S4E18: Geary Brewing Co. Riverside IPA | Professional Development with AI | Importance of EQ in Finance

Disclaimer: The information in this video does not constitute Financial Advice. Consult with a Financial Advisor before making any decisions regarding your finances.

In this episode, we explore how emotional intelligence (EQ) can transform client relationships and boost your business. Learn key client insights, effective questioning, and listening techniques. I also share a four-step approach to becoming a thought leader using AI tools like Chat GPT for professional development. And lastly don’t miss our review of Geary Brewing Company's Riverside American IPA.

📰 On this week's What's News: https://almosttimely.substack.com/p/almost-timely-news-how-to-use-generative

👉 Interested in our guide on how to use A.I for Professional Development? 💬 Comment "Grow with A.I"!! 

Today's Brew🍺: Geary Brewing Co. Riverside I.P.A 

🍻 The P.B.K.P.I (Pam's Beer KPI)Scale ⚖️: 
1. Pam's Not Touching It
2. It's Sippable
3. I'd Drink it Again if You Gave it to me
4. I'll Order it if it's on the Menu
5. I'll Seek it out

About the Brewery: 
Geary Brewing Company, established in 1983 in Portland, is New England's first craft brewery of the post-prohibition era, holding federal craft brewing license #13. Pioneering the craft beer movement with its flagship Geary's Pale Ale in 1986, the brewery offers a diverse range of heritage and contemporary beers, brewed in both open and closed fermentations. 

Guests can enjoy hazy IPAs, porters, stouts, sours, and even gluten-removed options in the renovated tasting room or beer garden, with chances to catch a local food truck or live band event. The brewery also features 1820 Brewing Company’s non-alcoholic brews and a house-made root beer.

