r/BusinessHub

His name was Claude Shannon.

In 1948 he wrote a paper. It proved that a photo, a song, a phone call and a letter are all the same thing underneath...

Just ones and zeros.

He called the unit a "bit"

Everything digital you use sits on top of that btw...

Your payments. Your video calls. Your ads. The AI you use every day.

Anthropic named their model Claude after him.

He also made 28% a year in the stock market for thirty years as a hobby.

He did it from his kitchen with his wife and an old Apple computer lol.

In 1986 a magazine ranked 1,026 funds...

He beat 1,025 of them.

Here's how he said he solved problems:

1. Cut it down

He said most problems are buried in extra info. Take everything out except the part that actually matters. I tried this on my churn. Wrote down 11 reasons clients leave. 9 of them were things I tracked because they were easy to track. 2 actually mattered. I'd spent 3 months on the 9.

2. Look at problems already solved

Don't attack yours head on. Find every similar problem that's already been figured out. Then look at what those answers have in common. He said two small jumps are much easier than one big jump.

3. Say the question a different way

Change the words. Change the angle. He warned about sunk cost here. The work you've already done is usually the thing keeping you stuck. That's why someone brand new can crack it in ten minutes.

4. Break it up and let yourself wander

A lot of big discoveries came from someone poking at unrelated stuff that went nowhere. Then hitting the answer from the side.

5. Flip it

Can't get from here to the answer? Assume the answer is already true. Then work backwards. So instead of "how do I get to 100k a month," assume you're already there. What are you selling? To who? How many? What breaks at that size? Totally different questions. And you can actually answer all of them.

6. Make it bigger

Once you solve one version, build the one that solves all of them. You fixed one client's onboarding. Now make the version that works for every client. That's the difference between a job and an asset.

Here's how he labels someone that can solve problems quickly:

"A genius is simply someone who is usefully irritated."

That itch when something isn't right and you can't leave it alone.

He called it constructive dissatisfaction.

Two more things...

His mentor's rule was that specialising kills genius.

So he'd throw Shannon into fields he knew nothing about on purpose.

And Shannon worked on three unrelated problems at once...

Said it beat focusing on one (which can be kinda backwards to what people say today)

P.S - Book is " a mind at play" by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman

I’m sure many of u are familiar with Alex the G, Genghis Khan, Caesar, Hannibal, Sun Tzu, etc etc

It’s like war leaders are immortalized and even business leaders use them to inspire themselves and others….. I’m an avid readr adn I want to learn from the best in history (or even legendary figures who are fictional but good examples)

Who do you think of when you think about business?

What books (especially biographies and how to manuals) did u love most?

I recently ready Book of Five Rings by Musashi and it was great (kinda hard to understand sometimes but I totally got value to apply to my work)

Hey so I am a bit of a seasoned investor, meaning I have technical knowledge on the markets but never used any automated algos as I didn’t trust them. Anyway long story short, noticed Kevin Edgar launched gemeos a while ago and given his track record I felt comfortable getting involved etc. It’s been a little over 6m and the system is consistently hitting 5.2% month with minimal involvement on my end. You always see sh*t like this online and wonder if it really works guess is weird when you’re like ”nice, it worked“ anyway I contribute a bit on the group so thought I’d share my experience, any q’s on the system or even how I learnt what I learnt drop em below and I’ll reply at some point but yeha hard to sorta know what works/what doesn’t out there so thought I’d share also note I know what am doing so that helps and yes their system works, but you gotta be patient otherwise you can feel like pulling your hair out. Good things take time!

Guy's name was Les Schwab who died in 2007, never heard of him until last week.

Charlie Munger used to tell people to go read his book. Said if you want to see the smartest pay structure ever built in a chain of small businesses, read this...so obviously I went looking.

The backstory is rough.

Grew up in a logging camp in Oregon. Two rooms, no running water, one shower for the whole camp. School was a converted train boxcar. he failed 8th grade, so did the other two kids in his class.

His dad was a drunk. Not a fun drunk. Les used to sit outside a moonshine joint on Friday nights until 10pm waiting for his dad to come out wasted and drive him home.

Mum died when he was 15. Dad died the day before his 16th birthday, found dead outside the same moonshine joint.

So now he's 16 with no parents and no education. Gets a paper route. Doesnt own a bike, doesnt even know how to ride one.

