got to do something about it. And I said, Well, there's two ways you can deal with that from my point of view is you preemptively know what you're gonna be needing as a surplus, transfer it a month in advance or a few weeks in advance, store it local if possible, or find a different technique to pay. The easiest way is to store it local and just send it early. And it's basically what we're talking about get that cash reserve up, hold it so you can use it, and at least if you've got that cash reserve, if something comes up, you can always move money around as well. You know, you've got the capability that you've got funds sitting there. If you know you're gonna be able to replenish it in three days, then you know you can take a little loan from that account and borrow it, then replenish it back when that money arrives back in the account again.

Dave: 10:53

And if it's the rate type account, right? Like so, yeah.

Duarne: 10:56

I mean, like why I'm saying like that, it means if you've transferred funds and it's already in transit and it's between the two banks, right? Then you make a calculated risk to do something like that. But if you have no reserves, you can't do that. You can't make that decision. That's when the stress sets in.

Dave: 11:12

That's when some of those things that we've I've been talking about a lot of is then you rely on these one-time solutions where they're quick money and you're like, oh shit, like I gotta get this stripe capital loan, which is a video that I put out yesterday because I got sent an email from a you know a client that had an option, and it's like, well, what do we do? Well, if you look at it, you would think, oh, $200 to get two grand, it's not that big of a deal, right? I'll just pay it. It's like 10%. But when you actually factor in the impact it has on your cash flow every week or every month, it's a big significant difference. And your APR becomes crazy. So when you're able to set up a reserve account or a vault account, in some cases, where you set up this vault account with some excess funds and you can just pull and you kind of treat it as your own line of credit, then you don't need a bank, you don't have to pay interest then. You you're your own bank when you can set this up. And I mentioned this this morning when I was kind of sharing some information on LinkedIn and Facebook. But the beauty of any system, any improvement is that you don't have to try to make this giant leap forward. The idea is that you just make one small step today, right? This quarter. Make just decide like today or by the end of the year, you're like, I'm gonna set up my accounts. Boom. You made that first step. Now it's like, okay, now when I get money in, I'm going to try and I'm gonna take 2% here and 1%, you know, just profit and 2% or 3% to taxes, and just 10% to owners pay, you know, and then I'll run the rest of the business off for the rest because that's what you've been used to. But then in January, now you can review your expenses. What can I cut? Like, if you haven't reviewed your and I think we mentioned this previously as well. You mentioned it a few times. Yeah, if you haven't reviewed your your vendors and what you've paid like in the last quarter, it's way too long. Like I try to do it every month. And this morning I just ran. Like, I look at last month and I look, okay, where did I spend my money? And if it's something that I know I'm not gonna use again, I make sure that I go and that if it's a if if it's a subscription, I cancel it because you don't want it to happen. You know, you pull and then you're like, oh crap, I gotta do that, and then another month and another month. And so this is where the insight into your cash can help you make better financial decisions, and that's the big thing. The only thing that matters in your business is that you make better financial decisions so that you don't become one of the 82% of business owners that fail because they don't have a cash management system or a cash oversight system. It's it's huge.

Duarne: 13:49

So well, let's look at the easiest way to make money in your business by saving the money that you don't need to spend. That's less money you have to make if you're not spending money. If you're buying 50 subscriptions you don't need, yeah, that's a prime example. If you're not billing clients because you're not keeping good records, that's money you're missing out on in your business, that's money going out of your business for subscriptions you don't need, right? All of these things come in, but you don't always do that.

Dave: 14:15

So this is this is a reminder. This brings me back to like poker, right? And I I play poker, and one of the biggest lessons in poker that I learned was that money saved is actually money earned. And what that you know, if poker, you know, if you can, you know, maybe save calling down on the river when you know you're probably beat, but the price is too good, you know, and you don't pay that off, it's actually chips still in your stack, right? And in business, that's still cash in your bank account. Just because it seems like it's a good price, you're probably not gonna get the use out of it, especially if you don't have the time and you're overwhelmed and you have no time to learn it and implement it. It's probably not worth that $50, right? Even though you feel like it's gonna do a lot for you. If you don't have time to implement it, you're probably just wasted that $50. And so, just like in poker, money saved is money earned. And same thing in your business cash home. Money not spent is money still in your bank.

Duarne: 15:08

So yeah, I'm gonna give you, I'm gonna give all our listeners a bit of a tip here. Keep a spreadsheet or a list somewhere of any software that you're thinking, I'd love to experiment with this, I'd love to check it out, etc. And then when Black Friday sales come along, go and have a look again if you don't and see if you still need it, want it, and have the time. And you might find that it's a very, very good deal to sign up and get a year's subscription at a very, very low cost. And that might be the time maybe you make the decision to do something with it. But again, make sure you're gonna do something with it. Don't just get it because it's cheap. But the other expression, the second comment later.

