3 top tips from Henry Daas:
1. Don’t be afraid to experiment with Saas products.
2. Explore the 5 reasons that small businesses fail
3. Use Money tools in your business & personal life.
Visit Henry’s website: https://henrydaas.com/
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, business, book, run, money, coach, hiring, clients, entrepreneur, finance, write, businesses, marketing, successful, silo, coaching, years, call, screenplays, henry
SPEAKERS
Henry Daas, Debra Chantry-Taylor
Debra Chantry-Taylor 00:12
Welcome to another episode of Better Business Better Life. I’m your host, Debra Chantry-Taylor. I’m passionate about helping entrepreneurs and their leadership teams get what they want out of business and life. On the show, I invite successful business owners and expert speakers to share their successes. They are open and honest about the highs and lows of business and also life as a business owner. We want to share those learnings with you to inspire you, but also to help you avoid some of the common mistakes. My hope is that you take something from each of these short episodes that you can put into action to help you get what you want, not only out of your business, but also your life. So good morning, and welcome to another edition of better business better life. Today I am joined by the charming Henry Daas who is based over in the US. And Henry is a serial entrepreneur. He has run a number of businesses from it to leasing to spec houses, you name it. But in more recent times, he has gone into coaching and he has written a book called FQ, which is financial intelligence. So welcome, Henry, pleasure to have you here.
Henry Daas 01:16
I’m very happy to be here, Debra.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 01:18
All right. So obviously a very well accomplished businessman yourself, would you like to give us a little bit of your personal history and give us your professional and personal best in your life?
Henry Daas 01:29
Okay, so um, I started as an entrepreneur about 30 years ago, just sort of hung up a shingle and said, I’m an entrepreneur, kind of you know, that old, that’ll just not Yeah. I’ve had business partners, I’ve had a couple of them. Sometimes it works out really well. Sometimes one plus one equals three, sometimes. One plus one equals minus three, Kennedy. We all know that one. So that’s been pretty interesting. As far as business best I would say probably writing this book, my book is called FQ financial intelligence. I mean, it was looking back on it, it was a pretty Herculean task to write 120,000 words, real Compendium about you know, anything and everything I thought people needed to know about finance so, so that I would, that I would chalk up as a one of the business bests. And a personal best would be I’m a golfer. And last summer I broke 80, or the very first time, in fact, my last round of the season, before we closed up with the cold weather. I shot 78 I’m very proud of that.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 02:47
That is awesome. Well done. Okay, so the book. Yes. I mean, I must admit I trying to write a book on financial intelligence. I think that that sounds quite challenging. So, so why, what made you want to write a book around it?
Henry Daas 03:01
You know, I was I was in Bangkok. And I was at a conference with a lot of probably about three 400, digital nomads, people who write people who have location independent businesses, I had a half a dozen of my clients, their son, who I had never met in the flesh before. And one of the days was were these mastermind groups, and I found myself at a mastermind group with a bunch of coaches. And we were talking about our, you know, our Jim Collins B hag, you know, the big, hairy, audacious goal. And I said, you know, I’ve been trading the markets and managing my own money since I was in high school. And I always thought it would be nice to, you know, build a course where I could teach people what I’ve learned, and that kind of everybody at the table was half my age. Like, Well, you better get on that dude, because you’re not getting any younger. And, and I did. That was really the impetus. I got home and I wrote it all in less than two months. I think it was about 50 days. It took me to write this. Um, yeah, I basically just plowed through it. And it was, I started at the beginning. And I finished at the end, I’ve written 11 screenplays. It’s one of the things that I do is like a little side thing. I’ve never sold anything and nothing’s been made. I’ve entered them in contest then the very first one I wrote that way I started at the beginning. And then I finished at the end, but that’s the only time the rest of now I’m writing another book about business and I’m hot hopscotching around you know, I’m a little thing comes to me and I write a little bit, and I’ll piece that all together later.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 04:32
Fair enough. So tell us a little bit about your business history because it’s obviously this knowledge to write this book has come from you actually being a serial entrepreneur and running many many businesses. Tell us a bit about the some of those and some of the highs and the lows of running a business.
