TMBA 550: Revisiting Our 2020 Business Goals
Podcast 35:21| Download | Spotify| Stitcher | iTunes | Comment
At the beginning of the year, we recorded a podcast where we outlined some of our business goals and aspirations for 2020.
We're now halfway through the year, and it's safe to say these past six months have been a period of disruption for entrepreneurs all over the world.
Given the unexpected circumstances that we've all experienced, we thought it would be interesting to revisit those goals that we shared on this podcast back in January.
In today's episode, we're looking back at how our business goals have played out thus far in 2020, how our plans have changed since we first recorded that podcast, and what we've learned from the last six months.
Listen to this week's show and learn:
Why we made the decision to shut down Dynamite Deals. (7:09)
What 2020 has looked like for Dynamite Jobs. (15:13)
How our team has improved dramatically in the first half of 2020. (20:31)
What we've chosen to focus on for the rest of the year. (26:11)
How event cancellations have impacted our business in 2020. (31:50)
Mentioned in the episode:
Before the Exit - Our New Book
TMBA Masterminds
Partner With Us
The Dynamite Circle
Dynamite Jobs
Dynamite Deals
Tropical MBA on YouTube
Rob Walling
Startups for the Rest of Us
TinySeed
Enjoyed this podcast? Check out these:
TMBA506: The Power of In Person
TMBA526: Our Business Goals for the New Year
TMBA549: 10 Tech Tools We Use In Our Business Every Day
Listening options:
Subscribe via iTunes.
Listen on Stitcher Radio.
Android users can grab our RSS feed here.
Right-click and "save file as" for direct download.
Or click here to get sent to the top of the page where the on-site player is.
Have comments about the show?
Do you have ideas for things you'd like Dan and Ian to discuss on future episodes?
Our producer Jane would love to hear from you at jane@tropicalmba.com or leave us a voice message using the record button below.
Thanks for listening to our show! We'll be back next Thursday morning 8AM EST.
Cheers,
Dan & Ian
Full Transcript
Dan: Welcome back to the TMBA podcast. It's halfway through the year. And so a few days ago Bossman and I were hanging out and we decided it might make sense to take a look back at our 2020 goals, which we stated here on the pod and see how we're progressing.[
bg_collapse view="button-blue" color="#ffffff" icon="arrow" expand_text="Show More" collapse_text="Show Less" ]
Now, as I'm sure you're aware, some things have happened that we didn't quite have in the plans. And so this episode is really all about flipping on the mic and taking a look at what we said and what we've stopped doing and what we've started doing, both in response to this Coronavirus challenge but also to the things that we've learned along the way of the first six months of the year.
And again, sometimes I feel a little bit self conscious about doing these episodes about our businesses, but you guys reach out to us and encourage us to do it. In fact, this particular episode, we almost thought about redoing it because it didn't really turn out into these like takeaways or thought nuggets and not everything has a ribbon on it. And the reality is, like so many of you, we’re just figuring this stuff out as we go.
So pull up a stool and join the Bossman and I at our virtual breakfast bar. Maybe I'll swoop in here and there to offer a little postgame reflection along the way. So let's get started.
Music
Dan: All right, we are back. Bossman Are you with me?
Ian: We're back. Yes I am.
Dan: We’re back, I'm excited. We're going to do an old school, ‘talk about our own businesses’ and a little bit of open kimono, a little bit of revisiting an episode we did back in January, Ian, where we laid out our plans for 2020.
Ian: Whoops. Didn’t see that coming.
Dan: Wow. We didn't plan for any of this. In some ways we did. In some ways me and you are very much ‘worst case scenario thinkers’, we're always thinking about protecting at downside, you know. I think an important trait in an entrepreneur is to protect that downside, while exposing yourself to upside. So on that note, what we're going to do is take a look back at our goals for 2020 and take you through a little bit how the businesses we're working on, how they've changed.
Ian: Oh man, I'm so scared to hear what I said six months ago.
