Loading summary
Transcript99 lines
- [00:06]
A
Wake up. Your competition is asleep. It's you against the world. And if you want to win, we need to get a few things straight. Your business is a mental war. Your success is a mental war. And making money is a game. And the game of money starts in your mind. This podcast exists to help you weaponize your brain through advanced marketing mindset and money concepts. To have what others don't, you need to know what others won't. Your future fortune awaits. Welcome to the War Plan Podcast. Hey, my friend. Welcome back to the War Plan Podcast. Hope you're doing amazing. I have a special treat for you today. We get to have a casual conversation with a friend of mine named Daniel Dixon. They say you should never trust a man with two Ds for his name, but Daniel's an exception. No, I'm just kidding. Daniel is amazing. He's a. He's a. An mba, business guru genius. He's also the CEO of Send Jim. He's been growing and fixing and cleaning up Send Jim for years, you know, which is actually a company I started a long time ago. We're going to talk about marketing, cost per lead, the economy, technology, AI, all this cool stuff that's available to you if you have a local business that you probably don't even know exists. Maybe even a little bit of the origin story of Sin Jim, and how it can help you make a bunch more money. So with that being said, my brother Daniel. How we doing, my friend?
- [01:34]
B
Good. Thanks for having me, Josh. Super excited to be here and spend some time with you.
- [01:39]
A
Yeah, me too. So it's kind of weird that I'm out of the loop on my own company in some regards, you know, because, like, I don't work in it. You're running the whole thing. You've grown the team, you've grown the revenue. Like, you're killing it, but you're also just developing the product. What year did you step in as CEO? Is it 2020? 2020. Okay. Yeah. So it's been. This is like year six, which is crazy. And you're a partner now. You're my business partner. And when you showed me some of the things you're working on, it kind of broke my brain a little bit. And what I've been hearing. And then we'll get into your background and stuff, but I really want to get right into it. What I've been hearing from businesses is, like, costs are going through the roof. Everything's super expensive. Literally, like, you need a home equity loan to buy a pack of bac. Like, Costs are out of control of the economy. It sort of seems good, but it's kind of weird and like AI and there's fear and politically people want to kill each other. Like literally. There's just a lot of uncertainty. And what are you hearing on your side? I mean, S. Jim has thousands of customers from all kinds of different industries. Maybe answer that question and introduce yourself at the same time somehow.
- [02:54]
B
Yeah. So, Daniel Dixon, like Josh said, I'm a friend. Love being here. Josh. I'm just so excited. Owned a own multiple home service industry. Still own one today, an epoxy garage floor coating company out in Nashville, Tennessee. I run Sin Gym. I was in the military, but I'm just super passionate about small business. I love creating jobs, I love helping people and, and that's why, you know, I've stayed here at Sin Gym and in the home services, I think it's just a great space to be. Yeah. What we're hearing all those things, right? Like, I think it's really unique. I know your audience isn't just home services. That's my kind of niche now, is that I'm, I'm in the home service blue collar space. But from my point of view, what I hear is like, there's never been a time, a better time for home service companies. People are leaving corporate America and joining home service at a rapid pace. Because a lot of the things you said, right, like people are getting laid off. It wasn't too long ago where we were trying to hire software developers at Syngeim and people wanted over $200,000 a year like that. You couldn't even get people to apply to your, you know, job listings. And now it's like developers are fearful that they're going to be employed in five years. Right. And so like you're having really, really smart people. I had dinner last night with a couple people. They're both from Princeton. They both graduated with master's degrees from Princeton. They worked on Wall street and they're in the home service industry now. And it's just you're getting a lot of really smart people jumping in because of a lot of the things you said. And then the second thing I'll say to that, Josh, is I hear a lot from these people in the home service industry that at the cost of everything's going up, especially the cost to acquire leads with digital marketing, that's a theme. We're seeing that from very sophisticated franchisors. And there's just, you know, a lot of conversation about what do we do to Combat that?
- [04:56]
A
Well, like Facebook ads and things like that. I mean, the costs have to go up. How is Mark Zuckerberg going to pay for his apocalyptic doomsday bunker on 10,000 acres unless he charges more for Facebook ads? Daniel? I mean, that's right. Yeah, It's. Dan Kennedy always says, like, the goal is not to make marketing cheaper. The goal is to make your customer more valuable. It's simple, but it's like lost on people. You know, they miss it. And so if your mindset is to cut, cut, cut, how do I make everything cheaper? It's sort of kind of like a death spiral. Or I in corporate consulting, like kind of a death marker of a big business is if they start charging their employees 10 cents for a coffee cup. You know, it's like, that's not how you fix the business. You know, you have to out of the business. You have to sell your way out of the business. What are your thoughts on that? I mean, the reality is it's not going to go back down. It's not going to get less expensive, and now people are going to be competing with MBAs from Princeton with their window cleaning business. You know, witchita. Like, we got to get smarter. Right? And we got it. We got to figure out, you know, we could talk about frap. We could talk about lots of stuff. What are your thoughts on that?
