The Unsure Entrepreneur

The Unsure Entrepreneur Podcast

SUMMARY KEYWORDS
business, banks, small business, content, customers, online, small business owners, glenn, workshops, company, create, running, microsoft, money, people, talk, new zealand, banker, product, year

SPEAKERS
Glen Senior, Roger Pierce

Intro 00:00
You're listening to the unsure entrepreneur podcast with Roger Pierce, whether you're scribbling business ideas on a napkin or wrestling with the should I shouldn't I question. Get ready to explore the realities, the risks and the rewards of entrepreneurship as we share the stories, scars and successes of small business owners.

Roger Pierce 00:22
Hello and welcome to another episode of The unsure entrepreneur Podcast. I'm Roger Pierce. Excited to introduce my guest here today, let me tell you a bit more about him as the CEO and founder of the small business company, Glen SR has developed extensive resources for small business owners in collaboration with banks, credit unions and brands in six different countries, his expertise lies in creating content that helps financial institutions to engage more effectively with their small business customers, so that these businesses can thrive through better financial understanding and planning. Now, the small business company provides all its resources free to small business owners. The insights and practical tools developed by Glenn and his team are distributed through partnerships with banks, credit unions, government bodies and other small business focused organizations reaching millions of small business owners annually. Glenn has also authored six books on small business development and planning, created and conducted in person training courses. Built innovative e learning platforms and design online business games for schools. And full disclosure, I'm proud to be a partner for the small business company in North America, and very proud to be a friend to Glenn. Welcome to the podcast. Glen thanks, Roger.

Glen Senior 01:39
Pleased to be a friend of yours as well. I'm not sure about the lifetime tag, but I guess you're right. It's been quite a long time I've been involved in, you know, running and helping small business owners. So yeah, it's interesting.

Roger Pierce 01:52
We've been working together now for what I think it's since like 2016 so a good eight years or kindred souls, because we both want to help small business owners with advice and support and resources, and I think we've got a clever way to go about it. It's free for the small business owners and third parties like banks or brands or government clients, pay for the content, pay for the advice pieces and put them up on their websites. It's like a win, win, win, isn't it?

Glen Senior 02:19
I think the key is that there's no conflict of interest. So for example, we're not trying to encourage business owners to come to us, to charge them for consultancy. We've got no programs aimed at small businesses for subscription. It's really, really clean. The more businesses approach and contact the banks, the better we're not getting. It's not per click. So therefore, we have an inherent interest in getting as many business owners talking to the banks or the financial institutions as we can. And as

Roger Pierce 02:49
you and I both know very well, small business owners don't like spending their own money. They don't have to. So the fact that all these resources can be hosted by our clients, this is perfect. The entrepreneurs get the help they need, and we get to help them in return. So So let's dig a bit deeper. I want to go back to your journey. Can you share a bit of your journey with us? Glenn and what inspired you to dedicate your career and your company to supporting small businesses?

Glen Senior 03:15
So I guess if we want to go far back, I won't say how far, but last year of school, I had an idea of starting the business, but there were no business courses, hardly any education. So the only course I could find was a stage three university course. But also had an idea of of selling. And it might sound a bit nerdy, or back then it was, but Dungeon and Dragons was a the tabletop stuff. There was no online. There's no internet, by the way. So the tabletop game was quite new in New Zealand, but I knew overseas built a business around it. So actually took a gap year from university, went over to England, and I found a guy who made these figures. So I managed somehow to convince them to give me the license for New Zealand and Australia. So I came back and actually spun these metal figures through a contract manufacturer and sold them all throughout Australasia. It was classic.

Roger Pierce 04:09
wow, I don't think I knew that part of your history, yeah.

Glen Senior 04:13
So that kind of kick started. It really thinking, actually I can be in business. It was really small, as you know, I went back to university, so I actually ran the business while I was doing my final year.

Roger Pierce 04:24
So you got your start really early. And by the way, those who you, those who don't know you, Glenn's coming to us fly from from New Zealand, so he's gonna talk a little bit more about his history down there too. You start really early. You got your first business here. But you've also run several, several businesses, I don't know how many, over the last few decades. How have those experiences shaped you into who you are today?

