The WP Minute+

Kurt von Ahnen (00:01)
Hey folks, welcome to another episode of whose WordPress agency is this anyway. My name is Kurt Von Ahnen. I'm here with my cohost Toby Krines and we're just stoked to have you. Toby, I know that you usually like to open with a story or a question, but today you're going to open with a list of books.

Toby Cryns (00:19)
Books, we're gonna talk books today. This was the cliffhanger from last week. both Kurt and I each put together two lists of books. One is businessy and one is non-businessy. And interestingly enough, when we were talking offline last week, you and I both had one recommendation in common that we both kind of jumped to. And that was the four hour work week by Tim Ferriss, which is now a very old book. There it is.

I've actually owned, think, two or three copies. Two that I purchased because I lost one, and one I got at like a little library because I lost the other one.

Kurt von Ahnen (00:55)
So you just took it from the library and stole it?

Toby Cryns (00:57)
Well, in Minneapolis and others, there's like these little libraries. Are you familiar with that?

Kurt von Ahnen (01:01)
So, need a book, take a book, have a book, leave a book, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Toby Cryns (01:03)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and they're all around

town. Just people put them up in their yard and ⁓ sometimes you can find some good stuff in there. But anyway, four hour workweek. So it's like to me, like it's the the title is a joke because it's not about getting to a four hour workweek. And even Tim Ferriss has admitted like it was just in the book, he admits the title is just the title to sell books. And so he's like, well, eight hour workweek, not as interesting as four hours. And so he talks about this in the book. And so

You gotta kinda take everything with a grain of salt and also realize that the stories in the book are probably not real, even though he touts them as real. But there's some great stuff in there. To me, the core is probably, the book encourages you really to challenge your assumptions. Whatever you think business is, whatever you think work is, challenge that. ⁓

you know, the kind of the underpinnings and I it's kind of like live life like a millionaire without actually having to be one. And so for example, in the book, he talks about take many retirements of a week or a month rather than save it all up till you're dead one big retirement at the end. Like he's like, why not do it now? You know, let's say you love golfing. Why wait until you're 65 to golf a lot like do it now you can figure it out, you know, whatever.

Kurt von Ahnen (02:30)
Yeah, just

go golfing.

Toby Cryns (02:31)
that means

for you. Talks a lot about being effective versus being efficient. And the idea there is like, find the things that move the needle for your business. Or if you're at a job, find those things. For example, let's say you have a boss, let's say Kurt's your boss. There are things that are gonna make Kurt happier than other things that you do as an employee. Do the things that make Kurt happy.

Don't worry about the other things so much.

Kurt von Ahnen (03:01)
the things that make me happy.

I like the idea of this book is for a lot of upstart entrepreneurs.

they're good as solopreneurs, but when they become people that want to hire people, it's like you put up this wall and you go, I can't do that because X, Y, Z, one, two, three, whatever. ⁓ this book does a really good job of like opening up the blinds, right? And saying, no, you could get a virtual assistant for four hours a week. You could do this. You could do that. And then you go, wait a minute. I really could start to do some of these things.

when Manana Nomad started to grow, was through the idea that, I could leverage the work of other people without abusing them or taking advantage of them. That's not what I'm saying. But I'm saying use people in their skill sets to promote what we do. And I, I, I don't want to give them like full credit for it. Cause I think that's kind of the wrong way to go, but it was certainly inspirational. Like I have, I've put way too many limits on myself as a person growing a business. And if I start to

pull some of those limits back a little bit, I see more opportunities for growth.

Toby Cryns (04:14)
Yeah, there was a time where the Mighty Mo, we delivered pristine code using the WordPress code standards that are published on the WordPress docs. And after a few years of that, at some point I was like, what would happen if we just threw away this requirement of doing pristine, beautiful code? Poetry is poetry. The code is poetry. That's something that used to be hot in the WordPress community. And one day we just threw it away and it just saved us time and energy and money and nobody noticed.

Kurt von Ahnen (04:36)
Yeah.

Nobody cared.

It's amazing to me the things that we hold on to as individuals, because we think it's important, but no one else cares. And we never take the time to really ask, right? But if we ask more questions, if we got more involved with our clients, we would be able to extract that information and go, well, then why am I doing it this way?

Toby Cryns (04:44)
Yeah.

Yeah. And another thing, I think this is in the book, one way to figure out what's important in your business is to go on vacation, unplugged for, let's say a week. You know, if you haven't done a week, do a week. See what's important. You'll know what's important when you get back. And probably not much is all that important. That's probably the short answer. There's probably one or two things, but like, ⁓ the longer you go, the more you'll kind of notice you'll get a better sense for what the important things are.

Kurt von Ahnen (05:15)
and see what explodes.

Yeah.

Toby Cryns (05:34)
⁓ What's something you think, Kurt, in your business right now that you might be doing that is basically a waste of time, but that it requires a lot of your time right now?

Kurt von Ahnen (05:46)
So we are really, really big on project management software that I use to run my different projects. It gives me tremendous oversight over what we're doing. So for me, it's still a valuable tool. But we also give that transparency to our clients.

