The Pulse of Business: Managing Uncertain Times

You know, you're going to see some of those things come down. And so now is going to be a phenomenal time to capture more market share and to capture amazing talent. Just make sure you're optimizing for that rate of return.

How much more successful would you be if you had lunch once a week with insanely successful entrepreneurs who share their biggest secrets on how they think and achieve success? Grab your seat at the table because this is Business Lunch with Roland Frazier and Ryan Deiss. Welcome to another episode of Business Lunch and today's a snackable episode with Roland where he's going to get into some more tactical strategies that you can start using to live a rich and happy life. If this is the first snackable episode you're hearing, I'd encourage you to go back and listen to some of the other episodes that Roland has put out. And if you want to get notified every time we release a new episode, go to the new businesslunchpodcast.com website and we'll send you detailed notes along with every episode. That's businesslunchpodcast.com www.businesslunchpodcast.com and you can sign up for the free email newsletter where you'll be able to get all the highlights and resources from the episodes.

Hey, everybody. Roland Frazier and Ryan Deiss here with another episode of the Business Lunch Podcast. Wonderful to have you guys with us as we talk about various assorted and asundry things that we would talk about over lunch. Ryan, how are you doing today?

I'm doing exceptionally well. The kids are all back in school, which means that we're getting back into a rhythm again. I love the summer, but man, it's hard to get anything done when just you're being pulled in all these different directions. So I'm excited to have those little punks back in school.

Let's start talking about what is going on. I just had a conversation. I just interviewed Cameron Herold for one of our business launch podcasts and he was talking about, Cameron runs the.

COO.

Alliance where they, they basically have a whole bunch of CEOs. It's the only mastermind I know about for CEOs. And he was talking about, we were just kind of talking about what's going on after the podcast. And he said, you know, man, he said, have you seen like dramatic changes in acquisition lately? Like, you know, getting customers? This is across, he said, at my business and across, I think he said 17 of the other people that were in his at his last meeting that they're cutting costs because acquisition is down. He said those 17 were all in the areas of marketing. And so we started talking about that. But I know he said they went. I want to say that they. One of the businesses had gone 20 days with no sale. And I know that we had one of ours that went, was it 14 or was it longer than that?

It was, it was about, I think it was 14 business days. So it was at least 20 day days. Yeah, right.

Of no sales. Which is just insane in a, in a service business. I know that we've seen that across a lot of the. We're recording this, by the way, in August, towards the end of the month. And so August is generally. Summer is generally slower. August is usually the worst month. It's the worst month to do an event because most people are like racket wrapping up their vacations, going back to school with the kids and all that. You just mentioned that. And it's just not a time that a lot of people are focused on any kind of discretionary business type stuff. You want to talk about that a little bit about, like should people panic if they're seeing that happen right now? And, and whether they do or don't, what are the things that they ought to be doing or, or just sit tight to see how things turn out. What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, absolutely. Panic. It's always the first option.

It's the safest course of action. Right. Because you'll never be caught unaware, right?

