Episode 357: Finding Million-Dollar Accounts in Plain Sight (with Mark McCormack)

What if your very first promo sale was $30,000? That's exactly what happened to Mark McCormick on his first day calling on clients. He was a college senior working at an ad agency, and he was supposed to be their designer when 18 people quit and his job started shrinking before his eyes. His boss asked if he could make a sales call, so he did. And he got completely hooked on promo. On today's show, we're exploring how to use promotional products as your gateway to becoming the strategic quarterback of your clients' brands. Welcome to the SkewCast, the podcast for innovators and maverick thinkers in the promotional product space. My name is Bobby LeHew. I'm glad you're here. Mark McCormick built Identity Marketing Group by understanding one fundamental truth: if you're the person who has the logo, you control about 80% of client spend if you're a good quarterback. Today, he runs multiple revenue streams per client, and he just won our Shops Innovation Award for explosive growth in pop-up shops. And he's cracked the code on landing the kinds of accounts most distributors only dream about. Join us as we talk with Mark about 3 things. 1, the employee headcount formula that identifies million-dollar opportunities hiding in plain sight. 2, why everything is going print-on-demand in the next 3 years and how winners are preparing now. And 3, how to position yourself as the brand quarterback instead of the order taker. Today's episode is brought to you courtesy of us at Commscue. Over 900 distributors powering $1.8 billion in network volume rely on Commscue's connected workflow. Process more orders, connect your team, and dramatically grow your sales. To learn how, visit commenscue.com. Now here's my chat with Mark McCormick.

Mark, thanks for joining us on the SkewCast.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, we joke that when people ask us how many expos we've been to, basically all of them. You started in Is it 2003?

2003. I started on my own.

Yeah.

Before that I was with a distributor. Basically it was an ad agency.

Okay.

So I was with them for almost 3 and a half years.

Okay. So that explains why you've built more of an agency type model. You explained a little bit like merch is just a part of your revenue, right? What are the other components?

So we have a really solid design department. We have a division that manages social media. We do management of HubSpot, Marketo, Salesforce. Wow. Lots of different CRMs for clients. And then we have traditionally what we call strategy or concepting. So we bill for everything from custom promotional items, custom campaigns. But what it does is it spans everything. And it came from— I was a graphic artist in college and so spilled out to work for a friend of my dad's who had bought an ad agency. Okay. And I was supposed to be their designer. And my very first day was the day of the acquisition.

Wow.

So I watched like 18 people quit because all of their noncompetes were null and void. And I started to see my job shrink on my desk. Yeah. And he came in and asked me, hey, can you go call on this person? And I did. And I went there to talk to him about promo. And my first order was sizable. It was probably $25,000, $30,000.

Oh, you're probably—

yeah, I got really lucky, but it was like print too. So it was like envelopes.

Yeah.

Keychains, all sorts of stuff.

An issue where the order average is 700.

Yeah, it was huge. Like, yeah, I got this guy that was an enormous, like, property owner. So he owned tons and tons of apartments.

Yeah.

And he's like, I need mailing envelopes for people would still mail checks. They didn't have direct deposit of their rent, so they would mail their rent checks. He'd give them like a keychain with their keys every time he had a new renter or tenant and brochures for each of the apartment villages that they owned, all this stuff. And so I went back to the office, wrote up the POs, got it done, and I was still a designer. And I went to dinner with who's now my wife. And she's an accountant and she goes, are you going to get paid commission on that? And I had no idea what that was. And I was like, I'm just happy to still have a job because I watched all these people leave. And she's like, just go ask. And I did. And it was more like more than my 2-week check. My commission when it finally came in was sizable. And I was born into an entrepreneurial family. So I went back in and I was like, hey, so What are you guys going to do with all those folders in the back? And can I start calling those people at 3:00 every day? I'll get through all of my jobs because there was little jobs left. And so that's how I got into sales.

That's a crazy story. I've never heard that angle on a story like that.

Yeah. So and then I just started calling. I did $1 million in my first 6 months.

Well, no wonder you got hooked into promo.

