All right, all right, all right. It's another Friday. Welcome to another episode of the Business Unscripted Podcast. And well, you are stuck with me today. Just me, Duarren has a sore throw. So hopefully, Duarne, you're watching this brother. I hope you will feel better. Uh, but we're here with another episode. It's another Friday. And today we're gonna be talking a little bit as I was kind of pre-prepping a little pre-show what I want to talk about. We're gonna talk about a little story from conversation I was having last night and how it impacts your business with my fiance. And so about how effort, right? So, effort, we're gonna talk about a video topic that I just released and how important it is to understand the miscategorization of your expenses and how that can impact your decision making in your business. We're gonna talk about your schedule. A lot of people uh struggle with this, have a lot of conversations about business owner scheduling and when to get things done. We'll give you our software recommendation of the week based on what we use on a regular basis, and then have a little announcement here about next week. So grab your favorite cup of Joe and let's jump into the show. So if you are a business owner, you are in the right place. So we are performing this podcast and creating this podcast for you all to give you insights on different things that we share strategy-wise with our clients, but also struggles that we've gone through ourselves. So if that's you, you're maybe you're you're just started a business, or maybe you have been thinking about starting a business and you just don't know how to get started, you're in the right place. So with that, let's jump into it. Uh, first things first, let's start with an announcement, and I'll give you a reminder at the end of the episode as well. But so next week, I know I say we do these things live every single week, but next week, unfortunately, actually fortunately for me, we are me and my fiance are actually expecting our little baby girl next week on Thursday. So unfortunately, I am gonna be in the hospital on Friday morning, and so I'm not gonna be able to do an episode next week. However, we'll be back the week after. But what I will be doing is I will be kind of looking back and creating sort of like a highlight video of some of the best things that we've talked about, and I'll have that go live next week at 8:15. So if you want and you found that you love our show and you're here, uh next week, it's not gonna be live, but it will be a sort of recap show of some of our most impactful tips and strategies that we've talked about along the way. So, first, you know, story time. So my fiance and I were you know kind of laying in bed last night, and you know, she said something and we were kind of talking about future, right? Especially, you know, you're you're kind of looking ahead and you're like, man, there's only like six, seven day nights left of no baby and this other kind of you know, human that you're about to be responsible for. And now while we both between the two of us have like five humans that we're already responsible for that are teenagers, we're expecting one between ourselves and we're happy, we're excited. It's a it's a it's a grand time. But as you're uh facing this unknown, you want to make sure that you know you're not losing yourself. And so she said something to me about, you know, we want to make sure that we don't lose us in everything that's about to happen. And with that, it was you know, about being impossible, about not letting that happen. And and so that brought me to like business and and that word impossible. And I said, take that word out of your like let's take that out of our vocabulary, right? Impossible, take out of our vocabulary. And she changed it to you know, highly unlikely, right? And for me, even that is the case, and whether it's a relationship or your business, highly unlikely is still something that is really dependent on us, right? And it depends on the effort, and that's kind of the first topic, right, that I wanted to discuss is that nothing's impossible, nothing's really unlikely, and it's truly dependent on the effort that you're putting in towards it. So if you feel right now that something is unlikely, it's probably because there's been a lack of effort or there hasn't been a the amount of effort that you should put in towards that, or even had time to put in the required effort to reach that destination that you want to reach. So you yourself have to keep reminding yourself like this isn't impossible, right? Being a success as a business owner isn't impossible. It just means I have to put more effort in. I have to find the time to put in the effort that I need to in order to make it happen because you want to make it happen, right? That's why we're all in business. We're in business because we want to be a success. We want to provide for our families the dream and the freedom of having more time in the future, but also giving them the freedom themselves to be able to do something that they love or spend more time with them or travel, whatever it is that your motivating factor is. That's why it's truly important for you to just realize stop saying things are impossible, stop saying things are highly unlikely. Your effort defines the actual success that you're going to have in your life, in your business, in your goals. So it was kind of funny that you know, we're we're having this personal kind of talk in bed, right? And then we're like, and for me, it's like, well, this truly like relates to business. It relates to you, the business but it relates to me. You know, and and if you take a moment and you self-reflect a little bit and you look back, and maybe something that you missed, maybe an opportunity you missed, or maybe a a