Rieva Lesonsky is CEO and President of GrowBiz Media, a media company that helps entrepreneurs start and grow their businesses. Rieva shares a bit of her story as a writer, covering entrepreneurship and small business. She also discusses how small businesses should think about cloud adoption to win the battle for customers in a competitive marketplace. Plus Rieva shares where you can find help to digitize your business and give consumers the confidence to safely walk in your doors.
When I first started writing for Entrepreneur magazine back in 1979, I was conducting research related to small business and at that time the term entrepreneur was not well known or understood. By the late 1980s, the U.S. economy was recovering from the double-dip recession of the early ’80s. Technology was starting to boom but unemployment was still high which was the catalyst behind the shift towards entrepreneurship becoming mainstream.
One of the biggest mistakes I see small business owners make is they create a business plan, put it in a drawer, and never look at it again. Most businesses fail due to a lack of cash flow and I believe that is most often driven by a failure to plan. We often write about how the business plan should be a living and breathing document. If you plan to invest a certain amount on marketing, with the hope that sales will increase, did that happen and what should you do next. You go back to your business plan and update it based on the results, that way you can choose the best path forward.
As we come out of COVID, the reports we’re seeing say business formations are booming. This is great because small business ownership can be liberating and help people break through the glass ceilings that exist for many minorities. When it comes to small businesses, the only thing that matters is the product or service you offer, the price you are charging, and if there is demand for what you are offering.
I was speaking to a group of small business owners and I asked if anyone was using cloud tools in their business today. No one raised their hand, but then I asked how many people use Gmail for their business and hands went up everywhere. So I made the point that Gmail is simply email that is hosted in the cloud. The cloud allows businesses to ramp up quickly with lower costs than you would if you had to have servers on-premise.
One of the problems COVID highlighted was consumers were more forward-thinking than most small businesses. Consumers have adopted technology far more than most local businesses. If you have a main street business or storefront your number one job is to ensure consumers feel comfortable walking in your doors. Offering contactless payment options or digitalizing other parts of your customer experience are critical to helping consumers feel more comfortable. What you have to realize is other businesses do what you do and those that digitalize will take your customers if you don’t change.
When it comes to marketing your business, you need to have some knowledge about what is out there and how it will benefit your business but often the best choice is to outsource or hire someone to market your business. The Thryv software not only offers a lot of great features to help you digitalize and market your business but they provide free support to customers to help them use the tools and grow their business. Often the difference between success and failure for a small business today is if they adopt software.
Resources Shared:
Small Business Development Centers
Rieva Lesonsky: Except digitization, because if you don't, you're going to get left behind. Because what you have to realize is there's another business who does what you do, who is going to be digitized, who is accepting that, and people are going to go there because it's easier. We have to cater to the consumers because that's what big businesses do. We're lucky that the technology today has enabled us to do that and we have to take advantage of it.
Speaker 2: The following is brought to you by Thryv, the end-to-end client experience platform that helps you get the job, manage the job, and get credit.
Gordon Henry: Hey, everybody, this is Gordon Henry at Winning on Main Street, the podcast bringing you actionable insights for small business owners and entrepreneurs. This week, you get to meet Rieva Lesonsky, who runs GrowBiz Media. Rieva has been working in the small business space for like three decades as a content creator, creates content for small business websites and major marketers such as Pitney Bowes, American Express, Microsoft, the many other large companies that want to connect with entrepreneurs.
She also owns the small business blog smallbizdaily.com and she wrote a book Start Your Own Business on how to launch your own business and get into business for yourself. Rieva works with Maria Valdez's Haubrich, who she met at Entrepreneur Magazine over 30 years ago. Welcome, Rieva.
Rieva Lesonsky: Thanks, Gordon, it's great to be with you.
Gordon Henry: I'm really looking forward to just hearing your story because you've been doing this for a while and have really seen, I think, probably a lot of changes that a lot of us are just trying to understand. So, maybe just let's start with that. You've been writing and blogging about small business for three decades. What's changed over the years?
Rieva Lesonsky: So, the first story is when I first got to Entrepreneur Magazine in the very end of '78, so let's say 1979, you would call people because I was a researcher. I started out to research articles and write a few and you'd say, "This is Rieva Lesonsky from Entrepreneur Magazine." The only words understood in that sentence were from and magazine, right? My game is hard and nobody knew what an entrepreneur was, just nobody back then. Then, as I like to say, sometime around the mid 80s I was home sick. I had a strep throat, so I was sick for like four days and I was watching General Hospital.
