Most small business owners don’t think anybody would bother attacking their website. That’s a big part of why so many of them get hit. Most attacks on small business sites aren’t personal. They’re automated, and they go after whatever’s left unprotected, no matter how big the business behind it is. Most owners are wearing 97 hats, and website security never makes the list. It doesn’t feel like a problem for a business their size. But an unprotected site puts your business at risk, and it puts your customers at risk right along with it. October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, so that’s what I’m teaching at Office Hours on Wednesday, Oct 14, 10 am cst. That’s 11 am eastern and 8 am pacific. I’ll cover where small business sites are exposed and how to take care of yours. Details here: linkedin.com/events/75144055…

Thank God for Bitcoin.

Why didn’t they book? When a customer goes quiet, most owners blame the service. Most of the time the service was fine. Tressa’s point in this clip is that businesses rarely lose customers over bad work. They lose them because the customer couldn’t see a clear path from interested to booked. Nobody showed them the next step, so they didn’t take one. She’s teaching how to fix that at Office Hours on Wednesday, Oct 14, 10 am cst. That’s 11 am eastern and 8 am pacific. She’ll walk through how to lay out a clear path for your customers, so the people who already want to hire you actually book. If you’ve ever wondered why a customer didn’t close, or why they never came back, come to this one. It’s free and it’s virtual. Join us: linkedin.com/events/75144055…

Go count what your homepage asks people to do. Book a call, join the newsletter, take the assessment, download the guide, start the trial, follow us, get the free audit. Seven asks isn't seven chances at the sale. It's one person standing in the doorway getting overwhelmed and leaving for a business that made the decision easier. You need two, and they're doing completely different jobs. The first one is for whoever's ready right now. Book a call. That's the thing the whole page walks toward, and you don't dilute it. The second is for the person who isn't ready today but will be in six months, and that group is much bigger than the first one. Join the list. Then you get to be useful in their inbox now and then, and when they're ready you're not a stranger. The worse failure is more common than the seven-ask homepage. It's the site that asks for nothing. Somebody reads all of it, agrees with all of it, and hits a dead end. You paid to get them there and lost them at the last step.

Hardest thing I watch owners do isn't hiring or pricing or firing somebody. It's admitting the things they're bad at need to go to somebody who excels at those same things. Everyone agrees with that until it's their turn. Then they white-knuckle the website, the books, the ads, the one job they've never enjoyed a single day of, because handing it off feels like conceding something. I told a group a few weeks ago that some of this is simple, then caught myself, because simple is the wrong word. It isn't simple. It's just not expensive. Current hours. An address that matches the building you're in. A team page without two people on it who quit. None of that is difficult. It's just nobody's job, so it sits and rots. And it rots in the exact place a stranger decides whether you're real. You're already a 9 at whatever your business actually runs on. You don't need to grind your way to a 6 at everything else. Find the person who's a 9 at the part you keep dodging, and then actually let it go.

Anybody who thinks they don't respond to marketing should sit with that one a little longer. There was a company called Brandless. Premise was that you shouldn't pay the brand tax, so they stripped the branding off everything and charged less. That is a brand. They marketed themselves as brandless and the marketing was the branding. There's no version of this you opt out of. The food on your shelf, the shows you watch, the shoes you own, the phone in your hand. Every one of them got picked because somebody figured out how to talk to you. It wasn't the spec sheet. Something in there made an emotional connection. They got to your feels, even if you're a man. Go far enough into the psychology of it and it gets creepy. It's fascinating and it's also strange down there. It exists either way. Every good tool ends up getting used by somebody with bad intentions. So be the one using it well, for a business that earned the attention.

Went and looked at our actual client list last week instead of going off memory, and there was a pattern I'd never named. A big share of our longest-running relationships are mission-driven organizations. Churches, ministries, nonprofits. Some go back nearly as far as the company does. I never set out to build that. They just happen to fit who we work well with. Real trust built face to face over years, and then a website that looks like a favor somebody did for them a decade ago. Which it usually was. That gap between what they've built and what a stranger can see is wider for them than for almost anyone else, and closing it is the entire job. The work lands different too. A contractor getting more calls is a good day. A ministry getting found by the one person who needed to find them is a different kind of good day. Still don't know if that's a niche or just a thing that's true.

When somebody refers you, they put their own name on the line to do it. There's a bookkeeper in my chapter I refer constantly. Partly because I enjoy sending my friends to somebody who keeps them out of prison, and partly because I know what happens next. He calls fast. He takes care of them. They come back and tell me about it. He gets that my name went along for the ride. The other version is somebody who sits on a referral for three months and then sends a long apology email trying to book a meeting. Now the person I vouched for thinks I don't know what I'm talking about, and the guy I referred looks like he couldn't be bothered. Two reputations dinged over something nobody wrote down. That's usually all it is. Not malice. Somebody figured they'd remember. You won't. I don't remember close to what I think I will and I stopped pretending years ago. Write it down. Record a voice memo. Use whatever's in front of you. We've got tools people twenty years ago would have killed for, and the most common way a referral dies is that nobody opened one of them. If I vouch for you I want it to mean something. Which means when I can't vouch for somebody, that has to mean something too.