Dave: 15:53

Right. Like make an idea, write it down, and then you know, if in 30 days you come back to it and you're like, Yeah, you know what, I really need that, like I really need that. Now you can go get it, like especially if the price is there. Or I think the the what's the website that you that you use? What what's where you can AppSumo? App sumo, yeah. So AppSumo is in a website you can go to that you know has a lot of these emerging you know softwares or platforms that you can get for really dirt cheap. And some of those you can even get lifetime deals. So it makes sense, and and a lot all of them come with a guarantee. So if you don't like it in 60 days for whatever reason, a lot of times you can get it back and refund it. And so it's it's definitely a place that if you're looking and you're you you want to find something cheap that's new that can help you, go to Apps Memo first, find out what's there, and then determine what you need. But so I want to go back, I want to kind of with that go into the the pricing. So we kind of hit a little bit on it earlier. But I I saw a post last week from a connection of mine, I think it was on Facebook, but it was talking about how oh, we gotta love this time of year, you know, where you know you get all the pricing increases, and you know, maybe it's three dollars here or thirty dollars here or seven dollars here, right? And the post was like, oh, we just have to increase our profit. Like, that's where we're doing this, right? Is that we're increasing our profit. And and I commented on it because there's somebody really close to me, and I kind of mentioned here that the important piece to recognize about uh this aspect is if you get upset when somebody that especially a small business owner that you do business with that provides a good service to you, and at the end of the year they say, Hey, guy, guy the way, like I have to we have to increase a little bit of pricing, and you're upset with that and you're thinking about changing, stop for a minute because what they're really saying to you is not I need to make more money, right? 90% of the time, it's probably like, hey, our cost went up. In order for me to make the same margin, I need to increase pricing a little bit. And if you get upset with them for that, you put you're basically telling them is that I want you to do the same amount of work for me and make less money from doing it. And so you have to like really understand, especially small business owners, like we're not working at scale. A lot of you know, small business under, you know, you're you're basically it's you if it if you're solo, or it's you know, maybe three or four people in your business. And so what I really wanted to kind of focus on here, and I've said this in the meeting too, is that sometimes when you find that you want to do a price increase and your customer base is pushing back a little bit, it's there's a few ways and a few things that probably went wrong with that price increase. The first one was that you didn't explain the value, right? And the reasoning why. You probably just said, hey, by the way, we're increasing our prices 30% next year, effective January 1st. And that was it. And you didn't explain why. Like, especially now, hey, due to inflation, due to you know, expenses for vendor, you know, and cost of supplies going up, we need to increase our prices X percent in order to cover those increases. When you can actually give the reasoning, people accept it that much, you know, that much more. One two is you probably did it in a way where you didn't communicate it in enough time, right? And so you you just said, hey, by the way, like next month you're going up. And you probably didn't do it in the right medium. And so you have to analyze what type of client and service you provide. So for example, if you're a software service and so you serve the masses and your price is 45 dollars a month, you probably don't have to call each one of your clients to say, hey, by the way, we're doing a price increase. You could probably just do that with an email, right? And you probably want to give people 60 days notice and say, hey, by the way, effective, you know, maybe it's so it's December 19th, effective February 1st, right? Our price is gonna go up 10% because of. Cost increases, server increases, whatever it ends up being, but you make it known that you're gonna do that. You're still gonna get the same thing. And here's what we're gonna possibly add extra. And this is where you can make it worthwhile because you could add some low-cost value that they're gonna get as an addition to their service or their provider, whatever it ends up being. But if you're somebody like you know, Dwarne and I, where we personally work with every one of our clients, sending an email is not gonna be received well. And so ultimately what you want to do there is you want to actually give them a call and say, hey, John, like I really appreciate your business. I'm doing some you know analysis of our of our pricing and our structure and you know, effective, and I would say 90 days now, right? You want to look out and say, you know, effective March 1st, our price, you know, for your package is gonna go up X percent. So for example, let's say they're at $1,000 a month and you need it to go up to $1,250, right? So a 25% price increase to offset things. What you can let them know is like, hey, I'm not just gonna jump you, you know, I'm not gonna go from a thousand to twelve fifty, but over the next three months, we're just gonna, you know, up your account like $75 a month, and then that way, you know, you don't see it all at once. That's one way to do it. But you're personalizing that offer to them and that communication, and now they feel valued that you took the time out of your day to actually communicate that to them, and you're giving them enough notice to make that change. So the three things to consider are you know the mode, right, the medium of communication, the timing at which you're actually giving notice. And number three is you know, what extra value could you possibly add? And what's funny is that people they they they they buy stuff from McDonald's all the time, they buy stuff from Walmart all the time. They they change change their prices like quarterly or yearly. Like what used to be 89 cents is now a dollar fifty, and nobody's complained. So it's almost doubled in price. So nobody complains, they don't notify you, they just make the change. And so when it comes to pricing, this is you just have to consider like what type of service do I provide? If it's more personal, you want to actually do a call, right? You don't want to just send an email or just put it, you know, a banner on your on your website. And how much notice do you give? And these are the things that when price increases fall flat, it's probably because you missed one of those aspects.

Duarne: 22:51

You know what's interesting about that is honesty is often really well received a lot of the time when you do those calls too. So think about the things that increase during the year. You need staff retention. So you might have had to increase salaries. You might have that means increased contributions. You might have introduced a HMO plan for your team. These are things to keep your staff happy, keep them healthy, keep them available to do the job, which supports your customer base. You're you might have changed premise. So therefore, your rent went up because you've had to change premise. You might have done a new fit out to support a client. You may have got a new server to supply services to your clients. You may have introduced new software into your mix to provide better services to your customer base. You could have put extra team members on in the background to help deliver better services or faster response times. If you think about the things you've done for the reasons you've done it, then explain those. A lot of the times you can say, Hey Dave, so this last 12 months been great growing with you. We've actually put on three new stuff, and we've actually changed office, and as part of that, we've also upgraded our reporting software. So, with all of these internal changes, I'm sure you've seen that we've been able to deliver XYZ for you, and we've been doing it, you know, in this time. We'd like to talk to you about the why we're increasing some of our rates. And this is to help offset some of the costs of the business for these services that we're now offering.

Dave: 24:35

So I'm gonna stop you there for a second. I did not say that, and this is why. I, as a customer, don't care about your your premise, I don't or your your your great real estate, right? I don't care about your number of staff to give me my outcome. What needs to be focused in that message is what are the outcomes, right? What are the actual things that they're getting for that increased price, right? So, hey, we added on three new staff. This has allowed us to reduce wait times by 10%, right? So we're gonna guarantee now that you're gonna see results quicker with this new change. Not, hey, I'm raising your price because I need to break.

Duarne: 25:09

I think what you need to do is you need to say, you know, rather than you will see, you will have would have noticed changes through the year where we have reduced wait times, we have reduced, we have improved things like that. That's the value. And so it's not going to be not perceived future value necessarily, but value that you can show based on things you've done. If you've been absorbing some of these costs, if you're not absorbing the cost and you're putting new costs in and you need to recover those, then I guess you need to show perceived value though, too.

Dave: 25:43

Well, even if they've seen the value, right? So the big thing that you have to focus on is like, yeah, that's all in the past. But you have to one, point it out because if you don't point it out, the the customer, your client is going to just assume that that's part of the norm, right? But if you do point it out, hey, this is what we've done throughout the year, we've been able to bring on new staff to be more efficient, to get you better results, to you know, give you better reporting. And now that wasn't part of your original package, but with the changes, we're changing our packaging. And this is what it's going to include now, which is the difference, the add-in value, right, in your package because of that. And moving forward, this is what you're going to see with this change. Now, you can grandfather them in and say, look, you can go back to the old package and you're not going to get the added service, right? And take it away from them. If they don't want to change, great. Or if they do want to change, they're going to pay the increased price because of all those added value. And so you don't necessarily have to go into like the detail, right? Your property. And so this is the biggest thing that I ran into. And I'll give you an example of this. I had, you know, back when I was in my tax office back in the day, I had a couple of you know offices of a franchise. I had owned a used Jaguar, right? And I got it wrapped with the you know the company. And I actually had a guy come in and say, I'm not gonna pay you to pay for that Jaguar out there. Right? So you have to understand that like people look at like what you drive or like you mentioned, your new premises. Like if if you just build it, you know, in your real estate or a building, right? If you just built this brand new building and you could tell people, hey, I need to increase your price because I just bought this brand new building and I need to pay for it, you're gonna rub them the wrong way and they are not gonna continue to do business with you. But if you say, hey, we bought a new building, we moved into a new premise because we're bringing on new staff to help serve you better, that's what you need to focus on, not that they need to pay for the building. So that was my only thing that wanted to kind of you know kind of broughtly.