Henry Daas 04:49
Well, I look at businesses you know, the origin story of businesses basically fall into two buckets. There’s the what I call the Accidental Business, right? Yeah. And then there’s the purposeful business. So in the latter case, you sort of sit down and write a business plan, you look at all the things that you’re going to do, you can’t you, you vet your idea, and you raise money and, and you go at it, and there’s a chance you’ll succeed, and there’s also a chance you’re going to fail. The Accidental business is more like, hey, you know, I need some help, like a friend of yours will ask, I need some help. I’m having trouble. That’s how mine started. I had a friend of mine who was having trouble sourcing computers. I said, let me take a crack at it. I took a crack at it, I did it. I didn’t know have any idea what I was doing. I did it, it was successful, I made a couple bucks. And then he started feeding me deals. And before you know, it, I had done I think $600,000 worth of business and about a year and a half. And I said, this is a real business. You know, I’m running out of my apartment, I’m running out on credit cards, wasn’t until I actually quit my job that I turned my attention to okay, how do I structure this in a way so that it’ll be successful? Okay, so that’s, that’s kind of how that’s kind of how things go. And then business will run its course, that first business ran for, you know, 10 years. And then I had a falling out with my business partner. And so I had to pivot into something he had to pivot into something was a couple years of hell to do that. And then I, you know, I found something new I got into the home building home theaters for people. And it’s still it’s still scratched that, you know, tech itch that I had. But I had to build a whole sales and marketing organization, which was my partner’s responsibility in the in the previous incarnation. So I had to learn a whole different skill set.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 06:53
So where do you think your natural skill set lies? We talk about our unique ability, the things that were really great at this or I God given talent? Where would you say yours naturally lies?
Henry Daas 07:04
Well, the business book that I’m working on, it has the unlikely title of codfish. And it grew, the name grew out of a coaching session with it actually, with an Australian client a number of years ago, we’re trying to look at the different buckets that you have to play in as a business. And so, we came up with customer support operations, development, finance, infrastructure, sales and marketing and human resources. And then I challenged all my other clients to find the, you know, like the eighth bucket, right, it was like a convient, find me something that isn’t covered in one of these seven, we never did, never came up with anything that wouldn’t fit into one of these buckets. Now, again, going back to your origin story of your business, if you look at it as the entrepreneur, your business was born out of one of these, I call them silos, right? My first business was born out of the customer support silo, I was selling computers a commodity item, if you’re selling a commodity item, you better have some value add that’s going to make people want to buy this from you, because they can buy it from anybody. If you want to compete on price, well, then you know what that is, that’s a race to the bottom, that’s just margin compression until nobody can make any business. Except the people who are just so gigantic like Amazon, that they just crowd out everybody with their sharp elbows and they make what they make, and they own the market. So if I look at those seven, whether it be me or any entrepreneur that I might be coaching, the way I generally define it is you’re gonna have two that are really, really good that you you know, you kick asset, you’re gonna have three that you’re, you know, Fair to middling, I’m okay at it, and you’re probably gonna have one or two that are your Achilles heel. Yep. And that’s been pretty consistent. For me, I would say that it is probably the customer support and the finance side, which are really my, my strong suits. And my absolute Achilles heel, which won’t come as a shock to anybody who knows me as Marketer.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 09:16
Right? Okay.
