Tag: Off The Grid Biz

Russia Invades Ukraine and Your Business 🇺🇦

Posted on by brianjpombo

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Brian chats about what’s going on in Ukraine and the value of preparedness.

Transcription

Russia Invades Ukraine and your business.

Welcome back to Brian J. Pombo. Live.

I’m Brian Pombo, this is a very interesting story because it hits home a little bit.

I’ve mentioned before, my wife, Kate was born in Ukraine, and still has family back there. And so watching this is really interesting. I mean, she has family right in Kiev, and watching a lot of this go on is pretty heavy.

So this is being recorded. I’m recording this the night that the invasion while the morning over there, that the invasion is occurring. Watching is pretty, pretty wild stuff.

I’m not going to get into the politics of the situation. Not here, you’re always welcome to ask me personally. But you can imagine where we’re kind of what we’re thinking about this.

But I want to bring it back home, because this is a conversation that we’ve had with her family for years, really going back and certainly the last few months, attempting to impress the idea that there may be a reason for an emergency in the future. You may want to be prepped for anything.

I don’t know, it kind of seems like the way the world’s going right now.

That we might I would predict within the next 10, 20, 30 years, we’ll probably be seeing more and more outrageous situations, social, political, economic situations that we haven’t seen, that most of us have never seen in our whole lives.

We’ve lived through the last 40 years, 50 years or so, of relative peace, harmony, economic gain, and so forth throughout certainly United States, most of the western world, and a good portion of the world.

I think a lot of that’s going by the wayside.

This is just a sign of the times, it’s just my own perspective on things.

I’ll give it to you from this way, I host a show called, The-off-The Grid Biz Podcast.

The whole point of the show is to discuss being self-reliant.

Specifically, businesses that surround the Self Reliance industry.

So everything from raising, you know, teaching people to raise chickens, and all the way to emergency preparedness. I mean, we really run the gamut and we talk to people of all different political persuasions and everything else.

So it’s a great show you go check it out, offthegridbiz.com.

But the main point of it is really being self reliant and a huge piece, a huge chunk of our audience are people who are into preparedness of some sort.

No, we’re not talking hardcore prepper or necessarily, you need to go join a militia or anything like that. But just being prepared for just general emergencies.

It could be a natural disaster.

It could be something of more political nature, like somebody invading you.

I’ve got my tea here tonight, just to keep me warm. It’s a cold night on top of everything else.

It’s one of those things that is really important to me, that people at least have a minimum amount of preparedness for anything that could possibly go wrong, especially if you have family and so forth.

This was something we were trying to impress upon our family in Ukraine. And it’s really easy to fall into. This is the way things have always gone.

That normalcy bias, like they call it this is the way this is what’s normal. So more than likely, nothing else will happen because this is the way things have happened up until now.

If your life wasn’t shocked, from normalcy bias, during like, things like 911 It certainly should have been relatively shocked free from you through the COVID 19 pandemic.

I mean, there’s a lot of things we’re seeing now that we’ve never seen before.

You got to be ready for anything. And this isn’t a dig at all on our family in Ukraine or anybody else but

it’s a lesson to not get caught up so much with I got to pay attention my business I can’t can’t watch all that news and politics and stuff like that.

I understand that point of view, certainly, you have to have a separation, and you can’t be consumed by everything that’s happening and go into a panic at every moment.

But having systemized plans in place, for ongoing, you know, just in case stuff, just in case something bad happens here or there just in case this happens, you may not even plan for a foreign invasion or anything of that sort.

Just in case, we should have this on hand or that on hand or have a backup plan. In case things don’t go the way we want them to. So this is really a lesson for you personally.

And you’re saying, well, where’s the business lesson in this?

Well, the business lesson is, is don’t let your business get in the way of life. Because life will get in the way of your business once in a while.

You need to have a lot of your essentials handled. If you do that, you it’s a lot easier to kind of back away from paying attention to a lot of this stuff that you don’t necessarily need to pay attention to for now, if you’ve got backup plans.

If you’re relatively prepared. I’m hoping this means something to you. And if not just let it go. I will go on to something more lighter. Certainly tomorrow I’m hoping.

My book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business is what I use to sponsor the show. So if you’d like to get a free copy, go to AmazonProofBook.com. You can download a free copy there or you can purchase it at Amazon.

We’ll be back tomorrow. In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.

The Story of Liquid Gold 🍯🐝

Posted on by brianjpombo

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Brian shares a story of a jar of local honey he got from his friend Jonathan…or is it Johnathan?

Who knows, just watch the vid!

Transcription

The story of liquid gold.

