Welcome to the Bcast, the official podcast of Bplans.com. Each week we discuss the latest news, resources, and advice for entrepreneurs and small business owners. Hosted by Jonathan Michael and Peter Thorsson.

In this week’s episode, Peter and Jonathan talk about Robot Paper, a startup comic book company founded by Brian Wyrick. We also learn how to find a mentor with Caroline Cummings, and chat about how small businesses can use Big Data.

Listen:

Show notes:

Audio transcript:

Peter: You ready?

Jonathan: I’m ready. Episode 3. Are you ready?

Peter: We don’t need to do the intro. We can just start just right in.

Jonathan: We’ve got to do the intro. Peter, do you know how people can reach out to us if they wanted to find us?

Peter: I have no idea.

Jonathan: If they wanted to email us, what would they email?

Peter: You?

Jonathan: No.

Peter: Not me.

Jonathan: Bcast@Bplans.com. And if they wanted to reach out to us on Twitter?

Peter: I bet there’s a way.

Jonathan: There is a way.

Peter: All right.

Jonathan: @Bplans.

Peter: Great.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Peter: I guess you’ve got it keep it under some characters. I never really understood what Twitter was. It’s a chat forum?

Jonathan: That’s a different podcast. We’ll get to that later.

Peter: I have no idea what that is. It’s got birds in them and things.

Jonathan: And, if people want to find us on SoundCloud? That’s where our podcast is currently, they can go to Soundcloud.com/bplans. That should show our episodes. You can follow our profile, or you can share the podcast with other people.

Peter: It’s exciting. I think people should do that.

Jonathan: It’s extremely exciting, and I think people already are loving us. If you want to email us a question, we can talk about it on the show, Bcast@Bplans.com. We do already have somebody who’s emailed us. It’s an India-based web design company. They actually didn’t say their name of their company, but they want to know if we need any design work… What do you think? Should we use them?…

The Story of Robot Paper:

Peter: We’ve got an article this week from Angelique O’Rourke published on Bplans.com. The title is “What Does It Take to Start a Comic Book Business?” It’s an interview with Brian, who’s the head of Robot Paper, founder of Robot Paper.

Jonathan: Yeah, he’s actually the founder of Robot Paper, but that’s not his only job. He’s also the chief operating officer of Raidious. It’s a digital agency for content marketing. This comic book company is like a side gig that he’s done.

Brian: A friend of mine that I went to high school with sent me an email and said “I have an idea for a comic book. I know that you know how to draw. We should make a comic book.” I said that’s a fantastic idea. Let’s talk. We had a conversation. He pitched the idea to me. This is great. We decided that we’re going to create this book together.

Peter: The net result is they ended up self-publishing under this company called Robot Paper. This is pretty cool. To me what’s really interesting here is this idea of the validation here. You’ve got almost this two-stage validation. I think that this is something that all these small businesses out there can really think about. Kickstarter’s a pretty popular platform. I think a lot of small businesses think, that doesn’t apply to me. I’m not just dreaming up an idea.

The way that these guys have used Kickstarter is as a way of validating whether there is interest from the broader audience, their potential users out there. Really it’s fun to think about this idea of reaching out to people, getting that validation for your new idea. Again, this could be whether you’re an up and running business, trying to start something new, launch a new product, that kind of thing, or somebody who just wants to try something completely new. Kickstarter is one platform.

Another platform might be just getting out there and interviewing. Putting samples out. Literally, a great way of audience validating a product in a consumer setting is a little sliced pieces of cookies up at the counter. Do people like it? What do they say? Do they smile? Do they buy the cookie? These are all equally valid ways of reaching a conclusion which is, the real users of my current product want X enhancement. Or real people out in the world want to purchase a comic book like mine. How else would you do that? It’s always an interesting sort of question small businesses can ask.

Brian: Kickstarter is a great avenue for funding and starting a business. You do have to have a plan in place.

Jonathan: Yeah, not every Kickstarter campaign is successful. That might be because the idea itself is bad, or maybe you just didn’t execute the campaign well enough to get enough people interested in the idea. How does that compare versus doing something like bootstrapping or something like that? How can you still validate your idea through that means?

Peter: I think the two go hand in hand, but really the biggest thing about reaching a validation point, and doing it frequently frankly, it’s not just a one-time thing, but figuring out what the audience actually responds to, what they respond to positively. Then really most important, will real people actually pay real money for the thing that you intend to sell to them? It’s one thing to say, I’m super interested in Pinterest. Absolutely, there should be a Pinterest out there, but how do you monetize that? What if we charged you a subscription fee? Does your whole audience disappear if you do that?

