CAIR 3: How to Make MONEY (what oil??) !!!

What does it mean to make money!!?? That's That's a big question on a lot of our minds, right? What what does that actually mean, especially for all this going on with COVID-19 and such? Wow, small to medium businesses are just getting hammered. I'm sure a lot of you have been seeing the small to medium business loans, the SBA loans that are coming out. And obviously, some of those are even grants, if you will. What I wanted to talk about was some of the secrets that we've learned in terms of making money or earning more money in our businesses. It actually kind of goes back to some of the things that we've done with our kids. So, so quick, quick little story here. So we have a large family. We have six kids. And we basically have started each of our children with running their own business in our home. I call it the yard manager. So as each of our children were growing up, they each took turns being the art manager, and over the years well, first of all, I should probably explain why What What it means is they're responsible for getting the work done in the yard. Now, that means they have the opportunity to hire their siblings that have budgets, they'll have cost of goods sold requirements. But in the end, they ultimately have to send me an invoice. And one of the lessons they've learned over time is no invoice no money. And so there were times when I went without paying them for weeks and they'd be like, Hey, Dad, where's you know, where's the money? It'd be like, you got to send the invoice. And so they would do that and they'd get into the pattern of that and help them to start tracking and finding some independence but I noticed a pattern over many years of doing this as each child took on the role as they came into the role they are crowned you know, with with this crown, your crown is the art manager anyway, the pattern that I noticed is that is it they almost always Start projecting into the future. So as they start to see the flow of the money coming, right, and they start to get into the pattern of that, and they start collecting the data. Now, of course, the data in this little operation is very simple. It's, it's, here's the work that was done. Here's the data was done. Here's the amount and of course we come up with with what those mounts are ahead of time. And here's who was involved with it, if any, mostly it's down, but like, like I said, sometimes some of them hate doing weeding, right. So they, they want to hire that out to their siblings. But in any event, they almost always start projecting into the future because they see the money flow, and they start looking at ways to optimize it. Alright, so maybe there's another way they can figure out to get the work done faster or cheaper. And of course, like I said, they're looking at the cost of goods sold. Some of them may have even looked at patterns like, Well, okay, when it's storms or rains or whatever it might be, they realize that there is Come reduces, right? Well, it's interesting when we look at our businesses and we look start looking at the data that we have available to us, it actually becomes a critical activity to monetize our, our data, right to commercialize it. There's a couple obvious ways, of course, for companies to commercialize data. One of those is the data, of course gets collected, and it's analyzed for product development purposes, right or to make better products. And of course, that can translate into improve sales and, you know, products with higher value and so forth. That's the first sort of obvious way. The second obvious way is, of course, the data gets used to identify problems and bottlenecks in internal processes, which of course then can eliminate or improve, you know, business bottlenecks and improve the efficiency and profitability. Right. So those are two obvious ways. I saw that with our kids in the US Manage payroll. Again, I've seen it many years over over time with small to medium businesses.

So I wanted to look at some examples of some companies on how they've used data like, there's a search and discovery service called Foursquare, and they sell its data to retailers. So they can optimize their outdoor advertising and online marketing to match you know, the routes that people use to navigate the city. Right. There's other groups, media companies that collect digital data on people's interest, and then they sell that to online advertisers. Certainly weather forecasting companies like freaka can, you know, they also help advertising match weather conditions? Those are certainly some examples. There's other companies and this is of course, in some cases, it's their own data, or its data there that they're intentionally collecting from others or for others. Certainly An example would be Facebook. Right. So the you know, the question is, you've got Facebook, right? Would Facebook really have paid $22 billion? And you know, for WhatsApp in 2014? If if, in fact WhatsApp didn't already have data on 600 million consumers worldwide? I mean, they probably wouldn't have done that. Right. So it wasn't the fact that what's apps revenues were massive. I think at the time, maybe they're around 10 million back in 2014, or 2013. You know, Microsoft, what did they pay over 2 billion, I think is two and a half billion. They did that for from Minecraft, and that the time Minecraft had very little actual revenues. It was the data that the Microsoft was after, which is a key valuation. So, fact of the matter is, even as a small to medium business owner, if we're not cognizant of the data and information we're tracking, we're actually leaving money on the table and now ends up hurting us rather than helping us. And in today's technology world, it actually becomes more important for us to do this to take a moment to get our data strategy together. Doesn't have to take a lot of work. We got to take some effort to do that. Well, I'm sure you've heard the phrase, hey, data is the new oil. Right? And there are some people that certainly say that, and I think that while at a surface level, you might say, Yeah, that makes sense. But there's some challenges with that with that metaphor. Turns out in reality, I think we're the oil in the metaphor, right? It's humans, right? It's the footprint, the digital footprint. The transactions that we do, the places we go, the people we see how we interact. That's actually the data. And that's actually where the money is. It's tracking that. So we have to be much more cognizant of how we of course give our data but also as business owners We need to be more cognizant of, if a consumer is sharing certain kinds of data, and they're open to that. It's important for us to also understand the opportunity that's available there as well. I think when Zuckerberg you know, Facebook when he was testifying before Congress, he explained a bit about how Facebook makes money, right? He said something about, Hey, you know, it's we're taking data in terms of what's happening, you know, where the people are clicking what they're doing, who they're interacting with. And then ultimately, they sell that, you know, off to advertisers, right? I think they do over 200 billion a year annually, right, basically, by selling our information. So to get started, it's really important that you know, as a small to medium business owners that we start with the data that we currently have, we have to look at it and say, what's our business, what's my role in the business, and then there's typically at least three things to get through. are no one is we got to look at the patterns of our data, right, we should analyze it. Look for patterns and trends that certainly present themselves. But number two, we got to look for what those patterns mean, they tell a message, right? There's some information about it. And the key to this is to figure out what's actionable and what's not. And number three is to focus on the big picture, where are we trying to go as a business? What are we trying to get done, and then use some tools to help us get there. Now one of the things that we do is we apply artificial intelligence to do that. So because after a while you realize you go mind not looking at all this information, number one, number one, right take so much time number two, the AI is proving to help see things that we can't see very easily with our eyes. And so given the fact that we believe that there's money on the table in our data, that we don't have to do a lot of extra work to go harvest it. We just got to go mind for it. Pull it out, leveraging technologies like AI helps us to do that. One of the things that we've seen that comes out of this is the ability to make better decisions, right? And so I'm not a fan of saying take AI and hand it off, and we just go blindly do whatever it says, I'm more in the line of thinking that this is augmented intelligence, use the intuition that you have as a business owner, but then augment it with what AI insights are providing. So, you know, these days, as I'd mentioned, you know, the more that we have data at our fingertips, the more important it is for us to leverage some kind of techniques that will help us to, you know, understand and get the insights from it. Now, recently, I was applying some AI for a company and was evaluating patterns and the predictions and as I reviewed it with the business owner, he made the statement simply, I had no idea I had no idea that the patterns were existing in my business, and that if I did more of this and less of that, I actually can, you know, increase my sales as well as you know, reduce some of my losses. And that's just as important to know ahead of time. You know what this is actually, uh, you know, historically and predictively a losing venture on these particular set of activities. Therefore, let's stop doing that. So whether we'll see improvements in you know, making more money or reducing losses, both are certainly benefits to our business. All right. So there you have it, the How To Make Money, it's in our data. Let's go after the data. And quite frankly, there's enough tools and services out there today, that even if we don't have the skill sets in our small to medium business, reach out to someone such as ourselves that click AI and talk to us about it or find someone else but nevertheless, go harvesting for that data. My name is Grant Larsen. Thanks for joining us. Next time, go find the money in your data.

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