Episode 109: Surging Towards Growth with Greg Scully

I have a new name for the show, by the way.

What's that?

The Profit Surge podcast.

Dude, I'm a genius. Oh, my God. Who invited this guy? Dude, we are rolling.

Barry, do you think a rebrand is in order for the name of the show?

No way.

You crazy.

Oh, man, really?

Darth Vader, what about you? Oh, no.

Everyone's saying no. All right, bad idea.

Let me ask my wife first. Hey, hon, do you think we should rename the show? Oh, hell no. That's what I thought.

Now.

Wow. All right, so you know what?

Screw it.

We're going to stick with the Profit first podcast.

Boom. And we're going to do episode 109.

Yeah.

Oh, geez, Briton man, the energy.

Your face is red.

Is it red? Is it red? I did.

I did.

Wow.

I do some Jack.

Welcome to the show, everyone. You're in for it. Hope you got your seven point harness strapped in. I'm Chris Curran. I'm the founder of Fractal Recording and the Soon Podcast Engineering School.

And the mystic show and the mystic host and I. I'm Mike Malowitz, the author of Profit First.

Yes.

And Serge Newly.

Sorry.

Thanks for ruing that, man. And Serge. And it's available on Amazon right now. And I'm joined in the studio by Christina Bulldog.

Hey there, friend.

Oh, I get it, Chris. You were doing Surge to the beat of the music. I thought you were just revealing the book name. Before I could do the pinnacle, I was. I was at the threshold moment. You're listening to the Private first podcast. This is a show where we explore all elements of profitability which may hint, hint, even include. Hint, hint. Surging your business forward today.

Was that a hint?

Yeah. No, that was not a hint. Just seems like it was a hint. That was a subliminal message.

Of course.

I did not say the word hint. Chris, what can I find out about us or listen to?

You can hear us in any app which has podcasts, including itunes, Stitcher, tune in Radio, and you might want to surge your way over to the website profit first, podcast.com and all our previous episodes are there. Seriously, I was happy to hear that someone really loved our hundredth episode. Remember when we did the Intro to the 100th episode and we totally went off the hook?

And.

And even Mike Malitz said, yeah, Mike Malitz was like, dude, I think we went too far.

That was too much. That was too much.

I said, no way. So go back, listen to episode 100 and this is great.

What?

And just if you don't know, we Basically interview an expert. We talk about profit, and then we. We. After that, each of us gives our takeaways on what we learned. And that's how this works. Because revenue is good. Revenue is yeah. Oh, yeah. But profit is hell yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

So. And sometimes it's an expert. Sometimes it's someone that has successfully implemented profit first sharing their story and hopefully encouraging you to follow suit. And sometimes it's someone just starting out. And today's episode is interesting. Greg Scully reached out to us. Apparently an uber fan.

Yes.

He listen. He listen. He listens to. He binge listens to this. He's read and listened to all my books. He's a fan of Chris's. He listens to the mystic show. He even said he would buy a CD if Christina had one. And her eyes went. Her eyes went wide open. She's like, I'm making a CD tonight. Of course, profit. And so in Greg's case, he discovered Serge and thinks there's an opportunity for his business. So we're gonna explore actually how to search your business forward. That's why you perhaps, even though I didn't say the word hint, hint, perhaps you heard the hint, hint. But, Chris, first tell me what you've been up to. My brother.

You know, I am just psyched about summertime. And it's our first summer here in Colorado Springs. And during the day, sometimes it can get pretty hot. The sun is direct. You know, being at 6,680ft elevation, the actual direct sun is more powerful than at sea level. I don't know if you know that. It's not just the air that's thinner up here. It's. It's. The sun is more powerful and it's considered the high desert. So that's why I'm gonna rent a horse and. And dress up as Clint Eastwood and just, you know, roam the hills, I think.

And you can play that America, America song, Horse with no Name.

I'll be blasting our podcast to the masses.

Nice.

What have you been.

What do you guys. I love it. So, Christine, what you been up to? Anything?

You know, I've been going to a lot of concerts this summer. Me and Alex, we've been going up to Bethel woods in New York.

Oh, okay.

And it's. I love that venue. It's very, like, nature esque.

Who'd you see most recently?

We. Well, most recently we went to see Steve Wynwood and Steely Dan.

Oh, right.

Which was interesting. And then before that, we went to see Journey, and in a couple weeks, we're going to see Shinedown, so.

Wow.

