Agency Success Interview with Matt Plapp

This is the 7 Figure Agency Podcast. Discover the strategies and techniques to grow a highly successful and profitable digital marketing agency with your host, Joshua Nelson. All right, well, hello and welcome. Thank you so much for joining us on today's special session of— this is part of the 7 Figure Agency Podcast, our agency success interview series where we interview successful agency owners from across the country. And today I'm super pumped to be interviewing Matt Platt. Matt, thanks so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

So Matt runs a really successful agency north of 7 figures serving the restaurant space, which is a really, really tough niche. Matt, why don't you just start with telling us a little bit about your background and how you got into the agency world?

Okay, so got in radio advertising in 1999. And did really well out of the gate. My dad put me through what he called sales school, which apparently was unique. I didn't know because my dad's a salesman and entrepreneur, but the month leading up to my interview, because I had like a month notice of this interview for radio, he put me through a sales school and taught me how to sell. And he's a freak. He's the Michael Jordan of sales. He could literally— Josh, I'm not joking, if you ever get a call with him, he could sell you a membership to 7 Figure Agency and you'd be like, hold on, Joshua Nelson. So he taught me how to sell. I did really well in radio. Uh, 6 months into it, we got the idea that we were going to start a boat RV dealership as a side hustle, all 3 of us. It's just a family thing. We got $5,000 loan, got a lot, and I bought a book on how to design websites. And I'm not a tech person at all, but that was our, our, okay, if we're gonna do this, my brother couldn't do it, my dad couldn't do it, I'll figure it out. So I, one of my radio clients sold, had this book in his place called Adobe PageMill, and it was a software. And I bought it and built the website. And with— fast forward, within 3 years, the business was doing about $6 million in sales with a brick-and-mortar location. And we ended up getting up to $15 million in annual sales, 3 locations. Accidentally learned a lot about SEO. We had a— the same guy that sold me that came in. He was our IT guy at that point, 40 employees. We had a 7-acre store. And he came in and we had a virus all the time. And I thought Glenn was planting the virus. I'm like, bro, seriously, I'll just give you a check, quit planting it. Because like, there's— that's like, you're the only one that benefits from this. He's like, Matt, it's not me, I promise. It turns out he wasn't. But he's like, hey, I'm going to put a software on your computers. Every time your employees log in, they have to use their username and password. You need to let them know that they're being tracked. We're going to figure out where the virus is coming from. So long story short, he did it. We figured it out. We fired that lady. People wanted to date her after they found out what she was looking at. Different story. But we ended up growing that, going on our way. Well, about 60 days after that, Glenn brings this binder. I wish I still had it, man.

I was gold.

It was a binder about this thick, and it was a catalog of every website our employees were visiting. Now remember, this is 2004, 2003, 2004. So this is pre-social media. Well, every website they were visiting were bassboatcentral.com, camp, uh, airstreamcampers.com, arcticcatatvs. They were all things chat rooms about why we hired them to sell what we sell. We had all outdoorsmen working for us. And so I kind of tricked them. I pulled them all in. I reached out to all these chat rooms and bought sponsorships because that was a big thing. $500 exclusive Triton Bass Boat dealership for Kentucky. You just can't sell, you got to have your name, your phone number, your address, all this stuff on there. Well, I ended up doing it with about 17 sites. We ended up having a lot of our employees active. I mean, I'm talking crazy active. Well, long story short, within 6 months we were the number 1 on this thing called Google for anything boat related, period. And so when I learned that, when I went to Yamaha, I was at a Yamaha convention, then the head of Yamaha Marine, Ben Jarrett, walked up and said, Matt, what are you doing on this thing called Google? I'm like, it ain't me, I didn't do it, because we were always breaking rules. And he's like, no, you're not in trouble, it was you. I'm like, okay, we probably did. What do you want to know? And that's what I learned about backlinks. We literally had, you know, like our IT guy was telling me when he explained SEO to me He's like, Matt, you're the— according to any search engine, you are the authority because you've got thousands of backlinks from credible sources, and all of them have your website, your name, and they're all keyword stuffed because people are saying, hey, why is my 21-foot Skeeter with a 250 Yamaha HPDI not running at 73 miles an hour? And then Sean Weeda gets there and drops about the prop, the drag on the boat, the weight of the trolling motor. That's what Google loved. So I figured out digital marketing really quick. We put fire— we put the gas in the fire and blew up. By '07, I hated it. Me and my dad and brother had 40+ employees. We were too leveraged with banks. It was stressful as all get-out. And I was back into a lot of my radio clients I had stayed in touch with were asking me to consult for them. And I was getting free cars, free landscaping, free food. It was just like, this is fun. Well, come end of '17, or 2007, I realized my wife and my mom came to me, my brother and my dad, and said, hey, you guys need to talk to each other because you're not— your dad hates this damn business, you hate the business, and my— your dad wants to retire, you want to go into marketing. And so that's what happened. I built my agency. I was fortunate that I had a contract from the Reds and Bengals for about $150 grand a year to do marketing on there, help them with stuff. And so I had, you know, that bridge they say that I could go from a successful company to my agency. And then from there, we just built from 2008 till 2000— and she celebrated her 10th year, uh, 2 weeks ago with my agency. And we had just me and her, we had 34 clients from 31 industries. And in April of 2015, I had one client that had— 2 clients that were kind of connected had 9 restaurants. That was our only vertical we had you know, we actually had. We didn't know what— I know what the hell a vertical was. And so in that 2015, the client actually, you know, was giving me a hard time. We're spending about $1.2 million on radio, TV, sports sponsorship for their restaurants. And anytime I spent $50 on a Facebook ad, like, you thought— you thought the world was ending. Like, this is stupid. You shouldn't be doing it. And so he said, okay, prove to me. He used to always say, I can't deposit likes, Matt. I can't go to US Bank down the street and deposit the 5,000 likes that the people got last week. And I'm like, I don't disagree, but it's working better than the damn TV. And so he said, prove to me. So we did a National Pretzel Day promotion, April 26, 2015. We did 3 Facebook ads for $50. We did 3 emails because they had 3 of the stores we did this with. It did $18 grand in trackable sales in one day.

Wow.