- [06:07]
B
Yeah, so I actually just saw a met with a marketing agency recently for my home service business, and they were saying they were worried about the cost. Right, right. Like, they did their pitch and they're like, well, how much is your budget? Like, we can probably save you some money. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like, I don't know what you're talking about. Saving me money. Like, I want to spend as much money as possible. Right. Because I have a business model that I know if I provide the best value for my customer, I have the best reviews, I have the best brand, I can charge more, and then I can acquire customers for more. Like, there's more room in my budget. And it goes exactly to kind of what you just said, Josh, of like, it isn't about how do I pay less, it's how am I able. How. What do I need to do to grow my business to be able to invest more into marketing. And so I tell these people, I have an unlimited budget as long as you can keep getting me leads at this price. And yes, we just need. I love that. How do we make our customers more valuable?
- [07:08]
A
Yeah. Dan Kennedy also says if you have offended someone by noon you're not marketing hard enough. You ever heard that one? But you know, and for everybody listening to the podcast, I actually launched another podcast kind of for send Jim, called the Money Lever podcast. They're all very short episodes, like 10 to 15 minutes and just kind of talking about this topic. So you can just like search for that. The Money Love, it's free. There's 26 episodes and I talk about that. Like, how do you make a customer more valuable? Well, it's simple, it's frap.
- [07:40]
B
Yes.
- [07:40]
A
If you get people to buy more often than they otherwise were going to, AKA Frequency, you'll make more money. And like, here's a really simple example. If you have a restaurant and your average customer eats there once a month, if we can use our creativity and put our thinking caps on like, and figure out a way through scripting and choreography and systems and follow up and clever, promote like whatever it is, if you figure out a way to get a person to eat there every two weeks instead of once a month, that one thing doubles the entire business, right? So a $1 million restaurant is two. And what happens is we get so caught up in like the technical side of our business, we, we forget that there were marketers that just happened to sell tacos or sell window cleaning. Like everything is marketing, marketing is everything. And, and I don't know, like, obviously I'm passionate about frat, but send Jim is a secret weapon when you understand frap. Usually. Daniel, just so you know, I haven't told you this, but when I work privately with people, it's pretty common. I'll actually have them stop doing all advertising for months sometimes while we just work on frappe and then we turn it back on. But when you turn it back on the unit economics are different, you know, you understand, I know that. You know what I mean. I just hope it's coming through on audio to everybody else. It's like if your average customer is $1,000 and you keep 10% profit, you have 100 bucks. Well, if you spend more than 100 bucks to get that customer, you've burned cash. Like you can't do that. You know, venture backed companies in Silicon Valley that cheat and don't play by the rules can do that. But like blue collar entrepreneurs can't do that. But if we can, if we can cross sell and upsell and create a high ticket offer, if we can manipulate prices not to gouge people, but to sell it, premium prices, if we do these things, maybe they're worth 2,000 now and you're in. Your profit is 25%. Well, now you have 500 in profit per customer. And you turn the ads back on and it flows. It just works like the rules are different. And because in Sun Gym when I was, you know, at the helm before you took over and I stepped back and started working on war plan and stuff, people would start, stop. And this is with all marketing, not just with direct mail and send you. They like, they do it and then they stop and then they wait six months and they do it again. Then they stop. What are your thoughts on everything I just said?
- [10:01]
B
Yeah, two big things. So one is the this thing that I like to say is like, when we start businesses, the only way to grow is to get your next. Your first customer, right? You open day one, it's like, where can I get my first customer?
- [10:13]
A
And.
- [10:14]
B
And then it's like, where can I get my next customer? How do I get five customers? Right? And you get just like going to the gym if you only do curls, like, your biceps are going to get strong, but the rest of your business or body is weak. And so you become addicted to doing curls because you're like, I'm really good at this. This is, I can see it's working. This is how I grow my muscles. Right? And that's what businesses do. And they have to do that to start out of necessity. But what they realize is that they naturally, as humans, we go towards what we are good at and what we know how to do. And they know how to acquire customers. They're good at that. And that's what they want to do more of. But we get addicted to this, of acquiring customers. And we've acquired this massive database of customers that already know like and trust us, that are willing to buy from us. But we don't spend any money marketing to them or getting more, delivering more value to them and getting, you know, a higher lifetime value out of them. So 100% what you're saying, Josh, and I really try to preach that because you, you know, if you go to sell a business, it's not about, well, how good are you able to acquire customers. It's most of the time they're buying your customer list and they know they're going to be able to squeeze, you know, 30 to 100% more revenue out of that list that you just have neglected.
- [11:30]
A
So that's literally the first thing that we would do if we acquired a business.
- [11:36]
B
Yes, instantly.
- [11:37]
A
Because it makes part of your purchase price of that business free inst.
- [11:41]
B
Constantly.
- [11:41]
A
It's just like call people. People forget that this little thing, this is, I'm holding up a phone right now. It's not just for watching TikTok videos or rage bait. You can actually type numbers in it and talk to people. Like if you just called your past customers, you're like, hey, you're due for service. Hey, did you know we offered this like, like less than 10% of people's customers even know all the stuff that that company even sells. They don't even know that you have this big fancy, expensive other thing. You think they do, but they don't because we never talk to our past customers.
