Dave: 0:22

Hey, hey, everybody, welcome. It is another Friday, which means it's another Friday morning with these two pretty mugs between me and Dwarin for another episode of the Business Unscripted podcast. Where we're here, we're going to share some stories, some advice, some insights on things that are going to help you with your business. Or maybe you're just starting a business. Maybe it hopefully gives you that little kick in the butt to get started get moving. Maybe you're just starting a business. Maybe it hopefully gives you that little kick in the butt to get started get moving. It's things that we've learned through our experiences but also helped our own clients work on and improve as well. So welcome to another Friday. Grab your cup of Joe and let's jump into the show. All right, dwarren, how are you? Buddy? How was your week?

Duarne: 1:03

It was a good week. It was a good week. Lots of things happening, very busy, lots of positives, and it was just a good week. It was a good week. I had a good week.

Dave: 1:15

I got to know because we missed the update last week. But how's baby doing? Baby's doing?

Duarne: 1:21

great Baby's doing wonderful, sleeping a little bit more during the night, although my poor wife isn't getting as much sleep as she should be getting oh no, why is?

Dave: 1:34

is the baby up all the time or she just can't sleep?

Duarne: 1:38

we got super. We got super lucky with little autumn um, who was, like you know, 11 and a half months behind uh little baby anna now. So she was a really quiet baby, just like really chill, didn't really cry very much. Um drank a, she slept a lot. Uh, little baby anna just likes a little bit more attention from mom. So you know, as soon as mom tries to put it down, eyes wide open, oh, what's going on? Why are you putting me down? Is it a playtime? It's just poor mom is uh on high alert. So and uh, yeah, we had a meeting early this morning so she had to be up for that. So she uh normally should have been getting some bit of daytime sleep, but, uh, she didn't get any today. So she's actually sitting off to the side in the office here processing a bunch of employee information for some new starts for next week.

Dave: 2:32

Nice. Well, paige, I hope you get some rest. You know, kick Dwarin in the butt once time or two. Tell Dwarin to get up and take care of that baby.

Duarne: 2:42

There's a little thing, though you know there's a part of the feeding process that I can't help with. So, yeah, you can definitely yeah.

Dave: 2:51

You can't do anything about that part, that's for sure. So, yeah, but well, good, good to hear things are going well. Paige, we're, we're always thinking about you. Hope you, you get some rest here. But so, dwarin, I know we were talking pre-show and also earlier in the week you know about profitability, something that we've talked about in prior episodes. We've talked about knowing profitability not only by like service line, but profitability by client sometimes can actually be important to to know. And, based on our conversations, you went back and you did some research on your own work and your own clientele. So why don't you give us a story? What kind of prompted you and then what did you find out?

Duarne: 3:37

Well, dave, you prompted me because we talk far too often about this and I had the realization at some point that I couldn't answer a couple of questions in relation to. So we do all that. We do a lot of staffing, our staffing solutions Right, and we've got some legacy clients that have been around for 10, 12 years and there's some great clients of ours and we've got staff that have been with them for like probably eight, nine years now. So what's happened is, over the years, we've passed along bonuses and we've passed along increases from a client, but we never really went back and evaluated how much those staff moves really cost, because you know, we were making a little bit of money in the beginning and at some point along the line we just kept adding to it.

Duarne: 4:31

Well, we had to do something. Prompted me when we had our conversation it was also a little something locally. Prompted me that they had a change in legislation on a couple of the ways payments worked out etc. For staffing. So I decided to build a nice little algorithm, turn it into a formula, put it through spreadsheet, manipulated that a whole bunch of times as we do um, and we basically broke down every single staff member how much we're paying um based on whatever we felt their salary was, then what the real cost of that person was, with all of their um inclusions and costs and contributions and taxes and all that sort of wonderful stuff. So the real cost.

Duarne: 5:19

That was surprising itself. Just to see the real cost, because I'd only ever seen lump sum values in other spreadsheets, so I kind of hadn't associated with an individual staff member previously. It was kind of like a uh oh, I should have been doing this a long time ago. Why wasn't I? Moment. And this was prompted to you know how granular we had been talking about. You know you should be getting with your cash flow and your reporting and understanding.

Duarne: 5:49

So I decided to go through this process and I did it for all my staff and what I came up with was the majority of my staff was doing okay and I'd basically worked out. I knew what I wanted my minimum percentage for profitability to be, because obviously for every staff member you've got, you've got to have back-end resources to back them up as well, and that wasn't in my inclusion. That's like a just another formula somewhere else that we work out. But this I decided to add in what we charge the customer for each of these outsourced staffing resources and our staff, as well as put in what the percentage of profitability is and the value of the profitability. Well, it was pretty scary when I did that on at least one staff member, who ironically had to be one of the oldest staff members in the team, and we actually realized that, depending on the fluctuating dollar at the time, that particular staff member could be as low as less than 3% profitability.

Dave: 6:51

Wow. And it was like oh, and here you thought you're probably making a decent profitability on them because they had been here so long.

Duarne: 6:58

Exactly Like. I'm like yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, and I realized oh, I'm barely covering costs. So if there's a and we're talking like 3%, that could be picked up with a shift in the dollar. We've seen a shift in the dollar. So, like a good example, when we first put him on, the Aussie dollar was sitting at about 44 peso to the dollar, whereas nowadays it's about 36. But I've seen that drop as low as 31.

Duarne: 7:24

So, realistically, if I look at the mass, at points in the past I would have probably been losing money on that employee by having him on the team. Um, just purely because it was a complete oversight and I couldn't understand how I'd gotten here and we. I went back and worked it all through and what I'd realized was because we had actually added on bonuses and then passed them directly through to the staff member. They had just increased over time. So he was on like three or four times what he'd started his salary at, you know, over the last nine, ten years, which sounds like a hell of a lot. But I mean, we're talking about, you know, the Philippines and you know, learning the role and progressing through the role.

Dave: 8:08

I was going to say what's simple that people can apply to their own business. Right and kind of what you did is you just took a look at individual in this case charges by client and you took what is the cost? What am I charging my client? What am I? What is it costing me, which gives you a net number? So let's say, for example, you were charging $2,000. This individual you have to pay out, between taxes and payroll and everything else $1,900. So it leaves you with a profitability of $100, where you might be thinking that you were getting $400 or $500, because that's what you were getting at the beginning of that individual, not adding up all the extra costs. So maybe at the beginning you were charging $1,500 and he only cost you $1,000.

Dave: 8:53

Your profitability is 33%. And if you set it and forget it which it sounds like this might have been something that happened in your case you may think I'm always going to get 33%. But in your case, if you you added $400 of bonuses right To his salary, but then you didn't increase that 400 by the 33% profit margin, just one-to-one directly added it to the client, which is what we do. Right, you now become, you know, let's say, 1400 or $1,400 in charges and you're only charging $1,500 or whatever it ends up being right and you ate it, and so those costs, like you just found out, can be picked up and your profitability, as you said, goes from 20%, maybe down to 3%.