client that you missed, you probably realize that it came down to effort. It came down in the end to either you maybe stopping before you should have, came down to maybe you didn't follow up as much as you should have. For me, myself, that's that's me. I can I can think back to a lot of missed opportunities, and it comes down to the fact that I probably didn't have a good follow-up process at the time. I probably dropped a ball somewhere along the way. So it came down to my effort. And so this is why I don't like that word impossible. Like nothing's truly impossible. It's just either the time hasn't occurred where that's gonna happen or the effort or a combination of both. You know, like we think of so many things that we are able to do today in our world that people probably four, five, six decades ago were like, that's never gonna happen. That's that's it, that's impossible. People never thought we'd have cell phones, we'd have many computers, right? People never thought we'd have computers, right? They all called that impossible. We're never gonna be driving around, you know, everybody's gonna have a car. You're never gonna have, you know, be able to connect your phone to your car. That's impossible. That's never gonna happen. We're never gonna have self-driving cars. That's impossible. That's never gonna happen. But the definition, right, is that somebody then puts more effort in than other people wanted and they make it possible. So you have to decide what is that in your life? What is that in your business that you are like, I'm gonna take what people are telling me or what even you might feel yourself right now is impossible, and make it possible by putting in that effort, which is gonna be in tandem with the third topic I'm gonna talk with later today as well. So think for yourself, where are you feeling something might be unlikely right now, or where are you feeling right now that it might be impossible for you because you've told yourself that? And then look back and say, am I putting in the effort that I need to in order to make sure that it's not impossible? So that's the that's the first thing today. Next, we always talk about a software, something that's really important. It's funny because you know I apologize for being a little bit late today, but it brings me back to the software I want to kind of give you guys. And so a software that I use as a small business owner to truly help me is Canva. Canva is something I'm sure you all have heard about it, especially if you're in business. But the availability of options that you can do on Canva is truly you know up to your own, you know, kind of knowledge, how much time you want to put into learning it, et cetera. But Canva is a big piece, you know. Like this whole overlay you guys are seeing right here, this whole background, like all this stuff was kind of done with Canva. And I it can be overwhelming. You you probably might waste a little time. You know, this morning it was probably a lot quicker than the other day, where I probably you know wasted like an hour, hour and a half trying to just figure out okay, how do I get this background to be an actual overlay from an actual image? And then finally it hit me where I just had to like keep recreating it and then resizing each image to make it an overlay. But you can use Canva in so many different ways. You can use it to create your social media content, you can use it to create overlays for videos, you can use it to create business cards. Like Canva for the value that you pay, I think it's still like$14 or whatever it is, you know, a month. But and that's if you want the premium, there's still a free version. But the premium version of$14 is the value, the ROI that you should potentially be able to create from that$14 a month is exponential. So this is why this week I wanted to talk about Canva and just how important Canva is to you, your team, to be able to make the social media content to make the copy, the images that go along with that. And there's so many things that I obviously I could get into because I'm not a Canva expert, but you know, you could take your social media posts for a month, drop them in using a CSV file, and then create you know all these unlimited sort of posts if you want to, and you know with the same background, et cetera. But Canva, look into it. If you haven't, you if you haven't heard of it, you've probably been living under a rock, or you maybe you just haven't been in the in the world yet when it comes to business. But Canva is the number one that I suggest to a lot of people if they're looking to you know kind of do their edits for their images, et cetera. So jump into that one. Next, I wanted to kind of talk about obviously, as everybody knows, I've been in business finance accounting my whole career, right? Pretty much. Uh sorry, great grade college, but college degrees in accounting, and 20 years in the corporate world. And so, right now, our focusing with business owners is helping them get a better understanding of trying business solutions with where is their profitability, where are their margins, how do you kind of take that stress away? You know, so it's ultimately our goal is to type your stress away when it comes to your business finances so that you can make better financial decisions in your business. And so I just created a video, and you can find it on our YouTube channel, where I was reviewing a client's financial statement, and this happens all too often, but it's about the miscategorization of expenses and misclassification of expense accounts on your balance sheet. And the biggest thing here that you need to understand is if your accountant or your bookkeeper, maybe you have one, or maybe you're doing it yourself, the differentiation between cost of goods sold and operating