Dave: 0:23

Good morning and welcome to another Friday episode and the first episode of 2026. Born happy new year, sir. If you are a business owner, or maybe you're an aspiring business owner, and you're just like, I don't know what I'm doing, or maybe you're facing an obstacle and you're looking for a space to come to, you know, maybe learn, ask questions. This is your podcast. We're talking through experiences that we've gone through in our life, in our businesses, and also things that we've helped our clients through as well. So grab your favorite cup of Joe and let's jump into the show. Duarn, welcome to 2026, my friend. Welcome to 2026.

Duarne: 1:06

It took you a little longer to get there than myself, but yeah, you finally got there.

Dave: 1:11

Yeah, you do hit it like what? What was it, 13 hours ahead of us?

Duarne: 1:15

So that's right. But like don't worry, all my friends in Australia, they got there like two, three hours before me. So yeah.

Dave: 1:22

So it's crazy. You know, I'm like waking up in the day and I'm already starting to see like you know, people, people getting ready or shooting out fireworks and things like that. It's pretty the time the time continuum there is pretty weird, you know, when you really think about it. All right, it is.

Duarne: 1:40

Time is relative at that point, right? So I was actually sitting down greeting some friends in the US at quarter to 12. And at the time, I'm actually sitting in the shade watching my kids play in a little swimming tub in the middle of the day. And I'm like, hey, what are you doing for New Year's? What are you doing for your new year? Oh, I'm just having a quiet one at home. Oh, really? Santa Foto what I'm doing on the actual New Year's Day.

Dave: 2:11

And it was probably like it was probably like actually January 1st, right? It's like mid-afternoon, January 1st or whatever. So that's it.

Duarne: 2:19

It's like you're so living in the past there, like we've already done that. Move on.

Dave: 2:25

In there, past it, moving on to the next one, you know what I mean. So Juan, like what have you been doing the last couple weeks? You know, I know obviously last week you had to take some time off, but you were you were away for holiday. But what have you been spending your time on?

Duarne: 2:43

Yeah, look, Dave, I took a couple of uh a few days off with the family. We all took off and spent some time for a little bit of downtime R, a bit of swimming, just relaxation in the sun. It was fun. And then I decided to proactively take a couple of days away from my computer, away from my desk. And during that time gave me a chance just to sit back and have conversations with my wife, who's my business partner, and do some strategizing, do some planning, right? Think things through, discuss things clearly without just jumping in and taking action straight away, which was quite fun. What do you decide away?

unknown: 3:25

Right.

Dave: 3:25

What do you want to spend a lot of your what do you spend a lot of your time kind of planning on at the end of the year? Like what are you what are you focusing on in your business? What's some of the advice that you've helped your clients plan on towards the end of the year, heading into a new year?

Duarne: 3:40

Well, see, for me, I don't think it matters if it's the end of the year so much. It just happened to be ironically, I found the time to relax and the time to get some clarity in my thinking. And it just happened to be right then and there at that particular point in time towards the end of the year. So for me, totally, totally agree with um the fact that getting as a downtime definitely helped. Where we decided to stay, their wi fi was down, and whilst the rest of the family was a little bit stressed out about this, I'm actually like you're in a you're in a nice good reset, you know. I'm good with this, yeah, for sure. So we're gonna go to each other. Exactly. So I'm like, well, that was a forced break. So when I got back, I decided to kind of take it in that same direction. So we had some building stuff to sort out, you know, for the renovation. And so I managed to do a little bit of that. I also got a chance to do it. Was things I'd done previous research on, like, you know, healthcare sit process, healthcare plans for our team, and looking introducing some new healthcare plans for our team.

Dave: 4:48

And so, what about any operation? Well, what are the operation stuff that that you pay attention to towards the end of the year? For me, heading into a new year.

Duarne: 4:58

Yeah, look, for me, I think looking at what's been working well and what hasn't been working well. So it gave me a chance to reflect. We had some discussions about some staff who had been in some key roles during the year and had moved on and discussing whether we're gonna go down that path or if we were gonna try something different. In our situation, we were looking at potentially a the creation of a holding company to actually hold our companies here. So that was a pretty big conversation that we had. And you know, we ended up ultimately deciding that that was the way to go to reduce some liability because we have been running as a sole proprietor, and that comes with its own liabilities.

Dave: 5:42

Well, and I think too, like if you if you think of you're a small business owner and you're watching this, and you're like, What should I pay attention to heading into a new year? And ultimately, it's it's not even that it's a new year. And I think this kind of goes into the new year resolution thing. It's not that it's just a new year that you should be paying attention to, it's a lot of these things that you should be paying attention to at the beginning of every month or at the beginning of every quarter. And and those are like what services are actually making you money. You know what I mean? Like track if you're not tracking profitability by project or you're not tracking profitability by service, you need to start doing that in order in order to understand what is actually contributing to your bottom line. Like Warren, earlier in the year, you kind of focused on that when you were you do a lot of VA work and you do a lot of things that in that area, and you kind of did an analysis of this in the middle of last year, and you determined that your add-on was insufficient for what needed to be because the actual price had stayed the same for a long time. So what you can learn from this and what you should start doing, and not just because it's a new year, but it's a good time to start, would be if you're not tracking, if you have maybe you have four, five, six services or products, actually start tracking things in your accounting system by product, by service, because it actually gives you that in-depth right analysis and better decision making by understanding where your business is operating and how profitable it is. Because what you may find, and I found this when I worked in corporate, I find it when I work with business owners, is that a service or a department that you feel like is profitable is actually costing you money. And you can actually become more profitable by cutting that service out, save time, and you know, reallocate resources where they need to be. So besides that kind of VA analysis you did earlier in the year, hey, do you do you spend any time at the end of a year, end of a quarter, looking at your services and deciding where you're gonna put your attention for the next quarter?

Duarne: 7:39

Actually, yeah, we did do that. So one of the things we we we had had a actually had a client meeting in between the break. So while I was away and coming and kind of now, we had a couple of moments where we actually got together and with a client and had a conversation, and there's a couple of good opportunities coming up. We're waiting on some clarity, but it could mean quite an ex quite a good expansion for us. So we're kind of quietly excited about that, and we started talking about what that looks like. So while we're doing that, we looked at the well, if that's going to be there, that means going in this direction and doing this, which means we need to look at resourcing this way. But let's look at the whole picture and let's look at setting some personal goals and some business goals for ourselves for this year, which is what we've done. And that is putting our full focus on the things we do really well. So virtual assistant, output staffing, solutions, the SEO packages, our website design and development solutions, we are not gonna be putting a strong focus on the local market here in the Philippines. We're gonna be focusing on our channel program, which is predominantly based out of Australia and some US partners. And that's where we're gonna be putting a lot of our attention.