Duarne: 27:44

Well, Dave, this is great. Now I know the conversation I need to have with you after this. Yeah. Just kidding.

Dave: 27:52

I get it. Yeah, another example of this one, right? So uh, and and then we'll kind of move on from the pricing, but it just happened. I think it was like what yesterday? I think it was no, it might have been the day before. But I we use StreamYard to stream this podcast. Out of the blue, I get an email from StreamYard that says, Hey, by the way, we did uh AI or we did an automated analysis of your account, and we've determined that we feel that you're a business account. So starting in January, we're gonna renew your membership at $299 a month, and which is an increase from the $45 a month that you're paying right now. And I was like, Whoa, what? I mean, that's a 5x increase from what determination? And I'm like, I I stream once a week, right? It with a podcast. I don't do, I'm not doing webinars, I'm not doing all these things that like they're they're like, oh, well, you get all this extra benefits of the business suite and all this stuff. And I'm like, okay, but I don't use that stuff, like, and I don't want that stuff. Like, why are you automating me to go to this $299 a month plan? And so I reached back out to them and I said, Look, I I I stream once a week. Like, I'm not doing business on this. This is just a a podcast recording. Like, I'm not a business, we're solo, we're doing and they're like, Well, here's what we'll do we'll we'll we'll give you 12 months of the business plan for your same price so you can get used to using it, and then when it renews after 12 months, then it'll be the 299. And I'm like, Oh, okay, so I basically got 12 months to figure out what other streaming software I'm gonna go to, because I don't plan on using this that way, but and and so that's another one. They they didn't let me know, right? They tried to 5x my my payment, and they do it with under 30 days' notice. Like, yeah, that's crazy to me. And so that's like a crazy example. It's just like stream guard, get your shit together. Like, that's not how you treat people. Like, why don't you like reach out and say, by the way, like we think you might be using the business account? Maybe you know, here's the extra benefits. Let's have a conversation to see if it's right for you. Not we're just gonna automatically start charging you 300. Because if I would have missed that email, you know, and then they charge my account in the renewal in in two weeks, I would have been like crazy upset. You know what I mean? Oh, yeah. Um, but yeah, so that was just another extreme example. Well, not even an extreme example, it's an example. It just happened. Like they wanted to 5x my my investment on StreamYard because they felt that I should have been a business account and not a regular account.

Duarne: 31:04

And look, I that's I think that's absolute nonsense. It's so ludicrous to do that. I think like with something like that, they should definitely be reaching out. They should be saying, we'd like to talk to you about your usage of the account. We feel that you're more likely should be using this service. Let's have a conversation and talk about it.

Dave: 31:25

Let's set up a one-on-one. Yeah, like anything.

Duarne: 31:28

Exactly. I mean, I had a similar experience probably, what I mean, and end of COVID 2021, 2022. Right. We were renting an office, just came out of a three-year lease. We couldn't use the office because of the shutdowns in the Philippines for about six or eight months. So we were paying the rent on the office, the lease, not using it. All our staff were working from home. We already had extra expenses because of that. Right. Because we were substituting their costs of internet and power and stuff back then. And one of the things that came up was they said, look, end of renewal, uh, time for renewal. Look, we're gonna we have doubled the rent. Literally, it was double the rent. And we're like, Oh, hold on. Every other company, you know, is getting a break on their rent because you know they're doing it tough during COVID. They come along and said, Hey, look, we want to double your rent. At the time, I was running a whole floor which had 47 desks. We had built this thing out to a 47 desk with a growth plan. And within, and they gave us like a 60-day notice to figure it out. So I was in a mad rush to find a place, and it forced us to reevaluate that we probably didn't need that space. We were able to downsize to a third of the size at that time. We put in enough desks plus extra for a little bit of growth, and we didn't outgrow that space that we moved into. But again, I mean, there was no reason we drove past that place, it just happened to be that our signage was up, and we couldn't move to signage because it was like an eight-meter wide signage, it was huge, eight by one meter, so it was massive, and we didn't move our signage, we left it there. They didn't rent that space for 12 months, they did not rent that space out for 12 months, and our signage was up on the front of that building for 12 months, getting, and it was in a prime location, right on a highway, getting all this free advertising. Meanwhile, we're like the next road over. And I remember saying to my wife when we drive every time we drive past, go, I liked that office, it's a shame. But there's no way I would pay double to be there still. And eventually they filled the space with a boxing gym, and I have no idea how much they end up paying for their space, but I'm sure it wasn't what they were asking. 12 months later, we drive past it again, and it's empty again.

Dave: 34:06

You have that you have you definitely have to analyze like what how much are you price increasing? Does it make sense? Is the value there? Like in this case, for example, and then we're gonna jump move on, but like you you weren't getting an extra value. You literally got the same space, you weren't getting, and they wanted to double your price. And and so you people are gonna move on. If you're not gonna give the value and you're not gonna justify the price increase, you're you're not gonna get that price increase, just hands down. So, with that, what I wanted to move on to obviously, we mentioned last week that we're gonna start doing you know, sort of like software platform things that we use on a regular basis that we feel is gonna be helpful to you. Maybe you are aware of it. And so today, one of the things I talk with a lot of people is how do they get more out of what they do and how do they get it posted, right? And so this is where for me I have found to be most impactful lately has been a platform called repurpose.io. And so this is for if you're doing a lot of video content or you're doing a lot of, you know, and you want to share it in multiple locations and you don't have the time to go out and post it all, right? Repurpose.io is great to help you kind of take all of that and turn it into workflows and post on your behalf. So, for example, how I use it is I edit all of our videos by long form into short form, and we'll talk about the platforms that I use for that on another day. But once I edit everything and I'm happy with it, I just drop it into a Google Drive folder. And then the system picks up any new files and then auto-schedules out to YouTube. And so that's step one. And then from there, YouTube is my source. So anytime a new video gets posted to YouTube, Repurpose picks it up and posts it to all the other platforms that I want it to be posted on. And I don't have to think about it. You can put, if you want, you can put the first comment, you can, you know, have AI generate, you know, the caption, or you can just use description on your you know YouTube video as it posts. There are some obviously some quirks, right, with it. It's still you know kind of growing, but like the AI still needs to be improved in terms of like the actual like information that it's putting there. It'll still put a lot of placeholders when it shouldn't. So I do have to go in and kind of edit some things afterwards, but it saves me a ton of time because I don't have to be thinking about it, right? I don't have to go out and post, it's it's posting for me automatically once I just drop it into the folder. So I just have to edit, get into the folder, and then as you know, getting into some of the softwares, I'll go in and I'll change some of the descriptions if I need to. Most times I don't have to. And so repurpose.io, I feel is a great one. I in for me, they were doing a crazy special. I think it was like two-month trial for like a dollar a month. I don't know if they're still doing that or where they're at, but you can still, I think it's only like 30 bucks a month, depending on how many videos you want to do. And I think that gets you like 5,000 videos a month kind of reposted. The other piece of it too that I haven't used is that you can actually resize the videos, they'll resize it for you. So, like if you want to go from a vertical to a square, it'll do that. You just, you know, it'll edit it and everything for you. So it's great. I love it. That's my suggestion today is repurpose that Io. If you're looking for a way to post on multiple platforms your video content without having to do it all yourself, this is a great way to do it.