expenses. And the reason why these are so important is because cost of goods sold determines, along with your revenue, what your gross profit margin is. And your gross profit margin is a number that you use when determining your marketing, right? Your golden ratio when it comes to cost, lifetime value versus acquisition, to know where you need to be spending more, to know if I make$10,000 gross, what does that mean in terms of being able to offset my overhead costs? And having a wrong gross profit margin in your mind or in your books can truly set all of those things awry. And here's an example, and I'll give it a high level because I don't have all the work in front of me, but you can find the detailed video on our YouTube channel. But cost of goods sold expenses. If those expenses depend on you having to make a sale or start a new project, then those are considered cost of goods sold. They're directly related to you bringing in that revenue. And if that's the case, those should be classified in that section, which is the cost of goods sold section on your PL. If the expense is paid no matter what, so rent, right? Utilities, those things you have to pay whether or not you have a sale in your business. We all know that because when we have low sales months, we still got to pay our rent, we still got to pay our utilities, we still got to pay our insurance costs. Uh, if you have admin staff, right, these are all operating costs as well. Those are not directly related to the generation of revenue. But if you have staff that are directly related to the generation of revenue, which means you only pay them when you have a sale or when they're doing work, that is considered a direct labor cost. It should be a cost of goods sold. And here's how misclassifying your cost of goods sold expenses as operating can impact your decision making as a business owner. So I just uh was reviewing this with a client separate from the video. And they're it's a car detailer, and they had a lot of their materials costs, they had a lot of their contract labor costs down in operating. And so initially, when they submitted them, when they sent me their financial statements, they had a gross profit margin of like 95%, which you would feel is that's awesome, especially for a car detail detailer. But it was very easy to see that their materials number was misclassified, their direct labor was misclassified. And here's why it makes a difference because when we reclassify those as cost of goods sold, you and your business can think about the same way. Think about how, you know, and where are things classified on your on your PL. But when we reclassified those, it took his gross profit margin from 95% down to 59%, which is still good. It's still a good gross profit margin. But now this is more accurate, and this is why. So we've talked about on these episodes before, kind of knowing that customer lifetime value in your business. So when you bring in a new customer, what is the gross profit margin that they're bringing into you for the lifetime that they're engaged with you? And that ratio should be about three to four to one in terms of lifetime value to acquisition cost. Now, if you were to take your initial PL for this client, and they would assume that it's 95%. So if they brought in$10,000 of revenue from a client, they would be estimating that their gross profit on that client would be$9,500, right? 95% of$10,000. And then let's say they have acquisition costs of$3,000. For whatever reason, it's really hard for them to bring a new client, but that that's still a good ratio, right?$90 to$9,500 to$3,000, they're still above that three to one golden ratio. But in reality, right, when we actually take a look and readjust, they're only at 59%. So of that 10,000, their gross profit lifetime value from their client is actually only$5,900, not$9,500. So in this example, right, they're not at the golden ratio. They're actually just under two to one. So they're overspending on their marketing. And so not understanding the gross profit of not just overall, but of your individual programs, your individual service lines, you are probably reallocating marketing spend in the wrong place. So in this case, they should, there's one or two ways that they could look at this. One, they need to maybe increase their price. If it truly is costing, right,$25,000 to$3,000 to bring in a new client, you probably got to increase your pricing on this, or you have to reduce your marketing spend. And so this is why gross profit margin, this is just one example of where this margin, this KPI, really truly kind of impacts your business decisions. And if you have the wrong percentage created in your business and in your financials, it's setting you down the wrong path. And so your task this week, if you're listening to this, you're a business owner, it's the beginning of the year, you're probably reviewing your financial statements from last year. Look at your expenses and determine where they are classified right. Are they categorized right? And so if you define that you have cost of goods sold expenses down in your operating, reclassify them. If you're in QuickBooks, it's as simple as going to your chart of accounts, editing that expense category and reclassifying it to cost of goods sold. It's gonna help you make many great decisions in terms of your marketing, in terms of your pricing, in terms of your offers, all of those things, among others, have an impact on your gross profit margin. And your gross profit margin impacts those decisions. So do that for this weekend. Dedicate some time, whether it's this weekend, whether it's you know during the week, dedicate some time to review your PL. If you have a bookkeeper or accountant, have them send it to you. Right? Or ask them, like that's what you're paying them