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

I’m going to tell you a quick story and kind of my thoughts about it. This, my friend Jonathan gave me this. This is a plastic container full of honey, local honey, made from his own beehives.

Now, it’s interesting, I liked the idea behind this story and I’m not sure where it’s gonna go as I start to tell it, but I’m about to tell it anyways.

Because I think there’s a lot of people that be interested, I’m being plugged in with a lot of people in the self reliance field.

In fact, I have a podcast out there you can go check out called offthegridbiz.com, which we’ve been we’ve had around for a few years now interviewed some great people in the business area of self reliance everywhere from environmentalists to survivalists to everything in between, I mean, just people all over the spectrum, but people who have an interest in self reliance of some sort, then go on and on about that.

But then what, what is one of those things that pulls a lot of them together, honey, honey is a really interesting idea.

For one thing, the preservation of bee colonies and everything with with a whole lot of the loss of bee colonies over the years. All the controversy around that had pulls a lot of people together.

People who are involved in any type of agriculture depend a whole lot of their crops depend on bees.

Honey is one of those things, it’s, it’s kind of everywhere, on my friend, Brad out there, which we we have an interviewer to with him on off the grid biz, and he he has an amazing product.

Regarding beehives, you can go and check that out. And an entire business wrapped around it. Learning how to make your own honey is a huge self reliance project in and of itself, whether you make a business out of it or not just learning how to do it is pretty wild.

There’s a whole bunch of medicinal uses for honey. Honey is one of those things that’s also shelf stable.

You know, there’s no specific for my understanding, there’s no specific date of use needed for honey, they found honey, you know, 1000s of years old, that’s still edible.

So you can put this up on a shelf for quite a long time and not have to worry about anything other than probably a little bit of crystallization. But I think it depends on the honey to and the purity. It’s just it’s a very interesting idea.

A lot of people refer to it as liquid gold. Let me tell you the story behind this, this particular bottle.

So Jonathan, I’m sure he won’t mind me saying this. He, he was he’s been interested in keeping bees for a number of years. But between work and everything else, he hasn’t been able to really spend time to really get good at it.

He was contemplating getting rid of it. So he wanted to talk to an expert, he talked to somebody who referred him to somebody that was kind of an expert at these types of things. And this gentleman, he said, and he said, here’s the here’s what I can do. Would you be willing to let me take care of your beehives.

I’ll do everything for you free of charge. The only thing I’ll charge you for is if we needed any equipment to update anything, or to keep anything up and running.

I’m not going to charge you for I’m only gonna charge your cost on that.

You just if you pay for that I’ll do the rest of the work. All I asked for us 50% of the honey that comes from it. Now he had pulled any honey out of it up till now. They’ve been active, relatively active.

But he had he hadn’t been taken care of it as much as he wanted to. And so that seemed like a good deal. No, some honey is better than no honey, because if he didn’t do it, he’d have to find somebody else or he’d have to get rid of the beehives.

So that was a great day ended up with a whole bunch of these.

I got this as a great little Christmas gift. I don’t eat a whole lot of it. But my kids go crazy over it. And it’s good to get local stuff. It’s good for allergies, and so on so forth. At least that’s my understanding of it.

So that the reason why I wanted to talk about that is that business isn’t just about money for product or service. In most cases it is.

But it isn’t always and you got to be really creative with what you can do because both sides ended up with something that they wanted.

The one person ended up with a whole lot of honey that he wouldn’t have had otherwise he doesn’t have to. He doesn’t have to have the hives himself. He doesn’t have to be responsible for them afterward.

This is the gentleman who knew who he hired. He doesn’t have to have the land to keep the lawn, or have anything else that is required for it.

All he has to do is apply a skill that he already has, right, and he gets honey. Now, I doubt he’s keeping that on himself. I’m sure he’s selling it to other people. He probably has a network of people who want honey, which is the cool thing.

So he took his expertise and teamed it up with somebody who had the resources, but not the expertise and not the time to be able to put into it. But he ends up with the honey, that is really all he wanted out to begin with.

So that’s it’s a cool, simple example of a joint venture of a process of people getting together, one having one thing one having another. This has been talked about a lot. If you’ve ever heard, there’s a great podcast out there that you can listen to, it’s called Welcome to Cloudlandia.

It’s kind of what would you call it cerebral, because of two very intelligent people, Dean Jackson, and Dan Sullivan, two, marketing and strategy geniuses that are out there. And they’re talking back and forth.

Sometimes I get lost, sometimes I’m not following along, but they have some great ideas. And one of the ideas that they have that I’ll talk about another time is this concept that Dean Jackson came up with called VCR that’s worth looking into, I’m not going to go into the details.

