Local DJ Spins Side Hustle Into $100K Wedding DJ Empire

Hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Now, we've all watched the movie The Wedding Singer, but how many of us have actually thought about the business behind the singer, but also maybe the band or the DJ? Now, if you've been someone that thought about having a business that could be general, but then you start to think about niching down and niching down, Today's episode, today's entrepreneur is going to really give you a great case study, a great example of how niching down can really help your business to thrive. We're talking to Chris Troker today, who has a company in Milwaukee, and it is a wedding DJ business. And Chris is going to tell us the journey, how they got through COVID, and how they've built this to be an award-winning DJ service, but he's also going to tell us about automation and how he and his cohorts have built actually an AI-powered chatbot to remove the friction in the sales process. So stick around, he's going to explain how they've done that and how they're managing to have technology replace the people so that they can carry on the dance floor. Chris, welcome to the show.

Jim, thanks so much for having me. What a fantastic intro. I'm ready to have fun.

Well, Amit, I hope that's okay. And I, and I have offered Chris a way to double his money, double his business. Um, so stick around, and at the end of the show, I'm going to give Chris a little piece of advice that I think can double the size of his business. Okay, Chris, but before, before I give you what, what may not be a pearl of wisdom after all, but before we go there, let's talk about you and the wedding DJ business. I mean, why would someone have a DJ business and watch people get married and, you know, throw flowers at each other every weekend?

Right, absolutely. I think we all kind of question why is it what we do, why we do it, what is it for. I think for me, I was kind of stuck working that 9-to-5 job, wondering what's going to be that next step. I always wanted to own a business, and I knew I had to do something about it. So I kind of took my old sound and lighting equipment from the band days and started to DJ for, uh, parties and anniversaries because weddings honestly seem super complicated. And I swore I would never, ever, ever do a wedding. I promised myself that. A couple years into business, I realized, okay, this isn't so bad. I tried one wedding and we actually turned out to be pretty fantastic at it. So I realized I only want to do weddings now. There was just a big mind shift. So we realized getting more experience Kind of using some lead generation tools like Thumbtack or The Knot would allow us to get connected with couples who wanted a DJ, who want to actually, um, you know, provide like a fun music party atmosphere. A DJ actually is kind of like a wedding planner in a sense where they help keep the timeline moving. They update guests on what important things are happening. And couples actually rely on us to be that, you know, trusted expert when it comes to weddings. I'll ask them a preference. Do you, would you like me to do it this way or that way? And they'll say, I don't know, you're the expert, you tell me, what do you recommend? What do other people do? So it's really cool to see how taking an idea, building and growing from it, niching down, can actually bring more success, can make you an expert in your field and go from being unnoticed into well-known.

Chris, I had to ask you, what makes a wedding DJ, you know, what expertise do you have there that's different to, Playing a disco, for example?

Yeah, absolutely. So there's going to be some main differences when it comes to DJs. With— when it comes to like typical parties or clubs or discos, they want popular music, they want to keep the dance floor going. And this is usually, you know, a 4 to 8 hour stint of doing something in the club where you're really just mixing music. There's not a lot of MC service, there's not a lot of coordination. This is you going in, Playing the beats, playing the music, playing what people wanna listen to. Whereas when it comes to weddings, this is a more upscale event. This is something where that requires a little bit more professionalism. So you have to realize that you have to be a planner, a coordinator, the MC. And this is a very, very important day. If you have a bad day at the club, well, hey, you can always try again next weekend. But people only get married once typically. So you really gotta make sure that you're, you're meeting your service expectations. when you're going in. So it's just the difference in playing a variety of music, the coordination style that makes it a bit different from your typical disco or any other event.

That's really interesting. As you say, it's sort of a heightened sense of importance, isn't it? Also, different generations are there, aren't they? You've got, you know, the older people who need maybe the music that the plastic hips can rotate to. And then you've got the younger kids who are there, plus the married couple who have their own special songs, right? So interesting. And also that you're much more engaged, aren't you, with, with the audience? So understanding the specifics of the niche is really, really, really fascinating. And now you made me think about a wedding. Um, Chris, just take us through that then with the wedding. Once you decided to focus, and you've mentioned some, some lead magnets and so on, I'd love, love to hear how you've taken a narrow— what presumably is a narrow niche and expanded it. Now you're doing over 100 events, you know, per year. That's, you know, there's only 52 weeks, uh, of course in the year. So you're, you know, you're out Saturday, Sunday night pretty much, aren't you, with your team? How have you built the brand into that niche where presumably you're the, you know, the number one music DJ in Milwaukee?

Yes, thank you. It was inspired from HubSpot back in 2017. Actually, I had the chance to work for a marketing agency where I could perform as a paid ad specialist. I had some experience in running digital ads. So working together, they introduced me to ideas and tools. HubSpot had this, you know, just prolific idea behind inbound marketing. And this is where you're creating value and content for other people without expecting a sale. You just want to provide something that informs them, can help them make an informed buying decision, and removes friction from the buyer's journey. So I thought, what if I kind of built this brand and kind of implemented those best practices? So we saw the importance of blogging. This isn't just good for, you know, your keywords and your SEO, but these can be great resources and articles that help move people from a slightly cold lead into a warm lead into a very interested buyer. So you want to leverage those types of resources and tools in order to take it to the next level. So it was going from building blogs as resources, and then we realized what other tools and technology can we use to help provide value within their buying journey. One thing we made a mistake on is sticking with paper for way too long. We required people to mail us a check and to print out a contract. And this was just— I couldn't believe I did this at one point, but what a great learning lesson. We realized, wow, people don't have printers and not everyone has checks anymore. So we needed to get with the times. So I was able to create this 3-step portal system that works similar to like a marketing funnel where I wanted to take interested leads who would pre-qualify themselves with our DJ quote building tool. So it collects the lead's information, it sends the info to our CRM, and then nurtures that lead with thoughtful email, personalized touchpoints. The second step, we said, well, we have a paper contract, let's make that digital. So we created this contract form that said, We were realizing, gosh, everyone asks for a contract, but they don't always move forward. And it can take 15 to 20 minutes to build a personal contract for you, just as if you were a marketing agency submitting a proposal. These things take time to do well. So I said, why don't we make one generic contract that can be available to the public that allows me to empower the lead, the customer, the client in order to move forward whenever they're ready? They don't have to wait for me. It's not a 24-48 hour response time to say, hey, I'll get back to you. Here's your contract. This is literally, here's everything you need. When you're ready, let us know. So kind of taking that buyer's journey, that experience, leveraging the content, and just creating this ecosystem where we provide value, become industry experts, and niche down into the wedding industry. So the wedding blogs can be from you know, consideration awareness phase, like wedding DJ pricing. We've had people book us from this blog. We've also had some other instances where we create a blog just about, you know, typical games we might play at a wedding. And these are all great pieces of content that either current leads or customers of yours are appreciating, or you're going to get in front of eyeballs organically because people are going to be searching whether they booked with our DJ service or not. I'd rather provide that information for them. So you can have a great wedding. It's not about booking with us, it's about providing value.

And I think that's, that's an amazing mindset shift. And I remember HubSpot used to do HubSpot TV, which I used to watch when I lived in Beijing, actually. Um, this would be back in 2015, '16, and they were pioneering this inbound marketing where, as you've rightly said, Chris, you're not talking about what you do, you're talking about the overall decision-making process of the maybe not now buyer but considering to become a buyer, so that they, they become aware of you as a trusted advisor before even then moving into the process of the journey. And on your website, and for anyone that wants to go to YouTube to my channel, which is The Unnoticed Entrepreneur, you can see the quote builder that Chris has got. So he's obviously removing the time it takes for humans to basically do a repeated process. You can also use tools like Proposify, can't you, Chris, which are, you know, online and off the shelf, or now I guess off the web, off the web, no longer on the shelf, but on the web. Chris Troker, you also have on your website you have a chat assistant, an AI assistant. I'm, I'm interested in this, and I'm, I'm sharing screen for anyone that wants to look at this on the YouTube. But for those people listening, you can see Chris has basically got a powered-by-AI chatbot. Chris, tell us how useful this is for you, because it's another way to manage what are effectively repeat questions, aren't they? Because the wedding process is pretty similar, uh, although the bride and groom change, um, and the music may change, the process is the same. So tell us, how do you use this AI chatbot?

Yeah, absolutely. So something that it really helps everyone with is the speed to lead. Uh, buyers nowadays are researching on their own. They're looking to kind of find out more information and make it— make an informed decision so that way they can decide, is this the right fit for me or is it not? So speed to lead is really important for them to get the questions answered right away, and you just need to make it super simple and easy for them to find that information. And what better way to provide that within a chatbot? Now, typical chatbots, you have very predefined if-then sort of statements where you take the person through the journey, but it's predefined. It's, it's you have to walk this path or that path in order to get the information. We realized that if we could take the learning language model, that sort of typical, you know, natural conversation style of ChatGPT from OpenAI, and if we could direct with prompts and have it siloed within information, maybe it can read your website, collect video, or learn it from a PDF. If you could take that collective knowledge and put that into a chatbot, what would that do for your customer service experience? And we realized, one, we can get speed to lead increased by 300%. You no longer need to have a human interaction in order for them to get the information that they're looking for. And second, it's a fantastic tool if they just wanna go in there and ask questions about planning a wedding or what great music examples there are. Even with you testing the chatbot, you're like, uh, I love The Clash, that's my type of music. And the chatbot came back with some examples of, oh hey, here's some great music that you can use with, uh, that goes along this exact style. So chatbots are a great way to make yourself accessible as a business. And then depending on what that's powered by, that can really leverage your speed to lead and then answering customer questions. Again, we're just trying to remove friction and make a better experience for, for the client.

Yeah, and Chris is just sharing here because what I did was I wrote into their chatbot. I said, um, you know, I need some tunes into the chatbot. I didn't say music, I said I need tunes. And it said, of course, music's an important part of any wedding. What kind of music you're looking for? Do you have any specific songs or genre? And I, and I just wrote The Clash. I wasn't talking about my marital status at the moment, I was still talking about music. Uh, and then it says The Clash is a great choice for wedding songs. Their energetic and iconic songs can really get the party started. Some popular songs by The Clash that you might consider including in your wedding: Should I Stay or Should I Go. I'm not sure you'd get away with that one on the wedding night, but you, but you get the idea. So it's starting to have a conversation with me, and I'm in England and, uh, you know, at one time zone, and the AI bot can be talking to me at any time that I need it rather than when someone is in Milwaukee and awake. So, Chris, did you buy this off the shelf or did you make it? Tell us about how you got this bot.

Yeah, absolutely. So this bot is part of another much larger system where myself, a group of entrepreneurs, and a team of developers came together and said, We realize a need for a better CRM system. We need something that, you know, kind of has the powers, the powers and capabilities that all of these big box companies have access to, like the automation, the email, the follow-up. But we also need something that's accessible to the small business owner, the typical entrepreneur. So our team, the developers, the other entrepreneurs kind of crowdfunded this idea. We all put in our time, our effort. We've been beta testing. To help improve this software. So this is a part of a 14-in-1 tool that we use. It's a drag-and-drop automation builder. It's a full-service CRM. This is your entire marketing funnel in a box powered with ChatGPT as far as your AI chatbot. Something cool that's coming down the pipeline here is because we saw the success of this customer service AI chatbot, we're now creating AI chatbot employees. So you basically give your AI employee an assigned task and say, I want you to help close these leads or take them through the step. And there's literally 11 stages of the buying journey. It'll take them through the process. And this is all through text message. So it's a really great way. It's an up-and-coming sort of medium where people want to connect. Email is still very valuable, but we find text message with warm leads is a great way to keep that conversation going and get faster reply rates. But again, it's really just using technology and tools, you know, to leverage your business and be better. I think that's what we're looking to do.

Yeah, and I love that because a big part of my driving mission with this show is to find tools and tech that basically democratize the business so that smaller companies and entrepreneurs can compete with bigger companies who are by and large often wrestling with integration with legacy systems, you know, buyer processes and so on. And as nimble businesses, we can embrace these new tools as you're doing, or in your case, actually building those tools out. And you can compete, you know, personalization at scale. And as you say, your time speed to lead massively reduced. Brilliant. I love that.

Chris, thank you so much.

Yeah, you're welcome. Um, I'm assuming that the AI bots are not yet going to be on site doing the disco. I think you're pretty I'm sure still going to have you there and your team. Chris, sounds like a textbook case. Can you tell me one thing that you'd suggest I don't do? One thing, one mistake that you've made that you think you'd tell me that I should be careful of making?

Absolutely. I think as business owners, we're constantly taking calculated risk. We are trying to make a short-term sacrifice for a long-term gain. So, we're always trying to, you know, consider these variables and What are my outcomes? What are my goals? What am I trying to achieve? What's the friction that it'll take to get there? One mistake that I, I had was I didn't strike while the iron was hot. Early on in the DJ company, we had a lot of interest in our service at our price point, but I didn't have the team to fulfill the service. And we even had some obstacles and hiccups along the way, a few DJs who just didn't meet our service expectations, things like that that you kind of learn along the way. But from that, it's a valuable learning experience. We are able to now service more weddings than we did back then with better customer service with a smaller team because we now leverage the technology and tools. But the overreaching mistake is you have to strike while the iron is hot. You really have to. If you see an opportunity and you feel excited about it, you have to go for it.

Right.

Just try it. You have to, because then you'll never question Okay, should I have done this? Was this right? What could have been if I had done this? So for anyone who's listening, watching, waiting to take that next step, focus and take action. We'll be back after a quick break.

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That's great, Chris. And I think that my, my kind of caveat to that is to try and make sure you get some money from a customer in advance because you can solve any problem if you've got cash. The problem is if you go for an opportunity but you're unfunded and if you don't have the funds yourself, and you don't manage to get the customer to pay, you end up really in a financial no man's land. So being brave and embracing those opportunities, absolutely. But my only caveat is to expand with enough resources to get to the other side of the chasm. Otherwise, it can be really, really uncomfortable.

Absolutely. There is that challenge, especially when it comes to entrepreneurs first starting out. We typically have more time than we do have money. And for those, I typically recommend, hey, start building your network and making friends, build relationships until that money can come in. But luckily, what you mentioned, collect that money upfront. You have to collect deposits for weddings so that can help fund that next level. So I think that's a great caveat to add into it.

Yeah, always try and get the customer to pay. That's the best investor in any business is a customer. Chris, a piece of advice from you, a number one tip you've built the DJ business in Milwaukee, and you've got another company as well. We're not talking about that today because I'm really fascinated by the niche and how you've built out the process and the automation. So what would be a piece of advice? What really moves the needle, do you think, as an entrepreneur in terms of getting noticed and building business leads?

When it comes to going from unnoticed to well-known, I think it really, really matters based on the relationships and the networks that you build for yourself. So for us with the wedding DJ service, we decided to begin nurturing and building relationships with other venues in the area. And in addition, we wanted our customer service to be so on point that couples just raved about us because we needed to build, you know, really great 5-star reviews just to start and then hopefully build off from that. So this, this idea behind using leveraging relationships And partnerships in order to move to that next level. Now we have basically an unofficial sales, you know, force that is out promoting our service, recommending us to other couples, getting referrals all the time that we realize, wow, this is the right area to spend our marketing dollars. For every thank you card or little gift that we give to someone else, that is going to come back tenfold as opposed to your traditional let's put an ad on Facebook or Instagram, or let's run another TikTok ad. I really, really believe to go from unnoticed to well-known, you need to leverage your network and build relationships.

That's wonderful. And to have, as you say, a referral network, which are all these venues plus all the wedding couples, that's amazing. Um, Chris, I did say I was going to give you a little— an idea of how you can double your money. Would you like to hear that now or after you've talked about your book choices and podcast choices?

