Why Cash Is No Longer King with Owen Toller from Dojo

When we're looking to save every penny on our expenses it might feel like a smart move to move towards a cash based business. Here to explore with me why that may not be the best idea is Owen Toller, also known as the Card Machine Guy. He looks after over 800 customers across the UK, particularly in the beauty industry, alongside Dojo Card Processing. Let's get him on the show, shall we? All on Build Your Salon Owen, welcome to the Build Your Salon podcast. Hey Phil, how are you doing? You alright? Thanks for having me on. No problem at all. It's my absolute pleasure. So we're going to really annoy some people today, I think, by telling them that they shouldn't be dealing with cash. And I wanted to invite you on the podcast because I keep seeing a particular flavour of post on social media. And it goes something like this, that if you spend £50 in your favourite Indian restaurant, and then they take that £50 and go off and spend it in a laundrette, and they take that £50 and go off and spend it in a barber shop, and it's still £50 and the nasty parasite card processing companies and banks don't take their slice of it. Which I feel is absolute drivel and a load of nonsense. Apart from anything, the biggest problem that we've got in this country, of course, is that, well, first of all, if you're VAT registered, that £50 is £40 straight away. So I've always felt that actually it was more the taxation side of things we need to be tackling. But I so I wanted to bring you on so we can kind of unpick a little bit why cash may not be king and that perhaps we could look at a more innovative way of doing business. And but before that, let's kind of get some introductions underway. So why don't you tell my listeners who you are and how you ended up doing what you're doing? Yeah, for sure. So again, so I'm Owen. I'm very active on Instagram, the car machine guy. And I've been in the industry for about six years now. And as you mentioned, I've got about 800 different customers across the country, mainly in the beauty industry, but I look after a lot of restaurants and we do a lot of retail as well. So before working for Dojo, I was just working a very boring job at Lloyd's, actually, as it happens, cashing in checks. And yeah, very, very, very mundane. Yes. I've been in the industry for six years now. And I love looking after people, love getting about meeting loads of different businesses. I've got some really, really quirky customers and a lot of them have come over to myself. They save a lot of money. We we upgrade their technology.

And yeah, it's an industry I'm really passionate in, which I think is super important to love what you do. Absolutely. So we went from banking into card processing. So you're not worried. You're not worried about being popular then. No, I knew that I wanted to be in some kind of sort of professional professional environment around money, something like that around finance. So there's a lot of crossovers and a lot of sort of with anti money laundering and stuff like that. A lot of safety carries over from sort of traditional banks to the likes of Dojo. It's all very, very safe and very like a really, really sort of high security technology and industry. So there's a lot of crossover there. So let's let's jump in a little bit and start unpacking why cash may not be king. Now, in my own salon business, we were actually ahead of the curve and we were cashless way before it became fashionable. And that was off the back of two things, actually. The first was I read a book by a chap called Rob Moore called Money. And he said money loves speed. And I think sometimes it's really tempting to think that the quickest way to get money is cash. But we can we can talk about that may not be the case in just a second to. And the other thing that happened was I went to Stockholm, which is home of the ABBA Museum. And it may be a surprise, listeners, but your Uncle Phil is an old homosexual, which means, of course, I had to go to the ABBA Museum when I was in Stockholm, because that's mandatory for all gays to pay homage to the great ABBA. And the ABBA Museum don't accept cash. It was it was card only and it was the first business I'd ever seen which was card only. So I came back to the salon and I've always said the best ideas always come from outside our industry rather than just copying what everybody else does. And we stopped taking cash and we did meet a little bit of resistance when we stopped taking cash, just a little bit from our customers. And it was mainly around. So we're a hair salon and it was mainly around people who were kind of saying, oh, you know, my son's booked in at three o'clock, you know, after school kind of thing.

