A small business conference is either worth the money or it isn’t, and the answer shows up in the hallways, not the sessions. SBOC26 is in the books: about 125 owners, three days in Brookfield, and 45 first-timers who walked in nervous and walked out with a table full of people who knew their name.
Here’s what stuck with me, what the keynote did when he went off script, and the part you can steal whether you were in the room or not. Plus an Idea Slam on the question you’re scared to ask, and an AI story about turning history class into short-form video.
Businessing is the daily live show where small business owners figure out what to do next. Hosted by Pat Miller, founder of the Small Business Owners Community: owners only, nobody pitching, $9 a month.
Short answer: Is a Small Business Conference Worth Going To?
Short answer: How Do I Explain What I Sell Without Losing People?
Short answer: Should I Ask a Question That Sounds Dumb?
In this episode
- 00:00 Open, and what’s on the show today
- 01:17 Looking back at SBOC26
- 02:55 What Mike Michalowicz did when he went off script
- 04:32 Why the first-timer night is the one that matters
- 06:05 The education lineup, from professional presence to AI
- 06:53 Are we going to have a job in 12 months?
- 09:35 The Friday VIP session with the Hug Sleep founder
- 11:18 Idea Slam: should you ask the question that feels dumb?
- 14:25 AI story of the day: turning history into short-form video
- 18:41 The homework: make what you sell snackable
- 21:32 New in the community, and what’s on this week
Resources mentioned
- SBOC26 and next year’s conference
- The Small Business Library, so your AI knows what we know
- Money Masters Bookkeeping
- Athena Legal Solutions
Full transcript
Pat Miller: It is Monday, September 21st, and we are businessing. Nobody taught you how to run a business, but look at you, you’re running one anyway. This is the daily show where small business owners figure out what to do next together. I’m Pat Miller, founder of the Small Business Owners Community, the host of the show, and lots to do on today’s program.
First, educators are going to make history look like TikTok. Good idea? It’s kinda clever. We’ll cover that in the AI story of the day. We will talk about stupid questions inside the Idea Slam, and we’ll of course, say good morning to you, and hi, how are you? When you tune into the show, drop into the chat that you’re watching, share your name, who you are, what you do, drop a link for the business, whatever you wanna do.
Just come in and say good morning, and we can get our Monday started together. Businessing big story of the day is a reflection. We are looking back at SBOC26. Now, if you’ve been watching the show, you know from, for the last, how long has it been? Last year, we’ve been planning SBOC26, which is our annual conference for the Small Business Owners Community.
And we had an absolute blast last week when it was finally time to pull it off. Rebecca, good morning. Welcome to the show. And good morning, Abby. Great to see you as well. And I got some thoughts like what went well and what happened, and what did you miss by not coming to the conference? And for those of you that are tuning in this morning, make sure you drop into the chat what your favorite part of the conference was.
Something that happened, something you learned, someone you met. I wanna get all the good stuff out on the air today. Now, if you didn’t hear what the conference was all about, you missed all the shows leading up to last week. We get together, small business owners from everywhere, all across the country, once a year for the Small Business Owners Community Conference.
It was our sixth annual conference. Two and a half days of getting to know one another, learning things, and frankly, having a good time. If that… Is that allowed? Can we just kinda have fun while we build our network? ‘Cause that’s kinda what happened. Barbara, welcome to the show. It’s great to see you. So here’s what stuck out to me about SBOC26. And I think it starts with the keynote speaker, Mike Michalowicz.
Mike Michalowicz came to town, big time author, speaker, and he pretty much crushed it. His latest book, The Money Habit, teaches small business owners, and everyone really, what to do with money in your home. Because if the money at home isn’t the way that it should be, it’s gonna put a ton of stress on your business.
So we explained all of that, but that’s not really where I think he really shined. Steve, great to see you. Welcome to the show. I think Mike killed it at the conference over the Idea Slam lunch in the VIP session the very next day. Because Mike went off script, and we just started plowing questions. "Hey, what about this? What about this? What about this?"
And you know when you watch anyone do anything that they’re really talented at? You watch your grandmother cook a dinner, and it’s just like she’s effortlessly doing her thing. Or you watch a child prodigy play the violin or a guitarist play a solo, and it looks so simple, and it just kinda, just kinda flows out of them. That was Mike talking small business.
Hey, Mike, what about that? Pow! And then he would lean into this really thoughtful answer that would make people go, "Oh, yeah. Okay. Totally get it now." And he did that live during our Idea Slam lunch and in the VIP session that followed. It was incredible. Teresa, great to see you. Welcome to the show. Another thing that I loved about the conference, if you weren’t there, re-recapping what happened at SBOC26.