So he runs the route. 9 or 10 miles a day. for two months until he saves up for a used bike.

By 16 he had every route in town and was earning more than his high school principal.

In the middle of the Great Depression.

Then nothing interesting happens for 15 years lol.

Just newspaper sales...kinda stuck.

At 33 he panics.

"I knew time was running out. if you dont get started in business at a fairly young age you get into a rut and never make the big decision to jump."

So he borrows $11K off his brother in law, sells his house, and borrows against his life insurance to buy a tiny tire shop. Every dollar borrowed with a wife and two kids at home.

First line he wrote about his first day in business:

"I had never fixed a flat tire in my life"

Previous owner did $32K in sales the year before.

Les did $150K his first year working completely alone.

Now here's the part that actually got me because tires is a genuinely terrible business.

Everybody sells the same rubber. The manufacturers owned their own shops and gave themselves better prices than they gave him. They were openly squeezing him out of business.

He didnt do one clever thing. he did like six boring things and just never stopped.

1. He fixed flat tires for free.

 

Anybody. no purchase. he'd drive to your house and do it. sounds insane until you hear his reasoning "if we fix all the flat tires in town, we'll have all the tire business in town." you help someone for free at 8pm in the rain, they dont buy their next four tires from a warehouse.

2. He gave managers half the profit.

 

Not company profit. Their store's profit. So every store ran like its own business. He ended up with hundreds of stores and almost no supervisors, no policy manual, no controls. "if I give away half the profits I still have half. I dont understand why businessmen dont do this."

3. Theft solved itself.

 

Their share built up in a contract, get caught stealing and you forfeit all of it. and every guy in the shop knew a thief was stealing from his kids. "if he wont fight for his children he cant be very much for a company." peer pressure instead of cameras.

4. He flipped the shop inside out.

 

Everyone else had a small showroom and hid the stock in back. he made the showroom the warehouse. walls of tires right in front of you. then made every store wash and wax the display tires. every single day.

5. He never hired a manager from outside. not once in 34 years.

 

All 250+ managers started at the bottom changing tires. His store managers earned more than his head office people. When the MBAs complained he told them to go start at the bottom and work up. Nobody ever took the offer haha.

A competitor came for him. same advertising, same cost discipline, expanded faster, got to 24 stores. Only real difference was they paid their people less.

Les spent a whole year wondering if he should cut wages to match.

"I finally decided that if I couldn't be proud of my company, if I couldnt pay good wages, if I couldnt have the best employees, then why would I want to stay in business. So we did nothing. and we won. the customer liked us best."

Competitor went bankrupt.

His whole philosophy in six words: 

"life is hard for the man who thinks he can take a shortcut."

Also brutal side note...two early partners owned 20% each. Got impatient, wanted cash out, one of them wanted a swimming pool. He bought them out for $225K and $300K. Those stakes were worth about $12 million each within 20 years, plus a million a year in bonuses they'd have kept collecting. Company sold for a rumoured $3 billion a few years back.

Guy wanted a pool.

What I actually took from it:

I keep looking for the one clever mechanism. the angle. the thing nobody else is doing.

There wasnt one here. free flat repairs, clean tires, half the profit to the guy in the shop, promote from inside, pay above market, and drive 600 miles a day checking your own stores for twenty years.

Any one of those is a Tuesday. All of them for 50 years is $3 billion.

His actual closing advice:

"Whatever you do, you must do it with gusto. You must do it in volume. It is a case of repeat, repeat, repeat."

Book is Les Schwab: Pride in Performance — Keep It Going. 

Out of print, about 20,000 copies exist, hard to find.

Guy wrote the whole thing himself on a 40 year old typewriter at 68. No ghostwriter and put this in the foreword:

"should we fail to follow these policies towards customers and employees, I would prefer that my name be taken off of the business."

Meanwhile I've got a personal brand and a Notion dashboard lol.

I started a small business when I was 25 in one of Canadas major cities. I made furniture from pallets and solid it on Craigslist as a side hustle. I was already working full time at a bank. I loved working with my hands and my best friend happened to be a carpenter. We had a little wait list and the jobs kept getting bigger. Soon we took the plunge and quit our day jobs, we landed a vintage workshop that hadn’t been up for lease in 20+ years and the rent was cheap. This was 2012. It all seemed to line up, we invested everything back into the business/ bought machines one at a time. Built furniture for cheap to build a portfolio, the clients were lined up. We regularly worked 80 hour weeks and the housing marketing was also booming. We hired staff, landed big jobs ( commercial and residential ) and newspapers and other media did stories on us. My business partner went to get his red seal and I took some business classes as I run the entire front end, client relations marketing etc and I do work in the shop when needed.

