1067 – Use these skills to get better: Tom talks Basic Tech Skills For Entrepreneurs

SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

Tom Antion argues that entrepreneurs hurt their income by over-delegating simple technical tasks that are easy to learn and inexpensive (or free) to do themselves. He credits much of his financial success to mastering basic tech skills instead of paying others, avoiding delays, and staying in control of his business.
He emphasizes that these are not advanced or professional-level skills, but practical abilities entrepreneurs use daily that save time, money, and frustration.
The 9 Basic Tech Skills Every Entrepreneur Should Have
1. Create simple graphics
Use free or low-cost tools and AI to quickly make and edit graphics instead of waiting weeks for designers.
2. Organize files and folders
Proper file naming and folder structure prevents wasted time searching during calls or work sessions.
3. Search effectively on your computer
Learn wildcards, quotation marks, and search tools to quickly find files and text.
4. Use keyboard shortcuts (Mac or PC)
Master common shortcuts to dramatically speed up work and reduce repetitive clicking.
5. Handle and automate email
Use rules, folders, and alerts to manage volume efficiently and surface money-making messages.
6. Basic web design
With tools like WordPress and templates, entrepreneurs can build professional sites cheaply and quickly without relying on web designers.
7. Use dual monitors
A second monitor significantly increases productivity by eliminating constant window switching.
8. Basic audio editing
Simple audio editing can be learned quickly and saves tens of thousands of dollars over time.
9. Simple video editing
Learn basic trimming and cleanup so you’re not dependent on video editors for everyday content.
Core Message
Learning these foundational tech skills allows entrepreneurs to:
• Move faster
• Spend less money
• Avoid unnecessary delays
• Focus on revenue-generating activities
Antion concludes that mastering these basics has saved him millions of dollars and enabled him to build more products, serve customers better, and grow faster—and he strongly encourages entrepreneurs to do the same.

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Episode 1067 – Basic Tech Skills For Entrepreneurs
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:25] It's Tom here with episode 1067 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today is nine basic tech skills every entrepreneur should have. This is episode 1067. Now, hope you didn't miss episodes 1064, 1065 and 1066. That was, I guess, what I called Elgato Week. These are stream decks, teleprompters and key lights all made by the same company. So they work together beautifully. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, then the episode number 1064, 1065, 1066. And today is 1067. Also, pick up a copy of our automation e-book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Make sure you get version 3.0. That's the latest. And check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com and my school at IMTCVA.org, certified to operate by SCHEV.

[00:01:28] Okay we're going to go to nine Tech skills basic tech skills that every entrepreneur should have. And here's the thing folks. I made my fortune by not blowing a lot of money on things that I could have easily done myself. What I get sick of is I see these people on stage when I'm speaking, telling you to delegate everything. Delegate. You know, only do things that you're good at. And I'm thinking to myself, hey, if what you're good at is making you broke, maybe you should rethink that a little bit. What do you think? All right, so a lot of these, if you just took the time to learn these basic skills, I'm not talking anything super fancy or becoming a super programmer or anything like that.

[00:02:16] I'm just talking basic skills that entrepreneurs need all the time. You would make way more money, use way less of your time that you could do other things you like, or you could do more business where you're actually making money, rather than fighting with your computer and waiting for people because you had to hire things out that were so simple, and then you get a bill for a fortune when it should have been free if you'd done it yourself, you know? So it's just crazy for you lazy pieces of crap out there that, you know, think that they're too good to do these things. Well, I still sit here today as a legitimate multimillionaire and do them all right? Because it's better for my business, you know. I don't know where I'd be if I had paid. I figured out the other day, just this podcast alone, I would have had $100,000 in simple audio editing, which you could take anybody with an IQ, half their shoe size and teach them in about 15 minutes how to do basic audio editing. All right. So so I'm not going to pay 100 bucks an episode or more for this kind of stuff. All right. So anyway, let's get into it. And these aren't in any particular order, but I just put numbers because I wanted to see how many I had.

[00:03:40] All right. One is be able to create simple graphics. And this is so much easier now with AI. But but you should go get an account. I don't even think you have to sign up for an account. Tell the truth that Ipec Ipeca Wycombe and you can create graphics there and you can edit graphics. You can take a picture that you have and put text on it easily and make it different sizes and different formats. And there's just all kinds of things you can do totally for free now for creating graphics. Also in this number one is you can go to ChatGPT or any of the major AI things and just tell them what you want and boom. I mean, I had this one guy, this one student of mine, he needed a graphic and I kept asking him, did you get the graphic I told you to get? Did you get? Well, my other guy, my guy's on vacation, my artist is on vacation. And after 3 or 4 weeks of this, I'm saying this is ridiculous. And I said, I'll make it for you right now. I went to ChatGPT, told it what I wanted, it spit out a graphic which he's now using and that took, I don't know, three minutes rather than 3 to 4 weeks and never did get his graphic guy to do it right, and he would have had to pay the guy.