Henry Daas 09:19
Right. I mean, this is a piece of marketing here. But, you know, I grew up in a in a in an era of put your nose to the grindstone, do your work. Don’t call attention to yourself. Good things will happen if you work hard. It doesn’t work that way. Right, you figure that out very quickly, that the cream does not rise to the top that there are all sorts of headshaking li inferior products out there, that people have spent an enormous amount of marketing dollars on with the idea that don’t worry, as soon as you know we’re going to get eyeballs, we’re going to get a clientele and then we’ll fix everything that really sucks about our product. That’s just kind of kind of how how it’s done. I’ll tell you an interesting story about when I was developing this as a as a course. And I had written 100,000 words and had all of that I spent an enormous amount of time. So a friend of mine who coaches people who are exiting the military, he sends me a thing it says, you know, I got this course and I’m gonna sell it and what do you think about all this material? I said, you know, and he’s got all this marketing material. And I said, Yeah, it’s, it’s really great. Could I see the actual like, you know, coursework, he goes, Oh, I haven’t written any of that stuff. I’m gonna, I’m gonna, I gotta market it and make sure that there’s a there are people out there who are gonna buy this? Yeah. And once I get enough people who are gonna buy this, well, then I’ll use that money to build a course. And I said, Well, you know what? Compared to the way I did it, I have to be honest, I think that’s the smarter way to go. Yeah.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 11:05
And it’s the way people are encouraged to do it as well. I mean, I’m I trained in market validation under Dr. Rob Adams, actually, as a as a fellow American. And, you know, he always says that you are your best to spend as much time working through the validation as you’re going to spend on actually developing the product. Otherwise, you can find yourself developing the most amazing, you know, IT technology stuff, but nobody actually really wants to
Henry Daas 11:28
I know, but nobody knows about it. Yeah, exactly.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 11:30
Listen, that you can develop something, not test it in the marketplace, go out there and launch it and realize that it is just a complete Nutter
Henry Daas 11:38
Well, I knew I knew that people needed to level up their financial game, there was no, there’s no question about that. You look at the entities like Robin Hood, and some of these other, you know, Fin tech, a lot of money has gone into fin tech. But what, what they’ve, what they’ve done is you’ve given people, in my opinion, you’re giving them a race car that goes really, really fast. But you haven’t taught him how to drive. Right. And what I’m trying to do is teach people to drive. Yeah. All they really want is the shiny race car.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 12:19
And I think you’re right, I mean, often we go into business, and I myself at a number of businesses as well, probably my Achilles heel is more the finance side of things. And you know, you you’re very, very passionate about what you do. But if you’ve never run a business before, you don’t actually understand all the different facets of it and what needs to be done. And it’s the finances that will ultimately kind of well, any of the op sales or marketing or finance can kill you. But quite often it is the financials that end up being the issue for businesses,
Henry Daas 12:46
I see it all the time I get I get clients who come in and and they just, they just don’t know anything about. They figure if there’s money in their bank account that they must be making money. And it’s like, never heard about receivables and payables and some really, really basic stuff. And then the other the other silo that I see a lot of problems is operations. They just don’t really know how to operate. And that’s kind of the hardest thing to learn for many entrepreneurs, especially, you know, as as you scale up, right, so you’re, you’re a two person shop when you start and now you’ve got 20 headcount, now you’ve got 50. Now you’ve got 100, this beast is getting rather unwieldy. And you can’t run this. Like you ran it when you were bootstrapping. Yep. So you’ve got to ask yourself, well, you know, I had all these I had these great skills I had, I had the customer support and the finance silo down pat. But I’m not great at operations. And now I’ve got this sprawling enterprise. I’m not very good in in human resources. How do I manage this? Right? It’s, it’s, it’s vexing. So on the surface, you’re super successful. But what’s behind the curtain there? Is is just cobbled together with spit and glue. Yeah.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 14:13
So how did you fill your gaps in your business? So you know, recognizing that sales and marketing potential is your Achilles heel? What did you do to to fire people? Yeah.
Henry Daas 14:24
I wrote a thing that’s a little PDF. It’s about 25. page PDF. You can download it for free off my website, five reasons. Small businesses fail. And I’ve done a I’ve done a deck and I’ve done it live back back in the day when you used to be able to do things live.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 14:43
I vaguely remember those days. Yeah.
Henry Daas 14:45
Yeah. Vaguely. Right. And number two was hiring. Yep. You know, when I asked people I asked the audience tell me the last person you hired. What was the process? It’s like, well, I needed a you know, I needed a developer and so my friends cousins, Dan, Hi, Janice knew I was acquainted with somebody who just got, you know, this terrible, terrible stories of I’m just not going through a, you know, an SOP not following a standard operation, operational procedure for how do I find talent and not taking the time to evaluate that talent. I mean, when I know I’ll give you a simple example, when I hired a copy editor for my book, and until I went to one of the seminars, I didn’t know what a copy editor was. And so I did some research. So I went on a site that’s called the editorial freelancers Association, all professionals, I put a two sentence ad out. And I got 60 resumes in 24 hours, and I went through every single one of them. And I picked nine people. And I sent out invitations to interview with me and seven of them responded, it took a lot of a lot of work. Part of it was educating myself on what the talent pool is like. Because you don’t want to put an ask out there. That’s what I call looking for a pink unicorn sit on a rainbow. Right? Some people go out there, oh, here’s what I want. I want all of this, but I’m only gonna pay them $13 an hour. It’s like, you’re not gonna get that dude. I’m sorry. So be realistic. But it was a process. And it took me weeks. But I wasn’t in a rush. Because this was a super important hire. And this is just for a project. This is not even for someone that you’re going to put on salary. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that’s, do you need to put the time and the effort into that, because the stakes are so high in human capital, and mistakes can set you back. Right, one bad hire can set you back for months, or can you even in some cases, kill your business?