My second favorite thing at the conference was the Tuesday evening welcome session. We had more first-time attendees this year than I think ever before. Forty-five, a third of the people that were there were all first-timers, and they all walked in like nervous kids in the first day of junior high, looking around, seeing some of the old-timers high-fiving one another and laughing up a storm already, and they had no idea what they were in for.
They sat down in their chairs, and we started to explain what we’re doing, and everyone in the audience had the chance to introduce themselves. And then we started laughing and joking, and then they met their room captains, and then the members and the past attendees came in and actually talked to them like they were human beings and didn’t try and sell anything.
And by the end of that first night, after the welcome session, everybody had filed into the other room where we had a pizza party and a bar, and it was just normal, and they were just a part of the group, and it just felt right. It was just great. And what was fun is that some of the most animated conversations and the funniest things I heard were from some of the first-timers.
So successful mission to make sure all the first-timers felt like they had a great time. And if you’re tuned into the show right now and you were at the conference, drop into the chat something that you enjoyed about the conference. I would love to include you in the conversation. The third thing that I thought stood out, stood out was the education. Rebecca’s on the show, Steve’s on the show this morning.
The education was awesome. Rebecca and Captain Cathy did a talk on professional presence. We had talks on accounting and legal. We had Mike dropping his knowledge about financing and answering questions during the Idea Slam. We did two different talks on marketing, one on organic SEO and one on how to capture all the leads that are right there in front of us.
And then we had the AI super session where I did 45 minutes to tell you what’s going on with Claude right now and to show you what’s possible if you start installing these AI tools at the moment. And then we did a one-on-one conversation with Kevin Ziegler. Kevin Ziegler, fractional CTO, super smart guy, right on the edge of where AI is going.
And during my interview with him, just to kinda know where things are headed, I just said to him point-blank, "Kevin, are we going to have a job in 12 months?" And Kevin, without missing a beat, said, "Maybe." And like everybody in the room… He went on to explain what we need to do to stay competitive and to build our moat and to have our business do just fine.
But that was a moment, and that was a moment that stuck with me because for me, it fuels my urgency. When you tune into the show and you see me being a Claude dork and, like, really into all of this automation and where AI is going and, you know, it just kind of looks and feels like a dude that likes to play around with AI tools. And I do.
But I feel this sinking feeling. I feel this urgency in my business and also on your behalf that we don’t have time to sit back and figure out what must be done. We need to get on it straight away. And I really, really am trying to encourage you to think about what can you do today to implement these tools to move your business forward.
I love the conversations during the education portions, and then the conversations in the hallway, I thought they were awesome. It just felt… This year felt fun. It felt right. It felt like the people that came were into it for all the right reasons, and real relationships were built. And Thursday night after the celebration dinner, the bar was full.
People stayed there until one, two, three in the morning even, just hanging out and collaborating and just enjoying one another. And as the conference organizer, I can tell you that’s about as good as I could hope for. So to those of you that came, thank you for coming, and I hope you had a great time.
And let’s see. We’ve got Coaches Row. Well, let’s see here. "I second what Barbara said about Coaches Row and getting to laugh and goof off with fellow attendees during happy hour." Yeah, Rebecca, for sure. And that was from Barbara’s comment here: "Coaches Row was fantastic. I wish we’d have more time."
Yeah, Coaches Row was fantastic. Very good. Tim is sharing about the conference. "Need to always be updated on AI, not just tools. How to combine them changes things." Correct. So Tim’s making a great point that it’s about knowing what’s going on and then combining these tools together to move everything further ahead.
Tim’s definitely one of the leading minds on that. Appreciate you tuning in this morning, sir. Great to see you. So yeah, SBOC26 was great. And what was fun for me is behind the scenes, we get done with the conference on Thursday, network in the bar, have a great time. Bye, everybody. And then Friday morning, we got up, and we had our VIP after session where we got to meet Matt Mundt, the co-founder of Hug Sleep, and he was awesome.
We had a deep thought conversation of his business journey. His journey onto Shark Tank, where he got five offers from the Sharks, all the things that he learned along the way. And then we had a deep thought conversation about the VIPs that were in the room and their businesses. Where are they headed, and how can they think bigger, and what can they start doing today to move their business forward?
So we had that, and that was great. And then at lunch on Friday, like my brain just switched off. Like I was out of brain cells, no more brain cells to give. I was done. Went to lunch, hung out that afternoon. Saturday, came home and just crashed. Sunday, played golf. Good golf, by the way. That was kind of exciting. Watched a horrible Bears game. Rested the rest of the day, and now we’re back here with one another.