And there's always some kind of onboarding or some kind of friction about this is the SaaS platform. This is how you log in. This is a screenshot of what you're going to see. This is how you add a comment or a note, you know, to the work that we're doing for you. And I think it's this great value added thing. Like for some reason you'll hear it in my own marketing. Like this is this great thing that we do, but in reality, when I look at the percentage of clients that actually use this tool,

it's like 5%, 5 to 8%. And the people that are using it aren't even using it at a high level. Like I'm saying you can direct message me, you can put comments on different tasks we're doing for you. can do all, you you have access to all of this stuff, but nobody, nobody uses that access. What they want to do is they want to send me an email.

Toby Cryns (06:53)
And they want to say, what's the status of this? was thinking, um, Glenn, my SEO guy and I are producing a report, a six month SEO report for a client who's paying us for SEO consulting. And I was, we've on this one report that we're going to deliver next week or the following week. I bet you after all the research and analysis has been done. So Glenn did a ton of research and analysis to like compile the results and think through it. He presents this first draft of this report to me.

Kurt von Ahnen (06:56)
Yeah.

Toby Cryns (07:22)
And it's probably like 20 pages. since that day, about three weeks ago, I bet you him and I have invested, I wouldn't doubt if it's 30 hours combined on refining this report. like, I bet you we didn't need to do that.

Kurt von Ahnen (07:41)
Yep, because it's going to go in a drawer.

Toby Cryns (07:43)
Mm-hmm.

Kurt von Ahnen (07:44)
I used to work for a large corporation. ⁓

And they would onboard other businesses to their distributorship. And they had this giant binder of like all of the company guidelines and communication systems and how to place a purchase order and all these things. This giant book they sent to owners of all these distributed businesses. Nobody read those books. Everyone just grabbed them, threw them in the bottom drawer, you know, underneath a bottle of whiskey. And that was it. And, and then of course, six months, a year later, those things would come up, but it,

would always fall on different department heads within the parent company to put those fires out and you'd always go, but that's in that guide we sent you. And they're like, I haven't seen that since the day I unpacked it.

Toby Cryns (08:29)
Exactly. So, Kurt, what's a great business book that you'd recommend?

Kurt von Ahnen (08:34)
You know, this was one of my go-tos from the very beginning. This is a John Maxwell 360 degree leader book. Um, I was,

For lack of better ways of describing things, I've always been kind of like that middle manager person trying to find a way, like, how do I run my team really well? But how do I have influence on my peers and the people above me? Like, I always found that I had this niche of kind of like just being able to communicate really well to like, ⁓ UPS is a great example. I worked for UPS for a couple of years. And so it was like, I trained my team. I had a peer of supervisors that I, you know, had influence with. And then there were all those

people above us all the way up to like the hub supervisor and you know we could have an adult beverage together and have a conversation and I could have influence in that conversation and so maybe it's an echo chamber for me but I really took a lot of great gold nuggets out of the 360 degree leader because I feel that that's where most people in leadership struggle.

Toby Cryns (09:34)
Yeah.

Do you think that, I was curious about this 360 degree leader, because I've never read that one. One thing I was curious about, just generally speaking in my life, like, because I also

Kurt von Ahnen (09:39)
How about you?

Toby Cryns (09:53)
conceptually try to achieve that end. Like, how can I be of most utility to the community, whether it's WP Minute community, you know, or the local WordPress community here, or my family, my house. ⁓ But one thing I struggle with, so I have a friend who runs a similar agency. He doesn't do any of this stuff and he's doing just fine. Good guy. He's not, not influential, doesn't know anybody, but his business is just fine.

It's been going on for decades, you know?

Kurt von Ahnen (10:25)
Yeah, it's, it's unique to see how you can choose to become part of the community and try to have influence and work things through. It's to me, it's, I was in the WordPress space since 2004, but I didn't really embrace community until ⁓

Now I'm losing, I'm losing track of time, but when was the WordCamp US in San Diego? It was three years ago, four years ago. I mean, that's really when I started to go, Oh, you know what? I probably need to do a little bit more. I mean, I was doing stuff with Lifter LMS and WP Tonic, but, going to that WordCamp was my first real exposure to community in person, you know, doing stuff. And then I started going to WordPress meetups and all that stuff. And so to your point, yeah, I had an agency, I had hundreds of customers between 2008 and 2020.

Toby Cryns (10:51)
bit right?

Mm-hmm.

Kurt von Ahnen (11:13)
You know business was just fine So I don't think it's a requirement, but I think and and You're gonna make me do it. I put it off to the side. I wasn't sure if I was gonna do it or not. I Wrote my own dang book on leadership. It's called action leadership from the edge I personally think that everybody is called to a certain

Toby Cryns (11:17)
huh. Yeah.

You look curt.

There it is.

