Hey everybody, welcome to our broadcast this week. Thank you for joining us once again for Business, Money and Christianity, a financial podcast from a faith perspective. We talk about areas of life just to make life a little bit better. For 10 to 15 minutes, we're just trying to get people to think about the business that they're in, their family, their life in general.
And so today, I want to talk about some business attributes found in this new world that we're living in. A lot of things are changing, maybe not as rapidly in some countries as in the United States, but it seems like there's a lot of change going on. How do we navigate our businesses in these times of change? You also have different generations, like you've got the Gen Zs now, who basically their whole life has been technology.
And then you've got an old guy like me, a Baby Boomer, who misses the old days of less technology. And so in our businesses, we need to identify our market, and part of identifying our market is the age group. Now, if your target is younger people, you're going to probably have to go more technological because that's what they're used to; that's what they're accustomed to.
If your primary market is older people like me, I like customer service. I hate this thing where you call a business and you've got to go through a daisy chain of hitting buttons to get to the right thing, and then there's a video recording telling me what they think I want to hear. Or you get on a website and it says something like "chat with us," but when you click on it, it's an AI-generated chat. I really don't mind those if I'm talking to a live person, but I don't like talking to AI because, while they're good in a lot of ways, they don't typically get... you can't cut to the chase of what you're wanting to talk about.
And so I've got four points that I want to talk about today.
And one is: embrace transparency. In this new modern era that we live in, transparency becomes very important. And how do we become transparent? It used to be you go to the mechanic shop, they said, "Yeah, I can fix that." You pay them, you come back, it's fixed. Nobody knows what really happened. Then they moved into giving you the old parts, and they moved into kind of diagnosing what you're going through.
But we're living in a time where people want to know. I know in my financial business, one of the things I do is sell life insurance. In life insurance, there's two primary products. You have a big name here in the United States, Dave Ramsey, that just really pushes one called term insurance. It is, as he teaches, the cheapest form of insurance. However, what he doesn't tell you is that less than 2% of the people that buy it ever have a death benefit actually pay out.
Then there's a product—there's various names for it, universal, whole, different types of life insurance—and it's designed to last your whole life. It actually goes to age 121. If you live longer than 121, it pays you the death benefit anyway, even though you're still alive. It's very expensive insurance. But it lasts your whole life, so there's a benefit to it because when you actually get to the age when you're going to die, you still have insurance.
On the term, you pay really cheap, and insurance companies are very good at math; they know the statistical probability of you living to that age. One of the things I've started doing that has actually worked very well is I break down not only the benefits, but also the negatives. Each product has something positive about it and something negative about it. I break down the cost, and I even break down my commission so they know what I get out of it. Obviously, in this particular case, because the whole life is far more expensive, the commissions are a lot better. That's why most insurance companies don't offer the term.
I have no problem selling a person the term because I'm trying to help them, but I walk them through it so they know exactly the pros and the cons. In this generation that we're living in, I think in any business that we have, we need to be transparent. We need to let people know what's going to happen. We need to explain to people. The more that we embrace transparency, the better relationship that we will have with people. People will feel more confident in our product or service when they feel educated about what they're doing.
In fact, I've told many people in the life insurance portion of what I do that I'm more of a teacher than a salesman. I always tell them, I say, "This will either work for you or it won't. You're never going to be in a position where you're going to feel like I'm pressuring you into buying, but I'm a teacher. I want to explain to you how to use these, what are the pros and the cons." I think that's one thing: within whatever business that we have, the more transparency that people see in us about the business, the more they're going to be connected to our product or service.
Now, we come up to the second point: embrace technology. As I said just a minute ago, I'm 63 years old. I'm an old guy. I'm a Baby Boomer. I like the way it used to be. I liked it before we had all this technology. In fact, technology moves so fast, I don't really even try to keep up anymore. I try to get people around me that can understand it and explain things to me. But we're going to have to embrace it.
But here's the key takeaway in it: retain the value of personal contact. This is where I see a lot of businesses fail, and one of the things that us older guys don't like is when everything is technology. You push this, you rate that, you schedule your appointment, you want to change your appointment... you never talk to a human being. There's good in that. I get it. There's some products or services that I like the fact that I don't have to sit on the phone for a long time; I like to just get it done.
