4 Ways to Make Money by Spying on People. Ep #076

I just, I love the framework that like something that seems on the surface like just a feature, which is what both of us are talking about, can actually be a big company. There's one app that I use, I don't remember the name of it, but it's the only company doing this and someone needs to compete with them. Welcome to the Kerner office. We had an idea episode today. I had my good friend on the pod, Steven Ullman. We are office mates and friends and he also owns a holding company and he's a startup addict like I am. So we get along great. We talked a bunch of business ideas. We kept coming back to white labeling software ideas or plugins or app ideas that would be really affordable to outsource the development of to a VA overseas. We talked about using call tracking software to help home service businesses with their customer service and sales. We talked about how there's a 30% payout if you report tax fraud to the government and how you can get paid 30% of all the tax money they recover from from the person you tattletail on. It's a good episode. You're gonna like it. Enjoy. All right. Who the heck is Stephen Ullman?

I am a husband and father from beautiful Dallas, Texas. I have had a odd twist and turns in my business life. I run a few businesses with friends and make opportunistic investments when I can in my office with some friends, including you. But you're not here today.

I'm not? No.

Which I'm crying. You can't see it's on the inside.

I know my studio is at home. What can I say? I know I got to influence from home.

Yes. It's not an influence her, it's an influence him.

Thank you. Yeah, thank you.

Right.

What's like the high level overview of your career from high school to today?

Yeah, high school in Dallas. Went to Texas A and M. One of the crazies. We bleed maroon nuts. Camped out for a football ticket. Most people do all night long sort of thing. Yeah, loved it. Went to KPMG and their consulting practice. So I was not smart enough to do like tax audit things but I was on their consulting side for a couple years. Realized that was not really my giftedness or what I enjoyed the most. I don't even know what a 22 year old management consultant is or don't get me started.

Don't get me started.

But I did that and they build a very healthy rate for me.

Gave you about 20% of that.

Yeah, sorry. Large telecom company based in Dallas. That's headquartered here that everyone knows who I'm talking about.

Rhymes with shmei, shmee and T. Yeah.

I probably did not deliver enough value, but I tried.

Okay.

Then I bounced to a software company in the senior living space. Loved it. Head of sales had never sold anything. Couple guys had actually bought a business that I wasn't really familiar. I couldn't even spell M and A when I got there. And they were very kind. They taught me a lot. They let me into a lot. They let me into more than they should have, probably, But I kept a lot to myself and did pretty well. And then they sold to a private healthcare conglomerate three years into me being there. I stayed for most of their earn out and it was super educational for me. And then I left about seven years ago, started a marketing company with a friend and over the course of the last six and a half, seven years have started and acquired a few different businesses. Never by myself, always with friends. I think I just learned that I have more fun and it's likely to be more successful when I partner with other people who are smarter than me.

So that like a core framework of yours?

100%.

Yeah. You're kind of a mega extrovert, right? How do you describe yourself?

Like 73 out of 10 extrovert.

Okay.

Yeah, I actually got that from Reg Zeller. He said that one time and I was like, I feel between that and our other friend Kyle, who said he was a professional opportunist, I was like, you know what? Both of those things I, I connect with. Yeah, yeah.

People shy away from the word opportunist. And I'm like, no, that's what I am.

Yeah. It doesn't have to be negative.

Yeah. So, okay, so you only do stuff with friends. Do you ever, like, you have an itch that you just maybe want to scratch one day and try something by yourself, see how it goes? Or is that not even on your radar?

I'm a really big fan of the Money Wise podcast that Sam Parr has been doing and he had a guy on a couple weeks ago who after a successful exit, shifted over to executive coaching. And I've always been a natural coach, mentor. Like I started coaching youth basketball when I was 15. I just really enjoy mentorship and coaching. And so I could see myself doing something like that solo. But not like a legitimate operating company. No. Interesting. I just literally would not have as much fun. And I'm like, oh, we're all gonna die. It's all gonna burn. Like, let's really enjoy our Time we have. And so for me, that looks like working alongside other people really closely.

Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, I. It's funny. Cause I coached wrestling for three years, and I didn't like it. I didn't like it. I don't know. I don't know what it is. And today I coach like a couple business owners, but it's not like my favorite. And so I always charge more than I feel comfortable charging because it's not my favorite, but it's rewarding. I get some value out of it, but it's not what I want to be spending most of my time doing.

Yeah, I don't think I would do that anytime soon. I also think that at 35, do I have some value to give to certain people, Especially maybe in their twenties? Yes, I think so. A lot. But what I'm envisioning, you know, I'm thinking more like 50 plus, kind of in that stage of my life. Ideally I'd be slowing down some, and that would be a really fun way to spend my time.

Okay, so you went to work for this software company, and it was more of a startup vibe. They pulled you in, they like you, they showed you a lot of cool stuff. Open your world to entrepreneurship. Is that accurate?

A hundred percent. And really specifically business buying. Using leverage to acquire businesses. They had leveraged a diverse capital stack, including a seller note. So, like, just things like that. I didn't even know people would do that. I had no idea. So I'm in 24, just a sponge learning from these guys. And I'm still friends with them both. And they had a meaningful exit, and I'm really happy for them. They taught me a lot and they paid me well, and they were good to me along the way.

So what was the marketing agency that you started and how did it go in the beginning?

It's called Qwickr. We were a classic. Like, take anything you can get at that time, just grab it. Cash flow, a couple subcontractors. And that was with a guy named Sam Preston, who I know you've met. It was haphazard. Like I. It was sloppy. Like I had never done that before. It was my first try at it. Similar to the first six to eight months of my sales career at that software company. Like, made a few sales. Really had to work to get a little more professional in my approach. Same thing there. Took about a year, a year and a half for us to really figure things out. Didn't really have a mentor in that space, but figured it out and we landed a fairly large Retainer with a large both commercial and residential services company that randomly was based in Wisconsin of all places. And that kind of helped us get our footing.

What kind of marketing was that?

Mainly like web paid ads, SEO, kind of out stack.

And then how does that differ from what you're doing today? What all are you doing today?

Still involved in a few businesses at a time. I had like a moniker out on the Internet that was 50 by 2050. I had this 50 businesses by 2050.

Oh, I remember that. Yeah, I remember that.

Yeah.

Yep. That was like 2020. 2019. Ish.

2020 2021. And that was also kind of connected to the idea of several ventures. I have not always had great older mentors and I met two older men who had been successful. A happy hour of all places at a conference and a mutual friend introduced us. I said hey, I'd love with. We were all in Dallas and said can I buy you lunch in the next few weeks? And I shared some things about my life and how things were going mainly on the business side. And they both gave me the exact same feedback and they didn't talk about it. I mean it was nearly word for word verbatim. And that led me to a place to simplify my life a little bit more. I've got three young kids. I care about my marriage and I still enjoy having a diverse set of business interests with a little more focus. If I wrote a check into a venture deal, I'm not thinking about that ever really. You know, it's very binary and I just needed to. To simplify. So I did that. And that's been about 18 to 24 months. And I've really felt the benefit of that. And so what that is today I'm very involved in Alarm Masters, which is our security and alarm platform, which is mainly serving businesses like commercial and we're in Texas.

And you bought that, correct?

With a partner that I went to Texas A and M with.

Okay. Alarm Masters. Quicker. Anything else?

There's a couple other businesses kind of more of like advisor for a salesforce implementation business that's in its second full year of operation. From there, like, things kind of trail off towards advising investment, that. That type of mentality. And so it's like, where can I be more concentrated and more focused? I still through writing more passive checks, like. And maybe I could go reach that 50 number by 2050. Like I guess I'm on target for that, but not through operating companies.

Yeah. Which that's kind of the part that shifted of your goal.

It has, yeah. And I think some of that's just me being naive when I was a little bit younger and also not accounting for three children. Life being more complex.

Yeah. Okay, so gun to your head. You have to go the rest of your life only starting businesses or only buying businesses. What do you do?

Phenomenal question.

Thank you.

Very torn. I've done both and I've really enjoyed both. I think at this point I would only buy businesses. I think because of what I learned in starting businesses, there was so much to apply forward into businesses that are more mature and are more sizable. I kind of got punched in the face enough and learned enough lessons starting, and then also across different types of skill sets, different scenarios and hardships and things like that that now all are very applicable to a larger, more mature business that I could buy. So, yeah, that's where I'd go.