Debra Chantry-Taylor 16:51
Completely agree. And I think you know, we’ve got even more strict employment laws over here in New Zealand as well. So if somebody doesn’t work out, it’s not just a case of saying, hey, this isn’t working out, off you go. We can’t go here. So it’s
Henry Daas 17:03
Very liberal laws here. And having coached people in Central America and Europe, I mean, not a client in Austria, everything’s collectively bargained, right. It’s a very, very different environment. So in, in Central America, you’ve got to offer them separate IDs for every year that they worked for you. That’s not mandatory here in the US, we’re kind of the Wild West for hiring here.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 17:31
I was very fortunate to, to have John Spence come and talk at one of my events. And he was just talking about, you know, if somebody doesn’t work out, you just fire them. It’s like, you might do that in the US, not quite so much.
Henry Daas 17:41
Not quite how it works.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 17:43
So we were very fortunate to spend a couple of hours with Patrick Lencioni. Yesterday, and he was saying that, you know, when you’re hiring people, you actually should not just follow all that process you just talked about, but also take them out somewhere, take them out underwear, shopping, take them out to lunch or something, have somebody delivered the wrong lunch meal to them and just see how they actually responded every time on
Henry Daas 18:06
The golf course. Well, yeah, that’s
Debra Chantry-Taylor 18:07
A great idea. Yeah,
Henry Daas 18:08
That’s a great place to take. Take them, because you will, you will see everything about them. Right. Do they cheat? Yep. Right? Do they get angry when things because it’s a very, very difficult game. So
Debra Chantry-Taylor 18:21
The game too, so you’re getting quite a bit of time with them on to
Henry Daas 18:24
Four or five hours? Yeah, with them. And yet, and there’s a lot of downtime while you’re waiting for other people to hit, or while you’re looking for balls in the woods. So yeah, you get to see people’s true colors.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 18:35
I love it. I love it. Okay, so tell me a little bit more about the actual book and the course. So people who, who would take the course or read the book, what are they likely to get from it? What is the the key takeaways from that? doing that? Well,
Henry Daas 18:51
The way I structured it is, you know, as like a like a screenwriter, it’s a three I, I put it into three acts. So the first act is starts with the psychology of money. So understanding what your tendencies towards money are. Are you living in scarcity? Are you living in abundance? There’s no point in teaching you how to trade stocks, if you’re too sheepish to ever put a trade on, because you’re worried that it’s going to go down and I see that all the time. Yeah. But it’s also about getting your personal balance sheet, your personal income statement, your cash flows, really, for many people, it’s the very first time in their life that they’ve actually sat down and said, Okay, this is what I’m worth, right? This is what I have my house, my mortgage, my cars, my personal property, my stocks, bonds, whatever it might be. They may have absolutely no clue. Again, they may think well, you know, I’m not broke, so I must be okay. And then I have a chapter that I called the thick green line where I look at not only today but the what we call contingent liabilities like looming you later on down the road, if you’re 30 years Old, it’s not unusual in the US, for people to get to be 30 years old, and have a net worth of zero, right with the student debts and other headwinds on people. So think about that you’re 30 years old, you might be out of school for 10 years, and you’ve got no money. Right? You’re at 01, my wife and I got married, we had a net worth of zero, I was 31, she was 29. Within five years, we had seven figures, I’m not saying this to be braggadocious. But within five years, we had seven figures in net worth. And we’ve never had less than that, you know, we were off to the races that took a plan. And it took a lot of hard work, it didn’t happen accidentally. Not just gonna happen by getting a high paying gut job. Because you know, the more you make, the more you spend, spend
Debra Chantry-Taylor 20:44
To Absolutely. Design your life before.