Dan: Let's start off with a comment that you made at the turn of the year. My take on your idea of 2020 as a year of ‘learning, and not of earning’ has aged particularly well, so one point to you. We have this enormous opportunity in front of us if we're willing to adapt. We rode the last recession out by designing a business that was somewhat recession proof in the sense that it was designed in that context. Of really focusing on the core elements of the business that would be robust. And all of us have that opportunity if we serve our customers, if we're running a profitable business, that as we eventually come out of this recession we are well suited then to participate in that upside.
Ian: Is it even recession? I mean, stocks are up. I'm not sure if it even is a recession but you're just listening to myself on the tape. I feel like, you see the television shows where guys are in courtrooms like, ‘No, I didn't say that. That wasn't me on that recording’. It sounds a little bit like a cop out. Kinda. It's like, ‘Oh, man, I don't want to earn any money because that would mean like having to put skin in the game and talking to customers and things like this’. So I just want to point out that, part of me was probably trying to do a little copping out there.So let me just share a little bit of what I've learned in the last six months, and this is actually pertaining to Dynamite Jobs , which is one of the big initiatives that we have in the company right now. One of the things I said to you a couple of days ago, Dan is like, ‘I'm not delegating nearly as much as I did in 2019’. We have a team of Dynamite Jobs that is doing great work for us. And I kind of had a tendency to, like, push off some of the work, especially if it was like new work. I felt I knew what the result was going to be from the work. So I was like, ‘Well, there's no point in me doing this, like, what could I possibly learn?’ But one of the things I feel like I've done in the last six months is stepped up and kind of done some of this work that even if I claim to know what the outcome is, I'm getting into it, and I'm learning things.The difference between like passive and active learning. And I feel like for me, 2019 was a lot of passive learning: ‘Have our team go out there and figure out what's going on and come back and then we can kind of distil it’. The problem for me is that I wasn't actually getting the correct interpretation, sometimes, of what was actually going on in the marketplace and with our customers. And to no fault of our team is just like, I didn't have all the information, I wasn't sitting in the room, I couldn't quite evaluate the real scenario that was unfolding in front of us. So one of the changes I made in the last six months is to just actively get more involved in these conversations. And I feel like that style of learning has been great. It's been great for me to get back into the game in that way, even if I'm not the one that's executing on 100% of the things, I feel like I need to be present for most of the conversations.
Dan: One way you get real information about your market is you sometimes do things that don't make immediate sense, you dig in. You start to feel the information in your bones like, ‘I know something that's happening here’. No one wrote a blog post about it. I figured something out about the world because I was working it, so to speak. And I think that's really cool.
One of the related ideas I've had in my head about this time for us is like, look, there's not like a tonne of fun stuff to do right now. A lot of our plane flights have been cancelled. There's not a like public outdoor concerts, sort of the things you might do normally in the summer. And so now's like a really great time for us to prepare for the winter, to learn as much as we can about our markets so that maybe when things change in the wintertime, we can turn to more of an earning framework.
So let's dig a little deeper than into some of the key projects that we pointed out we'd be working on in 2020. And the first is ‘Dynamite Deals’.
Ian: Here’s the deal about ‘Dynamite Deals’.
Dan: So we just shut the thing down. So in the podcast, we said, ‘Look, we're going to do 20 great deals this year’. And, for reasons of focus, we just said, ‘This is off the table right now’. First off when Coronavirus first hit Bossman, like, especially that first month there. I mean, the sorts of deals we had historically been pulling together didn't feel super appropriate, like people were just trying to figure out what the future is going to look like. So that kind of gave us a month away from deals at least.
Ian: Yeah, well, maybe it's perception versus reality. For us, for some reason, it just felt inappropriate to be like, messaging people excited about these new products and these deals and things like that, like it just felt inappropriate. The nation, the world was kind of hurting, right and so it didn't feel like a great time for us to profit off that, in a weird way.