The interesting thing there again is Kickstarter is one way to say, “Will you give me money in exchange for the promise of this future idea?” Bootstrapping comes a little bit later, where this idea of throwing your own money into the mix, making it happen yourself is important. I think the two go hand in hand in the sense that you don’t want to overinvest in an idea that will not be accepted by your intended users.

Jonathan: The Kickstarter campaign went well for them. They’re going to do a six-issue miniseries. They’re currently on the fifth issue of their comic called Henchmen. Things are going pretty well for them. The idea was validated, so now it’s off and running.

Peter: The other thing that we liked about the article was this part about Dave Dorman and this story they tell about how haphazardly recruiting this artist.

Jonathan: Yeah, and I didn’t know who Dave Dorman was before I read this article. Apparently, he did all of the Dark Horse Comics for Star Wars covers through the ‘90s. People who love comic books and collect them, Dave Dorman is a household name. He’s done tons of the covers of people’s favorite issues of comic books. He’s really well renowned, and these guys were able to get him to do their covers for the Henchmen comics.

Brian: Friends of mine who know of Dave Dorman were like, “Oh, my gosh. How did you get Dave Dorman to do your cover art?” My response was just, “I asked him.”

Peter: This is going to dovetail into, I think, some of what Caroline’s going to talk about with mentoring, this idea of just asking. How else do you get anything done in the world without asking the people who are your stakeholders?

Jonathan: That’s right, and I think a lot of times we set up these false obstacles in our minds of why we shouldn’t do this, or shouldn’t ask that. A lot of this is about, go out and do it. Try it. Ask people, and you might be surprised who’s willing to help you out.

Peter: I think that’s a great point with this article too. He’s talking about what he loves, and what his biggest challenges are. The biggest challenge for him is time. Robot Paper may or may not exist based on how much time Brian’s got to dedicate to it.

Brian: In order to make money and sell books, you’ve got to go to comic book shows, email people, and do things. Sometimes you’re sitting at a comic book show that didn’t have the attendance that the organizers thought it would, and you’re hoping you make the table back. Sometimes you’re at a show and people are buying things left and right. Like I said, it’s a labor of love. It’s finding the time to do it too. It’s a challenge because you have an extra hour and you want to go to bed, but you have to proof it in time to get it to the stores.

Jonathan: That’s one of the biggest challenges he has, but the way that you get through these challenges is discipline, planning, but a big part of that is you doing something that you love to do.

Peter: It’s interesting. The time issue is always huge. Any small business owner knows this. You don’t have time to do everything you should be doing, everything you could be doing. You’ve got to make the best investment possible. Like you said, what allows you to wake up in the morning and make sure that you can do those things. It’s a tough balance, this idea of doing something that you’re actually good at, or that actually has a market, versus something that you purely love doing. There’s usually somewhere in between those two points where people fall, and that’s what makes it hard to get up in the morning, or hard to dedicate 80 hours a week to the thing, to that venture.

It’s always cool to hear a story like Brian’s where he’s in this because he loves it. He does it because he cares. Then he loves the fans’ reaction.

Jonathan: To be honest, there might be some of the process and the production of your product or your business that you don’t love, but maybe it’s that final point of once it’s out on the shelves, once it’s in people’s hands, that’s what you love. You love seeing people interact with it, get joy from it. That’s exactly what Brian gets.

Brian: One of my favorite things is when the books arrive from the printer, and when I get our overprint and my copies, there’s something just amazing cutting open the first case of books, and opening it and smelling the smell of the printed page. That ink smell.. it’s also pretty awesome to get an email from someone that really likes the book. Someone tweeted out of San Jose, they did a really amazing review of the book. You can tell they actually read the book, and it was a really positive review. They really liked the book. That’s pretty awesome. Meeting people at comic book shows that are fans of the comic are great.

Peter: Which leads us to this idea that a lot of us have things that we love doing, and that we do in our spare time. Maybe we’re wondering whether we can make that into a career of some sort. We’re wondering, can I possibly ever make money off of this? I’m reminded of Miles Davis who said almost every other album he would do was what he called a “pot boiler.” It kept the pot boiling, when then he could make albums like Bitches Brew which he felt like were his real artistic pieces.

Jonathan: Interesting.

