Kelan Raph Founder of MarketM8

Welcome back, folks, to another week here of the Small Business show for Wednesday, June 3rd. Here we are again, still from our quarantined bunkers. Separate but equal. Yeah, there you go.

You got it. Yeah. I'm excited about this week's show. One of the best things I love about doing the Small Business show is it's allowed me to connect with a ton of people that I otherwise would have had a much tougher time connecting with, as well as people that I've become friends with over the last couple of decades and seeing what they're doing with their companies and having them on the show and then when they start new businesses, having them to come on back and talk about that. So we have one of those guests here this week and I'm real excited about learning, seeing what he's been up to and sharing it with our listeners.

For sure. I'm going to tease out something. You said it in passing in the interview. This really isn't what the interviews are about. But you said that you were talking about his thoughts on COVID 19 and its impact on various industries. And you can hear the interview in a moment here to gain Kellen's thoughts on all of that. But you said hopefully we're on the back end of this COVID 19 thing. Do you really think we're on the back end of this?

I do.

Okay, that's good.

Especially light of current events that I don't want to go into here. I really think we are on the back end of it and learning a lot more about it and, and that things are going to rapidly expand. I think the fourth quarter of this year we got, you know, it's going to be a tough couple of months here getting things back, few months getting back, things back open. But fall is going to be glorious and 2021, I think, is just full of opportunity.

2021 will be. Yeah. I still see that as the kind of the beginning of the roaring twenties here for us. Golden age, I think. So people, I think, mean, it's clear, you know, from like you said, all the stuff that that's happened this week and this past weekend that people have hit their level of stir, craziness in a lot of. Well, in a lot of dangerous ways. And it.

Absolutely.

And quite frankly, it's, you know, it's awful some of the things that have happened.

It is.

And it like, I can't even wrap my head around it. But yeah, you know, but. But a lot of what we're seeing is people sort of throwing their social distancing Guidelines to the, to the wayside. Yeah. And so we're going to know a lot. We're going to know a lot more coming weeks.

Yes, yes, we'll know. Wow. Okay. It's not just Florida and Georgia, so. Because they haven't seen increases in it since they opened up a few weeks ago, but now all over the country, you know, large crowds and so.

Yeah, we'll find out.

We'll find out. And I'm optimistic. You know, like everything else, we get through everything in this country and we'll get through this as well. And it'll be people that like you that are listening today that help us get through that stuff. And the ones that, you know, productive folks that want to solve problems, want to go to work, want to get things done together, that's what's going to make things better. Yeah, Action, man. It's action, like we say.

Well, that's what we said at the beginning of all this, which was, you know, figure out first how to survive and then don't stop. Then figure out how to thrive. And there are folks that are, that are kind of figuring it out, you know, in a variety of different ways, which is good.

Absolutely. Lots of opportunity.

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No, man, I'm ready to go. Let's do it.

All right. He's Shannon. Gene. I'm Dave Hamilton. And this is the Small Business Show.

That quick prototyping, that experimental kind of mindset. You know, if you take too long to try to craft or develop something and just go get your focus group feedback and keep iterating, iterating, iterating. Never go to market, then you're just wasting time. So the best thing is follow that lean startup mentality of that minimum viable product. Get it out there, get commercial with it. And when I say commercial, it's like, really like you have a customer that's paying. You can't just give the stuff away and ask for people's opinions. You have to have real buyers.

So we love to check back in with previous guests to see how they're doing, what they're up to. I always mention that interview. Haven't check in in a few. It's great to see how their businesses are doing, what new projects are working on. So today we have a serial entrepreneur that's also a serial guest on the Small Business Show. This will be his third time, and I just told him that, you know, if he keeps starting new companies, he can keep coming back. So it's always great. Yeah, it's always great to catch up with with Kellen Raff. Kellen, thanks for joining us today. I'm excited to talk to you.

Yeah, thanks for having me on. Shannon and Dave.

Yeah, that's cool. So I want to go back, really back. You know, I feel like this music. When we met, you know, you were working for dhl, right?

Yeah.