We absolutely took off in 2018/2019. Selling $500 k a year. Refining our craft worked, we had 3 full time carpenters and we started to do high end fine furniture/ millwork/ joinery. Business debt was being paid off as when we started we just used a personal credit line and credit cards to fund things as we could not get a small business loan. I was able to get a business loan at this time( 2019) and we added a small photo studio and built a showroom when the building next store came up for lease. We had started on plans to open a second workshop for the metal working part so we could scale up our capacity and build everything in house. Everything we do is custom made to order, we only use Canadian timber and materials. It’s all made in our workshops right here in Canada. We maintained a 8-10 week wait list. Clients who would visit us in person, see the shop and discuss their projects , all were in aw as this was a true craftsman shop. The kind of place your great grandfather worked at.

Then 2020 Covid happened, it all changed. The furniture industry changed over night. Clients put projects on hold, two of my red seal joiners decided to head home, both were from Europe and they were worried their visas were in danger. Clients walked away from projects even their deposits. Covid shook everyone. Then the CEBA loan came out and of course we took it, it was easy to get and the times were uncertain. They dropped it in our bank account next day no payments. That loan from 2019? They let us put those payments on hold. Things moved online fast, it was honestly a race to get online. We had a regular website but no online shop with a collection to buy shipped to your door. We had to build this online store from scratch but all of our carpenters had left. It was up to us to build our custom furniture in the shop and luckily we could. But we now had to work in the shop 10 hours a day and that left minimal time to get to work on the online shop. Rent needed to be paid. Some orders resumed, it was not like before. We looked for local Canadian carpenters and hired someone, they weren’t that good but they were available and we needed the help, we had job postings up for months. We figured we could train him to be great. My business partner and I couldn’t make all the furniture ourselves, we were too big and we needed to get online. We used the $40k ceba loan to hire a Shopify expert to build our online store and create the content. Our clients usually came to us for ideas/ collaboration so we used our custom clients to build a furniture collection and hired a photographer to shoot it all in the studio we built. This took two years and orders were steady enough we ended up hiring another junior carpenter. At this time we still kept the showroom open and the metal shop was almost complete. At the same time we were also training our new carpenters on our processes a lot was going on.

We finally got online, professional photos not renderings. We thought this would make us stand out. A full collection you can order shipped to your door plus custom. I also invested in a marketing firm to help market us to the right clients. This was the $40k. It seemed like a great investment. We also spent money on google ads and meta ads. I cold emailed every designer we had worked with and some new ones talking about our new online shop and trade rebate program. We have a pretty big instagram following and I was creating reels weekly. Big box stores and over seas manufactures started to open furniture Shopify stores too. They all had clever furniture renderings, some “similar” products shipped to your door at 1/2 the price of us. Tricky marketing like “ solid wood legs “ when the table top is full mdf or veneer. We noticed since the client were mostly shopping online now, they were shocked at our prices. They no longer could tell the difference between our products. ( in person they are night and day )They rarely wanted to visit in person as it was still covid times. Sales were slow at this time we were just clearing $200k a year in sales. I started asking our clients who visited why they chose us, everyone was educated and did their research, purposely seeking us out for our quality heirloom pieces built to last. I took this feedback and added photos of us working in the shop. I changed the
Marketing reels to this so everyone could see we build it right here in Canada. “ built by real craftspeople just for you “

Then 2023 hit and we had to start making our loan payments again totaling $2,200 a month. It was tight, our one carpenter found it so expensive to live in the city he ended up leaving. We were again down to one carpenter, he was making simple mistakes again and again. Cash flow was now tight, I emptied our savings to pay for rent. We let go of our final carpenter this year as his production was not good, slow and quality was low. He was costing us money. We pride ourselves in a quality craftsman made product and have never cut corners. We started to build it all ourselves again while juggling the business day to day. 2024 we received a rent increase of 7%. We could no longer afford the showroom building so we let it go. Most sales were online anyway and we needed to reduce our overhead cost as sales were still low.