If anybody knows the story of that, there's a rich family and a doctor, and his kids were doctors. The doctor is standing around at the nurses station and he's flirting with one of the doctors and he says, "Yeah, my dad, he's a real entrepreneur." I was like, "Whoa, soap opera, medium of the masses." It sounds silly but I knew that there was a shift coming and that's what started it. What really kept it was technology in the 1990s and the recession at the end of the 80s, which resulted in a lot of women and minorities who were all told, "Go get your MBAs and then you'll be equal." In the 70s and 80s.
They did, but they found out last hired, first fired. So, nobody had a job and they were like, "Okay, what am I going to do? I'm going to start a business. It's temporary till the economy gets better." Then, they found out they loved it. So, this whole entrepreneurial revolution started in the 90s and the advent of technology and people understanding what small business was and aspiring to be small business just literally changed the whole industry. I don't want to say overnight, but it seemed at that time like it was overnight.
Gordon Henry: Yeah. No, those are great points. I agree that something changed in that period and the tech entrepreneurs and, obviously, the money that was made once the internet boom and you go back to Marc Andreessen and Netscape and the glorification, and then Facebook and Zuckerberg, and people like that. All were young Silicon Valley, but the idea of owning a small business, of course, it's been around for a long time. The folks we try to talk to on this show are everyday local businesses, not necessarily tech ones.
Yet, I want to ask you, there's been this small business boom, and this glorification of entrepreneurs and yet we still hear that half of all small businesses go out of business in the first five years. That the statistics aren't so great. So, why is that?
Rieva Lesonsky: So, first of all, in context the tech revolution changed main street. It changed those businesses. I'm a retail brand. I grew up, I like to say I spent the first three years of my life in the back of a liquor store, where my grandfather owned and then my dad owned his own men's clothing store. So, I understand that whole world. The reason that businesses, still today, that number has been pretty consistent over the decades, is because people don't plan. They don't plan properly. So, they don't really know, "How much money am I going to need? Is this seasonal?"
Some businesses have seasonal spurts. Most businesses do. Like I just said, my dad had a men's clothing store. Well, you have that spurt in December, with Christmas and the holidays. Then, you had a spurt in June with Father's Day, but if you don't know that going into your business, you're spending money every month that you may not have in August because sales are down, sales are slow. Here's one of the biggest mistakes I think small business owners make, they create a business plan because they're told they have to.
Then, they take it and they put it in a drawer and that's it. They don't check it. They don't say, "Oh, was I right? Was I wrong? Did this mean anything?" So, they didn't plan and they run out of money. So, it's really it's a money issue, cashflow, but I think that's caused by lack of planning.
Gordon Henry: So, do you help them with that? Is that one of the things you do, is you help people with planning or you write about it?
Rieva Lesonsky: We write about it. For some reason people look at my LinkedIn profile and think I'm a coach or something and I'm not. I'm happy to answer questions, but we write about it. We talk about how business plans are living and breathing documents and you should always check. If you think you're going to spend this much on marketing and sales are going to be this much, and if sales are this much, is it because you spent this much on marketing? One thing leads to the other. Everything in small businesses interconnected.
So, we talk about those things. Talk about how it's about cashflow. You'd be, or maybe you wouldn't be shocked how many people think it's about what your sales are and not what your profits are. Sales mean nothing. It's what comes after it, the profits that determine whether you're going to be a business or not, stay in business.
Gordon Henry: Yeah, absolutely. So, we're coming out of COVID it seems, slowly but surely with these vaccinations. Nobody can predict exactly how quick the recovery will be, but it's starting to happen and we're happy about that. A lot of small businesses, or I should say a lot of entrepreneurs, are starting small businesses. We've heard that business registrations are at an all-time high in end of 2020 or early 2021 coming out of COVID. Is that a good thing?
Rieva Lesonsky: I always think it's a good thing. As long as you do your homework, right? I think that small business ownership is liberating, it's equalizing. The world of regular business still is predominantly not that open for women and minorities. There's still glass ceilings in a lot of places. So, when you get to a small business I always like to say the only thing that matters is what you're offering, how much you're charging for it, and if that's a product or a service that people want at a price they want to pay.
That's all people care about. So, you can get in there and rise to whatever level you want. You get to control it. I used to joke with my dad once I started working and understood the world of entrepreneurship. That if only, I compared him to Leslie Wexner, the guy who took over his dad's clothing store in Ohio and built the Limited, I said to my father, "Why couldn't that have been you? I would have been an heiress and I wouldn't have to work in anything." But he just wanted to grow his store. He just wanted to make enough money in his store to buy a house, send us all to college, do those kinds of things.