Yeah, it was fun. And during that time, I was still a senior in college. And I took a whole extra— I think it was a year, maybe three-quarters of a year of school, and I started hiring designers in my class that were in my design classes.

Wow.

So I was like, hey, $500, can you get me a brochure by Friday? $200, can you lay these pieces out for me? Because I wanted to concentrate on sales. Yeah. Versus doing the design. And at one time I hired every kid in my class and the teacher was like, why are you still here? Like, you come with a box of zip drives, you know, like zip disks and I'd come in and just dole them out like cards. I was like, I'd write on top of it like what I needed, the name of the brand, the business card of the person that needed it. Be like, here, if you can get this to me by the next class, I'll bring you cash.

So fast forward, you obviously then had this major imprint in agency side, design side, all of that from the get-go. Fast forwarding now, there's lots of crossover, it sounds like, with your clients. So some people that go agency route typically have promo clients that stay in the promo lane and then some don't. Is there a lot of crossover with some of the other work that you do with clients?

Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting because it allows us to be really nimble and we'll have clients that just use us for promo, just use us for social.

Sure.

Just use us for retainer work. And what usually ends up happening, what I found like years and years ago was that if you're the person that knew what the logo was, what the brand guide said, and had access to the EPS file, you controlled about 80% of their spend.

Purchasing.

Yeah, just— yeah, because they'd be like, he's the guy that has the logo and everything flowed to you. Now it's you have to have other pieces of your business.

Yeah.

And typically I like to say that we want to have between 7 to 8 income streams coming in into the business per logo. Just, just in general. Just in general. So that we're nimble enough where if promo starts to take a dive or there's tariffs and that starts to slip, what you find out in large enough accounts is that the money moves somewhere else and they'll shift it like Hey, our trade show budget got cut, but they still have to talk to their clients or they still have to gift them or they're going to do an event. So it changes from being like, oh, I didn't get the shirt order to, well, what are we going to do? Yeah.

Activation.

Yeah.

Rattle off the categories that you—

so that's just a few of them. I mean, we're tied into a ton of different things. So we have print, social, promo, strategy. I have a guy that shoots video for me all over the country, so he'll fly anywhere in the country and shoot video. So depending on what the client needs, we don't ever have to say no, like ever. Like if somebody in our office says, hey, can you? It should be yes.

How many employees you have?

I have 9 in Omaha.

Okay.

And that's kind of total. So those people blend in and out.

Where do you see the biggest growth category coming for the year?

Promo's a big piece of it, but I'd say it's probably 40% of our business. 35, 40% of our business is in promo. The rest is kind of retainer services. We charge a lot of retainer. Type of clients and accounts. And we have clients that we'll call it a design retainer, but that design retainer could roll into, hey, we also need social, and then we spin it up and just bolt it and add on social, or we'll add on trade show, or we'll add on, hey, we need somebody that can manage and build funnels in our CRM. Awesome. I have that too. We also have people that manage people's Google accounts, so their AdWords accounts, their local SEO. Is big and it's like the easiest add-on on the planet to add those services into a promo business. And what I also found out is that it gives you more than one reason to call them. So you're not calling them and just going, hey dude, are you ready to buy more pens? It's okay. I just noticed on social media somebody made a comment. You want us to respond to this or you want something else? And what's happening in the business? It's kind of more open kimono. They they're able to talk to you more about the business than they are about this one order.

Right.

And so I love that.

Do you have particular verticals you serve? Is there a particular niche industry?

We're in lots of B2B and lots of B2C. So we have like insurance, finance, healthcare.

I used to say the B2B boring businesses are my favorite.

Oh yeah.

Insurance, finance.

Yeah. And there's a ton of that in Omaha. So like, oh, it's true because of where we're at. So you have Berkshire Hathaway, which is Warren Buffett. So all of those companies, you have Mutual of Omaha, you have every type of insurance company exists in our backyard. So they're already there, which is fun. It's great.

Congratulations, by the way. You and your team won our shops innovation award.

Thank you.

I know you do a lot of different types of shops. You guys had a massive growth year just in shops with common SKU. How did you spark that growth? Is shops like a natural part of your DNA? When you guys are working with a customer? Do you have to proactively push that? How does that happen?