Peter: He toggled between making money, and making art, all the while doing the same basic action that was playing the trumpet, leading the band. That was core to the whole activity. I think in a way it’s really interesting to think about this idea of what does it take to turn a hobby into a business? Should you do it? Are there pros and cons to it? That kind of thing.

Jonathan: Yeah, and we actually do have an article. It’s called, “How to Turn Your Hobby into a Business.” If you’re interested in that, you can go to Bplans.com, and it’s “How to Turn Your Hobby into a Business.”

Peter: That’s good, yeah. It’s a good reference point. They talk a little bit about, should you turn your hobby into a business? What kinds of activities do you need to do to get through that process? Again, I think it’s interesting for everyone to think about. If you’re not currently an entrepreneur, but you’re thinking about it, what does it take to make you think about those things that you love in a way that is potentially entrepreneurial?

Jonathan: That’s a great story about Robot Paper and Brian and how he got that up and running. We definitely encourage you to read the article, and also the “How to Turn Your Hobby into a Business,” if you’re interested in that. We want to hear from you, if you want to email us at Bcast@Bplans.com, or send us a tweet. We’d love to know what hobby you have that you’ve always thought about turning into a business.

Peter: Yeah, Jonathan, for me I was trying to learn how to build acoustic guitars. It’s a bit of a part-time hobby for me. It’s not something that I’m very good at, so I don’t think I can make any money from it. To be honest, maybe one day I could. I don’t know. It will be interesting.

Jonathan: Tell us what your hobby is that you’ve thought about turning into business. You can even feel free to even tell us why you won’t turn your hobby into a business. We’d love to hear from you, so @Bplans on Twitter, or Bcast@Bplans.com on email. We’d love to hear from you.

How to Find a Mentor:

Peter: Now we’ve got Caroline Cummings here with us to talk a little bit about this idea of business mentoring, finding a mentor. How do you find a mentor? Who’s a mentor? What’s a mentor? What do I expect as a mentee? A mentee is one who gets mentored.

Jonathan: Okay.

Peter: This is a question we’ve handled from a lot of our audience, especially in a webinar Caroline did recently, where one of the primary questions was we here this advice of I need to find a business mentor. I should find one. Here’s the parameters of what they should do for me, but where do you find one? How do you start the process? How do you have that conversation? Let’s ask Caroline all those questions, and just see where we get.

Jonathan: Awesome. Welcome, Caroline.

Caroline: Thanks for having me. This is a topic that I’m super passionate about. I have a pretty cheesy saying. That is, “everybody should mentor, and be mentored.” I think if everybody in the world did that, we would be in a much better place. I don’t believe that world peace is truly accessible. However, if we had everybody mentoring, all boats would rise.

Peter: This is it. The world peace podcast.

Caroline: That’s it.

Jonathan: All right. Here we go.

Caroline: Thanks for having me. I have been mentoring now for about 20 years. It started out where I was mentoring at-risk youth. I kind of hate that term, but I’m trying to find a better term. It’s kids who are at risk of either dropping out of school, or doing drugs, or going to jail. They just don’t have a lot of positive role models around them.

In the business side of things, there’s not a lot of formality in places to go. You’re on your own. There’s really a few things that you have to think about, and the first thing is what kind of mentor you want, as opposed to saying, “I’m starting a business, and I want to find a mentor.” That’s such an ambiguous, very broad ask. You want to clarify specifically, what kind of mentor are you looking for? Do you want someone who has started a business before? Do you want someone who has expertise in marketing? Do you want someone that has access to resources that you may not have access to? Do you want someone who’s really just a kick-ass leader, and you want to be mentored on how to manage people? How do you hire? How do you fire? How do you promote?

First, clarify what it is you want because you name it, it’s going to be easier to then go find those people. Mentors, you don’t pay. It’s a person who you guys make an agreement to hang out together and work on certain things together. If they want to charge you, then they should really be calling themselves a business coach or a life coach.

Jonathan: When it comes to clarifying your needs, is it okay to articulate multiple needs? Rather than it being one specific thing, I want help marketing. Is it okay to have a couple? I need help marketing, but I also would like some help being a better manager.

Caroline: Absolutely. If you’re lucky, you can find one mentor who has all of those skill sets, but really you should have a couple of different mentors based on what the needs are. I have yet to find one person who was able to mentor me, and have everything that I needed. Even if you did find that one person, it’s probably good to have diversity in the people and the ideas that you’re getting exposed to. Clarifying is one step.