So, it varies with your own personal goals and objectives. I think that entrepreneurs, small business owners, shouldn't let anybody else define success for them. I think that is a huge problem. It's like you mentioned before, people look at Mark Zuckerberg and go, "Oh." Well, not everybody wants to be Mark Zuckerberg. Not everybody wants to build a company that big. So, you should be able to figure out for yourself what you want and then construct your objectives and your goals and your business plan around that.
Let that take you through where you want to be, and understand that you can change your mind at any time. You can decide, "No, I do want to be Mark Zuckerberg. I do want to build a chain of stores." Or, maybe you wanted to build a chain of stores and you go, "No, I'm fine. I'm just going to stick with one or two that I have."
Gordon Henry: Moving over to the technology piece of the discussion a little bit more, you've written about the coming or the advent of cloud technology, which is something we here at Thryv are super interested because our product Thryv is a software solution in the cloud for small businesses. Of course, we're big advocates of small businesses adopting the cloud. In fact, we think it's critical because you need it to be competitive with big businesses because consumers expect to be able to access everything on their phone.
They don't expect to certainly have to install complicated software and they expect instant communication. So, about moving into the cloud, why don't you just briefly say, what does it mean to a small business to move into cloud and why is it important?
Rieva Lesonsky: It means freedom. It's liberating. One of the things at the beginning when cloud technology first came out, I was in a room with probably 600 people that the Los Angeles Small Business Developments that had put together. We were talking about cloud technology and a lot of people were scared of it. I said, "How many people here use anything in the cloud?" Nobody raised their hand. I said, "How many people here use Gmail?" Everybody's hand goes up. I said, "It's in the cloud, people. Gmail is email in the cloud."
So, I think it's a matter of understanding the cloud can take a business owner anywhere. You can do what you do anywhere you want to do it. At the beginning, at the tech revolution, if you had an office and you needed your own server, you needed space, a big enough office to house all the equipment. You needed special heating and cooling system to keep it cold. Once you got to the cloud, you didn't need any of that. You got to get smaller space. You got to work at home. That's a lot of money you didn't need to spend. So, being in the cloud will save you money. It will save you time.
The cloud can take the place ... I'm not trying to advocate don't hire people, but the reason it's a lot easier to stay in business at the beginning today is because you don't need to hire people. You just need to buy the software and use it.
Gordon Henry: Right, automate.
Rieva Lesonsky: Who needs a bookkeeper? A lot of infrastructure is in the cloud. You don't need to hire it.
Gordon Henry: Right, you can automate, you can modernize, automate and don't need as many hands. One topic you focused on is contactless payments. We've certainly seen with COVID the contactless payments became an absolute necessity because nobody really wants to get near you.
Rieva Lesonsky: Exactly.
Gordon Henry: So, why is contactless payment such an important item for SMBs to adopt?
Rieva Lesonsky: Because of what you just said, because I think one of the problems that COVID pointed out is that consumers were a little bit more forward than a lot of main street businesses. Consumers had adapted technologies that main street business was still catching up on or thinking, "I don't really need that. Why would I need to do that thing?" Consumers don't want to hand you a credit card because they don't want you to hand it back to them. They're uncomfortable. Even though the pandemic is winding down, as people get vaccinated, there are still habits that are formed.
There are still questions in people's minds. Consumers aren't quite there yet. So, you want to keep in place things like contactless payments. So, again, they're not worried. Number one, if you have a business on main street, if you have a store, or a salon, or a restaurant, your number one job is to make sure consumers are comfortable walking in your doors. That's your number one job right now, because it doesn't matter what you're selling and what your prices are if you can't get them across the threshold. So, it's all about comfort and contactless payments is part of that comfort level.
Gordon Henry: Right. Well, one of the things we always talk about at Thryv is just be easy to do business with. Don't make it hard.
Rieva Lesonsky: Exactly.
Gordon Henry: One of the things that makes doing business hard, I think, for a consumer and often it's the consumer doing business with a small business is what I call friction. It's that when things become difficult. As an example in the payment space, if someone sends me a bill attached in a text attachment and all I do is open it up and click and I can pay them through Venmo, which is instantaneous and takes me five seconds. How does that compare to me receiving a bill in the mail? Having to take that bill out of the mail, print out a new ... Well, first of all, sign a check, probably get a piece of paper to wrap it in so it's not sitting by itself in an envelope.
