Business Brain – The Entrepreneurs’ Podcast

There are not many places I enjoy more than hiking along a river with a fishing pole or sitting in a duck blind with friends. Since I also love Small Business, I am always interested in meeting people that have created businesses in the outdoor space. Bringing together a love of outdoor activities like fishing and hunting with a revenue-generating business model seems like a dream come true to me. Today we get to meet a business owner that has done just that. Brad Luttrell is the Cofounder of the GoWild social commerce platform for outdoor enthusiasts. Join your hosts Dave Hamilton and Shannon Jean as they learn about how Brad and his team have created GoWild.         00:00:00 Small Business Show #283 for Wednesday, July 1, 2020 Connect with Dave Hamilton and Shannon Jean on LinkedIn 00:02:25 SPONSOR: Linode. Instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode Cloud. Get a server running in seconds with your choice of Linux distro, resources, and choice of 10 node locations. Visit Linode.com/SBS to start with a $20 credit.  Welcome to the Banter Brothers! Brad Luttrell from GoWild, the Hunting, Fishing & Outdoors app MLM for Dudes Casually discussing “various levels of failures” Starting a business to avoid the BS Finding good co-founders “We didn’t execute, so we didn’t deserve any of that.” Building a “content” platform instead of a “follower” platform Reddit for the Outdoors “I’m competing against your email” Biggest obstacle: the idea you can’t do everything. Social Commerce is the Next Big Thing The Restless Native podcast, and Gearbox Talk Advice: Build a company roadmap Include milestones, define each step Find Brad Luttrell on LinkedIn SBS 283 Outtro We Need Your Reviews – Get a free book! feedback@businessshow.co The post Brad Luttrell – Co-Founder of GoWild – Small Business Show Episode 283 appeared first on Business Brain - The Entrepreneurs' Podcast.

We love learning about things we know nothing about. With both of your hosts having been with their spouses for decades, the world of online dating is a mystery to us. And while that’s a good thing for us, it seems like online dating apps have taken over the world of starting new relationships. Do you agree? Join us today as we meet Amanda McGrew, Founder of the Playoff Dating App that specializes in connecting athletes together for a lifetime of bliss – at least that’s the plan. We are looking forward to learning about the online dating scene, the App development process, and all about running a Small Business in this space. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a few moments to leave us a review – it helps us bring you more great content like this!   Shannon Jean  0:00 Greetings, everybody. Today we get to talk about dating something we know nothing about, at least not in today’s or not anymore. Yeah, that’s a good I think that’s a good thing or you know, a great thing. Very happy to not have to know about it. And I, the only thing I know about it is very different than when we were young men in the dating scene. That is true. Yeah, yeah. And we have an awesome guest that has created a dating app with a specific market niche that is   Dave Hamilton  1:00 There, you can tell that that, you know, she’s got a good path for success. There’s no guarantee for success. Right? Sure better, but that that is a necessary or at least a very, very helpful component of success. And she’s got several others that we kind of go through and identify in there. Throughout. But yeah, she is wise beyond her years. I mean, I don’t know how old she is. So maybe maybe that comment doesn’t mean anything. But, but she really has the wisdom. She is wise beyond a first time business owner. I will say that, that that’s really what I mean here. Well, and if Yeah, and it’s really worth listening to because that enthusiasm, the authenticity, the passion, it’s, it’s, you need that in your business, whether you’re pitching to investors, like, like Amanda was talking was talking about today in the show, or you’re pitching to your clients, you know, when I can no different Yeah, I can remember when I was doing landscape construction as a college kid, having to go into the living room, you know, and, you know, talk to talk and pitch the thing on a big plan and you   Another example of that, at least, hopefully, is how enthusiastic I am about PDF pen and I’m very happy that they are sponsored this week. pdf pen is an app that I don’t know how I would get my business done without it. You know, PDFs are something we use all the time. And I’m constantly having to send different things to people even taking existing PDFs recently, I had to send some tax documents for a loan and this that and the other thing, and I didn’t want to be sending people   PDFs of our tax returns that had my social security number in it like the the bank, the lender already has that like they, whatever they need that’s there, they just want to see the financials. And but I needed to share my tax return which I have as a PDF Well, good news, PDF pen, and PDF pen pro 12 are right there to go through, find all those instances of my social security number and redact them in one fell swoop. So I didn’t have to like go through and figure out how to block it out or anything. It just does it. It’s built in. It’s not the only thing that’s built in. There’s lots of things built in. But this is the kind of thing that you can do with PDF pen. You get to really manipulate PDFs and make them work for you. pdf pen 12 includes stationery with new paper colors, along with line and grid options for custom page designs. They’ve got a cool magnifier window that will zoom in on wherever your mouse pointer is in a dock.   And even moves across open documents without any mouse clicks. That’s pretty magical If you ask me, and you can customize compression settings for more control over the file size of the PDFs that you’re sending out. We’ve talked about it before. It’s got DocuSign support built in for digitally signing PDFs PDF pen for Mac supports Mac OS, Catalina and PDF pen for iPad and iPhone. Yeah, it’s available for your iPad and your iPhone supports iOS 13 and Apple Pencil. You’ve got to go check it out. Go to smile software comm slash podcast. That’s where you’re going to learn more about all of this. And of course, our thanks to smile and PDF pen for sponsoring this episode. He is Shannon gene. I am Dave Hamilton and this is the Small Business show.   Amanda McGrew  4:50 Yeah, I think there’s been a lot of adjustments since the beginning and it’s kind of it’s kind of just moving and changing on the fly a little bit. I think originally I thought okay, I’m just going to get   As many athlete influencers as I can, and you know, I’m going to use my personal network to find as many, you know, professional athletes, anybody with thousands and thousands of followers and I want to see who I can get to post about it and how much it will cost. And I was pretty much ready to kind of spend my savings doing that. And in the first probably like three or four months, I realized that that wasn’t going to be as as you know, profitable or as exciting as I thought it was going to be. It wasn’t going to give have the same effect that I think some businesses can have, because a lot of the target audience is not like if you take LeBron James, for example, and he posts about playoff today. Well, that would be amazing. There’s also millions of people following him who are not athletes.   Shannon Jean  5:58 Hey Dave, I’m really excited.   Because today we’re going to talk about two things that I know absolutely nothing about. The first one is dating. And the second one is having a business, an app based business. So I think it’s gonna be great. I don’t know what I know. I don’t help help with a former, but maybe the latter. Thank goodness. We don’t need help with the former. But But yes, yeah, yeah, the ladder the ladder would be good for both of us. I have I have apps with some of my businesses but but not an app based business. So yeah, this is good. This is the only thing I really know about dating now, at least I think I know is that it’s, it seems like online dating apps have really taken over, you know that that seems to be the way of starting new relationships. We’re going to find that if that’s true shortly. So joining us today, we get to meet Amanda McGrew, founder of the playoff dating app, and that this app specializes in connecting athletes together for a lifetime of bliss. That’s the plan anyway, so I’m looking forward to learning about both these things, the online dating scene and also Amanda’s journey as a small business owner and   This space. So Amanda, we’re so glad you’re joining us today.   Amanda McGrew  7:02 Thank you very much. Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.   Shannon Jean  7:06 Yeah, it’s cool. I’m excited to learn too. So let’s talk about some background. Before we talk about the playoff dating app. So reading about you and everything, I get the sense that, you know, being an athlete is a really huge part a core part of who you are. And one of the things that that I’ve read that I really that stuck me stuck with me was, you said on your website, you know, my athletic career has been a major influence in the way I handled problems and make decisions. And I thought that was really cool and unique, and especially as small business owners because we constantly solve problems and we have to make decisions all the time. Tell us more about that philosophy, how it’s impacted you as a small business owner.   Amanda McGrew  7:49 Yeah, I think honestly, most athletes who competed at a high level would probably agree that their authentic experience has kind of shaped everything about them. You know, it shapes the way I form relationships. So   I interact with people, the way I handle adversity, kind of like top to bottom throughout my life. And I know I know what you’re we’re always taught, you know, don’t let your athletic career completely define you, but it also but I also do want to, you know, accept and acknowledge that it is such an important piece that it may not be everything but it’s really really valuable to me. Also, because most athletes were not able to get the same type of potentially like business business experience or, you know, internship experience while they were playing college. But I felt like I was kind of thrust into the workforce without really knowing what I was doing or what I wanted to do. You know, playing college was amazing but in my from my aspect, it was I was always like, that was what I wanted my career to be I wanted and you know, no one’s really wanting to shoot anybody down and say listen to my BA, either a you’re not going to be a professional basketball player or be if you are you’re not going to get rich doing it. So kind of like this reality check of like, you’re gonna need to figure something else out and and all of the intangible   qualities that I learned playing sports, lent lends itself directly to being an entrepreneur, you know, it was kind of, like the ability to be on a team, the ability to lead people the ability to, you know, handle adversity and like, like you said, make those difficult decisions. It’s stuff that I’ve always done, but never really knew I was learning how to do, you know, I didn’t really realize that those were the qualities I would need throughout the rest of my life. And it’s, you know, just come in so handy, especially because in my mind, there’s really nothing like sports to kind of put you in a pressure situation and kind of experience these highs and lows. And in such, like, an immediate timeframe. You can, you know, in one minute, you could feel like you’re on top of the world and, you know, two plays later, you could be like losing the game for your team. And it’s like, you know, the devastating thing ever. So it’s kind of, you know, a microcosm of life really. So I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity to be able to have had that athletic experience because I truly feel like it’s shaped everything about me. Well, that that you know, immediate shift that you get going from a super high   Dave Hamilton  9:59 Do a super load. That’s the, to me, that’s a hugely valuable part there. Because, you know, it puts it all in perspective, like, you know, life isn’t highs and lows. Life is what happens, you know, the rest of the time. And, and, and the highs and lows just sort of happen. And that’s true in business too. Right? Right. You have your highs, you have your lows, but but really, you grind it out every day. And you will be able to prepare for that, you know, it’s like, you’re kind of set on the straight, narrow path. You’re like, all right, things are good things are good, things are good. And all of a sudden, they’re not, you know, and you don’t even know. Okay, now what do I do, but you got to kind of grit your teeth and figure out how to get through it. That’s it.   Shannon Jean  10:37 Yeah. That’s so cool. That that ability to persevere through that adversity over and over again, you know, will certainly serve you well. That’s for sure.   Yeah, yeah. Well, so we’d like to, you know, we always like talking about the transition from you know, employee to employer because we have a lot of aspirational business owners that listen to this to the show. So what what really inspired you to take action and to start the playoff dating app?   Amanda McGrew  11:07 Well, I will say I’m actually still an employee and an employer, which I find to be kind of exciting. I work full time I teach PE and I coach basketball. I’ve been doing that for the past nine years now. And I was coaching high school basketball, which kind of in and of itself was its own full time job. I was coaching a very competitive team and we were really good and winning state championships and sending girls off to playing college. And then once I took a break from that, I realized, okay, I’ve got some more free time, which I think everybody else would find is like their normal free time, like a night in a weekend. And I realized, oh my god, I gotta do something like what else am I can’t just sit at home and like workout all day, like I I feel like I needed to kind of do something. And that was really when online dating and really kind of taken over like you guys mentioned earlier, it’s kind of become the way of the world and I wasn’t really good at it. I didn’t really enjoy you know,   Getting on there and having these seemingly superficial conversations with people and not really being able to navigate that world in a in a seamless way. And so I spent my nights and weekends, you know, researching if there was an app for athletes, eventually I realized there was, all these niche apps started popping up. There was a there was a dating app for everybody, you know, vegans, farmers, black people, Jewish people, Christians, whoever. And I was like, Well, I don’t really identify with any of these groups. And I just thought if I had to identify with one group of people, who would it be? And that answer came immediately for me as athletes, you know, it was just something that’s always been a part of who I am. So once I really dug down, I was like, wow, I can spend this free time that I have, you know, creating this, this thing and it was really just wanting to create what I wish existed in the world, you know, and I think that’s what made it seem like not so much like work and much more like it was a passion because I knew if this gets successful, selfishly, I get to benefit from this, you know, like, yeah, this is potentially going to help me and everyone kind of laughs and   No, it’s like, Oh, are you on the app? And I’m like, I’m using number one like I am.   I this is definitely for me. No, that’s, that’s a good way. It’s not the only way to start a business for sure. But it is a great way to do it, especially if it’s one in your scenario where you’ve got other things going on in your life that you have to attend to. Right. It’s not like you can just dive in and do this. Although if you have to dive in having building something that you want, scratching your own itch is is a good way to do it. Because you know, what, what you would want out of your product and so at least at least there’s that right, I know how to drive the ship. Yeah. And it made me kind of get home from practice at five or 6pm and want to do it, you know, it made me want to send the emails and you know, work on the you know, work on finding a developer or finding a marketing person or just like any help I needed, it made me want to send those emails and start reaching out because it was so exciting to me. The end result was so exciting for me to get to that. I was like, I couldn’t wait to   Shannon Jean  0:32 just really unique. And she has a really powerful message and I’m really excited to share with you   Dave Hamilton  0:38 yeah, and and just listen, you’ll hear this if I’m sure we’ll talk about this at the end. But But as you’re listening, pay attention to how driven she is and how enthusiastic she is about her business. The need for her product, how the products works like that is the key right here.   Shannon Jean  2:00 You know, you’re creating this vision for these people that are going to spend, you know, 10s of thousands of dollars with you. And I can remember doing it as a kid and thinking, Man, I can’t believe that these people are writing me this check, but it is about sharing that enthusiasm getting other people to pick up on it. And I think Amanda does a great job. Yeah,   Dave Hamilton  2:18 enthusiasm is infectious. And, and, and she is a great example of that.   Amanda McGrew  14:00 Keep pushing towards it.   Dave Hamilton  14:01 So you had to learn how to delegate right out of the gate. You can correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds like you’re not a marketing person, nor are you a developer just based on what you just said.   Amanda McGrew  14:12 No, absolutely. It was. Yeah, go ahead.   Dave Hamilton  14:15 No, that no, that I want to hear more about that. Because that learning to delegate is something that’s very difficult for most entrepreneurs. we wind up just being the people that feel like we can do it all ourselves. Yeah. And sometimes you have to, but long term, it doesn’t usually work. So you you had this sort of leg up in the beginning.   Amanda McGrew  14:35 Yeah. And I think honestly, I think I tell people all the time, I think one of my biggest assets is knowing what I don’t know you know, being fully aware that there are certain parts of this that I’m going to have no idea about and I would love to learn out and I would love to develop in those areas but I am not have this you know, mindset that like I got it. Don’t worry, don’t worry about me. I’ll do this myself. I know that there are so many more, you know, people out there that are smarter than me and more powerful than me and more successful than me and have all this experience that like, I can’t wait to dive into that and to get, you know, to get those responses from people and you know, reach out send messages, send emails and, you know, really tap into people’s brains and, and figure out why they are so as successful as they are, and what’s made them kind of get to that top of that mountain. And, you know, love it up there. You know, I feel like that is so important. So yeah, I think delegating the work out that the tech side was a no brainer, because I just don’t have that background. And it’s and it’s so specific that like, there was no way I was going to be able to do that on my own. So immediately once I knew the idea that I wanted to kind of create it was really just about finding somebody who I trusted and whose quote matched even remotely in the ballpark of what I was able to spend to be able to have someone developed the app but you know, even that was tricky because I had to tap into my resources of, you know, I had it was like a dad of a former basketball player of mine. Who’s a software engineer. And he kind of acted as a mentor at that point. Because I mean, I could have looked at 100 resumes of, you know, web developers or app developers, and I would have had no idea how to separate one from the next. You know, I don’t know, I didn’t know the verbiage. I didn’t know any of the certifications that they had. So it was really going in blind for sure. So having this mentor there with me to kind of say, all right, I will vet all these people’s resumes. And I’ll give you back the resumes of the people who technically can do what you need them to do. And then you can start interviewing, based on you know, a behavioral interview and just decide who you think you’d work with best, whose quote is best for you. And you know, you can go from there, but being able to have that, that person with me to say, like, Alright, this person on paper can do what you need, and like it, you know, his examples and his portfolio looks great. And all those things that was like invaluable for me, you know, I don’t even know if I would have been able to move past that without him. That’s Yeah,   Dave Hamilton  16:56 yeah. What’s there so   Shannon Jean  16:57 along, I want Because I don’t think you can put too fine a point on this kind of the action that you took to convert this, oh, wouldn’t it be cool or maybe I could create this thing as an opportunity. But, you know, it is a ton of work to get things going. And then we talk on the show about, at some point in the process, it starts motivating you, instead of you having to pound forward to make it happen. It sounds like that might have happened with you based on the comment you said, you know, hey, it got me get home quick so I can get things going. Did you find that happened during the process?   Amanda McGrew  17:31 Definitely. And I think it was really like getting positive feedback from people, especially because you know, as an athlete, so much of my personal network when I was in college and even beyond has been made up of other athletes. So I’m as I’m reaching out to friends, letting them know what I want to do, whether they’re single or not hearing their feedback of like, Oh my god, duh, why doesn’t that exist? Of course, like that’s, that’s a no brainer. And hearing that kind of positive feedback is like, oh, man, do you really got to do this. Now, you know, Also you know putting it out into the world or sending it to as in a text message to a friend is one thing, but like once I kind of I think one day it was like in July I think 2017 I put it on my Facebook and maybe even Instagram and I said like, here’s what I’m going to do coming in a few months and it was like that was all I needed to like kick me in the ass a little bit I was like well now you’ve told the world you’re gonna do it. You don’t do it now you’re screwed you know like and to me like that was my reputation on the line and it was like you said you were gonna do it now you have to do it. And that was really all I needed to like really kick it into high gear and like take it to the next level.   Shannon Jean  18:37 Yeah, that’s that’s a great system because you you put it out there you could have just hunkered down and not said anything. I’ve been there before where you know you get nervous about telling people about what really are going I always say, you know, it’s better to tell people what you did then what you’re going to do. Yeah. Which is great when it when you can do it, but when having that your reputation at stake and your credibility, because you can only say that once or twice. And if you don’t do it, people can be like, Oh, yeah, you’ve talked about this thing before and that and so, yeah, that’s a great, great way to to get things going. I love it.   Amanda McGrew  19:13 Yeah.   Shannon Jean  19:14 So this is your first business. What surprised you the most about after you jumped in? You know, you looked like you found a mentor, you got things going, what what did you learn as a brand new business owner that you just had no idea about?   Amanda McGrew  19:31 I think most importantly, that like the marketing of something and kind of reaching out to your target audience would not be as easy as I thought it would be. Either. That probably sounds totally silly, but   Shannon Jean  19:42 no, no, it doesn’t. Yeah,   Amanda McGrew  19:43 you know, I think I just thought, Okay, you’ve grown up around athletes your whole life, you know, hundreds if not thousands of them. Like how hard could that be like you just put it on you’re like, you reach out to them. They reach out to their people and it’s like it’s done and you know, not to dumb it down so much, but I thought it You know, in my mind, and with the feedback I’ve been getting from fellow athletes, I thought, okay, it’s only a matter of time before this just goes viral, you know what I mean? Like, it’s just, it’s gonna be great. And I’m glad I had that mentality because had I not, I probably would have, like you said, it’s a little more, you’re a little more fearful to, you know, jump in, and I probably would have pulled the reins back a little more. And, you know, not been so gung ho about it. But I think I, and even to this day, I am so convinced that it’s like, oh, it’s just a matter of getting to that tipping point. Like, once it hits a tipping point, it’s like, it’s gonna bust wide open. You know what I mean? And I think it’s taken a little bit longer in my mind to get there. But I’m reminded every day that it’s like, there’s never been a day since I launched the app. It was December 10 to 2017. There’s never been a day since then, that nobody has signed up. There’s always somebody signing up. And I’m like, and I kind of look at that. And I’m like, Oh, yeah, that’s cool. And friends remind me like, no, that’s amazing. Amanda. Like, there’s people out there who have apps that like has never had a download, you know, like, and I’m like, yeah, you You know what, you’re right. That is that is pretty cool. So I think, you know, I was really just surprised that like, having it reached the masses was not as easy as it’s made to seem sometimes, you know, sometimes you you see apps or you know, even a tweet goes viral and you’re like, What the hell was so special about that tweet that made it, you know, thousands of views or whatever. So I think that kind of shocked me a little bit.   Shannon Jean  21:22 Yeah, I could, I could see that. And I think, having owned a bunch of businesses, that’s one of the things that we think about when someone comes to me says, Hey, I want to do this, don’t do that. It’s okay. It is a good idea. It’s a good product, and it you know, there’s some opportunity here, but how are you going to get that message out there? You know, cuz, right, you know, just coming out there and having the great widget or whatever it is, you got to get the word out, you know, yeah, critically, critically important. Now, so, go ahead. Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. And so how do you market the app? I mean, what what’s been your strategy if you’ve ever had to adjust and And things how does it work?   