So I've had some thoughts this week, and I jotted them down in my notes app on my phone, and it's just taken me a few days to get around to actually talking about it properly.
And basically the thing that we are is trying to do something. What is this? I don't want to use Zoom audio device. No idea what that is.
This is the joys of technology. Sometimes, actually, I'm just gonna go off on a tangent. But sometimes I want to do something, and then, oh, I've got to attach a microphone. It's gonna do some weird stuff. It's gonna, like, ask me for some weird permissions, and I thought I'd sorted it all, and now it's like, it just keeps asking if I want to connect to all sorts of other microphones which do not exist. So I don't know what's going on there. I've also had to turn my fan off, which was keeping me nice and cool, but it's just like, I know that it's going to mess up the sound.
SoI am melting a little bit more. And between Glastonbury coverage, I'm interested to see what happens at 4pm on Saturday. If you know, you know, we'll see, yeah, see what gets, what gets covered by that. And actually, that's slightly related to what I want to talk about today, which is essentially, it feels a lot like at the moment, that kind of harmful things are really well resourced, like, from genocide, surveillance, climate collapse, right wing media, all of the stuff that is kind of propping that up is being paid for, backed by billionaires, props up by these great big corporations. And, like, I don't want to go into all of that, because it's stuff that we are all being bombarded with every time we look on social media and the news and all of those things.
So I'm not going to go like delving into that in a lot of detail, because I know, you know, but it got me thinking and slightly moving on from when we when I last did a podcast episode last week, the idea of, like lists of things to do, and not really loving that, you know, giving people tasks to do, but I have, like a list. It's not numbered. It's just a list of thoughts that have popped up as I thought about this point. And it's actually stuff that I, yeah, thought about a lot and act upon in life, etc, basically, just like the idea this thing I'm also really passionate about that we can feel like, oh, money is bad, because bad things happen with the people that have got lots of money. But we can also look at it as well.
Money can do powerful stuff. So what we do with money, and if it's got good intention behind it, that can be really powerful for the right reasons. So this can seem, you know, tricky if you are like a small business and you haven't got access to a lot of, you know, funding, it's like, well, how can you make a dent in all of this world?
But actually, there's some really good ways that you can still make that money count, and how you can actually build it into your business when it feels like money's tight in particular, that's what I've kind of jotted down some thoughts on. So this isn't a to do list.
This is just a like, if something takes your fancy, give it a go, and some of these will just take a moment. You could literally do them as I talk. This one in particular I'll go straight into actually. So one thing that we all do have is probably a bank that we use, personally, business, etc, different things. And you can check if they are like, one of the good guys, if, if that is such a thing in banking, or one of the less bad guys, I suppose, might be the way to say it. So if you, if you go to like, just type in bank dot green on the internet, you can put the name of the bank that you use, and you can check if they are, like, good rating for not, you know, doing climate damage and funding war crimes, etc, basically, yeah, actually, I think it's more.
I won't go into too much detail on what it is, because I don't actually know if it's looking at all sides, but it's definitely looking at the ecological impacts. And usually if people care about fossil fuels, they probably care about
weapons manufacturing, etc, as well. So anyway, you can type it in find out what your bank's doing. And that's a really good starting point to say, like, oh, actually, yeah, I could use a different bank, maybe. Or you could be smug and be like, brilliant, my bank's fine. They've, they've rated, well, I'm all good. At least I can go round with some, you know, pride that my bank is a decent bank. Or you could maybe think about switching to another bank if, you know, no pressure to do it immediately, but just it would be one on, you know, in mind, then you can sort of think, actually, I will maybe think about changing this.
And it's never been more simple, I guess, to change banking with all the Challenger banks and things as well. So that's, yeah, that's the first one, just looking at that. The other one is actually also, and I'm not this is obviously not pension advice, because, you know, etc, disclaimers, but obviously your pension is also a big one. It's like, you know, same as banks, big financial institutions, check. I don't think there's a same comparison site for them, but you can obviously check out what your pension fund is doing with the money. Usually, you can influence this by changing the specific pension scheme or the fund that it's investing in, or changing provider if you're not happy with it. Yeah, so this one, I mean, I This isn't obviously advice, because, like, that's to go to a pension advisory person for or financial advisor, and specifically to your situation.