Dave: 9:40

So you, as a listener, go through your charges, your services, by client. What are you charging the client? What costs are associated with that? So how many hours are you spending with that client? If you have a like Dwarin here in our case had direct salaries and expenses to that client, check it out, Because if you get year over year expense increases, everybody does right, Whether you're doing salary increases for bonuses or you're doing salary increases for cost of living, your expenses from vendors are probably going to go up as well, and if you're still charging the same dollar amount, your profit margin is not the same as it was when you first started. It was when you first started, and so you have to essentially be increasing your prices appropriately, or you find four, five, six, seven years down the road that your profitability is to crap.

Dave: 10:33

So go back and that would be kind of your challenge this week would be to go through and look at your charges and your profitability by client or by service. Let's say you have tens of hundreds of clients in one service. Look at your profitability by service and you could add all that up and determine that. But I was going to ask. So you make this determination that your net profit for this client is pretty crappy. Where did you go with it? How did you take it to address that?

Duarne: 11:02

Well, just before we get get there, something you just raised there was interesting is one of the things that you tend to forget. When you're actually going through and giving increases and charging your clients for an increase and passing those across, in our instance, or a performance bonus increase, just as you do as, um, you know, staff being with you for a while is you do have additional costs in there. We've got Google Business Suite costs. Now they have gone up 40% since in the last three years, which was never factored into my costing of that particular individual. There's putting on managers and hiring managers to actually help manage those teams, those managers, their base salaries plus increases over time as well. So there's a lot of that sort of stuff which it's really hard to factor that in. So typically what I've done is I've basically worked on I need this minimum to maintained margin now, because that fact is at least a portion of all of that other stuff that's necessary to keep that person working and employed as well well, and you make a good point too.

Dave: 12:11

So and this is important, especially if you're, if you're a smaller business owner, you're just getting started in terms of developing your service. You have to be thinking forward state like, for example, I'm we're rolling out our new cashflow clarity program and I'm not pricing it based on me doing the work, because if it was me doing the work, the cost would be a lot less and the profit margin would be a lot more. But I'm pricing it based off of future state, which is when staff are doing the work. And so what do you need to price it at now for you to be able to, when you get your first five, six, seven clients, to bring in that first staff member and it still be profitable, right? That's where you have to be thinking, you know. And for your case, dorn, what future costs do I have to build in? Right, in terms of the initial charges that cover everything? So what is that? You know, sort of bulk of services that you have that every virtual employee has to subscribe to, boom. So you know, you bring on a salary, you add those costs and then you add your profit margin on top of that, right, 100%. And so the managers. And then when you're thinking too like, you brought up another one managers, so now you have to look at, okay, within my profit margin, do I have enough? So, for example and this is high level, so this is just kind of, you know, if you forecast out that for every five employees you have to have one manager, right, or that's when you need to start a manager after five employees, and then that manager can happen, can, can, you know, manage up to 15. Does the five at least cover the minimum expenses of the manager, so that way, the, when you add the other 10, that manager is still being covered and the and the five are still being profitable. So you know, for example, let's say, a manager for you know, this is just high level, it's going to cost you a thousand dollars a month. Okay, those first five, when you go to hire them, should at least have $200 of profit between them, right, each, so that they're covering the cost of that manager. The business as a whole may not make money for a little bit until they start growing, so they keep growing, but at least you've got your staff covered in, all your expenses covered, you know, and if you want to make some money, maybe each one of them. Your goal is to have $300 in profit each. So that way when you get to five and you hire the manager, at least you're still making $100 each Temporarily until you grow.

Dave: 14:40

You're always going to take a short-term hit in business when you expand a little bit. So that first court of hitch when you hire the new employee is when you're going to take the downfall. But then you're going to go back up and so you plan it out, you forecast it out. This is things that with our, as we mentioned, cash flow clarity program, we help you kind of do. We project out the next 12 to 18 months and the impact of these potential changes, loans, anything like that. So in your case, dorn, you mentioned managers. Always make sure that you're kind of projecting out the number of employees, the minimum when do I need to make a change and then the maximum what can they handle and look at the profitability at both what's the profitability when I first make that hire and what's the profitability when they're at their max capacity. Those two things are really going to help you understand and make the right decision moving forward 100%.

Duarne: 15:30

And the other thing is like, one thing that's really hard to factor in and you don't think about initially is things like rent increases, power increases, all of these sort of things In different software increases that you need to add in different, you know, tools you need to add on. All this sort of stuff has to be factored into the scenario. So what I've basically done is where I, like previously I might have said, hey look, I'm happy with x amount of margin, I've now doubled that margin that I'm happy with so that I can go. Well, you know what? I've got? A holy shit. Something is necessary that I didn't even think of. It's there. I'm still sitting above my base, that I need to be for that margin to make this worthwhile and not stress me out.

Duarne: 16:17

I got really lucky in this instance because I've got a very good relationship with this client. I went back and had a conversation with the client later that day after realizing this and simply pointed out that one of the five staff that they have with me was sitting at a very, very low margin and advising him, because we were about to do another pay increase, that I might need to charge him a little extra on the pay increase just to cover that new, at least percentage of what I was going to do. But I mean, we're talking I was thinking a minimal increase of maybe one and a half percent or something like that, on top of the current three, just so it was not going to cost me any additional money for that increase I was about to put on. Well, the client volunteered at that point. He said, well, we can't have this put on.

Duarne: 17:06

Well, the client volunteered at that point. He said, well, we can't have this. And he actually threw another 10 on the kitty and said look, build me out an additional 10 on what you get. So he's now sitting on about a 12 and a half to 13 margin on that particular staff member, which for me is a blessing. Um, and it goes to show that just because you find something out, that's not necessarily great news. Don't feel like it's something that you need to. You know, just be straightforward and honest with you know, your clients and the people around you. I didn't go expect. I didn't go into that conversation expecting anything. I just went in to inform and I walked out with something which was absolutely incredible.

Dave: 18:14

And so this is also something to consider when you're talking price increases. How do you do it appropriately, all of that? Right, in this case, you had a great relationship with the client, so you were able to kind of be open, you were able to be honest with what you found out and went straight forward to them. And again, you didn't do it where you went straight forward to him and said, hey, I need to increase your price because I need to make more money. Right, you just kind of pointed out hey, just letting you know, being straightforward, we're about to do this price increase. It's going to be a little bit higher as we look to adjust our margins, because we happened to find out that this, this one, was not at our, at our target margin. Right, and just letting you know, and being over it, it wasn't something that you did, you know, like unexpectedly.

Dave: 19:02

And that's the first thing is you want to make sure, whenever you're doing price increases, that you do it with clarity and transparency to your clients. And there's one of ways that you can do it is direct, which is what you just did. Right, you go right, especially if your service, your business, is one-on-one with the person. Right, you're having a conversation directly with them on a regular basis. That's where you want to have a phone call, maybe a virtual meeting, depending on if you guys are close or not Then you want to actually directly communicate to them. If your business is more like hands-off so maybe you're a service provider or maybe maybe you're a landscaper and you don't really see your clients, but you know you're there that's where maybe an email or a notice on the door could be more appropriate. We're just letting you know effective XYZ date.