I feel like when you buy a business, there's more leverage, opportunities. Leverage with regards to, like, levers to pull. Right. Like marketing levers. Whereas when you start something from scratch, it's like the lever doesn't have as much of an effect. Cause it's not. It's a brand new. It's a brand new thing that might not have any revenue. Whereas when you step into something that's, let's say it's netting 500 grand a year and they're like, their competitors are all doing Google Ads and they're not doing Google Ads, it's like, this is an easy lever and it will make a big difference because we have all the infrastructure in place to really support Google, these new customers. So is that accurate?

It is accurate. And at the exact same time, I love, like, starting a business from scratch. There is like a birth aspect to that.

Okay, well, with that in mind, let's go the opposite direction and let's talk about ideas, because we do talk about buying on this podcast. Just not a lot. I want to hear your business ideas, and then I'll try to. I'll try to give you a couple as well.

A lot of things that I think about when it comes to this type of conversation are a different use of a same technology or a niched version of something that's typically more generalized. Those sorts of things interest me. And I think the question is, whenever you're going to start something, what's the goal? Like, if I have the standard to try to achieve $100 million of revenue, I might come up with something different. I'm not going to apply that sort of pressure on these ideas.

Sure.

It's a good Point one that I like, that I think most people will hate. So controversial. We have these listening tools, Firefly and things like this, and we use them for note taking. There's different. There's been adaptations on the sales side. I think that there needs to be a version of that or an expression of that that leans more hr. I just was talking to someone the other day who got hit on a zoom call and they were very uncomfortable, but the call wasn't recorded and they knew it wasn't recorded and they didn't have an automatic like note taker in, so nothing was captured. I think it's probably more enterprise, small businesses. There'd be a lot of pushback, a lot of complaining, but at a more enterprise level saying, hey, we're going to roll out a tool like this, it's part of compliance or things like that where they're really kind of spot checking for inappropriate comments. All sorts of different use cases there. But I just think this, like more HR contextualized version of that would be a really good idea. And maybe it's an existing tool that needs to be pivoted or it's like another vertical for them, but there's quite a bit of context that would have to be done there. And maybe it's an extension. To me, the idea there is more attaching to current HR softwares kind of going. It's kind of like channel sales is where I'd go with that.

Yeah. It's like, even if they're like you said, there's a lot of tools that do this, but I just don't. I don't think they're right for this. Right. I think you need to go hard on the HR angle here. What I like about this idea is it works best if you don't know it's working. And what. It's kind of like selling dog vitamins. It's like, yeah, my dog. There's this confirmation bias. He's so happy, so healthy. Like, you don't know if they work. It doesn't matter with, with this. It's like, well, what if it doesn't record anything? Like, what if you don't catch anyone in the act? Well, it's working. It's working because people aren't saying things because they know they're being recorded for that purpose. Right. So it's like, no matter what, it.

Would be like some sort of decreased incidents. But the problem is that a lot of those incidents are not reported. We know this, whether virtual or even physical, unfortunately. So it is. You're right. I really like that metaphor. So then you're really just looking for continued mitigation and maybe there's again thinking more enterprise. There's anonymous surveys, things like that. Like since we've rolled up this tool in the last six months, have you experienced a decrease in xyz?

Yeah. I also like it because the value is so high that it offers because of the liability that it helps prevent. Right. Like how expensive is a lawsuit?

Yeah.

And so even if it's like a $20 tool, like that's $20 a month per user or whatever to prevent potentially a massive lawsuit. I wonder if you could attack the distribution strategy here by like a Bottoms up strategy going through the women, the people that are more likely to be like offended or affected by someone saying something inappropriate. And so like some sort of a social media strategy that would get female employees to request this from their superiors as opposed to like doing enterprise SaaS sales, which everyone knows is, is brutal.