Dave: 8:58

So basically, once you identify that, right? Once you identify those things, and if you're doing an analysis yourself and you're listening and you're trying to start the year, one of the things that you then do, right, is then you go and you put in like your marketing plan, or how am I gonna get the awareness out of this new service or an expanded service? And a lot of that comes down to planning your outreach efforts, planning your marketing materials, planning your calendar for that quarter and scheduling it, using softwares, whatever it ends up being for you to get that information out. So, Darren, for your case, as you're deciding that you're hearing that you're gonna start doing a lot more with your VA, what's some what's one thing that you're like, hey, this is what I need to focus on in January to really begin to kind of put that focus on this new expanded outreach that you want to do?

Duarne: 10:23

Well, it's interesting. We actually started it in late November. So we started our branding for your next VA. So your next VA is one is our new branding model for the virtual assistant side of the things. We've actually got four variations of a website out there at the moment, which all went live in December. And we haven't done any real push or moves on them at this point or publicize them too heavily because there's a lot of little moving parts in play at the moment.

Dave: 10:50

But if you heard that, if you if you're listening, you heard that you're like, wait a minute, he's got four websites. Like Darren and his team are website developers. So it's like if you're just you don't need to have four websites, if you're just listening in this, and you're like, wait a minute, this guy's got four websites for one brand. Like, just just take a step back. You just need one, you just need to have some sort of you know awareness and authority.

Duarne: 11:12

But exactly, let me explain.

Dave: 11:13

It's a lot easier on his side, yeah, for him for him to create four website.

Duarne: 11:17

And this is a conversation that I've had with Dave on occasion in private was sometimes when you're the owner and you have of a company that builds, you've got a full design team, development team, SEO marketing team, you can kind of make very quick decisions. You can take ideas and produce them very, very quickly, very efficiently. That's a good thing and a bad thing. Because it means you can be very agile and very quick, but it means you can also be a little bit rash on decision making if you don't think these things through properly. Now, as a personal thought to people, my rationale of actually doing four websites is I have four different niche clients, four different domains, and it's the same website design look and feel with different content. Each of the content is actually targeted towards different niches. The reason I did that was because a part of our marketing strategy is we want to do ABCD testing to see which one of these niches work best, and then double down on those. Now it could be all through really well. Who knows? We'll find out, I guess. But we're not gonna know for six months. And also, this is a strategy that I'm playing at at the moment. I've done similar things in the past on a much smaller scale, but sometimes in digital marketing, you've got to try things yourself before you can implement them for clients. So this is me implementing it myself, taking the risk, taking the gamble, and make the making the investment to do that. So, yes, you can just do it with one website. Absolutely. I would not recommend going out making four websites. Most people struggle with the concept of one.

Dave: 12:53

So doing four sound like and test the messaging, you know what I mean? Like, and that's the thing. Like you could, you know, have different headlines, you know, maybe it's not a banner, right? That just go or or uh what's it carousel, right? You can have your carousel. You can put different things in there to test different messaging and test different offers. And that's one thing I do say is you gotta have on your website, you have to have some sort of like lead magnet or attention-grabbing offer right in that first kind of screen. So if you look at your website, this is one of the most important things for you to do when you you have to pay attention as your potential client, right? Your ideal prospect. So log onto your website and in that first web screen, right, in in your browser, that's the main attention. If if you don't have what you want to potentially get from your prospect and give them some sort of value in that rectangle, you're losing them because essentially once they look at that, you have 10 seconds. And a lot of times they won't even scroll down. They'll look at that and they'll determine if it's something that meets their needs or they'll move on. So, you as a business owner, or you as you know, if you're helping design, there should be some sort of educational, right, impactful headline request value that you're giving them in that first landing site. And it's not, you can think landing page, but nothing that below matters unless that first rectangle hits them, right? And with that, make sure it actually speaks to your ideal client profile, not what you think they want, but what you actually like have heard that they need or that's gonna give them value to, you know, maybe it's a first step of your service or your support, but it gets them started, gets them moving. That's the biggest piece.

Duarne: 14:42

Absolutely. And avoid these bullshit, nonsense phrases that mean nothing. Like these ones that come out with we are going to change the world. Well, that's great. How are you gonna do that? And does that mean anything to the person who's reading? If you're an accountant, what what's that gonna do with your business? If you're a plumber, okay, that's not gonna, you're gonna change the world. How? At the end of the day, all I care about if I'm looking for a plumber, I want to know I'm reliable on time, and I can unplug, I can unblock your toilet or I can, you know, you know, unblock your drains or whatever your problem is right then and there. So come on with something that's relevant. The amount of times that I go to a website, so I've got one right up in front of me at the moment. I hadn't, we got this new client December last year. They're a building company, and I'm looking up at one of my screens here and it says, Building the future, restoring the past. And I asked him, I said, What does that mean to you? He goes, I don't know, it's just some shit I put up there. That was his exact words. He's a trade, right? He's a contractor. And I said, Well, building the future, yeah, okay. Restoring the past. How much renovation work do you do? Oh, I hate renovation work, we don't do it. So, how are you restoring the past? Or we don't. I said, So it kind of doesn't make any sense. And the second part of it is exactly, and then they go down a little bit further. The second part of what he talked about is we are a customer-driven group providing quality projects at cost-efficient prices with our clients and time frames. I'm like, that is what should have been up top. That is more relevant, although I think you can improve on that even. But if the when you're working on just content on your website, that's more impactful to me because it tells me more about what you do. Or right under that, he's got specializing in residential, commercial, project management, design, and construction, even better. I know exactly what you do. That's what I want to know right there. Then I want to know what do you want me to do next? Do you want me to get in contact with you? How do you want me to get in contact with you? The call to action and the messaging is so important. And if you can't get it right on one website, there's no way you're gonna get it right on four websites. So for those people who are looking into doing messaging and testing it, you could use platforms like BSavvy, go high level, click funnels, which have a funnel where you can actually do A D testing and run different wording on different different content, and it'll just randomly select which people get which one, and then it'll give you the stats in the back end to see which one resonates better.

Dave: 17:18

But what I think the the important piece to pick up there is it goes along with emotion, right? It's the emotional headlines, it's the emotional support because your client is facing some sort of emotional obstacle, some sort of emotional issue that you are should be wanting to come in and resolve. Dwarren, in your case, you're looking to help them alleviate maybe stress or anxiety that they have because they don't have leads or they're overwhelmed with their time. You with your VA service is helping alleviate that anxiety. You should be talking towards that emotion. Accountants, bookkeepers, you're looking towards the stress and anxiety around the lack of financial awareness, the lack of cash flow, the lack of understanding their numbers and their profitability. You know, junk haulers are focused around the anxiety of their house being a mess or the stress around possibly moving and needing to clear out their home before they move. So think of your ideal client and really focus on what are those emotional factors that they're feeling before my clients do business with me. And that's where you should be targeting because that's truly what you're doing for people. 90, you know, the the percentage is high. Don't don't quote me on the exactual percent, but uh a vast majority of people buy and make decisions on emotion. Okay, they they they decide to purchase and you can put yourself in that situation. I can think of myself in that situation. We make decisions emotionally, and then we try to defend those decisions with logic. And so on your website, if all you're doing is you're pushing the logic of this is what you get if you do business with me, this is what I'm gonna provide you as an outcome, this is what you know we're gonna do on a regular basis, those are logical things that you're losing your prospects. But if you focus on what are those emotional support techniques that you're bringing and that you're solving for that client, that's gonna help them make a better decision. They make that decision and you start giving them the outcomes. Now they're like, oh yeah, this was the right choice. So it's so important when you look at your wording, are is your wording focused on logic or is your wording focused on emotion? And if it's just that focused on emotion, you need to possibly change it and think more of what are those emotional type words and those emotional type solutions that you do provide.