🍻 Learn more about Geary Brewing Company: https://www.gearybrewing.com/

Transcript

0:00

Professional development. It's something we always talk about, whether you're in corporate or whether you're an entrepreneur, or whether you have a small team. As an entrepreneur, you always want people to develop professionally. I mean, right now, we certainly know technology changes. I think somebody told me that the pace of technology doubles every year or something like that, which, if you think about that now, we are at about one bazillion times the speed of technical change that we were even 20 years ago. Bazillion's a technical accounting term. Don't worry. Look it up. Hey, I'm Pam Pryor, and this is the Cash Flow podcast. We're going to talk about everything related to money in your business. Without further ado, let's hop right in and welcome back to the Cash Flow podcast, where we take you through three segments, one involving beer, one involving news of the week, and one involving cash flow for business owners. This week, we are diving into the to the Geary Greer Geary, but Geary Brewery. And we'll talk about a beer from there, which looks really good and is sitting right there on my table. In the second segment, the new segment, we're going to talk about AI and how it can really expedite professional development for you or personal development. And then finally, for you or your employees, mind you, this is something good to have in mind. And then finally, in the cash segment, we're going to talk about the EQ of your bookkeeping, finance and accounting team. Whether you are the entrepreneur getting the services, or you are the finance professional offering the services. The EQ element feels mushy and soft, but it's not. I'm going to give you some very concrete things to expect if you're an entrepreneur with a bookkeeper or finance team. And to do if you're a bookkeeper or finance professional trying to up your game in this market. So stay tuned. We're going to jump right into that tasty beer now. Well, here we are with our 7.2% abV, Geary Brewing Company's riverside American IPA. So you all know I love an IPA, and so I'm really excited to test this one. So let's talk about Geary Brewing company. So it looks like they've been around since 1983 in one of my favorite areas of the company, which is Portland, Maine. And apparently it is New England's first brewery after the prohibition. So how cool is that? That goes back a long way. Prohibition now was 100 years ago or so. I don't know the exact dates, but it's its main beer, or its first beer was Geary's pale ale, but it also now is expanding into contemporary, contemporary beers. Up there in Portland, they have a tasting room. No, you can't have any of this. They have a tasting room and samples and a tour of the historic brewhouse. So there we go. And this is David Geary writing to me on the back of the can. That's saying he set off to England with a vision and a purpose to bring a craft beer to Maine. And it sounds like he accomplished it. All right, so let's crack this thing open and see what we think. Love the sounds of it, because it does describe it as unfiltered with pine and citrus, which are two of my favorites. If you've been watching this at all, let's just pour her in here. I would expect it because it's unfiltered to be a little hazy, and it actually. It's not horrible. Well, that's hazy. That's definitely hazy. All right, let's see what we got here. Oh, God, that smells so good. Even at the time of day we're recording this. I feel like Jason and Travis Kelsey when they recorded in London and got beer for breakfast. We're recording early today. All right. The smell is definitely pine, which I love, and the taste is not too citrusy, which I love. And it actually is clearer than I would expect for a hazy. But hang on here. Oh, God, it just pops. Okay. I love it. So that's got the really woodsy feel of the pine, which is great, and just some overtones of citrus. One of the things I'm going to have to look at, and I'll go back and look at my own segment on how to do professional development, and I'll use it to do this. I want to understand what the different hops do, because this one said it's mosaic. And I don't know a lot about hops yet, but I will, and I will bring the knowledge to you. But for now, if you like an IPA, it does leave a good, bitter IPA taste on your tongue. I will tell you that now that I've gone longer without a sip, it's really there. I like that. But a lot of people don't like that. I can actually see this pairing really nicely with, like, nachos would really give nachos a good fight. Yeah. So Pam's KB. KBPI. Jeez. KBP, Pbki. Pam's beer, KPI. And just as a reminder, our ratings are in the link below. But one is basically, I'll never touch it again. And five is, I would hunt this down till the ends of the earth. I'm going to give this a very strong four. This I would definitely order and look for at a restaurant. Very good. The only slight thing is that the over the aftertaste is very, very powerful for a very long time. But if you're an IPA drinker, that won't bother you. If you're not an IPA drinker, this might not be the one I'd start with, but strong four from me. Cheers. Let's move into professional development now for our new segment, professional development. It's something we always talk about, whether you're in corporate or whether you're an entrepreneur, or whether you have a small team. As an entrepreneur, you always want people to develop professional. I mean, right now, we certainly know technology changes. I think somebody told me that the pace of technology doubles every year or something like that, which, if you think about that now, we are at about one bazillion times the speed of technical change that we were even 20 years