Boutique Chat #040 | How to Truly Serve Your Customers & Your Staff | Jason Stoker, Deep South Co

Hey, guys, it's time for episode number 41 with my friend Jason Stoker of Deep South Marketing, who actually owns four different companies serving four unique sides of the boutique, retail and wholesale industries. This is going to be a really great episode, guys. Let's talk about your business strategy and the juicy details of what actually works. From mainstream fashion to fashion on Main street and the entire ecosystem behind it. How do we scale your company and it with the balance and the happiness that we all seek? Let's hear from those insiders, experts and strategists that actually make it happen. I'm your host, Ashley Alderson from the Boutique Hub and I can't wait to chat. Just about two years ago now, I ran into Jason Stoker in Dallas Market center right after we hosted our very first Boutique Summit. And I'm going to tell you, it was an experience that I won't soon forget because there's something about this man and his personality and the way that he greets you and makes you feel important that is so special and so unique. He is a man that is a definite go getter in this industry. Between he and his wife and their friends, who are also business partners, they own four different companies serving the retail and wholesale industry. From Love Poppy Jewels, a jewelry company, to Social Shop, a technology and comment selling company, to Deep South, a T shirt company, to the business that actually started it all. And that's Deep South Pout, his wife's boutique. You name it. Every side of the industry.

Jason.

Jason and his wife and their friends understand it and support it. So you're not going to be surprised to know that during this podcast episode, there's going to be a ton of key takeaways. Whether you're listening as a retailer, a boutique owner, a wholesale brand, or someone who's an industry insider just learning to better serve your marketplace within this industry. Guys, Jason is definitely a man that you want to get to know because he is a man of his word and someone that holds so much integrity, which I really value about him and the way that he does business. So get a pen and paper, get ready to take some notes and some key takeaways from this episode.

I know you're going to love it.

And look for some huge announcements coming from Jason and his team regarding Social Shop very soon.

But we'll wait to tell you about.

That at the end of this episode. Get ready to enjoy this one, you guys. Hey, guys.

Welcome back to the podcast. This week. I am joined today by one of the most ambitious people that I have had the pleasure to get to know through our time at the Boutique Hub. And before I tell you more about why he's so ambitious, because there's a lot of detail to go over, I have to tell you how I first met Jason Stoker. So it was right after the very first Boutique Summit, and I believe it was Jesse and Beth and myself and maybe Sarah, I don't know if Sarah was with us yet. Went down to the Starbucks at Dallas Market center, and here's this guy standing there handing out cards for free Starbucks if you come and visit his booth. Turns out to be one of the most charismatic people we've ever met. We struck up this great conversation and now a great friendship a couple years later. So, Jason, thanks for being on the show today.

Yeah, I'm excited. Thanks for having me.

Oh, my goodness. So if I tell people you're the most ambitious guy that I know, we've got to explain what that means. You have four different companies that you operate. They all are members of the Boutique Hub. And I would love it if you would start from the beginning and talk about first how Deep South Pout got its start and how it really spawned, you know, these different opportunities.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, my wife and I got moved to Starville, Mississippi. I was planning a church and we went to her 10 year reunion and she ran into an old friend, Nicole Oswald. Nicole and Justin were married and were fixing to move to the area that we were I had just moved to. And we said, hey, look, when you get up here, you need to come to our church, come to our small group. And they did, and we hung out. And after about six months of them being in our small group and spending time together, we one day just said, hey, look, we ought to open a boutique. And just kind of laughing. And over the course of a couple months, that weird, strange comment turned into this dream and this process and off. We started with dsp. We begged people to go in with us, we begged for investors. We finally talked to banking a loan of US $15,000, $7,500 a piece, and we started the store. And so that was it. We had 15 grand and a hope and a dream and four really hard working, determined people. And so that's kind of how DSP got its start. That was about eight years ago.

And DSP today is brick and mortar online. Tell me more specifically about the business.

Yeah, we have two locations. We have Starville, which is in a college town in Mississippi State. We have a huge brick and mortar presence there. We have a very large online Shopping presence, I would say. I don't want to use the word nationwide because it sounds like I'm, you know, saying we're much bigger than we are. But we ship everywhere. I mean, we really, I think being in a college town, as students leave and graduate go get their real jobs, they continue to shop with us and kind of has dispersed our customer base across the country. And then we do Social shop. We've been doing Social Shop for about five years and do a lot of sales through Instagram is our big bread and butter. But also Facebook and we have a location in Columbus as well, which is about 30 minutes away.

Can you tell them more about. I know we're putting the cart before the horse here, but you started with Deep south and then you branched into two wholesale companies. Did those come first and then Social Shop or what was the order that those evolved?