And I looked at it and said, crap, this is the first time in my professional marketing career that I've ever seen that type of attribution at that level. And so, I just started digging into it. And so, I spent all of '15 and '16 building— I didn't know what it was then, but building funnels in essence of, okay, this person saw a Facebook ad, how do I get their email? How do I give them an offer? How do I get them to come back for their birthday? And I met Billy Gene in the summer of 2016. I say I met him, I saw his ad, I missed the webinar I signed up for, I bought the flash drive, I got the reminder sequence that I missed the webinar, I showed up to the webinar on a Sunday night, the replay, watched it for 90 minutes, went to bed, and my wife's like, what's wrong? Because I'm never quiet. And like, you know, if you know me, you know that I'm not ever moving. And I said, I'm scared. She goes, what do you mean? So I just got off a 90-minute webinar. She's like, yeah, I was confused. Like, you're in your office. Like, I, I walked in, I'm looking in there, and you were actually like not talking, and you weren't doing that. You were looking at a screen, nothing else. I said, because I just saw it. I just figured out this Billy Gene guy I just figured out how to do what we do at a huge level. And, uh, I had— I ended up having a call with Billy's team that Wednesday, bought their training course on digital marketing, went to their event a couple— I guess 2 months later in San Diego. And then from there, that was the first time I had ever realized this whole scaling thing and a vertical. I had never heard— I didn't know I could— the first thing I had Billy, I had a in-person meeting with him at Traffic and Conversions. In February of '17, which I think is where I met you for the first time. You were sitting next to me, and I'm naive. I'm just sitting there talking to this guy next to me in a green shirt, and next day I know you're on stage. I'm like, oh, I know that guy, that's the guy was sitting here. And so Billy, I had met with him, it was '17 or '18 I think when that one, but Billy's meeting was '17. I met with him and he's like, well dude, you've already figured out the scaling thing, just go find a brewery in 50 markets, you'll make a shitload of money. And I'm like, I'm not traveling these markets. And now I am, ironically. And he's like, well, all you need to do is do this, you know, online. I had never thought of selling via Zoom and via phone calls. All my relationships were in person. And so ended up doing that, uh, you know, flash forward to 2017-18, we started hiring a lot of employees, got out of the way a little myself, and here we are June of 2021. We've got 39 full and part-time people. Uh, we've got a 9,000 square foot building that we bought, uh, 4 months ago where I'm sitting in my Mercedes Sprinter van. It's a mobile conference room and, you know, got all sorts of crazy stuff happening.

That's awesome. So, so it sounds like transition from sales to running an RV dealership, running to this dealership, to going to the agency model, to— all right, rather than being a generalist, to kind of being a specialist in restaurants. How did you land on the restaurants as your, like, main vertical?

So, I think the way I landed, I don't know exactly how. I think honestly, it was an accident because I had, when I looked at my client list, like, back then, if I look back 2015, we had 34 clients from 31 verticals. I had one guy that had 50 car, 45 car dealerships at the time. And we did all of their social media, all their review management. You know, we had chiropractors, we had— I mean, you literally, you name it, commercial hardware, commercial construction, home builders, we had everything. And I realized the one thing that Billy really taught me, and I— and even more with you because you took it to the next level, and you and your team, uh, and even the community, was that I wasn't able to reuse what I was doing successfully at every stop. I was recreating the wheel because nothing transferred from a cardio to a chiropractor to a GNC store to a carpet cleaner to a restaurant. And when we had success with the restaurants, I just sat back and looked at my client list, and Billy had said, hey, you need to pick. So I picked 3. I picked golf courses, I picked restaurants, and I picked boat and RV dealerships because I knew boat RV dealerships really well. I already owned a golf— I had another golf company I owned as well. I thought, man, this would be a good piggyback. And then restaurants, we had 9 of them, and I said, well, worst case scenario, I control all of their ad budgets. I'm just going to make sure that their ad budgets all go to creating what I think should happen. And so that was kind of the best thing that ever happened to me and the worst thing that happened, because that first 18 months of being a restaurant agency, quote unquote, the decision maker who decided how successful stuff was and how awesome it was was Matt Plapp. I was the marketing director. I was in charge of every penny for all of our restaurant clients. And so when I went out to the street to actually sell to people who weren't Matt Platt, the messaging didn't make sense because they didn't value what I did. So it put behind about a year. I had to figure that out. But that was a big part of it, was having more restaurants to play with. Uh, the other part of it, I looked at all of our clients and said, you know, when we had the boat business, the struggle was it was every 3 years somebody bought something if we were lucky. And I said, okay, I'm really good at getting people to give me their information. Via digital marketing. Who needs it the most? Well, the car dealer, you know, you buy a car every couple years, nobody really gives a shit about the car dealership, it's the deal you get. But the restaurants— of all our clients, the place that people went back to a lot were golf courses and restaurants. And so I got rid of the boat and RV dealerships, I'm going golf course and restaurants. And the first year I had, I think we had at one point like 19, uh, boat or 19 restaurants, and we had I don't know, 6 or 7 golf courses. And then on accident, an agency training bloomed off of that, which was a whole nother world. And I had to make a decision. Billy kept telling me, get rid of everything, cancel your agency, get rid of the agency training, get rid of the golf course idea, go with restaurants, be done with it. Of course, I'm like, dude, I know better, I can hustle more. And I did. I just worked 100-hour work weeks. And I got to a point where I eventually sold my golf company, realized the golf vertical wasn't for us. And then went restaurants. And then now, I mean, we still have our agency. We have 5 clients, traditional clients, and it worked out because one of them does basement, uh, water removal, and we had a leak in our sump pump on a torrential downpour Saturday morning. So I was able to call him and he fixed it. And the other one is an air conditioning company, and they put 3 new air conditioners in our building. So, uh, that's kind of where we're at. But I picked, I think, just Josh, to answer your question, is, uh, The fact that they need data more than anything. People can eat at restaurants 2, 3, 4 times a week. They need a plumber once every 6 months or a year, right?

So kind of the repetitive nature of the industry, um, and the fact that you already had 9 restaurants and you kind of had some wins under your belt that you could, you could draft on. Um, how many restaurants are you guys working with now, approximately?

Uh, I'd say between all the brands we work with and their locations, there's upwards of 300 or so.

Nice.

Because there's some of them, like, one guy's got, like, it's weird in our end because, like, some of them will run, like, 20 restaurants will run under one program, but then other 20 restaurants are all 20 programs. So it's— I should probably know the number, but I haven't paid attention much last 6 months to that part of it, but it's 300 plus, somewhere, somewhere in that range.

And I know that over the last 9 months you've had some really good momentum in terms of growth and revenue. Like, what were some of the things that you changed that helped to get that velocity you know, to kind of push you over the 7-figure mark?

So one of the biggest things that happened, and I'll, I want to put him on camera and then let him go back in the trade show, is Billy Jean kept telling me to hire— hold your tool up. What is your tool you use? A camera. Camera. That's David, by the way. So Billy kept telling me, because he knows I like video, I have no issue with it. I can get on video anywhere. I haven't gone in the shower yet, which we have a funny idea for a shower video. Oh, you don't got it. I'll be in close. But he kept saying, hire a video person, hire a video person, have them follow you, chronicle the journey, tell your story, create better video versus the crappy video you create. And I hired David January of last year, and we had a, we had a goal of my podcast. Everybody's got podcasts. Like, I don't want to do a Zoom podcast. I don't want to look like I'm in my mom's basement on headphones. I want to, you know, go in person. So we literally started the podcast, and we started it before COVID hit, and we shot 9 episodes end of February in person. COVID hit, and everybody— when everybody stopped, I'm like, ah, screw it. If I get a cold, I get a cold. And so we never stopped traveling, and that was probably the biggest thing. We never stopped what we were doing. I think Jaime asked me at your your mastermind in December of— what year is this? When the hell was that?

2020.

Yeah, 2020, when we were in Miami. He said, what was one of the things you did that helped you grow during the pandemic with restaurants when other restaurants shut down? We didn't stop. We put it in high gear. I mean, I invested $150,000 in 4 months last summer. Uh, I, I doubled down, tripled down on everything. And so I think the biggest thing was we didn't stop. And we put the foot on the gas and we went everywhere. And, you know, this trip's a great example of it is the fact, like, I'm in here talking to the head of Cisco. He's like, dude, we do these blitzes where they literally will bring in a vendor and take them to every restaurant possible, 8 AM to midnight. Here's who it is, here's why you need to work with them, and here's how Cisco is going to incentivize you to work with them. He's like, Matt, we've never seen a cool product. Like, nobody's got a, you know, a wrapped Mercedes van and a video crew. And you gotta— we have a media side, which I'll talk about later. We created a media company called America's Best restaurants. We're creating our own channel, creating our own place that people go, shit, they— we got to work with them. But it just was that, that element of it. You want to head back in there? Yep. Cool. Thanks, brother.