Glen Senior 04:47
Yeah, I think I mean my my career sort of took three paths. So the first one overseas for a couple of years, as you do, and then when I came back, I fell into a job at a college teaching small business. No training, no teaching qualifications, but I knew about, you know, running a small business. So I got collared into this. And then that kind of led into teaching entrepreneurship, and then I left and went into chambers of commerce, and I ran these business programs, so creating from scratch, these small business workshops, so that education piece has always been the core of my background. So from writing books to running workshops and helping people directly. And the second path was setting up and running businesses along the way, as I mentioned, the university around a business. So while I was teaching, because you got spare time when you're teaching. And therefore I found I could run other businesses or set them up. So my father had five retail stores and photographs, so I helped him out. We had a tiling company, a company called E digital, which sold creating websites for companies. There was another company that ran venture capital workshops around the country. So always had these sort of part time businesses that I was involved in while I was doing the education part, and then the third bit, they kind of merged together. When I thought, right, I'm not going to run workshops for other people or do this part time, I took a big risk and decided to start my own company, enhance small business company.

Roger Pierce 06:20
So really background in education and teaching, combined with your own family businesses and your own early entrepreneurial endeavors all melded together to bring you up to that moment where you said, I want to start the small business company

Glen Senior 06:32
That's fair. And you know, in those days, you know, to start a company, it wasn't as easy as going online, because, as I mentioned, it wasn't online. It was like business class and old school. So it was like you had to contact people and find people, which it wasn't easy, you know, I found with a small business company, again, sort of two parts the education piece. So as you mentioned, you know, we've formed a couple of online games. So I find out, I write up now that, like, gaming is a $350 billion industry, films like 50 billion. So it's, you know, seven times bigger. But in my days, it was frowned on you like in libraries, playing with wee toys. But now, obviously it's kind of cool. I actually managed to invent or create a game, like a sports manager game, and we sold to Microsoft. It was a football or a soccer store. We launched Wembley with all the football clubs sponsoring the game, and we had about 85% Business Studies students in England playing this game and their schools. So that was kind of cool. So sort of gamifying content, and that's kind of what we try and do now, is all the content or tools or checklists and stuff we create is to try and be as not entertaining but as easy to consume as possible.

Roger Pierce 07:44
And that's a perfect segue for you to explain, better than I did earlier, what exactly a small business company does for its clients, and the kind of things you produce.

Glen Senior 07:54
Good question. What I normally say to somebody is, who do you bank with? And they go, Oh, RBC, or Bank of America, or somebody. And then I say, Well, if you go into those websites, you look under the business section in there somewhere, there will be like a toolkit, or there'll be a resource center, cash flow forecasting. There might be some marketing stuff, there might be some videos, there might be a calculator. It's all that content inside their websites we create and provide them.

Roger Pierce 08:21
Let's down a bit of the types of content you're producing. Interactive content. There's articles. Can you give me kind of the laundry list of things that clients are buying?

Glen Senior 08:29
Banks credit unions, to be fair, looking to help their small business customers. I kind of sumise it by having fewer fail and more grow. I guess more startup as well. But if you can get more people wanting to start a business, I find small businesses recession proof. If the economy is going poorly, people lose their jobs, and therefore they have to start a business. And if the economy is going well, they quit their job and start a business. So you hardly ever see a drop in small business startups during covid, you had the biggest bump in startups on the planet because people are reassessing what they want to do and may not also be full time. So there's now, obviously, through the internet and online enablement, you can actually run your business while you're still working. Being in that small business industry I find has never, ever dropped or fell away, and so banks and institutions have a role to play to make it easy to find out how to start what legal structure should I have? How does cash flow work? How do I pay my bills? Just simple educational content that every business owner should have, and they shouldn't have to go and try and find it. They should be making any sort of basic financial mistakes that

Roger Pierce 09:43
comes in the form of a number of different types of content, articles, how to articles? That's tried and true. But you've also got templates, like a cash flow template. You've got business plan template, marketing plan template, I know you're a big fan of checklists. You know? Here's a checklist to help you sell your business. Kind of thing, webinars, videos, seminars. You know you do seminars that banks themselves can go out and present. I know you love your financial calculators and business calculators, which every financial institution should have on their website, right as a resource for entrepreneurs. To me, part of the fun is the different types of content we get to produce, and banks get to pick and choose what they put on their site. Roger

Glen Senior 10:23
comes from the educational background that still runs through our company. And so the reason why there's so many different types of content is because people learn differently. Some people want to read, some people want to skim, more people want to listen to a podcast, or they want to look at a video. So there's levels of learning, and there's also levels of depth. If I am looking if I got a cash flow problem or there's an opportunity to invest in a new product, then I'll skim content to find a heading or a piece that interests me, and then if that piece interests me, I want a deep dive. And I want all the information I can find. The breadth of content types is a, learning styles, and then B, to allow people to skim, and then deep dive. And

Roger Pierce 11:11
you're a big fan of proper architecture. I mean that, you know, you don't just let the banks throw these things up ad hoc. It's organized into start, grow, manage your business, even exit your business, isn't it?

