Episode 57: Marketing Buzz and Business Growth with Michael Shepherd

You are listening to again, hopefully, because you love this show. The Profit First Podcast.

Episode 57. Hurry It up this time. Faster.

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We're in a rush.

Oh, my God. We gotta get this show on the road.

Yeah.

Welcome, everyone, to the Profit first podcast. I'm spitting into the mic, and my name is Chris Curran, the founder of.

Fractal Recordings, and I'm stepping on you. I'm Mike Michalowitz, the author of Profit First. I'm here with my colle, Christina Bulldog.

Hey. Hey.

And you are listening to the Profit first podcast, where you learn everything about profit.

That's right. You can find us as a podcast on itunes and Stitcher and Tunein Radio and of course, the website profitfirstpodcast.com. and this is a show where, yes, we talk about profit because revenue is wonderful. Size of your company is wonderful. How many employees you have. It's all wonderful, right, Mike?

Revenue is nice, but profit prevents lice. That's the rhyme for today.

Thank you. Thank you for. You know.

That's a tongue twister right there.

It is, Barry. It is. Dude. I know. We are in a blazing rush here because we're excited to get our guest on today. But first, Chris, I got to ask, dude, what have you been up to?

My brother, I relaunched one of my other podcasts called oh, yeah. So social media unscrambled.

It's back.

Yeah, it's back, and it's just a lot of fun. So Anyway, social media unscrambled.com and listeners collectively are known as the Unscrambled Army.

Oh, I like it. Yeah, I like it.

What have you been up to, man?

Growing a beard. Trying. Yeah, yeah, that's what everyone says. The response is usually that squealy. Really?

Oh, yeah, dude.

Trying to grow a beer.

It's awesome where it's.

It's coming together.

You could be a lumberjack for Halloween then. Or were you this. Sorry, this is. Episodes are going to come out much later than Halloween.

Yeah. Yeah, I was, I think, a lumberjack for Halloween. Do you think it looks good?

You like it? It's scruffy.

Scruffy. It's still early stage. Yeah, but I mean, it's. It's a legit.

I wouldn't grow it out. I would keep it pretty.

Yeah.

Tight, tamed.

Oh, but this is a legit beard now.

It's legit.

It's legit.

Oh, I need to see this. Can we. Can we put. Can we post it on the episode, Christine?

Yeah, let's get A picture.

Got it.

I'll do a selfie while we're doing this. All right, man. We gotta thank our sponsors for today. What was that, please?

We love our sponsor. Our corporate partners.

Fund box, man. They're in.

Yes.

Fundera. Fundera and Fundbox are two separate companies. Nextiva and of course, tsheets been here from with us. Tsheets have been with us since day one. So I just want to thank all of our sponsors for supporting us. We'll give more details on them in a minute. But first, with no further ado, I was doing a selfie with my beard, dude. There's a guy out there, his name is Michael Shepard, who has won the World Pizza Champion. He reigns that title four consecutive times. Release. He's earned it four times. He's the World Pizza Champion four, four times over. He has grown his pizza shop from literally a meager 2,000 bucks a week, which ain't too bad, to $1 million in sales. And here's the big deal. This is a town with only 8,000 residents. I mean, that's a small town.

Wow.

Geez. So. Oh, and Chris, I have one question for you before we bring him on board. We're going to ask him. We're going to find out, how do you build such a dominating pizza empire? But here's the question I have for you, Chris. He has to travel to go to the World Pizza Championship every year. Where do you think they hold the World Pizza Championships? One guess. If you get this wrong.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

No, I would have said Chicago.

Italy. Italy. Oh, my God, the two of you.

You should have said international travel.

Oh, I still would have said Pittsburgh.

Michael, I know you're listening to us right now. I gotta start off with a question right away. What does it take to be a pizza champion?