Doing logistics and international stuff. I think if I remember correctly, take a couple of minutes and talk about making the leap from the corporate world to starting your first business, because you've done this a number of times now. You know, I've met a lot of people that work for shipping companies. A lot of them talk about Going out on their own, doing their own thing. They're always fascinated, maybe because they deal with so many small businesses and it sounds so great, at least from the outside, but most of them stay and because it's a safe bet. What pushed you to kind of make that. To make that leap and then do it over and over again?

Yeah, for sure. And it's funny because I actually was. I had a career with DHL even before we met. I was working for DHL from college and got bit by the international bug and really loved all the, you know, the international trade. As soon as I graduated from UC Santa Barbara, applied for a position to go over to Asia and I was in Guam running the airport operation and physical operations there. And then kind of got bit again by one of my clients. Actually was looking for somebody to expand their business in in the US So I moved back to Los Angeles and that was really my first kind of entrepreneurial mission. And I was sent with $10,000 to go open an office and open a company and do all that. We grew that company to about 5 million in sales in three years. And it was really a trial by fire. Very uncomfortable, but at the same time like just super valuable lessons. And started developing products, developed hundreds of products for big box stores, private label stuff as well, as well as our own labels. And then in 2003, when the LA ports went on strike, it put me out of business. I had all my Christmas deliveries on the water at that point and that was it. So at the time I was like, what am I going to do? I'll go back to DHL and this time I want to go into sales. So I moved back home, ish, you know, back to the Bay Area and applied for an entry level sales position and got that. And then you became my customer. Actually I didn't even have to sell you.

What a great day that was.

I remember it so clearly. Remember Jason and he was your account rep before he'd gotten a promotion and introduced me to you and I came out and saw your business and Concord, the refurbishment and repair of all the Apple products. Right?

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah.

That's good stuff.

So yeah, working with you and your wife and what was cool is that like my relationship with you, I had about 200 customers that I was serving not as closely as I was with you, but being able to come in the front door and talk strategy and expansion and customer value type of stuff with entrepreneurs and executives, but also being in the back door and seeing how the constraints of the business really Run things and challenges that might be there physically. The impetus for me to move on and start my own business was I was just finishing my MBA and DHL and the economy both started to tank. And if you remember, we couldn't even bill you correctly. And I remember that you ended up firing me, which I was like, geez, it's about time, you know. But it was kind of a little bit of a push as well. Like DHL reduced staff by 90% in the U.S. right. I had left before that because it was just, I mean, it's impossible to be in sales if you can't deliver the service anyway, so. And what I had crafted was kind of a best practices consulting business. And I realized that, you know, having seen so many companies, online retailers especially, or brands that are distributing with lean teams, that there's really a lot of value that I could add as just a single shingle professional. So I went out and left DHL and started what was the first version of Optimum Supply Chain. Just a different name basically. We've named it that sense and was very successful in doing, you know, five to six, seven transformational logistics projects per year, outsourcing logistics to third party logistics companies, expansion to new countries, renegotiating contracts with FedEx and UPS and was very successful in doing that. We started to develop a software to do that as well. And I did a joint venture which I talked about, I think on the first episode of.

Was that the Grand Canal?

Yeah, Grand Canals, exactly. So went through the whole fundraising from Angels and then into a series a, raised about 6 or $7 million, hired a whole professional team to really grow and expand the company. And then in 2018 we ended up selling the business to C.H. robinson. And then I basically just restarted my supply chain practice, you know, more of the consulting.

That's cool.

And so yeah, it was, it's been a fun ride and it's been nice to work so intimately with brands and customers like you guys at Tech Restore too.

Yeah, it's good, good stuff. I still am expecting to get a DHL invoice in the mail at some point. You know, all these years later. I mean we, we had. There was hundreds of thousands of dollars in discrepancies and trying to go through it was just a disaster. And I haven't thought about it in years until you mentioned it, so. But, but yeah, it's a tough thing.

Yeah, it's a tough thing to do. I mean even the other, the big boys, other ones too, have, have a challenge with, with invoicing and it's, it's a real problem for sure. So that's one of the services that we actually launched was an audit service to make sure you're getting billed correctly and then to represent you if you weren't.