2024/2025 Inflation started to happen, real-estate sales were slow. Our clients were spending less. Interior designers were starting to spec Wayfair / over seas mass produced products instead of fine furniture. Clients were being hampered with home building costs and no longer had extra cash to invest in heirloom furniture. Building or renovating a home costed 20-30% more.Designers told us their clients were in an upgrade later mind set. People were not going into the office so office furniture was not needed or upgraded .Restaurants were not ordering solid wood furniture as they were also ordering cheap for now. Food inflation was hitting them hard and they were suffering too. Our clientele completely changed. Some competitors closed.

Still we hung on as some months the sales were good and others were slow. We also had to pay down our debt. This business worked before so it has to bounce back, right !?

Then trump got into Power, the tariffs scared people. Oil shortage issues with the war and inflation have everyone strapped spending wise or clamping down. However summer 2025 we got super busy. We ended up hiring a local carpenter in October 2025. In the last two quarters of 2025 we did the highest sales since 2019. $350,000. Not bad. The future looked bright, maybe we made it over the hump.

2026 has been another roller coaster. Some months we are doing $30,000 in sales. Some months not even a single sale. Cash flow is tight because of this. My landlord just increased our rent $650 a month starting September 1. We didn’t make one sale in July. We do have an 8 week wait list and our carpenter is doing a fantastic job. The best we have ever had. I used all of our cash to pay PST snd GST as they have high penalties. This was July 31. I used our business credit card to pay $7k in rent for August 1. It’s mid August and we have not had a single sale. This card is now full paying suppliers as well. We get inquires all the time and people are shocked at our pricing half the time these days.Expecting us to be Wayfair priced. Most don’t even understand solid wood or why craftsman made furniture locally made would cost more. A lot of them don’t really research our site. I have been following up and trying to wheel and deal. But since we are a true local handmade product, we can’t go on sale. We are already well priced and there isn’t any way to cut the cost. Even with all of our costs going up we can’t really increase our prices as clients won’t pay more. Even the wealthy ones are price conscious. Our profit margin is about 20% per order. To be comfortable we need to do about $30,000 + in sales a month steadily. This hasn’t happened this year. We have been spending $300 on different Meta marketing a month and $400 on google ads. $700.00 a month in marketing total. The feed back we get is beautiful products it’s just out of our budget. I’ve started to really push Canadian made and make sure we are showing production shots with us building so we stand out from the big box stores. I’ve talked to other small business owners and our industry is slow. Small businesses are down sizing and closing often. Even the ones around longer.

I’m at my wits end, my business partner and I haven’t paid ourselves this year. We have even tapped into our personal credit lines to get by due to those months with zero orders / no cash flow.

I’m now going to be 40 next year, I haven’t been able to save / contribute to my RRSP since 2019. I have friends talking about their retirement financial planning…..We have been hustling this entire time to stay alive. Did I make the wrong choice at 25 ?

We have $106,000 in debt, two fully equipped workshops. A nice portfolio, people just don’t seem to have the money ?

Part of me has thought about getting a job and just doing my business jobs after hours. We still need to pay down this debt regardless and I’m worried next month I’ll have to pay rent on my personal credit card. This is not how I thought our business would be 14 years later….

Our two loans are paid off in two more years and that’s a total of $40,000. They are low interest at this time. Financially it doesn’t make sense to close as we are still on the hook for the $100k. I just don’t know anymore, will we ever get back to 2019 sales ? Something keeps happening in the world. It also seems like a shame to close as our client feedback is always 5 star, they love our products and some save up to return years later for more. However we have noticed even they are holding off.

I have been racking my brain on what product we can build ? We can make anything from scratch out of wood and metal. Even if it’s a boring product I’m open. We need some sort of bread and butter.

I’m also open to different marketing ideas. I’ve cold emailed deign firms and architects. I’ve had meetings with meta business and good ads business and constantly run different campaigns. Making sure it’s all correct. The last two things I can think of is getting flyers made and have Canada post deliver them there is a service. Perhaps also approaching stores to carry our furniture pieces ? But we can’t do wholesale pricing as there is no room. Also we would have to build stock for their showroom displays. Clients are sold when they see our high quality products in person. I just don’t have the cash flow to do this.

Now trump wants to put 50% tariffs on all Canadian made products crossing the boarder. We had a few Americans reach out this summer hoping to order, with the exchange rate they actually save 30% ordering from us. That’s another potential client lost.