I'd say the first thing. You gotta. You gotta like pizza. I think that would be kind of a prerequisite. Need some passion for pizza, you mean? You really gotta love pizza. You really gotta love making it a little bit of being in the right place at the right time, knowing the right people. And then, you know, one person always told me, you know, a good way to. A good way to go from being, you know, just this guy who wants to get into pizza competitions or whatever. You want to turn your idols into your rivals. I don't know where I heard that, but I. Somebody told me, I read it somewhere on the Internet, and that's always kind of stuck with me is, you know, getting into the pizza competitions. You know, I really sucked in the Beginning. And I looked up to the guys that were, you know, the big champions and I'm like, all right, I need to turn that into the guy that I am competing against on the same level. And just a lot of dedication.

What, what are the elements of a pizza competition? What do you have to do to win that or to compete?

You know, it's broken up into a lot of different categories. There's, you know, of course there's baking and then the pizza baking is broken up into a lot of different subcategories. You know, traditional, non traditional wood fired Neapolitan, you know, on and on and on. So you've got all those different aspects of the pizza baking. Then you've got the fun stuff. You've got the pizza box folding, you've got the fastest, what they call the pizza box folding. Yeah, that's, that one's kind of for fun. But you get the fastest pizza making, which is you, you know, you take five dough balls, slap them out to 12 inches as fast as you can. You've got the largest dough stretch, which is taking a dough ball about 18 ounces, which is normally what you'd make a 14, 16 inch pizza out of and tossing it out as big as you can in five minutes, which normally the sizes get out to about, I don't know, 36, 48 inches.

Wow.

Yeah, with no holes. That's kind of the, that's the kind of, the fun thing is you can't have any holes when you're done. And then the thing that really kind of caps it all off is the acrobatics, the, you know, doing tricks with the dough and things like, you know, and it's a choreographed routine. So it's not just, you know, you're not just out there standing and doing a couple tricks. You've got like a three to five minute routine set to music, choreographed. Your tricks are all laid out in advance. You know, you're doing, you're rolling, you know, two does across your shoulders, you're going through your legs, you're, you know, on the floor. You know, some guys are, some guys have dough that's on fire, you know, three or four at a time. And then, you know, then we even have the team events where you take that and then put it on even a larger scale where you choreographed a, like an actual skit with three to ten guys. So, yeah, it's a lot of fun.

Has anyone ever, at the end of the world championship contest when you guys are all tired and you're hungry, has anyone Ever said, anyone want to go out for some pizza? I assume that's never happened, right?

That's usually exactly what we always do. When we're done end of the night, we just got done eating pizza all day, and then we're gonna wrap up with some pizza and some beer at the end, too.

I thought sushi or something.

Do they have, like, a pizza eating contest? Like, who can eat the most slices in like, five minutes or something?

That's usually not at the. At our events, but I think they've got those somewhere.

Okay.

Has to be a tough one.

Yeah. It's like Nathan's does that. Like with the hot dogs.

Yeah, exactly.

And I know the preamble is like, pizza and stuff like that. Okay, so here's the question I have, Michael. How does this correlate or does it to your pizza business?

You know, when I got into the pizza business, it was, you know, in high school, working for one of the chains, doing some delivery, you know, making pizzas in the shop. And then I went to college, kind of worked, you know, there a little bit back and forth while I was in college, and then. Then went out on my own. And so as I'm doing my, you know, opening my own business, and, you know, we're just, you know, we're kind of scraping by not doing a whole, you know, not doing a whole lot of business, you know, just. Just. Just getting by and, you know, kind of. Kind of seeing the opportunity to get involved with some of these competitions. And I'm like, you know what? That kind of looks like fun. I think that's something I can do. I've been tossing pizza by hand forever. I know what I'm doing. I'm gonna go to this competition. And I won the competition that we had, they had here in Ohio. It was in Columbus at a pizza show, and that qualified me to go to Italy to compete at the world championships. Went to Italy and totally bombed. Did absolutely horrible. I was like 49th out of 50 gu.