Well, that's, I mean, that's smart. It's a problem you know exists and you know how it exists and how to look for it. That's how good businesses are built.

So yeah, it's killer identifying those problems. So, you know, you have a lot going on. I always think that Dave and I have a lot going on, but then I look at like your LinkedIn profile and I'm just like, man, look at this. He's doing this, he's doing that, he's working with optimum doing stuff. I don't know if you're doing things with Jensen Logistics and now you've got this new company market mate that we're going to talk about next. How do you effectively manage your time and to, to optimize your impact across each of the companies that you're involved with? I mean, is it just full of delegating or you do you dip back in and out? Because that's a challenge. I find myself is, you know, how do I. What's the best way to optimize, you know, my time and, you know, how do you, how do you do it?

Yeah, not well most times.

Me too.

Meditation helps a lot. Focus, you know, really focus on focus. Compartmentalizing, which I've always been able to do pretty well. Calendar, like Google Calendar is probably number one, you know.

Yeah.

And thank God for my team. That really helped me a lot with the blocking and tackling, the operations HubSpot, which is the most killer CRM ever and marketing application as well with you know, like a link that you can put in to schedule meetings. Like I don't ever go back and forth of choosing a time and oh no, that time's not available and oh, can we change it to this time? And where's the zoom link? Like I don't do that at all. I just have one little link and people click on it and set up a time on my calendar and it goes, yeah, that's great. Cell phone because I've been traveling the last five years, probably every other week at least. So obviously the apps and email help a lot. But I think more deeply than that, it's a strategy of agile. I learned this process doing software development. I'm sure you guys are familiar with agile process where you basically set up work, sprints, cycles. We do A one week cycle. So every Monday is a Monday, every Friday is a Friday. We have our set meetings on those two days and then pretty much everything between is just execution. So my team can reach me on my cell phone with text if it's something urgent. But I very rarely, if I'm missing a meeting, that's the only time I ever get a text from them. And they all use slack internally themselves but I don't need to be on that. So it is a lot of delegation. It's a lot of providing people with autonomy to be able to do things for themselves. And you know, we really rarely have any fires to put out. It's quite nice. And then that affords me the time to be more strategic with customers, more productive with actually sitting down and writing marketing messages and things like that. And then also gives me the time to carve out a one on one meeting with each of the team every week.

That's cool. Yeah, it makes sense that agile sounds like the way to go.

It sounds like you're pretty disciplined in terms of how you employ the agile thing. And I think maybe that's the key to the success of it. There is sticking with it as opposed to just adopting some of the things from it that sound like they fit in with what you were already doing.

Totally. And I used to not be that way. I used to be like at the end of the day, okay, what do we achieve today there, you know, weeks on weeks really help and you know, to be patient and let things happen rather than trying to force them. And they do happen, especially when you give people the freedom to do it.

Well, that's the key, right is, is giving people that freedom to, to you know, some level of autonomy so that they feel ownership and can, can want to do it as opposed to, oh yeah, you know, somebody's breathing down my neck. So totally.

Another thing is to, to set the expectation on reporting out. So here's like for instance, marketing team is responsible every Friday for reporting out certain metrics and so that I don't have to ask for them. It's rather than getting in the habit of oh like I've seen many business owners oh, what were the sales for today? Or what were the sales for this month? And they're asking questions and then they have to wait for a response and make people nervous sometimes rather just say hey, give me the sales every Friday afternoon and then let the individual report that out and just get in the habit of it. And then now there's no more conversation.

You know, it just happens and if it doesn't happen, then there's a conversation, but that's, that's a different conversation. Right, so.

Yep, absolutely. Yep.

That's cool. So, yeah, so give us the details about your new business. Market mate. What was the impetus to start another company and what do you guys do over there?

