For those of you that are new here, every week I send what I call a 1x1x1.
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One learning, reminder, or interesting item from my week.
One interesting find/tool from my week.
One image from my life.

Let's dive in 👇

Learning/reminder of the week

Can I give you a check for $50,000 today? Yes please!

Sometimes I get attracted to a B2C business but remind myself that B2B businesses are the best for so many reasons. Here is one from a few years ago:

Another night of tossing and turning in bed. We were weeks away from the end of the year and behind on our sales targets.

Looking back now, we had a good year for sales but i was inflicting stress on myself and, unfortunately, my sales team to push hard and reach our target.

I poured myself a dark black cup of coffee to shake the past night's insomnia and cracked the laptop open for the morning dig out of the inbox.

Top of my gmail was one of our larger clients. "Ben, can we speak urgently?"

Great, I thought. More stress on top of my already stressed-out mindset.

An hour later, the client and I were on the phone. This is where my day and end of my year, turned around.
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"Ben, can you send me and invoice for $50,000 today?"
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I was confused. Did we sell this client something this large and I forgot about it? I began digging for clarification. The client shared more.

"We have $50,000 left in our budget and if I don't spend it today, we lose it for next year's budget."

"Of course" I shared with the client. "You can just use it as a credit for any of our services next year."

The client was delighted. Not only was he giving me a $50K check that day, but I was his hero for allowing him to do so. This would go on to happen a number of times with other clients.

Moral of the story, it's much easier to spend money that's not yours. Teams at large companies have budgets at the end of the year they have to use and are eager to spend it.

A reminder to myself of one of the many reasons B2B businesses are fantastic.

Interesting item/tool of the week

Developers are becoming increasingly more obsolete.

I try to find an hour or two each week to poke at different tools that people share with me. This week, the tool was Bubble.

Bubble allows you to design, develop, and launch production-grade applications without code. It's surprisingly good. For example, I tried to see what it would look like to build a custom CRM for one of our businesses to sell to clients. Blown away!

Trying to launch a tech company sometime soon? Try Bubble first. Might just save you a few hundred thousand dollars ;)

Image from my life

My mother in law and I got out for a snow shoe yesterday evening. We're loving these longer days, not to mention where we live ⛰️.

See you all next week!