And the fifth guy didn't show.

It was that bad. You know, I mean, I'm in Italy for a week. I've been practicing like crazy leading up to it, you know, and. And, you know, the competition is basically, you know, the second to last day I'm in Italy and, you know, all that time down the drain, Horrible, you know, represented the United States very poorly. And you got smoked. Yes, very, very badly.

Your pizza crust got smoked.

But, you know, when I got back, even though I did so bad over there, the media, especially on the local Level just ate it up. And the community, especially because I was from a small area, thought it was the greatest thing in the world.

Hold on, let me make sure I understand this because there's a big lesson here. Even though you weren't quote unquote, successful in the competition itself, it sounds like you made this into a great marketing spin, that you're one of 50 people in the entire globe to be invited to this. You're representing your town. Is that kind of how you spun it and why people were so attracted to it?

Yeah, yeah, you know, I kind of, you know, I stumbled upon that, you know, it was kind of by, you know, it kind of by accident. I, you know, I, as the newspapers wanted to cover it, the TV stations wanted to cover it, the community started talking about it. Then I'm like, oh my gosh, this is a tremendous marketing opportunity, you know, and immediately sales started rising, you know, indirectly, of course, you know, well, directly of course, you know, because I mean, I'm all over the place in the newspaper, tv, and the community wants to know more, you know, what's going on. And we, you know, how's this, you know, what is all this? And so now I seen, you know, sales are going up because of this. I need to capitalize on this and really, really make this a cornerstone of our business.

Did you have to change the structure of business now to appeal to your customers? And let me just position that what I'm hearing is customers see in the news and say, this guy was in the international championships of pizza making. He's got something special going on when they arrived. If you're just an ordinary pizza shop, I assume that wouldn't resonate with them. Did you have to do something to, to confirm, yes, this is the pizza winner? Did you start doing demonstrations? Were you signing autographs or pizza tops? I mean, how did you kind of capitalize on that?

You know, it was a slow process, you know, so it was process that took a lot of years to kind of get, you know, to get it fine tuned, I guess would be the right way. You know, we already had an amazing product. You know, I was already, you know, we had fine tuned our pizza product. Community loved our pizza. I had, I didn't need to change anything with our pizza. It was rock solid already. It was just now being able to handle the increasing amount of business and being this little tiny, just as mom and pop, you know, local pizza shop and crammed in this little tight space. You know, people did come from all over the place and when they got There. There's nowhere to sit down, you know, because we're just a kind of a carry out delivery place, you know. So a lot of times when people did arrive, they were expecting something new, a lot different. But once they had the pizza, then they're like, oh, wow, you know, I'm glad we came. This is amazing food. Even though we're eating it out of a box in our car on the way home, we're glad we came.

Well, thank God you mastered the speed of box making while you're out in Italy.

Yeah. You know, and as we went, you know, we kept getting smarter about how we were marketing it and taking advantage of every opportunity.

Well, let me ask you this. How do you leverage that momentum? You get a spark of interest, but news wanes. I mean, a year later, people forget the story. Six months later, they forget it. How did you capitalize this spark of momentum you got for your business?

Yeah, well, let me take that. Let me take the long answer and just kind of compact it down, what we did, because we've been doing this for 15 years now. And I say we because you're right. The local media and our local community does get kind of tired of it. Oh, Michael's going over to Italy again. Oh, he won another gold medal. He won another gold medal. You're like, who cares? So we had to keep kind of stepping it up. Oh, now we're on the Food Network. Great. That sparked some interest. Now we're on the Food Network again. Now we did this. Now we did that. We just kept kind of stepping it up until we reached that point where the community just really didn't care anymore because it's the same thing. So then what we did is we got our staff involved. My sister was a manager for me, so my sister, you know, who I trained, I kind of groomed her for the competitions. And then she eventually became the first woman in the United States to ever win a gold medal at an international competition.

Man.