Henry Daas 20:47
Exactly. And then the second six chapters is the second act is walking. Now I got some money, what do I do with it? How do I invest it? How do I buy a house? You know, what sort of asset classes do I want to be involved in? Do I want to be you know, do I have FOMO? And want to be a crypto trillionaire? Or whatever it is? Or is it more like? No, I’ve had a bunch of clients recently where it’s been very real estate related. And I just got my real estate license here in the state of Connecticut. So I’m now a legitimately a realtor. So I can speak not only authoritatively from my own experience, but also I can peek behind the curtain because I’m behind the curtain now. And then the third act is kind of old mishmash of other things. I have a chapter that I called gypsies, tramps and thieves, which is, which was my favorite one to write because it’s like, all the ways that people are trying to steal your money, right? It’s just one after another scammed I talked about the lottery and other things, where it’s like, if you want to buy a scratch off game every once in a while, okay, no big deal. But if you find yourself in a situation where you need that endorphin rush from money, that’s bad. I tell people like when I talk to people to teach, and I teach them trading, I tell them and I’ve said this many times on podcasts, if your trading is not incredibly boring, then you are doing something wrong. It needs to be incredibly boring, you want to make Boring, boring, boring money. Same thing applies for entrepreneurship. If you’re if the business you’re running is a roller coaster, right? Ask yourself, is that really what I want? Or do I just want I sort of tongue in cheek called them stupid businesses, right? You just want a lot of people it’s really, you know, you just want a stupid business, something that flies beneath the radar. It’s predictable, reasonably predictable, there’s not a stampede of people that are coming in trying to capitalize on it, they’re not not a gold rush around it, you know, a predictable bread and butter, you know, good margin business, they’re out there. They’re just not very sexy. And let’s face it, Sex sells.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 23:10
Interesting. Okay, and I know that you now do you now coach and you do a lot of coaching with entrepreneur businesses in that kind of what we would call the mid market. So the ones that are already established already up and running. Yeah, tell us a little bit more about that. Tell me what to Who do you love to work with? Why, and How do you help?
Henry Daas 23:30
Well, I build myself as a bespoke, which is, which is a fancy word for custom. So I’m a bespoke coach, you know, as opposed to, you know, the Entrepreneurial Operating System which is which is a system that designed for you to follow or something like burn harnesses, Rockefeller habits, which you may have heard of another burner. Yep, yeah, burn, I know, burn, and he’s one of the founders of the Yo, then there’s great stuff and all of those things. Mine is my, my practice is a little bit different. My job is to kind of figuratively, speaking, speaking, crawl into your head and figure out which of these silos are your are your strong ones, and which are the ones that we’re going to have to do some work on? Not necessarily to make you a guru at it, but to figure out how you’re going to, in many ways manage around it, right, how you’re going to make good hires in the marketing arena. Right, if marketing is not your strong suit, as opposed to just doing it trial by error, you know, as I call it. So that’s that’s really the the main imprimatur. I call myself a coach approach strategic advisor. So I did a year of Coach Training on a on a path to become a certified ICF coach. When I finished it, I discovered that it’s just too limiting. You know, there are there’s so much about from my entrepreneurial experience, that I’m I’m leaving off the table if are on the table. If I follow these strict rules, so I said I’m not ICF
Debra Chantry-Taylor 25:05
Has got some pretty strong guy. It’s pretty, pretty strong frameworks that you have to follow. And I think you’re right.
