Ep315: Coonoor Behal – Pay Great Attention to Your Business Website

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Guest profile

Coonoor Behal is the Founder & CEO of Mindhatch, a firm that specializes in getting companies better results with creativity through Design Thinking, Organizational Improv™, Innovation Facilitation, and Diversity & Inclusion. She is also the author of I Quit! The Life-Affirming Joy of Giving Up, which will be published by New Degree Press in April 2021.

 

“If you plan to do your business for three or more years, then do not skimp on your website. Make it great and let it help you.”

Coonoor Behal

 

Worst investment ever

Going out on her own

Coonoor quit her job at Deloitte Consulting to start her own company, Mindhatch. She immediately went into a bootstrap mode and cut out all these things that were personal expenditures.

Taking the bootstrapping mentality into her new business venture

Coonoor knew what she wanted to be doing for clients, but she did not know how to go about it, mainly because she was so strapped for cash. Coonoor was looking for all possible ways to build her business without spending a lot of money.

One of the things Coonoor decided she needed was a website. Again, she went into the bootstrapping mentality of not wanting to spend much on this website. Her expectations for the website were low, and she thought this was a smart business decision. She went for a static three-page website with simple details of who she is, what her niche does, and contact details.  She paid about $1,000 for that.

Time for a new website

Coonoor’s business started to grow, and she started wanting to do more. Now she was a B2B business, and she needed a website that could do a lot more for her business, such as lead generation, answer questions that people are curious about, and more.

Struggling to find a reliable web designer

Coonoor decided it was time to improve her website, and she started looking for someone to work with. Unfortunately, this became the worst thing she experienced since starting her business.

It took her a really long time to find a good web designer who eventually built the website she should have gotten from the beginning. She learned the hard way that cheap is indeed expensive.

Lessons learned

Work on a great business website from the start to save money

You will save yourself money, time, and so much heartache and annoyance if you engage a good website design company from the start. Focus on building a professional website as you start building your business so that it can grow with your business.

Andrew’s takeaways

Building a great website is hard but with the right web design company, you can do it

A lot goes into creating a business website that customers will love and find useful. This is an expensive venture that most small businesses prefer to defer until they make a lot of money. However, when you find the right web designer, you can work together to create something great from the very start.

Do not let insecurity or fear of failure hold you back from going the whole nine yards

Most new entrepreneurs have a sense of insecurity and fear that their businesses will fail and, therefore, shy away from investing in essential business tools such as websites. Trust yourself and show the world what you are made of.

Actionable advice

Think about how long you want to do the thing that requires a website. If you are committed, and you know it is going to be something you will do for three or more years, then definitely invest in that website upfront.

No. 1 goal for the next 12 months

Coonoor’s number one goal for the next 12 months is to sell many books once her book is launched in April. She also plans to do keynote speeches and give author and book talks at organizations and conferences.

Parting words

 

“Just try it out and experiment. Most things in life are not as risky as you think they are.”

Coonoor Behal

 

Read full transcript

Andrew Stotz 00:02
Hello fellow risk takers and welcome to my worst investment ever stories of loss to keep you winning in our community we know that to win in investing you must take risks but to win big you've got to reduce it. This episode is sponsored by a stocks Academy's online course how to start building your wealth investing in the stock market. I wrote this course for those who want to go from feeling frustrated, intimidated or overwhelmed by the stock market to becoming confident and in control of their financial future. Go to my worst investment ever.com slash deals to claim your discount now, fellow risk takers This is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz and I'm here with featured guests. kinnaur Bohol kinnaur. Are you ready to rock?

Coonoor Behal 00:46
I'm ready. Let's do this.

Andrew Stotz 00:48
So Connor is the founder and CEO of mine hatch, a firm special that specializes in getting companies better results with creativity through design thinking, organizational improv, innovation, facilitation and diversity and inclusion. She's also the author of I quit the life affirming joy of giving up, which will be published by new degree press in April 2021. Can or take a moment and filling for the tidbits about your life?

