Carbon Based Business Units Ralph M. Rivera and Carol Lynn Rivera

Happy Valentine’s Day! Today, [insert husband name] is very much in love with [insert wife name] even though there is much talk of second wives and same-sex lovers. That’s all I’ll say about that, so if you really want in on the joke you’ll have to listen.
Jessica Evans Makes An Introduction Ralph loves being in the middle of the drama, so when he recently received an apparent spam email from someone named Jessica Evans, introducing him to someone named Donna, he decided to play along. Jessica assured Ralph that Donna provided excellent services and would be a great fit for him.
He knows neither of these people, but of course the email was phrased in a way that implied he knew Jessica, who was doing him the huge favor of introducing him to Donna.
He responded to Jessica and asked for an introductory call. When he received another email of the apparent auto-generated variety letting him know that she was on maternity leave, things took on a life of their own.
Suffice it to say, Jessica, Ralph and Donna exchanged a series of emails that ended in the question: is this a scam? And who is scamming who?
The Jessica Character Ralph thinks it’s possible that Jessica is a real person. Well, clearly there is some person on the other end of the email but I think she’s a fraud. And we’ve got evidence. If you look up her photo online, it’s everywhere. But sometimes she’s Samantha. And sometimes she’s Julie. And one time, she was even Mohammed.
She has a company website that is so generic as to say nothing at all. And a LinkedIn profile tied to this company that lists it as having 11-50 employees – of which she is suspiciously the only one on LinkedIn.
The Donna Character Here’s where it gets weird. Even though Jessica appears to be no more than a façade, Donna has all the hallmarks of being an actual person. She has a real-looking website. And a real-looking profile. She even has a YouTube channel where you can see her giving real-looking talks.
Based on everything we've seen, she seems like a legitimate person with a legitimate business. So... how did she get involved with... and who the heck is... “Jessica?” And why is Jessica acting like she knows Ralph and is just making a friendly introduction?
A Theory We can’t leave this one alone, so we come up with a theory that Donna has hired one of those companies that promise to get you leads. And that’s exactly what “Jessica” is doing – getting Donna leads.
Maybe somewhere, someone set up this fake company with the intent of doing this kind of thing.
We can’t imagine why, except that it’s a deception to take money from people who want leads and then sort of spam a bunch of people into being leads.
At this point, Ralph is wondering if he’s the one perpetrating the fraud, because he’s pursuing the conversation with no intent to hire anyone. So if Donna is some unwitting player and has gotten involved with a bad company then maybe she is as much a victim of this deception.
We decide that instead of being a meanie, Ralph should approach Donna truthfully and find out if she’s part of the scam (if there is one) or offer some friendly advice about not hiring fraudulent companies.
Stay Tuned We don’t know where this one ends yet. Maybe neither Jessica nor Donna will respond. We don’t know who they are or what they really want, so maybe they’ll disappear into the internet miasma from whence they came.
But if we do hear from or speak to either, we’ll let you know!
What do you think? Scam? Fraud? What do these people want?
Ten Easy Steps To Spam We’re convinced that there’s a play book out there somewhere telling people how to “reach out” to other business owners with the intent of gaining some advantage – someone to read their book, try their product or let them post on your site.
We get the same emails all the time. First, it’s the introductory email where the person praises you and tells you how amazing you woul

In Which I Take Issue With Chris Curran Our loyal listeners may have noticed that our opening drumbeat, courtesy of our good friend Chris Curran, features Ralph’s name. But I want to know why Ralph gets top – and only – billing? Is this the Ralph show? I think not.
So I issued a challenge to Chris to work my name into a drumbeat. Creatively.
Let’s see what we get.
Another Apology Last week Ralph apologized to various people and today I have to issue my own apology, to the great nation of the USA. In last week’s episode I mistakenly mentioned the Whopper as being an item you could eat at Mc Donald’s.
Travesty!
Are there enough mea culpas? I wonder.
In Which We Admire Chris Curran After I expressed my demand for a drum track with my name in it, Ralph mentioned something that Chris did with his businesses that was very clever.
Chris has a couple of businesses. One is called Podcast Engineering School, which teaches people how to professionally record, mix, master and engineer podcasts. The school is for people who want a career in podcasting.
The other is called Podfudge, an agency that provides editing and marketing services to podcasters.
Chris had one of his engineering school graduates produce The Podcast Engineering Show, which is Chris’s podcast. The show sounds great, which goes to prove that Chris is churning out qualified professionals who even HE is willing to hire and trust with his own show.
He also hires his grads for his editing business. And Ralph thinks that’s pretty smart. It’s a way to market your product (in this case, school) – not by saying how great you are and not by talking about all the wonderful things you do – but by actually showing it.
Show Don’t Tell We had an experience a few weeks ago where we went to a business dinner with colleagues, and in the course of the conversation we gave some advice to one of them about how he might improve his Facebook ads.
