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During crisis and economic depressions, small business owners often struggle with making sales and keeping the loyalty of their people. Because it is hard to pay the bills on the ethical sales podcast, you will learn new ways to selling ethically and communicating with your people to create more loyalty and getting out of the rut of stress and frustration. When there is plenty of sales, there should be plenty of profits to keep things flowing smoothly. And everybody be happy.

As you hear these ads that have this sleepy sounding voice that says All right, tonight on your sleepy stories, we're going to take you into them now and they go into some story, you know, and you people listen to them fall asleep. I'm really Yeah, yeah, it's on YouTube, you can watch him. He's like, interesting. I don't know, I didn't listen to him. I just see her dad. They're like, talking this sleepy voice. And it's just my biggest it's like storytime for adults instead of kids. Hey, might be the new thing.

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My biggest challenge with it is I can never remember what the story wasn't bad,

1:13  

right? Because you fall asleep within two minutes. All right, maybe you need to start going to bed a little earlier, they tell the people what to do because they listen,

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close your eyes and relax, just breathe. So this might be one of the traps to watch out for over the next four years,

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I'll tell you one of the traps to watch out for over the next years get off social media. I took my I took it, I took my Facebook, off of my home screen because I would just click it like, if if I'm if I have two minutes, I'm not doing something, I just hit my Facebook and I go through my feed. And we do have a roofing group on Facebook. And I still get on there. And I check that but I took my Facebook, off my home screen, I put it on the very last screen on my phone. So I have to swipe four or five over and I literally have to search for it. And I find it I get on there. And I'm not kidding. I literally spend like 10 minutes a day on Facebook right now. Because of all the drama and the people and all their stories and all that. And I find for me, it does not help me mentally be a good leader. It doesn't help me mentally stay, you know, keep my energy where it needs to be. And to be really honest, like for a month, I was just like before this whole, you know, the election was over and all this kind of stuff. I read all these stories from the people that you know, put their opinions on Facebook, and I'm just like, Man, I'm just depressed about this whole situation when I took it off, and I quit plugging into that, you know what, I have more energy. And I think we just have to know and discipline ourselves on what is dragging your energy down, and what is keeping it where it needs to go. Because you're not going to go change that. We're not going to go change the political agenda of you know, what they're doing, and all these kinds of things. I can make a difference in my own life. But I need to know, what puts my energy up and what takes it down. That wasn't even on here that we were going to talk about. But I do think it's really important. Like if you find it dragging your energy down, don't get on it so much. Why don't we just pause right here for about 10 seconds and give everybody a minute? I'm trying to do it on my phone. Give everybody a minute to move their Facebook off their home screen. I'm trying to do that keeps going back

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and remind me while you're at it and delete tweeter too.

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I have a Twitter account and I haven't been on it for years. I get bogged down with too many. There we go. Um, I have my vacation there anymore. Yeah, good job.

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Awesome, awesome, great job. So you avoid that trap going forward,

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it actually robs you of a lot of money, a lot of time. That's when you don't think about it because it becomes so habitual. Like, how much time are you spending on Facebook, if you put that exact same or social media, whatever your traffic is, but if you put that same back time back into something productive, what could you actually get for the time that you spent, if you're honest with yourself, it becomes a very costly thing to do

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is, first I say if you're going to be on social media, figure out a time you're going to be on schedule into your calendar beyond 10 minutes. And if you're going to be on social media, do it to put out value, nurture, create posts that help other people serve other people, then get off. No, otherwise stay off.

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Yep, I'm with you. 100%. You know, in today's world, we have all these new technologies and when we were talking about clubhouse and you sent me another app the other day Oh and I

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in my clubhouse @owenshrock

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I set up an account @eliasraber. if you're not careful. Like there's so many ways of communicating on these different forms that it pretty soon half your time is just spent trying to keep up with messages that are sent and all these things and so, you know, getting super focused and saying hey, you know what, I'm not going to let those things be a distraction. I'm gonna use them for a tool. But that's it. Because you have to get super focused in today's world. You got to get super focused.