I like that. So that's one. I think it's practical, I think it's probably needed. It's similar to things that people already experience today. So if I already know that Firefly is paying attention, like I said, think the criticism or like if I wanted to rag on the idea, it's. Well, this already happens with note taking tools. People know that it's being recorded or there's recorded calls, but there's nothing being flagged. There's no mechanism that is pulling something out of that and then proactively notifying someone. So I think that's a little different. And yeah, you're probably right. Bottoms up probably would end up being more successful and I think that it's more of an enterprise.

Is there like some sort of a, a software that you could white label to just tap into this? Right. Because building this from scratch would be hard. But there's gotta be some sort of a, like even like an AI powered something that you could white label for this. Do you know of anything?

I don't off the top of my head, I wouldn't be surprised if there is some sort of like transcription API that you could start there and then layer in the hr, more HR oriented components you're going to have to build like nlp, Natural language processing and some sort of like database that you're pulling against to highlight those potential issues and flag them. So like there is a proprietary element that you're going to have to develop, but it's probably something that you could start from to speed it up.

Yeah, I bet you could, you could prove the concept before having to do all that, at least white label something. I've got an idea that's very similar that I've had for a while. And this kind of plays on the framework that there's way, like there's a huge asymmetric supply, demand imbalance on Zoom for their app store, right? Like Zoom has like a hundred million users and like 2,000 apps, whereas the iPhone has a billion users and 3 million apps. Like, it's just, it's way, way skewed. Now of course you can make the argument that like apps are just not as needful on Zoom, which is fine, but, but I still think there's a big supply and demand imbalance. There's a lot of tools that could be used on Zoom, so this could be one of them, what you just said. I think there also needs to be a very simple, affordable sales tool. Call it a Zoom app or a Chrome extension that listens on sales calls to specifically to see who is talking the most. And it's like I'm picturing like it's a pop up on the screen that's like a meter, right. And it moves according to who's talking. Because it is well proven that if you want to sell more products or services, you need to listen more and talk less. Right. And so it's, it does two things in one. First of all, it helps the salesperson as they're talking. Like, all right, I need to give this guy a break, all right? Or I need to let this guy talk and it reports it to the sales manager so he can see is there a correlation between my best performing salesman and. And how little they're talking? Or maybe it's inversely correlated and I think you should call it something bombastic like Shut up or like stop talking or like shut up.IO or something.

Like it would just quiet like something. Yes.

Something I love. Yeah. What do you think?

I really like it. As a former salesperson. Day in, day out, demo, demo, demo, demo. I'm not sure that the average salesperson would admit to themselves that they need it. But I do think that it would be super productive. Like a great tool. I could see sales managers who know that the truth is that their underlying teams really could use that. And then kind of a top down from the sales manager, it's distributed throughout the team so it becomes a requirement. Like that sort of way. I'm not sure like we talked about previously, Bottoms Up. I don't know if that would work here. Loom was a great example of Bottoms up where they trickled up into organizations phenomenally. I love loom. I don't think that would happen here. So I think you'd be going outbound. Cold ads, all kind of at sales managers lived a life long enough to know that really would be a great mechanism real time in a call.

I think there'd be a lot of self awareness happening. Right. Like it's like, oh, I don't struggle with that. It's like, dude, you speak 78% of the time. Like it needs to be 24%. Yeah, I think people would be very surprised. And I think one sales strategy is to install it for free for a month through the sales manager and just monitor it and see. Like, is this helping? Because if it doesn't work, they're not going to. They're going to churn out anyway.

Yeah, I like that. I wonder even if based on average sales cycle, like if it would have to kind of live throughout a sales cycle and in an ideal world, you as most sales, especially if you're kind of mid market and above, have many touches and you also have to think about how does that work on a phone call versus a video meeting and can you aggregate? That's actually, I know we're getting in the weeds, but you almost want to aggregate those different touch points in total. Attach that average to a deal as like a deal note and say for the lifetime of this interaction, close this deal. Huge win. You talked 43% of the time. Yeah, in aggregate like that actually I think would be even more insightful.