So all in all, SBOC26, a huge success. Thank you to Money Masters Bookkeeping and our friends at Athena Legal Solutions for being our presenting sponsor. And the good news is we will be back for our seventh annual SBOC27 in September of next year. Very excited for that.
Idea Slam mailbag question of the day is gonna give you an answer you might not expect. The question: I want to ask a question, but it’s a dumb one. I don’t want to waste anybody’s time with something basic. Should I ask it anyway?
I love this question, and I love this question because I love dumb questions. First of all, there really isn’t a dumb question. The only dumb question is the one you don’t ask. But also basic questions, even in a room of experts, is fantastic because oftentimes when someone asks a basic question, it makes everyone go back to the basics and reconsider something, like should I… yeah, we should be doing that. Okay, yeah, we should be doing that.
But a simple question leads to really good questions, and I’ll give you an example. Let’s say we were having an Idea Slam right now and someone said, "Hey, do I need business insurance?" And the experienced entrepreneurs in the room would say, "Uh, yeah, you need business insurance because people can sue you for anything, and you don’t want to be left without it." "Okay, thanks."
Now, that’s a simple question, but that always leads to a better discussion. Should I have business insurance? Yeah, you should. What kind? You mean there’s more than one? Discussion. That’s why I love dumb questions. There isn’t anything dumb, and it always leads to a bigger conversation. Well, you’ve got cyber insurance, right? Ooh, do I need that? Yeah. Do you have an umbrella policy? Ooh, do I need that? Probably. Not legal advice, just sharing.
And we can have tons of fractional conversations off of that one simple question. And by having the courage to ask a question that you might think is dumb, you’re actually fueling a bigger discussion for everybody that’s in the room. I’ve been doing these Idea Slams for a long, long, long, long time and I’m telling you, if you have something that you think is dumb, please ask it.
Not only does it make a better discussion, but also I guarantee you you’re not the only person that’s thinking it. You’ll hear this all the time. Someone asks a question, "Hey, should I get business insurance?" And almost every time, even a simple question like that, I will hear someone else go, "Yeah, I was wondering that too. Like, oh, yeah, I wanted to know that." But they didn’t have the courage to ask. You did.
So brownie points for you when you ask dumb questions, and please never hesitate to do so because it’s a great way to start discussion in the group and to learn something by raising your hand.
AI story of the day. Now, this one is interesting, and I… You may have an opinion on this one. I’m curious if you have an opinion on this one. This is great. I’m of the generation where computers were put into the classroom for the first time. I distinctly remember in third grade playing Track & Field on the one Macintosh computer in our classroom.
And if you were… I think the deal was you had to help the teacher, like, clean the erasers or something like that. You could get some extra computer time at the end of lunch. It was that kind of deal. So I did ’cause I loved it, and I was a nerd. But I remember that. So computers have been in the classroom for obviously a long, long time.
But what’s happening now is that people are going beyond the actual hardware, and they’re looking at, well, how are people learning things now that computers are in our kids’ hands from the moment that they’re born? There’s a new company, and this is why it’s the AI story of the day. There’s an education company, and their premise is, look, kids today, the way that they consume content is not by reading a book.
They’re not sitting down and reading a two-hundred-page textbook on Socrates. That’s not happening. But you know what they are doing is that they’re spending hours engaged in this format: short-form video, social media-looking content, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop. They’re there trying to engage. So this company said, "I know. What if we take the stuff that they need to learn and make it look and feel more like TikTok and social media?"
So they have. What was Socrates really like? And it takes the information, and it turns it into TikTok-style videos, quizzes, short-form pieces of content, and education materials. When I first saw this story, I just had this reflexive ew, ew. Just, mm, I don’t know about that.
But then I heard a couple of quotes from the people that are founding this company, and they said, "What’s the first job of teaching someone history? Getting them interested in history. And once you get them interested, what can you do? Allow them the chance to go deeper."
Well, what if one methodology doesn’t get them to become interested? Well, let’s put it into a video. Well, if the video doesn’t work, let’s put it into some posts. What if that doesn’t work? Let’s put it into some quizzes. It’s not about the material, it’s about the modality of the material.
And they shared, like let’s say someone saw that Socrates video and they got interested, they shared that then you could swipe left or right to learn more about Socrates. Well, the Socrates thing is kind of interesting. Learn, learn, learn, learn, learn. I think that’s really interesting. Now, there is the old man under the bridge that’s looking at this thinking, "Oh, come on bro. Like come on. That can’t be a thing." But it is becoming a thing, and I’m curious where it’s going to go.
Tyler sharing here, challenges with that when we are trying to get away from social media with two young kids. That’s right. So as a parent that’s teaching children, we’re putting them right into social media as we’re trying to get them off screens. It’s the same format. Tyler, good to see you, bud. Thanks for tuning in.
