729 – Ensure you know your ingredients: Tom talks Make Your Own Dog Food

Episode 729 – Make Your Own Dog Food
[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.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 729 of Screw the Commute podcast. Wait till you hear what we're talking about today. What you can learn by making your own dog food. And I'm not kidding. So hang in there and we'll see what business use we could make of that. Hope you didn't miss Episode 728. That was Sally Gimon. She's certified to sell a very special trust that saves you taxes. I never heard of this one before, so it's worthwhile taking a listen to make sure you follow me on TikTok at tiktok.com/@digitalmultimillionaire and pick up a copy of our automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And hey, guess what? With our podcast app, pretty soon we're going to have an Android version. But right now all you iPhone users can grab it at screwthecommute.com/app and put us on your cell phone and tablet and take us with you on the road.

[00:01:21] All right, let's get to the main event. So what can you learn from making dog food? All right. Well, my neighbor has a big old golden retriever, and every couple months he makes the dog's food and then freezes it. And I told him, hey, I'd like to come over and help the next time he does it. So he called me and I went over yesterday and helped him mix everything up. And everything that went into the food was very high quality. And I actually read a book one time about the dog food industry and how it's virtually all marketing and little to no worry about quality ingredients that are good for your dog.

[00:02:00] So he had a cover on his pool table and two giant roaster machines were set out and a bunch of ground turkey and then a massive list of ingredients. I can't remember them all but red lentils and blueberries and kale and cottage cheese and pumpkin and a couple other things I can't remember. He's going to send me the recipe, so I'll have it. Maybe I'll put it up on on the show notes for this when I get it. So anyway, we mixed them all up and set the roasters on 350 degrees to let the entire thing cook for a couple hours. And he told me the whole batch would last for several months. And now, before I tell you what you can learn from this, let me let me tell you what happened to me Saturday night. I got an urgent message from a doctor that uses my shopping cart, and he pretty much reminded me of, like, remember Chicken Little with the old? The sky is falling. The sky is falling. Well, he said that the cart's not working, which I've heard lots of times. And I hardly. I never really believe it when I hear it because it's usually user error. So I got back with him and I tested out the cart, which was working fine, and I determined there was some change in his merchant account that broke the connection with the cart. I made a test purchase through PayPal and that part of it was working fine, but directly to his merchant account was not working.

[00:03:30] All right, so here's the lesson. He didn't know who his merchant account was with. And see, the cart is compatible. Compatible with over 70 different gateways. That's the thing that connects the cart to the merchant account. So I said, Do you get notice each month of your merchant account fees? And that's going to tell me who your merchant account provider is so we could get with them and get this fixed. He said he didn't get a monthly notice. He probably did, but just didn't know it. I asked him when was the last order that went through just fine. He didn't know. Right. I got him to share screens and determined. It was several weeks ago, and when we went into his PayPal account, the last order used PayPal, which we know was working. So that didn't help on the merchant account deal. So there was nothing more that I could do for him because he had a big seminar replay actually playing today, right? So he couldn't even tell people on the webinar about the problem and just to use PayPal because it was a recording. I told him to put a notice on the landing page where people would go to order. All right. Now, there's a couple of morals to this story. You don't wait until the last minute on a weekend to test your e-commerce system. And number two, you should know what companies you're dealing with and how to contact them with your merchant number and ID. Okay, back to the dog food.

[00:04:59] All right. Now, my friend knows exactly what healthy stuff his dog is getting to eat. In other words, he knows all the elements of his dog feeding system. Now, that doesn't mean he knows the exact nutritional breakdown of red lentils mixed with Turkey and all the other stuff, or how the vet that gave him the recipe formulated all the percentages exactly for his dog. Didn't have to know that. Just had to know all the parts. So my doctor friend did not know anything he needed to know to take care of his e-commerce site. He didn't know what company handles his merchant account and I can only suspect he doesn't know his registrar for his domain name. And who is hosting company is and how to contact him. And these are just basic things every website owner should know. So whether you ever decide to make dog food or not, I want you to to right now find out all the companies you deal with that have something to do with running your business and get their contact info and put them in your phone, put them in your password manager, back them up to the cloud and you won't be calling me on a Saturday night to save your butt. How about that? All right. So. So if you want help with this and 100,000 other things you need to know to run a great e-commerce and digital marketing business, check out my mentor program at great Internet marketing training.com. All right. We'll catch you all in the next episode. See you later.