Yeah, I just, I love the framework that like something that seems on the surface like just a feature with which is what both of us are talking about, can actually be a big company. There's one app that I used, I don't remember the name of it, but it's the only company doing this and someone needs to compete with them. And it just shows me, the owner of a business, how long it's taking my employees to reply to emails. And it's the same principle. The quicker you reply, the more efficient, productive you are, the more sales you get. Like, it's just, it's common knowledge, it's common sense, but it's human nature to not respond quickly. So if I can look at my 72 employees and see that these guys are responding to emails and you set filters for weekends and business hours and all that. But it's like, I just feel like a lot of the problems in any organization, whether it be 5 employees or 5000, can be solved by better communication.

What is that called? By the way, I don't use it.

I think it was time, like time to reply or something. Like I had one of those names where it was. It tells you exactly what it is. And it started out as just like a chrome extension and now they're like, you go look at their team page, like it's a pretty big business and that's all they do.

Interesting. I like it. I have something to go Google later.

There you go. There you go.

Search out.

Okay, well that's a good one. That's a good one. And I feel like a lot of these kind of techie software businesses sound unapproachable to a lot of people if they don't know how to code. But you go to upwork, you post what you're thinking, you get someone to build something and then you just start from there. It doesn't have to be expensive.

Yeah, I agree. And like for people that are interested in that type of route, an even more premium version of that would be like a top towel. You know, if you're looking to try to find someone higher end, potentially if you have a certain need, that's another place you could go.

I'd also love to hear if you have any agency ideas as well. That just kind of came to me because agency owners are always like saying no to different service lines. Right. So like I'm curious after that idea, whatever you want, what are you saying no to? Stay focused. But that are good opportunities that other people could say yes to.

A few different ideas. I may come back on the agency piece. Yeah, there's already kind of a market for this. So this is I would say maybe a category and we can explore a couple ideas and I'm sure you're quickly going to have a couple. And you might have seen this kind of bounce around online recently, one one version of this. But I'm going to call them like the, the tattletale industry. So whether it is tax fraud, there's a new piece of like regulation that's going live January 27th which is going to create a lot of pain for businesses that are lead selling. And I don't know if you know about this, but like you can no longer like a home advisor where they spit your lead to four companies and all four outbound. You, you will now have to see those four options, choose one and opt in with your consent for that one business.

Wow. Okay. Let me just make sure I understand that. I'm a homeowner, I need my windows washed. I go to HomeAdvisor or Angie's List. I type in my address. Today they're just selling my name, number, address to 13 different companies and I'm getting hit up.

There's typically a lower limit, let's call it three or four.

And it also depends on the industry too.

It does.

Okay. So from a homeowner's perspective, what is that going to look like on January.

27Th for people that follow this new regulation? You will present all four options to the homeowner. The homeowner will select one and only that one will be presented with your information and you have opted in to be contacted by them. Instead of all four playing this speed to lead game where they all four are trying to get at you as soon as possible.

Interesting.

So that means your ratings, probably your gmb, your ratings on that platform, anything like that is going to years in business will all become more relevant for the platforms that are going to adhere to that change.

It's going to be harder to just pay to play.

Oh yeah, for sure. But what you have to keep in mind is, I mean, you know this when we talk about lead selling there's a, there's an underbelly of lead selling and all the onesie twosies, really small, really niche. There's teenagers, 16 year olds that are running lead selling operations and it can be a great cash flow sort of play Right. With very capital efficient. So I do think that this will open up a bit of a tattletale now. Like a tattletale opportunity. And I'm not sure if it's more competitive like hey home advisor, I'll go take down as many of your competitors as I can that I can help proactively uncover that they are not following this new regulation. Engage me to go do that for you. There's an element that like that's one route.

Yeah.

In certain industries or certain governing bodies it's already been established like the 30% rule on the tax fraud. Now you have to produce really meaningful evidence for that.

But what is the 30% rule?

You can be paid by the IRS 30% of what is recovered.

Oh, how did I not know that?

That you provide very tangible evidence. Essentially there's a lot of standards. It's not like an email that just says like you should go look at Chris because I know that you commit tax fraud, Chris.

Oh, obviously.

So I just think that there's a, there's an interesting world. This is one example where whether you're going to a large player in a market and you're doing some dirty work for them or there's some governing body, whatever it is, I'm very interested. It's something that I've started to look at more just because I'm intrigued by these kind of like, tattletail opportunities.