Wow. Yeah. That then re sparked everything. She went on to college. She. She.

And I have to assume that there isn't something like in the shepherd jeans that makes you into gold medals? I think part of this is very smart marketing. Do you find? I mean, are thousands, hundreds of thousands of pizza makers competing and applying for this? Or is there a small set of pizza makers that are smart enough to leverage this opportunity as a marketing thing too? And maybe the applications are a few hundred people.

You know, it is a smaller group. It's not thousands and thousands of people, because the amount of dedication you gotta put into it, you know? Cause my, like, with the different competitions that I've won, we've won some baking stuff. We've won, I've won largest stretch acrobatics. And it takes a ton of time, especially on the lar. You know, when you're practicing for fastest, largest acrobatic, you've got to put a tremendous amount of time of your own into it. If you're an employee. A lot of off the clock time. And so it takes a lot of dedication. So a lot of those guys that just think they can show up and hey, I think I might want to go to this competition, they get blown out of the water real quick and they never come back. So a lot of these people just really, really. It's either people that are just really dedicated to their craft or it's people that are just really smart about marketing. It's a smaller window.

I hope our listeners are catching on to this, Chris. I mean, what Michael. What I'm hearing, what Michael did is he steps into arena where the consumer's perception is there's hundreds of thousands of potential applicants, which is true. And now here's one guy of 50 that came in 49th place out of hundreds of thousands, right? And then now he's elevated himself to number one. This is true in every single market. There is recognition for what you do. And from the consumer's perception, you are literally the world's best. When the actual real world competition may be a few hundred folks, which doesn't make it easy, but it's a huge marketing thing. Michael, how did you go to the next step? Now you got people flooding your store. You got to grow it, I assume to support the demand. But how do you stay profitable? This is the tricky thing is demand. But how do you keep up with demand and not overspend?

Well, you know, I have to throw this part in, I got to tell you. After my sister left, then we started training one of my managers. She became the second and the second only woman to win gold medals. And now she has more gold medals than I do at this point. She's got five gold medals.

Do you think a trophy room at the shop or something?

Yeah, we do have. I mean, we've got a monster wall of just, just medals. And she just, you know, last year she broke the world record on fastest, the fastest pizza making again. When. Which was her record to begin with that she had set the year before and then set the year before that. So she's broken her own record twice.

And that's Amazing.

You know.

So you trained both of these women too, right?

Yes. Yeah.

So what are you doing that's so spectacular in training these women and all your employees that are now, you know, excelling what you did?

Well, you know, we. Part of it is, is you got to identify. We identify the right person. Somebody that we know has just natural skill, and that person also has passion put into it, and they're willing to, you know, they're willing to own it and really want to prove that they're the best. And, you know, in my. And I, we saw. I saw that in my sister and my manager and said, you know, they. They've got what it takes. And I think if I hang that, you know, that carrot out there and say, hey, you know, you do great. You know, you're either going to go to the competition in Italy or we'll send you to the one in Las Vegas. And they were just like, they, you know, they were all over it and they have. They owned it. But I think back to your question. You had kind of, what do we do and how do we stay profitable? How do we grow? You know, we went from one store to three. And the third store, and the third store we opened, it was one that we could accommodate. It was a. It was a dine in pizzeria. It was a real pizza in a restaurant setting, 125 seats, a little bit of a bar. And so we could bring people in and we could really showcase what we do in front of them. Open kitchen. We can come out and throw some dough and, you know, entertain the kids. You can come and talk to us right across the count, you know, the kitchen and the profitability, you know, so that's how we handle the demand. But the profitability end of it never really changed much. You know, being profitable in pizza is very simple, but it's extremely hard at the same time. So many people are. I mean, pizzerias, I believe the figure, the last figure I saw was 60% of all pizzerias. Independent pizzerias that open up go out of business the first year. So 60% go out the first year, and then who knows how many go out of business the years after that. And the average profit of that independent Pizzeria is about 7% from, you know, I don't know about you, but 7% isn't even worth getting out of bed. I'd rather be on. I'd rather be on welfare than getting a 7% profit. Well, maybe not, but 7% just isn't even worth the risk. And you know me, I mean, you know, with pizza there's no, there's no formal training. I mean, it's all self taught. It's a self taught industry. You don't go to, you don't, you can't go to pizza school. Culinary industry, hates the pizza industry. They actually think we're a joke because anybody can just get out of bed and say, I want to open a pizza shop. And they can do it. But there's no formal training. There's very little resources and it's a very small market of the resources that are available. And so it takes a lot of initiative on your own. And you know, I've just. The things that I did from day one are pretty much the same things I'm doing today as far as profitability goes. But it's just, for me, it always made common sense. It was just common sense. I mean, I'm in business. I just invested a crapload of money. I just took out a mortgage on my house, a second mortgage on my house to open this pizzeria. I better make some money because I told the bank, I'm paying this back. And I gave him my word I'm paying it back. So I've got to pay it back. And I've got a family to support, so I got to make some money.