Coonoor Behal 01:20
Oh, sure on the spot already. Well, I am a longtime improv comedy performer. I have been doing improv comedy for 10 years. That's usually my one Fun fact when I'm in a group of people unless that group of people is other improvisers, then I struggle to find what my one Fun fact is. Um, but yeah, and I have a adorable bernese Mountain dog named Nika. She is named after a Japanese whiskey that I love a lot. Yeah, and those things pretty much wrapped me up. I think.

Andrew Stotz 01:52
That's good. And, um, you know, for the listeners out there, and what is improv anyways? I mean, I think I know what it is. I think I've experienced it, but maybe just give us a background of kind of what it is and what type of people do that.

Coonoor Behal 02:06
Oh, yeah. What type of people do that? Okay, I mean, like psychologically analyze improvisers. Well, well, one thing when it comes, like the type of people who do improv, I do think that there is this assumption out there that improv is kind of only for extroverts, you know, or only for people who have like a propensity for theatrical, you know, and I do happen to be an extrovert. But I can tell you having done this in multiple cities, for many, many years, been on dozens of teams. improv definitely has and benefits from its fair share of introverts, and it really takes all kinds because really, what it's about at heart is just collaborating and learning the skills to live co create something onstage out of nothing. And really, there's no reason to, like assume that an extrovert would be especially good at that, you know, so I think it really does take a lot of different types of thinking and types of people and everyone has their kind of strength in their role to plan a team and you kind of figure out what that mixture of magic is, you know, and, and hope that it comes across on stage when you perform. So

Andrew Stotz 03:14
it's interesting that you were saying, like, to create something out of nothing. Sometimes, I mean, I'm not a particularly good writer, but I have to write sometimes. And when I, when I write something, I print it out, I reread it, and I, you know, edited I go back and rewrite it. And then at the end of that period of time of writing, I have a one page document, I'm like, Damn, that was a white piece of paper.

Coonoor Behal 03:36
Nice. Yeah. When you see like the, I mean, improv happens to be pretty ephemeral, you know, it's like the exact kind of like, you had to be there kind of art form, you know, to really understand it. But it is pretty nice to have a blank page, that blank slate, you know, and just kind of trusting your team and trusting the skills you've been working on that those will see you through, you know, that you can kind of find the funny in anything and trust that the funding will come You know, just by being honest and truthful and you know, playing with each other. So, I hear you on the writing because I'm I started revising my book manuscripts last night, in fact, so there's no, no secret why today I went and bought my first bottle of booze in a really long time. I think I would have to Hemingway my way through these revisions.

Andrew Stotz 04:26
Yeah, yeah. There's so many things in your I mean, you gave me a pretty short and tight bio, unlike most people that give me a very long one. Oh, yeah. But there's a lot of things in there that are to me. Interesting. So I just want to ask you a couple more questions. Before we get there. Your big question. And the first question is, What? Wait a minute now I'm thinking for myself. I'm thinking. I remember Frank Zappa had an album does humor belong in music. And it was like does humor or improv belong in organizations and I'm thinking here you have organizational improv that you talk about. Tell us just briefly about how does that work? You know, most of your work is pretty, you know stodgy.

Coonoor Behal 05:08
Yeah, we think of work. You know, we've all kind of, you know, especially if you've grown up in the West, and especially in the United States, you know, you kind of you stop learning through play. By the time you get out of elementary school, sometimes I've even earlier right, and then suddenly becomes kind of like, just fall in line and follow the rules and comply and conform, you know, and you really stop knowing how to play. And there's a reason why children are like the greatest improvisers on Earth, like the best, right, because they don't see constraints, right, they only see possibility, and they know how to play right. It's how you first learn anything is through play. And so organizational improv is kind of like my in mind hatches, phrase, you know, for the application of the behaviors and the mindsets and the skills that are behind Improv Theater and improv comedy, and applying them to the workplace. So, you know, we find applications for it and a lot of like professional skills building, you know, like, using improv as the teaching methodology to get teams to be more collaborative, be more innovative, even training customer service skills or like leadership development. So improv is because it's so innately human, right? You have nothing but yourself and your body and your voice on stage and your teammates on stage with you. You know, it's such an innately human art form, it translates really well to something else that is innately human, which is in any organization in any team. You're always kind of like trying to create something that's bigger than yourselves, right. And that's kind of what improv is to, you know, and so I think the, the playfulness of improv is a really helpful conduit through which to kind of, you know, relearn how you work and like, just think in different ways, certainly work creatively and work collaboratively for sure. Me, I think it's all in an effort to kind of, you know, not turn work into play, but just kind of recognize that there's a reason why we all started out with play, you know, and why it was so valuable. And it's sad that by the time we're adults, it's kind of beaten out of us. Right. And

Andrew Stotz 07:25
it's playing around over there, stop horsing around.