Glen Senior 11:23
Yeah, so we, I mean, again, maybe the educational and behind theme is, you know, we call it a curriculum. If a customer comes to us and says, right, we want some content, then we won't just say, Here you go. We'll go through a process to build this curriculum. And it'll be, who are your customers? You know, what verticals Do you have? Is it construction, or is it real estate? Is it retail, tech? Is it AG? And then, based on their customer types, what types of problems do they have and what issues do they face? Well, so we actually work up a list of the content types and the content topics that will best resonate with those customers, and we go back to them and say, This is the best list of content we've got that we think addresses your customers needs. Because the idea is that somebody comes to the to their site and goes, gosh, that's exactly what I need. This addresses exactly the problem that I have. And so we do work through that sort of content strategy with

Roger Pierce 12:16
them, and it's all tailored if they want it to be. Tell us about the two options you've got, I know, custom content, which is tailored exactly what the financial institution wants. And you've also got more of an off the shelf program.

Glen Senior 12:29
We find larger banks, like a TD or a BMO, then they will want specialized custom content. For example, you know, any calculator has to go through their security has to be pretty much built from scratch to get through their IT protocols. If they have campaigns that are running, then, yeah, we'll create individual pieces of content to match for some of the medium to smaller institutions. They might, may only be one or two people with, you know, three inside the whole marketing department, and so they don't have the time, or it's not their mandate to actually create content. We'll go through that depth. So we've got a business content library. It's inexpensive. They subscribe to it, they log in. They can download content. We still customize content for them. We still create some one off pieces, but primarily it's a Yeah, to plug and play. They can literally have this whole library of content at their fingertips. Never have to think about content ever again, and then, as you mentioned the other ones, it'll be quite detailed or breath. Content gets signed off, goes through the legal process. There's two kind of options.

Roger Pierce 13:31
Glenn, in your own words, let's say I'm a bank or a credit union. Why should I care about doing any content? What's in it for the companies you work with?

Glen Senior 13:38
There's a few reasons. First is, bankers are trusted advisors, and in the old days, you'd go along to a banker and go hey, and you talk to them, and you'd go into their office, and that's obviously gone now, because I think you know online and and if you're not big enough, I find if you're not, you don't have if you don't owe enough money or have enough money, you fall in the middle where they'd rather deal with you online, because it's cheaper for them, right? Because businesses no longer have that banker connection, they start to look online and they start to explore other options. So therefore, the danger for an existing bank is that they will lose those customers at the fringe or the ones that are kind of under the radar. Good example, I was talking to a banker just a few weeks ago, and they had a customer they'd never talk to again. They weren't a large borrower, and they didn't have large deposits, but they had around about ten million worth of assets. Asset rich, cash flow poor. They were a customer that they could be they should be looking after, because that funding eventually, maybe they want to borrow, maybe they want to start a business. Maybe the asset will go into the next generation. So they should be keeping tabs on those people, so they kind of fall through the through the gap. So you can create online content that addresses some of those needs with those gap people, which is primarily on a 90% of the customer base. So banks tend to go right these top five high growth lots of money. Gosh, we can lend them millions and millions. That's awesome. And then you got the bottom five that probably the problems are going bust. They're at risk. So they tend to focus on the top five and the bottom five and the 90% that just paid the fees and just don't bother them. That's the ones they just try and leave and that, to be fair, are the ones that I think institutions should be trying to target the silent majority, because that's where the opportunity is. You've got people looking after the high profile ones. You've got people at the bottom trying to, you know, resurrect them. That's probably the main reason why I think banks and credit unions should be offering content. And the other one is so online, and the shift and the other discussions around conversations. So if you're a banker or relationship manager and you go, Hey, do I borrow some money? Or, Hey, you got money to deposit, or hey, we're on your credit card, but just talk about product. And so the challenge is, how do you get the front line to have a wider conversation? Hey, you know what's happening next couple of years. We've got some planning tools. Hey, we've got a, you know, an end of year checklist. The end of year is coming up. Here's some information to maybe try and pay a little bit less tax. Are you claiming everything you need so extra, more friendly and helpful content and conversations, rather just product, educate, then sell? Yeah. And it's interesting, if you look at a bank website or a credit union, be a million dollars, right? It's like product, credit cards, deposits, the drop down from the top of the of the nav, if you go business banking, credit cards, loans, deposits, right? All these sort of products. And you can correct me if I'm wrong here, but nobody borrows money for fun. It's not, Oh, great. I'll go borrow some money and chuck it under my pillow. Nobody wants a credit card. They actually want the credit card so they can pay online, or they can defer payments. So it's deferring payments and enabling is the benefit borrowing money actually is not. It's not the money is I want to then buy some equipment, or I need for working capital, or I've got a new opportunity and I need to scale up, in my view, that's the information that should be on the website. What you use the money for? Not necessarily the money you could go to a website from a financial institution. It just has a big search bar that says, How can we help you? And from that search, then it pulls down into product, so banks get around the wrong way.