Kurt von Ahnen (11:37)
position of influence or leadership within their lifespan. And I feel that in community as a whole, I feel that like society, people don't acknowledge their own call to leadership and that creates a gap in leadership and the universe hates gaps. And that's why people that are poor in their positions get those positions. I believe people that weren't naturally called to their positions get those spots because the people that were naturally called to those positions, you know, they abstained, you know, they go, like, I know a lot of people that

should be leaders that should have influences within their circles but they'll say things like I don't really think I'm a leader I'm a good support person I'm a good number two you know I'm a good co-host not a host right like like and that and that's false humility like if you have a skill or a talent you just need to put that forward and you're and by doing that you're gonna execute influence over other people and that's what leadership is leadership is just influence it's not really a position it's the influence

Toby Cryns (12:32)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah,

you know, that's a good segue into a book that I love and I've read many times. I even gave a presentation on, it was called WordPress Moneyball was the presentation, but it is Moneyball by Michael Lewis. ⁓ Fantastic book about kind of just looking at the landscape. And this is a biography about a guy who still runs the, well, ran the Oakland A's. I don't know if he's still there now that ownership changed, but. ⁓

⁓ so Billy Bean ran the Oakland A's, the gist of it is like, was really good at, seeing the, the, what was going on in the business side of baseball and working within some very real money constraints that his team was facing compared to like, big market teams like the Yankees, the Cubs, you know, ⁓ Dodgers, you know, like in LA and New York. ⁓

Kurt von Ahnen (13:28)
Yeah, yeah. ⁓

Toby Cryns (13:35)
And I always thought, I mean, I think it's a great business book, even though it's, you know, it's a movie starring Brad Pitt and it's a baseball movie, but the movie and the book are actually both really good. And I don't always say that by the way, most of time, like, ah, the movie's better or the book's better, but both are great in their own way. um, it's just great, a great, like inspirational story about like how to think outside the box. And as he's doing it, nobody's catching on. And that's like kind of the...

the greatest part. He's crushing everybody and they're not even noticing that he's doing it.

Kurt von Ahnen (14:06)
that ⁓ silent success to me has a certain power to it. You know, when you can work in the background and really see some strides and then one day you wake up and you're like, Hey, I got here. It's pretty cool.

Toby Cryns (14:18)
Mm-hmm.

And as we talk about that leadership thing, after a while, everyone started noticing, and now the whole, not only baseball, but basketball and football are now totally subscribed to the theory in moneyball. And it's because of moneyball, basically, that got that ball rolling.

Kurt von Ahnen (14:37)
Yeah, yeah nice so What other books are you more like a leadership person or more like a numbers and finance person?

Toby Cryns (14:47)
I'm more of a businessy person. I like thinking, so there's this great book called, It Doesn't Have To Be Crazy At Work by Jason Fried and David Hanmeyer Hansen. And they built the 37 Signals Company, which built Basecamp and still runs Basecamp to this day. ⁓ But they're kind of notorious for ⁓ thinking outside of the box. Like, here's how most people think about work. Here's a different way to think about.

Here's how most people think about running a company. Here's a different way to run a company. I always think with business books, take them all with a grain of salt, but there's some great lessons in there. In fact, ⁓ I saved a little paragraph here in this book, so here's the cover if you're watching our podcast. ⁓

But the gist of it is, they're very short chapters. is whatever it doesn't take. Because there's this thing in business, ugh, I'll do whatever it takes to get the job done. And they're like, what does that mean? You can't give whatever it takes every day. That's like something for the reserve for an emergency. And what they say is, if you're in business long enough, I'm quoting here, there certainly will be rare moments when whatever it takes is truly called for.

Kurt von Ahnen (15:57)
Yeah.

Toby Cryns (16:07)
a real honest emergency or maybe because you won't be able to make payroll or because inaction will permanently scar your reputation. So yes, there are moments, rare extreme moments. Don't drive your everyday business by the fear of those outliers. And so what they say is rather than do whatever it, rather than demand whatever it takes of your team or yourself, they ask, what will it take? And so it's an invitation for a conversation. It's kind of like,

Kurt von Ahnen (16:22)
Yeah.

Toby Cryns (16:36)
Let's put some measurable stuff on here. Like what will it take to achieve enough to move on to the next thing? Like that sort of approach. What's not worth doing? Because when you say what will it take, then you can say, well, what won't it take? Like maybe this SEO report I'm making doesn't need to exist.

Kurt von Ahnen (16:58)
It sounds really odd, right? But I'm getting older. So I think maybe these thoughts are normal when you get older. There's a lot of times when I think from an agency perspective, why am I doing this? Do I need to be doing that? Like, is that the kind of client that I really want? Like, just because a client's like, hey, do you make websites? Hey, can you make it? You know, is that?

the path I want to choose. Do I want to go down? Do I want to babysit this project for the next five to 10 years? Do I, you you start to have conversations with yourself that say, wait a minute, if I'm more purposeful about what I choose to do or engage in, I'm going to appreciate those decisions more downstream. And so there's a lot. I don't, I find myself not saying I'll do whatever it takes. I do find myself saying like, what do I really have to do?

Toby Cryns (17:46)
Mm-hmm.

Kurt von Ahnen (17:46)
Which is weird because I used to when I was younger, I had a higher ambition level. But that ambition level, it's like that seesaw life, right? So ⁓ control and ambition are kind of fighting each other on the fulcrum. And I'm starting to fall more in love with control and planning and purpose than I am with blind ambition.

Toby Cryns (17:51)
Yeah.

Yeah, so when I started my business, I mean really when I started doing it full time, it was 2007. ⁓ What I wanted was to be the great at building amazing, thoughtful, beautiful designs and things. And like you're saying, after a while the reality of that, first of all, that's not measurable. Like what is that?