ago. Bazillion is a technical accounting term. Don't worry, look it up anyway, professional development becomes even more and more important, and it becomes harder and harder for us to retain stuff. Right, because there's so much coming at us from so many places. So there's a really good article, and I know Frances is going to drop the link in down here, but I just want to share the four main takeaways from this article, and it's something you can put in action today to totally elevate your own professional development and also make sure you have time for it. This also allows you to make sure you have time for it. This relies almost entirely on the tools that are already out there. For purposes of this conversation, I'll stay chat GPT, because that's the one most of us are familiar with, but there are plenty of other out there that are competing now. In fact, Gemini from Google is challenging, I think, from a quality standpoint, what chat GPT chat GPT does anyway. Sorry, am I getting in your way there, buddy? We can't have that. My own large language model. So what this has done in this article is it's broken down into four pieces, and the first section is called explain it to me. And this is where you're really just going to get a feel for some area either you don't know very well, or that you do know and want to get a deeper knowledge of. So you're going to do a prompt that says, and again, the link to this article is going to be there, so you will see that. But a prompt along the lines of, hey, chat, bt, you're the expert on blank. Let's just say we're going to study decentralized. Now, let's make it something plain and easy. Let's make it astronomy. You want to learn about what Neil deGrasse Tyson knows, so you're going to type a promise, says Chat GPT. You are the expert on astronomy. You also know, and let's just pick, you know quantum physics. You also know quantum physics. And you also are. Let me back up there. You're an expert on astronomy, and you also understand quantum physics. Explain why the earth spinshe to me. Okay, that's it. You're going to pop that in there. If you want to understand something broader, you can pop that in there, too. So very simply, you're an expert on this. You also understand this. Explain to me how this works. And boom, you're going to get some information, right? So you're going to see that it comes up with usually enough to get some really hard concept into your head. So you're just kind of getting an explanation very broadly in the first step. Okay, what's the second step? The second step is what we call activate. You want to activate the knowledge that you now have. So what are you going to do? You want to find out everything you already have as if you're a digital pack rat? It refers to that you're going to point chat GPT to all of the resources you already have on hand because you've probably studied this astronomy thing peripherally. And once you do that, what we're going to do is add a different prompt, and the prompt is going to say something like, okay, blah, blah, blah. Here is all of the literature I have from this talk on astronomy. Please go through it and create an outline of recommended practices for me to build thought leadership in this area. Okay? And then you can also add even more qualification and say, hey, rely heavily on the material. I already have to come up with concepts and strategies and structure. That's it. You're going to throw it in there and your learning machine, your general chat GPT, is going to spit out something on. Here are the action steps you need to take to really become a credible thought leader in this area. Now, you might not actually be trying to be a thought leader, but ask the question as if you are, sorry, buddy, my foot's falling asleep. Ask the question as if you are, because then you'll get an idea of what you would need to go through to learn the things you really need to go to learn. Now, third step, my absolute freaking favorite step, there is an app out there called Notebook LM. It's called notebook learning machine. And what we're going to do in this third step is really start to build a very systematic understanding of what it is that we've jumped in to learn. So here you go. You've activated your knowledge. You've played around with it for a while. You've determined a really big knowledge base now. Now we're going to go look at all of the content out in the world, not just your own stuff, and integrate it. Now, we could, it's humanly impossible for us to go find all of the stuff on astronomy, right? But we are going to send our machine out there to find some stuff very specifically. Now, what it's recommending, and I love this idea, is something called YouTube, which I think you've all heard of, and you're going to find some expert in your area on YouTube that has done a ton of free stuff. And then there is an app called give me just a second. I believe it's called, it creates transcripts from the YouTubes. There we go. YT dip. YT dip dip. Again, you'll see this in this article, but it's gonna go take all of those YouTubes and create digital transcripts of them. Now that you have the digital transcripts, you're gonna use this very cool tool called Notebook lmDhdem, and it's recently been upgraded to use Gemini 1.5. So it's using the most recent Gemini large language model. And we're going to load the transcripts in. And what it does is it does something nothing else does out there right now. And it synthesizes it all and creates, very specifically, a set of, it calls it learning tools, but it sets up, I'm going to use their words exactly here, a straightforward system of reference for that large set of tools so that now you can come in and know that you're only looking at stuff that's been properly studied and vetted, and