Roger Pierce 17:27
Like we're saying, educate and then sell. Can't just all be product, product, when you've also got a talent for weaving together content, advice, content with products. Won't go too far down that rabbit hole. But there's a science to it. There's an approach that makes it work. So you can do both, right? You can educate and you can introduce your products and services

Glen Senior 17:45
correct business again, apart from not borrowing money for fun. But you know, small business owners don't tend to think about banks like and two in the morning when this, you know, when they're waking up, if they could get through again at 90% without ever talking to their to their bank and just pay their fees and build their business and get the kids from school, and then all those things. That's what they worry about. And then if they get a letter from the bank, it's like, ah, oh no, the bank wants to get hold of me. What's gone wrong? Like it's either bad news. Normally, the opportunity is to change that mindset around banks. In my view should be thinking, what is waking our customers up at two in the morning? What are they sweating about and nervous about? And it's not, do they need another credit card in the business sense, it's I've got a cash flow problem coming up. I've got an opportunity that I can't fund, and my equipment's obsolete. Got problems with employees. I mean, if you go wider away from financial my employees are fighting my best staff members just quit. My competitors set up opposite me. My suppliers are increasing their costs. Customers are wanting discounts. They are the problems that really keep people awake, and that's the content that we provide. So all those issues around small business concerns, you will find that they are our topics.

Roger Pierce 19:01
And a lot of those topics build financial literacy small business. I know that's another important pillar for you, because look, if we can do our way, our part in a small way, to help improve the knowledge of a small business owner, and they can speak profit and loss and income and loss and cash flow, and understand and read a balance sheet and understand what margins are and how those work, that makes for a better customer for the bank, doesn't it? Glen, again,

Glen Senior 19:26
as I mentioned, you know, more startups and fewer fail, right? The banks don't want to talk to the bottom 5% but really that's that's worst case scenario for them. This creates a massive issue for them, I think again, at 90% if they can get that 90% to be a better business that 90% increases sales by just 10% and lowers the operating costs by 10% or work 10% smarter, then that's going to a create more transactional work. It's going to mean that their businesses could have, across their whole customer base, another billion dollars. Dollars worth of savings, which is money they would invest for deposits, which the bank can then lend out so all their customers do slightly better a there's more transactions. You know, imagine if there's 10% more transaction fees across their whole customer base. And that's huge. It's not that much for a small business to go up 10% I would imagine if a bank increases their fees by 2% see, it's a win win. It's a win

Roger Pierce 20:21
win. It's a win win. And the last reason, I'll say before we move on, but it's acquisition costs. It's customer acquisition right. Content engages small business customers, your existing customers and new customers. We've got 582 million entrepreneurs in the world now, let's be honest, banks and credit unions, licks and more of them and content, no one comes around for the credit card, necessarily, because it's such a great offer. They come in for the advice about how to manage their credit card, which you can help provide