Duarne: 20:30

Yeah, and it's an interesting point. There's one thing that I was told a long time ago is don't go grocery shopping if you are hungry. Because I guarantee when you go grocery shopping when you're hungry, you tend to pick up a lot of stuff that you have no one that you would normally not buy, you'd but you get it because like I'm hungry, I could eat that now. And there's an emotional response to what you're purchasing at that time. Whereas if you go in when you're not hungry, you typically find you make better decisions than you're purchasing. And I've found that to be extremely true when it comes to people with their purchasing. Why I love that book that we work out of from Jeremy Minor there, the NEPQ Black Book. That thing is amazing. Working on the neuroemotional persuasion questioning techniques, when you start asking the right questions, you start getting the right results. And working towards an emotional decision, helping someone, you can have the boringest product on the planet, but it if somebody has a requirement for it, you just need to know how to ask them those questions to get them to come to the conclusion that it's actually a product that they do want to purchase or they do need or they do have a desire for. At some point, you just have to translate that into wording for your website. And if you can come up with that wording on your website, whether it's through any form of these Chat GPT, Gemini platforms, or just if you're a good on good wordsmith yourself, you can do it yourself. But you have to start from the foundation of who are you writing it for? Most marketing is very selfish. Selfish to the business that's doing it. It's focused towards marketing to the CEO, to the board. Who cares about what the board wants? Who cares what the CEO wants of the business necessarily if it doesn't work, if it doesn't sell? The marketing should be directed towards a person who's going to be interacting and taking action. And I think that's the biggest problem when people start writing content for a website. So yeah, my biggest advice, I guess, when it comes to doing a website, if it's something you're looking at doing this month or in the near future, is don't get so caught up with the look and feel of your website. That can be you, you can use a template and it'll still come across and look okay. Or leave the designer up to come up with something for you. Come up with the best wording that drives the results you want. Because that's going to make a huge difference. And if you can get that wording right and then provide it to the web developer designer that's doing the work for you, or even if you're doing it yourself, you can use that to drive your design. So many people start the opposite direction and do the design without the content. And they find themselves then trying to find content to fill in the gaps. And that's okay. You can do that, but it's not as effective as if you were to write the content first with the messaging you're trying to push.

Dave: 23:29

Well, and I think so. I think for a lot of people, it's that copywriting that's a challenge. You know, it's that they're they're focused on their business, right? They're focused on being in the weeds and they're not copywriters. So I think the biggest piece that you can do is really just focus on what are those emotional drivers that we were just talking about. And put together statements or put together solutions that you provide for those emotions. And ultimately it's all going to start to kind of fall together. But with that, so you actually mentioned the one thing that I want to talk about on the platform side of we want to talk softwares, right? And the biggest piece in tandem with this, and what I was thinking about this week for software kind of support and the insight of what we do on a regular basis, and that is the CRM. You know, it's you mentioned BSavvy, which is obviously your platform. Go-high level is another one. You know, there's a lot of you know, ClickFunnels or you know, HubSpot, or you know, there's there's just a ton of them. But for us, we use BSavvy, which is obviously based on the Go High Level platform. And the beauty of a CRM is that it does multiple things for you. You can you know keep track of all your client interactions or all your prospect interactions, you can do all your proposals, your templates, docusign within the platform. You can manage your landing pages, which is something that you mentioned earlier. You can manage your landing pages, do A-B testing, do your funnels, do even your websites can be through there as well. QARC, I mean, there's just so many things that you get for the one subscription price. And then obviously, depending on the volume that you use it, you're gonna, you know, there's some things that you pay in terms of like the volume of emails you send out or phone numbers if you're doing text and everything. But the fact that like just to get started and you get everything, I think is crazy because there's a lot of ones that charge you for like add-ons of these different services. But for how we I use it, I'm sure you use the same way. But how I'm using it on a regular basis is one website. My website is is hosted on kind of be savvy. I use it to manage marketing so you can schedule out your marketing. So the social media plan is awesome. I use it to keep track of my interactions so it's connected to my email. So as people email back and send things back, it's right there. The other way that I use it, I do I do use it for all my proposals and documents. So I'd send those out for signature with my clients. But when I onboard the new client, boom, it sends out right a proposal and also the agreement. So there's I know there's the basics. Yeah, I'm not gonna get in too much in depth, but the automations is obviously another piece where you can you know manage your newsletter, you know, do a lot of the automation email campaigns that you want to do. I work with a client, you know, to kind of help him get set up and do all this as well on there for his business, which is something that they've never done. But when you start to think of like, if you're doing all these things manually, like you're like, oh man, my follow-up is not good. We've talked about in the past about how good your follow-up needs to be. This is something that can help you with that because you just take, hey, I just met, you know, let's say Dwarne and I, we we just met. I entered Dorn in my CRM as a new contact prospect, however you want to call it. You have an automation that kicks off that's for the next 12 weeks, it's gonna send an email, just kind of touch point that has to do with, you know, overall kind of support, insights, whatever you want to do in that campaign, but it can kick off automatically and now it's it's connecting with you for the next 12 weeks. You can build it out, 15, 20, whatever, however long you want it to be, but it's automated now. And a lot of that stuff, you know, and then you, when you think of Dwarf, you know, if I think about Dwaran, or Dwan in two weeks, yeah, I'm gonna check in with you. I'm just gonna send you a message on LinkedIn. It's another touch point, but you've also been seeing my email and my name. And we've talked about when it, especially when it's a cold contact, a cold prospect, you have to do 30, 40, 50 touch points for them to actually recognize and build that recognition with you. So the more you can send an email, don't bombard them because then they'll unsubscribe, but the more you can do these different mediums, whether it's a meeting, a text, a LinkedIn message, a phone call, you know, multiple emails, you know, uh alik on their profile, their LinkedIn posts. They see your post on their on their thread, their feed. Those are all touch points. So you want to make sure you're doing all these different things in tandem to build up that expertise with all the people that you're meeting with.