Duarne: 37:23

Yeah, I just jumped on their website, Dave, and it looks like I love what they're doing with their pricing actually. It's $35 a month for their starter plan. Connect up to three accounts, so three social media accounts, and 5,000 published videos per month. That's insane. Yeah, 14-day free trial. But I love what they're doing here with the only $1.17 a day. They're advertising it as a daily rate. $1.17 a day. I mean, uh, that's you can't even buy a coffee for $1.17. Right? I mean, that's that's crazy. And if that's gonna save you that much time, and like I've seen the posts you've been putting out, it's incredible. And and you shared something with me the other day. Was it Alex Homozy? How many posts that his team put out over the last 12 months or something?

Dave: 38:14

There's like 35,000 pieces of content that they've put out across all their channels, right? Whether it's you know text, video, image, right? And so I the the repurpose is strictly for video content, like it doesn't do your like you know, your text or your imaging content, but it's great if you are planning to do a lot of video, which obviously we are because we cut the podcast off, we cut you know my long form or anything like that. So uh for that, it's great. I haven't found anything yet that does a lot of the the tech side, because if it did, that would be awesome as well. But for me, this now frees me up to just focus on the tech side, you know, and so kind of focusing there. So this would be my recommendation this week. If you want to check it out, again, as Doran mentioned, they do a 14-day free trial. You can post, like I think it's like you know, I just saw it too. You could do like 10 videos for free without even like you know, starting, right? You you know, just go on there and try to test it out and connect your socials, but it's huge, especially if you're doing a lot of video and you and you want to post in different places.

Duarne: 39:15

Yeah. Well, that's how I into the next topic, really, isn't it? Techniques what we were talking about before, like in relation to mediums for outreach. Right. That we're utilizing.

Dave: 39:29

We kind of and we kind of touched on this a little bit last week. We said we were gonna talk about it this week. And so a lot of people kind of fall into that, hey, I'm just gonna do one way of outreach, you know, and then if they if it doesn't work, they're like, oh, okay, this to this person doesn't want to talk to me. But I can't tell you how many times I've actually, like, for example, like let's say you send somebody a couple messages on LinkedIn, they're busy, maybe they're not checking LinkedIn, and you just write them off, right? Instead of saying, okay, I sent a couple messages on LinkedIn, let me let me see if their email address is in their profile. Oh, it is, let me send a quick email. You know, again, not salesy, not pushy, anything like that, but you're just touch basing touch points, and that's it, right? Especially when it's a cold, you need like 20 to 50 touch points for them to actually start to see you and trust you. So it's it's a couple messages on LinkedIn that aren't pushy. It's you know, writing or commenting on their posts, it's liking their posts, right? It's sharing their posts. Again, another good one, you know, that acts as a touch point. Sending them an email, right? Giving them a call. You just say, hey, you know, when we're connected, I saw this thing and I want I thought of you, and I just wanted to re outreach you and kind of see how things were going. You know, it's building that kind of rapport, it's building that you know, kind of relationship with with your network. And if you're only focusing on DM or you're only focusing on email, you're not filling out your outreach phone 100%.

Duarne: 41:38

And I think like I love the video content stuff for an outreach method. Like, if you you can start a conversation with video, you can do on a lot of these platforms now. Not just text-based, you can send personalized videos, you can do audio recordings. One of the things that I I found, it would have been, oh geez, probably about a year and a half ago. There was somebody, I can't remember who it was. Every time they wanted to send me a message on LinkedIn, they would do it as an audio recording. And what would happen is I'd listen to the audio recording, then I'd feel obliged to reply as an audio audio recording. And I found it actually to be a pretty quick method of communication. And when I started replying from my phone, it was like press a button. I didn't have to sit there and type it. I didn't have to worry about formatting methods. I didn't have to worry about my grammar because I can generally speak fairly well compared to you know typing it. So it was just a really smooth, simple technique. A lot of people tend to fall into that trap where they feel like text communication is the only communication, or getting on the phone and having a phone call is the only communication technique. But if you can find a way to do, and this is what like I hate the word instant messaging, which is like I remember back in the day with ICQ and stuff like that, where that was part of the appeal. Like we can you can instant message people. I see DMing, instant messaging, private messaging people, whatever you want to call it, don't expect they're gonna read it straight away. People are busy. If you want to get their attention and you want to stand out, send them something of interest, something of value, something that's a bit different. So starting from this weekend, I already plan to do a personal audio recording to a bunch of my LinkedIn network for people that I actually have contact with through the year on a fairly regular basis, and just wish them a Merry Christmas. And you know, see what happens. I've got no expectations, but I'm sure I'm gonna get a couple of people go, oh, that's really pleasant, that's really nice. And that'll make it all the worthwhile. But for me, it's just a different outreach rather than sending the generic image, which I generate in Canva and then I email out to everybody. I have no, I figure I'm gonna try something a bit different this year.