Coonoor Behal 07:29
Yeah, totally. So, but I think it can be like, you know, a fish to water or like riding a bike, you know, and I get a group of what you might think, buttoned up stodgy adults. I mean, God, I've done an improv session for the Pentagon on a couple of occasions, and literally had like a general and like, some dudes in fatigues, who were like, in my and they just loved it. Like the people, you wouldn't expect to have an easy time of like, getting back into the groove of playfulness, you know, and possibility. You know, we all have that in us. Yeah.

Andrew Stotz 08:02
It's, so many things go on in my mind. You know, first of all, I studied some seminars, when I was young with a guy named Dr. W. Edwards, Deming, he was the father of the quality movement. And one of his 14 points was to bring joy back to work, to bring pride of workmanship, to bring fun to work. And he was a real humanist, although people would think of he would be a statistical guy. And that that really is, is interesting, because you know, so many people, you know, think opposite. And what's also made me think, is that when I graduated from Cal State, Long Beach, I went to work for Pepsi in Los Angeles as a management trainee, and I worked for three years, and did my MBA there. And so I worked for three years in the US, and I've worked for 29 years in Thailand, either on teams or managing teams, Ty's look at work so differently, and how, and I think one of the big things is that if work is not fun, they're gone.

09:06
That's fascinating.

Andrew Stotz 09:09
Yeah, if work is not if it's not fun, they're just it's just not, you know, and that's another thing is that they're less money driven, let's say maybe then another culture in Asia, let's say. So it's not not their primary. Their primary thing is the relationships that you make it work. They go out together after work, they go on holidays together. They do all kinds of and and of course, they have great sense of humor. So we have fun at work. So in fact, I've spent my really my life either on teams or leading teams where, you know, first of all, anger is not allowed in Thai society, and confrontation is forbidden basically. And that has it's good and it's bad sides, but the good sides about that is that people smile and have fun and try to get through it. Now. There are some bad sides when you don't have that as you know all that but It just made me think a lot about what are the things I really love? And you know, what's a there's an infection happening in Thailand right now. And I think it's been spreading across Asia for a while. And it's not COVID it is modern American management styles of KPIs and numbers and people thinking that they can get the most out of business, by bosses sitting and looking at numbers and charts and graphs, and that people could be managed through numbers. Yeah, that's it's sad, sad state of affairs.

Coonoor Behal 10:37
It is you're speaking my language, because, you know, I am a design thinking Human Centered Design practitioner as well. And so what do you use the phrase like, humanist, you know, that that person described himself as like, it really resonated with me, because, you know, Human Centered Design, it's right there. It's like a people first, like, Listen to your customers, your users, your employees, whoever it is, you're trying to solve problems for whoever's behavior, you're trying to amend in some way, like, look at the people first, right? And, and really seek to understand them, you know, and it's, you know, I'm not, of course, opposed to data for data's sake, or I data has its place, but it's about getting intentional about when it's the right thing to lead with, right. And I think anytime you're working with people, which is a lot of the time, it's often not going to get the results that you hope, and it can sometimes be, frankly, like an act of cowardice. You know, it's just like, I'm gonna look at the numbers, because I'm too scared to talk to people, or I'm too scared to tell me, you know, and

Andrew Stotz 11:40
there's a bunch of wimpy bosses out there that think that, you know, the numbers can tell it. And one of the things about numbers that I've learned over the years is that measuring things, you know, ultimately, as an analyst, I'm measuring things all the time. But if I was to take a, you know, your notebook computer, and I was going to measure the width of your notebook computer, would your notebook computer Be aware that I'm measuring it? No, not. And therefore, measurement of inanimate objects is a pretty trouble this thing. However, when if I was to measure a person performance or other things, and the person knows that they're being measured, then you raise a whole nother element. So when you measure things that are inanimate objects, measurement works perfectly well. But when you measure things that know they're being measured, there's a huge problem that comes up about that person's reactions to the measurement, and yeah, many, many different things. So

Coonoor Behal 12:50
I think ologists have confronted that over the decades as well, where it's like, going in, even to observe like a population, like your mere presence is changing that population. Right. And it's, it's entering in a factor that people have to respond to. So it is question just how unbiased can we be? And, you know, and and, you know, we fool ourselves. And we think numbers aren't biased, right? Because they've been created by us, you know, and so, yeah, there's always gonna be bias there. Yeah.