So, so one was kind of doubling down on content, having a full-time videographer there to kind of shoot video with you. Um, what else would you say are some things that have helped kind of accelerate the growth?

Uh, advertising. You know, it's, it's fair because I don't think we're the— ironically, my whole sales pitch to restaurants is we have what I think is one of the most trackable programs on the front end of marketing for restaurants out there. We're not very good at tracking our own, but I can tell you that where we spend money, I can see it work. I mean, we spent massive amounts of money last June, July, and August, and it wasn't, it wasn't a coincidence that August, September, October were 3 of the biggest months we had ever had. And I think the problem with a lot of what I've seen with agencies and even Matt Pleb, I remember the first time I saw, I was back in 2015, I was talking to a buddy of mine. I said, man, I've got to up my game. I've got to find a place where people like me are at. And I've got to go to a, I got to go to like a conference. And I found, never forget, because I was talking to a guy named Ron McCracken. And can you hear me okay, by the way? Yeah, weird. And I was talking to Rob, he's like, you go. I'm like, I'm definitely going. Well, then I logged in and saw the ticket was like $2,000. And then I did the math on flying and hotel, and I'm like, even though I was making a quarter million dollars with one employee because we did well, I was a cheap ass and I didn't value— number one, I didn't have a coach like yourself, I didn't have a community, and I just didn't invest. And I didn't go. And eventually when I went and saw Billy and saw that, that first event I went to, and when I heard about TNC, I went to it. I literally booked the ticket, bought the ticket within a week, flew out there. At that point on, I've just gotten to a point, you know what, I'm gonna spend myself till I'm bankrupt if I have to, to get myself in the right places. Because, you know, like a lot of people say, cash in the bank is fine, but if you can invest it, it's a hell of a lot better. And I think that's been our biggest thing, is we invest money. I mean, we've, you know, this vehicle, these trips. I mean, I've got 4 employees with me here. You know, I'm gone, I'm home. My wife and kids are with me a couple of the trips. That's pretty cool to be able to take them. But I'm, I think I'm going to be in our office 2 days between past Sunday until July 25th. And it's not, it's tiring, but I'm investing. I know where it's going. And this commitment has already landed us. I got a meeting this Friday. I won't mention his name, but the guy's a huge television personality. Who wants to help partner with us and be our spokesperson for the restaurant consumer brand, uh, to help us do some bigger things. I've got another person who already called me twice the last 2 days, who's a client who's multi-millionaire in the restaurant space, very, very, very well connected. Uh, he wants to fund the next— investing, investing money, investing in Matt Plapp, investing in Marketing, putting us out there. That's a scary thing because, you know, we all look at it, but I think a lot of us don't do what we preach to our clients. When I was an agency up until 3 years ago, I'm telling all my clients to advertise, advertise, advertise, collect data, collect data, get out there grassroots, do this, and I'm sitting in my house by my pool on a Zoom call with them.

Yeah. So it sounds like, um, the, the, the willingness to be live and in person has been big for you. It's like getting to the restaurants, getting in front of them, um, and aligning with joint ventures, I think is what's gonna accelerate you to that next level 10 times faster as well.

Yeah, I looked at the one thing we did. We sucked at accounting. We sucked at money. I mean, we were doing $15 million a year in sales and we were spending $15 million. I mean, we were, I was young and arrogant and didn't know what I didn't know. But I like, my one accountant told me, he's like, Matt, the master's degree you got in the streets and the hard knocks is better than my Ivy League master's. He's like, so don't discount what you did then. Your failure then is your success now. Uh, but when I look at what we did back then, this has really got me thinking about this. A year ago, I was talking to my dad, and we're best friends. I said, Dad, what did we do so well at Platts? He said, we marketed. I said, okay, how did we market differently? We went to the boat shows, we went to, uh, fishing tournaments. Back then, there were typically— most of our competitors went to one boat show, the Cincinnati Boat Show. I'm looking where we're at. I'm like, okay, well, there's nobody that sells— we had 17, we had like 15 to 20 boat lines that we carried, our RV lines. So we had a lot of flexibility. There were 17 shows within 4 hours where we lived. None of our competitors went to more than one. I'm like, screw it, we're going all 17. And so we did. And my, my, uh, my life sucked. Somebody said, what was our profit margin? Now, we were about 12 to 18% typically, uh, but that was the front end. You know, Matt Plapp also had 7 vehicles for the company, so we had other problems there. But we went to 17 shows from the day after Christmas until the end of March. We did 17 shows. Our biggest competitor did 1 to 2. And so we did that. The other part of— I said, what else did we do that was successful? I wasn't a fisherman. I'm not a fisherman now. I wasn't a fish when we had the dealership, but we sold the number— we had Triton and Skeeter bass boats, number 1 and number 3 bass boat sold. Back then. And these fishing tournaments all had happened every week. So I went out and realized, okay, there's about 1,000 fishing tournaments. Let's go to every single fishing tournament we can. So we bought a 53-foot fifth wheel trailer that was a mobile store and a stage on the side for the tournaments to do the awards. And we bought a 28-footer that got pulled behind a Hummer we had. We went to fishing tournaments. We were visible. Everybody bought boats from Plaps because we supported their tournament. So then That got me thinking. I'm not— we have not been great at lead generation, which is funny. Like, my third book is delivered to the hotel in about 26 minutes, I'm told.

Nice.

Uh, right around noon, 36 minutes. And I've got so much content that we should have leads just pouring in. But I think the restaurant world's a different person. They aren't as active as, you know, you and I are, or the concrete guys. Like, my CrossFit gym I'm the owner of, You know, the CrossFit gym owners I know are all on Facebook and Instagram all damn day. If you want to run ads to reach CrossFit gym owners, easy as shit. For whatever reason, we have not done well with online lead generation. We've grown the business to 7 figures, but I don't want 7 figures. I want a $100 million company in 5 years. And when I looked at how to get there, I said, we've got to go to the restaurants. We've got to become the authority. And I looked at it and said, there's 2 people that are the authority right now: Yelp, and restaurant owners hate them, But consumers, they have the consumer's eyeballs and like Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, the TV shows, restaurant owners love them. What's his name? Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports and the pizza reviews. He's got the restaurant owner's attention. I'm like, how do I combine it? We're gonna do a road trip. We're gonna put 6 vans on the road in 12 months and we're gonna physically go and we're gonna go every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday where that van travels to different cities and here we are.

So good, cool, cool stuff there for sure. Um, before we dive into the strategy on kind of how you're attracting clients and kind of what that play is, because I think that's really exciting, um, what, like, what is it that you do for your clients? You've got these 300+ restaurants. Just high level, walk us through, like, what is it that Restaurant Marketing That Works does, um, kind of what you charge for that?

Yeah, so right now our services per location are $1,250 a month plus a $500 startup fee. Plus ad spend plus software. So we use a software called ManyChat. We're in the process of creating our own software that'll be done late this year. So every client that buys our software is buying my other company, Database Dynamite, because I want them to own the data. I don't want to have any of my hands on it. So they have their own account. It's theirs, kind of like a Mailchimp account almost. Uh, we— they— the Facebook spend is directly— or Facebook or Instagram spends directly on them. We put on their card, it runs for them. But our, our core competencies are two things. Number one, acquiring, uh, people. So they've got Facebook, they've got Instagram, they've got a website, they've got in-store marketing, they've got people that are seeing their concept. Well, how do we get those people to give us their name, phone number, email, and birthday? The next part of it is how do we use the data? So before COVID hit, we were mainly acquisition. Hey, we're going to help run your digital marketing, we're going to give you stuff for inside your restaurant, and we're going to help give you some tools on your, on your website and your grassroots tools that you go and use at events to get people to opt into an email text birthday program. When COVID hit, I never had a content team because I'm like, we're not in that business. It's a lot of work. The restaurants can create their own content. When COVID hit, I realized that one, before COVID they weren't using the data we were giving them anyways. So they weren't taking that. We're giving like one restaurant 18,000 emails and cell phone numbers over a 14-month period before COVID they had never sent out an email or text. I'm like, I just gave you a Ferrari and you took the wheels off it and put it in the shed. And they're like, we don't have time. Well, then when COVID hit, they sure as heck didn't have time. So we, when we, when COVID hit last March, I mean, everybody's business, everybody got rocked. The restaurant business got rocked big time for about 8 weeks. We only lost 2 clients in the entire process. We lost less than 0.05% of our revenue. We had a 28% dip in revenue because they couldn't pay their bills. But I told every one of them, you're not canceling. We'll work for free until you can pay us. Don't worry about me, I got plenty of money. I told them all that. So I'm not being arrogant. I've got money in the bank. My employees are fine. You need help. We're going to help you free of charge until you can help, so you can pay. And they were like, man, thank you. And so we kept our clients and they stayed on the books afterwards. But during COVID I said, I told our team, I said, hey guys, two things. Number one, your jobs are safe. I learned this when we had our boat dealership that we didn't do a good job of communicating openly and honestly. I told our employees how much money I had in the bank with the business and personally and said, your paychecks are secure for at least a year. So don't worry about that. I said, number two, our restaurant clients need your help. So whatever you can do overtime to help them with emails and texts and Facebook and Instagram and Google and Yelp, whatever, do it 100%. You're at their disposal. And when we did that, it helped. I had a client call me one time crying and said, dude, we're up 18%. We're a barbecue restaurant that was 95% dine-in a month ago. We have zero dine-in. We're up 18%. The only reason we're up 18% is your team.

Wow.

He said, because you helped us get our message out, you gave us advice, and then you took that database that we built and you used it. We had, we have, we have clients who are sending emails and texts every day. And so it was like, hey, we're going to hit the women on Monday, we're going to hit the men on Tuesday, we're going to hit your lost customers on Wednesday, your frequent customers Thursday, your new customers Friday. You know, we just went down the list. And so when COVID started coming around, like, well, I guess when it, when it, people started opening up a little in July, August, I told our team, hey guys, we got to shift the content. We've got to create a content department because why are we building this database nobody's using? And so now we're at 39 people full-time. We actually hired one more person yesterday, I think I heard, uh, because Ashley's involved with— in charge of that now. But I think we've got like 40 people or so now that are— most of them are doing content. So it's like, hey, we're, we're building the database and in the back end we're helping you use it.

That's awesome.

That's been a big transition too on our part is We used to have this objection a year ago. We had this objection a year ago. I've got a loyalty program, I've got an app, and they looked at us kind of as competition. And I'm like, well, you know, get people into an email program that gets— I call traffic sources to their other tools they currently have.

Nice. So it sounds like it's a combination of running Facebook ads and database management and database engagement and offers, and it's $1,200 a month and you manage all of that for them. In a nutshell, yeah.

And we, we have 3 main places we help them. Social media is 1, uh, in-store is 2, and their web presence is 3. Because I don't want to be— we, we got into a, a, we got pigeonholed a couple years ago into the Facebook people. And I'm like, well, we also do stuff on Google, we also do stuff in your store, we also help with your website, we help with your current database. So we, we have what we call 5 inroads. There's 5 ways to gain customers' data. Social media is one of them, because I know at some point Facebook's gonna go away, Instagram's gonna go away, something else is gonna come about. So I don't want to be a one-trick pony.

That makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense.

Um, awesome.

Um, so, so let's talk a little bit about kind of the new cool things you're up to to get in front of these restaurants, because I know restaurants is one of the hardest verticals there is. You know, like you mentioned, the Facebook ads to generate opportunity has been hit or miss. Cold calling a restaurant is almost like a dead end because they're so busy, they're not answering the phones. Um, talk to us a little bit about this new strategy that you're doing and kind of, you know, why, why you are so confident it's gonna, it's gonna be a game changer.

Yeah, so real quick, I saw somebody asked in the chat what my profit margins are. We are operating right now at 38%. 38% of what, you know, what comes in stays in the company bank account. So, I'll give you the vision. I guess I'll go outside real quick and show it to you. Sweet. Let's see, how do I turn my camera around? It's freaking bright out here.

And so, for those of you that were wondering why it's a little choppy, you know, Matt's literally on the road in a van. Check it out.

So, this is Piedmont Gas. It's a the gas company, natural gas company locally, but it's also a huge kitchen that Cisco has partnered with. So there's a couple hundred restaurant owners inside. That's where all these cars are, is restaurant owners, because this was empty when we got here this morning. And we're the one of only two companies that's not food oriented. So we did the van two ways. Let's give you a little trick here. We did it orange and blue. My colors are orange, our colors orange and blue. But I wanted it where if you see me go down the road on this side you see a blue van. If you see it driving down the other way, we're coming back from the interview, and you see an orange van, you're like, oh, there's another van from that company. And so the concept of this van is, number one, a mobile office, is that we're actually— we've created a media company a little different. America's Best Restaurants is a restaurant media company that we own that we're creating consumer-facing. There's my big ugly mug. There's QR codes to scan and get my book. There's a QR code on the back to scan and opt in, because one thing we'll do— I'll tell you in a minute— it's called our First Stop location. We're leaving this in towns for 5 days at a time in between our trips, and we're having restaurants where we, for $250, we advertise the vans at their restaurant to consumers. Go scan this for a chance for a gift card. And so we've got some lead magnets. It's got the whole front of it wrapped as well. Front, the top, top was Yeah, actually more expensive than anything else, it seemed like. But we wanted that for the drone footage. Let me get back in the van.

Nice van too, super, super classy on the inside. So it's beautiful.

It was a, uh, it was a year-old limo that I guess— I'm guessing went out of business for COVID. But it's got all audio video, it's got 2 TVs, it's got the starlight ceiling like the Rolls-Royces have. It's got a refrigerator, a wine cooling bottle. It's got some stuff we don't need.

Wow.

But my vision with this was I was looking at it and I came up with kind of an internal saying was I was going to take the funnel to the restaurants, was that if we suck at online acquisition and I'm spending $5,000 to $10,000 a month on Facebook ads incoming and some on Google and some on other places, well, shit, what's it cost me to buy a $100,000 vehicle? What's it— the wrap was $10,400, so it's not cheap. But I started looking at it. I also thought, what's different? What is nobody else doing? And I can tell you, the minute I did this and Cisco heard about it, they called me and said, hey, we heard you're doing something, we want to see it. And that's why it's here. And you know, like you said, it's classy, it's Mercedes. That's one reason I also went with Mercedes and not the Ford. I could have went 3 ways with this. I went Mercedes because even though it's pretty damn similar to the Ford version, it's got a little different viewpoint. But my big thing was, how do I stand out? We're not your typical, like one of my clients say, like, Matt, you're not your typical restaurant marketing company. You know, a lot of the agencies that call on restaurant clients of ours, this was another huge company called Performance Food Group. They're what you were 5 years ago. 2 and 3 employees, handful of clients, do a good job, but you're a different animal. And the other part of it I also thought was, you guys have all, you've seen Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, Guy Fieri. If Guy was in there shooting that restaurant and he looked at Joshua Nelson, who owns the 7 Figure Burrito, and said, Josh, I want you to come outside to the motorhome, I wanna show you what we do for restaurants. 10 out of 10 people are going to the motorhome And 10 out of 10 are going, here's my credit card. And so I thought, what if I create that? Well, America's Best Restaurants, I've had it for a few years. We've never really— didn't know what to do with it. Didn't have the money, didn't have the manpower. Well, now that I'm not involved in the agency, I take 1 to 2 phone calls a week with clients, with my account managers. I don't build anything. Like my managers all call me. I have 5 key managers. One of them called me today, text me, hey, you got 5 minutes? What's up? Talk to him. He handles it. So I'm not involved in the agency anymore that I can do different stuff and put my time out here. But I looked at it and said, what if, you know, I look big picture, you know, I want to create the biggest restaurant marketing I got to do business with them, you know, why wouldn't I? And so that's, that was my, my big goal with it. And then I decided, okay, well, how can we— if we're going to go on the road, how can we do this efficiently? And I've thought about motorhomes. I also figured out that, okay, I can't be the only person, because if I'm the only person, that means I got to travel every week. So I looked at my team. Doug on my team is a former college broadcaster. He worked in radio 27 years, but the first like 10 years he was a college broadcaster. He is amazing on camera. I'm like, well, hell, I don't have to be the star of the show, Doug. Luis on my team is in Chicago. He's cool as shit. He's not a white dude, which is— I'm trying to get our audience diversified from our on-air because it's all white guys, it seems like, always. And I'm all white guys, just we need a little mixture. And so I'm like, Luis is Puerto Rican. He's hilarious. Clients love him as an account manager. Like, hey, guess what, Luis? Every 3 weeks you're traveling with the van and a camera crew and an employee, and you're the host. And so we've got 2 other people in the pipeline, uh, and so by the end of the year we'll have more than likely 4 vans. At this point I had 2, I was— our second one's coming in in a couple months, uh, but I had a client who's got 9 restaurants. I don't know if I told you this or not, he called me, uh, he wants to get 2 vans on the road by the end of the year because he wants to do a joint venture on it. He wants to do a JV on those vans because he wants to help us. He franchises restaurants. And he wants to help us franchise America's Best Restaurants so that I can have 150 vans on the road. And my marketing agency is fulfilling everything those vans have.

Wow. So I love the idea. So the concept is you're going to a city, you've got pre-scheduled appointments with these restaurants. It's not a sales call, it's a, we want to feature you on America's Best Restaurants via video. Um, are they paying for this? Like, how do you structure that part of the deal?

So originally the concept was, and by the way, when we show up, we've already have one phone call with them and they're recommended by either a franchise group we work with, uh, cause we have a lot of franchises or they're recommended by Cisco or a food company. Like Cisco's already got a, given me a list of the top 100 clients that fit our bill for North and South Carolina. That's just two states. And so our goal is 15 restaurants a week, uh, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, we fly in on Tuesday, the team Ubers to where the van's at. From the van, we film, uh, 4 restaurants that day, 7 the next day, 4 the next day. We drive the van to the next city, we drop it off at the first restaurant on the next one. So we're 2 weeks already scheduled, and then we fly back. Well, when restaurants get— we get on a phone call with them to pre-qualify them. Once we pre-qualify them and once they're qualified, we schedule a Google Meet, and that Google Meet is what we call it. It's a needs analysis, an attention audit. Here's what America's Best Restaurants is, and we're completely 100%. We have two divisions. Our entire company's— company goal is to help restaurants find frequent customers. How do we do it? ABR does it as a consumer-facing media company. We're going to market your restaurant and tell people why they eat your restaurant. It's going to take long term for that to get big time, but it's a start right now. Number two is Restaurant Marketing Works. That is our digital marketing agency that we own that works with hundreds of restaurants nationwide and can tell you exactly how to get your app off the ground. How to get more people in your email, how to get this. And so we're telling them from both sides, and they know it. We're also doing a needs analysis and an audit on that call. And we're letting them know that here's the agenda. If you agree to us come to your restaurant, there's no cancellations, because we're in town, we're doing 15 places, this is a big deal. There's no cancellations. And if you can't make it, somebody better got shot in a drive-by, and then you send your wife to come do it. And the next one is we have a 5-minute pre-shoot meeting in the van. And we go our 15 minutes, we go over what we're going to cover on the TV behind me. Here's what, here's what it looks like. They've already gotten a box in the mail with an agenda, everything. We then go in the restaurant for 30 minutes and shoot. We come back out and we show you how our marketing firm and America's Best Restaurants can help you. Now we're in the process of tweaking that a little. Because this is a test. I mean, we're testing A/B. I'm thinking we're going to move to where people— the whole package. When we come, you get our monthly— our services for 2 months, everything. There's no cost. Because I'm like, you know what, if I'm in front of 15 restaurants every week, I look forward to a year from now, and we got 6 vans— we will have 6 vans on the road in a year at 15 a pop. That's 30, that's 120 restaurants we're in front of. Why risk some of them saying no? Make it irresistible. Here's what you get for 60 days for us coming and being— you being featured. And here's what we need: Facebook access. You display the in-store kit. You put this code on your website and you put $400 in Facebook ads behind it. One of my ultimate goals is to get to a point where we fund that. You don't do shit. Make— take away every single possible objection because at that point we're going to overdeliver. We are the best at what we do. Let's say we only get 40 of the 120. Do the math at $1,200, you know, that's $50,000, $55,000, $60,000 a month times 12, you know, over every month growing and growing and growing. I mean, it's 8 figures.

Yeah, amazing, amazing stuff. And it's interesting we're doing this right at this point in time because it'll be cool to look back on this interview 12 months from now because This is innovative. It's very different. It has not been done in, I don't think, any industry, let alone restaurants. Um, and I, I cannot poke any holes in it. I love the idea. You're in front of these restaurants, you're coming in with value in advance. We're going to shoot this video, we're going to feature you on this platform. Now you've got their attention, you're plugging them into your service. Um, it'll be interesting to see 12 months and watch this interview because right now it could go, could go either way. Seems like it could go well. Um, to really see what the, what the outcome is, because I think it's going to be a slam dunk.