Dave: 44:11

Yeah, and and I think like so that I like like obviously direct message, right? Because you're you're giving directly to the individual. However, you still got to break through the noise, you know what I mean? And how many times have you done a deal with somebody? And I've had a couple of these recently, where it wasn't like I it was a outreach close, you know, easy two-week process, right? A lot of the times it becomes a three, six, nine-month process where you're just following up because everybody's busy. Think of yourself on the other end of that. And this is where I think a lot of business owners miss. They're they they put themselves on on the the outreach side and they're like, oh, nobody wants to deal with me, nobody wants to deal with me. Well, think of how many times that you've wanted to deal with somebody, but you've gotten busy or you you know forgot to reply. You know, that's just what your your prospects are on the other end, right? They're running a business, they're doing things, they got family. Like they're not just waiting for your phone call. And if you just put the woe is me, like, oh, well, he doesn't want to reach me now because he didn't respond to me in a day, that's on you. That's not them. They're just probably busy. So you just have to have that follow-up, you have to have that drive to want to push forward. But so many times business owners stop after like two or three, and that's it. Yeah, or and and I'm not saying, Darren, you know, and I hope if you're listening to this, this is not what we're trying to say. We're not saying send somebody on LinkedIn 25 messages without them responding. That's what they say. No, yeah. Well, that was like 25,000 messages, right? Or something like that, or something insane. But like if three messages on LinkedIn DM didn't work, send them an email, right? And then give them a call and and just check in and add value. That's the biggest thing that you can do is you need to add value, but stop making the excuse that, oh, they didn't respond after three messages, I'm not gonna reply. Because you know how many times I found messages and things like that from like months back that the system doesn't tell you because maybe you happen to accidentally click it and it got marked as red, even though it wasn't. And like it's gonna happen, but if you let yourself fall into that, you know, mindset of, well, you know, he didn't respond. I'm just gonna stop, you know, I guess I'll just move on to somebody else. You don't know what you could have lost there. They might need you. And again, if it if somebody stopped three or four months ago and you haven't outreached them, outreach them again now. Because the beautiful thing about life and business is that three or four months can change a ton, right? And so maybe they didn't need it then, but if you just check back in, hey, I saw this article and it made me think of you, you know, and they may respond and say, Oh shit, like I, you know, let's have a conversation. Like, I now need to talk with you, but you didn't reach out to you know you were just following it up, part of your process. But so many people, right?

Duarne: 47:02

I mean, the amount of times like if you send a text message, some networks don't send it through. It may not get to where it needs to go. They might have got hit with three spam messages around the same time, so didn't get notice. If you make a phone call, maybe they were in a meeting and they didn't notice. If you'd left a voicemail, maybe they may, you know, maybe they deleted their voicemail because it was full. You know, if you got an email, it could have gone into the spam folder. This is why if you've got contact details and methods to communicate on different platforms, sometimes it's worth hitting people up on a different platform.

unknown: 47:37

Yep.

Duarne: 47:38

One of the things I tend to do is if I've sent an email and I've got them on LinkedIn, a few days later I might just message you on LinkedIn, hey, I shot you an email a few days ago. Did you get that? And that encourages them to be respectful and oh yeah, I did get that, but I'm not ready to do anything about it. No worries, just checking you got it okay. No few of my emails have been ending up in spam folders lately.

Dave: 47:59

And do not use, hey, I'm just following up, or hey, I'm just circling back, or hey, I'm just checking in.

Duarne: 48:06

Yeah.

Dave: 48:06

Those are sales phrases. Stop using those phrases because once somebody if I once I see that, I'm like, oh, he's just trying to sell me. You know what I mean? But if you just say, hey, you know, in in your example, right? Hey John, a couple days ago I sent you the email of the documents you requested. Did you have a chance to review it? Can I answer any questions for you? You're just being helpful. And you don't use the the circling back checking and following up. Those are those are still. I I immediately write anybody off who uses those. And I never use them in any of my communication. And so just be mindful, just add value. Like that's the biggest thing.

Duarne: 48:37

You know, I find being casual works well for me. I think because it's my personality as well. Be true to your personality. If you're gonna use platforms to do your messaging for you, whether it's AI generated and you copy, paste, and send, I don't recommend that. I think just come up with genuine communication techniques, practice your genuine communication techniques rather than relying on generating long-winded messages. Like most of these shouldn't be long-winded messages. Unless you're doing an email, then yeah, it can be a little bit longer if you're gonna add some value. I've had situations where people hadn't responded to me for a couple of weeks, and I came across this technique and I tried it, and it worked really well. And it was a situation where I give them four options. You've seen this one, you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, hey Dave, look, I haven't heard from you for a while, which tells me one of the following things. A, you're not interested, b, you're too busy to pay attention to this right now. Three, you've decided to go somewhere else. Or four, you've fallen, you need help, and just reply back to me and I'll call somebody for you. Um by the time if they read it and they get to the fourth one. I've actually had five different people that I've used that on in the past, and each one of them comes back going, I'm so sorry I didn't get back to you in time. No, I haven't fallen. I appreciate the concern, or something similar like that. Or no, we've still got the plan, it's just on hold at the moment. I'm waiting for approval. No worries. It's like show a little humor, be human with it. It shows that you're real, and it's not just an automated messaging going out. I had an example recently where someone outreached me from another agency from within the Philippines, and he contacted me and on LinkedIn. I looked up, oh, looks interesting, replied back, and got a reply back, had a conversation. I took the time to check out the guy's YouTube channel. He had some good content. I found a video that I liked and I replied back, advising that I liked the video. I thought it was good, you know, great content. I can relate to a lot of that, right? And then asked him some questions about his business that he's doing crickets, absolute crickets. And I'm like, okay, he was either using software for outreach or he had someone doing the outreach for him, right? And they don't know how to reply to me. And I was like, you know what? That's okay. There was no business opportunity for me there. It was purely just a communication with a potential new contact, but it just went to cricket. So what'll I do? Well, you know, I'll reach out in a little while and I'll make a joke about it, going, well, clearly I touched the I I touched something I shouldn't have with that last, you know, compliment on your video. Apologies for that. I won't make more compliments on your videos if that's how you, you know, if that you know is going to offend, or something like that. Just have a bit of fun with it. And I'm sure I'll get a response going, oh no, no, it's not like that at all.

