Episode 68: Imminent Need and Profitability with Jonathan Royce

Okay, Chris, we are rolling on this side. Monster Kill.

Kill.

Kill.

Kill. You know when you hear that sound clip that you're listening to the Profit.

First podcast, and you know it must be the episode Monster Kill, which is vernacular for episode 68.

Yes.

Mmm. What was that? 68 epis.

Yes. Welcome, everyone. The Profit first podcast. I'm Chris Curran. I'm the founder of Fractal Recording.

Three weeks in, he's still sick. I'm Mike Michalowicz, the author of Profit first in studio solo today. And you're listening to the Profit first podcast, where we experience where we dig in, where we talk about everything. The alpha and omega of profitability.

That's right. Profit is not only king. What's above King Emp.

Oh, oh, I think a card.

See, our guest is already on. I forgot to mute his channel. Our guest is answering my questions. I love it.

Revenue may be king, but profits, what you sling.

Yeah, baby. You can find our show on itunes and Stitcher and Tunein Radio and of course, our website. Have you gone there yet? Please go there. Profit first podcast dot com. There's funny pictures of Mike. There's all our previous episodes. And you'll just have a great time on that website. And you can binge listen. Like our. Our guest, who's we're going to introduce soon. He binge listens to this show. He. He admitted it.

Yep, yep. You know, I'm becoming a binge listener, so I'm in really into podcasting, listening to podcasts and so forth. And so this past week, I was doing some office cleanup. I came into the office one afternoon. I was like, you know what? I'm just on a weekend. I'm just gonna clean up. And so I cleaned for about four hours, rearranged furniture and stuff, and put podcasts on and was just listening to podcast after podcast. I love the NPR one, actually. And just listening and listening. It was really cool.

That's awesome.

And no commercials. No commercials. You know, like a regular radio station. Like, we'll be back.

Yeah, yeah.

Most podcasts, they just go right through, and it's kind of cool. You're kind of. Kind of like a fly on a wall to some interesting conversations and insights.

That's right.

So that's what I've been up to. What have you been up to?

Yeah, you know what? I just read about this thing called Benford's Law. Have you ever heard of Benford's Law? No, it's this guy. Well, it's that book I'm reading about randomness and Numbers.

Yeah.

This guy figured out that most numbers, you know, long numbers with 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 digits. Most numbers start with the number one. There's like a 20% chance that the first number is a one. You'd think it'd be 10 equal. Right? You think it'd be 10% or 11% for each one. It's not. It's most likely to start with number one. The next most likely is number two. The next most likely is number three. Now, why am I saying this? Because they literally, they use this, and I think it's the. The irs, they can use this to audit company's books. And if, if your company, if you try to fudge the books and you don't. And you can fudge it wrong, you don't use. They can use Benford's law to figure out that you fudged your books. They can prove it.

Oh, my God. So most numbers start with the one because people aren't randomizing it says someone. I mean, it's not true. Random that people are trying to think up.

Right. So Benford's law says it's not random, but when someone goes to forge their books or to write a. A funny check number, they just do it randomly. And that's not. That's not natural. So that's how they catch people.

I see. So they compare and say it's not compliant with Benford's law, something's amiss.

Exactly. Then they take you to court and they sue the pants off you.

Dude. That's the profit. That's the profit. Tip of the week right there. Wow. Yeah.

Pretty cool.

That's amazing. So just so I understand, so there's a roughly just picking percentage here. 20% chance the first number is a one. Then you said the next number is two. You mean if it's not a one, it's most likely to be a two over any other number?

Right. So. So the percentages of number one is 20%. A two might be 16%. And when you get all the way down to nine, there's only a 5% chance that the first.

Really? That is mind blowing.

Mind blowing, dude.

