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Adventures in Businessing

Adventures in Businessing (AIB) is the culmination of over 60 years in organizational leadership experience between three best friends and business partners. Discover the how working together should work.
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Now displaying: June, 2018
Jun 26, 2018

Introduction

I’m afraid I’m going to have a hard time finding good goof material this episode; the topic is philanthropy and how to ingrain that into your business. James and Kevin have been busy with an eCommerce plugin that they acquired recently. Rob has been having an awesome summer, because he’s Rob.Jeremy has been doing nothing but vacation, and he has another vacation coming up soon.

The Show

In this episode, the hosts discuss how you can build philanthropy into your business. Rob gives an example of how the Alderman Group is going to be donating their time to local nonprofits based upon recommendations from their current clients. Rob claims all the credit for this awesome campaign which he’s dubbed Tag: You’re It!. James and Kevin talk a little bit about how they need to be better at giving as a business, although they do give their time and some money within the WordPress community. Jeremy talks about how BonLife makes decisions about which local charities to support with their resources. TL;DR - Don’t let giving to local causes be an accident. Work giving into your budget and create a plan for how you’re going to decide which charities you give to. It’s ok to give to a charity and get something in return, like exposure.

Our Recommendations

I refuse to label this section of the podcast “Tips and Tricks,” no matter how much Rob calls it that. Deal with it, Rob. Deal with it. Rob recommends that you listen to the Be the Kind podcast. See that Rob? It wasn’t a tip or a trick. You recommended that people listen to that show. Of course, Rob is in marketing, so I actually expected him to replace recommendations with something like one weird old trick. Rob is like a walking Buzzfeed. Anyway, Be the Kind is a podcast about kindness and people being awesome to their local communities. You can find it wherever you find great podcasts. Kevin recommends switching to GitLab from GitHub for your code repositories, especially if you’re a business. GitHub. GitLab. Why do tech people have to make up so many useless words? I mean, the word get already existed. Not to mention that git sounds like an English pejorative. It’s like leaving vowels out of words to be clever; you don’t need to do it. Apparently the Hub of Gits took down the Ninja Forms code repository a bit too willy-nilly for Kevin’s liking, so he recommends controlling the server where your code lives. James recommends finding local charitable events that you can use as both a way of giving back and team building exercises. Apparently James raced dragons in a boat when he worked at Tennessee Valley Federal Credit Union. That helped his team get closer together and raised money, or something like that. Jeremy recommends the site charitynavigator.org. Their tagline is: Your Guide to Intelligent Giving. If you want to check out how charities spend your money before you give, you can find lots of details at this site. Again, I’d like to make fun of Jeremy here, but I’m coming up a bit short on material.
Jun 12, 2018

Introduction

James takes the helm again as the hosts dive into how they react to various changes within their respective industries. Time is divided between BR and AR, which of course means Before Rob and After Rob. If you’re in the 10%, you know what I mean. Rob’s been sending out lots of proposals, so if you’re looking for a podcast-happy significant other, send Rob a message. Kevin and James have been working on a new product/service that they hope to launch soon. As usual, Jeremy is not in town. He’s currently in an RV driving across the country on vacation. When he gets back in town, he’ll be around for a few days before going on another vacation.

The Show

Rob talks about Facebook Ad issues that his team faced recently. A big client had a lot of eggs in the Facebook Ad basket and was recently told that their ads could no longer run. The client represented a large portion of the business’s income, and so Rob and his team had to find solutions. Once again proving how evil Facebook is and how much better off you’d be just putting up billboards. Billboard advertising is the future! Think about all the free time people are going to have to look at billboards once cars begin driving themselves. Think about it! Kevin and James discuss the GDPR, a European privacy law that just went into effect and how their business has responded. If you’ve gotten a million emails telling you updated privacy policies, you can thank the GDPR. Ninja Forms added tools and functionality to help WordPress users cope with the new privacy initiative. Good for them; I don’t even want to be snarky about protecting my privacy. What I search for is my own business. On an unrelated note, I’ll be right back while I clear my browser cache.