The next step is you then want to go out and seek this person, or these people. People always ask me, where do I go? It depends on where you live, but every community has a Chamber of Commerce, and the Chamber of Commerce organizations typically do networking events. Some of them have young professional networking events. Some of them have greeters and you can go and actually pass leads and meet people and help promote other businesses. It depends on where you live. There’s always different clubs and organizations that you can join. There’s alumni groups that you can join, online and offline.

There are professional mentoring organizations, one for example, like Mercy Corps puts out, which is a big NGO. They have a platform called MicroMentor.org. It’s free for the mentor. It’s free for the mentees. You can go on there and say, “I’m an entrepreneur, and I am starting a business. It’s X, Y, and Z.” Then you pick what are the types of areas you want help in. Then the system will match you with mentors who say they have expertise in those places. I’m on there as a mentor, and I’m mentoring a guy in Nigeria, who’s starting a business. Then I’m also mentoring a woman in the Bay Area. I get to pick and choose who I want. The important thing is the reason I picked them is because they clarified what their needs were, as opposed to, I’m just looking for a mentor.

Yeah. Then the next step, there’s give steps, is to ask. That’s probably the hardest part for people, to make the ask. It’s particularly hard for women to make the ask than it is for men. In our culture in particular, men are taught as younger boys that there’s been more modeling around making asks, but for women, it’s not there. At least it wasn’t for me, and people in my social network. There’s an art to making an ask.

Peter: Caroline, when I first on a hobby level, I started looking for a mentor here about the guitar building hobby that I’ve been trying to build on. The first mentor I asked, I said, “Let me just come and sweep your shop, and I think I will learn more just sweeping your shop than I will at home, just staring at my own set-up, and not figuring out how this is really done.” His response was no. Absolutely not. I don’t have time for that.

I took his feedback. His feedback was he doesn’t have time for that. He doesn’t know how to structure his shop to work me into it, and all this kind of stuff. I said okay. Great. Came back to him again a couple of weeks later, and said, “Listen, I’ll do it on a schedule that is flexible. You can accept the time or decline them at any time. I will stay out of your hair, and not add any work to your work load.” I basically made it so it was hard to say no, but also made it so it was actually beneficial for him. Maybe that’s something we can talk about a little bit more, but what does a mentor get out of this whole relationship?

Caroline: First, I want to address what you said earlier, and it was really great that you were clarifying how specific you wanted it to be in the relationship. That’s actually leads into the next step, which is to agree on terms. You were doing that already by saying, I’m going to come on this day, and I’m going to sweep the floor, and it’s going to be this amount of time. One of the main reasons that people say no to mentoring is for the time. It’s too much time. I don’t have the time.

The other reason is they feel like it’s such a big responsibility that they’re going to do the person a disservice. Why are you coming to me to be a mentor? There’s that piece in there. I think, to you point, Peter, that’s great that you got him to say yes because you came back with specific terms. You need this mentorship relationship as a professional relationship. Say, let’s try this out for three months. Let’s meet every other Tuesday at 8AM for a cup of coffee at this place, and have a very specific agenda item to talk to them with, not just get together and just talk about nothing. Otherwise, you can cancel it. That’s, I think, a piece that people leave out. They forget to set terms.

Then what people get out of it, I get so much out of mentoring because I end up getting to experience things I otherwise would have not gotten to experience. I’m getting exposed to companies that I never would get exposed to because they’re not things that I would start. I’m helping them think through problems and solutions for areas and topics I would never otherwise think about. That part is really rewarding and really great, and you get to know a lot about yourself. You do have to practice patience. I’ve had mentees that I’ve quote, unquote, fired because what I do is I give them homework. I say I’m going to help you with your business, but the first thing I need you to do is fill out this part of the business plan, and have it done within two weeks and then call me or email me when it’s ready. We’ll get together and talk about it.

Two weeks goes by, and they haven’t done it. I haven’t heard from them. I say I’ll give you one more chance. I’m cool with giving one more chance. After that, I say, this isn’t working out. I’m really busy, and you obviously are too. It doesn’t seem that this is a fit. Having terms and sticking to them is really important.

Then the last piece is thanking. You want to make sure there’s a beginning and an end to the relationship. It doesn’t mean that you’re not going to be friends with them afterwards, but at least the people feel like, the mentor feels like I don’t have to do this forever. I just want you to do this once a month for the next year, or six months, or whatever. Thank them. By thanking them, the best way I’ve ever been thanked is by handwritten notes, going back to claiming that pen again. Not the tweets and the texting and posting things to my Facebook page. An actual handwritten note and card, specifically saying what I helped them with. Then that makes me feel like I actually provided value. We weren’t just wasting time hanging out together. That’s important.