Yeah, it's crazy. So talking about mind blowing, we're going to do a mind blowing episode today. We're going to dig in with Jonathan Royce. He's the founder of Hustling Hoagies, and he's been implementing profit first in his new business. And we're going to learn about where he stands in his business, what he's got going on, and we're going to Coach him through some serious profitability growth. Before we do that, I want to thank our sponsors. And if you don't know who our corporate partners. That's a nice term we use, but sponsor corporate partners. Yeah. It's all the same. If you don't know who our corporate partners are by now, clearly you're not a binge listener. So I'll start, say the first letter. If you're a binge listener, you should be able to clean your mind to complete the name of the sponsor. First one starts with an N. Like Nancy. Yep, you guessed it. Next step. Okay, good job. Next one starts with an F as in Frank. Yep. You guessed it. Listener. Fundera or fund. A box.

Yeah.

And then last but certainly not least starts with a T. And if you listen, if you can't guess T sheets, you haven't listened to any of our episodes. We'll give you more details on who our corporate partners are in a little bit, but I just always want to thank them so very, very much. They make this show possible. They're the ones who fund this show and. And let us air it out to you, our loyal listeners. So thanks to our corporate partners.

They are special.

Yes, they are special. Today's guest, Jonathan Royce. You know, first of all, dude, he was an all american athlete at the University of Michigan for field and track. He was a high jumper. Talk about raise the bar. This guy lived that, you know, hey, raise the bar, man. Raise the bar. This is. These are the guys that raise the bar, Right? He went on. Among his multiple accolades, he's an author of a children's book. He is a part time principal or maybe full time vice principal, but he's running an entrepreneurial endeavor. It's called hustling hoagies. And he's coming on the show today to share what he's doing with hustling hoagies and where he's struggling with profit first. And our job on today's episode is to get this business more profitable than it's ever been. It's my pleasure to bring on Jonathan Royce. Jonathan, welcome to the show.

Hey, fellas, how you doing? Mike, Chris. Glad to be here.

What's happening?

Doing well, man. How are you doing, brother?

Since you're a binge listener, do you like the crowd or do you want us to take you to therapy with the harp?

I like the crowd. It reminds me of competing in college. Give me the crowd every time. Get you hyped.

I sorry. Oh, I like that. I just took it down with the harp. I'm sorry.

After doing this highest jump, this would kick on. Yeah, I don't know what that's all about. Okay, so that's what happens at the end. Yeah, yeah, right, exactly. At the end, once the meet was over, you got a gold medal around you, young lady saunters over, you're sitting there.

That never happened. Honey.

How did you get, how did you get hustling Hoagies started? What was the inception of this great business?

Like you mentioned in the intro there, I'm an assistant principal. I've been teaching for seven years, high school English and just transitioned into a principalship at the end of the school year. So I was four weeks in. And by the time that school year ended, the school system had gone into a financial tailspin where as the new employee, I was the one most at risk of being cut. So as I was thinking of this and it didn't come to fruition until later into the summer, but as the summer was going through, I wasn't sure if I was going to have the job that I had when I left. So not only did I look for another job, I decided to try to create one for myself. And hustling hoagies was born out of the fear of, of not having a job that I wanted to have when school came back around four months later or three months.

Yeah, which isn't too uncommon. I mean, I think some entrepreneurs start out of intentional design. Like this was my dream. And other people realize that the quote unquote safety of a public sector job or private sector really isn't that safe. So what specifically moved you to Hoagies? Was there a reason that is the industry you picked?

Well, one was my brother in law. Blu is a genius when it comes to food. Just flat out one of those people who just got a knack. And he and I, when we had been training for a half marathon on those long runs, we would talk about, you know, our dreams and our goals for the future and just kind of spitballing what are the things that we're good at and kind of, you know, what can we do? And he was food and I was or am good at kind of the visioning piece of it. And so having his knack and my knack and kind of putting those together, I can do the paperwork because in school, you know, you just kind of learn how to go through that process. I can get this thing rolling and set it up, but what can we do that's simple and doesn't cost too much and something that my wife will be okay if I Put this money on the credit card. I still might be able to pay it off over the summer.

One part of your story that's already unbelievable to me is that you can talk while running. The guys you were spitballing while running. That blows my mind. You come up with this business concept. What's it look like today? What's it look like today? Do you have a space? What's it look like?

It's a food cart. So, like, literally, like, you see the hot dog guy on the side of the street if you're in New York or a big city, right? So imagine that. But instead of doing hot dogs, we do cheesesteak hoagies. So we do a classic cheesesteak. We have a griddle that we have off to the side, and we make a fantastic cheesesteak hoagie. Just your classic Philly. This is good stuff. And it's. Nobody really does that around here. And nobody does it as well as we do kind of out there on the street.

And where's around here? Where's your.

We live in Michigan, in Ann Arbor. So we're right. College town, usa, University of Michigan. Go blue.

Go blue.

That's right. So we got some college campus and we did really well during the football season. We were able to set up by campus and we did well there. But prior to that, we were just trying to find our way. Where can we set up where we know we're going to get some decent food, foot traffic and make some money.

So how long you been in business?

So we were in business for those four months of the summer. So we are what, from last June? End of last June, July, August, September, October, November, December. We are in month seven and we're out of season, so we're not even slinging hoagies right now.

Okay, so that's. You're a brand new business.

Brand new baby.

The football season lasts three months, four months if you're having a good season when you get to a bowl game and so forth.

Right? Well, football season for Michigan, our last home game was third week in November. And we had only done those weekend games because it's so cold that we're not, you know, we weren't going to go out into the street. So we literally were only working those Saturdays, those games, those home games, Saturdays. And then during the summer, two or three days out of the week. So it cost us about seven grand to start up. And then with the cost of food and stuff, by the time everything was said and done, it was probably around 1200 total.

To run during that time. Now the home games, average football team, I love college football, has placed 12 games in a season. I mean, six are home, maybe seven if you play a weak team to start. So say you have seven homies. That means you'd seven days to sell hoagies over that season. And you also said you had three days, three other days a week. Where were those other days? Who were you selling to?

So we set up by a state park. Street vendors aren't allowed to be on state ground. So we found a place that was just off, kind of off the driveway or the street that people would come into to park to go to a canoe livery where they would get in the canoes and kind of do the whole travel down the river thing. So we set up down there over the weekends and you know, we'd sell 16 to 20 hoagies, which is not anywhere near what our business plan suggested that we would make.

Which is very common.

Wasn't working out quite as. As brightly as, as I had written in the business plan.

So let me ask you about those, those seven days at Michigan's home games. How many hoagies do you sell on one of those days?

Anywhere from if it was a home game and it was a noon game, it was around 60. And then if it was a 3:30 game, it was closer to, you know, 90, 90 to 100. But for the big rivalry game, which is when we had our best, our best day, we sold probably around 120 to 130. So that was our big, our big kind of day of the whole summer season.

And was that big rivalry game. That's Michigan State you play?

Yes.

Is that a night game?

It was a 3:30 game. So we had time to sell from, you know, 9:30 to 3:30. We sold out before the game even started. That's how busy it was.

Okay, so you said this isn't consistent with your vision. What was the vision for the business?

Well, my idea was that because I didn't know anything about the business, I'm just trying to figure things out as we go. I thought we could go set up anywhere and kind of set up and just produce food and sling it wherever we wanted. And I thought it would be a lot easier to get into places where we were not able to get. So I didn't know that we couldn't go into a state park. I didn't know that we couldn't go into a city park where these ideas where you just know people are going to be and you know that there's an opportunity for you to sell. So, you know, I had planned on being able to sell, you know, maybe 60, 60 a day, and that would cover, you know, our startup costs.

Okay, I gotcha. And so did you in fact cover your startup costs or is it right now, have you losing business?

We were able to cover those startup costs and the food costs, I think. What do you call them there on your, on your sheet?

Variable costs.

Materials.

And materials. Okay, yep, yep.

Okay, yep. But we didn't, we didn't do any profit for us. We were just working to pay off the startup costs.

Okay.

And we were able to do that minus 400. Minus about 400 bucks. So I had to come out of 400 bucks out of pocket to pay off the last little bit.

Okay, and what's the status of the business now? Are you waiting till next season? Are you still trying to sell? What's the.

So that's where, reading your book, my questions came in. So we're kind of at ground zero. We had our startup year where we kind of our startup four months where we kind of figured out the kinks. And now moving forward, next time summer comes around and we're ready to go, you know, how do I set this up so we can actually pay ourselves and move forward so I can actually have some money?

Yeah. So let me dig into one kind of major opportunity I see sitting in front of you right now. You know, when people read Profit First, Jonathan, the default thought is like, I got to cut costs, I got to cut costs. That's part of it. But in infantile new business, there isn't many costs to cut. Like, you can't get cheaper quality products and stuff like that. And so you shouldn't. The element that people look over is volume and margin. Meaning can I get more of the same customer more frequently or can I increase the margin? Can I sell for a premium? And so when I look at your business, a premium is likely unrealistic. How much do you charge for a single hoagie?

For the actual sandwich, it's seven bucks. If they want to make it a meal with the soda and chips, then it's. It's nine bucks. During game day, we bumped that up to a dollar and we sold the stuff for $8 for the sandwich and $10 for the meal.

Okay. And I assume I could be wrong, is that you're approaching the upper limit. I mean, it's a. You gotta look at the target customer here. It's a college student. And if you ask them to drop 15 bucks or 20 bucks and the vendor down the street selling hot dog for two hot dogs, they're gonna win. I also assume your customer is often inebriated. So the quality of the food may not be as critical as the convenience of the food. The availability of it. Is it something that's going to satisfy me right now?

Right. And that's kind of why we didn't go to the after hours nightclub kind of food piece of it. Because we knew we couldn't compete with the street vendor who's selling two hot dogs for three bucks. We knew we wouldn't be able to do that. So we did more of a lunchtime, lunchtime crowd. And that's kind of the niche that we're looking at now. Are we able to figure out a way to go where we know customers are and we can set up and make some. We know that there's 300 people in this business. You know, we're going to get whatever percentage of that because they're gonna go eat anyway. If we set up here, we know we got some foot traffic and we know we can, we can make some money here. That's kind of where we're, where we're at.

You're going down the right path. And I want to add one more thought for you. I'd like you to write this down. It's called imminent need. And what that means is, is when a customer has a very specific need that needs to be addressed quickly, they are less critical of the price and they will default to what's most available. An imminent need that college students have when you're drinking at a game pre game is you got to find a bathroom. And you'll see that they're not so critical about the bathroom that's available. Right. So I'm not surprised when you said, at noon we sell 60 hoagies. At a 3:30 game, 90 to 120 hogies. What happens is the build of hunger is. Is longer. They're tailgating even longer now. Their hunger is growing. The imminent need to find solutions there. Here's what I want you to write down is, is where is there imminent need? Now, we may not figure out the answer now, but unless you start asking the question of yourself consistently, you'll never find it. I want to do a little experiment with you if you're up for it. Jonathan on the phone right now. Let's go run a little test. Okay. Okay, here's the test. And I can't remember if we've done this in another episode, but I'm going to ask you to look for something in the room you're in. Right. I'm not going to tell you what it is just yet, but I'm going to give you five seconds to find as many of these things as possible. Does rules make sense?

Yes. Whatever it is you ask as fast as I can.

Yes, as many as you can. Okay, so here we go. You have five seconds to find anything that's colored red. Go. One, two, three, four, five. Okay, stop looking. Stop looking. Now here's my question for you. How many things did you find that were black?

Absolutely none.