Yeah, so I've been in sales for 20 plus years, customer facing, you know, working very closely with marketing, being the person to deliver the offer and to, you know, set up customers. And I've seen marketing done really well and I've seen it done poorly. And at Grand Canals, you know, when we took all this funding, a lot of it was for marketing, a lot of it was for sales and marketing. So I was, you know, around the country, you know, at conferences and part of, you know, the creation of marketing content and saw how it was done and really fell in love with it. And it was, I felt finally that I could scale myself rather than just being sales of talking to one customer at a time and pitching and, you know, all of that, that it was something more, more valuable in the long term. So when I left Grand Canals I started some sales agency stuff that we were helping our partner companies with their services to bring them to market and you know, to get the introductions done, referrals and things like that. And then I'd had a lot of experience in developing CRM processes, everything from implementation to training and using CRMs myself. So, you know, everybody from Zoho to Salesforce to, you know, HubSpot and everybody in between. And I saw how Marketo was used at Grand Canals in conjunction with Salesforce and really loved it. A lot of the people who were working on it didn't like it as much. Obviously Adobe loved it and that's why they paid billions of dollars for it and it was very expensive. So about a year and a half ago we decided to bite the bullet for optimum and implement HubSpot. And they had just rolled out a CRM system themselves. It was pretty light but very flexible. And so I started to hire a team and build all the processes of sales and marketing on HubSpot. And then about seven or eight months ago, HubSpot approached us and said, you know, hey, you guys are really sales forward and really using the CRM. Well, what do you think about doing a sales agency, like a sales partnership with us? So we became a partner of HubSpot and got really good support from them on, you know, different inbound tactics. Really just learned a lot. It was painful. The whole year was like, you know, Learning can be very painful. It can be very costly as well, especially when you have a team that you're paying for it. But it was well worth it. And so we finished up last year just feeling extremely confident too to basically spin out a digital sales and marketing agency called Market Mate. And that's how we started. So we've been implementing HubSpot. We've been doing all the landing pages and forms and offers and inbound marketing on LinkedIn. A lot of the integrations of systems like even Salesforce and things like that. You don't have to use the HubSpot CRM, you can use any. Everything these days with API is all connectable. But yeah, just totally fell in love with it and started to see it work and realize that this can be a whole business.

That's cool. So you guys are doing everything from, like you said, LinkedIn stuff, direct marketing, social media, pay per click campaigns. I mean, it's pretty broad, right?

Yeah, it is. We don't do as much on the pay per click, but all the other stuff. Absolutely. Much more social content creation and distribution. And as somebody told me, content is king and distribution is queen and she trumps. And it's super true. Like you could write the best white paper ever, but if nobody ever reads it, it's completely worth this. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

So, you know, I look at this stuff and as a small business owner, you know, there's so much, you know, you, like you said getting your content out there and there's so many different places and venues and I'm always just like, I don't, you know, where do I focus on this stuff And I imagine that's, is that your type of customer? You know, small to medium sized businesses that need help, you know, maybe fine tuning, you know, their message and where to, you know, where to be, whether it's LinkedIn or Instagram or you know, Facebook. Is that your type of customer?

Yeah, totally. So we do a lot of strategy stuff with startups on creating the message and who's the target market and how to approach them, what's the offer, all of those. But we also have a lot of experience working with enterprise. And so we have a couple customers that are billion dollar size revenue where we'll help with a specific program that they're launching a new division or a certain territory or a certain channel, like just LinkedIn for instance, company page and professional profiles of the salespeople and then help them to create the processes and then actually execute processes as well. So a lot of the work that we're doing was traditionally done internally by marketing staff. And now with things just needing to scale much faster, it's way quicker to hire a service like ours. Sure.

And when you meet with these people and you're working on projects, I mean, do you hear kind of common misconceptions about digital marketing over and over? Is there similarities and how do you guys overcome those?

