Brian Nichols  
Instead of focusing on winning arguments, we're teaching the basic fundamentals of sales and marketing and how we can use them to win in the world of politics, teaching you how to meet people where they're at on the issues they care about. Welcome to The Brian Nichols Show. Well, happy Tuesday there, folks Nichols here on The Brian Nichols Show. And thank you for joining us on the force, another fun filled episode. I am as always your humble host. And today we're talking econ, we're going going to our good friends over at the Mises Institute, and we're talking economics for business, Hunter Hastings. Welcome to the program.

Hunter Hastings  
Hello, Brian. Great to be here. Thanks for the invitation.

Brian Nichols  
Absolutely, Hunter. Thank you for joining us on the program today. And thank you for what you're doing over at the Mises Institute over specifically at economics for business, we The Brian Nichols Show, we've taken a very hard turn towards working with business owners, small business owners, large business owners, entrepreneurs, because I see right there, there is a large, untapped market of individuals who are Liberty minded because the very nature of being a small business owner or an entrepreneur means that you try to do things on your own outside of government, and they see solutions overtly non government and I say they're easily one of the groups we should be reaching out to and building relationships with, I would daresay you agree the same with what you're doing with economics for business. So let's start things off, introduce ourselves to Hunter Hastings. But also, let's introduce us to the brand new economics for business a part of the Mises Institute.

Hunter Hastings  
You know, Thanks, Brian, we're in the same space as you are. We love small business, although I don't much like the term small business. I like the term entrepreneur and entrepreneurs is creating value for customers and the customers reward you. So it's a it's a wonderful attitude, as you say, it's the the absolute opposite of politics, in politics, there are winners and losers, and it's always a fight. In economics, there are only winners, it's it's mutual value sharing, if I do something for you, I produce something that you want you pay me for it, we're both happy. So an entrepreneurial society, which would be a much better society than the one we have now. So we're working our way in that direction. And the the other thing about small businesses, it's all business. 99.9% of businesses in America are what the government calls small, but they're the middle class of business. They're, they're the backbone of the economy, they create most value, they create most jobs, they create economic growth, they create innovation. And so they are the backbone. And economics is Business and Economics for business. We're trying to, we're trying to assert that. So it's based on Austrian economics, which, if I was a brand manager, Brian, I wouldn't call my brand Austrian economics, I'd call it something else. But it's the brand of economics for entrepreneurs, for individuals for the creation of value. And to do that in a in the freest of free markets, where the customer is the boss, and the customer determines what's produced by buying or not not buying. And so we help entrepreneurs, we help small businesses to succeed in that economic arena.

Brian Nichols  
You know, it's funny, I think I found myself realizing that the correlation between the business world and that Austrian economics world really made sense. I was listening to a podcast with a gentleman named Victor Antonio, and he is a sales legend. And he was discussing about how he's on a podcast about how he was a big fan of iron Rand, and it caught me off guard and then he started digging into the ideas behind not only objectivism but start talking about libertarianism and the value of capitalism. And I said, Wait, this, this is a sales guy. And then I listened to the next podcast was Jeffrey Gitomer, who's also another sales legend out there in the world of sales. And he on his website, his favorite books were Atlas Shrugged, and in a few other libertarian leaning economics books, and it struck me again that okay, this now now, it's definitely not just an occurrence. Now, we're seeing this as an actual happening. This is a thing, and we should be focusing more on this. And I was just speaking to you beforehand. I went to an event just this past week, as we're recording here on Monday, the 21st. Yeah, couldn't February, and it was up in Wisconsin. It was with a bunch of small business owners at the young guns winter Summit. And it was a non political event, like there was no political leaning, but it was obvious. Pretty much everybody there was in the mindset of being pro limited government because they saw themselves in that that realm of being the individual in the economy, creating value solving problems, and they Don't need that extra government entity to help facilitate that happening in many cases, actually, it's that government entity that's holding them back. So with that being said, 100, let's dig into economics for business. So this is obviously the new venture from the Mises Institute. And I want discuss what this is doing for business owners, and how are you're having success in terms of actually reaching out and getting conversation started with people we haven't been talking to?