None. Right. And now you may be looking around real quick, I kind of caught one on the corner of my eye. Here's what's interesting about that little trick I played on you is our minds are wired to look for what we tell it to look for, but are really, really efficient at ignoring and filtering out the other things that may actually be the relevant thing. If we tell ourselves in our business I need to find more college students, it may take us down the wrong path. And that's why I'm telling you this concept of imminent need. I don't know if college students are your best customers. I know that college students with an imminent need are more likely your best customers. And if we start asking ourselves where else is there imminent need? You are more likely to find them.

Right, Right. And that's kind of where we. I didn't know those terms, but that's kind of where we're thinking about where can we go where we know people are who have some disposable income? And then we were thinking about why can't we go to an industrial park where there's three or four businesses where we can just go set up, you know, why can't we do that?

Yep. So, and then the you can. But here's the analysis you need to run. Our people, our people in that scenario, is there a large group of people means more potential and are the people, do the people not have access to food for an extended period? I'll tell you this. If I go to a building where people haven't eaten for the last eight to 10 hours and the door is opening, I will get more customers and than a company that they just served a corporate lunch and people are walking out of the building, it could be the same number of people. Okay, so what you want to look for is spaces where people are let out. And what comes to mind to me is manufacturers often have that. They have shift workers and shift workers often work for a pre designated part of time from you know, say 8 in the morning till 12 o' clock at night. They maybe have one break in the middle to use the restrooms and so forth. And at 12 o' clock they're allowed out. They are hungry. Bigger opportunity than other places. So industrial space like you're suggesting may be exactly it. My only tweak is always ask yourself where is there imminent need? You know, I'm thinking gymnasiums and stuff where like my children go to like gymnastics class and different things. And my wife goes in there and she's sitting in there for two hours watching them and so forth and then she's coming out and she's hungry and, or she's got to bring home dinner and there could be imminent need there. The part I love about your business is the fact that you have mobility. You know, someone has a retail store, you get one shot of getting the right location. You have an infinite number of shots. So to scale a business like yours, it's all about experimenting. Now that you know kind of the group to target, all you have to do is make your best guess and try it out. And just like the football games, seven games and we know 3:30 is better than a noon slot.

Right?

Right, seven games. And you know where the best position you can to buy, you know, to get, for the, to get the most traffic. That's all you need to do a small sampling, seven tries at each location where there's potentially imminent need, you're going to find out what truly plays out.

That's good, that's good.

It's not good. It's, it's this, it's. Yes, it's damn good.

He's not the prince of profit for nothing. I mean.

Yeah, so step one's that. Now here's the big challenge I got for you Jonathan, is you have an early stage business. You can employ the profit habit starting today. So here's what I encourage you to do. Starting with the very next sale, you make a $7 hoagie. 1% of it goes to profit. I'm literally 70 cents. 1% goes to profit.

No, 7 cents.

I'm sorry, 7 cents, 70 cents. Listen, that's 10%. 7 cents goes to profit. A percentage 20%. So $1.40 goes to you and your brother in law and you reserve it. When you start allocating profit and owners pay for the business first, you're going to be forced to be very critical of the expenses used to run your business to pay for the fuel, to get the cost of goods sold. They call it the materials, the Meats and the breads for your product. And what you may realize is that's.

Where my wife comes in. My brother in law and I are the dreamers. The. The. Let's. Hey, yeah, we can go do this. How about we go buy. You know, she just talked trash to me the other day because we had bought like 500 business cards and she. She had just started reading your book and she was like, she had told us before that we didn't need. That we didn't need to buy those cards. And I. And I was talking to her about the book and you had talked about leakage or there was some. Something about buying leakage. There's no reason that you need it. Or you had interviewed somebody and. And they had bought stuff that they didn't need, and so they had to, you know, cut it out. I was like, God dang it, you're right. We didn't need those cards. She's like, yes, I've always made.

Well, yeah, she kind of is. Yes, every wife always. No, she is totally right. And now think about the. The return on business cards. I strongly suspect if you went to the Michigan game and every student that bought a hoagie from you got a business card that if we visit the stadium after the game is over, over, Every business card of yours will be littered over that stadium.