Social Shop actually came about the same time our first wholesale company did Love Poppy Jewels, which Lovepoppy is the Stokers and Oswalds and then also another couple, Alex and Chelsea McIntosh. Chelsea's kind of the designer. We went in partner with them. She was an employee of ours. She was actually an employee at DSP that we started and kind of started the wholesale company with. But we started both those about the same time. We couldn't find jewelry that we liked that we could source quick enough. And so we said, you know what, why don't we try to design and try to get into this. Did it just to make jewelry for my wife's store. We never even really envisioned it being a big wholesale company. Now we're probably in 400 stores across the US and that really was not even really on the table at first. As we designed and kind of put it. DSP people saw it and it kind of grew in Mississippi and then it kind of got in the Southeast. And then we started going to markets and kind of took it beyond that. But that and Social Shop kind of happened about the same time. Yeah. As Instagram kind of took its boom and it became much more visual than I'd say than Facebook. You would see things in a cross chronological feed and our demographic of, you know, 18 to 30 year olds really engaging that platform. We thought, man, there's got to be a way to maximize these pictures. People are seeing them and to be able to sell through this. And so we designed Social Shop around that idea so we could sell through Instagram. And. And this is about five years ago when we started it as well.

So one more, one more question before we dive more into Social Shop. Because I know there's a lot to talk about there. You also have Deep South Marketing, which is a T shirt company. Can you tell me more about that wholesale business as well?

That's right. Deep South Marketing is kind of a parent company, I guess Deep south and company is probably more people would recognize. But our wife's store, again, we were doing a lot of T shirts. We're in a college town and there was a lot of shirts for dudes, but you couldn't find cute, trendy, nice, comfortable, soft T shirts for the ladies to wear. And so we were designing them and having other people print them and thought, this is crazy. Why don't we try to print them ourselves? We could, you know, have a lot more freedom. We could get them as we wanted it. Me and Justin thought it'd be cool to learn it because, you know, that's what YouTube's for, right? So you can figure out how to create another business. But we, we bought a guy out, out of his garage in Birmingham, went and picked up all the equipment in a penske, drove back and started watching YouTube videos to figure out how to screen print. Because we were absolutely clueless. Neither one had ever seen screen printing in our life. And started printing just for my wife and. And then it kind of grew to where people around town. And then last November, it's been a little less than a year, one of our customers says, you should create a Facebook group to sew your T shirts in. And I thought, this is crazy. Nobody cares about our T shirts. And so we kind of created a group. We've got, I think 1700 members right now in it. And it kind of exploded on us. Honestly, we never envisioned that it would take off like it did.

It's pretty cool to see just like how you're active day to day in the hub between all of these companies because it really touches every area of the industry, which is so cool. You've got a unique perspective. Perspective, you know, that not many people have, having touched it from all sides. So let's talk about the, the technical side of things. So you've got these wholesale businesses, you've got the resale business. And really Social Shop can kind of work on both sides of that coin with Instagram and with technology. Tell me more about kind of the evolution of Social Shop because I know that you guys have made several changes recently, and if someone's not exactly familiar with how the platform works, give me some detail.

Yeah, well, there's kind of two ways to use it. The old traditional way, which is Still a way that a lot of people love and come on board and want to use it. We kind of call it charge and ship. Where a customer comment, you'll check the comment, you'll pull the item, you'll charge them as if they were sitting in front of you in our platform and you'll ship it out. And so you get your money immediately. You don't have to wait on them paying an invoice. They don't have to comment a certain way. We have people doing 125 to $200,000 a month and then people obviously less than that that way. And they'll have a couple employees running it, but they're having to check comments and make sure they're kind of staying on top of it. That's a way to do it. You get paid immediately, get the product out the door, don't have to worry about holding onto it. So that's one way to use it. The way we've really been working on also is to create auto invoicing. Some of our customers want that. And obviously it can do a lot of work for you. You can be a lot smarter and you can probably scale it a lot quicker. And so we've been working hard to get permissions with Facebook. Back in, I guess, April, Facebook kind of freaked out on everybody and kind of pulled back permissions and took away a lot of permission. So we worked really, really hard with Facebook, got all the permissions where people will just log in our app one time, they can comment. We use ship or pick up. And that way if you want to pick up something, you don't have shipping on it. So you use one of those two keywords and you'll comment the size or the color, whatever you want. It will create an invoice that'll get sent out. We have wait list capabilities, inventory management, all those kind of tools. And so we also have been working really, really hard and just today kind of finished the beta testing. On the wholesale side, being that our own wholesale businesses comment software really has been limited there. It's really been a kind of a retail side, not wholesale. And on the wholesale side, I'm like, there's such an opportunity there. And also as wholesale businesses use our software, they engage people that own retail businesses. So it's like the greatest marketing that I could ever do is to set up wholesalers to use it. And so we have got that set up now where people can comment and use it from a wholesale standpoint as well. And it know the size runs and so you can put whatever quantity you want. If you want 2552, you can comment that way and it will obviously send those emails and invoicing as well. So you can either work either way, charge and ship, or you can do auto invoicing. And so it's that last permission gave us the ability to see the profile, id, email and all that kind of stuff to where the auto invoicing works the way that we really wanted it to. We kind of had a workaround, but we want it to be more fluid and more user friendly, which it is. And we're rolling out even as we speak.