Dan: Well, and the other thing that happened is that our ‘DC offers’, which happened in our private forum, the Dynamite Circle, they really took off, because the membership understood the vibe of the moment and said, ‘Well, I'm going to start offering things for free’. So I have an expertise, I have a knowledge, I have a product, I'm going to offer these things for free. And that really captured the spirit of the moment. And then you compare this to the public deals we have that are these big ticket services and stuff. And that made sense to me, the fact that there's going to be better DC offers.
The other side of it is that we just try to figure out how we're going to allocate our team. One thing that's really wonderful is we've been able to … our businesses are strong, we've been able to keep everybody on board, we really want to make sure people are focused on areas that they can make a big impact.And back to our, ‘learning versus earning’ thing. I felt like we learned a lot about how to construct these deals, how to present them and the type of opportunity it was. But there was part of me that felt like, ‘Okay, well, I've learned that’. If we want to grow our business to this level, certainly creating a deal every other week is a decent way to do that. But it's also an enormous amount of work. And, for me, waiting every other week for a random deal to come up that only a few people can participate in is a great way to make some money to add a revenue stream. But also I didn't see the bigger potential for how that can fold into everything we're doing.
Ian: Well, I'll give my idea, Dan, about ‘Dynamite Deals’ and I'll leave it as still an open opportunity. So I think everything that you're saying is true, and most of it has to do with focus. And I want to just say that the Deal side, I think was fairly successful. I mean, basically, we brought in over $100,000 in revenue. And we only launched, I think, less than 10 deals. So I think that there's definitely value there. We proved that because we put a ‘Buy Now’ button and people participated in that. Now that being said, I think the biggest problem for us, Dan, is just focus. We see an enormous opportunity with some of these other projects that we're working on. And we are a small team.
So this talk about like, Would that site be successful if we kept running it?, I'd say yes. Where are we continuing to learn? I'd say yes, one of the things that we learned is that it's extremely hard to construct these deals. A lot of these people that are offering products and services, they would come to us with like a half baked offer, oftentimes even on their own site, right, so it's like, ‘Hey, I got this product’, we kind of both recognise that it's an interesting product or service, but like they hadn't done the work on their own site to sell it. And that's part of the reason why they were coming to us.
And I think that, in the beginning, we saw this as kind of an opportunity it was like, ‘Well, we can help them work on their sales and marketing and at the same time, we can get sales and profit from this and then they can go back and have a better understanding of how to maybe market their product or service’.So I think it's still a very cool business and I think it still has a lot of potential. But for us, it's just a matter of like, ‘Man, we have really got to focus on what we think the larger opportunity is here’. So I kind of want to leave the door open a little bit, Dan, this is like the entrepreneurial me and like maybe this is a mistake to do, but like ideas like there. It's been proven. If somebody came in and were like, hey, Ian, hey, Dan, like all run this thing for you, like, you only have to talk to me for like an hour or two a week, I'll construct these deals on stuff. I don't know, would you take them up on that?
Dan: Perhaps, one of the things about Deals is like, I’m just obsessed with this idea of a really great ‘Dynamite Deal’ is something that you can purchase and bring revenue into your business. And you really need to have a match made in heaven. Like, ‘Man, I don't have a content team, but I've proven the channel and here's a content provider, and I plug them in, and I make more money than I spend’. And I love that idea.
Ian: It’s the idea that you can go shopping for revenue for your business. And that's what I think people got most excited about with our most successful deals is like, ‘Hey, I'm going to click this button in like three months from now, I'm gonna have a bunch of content. I'm gonna have a bunch of traffic. I'm gonna have a bunch of something that I didn't have to do that I just paid for’.
Dan: Yeah. And this is an idea that I think is totally rad. And I think it's the way business is moving. That as companies continue to become more agile and sort of do more things with adjacent services as opposed to in house, I think that this is the way businesses are moving. I don't necessarily think that delivering a Deal every week or whatever is the best format to do that.