Interesting. I'm trying to think of some similar businesses that do this. So I had a mentor that built a massive consulting business that would spy. Like, he was like an agency to spy on competitors. And so they would go to trade shows and like, totally fake being a certain company just to, like, talk to people at their booth. Like, oh, what's this product you're developing? It's stuff like the unscalable things that you can only learn person to person, like at a bar or at a trade show. He was paid to go, like, do corporate espionage. How rad would that be? First of all? Yeah, he wrote a book about it.

It's almost like a more sinister version of a secret shopper.

Yeah, exactly. So that's kind of where my mind is going. And it's kind of built around inflection points in regulatory environments. Right. Whether it's this lead rule that's being passed or something else. I'm still hung up on the tax fraud thing. Like, are. Are there people that have businesses around that, like, is that like an established industry?

I don't think that they're proactively marketing themselves. But are there individuals who are capitalizing on that with some level of scale? I believe so, but I haven't confirmed that. So it's an interesting opportunity. Right. As a professional, opportunists say. But then you also have to think about whatever that standard is for whatever buyer on the other side, whether it is the government or some large organization, whatever it may be, what's their standard to actually get paid?

Right.

Typically, those are going to be very high standards. So you've got to have be privy to very specific types of information. And you also have to understand the consequences if you're going to try to play that role. So careful out there.

Lots of things coming to mind. So first of all, the best ideas or hustles or whatever are the ones that people refuse to talk about. Right. And it could be 100% legal. I just had lunch with a guy recently and I'm going to. I'm going to change some of these things around to protect his anonymity. But he has a social media presence and he does a lot of stuff like us, and he talks about it and he mentioned this one thing at lunch. I'm like, well, what is that? He's like, oh, I don't really talk about that one, but here's what it is. And it had to do with like a medical device with like, certain kickbacks. And he's like a middleman between like a medical device manufacturer and like the, the healthcare providers. And it's a very niche device. And he found his own little distribution method. He basically knows how to sell these, and the big companies have no idea how to sell these. And he's just playing a middleman, capturing a margin. And. And like every sale is like 8 grand in his personal checking account. It's like, it's crazy. And he's never going to talk about it, and I wouldn't either. But like, oh, this tax fraud thing, like, it just. The government has a system set up to pay people 30% of everything they recover. Like, because that's the hard part is you go bring something to the government and they're like, we're not innovative, we're not efficient. Like, get away from us. But correct, they already have.

It's got to be big enough. But also if it's got to be big enough, then it also is an attractive opportunity potentially. So, I mean, also, we use the word whistleblower, right? Like that. Yeah, that type of nomenclature. But anyways, I think again, the way that I like to think are things that already exist. Where could I take those ideas or those technologies and go place them somewhere else? One of the things that's done inside of our marketing company is call listening. And so we are listening to calls to help companies understand their own lead quality and lead scoring. And what that ends up also leading to sometimes is that you can hear awful customer service. And so you said, what about an interesting agency? I think you could take that type of call, which is pretty common. Like some of the large home service marketing agencies will do this at scale, like a scorpion they actually have. It's all automated. It's all through like AI and software and transcription and blah, blah, blah. Others are using humans. Regardless, you could pivot that entire concept to be customer service improvement and optimization. Like, if you're spending all this money on Google or SEO or newsletter sponsorships or I don't care what you're doing to drive leads, someone's on the other end of that phone. Is anyone really evaluating the level of quality of those calls? And that customer service, a lot of times that's not going to a salesperson. A lot of times that is going to sweet little Lisa in the office. And Lisa's awesome and she makes a mean Apple piece, but she's brutal. On the phone.

But she sucks at her job.

Well, she's just. She's being asked to do something that's not really her highest and best use. And so I do think that, like call listening, as an example, pivoted to more operational customer service quality type of an orientation is an interesting agency idea.