Awesome. So it's on Facebook and Instagram both.

Instagram, Facebook right now, Instagram in the next, probably week or two we'll have all that programmed out. So Facebook groups, Facebook Live, anything on Facebook you can use the charge and ship on Instagram. But auto invoicing on Instagram will be a couple weeks before, a week to two before we roll that last little piece out.

Got it. So most people that are using Social Shop, are they using it with certain posts throughout the week? Is it just their live sales throughout the week? Do they also have a website that they're using comment selling with, you know, kind of on the side or what's the trend that you see in your customer base and how they use the software?

Yeah, I've seen more and more people go away from websites and strictly work with comment selling. I tell everybody, I'm like, look, I would not put all your eggs on any one basket. I think you should, if you have a website, push that website, find ways to get email addresses and continue to push people to your website. You have no idea, you know, what can happen with Facebook or Instagram. I mean they have so much power over your business. So I'm real hesitant and honestly try to, you know, tell people, look, please, please, please, please, you know, try to sell on every aspect you can because your livelihood depends on it. But we do see more and more people shift more of their focus to comment selling. And the reason being you don't have to take as perfect pictures. You don't have to load the product with the way you do. You don't have to write all the descriptions the way you do. You can get away with a lot less production through Facebook and Instagram and you can with an iPhone or a nice camera, create a great looking post where the website, there's a lot more work on the back end that has to happen. And so I think a lot of people like the easiness of comment Selling and plus people, I mean, I don't probably go to two or three websites a day. I mean, honestly, the ones I go to, I'm going to go to no matter what I see on social media. My wife and I, we have our TV shows, we record and we'll lay in bed and my wife's watching tv, but she's also scrolling through Instagram and seeing pictures. And so the idea of comment selling is you take that, urgent buy, you take that, buy that. Somebody says, oh my gosh, ship that to medium and they go on to the next thing. They didn't have to get up, go to your website, get their credit card, put the credit card in, put their shipping address in, all that's built into it. And so you really maximize the ability to be in front of people, which I think needs to be happening. And I think those things also drive people to the website. I tell people all the time, the great thing about the charge and ship side or even auto invoicing side is you have people commenting on your post, which is going to boost engagement. As your engagement boosts, more people are going to see your product, whether they come in your store brick and mortar, whether they go to your website or they buy through comments selling, you should see an increase in traffic and buying just based on having engagement on your content. Which is really what we are all trying to fight right now for, is to get engagement and get people, you know, talking about us and engaging with us. And so I see a lot of people shifting to most of their selling through comment selling, which I think is great. But I would say do not dismiss your website in that process. You know, I think you should keep both and then obviously drive people to brick and mortar. And so. But comment selling is, I mean, it's just, we're just getting started in that world. I think the world has got so much growth and I think we're just seeing it kind of start right now.

So as you think about the most successful stores that are using Social Shop, is there something that you would say they all have in common? You know, just the way that they use it, the way that they brand themselves, the way that they speak to their customers, what similarities do you see among those successful businesses?

Consistency and hard work? I mean, I don't, you know, Social Shop is not a magic pill. You know, I tell people all the time, like, if you're, if you're signing up for Social Shop because you think it's going to make you rich and you're going to do the same thing you're doing now, then it's, you're probably going to be disappointed. And you know, and I just say that and I don't, you know, I think Social Shop's a great tool, but the people that are successful work really hard and they're consistent. And what I mean by that is they outwork the competition, they're going to put more into it, they're going to have a better looking product, they're going to buy better, they're going to buy smarter, they're going to price better, they're going to think about their posts better and then they're consistently pushing people to it. The hardest sale you will ever get in a comment selling is the first one. Same thing with your website, just creating a customer, creating that, that first initial purchase is the hardest part. And so if you can get people buying one time and they literally say ship or pick up medium and then two days later, the package at their door, there's no easier way to buy. But you've got to work really hard to make that first transaction. And once you do that, you're golden. And so those people that are consistent with it, I hear people all the time, they'll try our product for 14 days and a week into it, they'll say, hey, it's just not working, I need to cancel. I'm like, okay, well tell me how it's going. What have you done? Well, I did a post on Monday and I did two posts on Wednesday and one on Friday. And you know, I just didn't do anything. And I'm like, nobody bought anything. I'm like, well, did you talk about, did you do a live, did you engage people? Did you talk about the product, how to engage, how to buy? Well, no. And I'm like, okay, so you posted four times and you don't see a huge investment in return? Well, you're not going to see it that fast. Like, you gotta, you gotta put a plan in place. Same thing where open your store. If you open a brick and mortar and you unlock the door and you don't tell anybody you're there and you sporadically talk about yourself, no one's going to come, you know. And so for me it's consistency and hard work and people just having that resolve to say, I'm not going to fail, I'm going to see this thing succeed. We have a lady in Iowa that she literally does 100 to $200,000 a month and she used to be a hair salon that sold a little clothes on the side. Well, she Shut down her hair salon and she does nothing but sells clothes now. And when she started with us, she was doing a couple hundred dollars a week, couple thousand dollars a week, and she has absolutely blown it out of the park. But she outworks everybody that I see. And I just. There's no substitute or no shortcut to hard work, you know, And I think that's the one thing that's so frustrating to see in any industry, but especially in this entrepreneurial world, is we want to be successful overnight. And it's just. It takes more to it than that. And so the people that are. I've never seen someone try and fail in our system. I just hadn't seen it yet. Anyone who tries and put forth effort always succeeds. And it's just, you know, it's just. It's not rocket science.