Glen Senior 20:51
correct and the other danger or threat is the non traditional banks getting into this game. So you wait until you know, Tesla dollars come out, or Amazon, obviously, you know, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, from Google to Apple and Facebook. So there's no reason why they won't. They already do. You know, lend money to small businesses, and that's the biggest threat. So I go to quite a few conferences, and most of them are worried about the Jeff Bezos is in the world, not being across the road. So that's the biggest threat. Don't start playing in a sort of online space. And doesn't always have to be. I mean, I know their products can be traditional, and like in the US, there's 10,000 banks, and you've got small local community banks. They might have 10 branches that are embedded in the community. Their employees are embedded. That's a great business model, because it's not just the banking, it's the social community side. So weirdly, they probably have less of a risk, or maybe they'd be bought out than sort of the medium sized banks that don't have that local loyalty. Yeah, it's a big risk. And I think as digital wallets, I'm not sure about Bitcoin, not sure I should mention Bitcoin. But here's the weird thing, money is just made up, right? Like, currency is just a it doesn't really exist. And in the old days, when it was linked to, you know, bits of silver and gold and but now it's just all digital, and there's no gold standard. So currencies fluctuate globally, and it's trust. So you take a $20 note, or maybe not even note, these days, to your phone, and you buy something worth $20 I mean, that just comes off your bank account, which is digital, into their bank account which is digital. There's a huge trust element. If that fails, the whole global economy, you know, goes down to Googler. A currency, in my view, has to be two things. And this is my point about Bitcoin. You know, you can replay this in years to come If I'm wrong. But a needs to be stable. If you buy a cup of coffee and it costs you, you know, $3 then by the time you order the coffee and by the time you pay for it, you don't want to be $6 Bitcoin bumps up and down so fast. Or you don't want it to be worth 10 cents, because that, that's the coffee, you know, the cafe. If Bitcoin goes up in price, then suddenly, say, with 10 cents, they lose money. So currencies can't, can't go up and down so so fast as Bitcoin, or is, um, crypto. And the second thing for it to be a currency needs to be taxed. You need to have, I think, governments that have a safety net for society. You need to have tax to pay for, like the roads and security and all those things in hospitals and stuff, right? So if you can't actually tax and run a country, that's just not going to be viable. So two things stable and you got to tax it. So once you've got those two things, then maybe crypto will will be adopted by, I suggest the financial institutions or come up with their own online cryptocurrency that they'll use some

Roger Pierce 23:45
kind of solution? Yeah, it's fascinating to see how the banking world is evolving, and all these non banks getting into the industry and competing with the traditional banks, like you said, all these new players entering the financial realm, those are the the scary issues for for customers, for for small business bankers and credit unions. Let's talk about what, what's ahead for small business owners? What do you think some of the biggest obstacles for small business owners are going to come up in the next few years, and what? What can we do to help them?

Glen Senior 24:16
Good question. So there's a few things leading on to the crypto the whole kind of swirling, evolving tech and AI and things just outside people's and our not comprehension but how it's going to affect us. In the future, there's so many changes and so many things happening. You almost like, gotta shut your brain down and like, watch a TV program or something. I mean, it's like, in our business, I've no idea what's around the corner. I've always had a mantra, be first to be second. So rather try and develop, yeah, develop new tech that's just way too hard, way too expensive. So we kind of wait. We didn't invent the internet, but all of our product is delivered online. So how can you use these. Tools. So the problem is the change in environment. The answer, in my view, or my opinion, would be, wait till something gets developed and then be the first to be on the bandwagon. I think people find it harder to get new customers. People look further away. There's so many more options. You can order literally anything online. I mean, the death of retail and malls. You go into some of the malls in the US and Canada, and even here in New Zealand, they're half empty. There's tumbleweeds blowing down the middle. It's tough, tough being a retailer. So they need to also look at, you know, further afield, and how they can spread their footprint by diversifying, by looking at trying to get exclusive product, adding on advisory services subscriptions, no longer just wait. I always think retailers like a trapdoor spider. They kind of like hide their little hole and wait for somebody to come pass and pounce on them. So that's problem. I think the other theme would be how to be resilient when things are tough, every small business will face a challenge at some stage, even when they're growing fast, as I mentioned before, sales triple every year. That's not easy. Suddenly you become from an owner, manager to manager to CEO. You may not be the best people person. You then got to bring in HR managers or accountants. You've got this massive, big overhead that are non productive, arguably non direct to customers. Every business will find sort of touch points. Again, in my experience, it's sort of spikes. So you go along quite happily. Then you get a spike, whether it's sales, how do you deal with those, or whether it's a drop in sales, we get a spike of having to deal with suddenly, employee dynamics and culture, and that's that settles down. Then you get a spike when something breaks. We need more equipment, where you need to scale up, and then that settles down. The challenges, all these things will be thrown at you. It's not it's never really plain sailing, and so it's how you kind of deal with those challenges as you go along. And try and have this guess, smoothish line going up. There's

Roger Pierce 27:01
different challenges at every stage of the business life cycle. For sure, as you illustrated, including selling your business one day. You know, there's trillions of dollars of businesses going to transfer from the aging baby boomers in the coming years, and a lot of them don't have a succession plan.

