Building Better Businesses - Introduction to Season 24

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are in a new season. It feels like I've said that like, I don't know, 23 times before or something like that, because this is season, if I'm counting properly, season 24. And we are going to go sort of continuing our Building Better series of series of seasons. We're going to do about really sort of look at building better businesses this time around. Before I get too far into it, introduce myself. My name is Rob Brodhead. I am one of the founders of Develop-Nor, Building Better Developers, also a founder of RB Consulting. We help you there. With RB Consulting, we help you wrangle your technology. We look out there the technology sprawl that you have, the technology sprawl that you could have because there are so many opportunities, so many options out there. We help you, we understand, work with you to understand your business and basically build that custom recipe for the best dish that we can with you, your company, your goals, for not only today but also setting you up for the future so you don't have to, you know, every six months or every year, throw your hands up in the air and go, okay, what's my technology roadmap going to be this time around? We do that through integration, simplification, automation, and innovation even. We will create custom stuff or there's a lot of things out there that we can probably get stuff, you know, as they say, off the shelf and get you going very quickly. Good things, bad things. I'll go with, it's another one of those, it's actually a good thing and a bad thing in and of itself, is work and the last little bit for me has been very busy. It's been one of these things where it's like, we're sorry, we're into a new year, there's a lot of projects going on and that's really cool but part of the challenge is also that you get pulled in many different ways. You'll start, you know, you do 15 minutes for this project and you get pulled over 30 minutes this other and then this other and you get to the end of the day and it is, that's the bad thing. I guess the good and the bad is you're exhausted. You know you did a lot but it's really hard to remember exactly what you did because you did so many things because you're keeping everything moving forward but you probably didn't actually finish anything. However, I finished this introduction so that's the one I can check off and then I can pass it over to Michael to introduce himself. Hey everyone, my name is Michael Milosz. I'm one of the co-founders of DeveloperNUR, Building Better Developers and as Rob said, this season we're doing Building Better Businesses. I'm also the founder of Envision QA where we help small and mid-sized businesses, clinicians, essentially small businesses with their software. A lot of companies, I talk to company owners and businesses, a lot of them complain or have issues around their processes where their software doesn't really meet their demand. They have to kind of work around the software to get things done and that's where we come in. We work with you, we do assessments of your current processes, your current software and we help you understand what it is that you have, what it is that you need and we will either help you find the right software or build something custom for you. Good and bad. So good news, it's warmed up, starting to feel better, it's nice again outside although we're about to get cold again which is kind of the bad news. So we're kind of in that low of the seasons where it's like starting to feel better but then you know you take the risk of getting sick again because we're going to go through that hot, cold, hot, cold period. And also kind of to emulate what Rob said, you know, same kind of situation. Things are very busy right now, a lot of things going on. Make it to the end of the day, there is a lot that was done in the day and you're right. You know, we typically, it's hard to figure out what it is you actually got done but a lot of stuff was done but it's just we keep moving things forward, we're just not done, done yet. So it's like one of those words like come on, why don't you get there but you know, slow and steady wins the race. So that's my good and bad. So we're going to kick this season off as we usually do with essentially an overview. So like where are we going with this? What is it that we plan on getting done in this season? In building better businesses, I think what we're going to do it in a little bit like a fashion that we've done the last couple of seasons. Instead of, although we have done the developer journey, instead of like trying to walk you all the way through a business as we did, you can go see that a few seasons back we actually sort of walked our way through starting up a business and some of the challenges you're going to meet at any given time. This one's going to be a little more sort of like a, you know, drop in sort of helicopter options or kind of thing. So we're like a drop in, we're going to talk about a topic and then we'll move on. We will likely because we haven't done that in a while and we've got some people that are sort of out in the wings, we'll probably end up adding a couple of interviews back in as much as we did in the past. It'll probably be two-parters, maybe three-parters depending on how long, when did we get. But really what we want to do is part of this is going to be looking at how we can leverage who we are. And this is not just us as a developer with our background, but it very much is going to be, I think you're going to find that there's going to be ways that you can relate with your background and what you're working with. And in that, the little business leaning towards the preneur part of the developer preneur, but it's also looking at what we do because we are most likely interacting with different types of business. You think about if you've got a day job and a side hustle, your day jobs are quite possibly could be with a Fortune 500 