A few days later, we were at a networking meeting with this same colleague. He stood up and told the room that after implementing our advice, he immediately got seven new leads for his business. We didn’t have to tell people that we know what we’re doing. He told them for us. And that’s worth more than any dollar amount you can spend on an ad.
I know a woman who knits clothing. And she wears her own clothing. So when she’s out and someone says, “Hey, nice sweater!” She tells them she makes them for a living. It’s a great way to demonstrate that she stands by her own product.
When you do a good job for people, when you stand by what you do, then your work will speak for itself. And if other people speak for you, all the better!
A Travel Wrapup Last week we talked about our trip, what we spent and how we can budget next time.
This week we summarize a Top Ten list of easy ways to save money so you can travel even if you don’t have a big budget.
Bring food. Grabbing Mc Donald’s, grabbing a coffee or a donut or a snack can really add up. Eat at your destination but avoid expensive food traps. Bring water. Don’t spend two bucks a bottle at a convenience store when you can spend two bucks a case at the grocery store. Go where the tourists aren’t. Go to a beach town during the winter or the desert in the summer. It may not be your idea of the perfect vacation but you can still get away and do it a whole lot cheaper. Camp. If you’re adventurous, grab a tent and pitch it. Some campgrounds have great amenities like wifi and electricity. Use apps. Hotel apps can help you get really good deals. If you don’t mind the risk, you can get some great deals by just showing up and getting what’s left. Be flexible. Do things that you might ordinarily think you don’t want to do. With the right mindset you can make the best of things you might not have expected to enjoy. Use a credit card with points. Whether you get points that you can use for a purchase later, or cash back that you can use to pay fo

Apologies And Statements Ralph has a few things to clear up before we jump into this episode, and it begins with apologizing for mispronouncing the name of one of the co-hosts of Social Media Unscrambled. Of course, next week he will apologize for calling it “Social Media Scrambled” in this episode.
He also takes umbrage with Janet Johnson, one of the hosts of Business Growth Time, whose marketing campaign had a typo, but who didn’t respond when Ralph pointed it out. Mostly, he wants to know: whyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?
Finally, SuperFred and friend Nadia Bracken let us know that we may have used the a-s-s word too many times in last week’s episode, especially since her mom listens, too. We apologize profusely because we’re just so happy to hear that her mom listens to our podcast!
Traveling On A Budget. Or Not. Last week, Ralph asked me to tally up the expenses of our 11-week cross-country road trip. So I did. On this episode we disclose the amount we spent. But why?
It’s important to let you know that we’re not “lifestyle entrepreneurs.” We don’t work from the beach and insist that you can too, if only you follow our ten-step plan and sign up for our email list. So we’re not talking about money to tell you how amazing we are or to pitch you on doing things our way.
We just like to travel. We discovered that recently, when we did it for real for the first time. And we were fortunate enough to have a really good year financially, so we didn’t have to travel on a budget. We were cost-conscious in some ways, and extravagant in others. But we know we COULD travel on a budget if we wanted to.
Here’s what we learned about traveling smart, so that if you want to get out of a stuck space and spend time somewhere else, you can do it even if you have a small budget. It’s a matter of mindset and a willingness to compromise.
The Expenses After tallying it all up, the receipts, the credit card bills and the little bit of cash we brought, we spent about $22,000. Rounding it up just to have a nice even number, and in case we left anything out, let’s call it $25,000.
That includes a place to stay, food, gas, parking, and entertainment. It also includes anything we spent on incidentals on the road. Like toothpaste. And coffee.
It doesn’t include money we spent on souvenirs. We spent a couple hundred dollars here and there on t-shirts (one from every city and town!), gifts, and other fun things, but I don’t count that as a travel expense. It was totally optional.
That’s less than Ralph thought we spent, and more than we could have. But what if you don’t have $25,000 lying around?
Eating Smart You’ve got to eat. And you’ve got to do that whether you stay home or travel across the country. So if you eat smart then you don’t have to figure much if any additional budget for food.
We went to restaurants when we arrived at our destinations but we almost never ate from the road.
We bought a cooler and filled it with fruit and bottled water, and stocked up on non-perishables like nuts and granola bars. Grab a loaf of bread, some cold cuts and a little PB&J and you can eat anywhere, anytime, inexpensively.
If you stay somewhere with a kitchen (or even an outdoor grill) you can cook for yourself instead of spending on restaurants.
Our cooler was a lifesaver. We bought a Yeti cooler, because we had experience with their products in the past and we know how awesome they are. We used one of their travel mugs for years. You can make a cup of tea in the morning and it will still be piping hot by afternoon. We also got their half gallon jug. We put a cold beverage inside and days later it was still ice cold.