for. You know, say, hey, let's review our PL. I don't think some of these things are classified, right? They refuse to change it, it might be time for a new bookkeeper or a new accountant. But work with them. Like, you know, many of them are, you know, should be open to it, but the ones that aren't, they probably just don't have a good understanding of it. Um, and if you are somebody who, you know, you don't know, maybe you're doing it yourself and you want some good review, I am planning to do more of those live financial statement sort of analysis insights here, kind of when I get reset after the baby comes. So if that's you and you're like, hey Dave, I would love for you to re review my financial statement live, shoot me a message either down below or a DM, or if you have my email, shoot me an email or shoot me a text. All my clients have my phone number. I'm gonna be doing more of those. So if you want me to review your financial statement, give you some insights on that live on a on a future video, shoot me a message. Uh with that, if you guys have any questions or you have any, you know, right now, if you're watching live, you know, drop me a drop me a message right now, and you know, I can answer those live for you too. Any of our shows in the future, you're always welcome to drop a question, drop a thought, feedback, something that you're going through, an obstacle. Drop it down below. So, yeah, so so PL is is another one. And then the third thing, it was funny because this happens all the time in conversations, even when you're we're we're in peer comp peer group conversations, etc. But it's the message that I hear a lot about well, I don't have time. I don't have the capacity to do what I need to do as a business owner, to do my outreach, to do my follow-up. And it's kind of like nails on a chalkboard, honestly, for me. And the reason why is is the exception to that statement is somebody who is completely overwhelmed, completely out of capacity. But I would confidently say 85 to 90 percent of you, if you've said that, it's probably because your mis your time is misaligned, or you're wasting time in places that you may not even realize. And so it actually came up yesterday a conversation where we were having sort of like a pod group, and we are talking about outreach. And my advice to everybody, clients of mine, not you know, networks of mine, is if you are not happy where you are right now with your clients, if you aren't happy with the amount of revenue that you're bringing in right now, you should be doing no less, no less than two hours a day of outreach, six days a week. I'll give you I'll give you the seventh day for a break. Two hours every single day of outreach of some sort. And you're probably thinking to me, Dave, you're you're crazy. Am I am I? Because I guarantee you have two hours a day to do it. And or you're because you're probably wasting way some most of your time with things that don't necessarily matter, right? You know, in the middle of the day, are you doing admin work for your business? Because if so, that time should be spent reaching out to your ideal clients. You should be reaching out to the people who are at work right now, especially if you're B2B, right? You should be reaching out to them in the middle of the day, which is when they're working. But if you spend your main part of your day doing admin work, it's missed a line. No wonder why people aren't responding to you. No wonder why people aren't picking up the phone and you're trying to only try to call them at the end of the day. You know, also do a little time study on yourself. A lot of clients that I've had this conversation with, and we've done this, and we find out that, well, they tell me, well, I don't have time for that. And then we find out after a week that they spend, you know, anywhere from 45 minutes to two hours a day, you know, hanging out and chilling it on the couch at the end of the day to wrap up. That's that's valuable time, especially if you are not satisfied where you are as a business owner. Valuable time. Because as I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, our goal, many people's goals as business owners, is to get the freedom, right? To build something that allows us to be able to spend more time with our family or provide something for our family that maybe we weren't able to provide or have provided to us when we were younger, right? But that doesn't mean that today is that freedom. When you get started as a business owner, until you are where you are at, where you need to be in order to live that lifestyle, you don't have freedom. It's you so you see the memes all the time. It is truly we quit a nine to five to you know work 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., if not longer. You have to do that as a business owner, especially if you're trying to bootstrap it. You know, if you if you aren't you're kind of born into money and you don't have like free money to you know hire people to you know get a business off the ground, but you're not bringing in some venture capitalists to bring in money into your business, it's all on you. So you don't have two hours a day to watch TV, right? And if you have to leave, right, you have flexibility. So don't misalign flexibility with freedom. Okay. And I think this is a difficult piece. And if you're watching this and you maybe, maybe your spouse is a business owner or a family member is a business owner. Please do not misalign flexibility in scheduling with freedom and availability. There's a big difference in these, right? And what I mean by that is that they may be flexible to take the kid to the doctor's appointment. They may be flexible to go to the sporting event or get them to their practice. Okay. But what that means is now that hour, two hours that