Really, there’s these five steps. You want to clarify. You want to seek. You want to ask. You want to agree, and then you want to thank. I think people usually skip everything except for the ask. They’ll go, “Be my mentor.” They don’t understand why they skipped two steps before that. Hopefully, that’s helpful.

Jonathan: That’s awesome. Thank you. Peter, would you be my mentor?

Peter: Can you be a little more specific? Let’s get back to what Caroline said…

Jonathan: Right. I’ve got to clarify my needs. Can you teach me how to do a podcast better, and maybe do it for the entire length of this podcast?

Peter: All right. Maybe you if you can help me with the same thing, we can do some back-and-forth here.

Jonathan: Mentoring and mentee-ing, I like it.

Caroline: This is where you might want to find another mentor…

Jonathan: Hey, Caroline?…

Peter: Hey, those of you who have a great mentor, or being mentored story to share, give us tweet. Send us an email. Let’s hashtag it #MyMentorStory. That’s #MyMentorStory. Let us know how things went for you.

Jonathan: Yeah. Good, bad, funny experiences. We’d love to hear them. Go ahead and send us a tweet, or send us an email.

Peter: Maybe not too funny, but funny enough. How about that?

Jonathan: I bet you some of the bad ones will be pretty funny.

Peter: All right. Let’s not share names if it’s too bad. How about that?

Jonathan: Sounds good.

Peter: Let’s call him Jane. That’s great. We’ll also post some resources in the comments section of this post. There are places to find mentors, and Mercy Corps that Caroline mentioned.

Jonathan: Yeah, we’ll link to that definitely.

Peter: Great.

Big Data for Small Businesses:

Caroline: That’s an example of what people are doing with big data. They love to put maps together and infographics together, and it ends up creating really interesting content that you can use to market your business.

Peter: Retailers used to have tons of information on their own users, but not about the rest of the world. It used to be like small data was just your own segments. The bigger you were, the more data you had.

Caroline: Right.

Peter: Which is important distinction between then and now. Now, you can get good research, which is huge.

Jonathan: Even with all that information you had, people weren’t necessarily collecting it and using it. They might have been collecting it, but then putting it in boxes and shoving it in their warehouse.

Peter: Yeah, that’s a good point. Up until the bigger sized company, you don’t have the high-end, high-paid Princeton grad research people who can do anything good with that data. Without the people who can convert it into useful intelligence, without the actual size of the data, it’s just kind of a shoebox.

Caroline: It means nothing.

Peter: Yeah. Right. Really, it’s the realm of the bigger company. The new thing now is small businesses can have access to some, some of that access, to the bigger data. I think that’s good.

Caroline: Small businesses first of all should have a website, even though there’s a statistic out there like 60% of small businesses in America don’t even have a website, which is sort of crazy. Then if you have a website, you should have analytics behind it because analytics is free. You can at least start to gather where there are people coming from when they visit your site. Maybe your Chamber of Commerce if referring traffic to you, and you’re thinking about canceling your membership. It’s like, maybe you shouldn’t, if they’re actually sending you traffic.

How long are people on the website? What are they buying? What are they not buying? How long are they staying on a page? Things like that. Unless you are a technology company like us, you’re probably not monitoring those things. Everybody should be monitoring those things.

Jonathan: Yeah, I think it’s something that people have been able to access for a while now, but maybe now you’d just now start to call it big data. The idea of using Google’s keyword planner, that’s using big data to make a decision about how you should market your business. Use these terms and whatnot.

Peter: There’s no data bigger than Google’s user data. That’s a huge statistical size. It’s really important. From the small business angle too, what a lot of people don’t realize is available to them census data and that kind of thing. A free example would be SizeUp.com, and Jonathan, I think you can share that link after this. In LivePlan, we have some resources there that do similar research but a little bit more in-depth. These companies, Abrigo’s ProfitCents, SizeUp, and there’s others, basically aggregate anonymously thousands and thousands of companies’ information. That information in aggregate tells a story that any small business should know about their own competitive landscape.

Things like, if all other bike shops in your world take 30 days to get paid, and you take 120 days to get paid on average, that’s a huge difference. It’s something that you should know about, not just from the perspective of why it’s happening to you and how you can do better, but also just having an idea of what everyone else is doing in the world. It’s an interesting thing for any small business to dive into.

Jonathan: Are there other resources that you can tap into in order to get information, like big data information, at the sales level?