I think that's such a good point, because I'm sure that if you're listening and you've listened to this podcast for a while, you've probably heard me say this. But no matter what it is, whether it's social shop or a website, or like you said, brick and mortar, just because you build it doesn't mean they'll come. It's all a tool. But as an entrepreneur, it's your job to be consistent and to show up and to train your customer and to drive and build excitement around what it is that you're doing. You can't just open a business and tomorrow it's money in the bank. You and I both know better than that. Unfortunately, or fortunately, however you want spin that one. But there's a lot that goes into it.

Well, I don't think that, you know how you and I met. I mean, honestly, we got to market and they were like, you know, we're kind of slow at market. We don't have a lot of people come to our booth, like, what have you done? And they were standing in the booth, and I'm like, well, that's awesome. Like, no, no. And I'm like, let's go buy some Starbucks gift cards and let's get some cards and I'll come to Dallas next time and I will sit in the lobby and I will drive people to our booth. And we did like five times the business that market. And I'm like, oh, you got. You got to engage people. You got to think. And I was the only person down there. I mean, I look sort of creepish and, you know, down there talking happily married man, talking to these strange women, and was one of the only dudes down there that did set me apart, I guess. And. But I'm like, I'm just not okay sitting in a booth hoping people come by. Like, I'm going to engage people and I'm gonna. I'm going to get you in my booth. And if I get you my booth, I will out serve my competition. I have a better product than my competition. And we blew it out of the water, you know, that market. But the next market I didn't go to, and the sales went down again because someone's not down there engaging people. And so it's just hard work. It's, you know, there's no substitute for.

You know, it's funny, I think about that time we met at market, and I've used this example with my own kids, and I'm totally going to go into the weeds here for a second, but my oldest daughter Hadley, wanted to make a lemonade stand at a rodeo. So our kids rodeo, have horses. We travel just about every weekend of the summer competing with them. So her and her little friend are going to make a lemonade stand by our horse trailer. And they were so mad one day because no one was coming by. And I was like, girls, like, what are you doing to go meet your customer? How are you going to go get out there and go deliver your lemonade to other people on their horses? And honestly, you're the person that comes to mind because you are like the hustler who gets out there and meets people. And you've got to elaborate on this for me, your background, because I'll never forget right away I said, what did you do before you started these companies? And you said, yeah, I was a pastor. And what would you study in school?

Theater of Biblical Studies. That's my degree. And, yeah, and I was a golf pro before I went into ministry. So who knows? I'm like the strangest human being on the face of the earth.

I love that it's not the cut and dry. Like, I went into business, right?

No. If I took a business class in college, they would have probably made me leave for. I mean, I have no idea what I'm doing. I mean, still don't know what I'm doing. I just, you know, I don't make the same mistake usually twice. And. And failure is such a great learning tool. And as you fail, you just realize, that was awful. That was terrible. I don't ever want to do that again. So how do we not make that mistake again? And that's what we do constantly. And people all the time. I'll tell Them. Look, when you buy Social Shot, one of the greatest assets you get is you get my relationship with you. And the thing that I can give you is all the things not to do, not to fail, because we've already tried all these things and they're awful and they're terrible and they will wreck you. So I can at least tell you everything not to do. But sometimes I think we don't learn from our failures well enough and we only learn from success. And so sometimes success is just luck. And so, you know, failures, man, that, you know, as Dave Ramsey says, you know, you pay stupid tax and I've paid a lot of stupid tax, and I don't like it.

You know, would you say there is one greatest failure that you've had that you've learned the most from?

Wow. The one. There's so many, Ashley. You know, for me, being that I am the ultimate entrepreneur, like going 100 miles an hour, I think when I fail the most and the hardest is when I don't stop and think and plan and strategize and I just get out there and run ahead of myself and I just make a lot of mistakes. And so there's countless times that I could walk through that. I launch a product too quick or even with Social Shop before we've got out and blitzed it. And we had 100 people sign up and I'm like, I don't even have them. I don't have capacity to onboard these people. And so I get ahead of myself really fast, really quickly, and I put people around me. That's the number one thing. When I find somebody to come around me, I'm like, look, if you, you have to be okay. Telling me that you think I'm fixing to make a mistake, I give you the freedom to tell me, hey, I think this is a train wreck waiting to happen, or hey, Jason, like this, this has not been thought through well enough because I need those people around me to catch me because I'm going to make mistakes because I'm going to push us a thousand miles an hour as hard as I can. And so I need people pulling me back and pulling the reins. My wife is the ultimate person in that and to all the time she's like, slow down, slow down, slow down. You know, I don't, I don't require sleep until I lay down. And then I don't move for like eight hours and I get up and run another 16 hour marathon. You know, I just, that's the way I'm wired. And so when I Make mistakes is when I forget to slow down and think and, you know, and process and plan and put people around me that help me see my blind spots. Because I got a lot of them, man.