But me, personally, this isn't talking as me, as an accountant or whatever, or a CFO, just me. This is my personal decision. Was to use Pension Bee, which is quite popular for self employed people, and I was able to dial in on the green credentials and their non harming credentials. I think it might, I don't know. I think, to be fair, I think they perform quite well when you're not like destroying the planet generally. But that's obviously not,yeah, the risk tolerance, obviously, is very personal and need advice on, etc. But I'm just saying that that's what I've done, is I was able to go in and, like, choose a plan that I was comfortable with that was, was not going to be it was going to use the money in the right way. So that's just a couple of things you can tweak when you feel maybe like disempowered, but you are still using banking products, pensions, etc, you can go and have a look, and again, that's not telling you which one you should use, how to invest your money. It's just saying.
Be aware of like, the credentials of these things and what they're funding. Because actually, that's really powerful, because you think how much money is is actually locked up in pensions, and that's being used by pension companies to invest in various things, some good, not some not so good. So the other thing that I also see in my work, particularly, is a lot of people want to, like, donate to charity. And it's a really nice idea to donate, like, a percentage of your profits to charity. But sometimes you're like, actually, I can't quite afford that. Now, because things are tight, I need to pay myself. I need to pay my team and my bills and my tax and all of that. And actually, there just isn't really enough left over to be making a charity donation or, you know, something like that. So what can be really helpful in this instance?
And it might, may or may not work for you, but this is just an idea is, and it's something that I do myself, is if I am running like a specific event. I've got one that I'm running a workshop and running in August, and I've done a few in the past. I haven't done one for ages, to be fair, so that's why they're kind of a little bit vague in the past, but that I've run from I've done a few for communities, but haven't run my own one. But I, for the last 18 months. Say, when I run events myself, I do that like factor into the price of the ticket that I'm going to make a contribution.
So for example, the one that I've got a VAT workshop coming up in August, and I've said five pound per ticket price is going to be donated to Doctors Without Borders. So that's something that I can, you know, as the money comes in, hopefully for people booking onto it, I can take that money and straight away, make it go into the where it needs to go. So it's not like a case of waiting to see what profit you've got left over. You've already factored it into the price. And you know that for each one you're going to take it out and and pay it across. And that can be really nice, because it's a way of, you know, if you're doing like, could be anything really, it could be, you know, just like a some sort of could be a product sale with every products, or whether so many product sales you're going to donate so much.
Or it could be service based. It could be like, course, places on, yeah, like, like, I've got, like, any sorts of events, or any, you know, any, for every one to one client, or for free. I don't know lots of different options, but just maybe think how you can maybe build that into, like, yeah, one thing that you could maybe consider if it's if it's something that you could do, and that's a nice way, because it's not looking at what you've got left over. You know, sometimes that's how profit feels, like it's you're scrabbling about. And you Oh, it would be lovely to do it.
And, you know, I hear lots of people say it would be really. To do it, but I can't quite stretch at the moment. That's a way of just building it in upfront. And it might even mean you put your prices up slightly to do this. And hopefully, you know, the people that are going to be buying from you will be thinking, great, that's really nice. I'm would like to support that thing. And it might even drive your, you know, marketing and sales. So that's a nice one. One I'm really passionate about is what, when I say passionate about it, I I do this myself, and I'm really like, how have I got this, like, mental thing?
It's trying to do some weird thing with the microphone. Again, I've got this thing where I'm like, why in my head, and this is all marketing and the ease of the transaction stuff, but in my head, I'm like, it's so easy to give a big tech platform your money, so, like, IT services, subscriptions, all of these different things. Amazon, you know, it's really easy to give them your money because you're it's a one click thing. It's really simple. You know, you're thinking, oh, I need this thing.