Duarne: 28:31

But you're right. You have to automate some of this stuff because it doesn't matter how big or small your team is, automation really, really helps. I was talking to someone here earlier this evening. She works in a team of a company of about four or five hundred staff, and they do they're a large MSP back in Australia. And one of the things that was mentioned was every department was asked by senior management to come up with some automation solutions for their department, ways that they can automate portions of their department. And apparently, one of the departments, the accounts department of all things, is overwork overworked, over swamped, and has basically come back with no automation solutions. And one of the most obvious automation solutions for them is properly integrating their accounting package into their ticketing system. And at the moment it's not done. They're doing everything manually. And they're so busy in the weeds with the manual that they haven't focused on getting the automation set up. So they're just struggling to keep on. But if they did the automation, it would probably free up a bunch more time to focus on more automations and automate more parts of their work. And it just goes to show it doesn't matter how big or small your company is, you can get caught in that same loop where automations just certainly help you, but if you don't invest the time to implement and test them properly and then use them, then it's at your own detriment.

Dave: 30:09

Well, I think the biggest thing you said there too is test. I've been especially when I when you do it yourself, if you create your automations yourself, there's been times where I've I've done the double check where I think everything goes well. But unless the biggest thing for me is you have to step away and then come back. And when you're creating something like this, you're so you're so anxious to get started, and you just publish it and you're like, oh yeah, I'm gonna put my first people into it. And then you realize, oh crap, like I for I I used username instead of contact name. And I've done this, even recently, I've done this. And it's like, ah man, but you correct it, you move forward, things are gonna happen.

Duarne: 30:47

Like it happens, right? I mean, this is it. And I know what it's like. It's like when you one of the most when I talk to people, a lot of people love cleaning, they find a very they get instant gratification. If you get a really dirty car and you start cleaning it, you start to see the clean panels and you feel good. You get that great motivation. I mean, I'm motivated to keep going. Some of these, when you're painting a wall, you can start to see the results instantly. It makes you motivated to keep going. You don't get that when you're building these systems and automations out. They are a very slow, cumbersome process sometimes with lots of intricacies and lots of hurdles. And you'll find you test them, it doesn't work, come back and look for it, try and find the problem, test again, and you might do that process multiple times before you get a working version of something. You may find your first iteration is too complex and you should start simpler and do something smaller, and then do as next then expand on it. And this and this is something where, like you talked about a 12-week nurture sequence campaign. So that's what we call a nurture sequence campaign in the digital marketing world, where you send out emails over a 12-week period, right, to touch base with people. You sign people up on day one, you probably only need the first two weeks worth of emails, then schedule in to finish the last 10 weeks after that. So clearly you want to make sure that in the first set you're putting people through, they're going through smoothly on the first two emails and have your next through three through to 12 emails ready to go before they're due. Because you'd put a time delay on them of a few days or whatever that might be. What people tend to do is they feel like they have to have all 12 emails planned, prepped, ready before they start implementing that automation. But that's just simply not necessarily the case. Yes, that would be perfect world scenario, but if you don't, if you're busy, just break it down into smaller bite-sized pieces.

Dave: 32:47

But but I think like right now, with what we have available at our fingertips as business owners with AI, it should not be a problem for you to create a 12 email nurture campaign that is based on things that you already have created, solutions you already have, emotional overcoming that you're looking to do for your clients. It should be very easy with a ChatGPT, a Gemini, whatever, to create a 10 to 12 email nurture campaign. Because what I find with a lot of clients, and sometimes even myself in the past, right, you will tell yourself, okay, I'm gonna create the first three and I'm gonna come back, and you don't do it. And then these people are only getting three, and so it's incomplete. If this was back in the day where you had to create all 12 without AI, I would say I would definitely follow like that focus, right? Just get the first three out and then develop the next three next week and then come back and put it in your calendar and do it. But right now, like it's so easy for you to create the 12, drop it into a campaign, and then not think about it. And then come back and check your stats maybe every month. We talk about things that you should be doing on a monthly basis, checking your stats and how things are are actually occurring. The first couple weeks, you probably want to do it a little bit more and make adjustments as you need to. Yeah, that would be my only caveat now. It would just be it's just so easy to create the entire campaign all at once. Read through it once or twice, make sure it sounds like you use the text. I think a lot of people want to do these fancy templates with their images and all this stuff, but all that stuff gets blocked now from email. Just do simple text and emails that are going out. You don't need to send all these backgrounds and formatting because that's what they're looking for, that's what the email platforms are looking for to mark as spam. Uh, and especially if it's like the first or second time you're emailing somebody, you don't want it to go to spam, it's the worst place it could go because it'll never get out of there unless they mark it.

Duarne: 34:44

As not, it's interesting to say that. Like if you're using a platform like the Beastavvy Go High Level platform, one of the scenarios that you would actually employ then is rather than actually going creating all your email templates, which is what I'd consider best practice, you could just go and embed the email if it's plain text straight into the automation, which means you can simplify the whole process all in one go. And you're right, you can go through ChatGPT, train this thing up properly, and tell it I want to do this over a 12-week period. I want the journey to be this type of journey, and I'm targeting this type of niche client. Can you give me an outline on what you think would be a good journey for this? Let it create the outline if you modify that accordingly, and then say go and write the emails and give it the parameters. Like no emails, each email should be able to be read in under a minute, so it's not too taxing on the person getting the email. Each email should include a CTA, some form of call to action, or an educational touch point, whatever that might be, whatever you're trying to do.

Dave: 35:53

So when you're keeping this in mind, it should be three to four education to CTA in your email campaigns. Now, and what I mean by that is your email copy, the main body, should be educational. You can still at the bottom, after your signature, have a PS that says, hey, if this you know kind of hits the point, click here to schedule a link. But then that fourth or fifth email, that's your call to action email, which is, you know, hey, if you've liked what we've been talking about a little bit here and you're interested in learning a little bit more about you know XYZ program, click here and let's schedule a conversation. So three to four is that golden ratio of education value to direct call to action. Same in your social media that we've talked about in your past or social media copy. So when you're developing a 12 email copy, you should only have two, maybe three direct call to action emails. And the rest should be actual value written with like a you know, download or an attachment that's like an actual resource that they can use and begin to implement in their business, or walking them through a journey. Like that's another one, like storytelling. Like keep them on the hook for the next email. You know, hey, that you know, last week we talked about how you can start doing X, Y, and Z. This week we're gonna add on to that by starting with ABC. And then at the end of that, make sure you follow next week because we're gonna talk about D E and F. And what it does is now you're engaging them more to actually be looking for your email and following along that journey. And then at the end of DENF, now you have uh, and if you've liked X, Y, Z, A, B, C, D, E, and F, we actually combine all of these into this one program and we help you implement that. If it's something that you might feel a little bit overwhelmed with right now and want a little bit more support, want to talk through it, click here, let's have a quick conversation. We'll we'll give you the first step and we'll actually get you started on the first step or something like that. And then you can go on with your other, you know, kind of four emails after that. So, but there's nothing wrong with that your PS, like after your signature, and I do this. You just have a hey, you want to talk a little bit more about your situation, click here, book a call. That's a soft CTA versus a direct hard CTA. So you should have a soft CTA in every email, but then every three or four emails should be your hard CTA that you are you're kind of putting up for everybody.