they had to take out of that day, they now have to work in the evening to get that done. They now have to work on the weekend to make up for that time. Because what a lot of people who are as employees, or maybe even new business owners who used to be an employee, have to get used to, is that you don't get paid unless you're working and doing the effort. Like there's no guaranteed paycheck as a business owner. Right? Every two weeks, you're not going to get, you know, you put in your 40 hours, so you're going to get paid. That's not how business owners work. So if I have the flexibility to go and have lunch, that means at 45 minutes an hour that I have now had lunch with my fiance, right? I now have to either spend time on a Saturday morning to make that up. I got to spend time at Thursday night to make it up when we get home. Because we don't have freedom yet. If you're not where you're at, I mean, if you're not where you want to be, right? You're at where you're at. If you're not where you want to be when it comes to revenue, profitability, your lifestyle yet, you don't have freedom yet. So you have to get rid of that mindset that, all right, I have freedom because I'm a business owner. You don't. You have flexibility, right? You can be flexible with your time, but you don't have the freedom to not put in the time. There's a big difference in that. And I hope maybe if you know one or two of you are listening to that, maybe that gives you the kick in the ass that you need to realize, you know what? I have been sitting on the couch every night. Or I have been truly flexible with my time and trying to be free with my time, and I'm not putting in the time that I need. And the only way that you are going to understand this is to do some sort of time review or to have that good self-reflection moment with yourself by looking yourself in the mirror. And I've said this before, it's kind of that mirror moment in your business, in your life. As a mentor, as your support partner, your strategic partner, right? You can tell me anything because I'm not there with you 100% of the time. You can tell your spouse anything you want when it comes to your effort, because they're not with you 100% of the time. But the only time that you have to be right honest, and the truth is going to come out, is at the end of the day, you stand in front of that mirror and you have to tell yourself that you put in the effort because you know whether or not you did it or not. You can lie to everybody else. You can lie and make up excuses or anything you want as to why you're not where you want to be. But at the end of the day, it's the mere moment. You have to look yourself in the eye. And you can't lie to yourself because you already know the truth. So, unless you're open to that, unless you're open to accepting the mere moment that you know what? Dave's talking some real shit right now. And I need to be honest with myself. I'm not putting in the effort that I need to. I'm not doing everything. I'm not making up the time. I'm trying to be more free with my time because I'm a business owner and then I want to turn around and I want to complain because I'm not where I'm at with my goals. I'm not where I want to be with my revenue. It's because you're not being honest with yourself. Everything's gonna come with consistency. Okay. And so, how do you do that? And this is why the scheduling piece comes up. You have to control your calendar, or your calendar will control you. So if you're like, Dave, I need to, I'm gonna start doing two hours a day, six days a week outreach minimally. Okay, look at your calendar. Find the time when you want to do that, block it out. It doesn't have to be two hours in a row. Like it could be 30 minutes here, 45 minutes here, 45 minutes there, and 30 minutes at the end of the day. Like whatever it ends up being, you have the control of that on your calendar, but you need to make sure that you're doing it every single day. Consistency matters. So schedule it, block it on your calendar. You know, maybe you get up every day at 5:30 in the morning, and right now you take your time, getting ready, you make your coffee, and then you know, maybe you know, if you work from home, maybe you roll into the office at 7, maybe 7.15 out of you know, that day, right? But that's an hour and a half, an hour and 45 minutes that you can utilize for yourself. So get up at 5:30, make your coffee, get ready, get, and then maybe 6.15, you're like, boom, I'm in, I'm in the office, I'm ready to go. 6.15 to 7, that that time that you used to waste is now your outreach time. Get in, get it done. Right? The other thing that I do with my time that I I have advised other people on is what I call the my Triumph 30, right? So it's what is important for me today that I need to get done to make today a success. And I make sure I do that in the first 30 minutes of my day. Because then once that's accomplished, everything else that I get done for that day is sort of like, you know, gravy, you know, on the mashed potatoes, because my fiance likes you on this mashed potato, or you know, icing on the cake, whatever saying you want to say, right? But ultimately, you know, make your priority that first 30, 45 minutes of the day, you know, follow the triumph 30 and get it done. But then utilize your time more effectively by scheduling out your time throughout the day and build that repetitive schedule for you, build that habit of doing it. And outreach doesn't always have to look the same either. It doesn't always have to be cold calling, it doesn't always have to be you know cold emailing. It could be the the personal connection on LinkedIn or alignable or Facebook, wherever your ideal client, your ideal prospect sits. It's just about doing and outreach also, especially nowadays, like if you're