- [12:09]
B
Yeah. And I'm going to get a, you know, a little bit vulnerable here as far as like getting into Syngeim. So exactly what you're saying about, you know, the cost of not doing more business with your customer at Syngim Churn cost us over a $1 million a year. Right. And so I can be out there selling like hell and we could have our sales people crushing it. They could sell, you know, a million dollars a year and we didn't grow the business at all. And that's. How's that possible? Right. And so you taught me this a long time ago when we first met and I watched your webinar even before I was a business in business with you is like you had this picture of the bucket, it looked like it had like bullet holes in it.
- [12:49]
A
Yeah.
- [12:49]
B
No, and it's like you can only add water in so fast when there's enough holes in the bucket that it's like you're adding new customers but they're falling out the holes just as fast as you're adding. And it's like you can only turn that spigot on so much. My garage floor business, we max out Google, we max out social media in my area and it's like, well, if there's no more leads, then what do I do? Right. And so fixing your leaky bucket or reducing Churn for send gym like that is growing your business to, to your point of like when you coach, you can tell people to turn off their marketing because there's a ton of money outside of, of acquire acquiring customers that cost a lot of money.
- [13:29]
A
Yeah. It's basically incontrovertible truth. And if you don't like it, that's your problem.
- [13:35]
B
Right.
- [13:37]
A
And it's free, it's low hanging fruit.
- [13:40]
B
Yeah.
- [13:41]
A
And I'm not anti advertising. I mean, but the problem is, is you can't scale. Like when I actually joined Russell Brunson's program because Sin Jim was not making any money. He told me after he looked at everything, he's like, josh, imagine you buy a bunch of watermelons for 50 cents and you fill up the back of your truck with them. And then you're, you're. No, no, I messed up the whole funny joke, okay? This is what he said. He said, josh, imagine you buy a bunch of watermelons for a dollar, you fill up your truck with them, and then you drive around town and you sell them for 50 cents each. Do you see the problem? I'm like, yeah, I see the problem. He said, and you think the way to solve that problem is to get two trucks of watermelons? I'm like, yeah, I can see how that would be bad. Reminds me of a quote. I forget where I heard it, but these two guys at a bar, and the one guy asked the other, he goes, so how'd you go broke, John? And he said, gradually and then suddenly. And so a business, like, when I look at any business, I don't care if it's a donut shop shop, a coffee house, a chiropractor, a dentist, or all the same thing. There's a certain amount of profit per average transaction per customer. We need that to be way bigger for a whole bunch of reasons. Like you can't afford to advertise. If you give away 100. If you give away 200 bucks to make 50 bucks in profit, your bank account is going down the whole time you're advertising. Which is why small business owners, it feels like gambling. You know, what's cool about send gym is it has a whole suite of tools that just focus on past customers, right where you know, the cost to acquire them was already done, like in the past. And you can cross sell and upsell them more stuff, get them to replace, repeat, enroll them in a subscription. There's lots of things market even to their neighbors, and that's very low risk marketing. But if they. If they use frap, which is what we teach, they can go back and do just cold, hardcore marketing, even at the higher prices and still win. This is what all the big companies do. Their customers are just worth more. You know, you think an average garage door sale for Tommy Mellow is the same thing as it is for Larry, who does 211,000 in revenue in some, you know, southwest Arkansas. Like, no. And Larry in Arkansas, he, I can't afford to advertise. So it's very symbiotic, like what I'm doing now with war plan and like, what Send Gym is. Tell me your thoughts on that. But then tell me all the cool freaking stuff that Send Jim does. So everyone knows, because there's a lot.
- [16:13]
B
Yeah. So one of the things that came to mind when you're saying that, Josh, is like, I don't know if you teach this metric, but it's really critical in like the software space. Not as much in home service, but maybe in other businesses. And maybe you're teaching this is like the lifetime value to customer acquisition ratio. And that's like one of the key, key metrics that, you know, private equity is looking at when they're going to acquire a software business. Right. So it's not the total revenue. It's not a lot of different things that we like to focus on, but it's how much money is this customer going to give me throughout the life of being a customer? Maybe they're a customer for five years, maybe one year, I don't know. But how much money are they going to give me divided by the cost to get that customer? Right. And you really want to shoot for like 4 or higher in the software space. And so that's something you can think about even in your home service business. Right. Like my cost to acquire customer is about 500 in garage floor coding and they give me roughly 4, $500.
- [17:18]
A
So it's exactly the same with local. I think the only difference is we have to look at like gross profit margin versus revenue.
- [17:24]
B
Yes.
- [17:24]
A
Because software has a different cog, you know, but not to get account into accounting. But it's the same thing. Right. And send, you're killing it, by the way, because I think that metric for you right now is like eight or something. Because Send Jim is sticky. Because Send Jim does magical unicorn fairy dust stuff that people don't know about. And I'm not kidding, like it's, it's insane. Tell us some of the new things that are working now.