or a Fortune 50 company. And then your side hustle is maybe a solo preneur kind of, or maybe you're just one or two employees or something like that, most likely going to be a small business. Maybe your day job is a small business, you work for a bakery, but your main side hustle is you own IBM or something like that. But that's not often the way it goes. It usually doesn't flip that way. But what we get out of that is we get to experience, one, wearing a lot of different hats. If we are starting up a business somewhere along the way, although some of those hats may not fit us very well, we are going to be doing things like we're going to be doing accounting and marketing and sales and business planning and all operations kinds of things. All that stuff that we get hands-on experience, albeit in a small sense, but at least we have experience with it. It's like it's our own MBA program in a sense. It's going to be very valuable to others because there may be somebody that you're dealing with that's a company owner or something like that that maybe hasn't gone through all of that. There may be pieces that they haven't been exposed to. That doesn't mean we have to be an expert in each of these. It just is something that we can now say, hey, we've had some experience and here's maybe where we went for help. Maybe that'll help you out. We can work as a consultant in a sense with our customers along with being, if we have that developer specifically kind of bent, then we can also be solving problems with them. It allows us to, we have a quiver with more arrows. There are more problems that we, although maybe not personally are going to solve directly, but we can help them solve it through recommendations and things of that nature. There's also a value in seeing that range of what we'll call problems. The problems that you see with a small business versus a medium middle size versus some gigantic behemoth of a business. There's going to be commonality across those. Sometimes you're going to find stuff, most specifically, where I think the biggest value is where there's big business things that you can actually apply to a small business and really help them plan for the future and really help them stabilize. However, there are some things that there are valuable things that small businesses do that get lost once you become a big business. I think reminding people where they came from in a sense and pointing back to those small business tactics can help you as a large business as well. I'm hoping that we get out of this season and part of this plan is not only for us to have some ways, some action items for us to improve our business, but also ways for us to help our customers improve theirs as well. So I'm going to toss this to Mike and we'll get your thoughts on this as we step into this new season. Yeah, so this season, we're going to be talking about building better businesses, but it's not just about the business. It's also about you, the business. Because as people, we have a lot of busy things in our lives. As Rob said, you know, you could have a day job and a side hustle and you have a lot of things going on. We have to juggle a lot of things and juggling things in the right way really can enable us as business owners to really thrive, to kind of build the business or drive it. But being busy or being distracted can also detract from our business. We can also go off the rails, kind of lose focus on what we're doing. We can flounder and the business could essentially wither and die. So one of the key things I kind of hope that we can bring to you, our viewers this season and our listeners is how can you stay focused on your business? How can you make your business grow? How you can make it thrive and how you can kind of grow into those other areas that you may be looking to but either have not had the time, the focus or really the understanding of where can I take this? What can I do with this? And that's kind of my hope for this season. Like Rob said, we're going to kind of drop in different topics. But the overall theme for me for this season is what can we do as developers, as business grow our business and take it from that side hustle, to take it from that idea and really get it to something where maybe one day you can quit your day job or this is your day job and you can really stick to it and it thrives, it succeeds and you can start hiring people or if you don't need to spend enough that way, you can spend out horizontally and add more silos to your business and grow it that way. But these are just ideas and things that we'll talk about throughout this season. Yeah, I think that's an important part is that it is and we'll talk about this as well, some of the ways to do this because there are unique challenges I think when we're doing the side hustles that we have and part of it is sort of that stick-to-it-iveness that is the do it and then continue to do it. We talk all the time about that continuous improvement and progress and even if it's a baby step every day, at least it's a baby step forward every day or if it's a baby step sideways at least we're moving and we're addressing our overall goals because it is very easy to get distracted by your day job. Just like in a job in general, it's very easy to get distracted by that big customer or that big project and you lose sight of developing your business itself. You tend to do too much working in your business instead of on your business. You're like, I got to punch the clock and put eight hours of work in and then you're in it today and you haven't actually, yes, your business has generated income but it is not positioning itself for that next customer, for that next product. That's one of the things that I think always is going to be a challenge for any business is figuring out when do you do, how do you balance that stuff out? You see this even with big, huge private company or public companies where they're trying to figure out do we put a lot of money into improving our employees