Amanda McGrew  22:01 Yeah, I think there’s been a lot of adjustments since the beginning. And it’s kind of it’s kind of just moving and changing on the fly a little bit. I think Originally, I thought, okay, I’m just going to get as many athlete influencers as I can. And you know, I’m going to use my personal network to find as many, you know, professional athletes, anybody with thousands and thousands of followers, and I’m going to see who I can get to post about it, and how much it will cost and I was pretty much ready to kind of spend my savings doing that. And in the first probably like three or four months, I realized that that wasn’t going to be as as you know, profitable or as, you know, exciting as I thought it was going to be, it wasn’t going to give have the same effect that I think some businesses can have, because a lot of the target audience is not like if you take LeBron James, for example, and he posts about playoff today. Well, that would be amazing. There’s also millions of people following him who are not athletes. So it wasn’t like a direct like it wasn’t directly getting me you know that same amount of customers or optim app downloads. As I say something else, it’s available to everybody. So the way playoff works is every athlete has to erver user has to have competed at the college level or beyond junior college level or beyond. And they have to prove it on the internet. So they’re submitting a link to their athletic bio. So it the influencer route was difficult for me because I swore that was going to be the way it was gonna work. And, you know, it took trial and error and you know, some wasted money figuring out that, you know, okay, a lot of men who are influencers or who are athlete influencers, a lot of their followers are not fellow athletes, you know, a lot of their followers are fan. Yeah. And, you know, for female athlete influencers, a lot of their followers are female athletes, you know, peers, and a lot of male athletes follow them too. So the female athletes were definitely much more valuable than the men in terms of them posting about it. But even though that was like a that was not a foolproof system, you know, it was like there were definitely some people out there. There was like, they had, you know, whether it’s like bots, following them or whatever, it just didn’t translate into the same number of downloads that I thought it would. But, but honestly, most of the marketing has been on social media. I’ve since then since those first few months, I’ve spent so little on marketing. It’s been, you know, grassroots like ground and pound. I’ve been on LinkedIn. I’ve been on Instagram. I’ve been on Twitter, I’ve been on Facebook, and just Yeah, exactly, you know, like messaging people who I think would think it’s a good idea. You know, trying to find athletes who would like to who want to invest fine athletes who want to post about it, who want to get involved, maybe other athletes who have their own podcast and want to kind of share about it. And just kind of getting the word spread that way. So but definitely looking to get to the next level in terms of getting funding and then the, the number I know this wasn’t part of the question, but the number one goal is to get it to the Olympic Village next summer in Tokyo. So there will definitely be a massive marketing campaign around that. So yeah, that’s Yeah, that’s really smart. Yeah.   Shannon Jean  25:02 Do you check those downloads every day?   Amanda McGrew  25:04 Every day? I totally do that. friends make fun of me. Like, I’ll go to the beach. And I’m like, I’ve got like, I’ve got like my laptop in my bag. And I’m like, I just need to see, I just need to check. And they’re like, we’re only here for like, a couple hours. I’m like, but you never know. You never know. I’m like, What if it goes viral five minutes ago, I need to know that.   Shannon Jean  25:22 You know, it’s a it’s a motivator to   Amanda McGrew  25:24 Yeah, drive. It’s like a healthy obsession, I think.   Shannon Jean  25:28 Yeah, I do too. Because even, you know, like Dave and I, we just we recently published a book all about mistakes in small businesses, and it’s the same thing I always check. And even if there’s only a few sales, at least I look, okay, hey, we’re, you know, we’re making some progress, right, you know, gonna get this thing going. And as business owners, it’s up to us to figure out what motivates us what drives us because rarely are people going to come up and pat you on the back. Right,   Amanda McGrew  25:55 right, right. Absolutely. Yeah.   Dave Hamilton  25:58 And which kind of leads You know, there’s no boss to pat you on the back, you get yourself. Yeah.   Shannon Jean  26:04 So I mean, Has everybody around you people been, you know, pretty supportive when you started the business and, you know, go for it. Yeah, it’s gonna work, you know, you know, that kind of thing, or did you kind of have to win over their support?   Amanda McGrew  26:18 I think everybody was incredibly supportive of the idea. Because it all it’s like I said, it seemed like a no brainer to them. They’re like, I’m surprised that doesn’t exist. But I think there was some hesitation in like, Okay, are you sure you want to spend that much money doing that? Like, I know, you’ve saved a lot of your own money, but like, okay, like, almost in the sense of like, wanting us leave that to somebody else. big risk. Yeah. And not in a way, like we don’t believe in you. But like, make sure you’ve thought this through, you know what I mean? Make sure you and you know, when I remember when I told my parents, they were super supportive of it. And I think as we got closer to like, Okay, so now I’m like literally writing a check to this developer. I’m like, okay, whoa, I was So let’s talk about this one more time. And just kind of extra, like, there’s no competitors, right? There’s literally nothing else out there like this. You’re sure like you’re 1,000% Sure. And I’m like, No, there’s nothing. You know, there’s, there’s app and everybody always, you know, I was making my pitch deck, you know, a year or two ago, and everyone’s great, you gotta have a page about the competitors. And I’m like, but there aren’t any. And they’re like, well, you gotta show that and I’m like, well, there’s just like, there’s dating apps for people who like fitness and like working out but those are two different people like though like competitive athletes who have played the colors over beyond are not those type of people like it’s a different thing. And so I just kind of like you know, in that in that screen on my pitch deck, I just make it very clear that they don’t verify anyone’s athletic level of athletic competition or what they’ve done and that it’s like playoff really is out right now stands alone, you know, which to me I think is super exciting. But also it makes it very clear that like playoff has to lead the way in that sense. playoff is going to be the pioneer, which I couldn’t be more excited about. But I’m also I also take it very seriously in the sense that like, it needs to do what it’s supposed to do for the people it’s meant to work for. How have   Dave Hamilton  28:11 you pitched this to any like VCs yet? And if so, how do they respond to a page that says, We have no competition? Yeah, I’ve done that. And it, you often get people laugh at you like, oh, you’re wrong. That might not be wrong, though.   Amanda McGrew  28:27 Right, right. I think so. I haven’t pitched directly to VCs yet. That is I’m trying to raise funding now. So that is super exciting to me to be able to do. I think the one thing that would make that conversation a little less stressful, for me, at least, is that I am the target demographic, you know, like I can say directly to the point about like, why this would be successful. And why these are the three you know, online dating apps that I’ve listed here. Have no are in no way competitive with playoff, you know, yes, they’re out there. And yes, I’m sure they have users and I’m yesterday. I’m sure they’re very successful. And I’m sure that people on there love it and have found people that they are going to be with forever. But those are not the same types of people that I am, you know, selling playoff to. So knowing that knowing that they’re kind of in the same world and in the same industry, but definitely not reaching out to we’re definitely not trying to steal users from the other because they’re not the same people.   Shannon Jean  29:21 Sure. You can never get married. Wait till you get your exit.   Amanda McGrew  29:33 Or I’m like success story number one.   Shannon Jean  29:36 I like I like the word. Oracle, you know, then you’re dialed in. Yeah, that’s really good. Okay, good. Okay, so even though it’s your first business, you’re just getting started. I love it. I really love your enthusiasm. You know, we talked about mistakes on this show. Because Dave and I went up I’m sure I’ve made more than Dave had. So   Dave Hamilton  29:58 I don’t know about that.   Shannon Jean  29:59 Yeah, cuz he Teach us they teach us so much. And you know, especially when you look back on them, you’re like, oh, man, you know, and now it changes your habits, you know, right. Is there something that you did or something that happened, would you that you would say is your best mistake that stuck with you and taught you a valuable lesson as you built this business?   Amanda McGrew  30:15 I would say, the social media, the social media has been my nemesis since the beginning. I am one of those people who like doesn’t even use my own personal Instagram. Like I’m just not a fan of like, posting pictures of my meals and like posting pictures of what I’m doing every day. I’m just not good at it. I don’t think to myself, Oh, I gotta get my phone out and start taking pictures. So so the social media for playoff was really really really difficult for me, it was like, Oh my god, I got to post something today. I got to make sure people like it. I got to find what are the right hashtags? What do I do? So eventually, I said, You know what, forget it. I’m just gonna pay a company you know, a few hundred bucks a month to just kind of like come up with content to post and and post you know, a few times a week and Have it kind of sustained that way. So I hired this company and I don’t remember the name of the company, this was like two years ago. And they were I think it was like three or 400 bucks a month. And I was like, Alright, this is manageable for a little while. So I can kind of take a break from this. And they were going to post like, they were going to make the the Instagram look a little bit more aesthetically pleasing. You know, it was like, Alright, we’re gonna have kind of like a vibe to it, you’ve got your logos and your colors everywhere, and it’s gonna look good and whatever. And I saw their first month’s worth of posts sent to me like in an email, like, here’s what we’re going to do. And I was like, Oh my god, it was like all stock photos of like models who are like not real athletes. And like, women like playing basketball with their hair down in the sports bra and like, you know, against the guy but this woman is clearly never played basketball in her life before. And I’m like, Oh my god, this is horrible. And I and I, my biggest mistake was letting them go for too much letting them do it for two months because I signed a contract and I was like, well, let’s just do it and see how it goes. It was so so bad I was and I think I just realized that like, playoff is is cool and playoff is important and valuable because of like the story playoff is important because like I’m an athlete playoff is important because not every athlete looks like a supermodel. Not every athlete has a six pack or is like super buff or a six, five and 250 you know like that’s not? Yeah, that’s great. And yeah, that’s how a lot of NFL and NBA and Major League Baseball players look but like that’s not how every athlete looks. And, you know, the while I would love to have you know, NFL and NBA and MLB players, you know, join playoff that’d be awesome. Those are not traditionally the people have a hard time dating, you know, like those like those are not the people who need to use online dating to find somebody who they want to be with. Now, obviously, I’m not turning those people away and I would love to market to those people. But when I think about like the real people who are going to benefit from this, it’s like the people like me, who played through high school played, you know, played a little bit beyond that and then got a job and was not surrounded by athletes anymore like we were on our college campus. You know, when I was in college, there’s four or 500 athletes on our campus. And those are the only people I hang out with, you know, you’re not and not because I want to exclude everybody else. But because I see down the natural part of your life. Yeah, I see them walking to and from study hall and the dining hall and the weight room and the training room and, you know, our academic advisors office in the gym, like, it’s all located in one space, you know, so it’s like, those are the only people I interact with, because that’s all the time I have in the day. And so I think, you know, being able to tell that story through social media and show real people and real athlete couples and, you know, an interview with somebody who’s a real athlete on a real college campus saying, Here’s why I think playoff is cool. And here’s why I can’t wait to meet other athletes near me or whatever, that has become so much more valuable. So knowing that, like, you know, the marketing, and the social media piece is so powerful because it was real, you know, so the moment I took that like authenticity away, it was like, Oh, this is so stupid. You know, people were Like, who are these people that you’re posting? And I’m like, I don’t know, I’m, I’m done with them. You know, it was like, very quickly, I was like, I have to erase all these and pretend it never happened.   Shannon Jean  34:09 That’s a great lesson that Yeah, and you can just hear in the way you describe it authenticity of what the, you know, what playoff is supposed to be. And what it represents is not these flashy pictures of this or that. So right.   Amanda McGrew  34:21 But that’s a great lesson.   Shannon Jean  34:23 So I want to talk about the app for a minute to about finding success in the App Store. I mean, what what have you learned about creating it? And then also, you know, getting it approved? Did you have any problems getting it approved, and then getting it noticed on that? Or that just, you know, gazillions of apps? How did that how does that work for you?   Amanda McGrew  34:45 So first of all, the approval process, I thought was like, okay, so we, I think it was July of 2017 that I signed the contract this developer, we were ready to go. We were going to launch it by November, November. December, it was a great, great this is like super quick. I know a lot of people who have like tried to create apps and it’s taken way longer. So I was really excited about it. I think we were ready to go by like August or I’m sorry, October 1. And we put our beta out there Apple approved the App Store approves the betas, like immediately they’re like, Oh, we don’t care cuz this isn’t live, you know, this isn’t like, yeah, you can test your baby all you want. And I thought, Okay, this is great. They approved it in like six hours. And then we started testing it, you know, we fixed all the bugs we need to fix. And then my developers like, All right, ready, we’re ready to go. We’re going to submit to the App Store. It took like two and a half months before it was approved to be live. And I I think that was like such a shocking moment to me that I was like, Oh, you have no control over this time frame. You know, like this is Apple is is so enormous and they care so little about you right now because you’re brand new, you’re nobody you know, and and so I was like, did   Dave Hamilton  35:55 they did they reject pieces of it? Is that what took so long or did they Just not get to it for Jo,   Amanda McGrew  36:01 they were rejecting like,   Dave Hamilton  36:05 they were engaged, just not   Amanda McGrew  36:06 happy. Yes, they were engaged. But they were also engaged like on their timeline, you know, it was kind of like worse. They respond to you in three to five business days. So like on the fifth business day, they’d respond to you. And then I respond like 30 minutes later with a new version. And then five more days later, they’d respond again, you know, so it was like,   Dave Hamilton  36:23 they were telling us similar story. Yeah, yeah.   Amanda McGrew  36:28 Yeah, so it’s like, and it was it was difficult for me, but I made my developer was like, Listen, I’ve done this before, you just got to kind of take a step back and and realize that everything like they were eager to get your beta out, but they didn’t, because they didn’t care because nobody was, you know, purchasing or downloading that app. Now that you want an app live in the App Store. They’re going to really focus on this and look at it with a fine tooth comb and like, be sure that this is something they want to put their name behind. So honestly, I don’t think two and a half months in the big scheme of things is you know, the longest anyone’s have had to wait But because the beta was approved so quickly, I think I was convinced that’s how it was gonna go. So the approval process was definitely difficult. I am not sure I have figured out how to, you know, get it to the top of people searches or, you know, figure out how for it to, like really be successful, especially because, you know, like I said, My demographic is so specific that I don’t even know, you know, I know, reviews mean, a lot. I know, I know, five stars mean a lot. And I know feedback means a lot. But I’m not sure. You know, if you put it at the top of somebody’s list, who types you know, types in playoff. I know, it’s like it’s at the top of top of that list. It’s right near like the college football playoff app or something, you know, so yeah, that’s a good thing. But I think, you know, in app downloads, it’s definitely I think I was reading something when I first launched playoff that was like 95% of apps have less than 1000 downloads total like and it’s like in their lifetime and so on. I think once I passed that, I was like, Oh my god, you’re really doing it. Like it’s really happening. People really want to be on this. And, you know, I started reaching out to almost everybody who downloaded, I would I would reach out to them and say, thanks so much for downloading, you know, unfortunately, we probably don’t have a ton of people for you to swipe through who are near you, depending on where you are in the world. But you know, I’m working on it. I promise I am. And I’m sure you have a huge network of athletes, yourself. So if you wouldn’t mind sharing this link, like I was able, and the feedback from that is like, amazing. People are like, Oh, I totally know that this is brand new. And I think this is amazing. I’ll send this to everybody. So it’s just kind of like, and then I get a lot of feedback that’s like, oh, you’re a fellow athlete. Like I’m down to support you, like I’m ready to, you know, whatever you need to do. We need to support each other. And I love the idea. And even somebody who was, you know, convinced themselves they were able to be an entrepreneur after playing a sport for 20 years or whatever. It’s like, yeah, I’m willing to do whatever they need to do, you know, for me to help them. So that has been incredibly encouraging. That’s really cool.   Shannon Jean  39:01 That’s great. So, you know, you’ve been able to really take action to make this stuff happen, which really kind of separates a lot of people that that just talk about it. Right. And we love that, you know, we always would encourage action over, you know, taking too long to plan and talking and talking, you know, so given your success getting the app, the app launched starting this business, is there one action item, you could tell our small business owner listeners, you know, that they could go do today to help their small business?   Amanda McGrew  39:33 Um, I think one of the first things I was super excited about was just like buying an LLC, like, getting the like the name having somebody create the logo, and like when I tell people like friends of mine who want to start kind of like I had a friend the other day who was talking about, you know, like creating Thai clothes and like, you know, making these clothes and selling them to people and maybe putting them on like a site like Etsy or things like that. And I was like, you got to buy that you You got to go find the Instagram name, pick it pick a name and make sure it’s available on Instagram because like, that’s where the marketing happens, you know, especially in like the, you know, like the fashion, the fashion world it’s like that that’s where all that happens. So I think when I was coming up with a name with a name for playoff that was probably like a one month long thing. It was like, and it was so funny because I was like showing up to my parents house like every few days and I was like, What about game on? What about? What about home run? What about touchdown or like, I was like, I was shouting out the most ridiculous names. And it was like, and I think I know I settled on the name it was like now I got to make sure it’s available on every on every platform I got to make sure like the domain is there. And I think once I committed to you know, a logo and the Instagram and like the domain name it was like alright, like now you got to work you know now you got to this is that was the easy part, you know, but it made it feel very real. It was like, Oh, I really have a website you have an Instagram you have a logo like this is really gonna happen. And this was all before the app was ever had even started to be developed, like I had hired the guy, but like, none of the app was created yet. I was like, posting pictures of like, my friends who were athlete couples, like coming soon you’re gonna be able to meet your, your person, you know, so it was like, I really had to put my money where my mouth was at that point, like, right, it’s gonna come, but you got to really prove it, you know?   Shannon Jean  41:23 Yeah, and having all these different names and ideas is the way to go. Because there’s nothing worse than getting locked into something. And then finding out it’s art, you know, it’s being used for something else or similar. And we’ve, I’ve had that happen a number of times, so So yeah, I think you’re, you’re definitely doing it the right way.   Amanda McGrew  41:40 And even to, like, look around and start having these ideas. I think to myself, everything I come up with is gonna be taken. Like you convince yourself that there’s no way there’s, you know, in 2020, that anything hasn’t come up with the it hasn’t been come out yet. You know?   Shannon Jean  41:54 Yeah. It’s great. It’s a great story. And I’m really, you know, I’m really thankful That you share it with us today because I just love the progression of where you took it because you know a lot of people like Hey, are you really going to be professional athlete? Is that realistic? No I have and and but you picked out the pieces of it that help are going to help you and help you now succeed beyond that, that, you know sphere, which which I love it. It’s awesome. And just listening to the enthusiasm and authenticity in your voice is great. It inspires me and it inspires everybody else. And I really appreciate you coming on the show and sharing with us today. What’s the best way for our listeners to connect with you and to learn more about playoff?   Amanda McGrew  42:36 Yeah, so you can find playoff on Instagram. It’s at playoff dating app. And you can also find me personally, you can reach out to me via email. It’s Amanda at playoff dating app calm. That’s awesome.   Shannon Jean  42:48 That’s great. We wish you all the best. definitely keep in touch so you can check in and we can see how you’re doing and let us know when the wedding happens.   Amanda McGrew  42:55 Yeah, really.   Shannon Jean  42:58 Again, we really appreciate   Amanda McGrew  43:01 It was a blast. I appreciate it. You bet.   Dave Hamilton  43:04 Man, when she goes to pitch her to her series A or Angel round or whatever, when she goes to pitch to investors, they’re like that enthusiasm that we just heard for whatever 35 minutes like straight like a fire hose is what’s gonna get that company and really her funded that this is   Shannon Jean  43:24 Yeah, she’s rockin yeah the product right now right? yes the biz and she tells us a well yep and you know that you could just hear her kind of ramping up especially when she started talking about the demographic about you know, not everybody is you know, whatever professional this or that but they had this experience through college and and then when also when she talked about her experience leaving and then not having that big circle of people surrounding you that you had the big dating pool and that’s that key right there.   Dave Hamilton  43:57 It that’s why like, she knows Why this app is necessary? Of course, she built it for herself first, right? But right that, like, for anybody out there creating a business, you need to know the answer to that question, why? Why does someone else need what I’m building here? And if you know that in your core, well, then you can sort of build around that, which is exactly what she did. So   Shannon Jean  44:25 yeah, that’s great. And I love you know, if you have an idea concept or you built, you’ve taken action already done it, getting out there and talking to people like Dave and I is a great way to refine your pitch and to get it and to get some feedback. You know, we talked to Amanda a little bit after we disconnected and said, Hey, this was great. And this really resonated and hit home and, and, you know, we’re all about building each other up here on the small business show. If you want to come on and tell your story, let us know feedback at Business Show Koh. We would love to hear from you. We’d also love to hear from you with a five star review on that. The podcast directory of your choice wherever you’re listening to this. Just go to you can also just go to Business Show co slash reviews. And that’ll redirect you over to the Apple podcast directory and let us know what you think. Yeah,   Dave Hamilton  45:14 yeah. That’s, that’s all we got for today, folks. Thank you so much for listening. Like Shannon said, please thank you for your review, and keep living that charmed life. We’ll see you next time.   Read Transcript       00:00:00 Small Business Show #282 for Wednesday, June 23, 2020 00:02:25 SPONSOR: PDFpen and PDFpenPro is your ultimate PDF viewing and editing app for the Mac. Amanda McGrew from Playoff Dating App Sports gave me stuff that I’ve always done, but never realized I was learning how to do Perseverance! Big asset: know what you don’t know Inspiration: Put your credibility on the line Social Media has been my nemesis The App Store Approval Process Form an LLC, Create your name (social media, too!), create your logo SBS 282 Outtro @PlayoffDatingApp on Instagram Amanda@PlayoffDatingApp.com SBS 282 Outtro Review The Small Business Show The post Amanda McGrew – Founder of Playoff Dating App – Small Business Show Episode 282 appeared first on Business Brain - The Entrepreneurs' Podcast.

Education is ripe for disruption. In K-12 public school systems that have bloated administration and teachers that never have enough funding to properly run their classrooms and the cost of college increasing exponentially and saddling young people with massive debt as they are just started out. Today we are excited to learn about a new way to help offset those college costs with the founder of OnlineDegree.com, Grant Aldrich. Shannon Jean 0:00 Hey there, welcome to another episode The small business Show. I’m really excited to have you here today because we’re really excited about this guest. The timeliness of it. It’s almost like we planned it. Right? It’s, it’s, it’s almost like we planned it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s talking about college and non traditional paths, less expensive paths, not in person paths. I mean, all of these things are very timely, for a lot of reasons for a lot of people right now. So yeah, it’s great. I’m really looking forward to hearing what Grant has to say about his business and how he’s been impacted and how they’re, you know, adapting and, you know, learning about their Yeah, and learning about how they’re disrupting and their plan for disruption of some of the issues with higher education. I think it’s gonna be great. Dave Hamilton 0:50 No, it is great. He He is one of those people that was sort of setup, as we all do. When we form our businesses. We look down the road and we say yes, I see future success for this thing that I’m putting together a year. And that’s not the only thing we look at. In fact, we talk a lot about looking at other factors to like, is this the right business for you? But sadly for grant, one of those things was Yeah, I see down the road that that we’re, you know, we’re going to have more and more school online. Well, turns out, things got a little accelerated in grants world and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, that’s a really good thing. Shannon Jean 1:25 Yeah. The other thing I really liked hearing about because I felt this way myself is if you’ve ever felt trapped in your own business, and you know it, it’s a it’s something to really have to come to come to grips with. And he tells a great story about that and, and I’m really looking forward to sharing it with all our listeners. Yeah, for sure. The other thing I want to share with the other thing I want to share with everybody is our sponsor for this week, which is a linode@linode.com slash SBS. Dave Hamilton 2:00 When you are starting a business, when you are running a business, you will be using a server somehow, it may not be the thing that your entire business relies on, or it might be, but you’re going to be using a server for something. And you want to make sure you host that server with people that know what they’re doing. And they’ve been doing this for a long time, and have iterated their own business to better serve customers just like you. That’s what linode has done. We talk a lot about a lot of the details. When we talk about the sponsors, the fact that they are all native SSD, they have a 40 gigabit network, they have industry leading processors, you get to pick from any of their 10 worldwide data centers. We share these things because as people who have researched and signed up with companies selling servers to us, we know that these are the things that matter. But the reality is you don’t have to worry about it because that’s linode job. They’ve already figured out the things that matter and then They just offer them for you. So it’s really easy. You just go to Linode.com/sbs. Now you go to that URL for two reasons. Number one, it helps them know that we sent you and that’s a good thing for all of us helps to show all of that but there’s something in it for you very specifically. You get a $20 credit just by visiting linode comm slash SPS, their lowest priced server starts at five bucks a month, so you really can experiment and maybe even just run for a little while on that $20 credit at linode comm slash SBS our sincere thanks to linode for sponsoring this episode. All right, Shannon, anything else? No man, I’m ready to go. Alright, let me get it get into this one. Yeah, grants got some good things to say. He is Shannon gene. I’m Dave Hamilton and this is episode 281 of the Small Business Show Grant Aldrich 4:02 So I think by knowing yourself and knowing, hey, I shouldn’t even be in a kind of business like this, that I have to do this, and I don’t know anything about this, or kind of cutting yourself off at the past, in a way by starting at the very top is the first key thing I would suggest back to my early point. And then the only thing I would also suggest is that and I’ve definitely been a victim to this all throughout my 20s and early 30s was thinking I know more than I actually know and not relying on good counsel and advisors. Because to the point of your show, right this is this was your show would be an example of that. You it goes back to that Greek wisdom, right you know, the only true wisdom is you know, nothing. And that’s that’s always true in my in my in my experience. And so if you are foolish enough to keep going down a path longer than you should without good counsel, it can crush you Shannon Jean 5:11 Hey there, you know, we talk about disruption a lot on this show, you know, new ideas, new ways of doing things. And I, I’m really kind of passionate about what we’re going to talk about today because I think education is just ripe for disruption. You know, I have kids, one of my kids just got through college, I’m just starting, you know, another one, my last one on their college career. I hear about K through 12 public school systems that you know, teachers never get any money that way too much administration and, and then the cost of college and how it just increased exponentially. And, you know, he just tears me up to see these young people with massive debt as they get started out because it holds them back from taking risks, like starting your own business. So today, I’m really excited to learn more about a new way and a business to help awesome offset those college costs and just kind of look at the whole business of college, if you will, with the founder of online degree.com. Grant Aldrich, Grant. Thanks so much for being here today. Grant Aldrich 6:13 Hey, thank you guys for having me. I’m, I think we’re all David. I know, we’re just ripe to have this discussion today cuz both our kids are that age. Perfect. I did that when I saw you were on the list. It was like, Oh, I could pick this guy’s brain for like, Well, I’ll tell you this comes out of necessity as well. I’ve got three children under three and a half. So I’m going to be getting a quite a shotgun blast in about 16 years here. And so I I essentially need a solution so that I don’t I can actually afford to put them through college, no doubt. Dave Hamilton 6:45 Well, my presumption would be that and certainly this has been changing even over the last 15 years, that over the next 15 years, the the picture of higher education will change dramatically. And you might ask be okay. But as with any good entrepreneur, you’re not relying on others to get you there. You’re figuring out how to make it happen. That’s great. All right, good. Shannon Jean 7:08 So, I want to talk, I want to dig into the company stuff too, but also want to learn about your background, you know, how you got here. You know, what led you to start your first business? And then you know, what pushed you to start online degree? Grant Aldrich 7:25 Yeah, you know, I think to kind of understand my story, yeah, this is something I think everybody will appreciate, right? Because we always ask ourselves as entrepreneurs you know, why do we do this? Know what really has motivated us for the longest of time and and, and when I go all the way back to when I was a little kid, I’ve always wanted freedom. And you know, it’s funny because he’s a little kid even if you you know, you ask, you know, hey, well, what do you mean freedom you mean like to eat whatever you want or to go to bed at anytime? And no, I really wanted like lifestyle, freedom to have like creativity and to be able to do it. I wanted to do and to build things. And from a young age and the irony, of course, is I didn’t even know what that really meant back then I didn’t have any entrepreneurs in my life. My parents were teachers, which, of course, also comes back to the story with labrie later. And, you know, I, so I never was driven by the monetary aspects of it. And I think all three of us would agree a lot of times, it’s not about the money, the money is not really the big part of it, your work long hours, it’s hard work. It really is about the freedom. And so the irony though, is I really feel that in the I got out of college, when right into startups, and I think many people can appreciate this as well. I became a slave in the pursuit of freedom. Sure, you know, you It’s so easy to build blocks around you that make life miserable on a daily basis, and you get stuck. And I can go into kind of some of those things with my last startup, but basically, I kind of came out of that last experience with before starting online degree where I said, You know what, I’m going to do things my way this time and live the life I want to live. And it really became the Genesis and transition into how I live now what I want to do now, Shannon Jean 9:08 Yeah, that’s great. You know, we say a lot around my house because I, my wife works with me. And we’ve done all kinds of businesses and stuff. And I always say to my kids, we really don’t have freedom. But what we have is flexibility. Because I feel the same way, you know, where you You’re the responsibility net that I call it is massive, you know, for these businesses that you start, but but hopefully you can get some flexibility. And you’re right. The impetus I think, for most successful people is not about the money. It’s about doing something different, building your own life, and like Dave likes to say, create that charmed life that we’re all looking for. Grant Aldrich 9:48 That’s it. That’s exactly right. And you’re right, those those responsibilities. You know, definitely add a twist, you know, from when we were, you know, young and had no kids before we started businesses, but that but that’s you Right. And I really felt, I’ll tell you exactly what happened I almost after 2015 to give you the background for by 2015. For me, it was probably the best year of my life. In that year, I had exited my prior startup, which had been about an eight year journey. I had married my wife, and we were pregnant with our first choice. So just top of the world, right, congratulations. That’s awesome. Thank you. Yeah, good. Couldn’t be that year. And maybe I never will. And then in 2016, earlier in that year, I almost died swimming up in Northern California, at a time when I was on a beach and surf advisory shouldn’t have been out there and almost died. And like, you know, as I’m out there, it’s about to happen. And I was thinking to myself, Wow, I can’t believe that’s it. And after the fact, I had a very introspective period that I would I’ve now I’ve really been very vocal about to encourage all entrepreneurs to do because what came out of that was that you know, you question everything. That happened in an event like that, where everything you’d worked for, and everything that you were going to have was going to come to an abrupt end. And it’s sad, it takes an event like that, to, to bring about this good process. But really what came out of that process was I took about that six months to know myself, right. And I go back to that ancient Greek Maxim, which, you know, ancient Greece, for your listeners, one of the things that was on or was inscribed on the Temple of Apollo, the God of wisdom was the was the saying Know thyself. And the whole thought process was, how could you ever obtain true wisdom? If you didn’t know yourself the one thing you should know better than everything else, or anybody else. And so once I went through that, I got to know myself and realized that I was miserable. And the path that I was gonna be on was miserable. And so although I, I like to point like, Hey, I was able to get a successful then after that, I really am thankful that I was able to get to that point and now move forward. We all know that college has never been more unaffordable, more inaccessible for a working adult. And that is an A, that’s a crazy thing. Because especially at a time now, where these there’s these strong macro headwinds, they’re forcing so many more people to go back to school because you got globalization, robot automation that’s coming, that’s going to wipe out and just an incredible amount of jobs. You’ve got, you know, all these different things. And then what happened now with COVID, to you know, your guys point earlier, has really just accelerated what was going to happen in education and the workplace 1015 years from now. And now it’s happening at this very moment. And so all the dye had already been cast, about the changes and the disruption that was going to happen. And I really feel that we’re just there now. And we become even more important for what’s about to come. And I’ll summarize what we do. I mean, essentially, what we do is any we’re a modern alternative to that. And really try to attain happiness. Shannon Jean 12:02 Yeah, that’s that’s a powerful story. Dave Hamilton 12:05 We talk a lot about self awareness on the show, and and you just hit it right there. If you don’t know, if you’re not routinely focused on knowing yourself, you will very quickly become someone that you don’t know. It’s too easy. So yeah, yeah, that’s Grant Aldrich 12:23 Yeah. And you know, actually, you guys being fellow entrepreneurs, you could appreciate this, right? Because the one thing that is never involved in any decision when you’re choosing a business, or I’ve never seen it is, is this the right business for me personally, right, because we all know that we love the exercise and come up with a business ideas. It’s a constant thing. You’re come up with business ideas, or helping other people formulate their business idea or model and it never comes up and all those metrics we apply like business model scalability and all these things. Hey, is this the right business for me if I’m if I want to be in board shorts every day, should I go out there and have to play On a suit and be at conferences all the time? Well, the answer is probably no. Or, you know, I’m a terrible manager at which is actually, that’s true. I feel like I am a terrible manager. And so, do I want to create a company where I have to manage people all day long? Like those these questions, I think, for long term happiness and the success of the business, because we all know, businesses take a lot longer to be successful than we assume from the onset. I think it’s detrimental and people don’t take it into consideration. Shannon Jean 13:27 Yeah, that is some great advice. And I, after talking, you know, with hundreds of entrepreneurs over the last five or six years, it is a pretty common story that the first time out, you, you kind of get yourself in that position. And then the next time or, you know, maybe takes a few times for some of us, you do try to create that environment that you know, you can thrive in versus just banging your head against the wall. You know, square pegs and round holes, you know, type of thing. Grant Aldrich 13:58 Yeah, I think you nailed it. That’s right. And you know, as you hope there’s a next time because I think that’s correct. And I think this story embodies my story. And I think that you’re right, so many people fall into that trap because I, you know, you we all probably hear this often. It’s, oh, you know, this is going to be a side business and I won’t take up that much time. And, you know, I could just, you know, it’s not that I don’t have to put so much thought into if I’m gonna enjoy it or not. Or, you know, just there’s just so much money potentially here. I’m gonna look past the fact I’m gonna be miserable. You know what, I take two years? Dave Hamilton 14:30 Yeah, what I mean by that is, Grant Aldrich 14:32 yeah, exactly. So you know, you hear these mistakes all the time. And yeah, now I look back and just laugh and I try to tell people if I’m helping, or I’m, you know, talking to someone about a business idea. It’s like, Listen, no, no, you got to play for a long ball game. And you’ve got to make sure that this is the right business for you. Shannon Jean 14:48 Yeah. And, you know, we’re also just listen to your words. You know, I knew I wanted to be free and have this and all of us are so like, strong willed that you know, We many of us just have to experience ourselves even though everybody can tell you, Hey, this is you know, I did this, don’t do it. But I think, you know, I had to learn it myself too. It’s it’s Grant Aldrich 15:11 like you guys provide a lot of really good, you know, advice on the show with all these cool guests and all these insights from entrepreneurs and stuff that’s like very actionable. And yet like to me, well, that’s huge, right? You learn more from your show, then you’re ever going to learn a course on entrepreneurship. You’re listening to real entrepreneurs, all the stories and things that have worked or not worked and insights and revelations. And yet to me, yeah, it’s just one of those things, right? We never really ask ourselves about our like, we ever apply ourselves to the situation. It’s crazy. Yeah, no, Dave Hamilton 15:40 this show is the thing that taught it sounds very crazy and meta, but this show is the thing that taught me to apply myself to the businesses that I have, like and like, like, think about where where do I fit the best in my businesses, you know, and how can I make sure that that I’m Leveraging everything the way I should and and I’m in the right spot. Yeah, it’s it. But you’re right. This is our course on entrepreneurship right here doing this show. Hopefully it’s a course on entrepreneurship for people listening. But if it’s not, that’s very, yeah, we always argue about which one of the most, she always says he does. But that’s only because I know that I do. So it’s it’s all. Yeah, so Shannon Jean 16:23 that’s great. So we, you know, now we know a little bit about your background, kind of how are you going? how you got there. Talk about what’s the mission of online degree, you know, tell tell us about what you guys do over there. Grant Aldrich 16:37 Yeah, well, so the mission is, and I really just started with the mission is to make college affordable and accessible. Think about now, it’s funny that we need something like that today. Right, that needs a mission for higher education. Right, but that isn’t just inherent, yeah, we’re available. But you know, sadly, problem to solve. Yeah, right. But sadly, it’s not Community College System. It made it way better, right than some government institutions. So now, students can get started in 60 seconds on our platform, and start taking as many college level courses as they’d like for credit towards their degree. And we do it all for free. So that means they can get started with no applications, no entrance exams, start taking courses, try things out, see if it fits their schedule, see if it’s interesting, and save money and time towards their degree. Is that no cost? Shannon Jean 18:29 Yeah, that’s, that’s cool. I just brings up more questions that I have. So yeah, let’s do it. So what’s the revenue model? Everything’s free. I read up on the site. It looks great. What’s the long term revenue model for you guys? Grant Aldrich 18:48 Yeah, so the revenue models were totally supported by the universities. And so let me give you the genesis of this because I was in a position of absolute necessity to come up with a business model that could could work with it being free, because To my mind, it had to be free. There’s an estimated 35 to 40 million working adults who want to go back to school who aren’t taking that first step. So I think people in all the listeners need to change their paradigm where the main constituent now for higher education is not that 18 year old, it’s the working adult who’s going to be a lifelong learner. That’s how the markets changed. And so for that group, nothing is conducive to going back to school. I mean, I can’t leave work in the middle of the day and go to a drive to a community college for a couple hours and miss work for or on family time, skip out to go to class. Then there’s the financial component. And the Finally, as adults, we all know, we’re totally stubborn, and we’re scared of change. And so you know, to get over that leap, and go into normal process where Oh, yeah, I’ll just start enroll right now. Come up with a big loan and kind of go that process. It doesn’t work and so much approach to this was that you have to address all the impediments. Think of it like a customer for the student. And for all these working adults at the community college system doesn’t address. And so that was the genesis of it, I knew it had to be free. So if it’s free, if you dispense with the tuition model in your sout, in your, in your in your model, well, then you have to figure out a way to pay for it. I figured out you know what, the universities get a lot of value from this as well. And they’ll support it. Because what it’s obvious right with the value of the consumer gets saving money and time on their degree. wade into the pool instead of jump in the universities given immense benefit as well, because there’s a little known fact that universities are desperate for good students. And when I say good, I mean students who are going to finish their program, who are going to come prepared to learn, who are not going to drop out, they know how they can fit this in their schedule. So it’s kind of like the minor leagues. As you go through our program, you inherently become more desirable and a better student so that we universities are willing to sponsor The entire thing. Wow. And Dave Hamilton 21:01 yeah, okay, so you you are essentially finding vetting out and finding those students that are going to apply themselves and getting them on the right path. I mean, effectively what you’ve described as a it’s not really the right term, but maybe a CPA program for yourself, for you, with universities to bring them leads, right. You’re, it’s a lead gen program. If you’re if we’re just, you know, stripping it down to the brass tacks. You are you’re serving a mission here as well, but, but the revenue model is a lead gen thing. Grant Aldrich 21:36 Yeah, at Legion enrollment, really? Because, yeah. You know, yeah, yeah, exactly. So for them, it’s it’s a recruiting pool is really the way to look at it. Shannon Jean 21:43 That’s right. Yeah, right. Got it. That’s great. And, Grant Aldrich 21:46 and so it’s what’s great about that is that as as it grows, right, it has benefits on both sides. And both sides. Obviously, it’s a win win. They both have the same goal we all want to get. We want you to get the education you want. Of course. That’s what you want. And so because the platform with both sides equally incentivized on that, we have all of these awesome things happening, like universities are giving more and more perks as you come on bigger discounts, right? Because before all of this, the only way that you could save a college right in terms of the conventional wisdom was scholarships and Community College. And both of those do not work. And I will get I can get into that further, but they don’t work. And so when you look past that, instead, you come to this platform, and we realize that what’s more important is people who are prepared who have some credits, they’ve proven that they want to be there. Now universities really offer you just discounts straight up. 10% 20% right off the top. You don’t have to apply for anything. There’s no ambiguity of whether you’re going to get it just boom right there. Shannon Jean 22:50 I think without making a deal. That’s it. Yeah, Unknown Speaker 22:53 exactly. Shannon Jean 22:54 That’s great. So have you Have you always been focused on the on the you know, Coming back in to get additional skills or is that, you know, younger students that may be especially now looking at, you know, one of the questions I want to ask you is, is the COVID thing changed things for you? And so I’ll kind of combine these things. Is that younger student also part of the customer base that you go after? Grant Aldrich 23:22 They are now Yeah. And so let me start with the, the end of your question, which is, you know, has COVID changed anything and actually, not a thing COVID just accelerated what was already happening. And so, you know, college, all these trends, I talked about robot automation, the globalization, all these things are already happening. And, you know, for example, I go out and talk all the time, like guys, you know, like, just talk to people. You have to start thinking about your job being outsourced, like, you know, for example, I look at the trucking industry. There were there’s 2 million jobs in trucking just to pick one example and 2 million jobs where people make it decent living, right? They work hard, but they’re probably making around 70 80,000 a year. And that industry is right now going to be automated with robots. There are trucking convoys on the road right now, where they’re completely robotic. That industry is going to be cut down by, by estimates of like, 75 to 80%. One industry with high paying jobs, what are these guys gonna do? And you know, people don’t, they just don’t want to pay attention to that until it’s too late. And so what’s happened now with COVID is it’s a this is an unavoidable thing. You can’t ignore it anymore. And so now there’s been this surge of what was already going to come to pass right now. And for young if you know, for young kids coming out of high school, our platform works as well and we’re about to open it up to them. When I came out of the gate, I wanted to make it very focused and make sure we hit our core constituent with the working adult, but we get probably two people banging on the door for everyone we let in who are under 18 or international, who we initially had just not allowed them to log in, because we want to conserve our support resources. And we’re in the process of remedying that. So yeah, we will be able to offer this so that anybody can come in. Yeah, you know, either whether you’re advanced and you want to knock out a few credits before you get to school, or if you want, if you’re kind of part of a program where you’re at risk, and these kids can also try to get some college experience maybe to get back on track. It’s really applicable. Yeah, Shannon Jean 25:26 that’s great. I mean, not now. It’s a little different now as things are getting open back up. But as of, you know, three, four weeks ago, when we were prepping for my son to go away, you know, they were talking about, well, most of his classes because you can be freshmen are going to be done online and thinking, Okay, well, why are we shipping you out there to you know, I want you to have this eventual college experience, that’s great. But you know, there’s got to be a better way to do it. And I just think that you know, your service it just so it just makes so much sense that they could do it. Especially you know, If if somebody schools I mean, the whole, you know, Cal State system is going to be online this fall, apparently, I wouldn’t want to be sending my kid away just to sit in their dorm room, you know, drink beer when they’re not in class and then come back and do online stuff. They can do that at home, right? Yeah, yeah. Dave Hamilton 26:17 It’s not the experience you’re paying for. Yeah. Right. I mean, it’s like it’s, uh, it, you can get a good edge, you can get an education that way. And you can probably get a good one. I mean, it it. There aren’t enough data points to know that I mean, there’s a few schools that have done it all online, but you know, like we will find out, but I think there’s a lot of kids that are going to choose not to go in the fall. And if that happens, I think there’s a lot of kids that are going to realize, wait a minute, like I can get started in my life without waiting through college, you know, it, that whole concept of while you go high school in college, it just let you let you live in the shelter’s of academia, and there’s nothing inherently wrong With that, in a general sense for certain people, yes, for certain people, no. But those if you know, forced those kids not to have that option. And I think higher education, I mean, they’re shaking in their boots right now because they know that like, the, this bubble might burst for them. And we got it right. I mean, like, it’s, it’s, it was already I mean, it’s been bursting slowly in a controlled way for the last 15 to 20 years. Right. The whole, you know, estimated Family Contribution thing is, is relatively new and was really introduced to mitigate the, you know, the, there’s no way I’m gonna spend 75 grand a year for school, you know, like, it deals with that. But still, there’s there’s plenty to fix. I think so. Yeah. Grant Aldrich 27:46 Yeah. You just what you actually touched on is the defining issue. It’s online versus traditional. And if you think about it, that is the you know, so now of course, we’re seeing the wave of adoption and what people don’t realize Is that before COVID? Higher Ed is like a $700 billion industry. It’s massive. And the only faction or only portion of that that was growing was the online, every other part was in decline. And it was already 50 billion rapidly growing. And the reality is because online is as a huge point of contention internally at these groups from Old Guard professors don’t don’t want to do it’s not. And so that’s because that’s it. That’s it. They’re resisting the change and the resistance the marketplace, because again, they’re not good Damn, yeah. And they’ve they’ve been like totally insulated from that an ivory tower. And the problem is, is that now to your point, there is going to be a wave of closures. And all these universities who are not online or not substantially enough online, are either scrambling or realizing they have to close their doors are going to be gone. So you know, there’s been something out there saying 20% of universities are going to be gone next for us. That’s true. And the ones that are going to thrive are the ones that have adopted online and have realized that whether you like it or not online is the future, and that it is better under almost any context for learning and more immersive than the traditional setting with some very light exceptions. And, again, the dye had already been cast, there’s no it’s going to happen. It was whether they’re going to willing to accept that at this point or not. Yeah, it’s fascinating. Like, you know, an analogy I’ll draw is dating, right? I mean, like, you know, 20 years ago, no one was online dating, and that would have been weird. Now. I mean, it’s weird, not if you’re going to go out there and dating and not have a Tinder account or not have whatever the account is. It’s the gold standard. It’s the same white. Shannon Jean 29:42 Yeah. And we’re having a it’s a great segue. We have a guest coming on. It might be next week or the week after that has an online dating, app and business just for athletes. And so it’s your right I mean, it’s it’s, it is it is weird. If you were back in the day, when where, you know, you would meet people going out somewhere seems to be online? Dave Hamilton 30:06 Well, it’s way more efficient is is is what it comes down to. I mean, I, I am, I am like maybe one of the first people to ever have dated because of someone I met online. I dated a girl for several years that I met, because of a bulletin board that I ran back, you know, when I was like 20, or something, you know, and it worked out great, because we were able to do all those things that people now do. Now, if I was smart enough, I would have seen this and built a business on it. And then different conversations here. But I’ve proven over and over again that I’m not smart enough to apply the things that I do for myself to others all the time. I do it sometimes and it’s enough to keep me from living in a cardboard box. But Shannon Jean 30:48 I agree. I think it’s it is efficient, but I also think it’s stacked the deck is stacked against because it’s so visual, that you’re it’s it’s I think it can be shallow, and it’s almost like you shouldn’t get to see each other for a while. And then Dave Hamilton 31:05 the thing is, though, people are, I’m curious to ask our upcoming guests about this. I don’t mean to, you know, I mean, either it’s just Yeah, but but like, I, I actually, and I haven’t done it because I’ve been married and you know, for 20 years, woman for 25 Plus, but it seems to me that yes, the there’s that initial, you know, shallow thing, but then you’re just texting each other for a long time, but much greater necessarily. And that’s way better. I agree, then, you know, the only time we get to communicate is the you know, the the hour and a half that we’re eating dinner together or what you know, whatever the the quote, unquote date, Shannon Jean 31:43 so what you need to do is Anyway, you need to build an app that you the pictures are faded until you do a little texting and then you pay a little more and then it comes off. Grant Aldrich 31:56 It’s like the shallow hell of dating, right? Yeah. Shannon Jean 31:59 All right. I’m gonna get us back here Dave Hamilton 32:01 we have another business just gonna leave on the floor. It’s definitely Yeah, Shannon Jean 32:06 that’s so talk about mistakes of not starting other businesses. You know, we’re we’re big fans of mistakes on the show. In fact, we just you know published a book called mistakes and we think they’re the the tuition of small business owners and really can be the foundation of your success. You know, when you look back on them, you always like yeah, that I really learned that from the screw up. What would you say is your best mistake, you know, the one that stuck with you and taught you a valuable lesson as you build your businesses? Grant Aldrich 32:36 Yeah, wow. It’s hard to come up with why you look back I think. Unknown Speaker 32:41 Some people are like, well, I really have to think about it. Shannon Jean 32:44 And other people like, No, you don’t. Grant Aldrich 32:46 Yeah. No, you don’t. That’s right. I know. It’s just so true. Because you think about it’s more just you just littered more with failures and your hope that in that, you know, those those those few successes you get dotted in there, make up for Dave Hamilton 32:59 that. Yeah, yeah, keeps you out of the cardboard box. That’s it. Grant Aldrich 33:02 That’s right. Yeah, um, well, you know, honestly, I could give a lot. But I think that from like a big perspective, it goes back to knowing myself because I look back and I so much, it kind of goes back that old adage that you can be your own worst enemy. And that, you know, you have to kind of learn where you’re the weakest and not to allow you. Because actually, let me take a step back, if usually, in a startup internet business, small business environment, you don’t have a lot of people to bounce ideas off of, it’s kind of lonely, and you hope you have maybe a co founder or someone or some good advisors, but at the same time, it always is kind of a lonely and you’re making decisions in a vacuum, it seems like and you don’t always have a lot of precedents. And so you as again, and then another aspect of that is that you’re always thrust in all these different roles because you have to wear a lot of hats. And you constantly make bad decisions because you’re putting yourself in a place to make bad decisions because you shouldn’t be the one necessarily doing it or You know, all kinds of things like that. And so I think by knowing yourself and knowing, hey, I shouldn’t even be in a kind of business like this, that I have to do this, and I don’t know anything about this, or kind of cutting yourself off at the past, in a way, by starting at the very top is the first key thing I would suggest back to my earlier point. And then the only thing I would also suggest is that and I’ve definitely been a victim to this all throughout my 20s and early 30s was thinking I know more than I actually know and not relying on good counsel and advisors. Because to the point of your show, right? And this your show would be an example of that. You it goes back to that Greek wisdom, right, you know, the only true wisdom is you know, nothing. Yeah. And that’s that’s always true in my in my in my experience. And so if you are foolish enough to keep going down a path longer than you should without good counsel, it can crush you. Yeah, literally chronic sense. Shannon Jean 34:58 So yeah. What kind of leads us into? You know, one of the last questions I always like to ask to is, if you could give yourself one piece of advice, looking back now, as you were getting started with your first business and you think that would be that the, the insight that you would share with yourself? Grant Aldrich 35:16 I think I would tell them, you know, I think I would tell myself by bit. I do. No kidding. I yeah, absolutely. I because, you know, in my early 20s, a lot of the mistakes that I made, like while it’s respectable that hey, you know, you’re out you want, you’re willing to get out there, you’re willing to be an entrepreneur, you’re willing to take the risks and in just the ride in general, there are certain things that you’re prone, certain problems that you’re prone to approach and mistakes you’re going to make. And for me personally, this is exasperated by my personality, which is that I will put my head down and I because I think I’ve got a high tolerance for pain. I will sit there and think, well, if this isn’t working, I’m just not enduring long enough. Or I’m not working hard enough. When the reality is someone pulls you out of the water and says, Hey, listen, man, you shouldn’t be swimming in that direction in the first place and puts you right back on the right track. I think that would be the biggest one is that you got to have advisors to say, you know, what do you think about this and allow wisdom to come in and say, you know, you might want to rethink that. Shannon Jean 36:21 Yeah, that’s really good. I like it. I like it. We are we love advisors. Yeah, we I mean, we’re hard headed. And you know, we don’t listen to them all that all the time. But you get enough of that feedback. And, you know, it’s really helpful. You know, Grant, you share just some really great lessons today. I’m just stoked about your business model. And I just, you know, wish you nothing but the best. And thank you for coming and talking to us today. What’s the best way for our listeners to connect with you and to learn more about online degree? Grant Aldrich 36:56 Well, thank you for having me, guys. There’s just been a good time chatting with you. And hopefully my rant Links are somewhat useful to the to the crowd out there. Dave Hamilton 37:02 We all relate today. This is great. Shannon Jean 37:04 Yeah, you’re good. Grant Aldrich 37:05 Yep. But that shallow hell out that’s got something you know, I would say that, you know, they can definitely follow the project. It’s online degree calm. And you know, I know a lot of people thankfully and this is it’s always really flattering to me kind of follow what we’re doing just kind of rooting for us right that hey, can we bring a free market better model to this industry to help a lot of people and just, you know, feel better about ourselves make it work and let alone if it could actually help you. And and then you know, I’m on LinkedIn a lot. So that’s probably a really good place to is if you just search my name grant Aldrich, online degree calm, I could pop up. That’s great. Shannon Jean 37:43 Yeah, we, you know, we’re excited for you. And I’m, I’m excited to check back in with you as you grow your business and, you know, celebrate your inevitable success. I think you’re really onto something here. So thank you again, we really appreciate it. Grant Aldrich 37:57 Yeah, well, thank you guys. Really, that would have been a really good time. And I appreciate you appreciate those thoughts. Dave Hamilton 38:02 Yeah, you know, I No offense to our other recent guests, but grant perhaps just of the time because of the timeliness of it for me, and my life similar to what you’re going through in your life. This this is, you know, certainly one of my favorite recent interviews here, he he really nailed a lot of things, which is plus he’s been with me so that’s it. Of course, that’s Shannon Jean 38:27 always nice. That’s the echo chambers. Great. I have the same problem. But yeah, it was great that he, you know, he’s been through this, you know, this journey of doing something and kind of getting stuck and getting trapped, which, you know, we we all kind of been through through that. And I love the business model. I think it’s just a very unique way to do it. And, you know, after having seen my kids go through the online stuff these last, you know, few months and I’m just a firm believer that Yeah. Anyways, it’s great. I, I do still think there’s some, you know, big benefit to at least occasionally having that face to face in education and college and that kind of thing. Well, Dave Hamilton 39:12 I think what you miss is I I’ve often referred to college as a halfway house in there, right? I mean, you’re, you’re on your own, but you’re not really I mean, there’s training wheels, right? The training wheels are especially, you know, you start off in the dorms, maybe you move off campus halfway through, that’s, you know, one step and then and then hopefully you’re ready not to just go back and live at home. But and so you don’t get like that part of things does not happen as a natural course of it with online It doesn’t mean that it can’t, it just means that you need to apply some intention there. It’s not just baked into the program like it is going off to university or something. So, yeah, that’s the part that I wonder about because we don’t know Everybody goes through that. And most people turn out just fine anyway. Oh, you know what I mean? Shannon Jean 40:03 So we had a good time. Some people probably hate it. Dave Hamilton 40:06 Yeah, yeah, exactly. I actually hated it. But that’s, that’s a different that’s a whole different story. I mean, I was college was not for me, but, but you know that, that that’s okay. You know, like I said, it worked out like here, here we are not living in a cardboard box. You know, Jeff, that’s Shannon Jean 40:22 great. That’s great. Well, you know, we love having those guests on if if you’re a small business owner that wants to share your story, or you know, of someone that you think would be a great guest on the show, please, you know, reach out feedback at Business Show co The other thing we would ask you to do is please leave us a review. It only takes about 30 seconds, go to Business Show co slash reviews. And, and or leave it in the podcast, you know, app that you’re listening to right now, and let everybody know what you think it really helps that appreciate it. Absolutely. All right. Well, that’s what it takes to get there. Thanks for listening everybody. Make sure to Check out linode.com slash SBS and we will see you next time keep living at charmed life Read Transcript 00:00:00 Small Business Show #281 for Wednesday, June 17, 2020 00:01:49 00:01:57 SPONSOR: Linode. Instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode Cloud. Get a server running in seconds with your choice of Linux distro, resources, and choice of 10 node locations. Visit Linode.com/SBS to start with a $20 credit.  00:03:46  Grant Aldrich from OnlineDegree.com From the highest of highs to near death in less than one year Know Thyself: Is this the right business for me… personally? Starting OnlineDegree.com: Making College Affordable and Accessible Working, life-long-learning adults, are the new target market for higher education Universities are desperate for good students Online vs. Traditional Higher Ed is/has-been a $700B industry Online has been $50B and rapidly growing Mistakes, your tuition, and foundation, for your small business success Learn where you’re the weakest. Learn more about Grant and his team at OnlineDegree.com BusinessShow.co/Reviews — Please leave us a 5-star review The post Grant Aldrich – Founder of OnlineDegree – Small Business Show Episode 281 appeared first on Business Brain - The Entrepreneurs' Podcast.