- [17:50]
B
Yeah, so the things that are that work great are still one of the original features that you developed, which is the neighbor mailing feature. Essentially the neighbor of your customer is more likely to buy your product than probably anyone else in the city because they have the same type of income, the same type of home, same age home, all these different reasons. They just saw your vehicle there. Like there's. We can get all into that. But basically syndrome allows you to automatically market to the neighbor of your customer. So super effective. The old method of kind of marketing or direct mail was like, put out as many pieces as you can. Let's blanket the city. And it's just a numbers game. We've kind of flipped that on the head and said, hey, we're not a printer. We don't care about how many pieces you sent out. That's not what drives our business. We're a tech company that uses print to kind of uses data and print to get smart about marketing. And so we can send out far fewer pieces, but get a similar revenue number from that. And so it gets a much better roi. So that's a great piece that's existing. Then you've got like, things like ringless voicemail, being able to record a voicemail and send that to your customer base. Hey, John, you know, just want to let you know we're coming up on the spring cleanups. We got a special going on. Sorry I missed you today. Shoot me a message back if you're interested. We got a special going on. Something like that can deliver to your entire, you know, thousand customers with just a few minutes of work. And, you know, you can generate.
- [19:22]
A
I mean, the ROI on those are dumb.
- [19:25]
B
Oh, like we're seeing like 300, 400 times ROI on that.
- [19:29]
A
Yeah.
- [19:30]
B
So.
- [19:30]
A
Because it doesn't cost that much to do them, and people are like, oh, yeah. And then if you like, pair that with a text message, which you also do. We teach. We teach a thing called a Rainmaker campaign. I should actually give you our Rainmaker campaign training to give to send gym customers. Maybe It's. It's called A333. So it's like three emails, three ringless voicemails, and three texts over three days with very particular ingredients. And it just murders it. It's crazy. Anyway,
- [20:01]
B
super powerful. And then some of the things that are coming are just. They blow my mind. And I've been. Been working on this for a year, but we have this feature. We. We currently have a feature where it allows you. We call it Radius Bomb. But we are allowed to go on a map, a Google map. And you can like trace an area that you want business in. And then we can filter with like, demographics, saying, like, I want owner occupied, certain income, you know, has two dogs, whatever. And you can say, I only want people like that in this area. Well, and we mail to only those people. So what that does effectively, if you know your ideal customer really well, let's say there's a. There's a hundred million people in the United. In the United States. There's more than that. But I'm gonna use 100 just for easy math here. And then using demographics, you can generally get down to like 30 to 40 million of those people are your target customer. Right. So we're going to say I'm going to only send to owner, occupied income,
- [20:55]
A
whatever homeowner instead of renter or house value over this amount.
- [21:00]
B
Yeah. So we can eliminate like 70% of people. Right. So it's like, we don't need to send to them. We know that's a waste. Well, what we've got coming in the future is going to get you down to only having to target 3% of the audience instead of 13. Right. So 10 times better. And how do we do that? We've taken customer data, with their permission, of course, from thousands and thousands of customers and home service spaces, and we've taken a data science team and we've built data models. And that sounds crazy and, you know, who cares? I don't know. I don't know how to do all this stuff. Right. But it's like a lot of crazy math and a lot of predictive analytics and using AI, but they essentially know what type of. Of person buys fence building or window cleaning or cosmetic surgery.
- [21:54]
A
Grooming. Right, Pet grooming.
- [21:55]
B
Pet grooming, exactly. And so. And what they can do is, it's not just demographics. They're saying, like, did you know that people. This is real life, by the way. Did you know that people that buy window coverings are. Have a certain Myers Brigg personality. They're typically judgy, and they're like. They're. They're very, like, social. And so it's like, well, what? That's crazy. It makes sense. But it's like, okay, well, how do I find those people? Right. And so our products can allow you to go on that map. Just like radius bomb. Choose an area and then find the people that are most likely to buy your product. And what we believe is that you're going to get four times better response out of your mail than ever before.
- [22:37]
A
I believe it 100. I mean, what an amazing world we live in. You know, my fear for people is that, economically speaking, like, there's some weird stuff going on in the economy. Things are always, you know, expanding and contracting. And it's natural. You know, the economy is like a living, breathing organism. But what happens is when times are really good, people rest on their laurels. They don't raise their prices, they don't really get competitive. They. They're asleep at the wheel. And then like you said earlier in the podcast, all these smart people are coming into this space. Really all niches of local.
- [23:14]
B
Yeah.