I think that's true of a lot of entrepreneurs, don't you, where you can run and be a bit of a squirrel, but you have to strategically build your team around you to be the one that actually executes and finishes whatever the plan is initially. Have you, you know, as you've grown these companies, because clearly with four companies, there's a lot of people around you. How have you approached hiring and building a team so that there's always someone picking up whatever those dead spots are, those blind spots?

Yeah, I'll say we were absolutely terrible at this for the longest time because my first thought as an entrepreneur, if I have to find someone to do part of my job, I felt like I failed, you know, because I want to, like, manhandle and, like, just wrestle the problem down 24 7. You know, I like. I like confrontation. I like conflict. I don't, like, want it, but I'm okay with it. And so I hated to give away areas that I wasn't good at because I feel like people are going to see that as failure. And I finally realized that only person I was still in our whole company if I didn't give those areas away. And so we would hire people out of necessity and out of, like, 911. And then finally I remembered a guy one time, a mentor of mine, he would hire people, and I'm like, hey, man, where's that guy going? Work. And he said, I don't have a position for him, but that guy's a rock star. I need him on my team. And he would find a place for him. He was hiring before the need, but he was hiring people that fit the DNA of the company. And I'm like. He's like, you know, we're all on the bus. We just. We may change seats, but I won't be the right people on the bus. And so over the last, you know, I'd say course of the last six months, a year, we began looking for the right people on the bus and then realizing as we found the right people and we put them in places of position that really fit their DNA that, you know, that helped overcome some shortcomings in our life, the company would grow enough that we were able to really hire that that position became a need, because they fixed an area of the company that was really struggling because of our own shortcomings. Like Service. I want service to be on point every single time you engage us. And I saw we were not executing that our service had gotten to a point where I was embarrassed by it. In fact, I made a couple posts I think you commented on one at one time where I'm like, I'm sorry, we are not taking care of the people we need to. Well, we just hired somebody away from a $60 million company that is a rock star service person. Because I'm like, I've got to have someone and I want the best. And so we finally started realizing hiring a cheap employee to save a couple dollars an hour was jeopardizing our company. And it was allowing me not to be successful and fulfill the role that I needed to because I was having a babysit. And so we started hiring higher quality people, trusting that their ability on our team was going to make our team better. If our team got better, we become more profitable and we would be fine with that little couple. A little bit of a pay raise on the payroll. And I'm scared of payroll. I don't want to over inflate payroll. And I get that. But you cannot hire minimum wage people and expect them to lead your company as an executive. It just doesn't work. So you've got to hire people that have incredible skill sets and when you do that, your team's going to get better. We had to think differently. We had to not be scared to hire somebody that had a skill set way beyond what we were used to. And interviewing people over and over and over, people can fake it once or twice, but they can't fake it three or four times. And that's one of the things that we took away from Dave Ramsey and Entre leadership was the amount of times that people would get interviewed in his company was mind boggling. But it kept crazy out. And that was his whole thing. He didn't want somebody to get through the loop and get through the, get through the holes. And so he just over interviewed him. And so we do that. We try our best to do that now. And we've made some decisions that we've paused on hiring some people before that we would have hired in the past. That would have been an absolute train wreck for our company.

Man, I wrote down so many key takeaways from everything that you just said. Number one, Dave Ramsey and Entre Leadership. If you haven't read that book or he does, the conferences that are the same theme now, right? Amazing.

We went to his conference and we read the book.

Amazing. But I love, I Love the talk about the bus and keeping the crazy out. And I think you make a really good point too, in the sense that you can't grow a company by cutting expenses. Right? Saving money is not a growth strategy. Building revenue is a growth strategy. Right?

That's right.

And by hiring that type of team, that's the only way to grow your revenue. What have you learned along the way in terms of training that team? What does that look like when you bring people into the company?