And children were coming in without parents and they didn't have cards and all the rest of it. And that was about the only resistance that we met, really. And yet there's this reluctance to get rid of cash. So why do you think it is that small businesses like hair salons and beauty therapists, why do you think it is that we're reluctant to stop taking cash and move people over to card? Well, we're reluctant. I think a lot of people are probably pretty set in their ways and they're very used to taking cash and perhaps being cash only. But I think it's really important to highlight. There's just so many benefits of at least offering card payments. I'm not necessarily saying go card only, but I think it's at least very, very important not to be cash only. And there's so many different reasons. So firstly, it's offering that flexibility to your customer. We've all had it. You're going into a local bakery or something like that. You're really excited. You've maybe been queuing. You're really excited to go and order some food or something like that. You get to the counter and you see cash only straight away. I'm thinking or a lot of people are thinking, well, that's no good. I haven't got cash. And if there's not an ATM nearby, you've just lost that sale. And I think that carries over to all industries, really. So for that reason alone, I think it's really important to have that flexibility regarding at least offering that card payment. And I do think there's still a lot of people who are stuck, maybe reluctant to go and taking card. So I think it's important. And that's just one way. I know we're going to cover lots of different reasons, but certainly important to at least have the option. Hmm. I think you're absolutely right. And in my experience, and I don't know if this is I haven't got any stats behind it. Perhaps, you know, but in my experience, people that are paying by card tend to spend more. But we'd see the average bill go up a lot higher when we're taking card payments. Yeah, I think it's I think it's convenience factor as well. If you're again, if you're in a salon, if you're in any business and you can pick up a couple of bits and tap your card, knowing you're not restricted to a five pound note, I think you're more likely to have that impulse buying as well. It just occurred to me, actually, while you were talking about going out to the ATM. You know, people are kind of complaining about, you know, car companies taking, you know, one percent or two percent of whatever it is that they're turning over. And we forget about the fact that actually you've got to pay one pound eighty five to get your bloody twenty quid out of the ATM anyway.

It costs you a dumb sight more to draw the cash out. For sure. And unfortunately, scams and people putting these card swiping machines inside an ATM is becoming more and more of a problem as well. So I actually think there is more of a risk factor in drawing your money out of an ATM now. But yeah, you're spot on there. I think you're also being very kind. I think one of the reasons and I don't mind being unkind. I think one of the reasons that people are reluctant to get rid of cash is because they are probably in a position where they can't run a profitable business if they declared all of their income. And I think that's a reflection. My dears, this is your kick up the arse. This is more a reflection of your pricing and your cash management than it is about your policies on how you take payments. If the only way that you can stay in business is by taking a little bit of funny money, then I'm afraid you've got bigger problems than whether to take card or cash. But we kind of went through a bit of a journey, didn't we? Because after Covid came along, there were lots and lots of people who were then neglecting cash altogether or rejecting cash altogether. And we went on to went on to everybody looking for card payments. And then we've kind of come on a bit of a journey where there seems to be this resistance again, doesn't there? It's interesting because there are some really big reasons why people wanted to start taking card. Right. So, I mean, first and foremost is the germs factor. They say on coins and cash, there's the same kind of bacteria you'd find on the toilet. Right. So it makes sense to stop passing those germs about particularly with the likes of Covid and just a general, you know, flus and colds and things like that. It makes sense for your staff if they can take a contactless payment. I don't know. You would have seen during Covid they had the plastic shields as well. So I actually went where possible while I was getting out messages to my customers that they can actually put the... So I've got one of the dojo machines here. You can actually put that straight through the glass as well. Now, there's probably still going to be some customers who are perhaps still maybe in the Covid guidelines perhaps. But so you can actually just tap that through the actual glass. So the point I'm making here is, be it because of a pandemic or not a pandemic, it's far more hygienic to take a card payment than to obviously handle the cash as well. And actually, it's now up to three in five new businesses are going cash only since the pandemic.