Henry Daas 25:10
They’re very, and they’re really good. I mean, I learned an enormous I didn’t realize how much I learned until I actually went back a couple years later. I went to a school called Coatesville and coach Philly, once you’re a student, it’s kind of evergreen, and you can go back and take classes. And when I first took the took the class, I was like a deer in the headlights. I’m like, wow, I know nothing. And I was a successful businessman, you know, 50 year old, successful businessman, and I’d like and then a couple years later, I did and it’s like, wow, the game really slowed down. All of a sudden, it’s like, oh, yeah, yeah, I, I get this now. Yeah, but there are times as an entrepreneurial coach, where you just have the answer. So am I going to go through silly, torturous games with my client for them to discover? Or am I just going to give them the answer? Yeah. Sometimes, it just makes sense to give them the answer.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 26:04
I’m a bit like you, I also didn’t go down the ICF route, because it was so restrictive. And I think that being a business owner myself, you know, sometimes we have to put the mentor hat on. And like you said, actually say, I’ve been here, I’ve done this, this is this. And then other times, we’re a coach, and we can you know, which is where we are very much only about asking the questions to help them get to the right. And sometimes
Henry Daas 26:22
You’re just a cheerleader, saying, hey, you know, take a breath, enjoy a big win. Right? Enjoy it, right? Savor it, because they’re, they’re tough, you know, they don’t come by that often, you know, bad beats, people will talk about, you know, the entire session. But it’s like, no, let’s not do that. Let’s talk about something that was a big win for you, or even a little win, it’ll be something that will pick up your spirits, because entrepreneurship is very, very tough. You don’t have to tell entrepreneurs that they know it. And that’s why there are so few people who even attempt entrepreneurship, no less are successful at it. It’s a it’s a rare, it’s a rare cat, or kitten, as it were, who? Who was going to say, You know what, I’m I’m not, I’m not cut out for cubicle world. It’s going to be my show. Yeah.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 27:19
Great. And I think you’re right, I mean, that the work that I do with EOS is very much wrapped in a framework around how they run their business, I liken it to your operating system of your phone, for example. And then you plug in other things around it. And so I actually say to people, you know, you absolutely should have somebody else who is there to help you. With the leadership side of the business with the coaching side of the business. Because my job is around putting in the ELLs you still need help in other areas, plug the other, the other apps in, if you like,
Henry Daas 27:46
Well, yeah, you’re building the structural framework for that. No different than that my, you know, my codfish concept, which is we have these silos, and then I call them synapses that actually connect them in many businesses, even in even solopreneurs. Those synapses are broken, or they were never established. Right? So we want repeatable processes and procedures. It doesn’t mean we’re running a franchise, right? Where we’re putting the fries in for for seven minutes. Not like that. Nobody wants to do that. That’s not why people wanted to be entrepreneurs.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 28:20
No, um, we talked about, you know, you basically, was it you systematize, the predictable second, humanize the exceptional, which means you have the framework that allows you to people know what they need to do, but it gives them the opportunity then to actually be free to humanize the whole experience. Yeah. So when is the book The next book coming out?
Henry Daas 28:43
Well, I gotta finish writing it. So
Debra Chantry-Taylor 28:46
I just I love the sound of it. I’m looking forward to seeing it. Yeah.
Henry Daas 28:48
I’ve got a bunch of chapters done. But this book is even bigger. I mean, my FQ book is 432 pages. I gave some hard copies to people. And they’re like, this is the heaviest book that I’ve ever had. I said, I don’t know what to tell you. Right. There’s a lot of knowledge in there. So it’s got to be heavy. But I’m, I’m not in a, you know, I’m not in a rush. Not it’s not like lives are in the balance. No, my kids are going to eat, whether the book gets published this week, or a year from now. So I I’m not not to say that I’m a dilettante about it. But I don’t have quite the sense of urgency that I might have had, you know, 20 years ago. Yeah. It’s a little different stakes are a little different. Now, at my age,
Debra Chantry-Taylor 29:32
I should watch out for with interest, hey, we’re coming to the end of time. But one before we finish up a couple of things, I’d love you to share sort of three tips that would really help the listeners in terms of running their business in a better way so they can have a better life. And then also, I’d love you to share with us if people do want to contact you if they want to hold a book or order the course. How would they actually do that? So let’s start with the top three tips.