It used to be, hey, here's the keys and show up Thursday at 10 and good luck. I mean, that was kind of our training process. You know, for us it's hard because we have the college girl that works 10 hours a week and we have the executive operational COO person running one of our companies. So we, you know, we've got 100 plus employees between our companies, probably 100. And they range so far in the scale between very part time boutique hire to management on one of the other companies. And so one of the things that we have just really had to figure out is who are we as a company? We had to really spend some time and entrez. Leadership made us do that. Like, what do we believe? Who were our core values and vision leaks. Andy Stanley always talks about how vision leaks. And so we cast vision to someone. This is the kind of company we want to be. We hire them in the interview process and we never put it back in front of them again. And we wonder why they're not excelling and knocking out of the park because they don't remember what the vision of the company was. We don't articulate it well and we don't know what it is half the time. And so we really got back to figuring out, okay, what are our core values and begin to write KRAS key results areas that do entrepreneurship really talks about and gave people a great job description. And this is what we want to do. We don't do it all the time. We kind of fall back into our old system. Sometimes we just throw people in there because football season is crazy. But we were noticing we were hiring people and we gave them a verbal expectation of what to do or a job description that was so vague you had no idea we wanted you to do, but we did it. So that way if you didn't do something, we could hold you accountable to the and anything else being necessary. You know, that was like everything was built in that one statement. But what we realized is when we were on the sales floor, especially at DSP customers and be like oh, my God. You have the greatest customer service. Your people are so wonderful. We step out of the building, and everybody went back into the old mode of just trying to exist. And so we had to really figure out, who are we? What do we think we want to be as a company? Can we write them down? Can we articulate these things? And can we create a culture in which people just say them? And it's the new language that we use around our company. And DSP goes through seasons of getting it. Well, the T shirt business is really kind of changing that. Social shop's changing that. And we tell people we demand to be the greatest service that anyone has ever seen when they step foot in any of our companies. Now, we fall short of that all the time. Actually, right now, we're struggling because we're growing too fast. We can't keep up. But that thing still drives us back to we have to ingrain in our people that when someone walks in that door, you got to expect that they're going to spend $1,000 in our store. You got to treat them like they have all the money in the world. You got to serve them. You got to make them feel valued. You got to make sure that they know your want want them there and that we're there to serve them and take care of them. And, you know, we're a boutique that sells 25 to $45 items, but I want them to feel like they just walked into a Tory Burch or a store that sells four and five hundred dollars items. That's what I want them. I want them to feel like they just walked into Louis Vuitton, you know, and when you walk in that store, people are like, hey, you got. You're fixing to drop three grand. Let me take care of you. And I want us to just have that mindset that everybody that walks in, no matter if they spend 10 bucks or $1,000, they're valuable to us because they're the reason that we have a business. And we lose sight of that so many times. Customers become a burden, and they're not a burden. They're the reason that we can send our kids to school and clothe them and, you know, and all that. And so one of the greatest compliments we ever get is when our employees that leave our store and go off and get their big girl job and, you know, out of college and they come back to us and they say, I literally would not have been successful in my job if it wouldn't be for the things I learned when I worked for you. And we just, like, man, if we could, just, like that's a goal of ours, is to train and empower these girls to go out and just be rock stars when they leave us. You know, sometimes that's hard, but, you know, it's just making sure they understand the core values of the company and just making sure it's like on auto repeat that they hear it over and over and over and over again. Because vision leaks, and they're not. They don't care about the company like you do, and so you got to help them get there.

Man. I appreciate that about you. You and I have had this conversation a number of times about customer service and what that really means, and it's obvious your vision has leaked that customer service is such a core value. Would you say just to kind of flip this conversation to the inverse, would you say that there's big mistakes that you see happening in the industry today in terms of customer service? Like things that are often being overlooked?

Yes, I think we. I think the boutique clothing world is on a race to sell the most amount of product at the cheapest price and with no service in mind. And I think we have gone the complete 180 of what our parents grew up in. There's still a store here in town, a men's clothing store, that when I walk in there, I mean, I walk out of there, I feel good. I feel good, like, I love buying something there. I get served. I mean, they're just taking care of me. And it's the way that our parents expected service to be. And so now what we've done is said, hey, I'll just sell it for a dollar cheaper. And we're just racing down this no margin, as cheap as you possibly can, and no service involved. And I think it's a slippery slope. That's a scary place to be. Because we, the small business owner, will never be the cheapest price. We can't. We can't afford to sell it for the people as cheap as these big box stores can. And so if we don't provide service, if we don't provide something else, they're just gonna. They're gonna. We're gonna train our customers to look for the cheapest price. We're not the cheapest price. We don't want to be the cheapest price. Now, I'd say we're a very fair price. But the thing you get with us is you get a relationship. You know, the owners, you see our faces. You see us in the community. We serve you. We take care of you. And so buying from us isn't just buying a clothing piece of item or a T shirt, social shop or love Poppy. It is buying from people that are invested in your business as well. And I tell people all the time when they buy from us, I'm like, look, I want to take care of you. I'm on your team too. If you're successful, I'm successful. I think about Dana Waltz. I know she's a hub member. And Dana sends me like, last minute, like, hey, can you get this out in a couple of days? And my team knows and Dana hears it. She'll probably laugh at me or send me a text. But my team knows if Dana says I need X, we figure out how to do X. There's no exceptions. Dana's a great customer, and we're going to take care of Dana. And I do that with Brianne. I do that with Jo Beth. I have these people, but they literally, I mean, they. They text me. They're like my friends, and I'm invested in their business and I'm helping them be successful. That's a burden for me to share with them. And so when I see them, I don't just see a dollar. I literally see these people that I'm in relationship with. And I think that's the thing that we have lost. And it's become very transactional, and it's not relational. And I think, you know, I think that's why Ed like Ed and the boutique cup. I don't know Ed. I want to meet Ed. I told you that on the phone the other day. But Ed is a relational seller, and people love Ed because he's not just a transactional guy. And that's why people love Ed. And I think the Ed's of the world are few and far between. And we've got to get back to that kind of service because that's what's going to help us compete with big box stores. Because eventually price is going to be the thing that puts us all out of business, man.