You know it when you see it. Well, I know it when I see it, you might see it differently. Might not know it even when I know it. ⁓ And I think this happened, like you're saying with age and experience, lot of people who, and this is a good, I think a good, there's some balance there that needs to happen still, like, ⁓ here's an example. Like I was, I'm really right now in this moment, stressing about a business decision that could change the direction of the mighty mo, like for longterm.

Kurt von Ahnen (18:39)
Yeah.

Toby Cryns (19:05)
I'm going through some sort of a filtering process to make this decision and I don't have a formal process. It's just kind of like I've been sleeping on it, kind of losing sleep about it. But then I got to thinking today, I'm like, what if I assume my wife will continue working and making enough to pay the mortgage? Like I'm like, and that actually gave me a lot of relief. like, maybe this decision isn't that big of a decision after all. Like.

Kurt von Ahnen (19:34)
Sometimes we put so much importance on ourselves unnecessarily, right? Like we think everything hinges on us. And then when we, just like you said, go on vacation, right? If we take ourselves out of a situation, what is the real result?

You know, we just visited my son in Colorado. He's volunteering at a camp out there for the summer. And I got to tell you, he's doing great. He didn't need to see us. He didn't need us to be there. He didn't need me to drive a thousand miles in a weekend. No, he was having a great time. He's got, he's got friends. he's, he, he took us to church and he apparently knows the pastor walked right up and shook his hand and sat next to him for service. And, and I was, and I was thinking to myself,

Toby Cryns (20:00)
Yeah.

Congrats.

Uh-huh.

Kurt von Ahnen (20:21)
He's doing great. Like, it's great to see him, but he didn't need us to be there. We weren't rescuing anybody. Yeah, and think there's a lot of times where we put this pressure on ourselves that doesn't need to be there.

Toby Cryns (20:22)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that actually is an interesting segue to this other book that I've read and recommend. ⁓ The idea that you've produced a child that really the goal of producing, I think the goal of being a father, like my goal is to produce children that don't need me, that are in a place where your kid is at, like doing great. Maybe they'll like to see me, but they don't need me. That's like my goal.

Kurt von Ahnen (20:54)
Yeah, it's sustainable.

Toby Cryns (21:04)
⁓ There's this book, it's called Built to Sell, and that's the point of the book. They're like, how do you build a business that doesn't need you? That you could sell if you want, or you can maintain. know, like, do you build it in such a way that it relieves that pressure? And so one question I've been dealing with just outside of this podcast this week, it's part of this question is,

about productizing offerings and ⁓ like, have you thought about that longer term? Like, what products do you have that might exist without you if you hired the right people?

Kurt von Ahnen (21:49)
So that's part of the allure with the product side of WordPress, the market, right? So if you want to get into the plugin market and do some, know, wink wink, somebody might be getting into the product space soon. ⁓

The idea there is that you're now you're in products. So now hopefully you're going to have subscriptions and sales and all these things. But the other side of the coin is whatever we develop in WordPress is based on open source and someone can fork it and buy all these other things too. So I have like, you know, it's like the angels and the devils, right? It's like these things on my shoulders, like, my God, don't do product. you should do product. Right. ⁓ so there's, so there's that.

But even in WordPress as an agency, we have the ability to productize certain blueprints or bundles or things that we do with sites. And I've been really fascinated by that lately. Part of me is attracted to these super cool, large enterprise projects with the e-learning stuff that we do. But the other part of me is like, hey, in between those big projects, it's really satisfying to launch 10, 15, 20 sites a year that are 2,000

$20,000 for startup and 80 bucks a month for hosting and maintenance like they're easy to sell they're based on a template

the customers are happy and it's affordable enough to where it's just that recurring income that happens month after month after month. And I think that that's in a dream world. That's like, how awesome is that? If you can build a business on that and then in my case, you know, train my kid, if I get hit by a bus, this is how you maintain this. It's revenue for them after I'm gone or

If it's productized and it shows ongoing revenue based on a recurring revenue payment structure, then they have that mathematical equation, right? They say, what's your projected revenue over five years? That's the value of the business and sell the business.

Toby Cryns (23:45)
Do any of those service offerings you just mentioned, ⁓ you know, design, launch, maintenance, do any of those not at all require your involvement at present?

Kurt von Ahnen (23:59)
Yes, I have them. I have a few of them set up as automated processes where they literally go, I have a food truck. I'd like to have a food truck website. Click, you know, name, address, phone number, swipe a credit card and it says, pick a URL.

Do this. Here's your login. Here's your sign in. You're often ready to go. And it sets them up at $79 a month for hosting and maintenance. Like done. And so do I have to touch it? No. Do I touch it? Yes. Right. Do I have to? No.

Toby Cryns (24:32)
Mm-hmm.

Kurt von Ahnen (24:34)
But I like to meet and greet each customer when they come in and I like to say, oh, hey, noticed you bought this package. Do you have any questions? We always try to exceed the expectation on the customer side. But realistically, I don't need to. And if the business were to develop more on that productized offer and then become a company that was sold on that premise, they wouldn't have to do anything with it other than maintain it.

Toby Cryns (24:59)
Right. I think too, like one thing that we do is, ⁓ like I have a full-time developer that is part, some percentage of his job is doing website maintenance and security. the goal is that he's rather new. He started this year, so he's still raising, I don't know, a couple of questions a week with me. ⁓ but we're getting to a point, I think pretty soon, probably by the end of the year, he will not.