Yeah, I think the number one misconception is that digital marketing is expensive. And you know, people believe that because it is. It's very expensive. If you're looking at marketing being like Facebook or SEO or Google Ads, things like that, that's super, super expensive. But marketing itself is basically taking looking at your own business and your services, what you do best and then bringing that message and offer to your target market efficiently. So inefficiently would be like to mail everybody in a zip code extremely efficiently would be to go, you know, much more focused and targeted. And then don't just send them one message. You gotta send them the 12 messages that it's gonna take to really break through. You know, if you just keep, you know, cold calling down a whole list and your objective is getting to the bottom of the list and turning the page, it's not gonna work. You really need to focus and give the, you know, give the time and the energy that the prospect who you really want to be a customer at the time. And you know, I believe that marketing is really diy. Like you can absolutely do this yourself. And when you want to start spending money as much more when you want to scale. So when you've figured out a message that works, then you can of course start spending money on ads. But you don't want to just throw a bunch of money on a bunch of ads and then see what works because it'll just once you stop spending money, then your demand is going to dry up.

Yeah, you got to test and then iterate.

Right.

See what a lot of that A B testing. Does it really take 12 times for someone to engage? Yeah, that's it seems like it, right?

Yeah, it does. Shockingly and frustratingly.

That'S lower than the amount of times that it was stated to be. The first time I heard that number, you know, 20 something, maybe 30 something years ago, it was, it was in the high 20s, almost double that number when it, when it was first explained to me and you know, sort of marketing 101 was like maybe now, now.

That it's more focused and you can drill down, maybe, maybe that speeds it up as if you're. You're getting it to the right people.

First, you know, that would make sense.

Yeah, sure it does. And it's an average.

Right.

And then sometimes there's, you know, you get a referral, for instance, and you have one meeting and then they ask for, you know, for to set up an account. But it's more about. The point is, don't give up if you decide that this company that you're going to go after is going to be a really good customer for you, that they fit a profile when you call them, if the person who answers the phone says, we're not interested, which is what they're trained to do and have to do these days because of so many outbound calls or inbound calls to them. Right. And you just say, it's okay, I'll take your no, and I'll. That's, you know, let's go to the next one. And so try something a little bit different. Don't call the same person back. Are you ready to buy yet? It's more like contact the, you know, the controller if it's a financial solution, or contact customer service if you think there's something that you might be able to offer there, ask for an introduction. That's what's amazing about LinkedIn. And yeah, this is crazy. So I just hit 10,000 connections on LinkedIn last week. Yeah, it's insane. I can't even believe. Like, yeah, it's hard to even keep up. I, I probably have a, you know, 150 connection requests that are kind of sitting there that I go through pending. But the point is like, of all those connections, I get probably one request per month to introduce to somebody else on my network. I mean, and these are generally from like the one I got last week was from a VC that said, hey, I'm looking to hire this guy as a CEO of one of my startups, you know, can you give me some background on, on him? That's like the one per month. And it's. Why are people not asking for that? You know. Yeah, that seems because, yeah, that personal introduction is worth so much money. I mean, rather than calling them 12 times, you know, and having a success rate of 20% or something like that, you know, know. Yeah.

I'm always shocked how people often overlook LinkedIn and the power of, of your reputation, your credibility, your network, you know, on, on that site and that, that platform, if you will, it is really powerful. And so speaking to that, are you actively recruiting those followers or as part of your system that you've developed that you use with Like Market Mate is if, if a, you know, a business was coming to you for help and wanted that presence on there, are you using the techniques that you offer to them for your own account?

Totally. That's the primary service that we're offering. Where we're seeing the Most success is LinkedIn. You know, leveraging LinkedIn. We just did a webinar on it about six weeks ago or so about the things that you can do and it's totally free. You don't have to pay. I mean, I suggest that you get, get the sales navigator for $79 a month, but it's worth its weight. You don't have to pay any advertising at all. And you can build, you know, a good network and you can keep top of mind. I had one of our biggest customers now reached out to me like six weeks ago and said, hey, I'm just getting a job offer from this global 3 PL third party logistics company to run a new division. And she's like, I love what you're doing on LinkedIn. I love the way you write and your content. I want to have you got, you know, have you guys help me to go to market with this. It's like, she's like, pre sold.

Nice.

You know.

Yeah.

Can you give me a proposal? Oh. Oh my gosh, this is great. So that's what Inbound is. That's what, you know, HubSpot has taught us as well about the, you know, you do all this content creation and messaging and all of that stuff and then you have a nice form that when somebody's ready to engage you, then they can go ahead and do that and then save your time on the calls. You don't have to chase people as much.