Because, again, it requires, particularly with services, it requires, a very specific match between what you need and who's offering it. So right now I can brainstorm a little Dynamite Deal that I would love to see. I would love to see a proven, passionate writer who says, ‘I'm willing to take on three clients right now. And I'm gonna basically do a sort of a book in a box for them’. Because me and you, we've got one in the top drawer like normal, we have an amazing draft. That's kind of shitty but it has a lot of potential called ‘The Thousand Principle’, I would love to see that book go out to the podcast audience, give them a chance to read our thoughts on the topic. Problem is, we're not going to get that done here in the next few months. So that would be an awesome ‘Dynamite Deal’. So I do think that there is an opportunity for there to be a more ‘platform approach’, where people interested in making money and doing work can raise their hand and, you can hire them to say work for you.
Ian: This book draft, I think we can talk about it in another episode. But that's a real thing that you're working on. And then the ‘Dynamite Deals’ thing. If you want to email me about that, I think that that's cool. I would certainly entertain speaking to somebody about running that site. Do not email me if it's just something that you think is cool. Email me if you have unique experience, expertise or vision. If you saw what we did the last year there, you think that we're onto something and you think that you can help and you can shoulder this project, I'd be interested to talk to you.
Dan: Cool. Let's just get moving on to one of those things we've decided to focus our energy on which is ‘Dynamite Jobs’.
Ian: DJ. Dan, the other day, we had a Happy Hour, 4pm Happy Hour, everybody showed up with their fizzy water and their beers.
Dan: It was a happy hour with the team.
Ian: That’s right. And we were in Google meet and all of a sudden it was like ‘bring bring’ and it was like a name I didn't recognise. I was like, I'm pretty sure I know everybody on our team because they're fairly small.
Dan: I was like, ‘Everybody's right about zoom security. This is terrible’. We just gotta mis-dial on the team call, what’s up with that?
Ian: Exactly. So, it's a black screen. It's ringing. I'm like, ‘Who is this person?’ Then all sudden the camera comes on. And a dang alpaca is in the view, and I’m thinking, ‘What is going on here?’ By the way, an alpaca is our mascot over at ‘Dynamite Jobs’ and Alexander, one of our team members, invited this woman that runs an alpaca farm to come to the call and I thought it was super cool.
Dan: Pretty cool. Yeah, ‘Dynamic Jobs’. Look, this is a platform that's evolving really quickly, especially since the Coronavirus. We saw any enormous uptick in terms of interest from people that want to work remote. And on the other side of it, companies kind of froze up there for a month. And now we're seeing more and more companies that are seeing the opportunity right now to get amazing staff members on board. And so, it’s one of these things that's a little bit tough to judge but you always said, ‘Look, one of the things I like about ‘Dynamite Jobs’ is, this is a business that would work well in a recession as well’. I mean, you're on your own tape, saying that a few times, and certainly when we saw the greatest economic challenge in our lifetimes, that site didn't see it. It's all the opposite, which is an increase in interest.
