The Koerner Office Live Stream. Live, improv Q&A with biz owners and wantrepreneurs.

Good, good. Do you have any feedback for me? Any way I can make them better?

Man, I'm really, really like just eating it all up right now. So I'll think about that and shoot you an email if so. But I'm, I'm really, really digging everything so far.

Thank you. Yeah. All right, well, thank you for joining. So I, I try to keep these to 10 minutes each if at all possible. Sure. And we were just now starting, so would it be helpful if I just went ahead and kind of summarized the question that you already submitted and then you can tell me if that's maybe that's inaccurate at this point and then we can just go from there.

Yeah, that's great.

All right, so what you wrote to me was, let's see, Control, find. So I'm a wantrepreneur, slash software engineer developing consumer electronics, mid-30s, make 185k. I already trade my time for money. I don't want to start a side hustle. So that requires more of. More of that. I already tried cleaning gutters. I want something that scales. I read your newsletter and I'm desperate for my first dopamine hit of someone willing to pay me for something I did. Slash created and I will add, it does feel really good. So you're on the right track. I would love to sell something online. I have no e commerce experience, I have no experience trying ideas, I have no sales experience or online marketing experience, et cetera, but I would love to get this experience. Question 1. Should I prioritize getting experience with something like Klaviyo, which is a marketing email marketing software that gets me exposed to marketing and testing ideas, or work for a company part time selling their outdoor grill product commission only and learning how to generate my own leads. Question 2. I love spreadsheets, but I have no accounting background. Can you recommend a resource to learn the business lingo, important metrics, et cetera? So my first question to you, Aaron, is two part one, has anything changed since you submitted this question? And two, I would love to hear more about this side hustle opportunity to sell grills.

Yeah, so I did. The only thing that's changed since then was I was approached through a family friend who's, who's done very well for themselves and they're, they, they have some sort of stake in a company that makes a really nice grill and they gear it very much towards like the yachting industry. It's an electric grill that's approved for marine use. So I, I was. And, and so they're, they're trying to get into other markets, namely like the condo market where you're not allowed to have like a gas grill on your porch if you own a condo or the, the, the, the RV space. So they're, they're trying to find some, some hungry people to, to get their product into these areas. So that's kind of been the only thing that's changed. And I forget the second question.

I'm sorry, has anything changed since you submitted this question?

Yeah, nothing's changed. I'm still, yeah, it's, everything's still basically the same.

Okay, so this grill company, how are they currently marketing? Is it kind of an old school business with boomer owners or are they pretty savvy at marketing?

Very much like old school marketing as.

Far as I know.

And how are they doing with that?

They go to trade shows and things like that. I don't have any sort of insight into, into how they're, they're doing it, but it's a they, it's made in the usa so I would assume, I believe they're in some very, very, I won't mention the name, but they're in some very, very popular like boating stores that are, you know, that are common.

Okay. So they're mostly just doing the old school stuff, trade shows, retail. Are they doing any direct to consumer or e commerce shipping through their website at all?

I think they have e commerce through their website from what I understand. I've looked into it and you can purchase one online as far as I know. But I don't believe they're on any other platform like Amazon or anything like that.

Okay, so they've kind of sought you out thinking oh this, this guy, he's young, like he, he can help us. And you're like I, I want to know how to help you. But I'm not quite sure yet. Do I, do I fake it till I make it? Do I use this as a learning opportunity? Do I say nah, no, I'm going to try something else? Is that kind of where you're at?

Yeah, they're, they're very much. I think they would be eager to have somebody commission only who's hungry on the team who's. Who's also like my background is mechanical and software so I can speak technically to their product and explain that kind of thing. So they're eager for somebody who has that background. Because I don't, it wouldn't seem, doesn't seem to me like from what they've said like that that's a common thing. Somebody going from the technical sides. Who wants to get into sales? So that's kind of, that's, that's kind of what the, the pitch to me.

Was, so to speak.

And how much do these grills cost?

I want to say, you know, they started around a thousand dollars and go up from there. But they're, that's kind of the price. I think they might, they may have a lower budget, one in the 750 range.

Okay. Do you know what their revenues look like?

Yeah, I have no insight into any of the, any of those details.

What about how many employees they have? A lot of times you can kind of reverse engineer their revenues.

Yeah, I would say, I would say probably between 50 and 100. They do like all their manufacturing in the US and they have, I would say between 50 and 100 employees.

Wow. Okay. So I would think it's probably like a low eight figure business. That sounds right.

Yeah, that's a, that's a good guess.

And I'll give you some insight into why I'm asking these questions. Because when it comes to selling things, especially on commission only, it's really helpful to find a sweet spot, right. Like there's always a trade off between the ticket size that you're selling. Call it swimming pools or you know, verse T shirts in an American Eagle store versus the difficulty of the sale. And occasionally you can find a sweet spot where it's like A, the sales cycle is not too long, B the ticket size is high, at least in the thousands and C, it's not a very hard sale. Right. But like it occasionally you can find like some arbitrage there. But usually if you're selling a hundred thousand dollar pool, it's going to be a six month decision and it's going to be really hard. It's going to take months or years before you earn your first dollar. But then once you get that pipeline full, you can make some really good money. That's usually how it works. I'm trying to understand what would a commission look like and how successful is this company already? And they're thousand dollar grills. I see this as a perfect type of product that you could sell with Google Ads, just direct Google Ads. Because your cost per acquisition is probably going to be like 40 to $140. But if they've got good gross margins then they can afford to scale that and to pay you a commission.

Okay.

Would, would you say that like there would be. I've a number of your newsletters and, and podcasts and stuff you mentioned Outscraper and different online tools that you can use to generate leads. I don't know. And I don't. Just being that they're boomer owners, I don't know how far down the rabbit hole they've gone. This and me being a software engineer, I'm very, very, I would be very, very eager to write some of my own scripts or use, use like an outscrapers API to, to have a server running in the background. That's like trying to find the owners of a condominium, per se, that and, and, and get leads that way. For a customer who might put a grill in every single one of their condos, their tenants have, have a grill that meets certain requirements, is there. I'm trying to find a succinct way to ask this, but I guess I'm wondering if it's, if this organization has not gone down this route yet to employ some of these tools, do you see that as like, I guess, something that I could use to set myself apart or kind of get into the, you know.

Absolutely.

Okay.

Yeah. I mean trade shows work, right? Like I'm not going to dog on what they're doing, but their eyes just aren't opened to the new ways of finding customers. Right.

So, right.

If you were to be able to bring them new ideas and say to them with respect, hey, what you're doing is working. Keep doing that. Don't like, you obviously don't want to dog on what they're doing, but then say, why don't you let me try this and just start throwing a bunch of terms at them that are gonna, that's gonna confuse them but make you sound smart, right? Like I'm gonna run an outscraper API to pull up the owners of these condominiums on the back end. And then I'm gonna go to Google Ads and I'm gonna, I'm gonna go to moz.com and get a paid account and I'm gonna learn where the arbitrage opportunities are. Because some long tail keywords have high competition but low volume, but other ones have high volume but low competition. And so I really want to start bidding on those. And they're going to be like, whoa, yeah, that sounds amazing. I assume they're going to be like that. And to me this seems like the perfect opportunity for you because it's enabling you to basically start a startup with no money now, commission only. That's fine. Because the alternative to this is to like start drop shipping someone else's grills and you're going to have to Learn with that and you're going to lose money on your first few orders or first hundred orders, and it's just going to be really hairy. But if they're willing to pay you for success, then I don't think you have much to lose but your time. And you don't even have that to lose because you're. The reason you're calling is because you want to learn, you want to develop new skills. So I would think this is the perfect opportunity because they're a family friend. And if you didn't have this opportunity, I might very well suggest that you call a company like this and ask if you can do something like this. But you already have someone offering, so that part is done. So being more specific, if I were you, I would take up, take them up on that offer. Give yourself a 60 day out, just in case you don't like it. That way you could be respectful to them in 60 days and to yourself and there won't be any hard feelings, especially since it is a family friend. And give yourself 60 days to really see if you could move the needle and move some of these grills. But conversely, if they are requiring you to be commission only, ask for an ads budget and just tell them direct, like, can I just have like a thousand dollars a month that goes straight to Google Ads? Like, I can set a cap on the budget. And I'll tell you straight up, I'm learning, right? I, I am learning, but it's going to cost a little money for me to learn. But I can't, I can't spend my own money on your Google Ads. Do you think they would agree to that?

I think so. I mean, from what I've seen, they would, they would be willing to do something like that. And I guess that prompts me to want to ask you what, as an engineer with no sales experience, what is a, what does a fair commission look like for somebody like me wanting to get started but bringing a little bit of, you know, technical experience to the table?

It's tough because a commission on a grill that you had to pay $50 to get through Google Ads is going to look different from a commission on a grill that you acquired by cold calling a condo owner. Right.

Okay.

And so I would try to work out those details side by side with them and say, and just go cover all your bases. Say, if I cold call a condo owner and sell 100 grills, what does my condition look like If I spend $40 in ads to sell one grill, what does the commission look like if I find an influencer to make a video of your grills and he sells a thousand, but I have to pay him, you know, 100 bucks per grill. What does my commission look like? So I would just make a structure that covers, basically take all the ideas of what, of everything you might want to do to sell these grills and try to see if you can get a commission and a budget attached to each one.

Okay.

Makes sense.

Yeah, completely.

A lot of influencers are going to be like, yeah, oh, wow, you want to give me a percent of every grill that I sell. You and everyone else. That means you don't want to take any risk. I'm going to need some money up front. And so some influencers will be willing to take that risk, but usually the best ones are going to want some money up front so they feel like their time is being guaranteed.

Understood. Okay, great. This is definitely some food for thought or I really appreciate you talking through this with me and I think that's a great idea about the 60 day. Kind of like, let's try this out and see how it goes. Because, you know some of my questions to you in the email.

Right.

Like, I, I have some other interests and things and I, I, I was kind of wondering too if I should pursue those. And I can call back about that another time. But like, yeah, the 60 days. I mean, I, I think that's a great idea. So I really appreciate you mentioning that.

Yeah, absolutely. And I would recommend, I think it's, it's moz.com or ahrefs.com pay for something and it's usually going to be 50 to 150amonth. Month to month. You can cancel anytime where you can do keyword research specifically and find those arbitrage opportunities where people are searching for it, but not a lot of people are bidding on it and then use that data to bring to the owners. So you sound, you sound like you're more knowledgeable than you already are, but you have the intent to become that knowledgeable by the end of the 60 days. Right.

Gotcha.

Okay. And then, yeah, I would take like a Google Ads course or something. Just find a guy on YouTube or find a Udemy person. A Udemy person. Yep. And like, it's just, if you're a data guy, you, you will love it. Like, Google Ads is just fun. It's just really, really fun. And if you can crack that code, you'll never run out of money. So. Got it.

Okay. Hey, listen, I, I'm so grateful that for you have me on, I'M definitely gonna, definitely gonna try to come on in the future and ask, but I'm eating your content up and I think, I think what you are doing is awesome and your partner as well. So thanks again.

Thank you, Aaron. I appreciate that a lot and good luck.

All right, talk soon. Bye.

All right, see ya. All right, so thank you to everyone. Live streaming on YouTube right now. I would love to hear your thoughts or comments. This is only being live streamed to YouTube. I just like it better. I can see it easier. The UI is better. So I'd love to hear any questions you have. Maybe you have a business or you want to start a business and if there's filler time like there is right now, I'll answer them live. If, if I'm speaking to someone and he's asking for advice or ideas, I want to hear your advice and maybe I'll read that and I'll shout you out and credit it to you, but would love some interaction. So I have a couple pre submitted questions that I'm going to read while I wait for my next guest. So let me navigate to those. All right, this is a good one. This is a good one. One sec. All right, here is a question from Ashley. I sold an investment property, one unit in a 20 unit complex to a developer through an 18 month long sales process where all owners had to agree to sell to the developer. That sounds like a nightmare. I was initially very happy with the price. I got doubled my money in five years until I found out the prices that others received. I was not the lowest, but the Highest prices were 250k more. This, this is a substantial percentage difference as all prices were under 1 million. I know that comparison is a thief of joy. I hate that quote, by the way. And I should move on and learn from this experience. But I'm struggling to get past it. The question is how to emotionally move past this. I understand all the logical reasons. I can't change the past, still made a good profit, I can learn to negotiate better, et cetera. But it's getting past the missed opportunity mindset. How do you handle the situation? Ashley, I feel for you. I've been there. I have seemingly, I'm quoting right now, wasted my months and years of my life at opportunities that didn't pan out. I've been there and it's especially maddening. Like you would be happier today had you not learned that fact. You can't change it, but you would be happier. Right? That's why you're writing in. I would suggest that you Just you develop a chip on your shoulder and like, I don't know how to tell you to move past it other than make that fuel you to at least make up for that amount of money that you feel that you missed out on with a future real estate deal. Right? That's the tuition that you paid to learn more about negotiating with developers and. Or with other tenants. For me, when I had something terrible like this happen, the only thing that fixed it was finding more success. Success is the best revenge, right? And then it ended up being I became more successful than the person that had wronged me. And then it really became easy. Had that never happened, being real with you right now, I'd still be struggling. I'd still be angry. I wish I could just tell you that I just. I just forced my way through it and I moved past it and moved on, but I didn't. So I think you just need to put your head down and focus on making a lot of money at whatever brings you a lot of joy and attach that success to this moment in your life where you felt wrong and just. I say this every now and then, but everyone is insecure, right? I'm insecure. Steve Jobs is insecure. Everyone's insecure about something. The difference is, do you know what you're insecure about? Do you have the self awareness of what is making you angry or what is making you feel uncomfortable or, or, or, or not confident? Right. If you, if you have a self awareness about your insecurities or about the chips on your shoulders, then you will be significantly more successful and more happy in the long run. So you clearly do have some level of self awareness because you're asking me, I just suggest that you, you just keep crushing it and keep trying to make money and buy real estate and start businesses. And it will come, but it can take time. All right, we have Alejandro in the lobby. Alejandro.

Hey, Chris, how you doing?

Good.

How are you?

Can you hear me?

I can hear you, yeah. Can you hear me? Hello?

Yeah, it's a tiny bit of a delay, but I think we're good.

There is a delay, so it's. We just kind of have to work with it. Yeah. Okay. Can I, can I cover your question real quick and then you can add more context?

Absolutely.

Yep.

Okay. So you wrote in and said, I just started some. Doing some digital marketing work for some friends and happened to connect with a dog trainer who's trying to grow her business in the Dallas Fort Worth area. She asked if I had any ideas to help her grow. She's on social media but doesn't put any time into it. She let her website expire. She's actually a very good trainer. She has a good track record of past clients from what I can tell. I'm convinced she needs to take social media Google my business seriously, which is step one to get a digital footprint and reviews. But what I really want to do is some out of the box ideas for marketing like events, giveaways, etc. Some ideas? These are your ideas. Setting up a free training day at a local dog park and maybe run ads, post flyers or outreach, partner with a rescue organization. Two, go on local dog Facebook groups, mom groups and share dog training content to those looking to get training. I've never done this, so not sure if there's a certain code of contact that needs to be followed. Okay, so can you add any context to those questions or tell me if anything has changed since you submitted them?

So nothing has changed and I feel like that's as much context as I can give off top of my head other than any questions you might have on specifics. But yeah.

How big is her business? Do you know?

I would say it's pretty small. She probably does maybe 1500-2000amonth in dog training. She typically will do about four or five sessions at like 500 bucks for a total. Right. It's about 125 bucks per session.

125 bucks per session. Okay. And is this her full time slash only thing?

Yes.

Does she want to scale it or is this a dream that you have for her?

No, she wants to scale.

Okay. And she just, just doesn't know where to start.

She, she'd done 100% word of mouth and she's never really, you know, invested much in the digital space. Never really done any kind of advertising or marketing on her own end other than a couple Instagram posts here and there. But she just has, she's good at what she does. But the business aspect, the marketing aspect is not, not her thing.

Right.

Has she or have you identified direct competitors in the nearby area?

Very. I have.

Very loosely.

I've even worked with some other dog trainers in the DFW area that I was not impressed with at all. Spent, you know, three, four, $5,000 for a board and train, $10 10 day boarding train, which was not worth it in the end. But as far as specifics, I don't have a list. I don't have any kind of specific info yet.

Okay. And do you know how much work she's doing right now? To grow her business or is she just trying to run it?

She is really just trying to run it. She has not, like I was saying before, not put a lot of effort into, you know, any kind of marketing or advertising. Doesn't do a lot of the social media stuff. She's trying to get in the social media thing. Trying to do Instagram, which has kind of worked a little bit, you know, kind of driven some traffic to there, but not much. Just run the business.

Do you mind telling me the name of her business so I could look it up and I can also edit it out if you would prefer that. But I'd like to get more context here.

Absolutely. It's a Send dog trainings A S, C E N D. All right, let's.

See what we got here. Is it in Arlington?

Yes.

All right. Okay. So how long have they been open?

That's a good question. I'm not 100 sure. It's over a year for sure. I mean, she's been dog training for a number of years, but this specific business, I'm not. I couldn't give you the exact timeline.

Does she use any software for managing her. Her bookings or anything?

No, no.

Is there not a. A marketplace for dog trainers? Is there anything like that, like an Uber for dog trainers where they match you with customers?

There might be. I, I'm not familiar with one, but every time I've looked up anything, I've never seen anything like that. That's an interesting idea.

I would look into that. A lot of times there is a random niche marketplace for something like this that people, they just, they don't think to look for it. Another question I have is, would it be that hard for her to get her website back up and running again?

I'm actually working on that. So we are her domain name. She really wants to keep the same domain name she has, and so somebody.

Else had bought it.

So we're working on trying to get that back and I'm building up the website right now.

So what about ascendtraining.com if you can't get that one back? Is that one open? Do you know?

I don't know that one specifically open. I do know Ascend Dog Training TX for Texas is open. She was not, not too interested in doing that one, but she's open to it. She's still trying really hard to get her old domain name back. So.

Okay, yeah, if I were her, I would invest in a tripod and simply let a camera start rolling as she's training these dogs just to document and 95% of the time nothing special or interesting is going to happen. But occasionally something will happen and she can just start by posting that to, to Instagram to any short form video platform. And I would also suggest that she makes a list of her five biggest like most direct, most local competitors and then start reverse engineering how they got to where they are today. Looking at the web archive scrolling way back on Facebook and Instagram and look at those first posts. Look at the popular post on Facebook and Instagram that got the most comments specifically. So I'm, I'm, I'm kind of obsessed lately with reverse engineering why certain things go viral and it's always in the comments and it doesn't, she doesn't have to find something that went viral. Right. I'm just using that as an example. Look for the post of her direct competitors that have outperformed. Okay. So maybe she has a competitor named Arlington Dog training and their average Instagram or Facebook post gets seven likes and six comments. Then you see if few that get 70 likes and 60 comments. Don't just look at what they posted to get that, but specifically read the comments on that post of what they are saying and then create social media content that helps regenerate comments like that on her own posts. Does that make sense?

Yes. Yep.

So like for instance, maybe, maybe one of our competitors posted a video of them training a dog how to heal and they had a choker collar in the video and all the comments were like, oh, those are bad, those are unethical. Yada yada, you can use that. Right. Maybe now her brand is like ethical dog training or kind dog training. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Okay.

It's kind of like what people do, what Amazon sellers do. They will go to competing products and read the negative reviews and see. Oh, okay. Everyone's upset that this plastic widget always breaks around week three. Okay. So now not only are we going to make sure that part of our, of our widget is metal and not plastic, we're also going to talk about that in the title and in the top of the description. So taking the pain points of a competitor and highlighting those of your own.

Got it. Okay.

Yeah, I think that should be, that should be enough to get her going and of course like get any website back up. I wouldn't worry about getting the exact website. I'm sure she wants it. But it's really, really hard to convince a domain owner to get them to sell their website. Unless you're, you're really willing to pay up?

Yeah, that's what I've told her. And I'm pretty sure we'll go with a different name, but she's just. She's new to this whole thing, so once she kind of gets into. Once she realizes it may not work out, sure.

We'll find something else. Yeah, I get it. Anyway, I'd love to hear a follow up once you make these changes.

Absolutely. I appreciate your help. Thank you.

No, no problem. Have a good day.

Thank you, sir.

Yep. See ya, Lou.

How are we doing, Chris?

Good, how are you? Good, how are you?

Oh, peachy. Kane. I apologize. I'm up at the public library because I'm in Colorado right now. My wife's brother is getting married and said the house is like an absolute, you know, chaotic situation. So I came down the library and I'm just waiting for this guy to clear out of the room. So we ready to go here in a second?

No problem. So you need a little bit of time.

Just a couple minutes is literally. He's supposed to be out of there in one minute, so I think we should be. Gucci.

It is not a problem. I'm rereading your question right now.

Yeah, I'll get it. And, and we can kind of. I. I know that you. I think you posted about this before. Yeah. Because DM'd you about it. And so, I mean, we can really take it kind of whichever direction that you'd like if you just want to, you know, more about how, like, it's put together or how we're, you know, planning on revenue and all that jazz. I was just. We're. We have a lot of ideas about. Hi, how are you doing? And here I go. A lot of ideas about, like, how. And things already underway about how we're going to, you know, make revenue off the model. But just want to see. I. I really admire you. I've been listening to your podcast now for a little bit, and you're like a business savant from what I can tell. And so I, you know, wanted a chance to talk it, you know, talk it through, see that we weren't missing on anything. And if you had any kind of creative things that we hadn't come up with.

Thank you. Well, I appreciate the kind words. And yeah, I think it's an interesting business. Did you find me from when I tweeted about assumable mortgages back in the day?

No, I've been following you for a while, actually. I think maybe before you revealed to the world that you were Chris, I don't know if I've been following that one, but certainly quite a while. I think Retwit has some of the most interesting content because it hits me where I live, talking about different structures and different ways to get things done. So in that regard, um, I really appreciated following different folks on Retwit. And you were one of the ones that everyone was like, oh, this guy has great follow. And I agree. So.

All right, well, thank you. So I'll get everyone caught up. So you have a platform that enables people to find assumable mortgages. And from what I understand, an assumable mortgage is when you buy a property and you just assume that existing mortgage, which today, the big benefit of that is not having to pay 7 to 9% interest rates. You can hopefully capture their 3 to 5% interest rate. Is that right?

Yeah.

And I mean, we've actually been struck by how low some of the interest rates are. Like, you know, I'm a veteran, which is kind of how this whole thing got going. My buddy reached out to me, is like, hey, you know, you know, things about assumables. I was like, yeah, I've got a couple of assumable mortgages and I think we have a home in Nashville that we have a VA loan on because my wife and I are both veterans while she's going, but. And I think that one's like 2.25. And it's something. It's some crazy number, like 70% of the ones, which kind of makes sense given, like, where the funding environment was, you know, maybe 18, 24 months ago. I think it's something like 70% are under 4% interest rate. So that's. Yeah, I mean, you're talking about potentially up to, you know, thousand dollars or more savings on a per month basis, and then over the life of the loan, I mean, hundreds of thousands, certainly.

Okay, so where is your business at right now? Are you guys pre revenue, post revenue? Where are you at your journey?

So we're kind of like right on the front cusp of really recognizing some revenue. So we have generated a pretty remarkable amount of leads. I think we probably pushed like 3,000 leads to our real estate partners, and they're the ones that are actually going to be making those referrals out to whoever the local real estate folks are to actually help people. And so the only, you know, the thing about assumable mortgages is that it's not like a panacea and it is a little different from a typical transaction. It looks a lot like A regular transaction. You go through many of the same like underwriting processes that you might, you know, otherwise for a normal new loan. But it just the servicers who are actually like collecting, you know, funds every month on those mortgages, they don't move very quick. And actually just this week HUD announced that servicers could charge the previous maximum was like $900. And so it wasn't really worth it to them to rush or staff up those offices. And assumables haven't been like a big thing for decades because we've been living with such low interest rates. But they just bumped that up to $1,800 per transaction. And so from the folks that we've been talking to across servicers, they're all trending downwards. And so most of them are around maybe 60 days now getting back, getting down towards 45 and even faster now.

What is 60 days exactly?

That's basically from the time that the person engages with the servicer to get the loan moved over from the seller to the buyer's name and that's where they collect all that documentation. And we do have, we do provide a service that helps folks get all their documents in order and how my servicers basically try to move things along more quickly.

Okay, so first tell me how your platform works when you say you drove leads to your real estate partners and all that. How does it work?

Yeah, so we have right now the only nationwide platform where folks can go into whatever their local area is. They click on a property, they find one they like that makes sense for their, you know, financial situation. They click, you know, assume this home. At that point, you know, we've got.

Real quick, are these properties for sale? Are they for sale or are they just homes that exist that you know, have an assumable mortgage?

They are for sale. Yeah, we're, that's kind of down the road. That's something that we're thinking on kind of from like an ancillary revenue perspective to sell that capability for real estate agents to be able to look at that, those off market homes in their area, you know, try to get listing because that's especially with what's going on with NAR and things shifting on the buy side, those listings are like right. More valuable. And so that's another thing that we're thinking about. But right now on the retail side of it, it's just focused on yeah, those homes that are listed for sale. And so they click on that, we have it all zapped up in the back end and so they get reached out to from our folks who kind of get the particulars of their situation. Collate that with the information that we've already collected from them as far as like, down payment, you know, that they're capable of providing. And then that gets pushed off to an agent, you know, in their local area that we've already, we've already had a conversation with. We've already provided them resources and details about how these transactions are, you know, supposed to go.

And then.

Yeah, and then they, they run with it.

Okay, so I'm a, if I'm a consumer and I want to buy a home with an assumable mortgage, I'm going to go to your website, I'm going to search in my area, I'm going to see one, and I've got it pulled up now so I can say, oh, that's a nice house. Oh, 5.4%. Okay, nice. You click on it and you purposely can't see really the details of the house yet. Right.

Well, so another, this is like a totally bootstrapped thing. Me and, you know, me and my buddy, like late last summer, we started like thinking about this and working on it. And the thing is, is like getting at this data is like, very difficult. It's not impossible. You can do it. Like local real estate agents, they can figure this, they can go into like, and get the mortgage level data from, you know, whatever the county website might be. But it's, it's time consuming, you know, take you a couple of minutes to look up each property rather than being able to see like a full view, like, oh, these are all the ones, you know, so you're taking something that's, you know, hours, potentially down to, you know, seconds. But that comes out, you know, being bootstrapped comes at a cost in terms of like the data fidelity that we are able to offer people. And that's something that we're like actively working, working on because we realized that like the, the data piece is, you know, a big portion of it. And so we were like, okay, what's kind of like, you know, effective to get us to an MVP type, you know, offering? And I mean, people have clearly responded. It's, it's enough information for you to move forward. Kind of like just knowing the particulars of that loan and you can see the rest on like Zillow. You can go look at it, right? Yeah, it's, you know, it takes two.

Seconds and I assume that was for a reason. I'm not, I'm not criticizing that strategy. I'm just trying to fully Understand how it works? Sure. So, because I have it pulled up now as if I'm a consumer. So you click assume this home and that is basically a consumer telling you that they want to learn more about the home. And then they're led to a type form, right. And they put in their info. And I'm doing this now, so you're going to see a lead from me. I'm just trying to see how it works. I'm a buyer. Do we have a real estate agent? So if the answer is yes, what does that do? Are you, are you generating revenue by just referring leads to real estate agent for a percentage of their commission?

Yeah, so, so, so that's, that's a portion of what happens. And then we, you know, we, we get, you know, a piece of that from our real estate partners. It is the case that like certain, you know, people have come in and they're like, well, I already have an agent. And we're like, okay, yeah, sure, no problem. Like, hey, you know, if at any point, you know, once you guys are under contract on that particular home, go ahead and like, you know, give us a call. There's also a page on our website if you want to do like the Assumption Management, right up there on the services tab. I think it says Assumption Management. I always forget the wording, but. And then that, you know, we'll plug you in with our folks that know the assumable process really well. Pardon? And they'll help you, you know, process that, like I said, on kind of an, you know, as expediently as possible.

Okay, so if I don't have an agent, then you're sending that to an agent. What if I, what if I do have an agent?

If you do have an agent, like, that's, you know, that's fine or whatever, you know, at that point, if it's not an agent that we previously worked with, we're like, hey, if you guys have any questions or, you know, the whole point of we started this, you know, making money was kind of like a secondary consideration. We were like, let's make this information. Like, let's get this information out there. You know, information wants to be free. And so. But if you already have one, we're like, okay, great. You know, at that point, now you know the particulars that property and you, you know, you have the information to go to that seller and say, hey, I noticed that, you know, this, this mortgage is assumable. I'd love to do that. And then, you know, if you guys found value from the Website or whatever, then they could come back, engage us for the assumption and then we also, you know, get you know, paid on that.

Okay, okay. So back to the data fidelity thing. The reason, and let me tell me if this is wrong. The reason that I can't see the info when I click assume this home, it's because like you've got to go fetch that info. Right?

Yeah, well, and so the, yeah, kind of like product roadmap type vision is to make it kind of, you know, to gain parity with, you know, your Zillows, your Redfins, your, you know, those are $100 million, you know, billion dollar companies out there and you know, me and my buddy bootstrapping this. So it's, it's about like having the data provider that can actually give you all that information and so you make trade offs in terms of like, do you want to spend? I don't know if you've looked at like buying data from you know, like a CoreLogic or something like that, but it's, it gets very expensive very quickly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So once a consumer submits a lead, you, you get going on the back end. Do you get going at reaching out to the consumer or to a realtor in that area first?

Yeah, so they, they, they make, they make contact with the, with the consumer, you know, confirm all the details and then they make a warm handoff to that agent who's going to be down.

Okay. Okay. Have you thought about shortening the, the cycle of generating or of getting that lead within type form of just like getting their first name and phone or first name, email and phone or.

Yeah, we.

Yeah, we've tried a few different things. My, my co founder is a marketer by trade and he's like, you know, always, you know, kind of testing these different things. The issues I think that we're having in the business are not related to like actual lead generation. I think that that's something that we're, you know, we are literally, you know, week over week, month over month, day over day, like setting records. Like I think, I think like Monday this week we had, we had a record day in the term in the number of leads that we passed off and we're like what, you know, what, what happened? Our traffic blew up. Like we don't. And some of it's attributable to, you know, folks like yourself who just, you know, kind of, you know, may say something about suitables. And our SEO is very good. We got, we got the name which is nice and so like that that's not the part that we're worried about. We're, you know, now we're thinking about kind of like downstream ways that we can, like, you know, help agents become a little bit more informed so that it's. So that they can manage expectations for their buyers and their sellers, you know, more appropriately and kind of serve them in a better way to make the transaction more likely to be successful.

Okay, so can you explain that in a. In a more simple way? Like your, your bottleneck specifically is what.

Is getting, like, getting the transactions done? Because folks haven't, you know, assumables haven't been a thing since, like, basically like the 80s. And so everyone who has done them has more or less like, aged out. Like, they, they, they get processed from time to time. I think, like, the numbers for the last two years were, you know, something like 3,000 or 3,600, something like that. They're not big numbers, you know, in the past because it just hasn't been something that, you know, has been something that's super valuable to do. And now that it is, you know, both on the buy and the sell side, right, like, the buyer is going to be able to afford more home because the payment's not going to, you know, be crushing them. And then the seller, you know, depending on how you think about it, you know, with rates having risen as much as they have, like, prices on homes should be down significantly more than they are. But, like, you have all these supply constraints, right? And so sellers don't want to, like, give up on getting the number that they see on their estimate. And so the assumables are a way to get it done. But it's, like, slightly more complicated, and people just aren't super comfortable advising their clients on it. And so that's, that's the big thing. I think that we've been running into.

Kind of education to the realtors so they can educate their clients in an accurate way about how it works.

100. Yeah.

Do you have any stories of how this is illustrated perfectly? Like, all right, we had this one client, we had a realtor, and it just fell apart because of X, Y and Z.

Well, I mean, that's like, that's been the feedback that we've gotten from, like, the, all the agents that we've gotten feedback from. They're like, you know, awesome lead quality. Because we do, you know, because we have that little bit longer lead form, we collect that information, like, down payment, right. So we can kind of, you know, we know that we've got good high Quality leads. Because I think that the average down payment of the folks that are coming through our site is like, you know, 125, something like that thousand in down payment. And so like being able to pass on like those really strong leads, that's not really the problem. Right. The thing that we're hearing back from agents is that these listing agents, they kind of get the sense that they might have heard like a horror story or something like that, or they just have kind of a dated appreciation for how quickly these transactions can happen. So they're like, this is going to take six months and it's like 60 days.

So there's kind of a dichotomy that the realtors are like, wow, this is a great lead. Thank you so much. But also, I don't know what to do with this. And is this a scam? Like, they don't even know enough suitable to really sell it to their client?

Well, like we, so we provided them with, with a lot of material and we actually, we, you know, the real estate partners that we have, because we kind of, you know, have approached this, this whole business from the perspective of like, okay, let's focus on, you know, what makes our beer taste better and let's figure out, you know, partners and folks that are actually going to be able to do, you know, the real estate part, the lending part. We're also, we are about to announce, well, not like officially, but like, we have lending partners who are going to be able to like, lend in that second position to make that down payment not so big. So like say you can bring, you know, 80k, but you need 150k to make like the equity gap work between the purchase price and the amount on the loan. We're going to be able to lend on that now. And yeah, it's going to be at like 9 and a half, 10%, but the blended rate with like a 3% is going to be significantly better still and worthwhile. Going through kind of the headache of doing that. But the thing that we've heard back from these buyers, agents the most is like, hey, great quality lead. The problem that we're running into is that these listing agents just kind of don't get it yet and they frankly don't realize what an asset they're sitting on. From a listing perspective, it's a total differentiator and it makes it stand out in terms of, hey, I know this house is $600,000 just like the one next to it, the one next to it. But this one you can actually assume and you can, you know, it's much more affordable than going out and getting a brand new rate. And so we're like, that's the part that we're running up against right now is trying to help, you know, listing agents understand that.

Okay, so the buyer's agents are fine, they're on board with it. But yeah, they're trying to convince the listing agent that what they have is different and unique and so they should basically consider their offer more than, than a competing offer.

Sure. Yeah.

Okay. Now, how long have you been at this? Like, how old is the oldest good lead that you've received? And what, so we lost leads?

Yeah, so we, we launched the platform February 5th. In this current iteration, we went through like a whole like Google Chrome extension thing that just like sat on top of Zillow, which was not as successful. And then we're like, okay, we actually have to figure out another way to approach this. And like we, we've had a handful of these leads, like, actually go through like conventional transactions and we're still, you know, kind of fighting to get that, that same kind of uptake. On the assembleable side.

Did you not get paid on the conventional transactions?

It's. So it's a master listing agreement that our real estate partners sign with it. So it's basically, however, our master referral agreement. So however that transaction gets done, you know, our real estate partners get paid on it and then we would get paid as well.

But have you gotten paid on a completed transaction even if it wasn't assumable?

Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, so what you're seeing is because of this friction and confusion between the listing agent and the, and the, the buyer's agent, a lot of these are either just falling off or they're just closing a traditional mortgage and not using your platform. Right.

Yeah. Right.

That's.

Yeah. Kind of.

Does it make a difference to you if they, if they get a traditional mortgage as far as revenue is concerned?

No, I mean, once at some point. Right. If they, you know, once like the lending product is fully, you know, baked in, like, we'll be able to get like points on that or referrals from that. And you know, if they go out and get like brand new lending, you know, then, then that's a conversation to have too. Yeah.

How much, how much revenue are you receiving on average for deals that you've closed?

It's like in the, like single digit thousands. Yeah, low, low single digit thousands. So it's predicated right, on, on, you.

Know, percentage of their commission.

Yeah, right, sure.

Okay. Let me ask you this, like, sure. Does, does it matter, does it matter that they're getting traditional mortgages and that there's this friction in the education process? Or is this kind of like an ethical bait and switch where people come to your website wanting an assumable mortgage. You match them with a realtor, they're wanting an assumable mortgage and because of some idiot listing agent, they're not able to get that assumable mortgage by no fault of yours, but they still get a mortgage and you still get paid. Is that, is that too simplistic?

I mean, like, that's certainly like could be the case. And I think that could be the case, you know, like with any like lead generating service or whatever. But you know, our preference, right, is, and the whole reason we started this was to try to help people, you know, and actually my co founder found a property on our, on our site and is assuming a home. He's moving from Phoenix to San Antonio and he's assuming a home in, you know, in the San Antonio area that he found on our site. And he's using, he's, you know, really, we're eating our own dog food in that regard. And so like, we know it can be done and we know how to do it. It's just right, you know, there's, there's this like gap right now because agents haven't really, you know, kind of caught up to like, hey, this is actually like not just something weird that I should shun and like not try to like, you know, get good at. It's like a great opportunity to become like that person for whatever your market is.

Have you made like a 60 second video explaining how it works, like just very, very simply? Have you ever done that?

Yeah, we have. Yeah. And like what we found, because I like, I answered all of the emails that come through. So if you, if anybody sends something into that contact us form, I'm usually responding and I try to, you know, try to respond very quickly. I mean that's like we're in the New York Times and, and have talked with some of the bigger platforms too, and they just like send us something on the contact form because they're like, we couldn't find you guys. So we just like send your contact form and yeah, they're always impressed that we respond very quickly. And it's the thing that I've realized in like going through, I mean, tons, like we get agents reaching out to us, we get consumers reaching out to us, you know, folks who want to partner with us on this or that portion of the business there is like so little that people are actually going through our site and like looking at any like they, they kind of like sort of get the concept and they're like I'll ask a question but like no one's going through like the frequently asked questions. They're just like I just want to talk to somebody who's going to answer my question for me. And you know, at least right now it's a lot. But have capacity to answer all of those questions directly. Kind of taking a page out of Moiselle's native plan of like hey, until you get to a certain point as the founder, you should be seeing everything that comes in, see all the problems so that you can actually adapt and try to make fixes. And so that's something that was kind of core for us. People don't read.

Right. That's why I suggested a video. Right. Like I feel like if you were to make a very tick tock style short, like a literal short, that's not really, I mean you could post it, but that's not the purpose. The purpose is to ask the, the agent that you're referring to to send it to the listing agent like right away and like some sort of call to action and then some sort of an automated zapier follow up where you're asking the agent incessantly did you send the video? Did you send the video? And maybe a tracking system where you can make sure that the video is watched. Right. I look at this like I look at my mining syndicate where we sell bitcoin miners. Our biggest competition is education and convincing people that we're not a scam. And the only way that we've been over able to overcome that is very unscalable. And that's hopping like giving physical tours which is not relevant for you and hopping on zooms with people. And then once we do that the close rate is like 80% and we can get like 90% of the way of the way to that 80% if we just do a webinar. And that's in, in a way that's even more social proof because they see other people in the webinar and their strength in numbers. And so depending on your lead volume, I mean you could even do this like have you ever heard of webinars that are. They're not live. Like they appear live but they're not.

Yeah, just asynchronous.

Yeah, yeah. Like an async webinar. You could have a daily one that these realtors join at any given time and they can see like a live count of everyone who's ever been in it asking questions and whatnot. Maybe even have someone on the back end answering those in real time. And I just, I feel like you need to give them a packet with different multimedia formats, right? Like they're like from least to most friction and also from least tactical to most tactical. And so it's like back to my Mining Syndicate example. We recently had this huge conversion of platforms and it was a big deal and I ab tested the emails that we sent out and one email explained everything we were doing in detail and the other one just said like three sentence like we're switching platforms. Let us know if you have any questions. Here's a blog post. And the blog post was basically a copy paste of that long email. And 90% of people just, they weren't ever going to read the blog post. They didn't want to, they didn't care. They just kind of wanted to know the tldr of it. And so I, I would just have like a welcome packet with you know, a 30 second video first and then maybe like a three minute video second with even more detail and then maybe like a link to the webinar and then maybe a link to the FAQs and just set up a ton of zapier automations to the listing agent or to the, the buyer's agents where you're just pestering them to death. Hey, did you send it? Did you send it? Or just get the buyer's agent info and you just send it directly to them? Like I know this sounds like a scam, but it was really popular in the 70s, but we have had low rates for a long time, so it doesn't make sense. But now it actually does make sense. A lot of people don't think it's possible, but it is possible. It's actually life changing. You could save a thousand dollars a month, like go through all that and they just, just push that packet on them to no end with like tracking all over that. So then you can start to see. All right, everyone's clicking on the fourth option. Even though we thought they'd all click on the video, let's put the fourth option to the top. It kind of reminds me of of link tree where I have a link tree on Twitter and I'm like, all right, I want everyone to go to my personal website first and then I'll put co founders.com fifth and then after a month I can see, man. Even though co founders.com is fifth. They're all clicking on that. So I'm just going to make it easier for them. I'm going to put that first. Right, so you're just kind of got it. You're throwing a lot at them and then letting the data speak for itself and adjusting accordingly because it's, it's. It's hard to give advice of, like, how you can educate someone that's like two degrees of separation away from you. And so all I can do is kind of relate to my own experiences and companies like Uber and Airbnb. That sounded like a scam from first. And the only way Airbnb really fixed that is just by time, you know, and letting it become acceptable and removing friction and just doing the type of stuff that we're talking about now. That makes sense.

Yeah, no, that's an. It's, it's an interesting. Yeah, that's an interesting take. We hadn't, we hadn't considered.

Okay, well, I hope it's helpful. It seems like you're doing something awesome, so I'd love to hear a follow up of how it goes.

Yeah, for sure.

I'll.

Yeah, I would love to come back on six months hence and have closed a lot more transactions for folks.

Yeah, I would love that as well. All right, man. All right, brother man.

Cheers.

Thanks.

Appreciate it.

Yep. Thanks for calling. See you.

Bye.

Jake.

Hey, Chris, how are you? Good.

How are you, man?

I'm doing well. Happy Friday.

Happy Friday. And Daniel, I see you in the lobby, by the way, and you are next up, so don't leave me. All right. Jake, do you mind if I just get into your question real quick and you can tell me if there's any context?

100%.

All right, let me navigate over to it. All right. You asked, in your experience, what have you found to be the best way to source and find stellar GMs slash operators and two current correctly incentivize them, assuming no equity. So why don't you tell me, like, the business that you're in, the industry that you're in, and the specific problem that you're having around that question.

Yeah, so the question, I think derives more from my experience, even in the, the corporate world, the W2 space, is that, you know, I found a lack of direct incentives, you know, to go the extra mile, whatnot. Feels like, you know, generally speaking, people are vying for, you know, people's approval, almost being rewarded in arrears, if you will, with no direct, you know, compensation or incentive to be placed. So now I'm Starting businesses and whatnot and, and making the leap into entrepreneurship. I've got a pool cleaning company on the side here that's doing pretty well and as that grows, you know, I'm looking to hire on staff and whatnot and you know, I want to take my dissatisfaction with the, the commonplace lack of incentive and implement that into, you know, my business and then future businesses that I start. And I, I think, you know, assuming not being part of the capital stack, I was just curious as to, you know, your experience, if there's one off, you know, incentives that you've placed or found that worked best to make sure that you and your GM or owner or manager or whoever it may be are singing from the same sheet of music as they say.

So yeah, I like it. So let's talk more specifically. So you're asking about your pool cleaning business and are you thinking of hiring your first GM for that?

That's correct, yeah. So I mean I'm in Michigan so it's a very seasonal business obviously. And you know, I'm starting to step away from a full time W2 and I've actually worked out a pretty creative solution to afford myself some more time, start to grow this more and then start to look to start other businesses in the fall and winter. But yes, to answer your question, you're correct. Yeah.

Why don't you tell me about what you already like, the idea you already have for this guy and do you have a person picked out yet? Are you still too early on in the process? Do not.

And candidly, I mean I'm still learning the business and foresee myself being the owner operator for the duration of the summer here, really building up that client. Let's get a good foundation and then you know, next year, you know, jumping off the launch pad, so to speak and hiring out that work and bringing on some, some help.

So now what will the GM be doing if it's not cleaning pools directly or is that what he'll be doing?

So that's, it's a, it's a little bit of a crawl walk around if you will. So definitely going to start to clean pools because I've already got a decent client base built up and I assume that to grow throughout the summer. So the, the, the GM will start cleaning pools but as that list grows and then hiring out techs underneath, etc, that's kind of the plan right now.

So when you say gm you mean like, I mean CEO sounds too formal because it's a small business, but he's going to be in charge of the.

Whole thing, operation operationally wise. So like a coo, if, if that makes more, more sense. You know, still heavily involved, being myself on the business side of things, you know, being the CEO and then more or less hiring out the CEO, if you will.

Yeah. And would you just be growing the business and doing marketing? Is that the type of stuff you Enjoy more?

Yes, 100%. I'm in the asset management space of a real estate family office right now, so that's more or less and what I really enjoy doing but want to be doing it for myself. So. Yeah.

And do you plan to quit your job for this?

I'm already starting to. I've actually worked out a solution with them that I'll be pairing back to, to part time indefinitely and then, you know, so that provides some, some good cash flow in the interim and could pay rent and whatnot amongst ambiguity. But yes, to answer your question, I plan on making a leap of faith here very shortly.

Okay, so let's, let's talk hypotheticals. Let's say gun to your head, someone approaches you and you, you have to hire a GM tomorrow and you have to incentivize him and how do you structure it today? And then maybe I can help you work with that logic.

Yeah. So personally, I think, I mean assuming not anywhere in the capital stack, I would implement some sort of a profit sharing plan with you know, defined hurdles of X growth or X dollars, whatever it may be to. And that's on a monthly basis, right? Or a weekly basis even. Because the last thing I want to do is kind of have it evolve into the traditional year end review like how did you do and hope that I give you your bonus or whatever. I want them to take part in the success of the business on a day to day and not have to sit down and be like, oh you did X, Y and Z. It's defined you accomplished the goals that we had set out for you and you were compensated almost instantly, instantaneously for that. And so I think a profit sharing plan is probably what I would do right now. You know, be creative about that so they can take part in the, the success or immediate success of the company.

Would you want them to try to help grow the company as well?

So ideally, sure. But you know, for define the scope of what you know, I really want them to do is just drive up operations, deliver on a day to day basis, you know, our mission and, and the provide excellent customer service and then I can take more of the role of, you know, outreach, growing marketing. To your point, it's just that right now I don't have time to do all said. But yeah, to answer your question, if.

You could choose, would you rather do like a, a flat salary plus commission or all or one of the other of the two?

I would, I would rather them have to get in the game and you are directly compensated for how hard and how you work and your success within the company.

So commission only specifically?

I, I guess ideally, yeah. But you know, that might not be the most attractive if you don't have true equity in the company.

Right.

So it would probably be a hourly or a salary type ordeal with additional kicker on the top and it's just kind of identifying what that ticker really looks like.

Yeah. Okay, so I, this is a great question. I have a lot of thoughts around incentives and commissions and flat salary. Notice that oftentimes there can be an inverse incentive, so to speak, if you are, are. Look, and I know you're not married to this, so don't, don't. Yeah, if, if you're, if you were to seek out someone only for commission only, I feel like a lot of times that can attract people that you don't want for sure. People that maybe don't have experience, they don't have anything better. Right. So it's kind of like no one else will hire me. What do I have to lose here? Right. When that does work, I feel like that works best when it's, that's what the industry calls for. Like, let's say it's like life insurance and that's industry standard, is to be commission only. And maybe you're bringing a book of business over and you're sharing it 75, 25, and that's industry standard. And you're just bringing a killer and you're saying to the killer, hey, instead of 60, 40, let's do 50, 50 because you're a killer. And he's like, cool, it's commission only. But I know day one I'm gonna be making 175 because I'm bringing over what I'm making 155 on today. Right. In my experience, for this type of work, what works best is like a below market flat salary and a commission that will get them above market. So let's say I'm just going to make up numbers. Let's say you're doing $10,000 a month, top line, and you know what your margins are and you can afford to pay a 20% commission. So two grand a month and market salary for this is 70 grand. So you're going to pay him 50 grand, and he's going to be like, oh, but, you know, he knows that on day one, his commission is going to bring him to 74 grand or whatever. Right. And so he's, like, excited. And I would. I would always tie growth into the commission, even if you're planning on doing the growing, because he's out there in the field, at least to start. I know he won't be forever, but he's going to develop skills that he'll be able to pass on to his field techs as you guys grow. And that skill might just be saying hi to the neighbor as he pulls in and then, you know, developing an offhand conversation with a neighbor that might turn into another job.

Right.

A lot of times if you. If you talk to a guy that's a tech that's not used to sales and you talk about commission based on growth, he's going to bristle, thinking that you're asking him to go make cold calls or knocking outdoors. But a lot of times it's just like a spontaneous conversation with the homeowner, and all he has to say is offhand, hey, like, do you know any of anyone else that needs pool cleaning? Oh, actually, you know, it's like very low pressure. Right. In his mind, that's not selling.

Right.

He just doesn't understand what selling is. It's just. It's so effective to tie a tax commission to sales and growth, because being out there in the branded shirt, in the wrap truck, that's the person that's most likely to actually close a deal, more so than even you sitting in the office, just because he's out there doing it, you know?

Yep.

So I would tie it maybe two different commission tiers, one very conservative, and that's just for keeping going what you have.

Yep.

Right. And it's just like, all right, dude, we're doing 10 grand a month. I'm going to give you 20% of that, and that's going to get you to 74, which is a little bit above market. But here's the thing. That's only 20%. If you go get the neighbor, I'm going to give you 100% of the first month or of the first three months, because at that point, you know that your churn is like 4%, and that person's going to stay for years, so whatever. And so now in his mind, if you tie the commission to, like, I'm going to give you 5% a month for every month that that that customer's in business. It's like, it's an extra 50 bucks a month.

Yeah.

If it's like, hey, I'm gonna give you $400 every time you just mention offhand, do you know of anyone else? And they say, yes, that's. That's 400 bucks. That might be what he's making every week right now. Right. And so it all comes down to framing it. And so you always want to find that balance between a structure that can protect you in case he just goes crazy and starts selling a ton and you find yourself broke, and a str. A structure that's generous and simple because, like, it's really easy to be like, man, keep it simple. But simple can really screw you if he does nothing or does too much. Right. And it's also really easy to say, all right, here's what you got to do. You got to do earn out over time. It's got a tear down to a threshold that you just have to find that. Yeah, yeah. Too much friction. Right. So that's what I'm. You're asking the right question. Because most people aren't thinking of incentives at all. They're like, oh, market's 70k. I'm gonna pay him 70k. Commissions are everything. All right, sorry. Incentives are everything. You know, Charlie Munger always talks about it. It's like if, if you're not thinking about incentives right now, like, like, even if you think about incentives all day, you're not thinking about it enough. Right, Right, Enough.

Yeah.

That.

Well, and it's interesting, I guess it's just a forefront of my mind, especially as, you know, I start businesses and I start growing these businesses to where I might be disconnected from or very disconnected from the day to day operations and to instill or be able to sleep at night that, you know, your brand is being represented well and they have reason to represent the brand well and whatnot, I think is the most precedence, to be honest with you. And I know I'm not the only one who thinks about, you know, why am I not getting paid extra for working on the weekend or etc, whatever. You may have it in the W2 space especially. But. Yeah. So have you had, I guess as a follow up or the first part of the question, it's very broad stroke, but the, the sourcing and finding of. Of stellar guys or girls that you found or outlets or, you know, the vetting process as a whole.

I don't.

Just any experience of, you know, finding the studs out there.

Yeah. Honestly, the, the most luck we've had and finding this type of position has been indeed cool. It's very. It's like right in front of your face. I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, but paying for indeed. Like there's the free version and the paid version, allocating four to five hundred bucks to applications and then just making it a numbers game. Yeah, you're gonna, you're gonna come across good guys. Also, I would just drive around your area and when you see any sort of a crew, like a tree crew or lawn or whatever, I would just pull over and talk to them. Like, hey, man. Like, what do you guys. Oh, okay. And just kind of, kind of fake like you're just a curious but very friendly homeowner. And then start like, how long have you been working this job? Okay. Oh, seven years. Okay. Seven years means he's probably really good at this. Okay.

Yep.

And just like those unscalable things, and you already said this yourself, are often lead to the best people. For sure.

Yeah.

But otherwise indeed works great.

Yeah.

Cool.

Well, can't thank you or can't thank you enough for, for having me on here and respond to hell of a cold DM there. But no, you're, you're, you're, you're a rock star and you're inspiring a lot of people out there, including myself. So can't thank you enough. And I appreciate your time today.

Yeah, thank you, Jake. Of course. Have a good day.

You as well.

Take care. See ya. All right. Okay, Daniel, also I will say, Colin, you're up next. So Colin and I talked last week, but we didn't get to everything, so don't leave me. Colin. Daniel, how are you? I'm good.

I'm doing good.

How come?

I'm like, I'm, I'm funny over here. Like, you see me.

Yeah, I can.

Oh, okay. There's another guy that just says, connect me. Okay, fine. I just got this percentage thing saying 83. Okay, fine.

Okay.

What's up?

You're good. Okay, so let me. Do you mind if I just kind of recap your question and then we can go?

Yeah, of course.

Yeah.

Out of that light.

Yeah. Okay. All right, so what you said is. Give me just a sec. All right. I have a business I own and work at full time. It is set up as a high touch service heavy business. I would like to buy another business that I can use to increase my income. Since my current business takes up so much of my day, what type of business should I be looking for? So I'd love to hear about Your current business more.

Okay.

I thought so.

I thought you. I could talk forever about like any business owner can talk forever. Basically, it's a print shop. That's the, the, you know, the forward facing, forward facing type of business. But we really specialize only in printing for wedding, bar mitzvah and similar events. That's it. Here and there. I'll get other things from people that are my customers besides. Or a shop nearby or something like that. But basically that's it. That's all we do. We know what the event planners want. We know how to design it the right way. Other print shops that just do commercial things, they don't know necessarily how to design it the way that the event planners like it. They don't stock the funny papers, the, you know, the blush pinks and the metallic taupes. All the different things they like. We have those in stock all the time. And we have some specialty capabilities that a standard printing business might not have, like hot foil. We can print in white ink. I'm trying to think some other things we have on site die cutting. Some places send that kind of thing out. So we have all the things that we need to produce things for weddings and we focus on that. We, I mean, me, it's basically just me.

And you're in Brooklyn?

Yes, in Brooklyn, yeah.

Okay.

So we, we are able to get a higher margin because everything for a wedding is always, always gets out, always gets a markup that other, other things don't. You know, whatever service or product you're providing and printing is no different. And the downside of it is that you're dealing with a lot of last minute things. A lot. Like right now I'm dealing with orders that came yesterday and a little bit today for weddings that are on Monday, on Memorial Day. So a whole bunch of things that have to get done and in a short amount of time. And that's why I'm here all the time. I'm basically here 14, 15 hours a day. The rest of the time I'm either with my family or doing other different obligations that I have.

And how long have you been working that much?

That many hours? Yeah, let me try to think. So this year will be two years since I let this guy go. And before that, at least, at least three years. It's been like this. I had a really great employee before COVID during COVID immediately after Covid. But then he said, you know, I could move someplace else and get the same apartment for about a third of the price. So that's what he's going to do. And since then I've had a couple people that are not just not competent enough and I found that I'm paying them but I'm still coming back at night so there's no point. Like when I had the other guy it really took a load off and it was just, it was so much easier. But then after I lost him, it's hard to get people to work here that either they're overqualified and they think that oh this is so easy printing is just, you know, control P file print, what's the big deal? Or they're under qualified and you know, they're watching Netflix while they're doing the work and then I see it afterwards and I got to fix it all or things like that. It's just not, it's not, it's hard to find a good fit. That's the thing with, with, with this type of business.

Okay, so you've been working this hard for two to three years. How long have you been in business and what is your annual revenue like?

I've been in business for about 10 years. A little more than 10 years, 10 and a half years. I think I took this over from the previous person November, so It's almost about ten and a half years. My annual revenues are about 650, 700, something like that. But because of the high margin I'm able to take home a substantial portion of that. So my income is good. But I could always, I need more, let's put it that way, definitely need more.

And when you said take over, did you buy this or what Was that process 10 years ago?

No.

It's interesting. My mother in law had this business but not at the same time. It wasn't as built out as what I have now. She had it and she was using it just as a business to print addresses on envelopes, guest addresses and that is a high margin service. And after a few years of my being married, she said, you know what, maybe your wife wants to come work with me, we'll expand the business. And after did they took it, they expanded it to offer everything but most of the work was broken brokered. And when I took it over, she called me one day and she said she wants me to take it over. She can't handle it anymore. She'll give it to me debt free. I just walk in, it's all mine, I can do whatever I want. I didn't have to pay for it. So I was like, yeah, I was just like, why not? Let's give this A shot. So I was able to expand what we offer, recalibrate pricing to where we actually make money. I brought a lot of processes in house and it's been good. You know, every year we've seen growth every single year. Last year was our best year ever. This year we're a little off on the numbers. I'm not sure why. Every month our revenues have been down, but I'm still able to take the same salary. So I think I'm making. That's another thing. I just don't have my numbers really tight. Like I know my revenues and I keep track of that for sales tax, but I don't have a good handle on my numbers. But I know I'm able to comfortably take my salary and I've never had to carry a balance on a credit card. I have no debt in the business except for the leased machines because with printing a lot of equipment is leased because you lease it for five years and then the company gives you another one, takes that one off your hands, gives you a new one and that way you constantly have new equipment. So I have no actual debt. Like I have no small business loan. I have no credit card debt. I have no debt. Yeah. So it's really been. It's working out okay.

Do you have any employees?

I have.

My sister in law comes in for about four hours a day, three days a week. Sorry, four days a week. Four hours a day, four days a week to do some graphic design. But I don't need her to come in. I'm able to do it all by myself, but it's my sister in law and I got the business from my mother in law so I feel a little bit of an obligation to keep her on. She's going to be leaving soon and I'm going to use that to further automate some processes here. Like the money I'm going to save from that to further automate some things here that are taking. Taking a lot of my time and I don't really need a designer. Cause so many things are templated. So many of the designs I have templates for and it takes me. It'll take me five minutes to design something that takes her half hour to design. So I'm able to really do it all. Not do. I can't. I can't really do it all myself. But I'm able to hold it down. I'm able to hold it down. Yeah.

Are you purposely trying to grow right now or are you just getting business because of your reputation?

Right. Right now in the immediate like immediately short term, I am trying to find some new people until. For the last couple of years, I've had good customers and I haven't needed to expand. And I've been, I've been looking like over the last couple of years, we've been. I've been experimenting with some different things. Like I tried to say, you know, let's move out of New York. Let's go someplace else, buy a different business that's more nine to five. And after a couple years of trying to get my wife to do that, it wasn't in the cards. So that's done. Then I was trying to figure out a way to take this to more of a commercial direction and hire somebody to work with me and we'll do more commercial printing to minimize our hours in the store. And that didn't work. For whatever reason, I could not get the commercial business. Even as my regular business increased, I couldn't get the regular commercial printing. And finally I decided it's sort of like from God, this way. I'm getting these customers, I know what I'm doing. Why am I trying to force it to be something else? So I've doubled down on this. I tried to the dozen or so party planners. I tried to figure out what they want that they're not getting from me, they're getting elsewhere. And I've got a couple of things in the works to add to my business. But the other thing I noticed over the last six months, two or three people have stopped ordering almost completely. And they just tell me the reason they stopped ordering is because they haven't had business. I see on social media they do have business. I'm not sure what that means. Everything's really been good. I don't know why when you say.

People, you mean party planners.

Those are like, yeah, party planners, event planners. Yeah, I sort of have a dozen that come a couple times a month and they spend a few thousand dollars each time and it works out. And then I have a couple customers that. Then I have, sorry, general customers that come for invitations and things like that. But the main, the, the core of the business is working with the event planners and turning things around in 24, 48 hours, things like that. Okay, so I haven't been trying to grow that, but I want to replace those people. I'm really trying to get to a point where I can sell this business and just wash my hands of it because I really, I put way too much of myself into it. Like I can't do something. You know, it's Sort of a half measure. I have to do it 110%. And because of that, I'm here all the time and I can't. I need something where I'm a little. Have a little more distance, and I haven't been able to do that with this business. So I want to start with the other business. Like I was asking in the question, buy another business, start to build that up, and eventually get to the point where I can sell this because my take home is high enough that I can get a nice number for this business. It's just that. It's just that I don't have another thing to replace my income that's the problem.

All right, so if your take home is high enough to where you could sell this business for a good price, it's also high enough to where you could hire someone, right? Like a replacement.

So it's interesting. It's interesting. So I take home 250,000 a year, but I need that money. We have religious school tuition and just so many, you know, the mortgage and so many other things. So I'm not able to pay anyone because sort of what happened was I expanded the business and didn't pay attention to the fact that I needed more money. I could have hired someone a little earlier, I think, because right now I can't. I don't. I don't have any extra money to hire somebody. That. That's just my feeling. Maybe if I got more organized, I would see that I had more money. But. But I don't feel like I have. I have enough money to hire somebody else, at least not full time. What people have been suggesting is do part time. The problem with hiring someone part time is you don't know which part time because jobs will come out of nowhere, like Wednesday. I didn't even know I had this job that's taking me, you know, four or five hours to do. And now I have the job. So I don't really know, like, I need someone that I can just call, oh, come down. I have a couple hours today or tomorrow. I can't find someone like that. So I'm trying to keep it in a steady state where I'm able to still make the same amount of money, but build something else on the side where in the next three, four years I could sell this. That. That's, that's what I really want to do. I just, I. I've sort of had enough, right? Giving.

I've been there. I've been there. You're in like that messy middle where you Feel trapped, right? Like yes, yes. You feel like I can't, like I don't have enough to hire, but I have too much where I'm like golden handcuffed to this business. It's hard to make a move in the place that you're in without some level of faith. Right. Like, and I don't mean that in the religious sense. I mean that in the, oh, I'm.

Ready to take a risk. I'm totally ready to take a risk. I have no problem. I will take a loan. Because as terrifying as it is, it's far more terrifying to me to be in the same place in 10 years. Like, I can't do that. I'm scared to take a loan, scared to buy business. But I'm far more terrified of being exactly where I am now, 10 years from now. I can't, I can't handle that. That's not a good, I wouldn't, I.

Mean, this sounds harsh, but I'm glad you're terrified because that's the opposite of complacent. Right. You're not complacent. And so you're thinking, do I sell this business or do I double down on this business? Both of them are going to take a leap of faith into the unknown. Right, Right. You had a comment earlier where it's like, let's, let's find a business that's could act more of like a 9 to 5. But honestly, some industries might make it easier to be more like a 95. But a quote I heard recently was a graveyard is full of irreplaceable men. Right. Like any task can be outsourced. Some are harder to outsource, some make you feel more uncomfortable. But really anything can be outsourced and you've done it, you've done it yourself. You had a rock star and then they left it. How if someone, let's say someone came to you right now and said, I, I'll give you 750 for your business, three times earnings, but I, I don't want to run it. What would you do? Because you're the one running it. Right. Like how, how is it sellable today if you want to sell it, if you don't have anyone working for you? Really?

Right. That, that, that is a good point. I never even thought about that. I never thought about that. That's a good point. If I don't have anyone else working here, who's going to buy it?

Right, Exactly. Like you're selling a job. People don't want a job, they want to Be a passive income business owner. Whether that exists or not. I think no matter what you do, you're going to have to find some good help, and you're going to have to take a leap of faith to get that help, because you can't sell it until you replace yourself. And you can't replace yourself until you've decided what you want to do. So I would call from. I. I'm a fan of call from. Oh, that's. That's a little distracting.

Yeah, I just keep calling. It's someone. It's someone that's in front. But I, I, it's fine. I can take it to their house.

It's okay. I mean, hey, this is, this is why you're calling. This is exactly what we're talking about, right?

Yeah.

My gut. Here's my gut. Like, I, I'm very. I'm the king of shiny objects. I'm the king of managing seven things at once, whether that's a good idea or not. And I'm so tempted to ask you all about this other business that you want to buy, but if you, if you still have to find someone to replace yourself before you even think of that, then I kind of want to talk about that more. I just lost.

But what I was, what I was thinking was like, couldn't I buy something like a laundromat or like, like I was looking at ATM routes, but that, that didn't work out for, for technical reasons having to do with that industry. I spoke to a broker about it, but like having a laundromat and paying a guy $20 an hour, $25 an hour just to sit there. Like, is that, is that like, what could go wrong in a Laundromat? Someone loses their money, they need their quarters back. Something goes wrong with the equipment, you call the service technician. Replacing me here is a lot harder than replacing. You're just putting a body that scrolls his phone all day in the laundromat. That, like, how hard? I mean, I always, I've gotten myself into a lot of trouble with how hard could that be?

I know it's. The grass is always greener. Right? Like you, you already know. This is the devil you know, right?

Yeah. That's what I tell myself. Right.

The devils are in the details. And you know, this devil you've de. Risked, this devil I. As you're talking, I just googled. So there's about 100,000 party and event planners in the United States and in New York city, that's about 3% of the US population. So all else equal, and you could argue there, there's a higher proportion of partying event planners in New York City. But let's just keep, let's keep it conservative. There's 3,000 potential, not end consumer customers, but 3,000 potential wholesale customers. Customers, customers that are touching dozens of other customers per week or per month.

Right.

You have what, 20 to 40 event planner customers?

No, not even. I have, I have, I have probably like a dozen, about a dozen that come a couple times a month. That's what I had. Yeah. Like, I turn, I don't, I don't turn down business. I almost always say yes to anything that comes in, but I really am at capacity. Like if I'm gonna double down here, I need to get another person here. I don't think I could, I could do more because I'm here from about 8:30 in the morning till about 6:37. And then I go home, my kids, my wife, whatever, and I come here from 10 till either 2 or 3 o' clock in the morning. And then the next day I do the same thing. This is what I do basically every single day until like there's a night where I just, I can't hack it. And I go to sleep like at 11 o' clock instead. And then. So I wouldn't be able to take another. That's why I was thinking, like, you know, I have a little bit of money, maybe I should just buy a business that makes a little bit of money where I can start turning down a little bit of this business and go, you know, the next step. I'll figure out the next step later. I don't know what the next step will be, but I just, I have to sort of minimize my time here. That's the problem. Like to me, that was my problem. And then just get out of the business. You're saying it's probably better to double down on this business?

Yes, but I want to ask a couple more questions before I for sure get to that. How many direct competitors would you say you have in New York City that focus on weddings and bar mitzvahs?

So in my, in see, I, I really appeal to a very specific clientele that for exactly what I do, I don't think there's really anybody that does that, because I have, I have, because a lot of people that, that broker this kind of work, they'll do the design and they'll do the fulfillment. Like they'll assemble everything. So sometimes they'll need like a, like a menu card or a box to give to guests or whatever. And all that stuff needs to be assembled to those do the. All the assembly, but they can't do the printing because the equipment is too expensive. And the people that have the equipment, they don't want to be busy with this because they're printing 10,000 of this and 5,000 of that. I'm doing the small orders. So most people with the. I mean, I don't know of anybody that has the equipment and does the. And works with the event planners. Anyone that has a human won't and anyone that works the event planners doesn't have the equipment because I print for these people. Like I print. Sometimes I'm two steps removed. Sometimes there's. I'm printing for somebody who's putting together the whole package for the event planner, who's selling it to the customer. So sometimes I'm two steps behind and I try to find those people also. Because you always want to minimize the amount of customers you work with. If you can maximize, if you can increase how much you get per customer, it's better and then work with less customers. That's what I found at least because you get to learn exactly what they want. And it's a couple whatsapps back and forth and the orders in. So that's what I've been doing and I've been getting a few more here and there. But there's no one that does that does what I do. I don't. I don't know if anyone that does what I do, especially at the price, I do it like. Like even if there's somebody, let's say in the city that'll do it or whatever, Manhattan, they don't do it at this price. Like, I make the money on a little bit more of a volume and whatever. I can go into more details, but basically to answer your question directly is there's no one else that I know of that does what I do.

Yeah. It's funny you mentioned prices because on. On the YouTube livestream right now, someone home leads just said, like, raise your prices.

Prices.

Right. Same amount of work I did that.

I did a little bit. I raised my prices. And then you get pushback. You know, they start. They start whining about it.

But how much Pushback? Right? Like 10%, like 20% price increase. 10% pushback, you win.

Right.

That's a net win. So I would measure that before, like anecdotally saying you get. Because of course you'll get pushback. But is it more than the additional revenue that you're getting there's only.

But if there's only. So there's so few people that if I lose the wrong one, that's. That's what my feeling is. Like, there's like, three people. Three or three or four people that are the bigger fish. Like, of the 12, there's three or four that are. That, like, I'll do whatever they say. I'll come in whatever they want, because they spend a lot. They'll spend like ten grand here every month. So I. If I lose one of them, that's. That's. That's a big problem. That's why I'm hesitant. Like, I raised prices last year, and I was going to raise it again at the end of this year, but I think another thing I could do is start charging more rush fees. That's what I wanted to start doing. There are certain customers that I could charge a rush fee to. I was thinking about that. Really? If I were to double down, I think I need to outsource more stuff, offer more work, offer more products and outsource more things. That would be the only thing besides hiring somebody, you know, besides that was that, you know, the only way to get more money without spending more money would be to outsource more products. Yeah, that'd be the only thing I can do.

All right, I'm going to. I'm going to throw up a bunch of stuff on you floating around in my head. Okay, you ready?

Okay, put.

Put your poncho on. So, first of all, I completely understand what you're saying about being hesitant to raise prices because you only have a dozen customers and they're big customers. I think you could use that to your advantage and say, I only have a dozen customers. I'm going to get all of them on the phone and have a very honest and transparent conversation about where I'm at in life right now and about my prices and kind of feel it out. Because a lot of people think about raising prices, and it's just. You just send an email and you raise prices. Crap, I lost four customers. Crap, I lost a third of my revenue. I'm screwed. It doesn't have to be like that. Because of the fact that you have 12 customers, you have the luxury of being able to talk to all of them in an afternoon and just feel it out. Like, listen, man, I'm. I don't know what to do. Like. Like, we. You've worked with me for a long time. You know, like, I'm just being honest. Like, what do you think? Could you. Could you afford to take a 5% price hike. So that's my. I'm not advocating for you to raise prices. Someone mentioned it in the comments, and I thought it was an interesting idea. And you've already thought about it, but I think you should explore it a little more.

Okay.

Second of all, let's say you're. I, you know, I asked how many people do what you do? None. Now, I know you're kind of exaggerating. There could be one or two other guys that you're not super familiar with.

I know there's one that does it, but he charges a lot more than me. And when I first.

Right.

Yeah, but what I get is. What I get is I get some of the people that want sort of his aesthetic that he provides. Like, he does provide an exceptional product. Like, people in the industry know, the party planners, they know it, so they want his aesthetic, but they don't want to pay his prices. So they come to me, they say, listen, this is what this guy made for the last event. What can you do that sort of approximates this? I do get those. Like, those. I'm sort of the B brand a little bit for this kind of work. So I use that to my advantage. Like, I do have the people that don't want to pay us prices. Yeah.

Okay, so let's be super conservative and say there are 10 people. There are nine other people in Brooklyn, New York City, that do what you do. If that is the case, then there's 3,000 party planners and event plan planners in New York City. Let's divide that market up equally proportionally, and there's 300 for everyone. Okay.

Right.

Basically, if you were to 4x your business go from 12 customers to 48, then that only gets you to actually, sorry, I said that wrong. 12 customers to 300. So let's call it. Let's say you have 10 customers. If you were to 30x your business, then that puts you at a proportional share of the market. Are you with me? If there are 10 direct competitors. Right. So in my head, like, you live in one of the biggest cities on the planet. You also live in a city where they're having a lot of bar mitzvahs and weddings. I just Google it. It's like 60,000 weddings a year in New York. 56, 000 marriage licenses issued. I think you need to approach this differently. As if, like your print shop, like you're. You're on the cusp of Your Print Shop 2.0 and not on the cusp of, you know, your print shop 1.0 versus buying another business altogether. I would look at the 2.0 version of your business as another opportunity altogether. And that opportunity looks like having a competent person to replace you. That looks like growing your business, maybe by raising prices, maybe by finding more customers. When it comes to growing your business, I think there are some high leverage, low effort things that you could do. I think you should, when you have that same transparent conversation with your 12 customers, I think you should offset the awkwardness of a potential price increase with the, the promising aspect of potentially offering a discount in exchange for like some sort of a, of a shared marketing initiative. And what I mean by that is you have a viral marketing aspect built into your product because your customers are distributing your product to hundreds, if not thousands of people. And so maybe you say, hey, I'll give you a 10% price break or 20% price break if you distribute my business card with all of your invitations or if you let me print like my logo on the bottom right corner. And maybe they freak out and they'll never work because it's yet, but maybe they don't. Maybe they have price sensitive customers that wouldn't mind that. Right, right. It's kind of like if you're a web designer, you're like, listen, it's gonna be five grand to make your website or it's gonna be three grand if you can just let me put my name in the footer. That way I get a backlink and then maybe, maybe one day someone sees it and clicks and I'm able to sell them a $5,000 website. Have you ever tried something like that?

Yes, I did. I did that. I did it for probably two years. On all the day of printing that we do for weddings, I put my phone number and email address in like six point font on the back, very small. And one party planner said, no, you can't do that. I said, fine, no problem. It's only one. Only one of them said that everyone else didn't care. I got one phone call and that phone call was only to. They wanted to know if they could use a portion of my work without paying me anything for it. Like they wanted the files, they wanted my Adobe Illustrator files. I said, sorry, I'm not going to do that. That's my whole. That's how I make money. My design, that's my money. So that was the only call I.

Got from that in two years.

About at least two years. Yeah. Because I was doing it. It could have been even a little longer than that. Yeah, Just no one, no One called no. Like, I asked every single person that comes in or calls, emails how they found out about me. I ask every single person. All word of mouth, everything. Previous customers were people that came here to buy something but, you know, didn't end up for whatever reason but, you know, enjoyed the experience. It's all referrals, all referrals. But no one, no one called me back based on that. I tried partnering with event people and telling them, like with trade show people. I tried partnering with them and said, listen, you know, make me your preferred printer and I'll give you a 10 or 20%. I forget what I told them. I gave them a substantial cut and they said, okay, great. And they sent out a promotional thing and I got a lot of tire kickers, but no one pulled the trigger. One person did. So it was like a $40 order. It was a joke. I tried a lot of these things. That's what sort of makes me a little pessimistic. Like, like, if I've had people come in here and drop, you know, 10, $15,000 on an order and I said, listen, you know, you know, whatever you do, you know, for business or whatever, maybe I could print for your office. And I couldn't spin that into, into customers. Like, I keep. I tried a lot, a lot of things. What has helped recently is calling like the venues instead of the party planners. That's been an additional stream of revenue. And I just reached out to a couple other ones that I found last week. I did the email and then I'm going to follow up with a phone call next week. I find that most people, that's like the business advice videos I see, recommend that start with an email and then call and follow up and refer to that email. Trying to think what else I've tried. I've tried a lot of things.

No matter what you try, you do have to have multiple touch points. Right. And maybe it's the same venue. Like maybe you cold call them 10 times and maybe it's 10 different types of touchpoints. But I would, if you, if you try that again by printing your name and number, I would try printing a different number that you only use for that. Because if you're. If most of your business is based around referrals, a lot of times leads don't come back in the door for months or years. Right, right. Have you tried using a different email address or a different phone number for certain initiatives to try?

I haven't tried that. I haven't tried that. I should try that.

Okay, that's and that's. That's one lever, right? But you could hop on upwork and find someone in Argentina that has just a slight Hispanic accent or a slight Latin accent and have them start cold calling events and just very low pressure, like, hey, we're in the area. And just like 8 bucks an hour, you could have them doing that 10 hours a day and sending you a daily report at the end of the day. How many did you talk to? How many people showed interest? How many people said, never call me again? Like, you just. You need hooks in the water, right? Like, you need a lot more hooks in the water if you want to grow. And if. If you're having operational issues with this business, which it sounds like you are, and I do, too, no judgment, then that's gonna. That's gonna carry you on to the next business. Right? So it's almost like you have to. You're in. This is maybe a bad analogy. You're in kind of a toxic marriage right now. You don't know how to get out of it, but you want to.

Yeah, it's really what it is. I tell my wife, like, I have another woman. It's like, it's crazy. It's like, yeah, it's really crazy.

So you're in this toxic marriage. You're like, I need. I need a better wife. I need a better woman. But you really need to fix what's going on there. And it might not be your fault, but you still have to confront it head on. And then once you do, you're either going to learn, you know what, this marriage wasn't toxic. I was just looking at it wrong. Or you learn, this is toxic, and I figured out how to fix it. So I'm going to go into another marriage, and I'm going to be that prepared. Like, you're not to that point yet. You're just at, like, the toxic point. You need to go get to the point where you answer that question for yourself. Do I need another business, or did I just fix my business in the process of getting ready to sell my business, and now I don't even want to sell it. Right. It's. You're just like, you're asking the right question, but you're too early.

Yeah. This is what basically everyone's been telling me that you're. You're saying what everyone else has been saying, like, why am I running away from this? Like, why would I get rid of something that's making me money? Everything that I see is such a big problem is really very surmount. Very surmountable. It's not. None of this stuff is insurmountable. And I should just, I should just figure it out instead of running from it, basically.

But you are figuring it out, right? Like the fact that we're talking means you're figuring it out.

Yeah. I've streamlined so many things. Like, part of what's been difficult is it's been me, a lot of my employees, majority of the employees have always been family. My wife, my sister in law, my mother in law worked for me for a little bit in the beginning. And it's hard to get family to like, if you try to institute a process, you can't discipline people that aren't conforming to the process because they're your family. So then like if they don't want to do the process, they're just not going to. But since my wife's left in November after our sixth kid and my sister in law has less hours, I've been able to make things very streamlined. Everything's been templated. There's a system, there's email scripts that I have that I send to each person, depending emails, depending on what they're asking. Like I've really streamlined things a lot and it's getting more and more organized. The bookkeeping is not great. That's always been a problem. I have to, I spoke to an accountant. I know what I'm supposed to do. I just have to, to do it. But I've just been trying to get, get away from this. That's really what I've been trying to do. I've been like holding out, that I could, I could somehow just escape. But you're telling me this is what I need to do. This is what I need to do.

So. Okay, we're, we're about a time, but I just want to give you a couple more things. Okay? Just, I want you to make me a promise that by the end of the day you will have two posts on upwork. One for a cold caller, one for a bookkeeper. A bookkeeper on upwork will cost you 300 bucks a month.

And well, I have, I have a guy I'm working with already, someone to.

Clean up your books because you said your books are ugly and I get that. So I've had, I've hired VAs for everything and I've had very hit and miss experiences. But when it comes to financial stuff, like binary, like categorize this or that, I've had a lot of good luck. So I have a guy that told.

Me what to do. Like I have a QuickBooks. I just like have to classify, you know, the transactions and I set the rules. And for some reason the rules are not automatically classifying the transaction. I'm not sure why that is. I have to figure out what I'm doing wrong.

So in that case, open. I would open QuickBooks, start loom, hit loom, and say, hey, here's what's going on. I'm classifying it. It doesn't. I don't know what to do. Take that link, go to upwork, post that in your job posting and say, someone fix this for me, please. $50 and it could be fixed by the end of the day or by the end of the week. I've been in your shoes. You're feeling overwhelmed. The only way, the only antidote to that is to take action. And you are, we're talking, you're doing it. So like to, not to zoom out too much, but like you're in the game. Just stay in the game. Just keep caring, keep, keep grinding, keep doing what you're doing, keep worrying about this. And the answer will come. Like, the only thing you shouldn't do is just throw your hands up and watch Netflix all day. Right? Like you're just. Yeah, you're getting.

Yeah, yeah. The main problem I have is that I'm working too much on the day to day and not taking care of the bigger picture thing. So I've been trying to work on that the last two weeks.

An antidote to that. An antidote to that is to, is to like do whatever it takes to this sounds. You're gonna, you're gonna hate this. This overwhelm yourself even more. Like try to get more business because then you will be forced to find help. You will get to that point where it's like, I'm literally gonna die if I don't find someone right now. Right. I lean on your, lean on your email list. Like how often do you send drip marketing campaigns? Like how much?

Yeah, that's something I want to do.

I, I thought of that last week. I said, why am I not sending a newsletter at least once a month? It doesn't have to be. Yeah, I need to send a newsletter.

Yeah.

So my wife said she'll set it up, you know, cause she knows how to use Illustrator. I should just tell her what I want in it. And like, you know, I think like a product of the month and you know something about design trends, things like that. I think I can throw something together, but I definitely need to start with that. I do gift Twice a year to these, you know, 12 or so event planners that come. I make sure that, you know, they don't forget about me. I gift them twice a year at the end of the year and sometime in the middle of the year, I send gifting. I think that's important. But the newsletter, Yeah, I definitely want to do the newsletter. I try to send out emails to my whole list about seasonal things like holiday items, things like that. And I do get a little bit of a response, but not enough.

Once a week, send them something once a week, an email.

I do free gift type of things. Like anyone that's been a customer, you can swing by around different times a year to pick up something for free that I print for them, like stationary, things like that. So I've been doing that.

If, if I were you, I would literally just write a journal of what you're doing, document what you're doing. The stresses, the insecurities, the wins, the successes, the. The picture of something that you just printed that you're really proud of and spend 30 minutes on it a week and email it out to every single person that you have, even if they're not a customer and it's your, your Aunt Nedra, like, send it to everyone and I promise that good things will come back to you. You just have. You're not top of mind for nearly enough people.

Yeah. Okay. This is what I want to hear. Yeah, I was hoping to get advice about the other business. Okay. Okay, fine.

Let's, let's, let's save that for another call.

Yeah, a different call. Okay. Thank you for your help.

Cool. Yeah, thanks, man.

Have a great weekend.

You too.

Bye. Bye.

Bye.

All right, I'm letting Colin in and Connor is after Colin. Sorry you guys have been having to wait for so long. Let's see. I'm trying to let Colin in. All right, Connor Boyak, you are next, so don't leave me, please. Colin is joining right now. Colin, are you there? So Colin and I spoke last week, but we had some connectivity issues and I got a pop up here saying that we're having more connectivity issues. Oh, I lost Colin. He's got bad Internet. I've been there. Colin, I'm going to let in Connor and then I will let you in after that if you get that fixed. Connor B.

Hello, sir.

Hey, I'm sorry to keep you waiting for so long.

Here. We are all good?

Yeah. Okay. Is there a delay? Can you hear me?

Okay, I think there is a slight.

Delay that usually goes away over time. You just kind of. I Try to do like a hard stop at the end of my sentence. So it's of kind clear that I'm done talking but it'll go away over time.

Sounds good.

All right, let me go ahead and pull up your question. I. It's funny because now that I have these pre submitted questions, it would be really easy for me to go in and do a lot of preparation. But I'm such a procrastinator that every Friday it's like 12:59 and I don't prepare. So here we. But I did I, I read everyone's question at least once because people submit questions and I rank them 1 to 10 and then my assistant goes in and schedules, schedules these calls based on the ranking. And so it looks to me that you asked how can we attract major corporate sponsors 100k plus for our national youth entrepreneurship program. Yes. I remember looking at your website and I was very impressed with it. And so I would like to hear about your business and then about your question.

Sounds good. So this is called the Children's Entrepreneur Market. It is a series of Saturday morning largely activities. Think of these like lemonade stands on steroids or like a farmer's market where it's run entirely by the kids so mom and dad can help set up and take down the booth, but the kids run the whole show. And so not only are we giving kids an opportunity to learn about marketing and money and customer service and how to pitch and how to close and all that, we're really empowering them through the profit motive to get them excited about earning money. But use that as a way to teach about the principles of free enterprise and get them to become future little entrepreneurs and capitalists. The schools aren't doing this. Parents will sometimes do a short little lemonade stand, but 90% of the time the kids just sit there waiting for cars to stop. So at our market events we do a lot of advertising, bring out a lot of foot traffic so that these kids are not only selling a lot, but more importantly, they're learning a lot through the interactions. So we're scaling it nationally. We're in 26 states. We'll be fully national within the next two years. And so to sustain this, it's a non profit, but to sustain this for the future, we really want to develop a range of corporate sponsorships to get a lot of, we think as a national brand and as a way to kind of give back and support these community events, it could be a good strategy.

I love it. First of all, thank you for explaining that. So Succinctly. That's greatly appreciated. I think everyone listening and that will be listening is able to understand immediately what you do. So you basically organize farmers markets around the country and soon around the globe for kids to sell their stuff, to teach them capitalism, entrepreneurship. Are you able to speak about your, like, your numbers, your revenue numbers? I know you're a non profit, but I'd like to dig into how you make money.

Yeah, so this has been what I call a philanthropic kickstart model. So we go out to donors and we get them to help us launch in Austin, Texas or Orlando, Florida or wherever it is. And, and with that capital, we hire someone locally in that metro area who is our market manager to launch all these events. We start setting up events and then we attract people. We have booth fees that are $20 a pop just so the kids have a little skin in the game. And so we develop a little bit.

Of revenue that way.

We sell T shirts for the kids that say, you know, I'm an entrepreneur, and have some corporate logos on the back for our sponsors, kind of like a 5K type of thing. So we have those two revenue streams, which are minor. Those aren't going to generate enough sufficient to defray all the costs that go into operating this program. And so the philanthropy at the beginning is 100%, but the idea is to taper it down to no more than 20 or 30% of the overall budget, both through the booth fees and the shirt sales, but then largely through the corporate sponsorships where we're going to be able to, I think, generate far more revenue than we're getting from the booth fees and the shirts.

Okay, so I'm going to pick a random city and I want, I want you to talk me through what launching in that city would look like. So are you in Sioux Falls or not yet?

No.

All right, so you want to go to Sioux Falls, and what does that look like? What do you do? Who do you call? How much money do you ask for and what usually happens?

So we are focused on launching in the top 200 metro areas around the country. And so within any given metropolitan area, we'll launch a bunch of markets each year, you know, 10 to 20 or more. And so we'll first go to donors in that community and say, hey, help us bring this to your city and, and try and find that philanthropic support. Once we find some seed capital, we have a network. I write a series of books called the Tuttle Twins. So these are books that help their help kids learn about the ideas of freedom and we have a large national network, a million families. So we'll go to somewhere like Sioux Falls and we'll create a segment in our email list and say, hey guys, you know, we're launching this project in your city. Would you like to be a part of it? And from that network of people who already know us, love us, trust us, we're able to find our market manager, people who are really excited by the opportunity to work with our organization. So we'll hire the market manager. He or she largely, she will begin developing relationships with the cities and the community organizations. The key for us for growth is to launch our markets not just on a random in a park or on a sidewalk, but we attach our events with large, let's say city festivals and rodeos and other big events where there's already 5, 10, 15,000 people coming. And so we can kind of piggyback on those events and generate a ton of traffic. And so our market manager builds those relationships and plans all those markets and then actually on the day of is there to just administer the whole thing and operate the whole program. All of them across the country are supported by a very small national team, including our corporate sponsorship sales guy that we just hired, who's kind of our fundraiser out to try and attract some of the support to sustain the broader national program.

Program.

So how much money would you be looking for in Sioux Falls?

So in each, in the metro area itself, it's typically around 100,000 a year for each metro area that we operate in.

Okay, and that's to support 10 to 15 events?

That's correct.

Okay, how are you finding donors to raise that money from? Just through your email list.

So, you know, a lot of our locations that we launch in are aspirational and not already covered. What I mean by that is we'll have someone who donates in our national program without regard to a particular location. We'll use that capital to go into strategic places like, you know, in Austin. There's a lot of, you know, freedom minded, you know, capitalists or LA or Palm Beach. And so we'll launch in some of these places just to give us a little bit of toehold so that we can then go in and start talking to some potential donors in that area. But a lot of this is with our Tuttle Twins books. It's a well known brand. People around the country know it. And so that's allowed us to open up conversations with donors in all these different places. And, and what I like most about this project is the hyper locality of it the fact that I can go to, you know, someone in Boston and say, help us bring this to your kids or grandkids in your backyard, they will specifically benefit, benefit from it. It makes it a little bit easier to solicit donations as opposed to this broad, generic, vague program.

More personal aspect to it.

Exactly.

Okay.

And how much does an average donor contribute?

I'd say the average donor is probably around a 20 grand. A lot of our donors are entrepreneurs and business owners who can write larger checks. And so we get some that skew very large. And a lot of people donate 10, 20, 50. But what we're really after are the people who can, you know, drive enough revenue our way to allow us to launch this without us having to spend a lot of time chasing small checks.

Yeah. What is the biggest check you've ever gotten and how did that come?

Million dollars. And that came kind of organically. Someone saw one of our Tuttle Twins ads and reached out to a friend to say, hey, do you know what this is? And he said, yeah, I know Connor actually, and introduced us. And so we built a relationship and over time they became our biggest donor.

How much effort do you put into asking for more money from your current donors versus finding new donors?

A lot. Yeah, we're scaling up our fundraising team right now and that's a big part of it is to ask people to grow with us. But, you know, the same amount of energy we can put into someone who, let's say donated 50 grand and to get them to go to 75 or 100, you know, some of that energy, if we apply it to finding new donors, can often yield much larger gifts. If we spend our time focused on, you know, the very high net worth. Business owners who get really excited about entrepreneurship and capitalism and they see that the schools aren't doing a good job with this at all and they want to help stem the tide and push back on that degrading culture. So a lot of our time is really focused on meeting and cultivating relationships with these very high net worth individuals who are aligned with our values.

Have you ever taken the time to scrape like a public database of donors, whether political donors or otherwise?

We've done that years ago with political donors. A lot of non profits struggle with that just because political donors end up being somewhat of a different animal than, than, let's say policy donors, people who are trying to affect long term change. So where we've struggled and other organizations like us in the past is that political donors tend to be very fear based and very reactive. You know, hey, donate $50 today to make sure the other guy loses. As opposed to this like aspirational, visionary type of approach. So the short answer is yes, but very mixed and often poor results.

I guess. I didn't mean like specifically scraping a list of political donors, but rather finding organizations or databases where this type of donor is made public. Right. Like I'm thinking like a children's museum that has a page on their website dedicated to all of their donors. Right. Having a VA go in and scrape all those. Maybe it's just first and last name, maybe it's just the Jones family and taking that database and trying to append the data with address, email, phone number. Have you ever tried that?

So we've done that only for corporate sponsorships. We'll go to let's say an organization like Junior Achievement or something like that. And, and they'll list who their major corporate sponsors are so that, that gives us a signal as to like, hey, here's a business that at least in one case supports, you know, youth learning, financial literacy and learning about this. And so that's how we developed our first kind of base list of what type of corporations that we're going to, you know, try and go after and approach. Haven't really done it for the individual donors. In our experience a lot of non profits keep that confidential and there's just not a lot of data out there that you can get. For example, our own non profit, we don't disclose our donors and so no one would be able to obtain that data. And so oftentimes you'll, it's, it's either corporations or foundations which are, are required to be public in their disclosure about donating. And so those are both ways that we've been able to try and cultivate those lists and go after new people.

Okay, let me ask a totally different type of question. Do you have any data on how much revenue flows through an average market for through the kids?

So the average kid earns, I think it's around $150 right now in a three hour market. And so typically we get 60 to 100 kids depending. And so whatever that that math is, you know. Nine grand. Yeah. Ten grand. Yeah.

Okay. And then how many markets per year on average?

So we are in the process of scaling right now, just started last year. This year we will do about 340 markets around the the country and within five years that'll be up to 2,000. But right now it's 340 markets. So that's you know, 3.4 million if we're saying about 10 grand per market.

And then realistically, how much do you think you'll raise this year? Not like what your goal is, but what do you think you'll end up raising?

Does this include corporate sponsorships or just from the philanthropic donors directly?

Including everything.

Everything all together, probably I'd say million and a half if I just had to think off top my head.

Okay, and so you're the original reason that you wrote in was you're trying to find more 100k sponsors, right? Because you're chasing $20,000 checks and you think 100k it would just be more efficient. Right?

Well, very specifically the question is to attract the corporate sponsors. We have a good strategy with the individual donors, the foundations. We've got a good thing going there. What's new for us is trying to package this in a way that's very interesting to the corporate givers who are giving to the junior achievements and others in as well, trying to find the right way to present what we're doing in a way that would be attractive to corporations.

Specifically, what is the title of someone at a corporation that might be the decision maker for something like this?

A lot of times it's kind of the marketing team. A lot of organizations have like a corporate social responsibility type of person, I think, I think my team has created that list of job titles. So I'm shooting from the hip. But community outreach is another one. I know we often see some companies will have a community outreach team or at least one person on it. So those are some of the top of mind ones.

And what type of outreach have you done to these job titles so far?

For now it's just been, we're in early stages for this, so it's just been a lot of LinkedIn outreach and kind of creating DM workflows and trying to use Hunter IO to find email address patterns and then reach out to them and just build a sequence where we're then following up and trying to cultivate them.

And has that been fruitful at all?

Like I said, early stages. We've got some good conversations going, but not specifically any major corporate gifts yet.

Okay, and earlier you mentioned you had a million people. Is that, is that a million email addresses or what does that data look like?

Those are email addresses. So nationwide about a million and spread across the country. So these are people who've bought our Tuttle Twins books or engaged with our content in exchange for an email address. And so mostly it's the moms getting this stuff on behalf of their kids. So it's basically a million unique households is. Is how we see it.

And how often are you emailing everyone on that list?

Oh, twice a week.

Okay. What are your opening click rates?

Open rates are like 55%, and click rates, I think, are pretty low because primarily when we're emailing people twice a week, it's. It's more newsletter, not. Not boring corporate newsletter content, but it's. It's talking about current events and just keeping a strong relationship for when we do have a big sale of our books or something more specifically like that. So just creating a lot of content and value in the relationship and informing them. So not every email is designed to get people to click, I guess, is the point. So I think it's like 2 to 4% somewhere around there for the click rate.

And of all the emails you send, say you send 100 a year, what percentage of those are talking about fundraising or asking for fundraising or talking about your markets versus talking about your books?

So, I mean, 95% of the emails are talking about the books and the ideas in the books. We only occasionally sprinkle in any fundraising appeals directly to this audience.

Okay. So very rarely do you talk about fundraising. Now. Do you ever talk about markets that you're hosting, but not fundraising to the list?

So we'll send targeted emails. Yeah, so we won't blast the whole list, but we'll. When we're ready to launch in Sioux Falls, right, we'd have that segment, and then we'd go back out to them and say, you know, hey, guys, we're ready to launch. Here's how you can sign up your kids. Here's how you can support what we're doing. So. So yeah, we'll do the kind of segmented emails to the particular people in.

That region and what software are using for email.

Klaviyo.

Nice. I love it. How. How granularly are you segmenting based off of zip code?

So we'll do like within 30, 40 miles of the, you know, core location that we're focused on. And so whoever falls in that area.

And then do you have. How much data do you have on each email address?

We haven't done any kind of external appending and any other data services like that beyond what they've given us. And so typically it's, hey, here's my, you know, shipping address for the books. And so then we get their. Their mailing address, their phone number, their email, and that's basically it. We do ask at check out, like, the Ages of their kids is an optional question just so we can segment on that. But typically it's just their location information.

Okay, so I love Klaviyo. I love email marketing. I love that you love it. It seems a million emails is a ton. I don't even want to know what your Klaviyo bill is. What is your Klaviyo bill? I have to. I don't know.

But I remember I looked.

Don't look at it here.

And it was, it was a lot of money.

Oh yeah. I mean I, yeah, I pay thousands in. My list isn't anywhere near that big. I, I would segment your data even more. I would try to append it. I would also put your emails in a spreadsheet and separate out the domains. So basically cull out all of the Yahoos and the Gmails, find all the corporate domains and try to try to find which emails is a work email. And then I would take those far away from Klaviyo and use something like Lemlist or GMass to send hundreds of emails, not millions, hundreds at a time from like an email address. Like maybe your personal email email address using a. Something like gmask where you can plug in their first name. You can plug in as much personalized data as you want and say, Carla, like I see that you work for Coca Cola, you know the Tuttle twins. You're on our email list. I, I'm just very curious. Like this is what we do. We. We raise money for this program. These program. This program changes lives. Do you know anyone at Coca Cola or know anyone that might know someone that I could talk to about corporate sponsorship? I would, I would start with that and start the referral ball going from people that are already seeing your emails in their inbox. What do you, what do you think about that?

Yeah, I like that idea. Prompts a question in terms of data appending. Do you have any particular companies or services that you like or recommend that do that? We haven't done that yet.

I just did this like a month ago. Oh man. Let me see if it's. It like pops up in my browser.

Put you on the spot.

I know. I just remember the website was green. That's not helping you at all. But I can picture the website. I will say that the prices are all over the map on that and I was able to find one that was reasonable and cheap. If I find it, I will put it in the show notes and I will email it to you as well. It's. There's probably an email in My inbox. But I remember it was like 70 to 80% cheaper. This is what I did. I found like four and I test. I uploaded the same list to all of them and the one that was like 70% cheaper was just as good, if not better than the others. So let me see if I can find it and I'll send it to you. But if. If I don't find it, just keep looking until you find one that's drastically cheaper.

And green.

And test. Test it again. Yeah, in green. And test the same list against a few of them to see. See which one works best.

I like it.

Yeah, because those services are really good. It. It'll tell you their. The LinkedIn URL of their profile. I just feel like with a million people you have such an advantage and you can even take that list. Do you do any paid ads? Facebook or Google?

Oh, yeah, yeah, quite a bit.

Have you. Have you done lookalike audiences?

Yep.

Based on that list.

Oh, yeah.

Have you done. Have you done ads for corporate sports sponsors at all?

Not for corporate sponsorships, we haven't.

No.

Our ads are all centered around getting people to buy our books. So we haven't done ads for the corporate.

I would try that on LinkedIn. Specifically upload your email list to LinkedIn and make a lookalike audience. I don't think it's called lookalike on LinkedIn, but make the equivalent of a lookalike audience on LinkedIn for people with that job title. I would try paid ads for corporate sponsorships for people. You don't even need to make it look like audience. Just upload the million people and make an actual audience out of that and send the. Or like push the. The paid ads towards them at the same time that you're sending these emails. So hopefully some people can see both around the same time frame.

It's a great idea. Fun, fun idea that I'll get working on. I like it. I appreciate it.

Absolutely. Well, let me know if it actually works for you. And if it doesn't, let's chat some more ideas.

Awesome. Okay. Appreciate it, Chris.

All right. Yep. Thank you, Connor.

Bye.

See ya. Oh. Oh. We're two hours and 13 minutes into this. I lost Colin again. Got some comments here on YouTube. Colin. There he is. He's got that McDonald's wi fi today 80 chromebook yet. All right, sorry, Mr. Colin, we'll catch you another time. I think we better wrap. We better wrap it. This was good. Thank you to everyone that watched on YouTube and I guess we'll do this do this again in a week. But yeah, thanks for joining, thanks for the comments, thanks for the likes, and we'll see you next time.