We are firm believers that all Small Businesses should create a private “board of advisors” to help you build a more robust system for achieving success. One of the most important people on that board is your attorney. Today we are excited to be joined by Scott Reib, an attorney with over 20-years of experience. Scott is going to share with us ways to “shatterproof” your business and discuss why having an ongoing relationship with your attorney is so important. Dave Hamilton 0:00 We all know that we need an attorney. None of us want to pay an attorney. None of us are happy when we have to pick up the phone and call our attorney because we know it’s going to cost us usually, you know, in the the one sixth of an hour, right? 10 minute increments, right. And, Shannon, today we have a guest that has sort of broken that mold in his legal practice. Yeah, yeah, really unique way to bring legal services to small business owners that I think is really valuable. And I think for all of you is PDF pen and PDF pen pro version 12 of these great utilities are out now. And they are our sponsor for this episode. pdf pen is the ultimate tool for editing PDFs on the Mac. And they’ve added some great features in PDF pen and PDF pen pro 12 that are out now. They’ve now got stationery built in with like new paper colors along with line and grid options. For custom page designs. They’ve got a magnifier window that allows you to zoom in on wherever your mouse pointer is in a document and even move between other open documents without any mouse clicks. So you can just you know you’re looking at those like big things like contracts or, you know, orders or whatever and you just need to move around. The magnifier goes with you, which is very cool. PDFs, we’re all dealing with them these days. The size of them can get pretty big but sometimes you You want you know your images to look good. In fact, you always want your images to look good. And sometimes you’ve got big images in your PDF. Well now, PDF pen and PDF pen pro have customizable compression settings so that you can really pick how small you want things in relation to how you want your PDFs to look when other people are taking a look. And we all know that we’re using things to sign documents remotely DocuSign is a big big one that people are using and PDF pen pro 12 users get built in DocuSign support for digitally signing PDFs. So you’ve got to go check this out PDF pen for Mac supports Mac OS Catalina and then PDF pen for iPad and iPhone supports iOS 13 and even the Apple Pencil check it all out at smile software.com slash podcast. Yes, it’s a generic thing. They will ask you where you heard about it and you know the answer so go check it out smile software.com slash podcast or thanks to smile Scott Reib 4:18 Sure, yeah, the concept of shatterproof it kind of comes from the glass that’s, you know, all around us. Every time you get in your car, you’re surrounded by the shatterproof glass. And the idea is that when a rock hits it, and as we’re going down the highway, the glass isn’t going to shatter and come through and cut you. Right It marks the glass or it made the whole thing may crack up, but it doesn’t come through and hurt you. And so we want the windshields of our business to be like that shatterproof glass. And so as you’re going down the road of business, in your business vehicle, when things happen that you didn’t want to happen, I mean things happen in life and in business. In the market market. We see it and then we can deal with it in a proactive way. If we set Shannon Jean 5:32 So everybody that listens to this show knows that Dave and I are firm believers that you should create a private board of advisors for your business to help you build a better system. To achieve success. One of the most important people on the board is your attorney. Today we’re excited to be joined by Scott Reed, an attorney with over 20 years of experience Scott is going to share with us ways to shatterproof your business and discuss why having an ongoing relationship with your attorney there’s a ton of great stuff to learn on this episode for every small business owner, because there’s always gonna be legal stuff you have to deal with. And after hearing Scott, read, there’s a better way to do it. Dave Hamilton 0:51 There’s a better way. Yeah. And maybe, you know, like, we got to the end of the episode and you’ll hear us you’ll hear our reactions, but, you know, we tell our Guests, look, you can’t just come on and pitch your your business or service or your product, whatever it is, you can tell us about it. But really, we want to know your story. And sure, as you know, listening, that’s what we always do. And that’s what you’re about to hear with Scott rebe. In telling his story, though, it’s such a compelling thing that he offers that, you know, I’m sold on the concept and and I’m either gonna try and convince my attorney to do it, or I’m just gonna, I’m just gonna hire Scott. So you know, there you go. Shannon Jean 1:31 Yep, totally makes sense. Dave Hamilton 1:32 It totally does. It fits into our whole board of advisors thing, like it’s great. It’s, it’s efficient, it’s predictable. It’s all of those things that that you know, that you want in your in your business life, you know, is in fact it’s Shannon Jean 1:49 its own thing. It’s just really valuable. Yeah, in so many ways. Yeah, Dave Hamilton 1:54 totally. The another thing that’s extremely valuable is for me, and I PDF pen for sponsoring this episode. Shannon, do you have anything else before we get rolling here? Shannon Jean 4:05 I’m ready to go man. Let’s get legal. Let’s get Dave Hamilton 4:07 legal. He’s legally Shannon Jean. I’m legally Dave Hamilton and legally This is the Small Business Show Episode 280 Scott Reib 5:00 business in the right way. If we have the right structures and systems and documentation in place, then that’s not a big deal. when something comes up, we can deal with it. It’s minor. We don’t have a lot of exposure. We’ve done the right things to protect our business and personal assets. And that’s what I call being shatterproof. Shannon Jean 6:00 is so important. Scott, thanks so much for being here today. Scott Reib 6:03 It’s great to be here. Shannon Jean 6:04 Yeah, we really appreciate it. So, talk a little bit about your background, how you came to focus on business law. And also, you know how read law is different than most law firms? Scott Reib 6:19 Great. that’s a that’s a long question. Shannon Jean 6:23 We’ve got time we have time. Scott Reib 6:25 I started out as a business major at Southwest Baptist University and wanted to do marketing and advertising really loved it, and graduated in 91. And there were really no jobs. The they thought marketing jobs were selling copiers, selling phones selling computers. And so I got my first sales job. I was selling phone systems for at&t, which was okay, but it wasn’t what I really wanted to do. But I’ve found I was pretty good at it and actually found some ways to sell there. They’re extended warranties that they had not figured out. They had a computer system that would allow you to download 60 days in advance their expiring warranties, create contracts or proposals, send those out in the mail to the customers, I found that about 50% of them came back in the mail signed, and then I can follow up with the other 50% and get another 20% in and it was just became mailbox money for me really easy. And then I could go do the add on sales. And I had the whole Tulsa, Oklahoma metro area, which isn’t huge, but it was a good market for phone systems. And they decided to bring in someone else to take over the system I created that was making minimum wage and breached my contract and sent me to southeast Oklahoma. Now if you’re from southeast Oklahoma, it’s a great place. They just in 91 didn’t really have a real need for business folks. And so they kind of sent me there to die. And I went you were Dave Hamilton 7:57 you were making too much commission. Yeah, exactly. Scott Reib 8:00 Yeah, it was a it was a great system for me and not so much for them. And so they breached that agreement. I went to a lawyer and they said, Yeah, you could win if you could afford to litigate, but you can’t. And so I did what every other American would do. I decided to go to law school. Shannon Jean 8:18 I love awesome. That’s great. You, Dave Hamilton 8:19 you joke about that, but that’s like, I like there have been times in my career where it’s like, maybe I just need to be my own lawyer. Like I get that mindset. You actually ran with it. That’s awesome. Scott Reib 8:31 That’s great. Yeah, so I applied to law school at the University of Oklahoma. And Baylor decided Oklahoma College of Law Oklahoma was about $100 an hour cheaper. So I went there and and loved my time in Norman love law school. Anyone that tells you that school isn’t better than work is crazy. It is you get to go to class, go play basketball with the guys. Go home eat dinner and study. It was really was a fun time for three years and I was married. My wife taught school and you know We lived on like $714, every two weeks for three years. But it was a great three years. And I learned a ton. And then got out and started doing litigation at a commercial litigation firm, and found that that was really boring. I didn’t feel like I was helping anyone. And, you know, I’m sitting on these phone calls with engineers on these patent, these big patent infringement cases, just bored to death, not not delivering any value. And so I had to make some changes. And so I started working on some smaller cases for smaller businesses, for individuals. And then eventually that kind of morphed into me, we’re doing small business litigation, a lot of it I was doing on contingency where someone had been had taken advantage of them, and we would go try to recover that money for them. And so over the years, I’ve litigated about, about everything that you could litigate, and just and it’s a necessary thing, sometimes you have to go to court, but it really should Shouldn’t shouldn’t be a last resort and most business owners should be able to avoid some of those confrontations in court, if they have what you talked about, at the first of every show that if they had a board of advisors with an attorney on it, and so seven years ago, we decided to fix that problem. Because what would happen here is we would get a case for someone will call in and they’d made some really stupid mistake, because they didn’t know better. They just flipped the coin and made the decision or googled it, and it was a bad decision and they get sued. And so we, they come to us, we fix the problem, but it’s really expensive. So at the end, they’re unhappy, right? They’re not thrilled because they won, but it cost them too much. So then they don’t come back. They just flip the coin again, make another bad decision, and then they’re in crisis mode. Their house was burning down. Oh, Scott, you know, come help us again. And again, they’re upset about it costing so much. So I hired my first business coach in 2012 to help me create a subscription model for small business owners. To have the kind of access that fortune 500 companies have to a lawyer so that they can get this on demand access and access to questions. You know, they’re happening in real time where you’re in a meeting and something comes up and you don’t know whether to go left or right and need to ask someone if there are legal ramifications. And so we created the access plan where now they can do that. They can send the text, they can email me, they can call me and my team and say, Hey, I need to know if I can do this. And what’s gonna happen if I do? Dave Hamilton 11:30 That’s brilliant, man like that. Because you’re right. That is as business owners, that’s what we need is is a relationship with an attorney where we feel like, yeah, I can just like shoot a text like you said, Yeah. All right. Well, you you hit on one of our favorite topics in there. And in fact, you hit on it exactly the way that I was thinking before the show, I want to make sure we ask you this. We love mistakes. And a little bit later, we’re going to ask you about some of your own. However, you identified that what you see our clients that Coming to you that have made some mistake, and now they need an attorney. And if only they hadn’t made that mistake, if they had had access ahead of time, then they could have avoided You know, this whole thing. What is either the most common mistake or one of your favorite mistakes that you see clients make, that maybe some of our listeners could avoid? Scott Reib 12:20 The most common mistake that I still see 23 years into this is people doing business without a legal entity around them. Right. They’re sole proprietors, or they’re a general partnership, but they have no corporation or limited liability company, covering around them. So there’s no separation between them and their business. And how how that manifests in my office or my world as they come in and say, Hey, I just got sued or I got this demand letter that they say they’re going to sue me and I asked them well, when did you file your corporation and they look at me with a deer in the headlights look at I’m like, Oh, no, everything they have is exposed. And then we start talking about the different assets they have. And they’ve been successful. So they bought, you know, five or 10 rental properties. They have paid cash for all their vehicles, and they have several. And so their whole life is exposed to this one mistake that they’ve made in their business, where if they had this corporate cover around them or shield, then the company might be in trouble. But right, they’re not and they’re not going to have everything at risk. But they they just don’t. They don’t see the importance in it or the urgency of it. And so people skip that step. You know, Gerber, Gerber talks about people having an entrepreneurial seizure. And I think that really does happen that people get excited about whatever opportunity they see in the market, and they jump on it to take advantage of it and then they just never take a breath to come back and, and kind of shore that up until it’s too late. Dave Hamilton 13:58 Yeah, makes perfect sense. I Like that term seizure? I’ve definitely had a few of those myself. Yeah, yeah, you just run with it, which is great. Except you need to make sure you got some structure. Thanks. Shannon Jean 14:10 So yeah. And I’ve, I’ve made this, you know, mistake myself where you forget running for a while and you’re like, everything’s working great. I don’t even you know, maybe my attorney left in the firm, or I didn’t keep in touch with them. And then you’re, you’re kind of stuck, you don’t have anything. You don’t have an advisor until you have a problem. And, I mean, so your solution to that with with read law is they’ve kind of got an attorney in their pocket, if you will, where they can get, you know, quick access and, you know, get support ongoing support as they need it. Is that like a monthly service or an annual fee that they pay you How does it work? Scott Reib 14:49 It’s a monthly a monthly subscription, and so they pay us a monthly fee. And then part of part of that is that we do monthly phone calls with all of our clients, so that we can keep up with them. Pulse for the other business where What are they doing? We’re asking, asking lots of questions, listening actively to see if we can hear things that maybe they’re not doing correctly. It’s where we can kind of help them the most, the more they talk to us and tell us the more transparent and naked they get with your advisors, the more help we can be. And so by having those monthly calls, we do that. And then they have their SOS calls where there’s just something that comes up they can call any time I do I have a lot of texts running with different clients about different things that they’re they’re working on. It’s just by having that on demand access, they can be proactive, with their legal situations, rather than reactive and, you know, 99% of the business world, at least a small business world is reactive from a legal perspective, because they don’t really think they have a choice. They think that they can’t, they can’t afford legal counsel. And so we we created a plan that For, for less than 7000 a year, a small business owner can have on demand legal counsel to form LLC for them on the fly. If they want to try a new venture, right, they have a seizure procedure and want to start something new, a new virtual business, that they can form the LLC around it have that protection, and all they do is pay whatever state filing fee they want, where they want to file that LLC. It’s all done right for them, all the steps are followed, and then they know they have the protection. But without that, booked in advance, it’s very hard to do that. You can do it online. I know there’s lots of different ways that you can form those entities, but you’re just never sure you’ve done it right. And with us, you know, you’ve done it right. It’s our responsibility to do it. And you get to be very, very nimble as an entrepreneur because you’ve got that support behind you. Without it. You’re you are kind of reactive, you have to call and make an appointment possibly for a consultation fee, maybe a retainer for you. never get anything done by that time, the opportunity may be gone. Dave Hamilton 17:04 Yeah, right. No and Exactly, yeah, Shannon Jean 17:06 yeah, you’ll often spend more money to because if you have to ramp up every time and educate someone on what you’re trying to do, and you know, and I’ve done this where they’re like, Okay, give me all this background, and it may take hours and hours to really get them to dig in. It’s very, very expensive. Unknown Speaker 17:24 Why don’t Shannon Jean 17:26 I mean, it sounds like such a no brainer to me. Why isn’t it more? Why don’t I hear about it more? Why aren’t more firms doing that? Is it just they’re not designed that way or that is like a legacy system that they’re using this crazy hourly billing and all this kind of stuff? what’s what’s going on in the law field, Scott Reib 17:44 you know, somewhere back in the 1960s, the hourly billing started, and it’s a it’s a machine right? And they make so much money doing that and all the firm’s are built around time, right? They bring in these young associates and they just run them to death and build them a really high failure rate that the customers will tolerate. So they make a ton of money. And so that model is really good for making money, but it’s really bad for relationships. People do business with those with people that they know, like and trust. How can you really like and trust the person that only makes money? If they spend time on you? Yeah, right there. Somewhere in the back of your mind, this person, this person supposed to be your most trusted adviser, they’re taking care of something really important for you? And they make more money if they spend 10 more minutes on your case. I’m not saying that they’re all dishonest. But Dave Hamilton 18:45 yeah, the system is is set up in a way that that every every, you know, bit of time that someone spends could be put under the microscope. You’re right. I mean, there’s attorneys out there that are that are under that model that are doing the right thing for their clients. But the model is not set up for customer service at all. Scott Reib 19:03 No. And it’s, it’s, I think that there’s a conflict between the client and the attorney with that relationship and the way, but the way we’re billing people for projects, there is no conflict because I have to do business just like they do. I have to do a an estimate upfront for what it’s going to cost. And if I’m wrong, and it cost me more to produce that legal service, then I lose. And if I can do it more efficiently, I win. And it should be that way. I should be in the same type of type of business there. Dave Hamilton 19:33 Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Scott Reib 19:34 Yeah. I love it. I love the concept. But no, sometimes like the risk. Dave Hamilton 19:38 Yeah, well, that’s the thing. You’re taking the risk. Shannon Jean 19:41 Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I’m sure you I mean, you may be surprised to know that attorneys are sometimes not the most popular people in the world. And and I, I’m you I think you hit the nail on the head. It’s like somebody you don’t want to call because you’re in this, you know, stressful situation and you know, it’s gonna cost you a lot of money. And I love the concept of turning it into just another service that you you know you’re subscribing to. That’s going to help you out. I think it’s really cool. Scott Reib 20:07 Yeah. And it’s all about relationship. I’ll spend a lot of time on the phone with clients talking about things that have nothing to do with their, with the legal part of their business, maybe not even with their business. I mean, my call before we, we came on to do this podcast, while we were talking about the, you know, the Coronavirus, talking about the different vaccines, this person happened to be a veterinarian. And so they had some interesting perspectives. And we talked about how they felt about it. And there’s what’s going on with their family and had nothing to do with the law, but they’re comfortable talking to me, and the relationship is valuable to them. So they want to talk to me, so they call me if they miss if I’m not showing up for a call. They’re upset because they want they want to make sure that they’re staying connected. And five years ago, that wasn’t the case. My clients, not they didn’t like me, but they didn’t want to talk to me because they knew it would cost them money. Shannon Jean 20:59 Yeah, yeah. Like it. Yeah. So since you brought up the whole Coronavirus, the COVID thing has that, you know, I mean, it’s impacted everyone but has it impacted your your business and or the way you’re advising your your clients, what type of impact has had on you, Scott Reib 21:18 it’s definitely added kind of added a layer of things we’re now talking about and some documentation we had to create, especially early on. And now there’s some new things kind of that we’re having to deal with. Like we created a Facebook group for access clients so that they could ask questions that all of the other business owners in the in the, in the access could see. And then I could answer those questions once so that everyone can kind of learn from other people’s issues because it was all there’s all these common things we’re dealing with. And then we would create common templates that they could all actually all use and implement in their business and that’s one change that we’ve made. And then our business has grown. we’ve, we’ve grown during the crisis, especially the First 60 days of it. We’re adding clients because they had questions they’ve never had before, and didn’t have anyone to go to. Now, I’m not a COVID-19 expert, there’s not one. But I do have the ability to, to help to get them answers. If I know that I have a team that can work on it and get them the best possible answer so that they can move forward with confidence. That’s kind of the problem everyone has. It’s just the unknown. And so we were able to give them some sense of confidence on what to do be an advisor for them and help them make the best possible decisions. And then yeah, we’ll see a few a few years from now, whether we all made the right decisions with some of the lawsuits they’re already starting to come out with, with employees suing employers and that sort of thing. Shannon Jean 22:47 Yeah, it’s a fascinating, you know, time and like you said, so many unknowns, we own a bunch of vacation rentals, and we’re just getting back and there’s all these new things that okay, you You know, what are we responsible for? What’s our liability? How do we protect ourselves everything from the, you know, the way you put the sheets on the bed to the way you wash every single thing in the house? And I, you know, getting that guidance, I think is is invaluable. When you don’t, then like you said, Nobody really knows. Scott Reib 23:19 Yeah, one of the things I’ve been teaching our clients is that if you create the set of guidelines for your business on how you’re going to deal with the COVID-19, as we open back up, and then follow your guidelines, if you’re not going to follow them, then don’t create them, because that’s going to create that’s going to cause you more problems in the future is that if you’re not following them, that’s going to be the negligence, right? I created this set of guidelines, and then I couldn’t even I couldn’t even meet my standard. Dave Hamilton 23:44 Yeah, that makes sense. Shannon Jean 23:47 Yeah. That’s crazy. So I want to talk about looking at information and doing little background. You know, one of the things I see that comes up as your in your press information you’re described as the official zigzag A small business lawyer. So for those who aren’t familiar, talk about Zig Ziglar what that program is and how you got that title. Scott Reib 24:08 You know, Zig was probably the top motivational speaker and sales guru in the 70s 80s and 90s. My dad was in sales, and would go to Ziggs conferences. And I ran into the Ziggler group about five years ago, as I was starting really down this journey of wanting to be be really effective and have influence on the world and not just be helping one person at a time to be able to help more people. And so I started working with speakers, trainers and coaches, because by helping them then my effect is exponential. And so and around here in Texas, the the the company that does that is the Ziggler company. And so I went to a conference for the Ziegler group got to meet tom tom Ziegler. Back in 2013, and ended up he took me on to the airport that night. And so we got to talk for about an hour and Houston traffic. And then a few months later they came on as clients. I’m now a Ziegler, legacy certified trainer, and have been representing the company now for about four years. And then do speaking for them when they have conferences and things to try to help the small business owners, shatterproof their businesses. Shannon Jean 25:27 Yeah, that’s great. So on this, that’s another thing that really stuck out on your website information. Is this concept of shatter proofing your business. And is that what your your program does? Is there more you can describe about that? Scott Reib 25:43 Sure. Yeah. The concept of shatterproof it kind of comes from the glass that’s, you know, all around us. You know, every time you get in your car, you’re surrounded by the shatterproof glass and the idea is that when a rock hits it as we’re going down the highway, the glass isn’t gonna shatter and come through and cut you right it marks the glass Last, or it made, the whole thing may crack up, but it doesn’t come through and hurt you. And so we want the windshields of our business to be like that shatterproof glass. And so as you’re going down the road of business in your business vehicle, when things happen that you didn’t want to happen, I mean things happen in life and then business, then they’ll Mark market we see it, and then we can deal with it in a proactive way. If we set up our business in the right way, if we have the right structures and systems and documentation in place, then that’s not a big deal. when something comes up, we can deal with it. It’s minor, we don’t have a lot of exposure. We’ve done the right things to protect our business and personal assets. And that’s what I call being shatterproof. Shannon Jean 26:42 Nice, I love it. So somebody who’s a subscriber to your service. They, you know, make some decisions or getting advice and everything looks great. And then it turns out they have a bigger problem either, you know, someone’s doing something that shouldn’t be and they’re gonna have to file a complaint or trying to collect some funds. Different things. Do. Does Reed law offer then the next level of Okay, we this is your advisory portion of the services. Now, we’re going to go out and represent you. Is that a separate type of thing that you offer? Or is it included? Scott Reib 27:15 It’s a separate relationship as far as litigation, and we do litigate for our clients. It’s my preference that we not end up there. Yeah. But we do occasionally. And sometimes I’ll send it out to outside counsel, if I’ve been so involved in maybe the transaction that I’m I become a witness in the case. And so I’ll find someone else to actually manage the litigation and then I’ll kind of quarterback it for the client. But yeah, if they need litigation, then we’ll we’ll definitely take that for them. And the great thing about being an access client is pre litigation as part of your package. So if someone sends a demand letter to you, then we can involved and help you negotiate it and resolve it without you having to go pay a retainer and start getting billed by the hour for someone to settle your case because that’s not really likely to happen. If you go hire lawyers working by the hour, they’re gonna make some money before they settle your case. So we’re able to just eliminate that because we’re already involved in it, we already know what’s going on, and we can help resolve it. If we can’t, then we can get involved and litigate it. And then the other way, if that there’s something that maybe you need to send the demand letter out, those are included in the package, and then we can resolve that as well. So we’re equipped to take it to that next level if we if we need to, but the idea really is jump on it fast. Try to resolve it. lawsuits are only good for lawyers. The Dave Hamilton 28:39 so you really you’ve listened to the show before. Scott Reib 28:43 You’ve got to try to resolve your disputes. There’s very few. There are very few business disputes that really need to be in the courtroom. It’s just too costly. You know, the average contract breach of contract case is 80,000. In attorneys fees, you just can’t afford to spend that you need to find a way to resolve it. Maybe swallow some pride and move on. Shannon Jean 29:03 Yeah. And so and your description so you know, responding to demand letters, these kinds of things. You also do the other side where, okay, we need to this person owes owes us $50,000 hasn’t paid, you know, you help with those types of things as well. Scott Reib 29:17 You bet. Yeah, we’ve got quite a handful of those right now. Shannon Jean 29:20 Yeah, of course. And, you know, I can always tell a good attorney is when they make that statement is like, you know, the last place you want to wind up is is in court. I mean, it is such a nightmare. Dave Hamilton 29:32 So justice is rarely served. I mean, that like you said, it’s, it’s all about who can outspend and who can strategize and And oftentimes, I’m one of the few people that has been through a lawsuit and actually found justice at the end. It was because the other party ignored the judge, but hey, I’ll take it, you know, but that you can’t go in expecting that in fact, I still am sort of surprised it worked out but but the rest Have them haven’t So, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Shannon Jean 30:03 So as Dave alluded to earlier in the show, we’re, you know, we’re big fans of mistakes. You know, we just wrote a book called mistakes, and now they’re the foundation of your small business. Thinking back, you’ve been doing this for a long time had a lot of success. You know, what would you say is is one of your best mistakes, the one that really stuck with you and taught you a valuable lesson as you build your business? Scott Reib 30:27 Okay, it’s kind of there’s multiple things in this mistake. Back in 2014, we were a little bit bigger. We have multiple lawyers, about six people full time staff. And I had delegated almost everything except for building the access plan. To the point where I didn’t know where the passwords were for email for how to get into the credit card processing. I didn’t know where any of that stuff was, and I went on a vacation with One of my attorneys a little bit disgruntled, I guess, and didn’t have my finger on that pulse. And so I get it. I get an email halfway through a vacation. We’re at Universal Studios in Orlando, on the last day of May 2014. And there’s an email from him resigning with a attachment. That is the list of all the cases he’s taking with him and clients and also the other other other resignation from a staff member that’s leaving with him. And I had to make a decision then do I end my vacation with my 14 year old and 11 year old and my wife and fly back to, you know, get to kind of fight for fight for that? Or do I find a way to stay enjoy the rest of the vacation, and then come back and pick up the pieces. I very quickly figured out how to hire a Virtual Receptionist. The phones forwarded to them and stayed in Florida came back. And then when I, when I on that Monday when I called the office, we had a really young receptionist at the time, she was 18. She was gone, I guess she showed up. And whenever I was there, she got spooked and left and never came back. So when we returned that on June 2, June 4 of 214 2014, I walked into 2500 square foot office, and it was just me. And I did not know how to literally I did not know how to change the passwords. I didn’t know how to run a credit card. I didn’t know anything. And so I’m so excited. I said it was kind of a compilation of mistakes. It’s not wrong to delegate, but I had really just given everything away and had not built a system for how to do it. So I was really at a really, really bad spot and had to you know, start over Only like trying to keep the clients that were coming out the door, but trying to figure out how to take payments from the ones that want to stay and try to recruit new staff. And so it was a real learning experience. I had to get become a better leader, and then and start building more systems as an operator. And so it was a real learning. Learning. Shannon Jean 33:20 Yeah, thank you for sharing that and being so transparent and authentic, because that is a powerful lesson right there. I mean, you know, and I would say, many business owners have found themselves in this in similar situations where as as things exponentially grow, you kind of lose your your fingers, not on the pulse anymore. Maybe there’s no centralized spot where all that data and information is kept. And I’m very glad that you’re here today that you were able to, you know, turn things around and learn from that. That’s a great mistake to share with us. Let’s go on to the next book. Dave. Dave Hamilton 33:55 No, no, it’s great. We Well, we you know, we often talk about you know, you get to Write your own story. And when you’re in those moments, you decide what the end of its gonna look like. And then you write your way out of it. And and you write it your way out of it. That’s and that’s, you know, that’s, and I mean that write it ri ght Ed, you know, like you You set the ship correct and got it back on course. And that’s the key in those. Scott Reib 34:20 The benefit to losing your entire staff is your payroll goes away. Yeah, Dave Hamilton 34:25 yeah, no, I’ve been there. Scott Reib 34:26 Yeah. Yeah. And with recurring since I had the recurring revenue model already started, I had revenue coming in. And my payroll went down. It was well, I said it went to zero. And so I, that really helped me. And so I, one of the things I really preached to all of our legal coaching clients is that you need to find something in your business, that can be a recurring revenue model, a subscription model, so that when things happen like COVID-19, some part of your business, you know, you can count on at least you know, now 90% of it day in day out to come in every month, it just makes a huge difference in your ability to plan for your business. Dave Hamilton 35:07 Absolutely. Shannon Jean 35:09 Yeah. Great advice. That’s great. So, I mean, you’ve worked with so many small businesses over the years. I mean, do you see the same kind of legal situations just coming up over and over? Or, you know, or is everything unique depending on you know, the different type of business? Scott Reib 35:26 No, it’s really pretty much the same. I really kind of specialize in what I would call the low the low hanging fruit. It’s the it’s not really not the big, the big complicated things that people are messing up. It’s the, it’s the easy things. It’s the we’re not they’re not they don’t have contracts, or if they have a contract doesn’t have some of the standard things that should have in it. And so it’s a real easy fix, or they don’t have a corporation or an LLC at all, or they only have one and they’re running five business. is out of it. And so you can separate those out real quickly and fix that. Or they’ve got a lot of assets, like heavy equipment that they’re using to run a construction company, and they have it all in their operating company, not in a holding company. It’s real simple things like that, that can be tweaked very easily. And then it’s just the things that come up day to day, how do I, this employee did this? What do I do? Or I want to fire this employee? How do I do it? And make sure that they don’t come back on me? It’s that kind of stuff. It’s not hard stuff. It’s just the day to day stuff. Dave Hamilton 36:34 No, but that like those are those you know, like you said, firing someone the right way that can bite you if you if you don’t get it right. So having someone like you that they can just quickly call and say, Alright, look, I’m in this scenario, I’m doing this in, you know, 30 minutes, coach me, and that’s hugely valuable. That’s Scott Reib 36:54 great. And I’ve even done it for clients where they’re like, I just, I just, I can’t do it. And so I’ve driven to their business walked in, said have them in the conference room, I’ve fired them. The client, the employee that just got fired, walks out, hugs their hugs the business owner and leaves. Because they were just they emotionally couldn’t do it. So I just went and took care of it. It’s not fun. But there’s a very simple system to doing it and some personality types, it can be difficult. Shannon Jean 37:24 Yeah, we talk a lot about hiring and firing and how difficult it is, especially as a small business owner, because you have the relationships with them. And it’s, it’s really tough. Well, you know, there’s so many good pieces of advice here today on the show, and I really applaud your your business model, one of the things that I wanted to ask you about too, we’ve been talking a lot about LinkedIn. So before we go, you know, looking at your LinkedIn profile, it looks like you have like, you know, over 5000 followers and from a business perspective, can you can you explain why that’s important for your business to have that kind of thing. presence on LinkedIn. Scott Reib 38:04 I decided to just work Shannon Jean 38:05 out that way that everybody wants to be able to follow you. Scott Reib 38:09 I’m just really popular. Now. In 2015, I decided that it was important for me to have a presence on the social media platform for small business, if I was going to try to be be America’s legal coach, and I needed to have a platform where I could publish information, and people would see it where they could interact with me on a free basis. And to do that I had to get I had to have, I had to have at least 1000 people that followed me. And so that became a goal in 2015 to get to 1000. Then once you kind of get past that number, then it just kind of starts to to grow. I’ve got a lot more followers than that on Facebook. It’s, I think, easier to add, add people to your pages there. But LinkedIn is it’s it’s where if you’re marketing is the CEO of a small business on business, then that’s if you need to talk to that’s who’s on LinkedIn. They’re not on Facebook, right? So it’s really hard to get your ideas across to someone. Most advertising is disruptive. And you’re not gonna be able to disrupt a CEO on Facebook, because they’re not they’re on LinkedIn, maybe if your headline is good enough, they might watch your video, they might read a little bit of your article. And if they see them enough, then there’s some chance that they could reach out to you and in kind of an organic way. And so that’s why I’ve chosen to make that a big platform. And we also do, you know, organic outreach, using LinkedIn as why. Shannon Jean 39:42 That’s great. That’s awesome, Scott. You know, thank you again, for coming on. Spend some time with us today. You know, I’ve learned a ton I always say that I learned the most and I’ve definitely learned the most on this one. What’s the best way for our listeners to connect with you and to learn more about reblock Scott Reib 39:59 Well, We’re gonna set up a special webpage for your listeners and so it will be reblog calm Rei B la w comm forward slash business show. And if they’ll go to that page they can book a later legal coaching session with me. It won’t be it will it will be me and we can talk about your business and you will get some value out of that and then you can also download my my ebook five proven strategies to shatterproof your business all for free for just for these for the listeners of your show. And so that’s the best way I’m easy to find other places if you just type in the the Scott rebe on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram or Twitter, you can find me. Shannon Jean 40:41 That’s great. Thank you again. We really appreciate your time today. Really awesome stuff. Scott Reib 40:45 It was great. Thanks, guys. Dave Hamilton 40:47 Man. Well, I feel like I’m gonna sign up with him before before we publish the show just to make sure his client roster doesn’t fill up. No, I’ve really liked you know, he’s in Texas. I got three companies organized in Texas. Right, this is the like, this is what people like you and me and all of our listeners need is something. Exactly. Shannon Jean 41:06 Yeah. I mean, I was the first thing when we came off when we say goodbye to Scott that both of us are like, Hey, I think I need you to sign up for this guy. And, you know, it just seems like so useful in all the types of decisions that come up day after day after day, from how to light, you know, how do I do this? And how do I manage this situation? And just that that advisory service? Well, that that proactive Dave Hamilton 41:29 part where you’re forced to meet with him once a month? I mean, you know, I’ll be honest, sometimes when I sit down with my attorney or my accountant, like, I need to tell them about things that I know or they’re gonna yell at me about Shannon Jean 41:42 like you to do that, especially Yeah, why did you Why did you do it? Dave Hamilton 41:46 Why did you do it that way? Like, oh, you know, but but it those conversations are important. You don’t just want to stick your head in the sand, right? So you’re being essentially forced to have those, you know, whatever you want to call it. advisory. coaching, you know, just brain picking brain meld, it’s a mind meld once a month, so that when you call him in the middle of the month and say, I need help, he’s already up to speed other than the stupid mistake I made yesterday, you know, and that’s what I got to tell him out. But he knows which Yeah, Shannon Jean 42:17 and I like the fact that did sounds like you get connected to kind of a, you know, a mastermind community, if you will of other small business owners that may, you know, be able to chime in and offer some some feedback as well, which is really cool. Yeah, powerful, man. Yeah. I love it. Dave Hamilton 42:33 No, I love the I love the idea. He seems I mean, he’s the right guy clearly to be doing this because otherwise he wouldn’t be doing it. But yeah, and yeah, yeah. Shannon Jean 42:43 Very cool. Yeah. I like to always ask us at the end of the show, what what does it cost for our listeners to hear this show, Dave? Dave Hamilton 42:49 Well, the the cost is, it doesn’t cost you anything financially. We asked that you listen to us talk about our sponsors. So for this episode, as you know That’s PDF pen at smile software comm slash podcast. And and we ask that you visit their URLs, right that’s, that’s one of the costs, whether you buy something or not, that’s up to you, that’s you mean you in them, it’s our job to introduce you to them and and you guys take it from there so, so that that’s that’s one of the cause Shannon Jean 43:20 that’s great. The other thing we’d love to have you do, which just takes a little bit of your time, probably less than 90 seconds is go leave us a review on whatever platform you’re listening to the show on, you know, the apple podcast directory, you know, Google Play, wherever you hear our voice, go Leave us a five star review, and then share it with us and we’ll read it on the show and, you know, love to send some exposure your way if you’re a small business owner as well. Yeah. Appreciate your ongoing support. Yeah, Dave Hamilton 43:46 cool. Well, that’s what I got. We already told everybody about our books. So you know, you already know if you haven’t yet to go by mistakes are the foundation of your small business and we’ll go and that links already in the show notes for you. So That’s all we got. Thanks for. Thanks for listening. Thanks for thanks to Scott Reid for coming on the show. Thanks to you folks for the reviews and all that stuff. Keep moving that charm. Bye Read Transcript   00:00:00 Small Business Show #280 for Wednesday, June 10, 2020 00:01:57 SPONSOR: PDFpen and PDFpenPro is your ultimate PDF viewing and editing app for the Mac. 00:04:03   Scott Reib from Reib Law Access: Have an attorney in your pocket for a monthly subscriptions Be cognizant of the Entrepreneurial Seizure The legal business is all about time Shatterproof the windshield of your business Mistakes are the Foundation of Your Small Business Be careful not to lose control of your business Scott Reib on LinkedIn ReibLaw.com/BusinessShow – Book a legal coaching session with Scott! Leave us a review – make the world a better place The post Scott Reib – Founder of Reib Law – Small Business Show Episode 280 appeared first on Business Brain - The Entrepreneurs' Podcast.