Duarne: 38:11

You're right in the fact that you shouldn't be asking people to marry you on every email. Because that's just not gonna work. You know, the hard sell, no one wants to say that. That's the stuff to get you put into the sin bin. That's the stuff that's gonna get you. No, I don't want to say this, spam this for the future. This is just spam, I don't want to say it.

Dave: 38:31

Think about a date. You're you know, you're gonna go on a date with everybody, and then every single date being like, hey, by the way, do you want to take this to the next level? You want to move in together? Or hey, do you want to get married? Like, go and get married, you want to get married? No, you don't. You give them a little bit of who you are, you you make them laugh, you you buy them dinner, you make them feel good about who you are, you know, truly. And then when things are right, after you've taken each individual step, oh, do you want to go out again? Or do you want to take this to the next level and be official? You know, there's stages that you go through that then eventually turn into the marriage. And so you don't want to do that same thing with your with your prospects and your clients.

Duarne: 39:08

Absolutely. And, you know, it doesn't matter what platform you're using, a lot of these platforms they're coming up all the time. As long as it's something which is scalable for your business, something that has like so one of the big things that I would recommend is if you are gonna look at any of these platforms, look at how many user accounts you get access to for the monthly rates. A lot of these platforms tend to charge a per user rate. So if your plan is yes, you're the only person in your business, but if you've got a strategy to grow to five, 10, 15 people and each of them need access to this platform, you're eventually gonna have to pay five, 10, 15 times that price for the licensing. So that gets very costly. And the other big thing is when you sign up for these platforms, you invest the time in setting them up. So whatever you choose on day one, it's likely gonna be the same system you're gonna be using a year or two from now. So choose the system that you're willing to put the time in. Some of these systems, like if we're talking like Dave, you've got probably what a month or two straight hours, maybe more worth of time that you put directly into the CRM system, be savvy of actually building stuff out over the last couple of years. So when you start looking into that, that's a huge investment. Try and move that to something else. That's gonna take you a lot. It's gonna take a lot of time. So choose wisely.

Dave: 40:38

For me, it's is self-taught. You know, it's not, I don't have an experience with the Sierra before you and I kind of started our relationship. It was me getting into the system, playing around building and figuring out what worked, what didn't. And a lot of times as a business owner, you're just gonna have to do that. You're just gonna have to, especially if you're trying to bootstrap, you're gonna have to teach yourself at 10 to 11 o'clock at night how do the automations work together or how do I build efficiently. It's it's part of the game. You know, it's it's part of that journey.

Duarne: 41:14

Absolutely. And I mean, everybody's gonna get out there and tell you what's the best system. Everyone's gonna tell you what they use and they think it's the best. The truth of the matter is you've got to basically work out what works for you and solves your problems, and can you easily do it yourself? Or do they provide enough support to be able to help you get where you want to be? And a lot of these platforms, they just I've worked on a few, I'm not gonna name any, but I've worked on a few over the years that have very dated interfaces. That are very cumbersome, that don't necessarily tie very well into each other. And some of them, they've just been acquisitions of, and everything's been ad hoc software added into or apps added onto the main application, which means that at some point nothing really talks to each other properly, and everything's kind of awkward and horrible to use. And a lot of these other systems, like you'll find, is like the B Savvy go high-level platforms, like they replace like 18, 20 pieces of software or applications out there that you could be using. And that's really incredible, but it's also very daunting for a lot of people. So don't go into it thinking I'm going to use 20 of these software or apps straight from day one. You might only use four or five. Like you, you were indicating earlier, you're using probably about five or six of the functions within the platform, you know, pretty much on a regular basis. Most people, that's all they're going to need access to. I typically work on a scenario if you can solve three problems with one piece of software, it's probably a good piece of software.

Dave: 43:01

Well, especially if if it's three things or problems that you're using three different pieces of the software right now, you know, and or you're doing it manually right now. Like if it can solve three or four of those, then it's probably a good piece. And then anything on top of that is gravy. So like for me, it was a lot of the client relationship conversation management, the social media planning, and then the funnels and the automation. Everything on top of that's been gravy. So the fact that it's now it does my documents, my proposals, my you know, automatic signature, the the QR codes are all all gravy, are things that I would do elsewhere, but because they're in the system, I can do it all on the system. Yeah. And so it's it's beautiful in that aspect. And that's why, like for the software this week, we wanted to talk about the, especially if you're starting a new year. Like if you don't have a CRM, you don't have a platform like this that that can be one sort of source that you can log into and do a lot of different services from. You probably want to start considering the different types of platforms. So, like for Dwarren, for you, if you go to what would it's bsavvy.io, actually, is that the F1?

Duarne: 44:16

Yeah, bsavvy.io. But if the listeners are listening, there's a special rate available for TBS customers. So I'd be happy for them to reach out to you and get that link for that special link, and they can sign up for a discounted rate. So normally it's $98 a month, and they can get it for a discounted rate, which is I think it's about 28% discount each month. It works out to be, which is a great saving, and that's a that's a saving they'll get grandfathered in on.

Dave: 44:51

So all they need to do is I think it's everything comes into like it's like $69 a month or something like that.

Duarne: 44:56

I think it ends up being. So that sounds about right. So yeah, basically, you guys could sign up and get a discounted rate, all the same functions and features of the main package. Just reach out to Dave, and Dave will happily set you up. If you want to comment on any of these feeds that have got it, Dave.

Dave: 45:19

I'm dropping it down below. So if there's any excellent. Yep. If there's anybody interested, the link is going to be in the comments below. So feel free to follow that link. And again, I think you also you give a what is it, a 14-day trial? 14-day free trial.

Duarne: 45:37

Yeah, everyone can sign up for a 14-day free trial. Get in, get check it out. There's a free onboarding call with our onboarding team. You can claim that in your first 14 days, so that'll help you get set up, and you get a secondary onboarding call after the after that you can schedule. Generally, people schedule that about a week later, and that gets you a chance to play with the system, learn a few things, come back with some extra questions, and let the team help you work through those questions. Love it.