Yeah. It's nice to be have someone to do things with again.

I love Journey, by the way. Was Journey awesome?

Oh, they were great. They recruited a new guy that sounds exactly like the. Oh, God. What's the lead singer? Yeah. Thank you. Exactly like him. It was amazing.

And so. Yeah, so Christina's off the market, guys.

So she's for like, seven months now.

Yeah, I know, but. I know, but some people are like, hey, you know, tell me about Christina. She's off the market. She's going to concerts with her beau. Who had that. You had your first fight?

We did. We had our first, like, big world adult fight. And, you know, it kind of reassured me because we kept it clean. We didn't do any name calling. And I was like, wow, we really have respect for each other if we can keep it like this.

Yeah. Like, what couple doesn't fight? So that's freaking awesome.

Right? So you got a while to go before you get to the level of, you know, the War of the Roses type thing.

Right, Exactly.

Right, Right. We're swinging from chandeliers and trying to kill each other. For me, I was going to share. Well, basically, I wanted to share. For the update, here is we now have furniture on the deck. And Kristen's, like, so jacked about. We always had furniture, but it was cruddy stuff. Now we have, like, a nice couch out there. And I'm thinking about putting a television out there because I'm a college football fanatic. My school that I refer to as the Hokies. And so I'm subscribed to see every single game, but I've always watched the inside. And then, like, no one else here cares about football. So my kids are like, oh, daddy, you have to watch football. And my wife's like, can we put on more of the roses? I'm like, oh, my God. I just needed my own place for football. I'm claiming that deck. Even when it's November and it's freezing outside, Obviously they're shivering, watching full play.

You better tell her because that's going to play into her decor technique.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's already been a conversation, and. And here's how I got past it. Just real quick. Oh, I brought out. I have a projector. So I brought out a projector and I hooked up to a laptop and played her favorite movie. She's like, oh, this is actually very nice.

Nice.

Played it well.

You have setting up a man deck instead of a man cave man.

Exactly. Because I Can't have a man cave with flowers. The man cave is our office of now seven people.

Yeah.

So one more thing before we bring on our esteemed guest. I know. I want to thank our corporate partners, but also we had a shout out. Right.

Yeah. Well, our shout out is to Greg.

Oh. From our esteemed guest. Why don't you just read a few sentences from his email?

Yeah, no, he. He had a little note about Serge. Actually, he. Before the book even came out, he had listened to the first chapter of that bonus episode that we did and it resonated with him and he just said that kind of positioning is exactly what they have in mind for their niche. And he feels that they may be even a little early to the concept as Mike was when writing the book. That's kind of what sparked us talking to him about his business.

Yeah. So that email was awesome. I love getting stuff like that and is the reason Greg's coming on the show in a second. I want to thank Fundera, Nextiva Receipt bank and Fundbox. They are all sponsors of the show. We'll give you more details on them in just a little bit. Greg and his wife Kim have been operating Magpie Clothing Exchange as a storefront in Palmer, Alaska and online since 2014. Their goal is to transition into full time entrepreneurship with an emphasis on E commerce. Right. I mean, that's where the opportunities are at. But he hasn't been an entrepreneur his entire life. In fact, he took a little break for about 25 years between projects and being a lead vocalist for Alaska's most middle aged singers.

Yeah.

Punk rock band. And is now all in with Magpie Clothing Exchange. He. Gregory, originally reached out about a month ago. We were booking him again on the show and we had some tweaks we had to make. He was very flexible. We appreciate that. And his initial question about cash management was addressed by himself. So I want to find out how. And now he wants to talk about Serge. So, Greg, I want to welcome you to our show.

Welcome. Here I am.

We can barely hear you here. Put your. Can you hear us?

Yeah, I can hear you. Can you hear me?

Oh, there we go.

Put your. Pull your ear. Push it. Can you hear us? Because. Put the speaker a little closer to your ear, if you would.

Is it the speaker?

Yeah, real close.

The mic is like right on my lips.

Yeah, that's perfect. Now.

That'S exactly how I hold my microphone when I'm singing.

Nice.

Oh, do you really? How long have you been up?

Hold on a second, Greg. Yeah, I. Yeah, yeah. Don't put, don't really keep the mic that close.

Okay.

Yeah, keep it where you had it. You're fine.

I tried to. I tried to clip it to my lovely shirt and apparently that threw off the whole thing.

No, no, it's fine.

It was a build up.

Not, not the mic, the speakers. He was making a deal.