Glen Senior 27:14
That's right. I think the boomers get blamed for quite a lot, I think. But I won't tell you where I fit in that Boomer bracket, but the challenges, or the financial challenges businesses face, I think your business is quite simple. I always say, look, as long as more money comes in than goes out, you're fine. If you go into a small town and there's a cafe and the owner's rude, the coffee's cold, the cakes are hard. They're slow. The cheers, you know, break, regardless of how poor that business is, as long as more money comes in and goes out, they'll stay in business. They'll never go broke. And likewise, you can have most amazing service slack, the best experience you've ever had. The fear overhead is higher than their you know, their monthly revenue, they won't survive. So it's a very, very simple game, I believe, and so business owners sometimes forget look just more money in than out when you start up. There might be some scaling, where you get some, you know, some capital together, you know, break evens in five months time, that's fine, but if break even doesn't come along soon, it's not going to work. I know, I use that cafe example, but you know, a while ago, this owner went bust. She'd put down $100,000 floor. These tiles. They were lovely in her Cafe, and she spent like a million dollars on the fit out, borrowed all the money. She was the loveliest, nicest person you can imagine on the planet. But when you went through her, through the overhead and the way she was buying things, she was never going to break even, and she didn't realize that there's only so many people that come into a cafe. That's actually maybe another point about capacity. How much capacity have you got in your business at the moment? Maybe that goes back to the workshop idea, actually, and maybe a bit of a loop. So when I was running workshops, I had 30 people in the room. Didn't want to do 10 is not enough. And 50, you talk at them. 30, you talk with them anyway. So I was running these workshops, and then I sort of thought, How do I get to more like, This is exhausting. I was delivering a company ran about 400 workshops a year. And I was doing 8083, our workshops is quite, quite a lot. So I thought, well, yeah, how do I how do I scale this? How do I increase my capacity? So obviously, running a selling our materials to bigger companies that would then deliver them. But then when internet came along, it was a bit of a no brainer to start. You know, online training. So we pretty much converted all of our physical workshops into online training and online delivery. Who's the biggest company on the planet at that stage? It was Microsoft, kind of, you know, doing stuff with small business. So I went to New Zealand Microsoft and said, Hey, I've got this idea to run this online training, or it was a CD ROM, if I'm being i. Ha, how long ago that was? And they said, Oh, find that. You know, Microsoft New Zealand's total revenue is what Microsoft spends on Christmas lunch globally. So if we adopt it, it doesn't matter. But go the UK. There's a guy called called John courthart. Go see him. If the UK buy it, maybe make this again, a part of the journey. I actually took the whole family to the UK for eight months. I got a house near Microsoft in reading, and I piled up and spoke this guy, John coldhart, and pitched the CD ROM. And he went, Ah, no, I'm not, yeah, I'm not sure. But if the US, if the US, buy it, we're in. So then from there, I actually got an intro into the US, flew to Seattle and pitched to Microsoft, and they went, this is brilliant, yeah, I reckon. Next minute I had a Microsoft contract. And people said, No, you need lawyers. Attorneys. You need a contract of agreement. It was literally a handshake. And so next minute, we had six people from the UK, flight from New Zealand, and in two weeks, and we literally pressure cooked the CD and created this resource that went through eight countries, and that a funded us for a while and gave us that bump again to get into online. But it's just an example of following, you know, following where the money is. So maybe serendipitous that, you know, I just found the person in New Zealand, but I followed that trail. Same with banking we got actually, this is a funny story, the guy I went to school with who I didn't like, particularly he was anyway, I saw him in the airport, and he happened to be working at a bank. Hey, we've got the CD ROM that Lloyds Bank have developed. Can you make us one? And so I got a copy, and it was really complicated. And I said, this looks like it's been developed by a rocket scientist. And he went, Yeah, it was a rocket scientist, yeah, I can tell like anyway, so we, we recreated that. And then that got us into a new zealand bank. And then I went, Oh, banks, of course, they've got lots of small business customers. So while the Microsoft thing was going on, we then went into that sort of financial banking area. This is in 2004 it's like 20 years ago. Then I got a bank in Australia, because they owned the New Zealand bank. And then they happened to own a UK bank. They got me into the UK, set up the small business company UK, with the Royal Mail, the UK Government, Intuit sage, a whole bunch of others. And then I realized, in the UK, there's only four or five main banks, and you can't really work with more than one. And then I went, ah, the US, there's 1000s of banks. So getting to part of that journey, I guess another, I'll go to the US and find out how many banks are there. So I went to my first conference and kind of stalked bankers. Got a first US Bank, which happened to be Bank of America, which actually not that easy to deal with, to be fair, but probably too big. But that, again, gave us the credibility. Once you've got three, four or five banks, so pretty much one bank at a time and the next bank was how we kind of grew so kind of morphed. But again, going back to what I said earlier, it's kind of following the money. Where was the opportunity, and that's where we are now. We've got all these banks throughout North America, as I mentioned, six different countries, but the I call it like same joke, different client, it's or different audience. It's small business, education, it's good, honest content, it's practical, it aligns to what the business needs are and what their problems are, what they do when they wake up at two in the morning. And so we just deliver, deliver it differently from me talking to somebody one on one or doing a workshop, to now being global, which is pretty cool.