Dave: 19:47

Whatever you end up picking, you want to give at least a 30-day notice. Typically, if it's a larger increase, you want to give more, like a 60 to 90-day notice. But just letting them know hey, just effective. You know, let's say September 1st we're making a 10% price increases to all of our invoices to cover increased costs. And that's the third part. Make sure that there's a real reason why you're doing it and explain that to your client or your customer. Don't just say we're increasing prices 10% Like that's going to turn them off. But if you say we need to increase prices 10% to offset price you know increasing gas costs increase in, you know expenses or supply costs they're going to understand that because there's a legitimate reason.

Duarne: 20:29

Vendor costs have just gone up due to tariffs or something like that. Right, there's going to be if you've got legitimate reasons. But yeah, definitely. If you go in and say, hey, I really want to buy that new ford bronco, um, so I need to lift your prices up a little bit, they're gonna sit there and go well, do you really need that? Or if you do, why don't you go get another customer to do that? But no, like I, you're right.

Duarne: 20:50

I think just having that conversation really helps um, and putting it out. And another thing that I I think is good to do too is work at a staged plan to get someone where they need to be. So we've said I've seen this with the managed service industry before um, where clients are basically they need to. They've been on a legacy plan. It was signed for a three-year agreement. Um changes have come in different compliance levels and stuff which now need to be factored into their um solution. And yes, it was technically out of the scope initially, but the wording was vague so they needed to include it um, just because you know they want to provide a good service and an inclusive service. But when it comes time for renewal it gets a little scary because the price is suddenly 70 80 higher than before. But they're getting all this amazing service. But as far as they're concerned, I'm getting the same sort of service before.

Duarne: 21:47

So what the clients have done is said hey look, so for the next six months we're going to increase it by this much, and then for the next six months it'll be increased by this much, and then for the next six months it'll be increased by this much, and then that'll maintain for the next year and then we'll increase by this much. For the last year and it was a little bit easier pill to swallow and they explained it by telling them what the increase was about. And the clients were like well, you know what we can work with you on that. We can get that in the budget. We can work with the budget to make sure that it's inclusive. For that. It's not always a straight road, right Sometimes. Sometimes you're just going to tell you to bugger off. I don't want to do it, and I've heard that before a bunch of times too, and it's fine.

Dave: 22:28

Cause you're probably losing money on those clients, right? Or their margins are small anyways. It's taking up a lot of your time and their margins small. Well, take that time and attention and go to a client where you can charge the appropriate amount and get your margin back. Sometimes, loss is actually a gain, especially for the people that aren't profitable or who are maybe taking up too much of your time in association with the amount that you're getting off of them or that they're paying. Sometimes it's worth it to just cut of them or that they're paying, um, you know. So sometimes it's it's worth it to just cut, cut your cut your losses at that point.

Duarne: 23:00

Absolutely. I worked for a cost. I worked for a company uh, would have been probably 18 years, 20 years ago and, um, I'm feeling old now. Um, so while I was working for them, and one of the things that they were telling me is they had this really great account that they had before I came on. I'm like, oh, that sounds incredible. That must have been so profitable, it must have been really good, lots of business. And they're like, well, yeah, we did get lots of business, but it came with conditions. I'm like, what do you mean? Well, we had eight staff members working in the warehouse to pack and send their goods out, on top of the team of two that we have right now. So we had 10 staff down there. Eight of them are dedicated just to this one client.

Duarne: 23:47

Now, this client wanted restocking fees in the event that the pricing changed within 60 days of their purchase price, event that the pricing changed within 60 days of their purchase price. They wanted guarantees that they could actually get um updated pricing credits every time there was a change. Now we're talking about a company that at the time, was selling cabling and usb thumb drives. Now, usb thumb drives at the time it was the craze. We'd just gone from 128 meg to 256 meg, 512 meg, so it was that sort of era. So the pricing was fluctuating so quickly and rapidly at that time and what they found is they were stuck having to maintain this slow moving stock, also had the ability to um that they couldn't sell in stores. The the clauses were written, they could send it back.

Dave: 24:37

So you know I mean, and that's difficult, right? Because what you're trying to do is now you're trying to build a business model on unknown future price changes.

Duarne: 24:46

Yes, and you can't do that. No, and this is what happened. So what happened was the clients were every time they had a new model out, they'd get really stressed out because they'd have to drop the price on the old model to clear the stock. But it wasn't. They had to be careful because there might be 10,000 units in stock but it could be 30,000 units sitting out there with this one particular reseller partner of theirs in all their retail outlets across the country. So they would have to factor it in. So it became all this work for admin, all this work for processing because every process back then, every order would come in on the fax and have to be manually entered into the system, all this packing, all of the shipping and stuff. And because of the arrangement, there was a discounted rate on shipping because you know they were shipping so much of it, of course. So it basically worked out that they weren't making very much at all.

Duarne: 25:41

Um, after evaluating, after a relationship for two years, so they made the decision to drop that customer and whilst on paper it looked like they had lost a huge chunk of their business, they actually gained a huge amount of profit because they were able to go through retrenchment process, remove stuff that were no longer necessary to the operation, but also reduce a whole bunch of stress and overhead and, you know, for cash flow projections and stock projections, and it was just a lot easier for them to run their business and they're able to focus better on making money, which was pretty, which was pretty cool to you know. Kind of me 20 years ago to see, to hear about this was like wow, that's really incredible. I'd never heard of this sort of thing like I would have assumed a big customer like that makes you lots of money, where the reality is big customers rarely make you a lot of money if, depending on their terms, right, if they're too big, right.

Dave: 27:17

It's one of those things where and I've run into this with a couple other clients as small business owners, they get to these bigger companies who request, like they think are common products, you know, kind of terms and conditions, but in reality there are terms and conditions that they're only given to the small business owners because they know that the small business owners need to take it right or you know, or they'll go find somebody else.

Dave: 27:43

And so some of these things are, you know, like refusing to pay invoices for 45 days, like, oh, our invoice payments, 45 day terms, like you know. So we're only going to pay you, you know, in that case, well, so you got these small business companies that are out here fronting tens of thousands of dollars for these big companies right In payroll and supplies. You know when, when, typically you know, a bigger company would say you know, you have to pay us X amount up front, x amount at this milestone, a, milestone B, milestone C, and the remainder do at the end, right. That's why a lot of bigger companies will go to small business owners because they feel like they can give them terms and conditions that bigger companies won't.

Duarne: 28:21

It's kind of holy right, like one of the big ones I see is we're going to pay you 90 days after invoice and I've seen this with a lot of companies and they're selling products that are like maybe six to twelve percent margins, so it's not even like there's massive margins in this.

Duarne: 28:44

And when you take into consideration three like 90 days, that's three months and it's um that it's after you've invoiced, so you might have already got the purchase order, shipped the goods and then invoiced. There could be a delay of two weeks for the shipping before you get it. It gets very, very disconcerting for a business owner when you see things like that and I've witnessed this plenty of times where the businesses, small businesses, are fronting two to three months worth of cash flow for other businesses to provide. And then it's really bad is when those big companies or those even small companies you're doing it for, they go into administration and then you're left holding a bill that's never going to get paid or you're going to get paid cents on the dollar and that can really affect and so for administration that's like default right, that's bankruptcy over there, bankruptcy for those in the us and the line australia.