Whereas at the pandemic, I believe it was one in five. So that's really sped people up to wanting to take more card payments only, to be honest with you. Again, I personally think you should have both. But a lot of people, yeah, three and five are now going card only new businesses, which is really interesting. Again, that's showing the trend has increased since Covid. But like you said, there are still reasons why people are pushing back. I think another big reason why people are pushing back is perhaps car payments as a technology, as a safety and the cost has improved. It improves massively year on year. So perhaps a couple of years ago, probably a lot of your listeners would have heard of or remembered the likes of WorldPay. I believe they used to be called Streamline, perhaps seven, eight, nine years ago. So you used to have these. In fact, I've got one here. So you used to have like these older technology, these older card machines, which a lot of my customers are still upgrading from from these today. Now, the likes of WorldPay, they used to charge a lot of money. So we're talking the two and a half percent, you know, here and there on fees. Now you can take car payments at a fraction of that. So that's just one barrier that we've sort of reduced to try and get more people to start taking car payments. So perhaps a lot of people are still stuck in this sort of mentality that it's really, really expensive. Not to mention that the banks these days have upped how much they cost to put money into the bank. And since 2015, 65 percent of banks have gone anyway. So you've got customers who are busy and then they've got to find their nearest bank. A lot of towns don't have a physical bank anymore. So you've got to drive and then you've got to pay for your parking and then it's a time off. It all adds up when you can be taking a car payment and get that money into your account the next day. So, again, there's a hell of a lot of reasons why it's easier now than probably it was even when I started in the industry six years ago. A lot of those barriers have definitely been been removed. It's certainly well, OK, so when we went card only in my salon, that's the only year my business insurance ever went down because we were no longer keeping cash on the premises. We used to have a safe that we kept a small float in and then we had a bigger safe. And the other thing that was a lot easier was not having to do that journey to the bank. And we had so we had to pay Lloyds Bank, actually. We had to pay for a night safe key because we always close the salon after, of course, the bank had shut their doors.

And risk assessment wise, we had to send two team members. We couldn't send one person with that cash. We had to send someone to accompany them for safety's sake as well. It was just an absolute logistical nightmare just paying the cash in. And like you said, so many banks now will charge you to pay cash in or they've got quite harsh, quite strict limits on the amount of cash they can pay in a certain amount of time anyway. Yeah. So we're kind of looking at it from the business point of view at the moment then. So let's kind of stick with that. So if you said there's an awful lot of new businesses that are opening up card only from day one. Yeah. So apart from we've talked about the hygiene reasons, we've talked about the logistics of actually having to bank that cash. Why else? What else is in it for the business, do you think, that we should be focused on card? So another thing as well is I work with a lot of accountants and what they're saying is when you go cash only, and people know this, right? You're kind of putting a red target on your back from the HMR, for the HMRC. You're essentially there looking at things now and thinking, well, why are you, especially in this day and age, perhaps, in fact, I say, perhaps I'm, I'm almost definitely sure. 10 years ago, things are differently, right? Things are different, maybe even five years ago. But in this day and age, the HMRC are looking at it and thinking, why are you cash only? And it's starting to ring alarm bells. So a big one, I think, is you're going to, look, you can't, what's the terminology here? When it's cash, you can maybe move things around, which is in itself a risk, right? You can't do that with card payments. It's all black and white. But you're not opening yourself up to someone from the HMRC to start looking into your accounts and going down sort of that rabbit hole there. And you've got an audit trail there as well. So these people, so, you know, receipts, for example, right? With Dojo, for example, whenever you take a card payment, it goes on your app. So even as a business owner, if you're on holiday, for example, and you get a text message from staff saying Joe Bloggs has come in, he came in two days ago and he's disputing a transaction. You as a business owner sat on a beach somewhere, can go through your app, you can find Joe Bloggs' transaction and you can help remotely. And you can't do that with cash. It's a logistical nightmare. You're not going to be able to go back and see maybe there was a mistake. So, again, in terms of advancing technologies, we make it very easy for our customer from an analytics point of view to see all those transactions, right? So you've got the less risk on your tax. You've got ease of use and seeing all your transactions and all the analytics, finding out when you're most busy, finding your average transaction value.