it starts to help you draw conclusions, because now you can ask questions. Now that you've validated all these data sources, what conclusions do you draw from it? And how could I actually connect all the dots in these different sources? And it spits out a beautiful summarized set of learning documents. Okay. So that you can jump to the fourth step. Now, I want to warn you here, I am not saying at all that you should. What's the word that you use for using other people's material, francis, plagiarize. Right. But it is totally legitimate to add your knowledge to something, pull out public knowledge documentation and set up something to teach it to others. Right. So one of the things we're going to do is actually get your GPI, GPI, your chat GPT, or your Gemini five to go through. Now, all that you've put together in the notebook LM, and created a course for you. Now, this isn't necessarily a course you're going to sell, so don't look at it that way. I'm not saying plagiarize people's stuff and go make a course to sell. I'm saying plagiarize people's stuff and create a course for you to absorb everything that you know in a succinct and very fashionable way. In fact, Francis, here's what I'm going to do. I am so fascinated in this whole defi and web three and crypto thing. I'm going to come up with a series of prompts that I'm going to actually go use in crypto, and we're going to put that, we're going to make it linked to this video here so that you can access it and see me do these four steps, the explain it to me, the activate, the make it systematic, and the teach it to myself. And I'm going to go through those prompts over the next few weeks on this topic that interests me, that I'm not really doing business on. I may someday this may convince me to do it and go through all four of those steps for professional development. And then once I've done that, you can steal those scripts, plug in all of your own stuff, and if you say you have an employee who is currently doing, let's call it doing your editing for you, and you want them to learn what's out there in AI for editing, you can tell them, hey, go use these prompts. Here's your professional development for the next quarter. I want you to go in there, execute these prompts, and learn all this stuff so that you can do this better, faster, smarter, whatever. The thing is, if an employee of yours says, hey, I'm interested in learning how to do accounting or bookkeeping, which blessedly one of my totally non bookkeeper employees has done, I can go through and say, hey, here's what you need to learn. I'm going to use this very series of steps to create the certification that we're going to be putting out there, because I know all my material and I know the pieces that nobody else is selling but the basics, the accounting textbook basics. Basics that I've learned that every bookkeeper should frankly understand and doesn't. Those, I'm just going to pull them straight out of Wiley's intermediate accounting book because they're there. They're in the public domain. And in fact, I paid a whole lot of money to go to college and learn them. So I feel totally okay pulling them out of there. So we got a little project coming up as a result of this. What's news? We'll talk about it on our chat segment as we proceed in the next few weeks as well. But links will all be here. Francis will go update the links after the links have changed and I've gotten further in my own little discovery process. So there's my promise to you. I'm going to put this to use and keep you all informed on it. And in the meantime, not to have this whole thing go with the chat segment. But I talked about the certification that we're doing for profit concierge to help bookkeepers really step up their game. And the layer that's so important and feels soft and mushy is the EQ layer. So as an entrepreneur, what should you expect from your financial service providers? And as a finance professional, what should you be doing? Although I hate the word should, but what should you be doing if you want to get out of the game of chasing hours for money? Okay. And there's just some very, very distinct things you can do and put into practice tomorrow that'll take that game up a notch. So stay tuned with me for the business section, which we're calling the cash section, which we're also looking for a new name for. Welcome to my chaos. Hi, and welcome back. The little snapper thingy that France uses just made Diego jump a mile. It did not, however, make Murphy here budge. However, although I look like I'm perfectly casual in my living room, and I look like I might not know a lot about finance and accounting, the truth of the matter is, I know a lot about finance and accounting. I've learned it over 30 years in a career in corporate and over the last ten years working with entrepreneurs. There's been a little bit of an overlap there, but I've been in the workforce since I was 17 years old and I'm now 62. So that is, I can't do the math. 45 years, I believe, which is a lot of years. And yes, the thing that happened very early in my career, blessedly while I was still a cocky young punk, was that the bosses that I had in Dupont at the time were wise enough to say to me, and not just say to me, but to lead from this place and to actually hold me accountable in my performance reviews for this. That, Pam, you are incredibly smart intelligence you have out of the gate, and you will always be able to handle the technical sides of things, and you will always be able to make things happen on a spreadsheet or in a set of books. But what's actually more important than that technical wisdom, is how you do it. How do you treat people? What's your team? What is your teamwork like? Do you care about the people that you're treating? Do you