- [23:15]
A
Equity, private, not mentioned. Private equity, but just private, smart citizen like, you got. Like, it's not like a nice to have. It's a have to have. It's becoming more competitive because of the level of acumen of people you're competing with. Right. And they have bigger checkbooks than you, and they have better tools than you. I don't say that to scare people. Right. I just say it to prepare people. Like, wake up. Know that you got to be a marketer. Like, if you're not growing, you're dying. Your business isn't worth anything if we can't scale it to where it's not dependent on you. And it costs money to buy customers. It just does. It either costs time or money. You can either go all day shaking hands, kissing babies, knocking on doors, meeting people. That works. Or we use tools like Send Jim. But it takes some planning. You know, one thing that's always made me sad was I originally designed Zen Gym for one super simple initial idea. It was, we had a mobile app back then, and you take a picture of a house, push a button, and it would mail a postcard to that one house with a picture of that house on the front of the postcard, and there'd be a real price on the back, and people wouldn't go do it. And what was weird was the people that were complaining, I need more money. I got a book. I got to grow my business. I'm like, do this. It totally works. They wouldn't even do it right. Kind of like, like when you have an employee and they're like, hey, boss, I need more hours. And then like on Wednesday, you're like, hey, can you work late? They're like, oh, no, I have a Call of Duty tournament tonight. I know, it's so great. But anyway, so they wouldn't do it. Like, that's what they needed. Like, those cards, they're very polarizing to send a picture of your house to someone, but they got five to eight times more total phone calls than a normal card. They wouldn't do it. But then when I rolled out Radius Bomb as a feature where they could just sit in their underwear eating Captain Crunch and just waste three grand on circling a neighborhood and clicking a button. They like that. And because I care about people and I'm not diabolically bad, like, that bothers me.
- [25:14]
B
Yeah. So a couple. Couple things there. Josh is like, I just heard something recently, and this is a little bit more in the tech space, but it. You'll see it's relevant, which is they said that product market fit is only going to last like four to five years now. And what is product market fit? It's basically, if you don't know, it's like, how long is my product going to be relevant in the market market? And to make this, like, very simple, right? Like, no one's buying a corded wall phone anymore, right? But the product market fit was a long time for that product. Like, I don't know, 30 years, 40 years.
- [25:50]
A
But I used to talk to your high school girlfriend in your bedroom with the cord stretch.
- [25:54]
B
You had to buy the long cord, the extension one.
- [25:56]
A
Yeah, yeah. And then I'd like, shut the door and then my mom would pick up the other phone. I'd be like, mom, get off the phone. You know, meatloaf. Yeah.
- [26:06]
B
But like, the product market fit used to be a lot long, but because of like, AI and technology and the way things are rapidly evolving, our products are. Are just changing so fast that if you're to your point, if you're not like, evolving your product and you're sitting on your laurels and times are good, like, you better be thinking about what the next thing is and how you're going to deliver value. Even if you're like, well, I'm a chiropractor or I'm a dentist. Well, guess what? Like, the chiropractor used to sell one at a time visits, right? Now they've got subscriptions and they've got technology to go with their. They've got an app or a website that goes with their thing and they've got self lessons at home. And like, there's just. I don't know what it is for every business, but you should be on the forefront. I just actually met these guys. They graduated from Princeton and they, you know, they're in the home services space now. I'm like, wow, that's crazy. And they're like, using drones to, like, see which buildings don't have proper insulation and using thermal imaging. And then they're marketing only to those homes. And it's like, this is crazy. Like, you know, and it's like, it's.
- [27:11]
A
And then you got Larry out there who's like, yeah, man, no one will buy my insulation. It's like, Larry is in trouble.
- [27:18]
B
Yeah, it's almost sci fi. And to your point, it's not to scare you, but, like, you got to be aware and you got to just like, constantly give yourself time to think of, like, what's the next thing that I need to be be doing in my business?
- [27:29]
A
Well, I always say, like, first of all. Someone's listening to this. You're a nerd. You're our people. Like, kudos to you for just like leveling up and like putting the right content in your eyes and your ears. You know, there, there's, there's more than just hope. Like, there's opportunity everywhere in all of this stuff. But I've always said you have to know things other people don't know. So you can do things other people don't do if you want to have things other people can't have. And it's just things are moving fast, but it's still manageable. You know, you get in community. Later this year, we're launching FRAP chapters, which is going to be absolutely insane. Like, I think business owners getting together locally in person, you know, like a mastermind setting and focusing on profitability. You know, I. Tell me your thoughts on this too. Because, like, my argument is that profit inside of a business is unnatural. It's not naturally occurring. And what happens is like, our businesses are hungry cookie monsters. Right. And if like you don't force profit, it'll just eat and gobble up everything.
- [28:28]
B
Right.
- [28:28]
A
It's like, and, and people are always focused on like, I need more leads or I need more volume. Kind of like the watermelon analogy. And it's like that doesn't do anything unless there's meat on the bone, like margin, oxygen, space. Right. And profit specifically, it solves literally every single problem in a business for most small business owners that you can pay above market wages. Like, it fixes your equipment problems. You can make a mist. Fake marketing, which is normal, by the way, and it doesn't bankrupt you. Like, it's research and development. You can, you know, pay off your debt and you can expand and you can. Like it's the big domino that funds everything else. Yeah. So if they're making more profit, they're doing this stuff. They get Send Jim, they're doing a voicemail bomb in a sequence in neighbor marketing. Tell us the rest of this. There's more that Sin Jim does, but we're doing this AI super targeted stuff or sending postcards. What are, what are a couple of the other things that it does that can make us money?