We can even nickname machines here at Dojo. So if you're in a business, perhaps you're a nightclub and you've got different floors. You can have machines one to ten on floor one, then machines on floor two and floor three. You might have a month's worth of transactions and see, you know what, floor three over a month with the with the card payments. It just didn't take enough to warrant keeping open and having five members of staff there. Right. So again, that really helps with your with your analytics. And also when you go to sell the business as well. So, you know, if I open up a business and I take mainly card or all card, all my transactions are very, very clear in black and white to show the new owner or anyone, anyone interested in the business. I think with the cash only, there's just this sort of general vibe of what is right. Did you really take that ten thousand a month or was it a little bit less? Do you know what I mean? With the with the card payments is black and white. So I think it just gives that transparency, to be honest with you, which I think is a which is pretty, pretty big, pretty big reason to take it. And I think the I mean, I think we might, in fact, do a whole episode on front desk in salons and reception because I'm not entirely convinced that we need a reception desk anymore. And I'm certainly not convinced that we need a receptionist and the wage and the overhead that goes with that. I think we could use that little bit of real estate to much, much better effect in businesses. But part of the reason that I love card is it's just so quick. It's just so much easier. And we always used to really struggle with the bank reconciliation at the end of the day. We were always spending forever counting and recounting cash and trying to get the till to balance. All of that disappeared overnight when we went card only because there were no mistakes anymore. Everything was just really straightforward. It was much easier to reconcile. And let's also, you know, not be too down on our team members, but not everybody is 100 percent honest. And if you've got team members involved in your business, there is a reduction of risk around, you know, if we're handling cash, there is maybe an incentive for a certain type of person to not be 100 percent honest with what's going through the till. So certainly I think there's less chance of money going wandering if you're taking card payments.

So we've got some peace of mind as well. OK, so let's look at it from the customer point of view then. So we've talked about the hygiene reasons of why some customers might be a bit funny about about taking cash. I think part of the resistance is that there's an assumption. I think business owners make an assumption on behalf of their customers that the customers won't like it. And that's not really the case, is it? I don't think so. No, I think it's I think it's the norm now to take card payments and again, perhaps start going card only. I mean, I know for me, I never carry I never carry cash around with me, but I've always got my card. And if you don't have your card, you've got your phone. If you don't have your phone, you've got your watch. I know you can even get it on rings and stuff these days. Right. So it's it's so easy to keep these to have some kind of technology from a physical card to something digital to be able to pay. I also think it I think going into the mind of the consumer here, I think it adds that level of legitimacy. I can say that right there. You get a vibe of the cost, the business, whatever you're buying from, probably perhaps more in like from a service point of view or if you're buying a physical product. I think it just offers that level of if they do take card payments, it just has that real sort of, yeah, I guess, legitimacy there that they're not just cash only. I do think that you do get the kind of vibe of a cash only. It might be a little bit. I don't know the terminology, a little bit sort of wheeler and dealer type thing, whereas I do think. Yeah, yeah. Not to repeat myself too much. But yeah, I do think it just offers that level of there's so much to it. You know, it's also it's queue busting as well. Like we've all been behind the little old lady who's got a purse, she'll drop the purse, got coins flying out here. You've got a long queue, particularly with the weather at the moment. Everyone's hot. Everyone's frustrated. You as a consumer, you want to get in there, you want to pay quickly, but just as important, you want to make sure that if you're running a business, particularly in hospitality. Right. You know, things like bakeries, they need a quick turnover of people. It's so important to get people in and out the door really quickly. The last thing you want is multiple customers, you know, picking up their change, dropping it, things like that. You've got one one tap on your card and and they're out the way. So it's good for the good for the person taking the car payments. And it's good for you as a consumer, you and I, because we've got our goods out the way and we can get on with our day. So that speed of transaction in both ways, I think it's really important as well. Yeah, I think I think you're absolutely right. I think cash feels to me inconvenient. And I think the shift for me came from I went to one of my business retreats, which was in Tenerife.