Yesterday's Smoke & Social turned out a lot better than I expected. San Antonio was under a flood watch, and the storms rolled in right around the time we were getting started. I drove over to Cigars International, figuring it might just be me and a cigar. Instead, we had a great turnout. There were a handful of first-timers, plus a few people who hadn't been out in a while. When folks make it out in the pouring rain, you know they're the real ones. I enjoyed an old fashioned and a good cigar, and the afternoon did exactly what it's built to do. People connected, a few referrals changed hands, and I left with a couple of introductions I'm warming up to pass along myself. If you haven't been yet, Smoke & Social is a monthly afternoon for San Antonio business owners to get to know each other well enough to send work back and forth. Next one is Thursday, November 5, from 2 to 4 PM at Cigars International. See y'all there.

My personal admin skills are a 1/10. That's not modesty, it's accurate, and it always has been. I spent years trying to fix it, because that's the advice everybody gives. Find your weak spot, close the gap, become well rounded. Every hour I spent grinding on the thing I'm worst at was an hour I wasn't spending on the stuff I'm actually good at. Relationships. Communicating. Casting vision. Those are my 8s and 9s, and they sat there untouched while I tried to get passable at work I could have handed to a person or a system. Taking a 1/10 to a 3/10 is worth doing. It stops the bleeding. Nobody should be a 1/10 at something that can sink them. But your 8s don't turn into 9s on their own, and your 9s don't hold without attention either. Nobody warns you about that part. A lot of us are out here trying to be well rounded and landing on mediocre at everything instead. What's your 1/10?

Brendan, Rich, Tressa, and I sat down together after BNI. We talked business and we talked life. We got into the big plans each of us has for next year and what we want to see happen in our businesses. It's fun watching people get to know each other. You give it a little time, and everybody loosens up. People lower their guard, take some chances in the conversation, laugh a lot, and start encouraging each other. We also talked about how we can support each other and help each other grow. I don't just mean landing more clients, though that's part of it. I mean growing as business owners and getting better at what we do. As business owners, we need this. It's good for us to build this kind of community and have people like these three around us, people who want to see us get better and who we want to see get better too. Building relationships is one of my core pillars. It's in my DNA, and I'll take relationships over transactions every time.

Social media's been around twenty-some years. Some of us had MySpace. Do you remember who was on your top eight? In that time everybody learned to snap a selfie. Everybody learned to snap a photo of their burger so you could tell it was cooked a perfect medium rare. Everybody learned to get on there, fight about politics, and torch a couple friendships. Billions of us managed all of that. Almost nobody learned to use social media to build a successful business. Same platforms, same two decades, same tools in everybody's hands. AI is going the same direction and it's moving faster. Everybody has already learned to make an AI flyer that looks exactly like everybody else's AI flyer. Everybody has learned to ask it a question. Very few are learning to create anything with it. The split is between asking it things and telling it what to do. Different skills, and the gap is wider than people think. The part nobody wants to hear, and I'm including myself, is that when it isn't giving you what you want, it's because you're not using it right. Not specific enough. You said what you wanted and never said what you didn't want, and that second half matters as much as the first. It'll expose the people getting by on looking busy, and it'll do absurd things for the people actually trying to be excellent. I say this more and more frequently. You can either master AI, or you can choose to be mastered by it. Which is it going to be?

Smoke & Social is this afternoon, and I'd like to see you there. Most of us get so locked into the work that we don't make time to meet the other people running businesses in this city. Then a client asks if you know a good attorney, and you're stuck scrolling through your contacts hoping a name jumps out. Smoke & Social is a good way to get ahead of that. Once a month, San Antonio business owners and professionals get together at Cigars International over a cigar and a drink, and we get to know each other well enough to send work back and forth with confidence. That's where the referrals, partnerships, and deals start. We're there today from 2 to 4 PM at 5630 Landmark Pkwy. It's walk-in, so stop by whenever your schedule allows. If you're working on expanding your footprint in San Antonio, come spend part of your afternoon with us. These are the people building San Antonio, and you should know them. Who's the first person you call when a client needs something you don't do?

America.gov is already failing.

Smoke & Social is tomorrow, Thursday, October 1, and if you own a business in San Antonio, I'd like you to come out. Once a month a group of us step away from the office for the afternoon, grab a cigar and a drink at Cigars International, and get to know each other. We talk about what we're working on and who we're trying to reach. You find out who's really good at what they do and who you'd trust with your own clients. That's where referrals start, and it's how a lot of partnerships and deals get going. We're at Cigars International, 5630 Landmark Pkwy, from 2 to 4 PM. It's walk-in, so come whenever your afternoon opens up and stay as long as you like. If you're working on expanding your footprint in San Antonio, come spend the afternoon with us. These are the people building San Antonio, and you should know them. facebook.com/share/1YFrtyQSM…