Yeah, he was making a joke.

Your ear, it was, it was a horrible joke.

Oh, my hearing. Yeah.

Oh, jeez.

The opportunities missed. So here, here's what we gotta do. First, I gotta know about your punk rock band. Like, what is up with that?

It's been about nine, almost 10 years. We're met, we're Evil Ted and the thick Pink Antiseptic is the name of our band and.

Pink Antiseptic. Okay.

And yeah, we're, we're just 80s, three chord punk, plug and play stuff.

Okay, so, so you're doing covers then?

Oh, no, we do a few covers. No, we do mostly originals. Yeah.

Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, that's awesome. I love three chord rock or punk or three chord anything, because then I can do it myself. So you opened a storefront Magpie Clothing Exchange in Palmer, Alaska. And I know you have a retail outlet. Are you getting enough volume there to sustain the business or is E commerce a necessity now?

E commerce is not a necessity. We're not in the sense that we're not relying it on any cash flow because it's not producing any. Okay. So our brick and mortar is what is keeping the doors open. And I knew E commerce was hard, but then we're very niche. And then when we started to go down a road of talking to some people about SEO and getting traffic, I found out, you know, just how small of a niche we are when you really start to look at like adwords and search results. So instead of just throwing money at advertising, we're working very hard to do the organic approach. So.

All right, well tell me first, how Nichy are you? Who exactly are you serving with your store?

Our brick and mortar were a nice as new women's resale store with an emphasis also on sustainable fashion. And the sustainable fashion part of it is what the niche is and what sustainable fashion is. It's mostly fair trade, a lot of organic, a lot of small batch. It's ethically produced. Think of Whole foods as compared to Albertsons.

It's gotcha.

It's that side of the fashion industry. Some people are calling it slow fashion, fast. Fashion is the antithesis of what we're about. And for us, the resale side of it is sustainable in itself. So we marry the two together. Selling new and used clothing under the umbrella of sustain because, you know, it's part of the reduce, reuse, recycle type thing.

I gotcha. So you said as nice as new. Does that mean these are previously owned clothing outfits, correct?

Yeah, probably 80, 85% of what we have on the floor, we buy from the public and just resell. So similar to a Plato's Closet or a Buffalo Exchange or some of the.

But I don't know how big your market is for such a niche product. Sustainable fashion is. Can you generate, can you purchase enough locally to supply your store adequately?

Well, we're not buying. We'll buy from the public. Really. Any brands we actually sell mostly on condition is the number one thing that, that drives whether or not we buy something from the public. It's just that it's our new inventory that is exclusively categorized as sustainable by its, you know, by how it's made or who makes it. Get what I'm saying?

Yeah, I do, I do. Now give me a sense for the size of your business. I hope you're comfortable. I should have asked you prior to going on air here, but can you share kind of the volume of sales that you have annually and just so we get a sense of the makeup of your store?

Oh, yeah, we're. We're small. The first year we weren't open a whole year. I think gross sales was like 66,000. Second year was in the 70s. And I don't. We're kind of. We're actually flat to just barely up for 2016.

Okay. And so this isn't a full time endeavor yet. I believe you're working part time elsewhere. Right?

I still work full time corporate. My lovely wife is the face of the store and is here the bulk of the time. We get some help from our daughters as well. And I work at the store occasionally too. I spend most of the time trying not to be the awkward middle aged guy working in a women's clothing store.

Right. So a young woman comes in. Who's the guy there? Yeah, I've had.

Yeah, who's that? Who's the creepy gray haired guy behind the counter?

Yeah, B, when I. I know. Oh yeah, yeah. That's not.

It might be all in my head, I don't know. You know, our regular customers, they don't care. But yeah, sometimes I feel like, oh, I can't believe what kind of vibe I might be sending out or.

I know it's true though, Christine.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know, I'm not a creepy dude, so.

No, no, you know, no, I'm not.

A creepy dude either. I just don't want to be perceived this way.

Are you calling Greg?

I'm just kidding. Greg.

So I think do that though. They do look around and like anybody who's a little off, they're like, oh, creepy. Like you can't get.

Dude, you don't have to be off anything.

Well, it's not that I'm off, I'm just out of context.