Oh, and they're, they're, like I said, you're already a credible resource for them. They're coming to you. So the sales pitch and the whole relationship foundation is completely different.

Right.

I'm a firm believer in that.

Inbound it is, it's so much more personal. And that's why we're kind of combining sales and marketing. We're doing marketing on behalf of the sales professional so that when they, when, when somebody sees the brand and the person, it's the person that they're contacting, they're not going to engage the company and call the 1, 800 number. They're going to contact Dave or Shannon because they see him all the time. And so what we do is we help set up the strategy and messaging and the content calendars and then we have an integration with HubSpot to keep track of it all so that we can also do, you know, keep track of the companies that we're trying to attract and then the people that are at those companies in the specific roles and then keeping track of how many messages that they've received and what message have we sent, have we called them? Who else do we know at that company?

Yeah, leveraging those relationships. Yeah, that's killer.

It's really smart.

Yeah, that is good. So I want to ask you a couple of kind of timely questions here. You know, we're in the middle of this. Well, maybe we're on, hopefully we're on the back end of this Covid thing. Have you had to shift your, your, any of your business practices? I know you're, you know, every, you're pretty distributed and, but I'm sure there was some changes you had to implement and how you operate and maybe even the services that you offer to your customers. Based on the stuff we've just gone through for the last few months.

Yeah, we're, we're remote by design. And that was because, you know, I feel people can do their best work, you know, where they want to live, and it works really well. You know, we are heavy zoom users for like the past five, six years. And so it's nothing new. Our customers, business models have changed. I mean, some of our customers have actually gone out of business. Right. Those that couldn't distribute their product or for whatever reason, you know, issues. But, you know, the marketing budgets have shifted. What people used to spend a ton of money on conferences and travel and that face to face stuff is all just impossible now. And I think that's going to be a major, major shift in the way that marketing dollars are spent and that it's going to, you know, as it already has been moving towards digital, but really being okay with, you know, people, salespeople being remote and people working from home and being more productive and being never late for a meeting. I mean, how there's no traffic. How can you be late? Being able to take notes right there on your laptop or even record the conversations to be able to take notes later. Being able to bring people into a meeting right away, you know, how do you remember how awkward it is? I don't know if you've ever had a salesperson come in and then dial their team in. That's remote. It's kind of weird.

Yeah.

What's the WI fi? And this cable doesn't work and why is the monitor not working? And it's like it's Just such a waste. Like you could have a, you know, take that one hour that it could take and bring it into 15 minutes, have everybody there and alert and ready to go. That's great. And then it's just way, way more effective.

I believe you guys should check out Otter AI and it does real time transcription of your Zoom meetings as they occur. It's unbelievable. It's definitely magic. Magic. Yeah. That's good. Okay, so on that same thing, you know, you're, you're really what I think of a supply chain expert. You know, I always think of you because your depth of experience is just, you know, it's deep and broad. So what's your take on the impact of COVID and like, and also our current relationship with China on the supply chain? I mean, do you think things are just going to kind of return to the way they were before? Are they going to be different and are you advising your logistic customers and how those changes will, will be?

Yeah, I think we're never going to see or experience how it was before. This is just a huge change. And it's not just supply side or tariffs. It's even the demand and consumption is going to change drastically. Like, look at cars for instance, like automobiles. I mean, Tesla was already starting to take over and Uber on top of that and Lyft with the rideshare kind of model. And now you don't even need a car because you're not driving anywhere. And you know, it's, it's totally going to change, you know, beyond recovery for, for many companies and really challenging to a lot of industries. Restaurants, you know, 25 to 80% of restaurants I hear are going to go under. And that's after already kind of, you know, owners bleeding into them with not a very high profit business in the first place. Sure. And then all the fallout from service people.