Duarne: 29:43

We call it administration. So, and look, I've had a friend who's had that happen and his business basically had to go into bankruptcy due to, you know, clients who took receivership of you know, I think it was like 30, 40 000 worth of servers at the time back when you used to do physical servers on site, um, and they failed to disclose that they were actually financially insolvent. And, uh, two months later, when he was chasing the bill to get paid, that hadn't been paid. Yeah, he's getting told, sorry, but we've got administrators in here. Now You're going to have to deal with these guys and put your bid in to try and get paid, and I think he ended up getting paid like 30 cents on the dollar. Here's the problem he has to go back to vendors and pay the vendors for the services if he hasn't already paid the services, right, if he's paid for them, exactly, if he's paid for them, then that's interesting, he's out of money While the money's out there, and he's also you know he's never going to get that money back.

Duarne: 30:48

So that's a huge loss to a lot of businesses and that's something I think a lot of businesses need to be aware that you're the business owner, you're the business, set your own terms and if the terms are not met, then we're not saying you can negotiate right, but yeah, I mean, you've got to make sure that the terms are suitable.

Duarne: 31:10

So with myself, for example, we learned a long time ago in the services industry we bill for the month, that is. So we bill at the beginning of the month for the month. That is, we give seven day terms for the majority of our clients and they get seven days to pay the invoice for the month that is, which means that we're probably only ever going to be out 20 days worth of invoice. Um, at worst case if they pay on time. If they don't pay on time, then you know and we just we've still got that month to go in and get it, but we're not chasing them after we've delivered a service yeah, I would definitely like for any business.

Dave: 31:51

try to set your terms at 10, 15 days out and invoice every seven days In the US, you can do things.

Dave: 32:05

Don't wait until the end of the month. Try to space out your service-based business. Try to space out your due dates throughout the month so you always have cash flow coming in. But you know, always make sure that if you're on that retainer type program that you know bills are paid on time. Like you're not, you're not saying, hey, here's your and have them pay for the month ahead of time. You know just like you know. So the first for you know, the next, that whole month that's coming up. Not hey, I'm going to pay you on July 1st for the work that you did you know, in June. Like, that's not going to work, because what happens when that July 1st invoice doesn't get paid for your prior work? Well, now you're in trouble. So always make sure that you're invoicing for the period of head not in arrears.

Duarne: 32:55

Especially when you're in a situation where you're paying for staffing and resources and material to do the job. So for me, um, anyone who? My advice would be anyone who's offering any sort of services that require an upfront purchase invoice for the service, for the purchase of the equipment up front, when you're making the, when you're trying to make the order and basically set a number in your internally that if it's less than this number, we don't require payment upfront. If it is over this number, we require at least 50% upfront to place the order for you and then, once it's delivered, we require the complete payment or at the end of your term, for example, the labor component. You can wear it a little bit more, you can be a little bit more flexible with it.

Duarne: 33:39

But when it comes to real physical products like one of my clients in Australia is an MSP He'll get an order for five laptops that's $10,000 right there that he has to go out in front. So before he even places that order, he sends the invoice across, gets it approved, gets it paid, then he places the order with the supplier. So it's just. I think it all comes down to you know how you set up your business, but you, if you are going to be that P, that business that gives 30 days payment periods, then that gives you the flexibility to charge a higher price. You don't have to be the cheapest.

Duarne: 34:58

At that point you can add that extra 5% margin, for example, to cover the fact that you're not going to be making that interest in the bank account that it's going to take. You're going to have to send out and have a delayed payment coming in that you might have to pay interest because you put it on your credit card to make the payment to the actual for the purchase. So you've got to have that. You've got to understand. This is where what your work. You know the stuff you've been talking about with me, about the cash flow, understanding your cash flow, understanding where your money's coming from, when it's coming. It's becoming evidently more and more important in business, because those who don't know are destined to fail, whether it's today, tomorrow or sometime in the future. They're destined to fail because you need to understand where the money is and where it's coming in, because then you can make better decisions as to how to get more of that money coming in oh, absolutely, as to how to get more of that money coming in?

Dave: 35:55

Oh, absolutely, I mean, the idea, right, is that if you're not projecting into the future, you're only relying on information right now. And the idea is that when you project, it's not again like your profit market, you're not setting it and forgetting it. It's a moving, flowing document with you. How did we, you know, do we hit our goal right from what we projected? And so you want to have like kpis off of this. You want to have, you know, budget first, actuals off of your cash flow projection. But then also, how do different scenarios come into play within that projection? You know, how can, what can we do? Right?

Dave: 36:38

Do we need to cut costs by X amount of percent in the next four months? You know, if we do that, what does that look like? How does that impact our cashflow? Because what you may find is that you know cutting costs isn't going to cut your way out of the business. Right, because you can only cut so much, especially if it's, you know, not related to client service. What you may have to do is you may have to go back, as you found, and you may have to look at your pricing. Maybe your pricing's too low and you need. You know, maybe in two months you need to do a price increase to your clients and maybe that solves you for the next six months and then you focus on growth, adding new clients in.

Duarne: 37:11

You know there's so many different.

Dave: 37:14

Yeah, there's so many different things that can play into it, into play here when it comes to projecting, but you have to do it.

Duarne: 37:20

You do and like, and even to the point where, like I, had a situation just end of last week I'd been sending out notification for a client that was two months behind in payments for hosting and email services which we'd fronted the cost for and paid for initially, and what happened was we suspended the services because we had no communication coming back from them.

Duarne: 37:42

We'd warned them that it was going to happen. We just suspended the services, notified them of the suspension and then suddenly, oh, we need our services. Please turn them back on, so sure, as soon as you pay the outstanding two months and bring your account up to date within for this month, and we're going to require you to pay a month in advance, moving forward and so that we don't have to chase you consistently, because this has become habitual with you and we've had to do this for you know, every month, you know, for however many months, like two years or something, it's become a lot big deal. So we did. They came back, we negotiated, we agreed, if they paid the two months outstanding, we'd give them a 15-day grace, we turn the services back on and we'll revisit the matter in seven days from now um as it says.

Duarne: 38:34

Now here's where it gets interesting. They were offered, they offered to pay by credit card. Now this particular business that we have doesn't um, that part of the business doesn't accept credit card. So we said, look, we, you can pay cash, you can pay via check, because they're local, philippine-based businesses, or you can pay via pay, because they're local, philippine based businesses, or you can pay via PayPal or bank transfer. Which would you prefer? Oh, we'll do it by PayPal. I said well, okay, well, you're going to have to pay the penalty. You're going to have to pay a penalty, which is the fee that it costs us to receive that payment from PayPal. We're going to pass that along to you. So that's going to be added to your outstanding invoice, because our invoices were based on you paying by cash or check or local bank transfer. Well, as it turns out, they used a Canadian-based credit card to make the payment on PayPal and it came with a fairly hefty fee from PayPal, which ate into, I think, about 5% of the total payment when it finally came through.