a B2B and you're on LinkedIn, like outreach now is not just BMing, right? Or just connecting. Outreach now is commenting and getting involved in groups to add your value. And this is the other thing when it comes to outreach that I want you to truly if you're new to networking and you're new to building relationships in your business, stop selling, stop. People are gonna come to you when they learn about you, when you're the expert. And how do you do that? You build that expertise by giving value, by answering questions. That's how you build your expertise with your network. It's not by saying, Hey, I need you to come with me. You know, I'm gonna take care of your financials, I'm gonna give you this outcome. I'm gonna, you know, you've got to come and try business solutions. You know, I promise I'll just take away all your stress. People don't want that on their comments, people don't want that even in their DMs. So, what do you do when you go to networking events? Add value, answer questions. Hey, what's what's going on in your business? How are things going? Anything you're facing right now, struggles? And then when they tell you, one, you're gonna listen. Okay, two, if you know somebody that could potentially help them with that, provide a referral, provide a connection, be a connector in your network, and you're gonna be seen as an expert. So provide the connections to people, provide the support. And if somebody does have a problem that you know that you could potentially help them with, don't just be like, hey, well, let me let you know. I have this program that could help you with that. No, provide some support. Sit down for a coffee chat, talk them through it. Give them kind of the one or two pointers in the right, point them in the right direction. Let them go and try it first. And if it works, again, you're an expert. But if it doesn't, or maybe they don't have the capacity to do it themselves, who are they going to remember that pointed them in that right direction? It's gonna be you. You don't have to sell in networking events, you don't even have to sell online. Just get add value. So when you're in LinkedIn and you're and you're commenting on people's posts, comment to add to the conversation. Conversation is that driving piece right now on LinkedIn in terms of the algorithm and everything. It's are your posts generating conversation and are you commenting back to generate more conversation? And how I know that's true is because they're showing you in your profile the actual engagement, the impressions that your comments are getting. They're trying to drive the behavior of you generating conversation on people's posts. So go do that. Schedule that. That's part of your outreach efforts, is to go search, find, you know, you can find a big influencer that has a topic that you can comment on to add to the conversation. You can go to a local, you know, entrepreneur group or business owner group, especially if you're B2B, and find conversation in that group that's going on and add value to that conversation. There's so many different things that you can do when it comes to outreach. Because we said it, and it's roughly 40 to 50 touch points that you need to generate with a cold prospect, somebody who matches your ideal profile, but you're cold. 40 to 50 touch points that they have to see in order to recognize you. And that's like name recognition. So that's like emails in their box. They see your name. That's like you coming across their feed on LinkedIn, maybe sending a message to them, you know, personally to build a relationship, you know, you commenting on their posts. 40 to 50 of those in general is what somebody needs that's a cold prospect from you in order to have that name recognition, that recognition of what you do in your industry. But so many people just expect that the algorithm is going to take them to success, that the algorithm is going to put my post in front of my ideal prospect when they're thinking about the problem or the struggle or the emotion that I want to help them overcome. We have to stop being reactive in our efforts as business owners. You have to be proactive. And being proactive means getting in front of your ideal prospect, but also getting in front of people who do business with your ideal prospect. I say this all the time too. And I Darren, I wasn't Darren. Donnie, Donnie, a great conversation with with a guy, Donnie. He's out of Texas and he does networking. He's got a couple networking groups. And, you know, it was probably four or five months ago that we had this conversation, but it stuck with me because it's so true. So many people, and I listen to this when I lead our alignable alliance groups or networking groups that I'm a part of as well. But so many people go into these events and you know, and they talk about, oh, I need to do business with X, Y, and Z, their ideal client. But what people fail to realize is that you should be building relationships, whether it's on LinkedIn, in-person, alignable, any of those, you should be building relationships as well with people that do business with your ideal client. Because when you can build a relationship with somebody like that, and you're a value to them, you've made connections to them, they see you as a leader in that field. Now, when they make a recommendation of you to somebody that they're doing business with, it's a warm, trusted referral. And you don't have to go through those 40 to 50 touch points. Now it's more like five or less because it's it's trusted. They're already doing business with that relationship, right? So they trust that person. And if that person trusts you to give your name, it's like double trust. And so it's that much easier to potentially move that conversation forward, move that individual towards a solution than