Andrew Stotz 13:24
So for those people that want to learn about this man, Dr. W. Edwards Deming, they could just type his name in the internet, I also wrote a book, which is on Amazon called transform your business with Dr. demings, 14 points. And that's where I tried to bring out what this man brought to me, which was that you can bring joy to work. I really want to get into one last thing on your bio. What the heck, how could you write a book and call it I quit? Tell us just a little bit about what your meaning is, in this book. Sure,

Coonoor Behal 13:56
I mentioned that I am I just begun revisions to the book. So it is like all I'm thinking about right now is I'll do my best to be brief. But the book is titled I quit the life affirming joy of giving up. And it's really an idea that I had knocking around in my head for many years because I had noticed in myself that after years of being a perfectionist, after years of being the kind of overly committed stick it out for the sake of sticking it out kind of person, you know, I started to have some really excellent quits in my life. And I and I realized those quits, that they were very, very positive and that they really got me to where I wanted to be much more swiftly and, and so this kind of process of not just reinvention, but just kind of making making decisions about and for your life, based on what you've learned about yourself, you know, what your trade offs are, what your values are. And so yeah, so I was born out of my own experiences. But also just from talking to people, and it's always loving hearing people's quitting stories. And I think you can really understand someone really quickly when you just ask why they quit something, whether it's a relationship or a job, or a city or whatever it might be, you can really learn a lot about that person, sometimes even more than asking them why they chose to do something, you know. And so the book is a collection of stories of everyday people, and things that they summon the courage to quit in their lives, and why they have no regrets about it. And yeah, so I hope the book is gonna get people to rethink and reframe quitting and view it through a new paradigm and realize that quitters aren't losers, and quitters are actually oftentimes pretty courageous and have a lot of self knowledge and self awareness to make the big decisions that make their lives better.

Andrew Stotz 15:55
I'm looking forward to reading that. And I think I'll put any, any links to that, that I can get from you into the show. And I encourage the listeners to look for it. I mean, I wrote a piece about why we stopped doing performance appraisals in one of my businesses, coffee works that I have in Thailand. And what we basically because the reason why it's important is that many people go into, they think about quitting, and they don't want to quit, because they don't know what they're going to do. Yeah, in replacement of that quitting of a relationship or have a job. And what I basically said in that article that I wrote about performance appraisals is that, after looking at them in a lot of detail, looking at the time spent on them, looking at how employees felt about them, the quality of them what they really brought to our customer, we just came to the conclusion that this is a waste of time. And the way that we did these performance appraisals and try to assign ABC to people and then rank them. It just goes against, you know, so many things about the way you know humans are. And we just found it. Nobody was really happy, except a few people that were figured out how to kind of rig the system. Bonus every time. And so, but people ask us what if we don't do performance appraisals, what are we going to do? And I said, that's just the wrong question. Yeah, what you're going to keep doing something that's wrong. You don't know what's right. You know, the objective winner stop doing what's wrong. And then actually, the space will open. Yeah,

Coonoor Behal 17:34
that is exactly what I learned from reading this book. Like, a lot of the people who shared their stories with me, happen to share with me their first big quit quitting stories, the first thing they ever did it. And time and time again, I kept hearing like, say, like it, one of the benefits was, it just opened up my life to so many other things that I actually wanted, you know, and so, yeah, so yeah, you're echoing exactly, you know, one of the many kind of takeaways and themes from from the book, for sure. And definitely this kind of idea that, you know, and I write about this, in my introduction, It's uncanny what you just said, I referenced it in my introduction that like, you know, we're so used to thinking of quitting as like, a negative, like, not just in like, the stigma, the negative stigma, but also like, it connotes the absence of something, that there's like, nothing in its place, you know, when when, when actually, you know, it's toward what you want, you know,

Andrew Stotz 18:30
everything else, you're doing this, there's a million things you could do.