Duarne: 39:47

So my advice to people would be one of the things that you need to understand when you're doing your cash flow, when you're doing all of these pricing models is you need to understand when you're doing your cash flow, when you're doing all of these pricing models, is you need to understand different payment methods cost different amounts you're. If you're working on a low margin business and you're losing three to five percent every time someone pays you with a credit card because your payment processor or they're paying you with paypal or they're paying with some other platform, then what you need to do is factor that into your costing. You need to factor that into a cost of business or add a fee where your client's willing to pay. That you know as part of your service that you're offering. But if you haven't factored that in and your client is paying you I think we talked about it previously, dave, in another episode incentivize them to pay you on time and through certain channels.

Duarne: 40:46

If they do a bank transfer where you're paying no fees by the way they pay you. Give them a one percent discount. Give them a discount. Make them feel good about it. Um, you know, there's ways around it. That was a great example.

Dave: 41:00

You can give them. I think if you're trying to increase timing and it's maybe an ACH with no fee and they pay within 10 days, you can give them a 1% or 2% discount. That's a typical term called a 110 or a 210. The other one would be a lot of places now actually are charging the credit card fee to their clients. Um, and I would you definitely suggest you could definitely do that as well um, or say, instead of having them pay it through the credit card company, like when I pay the invoice, maybe just say like a credit card invoice, you know we'll have an extra one and a half percent fee added to it.

Dave: 41:39

Right, maybe it may not cover the whole thing, but, but. But it's a one and a half, you know, a 50% increase in your, in your, in your reduction in your expenses, right? So if you're paying 3% and you charge them one and a half percent, well, you just decreased your credit card card expenses 50%, right, which could have a big impact in your bottom line, depending on what your actual margins are.

Duarne: 42:00

So you know finding ways to do that and profit margins to your business for an entire year by doing that. And what you've got to remember is people will pay with whatever's convenient for them in most cases. So if credit card is convenient for them because they get their interest-free period or the funds are sitting over there or they get their frequent flyer points or whatever those reasons behind them using that method, it doesn't mean you need to be guilted in or feel like it's your problem to accept that payment and take the penalty or the cost of doing business in that payment method technology. Instead, feel free to pass it along, feel free to say, yes, you can do that.

Duarne: 42:39

There was a computer wholesale company in Australia that was extremely popular we're talking about. You turn up and there'd be people lined up 10, 15, 20 deep every hour of the day. It was always super busy and they had like five outlets and they had really cheap computing equipment. It was but uh, to the public, but it was wholesale pricing and you'd go in and if you didn't have cash, like physical cash to pay for it, what would happen is you'd get hit with a 2.9 percent surcharge and they'd say, no worries, here's your total bill. How are you paying for it? Oh, okay, there's a 2.9% surcharge. Are you okay with that? You're at the checkout, you're about to make the payment. It's like what am I going to do? I've got to run out, jump in the car, drive to an ATM, pull the money out, come back. No, I'm just going to pay it. I'll wear. I'm going to bring cash, of course you never do.

Dave: 43:38

You always turn up. You always face the same situation. It's like, well, the other thing you could do there too, like those places, if you are like a brick and mortar, like you know, put an atm, you know, that's it. But the funny part is yeah, but the funny part about that is too is, like some of you, it's funny because they'll go to an atm. They'll pay like six, seven dollars to get their money out. Yeah, they'll take a hundred dollars out, that's seven percent. Right, you know, if you take a hundred dollars out and they charge you six bucks, that's six percent, but you don't want to pay the two percent to the vendor.

Duarne: 44:07

It probably was less money, you know I mean, you've got it and look, you've got to do this convenience, they this saving money. There's so many factors that come into this, but you're right, I mean there is so many options here. But it's funny because when I look at this, like I had a situation just the other day where the ATM machine was down so I couldn't pay with my debit card. And I'm like, well, that's a bit frustrating. And they said, sir, just go outside and withdraw from the ATM and you can pay with cash. And I'm like, well, that's a bit frustrating. And they said, sir, just go outside and withdraw from the ATM and you can pay with cash. And I'm like, but I'm here, I'm here now, I just want to do the transaction. And I'm like you know what? Can I just jump on your website and make the purchase and do a pickup? And they're like, oh, let me check with the manager. Came back, sir, you could. But unfortunately, the way our internal systems work, if you pay, if you order on the website, they will allocate the stock from manila and then ship it to us in our monthly shipment. So it's a 25 day delay. And I'm like, well, you can pick up my what, but I'm looking at the item right now. You've already got the box sitting in front of me. Yes, sir. So I was forced in that situation, due to a technical issue that they were suffering from and a process issue they were suffering from, to be inconvenienced to go out and get an atm, withdraw the money and then bring it back and pay for it. It is what it is, but people will do whatever's, you know. For me, I wanted to walk out with that item. The convenience for me was being inconvenienced a little bit by using the atm and withdrawing and then coming back and paying cash, but I got to walk out with the convenience of taking the item with me that day. So your clients may surprise you.

Duarne: 45:50

I remember there was one situation. We had one guy that worked for us in a camping store in sydney many, many years ago and I used to watch him and customers would hand. We had a process where there was no surcharge on visa and mastercard but there was a surcharge of 3.2 percent or something if, using an amex ora diner's card, he would sit there, he would scan the card, but he would do it and he would go oh, I'm so sorry, it's not working. I'll try it one more time oh, it's not working. Do you have another card? Whenever it was a Dynas or an Amex.

Duarne: 46:24

And I watched him do this for half a day and I'm watching and I could see he was actually swiping it backwards every time. And when I questioned him he goes oh, the amount of people who get so angry at me because their donors or amex doesn't work here in australia, um is almost no one, because they just expect it's not going to work. It's just, for some reason, everyone's got this expectation, and that was like 20 years ago back in australia when it was, you know, barely new. He said but if I was just to say look, it's a, there's a service charge for doing this, but if you give me an amex or a visa, there's none, they'll yell at me and they'll blame me for it. He said so I learned this a long time ago.

Duarne: 47:06

I just do this little technique. They hand me over a master or a visa because they've always got one to go with their master card or their diners, and then I put the transaction through. It's no problem. Never get a customer yelling at me because you know I want to charge him a surcharge and I'm like what? Very deceptive. But that was his technique for doing it in relation to the company put in a surcharge. He didn't want to deal with the inconvenience of the client telling so he found a way around it and the customers were like oh okay, yeah, whatever, here's another card.

Duarne: 47:41

Pay with this instead so I mean, there's all these different stories and ways and I think, as a bricks and mortar, just find your own way, but people will generally do whatever's more convenient from them. What makes sense to us about you know? If it may doesn't make sense to you to add on, but people will generally do whatever's more convenient from them. What makes sense to us about you know? If it doesn't make sense to you to add on, you know, or you think you're going to get a lot of kickback from customers by adding on a 2.3 or 1.5% surcharge for transactional fees to help you offset your transactional fees. You probably find most customers if you just say hey, look, there's a three percent transactional fee, uh, that we have to pay. We actually are passing on 1.5 percent of that to you as the customer. Are you okay with that, right? Oh yeah, if you're not okay with it, no worries, we just have to ask you to pay with cash and if not, yeah, so exactly.