trying to build just you know 100% cold network referrals and cold network prospects. So when you're doing and you're meeting your network and you're going out and you're you know commenting on people's posts or you're building relationships with people through networking, focus on who does business with my ideal clients and try to build relationships with them as well. If you can do that, you will win. And one other caveat. Don't expect it to happen overnight. It's not, it takes effort. We talked about it, it takes consistency. A lot of times I've heard from people far too often, I've heard from people networking is impossible. Networking doesn't work, networking is unlikely to succeed. Going back to the initial segment from this episode. You then have a conversation with them, and you find out that the effort that they're putting in is not what's needed. They expect when they go to their first networking meeting that they're gonna get a referral out of that. They expect that they're not gonna have to give anything to that group in order to get anything out of it. And why I say this, I I've been there. I didn't get networking at first. I was under the impression that when you go to these and networking groups, that it's just gonna be this big referral fest. That's not what they are. You have to put in effort, you have to give value first. And as soon as I began to kind of change that mindset for myself, right? How do I serve people better? How do I give back to the group, give free advice, point people in the right direction first? Then that's actually begun to then give back. You have to give first, you know, and sometimes, sometimes you're gonna have to give, you're gonna have to eat shit for a little while as a business owner. Especially in if you're bootstrapping, you know, if if I look back to a mistake, maybe that I did was maybe I didn't try to find some you know, side, right? Income is general. Like you're not just going to get up and running, you know, and be a hundred percent where you want to be. Like it's going to take a little bit. And so finding ways to kind of generate some of that income for you or start a side gig while you're still in corporate, you know, or your full-time job. You you still have your your 5 to 9 p.m. or your 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. to build your side to replace your main income. You know, I wish I would have done that a little bit more prior to leaving corporate. It probably would have made things easier at the beginning. But give a little bit, right? And and if if you are in your business and you have to have cash flow, like you have to have money coming in for your personal, it makes it that much harder to try to make networking work because there's a lot of giving up front. There's a lot of time investment with nothing in return. And this is what truly comes down to when I actually have these conversations with people who say networking is impossible, networking is not going to work, you know, or it's unlikely to work. This is what it boils down to. They haven't put in the time, right? Or they haven't given it the length of time needed for it to start coming back. And the time that they have put in, it's been lack of actual benefit for the group and more what's in the benefit for them. And so if you're new to networking, or maybe you haven't done networking, or maybe you are doing networking and you're thinking, man, it is impossible, look back. You probably are gonna realize that maybe, you know, maybe you've only been to four networking events. You're probably not gonna get anything out of just four events, right? And you've probably gone with, you know, all right, hey, you're trying to talk too much about you, you're trying to talk about too much about your solutions, and you're not trying to learn about the people in that group. Learn about the people in that group, make a benefit, learn about their businesses, what are they facing? Who can I make a connection with in that group? That is the best way to win it networking. The best way to win it networking is to be that connector in your group. So, so with that, and so again, it comes down to scheduling, comes down to scheduling that time in your calendar. It doesn't have to be back to back, right? It doesn't, you know, when I say two hours a day for six days a week, it doesn't have to be, you know, 12 to 2 p.m. You can break that up however you want, but you have to put it in your calendar. You have to block that time and don't let anything overcome that time. The biggest hiccup when people start to do this is they schedule the time, but then they leave it either open, right? So they show it as free, or they allow things to overtake that two hours of outreach time and it becomes, you know, an afterthought. It's a backburn. It's like, oh, if I'm if I feel that I'm free, I'll do it at this time. Otherwise, I'll just do whatever else. But you can't do that, especially if you're not where you're at revenue, if you're not where you're at your clients, you have to be putting in the effort today because what happens today is what's going to pay off in the next 90 to 120 days. So if you don't do the work today, 90 to 120 days, you're gonna be cold. So you have to consistently do your prospecting, consistently do your outreach. So put it in your calendar. So with that, that's kind of you know what I was thinking of talking about today. If you made it this far, you you watched this. I hope there's maybe one or two tidbits that you get out of this. So we've talked about right how nothing's truly impossible, nothing's truly unlikely, but it's only limited by the effort at which you want to put in, right? Or that you can put in. Because if you can't put in the effort, yeah, you're right, that's probably not gonna happen. But don't let