Dave: 46:08

The one thing also, and we talked about a little bit earlier, the beauty of using AI to develop your email content. And I just had earlier this week a conversation with one of my clients because for me, one of the things that I do, we were we had a mentoring session earlier in the week, and he was telling telling me all these different details that he wants to accomplish and needs to schedule out for the year. And so I advised him, I said, Well, here's what you can do. Like just open up Chat GBT or your AI source and turn on the audio and just talk to it. Braindump. And it will take that information and it will turn it into a calendar. You say, Hey, help me kind of analyze what I'm saying here, break it down into calendar, into output, and for me. Now, what I realized was that sometimes a lot of people still don't understand how to prompt AI. So then I met with him on New Year's Eve for our in-person session. So we had a virtual mentoring and then our in-person sort of in Deep Dog. And we were kind of reviewing some of the things that he was doing. And it turned into where he just kind of had that back and forth conversation with AI instead of like brain-dumped thing and prompting. So this leads me into AI prompting. And because when I we started reviewing a lot of the things that were going into the AI, and they were very simple, very basic. They're like one or two sentences, and the results were not anywhere near what you would like them to be. Or he he was he was dissatisfied with the results. And we got into a little in-depth about well, here's how you have to prompt better. And first you have to tell it how you want it to act. What do you what are your main focuses for like act like a CFO or act like a CEO or act like a marketing expert or act like an email copy expert in XYZ industry who focuses on your ideal client, right, with maximum outreach? Then give it as much detail as you can about what it is that you're trying to create. So, in our example, right, how do we develop a 12 campaign email to achieve this outcome that is going to then deep dive into every three or four emails about a deep CTA and kind of dive into it more? When I've had that conversation with him and we we did better prompting in his scenario, he got the results you were looking for. And so it just reminded me that not a lot of people like you may be using AI still today and using it like your Google search bar and just typing in one or two sentences, and that's it. And so if that's you, like you can do so much better. You can totally use like a whisper flow, which I've mentioned in the past, which we'll give into before, but just to talk, and then it'll turn it into text and drops it into the field. So, do I mean what have you seen for yourself? Like what you've got what you've advised people.

Duarne: 49:23

Well, see he I'm giggling because I found myself repeating myself so often with this last year. So I went out and built a course called Mastering Practical AI Prompting course. Love it. Now, I just dropped the link in to UA on a private chat there, so you can drop it up on the screen if anyone wants to do it. It's a free course. We've got it currently open for free, and it's 11 frameworks that I've put together. And what I recommend is take 11 days to work your way through the course. You'll only need 10 minutes a day to do the course. It's not a very time-consuming course. The way I've designed this is very, very simple. Spend 10 minutes a day, we'll explain what the framework is, we'll give you practical scenarios, we'll give you a worksheet you can download and reference. Then the next day or later that day, depending on what time of the day you're doing it, go and put that framework into practice and start using it. The next day you'll learn a new framework. Once you've got to the point of, I think there's the way I've done this is nine frameworks in total that you'll learn. The tenth framework is a combat is learning to use a combination of frameworks, which is absolutely key for success because using a single framework is not always the res going to get you the result you want. Sometimes combining the frameworks will get you the results you want. And then we go into talking about when is the right time to use a custom GPT. Now we've talked about custom GPTs in the past, and a custom GPT is basically when you have a repetitive task which has a very similar set of instructions or parameters that you want to use. So that's what the 11th technique that we teach is in there. Now, if you want to learn how to do some practical prompting, not just here's prompt engineering and here's the top 100 prompts you should be using to get these results. These are real actual practical prompts that I've put together based on doing this and training clients. And these are what I use every day. And I'll give you an example of one of my favorite frameworks, and that is when I start using the judgmental framework. So what I'm referring to there is I ask when you ask Chat TVD something or any of these platforms, they're generally going to give you vague responses or they're going to give you vague praise, telling you that you've done a good job. If you ask it like, is this a good, is this a good email that I've written? Or did I write a nice email? It's going to come back and probably give you a pat on the back, which is going to give you a small feeling of satisfaction, but it's probably not accurate. So what I do is I tell it, you are an English professor, and you are reviewing this email as an English professor, and I want you to tell me if the client who I'm sending this to is going to appreciate XYZ and get it to go through and critique my work for me. And I love doing that because what that does is that gives me someone else checking my work. Or my favorite one, does this make me sound? I use another word, but like a terrible person. And or do I sound too aggressive? Right. And the reality is those simple little questions that I can ask, I get real results from. Now, people don't realize that you can just do that sort of thing and have those sort of conversations. And it all comes down to when I talk about prompting, it's just conversation. And I love the fact that more people like yourself are getting involved with the dictation platform because I tell you, I use dictation on my phone and it is horrible on Google Chat, Messenger, all these other platforms. I use an Android phone, it's absolutely horrible. Siri is not much better. Yet, for some reason, Chat GPT dictation and Gemini dictation is pretty good. When you enable those dictation, and you can sit there for five, 10 minutes and dump. So one of the things that like I've talked to you about is we'll have a meeting with a client, and then I'll just sit there and dictate back into Chat GPT and ask it to prepare my notes. And it'll output all my notes to me. That way I can give it all my thoughts from the meeting, but then add extra thoughts that I had after the meeting, which then puts it all into a nice thought process, into a thought flow, and I can give it more instructions and tell it, okay, now I want you to give me an email that I can send this a company as a download PDF to the client. Ultimately, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Dave: 54:27

There's literally no limit to like, I mean, let me take that back to there's some limit to the prompt right detail that you can give it. But in terms of our context, you cannot give it too much information. You know, and the more the merrier, because it's it uh in the end, it's just a computer platform, right, that's using what you give it to develop some sort of answer based on the information it's just been trained on. And so you have to give it the most. If you just say, hey, tell me how I can write an email campaign, right? Or write me an email campaign for a bookkeeper, it's just gonna be bland, generic, not gonna be, you know, in-depth. So the more information that you can give it, the more information that you can tell it about you, you know, whether it's supporting documents or, you know, talk about who you are, what you've done, the more, the better the results you're gonna get from AI. And so it's it's still, I guess, surprising to me that, you know, because I'm not even perfect with it, but as I'm learning, as I'm continuing to kind of do new things, it's still surprising to me how there's still the vast majority of the population that one either hasn't tried it or two, if they are trying it, it's very basic still. And they're not anywhere near to the level that you or I are, and there's people way ahead of us as well, you know. And it's so I don't, I'm not claiming to be an AI expert, but definitely in terms of the room that you're in, you're the expert if you know the most about you know that piece of information. So it's so it's interesting. But so when I when I talked to a lot of people, it just was something that just friend of mine for me because he was like, Man, wow, that's a game changer. He's like, I never thought you could do it. He just thought you just had to ask it like simple questions, and that was how you prompted it. For example, it came up with um he was trying to make a calendar for 2026 for their their marketing, the events that they wanted to do, etc., and and like deadlines that led up to that. And so it gave a pretty basic, bland journey. And he was just like, well, help me put it into a calendar. And it gave a very basic calendar in terms of like one per month, even though things were supposed to happen multiple times throughout a month, multiple times throughout the year. So then I spoke, I said, Well, hit the microphone, and then I spoke to it and you know, gave it a big, you know, long paragraph detail of what needs to happen when, when things needed to happen, what kind of preceded, you know. So if there was a requirement that preceded an outcome, you let them know, like, hey, this you know needs to happen seven days before the outcome. Otherwise, if it doesn't happen, the outcome is not gonna happen. And so we built all of those things then into the calendar, and now we're able to kind of review this with the executive team and say, hey, here's the goal, here's everything that we're gonna we want to do for 2026. Let's make it happen.