[00:05:04] You can't let 3 or 4 weeks go by. That's called a tail wagging the dog when you have. Everybody else has to do something before you can go make money. That's ridiculous. And that does bring me to the fact that you should go back and listen to episodes 1055 to 1060, which gives you some of the top graphic AI programs and how to access them cheap. And we're talking pennies for some of them and for fancy video graphics with like, I got one with me flying through like Gotham City to save people from spending money at a four year college. And I'm like, Superman, right? And it was I don't think it cost me $2 to create it in a few minutes. Go listen to episodes 1055 to 1060. All of them are 5 to 10 minute episodes, but it'll just change your whole life if you bothered to do what I'm teaching you there. All right, so that's number one. All right. Number two. Oh, I can't tell you how many times I've. I've sat here and people pay me a lot of money to talk to me. And I'm sitting here 20 minutes twiddling my thumbs or looking at my phone because they can't find what they want to show me. All right. I mean, not only should they have had it ready before we got on the zoom call, but but you need to take the time to learn to organize your computer, learn how to use folders and files so you can find stuff when you need it.

[00:06:44] Name them properly, you know. So learn to organize your computer. You could probably take a course on this for either Mac or PC and learn how to do this because you're just wasting your time, your psychic energy, which you could be using to create things that people want and make money and sell stuff, say, and a spin off of that. Number three, basic tech skills is learn how to search your computer. And you can go watch videos for both Mac or PC by using what we call wild cards. This the the best known one is the asterisk. And I'm not going to bother teaching on this thing. I'm just telling you skills you need to go get. But I probably have episodes on some of them. But wild cards allow you to search for stuff on your computer, and also when you're looking for something specific, you put quotation marks around it because I'll give you I will give you an example here. Let's say you're searching for something on Google. public speaking. There you go. That's what, uh, one of the things I'm known for. So if you just search for public speaking, you're going to bring up billions of pages that have the word public on them and have the word speaking on them, but not together.

[00:08:10] So you could bring up a thing where there's a public meeting today, and speaking is going to be so and so. So that's not what you were looking for. If you were looking for public speaking things, so you put quotation marks around it and it kicks and it only brings up pages that have public speaking together. See that's just one little thing. And then also learn how to use control-f. That's a finder on many different programs and everything. So, so instead of, you know, scrolling through a document to look for something, you hit Control-f put it in and it goes right there. Right. So you got to learn these things because you're wasting time and effort if you don't. And you're hurting yourself financially. All right. And the spin off of that I just told you control F but keyboard shortcuts for both Mac and PC. I'm learning them now for Mac because I've been doing so much on a mac now because of the podcast. But for PC, I knew all kinds of shortcuts, and I have a method that I want you to use to learn them. I'd say go ahead and Google Mac shortcuts or PC shortcuts. I say PC shortcuts and look at them and say, oh man, I do that all the time and I've got to click 3 or 4 times to get what I want done.

[00:09:37] So you write down that particular shortcut like control E or something. You know, control D takes you to your desktop. And my protege Ilya taught me that back in the early 90s or the late 90s. No, wait. Yeah. Late 90s. He would be watching me work, and and I want to get to my desktop, and I'd have to go. Each window I had open, minimize it like ten different and then get to the desktop. He almost busted a gut as a young man and said, what's wrong with you? Just hit Ctrl d, boom, the desktop appears and you hit it again. The desktop, all the other stuff comes back. All right. I mean, I've been using that for how many years now? The 20, 27 years. Yeah, 28, 29 years now. They saved me. Carpal tunnel syndrome, all the shortcuts he taught me. So the method that I teach people is to pick three of them and force yourself to use them. Those three shortcuts, even if you didn't need them, force yourself to use them for three days by the end of three days, using them all day long on your computer, you're going to own them and then do it again for three more. Oh, wait a minute. Uh Oh, yeah. I'm sorry. Not three days. I think it was ten days. I teach people, and then you're going to have three times.