- [29:26]
B
Yeah. So another one that's going to be coming out in the later in the year is the ability to put your customer's review on a postcard automatically and send it to the neighbors of the people that left the review. So super powerful. Right. Because now Syngen is partnered with a company called Nice Job. So we're Offering that for free. It's a review management platform. If you're not recollecting reviews in your business, I don't care what business you have. Like, you're wrong. Everybody looks at reviews before they buy stuff, right? Like, so you got to be collecting reviews. Okay, so now that we're past that and we, everyone agrees there can't be anybody out there that doesn't. Yeah, there probably is. Josh is going to get comments on here. Like, I don't, you don't need reviews anyway, so you collect the review. But social proof is so powerful. Like when you think about like if you've made a purchase, what's the like is the first thing you're going to do is like go out and just look at people's websites? Or is it like asking your friends, like, hey, who have you used for this? Asking fellow business owners, hey, what marketing agency do you use? Hey, does this product work? Does your CRM work? Like, of course you're going to do that, right? So how do we get the social proof out there? It's hard to get people to write reviews. Hard people get, get people to share. So you got to have a tool to do it and a process to do it. And then, well, what do you do with that review? It's great. It goes on Google. But like, let's leverage the value of that review by using it in our marketing. Well, that's hard because it's not scalable, right? It's like, I can't, I can't do that for every customer at leaves me a review. But this product's going to automatically take that review, put it on the card and say, hey, we just did Josh's roof and he gave us a five star review. Here's the, you know, here it is. Like, that is so powerful. If a storm just came through the neighborhood and they're like, oh, Josh used them. Yeah, he's a smart guy. I look like it went well, I'll go ask him about it.
- [31:13]
A
And the best part is it'll be totally automated.
- [31:16]
B
Automated 100%.
- [31:18]
A
And the other, the other best part about like doing like targeted direct mail like that. Because here's the reality. Direct mail, it can get super expensive really fast. I have a private client sends like a million dollars a year just on direct mail. Most people can't do that, right? That's a, it's a butt pucker. It makes you be like, but what you're talking about isn't like that. You can have a smaller budget where you're targeting over and over again, Little pockets and clusters of neighborhoods where you already have momentum and proof. And it's like, I don't know, it's. It's safer, if that makes sense. Because if you're. If you're targeting the neighbors of the neighborhoods you're already in and your trucks are going in and out and in and out, you drop a couple yard signs and you have a few postcards dripping. It could be like a few hundred dollars to send lots and lots of stuff. And then you incorporate the elements you're talking about with, like, hyper personalization of their neighbor. Even a picture of the neighbor's house, I guess, would be a possibility. It's ins. And it can be automated and takes no time.
- [32:18]
B
Yeah.
- [32:19]
A
If you're like, oh, but I don't have budget for that, that's because you haven't done FRAP correctly. Yes, marketing is free if your economics are correct. There's a guy that builds outdoor kitchens in Florida named Larry. I helped Larry go from 1.2 million to 1.95 million just in the last 12 months with no ads at all. Now what we're doing is we're getting ready to turn on ads. So he grew $750,000 without it just from frat love. It does is it creates the budget we needed to do real marketing. Right. There's another guy 30 minutes from Larry named Rick, and Rick's used s. Jim quite a lot in the past. Rick Wallace. I don't know if you remember that.
- [33:02]
B
Yeah, I know. I have heard of Rick. I don't know him, but he does a lawn care, right?
- [33:06]
A
Yep. He does fertilization. He's been obsessed with FRAT for like, two and a half years, and he's implementing all this stuff. He just bought a helicopter because of.
- [33:15]
B
Good for.
- [33:16]
A
Yeah, he flew me around on his helicopter. We're. I'm calling it the frap cop chapter. But. But the thing is, is, like, his pricing is premium. His frequency is denser. Like, the average lawn care company like him that does fertilization might do like six treatments a year. He does nine. Why does that matter? Because he's collecting more total revenue per person at a higher cost per treatment, which means his gross profit is way more, which means he can spend a million dollars a year on marketing. It means he can buy helicopters. And, you know, I'm basically an evangelist trying to beat this into people's head. Cassen gym, done correctly, if you put your thinking cap on is free. It costs nothing.
- [33:56]
B
Think about this, Josh. So we'll so then we. We'll take it a step further. Right. Like, they get the postcard, they go to your website, but they're busy. Right. A lot of people think, like, I have a nice website. Like, anyone that goes on my website's going to buy it for me. The truth is if. I don't know if you know the numbers, but, like, it's like a very small percentage of people that go to your website actually do it.
- [34:15]
A
It's like 1 to 3% percent.
- [34:16]
B
Yeah, exactly. Under 3%. So the other product that's going to come later this year, and it's actually in beta now, if you're super interested, you can reach out and we might be able to get you in the beta group. But basically, anyone that comes to your website, we can d. Anonymize. De. Anonymize them. That's a hard word to say. And we can send them a postcard or enter them into a postcard sequence so they don't have to fill out a form. They don't have to take any action. But we can identify who they are. So maybe they saw your postcard with the review on it, they went to your site. Site. And then. Then maybe they're just gonna kind of go on.
- [34:50]
A
They didn't do anything.