Right, exactly right. We're making our guests defend himself. Greg, I've been there. I've been there. I, I went to a college campus to speak and I'm walking down all these co eds, right? And here comes this middle aged, 45 year old guy. I felt so disgusting because they're all 18 year old girls, right? And they, and I've also spoken at women's events. And you walk into the room, everyone looks over and like, what's going on? And are you the creepy gawky guy or are you someone else? And it's a real challenge. It's a real challenge. So I think Craig, what you're doing is kind of stepping aside is probably the appropriate thing. So how do, what's your, the best thing you're doing for the business? How are you contributing to the business?

I do most of the social media, I do the bookkeeping, I just.

Social media pay all of you wearing the clothing, right?

Yeah, yeah, A lot of selfies of me and tank tops. Write copy for ads. Yeah. All the online advertising. Yeah, I do basically most of the back office work.

Gotcha, gotcha. So you originally reached out and you said, hey, we got a cash flow issue going on. And then we had to delay you unfortunately. And you were very kind to be flexible, but you said, hey, I figured out actually some hacks around my cash flow. Now I want to talk about surge. Let's talk real quickly. How did you address your, what was your cash flow issue and how did you fix it? And then let's get into the surge.

We're very old school. We spent about a year putting business plan together, you know, ended up with an SBA loan. Drew off of that for a year and a half. And then of course it turns into a note. You know, once it became a note, we had this fixed P and I, which was, you know, 800 bucks a month. And so before we closed the note, you know, I took X amount out as working capital. And as we're still trying to, you know, grow the Business, we. We would have to dip into the working capital. And what we ended up doing is really is we basically went all in. And with some personal finance hacking, we're paying off the business loan to increase basically our cash flow. So that that debt service, it's not going to be erased. It is being basically refinanced in a separate way. So it's not as much of a cash flow issue for us.

I gotcha. I gotcha. And what size loan did you take out for your business?

We owe 47 on it. So, yeah, I think we were allowed to do like 72, but we came in at like 60 total or something like that. We actually came in under what we were approved for.

Okay. But we owe 47. So that's definitely. And so you're right now how you got around in the short term, or perhaps longer term is you're using some personal financing and so forth.

But clearly, yeah, we're basically all in now. I mean, instead of going all in by doing like an equity thing out of your house on day one, we had basically a bridge loan until this point.

Right. And now that's your situation. You're all in. Meaning you're using personal finances, you've inserted your own capital, your own money to get this business to where it is today.

Right? Yeah.

Okay, so 70,000 won't pay back 47,000. This is how it works. So we got to grow this business. You discovered surge, you started reading it, and I know you have some questions. Why did research resonate with you and what can we do to get your business growing?

Well, the way fashion is going to go, it's going to revert back. This is, of course, my opinion. It's going to revert back to what it was, you know, 50 years ago, before globalization and we started outsourcing labor to everywhere, and everything just was just made cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. So, you know, it's similar to how food moved. People have found that, you know, because something is cheap and immediately available and satisfies your immediate want, it may not necessarily be good for you. And the same thing we feel is going to happen with fashion, that the appetite for $3 T shirts. Once people are more educated on the, you know, second tier effects of their buying decisions, it'll revert back to buying less, buying higher quality, and buying longer term. So, you know, when organic food used to be the little corner of the Albersons, now there's Whole Foods across the nation. To some extent, we feel fashion's going to go the same way that There'll be a much bigger market for what is, what is now a very small market for what is generally called sustainable fashion. Well, let me ask you. That's where we think we're ahead of the curve of the, of the market.

So I don't even know if this answers the question, but I wonder if it's facing our audience when it comes to thinking something's happening and improving it out. Those are two separate steps. I'm thinking of the electric car. Right now. The electric car is what I call an imminent wave. I talk about this in surge, something that's immediately upon us. I think if we had a discussion around the electric car five years ago when Tesla's starting up. Ten years ago, you know, ten years ago the electric car was a golf cart. It was a theory. Five years ago, you have a big player now trying to get into it, but it wasn't proven. But now we see that in any neighborhood. I bet you in Alaska, where you are in your own town, perhaps there's a Tesla driving around. There's a couple in this town. And Tesla's now got 400,000 orders. There is clear momentum that the early adopters have taken on this product and they're sticking with it. And now the secondary market, 400,000 orders, is coming in and that's only secondary. There's bigger markets. These are the laggard early adopters, if you will, who bought the Tesla. The opportunity in electric cars I would argue exists now is the big time. All the different ripple effects and needs. Do you see, Greg, that when it comes to sustainable clothing, do you see early adopters? Is there communities out there that are buying this type of clothing now and are sticking with it, meaning other people look at them saying, you could have got a $3 T shirt, you bought what? And that early adopter is willing and able to stick through their purchase and actually buy more clothing like that?

Yeah, but it seems to be mostly overseas. It's much more popular in England and Europe and also specifically in Australia. Just as accepted in the marketplace with some, you know, multi million dollar brands that are doing very well over here. It is just starting to catch on. And what we see, it's very fragmented. There's a lot of very small designers coming up doing very small runs. So they're not only producing it, getting it sewn or working across, you know, getting it made in India and getting it imported, and then they're also trying to sell it online. So everybody. So we're in a very small niche with a lot of fragmented Players all fighting for what is now a considerably small audience. So we're thinking that we would be the marketplace. We would be the Amazon of sustainable fashion. So we would, we would neither be making them.

Right.

We would be more business to business. We are the go to marketplace for women's sustainable fashion online. If you do that, specifically online.

Right. That, so that eradicates or supplants your need for a retail store. Do you see yourself trying to run both?

Possibly. I mean we, you know, in our three five year plan. Yeah, we have plans to open other stores. You know, we've got a three year lease call coming up on this in, in the spring and we'll evaluate and say, hey, well what are we going to do? Because we're not killing it here by any means, you know.

Right, right.

And yeah, we'll make decisions. She would move. Should we shutter it? Maybe do like a fashion truck instead? Get really niche about it and shows or blah blah, blah. I think online is, you know, you could do that from anywhere. So that's always been a long term, you know, passive income type goal was to, was to be successful online.

And do you have a sense just to reverse engineer this? Do you have a sense of the revenue or profit that the company must generate for this to be a business that supports your lifestyle? What number do we need to hit, do you know?

No, I don't know. It would be, I mean, just quick margin calculation. Yeah, it would be a, I mean you'd have to have top line sales of over you know, a million plus for a reasonable, you know.

Right, for reasonable. Yeah. And is that your objective? I mean, not to have a million plus necessarily, but for the business to support your lifestyle, that for your wife and perhaps even yourself, that you don't have to do the corporate job anymore.

It's part of a larger plan. It's not the only part of the plan that we're relying on for income. You know, and this goes back to some of the larger things like start with the why. I mean we're very passionate about.

Right.

You know, the reasons behind why we think people should, you know, be more conscious about whatever they consume. But at the same time I'm also looking at real estate investment and that might be what produces the income more. So that allows us to pursue what we really feel strongly about. You see what I'm saying? So.

No, I totally see you're saying, let, let me share because we're starting to run tight on time here. Let me share. Kind of the approach for you to kind of ponder. Not kind of for you to ponder. The. The first thing when it comes to defining a business is start with why. That's a book by Simon Sinek. It's a great book on purpose and it's going to play into the strategy I'm about to share. Additionally, many businesses just say, I want to grow without knowing the number. We got to figure out the number. And you can back calculate into your revenue by picking your lifestyle. So if you say to support our lifestyle, if we had a combined income, I'm just picking an easy round number. $100,000 annually. If we had that kind of income, how big is our business need to be? And you can use profit first to back calculate that. You could say, you know, our owners pay, we're anticipating will be 20% of our top line revenue. Therefore 100,000. You reverse. It ends up being. I got to run the math now. I think it's 2 million or whatever.

500 now.