Duarne: 57:14

Yeah, and then from there, like I use it a lot for like improving ideas, creating SOPs, giving it the foundation, and then letting it go and create better structure around my ideas and concepts. And I think it's all about learning how to use it in a way that works for you, but also what's the right way of putting this? It's also a tool that can be utilized in so many different ways. It's a like I've seen people using it in so many different ways, and everybody's got a slightly different technique on using it, which is why we didn't go down the path of just giving people a thousand prompts and say, here's the best thousand prompts to use. We thought, let's just teach people how to fish, let's teach people some basic frameworks that can get them the results they want and get them thinking in the way of the best way to communicate with this platform. Because it's no different to when Google came out with their search engine. When it first came out with their search engine, I used to explain it to people when they come in and say, Hey, look, how do I how come you're so efficient at finding things on Google? So, well, I just think about the what I'm looking for and the words that would help me find that. So if I was one of the examples I'd use, I'd say, Well, look, if you're gonna look up horse, you're gonna get results on general horses. But if you're looking for a you know, a Belgian riding horse saddle and you live in the Texas area, then you're probably not gonna ride horse in to get a result. You're probably not gonna use saddle as a to get a result, you're gonna want to put in Texas saddle, Belgian horse, or some sort of form of community combination of that to get the best results coming up to show you the best results. AI is no different, AI is just allowing you to communicate in a more humane way. And I tell people all the time if you're explaining something to your intern, to a staff member, an assistant, a child, a friend, just explain it the same way. We had this situation while I was on a training session just before Christmas. I'm not sure if I mentioned this to you already, but I'm sitting there and I'm on this training session, and I'll show you how to do some AI stuff. And she's there with her offsider, her assistant, and we're sitting there listening, and she's listening, and she's like asked me to do something. I said, just hold that thought for a sec. Just and I just start talking, uh I just started talking like I am now, and he clicked go, and I said, All right, I'm done. And she's like, Hold on, did you what did you do? I said, Oh, I just gave instructions to chat GPT. She goes, Hang on, hang on. It sounded like you were just talking to it like a person. I said, Yeah. She goes, I feel so stupid. I said, Why? She said, Because whenever I do that, I lean into my computer and I start talking really slow like this. And I uh oh, okay. She goes, You just look so normal doing it. I said, Yeah, because you don't have to talk slow. If you're using like a Google tick dictator on your phone, yes, talk slow because you get good results. But if you're using the dictation system here, it's very clever, it's very smart. I don't know what algorithms or systems are behind it, but it's very, very good quality. And I find it typically gets everything pretty much right with a few typos here and there, but those are easy to fix later. But she was like, Oh my gosh, I had no idea. And then I shared the results to her via screen share, and she saw what I'd done. She's like, Oh my god, that's exactly what I wanted to say. Oh, that is so good. Okay, great, great, great. And it was just a shock to her that it was I was communicating just like I would communicate to anybody else. And I think that's the problem. People feel like it's a computer, it's a robot, there's a stigma behind talking to it just in normal plain text. They feel like they have to be perfect, they have to get the perfect grammar, the perfect punctuation. It's like it doesn't care if you got typos, it'll figure it out. And if it doesn't, tell it it got it wrong and what you meant, and it'll correct it. And that's where I think a lot of people fall down. It's a I use in my course, I use the term it's an over-eager intern. It's gonna say yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. It's gonna try its best to do everything, but it's not necessarily gonna be really good at the res the results are not gonna be really good. But if you give really clear, distinct instructions, uh suddenly the results get much, much better.

Dave: 1:02:13

And you're when you're doing when you're doing the training, when you're when you're teaching a lot of people, I think ultimately you're never gonna get a perfect uh the first or second try. And I we might have mentioned this before too, where do multiple chats. Like you'd be surprised. We could put the same prompt into two different tabs of a chat GPT and get two vastly different outputs. I'm still on topic, but the the tone, the wording could be completely different. So just because it gives you the first, if you don't like it, try again. And don't try again in the same chat, like try again in a new chat. Take the same prompt and try again in the new chat. And you might get something better. But don't shy away from it. I think ultimately, if for those that are going to win into the future, it's the people that embrace AI and use it to complement their work, not do their work, but complement their work. There are so many times where on that tedious, like the redundant work, like for example, especially spreadsheet work. You know, there was um uh something this morning I was working on as a part of a project that, you know, the client, my client asked me about some numbers that's in their two softwares as we're working to clean up. And and so, but the numbers were they're not clean in their QuickBooks, it's all like embedded into the description of each transaction. But there's multiple transactions per invoice, which for like sale. And so I took the export from the year and I dropped it into, in this case, Gemini, and I said, here's here's a spreadsheet. It tell me what is the count of the different addresses that is that is embedded within the description of the spreadsheet, the description column. And in about five minutes, it was able to kind of one, parse out the description column, two, determine what is an address versus what isn't an address, and then three, give me a count of the number. And it said there's 94 unique addresses within this, you know, 12-month-long, thousand-long row column. And it's just like those are the things that you should be using AI for, as well as helping you kind of copyright, you're kind of being your right-hand man in terms of maybe things that you weren't used to brainstorm, but don't take it for gospel. And I think far too many people do that. They just get an output and they post it, and even then, you're gonna make a mistake. I made a mistake the other day. You know, I'll admit it, I happened to copy the line, the first line of a chat GPT output because I was sharing an article and I had it create me, you know, a headline or a copy to go along with it. And I happened to create copy without my knowledge. Well, I didn't look at it, it did it copied the first headline. Hey, here's your here's your uh here's your copy to post this article, and then I pasted it because I think I was doing it on my phone or something, and it was like cut off, and I didn't see it. But somebody who's following is like, okay, by the way, you might want to take off that first line to let them know that you posted that from ChatGPT. I was like, oops. So even even I can you're you're not perfect. I'm definitely not perfect at all.

Duarne: 1:05:23

No, you know, you need that's the thing, right? You need to read it, you need to check it. And this is where we're so busy. We just we tend to go, yep, do this, do that. I tend to find you I use it to like one thing a lot of people don't realize is you can do something as simple as take a screenshot of a conversation, right? And screenshot of a conversation, and then just paste that in and say, Hey, I need to resp I need uh some advice on how to respond to this. And or I want to create a great response to this, whatever it may look like. There's so many very variations you can do, but just a screenshot of text, it can understand it, which is great. People don't realize that, so yeah, it's very, very clever in what it can do, and this is where I think people need to just take a minute to understand and learn it. I've seen these reels online where it's like, go away for 30 days and learn it on Coursera, and it's like you don't need 30 days, just spend a little bit of time every day, learn something new, and then put it into practice. It doesn't take much, and any it's like anything, it's a muscle. Once you actually start using it, it becomes very natural to use, it gets better, you find ways to improve it.