We love to check back in with previous guests to see what they are up to, how their businesses are doing, and what new projects they are working on. Today we have a serial entrepreneur that has been on the show previously to talk about his experience and his latest venture, MarketM8. It’s always great to catch up with Kelan Raph. Join your hosts Dave Hamilton and Shannon Jean as they learn about how MarketM8 helps businesses of all sizes with their digital marketing campaigns. Dave Hamilton 0:00 Welcome back, folks to another week here of the Small Business show for Wednesday, June 3. Here we are again still from from our quarantine bunkers separate but good threats everybody cool. Shannon Jean 0:13 Yeah, there you go. You got it. Yeah, I’m excited about this week’s show. You know, one of the best things I love about doing the Small Business show is it’s allowed me to connect with a ton of people that I otherwise would have had a much tougher time with, as well as people that I’ve become friends with over the last couple of decades and seeing what they’re doing with their companies and having them on the show and then when they start new businesses having them to come on back and talk about that so we have one of those guests here this week. And I’m really excited about you know, learning seeing what he’s been up to and sharing it with our listeners. Dave Hamilton 0:49 For sure. Use I’m gonna I’m gonna tease out something you said it in passing any interview this really isn’t isn’t what the interview is about. But But you said that you were talking about you know, his Thoughts on COVID-19. And its impact on various industries. And you can hear the interview in a moment here to gain Carolyn’s thoughts on all of that. But you said, hopefully we’re on the back end of this COVID-19 thing. Do you really think we’re on the back end of this? Shannon Jean 1:16 I do. Dave Hamilton 1:16 Okay, that’s good, Shannon Jean 1:18 Especially in light of current events that I have to go into here. Yeah, I really think we are on the back end of it and learning a lot more about it, and that things are going to rapidly expand. I think the fourth quarter of this year, we’re gonna you know, it’s gonna be a tough couple months here, get things back a few months getting back things back open, but fall is going to be glorious. And 2021 I think is just full of opportunities. Dave Hamilton 1:45 What the 2021 will be the I still see that as the kind of the beginning of the roaring 20s here for us. Yeah, yeah. True. Yeah. I think so. People I mean, it’s clear you know, from like, you All the stuff that that’s happened this week in this past weekend that people have hit their level of stir craziness and a lot of well, and a lot of dangerous ways. Absolutely. And quite frankly, it’s, you know, it’s awful some of the things that have happened it is. And, like, I can’t even wrap my head around it, but yeah. You know, but a lot of what we’re seeing is people sort of throwing their social distancing guidelines to the to the wayside. Yeah. And so we’re gonna know, a lot I know a lot more real weeks. Yes, yes, Shannon Jean 2:32 We’ll know. Wow, okay. It’s not just Florida and Georgia so that because they haven’t seen increases in it, right. They opened up a few weeks ago, but now all over the country, you know, large crowds and, and so, yeah, we’ll find out. We’ll find out and and I’m optimistic, you know, like everything else. We get through everything in this country, and we’ll get through this as well. And it’ll be people that like you that are listening today that help us get through that stuff. And the ones that you know, people productive folks that want to solve problems, want to go to work, want to get things done together, that’s what’s going to make things better. Yeah, action, man, it’s action. Well, we say, well, that’s what we said at the beginning of all this, which was, you know, figure out first how to survive and then don’t stop, then figure out how to thrive. And there are folks that are that are kind of figuring it out, you know, in a variety of different ways, which is good. Absolutely. Lots of opportunity. Yeah, lots of opportunity. Well, as you create your new opportunity, you’re gonna need a place to put things and to host things. And that’s where our sponsor linode comes in. Because at linode comm slash SBS is where you’ll go to set up a server. And the beautiful part is linode has been doing this for a very long time. They know exactly what it takes to make sure that you can have a very cost effective server that is truly effective, because they know how to make things run efficiently. Even if you’re at something Dave Hamilton 4:00 Their $5 a month nano node server, where it literally is, you know, five bucks a month and you can set up a server. The cool part is, if you like, the command line and all of that crazy stuff linode got it for you. It’s all right there, all their servers, virtual and otherwise, are all accessible that way, if you don’t like that stuff, or even if you like it, but you don’t want to deal with it, no problem, use linode Cloud Manager and you’re good to go. You can set up a WordPress site or a VPN or both on the same system, if you like, and can do it all right from their Cloud Manager, you don’t have to go to the command line at all. They really know what they’re doing. You got to go check them out. And the beauty is you get a $20 credit added to your account right up front by visiting linode comm slash SBS that’s Li n od e.com slash SBS. Yes, that means that you could get four months of their Nano Server for free just because you’re a listener of the show. So go check it out. linode.com slash SBS and of course our thanks to linode for sponsoring this episode. That’s what I got here. I’m looking forward to talking to Kellan here you got anything else before we talk to Kelin? Oh man, I’m ready to go. Let’s do it. All right, he’s Shannon Jean. I’m Dave Hamilton and this is the Small Business Show! Kelan Raph 5:19 That quick prototyping, that experimental kind of mindset. You know, if you take too long to try to craft or develop something and just go get your focus group feedback and keep iterating iterating iterating. Never go to market, then you’re just wasting time. So the best thing is follow that Lean Startup mentality of that minimum viable product, get it out there, get commercial with it. And when I say commercial, it’s like really like you have a customer that’s paying. You can’t just give the stuff away and ask for people’s opinions. You have to have real buyer Shannon Jean 6:08 So we love to check back in with previous guests to see how they’re doing what they’re up to. I always mentioned that interview able check in in a few years. It’s great to see how their businesses are doing what new projects are working on. So today we have a serial entrepreneur. That’s also a serial guest. On the Small Business show, this will be his third time. And I just told him that, you know, if you keep starting new companies, he can keep coming back. So it’s always great. Yeah, it’s always great to catch up with with Kellen Raff. Kevin, thanks for joining us today. I’m excited to talk to you. Yeah. Thanks for having me on Shannon. And Dave. Yeah, that’s cool. So I want to go back really back, you know, I feel like this music when we met, you know, you were working for DHL, right? Yeah. Doing logistics and international stuff. I think if I remember correctly, take a couple of minutes and talk about making the leap from the corporate world. Starting your first business because you’ve done this a number of times now, you know, I’ve met a lot of people that, that work for shipping companies, a lot of them talk about going out on their own doing their own thing. They’re always fascinated, maybe because they deal with so many small businesses. And it sounds so great, at least from the outside. But most of them stay in because it’s a safe bet. What pushed you to kind of make that to make that leap? And then do it over and over again? Kelan Raph 7:25 Yeah, for sure. And it’s funny because I actually was I had a career with DHL. Even before we met, I was working for DHL from college. And I got bit by the International bug and really loved all the, you know, the international trade as soon as I graduated from UC Santa Barbara, applied for a position to go over to Asia and I was in Guam running the airport operation physical operations there. And then kind of got bit again by one of my clients actually was looking for somebody to expand their business in, in the US, so I moved back to Los Angeles. And that was really my first kind of entrepreneurial mission. And it was set with $10,000, to go open an office and open a company and do all that. We grew that company to about 5 million in sales in three years. And it was really trial by fire, very uncomfortable, but at the same time, like just super valuable lessons, and started developing products, developed hundreds of products for big box stores, private label stuff, as well, as well as our own labels. And then, in 2003, when the LA ports went on strike, put me out of business, I had all my Christmas deliveries on the water at that point, and that was it. So at the time, I was like, What am I going to do, I’ll go back to DHL and this time I want to go into sales. So I moved back home ish, you know, back to the Bay Area, and applied for an entry level sales position and got that and then you became my customer Actually, I didn’t even have to sell you what a great day. That was. I remember it so clearly remember Jason, and he was your account rep before he was gotten, gotten a promotion and introduced me to you and I came out and saw your business and conquered, you know, the refurbishment and repair of all the Apple products, right? Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. Yeah. That’s good stuff. So yeah, you’re working with you and your wife. And what was cool is that, you know, like, my relationship with you, I had about 200 customers that I was serving not as closely as I was with you, but being able to come in the front door and talk strategy and expansion and customer, you know, customer value type of stuff with entrepreneurs and executives, but also being in the back door and seeing how the constraints of the business really run things and, you know, challenges that might be there physically. And the impetus for me to move on and start my own business was I was just finishing my MBA, and DHL and the economy both started today. Tank. And if you remember, we couldn’t even believe correctly. And I remember them firing me, which I was like, geez, it’s about time, you know. But it was kind of a little bit of a push as well like DHL reduce staff by 90% in the US, right? I had left before that, because it was just, I mean, it’s impossible to be in sales if you can’t deliver the service anyway, so and what I had crafted was kind of a best practices consulting business. And I realized that, you know, having seen so many companies, online retailers, especially, or brands that are distributing with lean teams, that there’s really a lot of value that I could add as just a single single professional. So I went out and left DHL and started what was the first version of optimum supply chain, just a different name. Basically, we’ve named it That sounds and was very successful in doing you know, five, six, seventransformational logistics projects per year, outsourcing logistics, to third party logistics companies, expansion to new countries, renegotiating contracts with FedEx and UPS and was very successful in doing that.We started develop a software to do that as well. And I did a joint venture, which I talked about, I think on the first episode of the show the Grand Canal. Yeah, Grand Canal. Exactly. Sowent through the whole fundraising from angels. And then into series a raised about six or $7 million.hired a whole professional team to really grow and expand the company. And then in 2018, we ended up selling the business to ch Robinson.And then I basically just restarted my supply chain practice, you know, more of the consulting. That’s cool. And so, yeah, it was it’s been a fun ride and it’s been nice to work so intimately with brands and customers. Like you guys had at TechRestore to. Shannon Jean 12:02 Yeah, it’s good, good stuff. I still am expecting to get a DHL invoice in the mail at some point.All these years later, I mean, we went, there was hundreds of thousands of dollars in discrepancies and trying to go through it was just a disaster. And I haven’t thought about it in years until you mention it. So, but But yeah, it’s a tough thing. Kelan Raph 12:24 Yeah, it’s a tough thing to do. I mean, even the other the big boys are the ones to have have a challenge with, with invoicing and it’s, it’s a real problem for sure. So that’s one of the services that we actually launched was an audit service to make sure you’re getting built correctly and then to represent if you weren’t. Dave Hamilton 12:40 Well, that’s I mean, that’s smart. It’s a problem, you know, exists and you know, how it exists and how to look for it. That’s, that’s, that’s, that’s how good businesses are built. So yeah, Shannon Jean 12:50 That’s killer by identifying those those those problems. So I you know, you have a lot going on. I always think that Dave and I have a lot going on, but then I look at like your LinkedIn profile and then sec man, look at this. He’s doing this. He’s doing that he’s working with optimum doing stuff, doing things with Jensen logistics. And now you’ve got this new company market mate that we’re going to talk about next. How do you effectively manage your time? And to optimize your impact across each of the companies that you’re involved with? I mean, is it just full of delegating, or you do dip back in and out because that’s a challenge I find myself is, you know, how do I, what’s the best way to optimize? You know, my time and, you know, how do you how do you do it? Kelan Raph 13:34 Yeah, not well, most times. Meditation helps a lot. Focus, you know, really focus on focus. compartmentalizing, which I’ve always been able to do pretty well. calendar like Google calendar is probably number one, you know. Yeah. And thank God for my team. That really helped me a lot with the blocking and tackling the operations. HubSpot, which is the the most killer CRM ever and marketing application as well with, you know, like a link that you can put in to schedule meetings like I don’t ever go back and forth of choosing a time and oh no that time slot available and Oh, can we change it to this time? And where’s the zoom link? Like, I don’t do that at all. I just have one little link and people click on it and set up a time on my calendar. And it goes, great cell phone, because I’ve been traveling the last five years, probably every other week at least. So, you know, obviously, you know, the apps and an email help a lot. But I think more deeply than not, it’s a strategy of agile. I learned this process doing software development. I’m sure you guys are familiar with Agile process where you basically set up kind of work sprints cycles. We do a one week cycle. So every Monday is a Monday, every Friday is a Friday. We have our set meetings on those two days and Pretty much everything in between is just execution. So my team can reach me on my cell phone with text, if it’s something urgent, but I very rarely, if I’m missing a meeting, that’s the only time I have received a text from them. And they all use slack internally themselves, but I don’t, I don’t need to be on that. So it is a lot of delegation. It’s a lot of, you know, providing people with autonomy to be able to do things for themselves. And, you know, we really rarely have any fires to put out. It’s quite nice. And then that affords me the time to be more strategic with customers more productive with actually sitting down and writing marketing messages and things like that. And then also gives me the time to carve out a one on one meeting with each of the team every week. Shannon Jean 15:49 That’s cool. Yeah, makes sense. That Agile. Sounds like the way to go. Dave Hamilton 15:55 It sounds It sounds like you’re pretty pretty disciplined in terms of How you employ the Agile thing I and I think maybe that’s the key to the success of it there is sticking with it as opposed to just adopting some of the things from it that sound like they fit in with what you were already doing. Kelan Raph 16:13 Totally. And I used to not be that way. I used to be like, at the end of the day, okay, well, what did we achieve today, you know, but right there, you know, weeks on weeks, really help and, you know, to be patient and let things happen rather than trying to force them and they do happen, especially when you get people the freedom to do it. Dave Hamilton 16:33 Well, that’s the key, right is is giving people that freedom to you know, some level of autonomy so that they feel ownership and can can want to do it as opposed to Oh, yeah, Mike, you know, somebody breathing down my neck. Kelan Raph 16:44 So totally. Another thing is to to set the expectation on reporting out so here’s like, for instance, marketing team is responsible every Friday for reporting out certain metrics. And so that I don’t have to ask them It’s rather than getting in the habit of Oh, like I’ve seen many business owners, what were the sales for today? Or what were the sales for this month? And they’re asking questions, and then they have to wait for a response and make people nervous sometimes, rather just say, Hey, give me the sales every Friday afternoon. And then let the the individual report that out and just get in the habit of it. And then now there’s no more conversation, you know, it just happens. And if it doesn’t happen, then there’s a conversation. But that’s that’s a different conversation. Right? So Yep, absolutely. Yep. Let’s go. So, yeah. Shannon Jean 17:31 So give us a details about your new business market mate. What was the impetus to start another company? And what do you guys do over there? Kelan Raph 17:41 Yeah, so I’ve been in sales for 20 plus years customer facing, you know, working very closely with marketing being the person to deliver the offer and to, you know, set up customers. And I’ve seen marketing done really well and I’ve seen it done poorly. And at Grand canals. You know, when we took all this funding, a lot of it was for marketing a lot of those for sales and marketing. So I was, you know, around the country, you know, at conferences and part of, you know, the creation of marketing content and saw how it was done and really fell in love with it. And it was, I felt finally that I could scale myself, rather than just being sales of talking to one customer at a time and pitching and, you know, all that, that it was something more, more valuable in the long term. So, when I left my canals, I started some sales agency stuff that we were helping our partner companies with their services to bring them to market and, you know, to get the introductions done referrals and things like that. And then I’d had a lot of experience in developing CRM processes, everything from implementation to training and using CRM myself. So you know, everybody from Zoho to Salesforce to you know HubSpot. And every In between, and I saw how Marketo was used with at grant canals in conjunction with Salesforce and really loved it. A lot of the people who are working on it didn’t like it as much. Obviously Adobe loved it. And that’s why they paid billions of dollars for it. And it was very expensive. So about a year and a half ago, we decided to bite the bullet for optimum and implement HubSpot. And they had just rolled out a CRM system themselves. It was pretty light but very flexible. And so I started to hire a team and build all the processes of sales and marketing on HubSpot. And then, about seven or eight months ago, HubSpot approached us and said, you know, Hey, you guys are really sales forward and really using the CRM Well, what do you think about doing a sales agency like a sales partnership with us? So we became a partner of HubSpot and got really good support from them on, you know, different inbound tactics really just learned a lot. It was painful. The whole year was like, you know, learning can be very painful, can be very costly as well, especially when you have a team that you’re paying for it. But it was well worth it. And so we finished up last year just feeling extremely confident to to basically spin out a digital sales and marketing agency called MarketM8. And that’s how we started. So we’ve been implementing HubSpot. We’ve been doing all the landing pages and forms and offers and inbound marketing on LinkedIn. A lot of the integrations systems like even Salesforce and things like that. You don’t have to use the HubSpot CRM you can use any. everything these days with API is all connectable but yeah, just totally fell in love with it and started to see it work and realize that that this can be a whole business. Shannon Jean 21:02 That’s cool. So if you guys are doing, you know, I mean, everything from like you said LinkedIn stuff direct marketing social media Pay Per Click campaigns I mean it’s pretty broad right? Kelan Raph 21:17 Yeah it is we don’t do as much on the pay per click but all the other stuff absolutely much more social content creation and distribution. And as somebody told me content is king and distribution is Queen and she Trump’s, and it’s super true like you could write the best white paper ever but if nobody ever reads it, it’s completely worthless. Shannon Jean 21:39 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So you know, I look at this stuff and as a small business owner, you know, there’s so much you like you said, getting your content out there and there’s so many different places and venues number of pieces, like, you know, where do I focus on this stuff and I imagine that’s is that your type of customer you know, small to medium sized Businesses that need help, you know, maybe fine tuning you know their message and where to you know where to be whether it’s LinkedIn or Instagram or you know, Facebook, is that your type of customer? Kelan Raph 22:12 Yeah, totally. So we do a lot of strategy stuff with, with startups on creating the message and who’s the target market and how to approach them, what’s the offer all those. But we also have a lot of experience working with enterprise. And so we have a couple of customers that are billion dollar size revenue, where we’ll help with a specific program that they’re launching new division, or a certain territory, or a certain channel, like just LinkedIn, for instance, company page and professional profiles of the salespeople, and then help them to create the processes and then actually execute processes as well. So a lot of the work that we’re we’re doing is was traditionally done internally, by marketing staff. Now, with things just needing to scale much faster, it’s it’s way quicker to hire a service like ours. Shannon Jean 23:06 Sure. And when you meet with these people, and you’re working on projects, I mean, do you hear kind of common misconceptions about digital marketing? Over and over, as are similarities? And how do you guys overcome those? Kelan Raph 23:22 Yeah, I think the number one misconception is that digital marketing is expensive. And you know, people believe that because it is it’s very expensive. If you’re looking at marketing being like Facebook or SEO, or Google ads, things like that. That’s super, super expensive. But marketing itself is basically taking looking at your own business and your services, what you do best, and then bringing that message and offer to your target market efficiently. So inefficiently would be like to mail everybody in a zip code extremely efficiently would be to go you know, much more focused and targeted, and then don’t just send them one message, you got to send them the 12 messages that it’s going to take to really break through, you know, if you just keep, you know, cold calling down a whole list and your objective is getting to the bottom of list and turning the page, it’s not going to work, you really need to focus and, and give the, you know, give the time and the energy, that prospect who you really want to be a customer at the time. And, you know, I believe that marketing is really DIY, like, you can absolutely do this yourself. And when you want to start spending money as much more when you want to scale. So when you figured out a message that works, then you can of course start spending money on ads now, but you don’t want to just throw a bunch of money on a bunch of ads and then see what works. Because it’ll just once you stop spending money then then your demand is gonna dry up. Shannon Jean 24:53 You got to test and then iterate right? See what a lot of that a be testing does it really take 12 times Someone to engage. Kelan Raph 25:02 Yeah, that’s it seems like it right. Yeah. It does. Shockingly and frustratingly Dave Hamilton 25:09 That number that’s lower than the amount of times that it was stated to be the first time I heard that number, you know, 20 something maybe 30 something years ago, it was it was hot in the high 20s almost double that number, when it when it was first explained to me and, you know, sort of marketing one on one, like, Shannon Jean 25:29 Maybe now now that it’s more focused, and you can Yeah, maybe maybe that speeds it up as if you’re, you’re getting it to the right people first, you know, that would make sense. Dave Hamilton 25:38 Yeah, sure. Kelan Raph 25:39 It does, and it’s an average, right and more sometimes there’s, you know, you get a referral, for instance, and you have one meeting and then they ask for, you know, for just set up an account, but it’s more about the point is don’t give up if you decide that this company that you’re going to go after is going to be really good customer for you that they fit the profile, when you call them if the person who answers the phone says we’re not interested, which is what they’re trained to do and have to do these days, because so many outbound calls, or inbound calls to them, right? And you just say it’s okay. And I’ll take care of No, and I’ll, that’s, you know, let’s go to the next one. And so try something a little bit different. Don’t call the same person back. Are you ready to buy it? It’s more like contact the, you know, the controller fits a financial solution or contact customer service. If you think there’s something that you might be able to offer there. Ask for an introduction. That’s what’s amazing about LinkedIn. And, yeah, this is crazy. So I just hit 10,000 connections on LinkedIn last week. Yeah, it’s insane. I can’t even believe like, it’s hard to even keep up I, I probably have, you know, 150 connection requests that are kind of sitting there and that I go through, right, pending but the point is like, I have all those connections, I get probably one request per month to introduce to somebody else. So my network. I mean, and these are generally from the one I got last week was from a VC that said, Hey, I’m looking to hire this guy as a CEO of one of my startups, you know, can you give me some background on on it? Yeah, I think the one per month and it’s why are people not asking for that? Ya know, yeah, simply because, yeah, that personal introduction is worth so much money. I mean, rather than calling them 12 times, you know, and having a success rate of 20% or something like that, you know, yeah, I’m always shocked how peopleoften overlook LinkedIn and the power of, of your reputation, your credibility, your network, you know, on on that site, and that, that platform, if you will, it is really powerful. And so, speaking to that, are you actively recruiting those followers or part of your system that you’ve developed that you use would like market mate is if a, you know, business was coming to you for help and wanted that presence on there are you using the techniques that you offer to them for your own account? Totally. That’s the primary service that we’re offering where we’re seeing the most success is LinkedIn, you know, leveraging LinkedIn, we just did a webinar on it about six weeks ago or so about the things that you can do. And it’s totally free. You don’t have to pay. I mean, I suggest you get the Sales Navigator for $79 a month, but it’s worth its weight. You don’t have to pay any advertising at all. And you can build, you know, a good network and you can keep top of mind. I had one of our biggest customers now reached out to me like six weeks ago and said, Hey, I’m just getting a job offer from this global three peel, third party logistics company to run a new division. And she’s like, I love what you’re doing on LinkedIn. I love the way you write. your content I want to have you got, you know, have you guys helped me to go to market with this? It’s like she’s like pre sold. Nice, you know? Yeah, right. And you give me a proposal. Oh my gosh, this is great. So that’s what inbound is. That’s what you know HubSpot has taught us as well about the, you know, you do all this content creation and messaging and all that stuff. And then you have a nice form that when somebody is ready to engage you, then they can go ahead and do that. And then save your time on the call. So you don’t have to chase people as much. Oh, and they’re there. Like I said, you’re already a credible resource for them. They’re coming to you. So the sales pitch in the whole relationship, foundation is completely different, right? I’m a firm believer in that inbound it is it’s so much more personal and that’s, that’s why we’re kind of combining sales and marketing. We’re doing marketing on behalf of the sales professional. So that when they when somebody sees you know the brand and the person, it’s the person that they’re contacting that they’re not, they’re not going to engage the company and call the one 800 number they’re going to, they’re going to contact Dave or Shannon, right as they see him all the time. And so what we do is we help set up the strategy and messaging and you know, the content calendars. And then we have an integration with HubSpot to keep track of it all. So that, you know, we can also do, you know, keep track of the companies that we’re trying to attract, and then the people that are at those companies into specific roles, and then keeping track of how many messages that they’ve received and what message have we sent? Have we called them? Who else do we know at that company? leveraging those relationships? Yeah, that’s good. It’s really smart. Shannon Jean 30:44 Yeah, that is good. So I want to ask you a couple of kind of timely questions here. You know, we’re in the middle of this. Well, maybe we’re on hopefully we’re on the back end of this COVID thing. Have you had to shift your your any of your business practices in No, you’re you know, you’re pretty distributed. And but I’m sure there was some changes you had to implement and how you operate, and maybe even the services that you offer to your customers, based on the stuff we’ve just gone through for the last few months. Kelan Raph 31:13 Yeah, we’re, we’re remote by design. And that was because, you know, I feel people can do their best work, you know, where they want to live. And it works really well. You know, we were heavy zoom users for like, the past five, six years. And so that’s nothing new. The our customers, business models have changed. I mean, some of our customers have actually gone out of business, right, and those that couldn’t distribute their product or for whatever reason, no issues. But you know, the marketing budgets have shifted, what people used to spend a ton of money on conferences and travel and, and that face to face stuff is all just impossible now. And I think that’s gonna be a major, major shift and in the way that marketing dollars are spent, and that it’s going to, you know, ask It already has been moving towards digital. But really being okay with, you know, people salespeople being remote, and people working from home and being more productive and being never late for a meeting? I mean, how there’s no traffic, how can you be late? Right? have been able to take notes right there on your laptop or even record the conversations, to be able to take notes later. Being able to bring people into a meeting right away. You know how you remember how awkward it is? I don’t know if you’ve ever had a salesperson come in and then dial their team in that’s remote. It’s kind of rare. Yeah. What’s the Wi Fi and this cable doesn’t work and why is the monitor not working? And it’s like, it’s just such a waste. Like, you could have, you know, take that one hour that it could take and bring it into 15 minutes, have everybody there and alert and ready to go. It’s great. And then it’s just way way more effective. I believe. Shannon Jean 32:55 You guys should check out otter.ai and does real time transcription of your zoom meetings as they occur. So unbelievable. It’s definitely magic magic. Yeah, that’s goodness. Okay, so on that same thing, you know, you’re you’re really, when I think of a supply chain expert, I always think of you because your depth of experience is just, you know, it’s deep and broad. So what’s your take on the impact of COVID? And like, and also our current relationship with with China on the supply chain? I mean, do you think things are just going to kind of return to the way they were before? Are they going to be different? And are you advising your logistic customers and how those changes will? will be Kelan Raph 33:40 Yeah, I think we’re never going to see or experience how it was before. This is just a huge change. And it’s not just supply side or or tariffs, it’s even the demand and consumption is going to change drastically, like looking at cars, for instance, like automobiles. I mean, Tesla was already starting to take over and Uber on top of That lift with the rideshare kind of model. And now you don’t even need a car because you’re not driving anywhere. And it’s, it’s totally going to change, you know, beyond recovery for for many companies and really challenging to a lot of industries, restaurants, you know, 25 to 80% of restaurants I hear are going to go under and that’s after already kind of, you know, owners bleeding into them with not a very high profit business in the first place. Sure. And then all the fallout from a service people that creates opportunity, though, I mean, if food service especially is is a difficult business for people to you know, it’s difficult to maintain success in food service some people obviously can and and are very good at it. But But what you know, most of them will go out of business in their first year. Anyway. I feel like that that part of this is a business that’s used to reinventing itself on a regular basis. Yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? Like, I mean, there are lots of businesses that are, that are definitely impacted by COVID that are not normally so volatile. But that one is pretty volatile to begin with, I think I mean, I don’t mean to be insensitive to, you know, all of the folks listening who run restaurants and have problems with it, but going into that business, you know, that it’s, you know, you’re operating on thin margins and, and, you know, it’s food service, right. So get it, get it wrong once and that could be the end, regardless of anything else that’s going on around you. So it’s a tough business. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, for sure. But how about like, the, you know, the traditional, okay, we’re gonna build this product and we’re gonna, you know, have our folks on the ground over in, you know, in China, and we’re gonna do this and we’re gonna import I mean, is it just Shannon Jean 35:48 Have you seen anything in your logistics experience, or hear things about, hey, what’s the real cost of like manufacturing it here? Kelan Raph 35:59 You know, to me mystically, you’re in South America or something like that, any shift like that, or people just kind of sitting on the sidelines, know for sure, like near sourcing and and doing more local stuff. You know, if you’re manufacturing in Mexico then you’re supporting our neighbors, right Oh, and then you rather than air freight for some late delivery or other issue, you just got trucking which is like the super efficient or even rail, which is even more efficient. And you can do shipments every week or every day if you want, like the auto industry does, you know, like, follow those models of, you know, you can build cars in America, like high tech cars like Tesla, you can do anything in America. And I think the saving grace here for this nearshoring issue is that the capital from banks, you know, to be able to do capex investments and and job creation is going to there’s going to be so much money put into those programs to really say okay, well what’s the ROI you know, it’s gonna be six year payoff period for retooling To bring it from China to Mexico, it’s like, okay, here’s a check. You know, whereas five years ago, it would be like the lowest cost model 10 years ago, where it was, like, you know, like trying to find that lowest landed cost, but then it’s an unsustainable business. You’ve got people flying to China, you’ve got, you know, people working overnight, you’ve got like all this, like really complicated supply chains. They don’t need to be that complicated at all. And with the technology going, in manufacturing, going much more towards automation and robotics rather than just cheap labor. That was already happening naturally. So right now that we’ve got this issue and a lot of protectionism, of tariffs and things like that, and bringing jobs home, I think it’s just a bigger wave towards towards nearshoring. And whether it be in the United States or in, you know, in Mexico and Central America. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Yeah, yeah. I’m kind of hearing that too. It’s interesting to see where that goes. Shannon Jean 38:01 Okay, so I want to ask you the question we always ask everybody, I’ve asked you this before, but you may have made a mistake or two in the last I think maybe we talked to a few years ago, it’s always worth digging back into it, you know, you know that we love mistakes. It always makes us feel better, because I know I make a ton of them. Dave hardly does, but they teach us a lot. You know? And is there a mistake you’ve made? And even it’s the same one you’ve talked about before, something that stuck with you and taught you a valuable lesson, you know, across one of your businesses or your own, you know, brand building anything like that, that you can share with our listeners? Kelan Raph 38:36 Yeah, I think that it is that that quick prototyping, that experimental kind of mindset. You know, if you take too long to try to craft or develop something and just go get your focus group feedback and keep iterating iterating iterating. Never go to market, then you’re just wasting time. So the best thing is follow that Lean Startup mentality of that minimum viable product, get it out there, get commercial with it. And when I say commercial, it’s like really like you have a customer that’s paying, you can’t just give the stuff away and ask for people’s opinions, you have to have real buyers, you know. And then don’t expect that it’s going to be a home run. Like if you know, you expect you’re going to make errors expect you’re going to make base hits, and learn from it and be expecting that you’re going to change the product. So for instance, if you’re a manufacturing, you don’t put your first order in for 10,000 units, and then expect that, oh, we’re going to get the lowest cost by making the most amount of units when you haven’t even sold unit number one. Like it would be much better that you go make 100 and get those started, get the practice of the business and then iterate, iterate, iterate, and figure it out through action, not just like planning an argument and collaboration in terms of later. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got it. Do it. Dave Hamilton 40:02 Yeah, like what you said practice your business don’t treat it like it’s a static thing. You’re you’re constantly practicing and learning and getting better. I mean that that’s going to naturally happen anyway. So lean into that embrace it and, and truly treat it like a practice. That’s interesting. Yeah. Like, it’s great. Shannon Jean 40:21 It’s all it’s great stuff. I mean, I always love catching up and talking to you. You have a real interesting framework on a lot of this stuff. And I’m, I love watching you expand out to different things. It’s great. Thank you again for coming on hanging out with us today. What’s the best way for our listeners to connect with you and to learn more about market make? Kelan Raph 40:43 LinkedIn is the easiest. Send me an invitation to connect with a personalized message about small business show and any questions that you have. We’ll be happy to connect with you. That’s probably the easiest way and you can also Find my companies from my profile as well, company basis, they’re also make sure to put that link in the show notes for you and for everybody else, too. Shannon Jean 41:08 Yeah. And we’ll post the show up to LinkedIn as well because we, we know how good a resource it is. So, well thank you again Kalyn, you know, we’ll always keep in touch you Who knows you may be come back and forth time you start another business. Kelan Raph 41:21 I would love to. Yeah, we’ll be on congratulations on your the book you just published that is really cool. I love Thanks, Poshmark, as well. I think it’s a super good home based business. Shannon Jean 41:32 Yeah, both those titles are doing really well. And it’s part of my, you know, evolution, like you talked about and creating that content that spreads my brand, and then also the brand of the Small Business show out there so we can get, you know, just bring more people into the fold that want to live that charmed life that Dave always talks about. as well. Kelan Raph 41:50 I’ll be happy to distribute more of that stuff for you on LinkedIn too. Shannon Jean 41:53 Awesome. Yeah, that’s great. Thanks Kalyn, we really appreciate your time today. Kelan Raph 41:57 Thanks, guys. Dave Hamilton 41:59 As always, man, I disagree emphatically with you, I feel like I learned the most on that one. You know, his his whole thing. And he glossed over it and I was gonna kind of have him dig back in but but then we got into even better stuff. So I didn’t but I made a note of it here. That whole thing about you know, if all your if your only purpose in making all those sales phone calls or outreach phone calls, is to get to the bottom of the page and turn the page and go to the next page, that’s the wrong attitude. And it’s that’s what a great it’s not really an analogy, but just a great description of it. Yeah, cuz I bet you especially new salespeople, that’s what they’re doing. Oh, I called everybody call them I did my job. You know, and I mean, there’s that the problem is there is there is some some truth in in just, you know, practicing the fundamentals of work. I know that if I make 100 phone calls, I’m gonna get whatever the number is for you industry, you know, 1015 leads, and then from there, you know, it sort of filters down through the funnel. So so there is that goal of getting to the bottom of the page, like there is there is some value in that, but it needs to be tempered with, well, you know, how much effort are you putting into each of those calls? You know, because if your only goal is to get that person off the phone so you can get to the next one. Well, that’s gonna catch anyway. Shannon Jean 43:25 Yeah, that’s true. And the one of the other terms that he used that I really stuck with me was that he has learned to when he learned to scale himself. Oh, yeah. And I thought, Oh, yeah, that’s huge. Because I need to figure that out. Yeah. That’s right. And it’s just maximizing because he’s a perfect example. We’ve talked about it on the show before I’ve Scott Adams talks about the talent stack. Yeah, in one of his books that I really had to fail at everything is still still be a success. You know, you can just see, as he talks about well, I was at DHL that I went and I did this and I did a product company and that worked for a while and then that stopped and and then went back to DHL. Then I launched, you know, a business around logistics, then I built some software. And then we sold that software. And now I’m in all along the way. He’s been doing marketing. So now I’m starting this marketing business. So it’s just a great example of, of having all these various talents and stacking them together to help make you successful. So I think it’s a great example and something that I highly recommend people emulate. Yeah, it is no, it’s good. It’s great. All right. Well, I think that does it for another week here of the Small Business show. Yep, make sure to visit our sponsor linode comm slash SBS Of course, make sure to go to business show co slash mistakes so that you can get your copy of our mistakes book that kaelin mentioned. We’ll put a link to Shannon’s poshmark book in the show notes, of course since Kellan mentioned that as well cool and I Dave Hamilton 45:00 I don’t think I have anything else today man. Do you? Shannon Jean 45:02 I think that’s it. Last thing you know, we’d ask you to leave us a quick review. Wherever you’re listening to this today. It makes a huge difference in our life as we help you live your charmed life. Dave Hamilton 45:11 There it is. Thank you very much. Thanks, folks. Take it easy. Read Transcript 00:00:00 Small Business Show #279 for Wednesday, June 3, 2020 00:03:30 SPONSOR: Linode. Instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode Cloud. Get a server running in seconds with your choice of Linux distro, resources, and choice of 10 node locations. Visit Linode.com/SBS to start with a $20 credit.  Today’s Return guest: Kelan Raph, MarketM8 Kelan on Small Business Show 213 Kelan on Small Business Show 62 Embracing Agile Project Management Loving HubSpot “I believe marketing is DIY” The benefits of LinkedIn (especially Sales Navigator) Otter.ai – Realtime transcription of Zoom meetings (and podcasts!) If you take too long to try to develop something, you’re just wasting time. Understand MVP… and live it. Practice your business, then iterate, iterate, iterate! Find Kelan Raph on LinkedIn     The post Kelan Raph Founder of MarketM8 – Small Business Show Episode 279 appeared first on Business Brain - The Entrepreneurs' Podcast.