Yeah, we usually ask them how they purchase their stuff before we kind of jump too far. Like, we don't, hey, you need to order this stuff. And it's like, well, maybe they don't. They don't have the space to put it, or they want it on demand, or they might not have budget or have been stung in the past with inventory. Like, hey, we had all this inventory and our logo changed, right? So we had a really large customer that had a logo change in the last year and a half, and it was massive amounts of inventory. And we didn't have their store at that time. Now we have their store, but I think from their previous vendor, they had over 2,000 ProV1 dozens sitting on a shelf with the wrong logo. And there's no way to fix that.

No.

Sometimes you go in and they've had massive pain points of inventory. So if I know that I'm going to sell an inventory-free store, I'm going to go, Hey, how about we do these as drops or we do this as a fulfillment and auto fulfill? And we use multiple platforms for stores, but it's one of those where we can answer that a lot through the Commonsku platform. We can say, hey, we can do it as a pop-up store, we can do it as a corporate store, we can use it as this type of store, that type of store. And these are the triggers that we need. And, and it allows us to do that.

For us, you and I that have been doing shops for a long time, one of the hardest things about shops and stores was it was complex to set up. And I know I'm pushing an assumption on you, but the ease of which you can use Shops and CommerceHQ has been a huge part of the growth. Would you say that's the case for you and your team?

Yeah, it's absolutely easy to set them up, turn it on, let it run, turn it back off. Ease of use from a customer standpoint is great. Yeah, we like it a lot. And you guys have been a great piece of growth in our company. So feeling's mutual. We like working with you guys.

Both growth-oriented companies for sure. You also don't do a lot of inventory shops now, but you did at one time. That was the only option for the longest time, right?

Yeah.

So now you do a lot of POD. Do you see that category growing? Maybe a dumb question, but that's one of the hottest challenges and opportunities right now.

Yeah. Everything's going to be POD in the next 3 years. Everything will be POD and it's just changing. I was sharing a story with you earlier. We had one of the largest nurse recruiters in the country as a client of ours, and we still have them as a client, but it was one where we had a whole warehouse dedicated to them and we just saw it go. We shipped 1,000 boxes a day for them, new hire kits during COVID So 1,000 a day went out the door and it was random item, everything from beach towels to tote bags to backpacks to bento boxes. I mean, we had everything in this warehouse. Unreal. And I was telling you, like, the shipments went from 1,000 a day to 250 a day or 500 a day to 50. To 50. And I was like, thank God I didn't own the inventory, right? Oh, if I had owned that inventory, I would have been losing my mind. And when we told them, we don't know what's going on in your business, or we didn't know somewhat, COVID was over, etc., but we wanted to know what was happening. And they said, well, we're just not as busy. And well, I'm not going to hold on to this inventory. It's your inventory. You own it. It was 7 semi-trucks of inventory that was all owned by them. And what do you want us to do? Because I can't have 7 people twiddling thumbs shipping 50 boxes. It's just not worth it. So they took the inventory and, well, when you're finished using all this stuff, we'll switch it to POD. Yeah. But there's no reason to turn up a store for them when they have all that inventory. Right. And they were just using it internally.

One last question about shops. You have done every type of shop imaginable. You did the inventory shops, you do a POD, and your team has embraced pop-up shops. And you obviously won our award because you've had massive growth in that category. How would you encourage distributors? We're seeing a lot of organic growth with shops, and you know how this happens, how do you recommend they proactively go after shops business with their clients?

I always open it with asking them how they want to buy. How do you want to get this stuff? And how are you getting sizes? Or open-ended questions. Where's all your stuff sit right now?

Right.

If they're like, oh, it's at our warehouse. Okay. Who's fulfilling it? How long does it take to get?

Yeah.

That's a big pain point.

Yeah. You know, speed.