care about the things behind the numbers? And I learned that very early and very often from this set of leaders I was blessed to have for ten years while we had DuPont, Merck, and Du Pont Pharmaceuticals as the corporation we were working for. So I took that away at a very young age and have been incorporating it in my entire career ever since. But I never really thought of it as a system. I never really thought of it as a blueprint. But what's turned out happening now that I am in working with entrepreneurs, and I've worked with probably 100 or 150, and I've spoken to thousands on stages, I know now that it's a very systemic thing that I do when I'm working with a client. That's exactly the right client to work with me. And it has somebody pointed out to me, Pam, it's the EQ. You know, the IQ is all the technical stuff you need to do, and the picture you put together in your head when you hear their story and the business model that you're building and the forecast that you're building and the books that you're setting up and the reports that you're giving them. But that's not what's important, right? Any bookkeeper could do some pieces of that. Any CFO could do some pieces of that. What makes it magic is that we add an EQ element. And I need people to understand that the EQ element is not soft and mushy. There are very concrete things you can do to execute on this. So I'm going to tell you what the first things that I do, I didn't know I was doing them, but I have now documented them. When I am meeting a prospect or a client, or deepening a relationship with a prospect or a client, there has been this checklist in my head that I didn't even know existed of the things that I'm trying to learn about this person and their business and let them know how important it is to me that I'm learning it right. And that's the piece that anytime I've talked to somebody about what has been the biggest value in what we've done, yes, they'll talk about things like, oh, we ten x'ed the ability to, you know, the valuation on our business because we did ABC with Pam or, my books have never been in more neat order, and I'm comfortable that I know what money's in the bank yet. That's all good. But what every one of them actually says is, pam understands. Pam knew what I needed. Well, yes, that's true. But it's true for a very important reason. I asked questions, listened to the answers, and paid attention to the nonverbal cues. Okay, so what are we talking about there, and how can you execute those three things? Ask questions, listen, and pay attention to the nonverbal cues, especially when you're somebody like me that likes to talk a lot. My biggest opportunity for development that I continue to ask my team to help me on is that I talk. And the minute you said something to me, I'm about how we make it work. Right. Problem solver in me. But I've learned to listen and to watch for the nonverbal cues. So how does this play out? Right. So I made a few notes on the things that I very specifically make sure I ask about whenever, at any point in a relationship, as you're building the relationship, but certainly before you go live with a client, as a client, there's a set of things that you should know as a bookkeeper or a finance professional, and as an entrepreneur who's not a bookkeeper or finance professional, but you're looking for one. There is a very clear set of four or five things that you should be pretty confident that anybody you're hiring has asked and knows about from you. Okay. And they're not what you'd expect. So we're going to go down the list here. But the first is, and I'll talk about this so that I don't get myself all confused and twisted. I'll talk about this as if I am the finance professional that you are thinking of engaging. Okay. What I'm going to do always, is want to know your personal story. So whether I know that because somebody else has shared it with me, okay. But I want to hear your version of your personal story, and it always comes out in the conversations. And by this, I don't mean, you know, bookkeeper or finance professional. You make a list of these questions and ask them, hi, what's your personal story? But what you want to do is ask questions that make it clear that you want to draw that out. So things like, oh, where were you raised to? Do you have siblings? Do you know what's your favorite game to play? Are you an athlete? Are you a musician? So as you're listening to these people talk, as you're looking at the background, here's the non verbal cues. Be looking at the background when they're talking to you. Is there a guitar hanging behind them? Is there a basketball sitting on their desk? Like, get to know what their personal interests and story are, and there's a good reason for this. Okay, so the personal story, draw it out of what they're telling you. Ask questions that are comfortable and make sense that will give you hints about the personal profile you're drawing of this person. Now, I draw that personal profile and keep a picture of it in my head so that whenever I'm dealing with them, I know this profile. I add to it whenever I pick up more hints. Okay, so your bookkeeper, your accountant, youre tax CFO person should kind of know this about you, and I should know it if I'm going to serve you well. So in that a little bit separate is what are the personal goals? So through all this, I'm going to start to hear, I want to retire when I'm 65. I want to be work forever, but I want to be able to travel. I want to expand the different things that I do. I want to change from a business operator to a business owner to a business investor. So what are some of the personal goals they have now, this you can ask outright, you know, tell me, kind of aside from the business, what are some of the personal