Hunter Hastings  
Well, we think of the entrepreneurial journey, Brian, you, you, you begin your journey, you're trying to create value for customers, you're trying to build a company you're trying to grow. And we try to break down that entrepreneurial, entrepreneurial journey into steps that are accessible for everybody. And the first step is imagination, which sounds kind of woolly and imprecise, but it's not. The the whole point about economics is imagining a better future the customer imagines one, Otherwise, they wouldn't be trying new things. And the entrepreneur imagines one, so what is the the essence of imagining a better future? And so we call that a value proposition? Who's my customer? What do they need? What have I got for them, and I can give them a value proposition. And our site has a number of tools to help entrepreneurs do that we've got a value proposition template, for example, that you can download, you can fill in you can see examples of it, you can you can see how to apply it, then the next step is a design process. So how do you get from a value proposition which is an idea sketched on paper to an actual service or an actual product? Well, it's a series of steps, they become more and more material, you know, closer and closer to the market more and more like a prototype, and then a finished version. And you test that you test that for constant feedback from the customer. So by the time you've finished the design process, you're pretty accurate, that you've got something that the customer wants. The third step is marketing, which is, is a learning process for the customer. And one of the things Austrian and Austrians understand, Brian, is the value for the customer is a process. It's not one point in time, it's not one transaction. It's a it's a learning process. So the first learning is, Hey, I see something that Brian's offering me? Do I think there's anything in that for me? That's the first step then relatively, compared with other things I could do? Does it have any value for me? Then does it have any social value all other people think if I, if I buy this, are the people buying it, they make that comparison, then it's got to exchange value is the price, right? Will I change my dollars for this, then they use it that's experienced value, and then they step back and they say, did that meet my expectations, you can map all of this out. And you can get into that, that process, we have what we call an Austrian business model. And it's four sections of value, identifying potential value, here's something they might want, delivering that value, putting it all together through the design process, completing the exchange, what you call sales, and then the value ation of that stepping back and saying, did it work? Should I change it? Should I improve it? So we've got tons of tools and processes like that on the site that people can explore and walk around and find something that's useful to them. The second thing we want to provide on the site, Brian is is a community. So there's three things you need to be a successful entrepreneur, you need knowledge, and we've got lots of that. We've got tools, things you can do actions you can take. And the third is experience. And a big issue for small business is that they don't have that experience, right, they just getting started on their businesses is pretty limited. So the best way to get experience is share it with others. So we've got a community where you can come in, ask questions, have you had this problem before? What about this? What do you do about marketing, somebody will respond to you. And to your opening point, we're building up this community of entrepreneurs of small business people that can share experience, which will get them smarter and moving faster over time. So those are the three things knowledge tools.

Brian Nichols  
I watched you there for a second there, Hunter. But I love when we're looking through the economics for business website here. The community aspect you have specifically like you're mentioned, crypto enthusiast, marketing professionals, software developers, this is an opportunity for people to really engage in conversations. And let's be frank, these are conversations that aren't being allowed in some other areas we're seeing right now online. And actually this was one of the discussions I led at the summit this past week was big tech censorship and what business owners can do to fight back so I think right there and that maybe is also why I saw what you guys were doing. It got me so excited because we are right now seeing an entire group of individuals waking up and starting to speak out and fight back in right there. We haven't seen that really, we saw all of a sudden, an entire brand new group of voters called parents decide to wake up with school choice initiatives, Hu Ra. And by the way, shout out to our good friend, Cory de Angeles, because he's been absolutely crushing it at the different state houses, educating state lawmakers on the value and importance of funding students, not systems. But also we're seeing I would say right now your average person, despite the push from the corporate media to get us going to war with Russia over the Ukraine fiasco, your average person's like, Nah, not into that. And I'm feeling very much like we saw with Syria back in 2014. Yeah, your average person just doesn't want to get involved. And now to your average business owner, that and this maybe is the biggest thing, the past two years of COVID hysteria, the the insanity of having your business arbitrarily shut down, told, I'm sorry, you're not an essential worker, you can't go to work today. And families not only seeing their their livelihoods lost, but now entire generations of wealth completely just evaporated overnight. And And right now, your your average business owner, they're done. They're not playing that game anymore. So I'm curious with the conversations that you're having with small business owners, and especially in these discussion groups, do you see that that approach from the business owner, the entrepreneur, to fight back against the, in some cases, tyranny from the the government mandates?