500. 500. 500 you said? Yeah, I should say like 7 billion. Okay, yeah, 7 billion. 7 billion. You got to reverse engineer, right? So then you know what your revenue target needs to be. Then we go through the surge process. And surge is five steps, Greg, and it's an acronym. S stands for separate. The nice thing is you've done this. We separate out a target audience, but you need to find out where they are congregating. When you pick out a community, the only way you can communicate with that community is to know where they're congregating. So you separate out the group. One of the triggers I wrote down, I said, they may not be in the US Yet. England may be your opportunity. The next thing is to do the U stage, which stands to unify stands for unify. What is the need they have that's not being served? How can you paddle in front of that? Does the English community, for example, have a thirst for American clothing? American clothing designers that are sustainable, that may be an appeal. Sometimes even, you know, you're in Alaska, there can be some appeal to that. I was working with some entrepreneurs in Jamaica and said, let's leverage the Jamaican culture. There's appeal to that and it makes you distinct. Let's leverage the reggae community and use that to sell into the American market is what they were trying to pursue. So unified means there's a certain need they have. Can you satisfy it? And can you do it in a distinct way that catches their attention? Step three in Surge is the rally cry. And the beautiful thing is you already have it. The rally cry is what do you stand for? And the reason this is so important is that when clients start buying your clothing and they see that you're not wearing the $3 t shirt, but you're wearing this, you know, maybe $30 sustainable top, they will get attacked because the other people, the people that didn't buy will say, why are you buying that? You could, for three bucks, you can get this great little T shirt that I'm wearing. So your audience needs to be prepared to defend themselves. Now, a super niche community like this that buys sustainable closing clothing already has a reason, but they may not have it concisely packaged. When you sell your products, this community, you want to educate them and saying, congratulations on buying our product. You are supporting sustainability. Do you know as a result, the environmental impact is xyz and you bullet point it out, literally bullet pointed out, so that when they are attacked for the decision, they have something to rally around, a purpose that's congruent with you. It makes people very loyal and it helps them convert those attackers into actual customers of yours because they can convey that message. Then G stands for gather. As you start selling into, we'll say the European market in England, we sell a lot by the way, into Australia as our company. Right. So we're learning that market more and more. Gather knowledge, ask the customers, what do you like about us? What don't you like about us? More importantly, observe their behavior. When you get customers buying repeatedly, you are hitting something, you're hitting that perfect note with them that's triggering them to come back. Those are the best customers to interview. Repeating customers, particularly in your market, Greg, are the best customers to target. And then you start interviewing them. Why are you buying from us? And you do more of what they like, they become your on the street marketing team. And the last stage is expansion. And this is the stage that I encourage you to consider last. I don't know the real estate you're considering, but there's a risk if you're considering going to some real estate investing that that will take up your time and it'll actually dilute your ability to further your sustainable clothing business and let the competition step in. Now, I know the real estate may be the big opportunity for you financially, but maybe then you have to go all in on that one and really build an established presence there as opposed to trying to do two things at once. So that's in three or four minutes. That's the surge process. Did that kind of resonate with you?

Oh, yeah, absolutely, yeah. I mean, I read the book, I'M on the second reading. The wife's gone over, I think once. So honestly not much there that I had that I didn't already think about except for the E, so.

And let me ask you about the, the England English market. England. Do you, do you even think that's viable? Do you think you could go into England and shake some things up via E Commerce? I'm not saying you got to be flying and living out there. You may have to make a couple trips out there though to learn the market.

That would be terrible.

You'd have to hate the travel, right?

Yeah, my wife would hate that idea. You know, it's something online. We don't even offer international shipping because on the online store we've only been really focusing on it since just before the holidays of last year. And probably just as an easy way out, let's not offer international shipping. It's one less thing we need to worry about and we might need to revisit that and start poking around with some social media advertising or at least posting specifically to different geographical reasons to kind of gauge. Because I think that's a very good point because there's, it's super product but it's, there's, there's, the batches are so small that.

Right.

How does anybody ever see this stuff?

Right, right.

You know, when you just got a, you know, an industry full of small mom and pop, you know, self funded entrepreneurs making really cool stuff that they just can't be found. Yeah.

At the early stage I find that testing out multiple things is a good thing. Long term you gotta become more focused. But I would encourage you to try international shipping. I would try setting up a dedicated webpage saying are you in England question mark. We got products based in America that are perfect for the English community and start speaking to them. And I'm not just saying this as a concept. I'm a co owner in a manufacturing business. We manufacture leather products. And Thailand is a big area that buys from us. Australia is massive. Actually that's probably our biggest customer base, Japan. And as we're discovering this, we're now interviewing and we have been interviewing clients out there and saying, why are you buying from us? And part of it is there's a mystique to an American. In this case, these are American made, American made products. And they said you're the first American business that actually caters to us. Like you, you will actually ship to Japan and we'll try to accommodate some of the customs regulations and so forth. So perhaps that's the big Tip and takeaway. Maybe it's a small adjustment to your business, but I think there may be fascinating insights. So that's the thought I want to leave you with. Let's try to cater to England, for example, and to see what we get. And if nothing happens, nothing ventured, nothing gains. You know, we'll learn and then we'll move on. But I think if you ignore that market the surge model identifies. We got to pick an early market that's already moving the Tesla owners. And if you don't see it populated around here, it's still too early. You're trying to sell to autonomous cars, cars that drive themselves. It just ain't ready yet. It's great. It's here in theory. Google's working on it, but it just ain't. Doesn't have traction yet. So I want to move a little bit more toward where we do have traction.