- [34:51]
B
Yeah, they're busy. Right. But, like, now we can enter them into a drip sequence because we know those people are like, super interested in your product. Right. If they took time to go to the website, that's just like when you see an ad on Facebook and you click it and then you're like, well, for the next four months, I'm gonna get these ads over and over and over again.
- [35:08]
A
It reminds me of being able to talk to every window shopper. If you have local retail store, it's like, yeah, you're waiting for people to come in and you're only talking to them, but there's like four times as many people looking in the windows and never coming in, you know?
- [35:21]
B
Yes.
- [35:22]
A
Kind of like that.
- [35:23]
B
Yeah, It's. It's like physical retargeting. So that's coming too. That's really exciting. I'm just really exc. And in general, like, I'm really bullish on mail. I don't know if your audience is doing mail or not, but really consider it because you. When you think about the number of digital ads that you get on a daily basis and we scroll past them, it's Our attention is so scattered and all over the place. When you look at your mailbox every day, you might get like, Two ads. Ads, three ads. And you can really stand out. And I think as digital ads get more and more expensive, we were talking about just before we jumped on Josh, how it's getting more difficult to land in the, in the, in an email inbox, right. Because sophistication, you're having AI, pretty soon AI is going to tell you which emails you need to look at, which ones you don't. Same thing with text message. Like everything digital is going to get much more expensive and difficult to reach the customer. But mail is something that is going to continue to stand out. So I would.
- [36:23]
A
You didn't even tell them about the dog treats and like the brownies and like all this other weird stuff you can mail people? Yeah, that definitely freaking stands out. Tell us.
- [36:34]
B
Yeah, we, we've got brownies and cookies and dog treats and popcorn, all those types of things that we can, you know, mail again with automation. So connecting to your CRM and custom designed gift boxes. Yes, gift boxes. Mailing on a trigger. So hey, when an invoice is paid over amount, send it to them. And something you said, Josh too. Like people say like I don't have the budget for that. It's so simple with Syngen because you can control the marketing based on how your business is doing. So what I mean by that is if you do a job and our system is going to only send marketing to the neighbors when you do a job. Right. So we're only going to market when you do a job. So for every quote you give, let's say it costs $6 to send postcards to, to the 10 closest neighbors or 5 closest neighbors. Whatever you choose, just add $6 on your $700 quote or your thousand dollar quote. And if they do the job, those postcards are literally free. And who's going to choose a different company over $6, right? So it's just like there's really no reason not to do it. To your point, it's free if you do it the right way.
- [37:42]
A
That's a really good way to look at it. I had a lady I've been working with and I'm trying to get her to raise her prices and she's a good person who works her butt off, who raises her family and she has a lot of pressure on her and it's, she's bleeding, the business is bleeding and I'm like, hey, wake up, let's raise your prices 20%. She almost has a nervous breakdown, starts hyperventilating. All my customers are going to fire me. I can never raise My price. I'm like, okay, okay, let's do this. I said, I want you to raise your price 1% and then we're gonna talk on Monday, you know, so my prescription to her was like, raise it 1%. And she's like, what? I'm like, yeah.
- [38:19]
B
And then like exposure therapy.
- [38:21]
A
Exactly. It's like because, and, and you know, because the fear is real, you know, and like. But there's more elasticity in your pricing than you think there is to everyone listening because you're not the only person charging a little more. Everybody in everybody's lives is good. When we bought this commercial property in Texas, Texas, the insurance was $24,000 a year on this property. Four years later, it's $52,000 a year.
- [38:49]
B
What?
- [38:50]
A
Yeah, and that's an extreme example because insurance is insane, especially commercial insurance. But this is happening with like all kinds of expenses. I mean gas has been pretty stable, but, but lots of weird costs are vendor costs. I mean tariffs have had a big impact on like material costs and stuff. So we gotta. Raising your price isn't like an option necessity. It's a necessity and people are like, oh, I already raised my price. No you didn't. You didn't even cover like the, just the inflationary piece, let alone adding more profitability to yourself. Like if the true cost of goods and services has went up 10 and you raise it 10, you're still not profitable. You didn't do anything, you know, so. Yeah, what, what? How do people get like a demo for Send Jim or can see it? Because an audio podcast is really hard to understand, but it's a fully automated trigger based marketing system that brings the physical world to your customers, whether it's a gift or a thank you card. We have robots that write handwritten notes with a ballpoint pen like yes, yes, all this cool stuff. There is an investment to it. You probably have questions about it. What should they do? Daniel?
- [40:04]
B
Yeah, the first thing you should do is just go to s gy.coms n d j I dot com, look around, click, schedule a demo. It's a free, you know, non pressure demo where you spend 30 minutes but you got to see the product like it's. You've heard about the concepts here, but go see what it looks like and, and how easy it is to use. One person from our team will jump on, show you around. If you chose to sign up, I know automation sounds scary to a lot of business owners. You would sign up and you're going to schedule an onboarding appointment. We're going to do everything for you. You're basically just going to say, this is what I want, and tell them, and then they're going to set it all up. And if you do it right, you'll never log back into Send Jim again. It'll just run in the background, making you money based on the rules you told us to set up. And it's a. It's a really, really fantastic product. I use it in all my businesses. All my friends use it. It's. It's really cool.