Hunter Hastings  
Yeah, I love that. That concept, Brian, and I think that, that entrepreneurship is the way to, to make that progress, I think of a just slightly differently, and this is what people tell me as well, that it's not so much a fight head to head, because we'll probably lose that one. It's separation, and decentralization. And in business, people are looking for ways to separate themselves from from government. So if you take Bitcoin and crypto as an example, that's exactly what that is, you can conduct your your transactions on the blockchain ledger with your crypto. And that's entirely separate from government, it's shielded. And the whole defy decentralized finance approach is very much like that, I don't need banks, and I don't need even the big venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, I just need a friends and a community and a way of attaching to people that I can I can raise money that way, there's a great movement that I was learning from a young man in Germany, called the Free Software Movement, which is, you know, young kids who are just interested in building software, they'll, they'll make something maybe they make it for themselves, and they say, Hey, this might be of use to somebody else. So they put it on the market without a price, they just say, hey, download this if you'd like it, and people pay them back in, in Bitcoin or in Satoshis, you know, millions of millions of Bitcoin, and they call it stacking sets, I've just learned that terminology. But the point is, it's a value for value exchange, it's separate from the government, nobody's tracking it, nobody's regulating it. And I think we're gonna find more and more ways to do that. And obviously, not all entrepreneurs can do that they've they're regulated, they got to follow the rules, they got to sign the forms, they got to form their business, you know, according to state and federal regulations, and so on. But the general approach is the entrepreneur to the customer, the customer to the entrepreneur, and keep that between us mutually both voluntary exchange, and we'll figure out ways to keep the government out of it, we're gonna have to pay our taxes, we're gonna have to pay stop at red lights. But beyond that, we can separate more and more. And we can decentralize, which is the other key to this, the government's are a giant hierarchy stumping on you all the time. Whereas on the internet, and with network communications, and network businesses, network supply chains, we know we can escape from that hierarchy, we can do everything horizontally between peers. So those trends, I think, are very, very promising.

Brian Nichols  
I would say they're absolutely promising. And I would also say, the policy perspective, too, is interesting, because a lot of business owners and I even saw this I did an interview recently with a noted salesperson that could say who it was. But they they said beforehand, they said yeah, I don't I don't do politics, just so you know, I was like I got you no worries, no politics. But that's starting to actually change because when I was at the young guns summit, I had quite a few people come up to me afterwards and say, Thank you for putting your your liberty values next to your business self. And they said that they were thinking about doing that, but they just didn't have that kind of kick to do it. They were afraid. And I think right now we're seeing that change a little bit. Your average person isn't afraid More, they're more willing to stand up and fight back and also go towards policy and get involved in the political infrastructure. Now, we as libertarians, or as Austrians, we try to avoid Government Solutions. But I would say if we can start to reduce the impact of existing government policy, that's a fantastic step in the right direction. So let's kind of go that route Hunter when you're having conversations with these business owners. Do you see any push towards reducing policy and specifically in what areas? Are you seeing that conversation really leading?