But it’s the same idea about how you only need certain elements to create a good relationship. And usually you have some of the elements, and someone else has some of the other elements.

Actually, I will talk about that a little bit tomorrow because I know of a formula that’s similar and it may be exactly the same.

But I know of a formula that’s very similar that came to me a couple of nights ago. So I’ll share that with you tomorrow. In terms of eight, you probably have something you do really well. And there are other people that have that do something that you don’t do well, and you need to find them and team up with them.

More than likely that’s the case. Sometimes it’s another business owner, sometimes it’s somebody that doesn’t want to own a business, but they want to do what you don’t want to do.

It’s a beautiful thing when you really see it happen in action. It’s one of those things that if there are any really good things about American free enterprise, I should say, then that would be one of them, is the ability for people to be able to do what they do best and find other people that do what they do best and create something that’s greater than this then the sum of the whole.

Yeah, it’s greater than they would ever be able to do on their own.

Just putting those two together isn’t just addition it’s becomes multiplication. It’s beautiful thing.

Hopefully, that makes sense to you. It’s just a quick idea for tonight.

Go check out my book for more my broadminded ideas from be able to move your business forward.

My book is on 9 ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business you can go type that into Google, you can go get it off of amazon.com or one of their many competitors.

Or you can go to my website, AmazonProofBook.com and download your own free copy.

That’s all I got for tonight. You have a good one.

Get out there and let the magic happen.

Embrace Your Bad Reviews 🤬😔 (How to Handle Negative Customers)

Posted on by brianjpombo

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Having a plan to handle negative customers giving you bad reviews can help you make mature decisions when the time comes.

Transcription

Embrace your bad reviews.

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Today I’m going to talk about the scourge of the internet, especially for people in e-commerce of any sort, and that’s bad reviews.

What do you do about bad reviews?

I’m going to get to that in a second.

First, I want to remind you about my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

If you want to make it to where you have absolutely zero competition reviews or otherwise, then you’re going to want to check out this book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

This is how you can even keep Amazon.com from destroying your business, you get a free copy at, AmazonProofBook.com.

Now let’s talk about reviews. So this came up because I was really listening to a podcast that’s getting ready to interview that I did over at OffTheGridBiz.com it’s not up yet.

But it may be up by the time you’re watching this. It’s an interview with a lady in one of the things that she talks about that if she could change anything about her business, it was the idea of bad reviews.

And it’s not the first time I’ve heard it.

In fact, if you listen to other episodes of Off-the-Grid Biz, it’s a common issue.

And anybody that has an e-commerce business is going to just despise because all it takes is one, it takes one bad review, it takes one nasty customer, one interaction gone wrong for you to just look horrible to the rest of the internet.

Now there are ways to handle this, but the first thing you got to do is embrace it, you got to realize this is what it’s all about, okay?

It’s going to happen.

If you’re out there doing stuff, you are going to get bad reviews.

Now, how do you get over it?

You have to go straight at it.

First step is you have to respond wherever the interview wherever the reviews are. The bad review is, if it gives you a chance to respond, that is something you’ve got to do, you got to jump on it right away.

You’ve got to put yourself out there say I’m not sure quite what we’re what went wrong. Or we understand what went wrong, we want to fix it, we want to make it better for you. Or this is how we’re we’re going to keep this from happening again.

If you come back to us, we’ll give you this, this or this, you do everything you can even though the person’s a jerk, I understand that the person’s out to hurt you, I understand.

But if you can find a way to look good to the people that are reading it, then it doesn’t matter what they said.

If you say we’re going to fix everything, you know, well, yeah, but you killed my firstborn, and you did this.

I mean, just think the most horrible thing well okay, well, we will bring your firstborn back to life.

You have to go over and above and beyond to say that you’re going to fix it.

Especially if that person you know, there’s no way on God’s green earth that they’re going to allow you to fix it for them, even better.

You’ve got to come out as the one with a solid head on your shoulders, you don’t come out and say, Well, you did this and you did that and you lied and you so on so forth.

I don’t think that’s the best.

I’ve seen that happen. I’ve seen the excuse the language of the pissing contest going back and forth between the business owner or the business executive, and the person reviewing online, okay, don’t try and play that game.

Play the higher ground as best as possible, that’s the first step.

Get on there as quick as possible to add a comment and talk about how you’re going to fix the issue. Whether they go along with it or not, is irrelevant.

What matters is if somebody else is reading it, they see that you’re quick to respond and quick to fix whatever problem happened. That’s important.

Okay, the second thing, here’s another thing that you can do.

