The Force Your Business Doesn't Need with Roger Dooley

This is Mike Michalowicz, the author of Profit First. And you know the most common question I get? It's am I getting profit first? Right. Well, guess what? I'm doing a live workshop here at my offices in New Jersey. It's a two day workshop and I want to invite you. Go to profitfirstlive.com that's profitfirstlive.com and come to my office, perhaps even with your bookkeeper, accountant, and master profit first. We're going to make your business permanently profitable. All right, talking about naked, my friends, get ready to strap on your. Let me reveal the words here. Your fresh tuna. You guys are good because we're about to discuss the powerful force of friction and how you can leverage it to your advantage. You're about to hear that and so much more. On today's episode of Entrepreneurship Elevated. That sounded like friction. Did you like that?

Did you excite it?

Yeah.

Did you?

Yeah.

Oh, I like that. That sounded like a genuine light. Hi, everyone. I am Mike Michalowicz, the author of many books. I'm on a very specific mission to Iraq. Eradicate entrepreneurial poverty. Too many entrepreneurs are struggling to be successful. And it's not just financial poverty. There's countless forms, there's time poverty, there's education poverty. There's all these things we lack as entrepreneurs. Yet we gotta put this air of success on on this show. We fix all of that. We're gonna make you wildly successful. You're gonna have the time, you're gonna have the money. You're the life you desire. That's our intention on this episode and every episode of Entrepreneurship Elevated. I'm joined in studio by my dear friend and like, good buddy all of a sudden, compliments. Well, usually you insult me, but you start off with a compliment.

He said insult.

So are you feeling okay or.

I'm actually feeling very under the weather today.

That's Kelsey Ayers, everyone. Kelsey, welcome to the show.

Hi, friend. You can find us on Spotify itunes, stitcher, TuneIn Radio, entrepreneurshipelevatedpodcast.com iheartradio any podcast or anywhere. But please leave us overview and subscribe.

Do you know what our shortest lived bit was?

What the.

Just Jordan, your sister. We did like one and a half episodes. It was such a bomb. It was so bad. Even the one star too many bit lasted longer than that. Also in studio is Jay. Hold on. Wait, wait, wait. Oh, Jay Dictaphone.

Wow.

Is that good?

Thank you. That is a good one. Yeah.

Jay Dictaphone. Welcome to the show, Jay.

Thank you.

All right? So, Kelsey, we got a few things to cover today.

Yes.

I want to start off with another riddle if you guys are up for it. We. I do. We do have Roger Dooley, who's joining us today. Our most frequent guest of all time.

Yes. I love when he's on the show.

I love him.

I still remember this stuff from last time.

You ever try to get someone drunk, like, intentionally?

No.

So I did with Roger Dooley. We were. We were at a event and, you know, he. Everyone, you know, when like, a famous author walks in the room or someone, that's. That's the. The intellectual. And everyone just wants to.

Yes. Pick their brain.

Pick their brain.

Be near them.

I don't. I just want to pander to him. That's all I want. And so everyone's, like, around Roger, and I'm like, what can I do? I'm like, oh, I'm gonna make these margaritas and I'm gonna start, like, keep on giving them to Roger and try to get him drunk. It didn't work. It didn't. I got drunk. I got drunk and I fell in.

The pool embarrassed, and he lost his respect forever.

Yeah, exactly. He never came on the show for another two years until we paid them. All right, here's the riddle for the day. Roger, you're welcome to participate too. So listen closely. We're gonna ask for your answer at the end. Now, there's no googling this, my friends. You have to figure this out on your own. And these are all business related. Name three consecutive workdays without using the words Monday, Wednesday, or Friday.

Ooh.

So name three consecutive workdays without using the words Monday, Wednesday, or Friday. Now, don't answer now. Just let that steep in your mind and toward the end of the show, we'll talk about it. But, you know, let that be. You let that distract you from everything else. We're going to talk about today while you ponder that. Kelsey, do we have a shout out from any of our listeners?

Oh, sure.

Oh, you're too busy doing your question. You're writing it down.

You told me to be distracted.

You did a good job.

So this comes from. Ready for it. This is an itunes subscriber name. Okay.

Yeah.

It's not a real name.

Okay.

It comes from Jehovah.

That's an interesting name.

Yeah, I know.

Is there any vowels in their name?

No.

So how do you spell.

It's J, B, B, N, G, H.

And how do you pronounce it? So what. What does nehyp, N, Hibda have to say they write.

I have been running my family's small business for 20 years now and looking for processes to help us grow. Mike and Kelsey are a breath of fresh air with great strategies and a ton of humor.

Is it a ton of humor or is it a ton of humor?

A ton of humor. Highly recommend subscribing to this podcast.

Thank you, Jibonib.

Thank you, Jehad.

Which ironically is funny. It's funny. But do you know my first child? What name? I was thinking.

It'S very ironic and so coincidental.

It's coincidental, yeah.

Amazing.

But we went with Jake instead. Stop.

Your first child.

I know. That's my last child. Whatever, Kelsey. Whatever, Kelsey. Just go along with it. Kelsey, what else we got? Oh, sponsors. I do want to thank our corporate partners. Make the show a reality sponsor. Oh, for God's sake. I keep forgetting. Can we not get another sponsor? Have we tried?

We're going to.

Didn't we make a public decree? We did and nothing. No one responded.

Yeah.

What about eight Clock Coffee? What happened to them?

Well, they were a one timer.

Oh, they don't want to do another.

That was just for their specific campaign, you know.

You know how much freaking coffee I bought from 8 o' clock coffee?

How much?

I think like 15 bags now because they gave us some free bags, right? I come home like, hey, look, hon, we got a new sponsor and free coffee. She's like, how long do we get this? I'm like, well, you know, for a long time, as long as they're a sponsor. I couldn't bear going back home and saying they dropped us after one episode. So I started buying her coffee. I spent more on their freaking coffee than they did in our sponsorship.

But they didn't drop you. It was just the one episode was geared towards.

Yeah, it's true. That's true.

Make it sound worse than it is.

Well, I feel dropped. I feel dropped.

Yeah, you made this way more dramatic than it had to be.

Well, I don't know. You ever put something out there and you have to perpetuate it just forever, like a lie?

No, you should never.

You never really.

You never do that. How old are you know that lesson by now?

I want to hear some of your fishing stories. Because I guarantee, like, the marlin that you caught was like the size of a boat. You know what I mean?

It was huge.

Like, it starts out like 10 years ago. It starts off the size of, like your arm, and now it's like the size of a truck.

So we had Easter, you know, so we Record these, like, way in advance. So Easter was yesterday, and so I had to serve everyone, and we had, like, 15, 20 people at the table, so everyone gets some ham and stuff. My sister, I gave her one piece that was like a barely a morsel. And I kept on feeding everyone, and I put all the food away. My sister was, like, helping my elderly father sit down. So when she sat down, there was two, right? Two, like, things of rice, one little ham slice and a bean. And she guessed it was me immediately.

Of course.

I am a child. I am a freaking child. Kelsey, we have anything else to discuss or should we get into the show?

I think we should get into the show.

Okay.

I feel like this is going to be a lot to talk about.

Okay. His name is Roger Dooley. He's the author of Friction and Brain Fluence, as well as the popular blogger of neuromarketing. I got to tell you, Kelsey, all of these are must reads. I love his blog. I love Brain Fluence. I love Friction. He is an international keynote speaker and founder of the consultancy Dually Direct. He also co founded, a while back, College Confidential. Is that where you found the college you were going to by any chance? Either you guys, or is that before your time?

I think that was before.

Okay. The leading college bound website. He's been a serial entrepreneur since he left a senior strategy position at a Fortune 100 company to enter the nascent home computer market. And we're privileged enough to have him as a guest today. Roger, welcome to our show.

Welcome.

Well, thanks so much for having me on, Mike. And, you know, I've got some sponsorship advice for you. You know, I heard the opening bit, and I think in chasing a coffee company, you're probably going the wrong way, because as much as I've followed you online, I have never heard anybody say, wow, Mike McAlister is going to be there. I bet he's going to make coffee.

That's a good point, actually.

Is he bringing the margaritas? And so, you know, you got to work with your branding, Mike, you know, and go with maybe approach Jose Cuervo or somebody. And, you know, anyway, just, you know, a little. Little branding advice here, dude, you.

Every time you walk in the room, you just drop a logic bomb every time. So thank you for that. And let's. Let's pursue someone, but probably Jose Cuervo wouldn't pick us up, but let's pick a smaller Milagro. I want Milagro. I want them back.

Yeah, me too.

Roger, your new book, Friction, you talk about the probably one of the most important forces in all of business and so many elements. What exactly is friction?

By my definition, it is wasted time, effort, and perhaps money, but particularly time and effort. And I got into this from the customer experience side because I kept encountering these high friction experiences where I had long forms to fill out, forms that wouldn't even populate. Let my browser populate them, and I'll check out processes that were confusing all the things we associate with online friction. But then I realized that it went beyond that and that there is a huge amount of internal, internal friction inside companies. Not, not the kind of friction where people argue with each other, but the wasted time in meetings and email and procedures that have to be followed even though they don't make sense and creating reports that nobody reads. And so it really became, as I dug more and more into it, I got more and more excited about the topic because I began seeing it everywhere. And my experience, Mike, is that when I talk about this with people for a little while, pretty soon they are seeing it everywhere too. It's kind of like brain virus. So that's my objective here, is to infect your audience today with the friction brain virus and have them start seeing friction in their own lives and then also doing things to eliminate it.

So is friction anything that impedes the outcome?

I would say so if it's not. If it's unnecessary. I mean, I think if we look at some of the stats out there, every year, more than $4 trillion worth of merchandise is abandoned in E commerce shopping carts, and that's more than twice the amount of E commerce sales. So I mean, it's a huge, huge number. And if you say, well, okay, why is this stuff abandoned? Almost all of the top reasons are frictional in nature. You have to set up an account to check out. The checkout process is confusing or complicated, or there's surprises at some point during the checkout process that weren't made clear previously. You know, all of these things are totally unnecessary and can be designed out of the process. But sadly, most businesses don't design them out of the process.

Okay, so how do we identify friction within our businesses?

You know, it's really, I think there's a couple of ways. One is observing your customers, observing your users, depending on the kind of business you have, see exactly what they're going through to do business with you. And I'll give you a couple of examples from Amazon. Amazon is in one sense a very obvious example of a company that understands friction. And it's almost like saying Apple's good at design. But on the other hand, this has been a theme of theirs specifically since the late 90s. Back in 1997, Jeff Bezos was talking about frictionless shopping when most companies are just thinking about getting online and shopping. So he saw the potential there. They patented in 1998 one click ordering and they defended that patent even in with the onslaught from the much larger than Barnes and Noble who wanted to use the same system. And eventually they prevailed and Barnes and Noble had to add an extra click to their process. Meanwhile, Steve Jobs over at Apple, who really understood something about customer experience and user experience, didn't mess around. Apple just licensed it for their new music store. They just said, hey, we need this, we want it, it's going to be good for our customers. But beyond this sort of obvious example of making it super easy to do business with them, never logging you out. I don't know about you, Mike, I've never been logged out of Amazon. I think I'd probably have to buy a new computer to be logged out of Amaz Amazon, where many of the businesses I deal with, notably United Airlines, logs me out constantly. Like you're idle for 20 minutes, you're working on some complex reservation, bouncing back and forth between windows and you find out that your search results are gone and you've got to start over again. And Amazon understands that and they observe their customers and this is something that any business can do of any size. They saw that, well they first of all they were shipping the same retail packages that you buy at Walmart. So like if you bought a pair of headphones or something and being one of these plastic heat sealed blister packs that, you know, you need power tools to get into and risk serious serious injury from the shards of plastic, you know, and most companies would just say, okay, well that's the way the stuff comes. The manufacturer makes it that way. Well, they watch their customers struggling with this and they said okay, why don't we go with this other kind of packaging which they named frustration Free packaging, simple cardboard box, it's good, good for the environment compared to plastic, very little risk of injury and opening didn't require any special tools to open. And what they found was yeah, the customers like that experience and their perception of the products was better. Their negative comments about the products that were switched to these kinds of packaging went down 73% even though the product itself was the same. So I think the ease of opening sort of created a halo effect where the product itself seemed better and more satisfactory.

You know, the fact that you had to use the phrase very little risk of opening the package of injury. Very little, low risk of injury. I mean that sounds so absurd in retrospect. Where else are we at risk of air quote injury with friction inside our business?

Yeah, well, inside, you know, we develop rules and processes to make things go more smoothly. In fact, that was sort of one of the great discoveries of the industrial revolution in the era that followed it, that, you know, you could manage a large enterprise, even a global enterprise, by setting up procedures and rules and reporting systems and whatnot. But eventually these things sort of take over and become entities unto themselves where they're no longer enhancing the productivity of people, they're not enhancing the customer experience, they just become a way of doing things that has to be followed. There's an estimate from Harvard Business Review that says that every year $3 trillion of what the authors called organizational drag is wasted. And that's basically time and money spent on meaningless meetings. Dealing with email, that's not important. Creating reports and following rules and all the things that happens in businesses large and small, often more in big business. But even small businesses have these issues and now we've got all these great ways to communicate and distract each other. So in addition to email, now you can hit them up on slack and send them texts and messengers and you know, it's, it's very difficult to get stuff done inside businesses. In fact, there's one estimate that shows in a 47 hour workweek like for a manager, which would be they're already working more than the typical 40, that there are only six and a half hours of time available for uninterrupted work. Everything else is consumed by meetings and emails and dealing with other kinds of communications and system imposed time. So that, that gives you an idea of the magnitude of what we're dealing with.

Give me a sense, so you talked about Amazon. Give me a sense maybe of a small company. I can see it in Amazon, a great global example. But are small businesses using this friction strategy?

Oh yeah, there's one that I really like. There is an entrepreneur who co founded a business called Ubiquity Networks that ended up becoming a really big factor and somehow he ended up separated from that business. His co founder went on to become wealthy and actually bought an NBA team where this fellow, his name was Ramaham Malasani ended up from this morning might be he ended up having pretty much start over and he was, he was a very good technical guy, but he had an insight and wanted to attack the home router market. Now, pretty much everybody has at least one of these in their house. Now, it's a little box with blinking lights that lets the devices in your home connect to the Internet. And that space was populated with huge companies, companies like Cisco that are many billions of dollars in size, with years of experience in creating networks of all sizes, so they seem like formidable competition. But he had an insight. He watched what people were doing and found that even people who were even as tech friends didn't want to touch their router once, once it was configured for fear that they would mess it up and end up losing hours of time trying to make things work again. Because what they were were these black boxes with little blinking lights on them and a bunch of connections on the other side of it. And these things were pretty cryptic. You had to connect with a computer and log into them and then, you know, go through his complex configuration process. So he said, well, okay, what if we put a little tiny touch screen on the side of this box? Now everybody thought he was, he was nuts. I mean, why would you put touch screen on one of these things that doesn't require touch screen? We already have the ability to program them from our computers. And he created a three minute installation process which basically fire it up, type in a few things and, and you're done. And, you know, it's a simple little thing. And what, what he saw was twofold. First of all, he observed his customers, saw that even his technically adept friends hated this process. And two, that because of smartphones, these little screens were getting a lot cheaper so that he could incorporate, creating a huge cost penalty. And this enabled him, within a very short period of time, to get thousands of Amazon reviews. He used Amazon's low friction process as a vendor which is trying to get into Best Buy and such would be very difficult for him because they have like one buyer making these decisions. But Amazon lets anybody sell pretty much if they're legit, maybe if they're not. And he got in their system and began selling these things and he started getting five star reviews because people are saying, holy cow, this thing is easy. And that turned into its own little flywheel where he got more reviews and more sales, to the point where a year ago a friend of mine said, hey, you wouldn't believe what I just did. Bought a new router for my house and it was the most phenomenal experience ever. You're not going to believe it. And I said, not only do I believe it, I bet I know the brand. And I told him, yeah, it's a securify Right. And he looks at me. How do you know that? Because they are, they have designed the product to be easy for regular people to use. So, you know, I think that trying to, you know, take the friction out of the customer experience can occur at any level. But you have to really see what, observe customers. Because most businesses I think just operate on an assumption of what their customers are doing, what their customers want. And you know, that goes into all aspects, into product design, into the experience design, and there's not enough time spent actually seeing what they're doing.

I noticed some companies almost ignore friction. They let it flourish. I rented a car, I won't say the company's name, which was Budget. I went to Budget rent a car and the line Roger at the airport was maybe four or five people deep and literally it was a 45 minute wait, you know, and then I got to the desk to rent the car and he's like, well, you want to upgrade? You want the insurance? And went on and signed this and do that. 45 minutes of waiting. Clearly they can fix it. And they do have like the, you know, the Budget Ace Player Expedite Pass where you just walk in your car name. Why do some companies cling on to the friction? It was so frustrating.

Yeah, that's. Car rental is one of those areas that generally people dislike. It's one of those, you know, even the, even the better players seem to get very, very mediocre reviews on Yelp and such. But they, the most of the companies are trying to address that with their expedited system where you pre enter your information and you can pretty much walk right to their parking lot and grab a car. But if you don't do that, and certainly many first time renters are sort of casual renters, vacationers and such don't do that. They don't know how to do that or don't realize that it'll really save them a bunch of time. They go through that. And even, even the at the counter experience I found varies tremendously where some, you know, it can take them, you know, 10 minutes or 15 minutes to get a single customer through, depending on what special issues might arise, which is just a horrible experience, not just for that customer, but for everybody who's in line behind them, as you found. And you know, I think that companies just don't prioritize that. They just assume it's got to be done that way. I mean, look at, look at the field of taxis before Uber. Nobody really thought about taxis as being a high friction process. Yeah, it was hard to get one on a rainy afternoon in Manhattan, but, you know, it was like, okay, these taxis, they're pretty good. Better than walking, better than taking the bus, right? Until Uber came along and showed how every single aspect of the process, from calling for a ride, from seeing when your ride was going to be there, to monitoring your progress toward your destination, and then finally leaving and paying without any effort at all. I mean, to me, the, the friction on taxi ride just keeps on going and when you're exiting the car suddenly, okay, you gotta pay now, try and exchange money and change. Or, or you've got a. I try and do stuff with credit cards when I can. And that's even worse because the driver has to like reach under the front seat, pull out some kind of a device and he's like banging on to get it to work, you know, and it takes forever where, with, with Uber, just, okay, hey, thanks, goodbye. And now we're aware of the, the friction in taxis that really we just did not see before. It was, it was always there, but we didn't approach it from the standpoint. Is there a way of making this simpler? And, you know, there's two lessons there. One is it pays to observe. But also, whenever you have an entrenched company or dominant player, there's very little incentive to improve.