Exactly. No, so. So this is really nothing new in terms of August and the summer months. And I get it, there's an entire southern hemisphere that's like it's winter for us, so bear with us. I think, you know, most of our audience is in the northern hemisphere, so I'm kind of coming at it from that mindset. But typically, yeah, summers are, especially if you're B2B. Summers take a dip. Not, not the case for certainly if you're in the travel or hospitality, then summer is, is where you're just crushing it. But if you're, if you're B2B, if you're service based, even a lot of, you know, non travel, hospitality, fitness kind of things don't do well in the summers. I think though, a lot of us forgot that because going back and certainly if you've started your business in the last three years, you've never actually experienced a normal summer. Right. But historically we would always panic in the summer because sales would always dip. And then finally we decided, let's look at the data and look at the trends and we realized, wow, they've always dipped in the summer, and. And we've always panicked, and then they've always come back, and so what if we just don't panic? And so we finally began just to factor it into our planning, and it was okay. All that changed the summer of 2020. Obviously, with COVID everything was up in the air, but certainly people weren't, like, taking the summer off like they normally would. They wouldn't travel. Definitely the same thing happened in 2021. And not only were people not traveling, but because of all the money that the government pumped into the market, they had lots to spend, and they were spending it in ways that they typically wouldn't in the summer. They were going ahead and investing in stuff. Hey, they're working anyway. What's the point? We saw a lot of that in 2022 as well. And I think that this summer was the first summer when absolutely people are, you know, they're going on revenge vacation because they haven't done it in a while. At the same time, let's be honest, economy is softening, interest rates are up, and I think everybody's sort of looking at it, saying, you know, I don't have as much cash in the bank as I used to. Sales have dipped because everybody's doing this. And now I think you're getting that panicky effect. What I think is going to be interesting to see and what I think everybody should wait to see is do you start to see stuff come back to, quote, unquote, normal? And I'll explain what I mean by normal in just a second. But do things come back to normal? September, October, or do they stay really flat? Do they stay down? They stay flat, and they stay down. I think it suggests that definitely there's greater macroeconomic forces at play here, which doesn't mean that you should just panic, heal over, and die. There's opportunities to capitalize in those times as well. But if they do come back, then look for them to come back to not what they came back to last September and October or the one before that. Go back to 2019. What was your quote, unquote, normal? September, October in 2019, if they come back to that, I think we can generally assume that it's going to be fine. It was the usual summer dip we forgot because it's been a couple of summers, but everything should be fine. If it doesn't, if it stays as slow, then I think it's cause for not panic, but I think it's cause for thoughtful concern and thinking. Okay, now what do we do? What does this mean?

Yeah, it's, I think you're, you're 100% right that revenge travel. When I first saw that, I was like, what the heck is revenge travel? And it's like revenge against the pandemic. It's kind of a funny thing, but I think you're right. And I think that the, like, we looked when we saw across several of the businesses, we saw sales dipping or off from certainly a couple of months ago, and we were like, okay, well, this is just the summer thing. And then initially we look back and say, okay, well, let's look at how do we do last summer? But that's not fair because of all the things that you mentioned that. So when you guys are kind of looking at, well, you know, I know we can't look at like the last couple months to see, but let's look at the same period for last year or the year before or the year before. None of those are particularly valid because they're, they're impacted by all of the COVID pandemic stuff and the, you know, the stimulus programs and all that. So, so I guess don't panic is, is generally good advice. Never panic. Always try to be proactive. But I think that, that we look at September, October, and then that's going to probably tell us, are we going to go into a recession? Because if things don't come back relatively quickly to normal, then it's going to impact everybody. So if we see it at the business level, that will trickle down to everything else. That can lead to layoffs, that can lead to deferred spending for major assets and a lot of those kinds of things. So I think that makes a whole lot of sense. Speaking of recession, do you have any thoughts on where things are going there right now? As far as we see interest rates continuing to go up, we see basically none of the normal correlations. Those relationships between interest rates going up, for example, and houses, house prices falling, none of that seems to be happening at least yet. Doesn't seem like there's any big thing that's going to cause that to change. I know that in our real estate business, inventory on houses for sale is down 75% off of where it normally is. So it's not likely that's going to change. What's your, what's your recession thinking?

So I don't think you conflate what's happening in the real estate market with what's going to happen in the rest of the business world, because the real estate market I mean it's all supply and demand in real estate right now. You're not seeing home prices drop because nobody wants to move out of their house with their 2.3% interest. And so that's the big thing there, there just isn't any inventory if there's no supply and even if demand drops, then that's just going to keep prices where they are. And so I don't think that, that you don't have that same impact and that same effect in other places of business. Right. If, if I had a really massive SaaS contract and I've got an annual renewal coming up for that software, I'm going to look at it pretty closely and say, you know, do we really need this big a contract? Heck, maybe we just did a riff, we just did a reduction in force and we don't even have this many people here. So even if I still value it to the same amount, I'm not going to be as valuable because I don't have as many people. And so I think everybody's looking for opportunities to make cuts. That is now the mindset that exists. And so whether or not we go into a recession, I don't know what I do believe is I don't think that There are many CEOs out there who are making decisions or even people, consumers. I don't think there's a lot of consumers out there making decisions about in what sectors of my life or business am I going to spend more. And I do believe that's where everybody's thought, everybody's been thinking, okay, in what area are we going to spend more this year? Because we have more money and it was free from the government, that government cheese. So how are we going to go and spend this? Now everybody's thinking how do we spend less? Where do we make cuts? And so invariably if that's what people are thinking, then recession, not again. They keep changing the definition on that term. So I don't even know. I think you're going to have to, you're going to see some stagnation, some pullback in, in the economy. I just, I don't see a way around it. How severe is it? How long is it? I don't know. But I think if you're not preparing for that, you're and you get caught flat footed, that that's just a failure of leadership.

Yeah, so, so then it's kind of an interesting question if it's not going to affect housing prices because, and I agree with you between the inventory of just homes that are being built. There are so. So long that homes weren't being built that there was a shortage anyway. But then you take everybody who was moving basically out of the market because they don't want to pay double or.

Triple what their interest rate that they've.

Got locked in right now is. But in terms of business prices and things, that's always an issue. A lot of people are saying a lot of CEOs and a lot of companies are raising prices. Now, we've watched prices go up pretty dramatically. You know, that is the definition basically of inflation. Right. But with this happening and as people start to rethink spending and investments and where to. Where to prune, do you think that we'll see prices come down? Like, is it. Is it time not to raise prices? Is it time to raise prices? It's kind of an interesting period of time, right?

I think we called it, like, you know, we said. And you were. You were really, you know, banging this drum 12, 16 months ago that raise your prices. You know, you were telling everybody, raise your prices. We did an episode we can, you know, figure out. There was an episode where it was like, now's the time to raise your prices. You gave a formula around how, how to raise it. Because I believe there was a season there where you could raise your prices and nobody was going to notice because everybody was raising their prices. Yep. I think that season's past.

Think so?

So I'm not saying that you can't raise your prices, but I think if you simply raise prices and your competitors aren't, and you're in a market where there's any retraction or slowdown at all, I don't know that strategically that's the best move. Now, I do think you can raise your. Your prices, but change the terms. So what we're seeing coming back now in bigger ways is now that interest rates are higher. Look, they're higher for everything. Like, so what people are paying on credit cards is really high. So if you offer terms in your business, maybe everything was paying full before and they were happy to pay in full and get a discount because they could put it on a credit card and it was fairly low interest. Not the case anymore. So if you issue terms, I believe that if you're getting better terms, and it's a classic, like my, you know, you know, my price, your terms, your terms might like, pick one. I think that's where we are from A. If you're going to raise the prices, you either need to fundamentally change the offering, which I think there's opportunities to do that as well. Or what you need to do is offer better terms. I do think you can raise the price because in general when people get scared, what they will buy and what they will pay more money for is speed. Yeah, they're less interested in figuring this stuff out for themselves. So now I think is the time to raise the price by offering a more turnkey type solution, a more done for you type solution. Whatever you were doing before, whatever you were selling, get it to them faster with less work on their part, get them that. And if you sell the end result, I think then you can raise the prices.

The other thing that we've just done in a couple of the businesses is implemented financing so that we weren't really offering it before we had PayPal I think does a 66 month same as cash. And we had that. That generally isn't available to people that are outside the United States. And we have a fair number of people, about 40% that buy from outside the States in that business. And so we put in basically financing, didn't change the price, but made financing available. And that, that just happened for us. So it'll be fun to see how that, how that plays out.

And this is third party financing or this is like company.

It's interestingly enough it's, it's. So we always offered payment plans but. And then we did that internally. But now what we're doing is because the advantage of like if we could get people to the PayPal, then we get 100% of the money up front because PayPal take charges us nothing to do that pays us 100% of the money, takes the contract, does the financing for six months same as cash. And then after that it becomes an interest finance thing. So people have to qualify for it. So but, but the take rate on that is, is relatively low the number of people that can qualify there. So what we've done is we've got, we still have that. We still have our internal payment plans that we had before, but those are typically make three payments which is effectively a 60 day finance plan. A third now, a third in 30 days and a third in, in 60 days. So what we've added is we've basically said okay first let's see if we can get you something better than PayPal and something that will also be available to our outside the United States people. And so that's taking them to, we found for them credit cards that offer 18 to 24 months same as cash, no interest for that period of time. And so we're walking people through that so that they can get that funding and effectively get what they want from us, but they can pay for it with no interest over a longer period of time. We get 100% of the money. As soon as it gets paid, everybody wins. For the people that can't, I think that's a 700 credit score to do that. For people that are lower than that, we can go down to about 660. Then we can use third party financing for that. And that is a, is a straight out finance contract kind of thing. So it's the, it's the. And we also lose, depending on the company, as little as 10. But as much as 22% of the purchase price goes also as a discount to the financing company. So it's, you know, it's a significant cost to finance. But if you're picking up, if that's at the very bottom of your finance funnel, then you're still picking up sales that you wouldn't have had before and you're still getting about 80% of the money. So I think it does pencil.

Yeah, I mean 80% of something is better than 100% of nothing. That's just math. I did that right now in my.

I put that in chat GPT and it said that's not the case.

I didn't even need a calculator. It'll be interesting to see with these third party finance companies and even like the, you know, interest free if that doesn't tighten up. This is the thing I think to watch for, right. And when you, if you start, because I remember this is where it pays to kind of be, you know, maybe older than some of these young whippersnappers who started their business in the last decade or so. I remember 2008, 2009 when getting a letter from, from my bank saying that my credit line had been reduced and I at the time had I think a line of credit around 180, $200,000. It was right, it wasn't quite $200,000, but it was right there. Like 185,000 was the, was the line of credit. And I think at the time I maybe had 32,000 that was out there on this line of credit for this particular company. And I got a letter saying that my line of credit had been reduced and it had been reduced down to, wait for it, $32,000. It had been reduced down to the amount that I. So basically they wiped out my line of credit. Then you started to see them constrain how much credit they were given on credit cards. If you see a tightening in the credit markets, that is when typically things do start to go into recession, because that's where a lot of people. That's where people's discretionary spending is coming from, both individuals and businesses. And what we have right now is consumer debt has never been higher than it is today. That. That free money came out, everybody started spending. Everybody elevated their lifestyles. And by everybody, I mean consumers and businesses. Businesses hired up like crazy, signed up for really expensive software. Like, that was why we had the massive inflation. Right. So all of this happened at the same time. And then when it went away, most of us did not adjust our spending habits. People were still going out to dinner as much. They were still going on the same vacations. Just instead of using the free money they got from the government or the free. The extra money that they had because the economy was just exploding during this time, now they were putting it all on credit cards. And so if you see a tightening there, I think it's. I think that's when things are going to get. Things are going to get tough. Do you think it's. Yeah, well, I was going to say, do you think it's worth chatting about, like, what to do if that happens?

Yeah, I think, number one, it would make sense. And I was trying to remember, we had. Was it a million, million and a half or 2 million that we had on a credit line? In one of the companies that, around the pandemic, they said where. I don't remember if they said. I think they said, we're not. Not renewing. Was that what it was? Or something happened where we just paid it off and said, we're not going to do this anymore.

They basically ballooned it. Yeah, they basically said, we're not going to. It was. It had a. Every two years it was going to renew. And they were essentially, they. They were. They were going to renew us. But instead of the line of credit being an actual line of credit, it was like we had to have equivalent cash deposits at the bank to the line of credit that they were issuing. We're like, well, then we'll just be our own line of credit like this. What is the. And that was basically their way of saying, we don't really want your business anymore. And so.

And be careful of that because we, like, with. Without it. We just happened to look at that and the team was like, okay, we get lines of credit. We want to keep a line of credit. We've told them it's important to have a line of credit. So they're just going through the process and applying everything and then we're looking at it going, this is dumb. We're going to literally pay interest on money that we have to keep in the bank so that we can not be using the money we have to keep in the bank so that we can have debt. And no, it was like made no financial sense at all. And what you said about the credit tightening, I think that's something that you guys ought to be ready for. So I would be thinking about that. It's wonderful to have credit lines, but to help you with your business. But I would be very careful because if you get that notice and you've got to take care of that and you're in a down economy, it's going to be pretty hard to get that paid off. Because keep in mind, too, that's after tax dollars, you got to pay that off. Profits that you got. It's, it's not as easy as it sounds.

Yeah, yeah. And that's, that's when businesses go out of business. They go out of business when they get that letter from the bank saying, we're not going to extend your line of credit, we cut your line of credit, or, you know, we're going to exercise our balloon option. You have to pay this now, or maybe your sales dipped a little bit as a result of this and your cash dipped a little bit. You find out that you're out of covenant and they now, before they weren't doing reviews. They weren't even, look, they weren't even asking for it. Now they're going to ask for your financials, are going to review it, decide that you're out of covenant, want to call it all in, and you're, you're done. So, yeah, look, I think now is a good time to go back and review your loan covenants. Make sure that you're in covenant. If you're not, hustle, hustle, hustle to get back in. Because that has taken out many a good, profitable business.

Yeah. So let's, let's. I think that's important thing to look at. Let's talk also about if you're thinking about being careful. Based on the conversation that I was having with Cameron, if you're thinking about being careful and maybe shoring up things. The one place that history and data from multiple studies tells us not to cut is marketing. We've recently decided to go in significantly heavier in marketing. We added about $100,000 a month of spend. And while it is unfortunate that we did that and then got a significant tightening. I'd say the worst. August was the worst month that we've had this year and worst month in a long and a lot of years, actually. And of course that happens right after you say we're going to go all in on marketing, but we're not going to change that. We're going to push through and we're going to make it happen. Because historically, as other people cut back on marketing, if you stay the same or double down, then you end up getting a greater share of voice. You get top of mind, you get customer, customers that would have gone to the competition that now come to you. And eventually, if other people are cutting back on marketing, your cost of marketing goes down as well. Do you want to, do you have any thoughts to share with people on that?

Yeah, I mean, it's the classic. I couldn't find who said it. It's. It's often credited to David Ogilvy, but he didn't actually say it. But the quote is, in good times, you should advertise. In bad times, you must advertise. And it's the one thing, like you said, that everybody cuts first because it's typically the biggest line item next to people. And laying people off, that feels mean. That's an uncomfortable conversation. I don't want to have that. It's easier to cut the marketing spend. I think good leaders during this time will realize what are the investments? And I think that's the important thing. What are the investments that are getting us? Not just the highest return, but the fastest return. So what you're looking at is not just a high ROI investment. You're looking at a, at a, at a fast return on that investment because then you can redeploy it. So this applies across the board. I think it's worth stack ranking your advertising spend, your marketing spend, and simply saying and, but don't stack rig based on roi. Stack rank it based on return. How quickly does it come back? And you will find that there are some channels that return faster. Maybe not as much as others, but they return faster. You'll find that there are certain campaigns, so you can go at the macro and at the micro. You can also do the same thing with people, right? There might be some people that they're just not close enough to the cash register and making that thing ring that you just can't invest as much in that department or in those people. And that can be hard, especially when, if you just made the decision to hire up in a particular area. But that was a really long bet. Now may be a time when you choose to not make a long term bet, but rather to make a bet on something that we believe is going to return quickly, like marketing. I mean, you said invest in 100 grand in marketing. We knew that was going to be a 60 to 90 day investment. We're in like between 60 and 90 days now to cut bait at this point when all we're doing is continuing to exercise the plan. The plan was always, it was going to be 60, 90 days. That has changed. So if it's a part of your plan, but if you're looking at it going like, ah, we made this investment in this channel or in this person or in this technology, it should ROI in the next, you know, 12, 18, 24 months. You got to know if you believed it was going to ROI in 12, 18, 24 months, that probably got pushed out and it, the ROI, like the cycle probably got pushed out farther in a time when you can't afford to wait. If you can though, holy crap, buy up. Because like you said, everybody else is going to pull out. I do believe that prices will go down. Not maybe not the housing market right away, but I think they will with technology. We're already seeing it with people. I'm seeing, I know people who left us in 2020 and 2021 because they were getting paid way more money than we could possibly afford to pay them here. And like, I got to take it like, yeah, you do, you do. I'm really glad that that company can monetize you to that extent. We can. Good for them and good for you. I mean, I'm seeing layoffs happening, updates in LinkedIn, people hitting me up saying, hey, I got let go. You know, anybody's hiring, Are you guys hiring? You know, you're gonna see some of those things come down. And so now is gonna be a phenomenal time to capture more market share and to capture amazing talent. Just make sure you're optimizing for that rate of return.

The other place that I think would make sense to think about too would be adding another channel for marketing. So for us, I know in a few of the companies we have been actively adding inside sales and in a professional way. And so that is also an investment. You've got setting everything up, which I think is running us about $20,000 for a HubSpot installation company to help us do that. And then we've been using fractional sales teams to kind of come in, or fractional sales managers to help us with setting up the team hiring them all that kind of stuff. It's again, tough time to make that investment. And it's another investment that we made on top of the marketing investment. But again, it's like we even in one of the businesses. I just got the report this morning. We just started doing a video sales letter for setting appointments with salespeople. We've got setters who have been hired and I forget all of the names. Ryan's really good at them, so I'll let him tell you guys the technical names. Basically, somebody set set the appointments or they just get booked automatically online and, and qualified by a setter and then passed to the person that closes. But we got 18 calls booked this week from, from $273 spend. So $15.11 a call that we have, and we anticipate we'll close about 20% of those people on a relatively expensive thing. So if we closed, if we have 18 calls and we close 20%, that's 3.6. So that'd be, let's call it four. Four calls on a $40,000 thing would be $160,000 in return on a $273 investment, even if it was 75% less than that. It's an astounding roas. So that's like, that's a channel that we know. If I was looking for a place to cut, it's not going to be in those places that are guaranteed to generate revenue. And so be careful when you guys are. Are thinking about that. Any thoughts on that, Ryan?

Yeah. Please, for the love of God, don't cut your marketing spend. I mean, everybody does this. Like you said, everybody does it. And, and I'm not just saying this because I'm a marketer at Harden, because we have a company digital marketer, and because we work with agencies if it's not working and if it's not roi. Sure, but you should cut that even when times were good, you know, when everything was just high flying. But look for places to cut that are the farthest away from the cash register. Yeah, that's where you start your cuts. Ideally not don't cut the customer. Don't cut back on the customer experience. Where you start is with the employee experience. You know, where you start is with the perks. You know, some of those areas, you know, that, that maybe just impact you. But don't slow the acquisition engine. You know, don't water down the customer and client experience. You've got a real opportunity now to elevate that when everybody else is declining, keep people Longer generate more referrals while you're also cranking up. You're going to come out of this thing, you know, gobbling up market share. And when we do come out, which we will, has only always happened, you're going to be the big winner if you do this.

Yeah, and I think that's important. And I was going to say the last place. So we talked about marketing, we talked about sales. In terms of labor, Cameron was saying everyone who comes in should return four times their cost. So every job position, the content person, the marketing person, the salesperson, the chief operating officer, whoever you have, should be returning four times their cost. I've heard three before, but three and four seems to be the number. And so you might go through the team that you've got and say, how is each person returning right now on the investment in them? Because each human being that you have in your business is an investment that you're making. You're making an investment in them equal to their comp. And if they're not returning three to four times that, then think about how can you help support them to do that. Is it possible to turn some of those cost centers into profit centers or is it time to find someone who can do better or maybe to eliminate that position? That, that'd be kind of my last thinking on all of the things to, to consider and what we've been talking about. You have any others?

