The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - 5 Core Business Lessons You Can't Afford to Miss | Ep. # 151

Episode Date: April 2, 2025

Welcome to this solo episode where I'm trying something a little different by going solo and focusing on key business principles that I find to be really important. What I wanted to do differently was explain these ideas through relatable stories and analogies, something I picked up from my teaching days. I share several personal experiences and then break down the business lessons we can take away from them. We talk about the significance of a solid foundation versus just outward appearances, the value we assign to things based on effort, and even those hidden problems we might not see. Ultimately, it's about understanding different aspects of business and life through these everyday comparisons.Timestamps below. Enjoy!---Watch this on YouTube instead here: tkopod.co/p-ytAsk me a question on or off the show here: http://tkopod.co/p-askLearn more about me: http://tkopod.co/p-cjkLearn about my company: http://tkopod.co/p-cofFollow me on Twitter here: http://tkopod.co/p-xFree weekly business ideas newsletter: http://tkopod.co/p-nlShare this podcast: http://tkopod.co/p-allScrape small business data: http://tkopod.co/p-os---00:00 Exploring Business Principles Through Analogies04:49 Lessons from the Vasa: Stability vs. Appearance10:06 The Value of Hard Work: Basketball and Business14:53 Hidden Challenges: The Treadmill Analogy20:13 Cleaning Up Messes: Life Lessons in Business

I swear, it feels like every couple weeks I'm starting an episode with the phrase, I wanted to try something a little different today. That's what I do. I test things, right? So I wanted to do a solo episode today and cover a handful of business principles that I find to be true. But I wanted to do it in a different way. I wanted to use analogies to describe these business principles because I freaking love analogies

and I don't use them enough. I used to teach seminary at my church for four years to high schoolers. And I used analogies to get across to them. And I think doing that for four years trained my own. analogy muscle to where I can spot analogies all over the place. And I have a spreadsheet of analogies that I like to refer back to from time to time. So I went to this spreadsheet. I looked at a bunch of my analogies and I repurposed them to be more business related. So let me know what you think of this style episode and maybe I'll do some more of them. So there's going to be a good

bit of storytelling and then some analogies and teaching in here. All right. First story. I went to Stockholm, Sweden in 2018 when I got my MBA at TCU. We visited some companies and my wife was there. And it was awesome. And one of the sightseeing things we did was we went to the Vasa Museum. And you know, I am way too ADHD for some museums, but this is hands down the best museum I've ever been to in my life. So I'll paint the picture for you. The VASA was a Swedish warship from the 1600s. And I want you to think of like the Titanic before the Titanic. This was the biggest, the best, the most awesome warship that had ever been built. It had 64 bronze cannons, 32 on each side, two rows of 16 on each side, which is very critical to the story, and it looked awesome. And this

museum in Sweden has this entire ship that you can look at and touch. And it's not really recreation of the ship. It's the exact ship. And it was perfectly preserved. So on August 10th, 1628, the Vasa set sail on her maiden voyage. Now, let me tell you, no expense was spared on this ship, but the builders were warned that this thing might be a little top heavy. But they crunched their numbers as much as they could back in the 1600s and really thought it would be okay. So for its maiden voyage, it was just going to go out in the harbor in Stockholm and just kind of sail around and everyone would wave from the shoreline. And it was just like this big parade, if you will. Anyway, so it went about half a mile out. It was a nice day, slight breeze. It caught

a gust of wind. And here's what happened. If you're watching on YouTube, I'll put some pictures of the Vasa up. The sails caught some air. The Vasa tipped over to the side. And then it tipped back the other way. And then it tipped back a little further. And they had the portholes open for the cannons because they wanted to show them off. It looked awesome. But these portholes started filling up with water. and not because they were too low, but because there wasn't enough ballast. And what a ballast does is prevents a boat from tipping over. Its weight, they purposely add to the bottom of the boat to keep it more stable. So boats with more ballast are more stable, but they're also slower.

And that's just the trade-off you make. Well, they didn't want to be slow. So this boat didn't have very much ballast, and it was top-heavy. And so even though it wasn't even a windy day, this thing started filling up with water and sunk right there in front of everyone as they were waving them out to sea. 30 people died and it sat at the bottom of the ocean in that harbor for 333 years. But because these cold Baltic waters had a really low salt level, it means no shipworms could survive and it was cold water.

And the boat was also sitting in like the mud and silt on the seabed, which also preserved it. And so all the stars aligned to ensure that this boat did not rock. It just sat there for 333 years until finally, and this was covered in the beach, and this was covered in the museum as well. Some divers used this crazy equipment, which was very modern for the time, and they pulled the whole boat up, and then they built the museum right next to where it sank and built the museum around the boat. It's been in that museum for over 60 years now, and it's one of the best preserved ships from the 1600s in the world. So what can you learn from the VASA?

Well, at first, it made me think of social media, how we're so concerned on our outer appearance and how we portray ourselves to the world that we're not even worried about our foundation or our core, what's inside, our roots. But that's not really a business principle. So when I think about business, I think of Nicola Motors, how they were trying to build these electric cars and trucks. And they released this demo video of their electric truck, driving, quote, driving, but it was really just rolling down a hill.

And the camera was angled so you couldn't tell it was on a hill. Then they defrauded investors and the founder went to prison. And he actually just got pardoned last week. I think of a resume that comes across my desk. and it's full of fluff, lots of pretty words, but there's really no meat, no substance behind it. I have no idea what that person actually did to add value at their previous companies. I think of a startup that has 20, 30, 50 employees, but no revenue. Startup that's raised millions of dollars, but they have nothing to show for it.

So how can you use this analogy in your business or future business? You got to get sales. Sales solves everything. I have said that phrase so many times over the last 15 years. You start with sales and you end with sales. That is the foundation. So here's how this works. I make you free videos. I actually know what I'm talking about.

I have no greasy sales pitch at the end. And if you implement what I talk about, you'll make a lot more money and have a better life. And all I ask for in return is that you hit the subscribe button and maybe even the notification bell just like that. Thank you. And sales are scary. You got to go talk to people.

You got to be uncomfortable. You got to put yourself in awkward situations. You have to follow up to the point of annoyance. But the harder way is the better way. The harder way is the better way. That leads me into my second analogy. Two analogies in one. Okay, so a few years ago, I took my oldest son to Six Flags on just a date.

And I'm kind of cheap. Six Flags is like $80 for unlimited passes that last 16 months. Very, very cheap. And you get what you pay for. But if you go to Six Flags, they also have like a carnival section where you can pay extra money to do your typical Carney games, throw darts at balloons, shoot baskets, et cetera. So my oldest was like, hey, dad, he saw a Dallas Mavericks basketball.

that you could win if you made like, I think you had to make three free throws. It was actually a pretty straightforward game. But I am terrible of basketball. And so I was feeling generous. I was in a good mood. And he knows I don't usually spend money once I get into the park. But I thought, you know what? Let's do it.

That's a date. So I don't remember what it was, but I think it was like $5 for three balls or something like that. And you had to make three. But you could keep paying $5 to get three more. So I put down five bucks, shot three, missed all three. Okay, five more. bucks shot three missed all three i'm i'm really really bad at basketball five more bucks made one yada yada yada

i ended up spending forty five dollars to make three baskets okay and this was it wasn't even a free throw it was like shorter than a free throw i'm just really really bad of basketball and so the whole time i'm doing this my oldest is just watching me and like he like feels bad he feels nervous he like he was probably embarrassed to a degree, but his eyes just get bigger and bigger. Like, Dad, you don't have to keep doing this, dude. You don't have to keep giving him five bucks. It's cool. I'm fine.

I don't need the basketball. But I was being prideful. And I wanted that basketball for him. And once you make one, you got to keep paying. And then once you make two, you really have to keep paying. It could have been like six baskets or four. I don't remember. But my shooting percentage was literally like low double digits.

It was like 10 to 20%. It was bad. And so I won the basketball. cost 45 bucks he loved it we walked around with it went home a week later i took my second youngest child my second youngest son back to six flags and i wasn't as generous that day i didn't want to play basketball okay but as luck would have it we were walking around and there was this pond and in the pond there was a basketball floating that someone had likely won and then played with and then it got out of hand and and fell in the pond and was out of reach well not out of reach for us because i want to

want a free basketball and Brady did too. So we find this long piece of bamboo. I picked up Brady. I put him over the fence. We fished out the basketball with the bamboo. It kind of had some like moss growing underneath it. You could tell it had been sitting in the water for a while. But we bounced it around. We took a home, aired it up and it was great. Now we had two basketballs. But something very interesting happened over the next few weeks and months. Now both of these boys are about the same when it comes to how well they treat their things. But my oldest, with the $45 basketball, he kept it in his room. He wouldn't leave it outside. He washed it after he played with it. He put it on the shelf. He would only pull it out every now and then. And my younger son with the other basketball, he did what my boys

normally do with basketballs. He left it in the yard. He left it in the driveway. We backed over it on our van. It rolled into the neighbor's yard. It stayed there for a month. It was just like any other stupid yard toy. It got no love. And I observed this. And I thought, that which is easily gained is easily lost. The harder way is usually the better way. And of course it is. My oldest son valued that basketball because a memory was tied to it. Money was tied to it because dad reaching into his pocketbook, which he never does, was tied to it. And so when it comes to doing those foundational things to build or grow a business, that which is easily gained is easily lost. If you find a growth hack, and I love growth hacks, all right? I talk about growth hacks all the time.

If you find a growth hack or a shortcut to getting more newsletter subscribers and more sales or more followers or whatever, just know that the efficacy of that growth hack is directly correlated to the lifespan of that growth hack. If it's super effective and you feel like it's a cheat code and you don't know how you're able to do this, then just know your days are numbered. Whereas if it's like pretty good, you got an edge, you found an advantage, then it's probably going to be around for a lot longer. But doing those unsexy things, knocking doors, cold calls, cold emails, it's funny because this principle exists even in cold emailing. If you use automation software to send cold emails without your interaction, I don't know why. Maybe it's

because of deliverability or MX records or whatever, but it's not as effective as literally just typing out cold emails to people by hand. It's as if the universe knows that it didn't take us very much work to send that email. Okay, store number three. And this is, is two stories and one as well. So a few years ago, we had a treadmill in our bedroom. And it was pretty crappy. I got on Craigslist. It was about 200 bucks. And I got sick of running on treadmills, but my wife would use it all the time. She would run on that thing all the time. And her mile time on the treadmill was not great compared to her mild time outside. And usually your mild time on the treadmill is going to be better than anything you do outside because, you know, you've got perfect

conditions. There's no hills. You can control the environment better. So I thought that was really weird. And then sure enough, I hopped on the treadmill. And she had been on it for months, like six, eight months. I hopped on the treadmill and it just seemed kind of harder. And my mile time wasn't as fast. So I started looking into it. And I googled it and looked up the manual.

And there was a manual switch like a lever on the bottom of the treadmill that added incline. And it had always been on. It had always been at an incline. And we just didn't notice it. And so once I turned that off and we got back on, it was the normal treadmill. and our mile time increased. And it was just like, oh my gosh, I've been on this treadmill the wrong way for hundreds of miles, thousands of miles maybe.

And all it took was just a little digging, literally just flipping a switch. And so then it's like, okay, a couple analogies going on here. Number one, my wife's legs were freaking jacked. They were way stronger than they would have been otherwise because she was always running at an incline. And she was in a disadvantage when she went outside. Okay. Number two, sometimes all it takes is one little test, one little switch, one more AB test, one more cold email that could change everything. What would happen to your loaf of bread if you didn't put that tablespoon of yeast in there?