So getting a Yeti was more expensive than getting a traditional cooler but it was easy to carry (more like a giant purse than a cooler) and it kept food cold for days. We could stock up on food from farmer’s markets, roadside stands and grocery stores. It was like having a mini refrigerator.
We saved

The best podcast on earth is back on air!
We’re talking about Social Media Unscrambled, hosted by our friends Chris Curran and David Deutsch, masters of the mic and all things unscrambled.
They were on hiatus for a long time but it’s great to have them back. You know, hiatus. A thing we would never do around here. Except for that first one. And then this last one.
Well, we’re back too, after several months and a 10,000-mile cross country trip during which we planned to podcast and never did.
So what happened?
Creative Block We went through a phase where we started scripting this podcast and that started getting less and less fun. We had an idea in our heads that it would help us stay more focused on a topic and have a higher quality show.
In the end we struggled to make a scripted show sound anything but scripted and sort of lost our mojo. So we ditched the script and went back to having fun. Lesson learned.
When We Last Left Our Heroes… We were on our way to Podcast Movement in Anaheim, one stop of many on our cross country trip. Some two dozen states and eleven weeks later, we learned a lot about ourselves and our business along the way.
For starters, we learned that we’re not the planning type. Much like we started trying to plan this podcast, we started traveling with a serious plan. We had dates and stops and things to do and people to visit. But after two stops and a handful of days, we realized that planning was just holding us back. We didn’t need to know where we were going. We just needed to go.
So we threw out the plans and got in the car and drove. We drove for as many as 15 or 20 hours depending on our mood and whether there was anything we wanted to see along the way. Then we’d pull into a town somewhere and pull up the Priceline app or the Airbnb app and figure out where to stay.
If that sounds a little scary, perhaps it was at first. But after a while we got used to the idea of not knowing and were even comfortable sleeping in our car if we had to.
It’s not something that I would have thought would work. But it did. Sometimes you have to forget what you think you know about yourself and let something else happen.
Working On The Road It seems like it would be a challenging thing. After all, routines get disrupted, cell phone service drops out, and there are so many amazing things to see and do that work could easily fall by the wayside.
It didn’t.
In a completely counterintuitive experience, working on the road was easier than working from the same old table we’d been at for months. We had our work days. And we had our play days. The new environments were exciting and interesting. Our creative juices flowed. We got into an exploratory mindset and that transferred to our work.
Being in great places made us feel great, which meant we got to be more focused and enjoy what we were doing, whether it was gaping in awe at the deep blue of Crater Lake or writing a blog for a client.
Planning helped in that regard. One thing we did plan for was working. We got ourselves a mobile hotspot. We made sure we had plenty to do on our laptops even if we absolutely couldn’t get an internet connection. We made sure that we scheduled our client calls and we showed up, even if it was at 5AM our time.
So it can be done! Far from being distracting and chaotic, working on the road was relaxing, energizing and fun.
More Things We Learned Being on the road was a bit of a revelation. We learned more than the fact that we could survive without a plan. We learned that we’re better in long bursts than short ones. When it comes to driving, 20 hours doesn’t phase us. It’s a lot more enjoyable than 3 hours.
In a way, we work that way, too. Long bursts of super focused time and then a break.
We learned that we enjoy the outdoors more than we thought we would. We learned that we’re not city people, which was a strange thing to discover since we’re New Yorkers at heart and love the city. We lo

First, Housekeeping. We’re actually, really leaving for California in a week! And we’re taking two weeks off from podcasting to get there and attend Podcast Movement. We’ll be back with lots of new stuff and hopefully some good travel stories soon.
In the meantime, would you be kind enough to leave us a rating and review on iTunes or Stitcher? We had some great feedback on the Web.Search.Social podcast but those reviews didn’t come with us when we switched to the new feed.
We’d love and appreciate your reviews!
So You’ve Quit Your Job And Started A Business! Now What? The subject came up during lunch with our business partner Michael last week. Until recently he had a “day job”. A 9-5 work-at-a-desk job. But he had enough freelance clients that he decided to strike out on his own.
When he asked us what he should be thinking about in terms of starting a business, first, we poured the cocktails. Then we came up with this list. It’s not an exhaustive list, but put it in the “what we wished we knew” category of stuff we learned. Feel free to add yours to the comments below!
1. Give Yourself A Day To Work On The Business When you’re an employee, someone else makes the decisions. Someone else sets the strategy, for everything from hiring to marketing. But when you’re the boss, it’s up to you to do that. And you can’t do it if you’re constantly in a whirlwind of client work.
Set aside a day – not five minutes, not an hour, but a solid day – each week to think about your own business. Plan. Strategize. Put systems in place. Brainstorm ideas. Learn a new skill. Go to the bank with your checks!
Make that day about your business, period.