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Protecting your time what are some other traps to watch? For,

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I think finances is a big one. Oh, and you brought that up this morning. We talked about that a little bit. set money aside, don't eat all your money. You don't know what the future has. I mean, Tony, Tony, was an amazing year in our roofing business. 2019 was an amazing year in our roofing business. And I think we people thought maybe 2020, like the building industry would go down a little bit, but it's one up, which is kind of crazy. But you don't know when you're going to have a slow year. And I think if you're doing things, right, I don't think that you have to, I don't think you have to have a slow year. But I think preparing and saying, you know what, I'm gonna put some money aside for a rainy day, whether that's a personal money, I'm going to put some money aside in my business for a rainy day for marketing, I saw people last year, put money like literally stop their advertising. And people that are really good in 2019 struggle in 2020. They're like, man, it was just a tough year. Yeah, of course, because you didn't do the same things you did in 2019. But then I saw people do really well, people that actually didn't do great in 2019, put money into it and 2020, and do really well with it. 2020, don't look at the whole world situation too much. And let that get in your head too much. It's easy on the advertising side of things. I think it's easy for people, especially small businesses, to look at marketing as something they can turn on and turn off. I think the businesses that turn it on and turn it off, as they kind of need it, that's part of the reason that they stay small or maybe have a problem with growth is too many times when we see the need to turn it back on it's it's a little late because it takes some time typically for marketing to turn around and actually come back into your pocket. And so it might sit there with not a lot to do, when you wish that you know, maybe you would have just kept your marketing going. So I encourage anybody marketing, the good and the bad times, just keep it rolling, put around the board, and just make it a scheduled thing. You know, if you're in our space, a lot of guys are doing flyers, they're sending fliers out, you know, instead of just sending one batch out and seeing what happens scheduled to send one every other month, and consistently just think that's what we're going to do. That's where we're going to budget, it's also going to help you push money aside to pay for those things when you know that it's going to upcoming expense. So I think in that way your small business can actually start experiencing, experiencing growth that you might have not experienced before, you know, help you get up to a midsize business or eventually, you know, a larger business and, and I assume there's a lot of people out here that have small businesses a day. And it's not really their goal to stay small. But for some reason, they're staying small. Well, that's just one little thing that's very easy. It's not hard, it's Elementary, every one of you can do consistent marketing, consistently lead consistent new money, new people you're getting to know

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that's how you grow your business that rolls right into our closing thought, another small trap, and that's complacency.

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So it's an easy place to get to, like becoming complacent or, you know, looking at the events around you and getting discouraged, or what's the use and all those things continuing to get out there. Keeping your energy where it needs to be staying hungry. Like those are so important keys to continued growth in your business, it's great to be aware of what's going on, don't go, you know, put your head in the sand, but don't react to it. Either. It's smart to prepare for whatever might come. Put some money aside, whatever preparing means to you. Prepare, don't be blind, but then don't sit around waiting for things to happen. That's right. And if you think it's gonna get bad, or you think it's gonna slow down, that's when you need to pick it up, like go double your amount of time in your business or whatever, that's when you need to go out there's, there's always through a slow time, there are always people that are gonna sit back, guess what that does, it gives the person that gets out there more opportunity. Get out there and just keep doing life. You know, be smart, but keep doing your thing. Just keep doing your thing. I don't think you'll ever regret that you did too much. But most of the time it's the other way around. early last year, some of our roofers were shut down. And they spend a month or two months literally doing whatever they wanted to do go fishing or whatever. And that's all great for two weeks. But after a month of efficiency, you realize that I feel horrible about myself. I've not been productive, it's when you're the most productive is when you feel the best about yourself. It's when you feel energized. It's when you're interacting with other people, you get your energy from other people more than you get from anything else. Stay in the game, smart but stay in it, keep rolling forward, you don't ever get to hit the pause button and come back where you stopped. Like it doesn't work like that in life. It doesn't work like that, you know, raising your family. It's like, you know, I love the stage our family's in right now. But it's not like, you know, I can hit a pause button on my family and go build my business, and then come back someday and take my family on where I paused in his works like that and in your business as well. You don't get to hit a pause button and stop the flywheel. And then when you want to get back just hit play and it keeps going. You have to now push again to get that flywheel going but while it's when that flywheel is gone, And, and things are going smoothly. You want to keep it going and it's really usually it's pretty easy to keep it going but when you stop it, it's really hard to get it going again. So you want to keep that flywheel going. If you feel like it's gonna slow down, take it up a notch, take your advertising up a notch, get out there a little bit more, put in a couple more hours a day, and whatever you got to do. Thanks for listening to the Ethical Sales podcast.

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You don't have to put that part in.

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This episode was brought to you by JB Foaming & Vac Services. If you're a roofing contractor looking for rock removal, gravel removal from a roof, simply reached out to JB Foaming & Vac Services at 330-680-1232. Again, reach out to JB Foaming & Vac Services at 330-680-1232 or find them on Facebook. And don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts.