Q&A: Destination wedding biz, board games, RV park, gravestone, digital signage and dumpster rentals in SLC. Ep. #011. Small Business Ideas and Entrepreneurship

Welcome. Welcome to episode eight of the Kerner Office. If this is your first time joining us, this is a live call in show where people ask me business advice and it's really fun. So today we covered six things. We covered wedding biz. So this guy has a dad with a YouTube channel that does done for you. Destination weddings. And they've hit a plateau and they wanted to know how to grow interesting business. And then we have a board game business. Super cool. This guy's got a small board game up in the northeast and I gave him some cool ideas on how to grow it. We have an RV park. He wanted to stay anonymous, but he's having occupancy issues, so I gave him some tips there. The next business was a monument business, as in gravestones and headstones. And he wants to know how should he approach the owner to buy it. Second to last was a pre submitted question about selling digital signage to schools, how he can find schools to sell to. And then the last question, one of the best was a dumpster rental business in Salt Lake and he just ordered a ton of dumpsters and he wants to know, can I? How am I going to rent all these things out? So he really liked my ideas and I hope you do too. Enjoy episode 8 of the Kerner Office.

Hey, what's going on, Chris?

How are you? Good. How are you, man?

I'm doing well. Huge fan of your podcast and watching your journey on X and through your newsletter. Thanks for doing this.

Absolutely, yeah. Thanks for joining. I saw your DM and it was. I'm remembering bits and pieces of it, but I purposely, whenever I see DMs like that, I try to not read into them too much because I don't want to bias myself. I don't want to do research. I just know that your dad has like an event or a wedding business and he drives leads from YouTube and that's all I remember. So let's hear what you've got going on.

Yeah, great memory. So for background, you're right. Our family runs a travel company that specializes in planning destination weddings in Mexico and the Caribbean. We've been in business for about 30 years, never really done any marketing. So in a given year, we'll plan, let's say 80 to 100 weddings, which translate to about 7,000 guests across all those weddings. And like you said, about 80% of those leads come from our YouTube channel and the rest are from client referrals. Curious to get your take on some creative ways we can ramp up our marketing and reach prospective couples Outside of really just paid ads through search and display. Some things we're thinking about are like bridal shows, which we've tried in the past but haven't had a really great effort. Partnering with vendors, everyone from wedding planners to DJs to makeup artists. And then tapping into our email list. Like I said, we have 7,000 guests who will help plan in a given year across those 80 to 100 weddings. And we don't do anything except send them their travel documents, send them their reminder to pay their bill, things like that. So a few things were kicking around, but curious to get your take.

Okay, so tell me about like the unit economics of the business, how it works, how he makes money, and I'm curious to know like, at what capacity is he today? Like with his current infrastructure, help, whatever is he. Would he like to double the size or is he already 80% of the way there?

That's a good question. So we have about eight people who help manage the groups. And so I would say each of them could probably add 20 to 30% more. So I think if we're doing 80 to 100 weddings a year, we could probably ramp up to 120, 140. And the unit economics. So in a given group, again, if you assume 80 groups per year, each group is about 60 to 70 guests. Each person is paying on average about $1,000. And you can call it about a 20% margin per person. So there's a decent margin per wedding, which is why I think there's an opportunity to funnel some money back into growth.

Okay, so what is like the total ticket size of one wedding to you?

So gross revenue would be about between 60 and 100 grand, depending on obviously how many people and how expensive the resort is. And then for us, that translates to about 8 to 12 grand.

8 to 12 grand. And you're doing 80 to 100 of those per year.

Correct.

Okay, so you're up against that million dollar threshold that can be hard to break through, it seems as far as.

Exactly. And that's why we're like, okay, how do we ramp it up without just hiring excessively? And what are the sort of smart ways to do it? Not just dump a ton of money into Google.

Okay, and so you think with the eight people you have, you could realistically grow your business 50%?

Correct.

Give or take. Okay, tell me about this email list. 7,000 people. And over how long have you acquired all those emails?

So that's each year we're adding about 7,000 people just through them. Traveling with Us and opting into emails with us. Obviously they haven't opted into email marketing. So we need to shift the way we collect emails and have it be a double opt in. So since we started emailing folks, it was probably 2018, 2017, but I think in the last year or two when we've made a more concerted double opt in, you're probably looking at 10 to 12,000 people on that list over the last like year and a half, two years.

Okay. 10 to 12,000 people that have double opted in that you can legally just start sending mass emails to. And then if you were to guess outside of those 10,000 people, how many emails do you have that were just transactional emails that did not opt in?

I would say about double that.

Okay. Because the way I see it, it's there's a cold email and then there's an email to someone that maybe went to one of your weddings three years ago that didn't double opt in. But it's hey, do you remember us? You went to so and so's wedding. Now let me before I continue that, are these email addresses of guests to the wedding?

Correct? Yeah. So obviously the couples too, but it would be all the guests of the wedding who travel. And again, they heard from us over the course of a 12 month booking. Have heard from us 6 to 10 times. And so it's a pretty warmed up list. Again, they may not have opted into receiving email marketing from us, but they've heard from us. If we email them, it's typically like a 60 to 80% opt in because, or open rate because we're typically sending them their documents for travel or hey, don't forget, you know, you gotta add someone to your room by this deadline, things like that.

Okay. I love it. I love this. So I would start by segmenting your email list. I would start there. I think you're on the right track. I would make multiple buckets. Okay, so let's say there's an opt in bucket of emails. Let's say that's 10,000 people. Let's. And then there's the non opted in bucket. Okay. There's two segments. And then I would make a segment for brides specifically and then a segment for grooms specifically. And then I would make segments for. Now do you have data that tells you like a guest of the bride or a guest of the groom?

We don't know. That's, it's okay.

Just like wedding parties down the road.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Okay, so then I would make segments by year by wedding party and then also one for each, both the opted in and the non opted in group. And okay, and then I would forget like a mailchimp or a mass email service. I would do the same thing with all of these, whether they're opted in or not. Because you are legally allowed to email the people that did not opt in because they're like, you have their email, you have a relationship. Maybe it was how long has the business been in business again?

It's been 30 years, but really the sort of current iteration since 2016, 2017.

Okay, so the oldest emails go back like six, seven, eight years.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay. I would say those are fair game. So you have a history with these guys, you have a relationship. I would use a simple chrome extension like gmass or use like a standalone service like Mixmax or Lemlist and I would just start a trickle campaign. Start with 50 emails a day. A B test the heck out of this. So you want to know, and this is AB testing so you can know it doesn't really matter if you a B test between opt in and non opt in and not opted in. But you want to know which approach is working. Right. So I would still segment the opted in versus the not opted in. So you could know if the response rate is different between the two. But I wouldn't really worry about how you email both groups. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Okay, so then I would send just a plain text email with whoever has been communicating with this person the most. I'm sure you've changed hands or you've changed headcount over the years. So if that usually comes from your dad or his assistant or whoever, try to keep it as constant as possible to what they experienced back when they went to that wedding one to eight years ago and just say, hey, first name. Do you remember us? Like we, we helped you get to the insert bride and groom's names wedding at insert location and just personalize the heck out of this because you have that data. So I know this is random, we haven't spoken in a while, but do you know of anyone else that is getting married? Now the way I see it, if this list is 8 years old, all these people know other people that are getting married, especially the brides and the grooms. Maybe they're 25 when they got married and they're 33 now. Maybe they were 28 when they got married and they're 30 now. Like they are in the time of their lives when they know people getting married and they are begging you, silently begging you for A reminder of what a beautiful wedding looks like. But they will not remember unless you pop up in their inbox. And because of the fact that you have a $10,000 ticket item, you can offer really generous referral fees. Maybe it's a $500Amazon gift card or we'll Venmo you $1,000 or $200. And I would experiment with all of those thresholds and push it to where you're uncomfortable. Because this is a test, right? And worst case, you come close to breaking even on one wedding, and then you're like, all right, we're not doing $1,000 anymore. Cause we didn't make any money. But we did spend a thousand dollars to learn this new marketing channel that is almost unlimited, Right? Because if you can dial in the right segment with the right offer the right referral amount like this, it just becomes a compounding snowball where you can just keep getting referrals from all these new weddings as you go. And you might not even ever have to worry about paid ads.

Right? That makes a ton of sense. Yeah, 100%. And that's something we've talked about. And we just. A, we're using a CRM that feels like it's from 1999. And B, we're so busy planning the weddings that we forget that after these. Like I said, 70 people travel for a wedding. It's okay. Thanks so much for traveling. We hope you had a great time. Let us know if you need anything, but we drop it there. As opposed to following up a year after letting, hey, remember you traveled a year ago. What's new? And here's some new destinations for you to check out. We have that data on where they went, when they went, and why they traveled. But to your point, we haven't done anything with that, so it's super helpful.

Oh, yeah, you could also use ChatGPT. Upload a list of your 20 most popular locations. Have ChatGPT give you, like, facts about those areas and be like, you went to the Bahamas, but did you know that most people that go to the Bahamas do this or do that. That would be an amazing wedding. We're really excited for something like this. Like, you want to show your energy and your enthusiasm in the email. And I wish I could just shout from the rooftops, stop sending big, fancy emails with these big, like, well designed graphics and pictures. Like just plain text emails. So your first task is to segment everything and start this campaign and just see how it goes and keep adjusting these. A, B test. And then once you feel like you've got a winning formula. Then set up a drip campaign to fix this in the future so you won't have to make this a big endeavor every year or so. Right. Like you could automate all of this. But I would suggest never ever make big fancy emails from the mailchimps of the world. Keep them plain text from your gmail that look handwritten, no pictures. The shorter the better. The shorter subject lines, the better every word you add to a subject line, your open rate will decrease. So just experiment with like question or wedding or random. I promise you those subject lines perform the best. But I think that will work. I love it.

This is awesome. You're on my brain spinning on some ideas to start testing these.

Good. Yeah. Let me know how it goes. I hope it works out for you and your parents.

Cool. Thanks Chris. I really appreciate it. Thanks again for doing this.

No problem. Have a good day.

You too. See ya.

Here we got Suede. Am I saying your name right or. No, you're saying it perfect.

Yeah.

How you doing? I'm good, how are you?

Lovely, lovely. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me. I really appreciate it.

Absolutely. I loving the energy today. I want to hear about your board game business.

Okay. Awesome. My name is Suede. I have also a co founder named Salar. We invented the Lost Lands of Vern. That's a fantasy based game. Okay. And it takes the best elements of Monopoly, catan games you love, like Risk, wraps it up and removes all the bad parts. It's story based so it's ever expanding. We can come up with new equipment, new spell cards, new item cards, everything like that. And it's been doing really well amongst the New York community and so on and so forth. And we have like boxes going all over the place. We're at a crossroads because we don't know what to do next. Yeah, that's where we're at.

What, in what way do you not know what to do next? Do we make another game? Do we just grow this game? Do we have an expansion to this game? Is that kind of what you're thinking?

It's actually the simple answer is how do we scale this up? Now we have all of our other questions answered. Like our manufacturing is great, our logistics are wonderful. We launched pre orders last year in March, simply through word of mouth, no marketing on any type of paid service. And we raised 20k through that. We have boxes going to Toronto, Chicago, Louisiana, all over the place.

Right.

And the game requires around three to four players to play. So even when One person buys the box, three people are getting exposed, and so on and so forth.

Right?

But at this point, it's okay. What is the best way to expand? And so other companies like ours, other, like board game designers, they go a few routes. You have the Kickstarter route, right? We did our community build, right? And then the next step is going outside the community to people we've never met before, people who don't even know anything about us or the game, but they come on Kickstarter and it's one of those things. It's definitely a route to take. The other routes include just scaling with exposure, getting like a small business loan and just spending on marketing, spending on ads, spending on videos, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, getting it that way. I mean, as well as going to board game conventions, going to places where people are already in the space. And then the last part is going an investor route. Not as flashy as Shark Tank maybe, but something along the lines, venture capital. Someone who is a good value add to the business, who can provide maybe distributing rights or something that they're already connected in these spaces or all they have to do is check a few boxes, contact a few people, get some equity in the game, and then blow the game up itself.

Okay, what is the feedback on your game? Do you get any negative feedback or is it just universally, we love it so much. Do people play it multiple times or are they buying it and it's a one and done?

No, they're playing like we. So what happens? I told you, pre orders, Right? The boxes from the pre orders of March just came in. End of February, we distributed a few and before that it was just me and my guy going door to door with our sample boxes and playing. But since then, like once people have boxes, one guy played seven days straight every night, brought two people over and they played. And great feedback. That's the reason we're putting so much time and effort. Like we all have day jobs right now. Actually, really funny. I saw your tweet about being a dentist. I'm a dentist.

Mm.

So I was like, actually, you're not wrong. You're not wrong. I would never say go 350k in debt for only a 2 multiple. But thankfully I went a different route. But good. Yeah. So that's what it is. Like universally over the last year as well, any negative feedback that we've gotten, any criticism, we've actually adjusted it before we sent the order. Right.

Okay.

We've added any small specs, We've been play testing and the Best part about the game itself is any new rendition, any update since this box is completely valid. Right. Any criticism we get or anything that's fun to add, we just add. There's no like finite product because it's such a story based game. And it's not like chess. That's another thing. It's not like chess or checkers or Monopoly where you get it once and that's it. We have expansion packs, we have cards, we can add different characters, we add with different classes and everything like that.

How big is your business today? What is your profitability like per unit?

We're at 50% profitability.

Okay.

Gross 20k so far.

Where, like growth. 50% gross. Like cogs.

Oh, cogs. Again, I am. I'm new to the business aspect.

That's okay. Just like what it costs to manufacture versus you sell it for 50.

Because 50% of our price point is going to go towards manufacturing.

Okay.

And that's for like our first run. Minimum order quantity of 500.

Okay. And what is the, the real dollar amount of your manufacturing cost?

48.99.

That's what it costs you to make?

Yes.

Oh, wow. So you're selling this for 100 bucks?

Yep.

Okay, man, that seems like a lot. You would think so.

But that's also because we're doing a premium set. So one thing going forward with the Kickstarter would be there's a premium set with full metal coins, full metal aspects, and a plastic set. The reason we went with premium first is because within the community, if something messes up, they can contact me or solar directly. We can fix any of the problems with our manufacturing. If it goes too big, too fast and we're having problems, I'd rather solve that right now before it explodes. As far as plastic, people do plastic all the time. Like the manufacturers over there, they're ready to do plastic. And since we already.

What does that cost?

That would probably drop our cost in half. 24.24.99 is what the plastic cost would be. Yeah. But because we made the molds already, we already took the brunt of that in the metal. So our molds are made for the plastics when they eventually come. Because yeah, we would like to have two tiers where right now we're selling the deluxe version with everything involved.

I feel like the plastic version is a great way to get people in love with your game and then they'll want to buy the deluxe version after. And you could get two sales out of the same person.

Exactly.

Whereas you can't today have you experimented at all with like board game stores, like seeding your product for free to board game stores or influencers.

So yeah, that's. That is again, the crossroads ran. This is one of the avenues we can go. Now that we have product in hand and we have excess stock, we can now just go like where I want to say, maybe 40 orders. Yeah, 4k away from break even for this whole business.

Okay.

So we're right there at profitability and I don't think it would be hard to sell 40. But yeah, from the excess boxes that we have from our first order, we are going to go to at least local right now in New York City board game stores and going to get that started right away.

Okay. I love what you said about how marketing is built in for this because you can't play by yourself.

No, you can't. It's the best.

So people will want their own version. Then they're going to invite people, Then they're going to invite people. So I feel like the plastic version needs to be higher on your priority list so you can seed that version for free to. I would do meetup groups. Go to meetup.com scrape every single board game group or, or larping group or whatever it is, whatever your target market is and give it to the leader of the group for free, but beg him to use it. That's what most people don't realize is seating is easy. Like seating to big name influencers, small name influencers, meetup group leaders, whatever. The hard part is getting them to use the thing. Right. We did that with this product. We sold the restaurants. We sold it or we sent it for free to restaurants. And once they tried it, they loved it, but they would never try it. And it differs based on the market. Restaurant owners are busy. Right. It's unique. But you've got to put 10 times the work into convincing them to actually try it than convincing them to accept it for free.

Makes sense.

But I feel if you can get it in the hands of 30 people and get 10 of them to play it, then you're going to have a big enough sample size to know if that's a winning strategy for really scaling your growth. And then if that works, I would exhaust all of the meetup groups like everyone there is. And then you're also going to find some meetup groups that have nothing to do with board games that are just your target market. And so I would do a bunch of research. When you talk to your customers, you get your feedback. Awesome. You love it. Okay, great. Now I want to know about you. Like, are you white collar, blue collar, older, younger, rich, poor, male, female? And try to develop a Persona or an avatar of who your customer is so you can find pockets of potential customers that aren't like obvious board game owners. Like, I love board games. For instance, I'm a. I'm in a family of six, I've got four kids. We play board games all the time. You would never seed a product with me because I'm not like a. That's not. I don't identify as a board gamer, but if we got your product, we'd probably love it. So maybe parents of a bunch of kids. Maybe it's Utah. Right. Where all my people live. That's. In all seriousness, those are big board gamers over there because they don't drink, they don't smoke, they don't go out, they play board games.

Same thing with the Muslim community. We don't drink, we don't smoke. Okay, perfect.

Yeah, that's right. Those are my people too. You are my people.

That sounds great.

I would reverse engineer what the big board games have done to grow. I would find the founders, listen to all the podcasts they've been interviewed on, read all the articles. I would ignore the ones like. Was it the humanity cards of humanity?

Yeah.

What's it called? I would ignore. I would ignore that because you probably agree that card games are a bit different and that was a viral phenomenon. I would ignore the ones that blew up only during COVID because you can't rely on that. But find like the. What is it? What is the train game called? Ticket to ride?

Yeah. Monopoly, Catan and stuff like that.

Code names like the ones that were not popular. What's it called? The ones that are like 5 to 20 years old. I would do really real deep dives on them. Okay. And also, I don't know if it helps, but my in laws are good friends with the. Who are the people that did the COVID your assets game? That game?

Cover your ass? Actually, I never heard that one. Cover your ass.

Oh, that's cover. It's like a financial game. It's fun. It's Grandpa Beck. You heard of grandpa Beck? No.

That sounds awesome.

Okay.

Grandpa Beck.

It's actually a pretty big company. They cover your assets. Skull King.

Okay.

I think cover your assets was like their big one. Anyway, it's a pretty big company and my in laws are friends with the owners, so I'm happy to make an introduction there if that could help.

Absolutely.

I would love to send you a game. I Would absolutely.

I'd love to play it.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

But yeah, I think that's a lot. That's a lot to get you started and I want to hear how it goes.

Absolutely, brother. This is great. I think. Yeah. We've been trying to figure out our avatar because like you said, your people, my people, it's in that audience right now and we're trying to break it up. So R1 Avenue was going to go to the board game cafe.

Oh, there you go. Okay.

But the meetup.com, i think that's a great one. Meetup.com and scrape, that website for the leaders right there.

We're right there.

We can give out games at this very moment and we'll be totally perfect.

So now you can do it even more when you have a cheaper version.

Exactly. Amazing. That's cool.

I'm excited for you.

Thank you, man. I appreciate Facebook group.

Yeah. One Facebook groups. That'd be great.

One final question. If we're signing off. So this is the better avenue right now with the meetup and this placing and seating versus just doing paid marketing. You would.

Yep. Okay.

Perfect.

Yeah. Because that is such a black hole that you could sink so much money into. It's. You don't know how many times I've had these ad campaigns where it's, yeah, we'll do a hundred a day. Let's do 150 day and then that's five grand a month.

Yeah.

Oh my gosh. What are we doing? What have we gotten from this? Yeah. So of course it works, right? Like Facebook and Google are trillion dollar companies because it works. But I like to leave. I never like to wholly rely on paid ads for a business to be successful because the algorithm can change at any point. But you're in a really good spot if you can do more organic options and then say, shoot, let's just do paid ads now because why not? It's just more money. Agree, agree.

I'm very excited, man. I thank you so much. I really appreciate all this advice. And I will connect with you. Let me know how to as well. Just email you back with stuff.

Yeah. Yep.

Sounds good to me.

All right, thanks.

See ya. You have a great day.

To anyone that is watching right now, welcome to episode eight of the Kerner Office where we discuss business advice and how to grow your business, how to sell your business, if you should buy a business, if you should quit your job, if you're joining here for the first time, that's what this is. And so Steve filled out the form and All I know is that he has an RV park in an undisclosed location that he would like some help with. Steve, why don't you tell us what you're, what you're struggling with.

Yeah, I came into a park a few years ago. It in a kind of the outskirts of a metro in a suburb. It's one of the older parks, it's very centrally located, an older part of town. It had quite notoriety. It was pretty rough park. When we took over the park, a lot of work was done to turn it around and it has a great trajectory now. A lot of improvements have been made. But since it was such a rough park for so long, bringing the rents up to current market, there was a lot of pushback, but that's old news. So most of the upgrades are done, rents are picking up. It's 68 Pad Park. We're, we're just having trouble filling the last few pads. We're trying to figure out how to, to accomplish that. We mostly get our traffic from Craigslist and our website. I just started a Facebook profile yesterday and just wondering what was the, what would be a best way to advertise our vacancies?

So how long have you owned the park and then what did you bring rents to and where were they before they.

Under previous ownership they're about 300amonth which is well under market because it was the mark. The park was in shambles. It's up to 600 now which is still on the low end for the area. There's only two other parks in the metro that are lower. And our biggest perk or benefit is we don't have as restrictive as an age limit. So it's the most affordable for, for the community. And we've been controlling it for about four years.

Okay, so you doubled rents basically from 3 to 600 and did you do that four, four years ago or over time?

Over time. What Mostly trying to do damage control from the last owners.

Yeah. Okay, and what has the reaction been to that?

Negative but just knee jerk reaction. But when you look at the totality of the situation, if rents aren't brought near market with the taxes going up, they go, they went up last year almost 50%. And if the park isn't making any money or breaking even then because it's so centrally located, there's no park and it's going to be a shopping center or who knows what.

Have you explained that, the why of raising your rents to your tenants? Do you have any sort of communication system like emails or letters? And what does that look like.

So we have on site property manager that is very hands on and communicates with everyone at the park. We do not do a newsletter or anything like that because most of the residents aren't really tied in. I guess we could do a paper newsletter but as far as logging in and doing that sort of stuff, it's not really the preferred method to communicate in this park. It's pretty old school in that sense. Folks are writing checks and we've. So yeah, to answer your question, it's mostly just part gossip and the on site manager communicating through people individually and questions come up.

And has your as you or your manager communicated specifically why you've raised rents and like very specifics, the taxes going up and all of those things?

Yes, mostly focused on taxes and market rates and the outcome of not addressing those head on and the rent increases are, are very gradual, like 50 bucks every year.

Do you own any park owned park owned units or are they all tenant owned?

They're all tenant owned.

First of all I looked at your reviews and they looked a little bad and which is understandable considering they've had their rents raised. But I think you could do a lot more with regards to communication and I like to say it, in my businesses communication covereth a multitude of sins and it really does because yes you're raising rents but the more you communicate the why, and I know you already have, but the more you over communicate the why, the more goodwill you'll buy them. And I know that they're not tech savvy but you do have a website. And so if I were you I would just do a monthly newsletter. And so we're talking an hour a month of your time. I think it should be you doing this. That's just very like what's happening. Here's how everything's looking even here's what occupancy is like. You could do an A like a tenant spotlight with a headshot of hey, this is our favorite tenant of the month and here's why. Did you know this guy served in this war? Or did you know this person has 37 grandkids? That really goes a long way and it helps spark conversations within the community. And these are all tangential to your ultimate problem and I'm getting to that. But if you were to do that on your website, surely they're not going to go to your website. But then if you were to have an SMS distribution list once a month that just links to your website to that blog article, you could also do a paper newsletter but I think this is just easier. I think that would go a long way. You could just address the rent increases. First paragraph. Get it out of the way. We know it sucks, but this park by name is 650. This other park by name is 675. And these guys don't have these amenities. We do. And then you go into the tenant spotlight, here's what's happening, the history of the park, and just do something like that once a month and I think you'll start to see reviews trickling up, trickling in and going up. I think also if you were to talk to your park manager and ask him like, which tenants are great, which tenants love us, which tenants are happy, go to them specifically and solicit five star reviews. And because I think this, the sooner you can get your average review above 4.0, the sooner that you'll just naturally see your occupancy start to increase. And I would honestly tell your tenants maybe you have, but if you haven't, tell them what the rent increase schedule is going to look like into the future. Like, Maybe it's been $50 a year, but maybe you're good for a while. Tell them that. Or maybe it's going to keep being $50 a year. They should know that. If so, that's, that's like tangential. That's just like best practices that I would suggest. And it can help improve the occupancy, which for those of us, for those of you just joining, that is the question, how can he get his occupancy up now? You're already at 89% or so, so you don't have a lot left to go. That tells me that your rents are getting close to market. You just started a Facebook page yesterday. That's great. I didn't hear you say that you're using Facebook Marketplace to advertise vacancies. I would definitely do that. Put an ad up without boosting it, See how it goes. If it doesn't go well enough, then boost it. I know you're in a pretty big area, you're in city limits. I feel like you should be able to get it to 100% within a few months if you did this. If you go that route and you spend a little money and it doesn't work, I would, I would Seriously consider buying three to four units, RVs, nicer ones, and seller financing them to new tenants. I have never once ever had an issue getting new tenants in. If I deliver them a unit with a bow on it, you don't have to maintain it because your seller financing it to them. Of course you have to look up local regulations but that is always like the last lever I pull to boost occupancy because it never fails me.

Very great advice. Yeah. And follow up question would be I think Google Ads would be useful at.

All or in addition, I've never seen Google Ads be useful. I've seen other people do it. There's no way of knowing if it's successful for them or if it's just they're just burning money or if they're just trying it and they end up abandoning it. I'm sure it can be. I've just, it's never worked for me. But what does work for me is if the Facebook marketplace boost doesn't work then use Facebook ads like just normal meta ads through the business manager platform targeted in that area at lower income people and that usually helps as well.

Excellent. Thank you.

Absolutely Wish you the best of luck and come back and tell us how it goes.

Sounds good. Thanks Chris.

Hey guys. This next segment is a little different. We had a guy named Claude call in and he wanted to know how he should approach the owner of a monuments business. I think he's outside of Chicago. He was having some technical difficulties as he dialed in and then we went and listened to the recording when it was over and we didn't get his voice at all for some reason you can just hear me answering questions and talking. So I'm just going to give you a brief kind of intro of what he was talking about and then we'll edit my section to make it more to make it make sense. So yeah, Claude wants to buy business and he drives by this monument business like a gravestone headstone business every day on the way to work. They took care of his sister in law when she passed away a few years ago and he just thinks it'd be a good business to own. So he wanted to know should I buy this business? How do I approach the owner? And so I, I talked to him a lot about developing relationship and complimenting him on his business and yeah, you'll see what I'm talking about. So hope you enjoy. So I would start by just pulling in on your way to work and just meeting, meeting him and just being very transparent and lead with compliments. That is the absolute best thing you can do. Like you took care of my sister in law. I like you did such a great job, yada yada yada. And I, I drive by this place every day which makes me think about both my Sister in law and that experience and this as a business, frankly, and this is really random, but would like, would you ever be interested in selling your business and just like totally feel it out and it could be a hard no, but it could be the first step that gets you to learn about this business and gets you to fall in love with it and go find a different one to acquire. But I would play the long game here and say you don't know me from Adam, but I just, I'm fascinated by this business. I think it's a good business and I just wanted to get your thoughts. And if he kind of hems and haws, then that's probably a yes, that this is something he's been thinking about. And you're strike. He's. You're striking a nerve here. But he doesn't know you well enough to be more transparent. But if he's just. And he probably will hem and ha, he's probably not going to say yes, like how much do you want to offer? And he's probably not going to say never, never. Because he's old. Right. He has to do something with it. You can even tell him like a stat. And I would google it because I'm going to butcher this. But something like two thirds of businesses never sell. They just close down. And a lot of those business owners don't even know their business has value. They just don't. And it does. I don't care what business. I don't care if it's a one man show and you've got an H vac business and it's only you and everything's in your head. There's still something to that business. Like at a worst case, you could have your grandson write down everything and sell it in a course. There's something there. And so maybe tell him that and say, I just find it honestly a shame that so much value is going to waste as these baby boomers retire these businesses, they will literally go to waste. This value will be destroyed and the people that need your service will not be able to get it. Which means due to the laws of supply and demand, they're going to have to pay more for a headstone because there'll be a lot less supply than there is demand. And so it's just no one wins if a business closes. No one. And so I would just leave with that. And maybe the first stop is three minutes. And it's just like you stop in one day and it's, you know what, I pass there every day. And you took care of my sister and I just want to shake your hand and meet you and thank you and, and you're doing a good job with the community. And then maybe a week later I can't get this thought out of my head. And then you go into would you ever be willing to sell? Because I think I don't really need to do the research. That's a good business and it's only going to get better. Just looking at human demographics, I assume you're going to want to ask for some percentage of seller financing and the more of a relationship you can develop with him, the more likely he is going to be to say yes to that. Worst case, he becomes like a mentor and he just teaches you a few things that make you love the business and you buy a different one. So this is from. They want to be anonymous. So this is from anonymous. They say, hey Chris, I'd like your take on a question around growth. I run a digital signage management business. Essentially we make communication easier for busy schools. We take basic written instructions. Okay, convert this to engaging video based content and push it remotely through a CMS content management system. We are year out of 42 customers. Only one didn't resign for year two. So let's recap before I keep reading. Digital signage management business. Never heard those words put together. They make communication easier for busy schools. Okay, all right. I've tweeted about this before. We take a written instruction, convert it to engaging video. All right, so it's I get an email from a principal that's yada yada yada. This is what we're doing. Super boring. They take it and turn it into videos. Which is smart. Okay, so he had 42 customers and only one churned a good number. Went from wanting one screen managed to two up to now I assume they're putting these videos on a publicly facing screen somewhere. Up to now I've tried. All I've tried is direct response mail ads to schools. In a couple of months I'll do my first event where 300 to 350 school leaders will attend. I've also started to generate relationships with district level decision makers who would manage groups of schools. But this isn't the easiest thing to cultivate. Any ideas around growth? Maybe it's down to better ad copy in the mailers or perhaps a guerrilla approach that I hadn't considered as a bookend. Here I have started thinking, are there opportunities in industry like factory workplaces? I haven't really tried to validate that side. It could be interesting. Perhaps Higher ticket. Your wisdom is appreciated. So I have to assume some things because he's not calling in live. So I'm going to make some assumptions that his market is big enough to grow. His school market is big enough to grow. He's acquired 42 customers, and I imagine these are bigger customers. These are higher ticket items because it's a school, maybe even a school district. He has basically no churn. I assume they love him. He's able to find 42B to S business to school customers through direct mail ads. And he wants to grow. So what I'm wondering without him being here to answer is why not just more direct mail ads? I'm afraid that he's only done, like, kind of haphazard. All right, let's send out some mailers. Let's send out 400. All right, 40 to convert. Send out 4,000. 40 to convert. Mailers work only if you send them a ton. There's a tipping point for every industry, but you've got to do at least four or five batches. Quick story. When I moved my company to dfw, it was called LCD Cycle, and we sold iPhone parts to iPhone repair stores. We used direct mailers, and it frickin worked. We had five rounds of them, and they all had the same theme, like, same kind of layout on the post. There were postcards, but different colors. And so when they got one in the mail, it was like a trigger, like a Pavlov dog. Oh, ding. Yep, this looks familiar. This is from LCD Cycle. A different offer. We even had one of our offers of, hey, we bought a boat in dfw, come out boating with us on the weekends with me personally the owner, because who else was doing that? No one. Like, everyone wants a vendor that has a boat or that has a country club membership or that has the box seats at the Mavericks game. That's what I was trying to be. I was like these. I had a low churn. Just our. Our question asker here. I had a low churn, too. They spent thousands a month and they never churned. So I thought, shoot, if I buy a $40,000 boat that gets me one customer, it'll pay for itself. And so that was like our third or fourth postcard. But we didn't see hit rates on these postcards until the third or fourth or fifth or sixth. So you just got to keep mailing if that's working. Like, selling to schools is one of the hardest types of customers to acquire. So if you're already doing it successfully, then don't spin Your wheels, thinking about factories or workplaces or paid ads or anything. Just send them a ton of mailers, maybe even some chunky mailers. Put something in there, a little trinket, a pencil or something, something that relates to schools. And you have it. You have your winning formula. Just scale it. Keep sending them more. All right, we've got Bailey. Hey, you're going to be our last caller, so if there's anyone else waiting, I'm sorry, but we'll get you to next week because I got to drive to a wedding, so.

Okay. Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it.

Absolutely. I want to hear about your dumpster rental business.

Okay. Yes. Been in business for about six weeks now. Took quite a while to get funding for the dumpsters and the truck and everything. So I ended up flying into Texas, buying a truck and 11 dumpsters and driving them back to Salt Lake. And we have had those for about six weeks now. Things are going really well. But I mostly just wanted to pick your brain about some unique ways to market to either contractors or builders and get some more like long term contracts. Most of our customers right now are homeowners, which has been great, but we're spending a fortune on Google Ads and those traditional marketing channels. And so I wanted to pick your brain about landing commercial jobs working with general contractors or builders or is anybody like pulling permits? I've thought about marketing to want to just get some of your advice on that.

So you just went ahead and bought a truck, like I assume a truck to move these things around +11 dumpsters in Texas and just started from scratch or is this a business that you bought?

Started from scratch? Yeah.

Wow. Okay. What about the industry or business made you want to just go all in on this? And I like the business too, don't get me wrong. I'm just curious what your mindset is.

Yeah, so I've been flipping houses for the last three or four years and had to rent them all the time and started just running the numbers on them. And you can buy a dumpster for probably all in. After painting and decals, you're like 5,500 bucks and you can rent them out for 350 a week. It's also just really like operationally it's pretty simple. Right now I've got a full time driver and then a full time office manager that takes calls and schedules. So operationally it's pretty simple to scale. The biggest thing is it's just really capital intensive. That's the biggest downside. But yeah, that was most of the appeal is I've paid for them all the time, and they're pretty profitable.

Okay, what percentage of capacity are you right now with your 11 dumpsters?

It depends on the week. So, like last, I think two Fridays ago, it was really warm out, and we hit max capacity. We all of the dumpsters were out of our yard. But earlier this week, we were at 0%, you know, capacity, so we didn't have anything booked. And then this Friday, it's warm again, so we've got a lot. So that's one reason I'm wanting to move more into the commercial space is they're a lot more consistent. A lot of these weekend warriors want to rent one when the sun comes out. I've got 12 more dumpsters coming on the 15th, so I'm really going to need to increase my. My bookings in order to. To accommodate those.

How much do these cost? You said 500, but is that what these cost?

No, they cost like 5500 once everything said. Yeah, about.

Okay, six grand apiece. Okay. And you're ordering them because it's been going, and it's in Utah and the weather's warming up and you want to grow your business.

Yeah.

Right. Okay. How have you been finding customers so far?

90% has just been Google Ads. We've done quite a bit of. We're just cranking out cold calls every single day, doing a lot of just, like, networking with realtors and moving companies. But primarily Google Ads has been all of our. We're starting to get some traction with SEO, and we're starting to rank on, like, the Google map pack. So we've been making some progress on those fronts. But primarily Google Ads, which is pretty expensive. I think we're spending about 200 a day on Google Ads.

And what is that? Are you able to attribute it correctly? So, you know, like, how much in Google Ads equates to a rental?

Yeah. So $200 in Google Ad spends usually can book me about one and a half to two rentals a day.

Okay. So we're talking 700 or thousand bucks in revenue somewhere around there.