Open to tips/ feedback/ suggestions.

Thanks for reading, apologies for the length.

Curious about this because people usually recommend whatever is making them money. But I’m sure there are businesses that pay well and are still a complete pain in the ass to run.

What’s yours and why wouldn’t you recommend it?)

Here is one of those blue pill vs red pill type questions, but with no pills.

You are a business owner. If you had a Big Red Magic Button in front of you & when pressed, it would give one of your employees (or you) one skill in sales & marketing, what would that skill be?

Options not available "More sales", "More Money","More presses" etc. 😉

This question comes from networking events over the last couple of months, with business owners here in the UK, who had been on business start-up courses that included a very small "sales" & or "marketing" session, none were happy with what they had learnt and thought it was just a box ticking exercise!

Thanks in advance!

Hii

Just curious and still wondering. How to start a business? Like um, a restaurant maybe or a supermarket? Because thats my dream. I dont plan to start right now, but eventually hope so.

Altho idk what or when to take a first step when i finally earn money? And still curious tho but i dont take a business course so i have no clue

Please help meee :(

Is there anyone here who runs a **“seth wala” business** (a business that was initially completely dependent on them), but has managed to optimize and systemize it enough that they don’t have to be involved in every little thing?

Actually i have a business of wholesale bangles but it us so much dependent on my presence that i am not able to scale or even take a half day off

One of my biggest problem is **finding and retaining workers**. They usually leave just when they start understanding the work, so I constantly have to find new people and train them from scratch.
It’s becoming really difficult to build a team that can handle the work independently without everything coming back to me.
**For those of you who have faced this problem, how did you solve it?**
Any advice on hiring, training, retaining workers, or systemizing the business would be really helpful.

If you needed to make a lot of money in a short amount of time, let’s say 10k within a couple months for example.

What would be your business plan If you had no savings or investments/loans etc. straight from scratch. & what would your process be, how would you do this

Or

If your a business owner what was the business idea that made you a lot of money very quickly that was surprisingly easy to set up & how did h do this

& lastly what gave you the inspiration

A few years ago, a business I started failed and left me with around $50k in debt. I had a full-time job, but my salary wasn't enough to comfortably cover the monthly payments. I tried freelancing, flipping things locally, and a bunch of random online side hustles, but most either paid too little or required too much time.

Eventually I started experimenting with dropshipping. The basic idea was simple, find products that already have demand, list them on eBay with a markup, and have a supplier fulfill the order after it sells. What surprised me was that the business wasn't really about finding a "winning product." It was about volume, testing, and systems.

I'd research products with existing sales, compare competing listings, test different prices and titles, and gradually build up the number of listings in the store. I started with a few hundred listings. Then a few thousand. Eventually I had around 15,000 listings across my stores.

At that point, I was averaging roughly $3k/month in profit. The biggest lesson for me was that scaling wasn't simply about adding more products. I had to build systems around customer service, inventory monitoring, order processing, returns, and listing management. I also started documenting repetitive tasks and automating whatever didn't require my direct involvement. That made it possible to run the stores alongside my full-time job without spending every waking hour on them.

There were plenty of mistakes too. Some products didn't sell, suppliers went out of stock, margins changed, and I had to learn how to deal with unhappy customers. But over time, the process became much more predictable. Eventually I launched additional stores using the same systems.

If something went out of stock I never cancelled. I would find a substitute from another supplier, message the buyer, and offer it as a slight upgrade with a small discount. Most people accepted it. The order stayed alive and the account stayed clean. One cancellation feels harmless but the lost search placement costs far more in missed future sales than the original order was ever worth. I also ran a 24 hour markdown sale every single day because eBay puts a countdown timer on discounted listings and that urgency genuinely converts people sitting on the fence. I sent private discount offers to anyone watching my listings once a week because those people had already shown interest and just needed a small reason to commit. These things sounds small but together they consistently added hundreds to the monthly total from the same listing base

Eventually I built proper systems around everything. I documented every repetitive task, created daily routines, and started automating the parts that did not need my attention. That made the whole thing manageable alongside a full time job because I was not reinventing the wheel every single day. I launched a second store using the exact same process and then a third. It was not an overnight thing. It was just a side hustle I stuck with consistently for long enough that it actually made a difference.

I know a lot of people going to university for business and management like my self and I’d love to spread your advice.