Right?

It's money out the window. So, yeah, so we. Your wife will hear. This is for your wife, too. She listens to this. So your wife.

There you go.

Your wife is right. Your wife is right, that it is the natural tendency of ours, and this is Parkinson's law, as money comes in, like, hey, we're starting to make some money. We sold some hoagies. We had a killer day. 120 hoagies. We can now take the next step. Yeah. And that's the mistake. We need to. Yep, yep. We need to. And I'll tell you all that stuff. No one cares. And I hate to say this, no one cares about your business name. No one cares about the size of your sign. All they care is they have an imminent need and they're hungry and you got a pretty darn good hoagie. That's what we gotta focus on for this stage of the business. The quality of your food. It's gotta be in the ballpark. I'm telling you, it doesn't have to be the world's best. You're not gonna get famous for your hoagie, but you do have an imminent need. So you gotta get famous for being in the right place at the right time for these people. Then as we grow, we can further build out the brand. But everything's gotta focus on catering to that one need.

So you're saying I don't need a bunch of aprons that say hustling hoagies on em?

No, for God's sake, no. I want that going in your pocket. I want that going into your profit. But here's the funny thing is if you start taking your profit and owners pay first, if you start allocating a percentage to that, the remainder's left over. And you're gonna say you don't have enough money to buy the aprons, you don't have enough money to buy the business cards. And it'll force you to run your business more efficiently.

Right? And that's, and that's in reading the book, I'm like, we're just starting out. We have, we were able to. We're basically starting out with zero debt. How can we make sure that we're getting paid to do all the work that we do and it's not going back, you know, paying for garbage.

That's right. Because, Jonathan, let me tell you something, a little secret here. The world is telling us total bullshit. They're saying to grow your business, you need to put more money into it. Keep investing, Jonathan. It's an effing lie. I am telling you it's a lie. Your job is to run that business fiscally, financially healthy starting today. Because if you can grow a little hoagie business, a tiny little cart business, and make it financially healthy starting today, as it grows, it will continue that great habit I've seen. The other evil side of this is that people say, well, it takes money to make money. I got to invest more, I got to refinance our house. Hey, hon, we're not going to go on vacation. Let's put this into the business because one day it's going to pay off. And now you have 10 carts that are all losing money. We got to figure out a way to be very profitable today. The beautiful thing is you've started to find the answer. We know one part of imminent domains, those 330 football games. Now we got to find the rest of them and they're out there. So that's your job, brother.

Nice.

Cool, man. We got to go. What we're going to do, Jonathan, is Christine from our office is going to reach out to you. I'd love to touch base again and do a check in with you maybe, maybe a year from now. I mean, we got to Go through another football season, but you up for that? Can we touch base? Touch base in about a year from now and tell us where you stand.

Yeah, you'll. You'll get some emails for you. I got you on my, on my email list.

Nice, dude. That's why you're my man. Keep sending those to me. Jonathan, if someone's down in Michigan in the Ann Arbor area, next. Where can they find you? Where can they find your website? More information about what you're doing.

As of right now, we are just on Facebook. Hustling Hoagies. Hustlinghogies. We're on Twitter, so we haven't spent money on a website because we're trying to.

You passed the test. If you said you need a website, I was gonna get in your face. No. Good job. So everyone go to facebook.com right now. Hustlinghogies. Like it. And then get yourself over to Ann Arbor for a great football game and an even greater hoagie. Jonathan, thanks for joining the show. We'll touch base with you. And please, yeah, do email me.

Yeah. Thank you. Go blue.

Go blue.

Thanks, Jonathan.

I love it. I love a good Michigan fan. I'll tell you, dude, you go to. That's real football. I'm a Virginia Tech Hokies fan. I am crazy about Virginia Tech Hokies. I gotta admit, you go to a Michigan game, you're gonna be overwhelmed. Like, you may pee your pants.