Right.

You know, taxi companies could have invented the same technology. They didn't, they weren't motivated to do that because they had a lock on the business, took somebody else to come in and motivate it. And, and so, you know, if you don't want to be disrupted out of your own existence, you should be, you should be the disruptor.

All things equal. Does the friction free company always beat the friction company?

I would say in general, yes. I mean, there's, there's very few circumstances where you. More friction is productive. The high friction companies that are out there, as I just alluded to, are typically the ones that have such a dominant position in the marketplace that people just have no choice but to do business with them. Like, try dealing with your cable company sometime if you want friction, you know, and it's, you know, it is the most horrible experience ever where they penalize their loyal customers.

Right.

You know, you know, instead, oh, you've been with us for a year, we're going to raise your prices without telling you. And then to get them back down, you've got to go through a, you know, 45 minute phone call and negotiation and, you know, instead of saying, hey, as a loyal customer, we're going to give you a better deal. But typically there's only one provider for that service. And when there's a monopoly, that's kind of what happens, unfortunately.

Does an example come to mind though, of a company where friction is good? I mean, does that, does friction give a luxury experience where it actually takes more time?

Well, to an extent, luxury companies sometimes make it a little bit more difficult to do business with them. They may have a limited number of outlets. You know, there's not going to be a Gucci store in every shopping mall or a Ferrari dealership on every block. In fact, if you want to buy a Ferrari, you'll probably have to reserve your car and wait for a month or two. You know, you're not going to find. Probably find it right in the lot and drive it away the way you can with most brands. So there is some exclusivity associated with that. And the theory there, the psychological theory, is that when you work harder for something that is more meaningful to you. So there's a sort of. Because you wouldn't wait three months for a car if it wasn't the most awesome car in the world. But in general, I don't think that's a viable business strategy for businesses. It's. It's just something that, you know, a few brands can pull off. But and sometimes too, the one area where a company could use higher friction is in steering behavior a little bit. Not that they would have an overall high friction environment. But for instance, businesses that, say, want to encourage people to participate in their retirement plan and discourage people from drawing on the funds in that retirement plan every time they have to, you know, pay a bill or something, can automatically enroll people in it, which is pretty common now after Richard Thaler's work on how to increase participation by making participation the default, so you automatically enroll the person, maybe even automatically provide for a gradual increase in deductions over time to keep pace and to encourage even more savings. Now, all of these things are, can be changed by the employee if they want, but because people tend to minimize effort, most of them won't bother. That's why people didn't sign up for these things in the first place. Not because they really didn't care about the retirement, because they had to fill out a form and, you know, it was just like too much work right now and they'd postpone it and then forget about it. The flip side of that is one instance, a company had a very simple plan. If they needed money, they could just phone up the HR department and get a check Cut to them. They added a form for that process. Not a difficult form. We just said, okay, if you want this, you're gonna have to fill out this form. And that actually cut the number of early withdrawals somewhat. So these. These minor manipulations of friction can be good. Although obviously you want to make sure that if you are increasing friction some way or intentionally, that it is good for the employee, not that somehow you are steering behavior in a way that benefits the company, but not the. Not the employee.

I wonder if we can use friction at a personal level. Roger, I'm thinking of J. Ozone here. And you're looking to lose weight, right?

Yes, thanks for putting that out there.

You said a few weeks ago you're looking to lose weight. You're changing your diet. Roger, are there things we can do to stop eating chocolate or little behavioral changes with friction?

Definitely. And the ultimate friction increaser came from Art Markman here at the UT Austin, Texas. He's a psychology professor there and wrote a book about habit change. And his personal downfall were these pint containers of Ben and Jerry's ice cream. You know, now these things are. If you read the label, there's like four servings in one of those, right?

Death. Four servings of death.

I know. They're so tiny.