Well, your, your holes you poked in it were accurate. Number one, can you afford to give away that much on the front end? Because it's a, it's, I mean, this, this right here, I mean, me being here right now, I'm not working in my business. I'm, you know, in, I'm got 3 employees down here. I mean, it's expensive to fly people, and we got a big outlay. And then the other side of it is, okay, let's say I'm completely right on this. Can my team handle another 60 to 80 restaurants in there? Like, hell, I was inside an hour ago talking with the one big guy from Cisco here, and he's like, Matt, you tell me how many you can do, because if you're going to be here those 2 weeks, if you want to go 7 days a week, 7 to midnight, the restaurants will love it. You just tell me what your capacity is. I mean, we could literally and certain times do a lot more. I've already told my wife, like, I'm a family guy. I won't miss my kids' sporting events. And my daughter's birthday is today. We celebrated Saturday, but I mean, it was just that she knows the opportunity. Um, but we— I go to their sporting events, I do that stuff. But I'm like, you know what, if I can fly somewhere Tuesday morning and be back Thursday night, I'll do it 52 weeks a year if it takes to get to a different level. Because that's— at the end of the day, Josh, that's what I think— what I found bigger than anything during pandemic. Everybody's got Certain people have certain things. There are certain things that people couldn't do. I get it. Uh, but a lot of the people I know could have done, could have kept exactly what they were doing, but it was an easy excuse to stop. It was an easy excuse. Oh, you can't fly. Like, I had friends of mine go, how are you flying? Like, I'm on a plane. What do you mean you can still fly? I'm like, yeah, the airports are open. The airport's never closed. Kroger closed. Kroger didn't close. The restaurant's closed, but the airport's never closed. And I never had a client, I never had a client that didn't want to meet us in March, April, May, June, July. I think the only thing holding us back is ourselves and our belief in ourselves. And then also risk. I'm not risk-averse. I don't give a shit. I've had times, I mean, I've not been fortunate since I was 21. I've not made below 6 figures. I can also tell you I've had years where I made a half million dollars and that there was $50 in my bank account because I risk it. And I'm like, you know what? I've made it before. I'll make it again. This is a 6-figure gamble here. I'm already moving fast. Based on the conversations I've had today and yesterday, and I'm having in Tampa on Friday, I think we'll have 4 vans by December 1st in flow. And it's kind of scary because I mean, that means I've got somewhere in the neighborhood of a $75,000 to $80,000 a month outlay for 4 vans. To be running operationally and doing their thing, but I'm also like, shit, that could also mean a $10 million influx in 12 months.

Yeah, for sure. So another thing you're doing that I think a lot of the listeners could really tap into is this whole idea of aligning with the people that already sell to your industry. So Matt works with restaurants. Who sells to restaurants? The people that provide the food, the people that provide the equipment, the You know, the things like that. Cisco obviously is at the very top of that food chain. Um, and in any vertical, these types of opportunities exist. I'd be curious to see how, like, how do you look at those opportunities? How were you able to align with, with a massive, you know, opportunity like Cisco in your space?

The, the tough part about that, it comes with them seeing something they haven't seen. The Cisco deal came by two things. I won't say this from an egotistical sample, but it came by two things. The fact that one of the people who's friends with Cisco was telling him how I have a Lamborghini. Literally, I've made— there's— I don't know, right?

That stands out.

If you look on Facebook, you look on Instagram, you will not see a picture of me personally with the Lambo. I don't— who gives a shit? And I've got friends of mine that are struggling to pay their mortgage. They don't need to see my jackass in the Lamborghini. But there's also people that are at this event The guy I met with yesterday has two McLarens, and one of the, one of the things he loves is that. So when you, when you get to a certain level, there's certain things that people show. Uh, the other thing was the van. When they saw my vision, and I tell everybody, like, I've got my Vivid Vision, you know, I don't know if you guys have that or not, but I've got a Vivid Vision from the book. And a lot of this comes from also Josh. But in here I've got, well, somewhere I've got a copy of our Vivid Vision for our company that's 8 pages long. That's audacious. We're gonna have a company beach house, we're gonna own a restaurant in 3 years, we're gonna have a bat— indoor basketball court at the company, we're gonna have this culture, we're gonna have these services. When they see that, they don't see it anywhere else. So I think that that attracts the higher level. But that all came from the lower level as well. So the biggest thing I did in the past 24 months was Russell Brunson's book, Expert Secrets. So there's a guy inside right now named Gabriel. Uh, last May, Gabriel saw my post on Facebook, which is funny. I call him Gabe, and every time I realized today, every time he introduced himself, he says Gabriel. I'm like, huh, I always call him Gabe. But Gabe started as an intern last May, saw a Facebook post. I bought Russell Brunson's book Expert Secrets. Read it if you're wanting to be an influencer in this. Read it, because what I read from his book is the opposite of what I always did. I always went after my top 100 restaurants. And he's like, no, go up to the top 100 people that have your restaurants. The Ciscos, the Performance Food Groups, the Prestos, the US Foods, the GFSs. So I read the book, I said, shit, I can't do this. So I put an ad out. Luckily, I found Gabe, Gabriel. He applied as an intern, he did it for 3 months, and his entire job was like, we came up with a list of everybody that had a podcast or a book in the restaurant space. And we bought it. I've got literally 200 books. I've got my Amazon account. Every day I get notifications, something's being shipped, something's being shipped. Well, here's the cool part. Gabe now has an intern. So Gabe came on last May, helped me build my Dream 100 funnel, which is— I do— you've seen them. I do weekly interviews. I've got one tomorrow. I've got one Friday where I interview authors and podcasters in the restaurant space. Half of them aren't great. Half of them don't have connections. I never pitch any of them. They all always, after 3 or 4 conversations, go, dude, is this what you do? And I'm like, yeah, why, why didn't you tell me? I mean, you need to know. And then it, that makes the relationship different because everybody else, every other agency is calling that guy. Hey man, I gotta share what we do for restaurants. Hey, you could refer us. I'll give you a kickback. None of that ever comes up. And so Gabe, last summer, became a paid employee. He's not an intern anymore, he's an employee now. He's in college, a sophomore in college, he's a genius. And he's now got an intern named Ben. And Ben took all the stuff Gabe did last summer off his plate. Now Ben— Gabe is in charge of the abruniversity.com website that we're rolling out. He's in charge of the webinars. And he's in charge of my in-person events I'm hosting starting late July in our new building in the room called ABR University where we're going to have restaurant-oriented focus groups every month with these experts. And my thought is, okay, we've, we found about 35 of them that are awesome. If those 35 get to love Matt Plapp and what we do, and because we're helping them get their word out, I'll eventually get in front of their customers.

I love it. So it's kind of the, um, the joint venture strategy on steroids. You're not just reaching out to joint ventures, you're creating a strategy to really hand-select them and to feature them on your podcast. And again, everything you do, from what I can see, is leading with value. You're coming in, here's how I can help you, here's how I can feature you, here's how I can make you look better. Um, and in, in, you know, just the basic law of reciprocity, they're like, oh well, that was awesome, like, how do I help you? How do I get involved in your services? How do I plug you into my network? Um, I think that's, that's a powerful, powerful explanation of like, how do we look at these things? It's not just reach out to Cisco and say, hey, um, I want to sell to all your restaurants, because that's never going to work, right? It's leading with value. It's coming at it from a different angle. And, and, you know, that's how these types of opportunities blossom.