Ian: And so during the second half of the year here, the DC, ‘The Dynamite Circle’ our membership community of entrepreneurs and ‘Dynamite Jobs’ are our main focuses going forward this year, and super pumped up about both. There's been a lot of mixing and shaking up going on inside of the DC too. And the same goes with Jobs. Obviously, everybody's so woke to this remote thing. Welcome to the club 10 years later. I mean, it's almost annoying in a way but I'm very happy to be participating in a more meaningful way, I think. Dan, somebody reminded me the other day that we started ‘Tropical Workforce’, which is basically a version of ‘Dynamite Jobs’ like seven or eight years ago. Of course it had a palm tree, which is the reason it failed.But we were just too early on that, we were just too early. We saw this thing. And a couple of people got really interesting jobs from it. But I think we were just too early, this timing feels about right. And you know what? Our traffic and the number of people that are signing up, it looks like it's right, too. So again, getting back to what I was saying earlier on in the show, I'm spending a lot of time on the phone, talking to candidates as well as you are and understanding the real pain points of these people and trying to figure out how to help them get remote Jobs because this is not something that's going away.I'm just gonna swoop in here to tell you that we completely went off the rails here. We don't have enough distance from some of these issues to talk about them effectively on the podcast. But I can tell you a story about a few weeks ago. The whole team got on the phone with a lot of what we've been talking about on a podcast - how many candidates we have in our database. And we really wanted to put personas and faces and humans to these, opt ins, or whatever on the internet, they're just opt ins. But so we started getting on the phone with these candidates. And I was just so impressed. I kind of had this idea like, ‘Man, all these people should have jobs’, but there's so much broken about the hiring process. And that's really the vision for ‘Dynamite Jobs’ for the rest of 2020 is how can we make steps to fix what you can feel palpably from both the hiring side, which is most of the listeners of this show, and then from the candidate side like nobody's happy, nobody's happy about how difficult it can be to find the right job or to find the right employee.And so the vision for the rest of 2020 is not only to build those opt-ins and traffic, which we've been doing, but also start to take meaningful steps towards making the act of hiring a less frustrating process and will it work? We don't know. You're gonna have to stay tuned to see.
Dan:Alright, number three Bossman. And we've only got four. One of our big visions for 2020 was building a better team. Our team from when we recorded this podcast to right now has improved dramatically, and our payroll has remained more or less the same. And this is an opportunity that I think listeners can take away - we’ve focused on this as a key initiative in 2020. If you want to have a great business, you need to have a great team. So what are some ways you can do that? Well, first off, we started off with me and you. And the team starts with the partnership at the core of it. And so what I decided to do was I would sleep on your couch for two months to improve our relationship.
Ian: And I and I decided we'd make a gallon of margaritas every day.
Dan: One of the things I think is obvious to maybe some of the listeners of the show is that me and you have very different lifestyles. I live out of a backpack, you have a family and a ranchette. And so one of the ways I think we started to treat each other in the past few years is like, ‘Alright, he's my partner. So like, here's his responsibilities. And here's my responsibilities’. And it's almost like a little bit of an employee mindset. And I don't think it was like, always like that. But I think one of the things we really got on the same page about during those two months together was, it's like old school TMBA, like what do we really want to happen here? What are our emotional and financial goals, and what's a vision that we can really get on the same page about and then we can trust each other that the efforts being toiled for which is incredibly difficult, as you all know, are in line with a collective vision.
And going down a checklist of like, ‘Is this one in my category of responsibilities or whatever?’ might be a sign, I think, at least it was in our case that we weren't treating our relationship with the priority it deserved.
Ian: Yeah, I totally agree with that. And through these conversations, I think I'm trying to figure out, in retrospect if it makes sense to try and structure those types of conversations because we had some pretty intense conversations, about our relationship and the business, and I feel like we weeded through a bunch of stuff that needed to be talked through. Now, is there a format that should happen like every six months or a year? I'm not sure but I think that we both I kind of realised like, ‘Hey, we're at a bit of a junction’, it's like, the businesses needs help, our relationship needs help, we need to figure out how to like get through these issues so we can ultimately have a better team and a better business. And I think, again, just through the pounds of salt, Margarita mix, dirty Dick's Margarita mix, and cheap Jose Cuervo somehow we got through it. I'm not gonna say the reasons or how we got through it exactly, because it was a really concoction.
Dan: Well, I'll say this, it's like any relationship there, you can divert yourself from the core problem by putting a lot of other things around it that are worthwhile to focus on as well, whether that's tasks or projects or this or that. But really the core of the issue exists in the relationship and starting there, I think, is a wonderful place. And so that's an injunction for listeners who, if you do feel that, the charter of your business, whether it's you have an investor, a partner, or whatever it is isn't going right, you can decide to go try and solve that issue or, or maybe the fact that you're trying to solve issues around it as a symptom that you don't feel comfortable with the core.