Yeah, except. Except, you know, these things aren't that big. And it's pretty common to get the flavor you want, just start, like, eating a little off the top, you know, and pretty soon you're. Yeah, you're down near that halfway point. And this isn't that much to put back in the fridge. Before you know it, the whole pint's gone. Right. I mean, that's. That's pretty standard Ben and Jerry's behavior, from what I've observed. And this was his particular downfall. And he found that by simply not having them in the house, yes, he could drive to the supermarket if he really had that craving, but that was way too much friction. But you don't need that much of an intervention even. There's been a variety of tests that shown that just sometimes moving a snack out of reach decreases consumption. It could be as something as dramatic as, say, putting it on the. On a high shelf in another room or even just an opaque container a few feet farther away. And, you know, the impact may not be quite as great the more accessible it is, but in one case, Google, a Google office thing, was there a Manhattan office, maybe managed to cut the consumption of M&M's, where they have free M&M. And free other stuff too. But you know, they're just such a great snacking candy. You grab a handful of them and just munch them. Simply by moving them a little bit farther away and putting them in an opaque container, they cut calorie consumption in that office by a few million calories a month. So, yeah, these little interventions can make a big difference. And also, of course, if you want to adopt a good habit, making it easier, you know, if you really want to run every morning, then, you know, put your shoes right next to your bed, sleep in your running clothes or have them right there for you. And the easier you make it, the more likely you'll actually be to do it. Where if you have to think about, oh yeah, okay, I'm gonna have to go to the closet now and find this and that. And you know, it's just. In fact, James Clear, who wrote a great book, Atomic Habits, which I highly recommend that one talks about how if you want to work out at the gym, make sure your gym is on your commute to or from work, like right on it. If you have to drive even, you know, somewhat out of the way, you're going to be a little bit less likely to go and it's going to be easier to say no. So the easier you can make those good habits, the more successful you'll be.

Love that book. Yeah, Atomic Habits. Must read. There's one read though that for 2019, this is a must have. It's Friction by Roger Dooley. Roger, how can our listeners get your book, multiple copies of your book?

Well, the easiest place would be the normal booksellers, your Amazons and such. Right? Yeah, stop by my house too. That's fine. I might have a couple on hand. You never know. And if to find out more in general, I guess, or to see the various places it can be found, I would say start@RogerDouli.com and I've got all my info there and people can connect with me too that way.

Awesome, awesome. We're gonna. It's a book study here for our office is going to be Friction. Actually, our last book study was Atomic Habits, so it's a perfect compliment. Roger, thank you so much for joining us today. By the way, your website, your personal website, they want to learn more about your other books too. Where should they go?

Rogerdouli.com would be the best point because there I jump off from there to my neuromarketing blog, my Forbes blog, and other place where you can find me. Find my social media profiles, social media wise. I am probably most often @RogerDouli on Twitter.

And Roger, you may not know this. When you and I met that first time where I was trying to push margaritas on you, I told you I was looking to get fit, and you said you had a friction free strategy. I said, what is it? And you said this. Do it just so it worked. It worked. I've been fit ever since. All right, everyone. Roger Dooley, the one and only author of fiction, and he's a fiction novelist, too. Of Friction and Brain Fluence, two fantastic books. We're going to do a few more things, Kels. We're gonna share what we learned from Roger. We're going to do the riddle. We got a game to play. But first, I want to thank our corporate partners. Why is they partners every time, J. Bone?

I don't know.

Yeah, I want to thank our one partner.

So great.

It's like, well, it's friction free. It's just really. It's just easy to remember. Next, Eva.

That's their new patented friction free phone system.

Oh, I haven't heard about this. What's that function? What's it do?

I don't know. I just got the literature. I thought you were up on the. The new tech.

Oh, a little bit. It's called friction free. And there's nothing in the manual. That's the idea. They wanted to make the manual so easy that you didn't have to read it. It's called the friction free manual. The help manual. It's about 50 pages long. They're all blank.

It's amazing.

It sounds like not a waste of paper at all.

It's not a waste of paper. That's how easy it is next to eva. Now, we love them. You got to use them. We've been using them for a long time. We gotta get one to jbones house. But we love their phones. Okay?

Yeah, we love them.

Over my 12 years of being an author devoted to the small business entrepreneur, I've discovered the biggest challenge. And you know what it is? It's profitability. That's why I wrote Profit First. And that's why I'm now hosting a two day workshop here at my offices in Boonton, New Jersey, where I will teach you and my team will teach you how to become permanently profitable. Go to profitfirstlive.com right now to get details again. Profit first, live dot com. Find the dates that work for you, and I'll see you here at my office. All right, Kels, I want to know what you learned today from the one and only Roger Dooley.

I love Roger Dooley. My favorite thing, I think is, he says not enough customers or not enough companies spend enough time researching what their customers are actually doing and what friction they're experiencing to kind of eliminate that and put yourself as a differentiator from the other companies, bruh. I think that's super important for all aspects of your business, bruh.

I agree. That's funny sound, isn't it? That's a good one, Jay. Oh, I got words here. J estrone.

Oh, God, that sounds awful.

Yeah. Estrogen. Estrone.

Oh, close.

Yeah. I wonder what estrone is.

I don't know. It's a word.

Look it up. Yeah, yeah, Same along the same lines. I let. So the frustration free packaging made me think. There's a great episode of Curb youb Enthusiasm with Larry David where he's trying to get one of those packages open, and he takes a kitchen knife and starts.

Yeah, I remember that.

And he goes crazy. And then he's like, forget this. I'm going to the hardware store and getting a razor blade. So he goes to hardware store, orders a razor blade, doesn't look at it. He's like, I want one of those. Guy puts it in the package. He gets home, he opens up the bag, and it's in one of those. It's in one of the plastics.