Yeah, well, I would say don't, don't be afraid to have a conversation with somebody about that. I mean, I, I, I don't remember where I heard because I remember the 3x return. Maybe you told me or we read about it or talked to the same person at the same time. I don't know, but I remember going to certain people and saying, you know, we're, we're kind of applying a new standard to everybody who's here that they need to basically deliver a 3 to 1 ROI on, on their personal investment. You know, with some people it's easier, you know, marketers and sales reps, the people that are closest, it's easier with kind of product fulfillment service based people. If you're going to assume that, you know, people are going to churn out at a much higher rate, you can kind of figure that out with, with other folks it can be more difficult. And so I went to them and I said, we want to do this. I acknowledge that it's harder to figure out with your particular role how we get there. So I'm just curious, like, do you have any ideas and this is when you'll have customer support people being like, well, you know, what if, you know, we, whatever the promotion is, you know, what if we just added a little PS at the bottom where, you know, to anybody we're doing like P.S. we've got a sale going on on this. You might want to check it out. You know, let's track that and see if it like the, some of the, some really cool ideas came about by having that conversation. And not in a threatening ultimatum, we better figure this out or you're freaking gone. Right. But in a. I, in a starting with the. I believe it is there, but I don't believe we can measure it. We want to do it. And I want you to have the confidence and be comfortable knowing that it is, that it is there. I mean, we had that conversation with, you know, somebody on the finance team and it's like, what if we really own. Going out there and you know, chasing accounts payable. I'm sorry, accounts receivable.

Yeah.

Making sure that we're bringing in stuff. It's like, cool. Yeah, let's give that a go. So I think having a conversation and then if it doesn't work out, you've planted the seeds for the admittedly more difficult conversation, which is, it doesn't seem like we figured this out. So I mean, the only last bit that I would say in terms of planning and preparing for, if things do take a dip, people don't stop buying. But what they start doing during times of recession and during times of just concern, they make more smaller bets. So it's been very, very popular over the last decade or so to go high ticket and to get everybody to come in and like, let's only sell high ticket. And a lot of companies have kind of gutted their lower level, kind of entry level products and things. They've only gone luxury. And the argument has been, I think it was a valid argument. You know, we don't necessarily want to let people scratch their itch for a little bit of money. You know, we want to be all. Only premium. And I think that that is true in boom times. I think in other times you want to, you do want to give people the opportunity to sample because once they make a decision, that's when they tend to go all in. So now might be the time to introduce, don't lower your prices, but say, how can we offer a smaller, more complete solution with. In a fundamentally different package? Yeah, that is a good brainstorming thing to think about. Because now you're gobbling up all the customers, they will ascend.

Love it.

Well, we talked about a whole lot of things today. I hope you guys got a lot out of it. I think it's good when times are uncertain or you find revenue down to think really strategically about where you should go, what moves you should make. And hopefully what we talked about will be helpful to you. We'd love if you found this to be helpful or if you're going to implement any of these things or you have other thoughts or ideas, we'd love to hear from you. And you can go to businesslunch.com, all of the socials. Feel free to reach out and talk with us. And definitely if you found this valuable, we would love for you to share.

It with a friend.

And that will take care of us for today. Ryan, any closing words?

We this is the if we do dip into a recession, it's a good thing for people listening to this podcast. Don't panic. Don't freak out. You're going to be one of the winners. Your competitors will be the ones panicking. So be excited about this. Don't panic. And we're here. We're going to be here along with you, continuing to have lunch, continuing to invite you to join us.

And if you enjoy this also, I don't know exactly when this is going to air, but if you get a chance, you should definitely come to our Get Scalable Live conference that's coming up. We talk about these kinds of issues as well as a lot of other ways that you can grow and scale your business. And is it getscalablelive.com the website we're looking for?

Here it is indeed. It's a clever name.

It is very clever.

Cool.

Well, check that out, guys.

Thank you for being with us and we'll talk to you next time on Business lunch.

Hey, Roland Frazier here.

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