All right. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

All right, Greg, we. We gotta go. Believe it. Not time. Race by. Because I was just talking rambling.

Oh.

So, Greg, where can people listen to the show? Pick up some Magpie clothing right now.

Magpie clothing exchange.com.

Okay. And we'll have that in the show links. Greg, thanks for joining us and thanks for being such a super fan of all the stuff we're doing here.

Oh, yeah.

I love what you guys do. It speaks me perfectly, so I'm all in.

Thanks, Greg.

Thanks, Greg.

Take care.

Great job, man.

Very dog sledding. I want to go dog sledding.

Yeah, I've never done.

Have you ever done dogs?

No, I never have.

Chris ever go dog sledding?

I've been to Alaska, but I have never done dog sledding.

I've never been to Alaska. I've been to every.

It's ridiculously fast. Oh, you probably muted me.

No, we mean it's ridiculously fast. We mean we.

A buddy of mine, we had like, four or five, you know, domestic dogs between us, and he had like, a junior sled, and we hooked all the dogs up and like, hey, let's go dog sledding. And when you try and step off the rails, even with dogs that have no idea what they're doing, you might be going like 15, 17 miles an hour.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. I mean, they're clipping along. It's. It's, It's. It's quite amazing. But, yeah, it's. Those are real athletes there now.

Now you can deliver your sustainable clothes via dog sled. That'll really impress.

Delivery method.

Yeah. Going across the ocean's hard, but yeah. Well, so we're gonna discuss what we learned about in a second. Chris, Christine and I will do a recap, but first, I thank our corporate partners, nextiva.

Thank you.

Who else?

Fundera.

Yep, that's right.

Receipt bank.

Yes. And there's one more.

Fund box.

Fund box. I want to thank them all. I want to give a particular shout out to Nextiva.

Yeah.

Nextiva is sponsoring Profitcon 2016. I hope you're coming.

Yes.

Yep, they're doing that. They're doing some amazing stuff. They give away stuff. They're just. There's a fun group. ProfitCon 2016 is happening September 30th, is.

It September 29th through October 1st.

Yeah. So, yeah, exactly. So go, go to profit first professionals.com. click on upcoming events. Get your ticket. We're going to talk all about profit. We got some amazing guests have turned around their businesses with profit. We have experts speaking. I'll be saying a couple of keynotes.

There's a magician.

There's a. Oh, yeah, there's a little surprise magician. There's cool things and nextiva is going to be there.

And I have a clip. I have a sound clip that encapsulates the energy of profit. Khan. Yes. Good timing, bruh.

That was a brat.

Nice, dude.

Lay it on me. What did you learn today?

Well, I like the fact that Greg is up in Alaska. I've been to Alaska once and there's not a lot of people up there. That is. It's just nature. It's really nice. I mean, there are towns, there are cities. Obviously, Anchorage is a big city, but it's. I love the fact that he's there doing what he wants to do, living out his mission and making it work with what's there. And he's. You can tell, he's savvy enough. He's thinking, you know, branching out online. He's not rushing into anything. He's kind of just taking it slow. He's. Well, he's reading your books to make sure he does it right. I just like what he's doing and I'm fascinated by it. And plus, we have magpies here in Colorado Springs, so I like the name of his company.

It is a cool name. My takeaway was totally outside of what we were talking about, is he's a mega fan of our show, and I always expect someone just like me will like the show who's hyper and can't stop talking. And he is much more calculated and thought out. And I think that's a cool balance that what we're Doing here is appealing to different types of mindsets and it's not just clones of Mike out there that are hyper. Yeah, yeah. So that I think that was cool. I love, love how niche ified he was. To pick a category that deep is fantastic. My concern is if you're making 70,000, you clearly have a niches, right? You know, you got 70,000 purchase, $70,000 of purchases happening, but you're not hitting the core of the opportunity. You're fitting on the, hitting on the fringe, clearly. So we gotta find that better spot. Maybe it's England.

Yeah, no, I'm focusing on a niche too. And more importantly, speaking to your customers and finding out what they like, what they don't like and then expanding on that to help propel your business forward is huge.

Yeah, I think so. And then, you know, I didn't even know the, the market sustainable clothing existed. It makes sense.

Yeah, it does.

What's it made like? Hemp. Is that the thing? Hemp is the biggest?

Yeah, I think so.

Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. We'll have to find that out in our next episode. Chris.

Yes.

Well, listen, what if people want to leave comments? You give us all that stuff, right?