Yeah. I wonder if you could use AI to just go into like a. Let's say it's like a $5 million H vac business. Right. They've got a budget for stuff like this, but they're still a small business. And you just. You plug this software into their phone system and you just listen, and it just sends reports to the owner and says, hey, really? No one's answering the phone from 11 to 1. We're guessing they're at lunch. You got 38 calls then. And we know that 20% of your calls close to an $800 job. You're losing $36,000 a month because people are going to lunch. Like, it's just something like. There are so many things in small businesses where when a third party comes in and just looks at it, they're like, what about that? And it's so obvious to them. And the business owner is so in the weeds, he's like, oh, yeah. And huge value unlock, right? Yeah.

If you like this idea, I mean, like, you could basically just use call rail. I mean, recording calls. Listen back.

That's like, you could use the software that you're using on the back end to do this.

Agency, we don't explicitly use that, but if you were to go pursue this idea.

Yes.

That's would be just like a great starting place.

Yeah. That's another framework that I'm addicted to lately is just taking a tool, a website, something that's maybe known by millions but not known by your customer base. Connor Gross and I talked about construction journal. 200 bucks a month. And you buy leads from permits that are pulled in cities, and you sell them to pool business owners or contractors or whatever. And it's like, they could go be customers of that, but they don't know about that. So pay $200 a month for unlimited leads and sell each lead for a hundred dollars. Like, use CallRail. Pay them $79 a month. But you're the guy that pushes the button that, like, sets it up, reports the data, and, like, puts a human element to it.

Correct.

Man. What do you charge for something like that? You're the agency guy.

Yeah, it depends on scale. So some of these services are priced by the minute or buckets. Of minutes listened and reported on. Others are just, they know their economics. And so it's really built off your own labor cost. If you're going to do it yourself. Well, you could get aggressive with that potentially because it's nearly all margin. You're going to be at 95, 98 plus percent COGS. I mean gross margins. Excuse me. So it's really more predicated on how you want to try to go to market. I think the minutes thing is a little confusing in my eyes.

Yeah.

And so I just want to understand on average how many calls are you taking a month or a week? And I can do my own math.

Yeah.

And so I'm just going to say my goal is to achieve a 70% gross margin. And so based on this math, my labor cost, my software costs and blah blah, blah, like that's how I would do it. So you just want to like pick a gross margin goal if you're not going to do the work yourself and you're managing a small team or something and then back into their scale of operation. Because should inherently like you charge. Let's just say you charge fifteen hundred dollars a month for this. Does that make sense to charge John Wilson's massive company in Ohio versus the $1 million plumbing company here? I don't think they have the same call volume. So it probably doesn't make sense for your own internal economics to charge the same thing to anybody. So it's gotta be based on some sort of tier or level of call volume.

Yeah. I mean charging by the minute equals customers don't know what their bill's gonna look like. Equals friction equals lower close rate. Right?

Correct.

You gotta work that in your margin like you said. And then if you're losing your shirt on month three because people are using too many minutes and you gotta change your price. Right?

Yep.

I'm thinking of the whip meme where it's like the distribution curve. It's like on one end I'm thinking about like squarespace. Right. Squarespace comes around and people are like on one end of the midwit meme, it's like, oh, I guess there's no room for a web designing agency because squarespace makes anyone, makes it easy for anyone to do it. That's like the middle. And on the, in the beginning it's like, let's start a web design agency and just use squarespace for people. Then 80% of people are like, that doesn't work. Because Squarespace is easy. Anyone can do it. And then on the other end of it it's like, let's just start a web design agency and use Squarespace.

Exactly.

Just charge two grand for a website. That takes us an hour. Then you literally copy and paste the template with every customer and swap out the logo and text. You do it with CallRail.

It doesn't have to be that hard.

No, no. People overcomplicate it. And I still can't stop thinking about this tax fraud business. Like, I just.

Okay.

I'm such a snoop. I'm sorry.

Well, after you go pursue that, then we can just do another podcast and another episode and hear how it's going.

Dude. Yeah.