And I realized I didn't even think about it while I was there, but I realized that I hadn't actually taken any cash out at all. Literally, I'd gone from the airport into the taxi that took car payment into the hotel where I paid for everything by car and back again. And I hadn't actually taken any cash out. It's the first time I've ever been abroad and not had euros with me, which is exactly the same as myself. Actually, as you as it happens, I know we've recently both got off, got back from Spain at the same time. And having this conversation with my partner, actually, it's the first time we haven't got euros out. And it's one less thing to worry about. We don't have to go to the post office and get it out. I think I'm pretty sure you then lose money when you then put it back into pounds. It might not be massive, but I'm pretty sure you lose out. And then if you're like me, I'll put 20 pounds on the side somewhere and 20 euros on the side thinking to pick it up. And suddenly I've completely forgot it. Whereas again, when it can be card only, it's just so much more simple. Yeah, we've had that recently as well. Definitely. And I think the big education for me was how much it didn't cost me as a consumer. I think in my head that was going to cost me an absolute fortune in transaction fees. But that's all shifted. And you've already hinted that transaction fees from the businesses point of view have come down a lot in recent years as well. But the other thing that I think I just want to kind of finish that legitimacy point that you were talking about is whenever I see a business go from accepting cards over to cash only, in my head, and this isn't always accurate, but it has played out a few times in my head, I always think, oh, they're going to go out of business. It always seems to be just before a restaurant closes the month before they're cash only. And I always think that business isn't going to be around very long when I see them switch over to not taking cards anymore. Yeah. But the other reason that businesses have in the past been a little bit resistant is because you nasty card companies have been hanging on to our money for too long. But that's changed as well, hasn't it? It has. Yeah, it's got a lot quicker these days. So speaking, I can't speak for everyone, but particularly at Dojo, we do our own banking. There's no middlemen. Everything's done by one British based company, which is really rare.

And we've also got all British based, all UK based customer service. Again, really rare. Most of these days you're talking to robots. No, you speak to a human and that's if I'm not available. I've got a team. But yeah, we typically give our customer the money overnight and it can be in your bank account by about 6am the next day. There's still people out there that will do three or four days, which is crazy. And then you've got to factor in not getting your money on the weekend and bank holidays as well. It can be really bad for your cash flow. So yeah, we do next day, which has been brilliant for my customers. I guess another thing as well, just going back to one of the first questions you asked, which was why maybe people are hesitant to start using card. And back in the day, the average contract length used to be about 18 months with Dojo. Again, speaking about ourselves, we do a one month rolling agreement or the longest is a 12 month agreement. And the perfect the brilliant thing or one of the brilliant things is that you can try us as well. So, you know, I still get customers who are cash only and think I want to try those car payments, but I want to take car payments. Right. But I don't want to necessarily put myself straight into a long phone contract. Well, with us, we'll give you a free trial. If you don't like it, DPD, the courier service will come back and pick it, pick it up. So, again, I guess that's another reason why people have been hesitant because they're trying something new. But with us, you get that flexibility. And if you're with another provider, you've got your eyes and tools, you've got your sum ups. Right. And then you've got the old machines and stuff like that. You can try us at Dojo alongside them and you're not jumping ship. And if you're not happy for whatever reason, you give the Dojo back to us and just keep with your with your other provider. Again, it's it's just one of many things I think we've put into place to try and get as many people trying us. And yeah, almost everyone absolutely loves it. But it's it's trying to reduce those barriers, as I keep saying. Hmm. OK, let's some I just want to throw a little use case at you, because I think that might be one of the other reasons that I'm a big fan of card is because we have the curse in our industry of no shows and last minute cancellations. And any industry group that you join will always say, OK, you can reduce that if you've got a really good cancellation policy, if you start taking booking fees, that kind of thing. I don't see how you can do that with cash, because what tends to happen or in my experience is what happens in the past is you say, OK, well, our cancellation policy is that if you give us less than 24 hours notice, you owe us for the appointment.