That's awesome.

So he can't even open up the razor blade to get him because. But just listen. Listen to the customers because, you know, obviously if they're. If there's something that's not working for them, then they're gonna go somewhere else.

I love that. I love the story of the touch screen hub or switch or whatever. Or your brow router. Yeah. Because they are frustrating. It's true. Once you get it right, you don't even want to look at it. Yeah.

Go to an IP address to log in to it. And it's.

Oh, yeah, right. And it doesn't work like, oh, the website can't come up. It's like, because you're not on the web. It's like. But it says go to his web address. I also liked. He said that many businesses stay stuck with lots of friction because they just assume this is the way it must be done. He shared the taxicab story.

Yeah. I think that's par for the course with that router one. It's like, as a consumer, you don't really think about how much friction it is. I mean, you think about it, but you don't think that there's a better way.

Agreed. Did you find out what Estrone means.

Yeah, it is like a version of estrogen.

How is it really?

Minor female horror.

That's your new name. J. Estrone.

A weak estrogen. It's like even more. More worse than estrogen.

Oh, it's even worse than estrogen.

The weak one.

It's the weak estrogen.

It's not even a strong estrogen.

It's not even strong. All right, guys, so I started off this episode with a riddle. And I said, name three consecutive work days without using the words Monday, Wednesday, or Friday.

Yeah.

Did Kelsey, you figured out?

No.

Okay. J. Schlone.

No, I have no idea.

Our dear guest, Roger Dooley. Do you have the answer for that riddle?

Beats me, Mike.

Okay, so name three consecutive work days without the words Monday, Wednesday, or Friday. They are yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Oh, that's a good one, right? That's a riddle. That's a riddle. Okay, it really wasn't that impressive, Kelsey. Should we do listener mail, then?

We'll do a game, surely.

Okay, well, we got for our listener mail.

So this comes from.

I don't know why I keep doing these punches. I just feel obligated.

Feeling punchy.

This comes from Brian Barry. I feel like I should talk really fast.

No, no, no, I won't do anything. Don't worry about it.

Okay, he writes, from which account would you make charitable contributions? I'm actually thinking about setting up an additional account for this.

So, Brian Barry, you freaking nailed it right out of the gate. Was it Aaron who came up with the rule, if in doubt, add another account? Almost rhymes, but that's what you do. If you want to have any money forwarded toward a special or specific intention, you set up an account for it. So if you want to utilize the money for charitable work, you set an account called charity. If you want one to save up for a corporate retreat, which we don't have, we actually set up an account because we're having a corporate retreat. You set up a corporate retreat account, so let's set up a corporate retreat account. So, Brian, spot on, man. You nailed it. Just like this song. Nailed it back in the 80s. Can't touch this. All right, all right. J Zone Brimstone cologne, Earphone. That'd be great if your name was that long. All right, this is where you're gonna start us out. We're gonna do the real or fake. And, Roger, you're invited back to do this too. Now, these are products. These are true entrepreneurial products, except for one of them. Now, we're only gonna do three, because I've been kind of stretching to get all these and don't have enough time to do four. So one of these, Roger, is a fake. Two of these are legit. Now, I want everyone to know I came up with the. The verbiage for these because I want it to all sound similar. I want it to be my tone. So this is not copied and paste off of their websites or whatever. This is my verbiage. But the legit ones are legit. Okay, Jay Shlone, you're gonna go first. I'm gonna give you all three listen closely, then you tell me which one's fake and which two are real. Roger, you're gonna be in for this too, but you're gonna be able to kind of parlay off what Jay Schlone says. All right, first product's called the. These are so ridiculous. First product's called the car cooker. You're in a bind when you just gotta get there and gotta eat. Do you risk breaking the law and speed so you can sneak in some fast food, or do you risk the ridicule of being late? The ridicule. Neither are worth it. Kelsey, with the car cooker, a simple modification to your exhaust system channels the hot exhaust through a mini cooker. Exhaust fumes are safely kept away from your cooking hamburger while the meat cooks to a perfect medium rare.

That's faster than going to fast food.

Save energy and time with the car cooker. Okay, Modify your exhaust system. Listen, if you wait. You travel constantly, Kels.

I do, right?

How many times you've been like, sweating to get to work because you're late?

Yeah, and I'm scared of the ridicule.