If you want to leave a comment, I challenge you right now to leave a comment. Go to profitfirstpodcast.com you'll see a bunch of posts of all our episodes. Leave a comment on one, ask a question. You know, call Mike a funny name. You know, maybe. What was your favorite site to see in Alaska? I like, I liked Prince William Sound. And then.

Is it Olympic park in Alaska? Where's that? Olympic? I don't know, I'm just, I'm typing it in.

I never been there. I don't know why he's.

I don't think.

Let me take a moment while I Google.

Yeah. Olympic National Park. Yes, I was right. Oh, I think it's the biggest national park in the world.

At least in the U.S. there you go. So, okay, you can also rate and review this podcast. You know you want to throw Mike Michalowicz five stars. Go ahead. Itunes, stitcher, tunein Radio, wherever you listen to podcasts. That's awesome. And of course we thank all our corporate partners, but we thank most of all the, the organization that's putting on profitcon in September, which is profit first. Professionals. Talk about, you know, mainstreaming something that's a no brainer. This is crazy. This is just, it's like Butterfly.

Here's the deal. I want to talk about Alaska. The Russians when the Russians sold Alaska to the United States for a penny an acre or whatever, they should have consulted with a profit first professional. We have someone in Russia and they would have said, dude, you can make a little more money. That's a pretty nice state up there. The Americans. Listen, the Americans, they pay a lot of money for things. Why don't you charge a little more? But they didn't. And look what happened. Now I'm grateful being an American. I'm just sorry for our Russian comrades. Now, here's the deal. In your business, you are making decisions based upon bank balance accounting. You're making decisions based upon your gut, right? How many times have you said that, like, oh, we should do this, I think we should do that, and I get it. But that becomes the bane of profitability. There is a better way. We've developed a system, it's called profit first, that manages cash. It allows you actually not to change who you are. It works within the parameters of your behavior, but channels your toward more profitability. Now that's the core system. We have the experts, the trainers who stick. Make sure you stick with the system and take your profitability to the highest level possible. So this is what you need to do. Go to profitfirstprofessionals.com, click on the find button. It's real simple. It says find on it. Click on it and then fill out the little form. This is the way we will qualify the best prop first professional to help you out. And I promise you'll get a better deal when you grow your business than the Russians did selling Alaska.

And we'll be far more profitable.

Yes. And my Russian listeners, I. I feel for you. I mean, you could have got more money, but you didn't.

They can get a Russian Profit first professional.

Yeah. And then listen nowhere where you are. Come to ProfitCon, right? ProfitCon 2016 in New Jersey. In New Jersey, which was not bought from the Russians as far as I understand. Go to profitfirstprofessionals.com, click on the upcoming events. Get your ticket now. While they're discounted, we're at the early bird rates. Not much longer. Go there now and then meet us out at this conference and we'll tell more stories about Alaska and Russians.

There you go. Profit first professionals dot com. That's the website. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Christina. Thanks again to Greg Scully and of course everyone over there in the background, Obi Ron Kenobi and the Hawaiian lumberjack. Why aren't there more pictures of the Hawaiian lumberjack?

Yeah, we gotta get More camera shy.

Yeah, we gotta get more. More up here. But now we have Emma, who's called Rookie. Yeah, we got Mo. We have Lisa. We gotta get her nickname. Yeah, we got.

She'll get one.

Yeah, we need some more nicknames, actually. Maybe we should have a contest. Vote for nicknames.

There you go.

Well, thanks, guys. This has been fun as always.

There you go. See you guys. See you next time.

See ya.

Bye.

You know what we should ask is for people to send in sound clips of them grunting.

Oh, that's a good idea.

I held back. I was all ready, but I didn't want to.

Frank, that's what we needed from you. A good grunt, a good Chewbacca.

I did a really good job being reserved.

Can you do a Chewbacca growl real quick? Greg?

That was pretty good.

That was pretty good.

And hey, I think we should all do some grunting. Why not?

Oh.

That'S right.

I blew a gasket.

Greg, we should have done that. You know, we're gonna do this day going forward.

My wife just opened the door. She's like, what the hell?

What the hell's going on?

Of course.

That's why I'm just in the back room at our store.

Yeah. Now, you lot, all six customers out there, they were about to buy a shirt, running away. I told you he was a creepy man.

I told you there's someone in the back room grunting.

Yeah, that's funny. Is that the bathroom?

Exactly.

Oh, Lord.