You know, maybe once a month he'll reach out and say, Hey, I have a question about this upgrade thing and process. Like, I just think like people, agency owners will say, ⁓

they kind of like they, when they think of automation, oftentimes they think of the product you just described. You built like some computer software that does stuff, but I always think first it's oftentimes easier. Like you could build that process that you described and just have a employee do the whole thing and you still wouldn't have to touch it like, except tweak the process. And I was thinking.

Kurt von Ahnen (25:55)
yeah. Yeah.

There's interesting things from an agency perspective, like just this week.

We came up and I don't want to call it a bug because I think that's insulting. But I noticed that the cadence accordion wasn't working the way the cadence accordion should be working. And then I had my tech guy look at it. My tech guy goes, ⁓ it's a conflict with the zoom integration. So if the zoom integration is activated, the accordion doesn't work the way it's supposed to work. Okay. So I have no idea. I'm not a coder. I'm not, and I'm not going to put the time into it. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to deactivate the zoom integration. I'm going to make the change to the accordion, and then I'm going to react.

activate the zoom integration for them. So it's done, it's a workaround, but as an agency... ⁓

Knowing those types of small details keeps us from making those same mistakes going downstream. Like from now on, if a customer says to me, I want to have the zoom integration inside my website, well, I'm going to put them on the Astra theme, not the cadence theme, right? Because in my mind, I'm like, well, if it went bad before it'll go bad again, who knows? Same thing like Lifter LMS and cadence with the dashboard menu. Sometimes there's a ⁓ menu issue there. So if I know it's a Lifter LMS website, I'm going to put them on the Astra theme.

Toby Cryns (26:58)
Mm-hmm.

Kurt von Ahnen (27:13)
Like, as an agency, as you build it, like that build to sell mentality is, I should build a business that's sustainable even if I don't know all the ins and outs of all those weird little eccentricities. We should focus on just the tools. So I really focus on simplicity at Manana and Omas. I have customers that come to me with all kinds of weird, can we do this? Can we do that? Can we do the other thing? And I'm like, I really like this to stay as simple as possible so that we can maintain this and know that it's reliable.

And so I really only focus on like 20 main plugins that make our revenue for us.

Toby Cryns (27:43)
Mm-hmm.

Wow, give us another book.

Kurt von Ahnen (27:52)
⁓ You mentioned business. That's why I said, you like business or do you like leadership? Seeing the Big Picture by Kevin Cope. ⁓

Really really great piece of work. ⁓ He owns a company He's co-owner of a company called Acumen Learning and they do training and stuff like that the forwards written by Stephen Covey So apparently has friends and I places ⁓ I actually did an online review of this book with the author's blessing. So I did like an online training with this book ⁓ From a business perspective, it's it's really quite good and it's small enough that you can read it without losing your mind It's not war and peace, but it goes over things like cash and profits

and assets and how to identify those business markers, those KPIs, and then how to make educated decisions and choices based on those findings. It's a really good book.

Toby Cryns (28:35)
Hmm.

I read a book once, I

can't remember the title, the whole book was about like, you only need one metric in business. How much money landed in your bank account this year?

Kurt von Ahnen (28:54)
Yeah, that's a hard one though, because there's so many variables that affect it, right? So from a true business analytic perspective, like for instance, let's say I have a business that requires capitalization, like I do landscaping, right? So every three or four years, I know I got to replace my...

zero-turn mowers, right? So I'm going to have a couple of years where how much money landed on my bank account? Well, a lot, because they were great years. And then all of sudden, I need a $7,000 mower. And it's like, oh, wait a minute. My account's $7,000 light. It's not $7,000 light. You should be aggregating that cost over an annual basis, right? So I think when it comes to certain businesses, what's in the bank account is really like fake security, right?

or fake warnings, right? Because you, like, for instance, Manana DeMoss right now, we have invoices out that haven't been paid yet, haven't been reconciled. And so we feel broke, but we're not broke because we have invoices out. Like, we know the money's coming. It's just not here yet. ⁓ I think a lot of businesses run that way. And the bigger your business gets, the more that ugly thing raises its head.

Toby Cryns (29:48)
Mm-hmm.

That is true. ⁓ Now that said, I know somebody who runs a very small business. Well, it was her and she had six employees or something like that. ⁓ And she was having trouble meeting payroll one month and she had a bunch of invoices out kind of thing. And I was like, well, just get a business credit card, put it on that. And she hadn't considered that as an option. And I think like,

Kurt von Ahnen (30:33)
Yeah.

Toby Cryns (30:35)
You're right. Like there is this like tyranny of the cashflow business ⁓ mentality. ⁓ I do think that it is what we should aim for generally, especially if you don't have a lot of capital investments needed, you know, which we don't besides computers really, you how many, but we only need one of those and we only need it every few years, maybe, or more than that. So I don't know. I, this goes like, like to another thing, like,

Just that knowledge, like, oh, there's a credit card for business. Like, people don't even know that. Like, that you can, you know? And, yeah.

Kurt von Ahnen (31:14)
Yeah, or lines of credit. You can get a line of credit

to cover things. I hate the idea of added expense to cover a fixed expense. And hopefully I'm saying this in a way that people get. Because then that comes out of the margin. That's what's left in your bank account. Well, it's actually negative. ⁓ And then it adds expense. But if you ran negative and you had bank fees, that would be an expense too.