So spot on. And you named three awesome boutique owners. And for any of you who don't know Ed, Ed Olvera has been with Volatile Shoes for, I think, over 14 years. He was a lead buyer at Nordstrom, at JCPenney before that, and now he's joining us as our director of wholesale at the boutique Hub. And you're absolutely right. In Ed's mind, it is 100% about the service and the relationship and not just about the sale. So. So well stated, and I think so Often overlooked. So if someone's listening today and they're a newer boutique owner and you know everything that you just walked through, customer service, the whole thing, what would you say your number one takeaway should be for someone that's listening, if they're just getting started? What do you do to succeed?

You know, I think you should spend some time just trying to figure out what your goal, your vision, the store looks like. I think you need to put it on paper, put some goals there, and you need to be laser focused on seeing those things through. I think one of the biggest detriments that happens as people see success or failures outside them, they begin to chase those things and they try to mimic what someone else's success is and they get away from the core value of who they are. We see that, esp, we can't sell gift and we can't sell high end items, but we always want to bring in gift around Christmas and it always flops. We want to carry Moon Moo and lines like that. It always flops and we, we end up blowing money or spending money or getting sideways because we invest in something we know is not a home run at our store. It's because we lose focus of what DSP is about. Who is dsp? We are these things and we have to buy. We have to just really maintain this laser focus on that. So I think if you're a new owner, who are you, what are you about? What are your core values? And just make sure that you're laser focused on those. Don't worry about what other people are saying or doing. You do what you know you've been called to do and what you're good at and you'll be successful.

All right, so let's flip gears and talk about wholesale because we talked about success in terms of retail and being a boutique. And I love this conversation, by the way, because you and I can go one of 800 different directions and still be on the same page. I appreciate that so much. Talk to me about wholesale. The future of this industry, you know, traditionally was at market and then it was online, and now it's kind of a combination of both. How do you see wholesale transactions taking place in the future?

You know, we lived in the market world. We were doing 14, 15 markets a year. The amount of money that we spent to do those was just a crazy number that we then had to turn around and put inside the product so that we could pay for the product. And all we were basically doing is the retailers were paying for our market expense. Which is kind of crazy. Obviously, you know that that's not rocket science. But I don't think you ever really think about, like this expense is covered in the product. And so we started thinking, look, if we could figure out how to drop our price Some, we've got 500 stores buying from us, 400 stores buying from us. If we could drop our price some and then give incredible service because our sales team is not wore out from just, you know, chasing the world all over the place, could we sustain this business and even grow our wholesale business and not leave the office? And that was kind of what we looked at come March of this year. And I tell you, actually this past month, I think we did more sales in September than we did the year before. And that's with us attending all the markets and coming out of Atlanta gift and apparel and Dallas apparel and Vegas. We did more in September and never left the office than we did the year before. And I think it's now we're able to take care of customers. We're not chasing the roads all the time. I don't think anyone cares that they don't see us at market. We've lost a few folks along the way, but really, really haven't. And so I think we call people, we get on the phone more than we've ever been on the phone phone before. We don't rely just on email, which I think is something we've done in the wholesale business, even retail side. We just expect that you're going to check your email, want to buy from us, but we're really taking care of people. And one of the things that we did, we started sending boxes out. We, you know, put our line, you can't see us at markets. We put everything new in our line. We create 10 boxes. We just started this. We'd ship them to you with a return label, let you look at them, let you touch them, feel them, see them, ship them back to us. And we just have these things, as soon as they come in, they're back out the door the same day. And so essentially we've created market for about 15 bucks and a label each way and got the product in front of people. And we have not seen any change in sales at all. In fact, I feel like people probably, we get more of the undivided attention because they're not being distracted by the other thousand vendors there. Obviously we're smart. We hit people before they go to market, we hit people after they go to market. I tell people all the time, hey, you grassify and go to market, but save some money for me. And so we've really just tried to figure out how to not chase the market world. And I'm not saying market's bad and a lot of people still use it. We have not gone to market at DSP in like three or four years. We just know our vendors and we know who we buy from. And so we just said, look, if we don't do it, I think there's a lot of people out there that don't want to be away from their store and their families. And so we've relied on, we still rely on email marketing, don't get me wrong, but old fashioned picking up the phone, calling people and then getting the product in front of people with these pick boxes.

All right, tell me this, tell me what is your definition of community over competition?