goals you have? I have a child who wants to go to college, and therefore I need to save, you know, x amount of money by a certain date or I've never been out of debt and I'm ready to be out of debt. What are the things that are driving them personally? What? And in these goals, you're going to hear about what's important to them, and you're also going to hear about the things that have triggered them, because a lot of times, people's personal goals are to compensate for or overcome challenges that they've had. Right. So listen, in the challenges that they've had when they're talking to you about their personal goals, what stands out, what's been important, what might be the triggers that you'll want to avoid. So you're going to have their personal goals section and you're going to have blown out this picture of the person because now you know their triggers, what drives them personally. The second two points are very easy. You're going to do the same thing for the business. Right? What is the business story? And here it's okay to say, hey, tell me about your business. A quick overview of what's gotten you here. What's gone well? What's gone poorly? Is it where you want it to be? Is it further along than you want it to be? Are you doing what you want to do in the business here? You're going to really dial in to these questions and ask them, ask them explicitly. It's totally okay to do that. And as part of that, you want to also extract what's their biggest pain point in that business. So personal, personal goals. Tell me about your business. What are the pain points in your business? And then finally, what are the goals for the business? Now, this may be the first time that the person that you're working with has actually connected their business goals to their personal goals. They may not have done that yet. You can very often be the very first person, person to make that point for them. So listen for that. If the business goals are, hey, I want to make, you know,$200,000 a year out of my business and I spend 100% of my time in it. And the personal goal was I want to be making a million dollars a year. Then you very clearly know and can help them understand the gap between, yeah, you got, you're pretty far apart here. So what are we going to do to change something? Are we going to increase the income in your existing business? Are we going to give you time to look at other passive income items? Are we going to blah, blah, blah. But you may be helping them make that plugin for the first time. And if you do, you become a very special person to them. You've added the EQ component, the empathy component, the, hey, you're in this for a reason component. And notice none of this yet has had anything to do with accounting or depreciation or amortization or business value or. I haven't even used a finance word yet, I don't think, except maybe to say money. Right. And that's what's important to that human that you're talking to. Okay? And that's why this EQ component is so important. Now, there are many, many other things. There's one more I want to touch on that you want to make absolutely sure you completely understand before you hop out and just go pumping with what you can do from a business standpoint. And that is their communication style. Now, a lot of times you can figure this out without asking it directly, which is great if you can. If they're a person who draws when they're talking to you, do they talk in images? Do they talk in numbers? Do they say things like, oh, I hear what you mean there, or do they say, I see what you mean there? Those are kind of very different hints about how they're going to respond. The information you give back to them. And now that you know who they are, and now that you know what their business is doing, you need to speak to them in a way. They're going to hear you. So you want to understand how they like to communicate. Sometimes this will also be a direct question. You can make observations, but you can also say, hey, how do you like to communicate? Would you prefer that I do a loom video and explain something to you? That I call you and talk through it? That I email you a written explanation? That we chat on text in quick sentences, get to know what their communication preferences are. Now, they will tell you some things, and 50% of that will be accurate. Because I know when somebody asks me that question, I'll say, oh, I like blah, blah, blah. And most of the time I do, but sometimes I hate it. Right. But you will learn through practice where they're engaged, when they're engaged, pay attention to those nonverbal signs, and when they kind of glaze over and blank out. And you want to make sure that whatever you're doing gets that engagement light on, not the, oh, my God, I'm bored. I can't believe I'm sitting through this light. Okay, so again, just to recap, before you can become an effective service provider, probably of any kind, but certainly a bookkeeper, finance person, accountant, you really need to, if you want to become a big value add to your clients, you want to get to know them, you want to get to know their business, and you want to get to know how they communicate. So that's our one, two, three today, the person, the business, the communication style. I hope that's helpful to you, and I cannot wait to see you here next week. We are. We love doing these. If you have ideas for other things that we can cover, whether you're a finance professional trying to get more information, or whether you're an entrepreneur trying to get better idea of how to find the right financial people, we are here for you on the Cash Flow podcast and we will see you next week. Cheers. Thanks so much for watching the Cash Flow podcast with us. 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