Oh, geez.

Especially the Michigan. Michigan State game. 100,000 people.

Legendary.

Legendary. Legendary. Epic. Epic.

So we're going to talk about what we learned here.

But first, thanks to our sponsors, I want to thank tsheets Time tracking software. You know, one thing they can be tracking, Chris, is how long we run these shows. But listen, if you have employees, if you do projects, if you do anything where you need to account for the time spent, tsheets is the most efficient, effective way to do it. We use this software in house. Nextiva. That's our Voiceover IP phone system. And a corporate partner for our show here, Voiceover ip. It's a full functioning high end corporate system at the price of like a home phone. It's the biggest value punch you'll get in the phone industry. And yes, we use nextiva and love them.

And it's got just ridiculous features.

Ridiculous features, Yeah, I go on and on about it. My favorite right now is Call recording. We do interviews and stuff over the phone. And you just push one button and you're recording the phone call. Yeah. Other phones, of course, provide that function. But Nextiva. It's included. Like, it's there. You don't have to pay more for it. So that's what I love. Fundera is a loan source. So if you need a loan to buy your next hoagie cart, Fundera can do it. Now, here's the deal. You only buy that hoagie cart if you figure it out with your first one. What I like about Jonathan is he's mastering it with one cart. He hasn't bought the second one. God bless his wife. She's keeping him in check. Master it until it's totally profitable, then expand and then use Fundera to expand. That's an investment.

And the next married to Mayhem, maybe he and his wife can come on.

Oh, yeah, you know, I'd love to do that. We should have asked him. And then Fundbox. Fundbox, if you do invoicing. Now, Jonathan isn't in a business that would do invoicing. It's a. It's a cash on delivery type business. Like, you pay them when you're there. But Fundbox, if you invoice customers and. And if you need that money now but your customer is sitting on it and going to pay, then Fundbox will fund that invoice right on the spot. So they'll release the funds to you. It's the ultimate in cash flow management. If you have cash flow problems. And the nice thing, too is they don't do collections. They don't call your customer and say, where's the money? Now, you continue to receive that money as you normally would. And when the funds come in, you pay back Fundbox for giving you those funds early, plus their service fee, which is very reasonable. It's a great way to address cash flow shifts. All right, that's our sponsors.

Yes.

Corporate partners.

We love them. You use all of them, I think, right?

Yeah. Every single one. Yeah, Every single one we've used.

Yeah.

Let me take it back. Fundbox, we've never. We don't need. We haven't had that need for our business internally.

Got it.

We have our members of Prop First Professionals. We have at least 10 of them, maybe 15 to 20 now using FundBox and getting feedback from them.

So, yes, really great business tools, resources. Love them. Thank you to our corporation and good.

People behind it, too. And. And that's important to us.

Yeah, apparently. Which one of them throws the most wicked party?

Oh, T sheets, dude. Oh, my God. Are you kidding me? If. Yeah, you. You will not go home sober, even if. Even if you don't drink. Like, you can't help it. You just breathe in the air and it's like, oh, my.

I got to stay away from that then.

Yeah, avoid it. Avoid it. Uh, it's so good. Like, you gotta go, but you gotta avoid it. It's like. It's like this total yin and yang.

Yes.

You don't. You shouldn't be there, but you have to be there. Cause you can't be there. What'd you learn from today's episode?