Dave: 1:06:51

So exactly, and I think that's it's you know, you and I have embraced AI, I think, since it's come out. Like I've probably been a day one user of ChatGPT since it first came out. But you're not gonna overnight be an expert, you're not gonna overnight be like Dwarne and I, but we're not gonna overnight be like the people that have been doing it way more than we have because we've also been running businesses. There's people that have just been in AI, like literally 24-7. But what you can do is just get started. And I said this before. It's funny because I I shared like a this image because I'd seen it, I think it was like last year, but it's funny, these things kind of responded. I saw it again because somebody's reposting it now at the beginning of the year. But it's if you do one, right, one to the power of 365, the answer is one. Like if you do nothing, like it's just you're gonna be the same. But if you just do one point zero one to the power of 365, it's 37 and some change. So just one percent more, right? 0.01 versus 0.0 gets you to 37 to the power of, you know, so 1.01 to the power of 365, the result is 37 and change. 1.0 to the power of 3300, 365 is one. So just doing something, just doing that one percent every single day is gonna make you 30 times better, 30 times more better, educated, advanced than you were today sitting here.

Duarne: 1:08:31

Absolutely. And look, if you can learn, I think you should try and aim to learn a new skill every day. But if that's too much of a stretch, then try and learn a new skill every week. That's still 52 new skills you can learn in a year. Right? I mean, just aim to learn. And I guess that's the sort of reaction that you kind of need to be putting out. You need to be basically willing to put in a little bit of work to learn. And this goes the same with like the cash flow projects, processes that you teach. Implementing learning and implementing some of these things, just do them it slowly incrementally. They can really help and you know improve what you're doing on a day-to-day in your business. So I keep looking over here, I'm getting distracted, I'm getting bombarded with messages right now while I'm in a live. Okay, I love it.

Dave: 1:09:26

Well, hang on.

Duarne: 1:09:28

I am live.

Dave: 1:09:30

We're kind of we're kinda towards the end, anyways. You know, we've been here for the typical hour, hour and ten minutes. But like, so as we wrap up, I know there's some other things we wanted to kind of talk about as well. But for you, what what is something that you want people to walk away from today?

Duarne: 1:09:48

I I think for me, I want people to just take a minute in the downtime and reflect on what they can be doing better in their business, what's important, what are they doing really well, and how to double down on what they're doing really well and work out what that new skill they want to learn is and make the decision is that something that's gonna change and improve the way I run my business, or is it just a new skill for something I want to learn for personal growth? Either way is fine, but just knowing helps you justify it to yourself as to why you're doing it and helps keep you motivated to continue and finish it.

Dave: 1:10:32

And I think for me, I think ultimately it just becomes like just try, just like doing something. Whether it's it's not even doesn't necessarily have to be in like AI, but it's like just do the one call today, the two calls today. Maybe your goal is 10, but just and you're like, I'm never gonna get to 10, so I'm just not gonna do it. Like, but just doing those one or two outreaches, the calls, the messages, the emails, those things every day add up to so many more at the end of the year. And it's so small steps, it's so small, consistent. That's the difference between you kind of reaching your goals and you staying exactly where you're at. Um, and so it's one thing that I have maintained to, you know, kind of continue to do, you know, even if it's like, oh crap, it's it's 9.30, I didn't get a chance to do this. I can pull up my phone and I can do some outreaches, or I forgot to comment on on some, you know, post that means something to me that I want to add value to. I can go and I can do it at 9:30. Like it's not making the excuse that, oh, well, I didn't do it earlier, I'm not gonna do it now, but to just do it. I think that's the biggest thing that we can you can take from today's lesson is in this discussion, is that it's never too late to do it. You just have to do it, you know. Oh eye-opening when you actually like, oh yeah, you know what? You're probably right.

Duarne: 1:11:56

Yeah. And you know what's interesting about what you just said there is if you're planning out your day and night, depending on how often how many hours you're working or when you're working and how that works out, there's a lot of things you can do that are not time constrained. You don't like if you're calling cold calling, yes, you have to be there at a certain time calling people. But if it's a case of sending a message to somebody that they can read the next day, or dropping an email that they can read the next day, or something like that, you can do that anytime. I don't know if people realize this, but Outlook and Office 365, email, and even Google has scheduling. So when you go to send, there's a little drop-down next to the send on these apps where you can choose to send it at a later time. So if you're sitting there at 11 o'clock at night, you're thinking, I don't want to send this email too late, maybe I'll do it tomorrow. Just schedule it to go out tomorrow morning at you know eight o'clock in the morning, eight fifteen in the morning. Right? So it doesn't look like you're working at 11 o'clock because maybe that's an image you don't want to portray to a client. Maybe you want them to get an email first thing in the morning, whatever that looks like. Maybe you want to do three emails over the next week without using an automation system, and you just want to send regular emails to this one client to keep them motivated on a project you're working on, and you can just use the built-in simple schedule feature to do that. You can jump on LinkedIn and send a message to people at any time. You can put a post out and schedule it to go out at any time on a lot of these social media platforms. So those tasks can happen any time of day. So you can get to like five o'clock in the afternoon and go, I didn't get those done. That's all right. Go away and have some dinner, spend some time with the family, come back at eight, nine o'clock, and spend 30 minutes to an hour and just put a couple of posts out, put a couple of comments on people's posts, reshare or repost something. It's okay. You know, there's certain tasks in in business and in life that don't have time constraints. So get in and do them when time permits.

Dave: 1:14:01

Exactly. It doesn't, there's no perfect time. You know, now, unless there's a deadline and you missed it, I get it. But you as business owners have to be willing to do things at any time. Right. It's that there's no there's no nine to five for us as business owners. You have to lose that mindset. So if you come from a job and you're like, oh, I'm gonna work nine to five as a business owner, it's just not, it's never gonna be the case. You know, you're you're on 24-7, you know, or at least you know, 12, 16 hours a day. There, it's your working window. You know, you can be flexible with that because you have things going on, et cetera. But you have to any other time, you have to be willing to work. You can't say, oh, that'll wait till tomorrow because what's gonna happen? You're gonna be fighting fires, you're gonna be dealing with clients, you're gonna be doing all these things. You have to stop kind of waiting for things you know to happen in this perfect window, or else it's not gonna, it's not gonna work. So well, Dorm, with that, I wish you a happy and a wonderful 2026. But if you're watching this, thanks for making it to the end. If you're watching the recording, as always, if you have questions or if there's anything you want us to maybe deep dive in a future episode, drop it down below. We would be more than happy to answer those for you live or in the comments. And if you're a business owner and you want to join us, because maybe there's something you want to talk about, uh, we're filling up our 2026 calendar as well to bring out more guests who want to talk through different topics, maybe even talk through some obstacles as well on the show that you're currently facing, that we can kind of maybe point you in the right direction. But with that, we love you. We appreciate you to do all the fun algorithmy stuff. You know, give us a like, give us a subscribe, share it with your network if you found something in today's episode that is meaningful to you. But Darren, I uh hope you have a wonderful weekend and we will uh chat with you soon. Thanks, Dave. Thanks, everyone. Thank you. Bye everyone.