Toby Cryns (31:40)
Mm-hmm.

Kurt von Ahnen (31:41)
So

then you got to figure what's the best of two evils. And the best of two evils in that instance would be paying the interest.

Toby Cryns (31:48)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I think, like, that's okay. Like, I don't think paying interest is inherently bad, you know, like, ⁓ as a business move. But, you know, too many months in a row, maybe. But, like, I don't know. There's a lot.

Kurt von Ahnen (32:00)
Well, Grant Cardone would

tell you it's the absolute way to go. Have you ever listened to Grant Cardone or any of those, ⁓ Kiyosaki, he's another one that does it. ⁓ They're the opposite of, God, what's his name? I have his book.

Toby Cryns (32:04)
Who would tell you that?

Okay.

Kurt von Ahnen (32:17)
They're the opposite of Dave Ramsey. So Dave Ramsey says you shouldn't have any debt, right? Everything should be paid off. You shouldn't have any debt. And then Grant Cardone and Robert Kiyosaki and some of these other financial guys, they say, no, no, no, you're missing the whole boat. The wealth is based on cash flow, not cash holdings. And so if you have a lot of debt, how much tax do you pay on debt? And they're like, debt doesn't get taxed.

Toby Cryns (32:19)
Uh-huh.

Kurt von Ahnen (32:46)
income gets taxed. And so if you leverage debt and then leverage more debt to get more debt, you end up buying things and capitalizing things with debt that you don't necessarily have to pay absorbent taxes on.

Toby Cryns (33:03)
I think I'm following you. let me just give you an example. I'm curious if this is an example. Bought a car. It was a used car, but it was still quite a bit of money. We bought it at, took out the loan for the entire amount, most of it. And the interest rate on the loan was, let's say, 6%. Is that what you're talking about? Something like that? No?

Kurt von Ahnen (33:29)
No, like Grant Cardone

talks about buying buildings and flipping buildings. then, I mean, the guy, he says he's a billionaire, but he talks about leveraging debt to make more money. ⁓ it's a very interesting way to look at things. And I am not, by the way, folks, this is not official financial advice. ⁓ We're simply making a podcast. This is for entertainment purposes only. ⁓ I just, get fascinated at listening to the different voices in the same space. You know, we've got Dave Ramsey saying,

Toby Cryns (33:57)
Yeah.

Kurt von Ahnen (33:59)
you this is one way to do it and then you've got you know the the grant card owns and and ⁓ robert kiyosaki's the world saying to do completely different things robert kiyosaki is the rich dad poor dad author

Toby Cryns (34:12)
So I have this theory about stuff like this. It's about child rearing. When you have your first child, you're like, what do I do? I always tell people, figure out what you want to do and then find a book that supports that. And this is the same with business. Like you're saying, financial advice. There's every bit of financial advice that you can imagine. Go find it and follow that.

Kurt von Ahnen (34:29)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, it's I once worked for a guy and ⁓ he by the way didn't seem to have any problems with any of this stuff It was like a struggle for payroll. It was a struggle for the building It was a struggle for it was always a struggle and then he shows up with a brand new Excursion one month and a brand new speedboat like two or three months later and i'm like I thought it was a struggle Like like I think you're struggling less than some of us

Toby Cryns (34:59)
Yeah.

all relative, isn't ⁓ it? Yeah, I was thinking, ⁓ have about I own about 20 books, like I only keep books I love. And this is one that I keep. It's called Shel Silverstein's. ⁓ It's by Shel Silverstein. It's called Uncle Shelby's ABZ book. I'm going to read one of the passages from here. They're all very short. Goes. This is quoting Shel Silverstein in this book now.

Kurt von Ahnen (35:05)
It's all relative. It's all relative. So let's talk about fun books. What do you read for fun?

Toby Cryns (35:34)
And every passage is like this, by the way. So if you like this, definitely get the book. It goes, it's an ABC book. So we're on the letter D. ⁓ D is for daddy. See daddy? See daddy sleeping on the couch? See daddy's hair? Daddy needs a haircut. Poor daddy. Daddy has no money for a haircut. Daddy spends all his money to buy you toys and oatmeal. Poor daddy. Daddy cannot have a haircut. Poor, poor daddy.

See the scissors? Poor poor poor poor daddy.

Kurt von Ahnen (36:11)
Okay.

Okay.

Toby Cryns (36:16)
Yep. ⁓ What about you? What fun ones do you read?

Kurt von Ahnen (36:20)
⁓

I used to race motorcycles. And so I allow myself to get wrapped up in people that won championships and like biographies and things. And so my daughter is actually named Rainey. She's named after Wayne Rainey. And so I read his book, ⁓ super, super driven, you know, professional athlete got hurt in the sport, ended up in a wheelchair and now is still involved in the sport as a team manager and things like that. So I've tried to meet him in person a few times and he's, not the most agreeable, easily agreeable.

person. Even when he came to the offices at like Ducati, he was at the office at Ducati and I was like, hey I named my daughter after you and he's like and walked away. So it's one of those you know careful when you meet your heroes stories. I listen to audio books a lot when I mountain bike or when I'm you know doing stuff.