Get an envelope, get a stamp, and then find a mailbox. Who needs all of that? At first, the cashflow is actually better for the business person. It's those kinds of little elements or friction and you multiply them by all of the ... I call many small businesses, they don't call you back. Sometimes they don't even have a voicemail that picks up. All those kinds of things make you say, "I'll take my business elsewhere." Sometimes elsewhere is a bigger business that's just easier to do business.
Rieva Lesonsky: Right, and with contactless payments or almost with anything in the cloud, you get reports that come along with it. So, it's not like you're doing this and you have to do your own report at the end of the week or the end of the day. You get back because you're dealing with computers in the cloud. You get back reports that you don't have to, again, saving you time, saving you money. You can look and say, "Oh, it's my accounts payable this month. This is my receivable." At a glance, on your computer, on the beach. You want to go to the beach, go to the beach, take your phone and you can check it as you sit there.
Gordon Henry: So, Rieva, you make a lot of really interesting points about this. I think it comes down to change. Are people or business owners willing and open to adapting to change? Many of us aren't, or it's hard for us. It's hard for anybody to change. Whether that's eating differently to lose a few pounds, whether it's going to the gym, whether it's waking up earlier or whether it's changing your business habits as you're describing. So, what if you are a business owner and you've been in business for awhile and you hear everything you're saying and you're like, "I get it, but I've just been doing it this way a long time.
I'm just not ready to change. I'm not comfortable. I don't know how. I'm not technological, maybe I don't have a 25-year old kid who could do it for me. So, I'm just not going to." What do you say to that person?
Rieva Lesonsky: You're not going to be in business very long. You're just not. I was doing a report last night for one of my clients and they're in the construction home remodeling space. I was writing something from a conversation they'd had on a podcast they had. One of the biggest home builders remodelers said to people, "Accept digitization because if you don't you're going to get left behind." I think that that's because what you have to realize is there's another business who does what you do, who is going to be digitized, who is accepting that.
People are going to go there for exactly what you said, Gordon, because it's easier. The one thing, again, coming out of the pandemic is consumers, they have discovered the joy of curbside pickup. You don't have to get out of your car. You can get what you want. So, one, as a consumer, it helps you budget a little more. It's not like, "Oh, I want that, or that, or that." But two, maybe you picked up your kids from school, maybe you're on your way home from work, you don't have time. Business owners have to do ... we have to cater to the consumers because that's what big businesses do.
We're lucky that the technology today has enabled us to do that and we have to take advantage of it. If you're scared, if you think, "I don't know how to do this." There's so much help out there. Call your local SCORE office, go to score.org or go to your local small business development center. There's 900 SBDCs, over 900 SBDCs across the country. There's about 400 SCORE offices. They are partially subsidized by the SBA, by the government. You can get a mentor, you can get counseling, and you can get it all for free. You don't know how to digitize? Go call SCORE and they'll connect you with someone who does and who will show you.
Gordon Henry: Yeah, great points. So, I saw a chart actually in something you wrote or was on your SmallBizDaily site and I was sort of astonished. It showed only 7% of US full-time businesses have over a million in sales, 7% and 13% have over 500 K. So, that's another 6% and that's only 27%. So, I guess that's another 14% gets you over 200 K. So, 27% of businesses have over 200,000 in revenue, which means three out of four businesses in the country don't even have 200,000 in revenue. They're not really businesses. They're like hobbies or gigs. I was just astonished by that. What does it mean? Is it just most people just have hobbies that make them a few bucks?
Rieva Lesonsky: I think that they don't think they have hobbies, but I think that part of that is when you compare, when you break it down and compare businesses owned by white men and businesses owned by women and then businesses owned by people of color, those businesses owned by women and people of color have among the smaller revenues. I think that's a function of, it's harder for them to get capital. It's harder for them to still to borrow money. So, you need money in order to grow. So, that's number one. Number two is I think people just don't quite know all the things you have to do.
It is not, where you asked before, is it a good thing people are starting businesses? I always think it's a good thing, but you have to be realistic about it. This takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of energy and some people start that and go, "Whoa, I want my life back." For the first two years starting a business, I don't know that I slept. Either you're waking up in the middle of the night or you're trying to do something. A few weeks ago I sent something and I was up really late. I sent an article to one of my clients. We do some ghost writing. It was close to 3:00 in the morning my time.