2. Don’t Negotiate With Yourself We’ve talked about this before. And it manifests in a couple of ways. It can mean that you’ve pre-decided the outcome of a conversation. For example, Michael was working with a client and completely stressing out because he was worried whether the client would like the color he chose for the design. And whether the client would like the font. And whether the client was going to ask for changes and what he’d say about that. In the end, the client loved everything.
In other words, Michael spent a lot of time worried about something that never happened.
On the other hand, you might pre-negotiate your pricing before presenting it to a prospect. You’ll wonder if it’s too high. You’ll tell yourself they can’t afford it. You’ll second guess everything and that’s all before you even talk to the client.
Stop! Act and react when you need to. Don’t worry about what hasn’t happened. Have the courage of your own convictions.
3. Follow An Organizational Paradigm That Works For You We’re big fans of GTD. That’s Getting Things Done, an organizational system created by David Allen. It’s based on the premise that your brain is not a storage unit. You need it for thinking and creating and planning. So if you’re constantly trying to remember things, likes dates and deadlines and what color the client wanted, then you’re going to drive yourself nuts, be less productive and probably be miserable.
Ralph has notebooks by Field Notes that he loves. And he uses them to capture every thought, idea and note. Then he organizes them into an app called OmniFocus. This works well for him. You have to find your own system. Just remember that your brain needs space to think, so get organized by getting stuff out of it.
4. Don't Get Lost In Apps While you’re searching for that perfect organizational paradigm, just remember that there are a LOT of apps out there. And you don’t need to use or try every one. There will always be something new to try. From CRMs to proposal writing software to project management.
Skip the new shiny. As your business grows you’ll probably outgrow apps and need to find something else, but if you’re constantly trying new things then you’re wasting time you could be spending growing yo

Our Trip, Plan B. Or Maybe C. A few weeks ago we said we'd be leaving for California. Yet here we still are, and probably not leaving for a few more.
Why?
Business decisions, that's why! We've made some bad ones, and that has led to a lot of mistakes. But we rethought, reworked and figured out a better way so that we can keep moving forward.
The most important thing is launching our Podcaster's Toolbox product. And on further reflection, we realized that spending four weeks driving cross-country on our way to Podcast Movement was not only risky but costing us time we could be spending working on our app.
So the new plan is to spend only one week driving out, then seven or eight back at our leisure. We also have a backup to our backup plan - if things go really, really south then we'll fly out, attend Podcast Movement where we'll launch our app, fly back, THEN drive to California!
In the end we decoupled "trip" from "launch" which means we can do both - with a lot less stress.
Let's Make Mistakes! Admittedly they're not fun but there are things to be learned. And ours became glaringly clear after a conference we attended last week called Laracon, which is a conference for developers that is focused on a specific development platform called Laravel.
It turned out to be a lot less code-centric than I had expected it to be, which meant I got a lot out of it from a business perspective. Mostly, it made us realize that we were following the wrong path and we got a serious kick in the butt to get back on track with our software launch!
The thing is, I didn't hear anything earth-shattering. Nothing was particularly new to me. But we've been so stuck in the weeds of our daily activities that we lost sight of the big picture.
And if we can get so lost in our own heads, after 18 years and four business ventures, then we bet you can too. The trick is to get going in the right direction again, which is what we're talking about today. You may not hear anything earth-shattering here, either. But maybe it's the reminder you need to get out of your own weeds and start moving forward in your business.
Mistake #1: WTF MVP? We've developed a lot of apps in our time, and we've worked with other people who have. And one of the core principles of launching an app is MVP: Minimum Viable Product.
That means figure out the minimum thing you need to get your product out the door, and do that. You may have a lot of big ideas and grand visions, but you need to start somewhere. And start small.
If we'd been advising a client, we would have insisted on an MVP. But when it came to our own product, we completely lost sight of that.
We wanted it all. We wanted every feature. And we wanted them to be perfect. Except that's not how anything in life works.
So we had to stop and reassess. What's our MVP? And are we taking the right actions to reach MVP or are we digressing back into the weeds of big ideas?
Launch something good. Not perfect. Then make it better.
Mistake #2: Putting Design Before Content If we'd been working with a client, we would never have made this mistake. But again, we lost sight of what was important in our own busyness and excitement.
We got caught up in building pretty landing pages and awesome email templates and cool buttons, but didn't build a single feature.
Part of the problem was focus. It's a lot easier (and more fun) to work on the pretty stuff. The stickers and postcards and colors and pictures. It's not as much fun to draw flowcharts for user interaction and error control.
Sometimes you have to do the stuff that's not as sexy. The boring stuff. The hard stuff. Get rid of distractions, and focus.
Mistake #3: Mismanagement I get to blame this one on myself, and oh the irony! In one of our recent episodes I lamented the lack of leadership in another business that I'm not involved in. Well, this time I get to wear the mantle of poor leader.
The problem is that I am not a programmer. So when Ralph, my primary p