One of the other things, Bossman - the reasons our team has improved so much this year is that we've really been proactive about reaching out to smart people and being transparent with our business challenges and visions, and trying to get them on board at least in terms of mentorship, advice, guidance. This has been huge this year. So it's almost like you can build a board for your business, people that understand what you're doing, for free, because what's fun is talking to people about business.
Ian: Yeah. People love to participate in these conversations, especially if they're right. And you like to implement something that they advise you to do. I mean, this is like one of the most fun things to do ever, which is like mastermind with someone, have them talk about their business and then see the results six months later, not only because you got to be a part of that conversation, but lots of time you learn something from it too.
Dan: For me, it's enormously rewarding to be a part of other people's businesses in that way. Now, I will say some people don't leverage this at all, because I even have close friends with businesses that I am of zero use to them because they share about their business in such a way that I'm not really involved. Maybe I just know the sales figures and how good they're doing or how bad they're doing, or whatever. But I'm not really ever brought in. And I think you'll be surprised if you ask people in a genuine, authentic way to truly help. And then you're making that commitment that you're going to show them the fruits of their labour. And that's what a mastermind is, and you can create them all across the board.
I got to tell a story of someone who has been enormously influential in our businesses, Rob Walling. Congrats on the 500th episode of, ‘Startups For The Rest of Us’, Rob. And there's been questions about whether or not me and you should invest in our members’ businesses. And of course, Rob runs ‘Tiny Seed’. And so we called him up. And man, it was just invaluable to hear about his experience. And I walked away with a bunch of takeaways, but two were.
Number one, I don't think we're quite ready to be fund managers yet, Bossman. I don't think we've quite earned our stripes enough just for that. But number two, if you are running a SaaS business that's had some level of product market fit, I think joining ‘Tiny Seed’ accelerator would be an amazing deal. So that's just one shout out. I think Rob's doing some really amazing work. And this isn't limited to Rob. We've had so many sorts of influences like this on us in 2020, and one final shout out Bossman is to DC members. I've been on the phone with handfuls of DC members this year, talking about how to improve the community, how we can make that a better place for all of them. And we'll get to that in our next point. But, this idea we came in with a vision and I really feel like we've taken a lot of positive steps on this one Bossman on the team front.
Ian: I think, ultimately, having a level of transparency around your business that enables you to be able to share the things that you're up to, in a way that other people can participate, is extremely powerful. Now meeting these people, understanding who these people are, knowing whether or not they and you can also benefit from that. It's very hard. I mean, a lot of the people that we're talking about helping us this year, we've known for almost 10 years, if not longer. Now, a lot of these relationships, they take that long to mature. You know, Dan, just as an aside point, a lot of people have been pressing us, second half of this year to do more virtual events. And I think we are doing some of that, but one of the things that, after running a community for several years with you, that I think that we understand better than most people is that these relationships, most of the time, are found and strengthened through in person. And I think that's part of the reason why I resist this idea of turning everything virtual is because it just doesn't work. The hallway track, which is basically where a lot of these deals get done at these conferences. It's not in front of a presentation. It's not in front of the stage. It's where you're bumping into people drinking coffee. That's where shit gets done. That's where you meet these people.
Dan:There's so many virtues in person, but why do so many people fail at this, creating a board or a Brains trust around their business? Well, it's because the internet makes it really easy to try and use people. And when you see somebody on the side of a computer screen or an email, it's like, ‘I need something from them’. One of the things is that if you have a personal relationship with somebody, you're not going to get these kinds of mind shares if you're the type of person who needs them or is using them. And you won't be able to sustain the relationship. I think that's what I was getting out when I talked about authenticity earlier is, yes, the information that these intelligent people give us is very useful. But if that were the reason we were calling them, just to use their information, you can't sustain a relationship like that.