Dave: 51:52

But you know, like you said, I think the biggest thing is just be yourself, you know, don't try to make something that you're not. You know, we've talked about this a lot, you know, and and I've gone back with you, right? Is is I wear hats a lot, you know. Typically people that are professional don't wear hats, but I'm embracing it, right? I wear a hat all the time. I love wearing a hat. I'm never gonna stop wearing a hat. And and or, you know, I like you know, I'm more straightforward. I'm not gonna pull punches, I'm gonna tell you how it is, generally, you know, and a lot of people might feel like, oh, I'm afraid to rub people the wrong way. But you know what? Some people, the people that gravitate to me are gonna be people that need that, or that they they want to be told straightforward what's they appreciate it, right? You know, it's not like, oh, well, oh, you know, let me pat you on the back, it's okay. Like, no, man, like stop fucking around, you know what I mean? Like, sorry for the for the language, but sometimes people just need to hear that, right? That's it, or or they just they're just or they don't snap out of it. Like, sometimes if you don't be stern and you don't you know be shocking sometimes, people just caught up in their way and they don't think differently. And when it comes to cash, when it comes to operations or strategy, anything like that, you know, people are stuck in their way, especially if they've been in business for a while. And you have to like say, like, what are you doing? You know, but yeah, so just be authentic, just be genuine. You're you're only listening if you try to fake it and you attract people that don't resonate with you, yeah, you may sign them temporarily, but you're gonna get burnt out with them, you're gonna get you know annoyed with them, and you're not gonna give them the the value of service that you want to provide, and it's just gonna be bad to your reputation. And it's a downward spiral. Don't do that.

Duarne: 53:39

It's like taking on clients you know are not a good fit for you. And all you're gonna do is if you're not acting yourself, you're gonna find yourself attracting the clients that are not a good fit, and you're gonna waste your time. So don't waste your time with being making non-genuine content. Don't waste your time writing stuff that isn't you, don't write about things you don't know about. Don't have videos of things that you don't know about. Work out your niche, work out what you know, and create content that's genuine and relatable. And like there was something you and I were discussing, I think, this week over chat, and it was about two years ago when we first met. I was telling you that I feel the direction that content, video content needs to be going is going in the way of very natural, very authentic content, which means it's a value to people. And just short value-based authentic content was going to be king. And a couple of big names have come out and started preaching that now in the last few months, saying, you know what, this is this is what you need to be doing. This is what's working. And the reality is it's been working for years. It's just the overproduced stuff doesn't attract as much of attention as people think it does. People want an authentic experience, they don't want to be sitting there questioning, is that AI? Or questioning, is you know, is that real? It's a bit like when you watch the uh the like the late night sales TV, Daniel's direct, and I don't know what you call it over in the US and stuff, but they're selling you those wonder mops and stuff, and you're like, hmm, does this really work? You don't want to have that reaction when people watch your videos, right? You want to just go, was that a real review?

Dave: 55:28

Those AI ads are all over Facebook now. Like you can like shoes, or it's another one, our shoes are genuine leather. Like, and it's like, okay, you can tell they're fake. Like, it's just crazy. That like, how are how is these all over Facebook and social media? How are you not generally picking up on this? That it's that it's completely fake. But and I and I think all so to go on that point, Gary V was another one that I think is what we mentioned on, and who has come out with it, and he calls it, they call it interest media. It's not social media anymore, it's interest media. And the thing to pay attention to is that, and this is where I'm focused on like going into next year, is it's not necessarily on how many views you get, right? Like, you know, if you're a business person, right, like we are, or you listening to this video, your goal is not to have a million views on one of your videos, right? Your goal is to have engaged viewership, right? So, and the only way you can do that is you talk about specific content that is relatable to your client, your ideal customer, because the algorithm's gonna figure it out and it's gonna show it to those people. So if you're getting 100, 200 views and you're finding that you're engaging and that people are commenting and it's actually resonating with them, that's more effective than getting 10,000 views and getting three comments. Because the majority of the people that are viewing your content, they're not, they're not, you know, your ideal client. Same thing as if we just wanted to post like something really funny and it has nothing to do with business and it got a million views. Does that matter? Like, is that really like so it's not necessarily viewership? You want to be creating interest-related clips, topics, things that are on you know, point that talk to stressors or obstacles that your clients and your customers are feeling so that it resonates with them and that it encourages engagement. And that's the biggest thing that you know for me, it's been something that I heard from Gary that I'm like, oh shit, like you know, I was focused. Like, I'm like, okay, how many views do I get? You know, and it's it's kind of like a little refresh, you know, because I'm still, you know, newer. I'm not I'm not a Gary B, but I know I'm successful, right? I know I'm I'm I'm on the path. And so sometimes you just need these small little reminders from these sources that are that are above you, right? You're learning from somebody that's you know in in front of you on that journey. And if you listen to them and you do what they do, you're just gonna emulate them. And that's that's fine. And then you pick what works for you and emulate. You don't have to pick like let's say you look at Gary Vee, you're not gonna do every single thing that Gary V does. Like you're gonna you're gonna pick pieces and parts and implement that into your life and move forward. And to kind of go back to the poker analogy, same thing. When I was learning poker, the biggest thing was you know, you're gonna watch people that you enjoy to watch, and you're gonna pick a few things from each individual person. Now you're gonna develop your own game, right? And just like in business, you're gonna develop your own business by listening and taking pieces and parts and implementing that. And that's the beauty of it, is that you don't need to be somebody else, you need to be yourself, right? And learn, grow, but then develop your own style, your own way forward. That's what's gonna make you stand out.

Duarne: 58:41

It's interesting that uh there's one thing you mentioned there I really like. There's people out there who refuse to watch a movie because they don't like the personal life of an actor, for example. For me, I watch a movie based on the performance of the actor. Now, if the actor makes a good performance, I'll enjoy it. I don't care what religion they follow, I don't care about all their girlfriends, boyfriends, mistresses, and all that sort of nonsense. That means nothing to me because I don't even I don't even get involved in that side of things. The reality is like my like I know my brother doesn't like listening to Gary V because he finds that the swearing takes away from the messaging and he finds it distracting and doesn't enjoy it. Does that mean Gary V's got bad messaging? No, it just means that that particular person listening doesn't appreciate his method of tech or technique. When I asked my brother, do you like do you agree with some of his points? I guess, oh he's got great points. I just don't like listening to him. So it's all about that delivery. And it's interesting, the other point you make there was you I wrote an article, I wrote an article or I put a post out, I can't recall now, a few weeks back, and it talked about stop measuring the wrong results on social media. If you were an individual and you had put out a brochure and invited people to come to listen to you present your idea in person, and you had five people turn up and they all stayed the entire performance and listened to you, that's a win. Yet we go out, we put a video, and we don't get 50, 100 people view it or like it, and we see that as a loss. It's not social media has made us feel like we need a lot of people looking at our stuff.

