A week or so ago, I was at the technology club that I belonged to, and I was leading a small group discussion. Just kind of happened out of nowhere where about four or five people sat around, and they said, you know, for next year, meaning the year we are in now, 2020, they wanted to start businesses, but they wanted them to be businesses that were, I don't know, service-minded and community minded. And I said, with gratitude, and they said, yes, and what were some businesses that we could start? And that was the topic of the discussion.
So what do you say we talk about that for a little bit today? Welcome to the Daily Grateful. And I am Michael Croes, your humble and obedient servant. Here once again, this is the Wednesday edition.
See, I'm going to do this every day, five days a week. This is going to be fun. And I'm carrying this little book thingy round with me now that I write things down with. Yeah, everybody does this stuff on their phone, you know, they put it in notes on your iPhone or whatever.
I got my iPhone right here. What do I have that what do I have on here that can do that sort of thing? There's a, I don't, I like to write things down. So I carry a little book in my back pocket, just a little tiny thing, and I write stuff down a lot.
But anyway, we just had a discussion about that. And I wrote some of the ideas down in my little book. And I said, let's ponder this. And we're going to get together.
Actually, this coming Saturday, we're all kind of, you know, there's another thingy at the club and a bunch of us are going to get together and talk more about this. But one of the things we came up with is a coaching and consulting business that, that is a gratitude coaching and consulting business. Okay, and what's different about that? There's like a million coaches out there.
Now, have you seen all of the ads? You can become a coach for $7 and you look into it and it's, yeah, you can become a coach for $7. But to take the course to get the certification to be a certified coach, it's going to cost you a ton of money, you know, like $1,400. But you can do all of this stuff for free.
If you know that, you know, if you're good at things, you can coach people with it. I'm, you know, kind of good at audio stuff and podcasting. So I coach people with it. I don't charge them for it.
I just do it. Maybe I should charge them for it. No, I'm not. There's a lot of people that are out there doing that.
And you see, I don't do that because there's so many different ways to podcast that if I teach you my way, am I saying that those other ways are not good? No. Another business that they came up with, thank you gift box business. Now think about that.
You curate these custom boxes of stuff for individual people. And maybe you set up a website, this is what we talked about. Maybe set up a website, a local website, and just say, we will curate a gift box for you to give to somebody. Fill this out about that person.
You know, you don't want the person's name, but you want to know how old they are if they're a man or woman, what are their hobbies, what makes their heart sing, and all of that good type of stuff. And then you, as the person who creates this, just goes out and gets all this stuff, you know, you have a $20 box, $50 box, or a $200 box, or whatever. You know, all these things are going to have to be zoomed in. We're going to be doing that in this next Saturday.
Okay. Now, here's something established like a physical or online platform for people to anonymously express gratitude. Now, I'm, you know, there's a lot of online ones, but I'm all for creating a physical one. You would have to get permission from a park or a church.
I think a church would be easier to where you could put up a blackboard, a very large blackboard. So this could be evolving. And people could go and you could put all of these, you know, things down there. You could sell this to the church.
You know, this is our gratitude wall, where all of our members will come and you will service the gratitude wall by, you know, supplying them with chalk, I guess. I don't know, or just a one time sale thing. Okay, you partner with, you know, churches or local businesses and you just do a gratitude wall. Imagine if you had a restaurant and you had a big whiteboard in the restaurant that was dialed up really nice and called a community gratitude wall, where you could go if you're a customer in there, you could go and you could take a little marker and say, I am so grateful for my granddaughter or whatever and have this available.
And you could create this for businesses, which would be another noise for my computer and I don't edit. But that would just be really cool, I think. Now, there's another guy in our club. I call him weird guy.
His name is Corey. I call him Corey, the weird guy. Corey, the weird guy is developing mobile apps, figuring out a way to teach all of us to create apps. You know, I don't know if apps are good business or not.
When apps remember when the iPhone first came out and then it was like, there's an app for that. You could make bank creating apps. And it came, you know, one of the ladies said, why don't we create an app, a gratitude app? You could have featured meditations on it, journaling prompts and a bunch of stuff like that.
Is that a good idea? Perhaps it is. But you're going to have to spend a lot of time marketing it because I don't know if you've been on the app store lately, but there is a gazillion bazillion apps and I am kind of like selfish on my phone about putting apps on my phone. Would I do would I buy something like that?
That's the question I'm asking is if I would buy it, whenever I think about any business, I say, would I be a customer? Could I buy this? Then there's another thing, a paid forward service platform. Now, say you have a service business tutoring, gardening, dog walking, pest control, lawn care, any of this, and you're out there doing it, you could encourage your customers at the stage.
Come together with a newsletter I used to write a newsletter for my old customers years ago, a physical newsletter, kind of miss doing that. Come up with a newsletter or something and says, we want you to pay it forward. And if you want to pay it forward for somebody to have a week's worth of dog walking or us to come in and do a hundred dollar cleanup of your front yard and we plant flowers. And you pay for that for somebody else and you know, pay it forward.
My buddy Chris, who puts on this big event every year called Podfest, I'm speaking there at the end of this month, can't wait. He has a pay it forward plan to where when you buy a ticket, you can buy another ticket for somebody else who can't afford a ticket. A lot of people do that. So Chris is making the additional income from people paying it forward by buying that ticket.
And a lot of people who could not afford to go to this big event and it's like $260, $270 event can now go to this event. How cool is that? All right. So these are just a couple of ideas that we bounced around with.
What do you think? Do you think it's a good idea? I don't know. I'll report back next week after we do the Saturday thing again.
Do you have a business? Do you express gratitude in your business? Do you tell people how thankful that you are that they're your customer? And just by doing that?
And I mean, sincerely tell them thank you. Okay. I mean, seriously, tell them your thank you and and that you're grateful for them being your customer. You just might be surprised.
You ever got an email from me? On the bottom of my email, I signed it, Michael Crose and I signed it grateful. Michael Crose, see you tomorrow.