We're in the Amazon economy. People want to order it now and get it tomorrow for free. And that doesn't exist yet in our world. But at the same time, being able to order it as a customer and get it quickly is where PODs kind of just dominate. Because once somebody has bought all of that inventory and let's say you have, you know, 500 employees or 1,000 employees or 200 employees, after a year, everybody that's ever wanted that shirt has it. And you You're stuck with tons of inventory and they're like, oh, you sold me something bad. So it's a bad experience for the distributor too. And it's a bad experience for the customer because that's all they have is choices.

Yeah.

Is the shirt that they didn't want 6 years ago and they still have it and like, well, it makes it tough to pivot where POD, it's like, hey, we can spin up these 100 items and if you don't like any of those in 6 months, we're going to spin up another 100 and take those down and keep things fresh. So that's big.

You and your team have been great customers of Commenscue for a while now.

Thanks.

Think back to when you made the switch. What made you switch? What made you jump to Commenscue?

I was in a top 10 franchise for 9 years, left there, went to another software that was very antiquated, and it really bugged me because it, it took a really long time to enter the order.

Yeah.

And that was kind of the main pain point from our CSRs was they're like, I entered the order and how long did that take? It took us 30 minutes to enter an order. That's crazy. If you think about that, then you max out your time of how many orders you could enter a day.

Yeah.

And that's not going to work. And that was right as Commenscue was kind of merging into a full-stack CRM, like merging into, hey, we know how to enter orders, but we also have these other tools that we're going to develop along the way. Commenscue didn't have stores. Right. Not at that point. So not at that point. But that was the big decision factor for us. And I'm a UI person too, so I love when things look clean.

Yeah.

And my wife runs the accounting side of our business. When she likes something, it makes it easier for me to go, hey, I think we're going to switch systems and you're not going to kill me, you know, and make life easy. Happy wife, happy life. But that was one of those things where it did make it simple and it helped that Mark and his wife were in the business too because they understood it. So in talking with them, that was a big part of it. Hey, they get it. They've been down the road that we're on and understood the pain points where most people that design the CRM or design the stack or the order entry system or etc., they're so removed. They've never written an order before. You're like, this doesn't work, guys. I can tell you we tried 6 different ones before we picked Compass. Like we, we tried them. We'd be like, all right, what does this look like? Let's test an order, see if we could enter an order, make it work. And I met with our employees like every Friday. This is not working. And then that was right when Common Skew was kind of scaling. And I liked the community that was behind it too. So like I've been to some of the Common Skew events and that was cool because you're talking with distributors the same way you would in a franchise, but without the franchise, like without the giant fees that are associated with that.

Right.

I paid them to lick stamps and mail invoices and it was $100 grand. Oh, that was a lot. So where you go to a community where everybody's kind of all on the same page. You're all on the same system. You're trying to make things work and you're trying to grow. Everybody's trying to grow. But that was, that was cool. Big part of it.

How integral do you think that has been to scaling your business because of the connected workflow?

Huge. I mean, it's huge. It's just something where it's allowing people that do what they do incredibly well into your company will only make your company healthier. That's how I look at it. Yeah, that's cool.

And you as a leader, then real-time process visibility into your business, how's that helped you as a leader in terms of Transparency, what's going on? Because I remember I was on one of these legacy systems, and I won't mention the name on camera, but you couldn't see anything. You were operating in the dark all the time. You only had a rearview mirror to look at what happened last month. You couldn't see anything that was going on currently.

Yeah.

How, as a leader, what does that do for you?

It's huge because I can pinpoint where to spend time. For me, it's all about time. I need to spend time on this project. Because it's of this importance level and this has an opportunity to grow. Where if you see this, the customer buy the same amount from you every year, you go, I've probably capped that out. And maybe this is something that we can just handle internally. It doesn't need a rep attached to it. Just needs somebody to take the order, process it. Which is wild because I've had a bunch of orders come through in portals in like the last 3 months. We set up portals for these companies. I remember the employees singing the Portal song at a CommonsQ event like 3 years ago, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey, we set these things up and we're getting orders on them and I forgot about them. Like, I forgot about them and there's orders coming in. So I walked into like our staff, Grant and Wendy were on there the other day. We just got an order from Portals and I'm like, yeah, I got— that's crazy. It came in and I was like, run it, let's go.