Our listeners may not know that both Dave and I have sons that just graduated High School and are headed to college in the fall. We have both discussed the lengthy process of getting everything prepared to help our kids be successful when applying for and ultimately choosing a college. It’s been a bit more complicated with the Covid situation and if you have an athlete that is trying to play NCAA sports, it can be even more difficult this year.  Thankfully, today we have the Founder of LRT Sports, Keirsten Sires as our guest. LRT specializes in helping student-athletes overcome challenges and find success. Keirsten shares her journey with LRT Sports as well as some great tips to students and parents about the recruiting process. Join your hosts Shannon Jean and Dave Hamilton as they dive into this fascinating niche business. After the show, be sure to leave us a 5-star review to help support the content we hope you love and find useful. Read the Full Transcript of the show:   Unknown Speaker 0:01 Hey everybody. Welcome to another edition of the Small Business show. How you doing Dave? Dave Hamilton 0:05 I’m alright Shannon, how are you today? Unknown Speaker 0:07 Good good I’m excited about the show today we have a unique, a very specialized business with a super smart and enthusiastic small business owner there. Yeah. interested in sharing her story with everybody. Unknown Speaker 0:24 unique is the right word. I think eventually they will have competition though. Oftentimes, if you have a unique business, that’s not necessarily a good thing if you realize you have no competition, that should give you some pause and ask why is there no like why is no one else? Yeah, could be no demand, no demand night, but who should stop here in the beginning, or it could and it could put a target on your back. You’re right. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Well, yeah, yeah. at best. It puts a target on your back. And I think here is best case scenario, I think. I think that’s Yeah, that’s thecase. If you thinking along those lines, you need to think, Okay, well, how do we build this moat around us. So where there’s a significant barrier to entry for others that come after us? And maybe that’s the relationships that you build. Maybe there’s some kind of cost structure that you’ve developed that would make it harder for someone else to get in there. But it’s definitely something to think about. And I didn’t even think about until you brought it up. So I’m glad you did. Yeah, yeah. During the interview, I’m like, how come nobody’s doing there’s people doing similar things? Yeah. And so like, it’s not it’s not completely alone on an island, but it’s, you know, it’s it’s out. It’s on a peninsula for sure. So, yeah, that’s cool. really valuable. very timely for you and I with our Yeah, and this is a very valuable service. very valid. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Dave Hamilton 1:48 All right. I want to talk though, about our first sponsor, which is PDF pen 12. You can kind of do your stuff with PDF pen, and you’re in great shape. Very cool stuff. You’ve got to check this out. Go to smile software.com slash podcast. I know that sounds a little generic it is. But um, check out and when you kind of when you’re doing your thing, it’ll ask you where you’ve heard about it. And Chris, I think you know the answer to that. So check it out smile software.com slash podcast and our thanks to smile, and PDF pen for sponsoring this episode. Alright, man, I’m Uh, I’m eager to share this with everybody. You’re good to go. So am I. Yeah, I’m totally ready. Let’s do it. He is Shannon Jean, I’m Dave Hamilton. And this is Episode 278 of the Small Business show. Keirsten Sires 3:41 I think if you have like your let’s assume that you have your proof of concept and you know, you know that you’re going to make some money from it and that it’s a valid idea. I think the number one piece of advice is it’s never gonna be the right time. You know, you some people might be sitting back saying, Oh, you know, I have my kids birthday coming up, I really want to wait until after that, and then something else happens. And then something else happens. And the next thing you know, it’s five years later, and you’re stuck on this thing, and it’s it kind of gets ahead of you. So I think, you know, just don’t wait until the right time to do something because it’s never the right time. Shannon Jean 4:28 So our listeners may not know that both Dave and I have sons just graduated high school, and are headed to college in the fall. You know, we talk all the time, we’ve both discussed the lengthy process and you know, getting everything prepared to help our kids be successful when applying for and ultimately, you know, how to choose a school, all that kind of stuff. It’s been a bit more complicated with the COVID situation this year, certainly. A little bit. Yeah, Dave Hamilton 4:53 my son, my son has chosen to school that none of the four of us have ever even seen the city that it’s in yet. So there you go. Shannon Jean 5:00 Gosh, yeah. And And so, in just my son plays lacrosse. I mean, if you have an athlete that’s trying to play, you know NCAA sports, it can be even more difficult, especially this year. So thankfully today we have the founder of LRT sports, kyrsten sires, as our guest. And LRT specializes in helping student athletes overcome challenges and find success wherever they land. Kirsten, thank you so much for joining us today. I’m really interested in learning about your business and your journey as a small business owner. Keirsten Sires 5:29 Yeah, thanks for having me. You know, I can’t imagine what you guys are going through right now with having to pick a school out even seeing what they’re like and the campus and just everything else involved. So I definitely feel for you in that situation. And I’ve been hearing a lot of other similar stories with that as well. Yeah, it’s, it’s crazy. Thank you. Yeah. Shannon Jean 5:48 Luckily, we saw Yeah, my son. We toured his campus about a year ago before we were just up in the area. So thankfully, you know, that was great. But yeah, Dave Hamilton 5:58 it’s a lucky one. Yeah, you He gets to it. Yeah, he basically had it narrowed down between one school that he had seen that’s about an hour from home on the East Coast here and one school that he hadn’t seen that, you know, clear on the other side of the country in Portland, Oregon. And, and I told him, I said, well, kiddo, you get to decide you get to pick what story you’re going to tell in 10 years, are you going to pick the safe school that frankly, was going to cost a fortune? Or are you going to go, you know, across the country, and tell the story about how you picked the you know, the unknown, and how you made either one of those work, like you get to decide that either one of those is going to work out. You just get to pick which one you want to tell. And he’s like, yeah, I think I want to go sight unseen. I’m like, that’s cool. Unknown Speaker 6:40 Let’s go. There you go. Dave Hamilton 6:41 Yeah. So hopefully off he goes. Yeah, Shannon Jean 6:44 hopefully. Yeah. So before we jump in to find out exactly what you guys do at LRT. I want to talk about your experience and your motivation for starting the company. have done a little bit of research but would love for you to share a bit of it with our listeners today. Keirsten Sires 7:00 Yeah, so my journey, especially with starting LRT, sports was very unique. It’s unique in a way, but it’s also not unique in a way. So if there’s any,anyone out there that knows a student athlete or is a current or former student athlete, you know, it’s one of those situations where you hear a lot of times an athlete goes to college, and then they have a situation where they don’t end up liking the school or the coach or the, you know, the coach ends up quitting, or they don’t know exactly what they got themselves into, or whatever it may be. So for me in particular, I was recruited as a tennis athlete to Skidmore College. I was recruited to other schools as well. But Skidmore was the school that I felt felt that I loved the most. And when I got to campus, it was just a situation when it was one of those things that I absolutely loved the school but my coach and I didn’t necessarily see eye to eye on a lot of different things, and I was kind of sold a little bit in my recruiting process that I wasn’t necessarily expecting along the way. Again, you hear this a lot with student athletes go on your recruiting trip, you’re kind of everybody’s a salesperson, student athletes, the coaches, the parents and everybody wants everything to go well and then once you step foot on the campus, it could be a wildly different situation. So I ended up playing my whole first year we won our league championship, we made it to the NCAA’s and no thanks. And it was a great year as far as winning matches were concerned but my just overall satisfaction with my coach in particular mental health, a lot of other things wasn’t great. So I had to make a decision, which was a either stand the team and probably not be super happy for the next three years after that, or be quit and actually try out for another sport at Skidmore since I loved Skidmore so much. I dabbled around thinking about transferring but they had this great business program but I just loved it. So I actually ended up quitting and trying out for the soccer team. And I made the soccer team. So then I was a soccer athlete for my last three years of college. And I didn’t even play soccer in high school I played growing up. So it was definitely, yeah, that’s a Yeah, yeah, yes, very unusual. And it was definitely a huge learning curve for me. Um, I went from playing like two games my sophomore year, and those were games that, you know, we probably were getting blown out or vice versa. And then I think by my senior year, I ended up playing in 17 games. So it was definitely a huge transition. And I love my coach or even like, you know, letting me have that opportunity. So that story kind of led into this whole you know, just recruiting process information, every college coach ratings platform that we created, but that was how things kind of got inspired along the way. Fast. Okay, so then while you were still in school, you if had this right, you had a project where you needed to kind of develop a company if you will. And, and and is that kind of where the impetus for LRT came together so that you could help other athletes avoid some of the issues that you had? Yes, exactly. So okay, my senior year, we had an entrepreneurship class. And we were able to create a company of a company throughout the entire semester. And then at the end of the semester, we had to actually present it to venture capitalists, pe firm people, you know, really successful people who are alumni or parents and they basically sat on the panel and determine part of our grade. You know, which is intimidating when you’re a senior in college thinking that you have all the financials figured out, and then you have somebody who’s a venture capitalist, absolutely ripping you apart. Dave Hamilton 10:48 Same thing happens when you’ve been in business for decades and you go to pitch somewhere, someone just have to assume there’s someone that knows more about what you’re talking about than you do. And they’re going to ask you those tough questions. Yep. Keirsten Sires 11:00 That is totally true. Absolutely true. So, yeah, you know, we had two of the people come up, up to us after there’s a group of four of us and they said, Hey, this is a really great idea. You should you should go with it. Like, if you ever want to go with it, here’s our card. Um, I had my real person job, which, you know, at the time, I was like, Yeah, yeah, great. This is awesome. But I’m gonna go sit behind my, my corporate desk and have a great time and get a paycheck. Right? Make sure Yes, exactly. Exactly. In a couple months into my job, I thought, you know what, I really couldn’t get it off my mind. It was one of those things. I couldn’t fall asleep at night without thinking about it just a different way that would help and I definitely was more passionate about it than I initially had had thought. So it was one of those things where I ended up just, you know, starting it on the side and couldn’t sustain both and decided to kind of take a leap of faith into the unknown, just like your son is doing with the college a little bit. And, you know, from there, it’s just been a whirlwind of emotions and ups and downs and everything else that any other entrepreneur kind of experiences along the way. Shannon Jean 12:06 Yeah. It’s a great, it’s a great story. That step from, you know, sitting at the desk getting a paycheck, that steady thing where all your you know, your family was probably happy. Oh, she’s got a great job, you know, this kind of thing. Yeah. And then and then taking that leap is is it’s a huge risk. It was there an impetus, you just were just not excited about what you were doing day to day that pushed you in? to starting LRT? Keirsten Sires 12:35 Yeah, I mean, I was. So I was working at Morgan Stanley in New York City, which is obviously a dream for most and myself included. And I absolutely loved Morgan Stanley. I loved everybody that I worked with, there was nothing in particular that was upsetting about my job. I could have, you know, I could still be sitting there today and probably would have had a happy life. Um, I think for me, the one thing that I always envisioned myself Unknown Speaker 13:00 Maybe being a little bit more out there in public and kind of just being more involved with things. I have a father who is also an entrepreneur, he’s started multiple companies, one being a company that’s a manufacturing company that is injection molding. He’s invested in tons of companies, and he’s kind of been on that on the go kind of thing. And he’s always doing 20 different things at once. So I think, kind of seeing him doing that. And then my mom starting her own fitness center, and them always kind of being risk takers. It was one of those things where it was an easy decision because they were super supportive. And I’ve also kind of learned from the best between both of them. So I think just having conversations with them, you know, and then kind of being extremely supportive was one thing and then the second thing being just not totally excited, like jumping out of my seat every single morning for my job And to me, that’s always been, I don’t know if it’s a problem or not, but always been something that’s important to me, especially with school. Even when I was taking classes in high school, there would be certain classes that I wasn’t super excited about. And I wasn’t giving 100% into and I had to work harder at versus the ones that I loved. It almost came naturally to me. So I think as long as I love what I’m doing, I’m always giving 100% which I’m sure could be said for most people, right? Yeah, for sure. Dave Hamilton 14:20 Yeah. between wanting to do it, and knowing that you have to do it, right. Yes. And, and and if you can, we talked about hacking our brains a lot here. But if you can hack your brain into wanting to do something, then it doesn’t require discipline anymore. You just need to go. So yeah, Shannon Jean 14:35 I would say, you know, I commend you for it, you really escaped employment, which is a hard thing is lots of people that sit there for 20 years thinking about it, and then realize, oh, wow, you know, I got all i got kids and a mortgage and this and that, and I’m not able to do it. So so that’s great. That’s great. So, okay, about 10 minutes into the show. Tell us what you guys actually do at LRT sports. Keirsten Sires 14:58 Yeah, so first and foremost. We are a rating and review website for college coaches. So that means that we actually allow current and former college athletes to go on and rate their college coaches. And when they do that they’re verified. on our end, we have a verification process that everybody has to go through to make sure that they are who they say they are, because everybody takes your sports very seriously. And it’s a very passionate topic for most. But on the other hand, we actually post those reviews anonymously on the front end. So when the coach ratings go up again, they’re verified, but they’re anonymous because we wanted to keep the athletes feeling comfortable and safe and not feeling like they could share their story without getting lashed back from a coach or an administration or anything else in between because, again, college sports right now, especially you hear more and more stories of mental abuse or anything else in between. And I think it’s just really important for us to you know, protect the identities of those college athletes out there. Shannon Jean 15:58 Yeah, no, it makes sense. So, so the coach rating service is, you know, kind of the fundamental thing. Is there other areas that you’ve expanded into? Or is that really the core of your business that you that you offer? Yeah, it’s Keirsten Sires 16:12 definitely I’d say like our bread and butter, but we we have other offerings as well. So we have a section called the huddle on there, where we actually write articles. It’s a combination of kind of getting stories from other people similar to you guys. So we have a series called recruiting horror stories where people commit too early or they went to an overnight visit and somebody got drunk and lost her. Uh, you know, scholarship offer parent ruined a scholarship offer for somebody or anything else in between. So we have stories like that. Coach advice, so we actually talk to the college coaches on what they look for in a student athlete, talking to professional athletes, Olympians and everybody else just kind of about the recruiting story and their advice and everything else in between, and I think the biggest thing for That too is also we provide resources for current college athletes to if they’re looking to transfer or wanting to know what it’s like to redshirt or just kind of anything to do with understanding college athletics. That’s our tagline. So understanding college athletics is super important to us. And we also offer a membership where athletes are able to go on and kind of organize their recruiting process. There’s a common misconception that we connect student athletes and coaches together, which we don’t. It’s purely educational. It’s all about organization, education, empowerment, working with mental health, and everything else that kind of goes along with, again, college recruiting process, but also just being a college athlete in general. Shannon Jean 17:41 Yeah, I really found that huddle area fascinating. And one of the things that I read that I had no idea was, you know, the benefits of getting an academic scholarship in addition to you know, trying to get into a sports program. It kind of made you more marketable because you didn’t use up so much of the budget from the athletic program. And I thought that was just brilliant was brilliant. Unknown Speaker 18:04 Yeah, there’s that. And then there’s things like division three and Ivy League. They don’t offer athletic scholarships, per se, but there’s a lot of like merit based scholarships, academic scholarships and need based and everything else that they kind of work around. And sometimes schools with huge endowments are able to grant student athletes money, depending on circumstances or whatever else. It may be each school League, everything else in between has their own rules. But again, I always tell student athletes and parents make sure that you’re, you’re kind of asking those questions when you’re on campus. And actually, in the point of the process where you can have that conversation with the coach, don’t go out guns a blazing conversation, number one, hey, what can you offer me? But when you start to have those conversations and coaches are bringing up, you know, money or anything else like that. Those are the kinds of questions that you need to be diving into. But absolutely, yeah, there’s a lot of opportunity outside of just that athletics. scholarship and, you know, very, very small percentage of athletes can even receive but also just do receive your traditional division one full ride scholarship, that one thing that everybody wants is such a small, small percentage of athletes. So, you know, we’re here to, you know, kind of teach that information and let people know that there’s ways to get money. It might not be your dream of that full ride D one scholarship, but also there’s a lot of sports that don’t even have the opportunity for that to happen. So that’s what we’re here for. That’s, Dave Hamilton 19:33 yeah, no, no, that makes sense. I mean, like, as with anything in the college process, you know, you you have some preconceptions, and they’re always either incomplete or simply wrong. And here’s yet another part of this and you fill in this gap. I think it’s great. Shannon Jean 19:48 Yeah. Yeah. And so you, I think you answered one of the questions I was gonna ask you if your target customer was, you know, just high school students, but it sounds like you also help college you know, athletes As well, once they’re there, they have, you know, if they want to transfer do different things. I want to talk about your revenue model. We’re big fans, what we call a revenue stack here of, you know, finding revenue in all different places. And you mentioned the memberships. Is that your varsity membership that you have on the site? And is that your main source of revenue for the business? Are there other areas? Or are you planning on adding additional areas? How does that work for you? Unknown Speaker 20:39 camps, showcases training facilities, and actually just speaking about the recruiting process, setting up a plan, what you need to be looking for in a coach in a school, even in the school outside of athletics, because again, you know, my story is based in I loved my school so much, so I decided to stay so I’m a huge believer in going to the school for the school more so athletics. Um, but you know, doing those speaking engagements has been another really great source of revenue for us. And that actually came up by accident. We weren’t planning on doing it. We were at an athletic director conference, and an ad came up to us and was like, hey, do you guys do seminars? And I kind of said on one, and they were like, oh, like, recruiting process? And I was like, Yes, we do. Yeah, Yes, we do. And they said, Well, how much does it cost? And at the time, obviously, at this point, I have no way I’m 22. I’ve no idea what the market is for that. So I just go, it’s free if you pay for room and board, travel and lodging. Yep, there you go. And the school happened to be in Hawaii. So yeah. Um, so you know, it morphed into after Corona kind of doing these engagements online, so virtual workshops and everything else. And then, you know, you have your traditional ad revenue. And you know, we’ve been dabbled in doing different things, which I also didn’t see this coming. But with our research Susans, we do have a survey with a target market that a lot of people want to get ahold of. There are some companies that actually pay to add an additional question or two to find out a little bit of insight into the student athletes minds. And then when those are on the rating, obviously, we’re transparent with the student athletes. It’s an optional question. They could choose to fill it out or not. And then that’s another source of revenue that we actually never saw coming. Shannon Jean 22:28 Yeah. Oh, that’s great. So you mentioned the Coronavirus shutdown. So did you? How was that transition for you? Did you just seamlessly roll right into Okay, well, we can do you know, video workshops for your team. I’m sure there’s lots of, you know, athletic directors looking for how do I support my team when we’re not playing? Right. You know, that kind of thing. So, you mentioned that doing that is that that’s what you started working on now. Unknown Speaker 22:54 Yeah, um, you know, we got really lucky because our entire company is remote. So everybody That works for me right now is remote. So it was a blessing in disguise for us because nothing really changed. As far as our day to day is concerned, the biggest upset obviously was having a lot of canceled events. Some of those were just completely canceled. Others were able to kind of transition to the virtual workshop portion of things, which is great. But yeah, I don’t I’m not sure it was seamless. I think it’s different trying to market a virtual workshop than it is an in person workshop. And not everybody’s fully on the virtual bandwagon quite yet. But for some of those people that were a little bit ahead of the time, or have some foresight into at least seeing like you know what, hey, I kind of have to hop on this bandwagon. So I think there was some convincing to do the marketing was a little bit different, so it wasn’t entirely seamless. But I think it was definitely were way more well suited for it then. A lot of other people only because our entire company by nature is forced to be tech savvy. We’re always trying to see what apps integrate with slack the best or Google Drive and we’re just always trying to stay up on that. So luckily for us, it wasn’t, it wasn’t the end of the world. But at the same time, let you know people right now don’t want to be spending money. We have a low price point of 999 a month for our for our membership. And you know, a lot of the times we’re offering it for 789 dollars because we have run discounts and everything but at the same time, people aren’t wanting to spend extra money right now. And they’re not spending money on sports because all sports are shut down. So it definitely definitely was an impact. Shannon Jean 24:37 Yeah, it’s a challenge. I think that the opportunity for you with online courses and and setting things up to where people can log in and get I think it’s huge and could could be a whole nother you know, business almost for you guys going forward because, you know, some smaller schools that maybe you’re not going to be able to go out to and have these workshops but individual parents could, you know, sign up online and watch the workshop would be great. Unknown Speaker 25:04 Right, right, exactly. Shannon Jean 25:05 That’s great. So one of the things that, you know, when I look at that having gone through all this stuff and the headaches of the paperwork and everything with schools, if I had a