Duarne: 48:35

Most of them are just going to say, oh, okay, well, yeah, okay, I get it all right, we'll do it, because most people, people are not that unreasonable. But I think, as a business owners, we're a little bit skeptical. We don't like, we don't like to push up, push against business and try and change the terms in case we lose the business. We don't want to try it and we feel like adding a surcharge at the time of checkout might be, or payment might be, a way of losing that business because it was. It's another level of negotiation. We have to go through with the, with the customer, before we can finalize that sale so, yeah, so, and and I think there was, I know we we talked about.

Dave: 49:19

There was one other thing that you wanted to kind of talk about today, right, so we talked a little bit. So you know, so far we've talked about, you know, understanding your pricing. You know, understanding your profitability by client, right by person, by by service line, whatever it may be, because you may find that your, your profitability is off right. We talked about the importance of cash flow projecting and building out scenarios for your future. But there's one other thing a little off topic. So those are important things as well. So, if you're interested in putting profit projections, cash flow monitoring, in your business comment down below clarity We'll share some information with you about our new cashflow clarity program that'll help you not only you know, build out your projection, but also monitor it on a weekly basis and be able to build out some of these scenarios that we've talked about that were so important to Dwarin's business and even business owners of mine and clients of mine as well.

Dave: 50:11

So, but Dwarin off topic, I think, something else was was kind of interesting, interesting that you, you kind of ran into. So why?

Dave: 50:16

don't you share about that as well just be nerding out again.

Duarne: 50:20

Um, totally, in the last 24 hours, as many people are probably aware, open ai came out with an announcement that gpt5 was officially launched and they did something very interesting they put it forward for all users of free, plus and pro accounts, so everybody, even with a free account, will be able to use now gpt, gpt 5. Now, for those who are not sure what I'm talking about, what I'm referring to is we were currently using gpt4 and a lot of people were getting gpt4 4.5, 3, 4. You know, 4 mini. Um, there was a variety of different options of these different um, what would you call? What do you call them?

Duarne: 51:14

Uh, like it's just different variations that have of the chat gpt platform to do different things like analyze documents, to go through and look at images and grab all the content out of it and understand it, to write really good content for you. All of these sort of things that we've talked about in the past. You'd normally have to know, as a user, which one to choose. Well, one of the big things that was part of the announcement that I was watching earlier today, before I went in and started playing, was gpt5 is the only option you have now it automatically selects the best use case for you. Really it does, and it's rather interesting because you don't have to go in and choose manually what you want to do. You just tell it what you want to do and it's a more.

Dave: 52:07

I'm in here I'm in here now and, like before we're you know we were talking about. You said the 40, the 50 or, sorry, the 40, the four light.0 mini. Now it just says chat gpt5 flagship model and then the other models are gpt5 thinking, which gets more thorough answers. So maybe it's something where maybe it's a deep research almost it is no, no.

Duarne: 52:29

Well, yeah on the $20, yeah, yeah on the $20 on the paid account. On the paid account, you get deep thinking and then you get the pro.

Dave: 52:37

If you upgrade to the team, when you go to the team workspace, you can actually get GPT-5 pro. It looks like I don't have that because I don't have a team, it's just myself.

Duarne: 52:49

But um, yeah, it'd be a 200 a month version also has um the thinking and it's like an unlimited version of thinking. I think is what they were saying. But I mean, we're talking about a pretty powerful engine, like if you were doing coding you would typically have to choose the coding style, chat, gpt. So for the average user is a little bit daunting. Still, like which one do I use? And in fact I legitimately just had a conversation with a very good friend of mine, um, over coffee two weeks ago where I was telling him um for a task he wanted to achieve. I said why don't you go through and I think I had a similar conversation with you, dave go and try it and put it through this type of engine, then try the same prompt with another engine, try another one and then see which one gives you the right result or the closest to the right result that you wanted, and then default to that one when you want to do that task. Well, now, we don't have to worry about that. It's smart enough now to go oh, this is what you want. Yeah, I can do that and do it accordingly. Now, it's not going to be perfect, but that's part of it, so you can still direct it and say hey, I want you to be more precise. I want you to think a little bit deeper about this. I want you to research this a little bit more. They've made it more humanized, so it's more. The more human your communication is with it, the more it'll actually adapt and grow to suit to your requirements and needs, which is really quite fun. Another big thing that I saw at this particular announcement and I haven't gotten all the way through the video. It's over an hour long. I'm about halfway through. I was watching it while I was eating some lunch earlier. What I saw was a mention where it could actually do cogeneration, so you could tell it what sort of app you want.

Duarne: 54:33

And the app that was given in the demonstration was he wanted to teach his girlfriend, who's a native English speaker, french. He wanted to do it in the quizzes, he wanted to do it in the form of flashcards and he wanted to do it with this special little game that he'd come up with, which is I think it was the cheese and the mouse or something. Now he gave an example that, just like developers, it's going to be interpreted differently by chachi pt in different ways. So what he did is he did an experiment by opening up three different tabs, same instruction. Hit, go on each of those tabs and have it generate what it felt. The instruction was with his instruction set and he gave a bit more of a detailed instruction set to do that, but it was all the same.

Duarne: 55:19

Each one of those came up with a different scenario, but they were all fully coded up with hundreds of lines of code that they could hit, play and run the app as a working app within ChatGPT's window. Wow, which is incredible. He compiled it and ran it local. The app as a working app within chat GPT's window Hmm, wow, which is incredible. It compiled it and ran it local, I mean that's crazy and that's incredible.

Dave: 55:44

Now, do they still have agent mode now in chat, gpt 5? Do they have?

Duarne: 55:48

it. Yes, Agent mode is still there, so you can still use agent mode. They've still got study mode. They've still got study mode. They've still got these other modes and in fact, if you use your cell phone you'll actually find that with those you can still select those types of modes.

Dave: 56:04

I haven't played enough, it must just be. Yeah, I haven't played around with it. Obviously, it sounds like it's something new to me.

Duarne: 56:10

I want to use agent mode and I think it's probably the way to bring it up Cause before it was like a setting right here, right, that would be.

Dave: 56:18

You know, you select agent. Yeah, right underneath that it's not there anymore. It just says GPT five.

Duarne: 56:23

So I'm going to have to watch that yourself.

Dave: 56:24

I'm going to have to watch this, this presentation, right.

Duarne: 56:27

You know what, for me, dave, like I'm an android user and I used to use nokia back in the day, and then I switched over to htc, use their um phones for a little bit with their um os, which was horrible um, and then I decided to take the plunge and I bought a friend's old iphone 3 and I was like, oh, this is kind of cool. Uh, it died, it got bricked through an update and then I did a deal with Apple and they upgraded me to the iPhone 4 and I used that until I um kind of realized it was a little out of spec for me. And then I upgraded and I didn't want to spend the money basically to get to an Apple um, because in Australia we do a little bit different. You have to pay for your Apple outright, you don't you? I don't think you can do that in the us. You have to be on a plan, subscribe to something to get an apple in most cases.