Yeah. Assuming that we can maintain that. And I think that'll. Yeah, that's the goal for this year. Once I have those other dumpsters come in.

Okay. Theoretically, as you scale the ad campaign, it'll get less efficient, but it's also getting warmer. So is it reasonable to assume if you were to spend a thousand a day, that it would still be somewhat profitable as the weather warms up, but.

Not as I would think, so the more I increase the budget, I've already noticed like my cost per click starts to go up a little bit. My conversions are a little bit more expensive. The nice part is as long as I'm getting like one and a half to two bookings a day, that covers all of my fixed costs. So the vast majority of my expenses are fixed. Like I've got to pay a full time office person, full time driver, my yard rentals, 1200 bucks a month, my loans on the equipment. So once all that's covered, my margins get significantly better. So even if my ad spend efficiency goes down, it would still be worth it.

Okay, and what percentage of your business is coming from Google Ads today?

90%.

Okay. So cold calls aren't yielding much fruit yet.

They haven't. We've been cold calling primarily like roofers, remediation companies, home builders and no, we haven't had any luck with it. We've probably done, I don't know, 200, 300 cold calls at this point. A lot of them either already have a dumpster guy that they're using, like already have a contract with somebody that's set up. So that's one thing we've been running into. We can try and compete on price, but a lot of these guys have larger operations so they can run at smaller margins.

Are you willing to tell me what your website is so I can pull that up? Yeah, it's co. How easy is it or hard to change the pricing on your website on any given time?

Yeah, would take two minutes.

And are you not concerned about that? Would it not cause friction with current customers or is it not a big deal?

No, we don't have very many repeat customers. Most of them are like one off homeowners that are find us from a Google Ads search or on the map pack and are just booking once we have a couple repeat customers, but.

Okay. Do you know how much you compete with those Baxter bags at Home Depot at all? I don't know how you measure that, but they're a lot smaller than what you're renting. I know that.

Yeah, yeah. So we have 20 cubic yard dumpsters, so they're pretty large.

Okay. And are most of these homeowners just doing like bathroom remodels and stuff or is it bigger stuff?

Yeah, a lot of them are either just like garage cleanouts or some sort of smaller renovation.

Okay. Or a lot of them are moving. Okay. Have you thought of trying to partner with the junk hauling companies in the area?

I've given it a little bit of thought. I actually called a junk removal guy yesterday to see if we could set up some kind of like a referral program. The larger junk hauling, like junk removal guys, you've got like 1, 800, got junk and junk kings and those types of like franchise models. Those guys have their own dumpsters that they'll rent out on occasion. The guy that I talked to yesterday was mid sized so he doesn't have dumpsters. But he said usually if he gets somebody that's requesting a dumpster, he'll just try and talk him into doing a junk removal job and he can usually for a slightly higher price than a dumpster will just go out. And a lot of those junk removal guys work really cheap. They don't seem to make a ton of money. So I think they're willing to take a cut in price and make it worth it for their customer.

Have you gone the handyman route and scraped a list of handymen or general contractors specifically more smaller ones to do outreach to them?

We haven't. Most of the people we've been reaching out to are larger companies like large remediation. Because my first thought was I want to land as big of a contract as I can. So mostly like larger remediation, roofing and home builders. But that might, I haven't really given that much thought, but that might be some lower hanging fruit.

Yeah, the hard part with those guys is they can be sometimes hard to find. A lot of those handyman and contractors, like they don't have a website, they're not even on Google Maps. They just get business from referrals and.

Yeah.

You know what I'm saying?

Yeah, absolutely.

Have you noticed on your Google Ads a time of day or week when you're busier or slower, like when is the demand? Is it like on a Thursday before the weekend or is there no correlation?

There's a lot of correlation. So Wednesday, Thursday, Friday are wild. Like today I've got I think four drop offs. Yesterday we had two or three. So Wednesday, Thursday, Friday are crazy. Monday and Tuesday are pretty slow. And a lot of that is because I'm working primarily with homeowners that just want a warm weekend where they can do a garage clean out or tear down that deck or whatever it is. And that's one reason why I do want to go the commercial route a little bit more is because they're a little bit more consistent. If it's raining out they're not going to stop their project or so that's one thing. It's very varies a lot between Monday And Tuesday is dead. And then Wednesday, Thursday, Friday is just crazy to where we run out of dumpsters.

Do you have to rent these or could you sell them as well?

Sell the dumpsters?

Yeah. Is that even an option or is the margin not there?

If I were to sell them, it would just be to, like another dumpster.

Company or just a commercial business. Right.

That.

That needs an extra one permanently.

Yeah.

Have to go through the trash company.

They would need somebody to empty it. I could sell it to them and then just service it on a monthly basis. So usually, like, we've got one guy up in Park City right now that we have a monthly contract with. So him, for example, we charge 550 bucks a month, and that includes one empty. And then if he needs us to come out and empty before that, we can do a swap for 200 bucks. So those are usually how those types of contracts work. I'm sure. I know there's some people that will, like fabrication shops will buy a dumpster that's for like metal recycling, and then somebody will come empty it for free. But primarily it's more of a rental.

And the guy in Park City, what is his use for this dumpster?

He does build outs for commercial spaces. So he's doing like a commercial build out on the shopping center right now.

Okay, so you've been trying to find more guys like him?

Yeah. The nice part about guys like him, and especially as we get more dumpsters, is like, we've been having to go the residential route right now because we only have 11 dumpsters. So we have to turn these things really quickly. But the nice part about those commercial guys is he takes the exact amount of work as a residential person. So, for example, a lot of residential guys, I'll cut them a deal if they're doing like a three day booking, and they'll pay 299. This commercial guy, he keeps the dumpster for a month, but he pays me 550. So it's the exact same amount of work. And the additional 200 bucks is just pure profit. The downside is I've got that dumpster tied up. So ideally what I could do is over time, shift more and more to commercial as I get more equipment. And eventually that's primarily where I'd like to be and then do some residential jobs here and there. But those jobs are. They're significantly more profitable. But if I only did commercial jobs, I wouldn't pay the bills because I'd be booked out. Whereas with the residential jobs, some of these dumpsters, I can turn two or three times a week. So it's more work, but more profit.