[00:11:09] Three is ten shortcuts by the end of the month. If you did ten days or if you did three days, you're going to have 30 shortcuts at the end of the month, and you're going to be lightning fast on your computer, lightning fast. You're going to save so much time, so much frustration. So learn keyboard shortcuts for either Mac or PC. Okay, next thing that basic tech skill is handling email. I get so sick of my students crying to me about all the emails that comes in, and I tell them, look, if they had money in them, you wouldn't be crying so much, would you? You know? But you got to go through the spam and the crap to get to the ones that had money in them because of the promotions that I taught you to do. All right. So learn how to handle email. You can most email programs, you can automate stuff for certain things automatically come in and go in certain folders, and you can set rules so that a certain thing comes in and it lights up red and goes, Ka ching! All right. Which is what I'm kind of known for. That was my nickname, the King of Ka ching. Okay, so learn how to handle your email. So you're not crying about it all the time. And you're again a lot of the automated so you're not wasting time on it. So learn how to handle email.

[00:12:37] All right. Number six is basic web design. And I'm not asking you to become a web designer and put your shingle out and do really intricate stuff. But with the programs available today, I mean, I've been doing this since 1997 when Microsoft Front Page came out making my own websites. I have to have saved at least $1 million on web design at least over all these years, and had all these websites making money for me. But I'm not waiting on web designers who are a lot of shysters and idiots, and I'm not delayed and I'm not spending any money. If I get an idea, I can have a website up that fast for it and have it out there selling, say, and nowadays it's basically templated. So you put a WordPress site up and you put a theme on it and you, you know, with basic training you could be making, you know, saving your, you know, having world class websites for that are worth 5000 bucks on the open market to get somebody to make it for you for 150 bucks. All right. So if you're willing to blow that $4,850. Good. Good for you. I'm not. I'd rather have it in my pocket. So so basic web design. Now this one is is I don't know, I was just thinking about it because I was just beating my head against the wall with this one student of mine up in New York, and she's, um, we're trying to do a zoom call, and I say, don't click there, don't click there.

[00:14:17] And she said, I'm not. I'm just trying to move this window or this zoom window around. And I'm like, oh my God, I'm going to shoot myself. I said, I'm not working with you anymore until you get set up. Dual monitors. I can't frustrate myself to no end when you are taken three times and five times as much to do it, because every time you want to do something, you got to move the zoom window. Or you know my picture, even if it's small or a toolbar or something. I said, you got to get that's I don't care if it's a pawnshop, $15 monitor. You got to hook up two monitors and then we'll work together. And if you have trouble hooking them up, get in touch with my guy Larry, and he'll help you. All right, so dual monitors. All right. Now, numbers. Uh, let's see. Number eight is basic audio editing. It is so easy to do audio. I think I mentioned earlier how it would have cost me over $100,000 to have all the audio editing done on these podcasts I've done. And I don't want. I'd rather have that 100,000 bucks in my pocket. Right? So so basic audio editing is easy. You may have heard me talk about the guy that taught me back in the year oh, 2000, and it's Mike Stewart, the internet audio guy.

[00:15:41] He's an old, old boy from Georgia, and he's got this drawl. And I keep repeating this because it's so funny. He says, well, if you want to be an audio editor, the first thing you got to do is record something. And then he said. He said, then you cut out what's bad and what's left is good. That's all you got to do. I could teach you the basics of it in 15 minutes to save all that money. If you want to do a podcast that makes you a fortune and and you want to do all kinds of audio stuff. It's way easier than video. All right, so audio editing. And the last one is simple video editing. I'm not talking about being, uh, Steven Spielberg, all right? I'm talking about being able to trim the beginning and end. So you're not walking up to push the button on the camera and all that stupid looking stuff and just basic stuff. So you're not waiting for a video editor to get videos out, because a lot of the stuff you do does just does not take fancy stuff, especially if you're doing in TikTok and this and that. So a simple video editing. So those are nine skills I'll repeat them here. Be able to create graphics. Be able to organize files and folders on your computer.

[00:17:13] Be able to search your computer with wildcards and specifics like quotation marks and things and asterisks and keyboard shortcuts for your either Mac or PC. So you can do stuff that would take 3 or 4 clicks in one quick keyboard shortcut. Be able to handle your email easier and automate that so that things go into folders automatically, or light up red to show you important stuff or whatever you want. Basic web design so you're not waiting for web designers and spending a fortune on things that should cost almost nothing. Dual monitors will change your freaking life. I'm telling you. So you're not, uh. You have. If you only have one screen, you're always clicking and moving stuff around and wasting your whole day doing it. Dual monitors and audio. Basic audio editing. Very simple. And then simple video editing. If you get those skills, I'm telling you, I'm guaranteeing you. I've been in business since 1977, and these things have saved me millions and millions of dollars and allowed me to make millions and millions and millions because I'm not blowing money and wasting time on simple things that if you get a little bit of skill in these areas, you can go way faster, do way more for your customers, create more products and services rather than fighting with your computer. And that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Catch you on the next episode. See you later.