18:34
Everything else is out. It's not failure, you know? Yeah.

Andrew Stotz 18:38
Fantastic. So for the listeners out there, I challenge you, right now, to think about what is something in your life, a person, place thing, a relationship, a job, this that, that you really know, in your heart is not right for you. Maybe it's time to take a lesson from Connor and think about, you know, maybe it's time. And if it's not time today, then I challenge you to read a book in April, and then you'll be inspired. So, alright, now it's time to show you speaking of time, it's time. Now it's time to share your worst investment ever. And since no one ever goes into their worst investment thinking it will be. Tell us a bit about the circumstances leading up to it, then tell us your story. Sure,

19:25
yeah.

19:26
So

Coonoor Behal 19:26
my circumstances were that I had just quit my job at Deloitte Consulting to start my own company to start my intach and you know, I remember this like immediately and I don't blame myself just going into like bootstrap mode. Like I remember even having like this piece of paper up in my bedroom wall, and like writing down all the things that I should like cut out that were personal expenditures, you know, actually, I one of the things that was on the chopping block was, I remember writing stop buying books, and like, go to the library. You know, and so I'm still a passionate library goer because I made that decision, you know, seven, eight years ago. So I'm in this bootstrapping mentality, you know, I'm starting a business of my own. I don't know what I'm doing. You know, I know the things that I want to be doing for clients, but I don't know how to go about doing it. Right. Um, well, one of the things I decided I should do is I should have a website, of course, like, why wouldn't you have a website?

Andrew Stotz 20:28
Why wouldn't you kind of like improv? Right? Know what we're doing? But yeah, do it.

Coonoor Behal 20:34
You say something magical happen? Yeah. Um,

20:38
so I was like, Okay, I'm

Coonoor Behal 20:39
gonna, I'm gonna have a website, you know, and but I was like, again, this bootstrapping mentality of like, I don't want to spend hardly anything on this website, you know, and I and I, really, my expectations for the website were very, very low. What I thought I was being smart. I, you know, I thought to myself, like, Oh, I missed like, a single shingle consultants, you know, like, my websites knocking, like, bring me business, people can't click and buy what I have to offer. And, you know, use like an online shopping cart, you know, and so, so basically was, like, I just need, like, I think at the time what web designers called, like a brochure website, I think it was really static, two, three pages, who I am, what my niche does, email done, you know, and so, so I did hire someone to like, you know, make that for me. And because I'm not a web designer, I have no skills. And but I think I paid like, barely $1,000, you know, and I was like, Okay, cool. I have this website up. Well, as, like, my business started to develop. And as I started wanting more for my business, and I started, like, you know, yeah, I'm a b2b business. And, you know, people aren't going to click and buy, but like, I started learning, like, Wow, my website could be doing a lot more work for me. Like, it could be a lead generator, you know, it could answer questions that people are wanting to know about, you know, these very niche odd things that I do in my practice. And, and so over the years, it was just like, Oh, my God, like, people often ask me like, Okay, what are like, what's the worst thing about running your own business? Hands down, it's been my website saga, hands down, it's been time after time after that first time, not finding a good person that I would work with a second time for my website, or for other things as well. And so one, it took me a really, really long time to find like, my forever web designer, who now I have and love her. But in those intervening years, before I found her, it was just like, web designer or web designer, and like, every single one was like, we need to rebuild your entire website. And I was like, No, you know, and it just became this, like unwieldy patchwork of just crap on the back end, and also probably on the front end, and it was, like, unusable by me. And it was just this like, monster, and it was always a pain, you know, to do anything with it. And so my regrets around that I wish I had been a little less bootstrapping at the beginning. There I say cheap, even. And I wish I just maybe had a bit more, I guess, sophistication around what a website could do for my business. And do you

Andrew Stotz 23:33
tell us about how your website is now compared to you know, the way you look at your website now? Or how you Oh,

Coonoor Behal 23:40
yeah, I mean, I go to I will first of all, I don't go to my website all that often because I hate seeing photos of myself. So I kind of don't go to it as often as I probably should. But it works, you know, like, I have, like automation setup I have, like, it's integrated with my newsletter and you know, with like, other forms, and it's, um, you can download my one pagers, you know, it's like a one stop shop, you know, where someone can go and and learn and contact me and I find business through that people contact me, you know, to work with me through the form on the website. And so it's working, you know, I think there's always, always room for improvement, but it's like the, the bones are now solid.