Dave: 1:00:31

If you I think that's life, like I think that's like not like social media, I think is one contributor to that, but I think the other one is like the resources that are available, like the the I the idea of like you have access to everything. And to kind of go back to one point, right, on Gary's swearing. And I saw it's funny, I just saw this video last night sitting in the car with my fiance, and I showed it to her because I swear, right? And and I use the F word because I feel like sometimes it's warranted. And it's it's and the video from Gary was somebody asked him that question, like, why do you swear? And he said, Look, because it's authentic to me. And if I'm gonna preach and tell people that they need to be authentic, I need to be authentic. And sometimes to me, and this is his example, when instead of saying, right, I care about my employees, saying I give a fuck about my employees means more to me. So that's why he says it. And so for me, like that's like I use that word because it's it's who I am, right? It's not because I'm just going around throwing it, you know, and swearing because I can, right? It's not because you know, I'm thinking I'm cool because of it. It's because when I say it, I'm emphasizing something that I want to emphasize, right? And that's being authentic to me. And so here's the thing like you mentioned they didn't want to listen to it because he swears. That's fine. But to then say, well, Gary, I be I don't Like it, I'm turned off, so I want you to change. I think you should change, I think you should stop swearing. Like you're saying that he needs to be inauthentic so that you can feel better about yourself. And sorry, that's not the point of this world and this life we're in, you know.

Duarne: 1:02:02

Like you're gonna rub people the wrong way. Tune in, change the channel, find something else, right? That's what my brother finds someone else to follow and listen to who says something similar in a way that he prefers to listen to it. And it's funny, right? I swear because I'm Australian, it's part of our culture. But I find it very intriguing. One other scenario I think people need to think about is if you think about retail stores, and we've all been there through retail stores. You go to a and those who don't know the difference, we typically have two types of retail stores: a destination retail store and something that's in a mall where it's just lots of traffic stores, so it's a high traffic store. Right. We used to, I used to work for a store back in Australia years and years ago, doing some retail therapy, I called it. And we used to have a store which was a destination store, the same branch had one in a mall nearby. The mall got less sales than we did, but five times as many customers come through. Does that mean that that store is more successful? No, because a lot of the people coming through weren't actual world buyers, they were tie kickers. People who take the time to go to a destination store typically are more inclined to purchase. Now think about this for our social media marketing, our interest media, online websites, all that sort of stuff. If people are turning up at your doorstep to your social media post and they're taking the time to watch, engage, that is worth so much more than 500 people who just glance at it and don't do anything. That person who takes the time to repost your post, maybe next time you see someone do that, reach out to them and just thank them. Yep. Because they took the time to engage with what you got to say. And it doesn't matter.

Dave: 1:04:09

Like point out to I'll go out and like if I see somebody sharing a repost or whatever, I'll call a comment and just say, hey, thank you. Like this means a lot. I appreciate it. You know what I mean? And the idea there is, you know, and to go back just one last thing, right? And in terms of like who we're looking at and what was it meaning. Like, oh my god, I only got 300 views, or my impressions were only whatever. Like you still gotta realize that we if if you're in the United States and this is your first world problem, like there is somebody way worse than you right now that is living a life right now in this earth in this second, that is going through something unimaginable, and they're probably not complaining. Or like sink at Africa, right? You know, like the people, the things that they go through, they they'll probably a lot of people don't even have clean clean running water right now, right? And and they're living life, and but you want to complain because oh my god, I only got 100 views on my social media, and like it's not oh whoa is me. Like, sorry, like it's it's hard work. Like we're being a business owner is hard work, and you're gonna do day in and day out, but if you're complaining, that's all you're gonna see is the negative. And I say this to people all the time, they're like, Dave, why are you so positive? Like, why are you because why what other way do you want to be? You want me to be negative, you want to be frowned, you want me to be like, oh man, like my life sucks. Like, I didn't, I didn't I didn't sign that new client. Oh, like no, like be positive, be forward thinking, you're gonna see the other opportunities that people are gonna miss. That's your ultimate feat.

Duarne: 1:05:34

We've done 41 episodes of this podcast this year. I've been here for a few of them, not all of them. The 41 episodes you've you've put in, you've turned up every week and put forth for an hour, a little bit more sometimes. Did you do that because you wanted to get more likes? No. Do you feel like not getting multiple people tuned in live every single week means that you've achieved less? No. If a video doesn't get, you know, a couple of comments on it and a few likes and shares, does that mean that we've failed at what our mission is here? No. At the end of the day, you've got to turn up, put in the work, and some days there's no customer comes walking through that door. Some days you don't get the deal. Some days people don't give you a little bit of praise and a pat on the back and say, job well done. But it's about turning up and doing the work day in, day out. And all it takes, if you're putting video content, if you're putting posts out there, one post to resonate, and then suddenly everything starts to fall into place. Yeah, because people will start to look for you, they'll start to see something. We've seen this with make music videos at home on YouTube, put them out, and then one day someone sees something they've done and goes, ooh, that's really good, and they start sharing it.

Dave: 1:07:00

Here's the thing going to that point. I probably, pardon my French, fucked up on, right? Is I got away from the consistency because at a time when we were at the beginning of the year, probably I think towards the end of the first half of the year, I was trying, I was spending a lot of time, right? You know, putting out the videos, and a lot of the shorts were starting to get like over a thousand views. I think there was a bunch of shorts for a while that got over a thousand. But then I got things that going on. I had you know kids' sporting events, all this kind of stuff, and now it's like back, you know, it dropped because I wasn't consistent, right? The algorithm forgot about me essentially. And now it's and trying to build it up again and trying to build in that system. And that's where I think it's important for you to have a process and a system that works for you, right? Thank you, repurpose. Yeah, yeah, repurpose.io. Like, here's the thing like you can you can use something like that that is going to help you do so much more. And you don't only need one thing to take off on LinkedIn and then another thing to take off on on TikTok. It may not be the same thing, you know what I mean? So, yeah, so so here's you know, Barry, swear words could be effective when you use sporadically. Absolutely. First time I try not to swear, I was taught there's always another way of expressing yourself without swearing on the mother format. So they're going up my hobby trying to limit and just yeah, being honest exactly important, good kind, you know. So essentially it does come down to like, are you like it'd be way different if Warren, you and I were here saying F-word every single sentence, right? But if you're using it to emphasize, I think that you're just being authentic to yourself, kind of like we're yeah.