If you’re doing any form of content marketing whatsoever, I would highly recommend that you use bad reviews, especially the most vile ones, the ones where people just say the most absurd things. Take that and put it in your content.

Okay, if you’re doing a blog post, I want you to make a whole blog post about that one issue. And then you can go a little bit deeper. Well turns out that the real issue with this person is this, this, and this, but we understand.

See, you can be a little bit more open about all the details of the scenario. But in that situation, you also and this is only for lost causes.

This is for a person that you’ve already blocked and you’ve got a restraining order against them. That’s the person I’m talking about you, it’s already a dead deal, then you can go out, make it public, put it out there, but do it in your own way and always end on the higher ground.

Always say, Hey, no matter what we want to fix it for even if this person came back and apologize, we would fix it for them tomorrow, you have to keep the higher ground you have to, you have to show yourself as being better than the other person and not making it petty.

You laugh about it, you joke about if someone says something absurd, you say, I understand that this person believes that that happened.

But from our perspective, we didn’t see that happen. And so please come and join us.

If you have a situation even similar to this, I will bring you on my show, I will have you write an article for me, I will do you know, you use it as a challenge, use it as a way to make fun and have a good time with it.

Especially if you’ve got a troll out there that’s just messing with you a person that didn’t even buy from you, it’s probably a competitor, but they’re saying the nastiest things about you.

That’s okay, play with it a little bit. It’s not that big a deal, just as long as you don’t make it as serious as they’re making it.

As long as you don’t take them too seriously. And make it too over the top and get offended, just don’t get offended, stay on the side of reality and have a good time with it.

If you do that, if you handle it with an adult attitude, you’re going to be happy with the results. In the long run, people will see you as the adult in the room.

And that’s all that matters.

What matters is you know, he who laughs last you know what I’m saying.

So, hopefully, that makes sense.

When it comes to reviews, don’t make them everything, use them as an opportunity take them and use them as a learning situation, as something that you can discuss as something that you can throw out there.

And then the third thing I’m going to recommend you to make sure you have a process for getting good reviews. If there are 110 good reviews and one that isn’t good, you’re doing okay. All right.

Yeah, it’s gonna take away that perfect five-star rating you have and it’s gonna pull it down to five, four and a half stars or whatever. Don’t worry about it. It’s okay. It gives you that no matter what the product is on amazon.com is a perfect example.

You can look at any of the highest selling products, you will not find one of those products that are over 1000 reviews that don’t have a single negative review and single one-star review. They all have them.

They all have them because no matter what, someone’s not going to figure out that they’re holding the book upside down and they think it’s a foreign language that they bought, and, or whatever, you know, some absurd, crazy insanity, you can find it out there.

So it’s just part of the business.

What you got to do is take everything that most people would see as a negative, you flip it on its head into a positive. Hopefully, that’s helpful.

We’ll be back here tomorrow night with another idea of either a tactic, a strategy, or a principle that can help you explode your business. Go check out the free version of my book, AmazonProofBook.com, and we’ll be back tomorrow.

In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.

Real Business is About Friendship 🤠 (trip to Mountain View Ranch in Oregon)

Posted on by brianjpombo

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Yee-haw! Brian heads on down to Mountain View Ranch for a swell time hanging out at David and Beth Pruett, of Amp-3.net’s event over the weekend!

Checkout the Pruett’s website for quality practical preparedness products! – https://www.amp-3.net/

Transcription

Real business is about friendship.

Hi, I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Today, I’m at Mountain View Ranch out in Sam’s Valley of Southern Oregon, not far from Medford area.

See in the back, you’d see the horizon, there’s a table rocks back there. And this is the part time home of David and Beth Pruett, who I’ve interviewed, you can hear multiple interviews I’ve had with them over at Off the Grid Biz Podcast, offthegridbiz.com.

And it’s really cool, because what they’ve developed here, what they have put on is a little artisan show with multiple vendors, many of them local, that are selling their wares.

It’s either personal, artistic stuff, antiques, a whole bunch of cool stuff. And they put this all together from scratch.

We’re here right on the tail end of COVID-19 pandemic, which is, it’s really neat to see people getting together again. And really cool.

I was asking them, you know, how did you go about putting this together?

You know, where do you find the people to come to something like this?

And it’s just in their travels, finding people online, finding people in person, getting they’re, getting their contact info, keep it in touch, and just becoming friends and then letting them know, Hey, would you be interested to doing this in the future?

And that’s what they’ve done. It’s really a great thing.

Everyone’s having a great time.

And it’s all business, but you don’t think of it as business.