Caroline: It depends on the industry. If you are an e-commerce site, then whatever e-commerce engine you’re using should be giving that kind of data. Time to purchase, conversion rates, those kinds of things. That’s data that you should be using to constantly tweak what you’re doing for your marketing, whether it’s online marketing, offline marketing. Just this idea of big data is now available to small businesses, I think that’s compelling and is going to change the landscape for small business whether you have a coffee shop in a small town, or you run a 10-office dental practice. You should still be tracking all of that, traffic into your store, traffic into your office, the referral rates for your customers, those kinds of things. Just helping small businesses think about data, whether it’s on the small level or the big level, I think that would help move the needle just a little bit for a small business. For a small business, moving the needle a little bit is a lot.

Jonathan: Yeah. Do some platforms do it better than others, I guess, is what I’m wondering? E-commerce platforms. You can build a website. It has that functionality built into it, but not every one of them is saying, we’re going to take your data and show you how it matches up against all of our other customers who have this type of data.

Caroline: I think what’s most important for a small business is to, unless they love data and they’re analytics geeks, they should find someone who does to help them think through that, and pick the right tool. If they get retargeted online, they’re going to buy whatever that e-commerce engine is. It might not be the right thing for them. They should tap into some experts to help them pick the right tool based on the market they’re in, the business model they have, so that they can make intelligent decisions about their marketing and their spend based on utilizing an opportunity to have a big set of data for a small business.

Peter: Yeah, and really, it’s guideline. In a way you have to look at them as the data is always wrong, and you are always a bad fit for the data. That should be the starting point. Not that extreme, but in the sense that since everything is anonymously aggregated out there, these are always thousands and thousands of average numbers, you know there’s a high and a low within that average. That means that the result is going to be maybe a good average, but really not fully accurate.

The second point is you, whether it’s your comic publication company or whatever, you’re a unique snowflake anyway. Again, knowing if you’re way off from that average, why you might be off from that average is really the most important way to look at this data. If there’s places that you can make improvements based on that too.

Jonathan: Okay. Is there anything inherently wrong with big data, or a vulnerability that you might have if you use big data?

Peter: There’s a lot of the fear-mongering out there. I think some of it is valid, and some of it is extreme. That’s a good question out to the users. Where are we at with this big data? Is it getting too big?

Caroline: There’s the push and pull of data for small business. One is, what kind of big data can I pull in to analyze to make it work for me? Then what kind of data am I collecting already that I now want to push out to use in creative marketing strategies that doesn’t feel icky? Big brother’s watching. I saw you were shopping over there. I’m going to chase you over there. People more and more now with the internet, now having been around for how many years now?

Jonathan: At least two, is that right? A couple of years?

Caroline: At least two-and-a-half?

Peter: Good point. Let’s fill it in with some research afterwards. How long has the internet been around?

Caroline: We can call Al Gore and ask him. People are more comfortable, I think, with putting data online. Even though they might not know where it’s going, I think most people realize that it’s probably being used in some capacity.

Jonathan: Then they wonder why they get an ad on Google that’s about something that they were searching for.

Caroline: Right.

Jonathan: They don’t realize that it’s going out there, and their data is out there.

Caroline: Right, and that lead targeting works. People are buying into it.

Jonathan: That’s our conversation about big data. We’d love to hear from you guys. If you have an example of how your small business is using data, whether it’s big or small, to help your business out, we’d love to hear about that example. Send us a tweet @Bplans or send us an email, Bcast@Bplans.com. Tell us about it, and we might feature your story on the show.

Peter: If you’ve got a favorite tool or a favorite way of accessing data, a favorite way of using it that might surprise our users, feel free to post it. Thanks.

Jonathan: Do you have a question you’d like us to answer on the show? Send us an email at Bcast@Bplans.com. That’s Bcast@Bplans.com. Our theme music is by Jasinski. The Bcast is brought to you by Palo Alto Software, makers of Bplans.com and My Plan. Visit Bplans.com for everything you need to start planning and growing your business.

If you have a question you’d like us to answer on the show, send us an email at Bcast@Bplans.com or send us a tweet @Bplans.

The Bcast is brought to you by Palo Alto Software, makers of Bplans.com and LivePlan.

AvatarJonathan Michael

Jonathan is the Engagement Marketing Manager for Palo Alto Software, and has spent the last 9 years developing and implementing digital marketing strategies. During that time, he has learned that empathy and authenticity are strengths by which companies can effectively engage with individuals at every point throughout the customer journey.