Duarne: 1:08:35

Look, I've I've had scenarios like I try to be on my best behavior, it's very hard, I am Australian. When it comes to like I've got missionary friends, and I'll be having meetings with them and discussing things, and then a swear word will slip out, and I just look at them and go, I'm sorry, and they look at me and go, It's okay. You're human, it happens. And it's like, okay, I don't feel so bad, but I you know, we try and behave if you're around small children. You try not to do it, you know. If I'm around my parents, I tend not to swear as much. So we can control it, but sometimes you're right. I mean, you just get caught up in the moment, bang, it comes out, and you're like, you're making a point. But yeah, I've uh certainly met a few people who just sit there and uh swear, and I know I've got annoyed at a f a few times and there's a few too many swear words coming out, but that's in a private environment where I don't have an audience, or if I do have an audience, it's a very captive audience who I'm directing a lot of that towards.

Dave: 1:09:32

Um, with that, with that, so I think we had a great conversation again today, Dwarne. And I don't want to cut it short. I think we could, I mean, you know, you and I could probably go for two hours every every week if we really wanted to, but we both, you know, you got to go to bed and I gotta get some work done. So with that advice, Dwarne, today's episode, what's one thing that you want the business owner who's listening to this to take with them today and begin implementing in their life?

Duarne: 1:10:01

I think start planning. Plan for what's gonna happen in your business, and that starts with understanding what's going on in your business. So we touched on cash flow portion earlier. If you've got upcoming expenses, if you know something's coming up, throw it in. And thanks, Mary, you're right. We do swear play. Thankfully, my wife, who's Filipina, swears a lot because she worked a lot of Australian call center roles. So I don't know if that's a side effect of that role. But uh cash flow, yeah, yeah. I mean, cash flow is gonna be something you need to understand and start planning for it because the stress isn't worth it. Business is stressful enough without worrying about where your next cash flow injections are coming from. And the other thing is when it comes to your outreach content solutions, just try and be original, but be authentic to yourself. And if it does feel a little uncomfortable, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Be outside your comfort zone, that means you're probably doing something right. If you're in your comfort zone doing outreach, yeah. And and just think like we use the I use the analogy of retail before. If you think about outreach, how many times have you been into a retail store and the agent comes up or the salesperson goes up and says, ma'am, sir, can I help you today? No, no, I'm okay, I'm just browsing. We do it so subconsciously, even if we needed help, first thing we do is say no. We're just programmed to do it. So don't be surprised if people do the same thing on outreach to you, they don't even want to hear you out first, they just want to say, no, no. You have to break through that first barrier.

Dave: 1:11:48

And the the thing I'll give before I give it is with that, try then to formulate your questions so that no means yes. Right? So a lot of times I will tell people and advise people to instead of say, would you like to have a conversation? Would you be opposed if we got on a quick conversation to talk through this? Now, in that scenario, in the first one, no is their their, you know, what their program to say and to respond. But it is weird when somebody goes, would you be opposed? No, I wouldn't be, or or yes, I would be opposed. Like it's it's harder for them to say that, right? But they would say, No, I'm not opposed. Let's let's jump on a call. And so they jump on a call. So formulate some of your questions to where no actually means yes. Uh, and you might see an actual general improvement. For me, it I I saw the improvement. You know, I learned that from Jeremy Minor at seven level. And you know, I use that would you be opposed question a lot. Like, hey, would you be opposed to learning a little bit more about this? Would you be opposed to a 10-minute conversation? I'll show you one or two things that you can make an improvement in.

Duarne: 1:12:49

You know, and learn. Oh shit, I just agree to a meeting. I just I just, oh man. And so there.

Dave: 1:12:56

And so with that, I would say the the one or two things for me that I hope you can take away from today is one, it's the end of the year, and you know, and you're going into the new year, and uh maybe it's too soon to do like a price increase on January 1st, but do yourself a favor and analyze your pricing. And if you need to, do a price increase in the first quarter. And then listen to the first part of the episode and figure out what's the medium that I need to announce it, what's the value that they're at that's added that they're gonna be able to get, right? And do I need to do it through your timing, right? Do I need to make it 30 days, 45 days, 90 days notice, whatever it is? Do yourself a favor and look at your pricing because you haven't done it in the last 12 to 18 months, you are probably costing yourself a lot of money because you're doing the same amount of work for way less buying power. And in fact, I did a video on this where and an article on LinkedIn that if you haven't raised your price since like 2021, you've actually taken away 25% of your price and your buying power. You've taken a 25% price increase to do the same amount of work. That's what happens with inflation. That's what happens when everybody else raises their prices and you don't. And so it's really important for you to analyze your price on a regular basis, look at you know, what you need to change, what added value you need to add, and the service that you're providing to people and communicate it appropriately. And then the second one would just be you know, kind of play with Darren's, you know, the outreach. Have a good follow-up process and don't deter yourself just because one method didn't work. You know, if you're connected to somebody across multiple platforms, outreach on multiple platforms. If you have their phone number, send them a text. Hey, I was just thinking about you, or hey, I just saw your post about XYZ. Just want to say keep up the good work, man. Hope all is going well. You know, that I just did that with another person from my Facebook group that I was like, hey man, I saw you come across. Great job with that roofing. You know, just you know, hope all these things are going well. It's been about a year since we touched space. You know, and now we're actually engaged in a back and forth right now. So you never know what's actually gonna happen. You just have to continue to push forward. So with that, Warren, thank you again for joining me on another week. As you mentioned, it's it's 41 weeks in. It's crazy to think we've done this for 41 weeks straight. Who you know, like we're gonna get to 100. I know it. Next year we'll get to 100. But with that, if you have listened and you've made it this far, thank you so much. We love you. As always, we at Triumph Business Solutions and Dwarin helping me out here are on a mission to impact a thousand businesses by the end of 2028. And this podcast is just one of those areas. So, with that, if you've listened to something in our podcast and it's impacted your business, share it with us. I want to make sure that I count it because that is an impact and a change in your business. And don't be afraid, if you're watching the replay, to drop a question down below or you know, shoot us a DM if it's in one of the networks, whether it's to Dwarne, whether it's to me. And if you could help us, you know, kind of reach others, share it. Share this video, whether it's on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, wherever you see it, or our clips. We we kind of, as we mentioned earlier, we kind of with repurpose, we're putting a lot of these clips out there to help increase and give some of these support back to business owners like you. So we appreciate you. Do all that fun algorithmy stuff. And until then, you have a wonderful Christmas, because by the time we see you guys next, it's going to be after Christmas if you celebrate. If not, all the other holidays, happy Hanukkah. You know, I'm sure I missed a few in there too. But have a wonderful rest of your week. And we'll see you, we'll see you in the next one. Thanks, Brian. Take care, everyone. Thanks, Debbie.