It wouldn't rise. It'd be a rock, it'd be flatbread. A tablespoon of yeast accounts for 2% of the weight of those ingredients, but the whole loaf is lost without it. So on one hand, you don't want to optimize something to death. It is very easy to over-optimize anything. Let's talk about Facebook ad campaigns. You get a Facebook ad. Let's say you need it to convert at dollar per user.

And you get it to 94 cents and you're winning. And it's stable and consistent. Cool. Well, what if I tried this market? What if I tried putting the ads in Spanish? What have I changed this pixel? What if I change the color of the button from blue to magenta? And you keep over analyzing, over optimizing.

Next thing you know, you're at $1.30 per user. And you don't even know how to get it back down to 94. You try recreating what you had before and you can't. You over-optimized it to death. That can happen in any principle in business. So that's on one side of the spectrum. Then on the other side of the spectrum, you find something that works and it works well,

so you never even think to look at it again. For instance, in my newsletter, all of my subject lines are newsletter, hashtag zero-zero-zero, zero, and then the number, 76, 77, whatever week of the newsletter it is. I did that kind of a joke on edition number one, but my open rate was awesome. And then I just kept doing it. And then I A, B tested it like a couple weeks later against a normal subject line.

And my open rate was still better on just the boring generic one. And so to this day, I do that. But I haven't tested it in over a year. That might not be the same because the last time I tested it, I had 1,500 subscribers. And today I have almost 100 times as many. So sometimes on the other end of the spectrum, something is working and it's working well. And we don't even think about it anymore. We move on with our lives.

And if we were to revisit that thing, the pixel, the email, the offer, the sales tactic, whatever it is, we could find one little tweak that would change everything, right? It's kind of like my white whale theory or the permissionless marketing theory. That one little thing that could just change everything. We have a software business called Voltaire, and we help skilled nursing facilities save money on their medical billing. And we've got a handful of customers. and it's growing, it's doing great.

But we're on the precipice of signing a customer that has 150 locations. And it's taking just as much work, if not less. To sign that customer, then it's taken to sign our customers with single locations. And it will literally 10x the size of our business without hardly any additional overhead. That's just incredible. Now, I wish you could just go fishing for only the whales all the time. But you just can't. There are power laws at play.

So find your place on that spectrum between. analysis paralysis, over-optimizing everything to death, and done is better than perfect, because good can be the enemy of great. I've put out about 600 short-form videos over the last year, and 90% of my followers have come from 2% of those. Sam and I mentioned this on a recent podcast, but the 80-20 rule is a myth. It's more like the 96-4 rule. So take 80-20 and then multiply those by 80-20, and you've got 96-4.

So find the four. So a few years ago, I went mountain biking for the first time, actually. I say a few. It was probably 10 years ago. And it was in Wyoming with my father-in-law and my brother-in-law. And I was having a blast. I'd never been mountain biking before. And the trail was a little treacherous.

There were trees right up against it. And at times you had to get off the bike and walk. And my brother-in-law, Justin, told me something that just stuck with me. I thought about it for the rest of the ride. He's like, now, Chris, as you're barreling down a downhill, You're going to see trees really close to the trail and it's going to freak you out. And if you look at the tree, you're going to hit the tree. Just Chris, if you look at the tree, you're going to hit the tree.

The trail is clear. Trust the trail. Look down at the trail, just like you're playing baseball. Keep your eyes on the ball. Look at your front wheel. Look at the trail. And you'll be okay because you ride where you look. And I was just like, you ride where you look.

Holy crap. We can't take an action, a physical action, without thinking of it first. Now, not everything we think about will end up doing, but that which we focus on and think about in the direction that we look towards at any given time or on a recurring basis, that's where we're going to go. So if you want to look at things pessimistically, then you're going to find that. You're going to find the negative things and you're going to become that. You can look at things optimistically and bad things will still happen.