or do we put a lot of money into sales and marketing and it's finding that balance and it's very, I think that's one of the things that we bring to the table is it is much more real to us, I think, because we're not steering 10,000 people and everything sort of spread across them and saying it's us and so if we spend more time on one thing than another, we're going to feel it. We're going to know that I'm not doing this as much as I used to or there's this thing people talk about in a business and I've never actually done that so I should probably think about it and some of those are the things that we're going to talk about here is making sure that we touch all the bases often enough and that we, and some of these are going to be those episodes that remind us that hey, by the way, this is something you need to do periodically as well. Also some of the things that brings to mind is it's not always the best practice of things to do. Some of the things we will also touch on this season are the personal challenges that you'll run into while trying to build your business, while you run your business because not just getting bogged down with your customer or your business but personally, we take on a lot of stress as business owners because we want our business to succeed and there are times where you're going to get into those dark areas or you're going to get bogged down and it's like I don't know if I can do this and we'll give you ideas and suggestions to kind of keep things moving, keep things positive and kind of get you over those humps that you run into because running a business and getting it started is a lot of highs and lows and you're going to hit a lot of lows at the beginning. It's going to be like, great, this is great and it's like, wait, I have no customers and then you're going to go, why? And you get into those what ifs games. So it's not all about being essentially building better businesses, but it's also building ourselves up and positioning ourselves for a better business. Yeah, and I think that's part that's a great point because I think there is a it's sort of glamorized being an entrepreneur or a small business owner that is like, well, that's so cool. You get to be your own boss and things like that. But, you know, there's other there's all these other things that I don't think people understand as much because it's like when you when you do when you run a payroll, you're the last one. The owner is the last one to get paid. And it can be very difficult when you're sitting there and you're running a payroll and the company is sort of chugging along, but you're not yet. You know, you're like you're still investing too much in it. And that is always you know, it's very painful to like write a check to everybody else, but not yourself, even though you've been probably busting your hump more than anybody else in the company because you're you know, it's it is your life. It's not just a nine to five kind of business. And that's, you know, one of the things we're talking about is how do we how do we find those limits? And some of this we're going to talk about it because we haven't found it quite yet because there's those lines get blurred all the time. We cross the lines. And the next thing you know, you've spent 48 hours straight focused just on your business. And there's a whole other life out there that you've you know, you've forgotten about because you've been too busy, because you've been focused. You've been too focused is actually it. And then some of it's going to be we have to talk about like how do we maintain productivity across all of this? It's not easy. This is not something that, you know, while people are like, oh, that's so cool. You get to this. You get to do that. It's like, well, yeah, if you if you're Elon Musk or somebody and you've managed to sell business a couple of times or get billions of dollars and yeah, sort of life becomes easier. But even then, you've just got more stuff you've got to manage. So as we grow business, it's not like you go into startup mode and then six months later you get a customer. Now you're like, cool, I'm on easy street. No, because now immediately you've invested what you need for that customer. You have to keep that customer happy. And now you're also still looking for another customer. And when you win that one, you have two customers to keep happy. And now you're looking for another customer and it can be daunting. But there is there's help out there. There are ways for us to find our way through it. And that's part of it is just sort of like go through with a camaraderie kind of feel with this to say, hey, this is not something that is unique to you. It's not like you, you know, you screwed it up and you're running your business wrong. It's like that's just part of running a business. Thoughts? Yeah, and we try to keep it real. You know, we try to keep it personally. What we've gone through, you know, a lot of stuff we talked about. We've been in the trenches. We're still in the trenches. I mean, we run businesses. It never stops. I mean, if you are a business owner, you are almost 24 7 in your head about your business at some level. You may not be like physically working on the business, but you may be thinking, oh, I remember payroll. Oh, I need to talk to this customer. These are things we are going to be talking about a lot this season and that we're going to bring the discussion closer to home, you know, back to not necessarily the glorified, hey, you're running a business to, hey, this is what you can expect from running the business, how to succeed and some issues you're going to run into. You know, we constantly challenge ourselves. You know, if you are an entrepreneur, you're challenging the status quo. You're like, hey, I can do it better. Or, oh, I have an idea that people need to pay for it, sign up for it, you know, sell this in. And given that a lot of our sector, you know, we constantly talk about building better developers. So we're talking software. Software