If you’ve got friendship with people, yeah, money can change hands here and there but it’s not necessarily what most people consider a business.

But it is real business is all about friendship. It’s all about who you know, who you like, who you trust. It’s kind of the same things that make up our our friends, you know? So, I love the Pruitt’s I’m glad to call them friends.

Glad to be invited to something like this and you’ve got to keep your eyes open for things that you can do for your friends things that you can pass on to them.

Go check out all of their material. Amp-3.net is their website where they sell emergency preparedness gear. Really cool stuff, go check it out.

I’ll be back here tomorrow.

Go check out my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business, you can get a free copy at AmazonProofBook.com.

You have a good one. Get out there and let the magic happen.

Combine Interests For Extra Attention 😃 (Nintendo Lego Super Mario Magic)

Posted on by brianjpombo

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Brian’s son Tyler jumps in on tonight’s episode to share his love for Nintendo Lego Super Mario in our talk about the power of combining interests.

Brian also shares how combining interest of gardening and chickens has worked for a recent company he interviewed named, Roost and Root.

Transcription

Brian: Combine interests for extra attention.

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live. And with me is…

Tyler: Hello my name is Tyler. I’m his son, Brian J. Pombo.

Brian: This is Tyler Pombo here.

And he is How old are you?

Tyler: I’m 7 years old, and I have a Mario I’m going to show, it’s actually Lego Mario.

Brian: Lego Mario, okay.

What about it do you like?

Tyler: Yeah, like, if you put them on green Legos. It shows like, green, and it’s electronic.

Brian: And so you could play games with them?

Tyler: Yeah, like there’s a little pipe that you put them in, and that’s just like the Mario, you have a time and you have to go really fast. You only have one minute to delay.

Brian: So it acts like the Super Mario games.

Tyler: Yeah.

Brian: So what what do you like, Do you like Legos, or do you like Mario?

Tyler: Both.

Brain: Okay, so both Legos and Mario.

So they took Mario which which came first, Legos or Mario?

Tyler: Legos.

Brian: Legos came first. You’re right. And then Mario came out.

Tyler: So how you turn them on is, this a little button that’s down here. Then there’s a little app, and that’s one of my favorite parts.

Brian: An app for a phone?

Tyler: Yeah.

And then you push this one that’s up above it, then it actually connects to it.

Brian: It’ll connect to the app?

Tyler: Yeah, yeah.

Brian: Was that Bluetooth or something?

Tyler: Yeah. It’s Bluetooth. It’s awesome!

Brian: So do you think do you like that better than a lot of your other Legos?

Tyler: I used to build a lot of Legos that I changed to a bunch of stuff with Lego Mario.

Brian: Yeah, and you but that’s your favorite Lego piece is the Lego Mario ones.

Tyler: Yeah.

Brian: Do you think it’s because they that combines two things that you really like?

Tyler: Yeah, it’s like super super cool. You guys can like get it. I bought this at like, Fred Meyer I think.

Brian: We’re not doing a commercial just for Mario.

We have we have stores in this area called, Fred Meyer. That’s what he’s talking about.

Tyler: Yeah.

Brian: But, I think they got the point that you like Super Mario and you like Super Mario Legos. But the idea is, is that if you can combine…if you can combine two different interests, two different areas, two different things that people love.

For example, on my podcast, the Off The Grid Biz Podcast, we had Roost and Root and that website, it actually combines the idea of raising chickens with gardening.

Who someone that you know, that raises chickens and has a garden?

Tyler: Mama.

Brian: Mom does that. So it’s common to have two things that go good together.

You know, the old Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup concept to two things that are good alone, but also are good together.

So think about how you combine products, combine interests of your marketplace, and you’ll be able to get a lot more attention.

So don’t forget about my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

You can get a free copy at AmazonProofBook.com and you can find out more ways to be able to make a huge difference in your business in the long run.

It’s a quick book, it’s tiny. It’s real thin. You get a hard copy or you get a free one AmazonProofBook.com and we’ll be back tomorrow. Thanks for being on Tyler.

Tyler: Yes. So there’s like, so like you can also buy expensive and expand on Lego Mario.

Brain: Oh yeah it goes on and on with all the Lego Mario stuff that you can.

Tyler: Also you can take off his pants.

Brian: Oh, yeah, which is always a good feature.

So thanks for being with us.

Tyler: He does not look like this in the package but he looks just like Mario when you buy him.

Brian: Yeah, he added some added some Legos on him.

Tyler: Yeah, yeah.

Brian: So that’s all we got for today. You have a great night. Get out there…

Tyler: And do the magic!

Brian: Let the magic happen.