But don't you have to go through a major transition yourself? First you're throwing dough, but now you're running multiple locations. A whole different skill set. Didn't you have to relearn how to run a business as opposed to doing. From doing it to running it?

No. No, I didn't. Most people would. But the way I've always done things, I've always. And it was, it was mostly by accident. I can't say that I was just smart about it, but I was just by, by. It was just the way I decided to set my business up. I, I set my business up with systems and procedures and all of that stuff that 99% of independent restaurants never do. I did it from day one. You know, we had handbooks, we had checklists, we had systems, procedures, guides. You know, so the business, you know, my goal was never to be in there working, you know, 18 hours a day. It was always so I could have a real life outside of the restaurant, which most restaurant owners don't have. So in order for my staff to be able to operate the business with my absence, they needed to know what to do. They needed the training and they needed the tools. So from day one, I gave Them and I set up the training and tools so I could always just, you know, even though I was present virtually every day, they didn't need me there because they set everything up from day one, basically, so I didn't have to be there. And then. So going into multiple locations was not that hard.

I suspect you are less and less in the food services or restaurant business and more and more in the entertainment business. You just said your last business, you have an open kitchen, you're performing in front of families, young children. If that is true, and tell me maybe I'm wrong, but if that is true, you're turning more toward entertainment. Can you dictate a higher premium per pizza versus a competitor that just sells pizza?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That we're selling an experience, not so much just a pizza, because pizza has become so. Oh, man, what's the right word? Bastardized would be like the right good way to put it from. The chains have just made pizza laughing stock. Everything's five bucks. Five bucks for a pizza, five bucks for a pizza. All the chains are selling cardboard covered with tomato sauce and selling it for five bucks. So everybody's got the perception that pizza should only be five bucks. And so when I'm selling a pizza for $15, same size, same, it's got pepperoni on it, it comes in a box, or it comes to your table that the guy down the street's charging five or six bucks for. People want to know, well, what am I getting? And, well, so you have to turn that into. It's going to be an entire experience when you come in. It's. It has to be an amazing pizza that just blows your, you know, blows you out of the water after you bite into it. The settings got to be right. You know, the whole atmosphere's got to be right. The service has got to be amazing. So when people come in, they, you know, they, you know, they spent $75 for four people when they could have spent 15 at the place down the road. So, yeah, I mean, it's very, very much about, you know, tying those two things together. Because I couldn't do that in another setting if I was just a carry out delivery place. I couldn't, I couldn't get that same premium because I wasn't giving that customer the same experience which they get when they come and they sit down.

As we wrap up on time here, Michael, last question is, if you look back, or as you look back at your business, if you could talk to your younger self, do you have things that you would suggest yourself? To have been more profitable throughout this process.