Well, if I haven't given you any money, guess what I'm going to do? I'm just going to find another salon and you won't see me again. Yeah, of course. Absolutely. So how can that work, though, if we're asking people for something like a booking fee, how can Dojo help with that? Yeah, you're spot on there. So we've introduced payment links for our customers, right? So you as a as a salon owner, say Joe Bloggs calls you and says, I want to come in, get my hair done. You say, yeah, absolutely fine. But I want to take a 50 percent deposit. Perhaps you would really easily simply go into your Dojo app. You would go under payment links. You would put in the deposit amount. You can put a description and then you can send that to Joe Bloggs however you like. And you can send it a text message. You can attach it to an email. You can put it on an invoice or you can send it on WhatsApp. But essentially, that's going to send a secure link to Joe Bloggs and you can take a deposit really, really, really, really simply. Right. And then again, you've you've actually there's more of an incentive now for them to actually come in and see their appointment, because they've already paid 50 percent or 25 percent, whatever it might be. We also go one step further for customers who want to do table bookings for food. So we've also now got it's a little bit different from the car machine, but it can pair with it. We've got food booking systems. Right. Again, you can set up deposits, maybe five pound a head or five pound per table, which actually reduce no shows in the restaurant industry in in in the food and drink industry. Actually reduce no shows by about 70 percent. So, again, offering deposits again, talking about the beauty industry here. I mean, I don't know the percentage, but it is going to massively, massively reduce those people not turning up. So, yeah, the ease of use with with payment links or you can take deposits over the phone as well. So be speaking to the customer, put it into the card machine at the same time. And then you've secured your 50 percent or whatever fee it was just to try and make sure that they do do indeed turn up as well. Absolutely. And full full disclosure for everybody. I do have a dojo machine for the bit of hairdressing that I do. I have used payment links. And what I loved with it was that I wasn't handling card details. I didn't have to worry about people punching in card numbers and pinging them over in a WhatsApp for me. That wasn't my problem. They entered all the details and I just got the cash the next day when it settled. Yeah. If I can just add on there as well, Phil, that we've also that they can also use Apple Pay now. It could not be more. It could not be simpler. You send me over a link for for, say, £100 or whatever, and I can Apple Pay or Google Pay it now. So they don't even have to take the time to go and find their card, put in their long card number. Then you've got to find the expiry date. Then you've got to do the CVC, I believe. And you've got to put in your name. Just Apple Pay it.

It literally takes your customers probably 15 seconds at the absolute most to pay. And when you send a payment link from your Dojo app, it will actually tell you which what the status of it is. So you'll see, for example, if you sent 10 and it will show you a traffic light system in terms of where it's at, as in it's been sent, it's been received and then it's been paid. So you know exactly who's paid and who hasn't. And you can resend it again if perhaps someone's been a little bit slow and you're not you're not going to accept their actual booking until they've paid. So, yeah. Yeah. Customers absolutely love it. Well, if you want to feel super, super slick, of course, you don't have to use just the Dojo machine to accept payments either, do you? Well, we're talking about Apple. So I've got the app installed on my iPhone. And what was lovely for me is that I don't work in one location when I'm doing here. I kind of drift around, but I don't have to take my Dojo machine with me, do I? Yeah. Yeah. So tap to iPhone has been brilliant. So, yeah, you've summed it up really well there. And it's particularly really, really popular with like pizza shops, for example, instead of them having to pay out for loads of different Dojo machines. What they'll do is they'll set up tap to iPhone on the delivery drivers machine and they can just go out to the house and take payments again straight from iPhone. So, yeah, that's that's been brilliant. Gives you that flexibility. Again, if you've in hospitality, you know, you get you get bars on a Saturday night who are thinking, God, I would love just to go like that and have an extra card machine in my hand. Well, we've tapped to iPhone within five minutes of setting it up through through your sort of Apple ID through the Dojo app. I mean, you're taking payments and it doesn't cost you any more as well. You can have that on 10 iPhones. And yes, it's all included. So if we were running if we were running a team of stylists or a team of beauty therapists, then they could all have that on their own iPhone and be taking payments at the chair or taking payments in the treatment rooms without us using that front desk at all. That's it. And you can also nickname each iPhone as well. So you as a business owner know at the end of the day, you've got a team of five or whatever. You know exactly who's done what on which iPhone. Well, I'm on that as well. So we we have gratuity options or tip options right on the card machine. And I've got a lot of salons who have started taking tips and and now that they can offer it really conveniently on the card machine have seen a real increase. So having that as an option and you can play about the percentages, some people maybe want just 10% option. Yes, no or 10%.