Duarne: 57:20

Um, well, in australia we we just buy them outright and then put them on our own telco plans. So it was quite expensive. So I bought a budget friendly samsung android um and the one thing that really threw me was, after using the Samsung, I realized just how simple it was to use an iPhone. It was just for me. When I tried to use an iPhone later, a couple of years later, it was just too simple for me. I couldn't. I was getting frustrated with it. Like I didn't have a back button, I didn't have a you know, like I have all these things You've come.

Dave: 57:59

you became accustomed to you, right I?

Duarne: 58:00

just become so accustomed and used to. I think this is going to be my biggest problem as a power user to deal with when and it's probably going to be yours as well GPT five they've tried to make it so simple. They've made it the you know, the apple iphone interface for phones where everything's just very simple one button click, no backs, no approve, very easy to use and navigate. If you're used to that sort of simplicity, simplistic tech, you know. Viewpoint for new users and non-power users, I think it's amazing. For people who are power users it's going to take us a minute just to get our head around it and I think once we do, we're going to really love it. But, um, like, for me, it just it doesn't have that like.

Duarne: 58:47

I've got it up on the window up next to me at the moment and what they're saying is you're going to have a conversation where they described you're going to be basically communicating on chat gpt5 or gpt5 on the free version until you run out of credits. Then you're going to turn, then they're going to drop you down to a gpt5 light or mini version, um, which is still in there. I think that was saying it's still equivalent to about a 3.5, some parts of four capability, uh, for the free version, um, but it was what was most interesting and the intro, the beginning of that video, when they start talking, they were describing how to communicate. Basically they were saying that the original version was like chatting to a teenager. Okay, it was kind of. It was kind of interesting, but it would annoy you sometimes with the, with the answers you would get. Yeah, I got that, yeah, and although that's a great analogy, right, then we went into, you know, for gbd4 and it was more like dealing with a college grade, university level, uh, educated individual. It was mostly accurate, mostly correct. You got a lot less annoyed in the conversation and you got better results.

Duarne: 1:00:12

Most of the time they're saying well, basically what you're dealing with is a professional. Now you're dealing with someone who gets things right most of the time. They understand, understand the nuances that you're trying to you know put forward and it's got a bit more of an understanding and it does the thinking for you. So one thing, then, they do, that they do demonstrate and I have noticed too is, you know, when you do a deep search and it shows you how long it thought for before it decides to answer you. It demonstrates that and one of the things it seems to have the ability to do is, as you're starting to do a search, it'll instantly, if it feels like it needs to, it'll do a deeper research on it. But it gives you the option say quick answer. So you can shortcut it by clicking the short quick answer and it'll just give you a quick answer based on, rather than go and do all that deep research for you. So you can tell it by interacting with it, still to not go so in-depth, but by default it's going to automatically try and figure out if you want to go in depth or not. So lots of really fun things to come.

Duarne: 1:01:21

Like I said, it's only been out. I've only got to play with it a little bit today. I've got to watch the video. One of the cool things I'm seeing is there's a whole side menu now, so there's a lot more history and source material, so you can actually see where the information's been sourced from now A lot quicker. It's more interactive.

Duarne: 1:01:40

The other thing I saw in the video which I wasn't aware of previously, and maybe it's just I was ignorant to the fact, but when you create a canvas, to actually sit there and edit the documents and build stuff in that's now resizable. So if you want to resize that and go back to the original chat, you can actually resize that, push that off to the side and instead of having that taking up, you know, three quarters of the space and then one quarter of the space for your chat. You can resize it to do 50-50 or two-thirds and one-third or whatever, which means you can go back to your chat and actually communicate better rather than just scrolling through a phone screen worth of information going up, which is kind of frustrating for me. So I'm excited to play with it more. I just wanted to share.

Dave: 1:02:28

I think it'll be a game-changer for people that are using it on a regular basis. I think, understanding what a couple weeks ago now a game changer for people that are using it on a regular basis like that. I think, understanding we what a couple weeks ago now and we and this is showing how quickly things evolve in the ai game right now, like a couple weeks ago, we were literally just talking about you know the different models and how to know when to choose which one and what you're looking for and how you're going to get the different results out of each. And now chat gpt, what two, three, maybe in a month later, I don't know comes out with a version that completely blasts that whole thing out of the water and it doesn't matter anymore, because you know it's going to make the decision for you now.

Dave: 1:03:03

Uh, so you can see how quickly and I mean we're literally talking, not even what. It would just be november, november of this year will be the third year that AI ChatGPT has been out.

Duarne: 1:03:15

Yeah.

Dave: 1:03:15

Right, so you know you're talking. In under three years, this thing has gone from basic you know historic data, right, it was trained on data from September before it launched and you could never go live, right, you couldn't actually use it for live research on what was happening. Like today, no browser interaction at the. No browser interaction. No, no integrations with other outside sources.

Dave: 1:03:41

To now, this thing is so super powered that it'll go out and do research for you, design an app on the spot, you know, give you coding to code something you know for your website or for anything, um, and it's great. Like, for example, I just while we were sitting here, you know there's an Excel formula that I kept getting an error with and I'm like man, where is it? I just took, I just copied it, I dropped it into JetGPT and said you know JetGPT 5? And said, hey, fix this, fix this formula for me, and it did it in two seconds. It said I get what you're trying to do. You're trying to do a, b and c, and so here's the error and here's the fix. And I copied it, dropped it in, boom, done, um, and. And so it's one of those things, instead of you trying to spend 10-15 minutes of your time. You can go to chat gpt now with these simple things and say, hey, help me with this or hey, fix this right, and it's going to understand.

Duarne: 1:04:29

That's the thing it understands you know, and they're introduced the feature called study mode about a week ago and that thing is incredibly cool for people who are concerned that they're going to get dumber using the platform, which is a lot of us are concerned by this. So what it does is, if you enabled the study mode, which you'd normally recommend for academics and students, et students etc. And you say, hey, I'm trying to learn about this, it'll actually introduce it. So, rather than just giving you the answer, it'll show you how to get to the answer. It'll actually generate the questions and if you try and say, just give me the answer, well, hold on, let's work out how we got there first, right, and it'll actually go through and slow down the process and explain it through with you, which is super clever and great. I was really quite impressed with that.

Duarne: 1:05:21

I was playing in the settings the other day and noted that you can even go through if you're using the voice communication part of it, which is really fun to use. You can choose I think it's like 12 different voices, so in your settings, you can change your voices. You can choose I think it's like 12 different voices, so in your settings you can change your voices. You can choose a different voice. If you prefer to deal with a different voice, uh, find someone you're more comfortable to communicate with. Um, it's really strange and incredible, um. But I think the one thing just keep in mind it's you shouldn't be sharing too much private information, um, or sensitive information, with the platform, because it is still a platform.

Duarne: 1:06:02

Especially on the free version Exactly on the free version.

Dave: 1:06:05

The free version. Anything you put in there is free game. Now, if you're on one of the paid versions, it stays within your own, but it is still learning. It's still there.