Oh, man. Golly. You probably could define this way better than me. You know, I think for me, I did not understand it in that terminology before I joined the hub. That's, that's not the words I would have used. But I think for me, even in Social Shop when we started, I'll give you kind of, I'll say it in this and try to define it because I didn't know you were gonna ask me me this so is I said, when we started Social Shop, I said there has to be a world where we can learn together and be better because of one another. And so when we started Social Shop, I created a Facebook group that we could all kind of be in. You know, it is not material. It has not like taken shape the way that I want it to because of me. I just had to put the time and energy into it. But I think for me it is we are stronger together. And if I really believe that I have a great product, I shouldn't have to tear someone down to build myself up and my product up. And for me that, I mean, I give you the perfect example. That's Brandon McComment sold. And I laughed last time. They didn't get to hear the, you know, the comments last time, the last podcast he didn't record. Well, I guess probably just to save my relationship with Brandon to pick it on him. But when I see a post in there and someone says, hey, does anybody know how to fix this thing? On comments sold. When I say that, always tag him because I know that he has an awesome product, he's an awesome guy and he's helping a lot of people become a lot better. And so why would I to try to make a buck, want to stop that process, you know, And I think for me, it's. It's. It's just not being selfish and genuinely caring about the person at the end of that conversation more than I care about trying to make a dollar. And I think that's really, you know, I don't know that's a definition, but it's just. I think it's having compassion that. That far reaches, you know, selfish motivations.

I think that's a really good point. And. And you two are a very good example of that. Two dudes, first of all, which. There's not very many dudes in the.

Hub, so it's right. Gotta stick together.

Nice to have the both of you in there. But, you know, two guys that are working in the exact same space, that are friendly and helpful to one another and do genuinely care about your customers, that's pretty remarkable.

Well, he makes me better, you know, I mean, because if he's good at what he does, I mean, that's what I tell people all the time, you know, a new store opening, like, oh, a new store opened up. And I'm like, yeah, you know what they did? They just made us up, pop better. Because it just reminded me that there's more competition. So I just gotta. I've gotta be better. I don't have to figure out a way to hurt you. If I'm better, I'm gonna. Everything's gonna take care of itself, you know, I think that's like Chick fil A, you know, so funny. Chick fil A is like chick fil A and out slamming people. They just serve the best fast food out there. Not even quality, just the best service. And so people love Chick fil A, you know, and so Brandon makes me better. Because I look at Brandon and think, man, he's just. He came out with something new. He comes out with something new, like every 10 seconds, you know, some new product. And so I'm like, he makes me have to think and he pushes me to be better because of it. That's not competition, you know, and dudes especially have competition. We're just wired that way. But that's a healthy thing. It's a good thing, you know, to have that drive that one another gives each other. And I think in the boutique world, it's such a cutthroat. I mean, I'm a dude and I'm like, oh, my God. I don't know how people live in this world, you know, it's just so, like, negative and so awful. And to see boutique owners helping one Another. I mean, it's. It's such an incredible thing. And they're only going to be better because of it, each one of them, you know, and the hub is. I mean it. I tell you all the time, I'm like, it is the most unique, special, unexplainable thing. And I know it's only by the grace of God that it's happened actually in your. In Yalls leadership, but it's just. It's not. It's not possible to do what you've done. You know, it's so neat to see it happen.

Thank you for that. I appreciate it. And I'm. I tell you what, it is by the grace of God. And I am blown away every single day at the compassion that these, you know, women and men have for one another. And it goes beyond just running a business. It goes beyond sharing whatever their secret is to, you know, buying or traveling or selling or whatever. But it's real life stuff. You know, the hurricane comes through and destroys lives and homes, and these women go raise money for one another. It is so cool to see. So I'm glad that you're a part of that.

Well, you know, and I think. I think your point, it's so much more than just the tip. I think it's the encouragement that just to keep fighting, you know, I mean, here's my bad day and 30 comments. Hey, keep going, keep going. Keep fighting. You're going to make it. And it's like having a, you know, a 4,000 cheerleaders, you know, cheer you on. And who doesn't perform well when people are cheering them on? You know, in the entrepreneurial world, owning a business, you feel isolated and alone all the time. And to have people on your side, I mean, it's just. It's invaluable.

Tell me about your life as an entrepreneur. Because, you know, the saying is, you can't fill someone else's bucket when yours is empty. So I'm curious, where do you go? We mentioned Dave Ramsey. Where do you go to find more inspiration, education, and to fill your own cup so that you can help others?

Yeah, I think there's two pieces. I think there's a spiritual piece for me that I think if that gets out of line and out of whack, everything goes south. You know, I refuse to let my business or success destroy my family. And so, you know, I'm a follower of Christ first, I'm a husband second, and I'm a father to two awesome kids next. And those things have to be before anything I do from a business standpoint. And that's a hard balance. It's hard to maintain that, but it has to happen. So I think spiritually being fed is the first thing that has to happen in my life. And, and then secondly, from an educational standpoint, you know, I really like Dave Ramsey. I really like Andy Stanley. His leadership podcasts are great. There's obviously.