Okay. All right. I think I've got some ideas. If you're spending six grand a month, and I don't know if you think how I think, but this is how I think. I never want to hire an agency for anything because I don't want to pay one to four grand a month for anything. But then I'll just. I'll dump $200 a day into Google Ads. And it just seems totally different to me. And really it's. That's three agencies. So I don't know if you think like that, but I think you would be pretty well served to find a GMB agency to organically increase your map pack ranking over time. And I feel like you're in this for the long haul, no pun intended. And you're willing to make investments today to grow your business six months from now, which is why you bought all these new dumpsters. But I think that would really help. It's not going to move the needle today, but I think a lot of these agencies are a thousand to fifteen hundred bucks a month and they work like, of all the agencies you could hire, It's a lot of times with any agency, it's is this guy, Is this even working? But with gmb, it's very clear you can see your ranking improve on certain terms. I would try that. There's a. I've tweeted quite a bit about it. If you do an advanced search under my name for home service, I've tweeted quite a bit about improving your map pack ranking and all that. I would try that. I would also experiment with surge pricing. I would be willing, if I were you, to really drop your prices during those low demand times and see if you convert a lot better directly from Google. That's the great thing about cold traffic to a website is you can play around with your prices all you want and no one's going to care. No one's going to remember, no one's going to care. I've always wanted to buy a hotel just so I could experiment with surge pricing, like, to an extreme where it's like, all right, I know that my cleaner is going to take an hour to clean this room. I pay her 18 bucks an hour. So my hard cost is 18 bucks. All right, our hotel is normally 130 a night, but if I'm not 100% occupied, I'm going to charge 30 until someone books it, because then I have an email address that I Could market to them every month. I still make a $10 profit because those empty rooms are just throwing money away.

Yeah.

I would experiment with something drastic like that where you even increase the prices on the weekend and maybe they convert the same and you drop them like significantly just to learn. Even if you're losing money during the week when you know, like, realistically, I'm not going to get any conversions today. Just play around with it and see what if it works. What do you think about that?

Yeah, yeah, I think that's a great idea. And then even if I'm breaking even on a couple bookings on a Monday or Tuesday and I get a shorter booking, it's better than them sitting in the yard. I've got these things, they're like a really bright blue color and they're all decal and everything. So they're like a moving billboard. So if I could move them around town and keep. I've got my driver there at the yard full time anyways. So if I'm just trying to find things for him to do, he might as well be breaking even on a delivery. And that way we can remarket to that person. A lot of times their neighbors will call based on the. We've got it. We've got like a QR code and our phone number and everything on these dumpsters. So they're like a moving billboard.

So if we can, I love it.

Have that added benefit and then also remarket to that person and keep my guys busy, then I think that's a great idea.

Yeah, I love that. Did you ever see that Dollar Shave Club viral commercial from 10 years ago, 15 years ago.

I've seen a couple of them.

It was the original one. It was the guy in a warehouse. It's really funny. I would go use that as a case study and put a little money into making a 60 second video that you can put right on your homepage of. Just use something funny and endearing. You sitting in a dumpster or sitting on a stack of dumpsters, maybe right when they arrive, just like climbing up there, getting a video, a very professional one, saying, just what am I gonna do with all these dumpsters? I've got 26 dumpsters or whatever. Like what am I gonna do with them? And that's let people see your personality right there on the homepage. And I, I think that will really help because this is a commodity and it's man, I could pay 400 bucks to this commodity or I could pay 450 bucks to Bailey and he seems cool and Funny. And I like this guy. Yeah, I think that would help conversion on your landing page, because if you're relying that much on cold traffic, then every little tweak you make on your landing page is going to make a big difference. So you can play around with keywords and all that stuff inside of Google, but I would focus more efforts on your actual website to better convert the traffic that gets there. And then I would take the efforts or money or manpower that you're spending on cold calling and just divert that to more digital efforts for at least a couple weeks. Posting on nextdoor, posting in local Facebook groups, buy, sell groups, mom groups, anything. Posting on ksl, Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace. And just don't cold call for a while. See how that goes. And. But specifically, tell your story. I'm a Utah entrepreneur, and I put all this money to drive to Texas and to buy a truck and 11 dumpsters so I could better serve the valley with dumpsters. Tell your story and people will read it. Like, they'll keep reading to the end, and then they'll feel like they know you and they like you. And it seems kitschy and, like, silly, but I promise you it works. Like, when we do our cold outreach, we tell our the story of James, my tree biz operator, just graduated from college, moved to Texas, started, like, people love it. They want to support you as a person. But if you're just a business, a faceless business. I know your face is on the website, which is awesome. I would do the same thing. Then it's just any other dumpster rental company.

Yeah, that's a great idea. I didn't even think of that. But anybody I've told that story because I flew out to Dallas and had to move all these dumpsters around so they could get shipped. Put one on the back. I'd never driven anything more than a pickup truck, so I drove it 26 hours back to Salt Lake. Anybody I've told that story is pretty interested or think it's funny or engaging. So, yes, that's not a bad idea.

Exactly. Yeah. And then I would get. I would scrape a list of all the handyman, general contractors, everything. Then you can start doing cold outreach to them. Cold call, text, email, or going to their website, submitting the contact us form. And then just keep going the realtor and the commercial realtor route for referrals. Because I think you're on the right track there. I would just pause it for a while to try these other things before revisiting it. Yeah, I think you'll find success there.

Awesome. Yeah. Those are some great ideas.

Yeah.

You're a genius.

Thanks, man. I hope it helps. And I. I want you to promise me that you'll follow up in a month or two and tell us how it's going.

Absolutely. Yeah. Do you want me to follow up by email or how.

Email's great. And maybe we'll have you back on the show. Okay.

Excellent. Yeah. I really appreciate you taking the time. I know you've got a lot going on today. I've seen on your Twitter you're headed to a wedding today.

Yeah, I'm officiating it, and I didn't even. Yeah, it's a whole thing, but.

Nice.

Yeah.

Thanks again. I really appreciate you taking the time.

Of course. Have a good day.

Hey, you too. Thanks. Bye.

See ya.