- [41:05]
A
Well, your. Your garage floor coating business, I remember when you started that just from nothing on the side, because you're running Zen Gym and you've been using direct mail with that consistently the whole time, and you grew it to a couple million dollars in the last few years. And that's not. Normal. People don't usually do that. It hasn't been that long. I mean, how. How many years have you even been in business with that? Like four or five years.
- [41:25]
B
Five years. Yeah.
- [41:26]
A
Yep. So pretty awesome. And there's a saying in business to eat your own dog food, and you definitely have by using Zen Gym to grow your own home service company on top of running Zen Gym because you're a genius. Billionaire philanthropist, Daniel Dixon.
- [41:41]
B
That's aspirational. Yeah.
- [41:44]
A
Yeah, man. It's so cool. Well. Well, maybe in closing. What. I have two questions. How excited are you and optimistic are you for 2026? Be honest. Is it like optimism, pessimism? Are you ready to. Do you see opportunity? What's your personal view on that? And then the second question is, what would you say to a scared, nervous, local business owner who just desperately wants to win, to encourage them?
- [42:11]
B
Yeah. So I'm hugely optimistic in 2026. I think there's more opportunity than ever to stand out from the other businesses out there. There's so many cool tools like, you're hearing about that. You know, there's a.95% of businesses are resting on their laurels. So go out there, take it. Take it from them. Like, we're disrupting. Disrupt your market. Like, it's, It's. There's so much opportunity. It's really, really cool. Buy a business, add it to yours, right? Like, there's all these baby boomers that are retiring. Like, there's just. I. I could go on forever. So that's not a fair question there, Josh. I got it. I'm really excited.
- [42:49]
A
I feel the same way, actually.
- [42:52]
B
I'm really excited. What I would say to somebody that's worried that, you know, wants to Go out there and crush it is don't be afraid to fail. Like we, we're constantly testing the next thing. Right. So like you should. Failure on testing something should be part of your business plan. You should say every, every quarter or every year I'm going to try a new thing, whether it's Syngen or direct mail or a billboard or whatever it is. Like try something new, plan on it. Failing. If it doesn't, that's fantastic. But don't be scared to fail. This is how we move forward. It's how we learn. Josh and I have both failed at countless things, but it's how we've got to where we got. So you got to try something new. Just go out and try it it. Just try it. What's the worst that could happen?
- [43:41]
A
I love what Alex Ramosi says. He says most people aren't scared of failure, they're scared of looking stupid while they try.
- [43:48]
B
Yeah.
- [43:48]
A
And for a lot of people it's like really an ego thing. It's a pride thing. For other people, it's legitimately a fear thing. You know, frap. Going deep on FRAP will calm those fears because it's just pure unadulterated logic. And so do that first. But when it comes to marketing, market marketing is iterative failure. That's what it is. It's like the hall of Fame baseball players don't get on base seven out of 10 times. That's what marketing is. Yeah, it's a feedback loop. You know, Mattress Mac owns a hundred million dollar furniture store in Houston. He's this famous marketer guy, old guy, 80 something years old, still works a front counter. He has monkeys in his furniture store showroom. Like you go there, there's monkeys. He's a marketer and he says you win some, you learn some. Some. That's it. Yes, that's how it works. And so failure is data. That's it. That's all it is. And I'll, I'll promote offers sometimes and it just doesn't work.
- [44:39]
B
Yeah.
- [44:40]
A
And if feedbacks like the hook, the timing, something, the positioning, the, and you, you keep tweaking it, you get it, you get it right once, it might be worth a million dollars.
- [44:49]
B
Yeah. And, and if you're scared to because you don't have the money to do it or whatnot, like go talk to somebody that's done it. There's, that's what Josh and I do. Like we've talked to people that are ahead of us. Go talk to a chiropractor in a different city, take them to lunch and be like, hey, I want to try this. I've seen you do postcards, like how does it work? But like there's people that have done what you want to do. Go out, ask them how to do it and follow it. It really minimizes your chances at failing. And yeah, just like Josh said, don't you just learn you're not failing, you're learning.
- [45:20]
A
Well, great words of wisdom. I appreciate you man. I know how hard you're working and you're going to build us a hundred million dollar business. You're getting closer and closer every year.
- [45:29]
B
A little closer.
- [45:30]
A
You're a little genius over there. So I appreciate you and our friendship and that's it. Any final signing off words of wisdom as I let you go?
- [45:38]
B
No. Thanks for having me Josh. It was really fun. We got to do it more often, but I appreciate your time.
- [45:43]
A
Agreed. Thanks my friend. Do you want to weaponize your brain in of terms turn it into a money making machine? Consider joining Warplan Coaching. You'll get thousands of dollars in exclusive courses and training, a private community, a chance to come to in person meetups at Warplan Studios, and access to myself for Q and A every single month. Want to know the best part? It's free. Plus we'll send you a private weekly newsletter full of money making tips and cutting edge ideas. Just go to warplan.com to sign up. Hey, I'm your biggest fan. I'm rooting for you. We'll see you next time.