Andrew Stotz 24:26
From that, if you'd done that right at the beginning, how would it have changed your outcome?

Coonoor Behal 24:32
Oh, my God, I would have definitely saved money. I would have saved so much heartache and annoyance and time that I that I spent either trying to teach web designers how to be professional and serve clients and ultimately firing them and then launching the seek the search for a new one, you know, but uh, yeah, it would have saved me a lot of time, and a lot of heartache and annoyance for sure. Yes, I wish I just made that investment right at the beginning to have something that was going to be able to grow with me and grow with my business.

Andrew Stotz 25:14
So, um, there's a few things that I take away. I mean, one of the things is that I did the exact same thing.

25:21
Oh, my God, I'm so sorry.

Andrew Stotz 25:22
Yes, it's so painful. And

Coonoor Behal 25:26
first advice I give to any budding entrepreneur or like small business owner, I'm like, Don't skimp on your website.

Andrew Stotz 25:31
Like, yeah, so what I did was, and recently, I decided to really, really, you know, improve now I've been improving them over time. But, you know, the bringing all the pieces together, it's just hard. I mean, the first thing that about it all that's very fascinating to me is that if you want to hire a full time accountant, to work in your business, you know, you just put out an ad, you know, looking for an accountant and you hire him, you want to hire a full time salesperson, put out an ad, get a salesperson. But I've found that it's very hard. If I was to say, I want to get a, you know, I want to improve my website and make it a lead generator, a money generator, who do you hire, you know, okay, there's a design person, but there's also the copy that's on there, there's the whole, you know, it's just, it's a much more complex thing. And I just found that you can't hire someone. And nowadays, like, I have, you know, multiple websites, like seven or eight. And I could literally have someone sitting next to me working with me, but I can't find that person, everything is outsourced in that area. And that's one of the unique things that makes it hard for small business. So that's my first kind of takeaway that I've realized is I kind of got to do it myself, in partnership with some different people that can help in different areas. And now there are a small number of people that basically come along and say, I can take you from zero to, you know, big revenue, but those people are expensive. Yeah, and you say, you know, as any person starting a business, you, you know, you got to be careful about the money. So, that's kind of the first thing that I thought about. And the second thing is that, what I did when the crisis came when the COVID COVID madness came, I figured, you know, there's a lot of people out of work in Thailand, and there's a lot of young people that are looking for jobs, and they can't find them. So I decided that I would offer internships in my company. And so, and I'm working on my home office, basically, and I do have a pretty, you know, reasonably sized facility here. So I decided that I would offer internships in from that time from April until today, I probably had 16 different interns work with me. Some of them work for a month, something that worked for eight months, some of them I've hired. And the idea then is I used that, that period of time to rewrite the websites. And it's really hard, you know, it's hard for everybody to put together. But I recommend one book that really helped me, and it's called story brand by Donald Miller. And it basically is talking about, you know, creating a story. For your customer, when someone comes to your website, they want to see a story about a transformation. And so that that book helped me a lot to rewrite my website. So that's a second thing. I just think it's, it's a huge challenge for any startup. But those are some of my takeaways. Anything else you would add?

Coonoor Behal 28:21
Yeah, no, I would just a plus one to what you said earlier about, like, you know, when I mean, there's definitely a day many days, in fact, where I didn't know the difference between a web designer and a web developer, you know, like, let alone back end front end. You know, like, there's, I mean, I, I think one of the biggest surprises to me when I first started mind tach was, you know, like, I was like a humanities major. I studied journalism, you know, I've always been in kind of, like, the softer side of business, you know, and so I thought, marketing, I know what marketing is, you know, that that is probably a thing that I can do on my own that I don't need to need to outsource. But then I started my company and I just realized, wow, marketing is a giant umbrella. There is a lot under that and a lot of specialties and subspecialties, you know, and like, I remember like, like learning that like, okay, like not every web designer is actually knows SEO like, there are whole SEO experts out there, you know, and so it is this. It is like part of the growing pains of like running your own company is kind of like learning yourself, what that patchwork of people is that you're going to need and, you know, understanding what it is worth the investment to, like, you know, go for the One Stop Shop, you know, even if maybe they have some things that you don't need, you know, but yeah, so definitely, definitely, I can't commiserate with that.