Why do you think it suddenly hit?

I have no idea. Like, literally no idea. I called the client. Okay. Did you know about this? She's like, I found it in my email. I was looking up to send you an email. And she goes, and I saw this thing, Portal. And it was unread email from like 2 years ago.

Oh my God.

And I was like, yeah, I go, I can't believe you didn't read my email, but that's great. Thanks for the order. So it's hilarious, but yeah, it's funny.

I'm real curious about your advice to distributors since you run a full spectrum business.

Yeah.

From digital and marketing and Talk to that young entrepreneur out there who's considering and looking at the business and looking at the landscape and going, I want to do what Mark's doing because it's fascinating to me. How do you diversify that portfolio? How do you even begin that step? How do you start to do that?

Network. You just have to network. And like walking down the aisles at PPAI, okay, these are my competitors. There's a million of them out there. How many of them do stuff other than promo? Like how many? How many? It's very rare. So if you can diversify your product offering and it's funny because you walk down some of these aisles and there's like a printer there, like standing there trying to sell print at a promo event. Yeah. And be one of the few people that talks to that person like those.

Yeah.

Hey, how do you sell this? Or learn how to sell print or learn how to sell local search or Google AdWords. I have a lot of those if people want references, I can give you references, but it's one of those where those people are trying to crack into the industry and are sometimes the biggest help you can get. Yeah, because they'll be like, oh, I'll quote it. They'll get it done for you. Or, hey, go quote this. And there's all these opportunities and they'll even send you leads to some of them, send us leads.

Is that also perhaps where a lot of the innovation is happening in these small little pockets of interesting industries like that? You broke into a category that a lot of people would love to, which is sort of some direct sourcing and creating custom projects overseas. That's a big category for you.

It's huge. I mean, I'm doing a lot of it, so I'll probably go to Vietnam in May. Yeah, Vietnam, China, a couple other countries. And we've got factories there that will bring product in for custom and it's a big margin builder. But that's the same thing in any of those groups. So like print, you can have enormous margin if you're the person that knows how to talk about it and knows how to get it done, it's incredible what you can get where people will be like, print's dying, you know, it's like, yeah, absolutely, there's less print out there. But isn't it great to be in an industry where there's less competitors?

Right. That's true.

Awesome. Be the one person that knows how to get it done.

Yeah.

And then you created your own ecosystem of stuff and those people refer you business because they're like, hey, where did you get your print? This cool box or custom fulfillment kit. I don't know how that gets done. Yeah, well, if you're super unique and you are super creative, I mean, the sky's the limit for what you can sell in this industry. That's what I love about it. And if I'm recruiting salespeople, that's what makes this fun. I have friends that sell life insurance in Omaha because we're an insurance hub. You're like, man, you talk about death all day. Yeah, I talk about cool shit. People run down the hallway to the office when we come in. Yeah, like, hey, the guy's here that does the really cool things and runs our website. He does Yeah, this and can we talk? And you get pulled into office like, hey, I was really thinking about doing something for this program or whatever. Sounds great. And that's what's fun about it too. Like, I think there's so many boring— this industry is so fun.

I totally agree.

But the innovation too. I also told our salespeople this. I go, when you come to these shows, the guys that can barely afford to be here are on the outer two rings of the whole show. Like they're the way back worst booth location because they're trying to figure out like How does this industry make sense? They're trying to figure out how to get in. They aren't the enormous SanMar booth. I love SanMar, but like, they aren't the enormous booth. They're in the back going like, hey, we have this really kick-ass product, right? All right, send me a sample and I'll help you get this done. And it's— that's exciting to me. I'm like, that guy is totally struggling. He has no idea how he's paying for that booth. He's probably staying at Circus Circus, like one of the other hotels on the Strip, right? You know, he's like, yeah, not at a fancy place. And he's look at that guy. He's trying, he's hustling his ass off, and he'll hustle for you too. He's like, oh, I got your order. Thank you so much. He's the guy that sends you a Christmas card and a holiday gift and all this stuff. You made his world.