Yeah, the ridicule. Or when you go home, how tired are you? You don't have time to stop and you gotta cook at home. Why not cook whole way with your exhaust? Okay, second product. Oh, this is great. This goes into the theme of today's episode. The WI FI detector. T shirt. Roger's seen walking around town wearing one of these, throwing these cool threads with a built in wifi signal detector. And you'll light up every time there's a strong signal, if you know what I mean. I love that I added that part. The shirt is made from cotton and has a glowing animation on the front to identify the strength of the WI FI signal. And then here's my favorite product I think of all time, the daddle. Jay Sloan, did you ever. Did your dad ever, like, play horsey with you? Jump on your dad's back? Or. Kelsey, you ever do that and your dad would run around. Yeah, I did with my children. I did it with my dad. Well, here's a problem. Children love to play horsey on their dad's backs, but danger ensues with the dad saddle, called the daddle. You can get on all fours while your child sits safely and comfortably in your back, strapped in and safe. Comes in western style only. Available now. Warning. Not appropriate for dressage, which is a form of horseback riding. If you didn't know that, like, barrel racing is another form. Okay, Jay Sloan, do you need any of these products repeated? No, these are all very entrepreneurial. Which one's the fake? Two of them are real.

Okay. I think I know you changed. You said you changed the WI Fi.

I added. I. I changed them all. Yeah.

Okay. Definitely. It depends, because the first one, if you're using the exhaust. No way. That's completely fake.

It does say exhaust fumes are safely kept away from your cooking hamburger.

That's impossible. So that one's fake.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay. I. I would agree. That sounds pretty crazy.

I said the WI FI detector.

I did add the line, if you know what I mean. Like, it says, it'll light up every time there's a strong signal, if you know what I mean. So you think that's the fake?

Yes.

Just to be different to Kelsey's point, I think you could channel. I think the heat can come through. I think you have tubes that go over the burger that keeps the exhaust in it, and it grills the burger.

And I feel like I've seen something similar to that, honestly.

Why would you see something similar to that?

Because, like, camping people have these things that, you know.

Yeah, but the whole thing was you're cooking while you're driving. That was right? Or no.

Yeah, yeah, you're cooking while you're driving. It's in the back.

That's totally. That's fake.

You. Well, I guess you could start the engines, have a coat. You could sit in the side, and you could. You don't have to be driving. Do you want to change your gas?

No.

Smart. Very smart. Stick with your first guy is usually right. And, Roger, what do you think's the fake product?

You know, I have to go also with the exhaust cooker. I mean, as much as I'd like one of those, I'd be actually be good if it also came with, like, Gordon Ramsay in the back seat so that because we're distracting, you have to flip your burger in heavy traffic.

But did you have a daddle when you were raising your kids?

No, I didn't But I could. I could just picture trying to, like, clear some hurdles with a child strapped to your back. I mean, that could be really good exercise.

The Dually family, the. The risk you put your children at by throwing them around. Your back could have been saved with a daddle. The fake product is the car cooker. I made that up. I think it was genius, though, so I take a lot of credit.

It's one of these things that, you know, you should start taking pre orders now. You should do a Kickstarter for that. I think I should.

I should. Someone will buy it.

You know what? I would have believed it was plausible if you said that it plugged into your outlet. Your outlet, and it was like a hot plate or something.

That's called the George Foreman Grill. Like, anyone could do that. This goes through your exhaust system. All right, Roger and Jay Schlone, you are both winners. Congratulations. You get nothing. And, Kelsey, you lost.

I think this means I'm not supposed to trust my first instinct.

I egged you on. I'm like, trust your gut. Your gut's never wrong. Never go back to a day I can answer. All right, Kelsey, I also have one elevation point, which I lost it. Where the heck is it? Let me get this real quick, because we got a roll. We got some sushi to throw down, you know? Oh, talking about friction. Oh, my God. I can't read my own hand.

You know, sushi would be good if your exhaust cooker isn't available because you don't have to heat that up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, my gosh. Here is my elevation point, which is not. Because I didn't think Roger would say this. I wrote this down. Keep it out of the room. So my suggestion was going to be whatever the thing is that you need to prevent access to that you. The habit you're doing. Oh, yeah, get it out of the room. But Roger shared it, so it's really not my elevation point. It's Roger's elevation.

You can use it.

Thanks, Roger. Hey, Brian, when we edit this, let's cut out everything Roger said the entire show and just leave it. I said thank you. Okay. I think that's it, right?

I think that's it, too. Yeah.

Okay, then let's get the heck out of here.

But please don't forget to subscribe and leave a review.

Yeah. Are we giving away free gifts or anything?

Not at the moment.

Yeah, we're kind of late.

We will, though.

We will. We'll get back into it. You know, we can. We can get free material at my website Surge. That's a book I wrote. You can get for free my articles I wrote for the Wall Street Journal. Free. I'm a blogger. Free. Podcaster. Free pictures of me that you can print out and make into a poster. Free.

That's the winner.

Yep, that's the one. You win.

And if you want special pictures, just email me.

Oh, gosh, yeah. Email Kelsey. For the special collection, it's Mike Mallowitz dot com. Go visit the website now for free.