So I have one other thing I want to throw out. It's kind of. I think it'll be kind of funny, but we can talk about a few ideas. So two sided marketplace is super common. There's a bajillion of them. All sorts of different industries have two sided marketplaces. I was having a conversation with someone today actually, and they. They are an atheist and they have been looking for a mentor, an older mentor who shares their world, worldview, and they have had a hard time finding someone. And I've already kind of thought about like niche mentoring. We even talked about like executive coaching earlier. But I'm not sure that atheism is necessarily the best niche for this. But you can imagine needs that people have. Like moms. There's like, there's millions and millions of moms. There's several different avenues for moms to find local mentors, all sorts of different things. Just go find a Facebook group, for crying out loud. But there are other smaller verticals or niches or interest groups that don't necessarily. You might be able to find people that are interested in the same thing as you, but you can't find a mentor related to that, although it is applicable potentially. And so I think that there's opportunities if you already have some sort of network available to you, like something you could capitalize on. I think that pivoting some set of contacts or influence or business dealings you have into like a niche mentor network that's more highly topical. Like, I think that could be very interesting where you're kind of brokering both sides. That's another idea as well.

Would people have to pay for the mentor?

I think so.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's time. Think of it like a coach. I don't understand how life coaching is an industry except at the same time, I really do. Like, I understand why people buy it. I don't like that they.

We all want a silver bullet, right?

Correct. And so in the same way people have started to accept at a greater degree, like a greater percentage of people, especially adults, self select and say, I need a coach, I need a mentor, weight loss, weight gain, you know, whatever. And so I do think there's probably lots of niche mentor like two sided marketplace opportunities out there.

Yeah. I wonder if you. The play here is to scrape like a bunch of therapist. Right. It's really, it's just a branding change. And then find out like maybe from their bios, maybe you scrape their bios into a spreadsheet and then use AI to like attach labels to them like Hispanic, atheist, Christian, Jew, whatever. And then you make categories on the site and you just put them on the site, maybe even for free to start. And you're just relabeling them from therapist to mentor. And then once you get traction, because obviously marketplaces are very hard, you gotta have the buy side and the sell side at the same time. Once you get traction, then it's like, hey, we actually need to start charging you whatever to stay on our website. Cause you're getting customers from it. That way you can at least start with a supply and then you can just go worry about the demand. Yeah.

And starting out in a segment where there's already this understanding, like you bring up therapists where there's an understanding of this relationship. You're not having to introduce the idea of mentorship or coaching in like the example I gave like atheism, like we're already talking about therapy.

Yeah.

Just creating better matching, which I'm sure that some, I've seen some kind of in the last two years therapy, kind of virtual therapy or.

Yeah, like better help.

Yes, exactly. Some of those sorts of platforms have some type of matching or interest relationships. But maybe, maybe not to the same degree.

Maybe that's the play is just like a better help for mentoring and it's literally the exact same thing. But there's a segment of people that are too proud or whatever to like quote, need a therapist. Right. Whether that's true or not, they don't.

Know how to ask someone in real life.

Right.

So if there's just a platform from them to go to, it's kind of like date, like especially originally on the dating platforms, like match for the people that were too shy. It allowed them to let others know they were interested without having to have that brutal in real life exchange kind of ease into it. Like I wonder if there's a lot of people that desire a mentor. They just really struggle to engage someone who could be a Great mentor. So this would provide an avenue.

So it could be like an intro, like, intro for mentors, where the charge by the 15 minute segments, maybe the first five minutes are free or whatever to see if there's like a vibe.

There that's a closer to what I was thinking. Yeah, I like that.

Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Because some people like, oh, no, I don't need a therapist, but I really just want someone to help me improve my life. Like a mentor. It's like, okay, you know, let's call it a mentor, but same thing. Yeah, that's a good one. I like it. Well, I got to go figure out how to start a. A tax fraud whistleblower business. Man, I can't get that out of my head. Oh, I would love to. When I retire, I know I'm going to be a private investigator just because I love spying on people so much. And I'm going to go do this. I'm going to go to, like, all the shady, seedy industries that are more likely to have business owners that are tax frauds and catch them, and then the government will pay me.

I'm happy for your future self.

Thank you. I'm going to do it. All right, Stephen. Well, this was good. Helpful. Where can everyone find you most active.

On X at Stephen Olman. S T E P H E N O L M O N Come give me a shout. DMs are open.

DMs are open. Okay, thank you. Okay. Thank you to Steven for coming on the pod. We'll have him on again soon. Please like and subscribe and share with your friends. We'll see you next time.