Andrew Stotz 29:52
So the next question I want to set up a little bit before I ask it, and that is, let's think about our listeners out there. Who are you know, Maybe they lost their job in the COVID time. And they're trying to set up their own business. They are setting up their website, up into this point, they kind of thought about it the way you described, you thought about it the beginning. Think about that man or woman who's listening right now and try to answer this question in relation to them, based upon what you learn from this story, and what you continue to learn, what one action, one, would you recommend our listeners take to avoid suffering the same fate?

Coonoor Behal 30:32
My advice is contingent upon how long you want to do the thing that requires a website. And so if if you are committed, that it's going to be something you're going to do for three or more years, I say, invest in that website upfront, I think maybe part of my own lack of investment was maybe just my own insecurity around how successful my business would be, and therefore, how long I would do it. And so but I, I think I should have known that I was going whole hog and wasn't looking back. And so I think if that is that characterizes you as well, like you're, you're into it, I say, you know, don't don't skip on your website, really make it and let it let it help you.

Andrew Stotz 31:21
Great advice. And I think, you know, one of the things for the listeners out there is that you mentioned that just kind of touched me. And in fact, I just feel that a bit seriously Touched by an sense that insecurity, and how you feel about your business and yourself when you start. And therefore you may shy away from doing the website, because of that insecurity. And so I want to put out a challenge to all of this news out there. If you're going to be doing your own business, and you're going to be going out there. I challenge you put it out on the web in a great way. Put yourself out, take the risk, build it in, build your story, build the story of transformation of your customers, and it will reward you tremendously in the long run. So that's my challenge to the listeners. What do you think good challenge

Coonoor Behal 32:17
is a great one. It's a great one. It's a, you know, definitely taking the risk, but also, how big of a risk is it? You know, that's like to tie back to my book? You know, it's a risk if you do and it's a risk if you don't write Why is one inherently more risky than the other?

Andrew Stotz 32:36
Yep. Fantastic. All right. Last question, what's your number one goal for the next 12 months? Okay, the

Coonoor Behal 32:43
next 12 months? Well, definitely, I've got book brain going on. So my number one goal is to of course, launch the book in April. And that April is when it will be published. And you know, I'm already you know, starting my like virtual, pre publish a book tour, as my number one goal for next year is to sell a lot of books and also get to talk about my book, you know, to do provide keynotes and do author talks and book talks, you know, at organizations and at conferences. So that's my thing I'm most looking forward to in 2021.

Andrew Stotz 33:18
Fantastic. Well, listeners, there you have it, another story of law to keep you winning. Remember to go to my worst investment ever.com slash deals to claim your discount on my course how to start building your wealth investing in the stock market. As we conclude, Connor, I want to thank you again, for coming on the show. And on behalf of a Stotz Academy, I hereby award you alumni status for turning your worst investment ever into your best teaching moment. Do you have any parting words for the audience? Gosh, just

Coonoor Behal 33:53
just try it out and experiment. most things in life are not as risky as you think they are.

Andrew Stotz 34:00
Try it out and experiment. Go for it. Well, that's a wrap on another great story to help us create grow and most importantly, protect our well fellow risk takers. This is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz saying. I'll see you on the upside.

 

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About the show & host, Andrew Stotz

Welcome to My Worst Investment Ever podcast hosted by Your Worst Podcast Host, Andrew Stotz, where you will hear stories of loss to keep you winning. In our community, we know that to win in investing you must take the risk, but to win big, you’ve got to reduce it.

Your Worst Podcast Host, Andrew Stotz, Ph.D., CFA, is also the CEO of A. Stotz Investment Research and A. Stotz Academy, which helps people create, grow, measure, and protect their wealth.

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