Whenever you're ready, Jim. I can't wait.

Please tell me now. All right. Well, let's do your podcast choices first and then I'll give you my sage idea for you, which may sound a bit pessimistic. But tell us then, what would be your podcast or book that you're loving at the minute?

Absolutely. So, I'm really enjoying Alex Hormozi's $100 Million Offers. I think the book series really dives deep into what value is as an equation. It's taking that, you know, how long does it take for me to get it? What's the likeliness that I'm going to achieve this versus how much effort do I need to put in and what is it going to cost me? And that creates your value equation. So I think the way that he positions and explains how to create an irresistible value, valuable offer, and then how do you scale that, I find that his information is so valuable. He dives deep into a lot of different topics and I think he breaks it down in such a very simple, simplistic way where the everyday person can really understand and see the success on the struggles, the obstacles that he had and how he overcame them. Literally anything is possible if you put your mind to it.

Yeah, I think, and he had the largest book launch ever, right? With his book and the podcast and yeah, it's a phenomenal story. So, thank you for that, Alex Hormozi. And apparently, his wife, Leila, apparently has a very good podcast as well.

Wow, fantastic.

So Chris, I did mention— don't take this the wrong way— but if you sold the divorce DJ— I mean, let's face it, there are half of all marriages don't last, and I'm sure that the marriages that you DJ for do last, but there must be All these people having parties. A divorce DJ, it's got a nice ring to it, don't you think? The DDJ.

Absolutely, absolutely. And people want to celebrate it. You know, marriage can be one of the happiest days in your life, and divorce can also be one of the happiest days of your life. It's kind of like people say they bought a boat, you know, they loved it the first day they bought it and the day that they sold it. So it's kind of a perspective and perception thing. But it's funny that you mentioned divorce because Being in business for a while, because we build relationships and networks, we've actually had the opportunity— so not a divorce party, but second marriages. We come in and they loved us so much at their first wedding. They didn't love their partner so much, but they loved us as a DJ. They have invited us back to their second or third wedding, which has been fantastic. But of course, we are proud to say that basically 99% of our wedding couples actually stay together. But of course, later down in life when they need something like a divorce DJ, I feel like we could definitely benefit them and, you know, kind of take that sad moment and turn it into a hype party.

Chris, I can see a whole customer lifetime value equation going on here. You've got the— then you could do christenings and bar mitzvahs and then, you know, graduations and weddings. And you can have basically the same playlist sort of modified by the decade, couldn't you? And then when they die, you'd have like a collection at the wake of all of their favorite tunes. Chris Troka, I think we've just doubled, if not quadrupled, the size of your DJ business. If people want to find out more about you and are probably tired of my rather sad entrepreneurial ideas but are loving yours, where would they find you, Chris?

Sure, people can find me on Facebook and LinkedIn by the name Chris Troka. They can also go to visit my website. You can check out the wedding DJ service at mupdjs.com, um, as well to check out some of the Um, marketing side and the technology that we implement in a lot of our businesses, feel free to head on over to focus-biz.com to find out more about the agency side of what we do.

Chris Troka, that's T-R-O-K-A, by the way, um, for anyone dashing to find him on their website browser. Thank you for joining me on The Unnoticed Entrepreneur and shedding light on a whole new area of entertainment and entrepreneurship.

Thank you so much, Jim. It was a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Well, thank you as well to Chris for sharing, you know, an insight into a whole sort of area, but also his decision-making about going into a niche and really also how intelligent he's been about automation and processes and getting speed to lead. And I, I suspect we've possibly doubled his business, if not more, with our, our idea about a, you know, a birth-to-grave music experience. So you never know what you're going to learn on this show. Thank you for joining me, Jim James, on The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. I hope you've enjoyed it. Do please leave a review and rate this on your player and share it with a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur. And of course, if you've got a wedding and you're anywhere near Milwaukee, give Chris a ring and I'm sure they will do a great job for you. Thanks for listening to me, Jim James, your host of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. And until we meet again, just encourage you to keep on communicating.