is more of an intellectual product where we can build things. And we actually sometimes have things we can show, like if you're building a website or mobile app. But if you're doing back end work, no one sees it. They just know something works. You know, numbers go in, numbers come out. Hey, great. But they don't see the product. So sometimes what we do is not seen. So it's hard to sell what it is that we're doing. The other thing is, if you're doing physical products, even if you're doing T-shirts or, you know, macarons or baking, whatever it is you're doing, if you have a physical product, you still have to meet the demands of the customer because they're ever changing. In our current society, I mean, you have a T-shirt that's hot today, but it could be out tomorrow. It's like, I mean, just look at Marvel. It's like Marvel is great during the first vendor series. Now it's like floundering and things go in cycles. And that is another area that we will kind of work into our discussions with you because cycles are a part of business. It's not just, hey, I have an idea. I have a schedule. We're going to crank out some software and we're going to sell it to the masses. It doesn't always work like that. Yeah, I think there's a couple of key like word associations there. One is cycle. Is it like cycle? Like if you think you're on a bike, like it's it doesn't end. It's like you keep going through it and then you get through a loop. And then it's like, now we cycle again. Also, it's running a business. It's not walking a business or leisurely strolling a business. You run a business. And trust me, once you get into it, especially, you know, it's it almost teases you when you first start off with a side hustle, because you get to do a lot of the things that you're like, oh, wow, I really get to stretch the who I am. All the stuff that I have, my boss didn't let me do or my business didn't let me do. Now, I get to do this and. Bless you if not, but for the most part, that shine wears off at some point, because then you're like, jeez, I got to do this again. I got to do this again. I got to do it like you, because you will realize, I think that there are things that you are built for. You're better suited towards that. You have certain skills and joys and things like that, that that's really where you want to be. And there's all those other things that don't have that. But you still have to do it. That's the whole like eating the frog and all those other things that we talk about is making sure that even the crap that we don't want to do gets done, because sometimes that is mandatory crap. It's just like one of those things that you've got to do sooner or later. And so you might as well get it done, get out of the way and go back to the fun stuff. Hopefully, this gives you an idea of where we go. If not, you can listen for the whole season and you will understand by the end of that where we have gone, hopefully. It could be that we've gone in so many different ways that you don't even know where we were going or even where we started. So quick question before we kind of wrap this one up. What type of challenge? I know this is kind of the introductory episode to the season, but I still want to challenge our listeners a little bit to get them in the mindset for this season. I'm thinking for our introductory challenge. If you're running a business, think about some of the things that you're struggling with. What are the things in your business that you need help with? For those of you that don't have a business, but have an idea of something that you want to do, write that down. And if you guys have time, shoot it to us on all our social media outlets to give us an idea of what it is that you're struggling with, what are some of the things you're looking for? And we can talk about those this season. Yeah, I think if you just put down like your top three struggles, that will help. And then honestly, even if you try to put together a business plan, it usually will highlight it. When you're trying to do that business plan, it will highlight some struggles. It may be things like, I have no idea how to value my product or my time, or maybe things like I have no idea how to go from concept to actually working on building a product or building a team or marketing it or selling it or telling other people, whatever it is. There's a lot of problems and challenges out there that you will find just in trying to think about your business. So don't think, oh, I'm off the hook because I don't have a business right now. You're here because you've got something in your head that's a business someday you would like to do, or you've got gripes where the boss has said, I need you to do this, this, and this. And you're like, I wouldn't do it that way. I'd do it the other way. Put those down. There you go. Put those down. There you go. Here's the things that I would love to do, but I can't do because my job, my boss, whatever it is, the man keeps me from doing it. The man will not keep you from sending us an email though. Just as Michael alluded to, go ahead and let us know. Send us an email at info at developernoor.com. You can go, there's contact us form. You can leave us feedback, whether it's on developernoor, whether it's out on YouTube and the developer channel, whether it's the Building Better Developers podcast, wherever you get podcasts, any of those places, we would love to get feedback from you. Hear your thoughts about the challenge and what you'd like to hear from us as we step into the season ahead. And if you would like to be interviewed or you know someone that would like to be, definitely reach out to us because we'd be more than happy to talk to you and see where that will fit in with the wide range of topics we're going to cover this season. That being said, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the developer podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts, we are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success.