Hunter Hastings  
Well, I'll give you two good examples. I think, Brian, one you've already mentioned, which is homeschooling. That's an entrepreneurial solution to state dominated education as a problem. And as you said, moms and dads and parents are figuring out ways to do homeschooling businesses are coming up on the internet, where you can download the curriculum, you know, the Ron Paul curriculum is, is one of the best from Tom woods, but there are there are many more. The Libertas Institute with the Tuttle twins is another source of, of information. There are all kinds of entrepreneurial ways to do homeschooling and education. Another great example of this is the what's happening in the medical field, where individual doctors are setting up their own practices. It's called direct care direct primary care DPC. And they'll they'll find 300 patients that want to subscribe at, you know, $10 a month, whatever the number is, and that gives those patients complete access to the doctor, the doctor can sign up to be have a pharmacy license, so he can, he can prescribe. And it becomes a self contained system. That's not entirely separate from the state system. But it's not in the big hospital system, it doesn't have all of the medical tyranny that typically goes with, with those kinds of hospital systems. So yes, people are finding ways to have this entrepreneurial, decentralized individual solution. And they've got to fight the red tape. But the finding of that can be done, they find in creative ways to do it. And so those are just two examples, which I think are really, really important in terms of education, and medicine, medicines, a place where, where tyranny of not just the government, but the big bureaucracies and the pharmacy companies has been really oppressive. And it's really exciting to see that individuals are finding ways around that, you know, there's a, there's a famous free market set up called the surgery center of Oklahoma, run by a guy called Dr. Keith Smith. And he started a surgery center where the big breakthrough was, I'll put my prices on the internet, you want a hip replacement? It's $27,500. I know what that number is, you know, he's got a price list. And that's exactly what it costs you, you go there, you get the anesthesia, you get the surgeon, you get the treatment, you get the overnight in the hospital, and it's cash. And people come from all over the world, you don't have to wait, you just make an appointment. And that's another entrepreneurial solution. And there's a group called the Free Market Medical Association that is furthering that. And so it's happening everywhere, Brian, we're entrepreneurially creating these separate value centers that deal directly between the entrepreneur and the customer. And they're finding ways around the red tape and the legislation and the bureaucracy. You'd love to see

Brian Nichols  
it, you love to see it. Well, how about this, let's, let's turn the last five or so minutes of the conversation, I want to focus on the business owner, I'm a business owner, let's say and I am looking to take a step get involved, learn more, because I maybe feel a little lost. And I'm looking for some guidance. So help me out. What are the first steps last Lam approach? I look at econ for business.com. Then what?

Hunter Hastings  
Well, you need to understand your own process and your own journey. So often businesses told to start with an idea, you need an idea? Well, you don't you need a customer. And so start with customers, who are you going to serve first? And then how do you figure out what it is that they need that you can provide that that becomes your business. And so we always say start there. The way to gather that data is just to talk to people. One of our friends who was on the podcast a little bit earlier, Brent lindhout said, you know, I decided to get into the construction business, I decided to sell siding, I knew something about siding, so I'd go sell to the construction business that was using siding, and I went and talked to them, I found out that their business needs were nothing to do with siding. They happily buy my siding, but they said three things one, and so The phone to be here when you say you're going to be here. And third, if you can't be honest about it. And so he's built a whole business around that. So this value creation is a feeling. So who are who the customers? What are the feelings that they'd like to have? They don't have now how can I create that feeling. And then we've got all the tools for accounting and marketing and, and selling and management, and organization, those kinds of things. But I would say, start with the customer, and know that customer better than anybody, one of our board members at the Mises Institute, a fella called Bob LADEE. And he started with his customers were restaurants. And he knew something about fire suppression equipment, no fire extinguishers, so he decided to sell fire extinguishers to restaurants. So we start to do that, listen to all the restaurant tours, what they need other stuff as well, that they're worried about ventilation, they need to keep all that smoke and grease out of that kitchen. So he started to get into ventilation systems. And he now he built a business over 30 years. That's now $500 million in size. And it's it's the biggest in its category. It's by far and away the market leader. And he did that by starting with listening to restaurant tours, selling them fire extinguishers, and then just finding out what the what are the stuff that they needed. So start with the customer. That's the ultimate advice.