I've gotten into very bad habits. She emailed me back and said, "What are you doing up?" She's in California, too. I said, "What are you doing up?" She goes, "This is what happens when you own your own business." Sometimes that's really true. So, I think that that's part of it. There's the impediment, and I just don't know. It takes a lot to build a business over a million in revenue. You do need to start managing a certain number of employees at that point.
Gordon Henry: Employees, yup.
Rieva Lesonsky: It just becomes overwhelming, but we need to do it. We have to help small business owners get over that million dollar barrier, we have to.
Gordon Henry: Yeah, absolutely. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be back in just a minute with more from Rieva Lesonsky.
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Gordon Henry: We're back with Rieva and we have some more to talk about small businesses. One question I wanted to ask you was, you write about small businesses getting unstuck, which is at the same thing as just having normal business problems. Why do people get stuck and how do you help them get unstuck?
Rieva Lesonsky: People get stuck. My friend Barry Moltz, who has written a lot of books and I worked a lot with Barry, this is his thing. His thing is he wants to help people get unstuck. People get in their own way and it's a variety of reasons. Sometimes we're not comfortable with success. We're not sure how people are going to treat us, how people will think about us. So, we say, in your head, if this is not a conscious thing about, "Oh, people aren't going to like me, so I'm going to stop my growth." You just self-sabotage in little ways.
So, you can't get there. They get stuck because of what we've talked about, this is how we've always done it. So, they're in that rut because that's not the way people do it anymore. So, to get people unstuck, to me, it's about knowledge. I can't convince you to do anything. It's not my job to do that either. My job is to educate you, is to show you why this is better. I'll show you. I'll tell you why it's better to offer contactless payments. I'll tell you why your retail store needs to continue to do curbside pickup.
Then, you need to read that or read other people and make that decision. That's up to you to decide, "Yes, I'm going to do that." It's not like pulling somebody at a quicksand. It's about maybe educating them to say, "Oh, this is how I get out a quick sand." Make them realize they're stuck. Sometimes people don't get that they're stuck. They don't realize that the rest of the world is doing all this while they're still doing that.
Gordon Henry: Right. You said you're not a business coach. Do you recommend business coaches to people? Is that something you think people should do generally if they can?
Rieva Lesonsky: I think so. I don't know necessarily a coach. I'm the biggest proponent of SCORE that exists. I have people who used to live next door to me who started a business 20 something years ago when they were very young and they're still growing that business. One of the brothers said to me about a year ago, "What do I do with this?" I'm like, "I have no idea, but here's a SCORE counselor I met. Just call him." The business is here in California, the counselor is in D.C and they still talk at least once a week. The other day, my friend called me up and said, "What do I do about this?"
I said, "Don't ask me, go call [Hal 00:27:03]." He calls me back like two hours later he goes, "You were right, Hal solved my problem." Some people like the coach, like somebody who's going to sit there and hold you accountable. Sometimes maybe you need to invest that money. So, you think, "I'm investing money, so I'm going to do it." But to me, you can't go wrong with SCORE and the SBDCs.
Gordon Henry: Yeah. Excellent, excellent recommendation. I agree. Those are fantastic organizations. So, you write a lot about marketing in general. For small businesses, it's social media, many of the new tools available. Do you recommend small businesses do their own marketings and learn how to use these tools? Or, should they hire someone to do it for them?
Rieva Lesonsky: Hire it out, right? You have to have a little bit of knowledge. You have to know why it's important. The way of small business gets to above a million dollars is to spend their time on sales and product development. What am I going to do? How am I going to do it and what is that? You don't have time to sit there on Twitter and do this yourself. So, you want to hire this stuff out. It won't cost you a lot of money. There's so many third party tools. So, if you invest, you can invest in the tool and investing in the tool will cost you what? 200 bucks a year. It's not a lot of money to subscribe to a tool and hire somebody.
Don't use an intern. That's a big mistake, people. Interns are in and out of your business. That's not going to help you. But hire either a person, hire an agency. There are agencies that do this for not a lot of money and let that supplement what you do and how you ... I just got an email last week from one of my cousins who said, "Okay, I don't know what to do. I know I'm doing social media wrong." So, I said, "Well, send me all your things and I'll take a look at it." I can't do it for her, but I'll see if I can recommend some people who could help her or some tools to make that work.