Oh, wow. Yeah. Oh, man. What are those things? I would say, though? There's a whole lot I would say in the. In the. Gosh, how many years, almost 20 years I've owned my own restaurants. Society government regulation has changed so much. That makes. It. Makes. It makes you less, like, less want to be in business than I used to be. I would. I would. The advice I'd give myself, if I could give myself advice would be to stay small. Stay small and stay still. Still create that demand for the product, but just stay small. Because even though, you know, I put systems in place, the larger I grew, the less one on one, the less personal I was able to make it. And the more stress, the more stress came with that. Yeah, I guess, you know, the. The short answer would be just to. Would be to keep it small.

I love it. I love it. Michael, it's been an absolute joy having you on the show. Thank you for all these tips and wishing you yet another gold medal at the next championship.

All right, thank you very much.

And, Michael, if you ever need. If they ever have a competition where you put a pizza in a microwave and hit some buttons, call Mike Michalowicz.

I will.

Sorry, Mike. All right, thank you.

Thanks, Michael. All right, we'll see you, Michael.

All right, thanks a lot. We'll talk to you later.

All right, see you later. So, Chris, we got to talk about what we learned. But first, first, first, our corporate partners. I want to thank them, really.

We have corporate partners who support our show, and they're all companies that, you know very well. You know, the people at these companies. You use most of these companies. So these are not just, you know, some people off the street with deep pockets who love us. Although I'm sure there's some of those, too.

But that's true. That's true. No, these are all folks that we work with.

Yeah, man.

First is fund box. Nothing to do with a pizza box. They provide funding, and here's how it works. If you have an invoice that's late and your customer's not paying it, they will release the funds in its entirety to you. Oh, Christina, you should see her face. She's like, whoa. Mind blowing. Yeah, you want to get some pizza for lunch and you don't have the money, but you got some invoices outstanding, they will release the funds to you the full amount. So a really cool way to get immediate funding on invoices. You have t sheets, time tracking software. We use it in house. We've had some problems because I've been actually accidentally.

You had some problems?

I've had some problems. I've reset the system a few times and I forgot to call their support. So I will tell you on a future call, once I do speak to a support how good their support is. Just a heads up that I screwed up the system. But I love T sheets otherwise, besides my errors, it's pretty perfect. Here's the great thing. We're not the interesting thing. I've had to revert back to the old way of doing things because I messed up the system. Oh, so we do by paper. It's like another hour of work doing by paper. It sucks. So tsheets makes that work done in seconds. And if you ever have a problem because you made a mistake, pick up the phone. Don't listen. Don't do what I do. Listen to what I suggest you do. Fundera1, stop funding. If you need to get a loan or some funds for your business in any regard, and when you want to be profitable, do the things that are already profitable and invest in those. Those are the best investments. Fundera is one stop shop. They will go out, seek the funds for you through different banks and resources, come back with you, say, here's our best loan suggestion and you have the funds. And last but not least, nextiva is our phone provider. I wish we were doing this call over nextiva right now. We're doing it over Skype and have had some trouble source connect some more trouble. But if we were doing this over nextiva, it would have been a reliable connection. So I wish we were using them. Chris?

Yeah. Nextiva is a voice over IP phone system. You can have extensions, you can have different phones, you can even forward it everywhere and do everything that a business phone system does. But it's all voice over IP and it's. And you love the people over there, right? Whenever you have a problem, you just call them and they're like, they're awesome.

Awesome. Probably literally the best support I've ever experienced from any company. And Ron just, he's down the hallway right now. You probably hear him in the background. He just picked up the next EVA phone and is doing a sale. I'm even flying out there. Maybe I'll give you an update soon. I'm flying out to Phoenix to meet with those folks. All right, what did we learn? Christina, you go first.

One of the first things that Michael said, turn your idols into your rivals.

Oh, wow. Isn't that cool?

Crazy way to. You inspire. You aspire to be These people, and then you get to their level, and you're like, wait a minute. I've learned all that I can from you, and now I'm going to compete against you, and I'm going to win.