Henry Daas 29:56
So the I guess, I use a lot of sass probably I’m sure a lot of folks that are out there do as well. And what I’ve discovered is I use I use a couple of sites, I use G two, I use kept Terra. Again, a lot of those are paid for I have clients that, you know, pay to be on those sites. I use another site that’s cold, that’s called alternative to the not every SAS product is great. But beyond that, most products are partial solutions for whatever it is that you want to do. Yeah. So I encourage people to not settle, right? Use the product. But once you detect that it’s not quite cutting it as your business evolves. But you look at it, and you say, well, it’s going to be really painful for me to change to something else. My suggestion is get over that. Right? Okay. Yeah, my job is yes, it is going to be painful, the benefits will outweigh that later on. And I’ve seen it myself even running, you know, a small operation, I’ll use a particular product, and then I’ll start banging into limitations on it. And I’ll get frustrated. And I’m saying, there’s a lot of products, right, you go on G two, and it shows you a matrix, right? If you’re going to do if you’re going to you’re looking for something for your sales team, you don’t have to use Salesforce. I mean, there’s a zillion of these CRM programs. Yeah, I’ve used a whole bunch of them. Right, whether it be Insightly or Pipedrive, or Monday or whatever. Don’t be afraid to experiment with those things. And if it’s got to get to a point where you’re kind of hitting a wall, and instead of getting frustrated, you or people who work for you say hey, I’m going to charge you with finding me a replacement for this. Yep, may cost you more money. Maybe this it may be that in the long run, it’s going to save you money. Yeah. So that’s, that’s a something I’ve learned experientially because you can you can run any business from almost any business from a laptop these days. I guess another. Another little tidbit. And I had a podcast earlier today. And I kind of went on a little rant about this. So I’m sort of fresh in my mind. That little PDF that I wrote five reasons that small businesses fail. Well, the number two reason is hiring. Well, the number one reason I’m not going to make you guess, is your idea. Basically, your idea sucks. Yep, just as simple as that. Yep. Right. So whether it be the current business that you’re running, or a business that you might be thinking of, of running or spinning off, I started my when we started our first IT company, we spun off a leasing company, which was very successful and very, very, very, probably the most lucrative business that I ever owned. And we created a whole separate Corporation and the whole thing that your ideas hard beat, I tell people beat them up. Yep, find the the Find a friend or a business associate, who’s always negative, right, find that person. We all have them in our lives. Yeah. Mine happen to be my children. But that’s the story. And pitch them on the idea and let them rip it to shreds. Yes, right, whatever it is. Because you’ll save an enormous amount of heartache, and a lot of money by not executing ideas that are just not very good. Yeah.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 33:46
It’s actually interesting. We have, we have an angel group over here, an angel investment group who actually run these drop in sessions where you can take your idea, run it past them. And I love it because it’s run by a guy called Rudy is a friend of mine German, he will just tell it, absolutely as it is, and he rips them to pieces. And I always feel really nervous about taking them in there. But it’s like he is the best thing that can happen. Because it’s suddenly challenges because your friends and your family want to tell you usually it’s a wonderful idea. Yes, you should definitely do it. Oh, that’s fabulous. And whereas these guys give it to you as it is, which I think is just the best thing that can happen.
Henry Daas 34:19
Yeah, I was in an angel group, New York angels for a little while. Yeah. And, and I would cover to cover my my eyes a couple of times with people in there because I just I felt terrible for them. But but they needed it. They they needed that tough love and that’s, that’s hard to come by that said some of that’s a generational thing. Like you know, you know, I’m an old school Boomer as I call myself. We’re not afraid to just give you the straight scoop. And we will admire people who will give it back to us in spades. But you have again, I’m probably not profiling an entire generation. But there’s a generation that’s kind of grown up avoiding controversy. Or, or just texting instead of meeting face to face and looking someone in the eye. Right? It’s a lot different when you got to be in the same room with somebody and look at their nonverbal cues and their reactions. But it has to be done. The same thing with the, with the coaching, there are times where it’s like, Dude, I gotta just tell you how it is. Right? Like, this is your this is you got to you got to rethink this just just doesn’t work. Right? But that’s important.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 35:39
I agree. Right? third, and final.
Henry Daas 35:45
Oh, three, you’re really gonna make me Stretch? Stretch my so lately?
Debra Chantry-Taylor 35:50
I am yeah. Oh,
Henry Daas 35:51
Okay. So, um, money tools, right? So here, so we were talking about finance, so many dreams. So for my personal money, I use Quicken. It’s the only thing that that actually works. And I’ve tried everything that’s out there at one time or another. For business. The popular ones are either QuickBooks or Xero. Right? I tried 01 of my clients was using it. So I downloaded it and did this I actually replicated my books. And zero didn’t work for my brain was much more. I don’t know, it’s just much different, much more difficult. But but people swear by it. But the My point is, stay up to date on that stuff. Right? It’s amazing how many clients are three months behind on their numbers? Like you can’t run a business three months behind? Yeah. Right. You just can’t stay up to date. Yeah, get the reports you need, understand the reports and use those as a as your crystal ball to help you extrapolate where this business is going. So that you don’t have to wait for it to happen. You can see it ahead of time. Yeah.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 37:01
We talked about using scorecards to keep track of these things like in the weekly because I just think that you know, no matter what size of the business, there’s always an excuse of as a smaller business, that they don’t need to look at those things. But actually, no matter what size, if you’re looking at things on a regular basis, you’re picking up on the trends, you’re picking up on the potential issues way before anything happens. And we used to have small businesses when I was working at the Ice House, who would not even look at their finances till the end of the year, when the accountant would give them the report to say this is you know, where, where you’ve gone. It’s too late, you know?