And another thing too is you standing out. Like what I told— I tell everybody our vision. I tell the most random people, you know. And, and, and part of it my dad always taught me, tell everybody everything, because number one, when you tell them You're committed to it. I'm going to have 6 vans. I say it all the time, 12 months, 6 vans. I keep saying, I keep saying it. I'm going to convince myself that we're going to do it. But then also you're— Matt, where's the 6th van? Where's the 5th? You know, and the 6th one, by the way, is going to be a 40-foot diesel pusher motorhome that's going to have a trailer to be able to pull my Lambo and a Jeep in it. So my wife and kids can go with me on a lot of trips and I can have the cars and do a little, have some fun. But the big thing too, with these vendors like Bruce Nelson, I interviewed Bruce last Friday. Bruce is an author in the restaurant space. He's the controller for 8 restaurants. I've not asked Bruce to do business yet. I won't. If he needs it, he'll find me. But when him and I are talking, I did— we're doing what's called deep dives. Every Wednesday we do our expert interview. It's the first time I've talked to him. Fridays, if we think your content's deep enough, let's go to the next level. And then we have monthly webinars. But also, when I told him that, hey, by the way, here's what ABR University is going to be. Our first event's in late July. Every month, end of the month, we're going to have an event. And we're going to pay for you to come in. We're going to fly you in, hotel. You'll have, uh, we'll have cars because we're gonna have, we're getting a couple cars wrapped locally to have as, uh, courtesy cars when people come in town. But I'm gonna make it to where guys like that come in, speak to 20 or 30 restaurants. I mean, nobody does that shit. And I think that, that we did that in the fishing business. Mark Menendez, uh, Joe Thomas, Billy Lowen, uh, Gary— always Gary's name. We flew in professional fishermen. We had our boat dealership and we hosted fishing events at our store. Like, nobody— like Gary Menendez or, uh, Menendez— Mark Menendez lived down at Lake Barkley. He was a Bassmaster Classic big-time guy. I would spend like $10,000 a year to be his friend. How do I sponsor you? I'll pay you to come to my store twice a year and give a seminar to 50 people. This guy's huge. He's coming to our store. Next thing you know You know, we're the place to be. And I'm just kind of taking that same thing from a restaurant standpoint. If all of a sudden we have this ABR University and all these people are coming, well, guess who's the exclusive host of ABR University? The sponsor, Restaurant Marketing That Works. Oh, by the way, the whole first level, our podcast studio, the shared workspace, our company offices, all that cool trendy crap up there, you know, that's from Restaurant Marketing That Works. And okay, you can do business with us.

Love it, love it. Great, great stuff. Um, Brandon says, uh, Matt's a wild man, I love it. Uh, Spirito says, uh, true inspiration, love to see you making moves like this. Keep, keep crushing it, Matt. Let's, let's shift gears for just a second. I know we're almost up to our hour, and I want to be respectful because you've got a big event happening right there that you need to be part of. Um, we talked about kind of the power of being in the niche and kind of how kind of shifting that focus helped to accelerate the growth. We talked about, um, kind of some unique ways that you're getting your foot in the door and looking at things differently. Um, you know, you've got 300+ restaurants, soon to be probably thousands. Um, talk a little bit about client retention and what, like, what are you doing to serve these clients and keep them on board as long as possible?

So I did the numbers, and up until June 1st, we have a 1.9% revenue loss this year. 1.98. Phenomenal. Banker— I did the numbers. My banker who financed this vehicle, I don't know what research he did, but he's like, Matt, your industry, you should be closer to 30 to 40% loss revenue at this point. And he's like, what are you doing?

1.9.

I said, you know what, I can't take credit. I think it's the fact that I don't get involved as much in my team. We have account managers, account analysts, uh, they do a good job. I think it's because we're sticky. That if you're a restaurant in the middle of a time of need, the best thing you can do is talk to your customers. Well, who controls your database? Like, granted, they have access to it, but they don't know how to do it. And so it's kind of like the person— like, my, my son, up until 6 months ago, depended on my wife to get him everywhere. He couldn't piss mom off. He wanted to go to football, Gabe's— or Abe's house, wanted to go to school, whatever. He couldn't pay if he wanted Chipotle. Before he knew what Uber Eats was, which was— Jesus, that's killing me now because now he has a car and still orders Uber Eats. And by the way, 16-year-old, 17-year-old kid the other day had a $24 Uber Eats order by himself. Now granted, he's a D-lineman and he's 250 pounds, but that's different story. But he depended on my wife. He couldn't— him and my daughter, I saw this as my kids, I analyzed a lot of this stuff, is that they depended on mom to get them everywhere. And when they wanted something higher level, like my wife always says, like, you gotta talk to dad. When my daughter, like, wanted a Jeep when she was 16, like, all of a sudden I was the greatest dad in the world for 6 months. And so I look at it from our clients the same way. How can we be as sticky as possible? You know, we can kick ass on the front end and overdeliver. Like, we do the welcome box now. I've actually got a— my assistant's mailing 2 welcome boxes out today. Uh, we have an entire line of apparel. Our— at our new location, we have a wall that says Get Geared Up, and it has the MP logo. It's got t-shirts, sweatshirts, sweatpants, and shorts. And we do that kind of stuff. Uh, we are account managers and analysts, and I tell all of our clients, here's my cell phone. Granted, I don't do anything with any of your stuff, but if you need higher level advice and you can't get a hold of anybody, I'm your guy. Well, it never happens. Like, once every 2 weeks I get a phone call. Our team does a great job of doing it. The content part has made us really sticky. We had less retention, or worse retention. Not bad, we've never, we've never been over like probably 7 or 8%, but we had worse retention when we did only acquisition. Because then they were, if they weren't using the email list, who gives a shit? Well, now we're using it for them. And like yesterday, we stopped by two clients yesterday, Sweet Taters in North Carolina and, uh, Conover, and Crazy Crab in Greensboro. And both of them raved about my account managers, raved about the content team. We use Facebook Workplace. Every, every client has a Workplace group, and their content manager, all 5 of my managers and their 2 dedicated managers and myself and my director of operations are in the group. And when they post something, they they get responses. And when my team posts up, we have like pretty strict protocols in place that if like right now, what is it, June 22nd, July's content's already done. In a week, by the end of, by July 1st, Tanya, Lisa, their content team will be posting August. And our clients appreciate that it's not happening tomorrow, that it's, what do you need? Here's August. Here's the two things happening in August. The NFL season kicks off. Let's do something trendy with NFL if you're in the NFL Network. And so I think that's why our retention is good. But I also think it's because, you know, we provide high-level services. I tell my employees, you know, overdeliver. You know, when you need the credit card, you don't even have to ask me. I mean, if I was cracking up one of the other days, like, hey man, I want to do a contest with our employees and my team. What do you think? I'm like, what do you think? What do you mean? I'm like, You've got the company credit card. I mean, if you want to spend $100 on your team, have fun. You want to spend $500, have— if you spend $1,000, we might want to talk. But, you know, let's make them happy. Let's make our clients happy. Uh, you know, that's at the end of the day, I think that's what it comes down to. But account managers, I'll tell you what, account— to backtrack on that, like, the biggest thing up until 2 years ago, Doug and myself, the salespeople basically, because I still sell, uh, we were the account managers. And it's impossible if you're selling. In my opinion, once you get to a certain level, it's impossible to keep up. Like, right now we have— I think there's 7 account managers and analysts, and the analysts are a low— lower level. They're account managers in training. All they do is look at our dashboard and our data and give a— once they used to do 4 times a month, now we're down to 1 because we found from clients was overload. They have a once a month report that they do on Loom. and they give it to the account manager. The account manager looks for negatives and highlights and then pops it up to the client, and then the client can schedule a call. They have a call with Scott or Luis, and then our content team kind of acts as that liaison as well.