Brian Nichols  
I love that advice. And my audience there. They're probably smiling and nodding in agreement right now with what everything you just said, because we did a morning sales had also our YouTube subscriber can see that scrolling at the bottom here at the screen. So if you want to go to subscribe, folks, Morning Sales huddle, the Brian Nichols show.com. But we did an episode here where I cover one of my morning sales, huddle emails, and we talked about trying to get rich, find your niche. And the reason being is because when you find that specific niche that you can speak to, you will get unique insight and unique insight is just insight beyond the obvious, right, but you will be able to see things and create value that other people simply can't because you're seeing it on a constant basis. I say this all the time when I'm talking to CIOs, and one of the common objections you'll hear is yeah, we already we got this right. But do you because on top of handling your phone systems on top, on top of handling your bandwidth, your voice solutions, your cybersecurity, you have so many other different agenda items that you have to make sure that you're hitting, can you be an expert in every single area, whereas my day job, I literally have to be an expert. That's that's what my job is, I become an expert in the voice data, telecommunications cybersecurity industry. And with that, like I am able to leverage the best people out there to bring that to the table for these business owners and IT professionals. So the same thing is true when you are in the world of sales. And regardless, if you're an entrepreneur or a business owner, the idea of knowing who your customer is, is so paramount because it's not a matter of what you sell, but what the person is out there that they're buying. It doesn't matter what you sell, there's nobody out there that's actually willing to buy your product. And this all goes into the importance of understanding the economics for business, which, obviously, econ for business.com. We'll include that link in the show notes. But Hunter people want to go ahead and see resources. I was just going ahead and scrolling through over on the the website here. And I noticed that we have some some courses here. I'll bring this up here on the page. But as I do tell us about some of these courses, this course the crazy method Launchpad, if people want to get involved, what do they have to do? And what will entail?

Hunter Hastings  
Well, we're just adding courses to, to our sites, or the one that you you're pointing to is by a wonderful entrepreneur. In Luxembourg, I think anywhere in Europe called Fabrice Testa. And he has written courses. He's taught courses for a lot of people, about Super entrepreneurs, you know how to be a great entrepreneur, how to grow your business fast, how to supercharge it, and so on like that. And then for us, for econ for business, he has created a course which you can go to on our site, you can download, you can participate, you can sign up at any time, you can talk to Fabrice directly. So that's part of our community approach. And Fabrice would love to have you there. And we're adding more courses all the time. And we'll we'll find will co create just like you said, Brian, we think of it as co creation. So you, you listen to people and then you try to respond with what they need. So we'll co create courses. We'd love to hear from anybody about what especially they'd like to see that. And most most of everything is free. Fabrice does call charge a little bit for his course. But everything pretty much on the site is free. And we'd love you to come and look around and tell us what you like.

Brian Nichols  
Awesome. Well, how about this, folks? We'll include the link to econ for business in the show notes all I got to do click the artwork. It'll bring you right to today's episode over at Brian Nichols show.com where you can access all the links Plus, you'll have access to today's transcript plus all 300 300 400. And I don't even know 450 ballpark episodes of The Brian Nichols Show, or somewhere in there. We'll figure it out tomorrow when I actually post the episode. But Hunter Hastings, thank you so much for what you're doing over at econ for business and of course, all the great work you folks are doing over at the Mises Institute. With that being said, final thoughts or words of wisdom to the audience?

Hunter Hastings  
Well, the future is entrepreneurial. And don't think of what you're doing a small business. Think of it as the service ethic, people serving people mutually rewarding each other for it. The future lies with them that a lot of these big companies are dinosaurs, we're going to replace them all with, with networked, interconnected entrepreneurial businesses. And that's where the growth is. It's also where the excitement is where the purpose is, where the meaning is, it's where all the personal fulfillment is so dive in.

Brian Nichols  
The audience cannot agree more. They hear this preached every single day. So it's great to hear. Yeah, we're actually seeing the connection between the world of politics and the world of business, truly coming together. And we're seeing that with economics for business. Thank you. For that being said, Hunter Hastings. Thank you for joining us on today's episode of The Brian Nichols Show.

Hunter Hastings  
Thank you, Brian. It's been great. Thank you very much.

Brian Nichols  
All right, and we are clear

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