So that is kind of a challenge at home. I wanna talk to you about your business and what can we learn here? You know that when I do this show, everything I see is, here’s what’s going on, and then the second part is, how can we use it? When I saw this, I thought, "Okay, that’s kind of interesting," and then I thought, "Wait a minute, there’s something we can do here."
I want you to take a moment and think about how are you presenting your information? Are you presenting your information only in 10-page blog posts? Or are you presenting your information in short, snackable, easy-to-consume, head-turning pieces of information that makes someone wanna go deeper?
Tyler’s a great example. Tyler helps people manage their inventory so they can save a ton of money when their money is locked up inside a poor management of a big business’s inventory. Tyler could write PhD-level novels and research studies that are this thick, but that’s not gonna get the attention of the person who makes the decision.
So is Tyler sharing his benefit with his audience in little snackable pieces? Your warehouse has $10 million hidden inside. Let’s go on a treasure hunt to find it. And then make a little short form video about, "See that thing right there? That’s $2 million. See that over there? There’s about $500,000 on this shelf."
And he goes through an inventory treasure hunt inside a client’s warehouse just to have something snackable and fun. And the visual of seeing how much that pile of stuff costs a company might be the type of thing that makes another CEO go, "Oh, I never thought of it that way." You can apply that to painting faces. You can apply that to taking pictures. You can apply that to balancing people’s books. You can apply that to anything.
How can what you know become snackable in a way that people can easily understand what you’re selling? And then give them the chance to go deeper. Someone engages with Tyler’s video about that stack of stuff is costing you a half million dollars. Wanna fix it? Click here. And when they click there, there’s another snackable piece of information. Let’s do the quiz and see what your inventory looks like. And then at the end of that, cool, click here, and let’s have a call.
So now they’ve done a little bit of work, they already know what the transformation looks like, and they didn’t have to read a fifteen-page case study because nobody wants to do that, especially when they’re cold traffic. People only wanna do that when they’re trying to really understand, and they sign the contract. Like, that’s deep down the interest funnel before they’re gonna read a fifteen-page case study. Up at the top, that’s attention getting land, and that’s the argument of this company.
How am I gonna teach a kid Socrates if I can’t get them interested in Socrates? And I’m not gonna get them interested if I throw a two hundred-page textbook at them. Let’s present the information in a different way. Definite inspiration for you and me. I challenge you to think differently on that.
What’s going on in the SBOC? So SBOC, smallbusinesscommunity.com. I was working on a project that I’m really excited about. I was so excited about it that yesterday after golf, I was completely exhausted, but I got working on the project, and it actually came out pretty great. ‘Cause I have a to-do list as long as my arm of stuff to do, but I was so busy putting the conference together, it’s all been put off on the side.
So I released something new inside the community where all of my shows, all of my blogs, everything we’ve taught is now searchable by your AI. You can connect your AI to our database and basically learn everything that we’ve ever done anywhere, ever, on the show. In fact, I think I can pull it up here, and I’ll share the link here in the chat.
Smallbusinesscommunity.com. I should’ve had this ready, shouldn’t I? Hey, guess what? Talk amongst yourselves. I’m trying to look this up. This is an easy way to connect your AI to everything that we’ve ever done, and it’s not working. Great live. Oh, it is working. Psych. Here it is. All right, so I’m gonna drop this into the chat if you wanna see it.
This is the instructions. These are the instructions rather to do it. But this is a way to have your AI know everything that we know. All the lessons we’ve learned, all of the information, it’s all right there. So you can ask your AI and get all of our stuff. So that was kind of a fun little project that I put together yesterday afternoon.
The other thing that we did is we welcomed four members to the community over the weekend. Sebastian from Minneapolis, Sarah from Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, Ben Page from Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, and Mai Yang from Wausau, Wisconsin. Coming up in the community this week, an Idea Slam happening on Thursday, and then on Friday at 4:00 is our Friday Finish Line, where we will celebrate our wins to wrap up our week.
Tomorrow on the show at 11:00 a.m. Central, what do you say to a client when they say they can’t afford you? You got to the moment of truth. How much is this gonna cost me? X. And someone says, "Ooh, I don’t know if I can afford that." What do you say? We’ll talk about that tomorrow on the show at 11 o’clock.
I’m Pat Miller, founder of the Small Business Owners Community, host of the show. Thanks for tuning in, by the way. And for those of you that came to SBOC26, thank you so much for being a part of making that room so special. We’ll be here right away, 11:00 a.m. tomorrow. Until then, go sell something. Take care.