Roger Pierce 33:34
What a fascinating story. Thank you for sharing that such a progression from country to country size of client, I love hearing all about all of it. Go to wind things down, one last little quick question for you, you know, what do you what do you care so much about small business owners? Glenn,

Glen Senior 33:47
yeah, it's interesting. I guess somebody asked me, you know, did you get get into the whole small business education market because of your dad, because he ran his own business? And I kind of went, Ah, never thought about that. But I guess, you know, having, you know, my dad been in business, maybe the confidence that it was possible to run your own company. And then I think, I don't know, I was cycling around Europe when I was 20, and I just thought, I want to get back and actually start, you know, running small business workshops, because I'd done that through university, and I kind of knew I could, I had a bit of an insight, I guess, and then starting up my own businesses. And just while I was doing the education piece, a friend come to me, I'm thinking of starting I'm thinking of quitting my job. Good idea. And then they kind of like hesitate, or they're not sure. And this works every time I put my hand on their shoulder and I say, I give you permission to quit your job and start your business. And then a relief, okay? And it's a simple thing, right? But every well, so knock on wood, every time they've actually quit eventually, and they've started their business, and they've been fine. I mean, I knew they would be fine, just encouraging more people in businesses don't need to do it on their own. They don't need to struggle when covid hit, not that it was like a Star Wars thing, but almost. Help the small business force. You know, all these businesses are dying, clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk, around the globe as they sort of crashed and burned because of, you know, being shut down and that, yeah, really affected me deeply, actually, where businesses that don't succeed, every time I see a, you know, for lease sign, or, you know, get out of business sign really makes me sad passion, I guess, just to help them out, and knowing that it's not that doesn't have to be that hard or there are lots of opportunities to help. There's lots of support out there to help businesses. And we're just one little piece

Roger Pierce 35:32
well said, you're on a mission to help more businesses succeed. I love it. It's fun

Glen Senior 35:38
from running, you know, a workshop with, like I said, My worst workshop, I turned up and it was like three people was fun. You know, speaking to three people at a workshop and then having, as you said, you know, we touch millions of businesses a year, then that's pretty satisfying for me. Glenn,

Roger Pierce 35:53
thank you so much for sharing your experiences and advice with us here today. I could talk to you all day, but we're gonna have to wrap it up before you go though, how does someone get in touch with you? Well,

Glen Senior 36:03
you can hit our website. It's probably the best way, so you can see what we do. It's tsbc.com so it stands for the small business company. We thought we shorten it, and then I think you can get a really good idea of some of their customers and their products and tools. And there's a bunch of free stuff, there's resources you can download. There's white papers and then my email, of course, glen@tsbc.com, love to hear from you. Anything I do to help? Let me know. Fantastic.

Roger Pierce 36:30
Well, thanks again, Glenn, and to everyone listening. Thank you for being here, and be sure to return next time for more insights from the Unsure Entrepreneur.

Intro 36:42
That's it for this episode of The unsure entrepreneur podcast. Thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss other candid conversations with small business owners, and be sure to check us out at unsure entrepreneur.com you