Episode 40: Website Traffic and Online Booking with Joseph Shemesh and Ethan Anderson

Rollin, you're listening to again. Hopefully. Hopefully you've listened earlier. The Prophet first podcast episode.

If my name was Morty, I would be shouting 40.

Oh.

Ow.

Morty, that's a good rhyme.

Yeah, thanks, Morty.

We got Chewbacca's in the. In the studio, kids.

Morty and Chewie.

Yeah, we got everything.

I think I made a noise like Chewie and you play Chewy at the same time. Same time. That was weird.

I did, bruh. Oh, seriously.

It was like me and my family sitting around a campfire going, do your best.

Your best chewy imitation.

I can't.

Give it to me.

I just did it. I can't do that.

No, do that again. Do that again.

No, not doing that again. Welcome, everyone, to the Profit first podcast. I'm Chris Curran. I'm the founder of Fractal Recording.

And I'm Mike Michalowicz, the author of Profit first and also a voice impersonator for Chewy.

That's pretty good.

Pretty good, right? Yeah.

Better than mine. Yeah, I'll give it.

I want all our guests to come on. I mean, listen, they're getting free pr. It's a. It's a free advertisement for them, effectively. They're. They're cool businesses. We should ask them to do a Chewy invitation when they come on.

Oh, right, right.

Hey, Christine, give me your best Chewy. What the heck?

I gotta get my tongue to roll. Sorry.

Oh, my God. All right, we're gonna have a Chewy.

Contest at the end where we asked Christina to do a Chewbacca imitation instead.

She does something like, she just got married.

All right, enough of that.

Oh, my God.

So we're available as a podcast on. Did you say who you were? Mike Michalowitz?

Yeah, I said I'm the author of Profit first, but I didn't say what this podcast is about. Do you want me share that? Yes, please. So the Profit first podcast, we talk about all angles of profitability, and we kind of do it like the morning zoo. I get that. I get that. But listen, if you just talk about just profit, just the bottom line, but ignore how to get there, you're going to be in trouble. So we talk about it from every single angle.

Yeah, we don't want this to be a boring show. You know what I mean?

I love it.

So anyway, we're available as a podcast on itunes and Stitcher and Tunein Radio and also on the website profitfirstpodcast.com. we have a lot of previous episodes, obviously, 39 previous ones. This is episode 40. And we always have great guests. We always learn a lot and have a lot of fun. Right, Mike Michalowicz?

Yeah. Yeah. And we don't take the usual suspects. That's what I love about our show. So today we have Joseph Simish coming on. You may not recognize that name, but he's gonna tell us about Sea Evolution. We have Ethan Anderson coming on. He has the. He's the founder of a company called My Time. Really interesting kind of angles on ways to drive profitability.

Totally.

And you know who. Who allows us to. To do this show? Who's. Who's supporting us?

Who would that be?

Our trifecta of awesome sponsors.

Amazing sponsors. T sheets, Fundera, who bellied up for a year. By the way, this called. I think I told a few episodes back. I told you guys. They called me and said, we're doing this for a full year. And I'm like, did you draw the right number? Like, no. They're like, yeah, no, we want to do for a year. So T sheets, Funder and nextiva. And nextiva has been with us since day one.

That's right.

And they. They're so awesome sponsors. So we'll talk about them a little later on. But what have you been up to, brah?

You know, I actually. I use Twitter to land a really big guest on one of my other shows. You know, people say, what good is social media? You're just. And yes, social media, normally you're just spraying out your message and praying that something happens. But I actually started a conversation with Bruce Lipton, who's the scientist and author who wrote the Biology of Belief. And I got to interview him on my mystic show, and he killed it. I mean, he just. He brought it. It was so awesome. The topic was basically how to regain full power over your life. Getting really deep. Really awesome. I was so. And it just. It went up recently, and it's just, you know, like, we talk about profit, we talk about business, but, you know, it always comes back to you as an individual. You know, how powerful are you? You know, it's like personal power.

Yeah, it's your thinking, man. You gotta be thinking right? And I think he's also the founder of Lipton Iced Tea.

I don't think so.

Yeah. Christine's like, here comes a lifting joke. So, dude, for me. Yeah.

What have you been up to?

You were about to record the show. I'm like, I gotta eat lunch. I haven't eaten all day. And my wife's like, oh, just take a peanut butter and jelly with you. When you head over to the studio, head down now to the studio as opposed to over. So I'm like, yeah, okay, I'll grab one. The peanut butter. You ever go, you. You open the peanut butter jar? It's like a big one too. It's like, who puts it back in empty? There was nothing there. So I'm like, God. So I have a jelly sandwich, I open the jelly. Same thing in the refrigerator. I open it up, there's nothing in there. It's like, when you're done with it, don't taunt the next guy they're reminding you.

You have to buy more, I guess.

Yeah, it's a good point. Yeah. My kids ate it all, I assume, by the way. So I had. I had oatmeal for lunch. Oh, by the way, like, no one says, have you ever been to any restaurant? We're like, hey, here's our lunch menu. Hamburgers, a blt, oatmeal, perh.

By the way, Mike Michalowicz, who was that female voice with you in the studio?

Oh, did I not introduce Christina?

I don't think so.

Phantom ghost.

She's a ghost.

She's a singer who. A songbird who doesn't have her voice at the moment.

That is true. Hello, everyone.

Cracker boy. Yeah, that's Christina. And what do you want to say, Christina?

Hey, world.

Okay.

She's the chief sanity officer at.

Right. She runs the office at Profit First Professionals. And she's a professional singer, but she's feeling under the weather. So this is her singing the national anthem. So just to give you a sense how her voice is. All right, dude, we gotta get to business, so let's not banter anymore. We have a couple awesome guests. We always have awesome guests because of the unique vantage point they're gonna share. Well, today, right now, you're about to learn from Joseph Simish. He is the CEO of. Of seevolution. That's S E Volution, which is a heat mapping analytical tool. You know, the old days, you used to walk around your house with that black light, looking for the filth and the dirt in your house. Well, now this is like a horrible translation, but now you can do that with your website. You can basically put the black light on your website, see where people are going and what they're doing with your website. It gives you real time insights to how people are using your website, which gives you real time insights to profitability. His name. Oh, the crowd's going wild. Is Joseph Simish. Yeah. Welcome, Joseph.

Hi.

Welcome. You're Terrified.

We're all lounged out now.

So did I. Now am I mispronouncing your name? Is it. It is Simish, right?

No, it's actually Shemish. It's.

Oh my God.

And now I'm gonna feel free to butcher your name.

Y, please. I'm sorry.

And you're pretty vulnerable, so you know.

I am a little bit vulnerable. And you know before the show I asked you like 10 times how do you pronounce it? And I still, I totally messed it up. So sorry. So Joseph, where are you calling in from today?

From West Los Angeles.

Is that where your office is headquartered?

Yes, it is.

Tell us what Sivolution does.

Well, Sivolution is a heat map analytic tool and we designed it to be a tool that will be self explanatory. You don't really need to go to a university to learn it. And everything is overlay on your website. So you can go to it from any page on your website. And it's basically what it does. It shows you how visitor interacting with your website. You see their behavior and, and what they do and all the good stuff. So this leads you to better profitability, conversion. That's what we're talking about, right?

That's right, my brother. That's what I want you to teach me all about. So listen, every business, listen, if someone doesn't have a website, like who are you? Every business has a website. These are mission critical. It's the entry point to your business. Now you actually see people walking in the front door, the website. What do you want to look for though? So you got this fancy software, but what are we looking for?

Yeah, well what you want to look for is first of all you want to see on what spot. We have a tool that show you the eye tracking. So you want to see where their attention span is on which part on your website. And then you can change the button, you can move them, you can change the size, you can change the images and also you can set up a goal. So you can see if a user convert and then you can roll back and see which page they came from and you can track where they went through and you can see where they come from and the location. This is a tool that can save you a lot of money because it works in real time. So for example, if you run AdWord Campaign, you pay a lot of money and you can see in real time if it's converting or not. So you can make a decision either to stop it and maybe to pour more money to It.

So let's first talk about the eye tracking.

I was just gonna ask about that, Chris.

Why don't you ask then?

Yeah, like, how in the world do you find out what people are. What their eyeballs are actually looking at?

That's. That's actually pretty easy. So now if you hold your mouse, most people, when they hold their mouse and they looking somewhere unintentionally, the mouse move to the same spot. You can try it right now. But in addition to that, we also collect the mobile gesture. So if you zoom in somewhere or you scroll or you move the screen on your mobile device, we track it and then we can predict. We have a logarithm to predict where is the focal point. And based on that, we can show you what is the eye tracking on the specific page.

Wow.

So, Chris, they already know that you look at every point on the planet.

Well, I'm just saying maybe it doesn't. Maybe it doesn't work for all the people, you know? I'm talking about the average people, you know?

Yeah. I mean, for. If you were analyzed, Joe Joseph, if you were analyzing Chris, you would just come up and just say, porn site. That's all he looks at. Like, you wouldn't have to do any more analytics. So. Interesting. So mobile technology is taking off.

Remember, we're talking about people that browse on with one hand. I don't know what they do with the other.

Oh, my God. So if someone's. If someone's looking at a website on an iPhone or some kind of smartphone and they zoom in, your software collects what they're actually zooming in on.

Exactly. And not only that, we see how much time they zoom in and they zoom out. So based on that, we can predict. We take the average time that the user going to a page, and then we can say. And we can also ignore users that maybe they left the browser open and they just went to the kitchen to make a sandwich. Or, or check if the. If they. They have something in the freezer or so.

Right. So, so say that happens. I don't know if you heard my whole issue with peanut butter jelly sandwiches.

Yeah.

So I have my. All right, so I have my website up. I go, I'm looking for my sandwich. How do you know I've left the computer screen up and just not. I'm not sitting there.

Well, I mean, if there is like one paragraph and I assume you read in decent speed and it's 22nd on. On the same sentence, you're focusing on that. So I know that this is A bogus traffic. It's not a real one. Then you come back with your peanut butter sandwich and you zoom out and then I can start tracking you again.

For some reason, I think you just gave. I'm sorry, what?

Hoping. Yeah. I'm not tracking the stain on your screen.

Or the oatmeal. He's talking about the oatmeal.

The oatmeal, the peanut butter. Joseph, I think in this, in this interview, you've given us like 50 sound bits. You're going to be in every episode going forward. This, the way you said peanut butter sandwich alone was. Was worth millions. Okay.

Yeah, anytime. You know, I also do bar mitzvah wedding.

Websites, you know.

Oh, all right. So let's talk about the profitability side now. Now that I know what my traffic is doing on my website and I want them take a specific action. I want them to fill out my form, meaning, you know, they're a prospect for me. What can I do with this information I've collected to make the behavior I want happen?

So what you do is after you make the change, first of all, you can see that after you make the change, you can see if the users that came from one page, they went to your conversion. So let's say the conversion is your shopping cart, right? So after you make the change, you see that more users that went through that button or that page specific page that you make the change is converting into your shopping cart. So you can do AB testing, you can use different designs. There are many tools that you can see in real time. Or for example, you can see, like, you can track by referrals. So you can see that all the traffic that comes from Google China, you know, are not converting for some reason. I don't know why, but they're not converting. So you can say, okay, you know what? This traffic, I can ignore that traffic.

That is cool, actually.

Yeah, yeah. So now I lost my. I don't know, I have this visualization of China actually.

The thing is, it's a tool. See, you can use like whatever action you want to promote on your website, right? And hopefully it's a profitable thing like buy my stuff or look at this, look at the ad that leads to my product type thing. You can like mess around with your settings and actually see in real time if they're paying more attention to that little picture ad or not. And then if they're not, then you switch it out and make it a different one.

Exactly. The good example is something that we have on our own website there we have an image on our website of a hand with a pointing finger. Now, this is not URL. It's not linking to any page. But for some reason I see that people clicks on that. Okay, So I don't know why, but it makes sense after I see that, that I'm going to make it to a URL, because people are clicking there and I don't want to lose that traffic.

Oh, so you even track where people click, even if it's not a clickable thing?

Yes, yes, exactly. And I can see the mouse movement, how much time they spend on each part of the page, or if they scroll down, how long they stay on each specific part of the page.

I'm on your site right now doing loop de loops with my mouse. I don't know if you can see.

That drawing mustaches on your bio picture.

I know, I know. So what about over optimizing? I could keep on changing my sites more and more. Is there potential that I'm changing my site constantly? That there's never a consistent thing? Is there a risk of doing too much of this?

No, there's never a risk. I mean, it's a very common feature for website and especially with E commerce, that you do AB testing. So you just divide your traffic and you say, okay, I want some of my traffic to go to version A and some of the traffic go to version B. And then you predict which one convert better. And based on that, you do the changes.

I got you. And just so I'm clear with this, the changes, is this something I need to now hire a web developer to make these changes, or does your software promote the ability to do?

On my own, it's mainly designers. Designers. And also we have many customers that are SEO professionals because they see how the effect of the traffic that they bring to the site, how it works with the heat map, and they see if it's converting and then they can do the changes accordingly.

Right.

So it's a tool for, let's say, somebody who knows a little bit about design, you know, website. It doesn't have to be a programmer, just design and know how to change the pages. And for SEO professionals, for sure.

Yeah. So for the business owners listening to this podcast, you know, a technical person can do this stuff. But I think what you would need to know is that it's a tool to help you make your website more profitable. Right. If you think of your website as a profit generator. Right, Mike? This is a tool that can help.

You know, the picture comes to mind. I'm thinking, remember the old Trifolds, Chris, where you. You hand out trifolds? Could you imagine if you got calls from every person that got a trifold and the customer says, you know what? I read through this. I don't get it confused me, so I threw in the garbage. Or one person says, I read it. And this line right in the middle is the one that caught my attention. This is why I'm calling you. I mean, we would have died for that feedback. And we've improved our trifolds. Now you literally can do it, people. So freaking do it. Do it. Hey, Joseph, we got a rock and roll. But so where can people find more about you, more information about your firm?

Well, the. Just go to the. To the website. It's civilution. S eevolution.com or you can go to.

Your local bar mitzvah. And Joseph will be performing, singing show tunes.

Yeah.

And we're gonna have better food than just peanut butter.

Oh, man, he can sling him back.

There you go.

Joseph, thanks for joining us. We can hope. We hope to have you back in the future.

Thank you.

Thanks, Joseph. Great job. Awesome.

Dude. Dude. You know, I've been using software. Not CVolution specifically, but software like this. And it is a game changer. The key, though, is to make sure you get enough volume of traffic. If you get one visitor a month to your website, right? And the one visitor clicks on, you know the picture of your face now, you're like, oh, my God, my face. I gotta put more of my face on the website. You don't have enough statistical information, so you need to have enough volume coming to your website. From my experience, if you're not. If you have less than 10 visitors a day, don't even bother with software like this. But once you start getting volume, you get some serious quality feedback using software like that, Right? Totally talking about quality software. Oh, I forgot. I make him do a Chewbacca voice.

Ethan, can you maybe hold up?

Joseph, you still there?

Yes, I'm here.

Can you.

One last thing we forgot to ask you, and maybe you heard in the intro is your best Chewbacca imitation.

Oh, man. Oh, you put me on the spot now.

Just make the noise. You don't have to talk.

Yeah, yeah, I'll do it first if you want.

Go.

Okay, you do it first. Okay, I'll try to do it better.

Is that better?

All right, that's as good as. Christina.

Nicely done. Okay, yeah, you're top two now. It's me and you. We're fighting for the championship. Christina and Chris are already out of the competition. Both their imitations were.

That was Chewbacca.

Face off for it.

Chewbacca gargling when he's in fear of his life. That's what I love it.

All right, Joseph, thank you. You know what, Chris? What I love is we got humans behind these businesses. S evolution is real software, but you got a cool guy who's pulling the joke around and performs abort Mitzvahs. All right, our next guest, his name is Ethan Anderson, and he is the founder and CEO of MyTime. Chris, I know you know what my time is. It is the startup package or company that allows consumers to find and book appointments from over 2.5 million businesses. Book appointments, bro. With not much further ado, and with an introduction of the Chewbacca voice, Ethan Anderson. Welcome to the show, Ethan.

Hello, everyone.

Welcome.

Glad you.

How's everyone going?

Yeah, we're awesome.

Well, we're doing well. We're doing well. Did you. I don't know if you heard our prior guest do his Chewbacca imitation.

Yeah, he was pretty good.

You want to get yours out of the way now?

Yeah, yeah.

You want to do it an hour later? Go.

Did you hear that?

No.

No.

I was trying to cheat. I was. I was. I was trying to cheat. I was trying to play it from an MP3.

Cheater. Cheater.

That was smart.

But you're not disqualified, unfortunately. You gotta do it now.

Okay, I'll do it.

Nice.

That was good.

That was like little baby Chewbacca going in a baby carriage.

That was more like the alien bursting from the chest instead of Chewbacca. But I tried.

No, that was good. Tell us a little bit about MyTime software. What does your software do?

So MyTime is really for any local business to be able to offer online booking and appointment scheduling. And the whole idea is that when you look at what consumers want today, they love booking things online and they hate calling now. It's like everyone hates talking on the phone. Even your teenage daughter is going to be texting her friends. She's not going to be calling them anymore. And so we're looking at one industry after another being totally disrupted. Uber, Airbnb, Instacart for grocery delivery. And we thought, well, what about the other two and a half million local businesses? Your local hair salon, the massage therapist, the dog groomer. Wouldn't they like to be able to take online booking? And wouldn't consumers like to have a destination they can go to, find and book, avail, you know, find and book appointments at those businesses? So that's what we set out to build.

Oh my God. So I love this because in the past if I want to book a dog groomer and it's a small practice, I got to call them, they're probably out grooming a dog right now. They're a one person practice and there's a voicemails back and forth. So I assume this is a significant time saver for businesses like this.

It's a huge time saver. And I'll tell you a couple of other interesting things. People who are still doing pen and paper, which is honestly about 2/3 of businesses, they're using Google Calendar or pen and paper. They're essentially invisible to the broader Internet. You can't book them through web search, you can't book them through a ratings and review site, you can't book them through a yellow pages type directory listing. They're putting themselves at a huge, huge disadvantage. And I don't want these guys to get wiped out because they're just not present in the main channel where people are looking for them anymore.

Yeah, and there's this immediacy I assume from the consumer. I want a commitment now. If I'm thinking I need a dog groomer, I'm not looking and then I'm going to think about it and then call them a week later to schedule for another week later. If I find the dog groomer, I assume that immediacy is there. I just want to book it now and get off my plate.

Exactly. And so one of the crazy things that we see is that 40 or 45% of the bookings happen late at night or early in the morning when the business is closed for the day. So people are doing exactly what you just said, they want to get it off their plate and then they know they have a scheduled appointment and they'll go in at that time.

Alright, so you're tackling the business to consumer sale right there. So you're saying if I have a service that sells to consumers, the person needs the dog grooming, wants to get a massage before they go to work, early morning after they get home, they're thinking about that. But is there also an opportunity for B2B if I sell services to other businesses to use an application like yours?

Yeah. So let's talk about what the application actually is. So for the businesses we have something that's called the MyTime Scheduler. And have you ever heard this term that's being thrown around in Silicon Valley, that's where I'm based, called online to offline commerce. Sometimes it's Actually referred to as O2O online to offline. All it really means is you're getting some service in the real world that you booked and paid for online or through your mobile phone. So everyone knows Uber, right? That's a good example of online to offline, right? So this is a huge, huge trend. And a lot of people think, oh, it's just about booking something or scheduling something, but it's about so much more. So when we thought about building a product, we wanted it to be everything. We wanted to be reputation management, what are your ratings and reviews online? We want it to be online booking. We want it to be automated marketing to make sure you keep your customers. So we put together this whole complete package called the My Time Scheduler. And we sell that to the businesses for somewhere between $10 and $40 a month, depending on the specific package they get. That allows them to be in the MyTime marketplace, where millions of people come to find and book appointments with businesses for services they need.

I got you. So you're your own standalone marketplace. So what if people. I use Yelp all the time to schedule like, I want to go to a restaurant or for some other service. Does your package tie into something like Yelp?

So without getting into the specifics of Yelp, actually, that's exactly the kind of thing that we're trying to enable. So enabling you to book through something like Yelp or through something like yellowpages.com or even through Google Web Search, if you're searching for that business on one of those platforms, we would love for you to be able to actually complete your booking right on that platform. And that's part of the value proposition we offer to these local merchants.

So. All right, so let's get back to some of the. Because our listeners, you know, have different types of businesses they're trying to schedule on their own. I think you shared some percentages earlier, and I want to kind of target that how many people are doing scheduling the old fashioned way versus now via online scheduling.

So 2, 2/3 of people are doing scheduling the old fashioned way. And the old fashioned way is pen and paper, or using something like Microsoft Outlook or your iPhone, Calendar or even Google Calendar. Because what that means is there's no client record, right? There's no notion of Ethan Anderson booked a haircut, and here's his appointment history and here's the price you charge him. There's no notion of automated marketing to keep me coming back. Like, for example, saying, oh my gosh, it's been six months since you've had a haircut. You must look like a wookie by now. Come back in and get a haircut.

So that was nice. Nice tie back.

Exactly.

You made his day, Ethan. Seriously.

Yeah, you totally did. But I'm actually thinking of the other side, not people, meaning business owners. How many consumers the other side are going online, booking versus picking up the phone and making a phone call?

Well, I'll tell you, first of all, our own product gets millions of visitors, which are the consumers coming into our website, mytime.com to book appointments. When we tie into third party products, whether it's in web search or ratings and review sites, then you actually get to hundreds of millions of eyeballs who actually have an opportunity to book your business. If you're part of the MyTime Marketplace, but just more high level, just more generally, there's probably not one service industry out there that's not being affected by people wanting to interact and book with them online. And it's not just booking, it's also communication. By the way, we talked earlier about people not wanting to talk on the phone. How about enabling a chat functionality so they can chat with you 247 and you don't have to answer them right away. It's like any text message, so they can send you a quick message or a photo instead of having to interrupt your day with a phone call.

Yeah, and this trend is only increasing, right? I assume two years ago less people were doing the online booking and communication, and I assume it's increasing. Where are we heading? Where's four or five years from now looking like? When it comes to scheduling and booking.

And talking, four or five years from now, you'll be able to. And maybe even less than that, honestly. You'll be able to talk to your virtual assistant on your mobile phone and you'll say, siri, book me a haircut. And it knows which stylist you go to, it knows what service you get, and it looks at your calendar, it looks at her calendar and it says, here's the available times for you on Saturday. Which would you like? And then you say, boom, do it. And then it adds it to everybody's calendar. Everybody knows it's happening and the payment is processed and you're on your way.

That's pretty incredible. Hey, Ethan.

So, yeah, my business is, you know, I produce podcasts for people, for business authors.

Just like the plug yourself show today, like everyone, Ethan's plug in your plugin. Geez, what's going on here, cracker boy? I'm not, I'm not finished, dude. You just keep on going out. Go, go.

My question is. Yeah, My question is, if I'm like, if my studio's open all day and it's. It's a virtual studio, I could, like, set time slots and just random people who are not even my clients could, like, book recording sessions with me using your software. Right?

Yeah, exactly. And so what you're saying. Can I just. Can I step this up to the academic economics class you took in college or high school? You have. Oh, okay. All right, so I'll try.

This is between me and you.

Remember, you're talking to a Wookiee.

You have, basically an underutilized asset. It's sitting around and it's perishable. Just like a piece of fish that's sitting out in the sun. You've got some time, and that time perishes. And so you don't want it to perish because the value goes to zero after it perishes. So you'd rather someone take that asset, that unused studio time and do something with it so you can make some profit rather than letting it go to waste. And that's the whole concept. So that's a really important sort of fundamental understanding of online commerce, is you can make that asset available to anyone who is available and wants to book it when you're not using it.

Right. And in terms of Mike Michalowicz's world, an accountant who has an accounting practice could book their time, you know, reserve time slots on their calendar, and people could just book themselves.

Yeah, man. I mean, they're sitting there staring at their phone, going, come on, ring. Come on, ring. And all these opportunities are shooting by you on the web. Hey, we got a rock and roll. Ethan, where can people get more information about my time?

So if you're a small business, you should go to mytime.com merchants. M E R C H A N T S if you're just an average Joe and you're looking for a haircut, a massage, or something else, just go to mytime.com and find your favorite business near you.

Cool. Ethan, thank you so much. It's a pleasure having you on the show.

Thanks, Ethan.

Great. Thanks for having me.

Oh, my pleasure. Yeah. So. God, you know, I think we scare away our guests. Yeah. And I'm not trying. Am I too intense?

Christina, you're very forward.

I'm very honest. I'm just very forward.

I guarantee he's never started an interview asking to make the sound of a wookie and then three seconds later. So tell us about your business.

Isn't that the best. Ethan, I love everything you're saying, but I don't know that the mark a little bit. So before we go into the meat of what we learned, who is the number one? Chewbacca, Christina.

Michael.

Yeah, I gotta take it. But who's the number one out of the remaining four? Who's the next one? Who's number four?

I really liked Ethan's.

Ethan's. I think I liked Joseph's. It was just that different. It was that he wins the creativity award. Chris, any other thoughts around our Chewbacca?

Yeah, no, I think, I think Christina's and Joseph's were equal and mine, of course, equally.

I was like a dying boar.

Absurd. Yes.

At the end of the show, just so our listeners can hear one more time back to back, could you mind putting together all five of us and we'll end it that way? I don't know.

Edits. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

In the edits at the end, we'd love to have that. All right. So, dude, what'd you learn today, Chris?

Well, I. Well, when we were talking to Joseph and by the way, I think we should all talk about Joseph. We'll go around talk about Joseph first and then go around talk about Ethan.

I like that better.

I think your analogy was totally spot on where you were saying how in the old days, if you had a trifold, like a brochure out there and the thousand people who look at the brochure, if you knew where they were looking, what questions they had and you know, what they liked or what they didn't like or what they clicked on or what they, whatever, that would have been phenomenal. And now with a website, you can have that information. And it was just a great analogy.

It's unbelievable. It's funny. Most people don't take advantage advantage of software like that. It's out there. We don't think about it now, but back then we would die to have that ability. And now you do, so consider it.

Right.

Okay.

So what about you?

What'd you learn, Christine? Oh, me, me. I'll go first. Eye tracking. You know, I thought it was almost a joke. I'm like, oh, you can track eyes? Like you had a little camera watching your eyeballs. But it was interesting. He said, no, the mouse. People move their mouse with their eyes. And that's true, but really what I did not know about and I really like is that our smartphones, when there's something I want to look at closely or I want to read the text, I expand it and their system is now tracking what I'm expanding and what I'm focusing on.

Crazy.

You're thinking something horrible, aren't you?

No, no, no. Actually, Facebook. Once I saw a picture of a woman in a bikini, and there was, like, red. A red coloring where all everyone's eyes went.

It was not her face. It was not her face.

It was a little bit.

Yeah, a little bit.

I'm sorry. It was a guy in a Speedo, Christina. Actually.

So here. This is totally true. You got it. There's heat mapping software out there, and they track men's eyes and women's. There was a picture of a baseball player with too tight pants. The men were looking more than the women. Isn't that fascinating? So, Christina, what did you learn?

I just am amazed at how fascinatingly scary it is that people have this much access to what you do, what anybody can do on their computer. But I'm glad that it's able to be so useful. You can literally see what people are trying to do. Therefore, you can kind of redesign your website according to where you want the traffic flow to go to maximize.