But in reality, personal interaction brings confidence, and we need as people this interaction. I read a story one time about how in surgery, like doctors, they can now do robotic surgery where a doctor's doing a surgery in the United States and they're on vacation in Germany. Through these robotics, they can actually do things. I can see the good part of it: maybe there's a time that there's a top-notch surgeon that's in a different country than you, and you have them do the surgery robotically because you want that person's skill set. But man, does it lose the personal touch, the interaction.
I was shooting the other day, and I shot a .50 caliber gun, and the blowback put a piece of metal in my face right here. And so I was looking at taking it out, leaving it in, what to do. But I was talking to the physician; I was talking to him. It wasn't just "do this." Now, they had technology embedded in it: once they had the X-ray come back to them, they sent me a text, they sent me emails, "We want you to take this prescription as an antibiotic in case infection comes, come back and see us on this day." And then I met with the person.
So technology can be good, and I would look at it like this: in whatever business you're in, service or product, utilize and capitalize on technology, but don't do it to the extent that you lose the value of personal contact. We need to build rapport. People like that, and I think even in the Gen Z, who are highly, highly technologically driven, that to some degree, some interpersonal skills are going to benefit us in what we're doing.
The third point: you're going to have to navigate government intrusion. This is one thing that just irritates me. I live in the state of California. California is notorious for being, in my opinion, shortsighted. You have somebody sitting up in their car—well, in their office—they have a degree, but they've never worked in the field of what they're making laws for, and they just constantly make laws that are duplicate, they're redundant, they achieve no purpose.
I would imagine the United States is worse than a lot of countries, but I also would imagine we're setting the pace for many other countries that they want to make sure they get their cut. They want to look like they're the saving grace of everybody. They have, at least in the United States, minimum wages; you have to pay this minimum. But they've gone even way beyond that. If they do this, you've got to pay them this, and you've got to do this, and you've got to give them this much time off. And they're just trying to dominate what a business can do.
Well, we live in a capitalistic society here in the United States. Government should not even be involved in business to this degree, and it's getting to the point now that you have to hire an external human resource department. Now, if you're a large enough corporation, you probably have your own HR department, but for small businesses, it's now getting where you have to hire somebody that's in the business of HR, so they can keep you on track with all the laws, regulations, things you've got to fill out, things that you've got to do.
For me, an old-timer, this is very irritating, but we need to navigate it. And it's very irritating because I treat people right; I'm not looking to take advantage of people. But still, I don't like all the government intrusion that goes on in the things that we have to deal with.
The fourth thing I want to talk about in this day and age that we live, and I think we have a great opportunity to stand out, is this: because so many companies are going to complete automation—because they can save so much money by not having an employee—well, on the customer side, that means that you're constantly dealing with just automation, and you can't get things done the way you want them done. The opportunity to stand out here is to have great customer service.
Use some technology to make it easy on some things, but I'll tell you what: if you answer your phones, you will stand out. I have a great rapport with my clients because they all have my cell phone number. They don't have to go through a daisy chain. They don't even have to go through another person to get a hold of me. I tell them to text me, call me. If I don't answer the phone, it's because I'm in a meeting or something, and I will call them back. Just leave a voicemail. I do return calls, and I'm very easy to connect with, even as busy as I am.
And so I think there's areas where we can really stand out from our competitors when people can talk to us and get their problems solved. Don't be afraid of taking a little extra time to spend with your clients to explain things, to show your concern, to help them through an issue. Maybe they have an issue with you because they didn't like the way something happened. Well, if they can resolve it with you, that's going to go a long way for them coming back and spreading good news about you instead of bad news about you.
So I want to encourage you. Times are changing. We've got to keep up with the times. People's mindsets are changing, but there's opportunities in this where we can really shine out and do a better job, and I want to encourage you to do that. Look at your business. Don't run away from the automation, but don't make it everything, because there's still a personal touch that, when included, will make people prefer doing business with you.
Thank you again for joining us at Business, Money, and Christianity. We're a financial podcast from a faith perspective. Like, subscribe, share, do something so that the algorithms pick us up and see that people are watching. Thank you, and I'll see you next week.
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