But if you're not focusing on them, then they won't have as much weight or leverage in your life. Focus on the little coincidences, the cool. little coincidences, blessings, whatever you want to call them. Exaggerate those. Over-emphasize those, even if it seems silly. And you're going to find so many more of those things. And I don't care if it's a self-fulfilling prophecy or some mental hack or confirmation

bias because you can easily write it off as those things. But it's real. It's very real. Delusion can be a superpower. A couple more ways to look at some of these stories that I just talked about. With the treadmill analogy, a lot of times in your business or in your life, you have hidden drag. You have a website that doesn't load very quickly. And you wouldn't know because you're not going to your own website. A few milliseconds, especially on an e-commerce site, can increase

your sales by double digits. There might be a silent drag on your company. Culture of your company is often the temperament or personality of your most toxic employee. Everything will fall to that lowest common denominator. And when it comes to that which is easily gained is easily lost, there's no better example than when collecting email addresses. You're going to be very tempted to remove as much friction as possible to acquire more email addresses. But that friction is directly correlated to the loyalty of that subscriber. The higher your conversion rate on your landing page, the higher your unsubscribe rate will be. Now, that doesn't mean we want our subscribers to jump through a dozen hoops so they're extra loyal and they always open. It's also a spectrum. You

have to find that happy medium. And my last analogy, which you may have seen on Twitter a year or so ago, which is one of my favorites, I spent six years volunteering at the Dallas temple for my religion, my church. And it was every Friday morning, I would go and help out. And it was awesome. Now, one day, I walk into the temple. And I posted this on Twitter. It got a couple hundred thousand views. And a lot of people didn't believe me. They thought I just made this up. I don't know if that was because I took an image from Google images for to like portray the story I'm about to tell you. And I'm you or because it just sounded too good. But this is a 1,000% real story. And no, I didn't take a picture of it because you don't take pictures in the temple. That's not allowed. Anyway, I walked into

the temple and there's white carpet everywhere and someone had walked into the temple with muddy shoes or boots. And they had walked all the way from the front to the back of the temple, maybe 40, 50 yards, just tracking mud everywhere on this perfectly pristine white carpet. And I remember coming around the corner and seeing it and just literally stopping in my tracks, eyes wide, thinking like, my first thought was just like, who did this? Like, what were you thinking? That was my first thought. I'm almost ashamed to admit. I just thought it was careless and reckless of whoever was wearing those shoes. I didn't know the backstory, but I had never seen really any blemish on that carpet. And to go from that to this was quite the shock. And so within a few seconds of me having that thought,

one of my co-workers or co-volunteers got a big bucket with a big scrubber brush and got on their hands and knees in their own white clothing and started scrubbing this up little by little scrub scrub scrub scrub scrub and it took hours and then others joined in and they helped and then someone else went and got a backup key because when you go to the temple you usually change clothes and you leave your clothes in the locker in your shoes and so someone went and got a backup key they found the locker of this gentleman, went in there, got his shoes, clean them off so it wouldn't happen again on the way out, put them back in the locker. The gentleman never even knew this happened. He didn't know anyone was in his locker, I presume. We didn't tell him. And after a couple hours,

the carpet was as good as new. It was white. And I thought about that for about the rest of the morning. And I thought, wow, what a beautiful analogy. And this isn't about business as much as it is about life. We have about 85 years on this earth. And hopefully we leave this earth a net positive on the world. This earth and the people around us are all better off because of our presence here. But I wish I could count. I wish I had some level of knowledge of all those people in my life that have scrubbed up my muddy footprints and cleaned up my messes that I never even knew about. Because sometimes that happens and I find out about these people and I feel very indebted grateful to them. And I try to thank them or pay them back, if at all possible. But I would bet that

most of the time, when people do kind things for us, we never know about it. We just don't know. And so the business lesson here is be the person that scrubs, not the person that complains. Don't be me in this example. And the other lesson is be grateful. Be grateful because good things are happening all around you that you don't even recognize. And there's a direct correlation between grateful and happiness. It's very hard to be grateful and unhappy at the same time. Hope you like this episode style. Have a great week, and we'll see you next time on the Kerner office.