I think that's part of what makes in person so powerful is that you can really get a sense for whether you can work with somebody and whether they're going to be honest with you. And a lot of people that are ineffective at building the board, at building the brain share, at participating in masterminds. They're always using it for a lower order outcome, like ‘Wow, I’d really like to make a sale to this person’, or ‘I'd really like to feel validated about my business's success this week’, or, ‘I'd really like to not be embarrassed in front of these people right now and hope that they include me as an entrepreneur because I'm struggling right now’. And the tough part is to shed all that stuff and to say, ‘I am going to connect authentically because I know that working with these people and getting their true thoughts on what's happening will in the long run be more valuable’.All right. So number four. One of the things it’s done, with the events getting cancelled, is our private forum has become a lot more important to us, and people are spending more time on it. Sometimes there's problems, people are fearful. Sometimes conversations might get a little political, and maybe distract us from sort of the core aim of what we're trying to do, as well as our tech platform hasn't really been revisited for years.
And this is one of the things our members have encouraged us to take a look at, ‘Let's fresh in the place up here, let's put a fresh coat of paint on it, let's build for the future here’, because this community is going to be a part of that future. And so, it's been awesome to be on the phone with members, and also challenging because it's, ‘Well, if you make that change, then ... ‘. It's like a game, a little bit, with technology, you push one down and the other one comes up.
Ian: Dan, I think this is just a cardinal example of even though you want something, even though you plan something, it doesn't always go as you want it to. This year, we came out of the gate saying, ‘In person is important’, as important as ever. We got all these events lined up, and then, life happened. And it was completely out of our control. How do we calibrate for that? And I think this is just, it's just a good lesson for us, Dan, as somebody that, maybe we haven't been dragged through the dirt as much as many other people out there. And this is one of the years where we are, we have a business that was built on ‘in person’. And our revenues have plummeted because we haven't been able to run this arm to the business. And so for us, it's honestly been a bit of a shake.
Dan: And I'll say what, you gotta appreciate the dark humour of all this, we get on the podcast, and we just raise our hands as entrepreneurs and say: ‘In person is the future, we believe in in person and we're putting it all down in person’. And the world comes to us a few months later and says, ‘Look, those things that you do in your products that are critical. We're going to need you to stop doing those. Okay?’
Ian: ‘How you've made a living the last couple of years, that's not going to workout too well’.
Dan: We make fun of it because look, we've gotta get through it. This has been a time, if I look through the membership and I'm on the phone with so many members, people are on the one hand genuinely scared and lonely, a lot of us are just sort of, haven't seen people for a while and it's easy for that to emotionally affect you negatively. On the other hand, the creative adaptations that I'm seeing are inspiring. Just people saying, ‘Okay, my travel site went away. I got a plan’, and that's the camp that I want to fall in. I will have to mention, though, because there is a big conversation around DCBKK and whether or not that's gonna be able to happen, and I will say, we're going to be working with our members on how and if and that might even get executed, if it's even possible. But the desire, you can see it, is strong. I mean people, they don't want to go to another virtual event, they want to see each other and whether we're gonna have to do it in a park somewhere, or whatever. Call me stubborn Bossman. I'm still betting on ‘in person’.
Music
Dan: Thank you for sticking around this far. Again, a little bit self conscious to post this one. It felt like Ian and I were just very much in the middle of all this. And, I think there are concrete lessons that we're learning and connections and patterns we're seeing in the things that we're doing. But, maybe the year is just happening a little bit too fast for us to see everything right now. We certainly had fun getting our thoughts out on paper, so to speak, and hope that maybe something we said today will inspire you to grow a better location independent business.
Drop us a line if anything here resonated with you, or if you have a story of how you're coping in your business. We read those emails, get inspired by them and come up with episodes in response to your thoughts. So we really, really appreciate it. That's it. As always, we'll be back next Thursday morning at 8pm Eastern Standard Time.
TMBA Ident
[/bg_collapse]