Yeah. If you. If you want to play at the next level, stop idolizing. Start rivalizing.

Yeah, good, good.

Hashtag.

Hashtag rivalizing. Chris, what'd you learn? My brother.

Oh, God. Well, he was. He. It's funny when you ask them, oh, now that you've gotten bigger and more successful, you know, at first you were just making pizzas, and then once you started having multiple locations, you probably had to learn different things about running a business. And he's like, no, I didn't. Because he had systems in place from the beginning. He has training in place from the beginning. He has the tools, the checklists, the manuals, everything in place from the beginning. And again, it seems simple, but, I mean, not many businesses do that. And you can see. I mean, he's living proof that when you do the right thing from the beginning, you organize it properly, that you can scale much easier. Right?

Yeah. For me, I heard tons of tips and stories in between the lines as he was talking. First thing was, and I mentioned it while we were talking, is any news can be spun to be a powerful news story. The guy came in dead last, dead last in the world championship and became world famous for being the best. That's perfect spin. We all have that opportunity. The other thing is that interest wanes, so he wins an award that won't last forever. You can't stop there. He kept on spinning things up, what's always new and unique, and he keeps on finding new and unique things. His sister becomes the first woman to win and so forth. Keep elevating and changing the recognition, and people will keep coming to you. Next thing, he went to Italy. He learned from international, the international community what to do with pizza. I'm sure he wasn't just competing. He was watching and brought back some of these things for his open kitchen pizzeria. He's showing stuff off they learned overseas. I think that's genius. And identify the right people. That one really hit home with me. I said, how do you keep doing it? He's like, I pick people that really are interested in spinning dough and flipping pies and stuff and that want to show off. And then I train them. You can't train attitude and energy and intelligence to people. You can only find that and then give them the few things you have. Man, I learned a lot. I thought this was a fascinating story and what can be done with any type of business.

This was very cool episode. Yeah, he. And also that he provides the experience around the pizza. It's not just the pizza, it's the experience. And that doesn't seem like it could apply to every business, but. Well, and maybe it doesn't apply to every business, but I think a lot of businesses out there who just think, oh, well, you know, I'm an accountant or I'm a bookkeeper. No, you can provide an experience, right, Mike?

You totally can. Whatever your business industry is, it will become commoditized the second you are seen as a commodity. That means you have to differentiate. Yeah, maybe through experience, maybe through add ins or plug ins. But the second you're commodity, that's. Then that's when you're the five dollar pizza guy. You have to find a way to differentiate. That's what he did.

That's it. Well, this has been awesome. Thanks for listening. Our website is profit first podcast.com. if you want to find out more about podcasting, actually go to my website, fractal recording.com. and if you want to find out.

About profit first professionals, well, go to profitfirstprofessionals.com. we are an organization of an international organization, by the way. We're also in Italy, bookkeepers and accountants that drive profitability in your business. So as you're listening to this, you too can get more profits. And I'll tell you, the ultimate tip that I heard from Michael was when he said, I don't want 7% profits. I'd rather be in welfare or something like that. Right. And that is true. If you're. If your profits are less than 10%, you're actually on the brink of check by check. You need to make more profits. And who can help you? Well, profitfirstprofessionals.com just go there, click on the find button. We'll hook you up with a profit first professional that will bring your business to levels you never experienced before.

That's right. Thanks for listening, everybody. You can find us on itunes and stitcher and tunein radio as well. Oh, and you can also hear me. Yeah, you can also binge listen to the previous episodes. You know, like put on your headphones and go walk around your backyard for 17 hours on a Saturday. You know, that could work.

Oh, totally could work. And make sure you join us for episode 58. We've invited in Michelle Patterson. She's me talking about women's empowerment. There's some things you can do in the women's market. If you're a woman entrepreneur, become more profitable. And she's me sharing all those tips on the next episode.

All right, see you guys next time.

See you later.

Sam.