You can really play about with it. You can allow a custom amount. And it's yeah, just put putting on those tips to to to the stylist really. So that's another another way in which. Yeah, it's another another useful tip that we that we that we have as well. Excellent. Well, it's always been one of my one of the pillars of the Build Your Salon podcast is that if somebody gives their time, then we're allowed to we're allowed to do a bit of pitching as well. And you've put together a particularly tasty deal on Dojo for my listeners, haven't you? We have. Yeah. So we've got an exclusive deal for your people whereby anyone that comes to us gets 75 pounds cash straight away. There's always a free trial. The rates are really competitive. And I'm also as well, I'm not even sure if I've discussed this, but I'm also including and I do have one if you just bear with me two seconds. So we do also have loads of different these these case cut these cases in. You might want one as well, Phil. So they come in loads of different colors. So this is the machine as standard, which is still a really nice sleek machine. It's oh, there we go. It's white. I find a lot of the salons again, especially when they come in, you know, beauty places when they come in from these sort of things, the plasticky ones, the dojo machine, even it's sort of naked sort of white form looks really nice. But again, with these with these covers, you've got loads of different colors to match the aesthetic of the business. But yes, I'm including those as well and throwing those in and you've got a pretty much any color you can think of that we include as well. But yes, a 75 pound cashback free trial and one of the machines as well. Love it. Love it. And to get hold of that deal, all you need to do is reach out to either myself or Owen on Instagram. So if you search for the carved machine guy and then Owen will pop up in your Instagram feed. Or, of course, you can reach out to me, Phil Jackson coach. If you ping me the word dojo, then I will send you Owen's WhatsApp number and you can reach out and let him know that you want Phil's deal on a dojo machine. Now, I always finish these episodes with three quick fire questions. They used to be a surprise, but there's been too many episodes now. So everyone knows what the questions are, but that's OK. So what is the best piece of advice you've ever been given? OK, so I was pondering on this one and it's a bit of advice and a bit of quote or it's a bit of advice and it's a quote.