Toby Cryns (37:01)
Ha ha ha ha ha! Screw you!

Yeah.

Kurt von Ahnen (37:14)
And I've been listening to a series from M.A. Rothman, and it's called the Perimeter series, I believe. And it's the weirdest story ever because it's a story about an Amish guy that somehow ends up becoming like a samurai somewhere and then ⁓ ends up working with the CIA and with the mob at the same time. Like it's just a really bizarre character. And it is so, so pulled from reality for me that it's a little bit of escape.

So I enjoy that. listen to the audiobooks about that series and I think I've listened to four of the books so far. I really enjoy it.

Toby Cryns (37:51)
Cool. That might be one thing. Let's say you're struggling for cash right now, but you want to listen to a bunch of great audiobooks, check out your local library. Like I know in Minneapolis, they have a whole audio app that's very comparable to, ⁓ what's the big one that Amazon owns? It's like Audible. It's like Audible. It's pretty much the same, but you log in with your library card and it's totally free. And they have a giant library of audiobooks. ⁓

Kurt von Ahnen (38:08)
audible.

Yeah.

So the libraries are connected to all kinds of things. I mean, they're connected to online learning programs. They're connected to the audio books. You can go and like get DVDs for free, watch them for the weekend. Just like, you know, yeah, it's, like Netflix without being Netflix. Uh, it's, really kind of a crazy deal.

Toby Cryns (38:32)
streaming services. Yeah. Right. And

you mentioned learning. Our library in Minneapolis has ⁓ free access to LinkedIn Learning, the entire LinkedIn Learning catalog. It's awesome. And yeah, and maybe your library does too. You kind of have to like ask.

Kurt von Ahnen (38:45)
Wow, because that's really good stuff.

Yeah, you got to go figure that stuff out. Our community here in Kansas has so many programs and so many things for so many different areas of society. It's like you just, you have to go and do, you have to go and look and see what's available.

Toby Cryns (39:06)
also, like I learned just last weekend, in Minnesota we have beautiful state parks, I know Kansas does too. You can go to the library, get a free state park pass for the day. Like the library, like you're saying, I love library. Like libraries are the greatest resource. I mean, among the greatest institutions ever invented probably, like the public library.

Kurt von Ahnen (39:29)
It's funny to me because you can ask people now like, Hey, when's the last time you've been to a library? And like, if they're young people, they may have never been to a library. Like that's the craziest thing. My kids love the library. My, my wife got them started at a very young age. Hey, you can go to the library. You can pick up, you can only pick three books, you know, or you pick four books or whatever. Like, cause the library said you can take 20 books. Um, but you know, you can only take three or four and then they would, they would read them at home and get all excited. And then they'd go to the library, spend a couple hours there.

Toby Cryns (39:48)
Right.

Mm-hmm.

Kurt von Ahnen (39:59)
story time and all that junk that you know for kids and they but they really got into reading and going back and forth and getting the new books and now to this day both of them like libraries. When we moved to Kansas I took Hayden to lunch in Kansas City to meet some friends I used to work with at Ducati and I said is hey is there anything you want to do in Kansas City while we're there? I'm thinking he's gonna I don't know a restaurant or something like I'm thinking there's something that he's gonna want to he goes I heard there's a library there where the outside of the library looks like a bookshelf.

want to go there. And that's where we went. We went to this really cool library where the outside of the building looks like a bookshelf. They're books.

Toby Cryns (40:37)
That's

awesome. Other great ⁓ fun tales. The whole Dogman, I celebrate the whole Dogman series. If you like fart jokes, poop jokes, heads exploding jokes, like there's nothing better and you can read a book in, you know, an hour or less.

Kurt von Ahnen (40:58)
Yeah, yeah. So for really short books, I like books and it takes me back to the business-y thing. But there was a book, it was like 37 pages, and it's called Tyranny the Urgent. That book will change your thinking.

It's kind of like Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell, except Dan Martell's book is a whole dang book, right? But this little tiny, almost like a pamphlet, 37 pages, a little tiny book, Tyranny the Urgent. You read that book, and then all of a sudden you start to rethink every meeting someone wants to schedule with you. You're like, is that really important?

Toby Cryns (41:32)
Yeah, if you really don't like meetings, should read more by Jason Fried and Dave Handmeier Hansen. Half their writings are about meetings and the tyranny of meetings.

Kurt von Ahnen (41:45)
Goodness gracious. Well, folks, we wanted to try and share with you some of the inspirations that we've had. So we thought this would be a fun episode to talk about some of the books. We mentioned it in the last episode. So here we are. But what else do you have going on that we can discuss besides books? You did something with AI this week, didn't you, Toby?

Toby Cryns (42:04)
Yeah, so I went to LinkedIn Learning, which was free with my library card. I was like, just wanted to learn more about how to do prompts. And I'm also in like a vibe coding thing that a new class on LinkedIn Learning that was built in April. So I'm like, this is pretty recent. So I'm doing that right now. But also I took this AI certification thing through LinkedIn Learning and it was like an hour lecture and then you answer five or six questions. And it's like, what, what would

Kurt von Ahnen (42:30)
You're certified.