Duarne: 1:06:14

It is. This stuff learns you, and I learned the other day. We were going through the back end, right, and we realized that this save memory is going back a year or more and some of them are complete nonsense, like they're questions we'd asked or statements we'd put in to just do a single task or work on a project for a particular client, and we were able to notice that they were there and go. Oh, so we started removing some of these irrelevant things from the memory and purging them and then suddenly we're like oh, that weird quirk that it was doing over here by putting that wording in every time I wanted to do it had hashtags, will always add that hashtag. That was because it picked up a memory saying always use this hashtag. Um, it's, it's the craziest thing.

Duarne: 1:06:58

So the technology is changing. You are not getting a. It's not like other tech software where you'd normally get a alert to say we've made these changes in the change log. It's very um, it's very much. Unless there's a major release, you don't hear about it. You kind of have to figure this stuff out yourself. You have to follow gurus. Um, so as power users, there's always new things we're finding. You're so much further down the track of using agents than I am, because I don't feel like I have any use case right now for it, so I haven't started exploring it. But I had a use case for the study mode where you hadn't had it up, so you probably didn't see it.

Dave: 1:07:37

Yeah, I didn't even know it was there.

Duarne: 1:07:40

In other platforms, like even Gemini. Right, gemini has done some cool stuff. They just introduced their deep thinking model this week, which is apparently pretty awesome. Apparently pretty awesome um, gemini just introduced a feature where, if you give it a prompt, it'll go and generate a storybook for children. But it's not just a storybook, it's an interactive storybook with illustrations, with wording, with audio playback. It's incredible, um. So I mean, we're talking about potentially making.

Duarne: 1:08:14

If you've got children that are not that interested in reading, but they love dinosaurs or they love robots or they love the moon, you can go and create a story in a book about that that includes things that they like, which makes it more interactive and fun for them to want to interact and read to. So we're starting to see better use cases, and this was something that was mentioned in that video that I was watching from, uh, the chat gpd team is, when they first introduced the platform way back three years ago, almost they didn't really know how people were going to use it. They were kind of like, yeah, they had scenarios, they'd ran simulations on how it could be used and what it'd be used for, but like they didn't know that developers and coding would be so heavily used on the platform and they didn't know where the direction was to be used and direct their attention to build it. They almost at one point, indicated they actually were thinking about niching the platform down but didn't know how to niche it down or where to niche it down. And you can imagine, imagine a platform like this that was built and then niched down to a specific use case, which we've seen a lot of those platforms popping up all over the place at the moment on AppSumo and other little you know fly-by-night apps that just disappear and get advertised on our news feeds and the platforms that we use social media platforms we use. This is like very inclusive, all-in-one little bit of everything, and for $20 a month.

Duarne: 1:09:45

As a plus subscriber, I am very I struggle to find anything else I could spend $20 a month and get as much value from. In all honesty, for me I think it's just amazing, and even to the point where I've been taking photos of computer hardware and saying I want you to compare this computer hardware to what I'm already running, which is here, and telling you what I've got in my computer at the moment. I want you to run a scenario based on my use case of usage. Is this a real an upgrade I should be doing? And then it'll go out and do all the research for me and tell me I don't have to go in and learn about what processes are the best processes in the market anymore, and if I don't want to, I can just basically go.

Duarne: 1:10:32

Well, that one's not good for me. This one's not good for me. This one's not good because of this reason for me. Um, so throw away information, I guess, like that for me, that I'm only going to use once and then not have to make that decision again for a couple of years. Uh, it's a fantastic tool for things like that, and they just made it a lot easier to get access to it. So it was a little bit intimidating for a lot of people by having to choose the type of you know what chat gpt version do I run the amount of people I spoke to who didn't even know there was more than one version. Um was also something which I always found shocking. Um, but also, like when we were talking the other day, there was new versions always getting added in. So it was super confusing, even for people like us as power users, to know which versions to use to achieve what we were trying to achieve, right?

Dave: 1:11:25

but yeah, get in and give it a try super cool, absolutely like, get in there, like that's the thing that we say all the time. Right, get out there, try it, give it a shot. Uh, learn about it you. You know, play around with it, you know, figure out ways to actually get to help your business and kind of go with it. But, dwarin, it's been another great conversation. Of course, we've talked about cashflow. We've talked about revenue, you know, by client, and profitability by client, and understanding that and how it can actually like really begin to help you in your business. Uh, but for yourself to warn, um, what's one takeaway for yourself that you hope somebody walks away from today's episode with?

Duarne: 1:12:03

don't be complacent in thinking you know everything about your own business. Do a little bit of a deeper search. Do a little bit of a deeper search. Do a little bit of a deeper dig and if you're not sure how to do that, get some assistance from someone who does know.

Duarne: 1:12:21

I wouldn't have gone down the path I was going down if I hadn't had the conversations with you, dave. I know that and because if I was going to do it, I would have done it in the last 15 years and I hadn't. So that was an eye opener for me, me. So, yeah, I'd say look, you don't know what you don't know, and if you don't go digging for it, you're not going to find it. And this sort of platform that you're offering with Clarity is just incredible. I think everyone should definitely check it out. You know I'm just thankful that I was able to find what I found and address my concerns. And I know I'm just thankful that I was able to find what I found and address my concerns. And I know that I have a plan moving forward where it's a lot easier for me to make decisions moving forward. And I mentioned I had a great week.

Duarne: 1:13:04

One of the reasons I had a great week is because we just did a deal where we brought on a couple of great clients for SEO. We brought on three new virtual staff clients this week Love it, which is fantastic. So I mean it was a great week. It was a really great week for us. That sort of stuff doesn't happen all the time and you know I'm not attributing everything that I've done this week, with all my cash flow projections, et cetera, to that, because I'm very early in the stages, but it certainly made my life a lot easier to understand what that means for me and my business moving forward Absolutely Well.

Dave: 1:13:43

Good, I'm glad you were able to figure all that out. Congrats on the new clients, all that fun stuff, that's awesome. But for me I think kind of like yourself when's the last time you looked at your financials? When's the last time you looked at your profitability?

Duarne: 1:13:57

When's the last?

Dave: 1:13:57

time you looked at your cash flow. If I ask you the question, how much cash is going to be in the bank in three, six, nine months? Do you know and I think that's a big thing that a lot of small business, even medium-sized business owners, don't know? They're just going by the seat of their pants, they feel like they'll be there, but they don't know for sure. And if you don't know for sure, you need to know it. Whether or not it's with us or not, you should be doing something to project your cash flow out.

Dave: 1:14:24

But with that, we appreciate everybody showing up, everybody being here every single week. We hope you got something out of it. If you did get something out of it, we ask that you share it with your network, share it with somebody else. You know you probably have business owners in your network. You know we're looking to get the word out. We're looking to kind of increase viewership as well. You know, as we're doing this, it's episode. What is this episode? 22, 22. I think, yeah, that's crazy. So we're glad you're here. If you like it, give us a. Do all the fun algorithm stuff like share, comment, do all that fun stuff, and we look forward to seeing you on the next one. So, dwarren, thanks for joining me and we'll see you all. See you all next week.

Duarne: 1:15:07

Thanks, dave. Take care everybody. You got me loose and set me free. You make me win every way. You showed me how to spread my wings.