That creates opportunity though. I mean, food service especially is, is a difficult business for people to, you know, it's difficult to maintain success in food service. Some people obviously can and are very good at it, but, but you know, most of them will go out of business in their first year anyway. And I, I feel like that, that part of this is a business that's used to reinventing itself on a regular basis. Yeah, yeah, you know what I mean? Like I, I mean there are lots of businesses that are, that are definitely impacted by Covid that are not normally so volatile, but that one is pretty volatile to begin with, I think. I mean, I don't mean to be insensitive to, you know, all of the folks listening who run restaurants and have problems with it. But going into that business, you know that it's, you know, you're operating on thin margins and, and you know, it's food service. Right. So get it, get it wrong once and that could be the end regardless of anything else that's going on around you.

So it's a tough business. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

But how about like the, you know, the traditional, okay, we're going to build this product and we're going to, you know, have our folks on the ground over in, you know, in China and we're going to do this and we're going to import. I mean, is it just, have you seen anything in your logistics experience or hear things about hey, what's the real cost of like manufacturing it here, you know, domestically or in South America or something like that? Any shift like that or people just kind of sitting on the sidelines?

No, for sure, like near sourcing and doing more local stuff. You know, if you're manufacturing in Mexico, then you're supporting our neighbors. And then rather than air freight for some late delivery or other issue, you've got trucking which is like the super efficient or even rail which is even more efficient and you can do shipments every week or every day if you want. Like the auto industry does follow those models of you can build cars in America, like high tech cars like Tesla. You can build anything in America. And I think the saving grace here for this near shoring issue is that the capital from banks to be able to do capex investments and job creation, there's going to be so much money put into those programs to really say okay, well what's the roi? It's going to be six year payoff period for retooling to bring it from China to Mexico. It's like, okay, here's a check. You know, whereas five years ago it would be like the lowest cost model 10 years ago where it was like, you know, like trying to find that lowest landed cost. But then it's an unsustainable business. You've got people flying to China, you've got, you know, people working overnight. You've got like all this like really complicated supply chains. They don't need to be that complicated at all. And with the technology going in, manufacturing going much more towards automation and robotics rather than just cheap labor that was already happening naturally. So now that we've got this issue and a lot of protectionism of tariffs and things like that and bringing jobs home, I think it's just a Bigger wave towards nearshoring. And whether it be in the United States or in, you know, in Mexico and Central America.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

It does, yeah.

I'm kind of hearing that too.

That's interesting. We'll have to see where that goes. Okay, so I want to ask you the question we always ask everybody. I've asked you this before, but you may have made a mistake or two in the last. I think maybe we talked to you a few years ago. It's always worth digging back into it, you know. You know that we love mistakes. It always makes us feel better because I know I make a ton of them. Dave hardly does, but they teach us a lot, you know, and is there a mistake you've made? And even it's the same one you've talked about before, something that stuck with you and taught you a valuable lesson, you know, across one of your businesses or your own, you know, brand building, anything like that that you can share with our listeners?

Yeah, I think that it is that, that quick prototyping, that experimental kind of mindset, you know, if you take too long to try to craft or develop something and just go get your focus group feedback and keep iterating, iterating, iterating, never go to market, then you're just wasting time. So the best thing is follow that lean startup mentality of that minimum viable product. Get it out there, get commercial with it. And when I say commercial, it's like really like you have a customer that's paying. You can't just give the stuff away and ask for people's opinions. You have to have real buyers, you know, and then don't expect that it's going to be a home run. Like if, you know, you expect you're going to make errors, expect you're going to make base hits and learn from it and be expecting that you're going to change the product. So for instance, if you're manufacturing, you don't put your first order in for 10,000 units and then expect that, oh, we're going to get the lowest cost by making the most amount of units when you haven't even sold unit number one. Like it would be much better that you go make 100 and get those started. Get the practice of the business and then iterate, iterate, iterate and figure it out through action. Not just like planning and argument and collaboration internally by the computer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Rather than design, it's like, do it.

Yeah, I like what you said. Practice your business. Don't treat it like it's a static thing. You're constantly practicing and learning and getting better. I mean, that's going to naturally happen anyway. So lean into that, embrace it and truly treat it like a practice. That's interesting. Yeah, I like it.

It's great.