Henry Daas 37:33
Don’t bury your head in the sand. Yeah, you know, even though the reason that people don’t do it is because they think that’s not gonna like what they see, well, you know what, take your again, this is old school, take your pain, take it now. Because you can then actually make some adjustments to do something about it, as opposed to waiting till it’s all said and done. And I see this all the time in the in, you know, coaching people in finance. It’s like, you don’t just buy a stock and then stick it somewhere and just, you know, revisit it occasionally. Yeah, I mean, I have a whole database that I do every morning, before the markets open. I look at all these charts and futures. And I’ve started I added even added Bitcoin and Aetherium. And I look at them every day. So I know what the price of oil is. Not only do I know that, but I know what direction it’s going in. Right? So I don’t want to be blindsided. And even with all the work I do, I’m still I still get blindsided. Just what happens?
Debra Chantry-Taylor 38:39
Yeah, that’s life. Yeah. Yeah, we do our level 10 meeting on a Monday morning. And, you know, throughout the pandemic, when we had very, very serious lockdowns, it affected our business significantly. And it got to the point was like, every week, you’re looking at the fingers and thinking, Oh, my goodness, you know, what’s going to happen? And it was one point, I thought I should just stop doing this. This is really quite depressing, but it wasn’t in actual fact, it made us look at the business and go, we cannot sustain in this way. So what do we need to do differently to actually make sure that we can get through this? And I think it was that almost that being looking at those numbers on such a regular basis, and it was reinforcing it and it actually made us get off our asses and do something about it.
Henry Daas 39:21
I’ll leave you with one little, little sort of statement that I that I created, and it’s the difference between successful and unsuccessful people. Successful people make proactive decisions and they live with the consequences. Unsuccessful people, abdicate the responsibility for making decisions to someone else, and then whine about it when it doesn’t go their way. Yeah, that is really the world in a nutshell. Yes. As I’ve seen it.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 39:51
Yeah, perfect, really good. Hey, look, it’s been an absolute pleasure to talk to you. I really appreciate you sharing all of this wealth of knowledge. If people would like to get in contact with you if they want to get hold of your book if they’d like to have a chat with you, how would they do that, Henry?
Henry Daas 40:05
So I have a vanity site henrydaas.com and it has links to my business sites It has links to we spent three weeks in Africa I’ve got my photos from Kenya. And they’re like, my screenplays. You can read the first 10 pages of my screenplays. Yeah, you can also download my book there for free. So it’s right there on the main page, click on it, and it will take you through the little, the little funnel, you’ll start getting my newsletters, you can always unsubscribe if you don’t like my stuff, but you’ll like my stuff. And and then you can get a free book. And and then my business site is called Daas knowledge. Yep. You click up at the top where it says get my help. You can schedule a free strategy session. I don’t I don’t charge anybody to meet them. Yep. And talk about whatever it is you want to talk about. I talk about entrepreneurship, if you want to talk about personal finance, whatever it might be.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 41:06
Perfect. I look that is absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much. I’m going to be watching with interest and see when this codfish books comes out. But in the meantime, I’m going to go and download this book for myself and have a look and see what I can do to improve my Achilles heel. Okay, excellent. So thank you for your time. Really appreciate it. You enjoy the rest of your day.
Henry Daas 41:27
Thank you, Debra.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 41:28
Thanks very much. Thanks again for joining us on better business better life with me your host Debra Chantry-Taylor. If you enjoy what you heard, then please subscribe to this podcast. And let us help you to get what you want out of business in life. Each week we release a new short episode which will give a success story and three takeouts to put into action immediately. These will help you take your business from good to great. The podcast is also supported by free resources, templates and useful tools, which you can find at Debra Chantry-Taylor dot com. I am a trained entrepreneur leadership and business coach, a professional EOS implementer and an established business owner myself. I work with established businesses to help them get what they want. Feel free to contact me if you’d like to have a chat about how I might be to help you. Or if you’d like to join me as a guest on this podcast. Thanks again to NZ audio editors for producing this podcast. See you on the next episode.
Debra Chantry-Taylor
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