Gordon Henry: Yeah. Yeah. Well, a shameless plug, but Thryv offers our software product as well as advertising. Particularly, with the software product, we offer a ton of client support that's no extra charge, because we view it as our job to make sure the small business succeed. So, when someone buys the software, first of all, they talk initially and get a demonstration from somebody who's a Thryv expert, who can do a zoom with them. They don't have to be sitting next to them. Then, they have onboarding support to learn how to use the software.
Then, they have ongoing support where we actually have a way to keep an eye on people electronically to see if they're engaging with the software. If they're not using it on a regular basis, somebody will ring them up and say, "Hey, it looks like you're not using it that much. Can I help you?" So, like you say, there's a lot of help out there.
Rieva Lesonsky: That is the biggest difference between when I started and today. There's so much help out there. There's so much information out there. You just have to take advantage of it. I think more than anything else, software programs, like what you just talked about with Thryv, are the difference between success and failure. That is what's going to take a business owner from spending so much time, wasting time doing things that they're not good at to begin with. You have to be good at this. So, you either need the tools to make you good at it or just let it automate the process and let it go.
Gordon Henry: Yeah, absolutely. We just have a few minutes left, Rieva. First of all, I wanted to ask you on a personal level, what's next for you? You've been doing this for a long time. You can continue doing this. You got any new plans?
Rieva Lesonsky: No plans. A friend of mine and I are talking about maybe launching a community for small business. This is my life. I've been doing this almost basically all of my adult life and I love it. I love helping small businesses. So, I will continue to do that. We will be maybe launching, like I said, a community where we can help, lead people in the right direction, give them information, introduce them to one another. So, we're working on that right now. But for me, I'm going to die doing this.
Gordon Henry: Okay. I wanted to ask as I asked most of our guests, you write and create a lot of content. You probably absorb quite a bit of content too. Are there any books, or podcasts, any particular thing you think an audience of small business owners could benefit from?
Rieva Lesonsky: Yeah, so I think there's a lot of information out there, I think, depending on what your level is. Our website, obviously, I have to shameless plug there. But there's a lot of other websites that are really good, Small Business Trends, allbusiness.com, and those are free, right? Inc. Magazine, Inc. Magazine's Twitter feed, it's continuous tons of information that they're throwing at you to learn. Their SCORES website is really huge with a ton of content and free templates and things like that.
There's a ton of information. Just go to sba.gov. There's a whole lot of information on the SBA site itself. But I also think that entrepreneurs can learn a lot from not reading business books. There's a lot of lessons to be learned from things that are not necessarily ... I think one of the best columns I ever wrote was making the connection between the movie Field of Dreams and entrepreneurship. It just hit me one day when I was watching a rerun of it, because I love that movie, that there's that connection.
That still inspires me decades later. So, look for that. Look for the connections, the moments of inspiration that you can find outside of business that can propel you forward.
Gordon Henry: Yeah. Great. Last question, Rieva. You're so busy with all your business. Do you have anything outside that you do for fun? Are you a swimmer, a golfer, a runner, a walker?
Rieva Lesonsky: I'm not a very big athletic participant, but I am a huge baseball fan. Opening day, on April 1st, was a huge day in my house. My husband and I, we were like, "Okay." We put on our jerseys. My dad raised me to love baseball and I just love baseball.
Gordon Henry: Well, I know you originally started on the East Coast and now are on the West Coast. Who do you root for?
Rieva Lesonsky: So, my father raised me to be a Yankee fan. He was born and raised in Brooklyn, I think his one act of rebellion, because my grandfather was a Dodger fan, was to root for the Yankees. So, my father raised us to be Yankee fans. So, I still root for the Yankees, but my husband's from Minnesota. So, those are the games that are on in my house every single day.
Gordon Henry: I love that.
Rieva Lesonsky: So, I become a twins fan, too.
Gordon Henry: Okay, nice. Well, I'm glad you're going to get to enjoy this season. Looks like it's going to start off more normal than last time.
Rieva Lesonsky: Yes, yes.
Gordon Henry: Good. Well, we're about at a time, but I really wanted to thank you for stopping by, Rieva. It's nice chatting with you and great information for small business owners.
Rieva Lesonsky: Thank you, Gordon. I really appreciate it. I love what you do, the fact that you're doing this podcast, the fact that you've created this software that just helps business owners. To me, that's what we all need to do, is what can we do to make a business owner smarter and better at what they do? So, thank you.
Gordon Henry: For you out there listening, if you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and tell a friend or colleague to subscribe and leave us a five star review. We'd really appreciate it. So, until next time, make it a great week.