So good, good, great stuff, man. If people want to reach out to you, they want to learn more either about the restaurant stuff or just in general they want to connect to you, what's the best way?

Somebody said on here, Matt, email me, I need your help. VA disabled veteran and homeless training restaurant digital consultant. Okay. Well, shoot me an email. Easiest way to reach me is matt@mattplatt.com. I will, I will say this, that I'm a lot less available than I used to be. Uh, probably one of the biggest mistakes I made 3 years ago that hindered my agency was I was too available to the agency side. I mean, it was Billie Jean and Mike Garcia kept telling me, dude, you gotta get out of that. You're hindering your growth. Uh, but I mean, if you— easiest thing to do, and this isn't to say because my shit's the greatest, but follow me on— follow me. I mean, I talk about everything. Uh, if you go to Matt Plapp on YouTube or Instagram or Facebook, you'll see everything I do. Uh, there is no secret. You know, the secret at the end of the day with any business is find a reason. Like, you know, like my dad's always told me, if you can sell, you can help. And so find out how people need help. Like my clients, the restaurant space, they need people to come back more often. How do you get them to come back more often? You invite them. How do you invite them? Email, text, birthday, retargeting. How do we get that? We get their information. Oh shit, I don't know how to use it. We do it for you. And so find a solution that fixes their problem. Uh, and then at the end of the day, like a guy asked me the other day, like, oh, how do you close clients? How do you do this? I'm like, you're probably, you know, if you're that new, just go out and shake hands and kiss babies, meet people, have conversations, quit selling. You know, my first year as an agency— now, Grant, I'll say this— I had a $150,000 guarantee from the Reds and Bengals, so I was pretty fortunate when I started my agency that I didn't have to worry about not eating. But my first year, year and a half, my agency, I had no sales collateral. I had no sales pitch. I went in and said, what's working, what's not? I know marketing 10 times better than you. At the end of the day, it's pretty simple. We all probably do. How can I, how can I give you advice? Or like, what do you need? Like, maybe you don't need me. And we would just talk, and I never presented something if I didn't see a need.

Great, great stuff, Matt. You know, congratulations on your growth. Um, practically speaking, if I were to boil this down for you guys, a couple of the key things that stuck out for me. Number one, if you're still thinking about should I go niche or should I stay general, um, you know, Matt's another great example. Choose a niche, position yourself as the expert. Has experienced accelerated growth. Number 2, I would say, um, figure out ways to get live and in person with your clients and your prospects, right? All of us want to stay behind the phone, we want to stay on Zoom, you know. I've seen it time and time again, and Matt's a great example. Get to their location, get in front of them, get to where they are hanging out at events, at exhibits, at shows. That's going to create new opportunities for you that didn't exist Number 3, look for joint venture opportunities. Find the people that are already selling to the people you want to do business with. Figure out ways to add value and lead with value in advance. That way, you know, you get with the Cisco, you get with the major association, they start to plug you into the client base instead of you going one-to-one. And the number 4 is think bigger, right? You can see Matt's not thinking, how do I build a, you know, a 6-figure income, or how do I build a 7— He's thinking really big. He's making big, massive moves. And I hope that that think bigger philosophy is starting to rub off on you as you listen to Matt's story here. Um, Matt, in closing, what else would you say up to that agency owner that's struggling and just trying to get things to the next level?

You know, Gary Vee always talks about it that like, I'll never forget, I was listening to an interview of his a couple months ago and this girl was like, uh, lady, she's like, hey, You know, I'm really struggling. Like, I've been trying this thing out. I don't know if I'm— if it's meant for me, but is it gonna happen? He goes, how long have you been doing it? She's like, 3 months. He said, fuck you. She goes, what? He's like, 3 months? Come back in 3 years. You know, and I think that that's like— I saw, I think Christos, I think, is on this webinar over in Greece. I want to say Christos shared something about Usain Bolt the other day, that Usain Bolt trains for 4 years to run 9.7 seconds. I think too many of us want stuff quick. I'm, I'm bad at it. I want 6 vans tomorrow, but I know what it takes to get the 6 vans. I wanted 1 van the last 3 years. I didn't stop. Oh, don't, don't try something for 2, 3, 4 months. Do it for 2 or 3 years. Do it for 5 years. Because I mean, I'm from Kentucky. Colonel Sanders— there's notorious stories about Colonel Sanders. He was like 70 years old when he finally figured out what he was doing, and he did it for like 20 years of selling chicken at gas stations. I think too many people give up too quick. Shiny object syndrome. They constantly change. I've had every opportunity. I get like, literally, I've been told I'm a jackass by a lot of people in the marketing business because I don't want to do joint ventures with them. Like, oh man, I got this online ordering. Oh man, I got this mobile website. I've got We don't do it. We do this. And like I told somebody, one of my clients that owns— I have one of our non-traditional clients owns a boat dealership. He was our first ever employee at our boat dealership back in the early 2000s. He's a client now and he's a good friend, and he's been a client since he opened this dealership 10 years ago. And he called me today and we're talking. He knows what I'm doing. He's like, dude, why don't you create that van concept for me so I can go do what you're doing in the fishing world? Because I'm tired of having employees. I want to go do what Matt Pflaubs doing with the fishing. I said, Sean, Maybe in 10 years. What do you mean? I said, I got 5 to 10 years left before I'm even close to becoming known in this industry. When I cash out in 10 years for $100 million, maybe I'll create you a fishing road trip like this. But I said, right now I don't want to talk about anything else. It is how to acquire frequent customers for restaurants, period.

Great stuff. Great, great insights. A lot of amens and preaches, and I needed this today. So Matt, thanks so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule. I know you're there at Cisco, you know, making things happen.

Thanks for sharing.

Really appreciate it. Cannot wait to see where you're at 12 months from now as we look back on this interview and kind of how this whole experiment plays out. So if you got value from today's session, be sure to look Matt up, follow him on YouTube, friend him, send him a personal message to thank him for sharing. and be sure to cheer him on as he continues to grow the business.

And Josh, final thing, the only thing holding y'all back is yourself. I've got a quote that's on the back of my keychains for the car and also everywhere I look at. It's from a song by Kid Quill that says, the hardest part about writing your story is knowing you're worth the ink. I remember when I met Billy Jean in 2016, I've always liked cars. I've always liked fancy shit. I have a problem buying stuff. But I had given up that I was ever going to get to a point where I could own something of that stature. Even though I made good money, I couldn't see it. And then Billy helped me see the vision better. And then Chris Patterson, now Joshua Nelson. I was where everybody in this call was more than likely in the last 3 to 5 years. And you— it's scary. Like I was talking this morning about a conversation with a client that we will have a $100 million business, one part of the business in 5 years. Thinking about that, it's like, wow, because I was thinking about a couple hundred grand a couple years ago. But the hardest part is knowing you're worth it. So, believe in yourself.

Love that. That's a great, a great quote to end on, a great analogy. Matt, thank you so much. We'll talk to you again soon. Thanks for logging in, everybody. Have a great day.

Thank you.