You know, I think the biggest thing I learned was when you were talking with Jonathan about, you know, thinking differently about prospects and where to find them. You know, the whole. The whole thing about imminent need that you were talking about. It's really. And then of course, that little trick you did on him. Look around and see what's red and. Okay, now what did you see that's black? And he's like, I don't know. You know, it reminds me of something that happened at a seminar once, that it was a seminar on coaching, teaching us how to be a coach, which is different than a trainer and a coach. So the person giving the seminar said, okay, I want you to pair up. And he's like, okay, you're paired up. He's like, who in this room knows how to juggle? And no one raised their hand, right? So he says, okay, you're gonna coach each other on how to juggle. And we're like, what the. How can we coach each other if we don't know how to juggle? Right? It's a very kind of deep question. So of course we. We took turns. Two minutes for me, two minutes for my partner. We're throwing balls around the room like crazy. Like, we couldn't. Couldn't juggle at all. It was. It's hard. So he says, okay, you maniacs, calm down, Sit down. So we sat down. He continued his presentation for about 30 minutes. Then he says, okay, I want you to pair up again. Same pair. And I want you to coach each other again. And I'm not exaggerating one bit. I went first, I picked up these three juggling balls, and I literally juggled for like 12 or 15 throws before I dropped one. And I was. I just amazed myself. I was like, what the hell happened? Well, guess what? He ended up telling us and teaching us that when we first tried it the first time, we were clumsy. But in that 30 minute period, literally our subconscious was figuring out how to juggle. And when I picked up the balls, I was able to juggle. So here's the thing is, and I talked about this on my last episode of the mystic show as well. You can give work to your subconscious mind, and your subconscious mind will do it. You give it a problem, it'll solve the problem. So coming back full circle, I hope that wasn't too lengthy of a story. But if you think differently about your prospects and you try to find new prospects in new places, your subconscious will start working on it.

Yeah, I love that. And it's so true. So true. Thanks for sharing that one. You ready for mine?

Yes, please.

All right, here it is. When it's the dramatic thing, he's got someone that's helping him out, and I want to shout out to her, it's Jonathan's wife. You know, it's a difficult role to be married to an entrepreneur. It's a mandatory role to keep that enthusiasm in check. And one area many entrepreneurs, me especially, gets caught in is the enthusiasm for the new concept. Expanding the idea. Oh, if only we did this. Oh, wait, there's a squirrel over there. We're constantly jumping around and we were trying solutions before. We're proving what's already working with what we have. What my shout out is to Jonathan's wife is the fact that she's keeping him in check and has the courage to speak up and say, wait, wait, those business cards aren't necessary. Wait, wait, we don't need to do that yet. So kudos to her for having the courage to do it. And a shout out to all our requests to all entrepreneurs. Get that second person that is less emotionally attached and living in the moment that can speak to the truth of what the business needs. It's either a business coach, maybe it's a friend, but someone that's not inside the weeds and can see it clearly from the outside.

Genius.

Genius.

Love it. There's so many takeaways from today. And yeah, you're playing sound clips again. That's awesome.

Yeah, the sound clips are back. I'm loving it. Yeah, Because I rewired the office here. All right, man, we gotta rock and roll, you know. Here's one request I'd like to make to you. Go on itunes. Go on stitcher. Please share your feedback. We want your comments. Leave a rating. That helps get more the word out on the show. More people get to learn about it. And leave a comment and email me@mikemicalicz.com I love to have you on the show. Let's tackle your business. Let's find a way to improve your profitability.

There you go. And of course, our website, profit first podcast.com all of our previous episodes and all that. And of course we have to quickly mention profit first professionals, which is how another way in which you Mike Michalowicz, the prince of profit, is changing the frickin world.

Yeah. You know, our corporate mission is to eradicate entrepreneurial poverty. And what this means is, is we're not telling you how to make more money, we're showing you how to keep more money. So I don't care if you have a $7,000 business. A few weeks ago we were talking with Erica, small business Jonathan's got a brand new hoagie startup. Last week, Robin Robbins, a $10 million company. I don't care about that. What we care about is how much go into your pocket. Because profitability brings about stability. Stability brings about the opportunity for you to really express who you are in your business and serve the world. That's our mission. We'll help you out. Go to propfirstprofessionals.com, click on the find button. We'll find you one of our hand selected experts that will walk your business through to the highest degrees of profitability.

That's it. Thanks again. We'll talk to you next time, everybody.

See you later.

See ya. Monster. Kill.