student athlete, it just seems like such a no brainer to Okay, who do I get to help? And how do I do it? Your services seem like, just okay, there’s no barrier, but I know there must be and you mentioned, I know, right now, people are a little, you know, tight with their cash. But I mean, are you what barriers do you face when you’re trying to convince, you know, either individuals or athletic directors of schools to use your services? And then how do you overcome those? Unknown Speaker 25:40 Yeah, I think the biggest thing is not necessarily for the athletic directors in schools, because they kind of get it in the 80s. Especially get all the questions. So anybody else that could take over those questions? They’re happy to give it to us. Yeah, um, but I think you know, just having parents and really parents but also athletes understand that A you don’t need to spend a fortune on connecting with college coaches, because you could do it all for free through, you know, the athletic websites and college questionnaires. But be that we don’t do that, that we’re not the ones that are providing the direct contact between college coaches and the student athletes. I think it’s a kind of quick and easy way to, you know, they I think they think it’s a quick and easy way to Front Load a lot of the work onto those other platforms. But something, again, that I mentioned before is you could kind of do all that for free. Every school has, you know, the information about the college coaches and if not, there’s a recruiting questionnaire up there for each sport that they all get, they want you to fill out anyway. So I think just letting people know that like, Hey, we’re not connecting coaches and players is like the one thing that we almost have to say before we can even tell them who we are. Just because our industry is like pretty slow with just keeping up with the times. Even just like recruiting with statistics in general, and just sports tech and everything else, it’s a little bit on the slower side of things. And, you know, club teams aren’t used utilizing all the resources that they could be using, even from a training perspective, and, you know, those things have a tendency to be really expensive. And I understand that, but there’s just always this Well, you’re connecting college coaches and players, there’s a million websites that do it. We already have 100 pitches from those on those websites. We don’t want it and it’s like, well, that’s not what we even do. Yeah. Shannon Jean 27:33 Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Unknown Speaker 27:34 Yeah. So I think that’s the biggest thing for us is fighting that just common misconception of everything to do with recruiting is connect player and coach and there’s a lot of other great companies out there that are also trying to fight that same narrative. And I’ve had conversations with a lot of them. There’s a company called True exposure and then another one called route and they’re actually getting more into using statistics for recruiting and comparing you know, sizes of different players. Seeing Which divisions that you’re actually going to fit in based on your size, weight, 40, yard dash and everything else. Now this is mainly specifically for football because you have all those stats and combine numbers and everything else. And obviously football is a very, we’ll call it body centric sport where it’s if you’re too small for football, you’re not gonna be able to play in a certain division. Um, but I think, you know, as we see a shift into more tech within sports, hopefully that that misconception kind of changes. Shannon Jean 28:29 That’s cool. It sounds like you’re in the right place at the right time to take advantage of that. That technological, you know, swing, if you will. Okay, Keirsten Sires 28:38 yeah, for sure. And I think I think there’s a lot of ratings websites out there, I mean, we’re rating everything or Uber rides or just products that we use Amazon, you know, encourages you to rate the products that you get and everything else. So I think ratings culture has definitely shifted over the past you know, 10 years as well. There’s rate my professor rate my teacher rate, my lawyer rate, my dentist rate my this right Yeah, that so Dave Hamilton 29:02 as soon as you explain that early on, it was like, Oh, so this is like, write my code. Okay. I grok like no problem. Yes, yep. Keirsten Sires 29:10 Yes, exactly, exactly. So that that’s kind of where things come into play. And I think it’s a really cool time to be in this industry. And I think especially with an external push for, you know, mental health and everything else, I think it’s a good time to be here. And I say external because NCAA has no specific rules or indications on mental health or coach abuse or anything else that they have laid laid out in their bylaws. So we’re happy to be here for people to be able to feel empowered to share their stories, but also, for people to read those stories so that they’re aware of what they’re getting into and a time to celebrate those really great coaches out there that might be in some of those smaller divisions at smaller schools. That you know, just you can win championship after championship most winningest coach in d3 or Whatever it may be that we kind of want to celebrate and let people know, hey, it doesn’t matter if you’re not going D one, you could be winning a championship, a national championship, elite championship or whatever else it may be, Shannon Jean 30:10 well get get out of it, what you’re looking for, right, that experience. I mean, you know, the funnel is so narrow if, you know, athletes that are going to go on to be professional at whatever anyway. Yeah, I think it’s a it’s a great, it’s a really a great thing to point out. So it seems like could be a huge resource. So one of the questions we asked every single guest that comes on the show, is about mistakes, we really love we’re big fans of mistakes, because I’ve made so many I don’t think David’s really made very many but but, you know, they teach us so much. We kind of call them tuition around here, especially when you look back on them. So setting up LRT and you know, getting things going, what would you say was the best mistake you made the one that really stuck with you and taught you a valuable lesson. Keirsten Sires 30:58 Yeah Great question, by the way, um, I have a story for you, as I know you love them. But when I first started LRT, again, I was 22 years old, kind of going into everything being a little bit naive and decided to kind of hire a company to build out our website that I didn’t do too much research into which, looking back, I’m like, how is that even possible? I don’t know. My brain was not screwed on at that point. I’m not really sure. I made a really quick decision just because I wanted to turn over the website quickly. And I ended up getting just kind of really screwed in the process from a monetary perspective, from a perspective of every time there was a change that needed to happen even if it was like changing the font. It took, like, you know, two weeks and I went into a big meeting, sat down, went to go pull up the website, and the website had actually crashed and I had no proof of the website even existed in this meeting. And it was extremely embarrassing. But from that I actually, you know, was in the meeting contacting the people, hey, gotta get this up ASAP. Oh, it’s gonna be, you know, a couple weeks and I’m like a couple weeks of a website being down that seems a little wonky. Um, and in the meeting, there was a woman who, and she said, Hey, is your is your website housed on WordPress? And at the time it was? And I said, Yes. And she said, Well, my husband is actually a computer programmer specifically for WordPress, but he does other platforms as well. Do you want him to just like take a look like just pop in there, see if he can do anything. And I was like, honestly, at this point, I’m willing to do whatever he got in there and fix it about in about two minutes. And then after that, I kept in touch with him. He’s actually our CTO now and has been our CTO for years. Yes. And all right. Yeah. So he’s been our CTO for years now. And honestly, that’s the best mistake ever. Because if I did some more research into that company, and didn’t have my website crashed for that meeting, I wouldn’t have found them. So that was definitely a blessing in disguise. And it also taught me that I need to actually like, ask for references and do more research into the people that we’re hiring, especially when a website is your product. But I guess, you know, at 22 I just wasn’t really thinking that through, well, 22 Shannon Jean 33:20 you know, you have this, everything’s gonna be awesome, and everything’s gonna work and you’re not gonna have those kind of problems. It’s Keirsten Sires 33:26 right, exactly, exactly. Everything in that way, too. Shannon Jean 33:29 Yeah, that’s, that’s great. So I had one when you were talking before a little bit about students and parents and things. And I have one of these questions that what is the biggest misconception that student athletes and or parents have about the process of recruiting and finding the right fit? And you might have already answered it, but maybe you just put a finer point on it. I just think, you know, we talked about no preconceived things at the beginning of the show. What is is there a misconception that that you kind of see Oh, Over and over again. Keirsten Sires 34:01 Yeah, honestly, I think there’s a lot unfortunately and again, that’s something that we’re trying to fight against on a daily basis. But, you know, we mentioned it earlier, so I won’t get too much into it number one thing being everybody’s going to get a full ride scholarship. Mom, that’s number one. But you know, since we already talked about that, I think the second biggest thing is, um, you know, it’s kind of a two pronged thing but a that you have to, like commit to a school early and be that that school has to be like, a total like name brand school that you think that you were like born to go to, from, you know, childbirth, and you know, people could be huge Clemson fans, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that that that Clemson is the right school for you. clemson on TV is very different than Clemson in person. And any school is very different than what your preconceived notions are of it. Schools changed throughout the years schools will be different from when your parents went there. There’ll be different from when your cousin’s went there, and they’re always evolving. They’re always adapting And I think there’s very few schools out there. And you know, I could argue in the Ivy League, but there’s very, very few schools out there that actually stick to their same traditions year over year. And technology plays a huge role in that. But I think when you’re looking at a school, especially for athletics, just trying to be as open minded as possible, I hear all the time. student athletes who ignore coaches have divisions that they think that they’re too good for leagues that they think they’re too good for. And, you know, the one offer that they have that they’re hanging on to coach ends up, you know, getting fired, quitting, stops recruiting them. A parent does something weird on a recruiting trip, and you know, the relationship is ruined, and then they’ve ignored those coaches. And then it’s like, oh, I’ve kind of burned all my bridges. And now I’m not getting recruited anywhere because I’ll tell you what coaches are talking all the time in between divisions in between leagues, and they know what’s up with all the players because they’re kind talking to each other to like, Hey, are you going to take this kid? Are you not? Um, so they’re always talking as well. I mean, there’s one girl that I know, um, I talked to a coach one time, and she said that she went to a showcase was recruiting her for soccer, shows up, all these coaches are sitting around to watch her good player, they sit down and watch her they’re talking. Next thing, you know, they’re all kind of sharing, like, Oh, she sent me this in the email. And it was like, That’s weird. She sent me this in the email too, and ended up copying and pasting the same email to like, let’s call it 10 different, you know, programs, all 10 of them got up, walked away, went on to the next player. So I think just like the common misconception of like, I’m supposed to go to this place, or I have to go to this place when there’s so many variables and college sports, um, that, you know, that’s not that’s not gonna, it’s not how it’s gonna roll. And Shannon Jean 36:49 you know, it’s great advice. Dave Hamilton 36:51 Okay. Makes sense. Yeah, totally. Totally. Shannon Jean 36:54 Yeah, it’s huge. It’s huge. I want to make my son Listen to this. For sure. You know they’re all they’re just so into it I’m gonna go here he forever he was going to Maryland there was just no way you know anywhere else and I’m gonna play lacrosse in Maryland I’m like dude you’re eight you know? Yeah Keirsten Sires 37:10 and that’s not to say trust me I mean look at Baker Mayfield there’s people out there that are just destined to do those things and yeah system and be that underdog and I’m never saying don’t shoot for those goals if you’re on email that college coach try and get in contact with them go to a showcase that they’re at, but if they’re not recruiting you after that, or they’re not talking to you, you can’t like quite literally go bang down on their door and say hey, you have to recruit me because they just might not be interested and again, that’s okay. Um, there’s you know, so many Dave Hamilton 37:41 a lot of things in life. Yeah, you if you get yourself emotionally committed before you’ll know that it’s a done deal. Well, that that shifts the leverage picture of course nest right you know, is now you’re, you’re no longer in control. And that’s not a good position to be in either. There’s a life lesson to learn about. But right Shannon Jean 38:01 now, yeah, no, it’s really great. It’s just some awesome information and some great information. Today, I want to ask you one more question. I want to kind of take you back to the beginning, when you were just on the edge of jumping off and starting your own company, we have a lot of people that listen to this show that are really at that stage, aspirational. You know, so for those listeners that are that are thinking, Man, maybe I shouldn’t do it. I don’t want to take the risk. What would you tell them? You know, if you had to give yourself some advice, when you were thinking of, you know, starting out, if your parents, you know, these folks, parents, maybe weren’t entrepreneurs, and they’re, you know, awesome, just, you know, paycheck folks that got it and look at them go, you’re crazy. You know, what, what, what tidbit of advice would you have given yourself? Keirsten Sires 38:45 Yeah, I think if you have like your let’s assume that you have your proof of concept and you know, you know that you’re going to make some money from it and that it’s a valid idea. I think the number one piece of advice is it’s never going to be the right time. You know, you Some people might be sitting back saying, Oh, you know, I have my kid’s birthday coming up, I really want to wait until after that, and then something else happens and then something else happens. And then next thing, you know, it’s five years later, and you’re stuck on this thing and it’s, it kind of gets ahead of you. So I think, you know, just don’t wait until the right time to do something because it’s never the right time. Again, as long as you have your concept proved and you know that you can make money generate leads and, and kind of actually create a viable business for yourself, then I think just go for it as soon as you can. You know, it’s just one of those things that you just kind of have to take the leap and throw all of your eggs into one basket and there’s going to be plenty of people listening where, you know, they’ve had failures are going to have failures, but your your guy’s point. That’s kind of like a really good currency. I think you called it tuition, to have and to have those failures, and you’ll learn and you’ll pivot and you’ll do a million different things, but don’t wait for the right time. Because I’ll tell you What there’s never a right time to do anything. Shannon Jean 40:03 There’s really great advice. You know, Kiersten. I mean, you’ve given us so much information not only just about, you know, your business experience and everything, but just, you know, anybody who’s got a kid or, you know, into sports, it’s just invaluable. Thank you again for coming on the show. What’s the best way for listeners to connect with you and learn more about LRT sports? Keirsten Sires 40:25 Yeah, you could just go to LRT sports comm We’re also on like every social media platform ever tik tok being our newest one that we’re learning about LRT sports is for everything. And then if you just go to LRC sports comm and scroll down to the Contact Us that’s a great way to just fill out that quick little form, shoot, shoot us an email, or you can kind of dm us on any platform. We’re very responsive crew. So we’re always on all of our social media. So whatever is easiest for whoever’s out there, to be honest with you. But yeah, social media and YouTube, whatever it may be. Shannon Jean 40:59 Yeah, and Go check out the huddle up there at LRT sports comm there’s some great information I found, like I mentioned earlier, there’s just a ton of great info up there. It’s a great resource. So, thank you again, we really appreciate you spending some time with us today. Keirsten Sires 41:14 Thank you so much. I really appreciate you guys having me. Dave Hamilton 41:18 And that was awesome. Gosh, Shannon Jean 41:20 yeah, she was great. I loved her enthusiasm, and I loved her passion, but I also really respect backing that up with the data and the and the realism about you know, oh, you know, we’re trying to tell these kids and parents don’t you know, focus in on just one school a coach, right? Especially if they’re not, you know, turning your calls or all that kind of thing. I really learned a lot I think especially right now with somebody with program shut down schools. This will be a great show for people that have gone through this and are going to be going through it you know, in the fall those next year, Dave Hamilton 41:57 those poor people that have to you know, as much as it sucks for you and me and our kids more. So having to kind of make their final decisions. Some kids are going to have to make all of their decisions based on what they can see online and via video conference and phone calls. I mean, yeah, you know, those apps are doing the fall, and they may not be able to do those college tours either. So that’s like, that’s right. All of this stuff is crazy, man. Yeah. Shannon Jean 42:25 I’ve got a question for you, Dave. Yes, it cost What does it cost our listeners to hear this show? Dave Hamilton 42:29 It costs you nothing. All you got to do is listen, subscribe, and Shannon Jean 42:33 there you go. And the one thing we would ask of you is to go leave us a review. Leave us a five star review at the apple podcast or wherever you listen to us. It helps us tremendously to keep delivering this content that we hope you love. Go to business show co slash reviews, wherever you listen to the show. Lastly, we have a returning guest coming back with us next week with a brand new idea and a brand new company. You don’t want In this update, if you’re a serial entrepreneur, this guy has, you know, and if you have anything if your business needs anything to do with logistics, this guy is a master. So we’re happy to welcome him back. Dave Hamilton 43:13 Awesome. I’m looking forward to it. All right, folks. Well, that’s a that’s a wrap for this one. Thank you so much for listening. Thanks for visiting our sponsor for us at smile software comm slash podcast, another cost of the show and keep living that charmed life! Read Transcript 00:00:00 Small Business Show #278 for Wednesday, May 27, 2020 00:01:49 SPONSOR: PDFpen and PDFpenPro is your ultimate PDF viewing and editing app for the Mac. Keirsten Sires from LRT Sports Growing up a risk-taker, makes the leap of faith easier. LRT Sports: Rating and Review Website for College Coaches A mistake turns into a hire! Guess what? It’s never going to be the right time. LRT Sports, even on TikTok! LRT Sports Huddle   The post Keirsten Sires Founder of LRT Sports – Small Business Show Episode 278 appeared first on Business Brain - The Entrepreneurs' Podcast.

I recently heard a quote from a successful business owner this week that went something like this: “Hire an assistant and double your income.” I thought about this and realized it encapsulates so much about creating a system to allow you to get outside of your business to focus on long term success and freedom. Timing for this quote was perfect since our guests this week are focused on Virtual Assistants that can help take your business to another level. Anne and Mark Lackey are Founders of HireSmart Virtual Assistants and we’re thrilled to have them on the show this week! Join your hosts Dave Hamilton and Shannon Jean as they learn about Virtual Assistants and how this super-successful spouse team has thrived while working together for over 20-years.   00:00:00 Small Business Show #277 for Wednesday, May 20, 2020 00:04:20 SPONSOR: Linode. Instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode Cloud. Get a server running in seconds with your choice of Linux distro, resources, and choice of 10 node locations. Visit Linode.com/SBS to start with a $20 credit. <https://linode.com/sbs> 00:05:43  Anne Lackey and Mark Lackey from HireSmart Virtual Assistants The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century Working with your spouse: give each person autonomy over different departments Using Books to promote your Business’s Brand Don’t be afraid to hire an expert. Know your Prime Directive “Done” is better than Perfect. HireSmartVAs.com – Book an appointment, if you wanna chat HireSmartVAs/Podcast – Get a free book! Leave us a review! The post Anne and Mark Lackey of HireSmart Virtual Assistants – Small Business Show Episode 277 appeared first on Business Brain - The Entrepreneurs' Podcast.

Small businesses have been hit so hard during the Covid lockdown – but maybe none as much as personal services like barbers, salons, and gyms. Today on the show we have a guest that specializes in implementing systems specifically for gyms, personal trainers, CrossFit, yoga studios, and more. I couldn’t think of a better time to learn about Untapped Revenue and their system to help personal services get back in business as we all get back to work. Welcome, Derek Vervoorn of Untapped Revenue.       00:00:00 Small Business Show #276 for Wednesday, May 13, 2020 Derek Vervoorn from Untapped Revenue 00:01:08 SPONSOR: PDFpen and PDFpenPro is your ultimate PDF viewing and editing app for the Mac. Turning clicks into Clients with Facebook Ads The Pivot – helping to create online programs for clients Be ready to follow-up when someone opts-in Make your clients lazy … and successful! Mistakes: The Foundation of Your Small Business Find Derek Untapped Revenue on the web Derek Vervoorn on Facebook Derek Vervoorn on LinkedIn Untapped Revenue on LinkedIn The post Derek Vervoorn of Untapped Revenue – Small Business Show Episode 276 appeared first on Business Brain - The Entrepreneurs' Podcast.

We’ve been focusing on the power of Systems on recent episodes of the Small Business Show and I’m excited to bring another perspective to the conversation with our guest today. Systems are what allow your Small Business to adapt and succeed. They also allow you to expand your business beyond your capabilities and create long-term wealth. As we continue our series of Systems discussions, we are thrilled to have David Jenyns of Systemology with us today to get his take on the power of systems.       00:00:00 Small Business Show #275 for Wednesday, May 6, 2020 00:01:47 SPONSOR: Linode. Instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode Cloud. Get a server running in seconds with your choice of Linux distro, resources, and choice of 10 node locations. Visit Linode.com/SBS to start with a $20 credit.  David Jenyns – SYSTEMology Business is a collection of systems Most business owners ignore the urgency of systems Books: EMyth Scaling Up Built to Sell Pick your business’s 80/20 systems using Critical Client Flow Uncover your customer’s journey – Write it down! How does your business generate leads and interest? How do we respond to that lead? What does our sales process look like? Do we have a script? How do you onboard the new customer after they say, “I do”? Invoice? Pay 50/50? Pay upfront? How do you get them to come back? Lead with a huge amount of value. Making Systems is a 2-person job Knowledgeable worker Systems Champion Capture what it is about your business that you’re already doing. The Founder needs a Manager The System for Systemizing a business David Jenyns on LinkedIn The post David Jenyns of Systemology – Small Business Show Episode 275 appeared first on Business Brain - The Entrepreneurs' Podcast.

Your hosts Dave Hamilton and Shannon Jean both subscribe to Scott Adams’ philosophy of Systems over Goals. Systems give you open-ended processes that you adjust over time to continually learn and succeed. When we were contacted by Ravi Abuvala from Scaling with Systems, we knew our listeners would benefit from hearing about his system for scaling your Small Business. Join us today as we discuss the power of systems and how to free yourself to work ON your business instead of IN your business each day.     00:00:00 Small Business Show #274 for Wednesday, April 28, 2020 Ravi Abuvala – Scaling with Systems Spend less time IN your business and more time ON your business Business is fun when you’re on top looking down Join a Mastermind Group, immerse yourself with more successful people Transitioned from one to one, to one to many coaching The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson Mistakes Pocket Guide Embrace Saturation Develop Your Personal Brand – Credibility before Results Dan Henry, Digital Millionaire ScalingWithSystems.com @raviabuvala on Instagram and Facebook The post Ravi Abuvala Founder of Scaling with Systems – Small Business Show Episode 274 appeared first on Business Brain - The Entrepreneurs' Podcast.