So I would say it's OK to fall, but fall on your back. Right. And it's pretty obvious, but through work, through life, personal life, stuff like that. We all go through through difficult times and people are going to fail, whether it's, you know, in business or relationships and things like that. But I think it's really important to sort of, yeah, fall on your back, you know, have that ability to get back up and keep going. So, yeah, I'd say that one's really stuck with me. I love that. I love that. Where's that from? Do you know? So it comes up quite a few times on a motivational podcast that I listen to on Spotify, but where it's from originally, not quite sure, to be honest. I can't take credit for it. OK, well, I would. OK, so you've been in the industry for a while. Well, if somebody was following in your footsteps, what advice would you leave behind for them? So it actually comes a little bit back to what I just said, and really, it's going to be not being disheartened with knockbacks, knockbacks, pushbacks. Let's say pushbacks. Not everyone's going to want your service. Not everyone's going to you can't not everyone's going to want to buy from you or not. You know, you're not always going to get on with everyone or whatever it might be in business and life. And I think it's just to keep going. Just just keep believing in whatever it is that you're doing, that you're selling your service. Believe in yourself, back yourself. And, yeah, just just keep going with it. You're going to get no's, but you're going to get a lot of yeses. So it would be, yeah, just just keep going with whatever it is you're doing in life and enjoy it as well. Do you have a particular kind of attitude around that? So so for me, I've always, you know, I've come from a place of, you know, running, running a salon, building a column, in which case you are by definition, a people pleaser, which is always kind of left me feeling a bit for a long time, left me feeling kind of icky about sales. Yeah. And particularly the fear of rejection and the fear of the no took me a long time to kind of get past that. And it was only when somebody said to me, actually, all you're doing is giving people the opportunity. Yeah. So you just kind of present the opportunity. And that was the big mindset shift for me. But so what do you do to get past those no's? What do you do when you've taken a bit of a kick in? I think there's there's a couple of ways of looking at it. It can be the resilience factor. There's been lots of deals that I've got through loads of different industries over the last couple of years where it may not have been the right timing. So it's a case of going back. It's been customers that I've been chasing for four or five years and they eventually make this make the switch and they're really happy.

I could have just said, I'm not going to bother again. But it's it's it's I think once you get a couple of occasions where you're like, OK, this is going to take a long time, but I'm going to be persistent. But on the flip side, also learn to walk away. You don't want to spend too much time on something that's going to go nowhere when and put all your eggs in one basket. But I think you get you build up a real resilience, maybe particularly in sales or just just I think just just life in general. There's going to be loads of there's going to be no's and there's going to be there's going to be pushbacks. But just keep you just got to keep going. It's not and it's easier said than done is easier said than done, but you just got to particularly if you believe in something as well. Believe in your brand. I very much take pride in my work and the the one to one service that I give. If someone wants to go somewhere else because it might be ever so, you know, I get people who might choose someone else because it's two pounds cheaper. Fine. They come back to me and say it wasn't worth the headaches and I missed the service or I love the the proposition of the service. So, yeah, I'm really confident in what I do. So I think that's a big thing. Enjoy what you do and be confident in what you do. Fantastic. And then you're not in the salon industry, but you work alongside the salon industry. What is the best thing about working with salons? So the thing I love about it most and I think really your podcast sums it up is the willingness to help each other and talk to each other. You know, not to be judging too much here, but if you go to OK, I'm not going to give us an industry as such. But if you there's lots of industries where they don't talk, they don't want to be active with you. They don't want to engage. One of the things I love about salons is quite often with my customers. We had Emma the other day from the treatment room. She gave me a nice little post which I could tag her back in. I love the fact that they're very sort of you look after me and I'll look after you type thing. And again, I find in the salon industry, you really, really get that. So that's one of the brilliant things about the salon industry compared to a lot of them is the willingness to work with each other. And I learned, you know, I've learned new things from yourself and will continue to do so. So I feel like everyone's there to help each other compared to a lot of other industries, which feels sort of very much like they'll take from you, but they don't want to give anything back, which is fine. I get people are busy. But yeah, I do find in the in the beauty industry, people are more willing to to work both ways, which is which is brilliant. You can't really ask for more. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for your time today. I'm sure lots of people are going to be reaching out. And even if you don't feel like you're in the market for card processing, I strongly encourage you to connect with Owen on Instagram. And if you ever want an example of someone who is superbly proud of what it is that they do and when they sell, then his Instagram feed is the place to go.

Thanks, Owen. Thanks again, Phil. Appreciate it. Thank you. So there we have it, my conversation with Owen around why cash may not be king in your business. I would love to be interviewing you on a future episode of the Build Your Salon podcast. My email address scrolling at the bottom of the screen now, phil at buildyoursalon.com. And just seven short days until I'm coming in your ears again with another dose of my Wise Hour wisdom. Until then, take care. Bye. Bye.