Our Recommendations

Rob recommends that you get some skullmonkeys. Unfortunately, he doesn’t mean little crystal monkey skulls to sit on your desk. That would be really cool. But, no. Rob is referring to skullmonkey headphones, which he compares to “really broken in baseball gloves.” If you’ve ever picked up an old, worn baseball glove and thought to yourself, “man, I gotta have a pair of headphones made out of these babies,” then you’re in luck. If you wear contacts, Kevin suggests that you check out Biofinity contacts. He insists on referring to them incorrectly as “bio-infinity,” but they are indeed just Biofinity. Normally I like to make fun of Kevin’s recommendations, but these are really good contact lenses. I wear them myself, and I win staring contests with my five year old nephew all the time. James recommends a podcast about kindness produced by Rob called Be the Kind. It’s about kindness and finding good in a world that makes it really easy to focus on the negative. I’d say something snarky about that, but that sounds like the kind of podcast I’d love. I’m the most positive and uplifting person I know.
Jun 5, 2018

Introduction

Well folks, it’s been a good run. 18 Episodes isn’t too shabby. Someone done decided to let Kevin drive this thing, and to be honest, it’s a bit of a train wreck. No offence to Kevin; I’m sure he did the best he could. Sorry, not sorry.

For someone who floated naming the show after himself, Jeremy has been conspicuously absent for several episodes. Can anyone confirm that he’s actually alive? And when do the hosts start looking for a replacement? I mean, I know a snarky, humorous show notes writer that could be convinced to be on the show for the right amount of money. Get with my agent.

The Show

In this episode, the hosts discuss hiring your first employee. When do you know it’s the right time to hire? How do you find qualified people?

The hosts suggest that the time to hire is when you find that you don’t have time to do things that energise you. James calls these areas in which you have the most impact your “super powers.” Once you are doing more admin work or other stuff that’s outside your super power, you should think about hiring someone.

From the outside, Rob says that it seems like he always has what he needs. When it was time to hire his first employee, he knew someone who had just come available. When it was time for the next, he already had someone lined up. While this may seem easy, he says, it’s actually the result of cultivating relationships with awesome people.

James refers to this technic with a generic sports metaphor: “keep your bench warm.” By that he means to keep your eyes open in your circle of influence to see where your next hire may come from. Keep in mind that the person you hire may not currently be performing the same job that you would need them to. That’s ok. Both Rob and James suggest that it’s more important to hire the right person and then find a position for them.

Our Recommendations

Rob recommends a script writing program called Slug Line, and he teaches the rest of the podcast what a Slug Line is. Of course, yours truly already knew what a Slug Line was. In fact, I have a great spec script about a secret service agent who’s also a baker that falls in love with a nerdy librarian. I wrote it for Spielberg, but he wound up passing on it because of creative differences. If you’re a big time Hollywood producer or director, let me know. Then I can finally stop writing show notes for quick cash.

If you’ve got a lot of extra cash lying around, James has a great recommendation for you! Just go out and buy an iPad Pro and an Apple Pencil, then download a program called Good Notes. That’ll let you replicate the usefulness of a notepad and pencil without the need to actually carry around the notebook and pencil. If you don’t have the money to invest in that setup, I’ll sell you an eyePad Pro, which is a legal pad with the eyePad logo at the top with a mechanical pencil attached via a string. You’ll get all the best parts of the Apple iPad: portability, ease of use, point and click interface, etc. without spending all that money. Just $79.99 each.

Kevin decides to get super nerdy and recommend that you play a tabletop RPG like Dungeons & Dragons. He claims that it’s a great way to be creative and cooperatively tell a great story. We all know that D&D, as the kids call it, is really just Fantasy Football for nerds. Apparently nerds like Kevin think that D&D, and tabletop games like it, are mainstream enough to recommend them on a podcast about business. I remember when nerds were polite and kept that stuff to their mom’s basements. Rob volunteers Kevin to run a D&D game for you if you are in the southeastern Tennessee area.

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