You obviously have not lost your enthusiasm for this business, and you've been at it for 20-plus years. Yeah, um, love it. What do you know now that you wish you knew back then? I keep trying to ask these questions around inspiring these younger entrepreneurs, but what do you, what do you know now that you kind of wish you knew then? It was a harder road, tougher road, ups, downs? Like, what, what would you say?

It's a great question. What I wish I knew—

what would you tell a young Mark?

Wow. Have fun. Like, have fun. Make it fun. I have lots of advice for people. Chase sizable deals. Mm.

That's good.

Because where you spend your time is how you live. There's a million bars and restaurants and small hits. The big trouble with salespeople is they'll— and this is the same thing for life insurance. I have a huge life insurance client. They hire 2,000 sales reps a year. That's a lot. And it's like a 97% fail rate. So the problem is that all those people go sell their friends and family and then they run out of friends and family and you're like, okay, now what? And you go, well, the failure rate is there. But if you look at how they spend their time, I'd rather spend my entire day quoting one enormous project. Yeah. And go, that project's going to turn into 100 others that my CSRs can handle hands down, knock it down, get it out the door on their own. But if we walk in and we are out-creative our competitors and we copyright our designs, so we protect our ideas.

Wow.

So when we lob in designs, yeah, the very first page has yours. This item is copyright. Ideas and concepts, designs are owned by us.

You're not just talking about a dropped logo on a product. It's a custom design.

Yeah, full custom.

So two things you said that they're gold, obviously you're protecting your creatives, but then I have a lot of distributors, they're running a very cool bespoke small agency and they are looking at themselves going, we've got amazing team, we got amazing taste, we got amazing, we got good clients. But what you just said is that leap forward, which is go after the big deals. Yeah, because that's the difference. They could be working on an order average that's $700 versus a $3,500 average in your repertoire of clients that you're working with.

Yeah.

Is that a matter of going after bigger logos or just smarter about who you go after?

Bigger brands. Look at employee count.

That's good.

So employee count is big. The industry stat in the '90s— this is way dating myself— was that the average white-collar company spend somewhere between $1,500 to $3,500 per employee per year. So take that number and compound it. So if they have 500 employees, yeah, that's their promo spend. And then you look at their print spend, which was like $1,500 or $750 now per year per employee on just brochureware, letterhead, stuff that they throw their logo on. And just do that across each of those platforms. And they will— that account that has 1,500 employees is a $2.5 million account if I go get all of it. You're never going to get all of it. I love it when people go, oh, I— oh, they have a 3-person company. They're like, we have John Deere, we do all of John Deere. It's like, you don't do all of John Deere, just an FYI, right? Not happen, right? But you might do 2 or 3 big orders for John Deere. Awesome. I love that you're doing that. Wonderful. But— and I would never say I got all of this account or that account. I don't. We have some really large accounts that we get sizable chunk of it. And when you get a sizable chunk, those big accounts produce bigger orders and you can spend more time on them.

I love the practical advice of employee headcount.

Yeah.

Because you look at the fast-moving sectors right now on the technology side or whatever it might be, and there's a downstream effect. They need more other services. It's still an ideal aim.

Yeah.

Is that— so last question for you, Mark. Yeah. What's next for Identity Marketing? What are you looking forward to this year?

Growth. We keep growing. We're growing fast and We're doing it with our same headcount, which is amazing. That's— AI is helping. Yeah. How so? We use a lot of different models. And then I also have other businesses that we're adding to the portfolio of social promo, all of that. AI has been a big one. We started doing AI modeling and data sampling. Incredible tools. What do you mean by that?

For your customers?

For our customers and for ourselves. So you wouldn't believe the data that's out there. The data is It's incredible what you can find and we charge clients for it. So we say, hey, tell us who your perfect account is and all right, let's go find them and let's go.

And you're using AI tools then to basically do that?

Yeah, use the AI tool, pull those lists into HubSpot or Marketo or Salesforce, shoot out email, create drips. All of that is done through our system and the AI data, I sat on a call about a week ago with a company in the financial services industry. And we have a tool that is mind-blowing for that. We just asked them to customize it for us and it's going to be lightning in a bottle. It's, it's so fun to see it.