Toby Cryns (42:31)
What should you do if you're presented with AI? Should you learn about it? Should you throw it out the window? Should you smash, you know, it's just like obvious answers. Anyway, I got this certificate from LinkedIn Learning, ⁓ which I then posted to my LinkedIn profile. And then I, from there, it says, do you want to create a post about this on LinkedIn? I was like, yeah, sure. I just clicked go, cause it writes it all for you. And ⁓ the funny thing about all this is that that post saying,

I completed a certification and it was all like just click, click, click. It had more engagements, likes, whatever you want to call it. This post is probably my most popular post to date.

Kurt von Ahnen (43:14)
my goodness. I literally have hundreds of videos on YouTube on multiple channels, hundreds upon hundreds of videos. To this day, my number one video on YouTube is me and a friend putting a 49 CC overbore kit in a pocket bike.

And it's so frustrating because I have made in my opinion, I have made really great, you know, paying it forward content, you know, good training content. And then something silly like, Hey, let's hang out in the garage, drink a couple of beers and put a different motor in this little tiny motorcycle. Everybody's like, I got to watch that.

Toby Cryns (43:39)
yeah.

Yeah, this is so

fantastic, Kurt, because guess what? We have, I don't know, let's say a thousand blog posts, most are about WordPress related things. Guess what the most popular post is by far? mean, like 20 to one, 30 to one ratio. ⁓ How to install Minecraft on Ubuntu. Yeah.

Kurt von Ahnen (44:10)
Isn't that heartbreaking? Like,

on one hand, it's incredibly entertaining to think that way. But on the other hand, it's it's heartbreaking. Because I see.

Just, just as a coincidental thing, Chris Badgett and I, Chris Badgett is the founder of Lifter LMS. And we were having a talk about, some courses make it, some courses don't. Some people, you know, they fail at the marketing that where they fail at the product market fit. Like they didn't even really recognize what the market wanted from them in the, shape of a course, you know? And I was joking because I do this ride every year called the great cycle challenge. It's a, it's a nonprofit ride to raise money for kids with brain cancer. So this is my eighth year and I'm joking around with Chris.

And I said, and he goes, you should do something you're passionate and knowledgeable about and it should have product market fit. And I said, you know, there's like 14,000 people in this stupid, ⁓ Facebook group asking dumb questions every year about riding bicycles for this thing. Right? I said, I should just make an online course about how to ride a bicycle. And he goes,

You should, you'd be amazed who would sign up for it. So I put a question in and I said, Hey, in the group, I said, I said, I'm not trying to spam the group. I'm not trying to sell anything yet. I just want to know. I answer a lot of questions in this forum. If I were to arrange those questions in a course, how many people would be interested in a course on, on how to buy the right bike, ride the right bike and you know, ride it as an athlete, you know, and within an hour, two hours, like 600 possible, you know, positive responses.

And that to me is like, it's like a real kick in the gut. Cause I've got a decade in of making like business content, leadership content, know, publishing a leadership book and, and, uh, you know, I put like a thousand hours into making the power sport academy, you know, courses for, to, the motorcycle industry. And then it's like a course on how to ride a bicycle and 600 people are like, take my money.

Toby Cryns (45:50)
⁓ yeah.

Exactly. So people, you, know, Kurt does do WordPress and digital stuff, but if you need to know how to ride a bike, he's the go-to resource.

Kurt von Ahnen (46:13)
If you need to know how to ride a bike, it's, but it's amazing. It's you don't know until you ask, like you don't, you don't know what you don't know. So what is, what is product market fit? What do people want? What are people looking for? And like, if you look at people's like Netflix accounts and what they really watch, or if you saw people's real search results, you would be mortified. You would be like, how stupid are we as a society? Like this is what people want. but if we create what they want.

We have product market fit and we can make success out of that.

Toby Cryns (46:45)
Yeah. Well, I think we're about time here. Let's call it a day. We have other items. So people stay tuned next week for more excitement. Also leave us comments, questions, email us. don't know. Kurt, how can we get it? Sorry.

Kurt von Ahnen (46:58)
I think the questions

are, people need to, what do you want to hear? What questions do you have about running an agency? Like that would really help Toby and I out with making sure that we have product market fit and that we're doing the right thing.

Toby Cryns (47:11)
Also, ⁓ I know this sounds dumb because you hear it everywhere, but apparently it makes a difference. Like and subscribe or whatever the options are on wherever you're listening or watching this, because it does help the algorithm I hear. And also what I've heard from other podcasters is that it helps to ask. So please like and subscribe and hit that bell or whatever you do on whatever platform. Kurt, how can we get in touch with you?

Kurt von Ahnen (47:38)
Well, a personal basis, I'm the only Kurt Von Ahnen on LinkedIn. I'm easy to find there. hit connect, more than follow, hit connect, and then that way we'll really make a connection. And then for business, my company name is Manana No Mas, and that's everything on social and for its website. Toby, you?

Toby Cryns (47:57)
Yeah, I'm

on LinkedIn. Last name is C R Y N S. I run the mighty Mo. If you type the mighty Mo WordPress will be number one in the search results. So hope to, ⁓ you know, reach out and whatever way works for you. So, we'd love to also, like Kurt said, like we would love to hear questions that we can address on a future podcast. So if I have whatever medium works for you, send them our

Kurt von Ahnen (48:20)
Perfect. I think that's it. Have a great day.