It's great stuff. I mean, I always love catching up and talking to you. You have a real interesting framework on a lot of this stuff and I love watching you expand out to different things. It's great. Thank you again for coming on hanging out with us today. What's the best way for our listeners to connect with you and to learn more about market mate?

LinkedIn is the easiest. So, Kellen K E L A N R A P H Raf send me an invitation to connect with a personalized message about small business show and any questions that you have, I'll be happy to connect with you. That's probably the easiest way. And you can also find my companies from my profile as well. Company pages.

We'll make sure to put that link in the show notes for you and for everybody else too.

Yeah. And we'll post this show up to LinkedIn as well because we know how good a resource it is. Well, thank you again, Kellen. We'll always keep in touch. Who knows, you may be come back a fourth time you start another business.

I would love to.

Yeah.

And congratulations on your. The book you just published that is really cool. I love Poshmark as well. I think it's just, it's a super good home based business.

Yeah. Both those titles are doing really well and it's part of my, you know, evolution like you talked about and creating that content that spreads my brand and then also the brand of the small business show out there so we can get, you know, just bring more people into the fold that want to live that charmed life that Dave always talks about.

Nice. Well, I'll be happy to distribute more of that stuff for you on LinkedIn too. Awesome.

Yeah, that's great. Thanks, Kellen. We really appreciate your time today.

Thanks guys.

As always, man, I disagree emphatically with you. I feel like I learned the most on that one. You know, his whole thing and he glossed over it and I was going to kind of have him dig back in, but then we got into even better stuff, so I didn't. But I made a note of it here. That whole thing about, you know, if all your, if your only purpose in making all those sales phone calls or outreach phone calls is to get to the bottom of the page and turn the page and go to the Next page. That's the wrong attitude. And it's that.

And that's what a great. It's not really an analogy, but just a great description of it.

Yeah.

Because I bet you especially new salespeople, that's what they're doing. They're drilling down. Oh, I called everybody.

I called everybody. I did my job, you know, and I mean, there's. The problem is there is. There is some, Some truth in, in just, you know, practicing the fundamentals of. Look, I know that if I make 100 phone calls, I'm going to get whatever the number is for your industry. You know, 10, 15 leads. And then from there, you know, it sort of filters down through the funnel. So. So there is that goal of getting to the bottom of the page. Like there is, is. There is some value in that, but it, it needs to be tempered with, well, you know, how much effort are you putting into each of those calls, you know, because if your only goal is to get that person off the phone so you can get to the next one, well, that's not going to get you anywhere.

Yeah, yeah, it's true. And the, One of the other terms that he used that I really. It stuck with me was that he has learned to. When he learned to scale himself.

Oh, yeah.

And I thought, oh, yeah, that's huge.

Because I need to figure that out.

Yeah, that's right. And it's just maximizing because he's a perfect example. We've talked about it on the show before. Scott Adams talks about the talent stack.

Yeah.

In one of his books that I really. How to fail at everything and still still be a success. And you know, you can take just. See as he talks about. Well, I was at dhl. Then I went and I did this and I did a product company and that worked for a while and then that stopped and then I went back to dhl. Then I launched, you know, a business around logistics. Then I built some software and then we sold that software. And now I'm in. All along the way, he's been doing marketing. So now I'm starting this marketing business. So it's just a great example of having all these various talents and stacking them together to help make you successful. So I think it's a great example and something that I highly recommend people emulate.

Yeah, it is. No, it's good. It's great. All right, well, I think that does it for. For another week here of the small business show. Yep. Make sure to Visit our sponsor, linode.com SBS of course. Make sure to go to BusinessShow Co mistakes so that you can get your copy of our mistakes book that Kellen mentioned. We'll put a link to Shannon's poshmark book in the show notes, of course, since Kellen mentioned that as well.

Cool.

And I don't think I have anything else today, man. Do you?

I think that's it. Last thing you know, we'd ask you to leave us a quick review. Wherever you're listening to this today. It makes a huge difference in our life as we help you live your charmed life.

There it is.

Thank you very much.

Thanks, folks. Take it easy.

Sam.