And it's like, isn't that interesting for you to be looking at a year ahead of you with this tactile part of the merch equation and then this very cool digital part that you apparently have some solutions for.

Yeah, it's fun. I— it's another tool in the toolbox and that's what's cool about Comms Queue. I run it through Comms Queue. I'll run the orders in Comms Queue and put that in there. And then I also have ones where I get referral offline where I just work with that company and say, I'm going to put you and this company together and it's a revenue share. But it's one of those where I love that because it opens up so many more conversations. Hey, we did this or we tried this and this is how it worked out. Awesome. And then I know one of the questions that you had told me about was how does digital and promo flow together?

Yes.

You'll find out that like when those people are doing campaigns, it opens up so many other conversations. It opens up the, hey, here's our holiday list. Yeah, make sure that's sent. Here's our trade show list of new contacts. Here's what we have going on. And you add value by understanding more about the client than just, hey, here's our logo that's 185 red and black and it needs to be on this shirt. That's wonderful. It fills a sector of the industry, but the ones that I think if like I was new, and that probably comes from me coming from a graphic designer standpoint and seeing that and going, well, the brand standards used to be just for print. They were always for print, just here's our color, here's what it looks like on a letterhead. And you go, well, what does it look like on a golf ball that has dimples? Or what does it look like on a pen? What does it look like on this? So we've actually written brand standards, promo brand standards for clients.

That's brilliant.

And you charge for it. I go, hey, why does this pen not look like that? And why is this etched? And why is— and they're like, I don't know. Well, it's because you're using 100 different vendors to produce all this stuff. Can I be just the vendor for all of that? And then I'll, I'll make sure nothing looks wrong. Yeah. And I'll solve that issue of you getting to your trade show and your brochure is not matching your trade show booth and this and that. And that's what a designer loves to do because they like consistency. They like things to look clean and brand control, and it ends up springing into tons of orders that fly through. It's a brilliant idea. It's work.

So one thing that also I learned from you is the more you know about your customer, the more opportunities you can find.

Oh, for sure.

Especially when you have so many different solutions that you do under your roof.

Yeah, they start calling you for other stuff. Yeah. And if you're the guy that just sells hats or promo or embroidery and you have an embroidery equipment in the back of your office, yeah, you're the hat guy forever. You're it. They're not going to change their mind about what you do, right? They're— you're the hat guy or you're our shirt guy or you're the uniform guy or you're the person that sells us mouse pads once a year. But if you go in and with a much wider pitch, and if my elevator pitch to clients is totally different, I just say, I play quarterback with your brand and I've got 30 years experience doing it and some major wins, some Super Bowls under our belt. Let us handle it. You can call the plays with the budget. Like you can tell us what the budget is, but let us handle that so that you don't buy junk, like you don't buy stuff that's going to fail. It's not going to make you look bad. People that will stay in kind of a, this is my environment and these are the brands that I sell. And I look at it and go, I'll go the exact opposite way, like 180. Everybody sells out of like a Sandmarc catalog, Alpha catalog. I love both brands, don't get me wrong, but I'll find the guy along the edge of the back, like a straight down or a brand that's in the golf sector like Peter Millar or whatever. And I'll go get with them at a different show to be like, I want to be the rep that only has this because when I quote against somebody, I don't have to quote. It's if you want this and this is really high end and this is good, this is the price. Yeah. And they can call 20 other distributors and not find it. Okay, well, that's what our CEO wants. So yeah, we'll just place it. And your margins are better. You're your production time because, you know, you're the only one selling it. They love you. So that's good. It isolates you. You create a moat. You've read lots of Seth Godin books. You're creating that moat around your brand, but also around their brand to say, hey, we can, we can go back and forth and this is going to work out well.

Yes.

You need to do a masterclass for distributors on building your business. That'd be fantastic.

Love to do it. Yeah, love to do it.

Mark, thank you. Congrats again on the award.

And thank you.

Thank you for being such an amazing customer and an inspiring customer to us. And we appreciate you, my friend.

Hey, appreciate having having me. Thank you again. It was awesome.