Yeah. And you have to do it because if you're not doing your competition. Yeah. Chris, tell me about Ethan.

Yeah. Yep. I like the whole. The whole thing about booking time online, like, you know, using Uber as the. As the best example or a great example. And I also like that you can keep track of clients, so, you know, when's the last time they came in? And you can. And there's a special chat window, and it's like all this great stuff packaged into this software, and it just makes it easier for everybody. And I'm personally going to definitely check it out.

Oh, yeah. And we. We don't use Ethan's software specifically, but we use online booking, and it makes a big difference. People do not want to pick up the phone, call. You leave a message, or God forbid, you answer the phone. That's. It's intimidating. So our customers and our prospects, this is true for all business. Are going more and more online. If you are sitting waiting for the phone to be picked up, for the phone to ring so you can pick it up, you're in trouble. So I concur. Any other thoughts, Christine?

Yeah, the phone is definitely being phased out. And I find it interesting that he brought up that 40 to 45% of bookings happen either early in the morning or late at night when the business is closed because people want to do.

I feel safer already. Oh, I'm sorry.

It's okay.

I missed the time. I missed the Timing on that, but.

No but people want to do things in the comfort of their own home and on their own time.

I feel safer already. That's right. That's what I wanted to do. That's where I wanted to put it in, right? Dude, I don't have a question for me for you to give back to me. So I think we're set. We gotta rock and roll. Oh, our sponsors. Our sponsors. Did I miss our sponsors?

Corporate partners.

Corporate partners, dude, they're coming to our live event. And by the way, listen, go to profitfirstprofessionals.com go to upcoming events and see this major conference we have coming up October 1st, October 2nd. And you know who's gonna be there? Our sponsors. And know who they are. TSheets, time tracking software. You got to track what your employees are doing and it even has GPS capabilities. So if you have people out on the road, maybe you dispatch your people to go on site. It can show you when they arrive and when they leave, so the time's automatically tracked. Fundera, it's a funding source. We love working with Fundera. They did a six figure funding deal for one of our members that had a great opportunity, just needed the money to fund it and they got the money. I live within like days. Fundera, they do, they shop it out for you. They source out different banks and ways to get money. And then nextiva, which. I'm looking to my left and I hear my nextiva phone ringing. Well, if I had my time software wouldn't have rang. They would have gone right into my booking software and I would hardly have clients.

You'd have an appointment.

Yeah, but if you do talk with people, even if it's only a little bit, nextiva is the company to use for your phone. We gotta get out of here, man.

Yes, and we love our corporate partners. So thank you very much to Fundera, tsheets and nextiva and thank you for listening. This has been awesome. You can find all our episodes on first podcast.com and iTunes. And you can send in your, you know what, email Mike Michalowicz, your version of Chewbacca. That'd be awesome.

I would love, I would love to, to get that. You know, we had a contest a while back, like in episode four or five, where we were giving away a free book for the person that could name the bassist from Van Halen. And no one guessed it. No one guessed it. Like, first of all, just Google it. Like, how could you? People are like, oh, I think it was Getty Lee. No, no, it wasn't like Google it. Like this is the easiest thing. So send us your Chewpaca imitation. The first person. No, you know what? The just the best one. Oh wait, one second, one second. The I nailed that one. The the best Chewbacca invitation will get a free copy of Profit first. And if you want to learn more about Profit first Professionals, the organization that Christina and I are with, where can they go?

Christina, Profit first professionals dot com.

That's it. Go there. You're looking for an account or bookkeeper that's going to increase the profitability in your business. Go there. Click on the find button. We will hook you up. And if you're an accountant or if you're a bookkeeper, you got to be driving the profit in your clients businesses. Check us out. Go there and click on become and we'll show you how to become a profit first professional.

That's right. It's a blue ocean.

It's a blue ocean. Oh, it's Throwback to last. Episode 39, Casey Johnson.

Thanks for listening everybody.

Get your pets spade neutered. Yeah, do it.

Sam.