Like, I often have to go through the apps and services I'm using and check, like, do I actually still need it? Because I'm still paying for it. And for some reason, even if it's ticking away in the background, I don't really care too much. I don't always look at it when I should work out what all of them are for and if I still need them, and it's interesting that we, you know, this might relate to you, or you might be a lot more careful about these things, but, you know, it's easy to just have that like, and it could be like the money going to Netflix, or, you know, it could be a streaming service, or it could be like a business subscription, and you're not quite sure exactly what it is that you're paying the big company for, but it's probably something important to do with your website or the it or something, or it might be one of these things that you try, you think, I'm going to use this, and maybe you don't.
But essentially, the thing with that is, we so easily give our money to these big corporations because they've got all the solutions. And then sometimes when we're not so forthcoming, or this is my personal reflection at paying like creators, and in this times of right wing media, we need to make sure that the people doing the, you know, the good creative, independent stuff, are getting resourced and all the night, you know, not just like investigative journalism or something. But I just mean, like, the people that are creating the stuff that's the good stuff that, you know, helps us to stay sane, even entertains us, does the deep questioning, all of it, like a lot of these people have, like, Patreon accounts.
I'm not saying the Patreon is probably great, because they probably take a massive cut or something, but you know, like you know, they've got, in a way, of giving them, like, a five or a month to support their work, and that means that they can do it in a nice way, and it can sustain their work and their messaging, and they can serve more people. And that is something that, you know, when I consider how much money goes to big corporations for things that are probably important, maybe aren't, maybe sometimes I just haven't cancelled yet. This isn't about saying, like, you need to go through and save money and cut things out.
Like, maybe you could, maybe you could save, you know, maybe a challenge should be, see if you can save 10 quid on some like, random thing that you've signed up to and not used, and then redeploy that money into a creator, supporting a creator that you really value their work, and you're like, using them on a free level, but just a as a way to kind of give back, and, you know, show your support, because that's going to then amplify what they can do.
So the other one is, actually, I've got, I'm probably not going to do them all. I'm going to say them quickly, actually, so just as a couple to give you a flavour. So obviously, you know, like, if, and sometimes this takes resourcing, because you've got to, like, research and stuff, but this is where you can also crowd source the research. Say, for example, like, if you want to find an alternative to something that you can easily click and get on Amazon if you want to, like, get a nice gift for clients or, like, you know, any particular things that you need to buy for your service, you know, to deliver your products or services, you could just, like, crowdsource it to ask people, like, put a story up on Instagram and say, like, oh, you know, where can I get a good I don't know. Maybe it's labels you need to get made or, or, like, gift, nice gifts for clients, for new clients, you know. And people will, like, flood your story, stick a figure with ideas.
I'm sure they'll be like, raving to shout out people they know locally or in the community, and, or like, Great, yeah, great thing. So it doesn't have to sometimes these things is like, Oh, I've got to, like, now devote my time to research, but like, outsource that research by asking people and see what they say, see what they have to suggest, because they might know, like a real lovely gem that is, yeah, something that you didn't think of. Yeah, in my mind, I then went on a bit of a tangent, so thinking, Oh, wouldn't it be amazing?
We could, like, have almost like the idea of a library of things for businesses. So we could, like, share stuff. But then logistics, sometimes it's quite tricky, isn't it, unless it's local. And then I thought, well, services would be great, but actually, that can be quite tricky as well. But anyway, that's a thought that I've got in my mind, but I think I'll save that for now and just stick with the examples we've got. But obviously, if, Yeah, take that and run with it.
If you, if you like that idea as well, yeah, I think that's where got a couple of things anyway to have a think about. Yeah, let me know if you try any of them. I'd love to know your feedback. If you, if you go off and, like, check your bank out and see what you know, see what they're all about, let me know about it. If you try putting a sticker up on an Instagram to get other people's ideas of alternatives. If, yeah, tag me. If you do make a like, a donation part of your offer, and then promote that, I'd love to see it, yeah. Otherwise, I will talk with you soon, and have a good rest of the day.
Don't know when that stops, for some reason I'm Yeah, I won't go into it, but the platform just keeps going, like, Oh, John Jesus, other microphone and then cutting me out. So have a good rest of the day, and I look forward to chatting with you soon