the fact that you can use the word impossible or you can use the word unlikely be the defining factor if that's what you're actually gonna allow yourself to accomplish. Because just think what what if we come up with today in today's world that in the 1800s, 1900s, people thought was impossible or was unlikely as well. Somebody put in the effort, they made it happen. You can do the same in your life, you can do the same in your build, in your in your business. Make it happen, put in the effort. We talked about your finances on your financial statements, looking at the categorization of your expense accounts and are they aligned appropriately between operating and cost of goods sold? We talked about the difference here. Cost of goods sold, if it's directly related to you doing a sale, directly related to you actually creating a project, generating a revenue, it should be cost of goods sold expense. If it you have something that you have to pay no matter what, like software, subscriptions, admin, rents, utilities, all those are operating. And why that is important for you to have those classified correctly to make better business decisions. Our software of the week was Canva. So if you're not using Canva or you know you don't know how to use Canva, haven't heard of it before, do a little bit of research on it this weekend. I highly suggest getting into Canva. Again, the$14 or whatever that you're gonna pay for a pro subscription, the ROI that you can make from Canva is astronomical. So get into Canva again, like none of these are like sponsored posts. Like this is just things that I use in my business on a regular basis that I'm sharing with you all, and things that I've seen that have worked for other people. And so this is why we're sharing these. And then lastly, it comes your scheduling. We just got done with that. How important it is for you to schedule your time, your outreach, and what that's gonna do for your success. You have to take the time to control your calendar or your calendar will control you. That's the biggest thing I can give to you to anybody. If you don't control your calendar, your calendar will control you. Which one is it? So, with that, remember, we love you all. Dwarren, if you're watching, I hope you feel better, brother, and that you, you know, your your short throat goes away. Next week, we're not gonna be live because we're welcoming our little baby girl into the world on Thursday. So we're not gonna be live on Friday, but we will have a sort of like highlight video of some things that have been kind of talked about uh over the what 45, 44 episodes that we've been doing this business unscripted podcast every single week. I'll create a little highlight video for y'all and we'll have that go live next Friday. So if you want, I would you know, let me know what you think about that. If you have questions, drop them. If you want to be on the show, down below is a link. You know, if you're a business owner, maybe you have some expertise that you want to share with the group, or maybe you have some obstacle you're facing right now in your business, right? Right down here. Sorry down here, obstacles and missed goals, right, are just learning opportunities. They're not failures, they're not ways, you know, they're not reasons for you to stop moving forward. They're just learning opportunities. Learn from them. But maybe you're going through an obstacle right now and you want some help with it. You want to be pointing in the right direction, you want to come on the show and talk about it. Let's do it. Drop, you know, down below there's a link. Click that, find a Friday show that aligns with your schedule, and let's get you out. And with that, if you have financial statements that you want to review, you want to get some insights on your financials, send me a message. I, as I mentioned earlier this week, I went live with a review of a client's financial situation, and we, you know, we talked about the miscategorization of cost of goods sold. So if that's you, you want me to look at your financials live and give you feedback live, drop them, shoot me a message, and uh we'll we'll set up a time to uh get those sent over. But with this, our goal, Trive Business Solutions, is to impact a thousand business owners by the end of 2028, a thousand business owners by 2028. Looking back at 2025, we're about 100, 125 right now. So we still got a little more, that a little less now than three years to get that done. So if you can help me with that, share this episode, share this channel, like our channel, subscribe to our channel, do all that fun algorithm stuff. If this is impactful for you, I appreciate it. The majority of people that are watching this are unsubscribed. So subscribe and get notified every time we put out one of these episodes. Use this as sort of yet learning block that stumbling block, you know, to get over the stumbling blocks in your business, in your life. I hope I can help you with that. But with that, if you have any questions, drop them down below. Whether you're watching the recording or live, I'll get them answered next show. With that, I'll see y'all. Well, I'm not gonna see y'all next week. I'm gonna see y'all in two weeks. Next week, I'm gonna be holding my little baby girl in the hospital. But with that, hope you guys have a wonderful and amazing week. Good luck to your 2026. I'm so excited to hear a lot of your success stories. Share them. If you're a business owner and you had success, maybe because of something that you've changed, something that you've heard on this podcast. Share that with us. I'd love to hear that. I'd love to share your win with our audience, with our group, with our network. Look forward to that. With that, have a good one. Enjoy your weekend. I'll see y'all. See y'all in two weeks.